Written by Philip N. Cohen; Originally published at Sociological Images

I can’t teach my course on family sociology without these graphs, which show the rise of the unfree population, and the incredible race/ethnic and gender disparities behind them.

The Bureau of Justice Statistics has released Correctional Population in the United States, 2010, which updates my standard figures. First, the total trend toward unfreedom in the population — from less than 2 million in 1980 to more than 7 million 30 years later:

And second, to understand the disparate impact of this change on Black men in young adulthood primarily — and secondarily, Latino men — here are the rates of incarceration for men by age and race/ethnicity (Blacks here exclude Latinos; Asians and American Indians are not included in the statistics):

Just to make sure you read the scale right, that incarceration rate for Black men in their early 30s is 9,892 per 100,000, or 9.9%, or one-in-ten — more than five-times the rate for White men.

I come at this largely from its effects on families. In a nutshell: The overall trend is largely a consequence of how the U.S. has waged its drug war over this period; these policies fit into a web of practices that deny families to millions of people in the U.S. (only a minority of whom have been convicted of crimes), including by simply removing men from communities and increasing the number of single-parent families.

All that said, you may notice the little decline at the end of that long upward trend in the first figure. In fact, for the first time since 1980, there has been a decline in the incarcerated population for two years running. There has been a long-term decline in crime, but I don’t know whether that is more important than the budget crises facing so many states, or the diminished lust for locking people up. In New York, for example, seven incarceration facilities were closed in the last year, after the number of prisoners dropped about one-fifth in the past decade:

The inmate decline followed a 25 percent statewide drop in crime over the past decade and revisions in sentencing laws that allowed earlier releases and alternative programs for nonviolent drug offenders. The number of prisoners in medium-security prisons declined almost 20 percent from 2001 to 2010 while those in minimum-security facilities dropped 57 percent.

The numbers on the charts are still off the charts, meanwhile — and remember these are just those in the system now. Many more people (and their families) live lives permanently hampered by criminal records and the experience of imprisonment.

It’s been awfully quiet around here lately. So, tell us what’s on your mind!

According to USA Today, the teacher who created the worksheet at issue resigned. This teacher was one of four who used the worksheet in class. The school system confirmed the resignation and said that all four teachers are still under investigation. More here [note: avoid the comments at all costs.]

Readers,
We know that you have astonishingly cute kids, so please send us pictures so that I do not have to fill this space with photos of me looking ridiculous in a batman costume. (Would you believe that, at my son’s behest, I walked around the neighborhood like this? And it was not Halloween.)

Seriously, help a girl out. Send your photos to team@loveisntenough.com, so we can show off your adorable kids (and you, too, if you wish, doing whatever ridiculous thing you do for love of your kid…)

To Serve [Relando Thompkins]

I love Dr. King’s words on service. The way that he laid them out so passionately in “The Drum Major Instinct” sermon on February 4th, 1968 are still relevant today and continue to inspire me.

(can’t see the video? Click Here.)

“..everybody can be great, because everybody can serve. You don’t have to have a college degree to serve. You don’t have to make your subject and your verb agree to serve. You don’t have to know about Plato and Aristotle to serve. You don’t have to know Einstein’s theory of relativity to serve. You don’t have to know the second theory of thermodynamics in physics to serve. You only need a heart full of grace, a soul generated by love. And you can be that servant.”

There’s Plenty of Room

I love this definition of greatness through service because it leaves room at the table for all of us.

No matter what your position is, no matter what your interests are, you can be great, because you can serve. No matter what challenges you might have faced, or may currently be facing, you can be great, because you can serve. As a matter of fact, I’m a firm believer that our life experiences and challenges can sometimes enhance our abilities to help others.

