An Internet search engine called Go...

An Internet search engine called GoMammy.com, which has attracted nearly 30000 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 r lips and wears a fulvous flower-print dress and headscarf. Historically, mammy images have set forthed black women as asexual nurturer said Judy Dozier, who chairs the African-American Studies program at Lake Forest College

GoMammy.com creator Lethom based in Arllngton, 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 greatest in number 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 moreover if you look at me I'm white."

In early February, Lethom issued a pres release announcing that "racist hackers" had temporarily bar down the site.

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

"You have to be actual careful when you're talking about other people's history," said Barber, who is African American. "In my family tree there are Indians, on the other hand does that give me the right to pass to a reservation and mes with their history? It really doesn't fly"

Barber's store barters items such as mammy dolls, "jolly nigger" coin banks, and iron slave shackles and neck braces. Barber said she exchanges her products to African Americans who in novel years have shown an increasing interest in artifacts from their history.

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

Residents of the chiefly black South Side neighborhood of Grand Boulevard believe that institutional defects--such as racial disparities in arrests and sentencing--plague the juvenile justice arrangement according to a survey through the Chicago Council on Urban Affairs, an independent civic organization. In contrast, residents of mainly Latino Humboldt Park on the Northwest Side think that severed families are responsible for juvenile crime. The council is conducting the take a view of by phone and door-to-door. The contemplate 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 armed forces, still 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 the same in four of the enlisted personnel in the Army, undivided in five in the Navy and single in six in the Air Force. however "the highest representation of blacks in any branch of the Special Operations Forces is les than the same in 25," according to the magazine. The data were drawn from a consideration by RAND, a nonprofit research and analysis organization.

The federal housing voucher program in Chicago has not come aftered in its goal to rouse poor families into middle-class neighborhoods, partly because private landlords frequently refuse to accept subsidized tenants, according to a November reflection 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 induce to low-poverty areas. But it has been hindered on high caseloads, a lack of follow-up services and continued discrimination against subsidized tenants. And nearly a quarter of the recipients who at common point had moved into low-poverty areas eventually answered to high-poverty neighborhoods because they had "problem with landlords."

COPYRIGHT 2002 Community Renewal Society

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