Daily Archives: March 16, 2021

Before Wakanda, there was Zamunda.

The 1988 film Coming to America, directed by John Landis, depicted a realized African dynasty that could only be described as fit for a prince. Naturally, no better fit for the main role was there than comedic prince Eddie Murphy.

The films release resulted in both domestic and worldwide success at the box office and is now revered as a cultural treasure and a nostalgia-inducing classic in Eddie Murphys royal arsenal of filmography.

So when the announcement came that a sequel was in the works, it understandably came with some skepticism. In a world of political correctness and cancel culture, fans of the original film feared that the sequel would not include elements of what made the 1988 film so iconically funny.

Eddie Murphy returns as Prince Akeem Joffer, the heir to the Zamundan throne, now a doting husband to his Queen Lisa, played by Shari Headley. He is also now a loving father to three daughters; his oldest and youngest daughters, Meeka and Tinashe, are played by Kiki Layne and Akiley Love respectively, and Murphys real-life daughter Bella has the role of Akeems middle daughter, Omma.

When Akeems father King Jaffe, played by James Earl Jones, passes away, he must travel once again to Queens, New York, to find the true heir to the throne of Zamunda. With the help of his loyal confidante of 30 years, Semmi, played by Arsenio Hall, Akeem locates his son, Lavelle, played by Jermaine Fowler.

Accompanied by his mother, played by Leslie Jones, Lavelle returns to Zamunda with King Akeem to learn of his newfound princely duties. King Akeem concludes that there is more to being a king than assuming the throne, and that family is the greatest ruler of all.

One of the triumphs of the film is its ability to introduce sociopolitical issues relevant to real-life experiences of Black people. This is displayed in a particular scene where Lavelle is at a job interview at the Duke and Duke firm. The reference to the business is a clever nod to the Brothers Duke from the 1983 film Trading Places, two other antagonists in the EMCU (Eddie Murphy Cinematic Universe).

Interviewed by Calvin Duke, played by Saturday Night Live news correspondent Colin Jost, Lavelle points out the disparities that exist between him and his white interviewer. Much to Dukes chagrin, Lavelle is more than happy to walk out of the interview so as not to feel any further onslaught of microaggressions.

Although there were opportunities in the film where the comedy couldve been taken back to 1988, the fresh take on dry humor and the myriad of cultural references bring the world of Zamunda into the 21st century. As a word of caution, older fans can take note from Akeems daughter Omma: to be on fleek is no more.

The storyline would be remiss if it didnt include some of the original films beloved characters, many played by Hall and Murphy: the neighborhood barbers with their tongue-in-cheek rapport, the musical stylings of Randy Watson and Sexual Chocolate, and the chaotic-but-devout Reverend Brown. Also returning is the head of the McDowells fast-food empire, Cleo McDowell, played by John Amos.

Alongside the characters from the 1988 film, Coming 2 America embellishes a star-studded cast that is on par with the gems of the Royal Jewels. Fans can revel in cameos from Morgan Freeman, En Vogue, Salt-N-Pepa, Gladys Knight, Teyana Taylor, Rick Ross and Trevor Noah, to name a few.

While Coming 2 America may not have met the full expectations of those fans who longed for a film that calls back to the era of Eddie Murphys Raw, the purpose of the film served as a way to blend the generations of fans who consider the original film a staple of Black cinema. Zamunda may be a place of fiction, but the reality of Black excellence lives on.

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'Coming 2 America' is a royal flush 30 years in the making - Mesa Press

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With last weeks introduction in Congress of the misleadingly named Civics Secures Democracy Act, we are headed toward an epic clash over the spread of uber-controversial pedagogies Critical Race Theory and Action Civics to Americas classrooms. I dont know whether the country will wake up to the danger of this legislation before or after it passes. Sooner or later, however, the truth will out. When it does, the culture war will have merged with K12 education-policy disputes to a degree never before seen.

Because this new legislation is a backdoor effort to impose a de facto national curriculum in the politically charged subject areas of history and civics, the battle will rage in the states, at the federal level, and between the states and the federal government as well. The Biden administrations Education Department will almost certainly collaborate in this attempt to develop a set of national incentives, measures, and penalties that effectively force Critical Race Theory and Action Civics onto states and localities. The likelihood of education controversies moving from third-tier to first-tier issues in federal elections has never been greater.

The Republicans who have co-sponsored the Civics Secures Democracy Act in the Senate (John Cornyn) and the House (Tom Cole) have been hornswoggled and hogtied into backing legislation that is about as far from conservative as a bill could be. It should be said in extenuation of their decision that the bill is careful to bury its true ends under anodyne jargon. You have to know a lot about Action Civics, for example, to understand that this bill is designed to force it onto the states. Most conservatives dont even know what Action Civics is, much less understand its misleading jargon. The very term Action Civics is a euphemism for political protests for course credit, something close to the opposite of a proper civics course. Thats one reason why the Civics Secures Democracy Act is so egregiously misnamed.

