Ever Thought about Getting a Virtual Assistant? It might Make Your Life a lot Easier

Hi there,

My name is Lynda Jamysen and I am with a company called JustGoVA.com. I have a couple of questions for you.

Do you experience "Too Many Hats, Too Little Time" Syndrome? Do feel "overwhelmed" most everyday?

Lawrence Watkins Explains Ujamaa Deals–How We Can Help Others Buy Black

To sign up for Ujamaa Deals for free, please follow this link.

The Ethics Problems of Wall Street: Dr. Boyce Watkins Breaks it down with Business Ethics and Entrepreneurship Expert Dr. Laquita Blockson

 

Dr. Boyce Watkins and Dr. Laquita Blockson break down the ethical issues of Wall Street and the logic behind the movement to Occupy Wall Street.

How to Quit Your Job and Still Make a Living

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Valencia Roner: What Washington is Missing in the Jobs Conversation

 

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Comparing Obama to Reagan and Carter on Black Unemployment: Is Obama Worse than the Others?

by Dr. Boyce Watkins, Your Black World

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11 Common Credit Card Mistakes

Kiplinger's Advises Consumers on Protecting their Credit Rating

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Despite the Weak Economy, Black Hair is a Booming Business

By JasmineHughes

In a time where it seems most businesses are on the decline, hair salons are on the rise. The Census Bureau recently noted their jump in an otherwise glum report about mom-and-pop businesses, stating that the number of hairdressers and barbers and the shops that employ them grew by about 8 percent from 2008 to 2009.

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College Students Seeking Out Sugar Daddies to Help Them Pay Tuition

By JasmineHughes

In light of the economic downturn, female college students are taking matters into their own hands. Now instead of working in McDonald’s, or shops for $8.00 an hour, many are finding it quicker and easier to seek older men and provide sex in exchange for tuition money.

 

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High-Flying Citigroup Executive Allegedly Robs His Bank with a Computer

 

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Jumping the Broom Does Very Well at the Box Office

 

Perhaps TD Jakes knows how to make a good movie after all.  But with Bob Johnson?

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Huffington Post: Black Unemployment and the Great Black Disconnect for Obama

Dr. Boyce Watkins

Professor, Syracuse University

Posted: 05/ 8/11 03:51 PM ET

 

President Obama has a problem, a very serious one. The president's problem is what I would call "The Great Black Disconnect." This divide is the place where black America's love and appreciation for the Obamas disconnects from the intense economic suffering of the African American community. Like a festering and infected wound that remains untreated, President Obama's support within the black community is threatened by the fact that the people who love him most are suffering unlike anything our nation has seen over the last 50 years.

This week, the Bureau of Labor Statistics released its unemployment numbers for the month of April. The figures were consistent with the jobless recovery that has taken good care of Wall Street, but created homelessness on Main Street. The national unemployment rate grew from 8.8 percent to 9 percent, which will surely perpetuate President Obama's somber ratings on economic performance.

 

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Technorati Tags: black unemployment,black scholars

Jumping the Broom is Fourth So Far at the Box Office

Jumping the Broom is fourth so far….click to read.

Dr. Boyce: Oprah Fires her CEO, So What’s Next?

Oprah Winfrey has fired the CEO of her network.  Is this a sign of desperation? 

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Technorati Tags: oprah winfrey,own,black news,african american news

Survey: Black Women More Likely to be Single Than Any Other Group

 

 

A new census bureau survey said that black women are the least likely of all ethnic groups to jump the broom.  Why is that?

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Technorati Tags: black news,black women,african american women

Friday Flash Feature: Denise Bolds Teaches Single Black Moms How to Raise Their Sons

Leslie DeTouche, Your Black World 

Many single black moms are not sure how to raise their boys.  Well, Denise Bolds has some solutions that work.

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“Jumping the Broom”: Just a Classier Version of Madea

"Jumping the Broom" is like a Tyler Perry movie with polish.