Some Reflections on the Limits of Sainthood [Crunk Feminist Collective]

King’s sermon is not a series of platitudes but an admonition for our own time. Indeed, it’s high time that we take our icons, our saints, off the pedestal and really heed their advice. Keeping MLK and others as distant, perfect leaders is really a cop out, a way to assuage our guilt at being “inadequate” heirs to the Movement, or to fool ourselves into thinking we’ve achieved some “post-racial” paradise, or to convince ourselves that the task of liberation is just too daunting. On this MLK day, I think that we owe it not only to MLK’s memory, but to the many forgotten foot soldiers of the CRM and Black Power Movement, to do more than recite sound bites or raise our fists in mock salute. We need to remember the richness, the complexity, the contradictions, and the power of black political struggles in the U.S. and across the Diaspora, and continue not only believing that injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere, but we must continue doing something about it–at home and in the streets.

3 More Women Held in Child-Trafficking Case [Associated Press]

Mexican investigators detained three more women in the city of Guadalajara in connection with an apparent child-trafficking ring that aimed to supply babies to Irish couples, authorities said Monday.

Authorities also took a tenth child, a 9-month old boy, into custody, the Jalisco state prosecutor’s office said in a statement.

It said the three women were detained at a ranch in Tonala, a suburb of Guadalajara, while taking care of the baby boy. They told authorities they had been hired as nannies to take care of children in the process of being adopted, prosecutors said.

Prosecutors first opened the investigation last week following the arrest of a 21-year-old woman who was accused by her sister-in-law of trying to sell one of her children and of “renting” the other one.

The woman led authorities to three other women, all in their early 30s, who took part in the “renting” of the babies, and seized nine children, including the 21-year-old woman’s two kids. The other seven were seized from the Irish couples.

Washington State Reports 15 Cases of Starvation in Adoption/Guardianship Since 2009: Governor Orders Work Group to Investigate Foreign and Domestic Adoption Abuse [ReformTalk]

Turkish government presses ahead with case against Duchess of York despite extradition doubts [The Telegraph]

The office of Turkey’s chief prosecutor announced last week that it was bringing charges against the Duchess for “violating the privacy” of five children.

The charge relates to footage shot for ITV’sTonight programme, which appeared to show children in state orphanages tied to their beds and being left in their cots all day without being taken out to be fed.

The Duchess, who disguised herself with a black wig and headscarf to gain access to the Saray orphanage near Ankara, where more than 700 disabled youngsters are housed, claimed it illustrated the appalling conditions orphaned children endured.

written by Love Isn’t Enough contributor Renee; originally published at Womanist Musings

Every parent eventually has to make a decision regarding what to teach their children about their genitalia. Some people simply cannot bear to give their children the correct anatomical names and instead make up cutesy nick names for them. In doing so, what they don’t recognize, is that they are introducing the idea of shame when it comes to both the physical body and sex and sexuality. As the years pass, it sends a strong message that certain body parts are dirty and not to be spoken of.

The unhusband and I made the decision to tell our sons that they had both a penis and testes. This should not have been a controversial decision; however, when they entered school, one teacher asked my oldest son to refer to his genitalia as his wee wee, because his forthrightness about his body made her uncomfortable. What should seem like a straight forward decision, can at times become complex depending on the people that you and your child interact with.

I recently came across the story of a feminist dad who decided to push the envelop when it came to talking to his daughter about her genitalia.

I really never thought this would happen. I had a vision that I was going to be able to raise my kids differently than anyone ever had, that they’d grow up free of racial prejudice and television and only wearing pink and all the other bad stuff that’s wandered into the head of any other kid, ever.

Sadly, that is not always the situation. Case study #1: Language.

In college I read Inga Muscio‘s amazing book Cunt: A Declaration of Independence. (I was a feminist! I was the only guy in Womyn’s Issues Now! I could do anything!) Essentially, the point of that book was that the word “cunt” used to be an honorific term for the female ruler of a country, whereas the word “vagina” is an Old English Latin word meaning “sheath for a sword.” And, in the earliest days of changing nappies and learning how female people wipe, I was quick to teach my gurgling baby proto-feminist girl to say “cunt!” instead of “vagina” — or instead of whatever other term you’d use.