There have, of course, been many important education battles in our time. The conservative movement was founded by William F. Buckleys 1951 book, God and Man at Yale, an early attack on the secular socialism of the university. Cultural issues remained important to movement conservatism, yet the focus soon turned to politics and policy in the ordinary sense. The 1960s gave birth to a series of intense cultural battles, with universities as epicenters of controversy. Yet many of the clashes were over the war and the draft. For the most part, the federal government kept out of higher-education controversies in that era.

The battle over the teaching of Western Civilization at Stanford in 1987 kicked off a decade-long culture war over multiculturalism and political correctness, the ancestor of our clashes today. At this point, education battles began to seep into national politics, especially via the actions of Education Secretary William Bennett and National Endowment for the Humanities chair Lynne Cheney. Even so, universities incubating what eventually was to become todays woke culture were largely insulated from government intervention by academic freedom.

The Obama administration pushed the K12 Common Core on states, but the founders of Common Core made a calculated decision to omit the controversial subjects of history and civics from that effort. They understood the dangers of mixing education policy with high-intensity culture war issues. Now, however, in an attempt to complete the creation of a de facto national curriculum, the top supporters of Common Core (including, sad to say, a few conservatives) have formed an alliance with the top national advocates of Action Civics and Critical Race Theory. The result is what we see in the Civics Secures Democracy Act and what were likely to get very soon from the Biden administration a de facto national curriculum in Action Civics and Critical Race Theory. And all of this is happening as woke culture is spilling out of the campuses and into the wider society. Once the reality of this new push for education reform comes into the open, we will see the culture war merge with the details of federal education policy in unprecedented fashion.

What does the not-so-civic Civics Secures Democracy Act of 2021 actually do? Above all, it appropriates $1 billion for federal grants to support K12 curriculum development, teacher training, and research on the K12 teaching of history and civics. Sounds good, if expensive, until you look at the fine print. Priority for grants is decided according to two basic criteria.

First of all, priority goes to grants that support evidence-based practices. The bill goes on to list these supposedly evidence-based practices, which are essentially the menu of troubling teaching techniques favored by the movement for Action Civics (Bill Page 5, Line 16-Page 6, Line 5). These are the very same practices I have written model legislation to block at the state level. They include: 1) directing teachers to discuss current social and political controversies in class; 2) out-of-class political protests and lobbying (nearly always for leftist causes) for course credit (in the bill, called projects and experiential learning) and 3) internships with (invariably leftist) lobbying and advocacy organizations for course credit (in the bill, called service learning).

Programs in media literacy are also marked as a priority. These programs ostensibly warn students away from dangerous conspiracy theories. In practice, however, they discourage students from looking at conservative sources and hold up mainstream media fact-checkers (largely left-biased) as sources of ultimate authority. Essentially, media literacy programs favored by advocates of the new civics inculcate the Democratic Partys position on fake news.

The upshot is that the lions share of this billion-dollar jackpot will support mandatory leftist protest, lobbying, and indoctrination, while supporters of traditional civics and history will be frozen out.

The second criterion for priority applies to grants that improve knowledge and engagement among traditionally underserved students, as well as grants that promise to close gaps in knowledge and achievement among students of different income levels, racial and ethnic groups, and native languages. This gives the inside lane to Critical Race Theory, while largely disqualifying those who believe that American history and civics can unify if presented in a broadly similar manner to students of all incomes, races, and ethnicities.

That may sound too strong. Keep in mind, however, that the main public justification for the controversial, Critical Race Theory-based Culturally Responsive Teaching and Leading Standards just approved in Illinois was that they would be more likely to attract minority teachers and more likely to appeal to minority students, thereby closing achievement gaps. Yet those standards force teachers to call America systemically racist, affirm the fluidity of gender, mitigate their Euro-centrism and whiteness, and substitute activism for achievement when grading students. Finding creative ways to present traditional civics to minorities is one thing. Teaching radical activism is quite another.

Yet the movement for Critical Race Theory in education essentially presents itself as fulfilling both priority criteria for grants listed in this bill: experiential advocacy projects designed to appeal to minority students. We are talking about Black Lives Matter protests outside of police stations for course credit. And the grants will be disbursed by President Bidens Education Department, sure to be staffed by left-leaning bureaucrats who believe as does the president that our country is systemically racist. Put together the priority criteria and a Democrat-controlled Department of Education and you will see a tremendous number of grants going to Critical Race Theory-based political advocacy programs, all under the label of civics.

