The Professor’s Desk

T.D. Jakes Pushes for Rehab of Prisoners

Mon, 8 Mar 2010 08:02:23 -0800

Last week about 150 formerly imprisoned persons walked across the stage of the Potter’s House Church in Dallas donning a green cap and gown. They joined the ranks of nearly a thousand ex-inmates who have graduated from the 12-month Texas Offenders Re-entry Initiative program (TORI) since 2005. Begun as a reentry mentoring ministry by famed televangelist Bishop T.D. Jakes, the now public/private partnership program seeks to curb recidivism by offering a wide range of services such as psychological counseling, treatment for addiction, job training and housing assistance.

Though many tend to associate Bishop Jakes with the excessive indulgences of televangelism or his neoconservative theology, this is one of the areas where he has a particular progressive posture. He has gone on record stating that convicted felons should have their voting rights restored. And the point of the program is to demonstrate the moral virtue and financial value of rehabilitation over repeated reincarcerations.

Jakes is quoted in the Associated Press saying that, “I think we have written off ex-offenders to a degree that we [Texas] have one of the highest recidivism rates in the nation. We’ve had to spend all our money building walls around our homes (to feel safe). Pretty soon you have to ask yourself, who is really being incarcerated?”

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Martin Luther King, Jr: “Why I Am Opposed to the War in Vietnam

Mon, 18 Jan 2010 09:02:24 -0800

Too often the words of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. are picked over and deployed out of context by jack-leg ideologues and political pundits. King’s quotable quotes are used to baptize the agendas of others. But rarely do we listen to or read King in order to heed his moral vision and/or apply his philosophy of nonviolence in our contemporary moment.

For this reason I am posting one of King’s most important messages in its entirety. No commentary or analysis needed! For his words speak to the moral condition of this nation in 2010 just as they did in 1967.

One Luv,
JLW

Rest In Peace Teddy Bear: 1950-2010

Thu, 14 Jan 2010 16:16:52 -0800

Philadelphia boy preacher turned 70’s soul heartthrob Teddy Pendergrass crossed over today. Multitalented as a musician, vocalist, and champion for the disabled, Teddy was an evangelist of love that will be sorely missed.

One Luv,
JLW

Catastrophe in Haiti by: Ashley Smith

Thu, 14 Jan 2010 10:14:30 -0800

Ashley Smith describes the natural and not-so-natural factors that contributed to the devastation when Haiti was struck by a strong earthquake.

WHILE MOST people reacted to the crisis by trying to find a way to help or donate money, Christian Right fanatic Pat Robertson stooped to new depths of racism. He explained that Haitians were cursed because they made a pact with the devil to liberate themselves from their French slave masters in the Haitian revolution two centuries ago.

The corporate media at least reported that shifting tectonic plates along a fault line underneath Port-au-Prince caused the earthquake--and that Haiti's poverty and the incapacity of the Préval government made the disaster so much worse. But they didn't delve below the surface.

"The media coverage of the earthquake is marked by an almost complete divorce of the disaster from the social and political history of Haiti," Canadian Haiti solidarity activist Yves Engler said in an interview. "They repeatedly state that the government was completely unprepared to deal with the crisis. This is true. But they left out why."

Why were 60 percent of the buildings in Port-au-Prince shoddily constructed and unsafe in normal circumstances, according to the city's mayor? Why are there no building regulations in a city that sits on a fault line? Why has Port-au-Prince swelled from a small town of 50,000 in the 1950s to a population of 2 million desperately poor people today? Why was the state completely overwhelmed by the disaster?
To understand these facts, we have to look at a second fault line--U.S. imperial policy toward Haiti. The U.S. government, the UN, and other powers have aided the Haitian elite in subjecting the country to neoliberal economic plans that have impoverished the masses...

Read full article here....

Whatchoo Talkin’ Bout Senator Reid?

Tue, 12 Jan 2010 14:27:10 -0800

Much ado has been made about Senator Harry Reid’s racially anachronistic yet somewhat accurate description of the American electorate when it comes to racial preference. An African American of a lighter hue who belies all of the cultural markers that are often associated with “blackness” has a better chance of broad success in America.

Well, as someone of “Negro dialect” might say, “No S*%t Sherlock!”

Intraracial discrimination and privilege based on the color of one’s skin extends back to the antebellum South. And many people of color are well versed at linguistic code-switching depending on the context. So why should I be offended by Senator Reid’s astute observation?

If anyone should be offended it should be the critical mass of Americans, of all racial, ethnic and political perspectives, who are so informed by the logic of white supremacy that they fail to interrogate the correlations between dark skin tone and negativity or lightness and positive attributes. Not to mention the way persons uncritically privilege the southern drawls of Bill Clinton, the effete New England vernacular of George H. W. Bush or grammatically obtuse ramblings of George W. Bush over any voice tonality and timbre that may reveal one to be African American.

This is why the feigned outrage from the political right is so vexing...

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