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*On this date in 1968, the Orangeburg Massacre occurred. Three South Carolina State students were killed and 27 injured during a fourth night of segregation protest in Orangeburg, SC. The All Star Bowling Lane, Orangeburg, South Carolina’s only bowling alley played a pivotal role in the “Orangeburg Massacre” on the campus of South Carolina State College. That year, the segregated bowling alley was a rarity in Orangeburg because most public places in the city were integrated. Since the 1964 Civil Rights Act, local Black leaders and members of the white business community had tried to persuade the All Star to reconcile. Their efforts and simultaneous appeals to the U.S. Justice Department failed. All Stars’ manager claimed that bowling alleys were not covered under the Act. Local African-Americans argued that since All Star had a snack bar, it was certainly covered under the Act specifically, under the interstate commerce provision in the public accommodations section. On February 6, a group of Black students from nearby South Carolina State and Claflin Colleges came to the bowling alley and refused to leave. The next night, another group returned and 15 were arrested. On February 8th, students started a bonfire on the state college’s campus. Authorities moved in to put it out, and one officer was injured by a piece of a railing that was thrown at him. The crowd facing the officers began to grow, and then the shooting began because a highway patrolman fired his carbine in the air a couple of times, intending it as warning shots, and others started shooting as well. Three were killed, Henry Smith, Samuel Hammond, SCSU students, and 17 year old Delano Middleton; a local high school student. While the student demonstrators worked their way back to the colleges, they broke car and store windows, and Governor Robert E. McNair mobilized a National Guard unit. Nine Highway Patrol officers faced federal charges in connection with the shootings. All were acquitted. The “Orangeburg Massacre,” between students and police was the most violent incident in South Carolina’s civil rights history and were typical of the tense times in the period leading up to the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. Early in 2001, the school held a ceremony honoring the victims of the shooting. Reference: Related articles by Zemanta
![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_e.png?x-id=b5a1477b-145a-4150-91bd-7823a6f172e3) By Anneli Rufus God cries when you eat Pop-Tarts. But He smiles when you drink carrot juice, and when you do a colon cleanse, He beams. That’s the spirit driving one of America’s biggest current diet fads. Granted, you’ve probably never heard of it unless you hang with Bible-believing Christians, but it goes by many names: the Hallelujah Diet, the Maker’s Diet, the Lord’s Diet, the Genesis 1:29 Diet. Some versions are vegan, some largely raw; all include organic whole grains — and some of their kingpins have piously channeled this fad into multimillion-dollar enterprises, hawking must-have supplements at hefty prices. An eight-ounce bottle of phosphatidylcholine (a membrane extracted from soybeans or egg yolks) for $124.99? Sure, when its brand name reads like a promise: Divine Health. Christians are fatter than other Americans. One of several studies revealing this, published by a Purdue University team in 2006, found that 30 percent of Baptists are obese, followed by 22 percent of Pentecostals and 17 percent of Catholics, compared to only 1 percent of Jews and 0.7 percent of Muslims, Hindus and Buddhists. According to the Journal of the Southern Baptist Convention, health screenings were given at the SBC’s 2005 annual meeting: Over 75 percent of its 1,472 participants were found to be significantly overweight. It makes sense that some within the movement would want to restore health to the flock. Gluttony, after all, is a sin. But how do you persuade religious Christians to adopt a dietary regimen that has been beloved by hippies for 30-plus years and by polytheists for thousands? The very fact that “health food” is an alt-culture staple is enough to taint it in the eyes of some. How do you convince them to switch their Sunday hams for lettuce-lentil roll-ups? By telling them the Bible says they must. “Your Heavenly Father, in His infinite wisdom, knows which foods are not fit for you to eat,” we read at Hem-of-His-Garment-Bible-Study.org, which offers a “Jesus Saves” lesson in its “What’s Hot!” box. “And, in His infinite love for you, He shared that wisdom. … God really does care what you put in your mouth.” Urging readers to follow the clean animals/dirty animals rules of kashrut, as outlined in Leviticus, the site’s author also endorses Jordan S. Rubin, a Christian motivational speaker and self-described “Biblical Health Coach” whose book The Maker’s Diet (Siloam, 2005) was a New York Times bestseller. At the Web site of his Biblical Health Institute, which sells online courses leading to Certified Biblical Health Coach