The ensemble comedy is about a wedding involving a bride from a family of wealthy African-American professionals and a groom from a family of working-class Brooklynites. It is well-cast, well-played and passably written.

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Bey-Jay Gets booed on the Red Carpet?

It turns out that anyone can get booed, as Beyonce and Jay-Z found out at the Metropolitan Museum of Art this week.

Teen Joblessness, Violence Expected to Hit Record Highs This Summer Due to Cuts in Federal Funding

CHICAGO, Reuters — A record-low one in four U.S. teenagers will land a summer job in the coming months as a result of a still-poor job market and lost federal funding, according to a report issued on Monday.

As a consequence, urban studies experts said cities like Chicago — where summer unemployment among African-Americans aged 16 to 19 years approaches 90 percent — could experience a rise in street violence.

Woman Gets Out of Jury Duty In Order to See Oprah

Your Black World Reports

A woman in Chicago asked a judge to release her from jury duty so she could catch one of the final episodes of the Oprah Winfrey Show.  She had tickets that she didn’t want to waste, and figured that the judge would give her a break.   The case actually involved former Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich.

Believe it or not, the judge let the woman out, justifying the decision by the fact that it is Oprah’s last season.  Maybe we should try that excuse ourselves.

Beyonce Joins Michelle Obama’s Anti-Obesity Campaign

Your Black World Reports

Beyonce recently decided to join with the first lady to promote her anti-obesity campaign.  Beyonce created a video called “Move Your Body” to send the message to a broader audience.

Do Black Women Have a Preference for Thugs? (Video)

In this episode of Your Black Love, Deborrah Cooper and I ask whether or not black women have a preference for dating men that are not good for them.

Do you know a woman who dates one bad guy after another and then seems to spend all of her time whining about the fact that she can never find a good man?  Yea, I have too.  Well, it seems to me that, at some point, we must all have some degree of accountability for our relationship choices. 

Oil Companies are Making Less Gas but Much Higher Profits

 

 

Gasoline prices are skyrocketing — and so are oil company profits.
Exxon Mobil Corp. earned nearly $11 billion in the first three months of the year, a rollicking 69% increase over its performance for the same period last year. That's on sales of $114 billion.
It's the same story for the other big oil companies. Royal Dutch Shell turned a profit of $6.3 billion in the first quarter, and BP — despite lingering costs from the Gulf Coast oil spill— made $7.1 billion.

 

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Should You Need a License to Braid Hair? A Woman Files a Lawsuit Over the Issue

 

by Dr. Boyce Watkins, Your Black World – Scholarship in Action 

Jestina Clayton is a woman in Utah who is originally from Sierra Leone in West Africa.  She does African braiding part-time in order to make extra money.  She is now being confronted with the loss of significant income, since a law in the state of Utah claims that you must have a full cosmetology license in order to braid hair.

Clayton filed suit this week in the court of law.  She is being backed by the Institute for Justice, a Virginia-based organization that helps people like Clayton challenge unjust laws.

Black Unemployment Reaches Depression Levels in Many Major Cities

by Janell Ross, Huffington Post 

CHARLOTTE, N.C. -- In the decade leading up to the Great Recession, Wanda Nolan grew accustomed to steady progress.

From an entry-level job as a fill-in bank teller, she forged a career as a commercial banking assistant, earning enough to become a homeowner. She finished college and then got an MBA. Even after the recession unfolded in late 2007, her degrees and her familiarity with the business world lent her a sense of immunity to the forces ravaging much of the American economy. Nolan was an exemplar of the African American middle class and the increasingly professional ranks of the so-called New South.

But in September 2008, everything changed.

A bank human resources officer called her into a private conference room. “All I heard was, ‘Your position has been eliminated,’” says Nolan, 37, who, despite being one of the more than 13 million officially unemployed Americans, still spends most days in her self-styled banker’s uniform of pearls and pants and practical flats. “My mind started racing.”

More than two years later, Nolan is still looking for a job and feeling increasingly anxious about a future that once felt assured. Her life has devolved from a model of middle class African American upward mobility into an example of a disturbing trend: She is among the 15.5 percent of African Americans out of work and still looking for a job.

