Tasty Morning Bytes – A Fake MLK Quote, Looking at DYRS Leaders and Defining Latinos
Good morning, DCentric readers! Enjoy some links with your morning coffee:
African American church is first in D.C. to be powered by solar energy “Florida Avenue Baptist’s installation of 44 solar panels was hailed at a ribbon-cutting Tuesday by Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lisa P. Jackson and other government officials as a breakthrough in the black community, where the clean-energy divide mirrors its well-known high-tech digital divide with the white community.” (The Washington Post)
Fake MLK Quote Goes Viral “‘I mourn the loss of thousands of precious lives, but I will not rejoice in the death of one, not even an enemy.” That 23 words, attributed to Martin Luther King, Jr. were yesterday’s Twitter mantra for those of the view that exuberant and partying in the streets in response to a death (any death, even Osama Bin Laden’s) was morally wrong, creepy, or otherwise problematic….The problem, as Megan McArdle also pointed out in The Atlantic, was that Martin Luther King never said it. Or anything even close.” (The Root)
Council members to examine DYRS leadership “Experience at the top of the agency and widespread perceptions of an overly therapeutic philosophy shared by Mr. Stanley’s top advisers figure to be the topic of questions on Thursday by Ward 1 council member Jim Graham, who has expressed doubts that DYRS has struck a proper balance between rehabilitation and detention.” (Washington Times)
Cocaine + Cell Phones = Caught? “You’d think that since David Simon’s The Wire portrayed how instrumental police wiretaps are in taking down drug operations, the subterfuge—which can be employed after cops obtain a court order from a judge—would have worn itself out. But in the D.C. area, 29.5 kilos of cocaine authorities seized last week says it hasn’t.” (Washington City Paper)
Creating race: How the ‘Hispanic or Latino’ category came to be “Also intriguing is how geography seems to make a difference, likely influenced by varying attitudes and degrees of empowerment among Latinos in different U.S. cities…Salvadorans and Guatemalans were also more likely to consider themselves “white” in Texas and “other” in California. The same went for Puerto Ricans, Cubans, Dominicans and Colombians in Florida, who were far more likely to consider themselves “white” than their peers in New York and New Jersey.” (MultiAmerican)