certificates, Rubin writes that he has “known Jesus as my Lord and Savior since I was eight years old” and that he was cured of Crohn’s Disease at age 19 in 1996 after spending 40 days eating only “whole foods consumed in Biblical times,” mainly yogurt, whole grains, organic produce and grass-fed meats. From this, he devised his diet plan, dividing edibles into three categories. “Extraordinary” foods include soybeans, quinoa, kefir, mahi-mahi, buffalo hot dogs (without pork casings) and umeboshi paste. Merely “average” foods include amazake, agave nectar and spelt. “Trouble” foods to be avoided at all costs include ostrich, emu, cashews, Egg Beaters and eel. He quickly followed up his original book with The Maker’s Diet Daily Reminders, The Maker’s Diet Shopper’s Guide, The Maker’s Diet for Weight Loss and more. It’s heartening to see Rubin’s emphasis on organic, free-range, fresh and wild, although his enthusiasm for highly saturated coconut oil unnerves some critics. Ah, but he sells the oil — for $15.95 per 16-ounce jar — along with honey and supplements, through his Garden of Life brand. A $50 million company “with the goal of becoming a $100 million company,” as Rubin puts it, Garden of Life offers dozens of products including the alleged fat-burner fücoThin® and Goatein®, a goat-milk powder that sells for $49.95 per 440-ounce jar. Advising people on what to eat is all well and good, especially if you’re advising them to go organic, shun processed foods, and increase their intake of fiber, protein, vitamins and minerals. But implying that God wants us to finish the job with a bunch of spendy, and to some extent untested, add-ons is entirely another. “Jordan Rubin is on a mission to transform the health of God’s people one life at a time — a God-inspired and God-sized mission,” we read at the BHI Web site. But Rubin’s health-coach cred fails to impress critics such as BellaOnline’s nutrition editor Moss Greene, who in a seven-part exposé calls the Maker’s Diet “the Faker’s Diet,” lambasting Rubin’s “miracle ingredient,” homeostatic soil organisms: basically, bacteria found in dirt. Rubin claims that because they couldn’t thoroughly scrub the produce they ate, our ancestors ingested these bacteria, which improved their intestinal health. Garden of Life’s Primal Defense Ultra, containing these “soil-based probiotics,” sells for $49.95 per 90-capsule jar; the recommended dosage is three capsules a day. Another vocal critic is Stephen Barrett, a doctor who has spent 20-plus years detailing health fraud through his nonprofit, Quackwatch. Barrett cites the Federal Trade Commission’s 2006 complaint against Rubin and Garden of Life for what the FTC called “engaging in unfair acts or practices” in its claims about Primal Defense and other products. In 2004, the FDA made a similar complaint. “He was making illegal claims,” Barrett tells me. “I don’t think his degree is worth the paper it’s printed on.” Barrett notes that Rubin’s naturopathic medical doctor degree (NMD) “is from the People’s University of the Americas School of Natural Medicine, a non-accredited school with no campus. His Ph.D is from the Academy of Natural Therapies, a non-accredited correspondence school that the State of Hawaii ordered to close in 2003.” But another Christ-diet promoter is Don Colbert, a board-certified family-practice physician with a degree from Oral Roberts University Medical School. Colbert heads the Divine Wellness Center in Longwood, Florida (Rubin’s Garden of Life is also Florida-based), and sparked a media storm with his book What Would Jesus Eat? The Ultimate Program for Eating Well, Feeling Great, and Living Longer (Thomas Nelson, 2002). “Did Jesus actually teach anything about nutrition or how we should eat? My contention is that He did, not necessarily by what He said, but by what He did,” Colbert writes. “The medical and scientific facts confirm it. If we eat as Jesus ate, we will be healthier.” Reasonably enough, he explains that Jesus consumed no “fried chicken, fried country ham, fried potatoes, fried onions,” no white bread, no Splenda. Blaming the spread of fast-food chains for a global health catastrophe of which Christ would not approve, Colbert avows: “Let me assure you, Jesus did not eat processed foods, too much sugar, or food additives. … Ask yourself these two questions about everything you eat today: 1. Why do I eat this? 2. Would Jesus eat this? … What He did eat was a diet based upon biblical principles that were focused on health and wholeness for the whole body.” As a practicing Jew, Jesus — if he existed, which Colbert believes he did — followed the Levitical laws of kashrut: plants, grains, dairy foods, certain birds, only finned-and-scaled fish, and only cud-chewing, cloven-hoofed, four-legged ruminants drained of their blood during ritual slaughter. Modern scholars say the prohibitions in Leviticus are presciently scientific. In biblical times, when sanitation and medicine were sparse and primitive, sharp observers noticed that eating certain creatures made more people sicker than eating other