No matter what anyone else said, or how they looked at me when I said it. In fact, because of how they looked at me when I said it. (source)

I think there is a good argument to made that teaching a little girl to refer to her genitalia as only a vagina, is teaching her to refer only to a specific part of her anatomy. It is based in the idea that the only part of our genitalia that matters, is the opening that allows penetration by a man. I would fully support teaching a child to use vulva instead; however, I believe that cunt is not the appropriate choice to thwart the limiting social construction of what female genitalia signifies.

There are some women who have chosen to reclaim the word cunt. This is an individual choice, and the same cannot be said for a father who actively chooses to teach his daughter this word. I think first we must consider that we are talking about a male parent. No matter the intention of the man in question, the word cunt will always be problematic. He may have done the research of the etymological roots, but the fact of the matter is that today the word cunt is socially understood to be a reductive word used to attack and debase women, no matter how many times you watch the Vagina Monologue and watch as Eve Ensler, encourages the men in the audience to shout out the word. Intent does not magically alter the social understanding of a word in question.

There are several groups who have attempted to reclaim words. Some Blacks have attempted to reclaim the slur nigger and some gay people have also done so with the word queer, but despite their efforts, these words are still actively used as a slur, and even within the communities to whom these words belong, the idea of reclamation is not necessarily universally embraced. Then there are communities like the disabled community, who are attempting to ask people to reconsider their usage of words like retard, lame, crazy, and moron, with little success I might add. Regardless of the community that you address, a large part of the issue with these problematic words is that they not only have become socially ingrained, the meaning of each of these words has developed their own unique definition.

In many ways, this mans effort reminds me of those who insist on claiming that they were only talking about a cigarette, when called on their usage of the word f#g. Part of raising socially aware children is teaching them to think for themselves. It begins by setting a foundation in which they are taught that all people matter regardless of their race, sexuality, gender, age, or ability. From there, the next step should be a discussion of common isms aimed at historically marginalized group, along with the concept of privilege. The final stage, and the most exciting I might add, is turning their questions around and asking them what they think and why. This can be as simple asking themselves to picture how they would feel in the place of the marginalized person at first.

I disagree with this man’s approach because his first thought removes choice. Not all women believe that the word cunt should be reclaimed, and many, myself included, find it extremely offensive. He could have chosen to thwart the common understanding of female genitalia and use the term labia and then had a discussion on why cunt might be a word for her to consider, but instead he used his adult and male privilege to decide for her. There may well come a time when she pulls away from her father’s understanding and decides that this word is not suitable for her, but we all know that ideas when introduced at a very young age are very difficult to overcome in later years. In this instance, I believe respecting women and encouraging agency should come with the right to name and that is something that was taken from her, in his bid to be the ultimate feminist man. Every person should have the right and ability to cherish their bodies.

Any parent who engages in social justice parenting will tell you that it is an uphill battle. There are times when your children will say the most insightful things, and you will be filled with immense pride, and others when you feel it is hopeless because they have learned and internalized such negative things from either their friends, or the media.

Written by LIE co-editor Julia

Probably most of you have heard by now about the Georgia elementary school that distributed math worksheets featuring word problems involving slavery to their mostly minority students.

As Salon summarizes:

In the most misguided attempt at social understanding since Kirk Lazarus donned blackface, Beaver Ridge Elementary School decided earlier this term to shoehorn a little of the antebellum into its math worksheets. “Each tree had 56 oranges. If eight slaves pick them equally, then how much would each slave pick?” asks one. Another posits, “If Frederick got two beatings per day, how many beatings did he get in one week?” Let’s see … Divide by eight, multiply by seven … got it. The answer is, “Oh my God are you people crazy?”

The Salon article characterizes the questions as “the dumbest third-grade assignment ever” and concludes that the teachers were “just being stunningly insensitive.”  The school has offered the unsatisfying explanation that the questions were meant to be part of a “cross-curricular activity” integrating social studies and math.