Critical Race Theory, of course, is antithetical to the classically liberal principles upon which our constitutional republic rests. Teaching it is actually a form of anti-civics. Yet that is what hundreds of millions of dollars disbursed by the Civics Secures Democracy Act is going to be used for.

So, the Civics Secures Democracy Act is a massive boondoggle in support of politicizing students and teaching them to trade away equality and individual liberty for identity politics and the redistribution of . . . well, pretty much everything. But theres more. On top of its billion-dollar lure, the bill revamps a key national test as a backdoor way of imposing a de facto national curriculum on the states.

The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), famous as the nations report card, is the national test that allows us to tell how well the states are doing at teaching basic knowledge and skills. NAEP allows us to see that, whereas Americas reading and math scores had once been headed up, Common Core has brought them down. Yet NAEP was never intended to create a national curriculum. On the contrary, NAEP was deliberately designed to make it difficult or impossible to link its results to state or local curricula. If anything, by revealing the failure of Common Core, NAEP has already discredited the very idea of a de facto national curriculum.

For decades, however, some have dreamed of using NAEP as a way of imposing what amounts to a national curriculum on the states. If NAEP could be aligned to specific history or civics standards, and administered in such a way as to facilitate state-by-state comparisons between results, the test could effectively force a federal curriculum on states and localities. Variable state NAEP results could then be tied to the awarding of federal grants. State-by-state rankings would have a profound effect on parental satisfaction with schools, and thus on migration in and out of state by both individuals and businesses.

The Civics Secures Democracy Act of 2021 is very much part of an effort to use NAEP to force a revisionist history and civics curriculum down the throats of unsuspecting states and localities. The bill would increase and regularize NAEP assessments in history and civics, facilitate state-by-state comparisons, and condition grants on the willingness of a state to participate in the history and civics portions of the test on a regular basis. Grant renewals would also be conditioned on statewide performance on the reorganized NAEP.

Combine this with the ambitions of the new, supposedly bipartisan, Educating for American Democracy (EAD) initiative (aptly described as a Trojan Horse for Woke Education). The leftist leaders of EAD, who just happen to be the chief public backers of the Civics Secures Democracy Act of 2021, issued a draft report on implementation that I have seen, but that seems not to have been released to the public in final form. That draft report calls for NAEP to be redesigned to align with EAD. This would be an inexcusable national power-grab and an affront to the proper purpose of NAEP. Its clear, however, that this is exactly what the bogus leftist civics coalition wants. (For a new report by the Heritage Foundation critical of EAD and its national ambitions, go here. For more critiques of EAD, go here and here.)

In effect, we are looking at an effort to impose a new federal Common Core in the politically explosive subject areas of history and civics. Worse, the program in each of these areas does more than just lean a bit toward the left side of the political spectrum. Instead, it sharply breaks with fundamental assumptions in American education, first by promoting illiberal Critical Race Theory, and second by turning what should be a politically neutral classroom into a training ground for leftist advocacy and lobbying.

All around us, the culture war has broken the bounds of the university and spilled into our day-to-day lives. Conservatives and traditional liberals are rightly up in arms about the woke assault on our most fundamental freedoms, extending to inculcating guilt and shame in elementary-school students for the color of their skin. The Democrats in Congress, in league with the Biden administration and the leftist Action Civics movement, are about to supercharge this culture war by injecting it into the heart of federal education policy. Whether sooner or later, this is destined to become the greatest education battle of our lifetimes.

See more here:

The Greatest Education Battle of Our Lifetimes - National Review

When Jennifer Lopez sang "This Land is Your Land" at the presidential inauguration in January, my phone blew up with messages saying, J. Los singing your song!

Its understandable why so many friends and peers associate the song with me: I talk about Woody Guthrie an awful lot. Ever since I first read Bound for Glory in high school, Ive never quite been able to shut up about the man: this Walt Whitman with a James Dean sneer, this Will Rogers with a razor in his shoe, this proto-punk poet who was just anarchic enough to believe in human decency, American potential, and though he sprouted from deeply racist roots in Jim Crow Oklahoma a racially inclusive society.

And so, as youd expect, his anthemic, tongue-in-cheek retort to Irving Berlins God Bless America has a special place in my heart, too. Its long been a central pillar of both my public performances and my educational programs for kids.

In theschool programsI teach on social justice, I use the song to unpack the idea of ownership. Whereas the chorus and first two verses speak to what we collectivelygetfrom America, the rarely sung additional verses ask what weowe to each other, specifically.

In the squares of the city, in the shadow of a steeple;By the relief office, I'd seen my people.As they stood there hungry, I stood there asking,Is this land made for you and me?