ones. “Unclean” animals were mainly those that fed on carrion and decaying matter. While these species sported highly specialized digestive tracts containing bacteria to neutralize the toxins, limited biblical-era sanitation would have meant that humans eating carrion-feeders ingested the toxins and got sick. This is no longer an issue in the industrialized world. “Jesus ate a great many fruits and vegetables” and never mixed dairy with meat, Colbert tells us. “He did not eat animal fat. … We can follow His example by choosing to eat whole-grain breads and pastas.” Wanna eat whole-wheat fettuccini with Jesus? Colbert’s cool advice continues as he explains that “God’s initial plan was for man to be a vegetarian.” Genesis 1:29, after all, has God saying: “I have given you every herb that yields seeds … and every tree whose fruit yields seeds; to you it shall be for food.” Thus ensued humankind’s “vegetarian period,” which lasted “from Adam to Noah,” in which people “lived very long lives. Adam lived 930 years, Seth 912 years, Enos 905 years, Jared 962 years, and Methuselah 969.” Why? “Some speculate that the oxygen of the earth was much greater at the time before the Flood. … Some speculate that there was a moisture barrier around the earth that resulted in a higher barometric pressure.” Antediluvian folks also possibly had more access to phytonutrients, the doctor adds. “We can follow His example by adding more fish to our diet,” writes this author of The Bible Cure for Weight Loss and Muscle Gain, The Bible Cure for High Blood Pressure, The Bible Cure for Prostate Disorders, The Bible Cure for Depression and Anxiety, The Bible Cure for Irritable Bowel Syndrome, The Bible Cure for Allergies and The Bible Cure for Candida and Yeast Infections, “and by taking fish oil supplements.” And hark: He sells those supplements. Colbert’s Divine Health brand offers 270 fish-oil capsules for $49.99. Other Divine Health products include a 300-capsule, $184.99 bottle of the soy extract polyenylphosphatidylcholine, which Quackwatch’s Stephen Barrett declares has “no proven value.” Examining the label of Divine Health’s 60-capsule, $29.99 bottle of the hormone 7-Keto DHEA, Barrett remarks that the product is “said to enhance the immune system and memory. I don’t believe that.” And the Lord saith “Sell” as well at Hallelujah Acres, a North Carolina-based farm, ministry, supplement company, seminar center, office complex, restaurant, health-food emporium, “healthy-living housing development” and online empire founded in 1992 by the Rev. George Malkmus, who opened another center in Canada in 1998 and whose many programs include “60 Days to a Hallelujah Waistline.” Continue reading ” The Newest Diet Trend: What Would Jesus Eat?” Farley: A note on Bob Marley’s birthday As Farley notes, the diversity of interest in Bob Marley and his music is global and spans all types of cultural boundaries Marley died in Miami, but his grave is in Jamaica. Marley had a difficult relationship with Jamaica. It took him about a decade to become a success in the music industry in the island. In 1976, Marley was nearly assassinated shortly before he was set to perform a concert that was meant to bring peace and unity to the country. “Exodus,” arguably Marley’s greatest album, was recorded after a self-imposed exile from the land of his birth. But he remarked more than once that Jamaica – its people and its culture – were at the root of his music. Marley grew up in Kingston, but it’s important to note that his grave is in the country. You have to drive several hours outside of Kingston to get there. Marley’s music had the edge of the city, but he drew on the myths and culture of the countryside. Marley was an urban sophisticate, but in his heart he was a man of nature. When I went to visit Marley’s mausoleum I was struck by the diverse crowd that the site attracted. There were visitors from Japan, South Africa, America, Europe, the Caribbean – all around the world. Bob had his roots in the West Indies, but his branches have reached around the world. That was true in life, but is even more evident in death. The items people leave for Marley at his grave site also tell us something about the way he lived his life. They leave Bibles and soccer balls, guitars and personal letters, pictures of Marcus Garvey and photos of themselves. Marley’s impact was political, personal, spiritual, sexual, whimsical, mystical and more. He meant many things to many people and that’s demonstrated by the diverse array of gifts people leave him in tribute. Perhaps the thing that struck me the most about Marley’s mausoleum is how he is buried. He’s not buried six feet below the earth, but instead he’s entombed in marble several feet above it. And he’s not buried alone. Marley had a half brother, Anthony Booker, a son of Cedella Marley Booker, but by another father. He was not a singing star. His birthday is not celebrated worldwide. Anthony was killed as a young man in a confrontation with Miami police. He was put to rest below his more famous sibling. In the