Protesting LAUSD Education Budget Cuts

In 15 minutes I'll be marching in a picket line outside my son's school. I'm joining 40,000 teachers city-wide to protest the massive $353 million in State of California education budget cuts. $100 million is going to be slashed from LAUSD's budget alone.

We're doing a "late-in" which means that from 7:30-8:30 parents and teachers are going to picket together. The teachers will enter the school at 8:35 and then parents are going to continue the protest till 9 AM. My kids are probably going to go into the school where the administrators and other campus staff can supervise them, much like they do at recess and lunch when teachers get a little break. But I'm tempted to have them both right out there on the sidewalk, protesting with me. After all, it's their educational opportunity that's being stolen away just because some people in our state capital, Sacramento, want to be funny with the money.

Speaking of Sacramento, Superintendent David Brewer says he respects the concerns but we should let folks in Sacramento handle things for us.

Oh, OK. Because just sitting by and letting our government paternalistically handle things has ever worked for Americans? With that sort of thinking, we should still be under British rule! Not to mention that Brewer's a black man so he should know better than to say something so ridiculous. He probably thinks people would free the slaves out of the kindness of their hearts instead of being forced to do so by a little thing called the Civil War.

And maybe Brewer's forgotten how much protesting and marching it took to integrate schools in the first place. I wonder how long it would've taken to get those schools integrated if folks had just waited for someone to "handle" it. Chances are, we'd still be waiting.

What Brewer and all the other folks saying that we shouldn't do this march fail to realize is that getting a good education is the civil rights issue of this generation. We can't stand by and hope that state officials just decide to do the right thing. Budget cuts of this kind in an education system that's already strapped are going to be devastating.

The only way I'm "for" this craziness is if Governor Schwarzenegger puts his kids down in one of the public schools in Watts. Then he can go ahead and cut the budget all he wants. Till that happens, I'm going to be right out there, marching with a huge sign.

The Devil Made Me Eat That Whopper Jr.

My sons came home from school today with a letter from David L. Brewer III, the Superintendent of Los Angeles' schools. It explained that the school district has ceased serving all food items containing ground beef until further notice.

What brought on this decision?

Well, the meat distributor for district cafeterias, Westland Meat Company, is being investigated by the USDA for, as the letter says, "slaughtering non-ambulatory cattle". There's no denying that these cows were being abused because it was caught on tape.

The letter made me think about how I became a vegetarian.

In a Burger King.

At two in the morning.

It was my freshman year of college and although I'd like to say I was motivated to put down my Whopper Jr. by a sudden desire to save cattle from the slaughterhouse, I can't. Sure, I'd read Upton Sinclair's "The Jungle"back in eighth grade but I didn't think too much about conditions in meat packing plants. In fact, at the time I had no idea that animal activists even existed.

However, I am a highly competitive person and a gauntlet had just been thrown down.

"You couldn't stop eating meat if you tried!"

Actually, let me back up. I believe the whole of what was said was, "You're such a devil, you couldn't stop eating meat if you tried!"

How did the devil come into the conversation? Well, I was dating a guy whose cousin was hardcore into the Nation of Islam. Needless to say, thanks to mon père irlandais, I was not popular with NOI Cousin. Clearly, if my Irish dad was the devil, I was, by extension, half a devil and therefore a bad influence.

In a college town there aren't many places other than a 24 hour Burger King to hang out at 2 AM. And the security guard, Sam, was a chatty old guy who could play a mean card game of spades. It was not unusual for me to hook up with a couple of friends, go get a bite to eat at the Burger King and end up talking and playing cards with Sam till the sky started to get light.

On one of these nights, NOI Cousin happened to be driving past the Burger King and spied my boyfriend standing up, laughing with two other friends of mine. (I'm now married to one of those friends but that's another story.)

NOI Cousin parked his car and came into the Burger King, full of disapproval for our little late night fast food and card game excursion.

I wasn't too bothered by his critique of our playing cards because I've known people my whole life who believe playing cards is sinful. But I didn't get what the big deal was about eating Burger King. I pointed out that I knew Muhammad had not restricted Muslims from eating beef, just from eating pork.

NOI Cousin explained how as a member of the Nation, he was committed to all forms of discipline. That discipline included avoiding fast food. He then ridiculed my Whopper Jr. to the point that I'm convinced he could have written "Fast Food Nation".

I was barely eighteen and more than willing to challenge his statements. He didn't like my lack of passivity so he started up with his, "Your devilish side keeps you from being able to see the truth!" He began to loudly preach about how I was corrupting the black males in my company by eating poison put out by Burger King, a corporation owned and operated by white devils.

Looking back, I can't believe I sat there and debated whether I was part devil or not. But the discussion escalated to the point where he pulled his final piece of proof out of his back pocket just as I was about to take another bite of my Whopper Jr.

"You're such a devil, you couldn't stop eating meat if you tried!"

I remember saying, "Oh really? Is that right?"

NOI Cousin had no idea that even though I ate burgers, I rarely ate beef growing up. My mom is very health conscious and only occasionally fed us hamburgers. She read Dick Gregory and Adelle Davis books regularly and only fed us whole grains and all natural products. She did not fry food. She did not cook pork. There were no ribs ever served my home. No brisket. No pot roast. Instead, we ate a lot of chicken and fish. I used to joke that she was the first person in the Midwest to eat tofu.