Yet it is hard for me to see this assignment as anything less than explicitly racist. And I’m concerned by any media coverage that says anything less. This worksheet is not just dumb, not just insensitive, and not just the product of people who had taken temporary leave of their senses—it is cruel and horrifying and utterly indefensible. Did it occur to none of these teachers that slave owners and overseers no doubt made exactly such inhumane calculations all the time?? The idea of black students receiving this worksheet positively turns my stomach.

And I take particular exception to this paragraph from the Salon article:

Using social studies as a springboard for math is actually a great idea. And making classroom lessons dynamic with real-world context is a time-tested device to teach children the ways numbers are applied in life. Let’s hope this failure doesn’t stop smart and more sensitive teachers from coming up with creative approaches that, you know, don’t involve beatings. Sadly, too, the whole screw-up reinforces the stereotype of what a poster at the New York Daily News referred to as “the New South [that] still has people who loved the Old South.”

Really, is this the time to worry about teachers being put off from pursuing cross-disciplinary approaches in the classroom? Or whether or not this incident reinforces stereotypes about Southerners?  I really could not care less. I am worried about the children of color in those classrooms. I am worried about what this will do to their future pursuit of education, their sense of self, their sense of safety in the world. THAT is what we should be calculating.

More coverage here.

May the waning days of 2011 be joyous.

See you in 2012!

written by Love Isn’t Enough contributor Liz Dwyer; originally published at Los Angelista

Back in the late 1970s when I was a kid roaming the stacks at my local public library, I wandered across a set of adventure books with a character named Tintin. I read the back cover of one and it looked fun. I loved Tintin’s cute dog named Snowy. However, my mom always reviewed the books I was taking home so she saw a Tintin book in my to-be-checked-out stack.

“You can’t get that one,” she said, removing the Tintin book from arms. “Those stories are racist.”

Of course, I decided that I was going to read the Tintin books on the sly during the two (sometimes three) hours we’d spend in the library every week. Well, then I picked up a well-worn copy of Tintin in the Congo. There on the cover was a black guy with bright red lips. Hmm…I’d seen that kind of imagery before and it was a red flag for me. But, I cracked the book open, read it, and wow, my mom was right.

Just as I’d seen black Americans portrayed as bumbling, monkey-like idiots, black Africans–the Congolese people–were being depicted in a similar light. I was done with Tintin before we even really got started.

Later on I found out that some Tintin stories also depicted Jewish characters as sinister villains and moneylenders. So showing black folks as animal-like and an anti-Semitic angle…WINNING!

Fast forward to 2011 when a Tintin movie is about to come out here in the U.S. Last night I asked on Twitter, “Curious if there are other parents out there who are not taking their kids to see Tintin because of it’s racist, anti-Semitic history.”

One of the responses, from Side-Line Magazine, retweeted my tweet, prefacing it with “load of crap.”

This morning, I asked them for clarification, tweeting back, “I’m sorry, what’s a load of crap, a movie based on a racist book character or… ?”

Their reply? “not a racist character at all. I think you’ve never read cokes in stock, the blue lotus. All very humanistic Tintin stories.”

Of course, Side-Line is based in Belgium, home of Tintin author and illustrator Hergé. I can understand being patriotic for your country, but c’mon son, don’t act like what happened didn’t happen. I can also appreciate that Hergé’s attitudes changed over the years. But that still doesn’t mean I have to support it. Or that I have to act like I don’t know the real history of Tintin.

I’m not alone in my concerns about Tintin. A human rights lawyer in the U.K. recently lobbied to get it removed from children’s bookstores. That led to the Telegraph posting a list of the racist allegations against Tintin. Gems like:

In 2007, the UK’s Commission for Racial Equality called for the same book to be banned, saying it contained imagery and words of racial prejudice. One of the most controversial scenes shows a Congolese woman bowing before Tintin, saying: “White man very great. White mister is big juju man.

