Wading In

The lesson from SCC’s comic strip tempest Fairfield Daily Republic / The Other Side By Kelvin Wade September 29, 2011 A comic strip by Phillip Temple in the Solano Community College newspaper, the Tempest, has sparked racial controversy. The comic strip depicts black woman slamming black men. Some students were upset by the racially charged nature of the strip. The paper’s editor, Sharman Bruni, and Temple (who is black) deny that the comic is racist. One of the objections is the perceived insensitivity of running a strip calling for getting rid of all black men so soon after the shocking murder of SCC football player Ennis Johnson. I imagine the campus is sensitive right now. People are hurting. However, the subject matter isn’t new. Black women do talk about the dearth of black men and the problems they have with them, just as all women of all races do. In Spike Lee’s 1991 film, “Jungle Fever” there is a scene of black women sitting in a living room having a conversation similar t...

Fairfield Daily Republic September 22, 2011 Social networking revived an old friendship By Kelvin Wade Facebook has become so ubiquitous it’s almost like having an email address and cell phone: you’re the odd man out if you don’t have one in 2011. Having a Facebook account paid off for me on Feb. 8, 2009, when I received a message from an old friend, Billy Dunn, asking, “Is this you, my man? Do you remember cutting class with me . . . and us running into that crazy drunk chick in the Mustang?” That was Bill. Cutting to the chase. Bill (he went by Bill back then) was my best friend at Armijo. I met him my sophomore year. A friend of mine, Shawn Brown, shared a locker with him in A Wing and told me Bill would always steal and eat his lunch. So one day I had Shawn give me his sandwich. I took it to the bathroom, opened the sandwich and put soap on it. I wrapped it up and put it back in a brown lunch sack. We put it back in the locker. At lunchtime, Bill Dunn came up to me and Shawn saying...

Fairfield Daily Republic Sep 14, 2011 ‘SpongeBob’ isn’t best option for toddlers By Kelvin Wade I’m always looking for ways we can improve kids’ ability to learn. A study led by University of Virginia psychology professor Angeline Lilliard that appeared in the American Academy of Pediatrics’ magazine recently found that 4-year-olds watching Nickelodeon’s popular show “SpongeBob SquarePants” did significantly worse on tasks afterward than children who watched slower-paced programming. This is not shocking. I wouldn’t need to conduct a study to find out that if I let my 6-year-old grandson Vika watch “SpongeBob,” with its bright colors and fast pacing and then sat him down to work on schoolwork, it would be a disaster. He wouldn’t want to sit still. In the study, kids who played with crayons or watched the slower-paced PBS children’s show “Caillou” did better on tasks immediately afterward. This wouldn’t surprise anyone who has seen the show. I don’t know how a kid could stay awake wit...

Nobody wants to see your junk By Kelvin Wade This week a San Francisco Supervisor introduced legislation that would require nudists to cover their seat when sitting in public and to cover up when they go into restaurants. What? Are you kidding me? This may be an incredibly naïve question but I’m going to ask it anyway. Why are you allowing people to walk around naked in public? This reminds me of when the city banned public urination and defecation some years ago. So relieving yourself in public was perfectly before? Why wouldn’t that have been one of the first five or six laws passed when the city was founded? Of course, San Francisco has a tradition of public nudity. Nude runners run in the annual Bay to Breakers race. One can see some of everything at the gay pride parade. And for years the city hosted the annual Exotic Erotic Ball where some attended au naturale. So, apparently this law is necessary because in the Castro there...

Lawd help me, I liked ‘The Help’ Fairfield Daily Republic, September 8, 2011 Kelvin Wade I went to see “The Help” over the weekend. I hadn’t read the book. (I’m reading it now.) I knew precious little about it other than the controversy surrounding the movie. I expected to be offended but came away from the film loving it and recommending it to others. The harshest critics have been the Association of Black Women Historians. They feel the black women in the film are “Mammy” caricatures of contented, loyal maids. The ABWH also blasts the film for employing a “child-like, over-exaggerated ‘black’ dialect.” They criticize the lack of sexual harassment and rape in the film, something African-American domestic workers dealt with. Finally, they resented the lack of the Klan and White Citizens Council and the movie reducing racism down to acts of meanness from rich white society women. Let’s take the criticisms one at a time. The maids in this film are definitely not content. They clearly don...

August 31, 2011 | Posted by Kelvin Wade Hungry children are unacceptable Almost one in four children in Solano County are hungry, according to a survey by Feeding America and Food Bank of Contra Costa and Solano. It’s astonishing when you juxtapose the vast resources of this country alongside the reality of hungry kids. Too many of us think hunger is a Third World problem. When I first saw the number, 22.4 percent of children under 18 in Solano County struggling with hunger, I couldn’t believe it. It didn’t seem possible. But when I went to http://www.foodbankccs.org and read the report, it put it all into perspective. While Americans certainly aren’t starving, some clearly can’t make ends meet. While many of those without enough money for food are those on fixed incomes, half of the need is from families who are considered part of the working poor. These are families who earn too much money to qualify for government assistance programs. After bills, rent and dealing with the higher ...