Dear Langston, It Explodes!

Regina Faye Brown

Description

Dear Langston, It Explodes! is the first title published by author Regina Faye Brown. It is a unique, genre-bending compilation of over two decades of writing. The author considers it like a social networking website in print.

Current publishing projects include a collaboration on a biography with a prominent New Jersey construction magnate and geneological research for a non-fiction family history. Her blog address is http://beigerage.blogspot.com.  

Sujets

• Ethnic Studies
• Black Studies
• Social Science
• Sociologie, société et politique
• Sitio web
• Website
• African American
• American
• Networking
• Collaboration
• Social
• Compilation

Informations

• Publié par: AuthorHouse
• Date de parution: 24 février 2010
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781477201251
• Langue: English

Extrait

DEAR LANGSTON, IT EXPLODES!
 
 
 
 
By Regina Faye Brown
 
© 2010 Regina Faye Brown. All rights reserved.
 
No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.
 
AuthorHouse™
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Bloomington, IN 47403
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Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.
 
Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.
Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.
 
ISBN: 978-1-4389-9532-8 (sc)
ISBN: 978-1-4772-0125-1 (e)
 
Published by AuthorHouse 10/18/2022
 
 
 

 
WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 17, 2008
Economic Collapse as “Reverse Reparations”?
By: Regina Faye Brown
‘In God We Trust’…it’s on our American dollar bills. ‘One Nation, Under God, Indivisible, with Liberty and Justice for All’… that’s from our Pledge of Allegiance. Both presidential candidates ended their recent speeches at their respective parties’ conventions with “God Bless America.” America talks the talk but when it comes to believing in and fearing God, does she walk the walk?
Watching the financial stocks plummet on September 17 th after a $70 billion “bail-out” of the world’s largest insurer, AIG, with taxpayer money, the commentators stated that Americans are worried about the safety of their funds placed in all banks big and small. The commentators insure the public that since the creation of the FDIC only three hundred or so individuals were not “made whole”.
What about the millions and millions of Americans of African descent whose forefathers and mothers were never “made whole”? Even though they were kidnapped, brutalized and terrorized during slavery and for a good chunk of time afterward, these Americans were not compensated for their labor or emotional distress and in turn they generally did not pass down wealth to their children to grow for future generations.
Thomas Jefferson, one of America’s most heralded founding fathers, was also a slave-owner and the father of slaves he never saw fit to emancipate. Being very intelligent he did understand the consequences of the actions of his class stating “I fear for my country when I reflect that God is just.”
Lehman Brothers has succumbed to bankruptcy while so far other investment banks have staved off this action. On www.lehman.com we see that Lehman Brothers was founded in 1850 in Montgomery, Alabama. They worked with local slaveholders as brokers of slave-picked cotton and in 1858 opened their office in New York. They made their fortune from the misery of others.
Lehman was not alone by any means. In 2002 lawyers Deadria Farmer-Paellman and Ed Fagan sued insurance giant Aetna, railroad company CSX and Fleet Boston bank for their history of profiting from slavery. But there are so many more companies who did just that as well and not just in America.
And let’s not forget the actual slaveholders whose children and children’s children benefitted financially for generations from wealth earned and passed down which originated from the wealth earned from the toil of other, uncompensated human beings. Maybe they even had inherited money invested in the markets and have inherited money in bank deposits that they hope are insured.
Unfortunately, many African-Americans don’t really know what reparations are, or that they were promised to freed slaves, or that we should be fighting for them. In Martin Luther King’s dream speech he didn’t just have a dream that his children could have the privilege of going to the same school as white children, he said America had given black Americans a check marked “Insufficient Funds”!! Most of the people who do know about reparations feel it’s a pipe dream to expect the government system established by the likes of Thomas Jefferson to correct itself and finally own up to its evil infliction of poverty on a people.
However, true believers in God recognize when He moves. They believe in His word the Bible where in James 5:1-4 it states: 1 Go now, ye rich men, weep and howl for your miseries that shall come upon you. 2 Your riches are corrupted, and your garments are motheaten. 3 Your gold and silver are cankered and the rust of them shall be a witness against you, and shall eat your flesh as it were fire. Ye have heaped treasure together for the last days. 4 Behold, the hire of the laborers who have reaped down your fields, which is of you kept back by fraud, crieth: and the cries of them which have reaped are entered into the ears of the Lord of Sabaoth.
Amen.
‘God moved on the water April the 19 th day’ is from a folk song African-Americans sang when the Titanic sank. African-Americans were barred from working or traveling on the infamous ship as it was reserved for the world’s elite. As I watched Goldman Sachs’ ( a company who sent me a letter stating they’d compromised my personal financial information, including my social security number and in a year of billion dollar bonuses for current employees compensated a former intern with a year of access to a credit-monitoring service!) shares fall today I knew exactly how the lyricists who penned that song felt.
 
TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 25, 2008
Obesity: Slavery’s Legacy?
My most recent reparations article
Obesity, one legacy of slavery?
By: Regina F. Brown 11/14/06
In the article, ‘Obesity prevalent in Southern States, Study’ from October 16, 2006’s Jet Magazine, the research pointed out that people living in the Southern states have a higher prevalence of obesity. I’m sure I’m not the only Ebony/Jet reader that noticed the correlation of obesity prevalence and former slave statehood.
According to the Centers for Disease Control’s (CDC) report entitled ‘U.S. Obesity trends in Adults from 1991-2001’, the prevalence of obesity among U.S. adults was broken down by population characteristics, including race. Blacks had a disproportionately high occurrence of obesity at 31.1% obesity rate. This compares to an obesity rate of 19.6% for whites and a rate of 23.7 for Hispanics. If the rate is disproportionately high, as it is for African-Americans, the rate is not closely related to the percentage of African-Americans compared to the population as a whole, in fact it is more than double the percentage of African-Americans in the population, 12.8 % in 2004 ( http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/states/00000.html ). The White population comprised 67.4% of the United States in 2004 with Hispanics accounting for 14.1%.
One of the Jet Obesity article’s main points was that poverty increases the chances that a person will be obese. This is partly due to the lack of availability of more nutritious, more expensive foods available in neighborhoods where real supermarkets exist. Almost one-third of African American children lived in poverty in 1999, compared with 27 percent of other minorities and nine percent of non-Hispanic Whites. ( http://www.prcd.org/summaries/blacks/blacks.html ). The White population comprised 67.4% of the United States in 2004 with Hispanics accounting for 14.1%. So if you live in the South, as 53.6% of black people do, are affected by poverty and also happen to be black, is there a good chance that you will have a higher prevalence of obesity? Is this so, and if so, why?
In ‘Rethinking Weight’ by Amanda Spake the story of the offspring of women who survived the Dutch winter famine of 1944-45 is noted. The article points out that “Babies born to women who suffered severe malnutrition early in their pregnancies tended to have more fat and become obese more readily as adults.” Are these findings exclusive to the Dutch of that year or could these findings, on human beings, be related to the experiences of others, human beings as well.
This is essentially what this paper is all about. Are we humans? Because if we are, and I know we are because if white is human, and I am that also, then black is human because you cannot (no matter how hard they try to beat you in the head with this concept) be half human unless your name is Jesus! If we are, then where is the outrage? Am I the only one outraged, me and Farrakhan? If we are, where are the revolutionaries? All murdered? Ron Brown?
On the United States Department of Veterans Affairs’ website in the section entitled ‘National Center for Post Traumatic Stress Disorder in an article called ‘As Survivors Age: Part II’, Yael Danieli, Ph.D. argues that “victimization/trauma” causes a rupture, a possible regression, and a state of being “stuck”, called fixity.” Danieli states, “The Holocaust not only ruptured continuity but also destroyed all the individual’s existing supports. The ensuing pervasive conspiracy of silence between survivors and society including mental health professionals, deprived them and their children of potential supports.’
Dr. Danieli’s article contends that survivors of the Nazi Holocaust suffer from Post Traumatic Stress and pass it to their offspring. It also mentions a study done by Matussek where “survivors in the USA and Israel… have been more successful in coping with their concentration camp past than …in Germany which for them, is still the land of their persecutors.”
Can slavery have predisposed blacks to obesity and other Post Traumatic stress symptoms? If the Nazi Holocaust could have done that to future generations of Jews, then certainly an argument can be made for this assertion. Is obesity more prev