WHITENING THE CITIES

Eddie Farmer, 75, lives with belongings thrown on the curb after a foreclosure next door to his home  in the Lawndale neighborhood of Chicago. (Chicago Tribune)

THE WHITENING OF THE CITIES...Soaring rents are driving poor and middle-class folks, especially African-Americans out of the cities. A major factor along with loss of jobs, evictions, foreclosures,school closings in targeted black communities, gun violence, and draconian cuts in city services, ie. health clinics, markets, etc... Here in Chicago, rent as a percentage of income has risen to 31%, from a historical average of 21%. In New Orleans, it has more than doubled, to 35% from 14%. In L.A. it's 47%. -- NY Times

HOW BAD CAN THEY BE? I'm still trying to wrap my brain around this interesting data set. Chicago's privately-run charter schools expel students at a vastly higher rate than the rest of the district. But even with their push-out of so-called low-performing students (mostly poor, black & Latino), these same charters continue to score below the very traditional CPS schools they are trying to replace. I mean, what's up with that, charter hustlers?

HOW ABOUT SOME COMMON CORE STANDARDS when it come to corporal punishment directed at black children in Mississippi schools?

In Holmes County, where 99 percent of the public school children are black, students say corporal punishment traditionally starts at daycare and Head Start centers, where teachers rap preschool-age students lightly with rulers and pencils, cautioning: “Just wait until you get to big school.” -- The Nation

42...It was the great W.E.B. DuBois who wrote: "...the problem of the 20th Century is the problem of color line." The great American tragedy is that well into the 21st Century, it still is.

Today is the anniversary of Jackie Robinson breaking through baseball's color line in 1947. Arguably this country's greatest athlete (not just in baseball), Jackie's story is also a story of the great migration of African-Americans from the Jim Crow South. In this case, from Cairo, Ga. to Pasadena where he became a multi-sport great talent and football star at John Muir High School and then at Pasadena City College and UCLA.

He's also the reason, despite living in Chicago since 1975 and aside from growing up in a left-wing family in L.A., I remain a loyal Dodger fan.