I’ve also heard how some Congolese just love them some Tintin. Colonialism, like slavery and Jim Crow wasn’t just physical oppression. Psychological oppression did a number on folks of African descent, too.

I know, pointing out the truth is spoiling all the fun. Some people will say I shouldn’t be so sensitive…Everything can’t be perfect and the past is in the past, right? Spielberg is Jewish so if it was racist or anti-Semitic, he would refuse to make the film, so what’s my problem?

Explain to me how I’m supposed to forget racist depictions of black people in the source text for a film and take my children, who get called the n-word at school, to see it? Yeah, right. I’m just going to have to be sensitive because this film won’t get a dime of my money.

Written by Lisa Wade; Originally published at Sociological Images

A recent protest against stop-and-frisk policies inspired to re-post this data on the disproportionate rates with which Whites, Blacks, and Hispanics are stopped by police… and the total failure of this form of racial profiling. New data is included at the end.

Jay Livingston at Montclair SocioBlog discussed the two figures below (full report here). The first shows that Black and Hispanic drivers are more likely to be stopped by Los Angeles Police than White drivers. The second shows that, when stopped, if searched, police are more likely to find weapons and drugs on Whites than on either Blacks or Hispanics. Conclusion: Blacks and Hispanics are being racially profiled by the L.A.P.D. and racial profiling does not work. Data from New York City in 2008 tells a similar story.

The New York Civil Liberties Union reports that the NYPD stopped 161,000 people in the first quarter of 2011. A record number. Eighty-four percent of those stopped were Black or Latino. The Civil Liberties Union has filed a lawsuit, claiming that the practice is unconstitutional.

Please feel free to discuss whatever is on your mind!

Thursday is here–time for another cute kid picture!

This is Melissa’s beautiful daughter, Emma.  Emma is 23 months old and she is grinning here because she just arrived at a play area.  What a smile!

Got cute kids? Send their photos to team@loveisntenough.com so we can brighten up our Thursdays!

Written by Gretchen Sisson; Originally published at Sociological Images

Adoption is a complicated system that both builds and separates families, frequently across lines of social privilege. It involves ideas about who society believes should be parents and under what conditions we believe children should be raised. And, as adoption becomes more open, it also becomes a lifelong process of constantly redefining family. Unsurprisingly, most television representations fall short of representing adoption with the nuance it deserves. Many, such as Glee, Parenthood, 16 and Pregnant, and Teen Mom, present problematic portrayals of adoption.

ABC’s Once Upon a Time involves dual plotlines: one story evolving in fairytale-land, the other taking place in Storybrooke, Maine, where fairytale characters are trapped and unaware of their past identities. While the series’ story arc is extremely complicated, suffice it to say that the main character is a birth mother, Emma, whose son was adopted by Regina. Regina, is — quite literally — the Evil Queen, poised to do epic battle with Emma. Regina actively threatens and insults Emma in her attempt to exclude her from their shared son’s life; Emma, who is presented as the hero, blatantly ignores Regina’s wishes and develops a secretive relationship with Henry:

The message is clear: birth and adoptive parents are opposing parties, with a child’s attachment to one serving as a threat to the other. Representations such as these make open adoption, or any type of cooperative and supportive relationship between the parents, seem like such an oddity, even as it becomes more of the norm within adoption communities.

In the video, Regina presents Emma as an unfit mother who cavalierly “tossed him away,” leaving her to do the hard work of parenting. Her remark, “who knows what you’ve been doing,” further presents Emma as unfit, presumably living a lifestyle that precludes her from any claim as a loving mother.

However, on a more recent episode, Once Upon a Time delved into explored adoption from a bit of a different angle. Emma assisted a character who was being coerced into giving her child up for adoption. Despite the many layers and plot devices, this example is one of very few mainstream media representations of a manipulative adoption. Ashley is told she can’t parent, that she shouldn’t parent, that her daughter would have a better life if someone else parented her; ultimately, she’s subjected to financial coercion. It’s left up to Emma — herself a birth mother — to convince Ashley that if she wants to parent, she should take control of her own life and do so.