end, Marley’s death is a triumph of living. For every great man, there is a road not taken. What seems in the end to have been destiny is often the result of sheer will and great talent. Marley, who had his own confrontations with Jamaican police as a young man, could have easily have succumbed to the obscurity of Nine Miles, to the poverty of Trench Town, to the hostility of the music industry, to any of the many slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. Instead, he fought on. Instead, he’s buried above the ground. And so, in death, we celebrate his birthday. Decades after his passing, we still pause to remember the genius who was born in Nine Miles so many years ago. We celebrate because he lived a life that was memorable and he made music that was unforgettable. Happy birthday, Bob. Christopher John Farley is the author of the biography “Before the Legend: The Rise of Bob Marley” and the novel “Kingston by Starlight.” Click here to purchase the book or visit him at his My Space page. Related articles by Zemanta
![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_e.png?x-id=8c1b31d3-4526-42c8-9f1c-5fc828b3c724) By Marcia Alesan Dawkins The second decade of the 21st century has ushered in changes in technology, economics, politics, culture and narratives of identification. From the advent of social media, to the Great Recession, to health care reform, to the revised racial categories on the U.S. census, American lives are faced with increasing tensions and ambiguities. No single icon reflects these tensions and ambiguities, and the paradigm shifts they are inspiring, more cohesively than President Barack Hussein Obama. Many argue that Obama’s election to the presidency and status as global “supercelebrity” are signs that we have entered a post-racial moment in which everyone and everything are mixed. Among these believers is Chris Matthews of MSNBC. Matthews, in a very different take on Obama’s public image than that offered by Sen. Harry Reid, said Wednesday: “I forgot he [Obama] was black.” How could we forget this important aspect of our president’s racial identity? What does Matthews’ statement mean? “I think Matthews intended this to be a positive statement,” says Dr. Rebecca Herr Stephenson, a media effects researcher at the University of California, Irvine. “But I doubt whether audiences will receive it as he intended.” In other words, while the racial climate in the U.S. does show some signs of progress, as Obama’s status demonstrates, the idea that race and/or racism is dead ignores the salient fact that we continue to live in a society deeply influenced by race, with material consequences that affect life chances and have implications for contemporary race relations that go beyond black and white. Matthews jumped to this conclusion while ignoring the daily reality of many Americans. He admitted as much when he declared: “I felt it wonderfully tonight, almost like an epiphany. I think he’s done something wonderful. I think he’s taken us beyond black and white in our politics.” “While there is some truth to the issue of progress in Matthews’ post-racial thesis, it is grounded in a privileged perspective that ignores what still needs to be done in order to achieve liberty and justice for all,” says Dr. Ulli Ryder, a professor at Brown University’s Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity in America. “From a lesser- or nonprivileged perspective, post-racial politicking is wishful thinking and must be mitigated by a closer look at social, political and cultural contexts. If we look at the ways in which we have dealt with events like Hurricane Katrina, increasing educational segregation, wars against Islam, immigration reform and the privatizing of our prisons it is easy to see that we have much work left to do.” So why, in the face of such turmoil, is there such a fascination with mixed-race icons like President Obama? In a post-race nation, mixed-race people are presumed to be beyond the traditional concept of race as an observable set of fixed biological and transhistorical characteristics. If this is the case, then race can be considered a costume that can be put on and taken off whenever necessary and convenient. Within this context, Matthews’ comments make a bit more sense. Here’s more of what he said: Obama “is post-racial, by all appearances. I forgot he was black tonight for an hour. You know, he’s gone a long way to become a leader of this country, and past so much history, in just a year or two. I mean, it’s something we don’t even think about.” Post-racial by all appearances. Let’s think about it. “Because of their supposed superpower to transcend race, mixed-race people are touted as a new model minority and can be propped up to denigrate other groups of color,” warns Dr. Ryder. “From Vin Diesel, and Dwayne Johnson (aka The Rock) and Keanu Reeves to Tiger Woods, Mariah Carey and “American Idol” ’s Jordin Sparks, mainstream society is reminded that multiracialism is not only our destiny but our reality.” Popular reality television shows like “America’s