In the programs I teach on writing, meanwhile, I use the song to teach about structure and rhyme scheme, and the ways in which a masterful lyricist like Guthrie is able to break all the rules.

But lately, Ive been rethinking my reliance on the song in my teaching, and the unintended message I may be sending to kids through its lens on American history a lens that obscures the fact that our land was, in fact, taken from its native inhabitants by force.

In 2019, Mali Obomsawin, a member of the folk trio Lula Wiles, wrote a piece for Folklife Magazine on how the song speaks to her as a citizen of the Abenaki First Nation: This land is your land, this land is my land These lyrics shake me up like a soda can every time I hear them. She makes a compelling case for why the lyrics, intentionally or not, reinforce Native oppression.

The article was met with quick backlash. Conservative papers reacted about how youd expect, but the reaction from many on the left was damning too. What both sides shared was a breezy dismissal of the concerns of a woman of color one with multi-layered expertise on the subject by largely white male authors.

Obomsawin is not the first Indigenous American musician to object to how This Land is Your Land has been sung and used over the years. Raye Zaragoza has spoken out about it too, and Buffy Sainte-Marie, one of the best-known Indigenous performers of all time, has long voiced her objections.

Somehow, though, Id never heard these perspectives until recently. Maybe its because the media is publishing wider perspectives than they used to. More likely its because Im paying more attention.

I dont want to throw away my beloved This Land is Your Land. But the opinions of musicians like Obomsawin and Sainte-Marie matter to me.

Like many white Americans, I was jolted out of a complicit slumber by the murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor this past year. Instead of just shaking my head and dashing off another ineffectual social media post, I decided to go deeper this time. I helped start a racial justice coalition in the Boston suburb where I live and another in children's music. I worked more closely than I ever had with Black and brown peers in these groups. I heard their stories, I asked questions. I learned to talk a little less and listen a little more.

And then, a few months ago, I was faced with a dilemma: I received a Grammy nomination, along with four other white nominees, for Best Childrens Album of the Year. Unlike when I was nominated as part of an all-white slate in 2013, this timeI recognized that there was a problem.

Artists of color have been deeplyunderrepresented in this category over the years. While there are complicated and nuanced reasons for this, the end result is a lack of representation that is not OK especially in a genre like childrens music, where musicians are uniquely tasked with modeling fairness, kindness and inclusion.

So, after much deliberation and communication with others involved, I and two of the other five nominated acts decided to respectfully decline our nominations. An NPR story on our decision led to a rash of national coverage. Like Obomsawin, we were trolled by white nationalists, but we also heard from many on the left who felt our move was misguided. Not surprisingly, the vast majority of those who weighed in were white.

I dont want to throw away my beloved This Land is Your Land. Its one of the songs that made me want to be a songwriter and that, despite its shortcomings, still resonates with me deeply. But the opinions of musicians like Obomsawin and Sainte-Marie matter to me. If I value their worth and intellect as musical peers and human beings, then I need to make a genuine effort to hear them to check my defensive instincts and be willing to reconsider my assumptions, even around something I love.

This is the work of allyship. Its not about political correctness. Its not even about getting it right. Its about trying to create more space for other voices and being willing to loosen our grip on the things weve convinced ourselves we need.

In this case, it may mean coming around to the idea that the best way to honor Woody Guthries vision of an equitable and inclusive nation is to live his famous words rather than sing them.

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Why I'd Rather Live Woody Guthrie's Words Than Sing Them - WBUR

How much blood has to spill on the streets of a city before elected officials give up political correctness and embrace tough policing.

Seattles murder rate rose more than 60 percent last year and violent assaults are up this year too.

Portlands worse. Shootings more than doubled last year.

Mayor Ted Wheelers cave-in to his violent Antifa and BLM friends led to cuts of tens of millions in police

That left the city with 55 homicides in last year: the highest number in a quarter century.

For context, only 20 people were murdered the year Wheeler first took office in 2016

This year, so far, we are already on track to top 100 murders.

And whats city halls solution? Portland has one of the lowest number of officers per capita anywhere in America.

And were short 90 cops right now. The city hasnt hired a single cop in the last 8 months.

And now the city council, unbelievably, wants to cut police 5% more with the promise it will put back 1 percent next year

How does this hit YOU?

When youre hurt or dying or in trouble and you call 9-1-1 for a lights and siren cop at top speedthe bureaus GOAL is to get to you 8 minutes after dispatch.

Theyre currently averaging 11 minutes.

My suggestion? Buy a gun, spend time at the range, get your shots inside the ten ring, and aim for center of mass.

The post Northwest Government Seems To Urge People To Buy A Gun For Protection appeared first on The Lars Larson Show.

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Northwest Government Seems To Urge People To Buy A Gun For Protection - 550 KTSA