So I put the Whopper Jr. down and announced that I had so much discipline I'd never eat a burger again. NOI Cousin didn't believe me and said that my devilish side was prone to lying and I'd say anything to trick the black man.

Guess he was wrong because I've kept my word all these years. That night was the last time I ate beef.

A couple months after I stopped eating beef, I felt so much better physically. Then I stumbled on an article that described the conditions on a chicken farm and how the chickens were fed a mixture of sawdust, growth hormones and seed. A few months after that, I read something about mercury levels in fish.

Before I knew it, I was a vegetarian. All these years later I have a hard time even looking at meat, whether it's raw or cooked and I'm seriously considering going completely vegan.

But my husband and my children are not vegetarians. They eat poultry and fish. And call it my devilish influence, but my seven year-old loves hamburgers. He only eats them at school because there's no way I would ever cook them. And now it makes me ill to know he's been eating beef from sick cows that are being mistreated.

Earlier tonight, I read that letter from the school district to my son and he's disgusted. He's torn because he doesn't know what to do. He loves the taste of hamburgers but he doesn't want to eat animals that are being hurt. My son is, at the age of seven, more mature than I was at eighteen when all I thought about was whether or not a burger tasted good.

Sometimes I wish I could track down my old boyfriend's NOI cousin and thank him for inadvertently pushing me back in a healthier direction. And then I'd sic him on an LAUSD school board meeting. Maybe he'd be able to somehow bait LAUSD into serving students grass fed, free range beef or more vegetarian lunch options.

But however the lunch menus change, let's all hope the devil stays out of it.

Straw Hair

It's Saturday night again. Wasn't I just here a week ago? Funny how it came back around so quickly.

I spent my day at a Los Angeles Unified School District parent leadership training. I'm now president of the School Site Council at my kids' school. I got myself elected to pretty much every other school committee as well.

That means that today I was supposed to be learning about how to be a member of all these committees. That happened somewhat, but what I really came away knowing for sure is that there are some VERY angry parents in this school district. Every time the facilitators presented some information, they'd ask if we had any questions. Without fail, a parent would stand up and launch into a tirade about all the illegal (or legal and wack) stuff some principal is trying to pull.

I get their issues. I truly do. But after two hours of this, I was mentally exhausted. After four hours, my goodie-goodie self was texting my sister and socializing with the lady sitting next to me. After six hours, I felt like bumming a cigarette off of someone and taking up smoking just so I'd have a reason to go outside.

This marvelous day was capped off with me winning a door prize that came wrapped in Star of David wrapping paper. It was a pair of 99 Cent Store candlesticks. Uh huh.

And now I'm home and determined that this will not, I repeat, NOT be another Saturday night of laughing at my email spam. Seriously, it can't be. Especially after I spent Friday night curling my hair up with straws.

Yes, I said straws.

This was yours truly at around 1 am last night.

Yeah, for the uninformed, that's called a "straw set". And I hope it's obvious it's called this because those are drinking straws up in my hair. 72 drinking straws to be exact.

It took me about an hour to put them all in. Then I sat around for eons waiting for my hair to dry. I watched two movies, wrote a friend and by 1:30 in the morning, it still wasn't all dry. The gifted-child in me figured I'd just prop a whole bunch of pillows up and sleep sitting up, like if I was on an airplane.

That worked for awhile. But by 3:30, I finally gave in and laid down on those straws. Ouch! The uncomfortable things we women do for beauty! Believe me, I was so grateful my hair was dry when I got up two hours later.

I'll confess, this straw thing was an impulsive, spur of the moment experiment but I really like it. It was interesting though how today while I was busy socializing during a session, the lady next to me was all, "Girl, your hair is too cute! Where'd you get it done?"

"Um, I did it myself," I replied.

"You did it yourself?" she asked in disbelief.

Her mouth fell open while I nodded proudly and replied, "Yeah, I learned from a YouTube video.

"What! You learned how to sew in some weave from a YouTube video?"

We had about 30 seconds of back and forth, with me saying, "No, really, it's not a weave! It's my hair!" and her saying, "Stop frontin'! That has got to be a weave!"

I thought I was gonna have to let her pull my hair to prove to her that it wasn't a weave, but she finally believed me.

This led to a discussion about hair and black women in general. I told her about my recent decision to not chemically straighten my hair anymore. You can read all about it in an article I wrote about a month ago for Anti-Racist Parent. But in a nutshell, it's because I no longer feel I can teach my kids to be proud of their blackness if I'm changing an inherent part of my black identity, my hair.

She shared how brave she thought I was for this and confessed, "'I can't stand when those naps start growing out of my head! They're so..." She paused and sighed, searching for the right word. And then it finally came.

"Ugly."

She's not alone in feeling this way. Black women are trained to do battle with and hate their hair. Most black women in this country have no idea what the natural texture of their hair feels like. At least that's not the case for me because I've gone back and forth between straightening and not straightening for years.

If you're not black, no one cares if you decide you don't want to straighten your hair to within an inch of it's life, till it feels like straw. But if you are black, wearing your natural hair can become an ideological and political statement. And it's a fashion "don't" according to a (now former) Glamour magazine editor.

But, I'm really feeling my "don't" hair so I'm going to keep rolling with it. In fact, I think I'll sit here and pull on my springy curls while I watch the movie classic, "Network" on PBS. It's a very appropriate Saturday night choice since as far as the haterade on black women's hair, "I'm mad as hell, and I'm not going to take this anymore."