Next Top Model” have even gone so far as to steer contestants through a makeover process in which they become biracial because the ethnically ambiguous look is the latest trend in marketing. A quick look over recent decades reveals that this is actually old news. We’ve been asked to celebrate several milestones of mixedness to prepare us for this alleged post-racial moment. Two milestones are virtual miscegenation in the form of a computer-generated “image of the new Eve” as “the new face of America” on the cover of a November 1993 issue of Time magazine and the model of digital pastiche on the cover of Mirabella in September 1994. Another milestone is the “check all that apply” option on the 2000/2010 U.S. census as an opportunity to refute the need for future race-based government initiatives. A fourth milestone is the public presentation of race as a figment of the social imaginary per PBS in its 2003 three-part series entitled “Race: The Power of Illusion.” The latest milestone is the election of President Obama, whose image in the national imagination is interpreted, by commentators like Matthews, as one of racial transcendence instead of an invitation to frank deliberation about the complexities and contradictions of race in America. Rather than simply declaring that considerations about racism and race are either wrongheaded or unnecessary, perhaps we can use Matthews’ gaffe to explain that we must contextualize race and racism, use logic to understand how conflicts and inequities emerged, and then make progress through honest communication. Perhaps then we will see that Obama’s image is better interpreted as a starting point for interracial dialogue rather than a post-racial epilogue. Related articles by Zemanta
![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_e.png?x-id=70f59796-d1ed-4455-809a-af7c7872dd2a) Renowned mindfulness meditation teacher and best-selling author Jon Kabat-Zinn speaks at UCSD Medical Center on the topic of “Coming to Our Senses“, which is also the name of his new book, subtitled “Healing Ourselves and the World Through Mindfulness”. A pioneer in the application of ancient Buddhist practices to healing in modern medical settings, Kabat-Zinn expounds upon the value of “resting in awareness” not only to facilitate clarity in ourselves, but also as a means of relating to and healing the “dis-ease” in politics, society and the world. Series: “Health Sciences Journal” [11/1999] [Health and Medicine] [Show ID: 9375] Related articles by Zemanta
![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_e.png?x-id=d7923bb6-3f6d-457c-b4af-86a8353fc84b) By Amy Goodman, Democracy Now! AMY GOODMAN: [Howard Zinn] died suddenly Wednesday of a heart attack at the age of eighty-seven. After serving as a bombardier in World War II, Howard Zinn went on to become a lifelong dissident and peace activist. He was active in the civil rights movement and many of the struggles for social justice over the past fifty years. He taught at Spelman College, the historically black college for women. He was fired for insubordination for standing up for the students. While at Spelman, he served on the executive committee of SNCC, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. After being forced out of Spelman, Zinn became a professor at Boston University. In 1967 he published Vietnam: The Logic of Withdrawal. It was the first book on the war to call for immediate withdrawal, no conditions. A year later, he and Father Daniel Berrigan traveled to North Vietnam to receive the first three American prisoners of wars released by the North Vietnamese. When Daniel Ellsberg needed a place to hide the Pentagon Papers before they were leaked to the press, he went to Howard and his late wife Roz. In 1980, Howard Zinn published his classic work, A People’s History of the United States. The book would go on to sell over a million copies and change the way we look at history in America. The book was recently made into a television special called The People Speak. Well, in a moment, we’ll be joined by Noam Chomsky, Alice Walker, Naomi Klein, Anthony Arnove. But first, I want to turn to a 2005 interview I did with Howard Zinn, in which he talked about his time as an Air Force bombardier in World War II. HOWARD ZINN: Well, we thought bombing missions were over. The war was about to come to an end. This was in April of 1945, and remember the war ended in early May 1945. This was a few weeks before the war was going to be over, and everybody knew it was going to be over, and our armies were past France into Germany, but there was a little pocket of German soldiers hanging around this little town of Royan on the Atlantic coast of France, and the Air Force decided to bomb them. Twelve hundred heavy bombers, and I was in one of them, flew over this little town of Royan and dropped napalm—first use of napalm in the European theater. Continue reading ” Noam Chomsky, Naomi Klein and Alice Walker Reflect on the Death of Howard Zinn” |
Jim Clyburn Fish Fry 2009
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