Web site Educates, Offends, then Disappears

By: Jocelyn Prince and Sarah Karp An Internet search engine called GoMammy.com, which has attracted nearly 30,000 visitors and 50 advertisers since its December launch, has renewed a debate about whether racially charged images can be used to educate.

The site features an animated “mammy” figure as its main icon. The wide-hipped woman has oversized red lips and wears a yellow, flower-print dress and headscarf. Historically, mammy images have represented black women as asexual nurturers, said Judy Dozier, who chairs the African-American Studies program at Lake Forest College.

GoMammy.com creator Lethom, based in Arlington, Wash., told The Chicago Reporter that he is a folk artist who paints images from American history and that his mammy depictions have been his most popular. He pointed out that the site links to information about the origin of the mammy image, its cultural history and the everyday experiences of “real mammies.”

Asked about his racial identity, Lethom said that he has “African American in me, but if you look at me, I’m white.”

In early February, Lethom issued a press release announcing that “racist hackers” had temporarily shut down the site.

Marchelle Barber, owner of Martha’s Crib, an Afrocentric art, craft and memorabilia store in south suburban Country Club Hills, said she is wary of the site.

“You have to be very careful when you’re talking about other people’s history,” said Barber, who is African American. “In my family tree, there are Indians, but does that give me the right to go to a reservation and mess with their history? It really doesn’t fly.”

Barber’s store sells items such as mammy dolls, “jolly nigger” coin banks, and iron slave shackles and neck braces. Barber said she sells her products to African Americans who in recent years have shown an increasing interest in artifacts from their history.

Justin Massa, a research analyst for the Center for New Community, an organization based in west suburban Oak Park that monitors hate group activity and racist Web sites nationwide, said GoMammy.com is offensive because it uses the controversial image to make money.

_________________________________________________
Residents of the mostly black South Side neighborhood of Grand Boulevard believe that institutional defects—such as racial disparities in arrests and sentencing—plague the juvenile justice system, according to a survey by the Chicago Council on Urban Affairs, an independent civic organization. In contrast, residents of mostly Latino Humboldt Park on the Northwest Side think that broken families are responsible for juvenile crime. The council is conducting the survey by phone and door-to-door. The survey also found little support in either neighborhood for the Illinois Juvenile Court Act of 1987, which automatically tries juveniles in adult court when they’re charged with certain crimes.

_________________________________________________

African Americans make up a large share of the U.S. armed forces, but they comprise a small percentage of those in the elite Special Operations Forces, units responsible for unconventional military actions and reconnaissance, according to an article in the February Black Enterprise magazine. Blacks account for one in four of the enlisted personnel in the Army, one in five in the Navy and one in six in the Air Force. But “the highest representation of blacks in any branch of the Special Operations Forces is less than one in 25,” according to the magazine. The data were drawn from a study by RAND, a nonprofit research and analysis organization.

_________________________________________________

The federal housing voucher program in Chicago has not succeeded in its goal to move poor families into middle-class neighborhoods, partly because private landlords often refuse to accept subsidized tenants, according to a November study by the Washington, D.C.-based Urban Institute. In 1999, the Chicago Housing Authority created the Mobility Program, which provides voucher recipients with services to encourage them to move to low-poverty areas. But it has been hindered by high caseloads, a lack of follow-up services and continued discrimination against subsidized tenants. And nearly a quarter of the recipients who at one point had moved into low-poverty areas eventually returned to high-poverty neighborhoods because they had “problems with landlords.”