Friday Linkage

Grow up all of you.

The black community’s face has been slapped by the simplistic attitude that we all think and vote alike, and are all gullible enough to actually believe that AY will be filled with happy working class black families with the toddler on Dad’s shoulders strolling through the verdant pastures of the AY park, like their literature portrays.

Slavery is an historic fact, and everything from that time forward has been affected by it. It would be taking PC to absurd lows to expect that companies as old as Barclay’s would not have had a hand in it somewhere, somehow. What is important is what they do now, where they invest their money today and with whom. I am anti AY, but Barclay’s involvement is a non issue. If people of color want something real to get upset about, it should be that the project utilizes eminent domain, a precident that has much more dangerous reprocussions for the historically black portions of Bklyn, when someone decides that, for example, huge swaths of Bed Stuy are “blighted” and should be handed over to some developer. We should be much more upset, as should any average Brooklynite, that to this day, there still is no guarantee that “affordable” housing will ever be built on site. Or that the real and pressing issues of the effects of density, transportation and other services, and eternal construction will have on the quality of life of all of us. We should be pissed as hell that the carrot of “jobs” is dangled in front of us with no real plan of action, and seemingly little creation of any kind of jobs that will pay more than minimum wage, or provide for more than temporary building jobs for trade union employees, unions that are not exactly bursting with any kind of minorities in great numbers.

We should be more upset that we are being used as corporate tools, and that very visible black “leaders” such as Ms Lewis and Rev.Daughtry have allowed themselves to be bought out. I don’t see anything inflammatory about what either Babs or Sylvia said. I don’t worry about what Dan Goldstein says, this is much bigger than he or his mouth is. The stadium naming is a smokescreen to distract people from the fact that after all this time and after all of the talking, meeting, writing, legislating and litigation, FCR still has not answered any of the pressing concerns that this project has created. By which I mean the use of eminent domain by a private individual or corporation, issues of size and density and their connection to issues of infrastructure, schools, transportation, the closing of public streets for a private enclave, unresolved issues of promised “affordable” housing, permanent job creation, and many others. We won’t even begin to talk about bad starchitecture.

6:01 and 6:23 – a bit overwrought, don’t you think? Sylvia, Babs and even you are entitled to your opinions, hopefully without being called names. We can all agree to disagree without losing civility. Why is it when people can’t come up with a good counter argument to a point, they have to retaliate with name calling and invective? Seems to me you’ve lost.

The link is working now, and a very interesting article it is. I’d love to hear Bertha Lewis & Co’s reaction to this.