For economists, that number may sound awful, but it’s not surprising. The nation’s overall unemployment rate sits at 8.8 percent and the rate among white Americans is at 7.9 percent. For a variety of reasons -- ranging from levels of education and continuing discrimination to the relatively young age of black workers -- black unemployment tends to run twice the rate for whites. Yet since the Great Recession, joblessness has remained so critically elevated among African Americans that it is challenging longstanding ideas about what it takes to find work in the modern-day economy.

Millions of people like Nolan, who have precisely followed the oft-dictated recipe for economic success -- work hard, get an education, seek advancement -- are slipping backward. Even as they apply for jobs and accept the prospect of a future with less job security and lower pay, they remain stalled in unemployment.

Trading down has become a painful truth for much of working America, but this truth becomes particularly stark when seen through the prism of race. Only 12 percent of all Americans are black, but working-age black Americans comprise nearly 21 percent of the nation’s unemployed, according to federal data. The growing contrast between prospects for white and black job-seekers challenges a cherished American notion: the availability of opportunity and upward mobility for all.

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McJobs Are Not the Cure for An Ailing Economy

Editor's note: Annette Bernhardt is policy co-director of the National Employment Law Project, a national advocacy group for the rights of lower-wage earners. She was lead researcher on NELP's recent report, "A Year of Unbalanced Growth: Industries, Wages, and the First 12 Months of Job Growth After the Great Recession."

(CNN) -- We are starved for signs that the economy is picking up. So when McDonald's threw its doors open to hire 50,000 workers nationwide, media networks scrambled to film applicants lining up across the country for that increasingly elusive piece of the American dream -- a job.

Dr. Boyce Spotlight: Lynn Whitfield’s Among the Most Talented in Hollywood

 

Growing up in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, Lynn Whitfield first watched the likes of Audrey Hepburn in "Breakfast at Tiffany's"and Bette Davis in "All About Eve" from her grandmother's lap. She loved classic movies and with child-like confidence, she could see no reason she could not become an actress and some day play those same types of roles.  Over the course of nearly three decades, the talent of the little girl who dreamed of being on the silver screen has taken her to the heights of the acting profession and earned the respect of the public and her peers.

After gaining attention on the stage as one of the young women of color in Ntozake Shange's poetic panorama of the black female experience, "For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow Is Enuf", Whitfield began appearing in supporting roles in such films as "Doctor Detroit" (1982) and "Silverado" (1985) but did not achieve real success until starring in television films ("The George McKenna Story", "Johnnie Mae Gibson: FBI", both CBS 1986) and miniseries (the acclaimed "The Women of Brewster Place" ABC 1989).

 

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Technorati Tags: lynn whitfield,black women,black hollywood,african american women,black actresses

TheRoot.com: Education Should Be A Right, Not a Crime

by Helena Andrews, TheRoot.com

Start typing "mother arrested" into Google, and the Internet wastes no time filling in the rest: "for lying about her address." Not "for selling her daughters on Craigslist," "for feeding her sons drywall" or "for locking her kids in the basement like Boo Radley," but for trying to educate them beyond the borders of their block. In the United States of America, educating your children by any means necessary is a punishable offense.

Black Family Wealth Has Virtually Disappeared

by Dr. Boyce Watkins – YourBlackWorld.com 

The first decade of the new millennium brought a lot of things that the world didn't expect: the ability to order a pizza on your home computer, cell phones that allow you to talk to your friends face-to-face, and our nation's first black president.

One other unexpected event of the last decade is the disappearance of a century's worth of progress in reducing the wealth gap between black and white Americans. AsRex Nutting at Market Watch so accurately notes, wealth levels of the black family in America have declined dramatically during the past decade, and they show no evidence of getting better any time soon.

According to Nutting, "In a country where access to capital is everything, most blacks have nothing."

