I feel a need to write this, I don’t know what form this will take but I know its from the heart. I look down at my clock its 124 am Friday morning, the last pure day of this National Academy. I think back to all the excitement I have experienced, this beautiful weather, a [...]
Posts from ‘July, 2009’
Taking Art to the Streets in East L.A.
This year’s National Academy experienced the potency of color and politics through a mural tour of east L.A. Ben Weber, a participant this year, arranged for us to meet Carlos Callejo at the corner of Cesar Chavez and Soto in Boyle Heights. Carlos’s enthusiasm for taking art to the street, “where the people are,” was [...]
What If Who We Are, Is Not Who We Should Be?
I consider this writing to be several things, really: an evolution, a mixture, and in the practical sense, a thesis segment. It took on its last form as a presentation for the 2009 National Academy. Consider the following. “There is to be no interracial dating Students who are partners in an interracial marriage will be [...]
We're Having a Wiki!
We want to add a wiki to Politicolor so access to the site might be a bit quirky this weekend. The wiki will be a place to share ideas for the classroom and to continue the scholarly collaboration of the National Academy. So, please bear with us this weekend as we extend the floorplan of [...]
Obama to NAACP: Our Work is Not Over
In a recent lecture, Will pointed to the constitutional nature of the speech President Barack Obama gave to the NAACP to mark their centennial convention. Obama marks the occasion as an opportunity to celebrate “not simply the journey the NAACP has traveled, but the journey that we have, as Americans, have traveled over the past [...]
Virtual Academy: Re-Presenting a Text
I’m sitting in a quiet computer lab at Oxy as the 2009 crew completes their re-writing project. Questions and concerns about choosing the perfect text clouded last night’s discussions but that seems so long ago as the project winds down today. The energy created through this sort of engagement with a theoretical idea is kinetic. The [...]
Virtual Academy: How do you know?
This week’s work at the National Academy has helped me reconsider a book I picked up in Charlottesville, Virginia several years ago. The title was intriguing, “What Do You Believe is True Even Though You Cannot Prove it?” This was a collection of essays written in response to the 2005 Edge Question and included Howard [...]
An old post
I am going to add this now, but as you can tell I wrote this last fall, but wrongly posted it as a comment not as a post. Hope it can still start a debate!! I believe we had our first real Constitutional moment during Wednesday’s final Presidental debate. In one of the final questions [...]
2009 National Institute
As someone who has attended two of the Center of the Constitution’s weekend programs, I was overly excited when I was accepted to the 2009′s National Institute. Of course I couldn’t wait to pick Will’s brain for more and more insight, but quickly I have learned this Institute is much more than that. This institute [...]
Ubuntu and the Birthplace of Cool
I’ve been recently reminded that my own activism has roots in the campaigns for Africa in the 80′s. I convinced my mother to make a donation so I could order a Live Aid t-shirt. I’m sure she hoped the purchase would buy her some quiet time but it wasn’t about the t-shirt for me. I [...]