So often adoption is represented purely as a joyful resolution, with a focus on a family being formed. But the complex realities behind adoption can’t be ignored in favor of only considering the happy ending. Ann Fessler’s The Girls Who Went Away: The Hidden History of Women Who Surrendered Children for Adoption in the Decades before Roe v. Wade, shows how, before abortion was legal and single motherhood was visible, young, unmarried, pregnant women were subjected to the same manipulation and coercion that Ashley deals with on Once Upon a Time. And these abuses aren’t just things of the past; even today many young women end up placing children for adoption because they simple can’t navigate through barriers like classism and sexism that set up adoption as a fundamental way to “redeem” herself for the “sin” of being unmarried and pregnant.

More nuanced portrayals of adoption could make viewers questions their presumptions about who birth mothers are, why they make the choices they do, and what their lives look like afterward, as well as how adoption can work. Once Upon a Time, then, both gives and takes: it allows viewers to more carefully consider the power dynamics behind adoption, while at the same time clinging to old ideas of birth and adoptive parents in opposition. These are challenges first mothers deal with every day: how do they do the work of openness in a world where their relationship with their child’s adoptive family is still viewed as suspect? Forming a lifelong relationship with strangers and finding a balance of contact that meets everyone’s needs is complicated enough, without images everywhere portraying openness as, at best, an unnecessary oddity, and, at worst, a threat to the child or adoptive family.

How can birth and adoptive parents form beneficial relationships if we frame their interests as mutually exclusive, and consistently portray them as alternately undermining and being threatened by each other? While Once Upon a Time is far from the careful discussion adoption deserves, it does perhaps move us closer to a world where more productive dialogues around the issue are not a fairytale.

———-

Gretchen Sisson recently completed her doctorate at Boston College, and is currently working as an independent researcher and freelance writer. Her work focuses on the “right” to parenthood: who has it, why some don’t, and how society enforces its ideal of an acceptable pursuit of parenthood. To examine these questions, her qualitative research has examined couples pursuing infertility treatments, teen parents and teen pregnancy prevention frameworks, and parents who have placed (voluntarily or otherwise) infants for adoption. For December and January, she’ll be writing on social class and inequality in popular culture for Bitch Magazine’s blog. You can find her on Twitter @gesisson.

Opinion: The Gingrich Who Stole Christmas [Washington Post]

With his slightly round form and thatch of white hair, Newt Gingrich might, with a little blush and a beard, pass for St. Nick. But any poor kid writing a letter to this particular GOP hopeful might end up with a lump of coal or a bucket and mop.

Rather than back off his plan to rethink “stupid” child labor laws and put children as young as 9 to work as school janitors — scrubbing, cleaning and moving around file cabinets — Gingrich has doubled down.

“Really poor children in really poor neighborhoods have no habits of working and have nobody around them who works, so they have no habit of showing up on Monday,’’ he said recently. “They have no habit of staying all day, they have no habit of ‘I do this and you give me cash,’ unless it is illegal.”
Others have pointed to the Dickensian tone of his callous remarks, taking from the beloved “A Christmas Carol” not the transformed Scrooge’s generosity of spirit and Tiny Tim’s “God bless us, every one!” but the miser’s unrepentant reply to those collecting for the poor: “Are there no prisons? Are there no workhouses?”

Gingrich’s image of poor homes would be laughable if it weren’t so widely and perniciously accepted among those who have never set foot in one. The stereotype that wealth is a reward for good behavior and poverty is more character flaw than economic circumstance is ubiquitous. You can see why wealthy types who sent manufacturing jobs overseas and manipulated financial systems for their benefit would find Gingrich’s words appealing; they eliminate any cause and effect between their actions and a growing poverty rate.

Chinese Police Arrest 608 People and Rescue 178 Abducted Children Aged 1 Month to 4 Years in 6 Month Sting-Most of Them are Boys [ReformTalk]

Police have rescued 178 abducted children following a six-month sting involving forces across 10 provinces and regions.