 

First, Nutting mentions that African Americans have the highest unemployment rates in the country, which stand at an average of 16.5%, compared to 9% for whites. What is most daunting is that soaring black joblessness, combined with higher foreclosure rates, bankruptcies, and declining home values have seriously cut into the wealth of the black family in America. in other words, we are the first to lose our jobs, have the least wealth to protect our families when times are tough, and a greater reliance on declining home equity as a source of economic security. This economy has provided the perfect storm of black economic destruction.

According to Nutting, the median net worth for black households dropped from $9,300 in 2007 to $2,200 in 2009, much lower than the median wealth of $98,000 for white households. He also mentions that incomes dropped in black homes by 7.2% between 2007 and 2009, much greater than the 4.2% decline for white families.

Nutting's article reminds us that the United States has a long way to go when it comes to wealth distribution. Over 80% of the nation's wealth is controlled by just 20% of its citizens, and the richest 1% of Americans controls one-third of the nation's wealth. Roughly 40% of Americans have no wealth at all. African Americans are disproportionately represented in the group of Americans with zero or negative wealth, which is a problem that most of our elected officials are inclined to ignore, and something that our nation's citizens don't spend much time getting upset about.

Nutting is correct to mention that most Americans have their wealth tied up in their home values. So, when home prices dropped so dramatically during the economic downturn, this led to the wealth of many black families disappearing as quickly as it had arrived. Most of the economic disparities in the United States don't exist because whites are more responsible with their money or possess economic intelligence that black people don't have. The primary reason for the gap is that for hundreds of years, African Americans added to our nation's net worth, but were not being properly compensated for it (similar to how the NCAA operates). Being left out of the growth of America's economic engine has kept African Americans at the bottom of the ladder of institutional opportunity: Our school systems are not well-funded, we can't find jobs because we don't own the businesses that take applications, and we continue to be utilized as for-profit commodities by the prison industrial complex.

According to Nutting's research regarding the Survey of Consumer Finances, black families were three times wealthier (in real terms) in 1983 than they were in 2009. As white families saw their net worth grow from $124,000 in 2001 to $143,600 in 2007, blacks actually saw their net worth drop from $12,500 to $9,300. By 2009, white families saw their wealth levels drop to $94,600, but African Americans's levels dropped even more to $2,200. So, between 2001 and 2009, African American families went from having a disgraceful one-tenth of the wealth of white families to an even more horrific ratio of one-fiftieth.

I am not sure how to process the Obama Administration's blind, deaf and dumb response to the persistent wealth and opportunity gaps in America that pertain to race. While the president continues to be popular among African Americans, I would encourage members of his administration to remember that leading with courage is an important part of making African American history (not just holding a fancy title that adds almost nothing more than symbolic value for the black community at large). Courage means sometimes doing things that are not popular and working to make America better.
Given that I haven't heard the president or his team use the words "black man," "black woman," or "black families" in public over the last two years, I am concerned as to whether or not our first black president has been or is willing to do much to fight on issues that matter to black people who didn't go to Harvard University. For example, it's interesting that President Obama would speak up for Henry Louis Gates in a meaningless and ambiguous scuffle with a police officer, but wouldn't say a word about Kelley Williams-Bolar, a black woman who was sent to jail for trying to get her kids into a good school. The latter case was far more significant in the fight against inequality, but Kelley's housing projects were apparently not close enough to Harvard Yard.

There is the added complication that perhaps, because of being a black man, President Obama could "get in trouble" with white voters for advocating on issues that matter to African Americans. This argument has been used by supporters of Hillary Clinton, who might be far less sheepish or self-conscious about advocating for women and minorities. I'm not sure if the Clinton supporters are correct, but the last two years have made many African American families wonder if it even matters who sits in the White House.

Dr. Boyce Watkins is the founder of the Your Black World Coalition.  To have Dr. Boyce commentary delivered to your email, please click here. 

Technorati Tags: black wealth,african american wealth,black scholars,african american scholars

Would You Pay $50,000 to Meet Oprah Winfrey?

