Wading In

Going about it the wrong way By Kelvin Wade | | April 24, 2008 22:04 While Rodriguez High parents expressed their frustration over the incendiary racial acts by two students and the administration's anemic response to them, I was involved in another racial dispute an hour up the freeway. I was steamed last week when my girlfriend's 11-year-old granddaughter Lauryn told me that she and her African-American classmates were pulled out of class to attend a meeting in the cafeteria with the principal. Jana Fields, principal of Madison Elementary in North Highlands assembled all black 4th, 5th and 6th graders and told them that their STAR test scores were below whites and Hispanics. She naively thought 9-, 10- and 11-year-olds could understand the racial achievement gap, when educators don't even understand it. Lauryn and her classmates translated the principal's remarks into saying they were inherently 'dumber than the white kids and a little dumber than the Hispanics....

High prices may change eating habits By Kelvin Wade | | April 16, 2008 17:21 Eaters beware! The country is dealing with the worst food inflation in 17 years. Food costs rose dramatically last year and are rising higher this year. Anyone who has been grocery shopping recently has experienced the sticker shock of how much staples have risen. There's a global food crisis caused by high oil prices, increased demand, freakish weather, ethanol and governments hording their exports for fear of running out of food for their own populations. We fat Americans are used to eating 'a hound's bait and a dog's farewell' (One of my mother's expressions meaning 'to eat a heckuva lot') and paying precious little for it. The uptick in prices will definitely change how we eat. An article in the Washington Post this past weekend, focused on what the restaurant industry is doing to weather the high cost of food. Some places are buying smaller plates, so smaller...

Keep posting those crimes online By Kelvin Wade | | April 09, 2008 16:17 You've probably seen the sickening video released by authorities in Polk County, Fla., of a group of teenage girls beating a girl so badly she had to be treated at a hospital for a concussion. The girls were going to post the beating video to YouTube.com and MySpace.com I presume for other young sadists to enjoy. While the video is repulsive, I think we should encourage young thugs to continue to videotape their crimes and post them to the Internet. We're no stranger to this phenomenon. It wasn't long ago that there was a bit of a stir locally over amateur rap videos shot in Fairfield posted to YouTube showing masked youth displaying Glocks and Uzi pistols. The Fairfield videos are still available online. It's not exactly how most residents would want the community represented. I think parents who have junior predators for children should give their kids cell phones with video c...

Remember King's Legacy By Kelvin Wade April 3, 2008 Forty years ago this Friday, Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in Memphis , Tennessee . While that tragic time will be memorialized in TV specials and editorials, I hope the remembrances will help reacquaint or introduce Americans to the real Dr. King. The assassination did more than to silence one of the greatest leaders and orators in American history. Out of the ashes of the riots that followed his death, grew a sanitized mythology of King. The assassination, like those of the Kennedys, made Americans almost deify King as “the Dreamer.” The reality is had Dr. King lived, he would most likely be viewed today in the same regard as Jesse Jackson more so than Colin Powell. The “I Have a Dream” speech was given five years before his death. Today, conservatives like to quote his desire to live in a nation where his children were judged not “by the color of their skin ...