“All of the children have been placed safely in welfare institutes, and some sick ones are receiving treatment in hospital,” Chen Shiqu, head of the Ministry of Public Security’s anti-trafficking task force, told China Daily on Tuesday.

He said the youngsters are aged from one month to four years, adding that most are boys.

Government Tested AIDS Drugs on Foster Kids [MSNBC; h/t Racialicious]

Researchers reported some children had to be taken off the drug because of “serious toxicity,” others developed rashes, and the rates of death and blood toxicity were significantly higher in children who took the medicine daily, rather than weekly.

At least 10 children died from a variety of causes, including four from blood poisoning, and researchers said they were unable to determine a safe, useful dosage. They said the deaths didn’t appear to be “directly attributable” to dapsone but nonetheless were “disturbing.”

“An unexpected finding in our study was that overall mortality while receiving the study drug was significantly higher in the daily dapsone group. This finding remains unexplained,” the researchers concluded.

Another study involving foster children in the 1990s treated children with different combinations of adult antiretroviral drugs. Among 52 children, there were 26 moderate to severe reactions — nearly all in infants. The side effects included rash, fever and a major drop in infection-fighting white blood cells.

Hundreds Arrested as China Police Smash Child-Trafficking Ring [CNN]

Chinese police have busted two child-trafficking rings after a six-month nationwide investigation, rescuing 178 children and arresting 608 suspects, the country’s Ministry of Public Security announced this week.

Calling it “the biggest achievement since the launch of a national campaign against human trafficking,” the ministry described in detail the joint effort of police forces in ten provinces in statement posted on its official website.

Written by Arturo R. García; Originally published at Racialicious

Basketball fans are well-acquainted with stories about a local star who never got to show their skills outside the neighborhood courts.

And make no mistake, Tayshana Murphy was on her way to bigger things. As Grantland’s Jonathan Abrams wrote:

Mention a court in New York City — West 4th, Rucker, Orchard Beach — they don’t just know of Tayshana “Chicken” Murphy. They know her. She possessed that killer crossover and played “man strong,” as Taylonn, her father, likes to say. Tayshana loved contact. “Babies,” she called the girls who helplessly bounced off of her when she drove to the rim. She played taller than her 5-foot-7 and with a fierceness that contrasted against her gentle, hazel eyes.

Those eyes sized up Shannon Bobbitt of the WNBA’s Indiana Fever this summer.

Bobbitt conducts a clinic every year outside the Harlem projects where she grew up. The clinic is a way for children to see the footsteps she laid for them to follow. Bobbitt had heard of Tayshana and that she could ball. She probably had no idea that the high schooler was itching to test her skills against the professional.

“She’s fast as hell, Pops,” Tayshana told her father of Bobbitt. “But she’s so little. She can’t handle me. I’m too big for her.”

Murphy’s story came to a premature and violent end on Sept. 11, when she was shot and killed in the Grant Houses project where she lived. Initial reports said the shooting was a case of mistaken identity stemming from a feud between residents of the Grant Houses and the nearby Manhattanville Houses – a story her family refuted.

Continue reading →

Via Crunk Feminist Collective

Janice Lewis went missing in Manhattan on Tuesday, December 6. Friends saw her board an uptown bound D train around 2:15 pm and she hasn’t been seen since. Janice is a 17 year old African American girl. she is 5’11” and approx. 155 pounds. She was wearing dark blue True Religion jeans and purple Ugg field boots. Janice is also autistic. If you have any information please contact her brother at imchrislewis@gmail.com.

See Crunk Feminist Collective tumblr for photos.

Talk! The floor is yours!

It’s Thursday–time for another gratuitous cute kid pic!

Here’s LIE reader Rachel’s darling Gracie, now 8.5 months old. What a cutie!

Got cute kids? Send their photos to team@loveisntenough.com so we can show them off!