 

It turns out that Oprah Winfrey is partnering with CharityBuzz to auction off her quality time.  The expected running price is going to be $50,000. Would you pay that much to meet with Oprah if you had the money? 

The money is being raised for human rights and Oprah is auctioning off four tickets to her show in Chicago and the chance to meet her backstage.  Perhaps since it’s for charity, it all makes sense.

Technorati Tags: black celebrity gossip,oprah winfrey

Study: Weaves, Braids Cause Baldness in Black Women

 

by Dr. Boyce Watkins, Syracuse University – Scholarship in Action 

Over one-fourth of 326 black women to participate in a study on hair loss were found to have lost hair on the top of their scalp. Additionally, 59 percent of the study’s participants showed signs of central centrifugal cicatricial alopecia, otherwise known as CCCA. CCCA is a form of baldness that starts at the crown of the head and causes scarring.

For years, many people thought that alopecia was caused by hot combs. Actually, it is caused by braids, weaves and other hairstyles. According to the study, it was determined that having these hairstyles for long periods of time leads to the creation of pus-filled bumps. According to Angela Kyei, M.D., the lead researcher in the study, the bumps can “develop bacteria,” causing scarring.

 

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Dr. Boyce Spotlight: Black Female Entrepreneur Teaches Math to Make Her Money

by Dr. Boyce Watkins, Syracuse University – Scholarship in Action 

What is your name, and what do you do?
My name is Stephanie Espy, and I'm the founder and president of MathSP (www.MathSP.com). MathSP is a math enrichment company that helps individuals to improve their math skills. Based in Atlanta, Georgia, MathSP provides instruction to middle school students, high school students, college students, adults who need additional math-based resources alongside their coursework, and students who need an added challenge beyond their coursework. MathSP also prepares individuals for the math section of various standardized tests such as the SAT or ACT, computer-adaptive exams such as the GMAT or GRE, and state exams such as the EOCT or GHSGT.

 

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Tyra Banks Heads to Harvard Business School

by Dr. Boyce Watkins, Syracuse University – Scholarship in Action 

Media superstar and modeling-model Tyra Banks recently announced that she's headed to the Harvard Business School. While it's still not clear if she's getting an official degree (I assume its a short-term executive education course; I can't imagine someone with her experience and schedule taking too much time off for school), one has to be impressed with her decision to continue educating herself. Some might think that education is simply a thing you tolerate long enough to make money to support yourself. Nothing could be further from the truth, since learning should be a lifelong process.

"I started last summer and I didn't really talk about it. It was very incognito, my name and everything, but I decided to talk about it [now]. I think it's a positive thing, especially for girls to see that you can still continue to educate yourself and you can still be fabulous and fierce and celebrate your femininity," Tyra said to MTV News.

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Dr. Boyce Watkins Spotlight: A Couple Makes Both Money and Love

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One reason that we do the spotlights here on AOL Black Voices is to profile businesses, organizations and individuals who are doing outstanding (but perhaps unsung) work within the African American community. While most media enjoys highlighting the dysfunction of the black community, we believe that there is plenty to celebrate. What I love about Ayize and Aiyana Ma'at is that they've found a way to use their love to create the financial fuel that helps to sustain their family. As certified relationship counselors, they also work together to help other couples find the love they've been seeking as well. It is because of their empowered commitment to strengthening the black family in America that Ayize and Aiyana Ma'at are today's Dr. Boyce Watkins Spotlight on AOL Black Voices:

 

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Dr. Boyce Spotlight: Dressing for Success in a Tough Economy

by Dr. Boyce Watkins, Syracuse University 

African Americans are suffering worse than any other group of Americans during this prolonged recession. Our unemployment, bankruptcy and foreclosure rates are far higher than whites, which is a striking reality to face after electing our first black president. People like Alison Vaughn position themselves to help those of us who wish to compete more effectively in the workplace by offering training that will increase your value to prospective employers. It is her commitment to serving her community that makes Alison Vaughn today's Dr. Boyce Watkins Spotlight on AOL Black Voices:

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