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With Chris Rock’s new documentary, “Good Hair,” hitting theatres nationwide today, black women across the country will undoubtedly be discussing the politics of hair. I’ve experienced more than 20 years of hair reinventions, from the 14-inch, layered partial weave I sport today to the two big country plaits my Liberian mother braided into my hair when I was in elementary school. On other occasions, my cousin would make square parts all over my head and make single braids out of my very short, very coarse hair. You probably would’ve mistook me for one of Coolio’s children back then, but my childhood hairstyles never became the source of hot-button debate—my hair was never political. But for 4-year-old Zahara Jolie-Pitt, the adopted daughter of Brad and Angelina, her hair has become as political as the debate over healthcare.

Newsweek’s Allison Samuels touched a nerve a few weeks ago when she wrote about Jolie-Pitt’s “uncombed hair.”  Samuels writes: “Any self-respecting black mother knows that she must comb, oil, and brush her daughter’s hair every night. Keeping your daughter’s hair neat is an unspoken rule of parental duties that everyone in the community recognizes and respects….In recent pictures it’s clear Angelina Jolie hasn’t taken the time to learn or understand the long and painful history of African-American women and hair.”

Samuels’ article had both black and white women crying foul, with readers leaving more than 300 comments on Newsweek’s website. Some said it would take Brad and Angelina a little bit more time to learn about black hair care. Others admonished Samuels for supposedly berating a toddler, saying that Zahara had beautiful curly hair that didn’t need to be damaged with harsh chemical relaxers or perms.

Before reading Samuels’ article I never thought of Zahara’s hair as unruly or uncombed, but a quick Google image search provided some evidence for Samuels’ argument. As a West African woman with Ethiopian friends, I have seen many black women, young and old, sporting hair similar to Zahara’s. Sure, Zahara’s hair maybe could’ve used some Luster’s pink oil lotion in some of the pics, but she’s only four years old and there’s only so much you can do with a toddler’s hair. The article seems to raise the issue of white parents not knowing how to care for black hair, which is a valid and interesting argument. However, I’ve seen plenty of black mothers who let their daughters—and sons—out of the house with hair yearning for the bristles of a brush. As America’s first black “First Family,” I know the Obamas are supposedly sacrosanct, but there were a few times on the campaign trail when Sasha and Malia’s hair looked a bit suspect. I don’t see anyone blaming First Lady Michelle Obama for their hair mishaps.

Black women have sometimes become too touchy about their hair. When Chris Rock was on Oprah’s Live Friday show a few weeks ago, Oprah read a letter from a black woman who was angry at Rock for exposing our hair secrets, even saying that black men date white woman because they like running their fingers through silky, bone straight hair. She argued that showing the un-glamorous side of black women’s hair would lead more black men to supposedly stray. Honestly, that Oprah viewer may have a bit of a complex. For me, hair isn’t that political. It’s more about function and fashion, whether I’m rocking my country plaits or my 14-inch yaky perm straight.

A study released last week by the Pew Charitable Trusts shows that over a generation African-Americans have a more difficult time maintaining middle class status than other groups.

The study, which began in 1968, tracked the economic status of more than 2,300 Americans, 730 of whom were African-American. Forty-five percent of blacks born to middle-class families in 1968 slid down the socioeconomic ladder. Their median family income was $23,100 compared to an inflation-adjusted $55,600 for their parents in 1968.

Only 16 percent of whites born to middle-class families had lower median incomes than their parents.

For lower-income blacks and whites, this disparity also existed.

The study found that 90 percent of whites born into low-income families now earned more than their parents did. In comparison, 75 percent of blacks surpassed the income levels of their parents.

Researchers don’t have an explanation for why the gap exists. But some economists have speculated the increase in single, mostly female headed households in the black community and the difference in education levels between blacks and whites are two factors.

Apparently not everyone is succumbing to the lure of social networking sites like Facebook and Myspace.

A study released earlier this week concluded African-Americans prefer to use the Internet for business and not pleasure. The study solely focused on what the authors termed “African-American influentials” (whatever that means) to draw conclusions about the online habits of blacks.

One interesting conclusion was that only 49 percent of these black influentials used Facebook, compared to 76 percent of the general population of people who actively use the Web, whom the study’s authors termed “online influencers.”

“African American-fluentials tend to embrace the Web for business and ‘serious’ pursuits while favoring a range of offline communications tools for social networking,” said Mireille Grangenois, managing director of U.S. Multicultural. “They are twice as likely to use handwritten notes than U.S. e-fluentials but half as likely to write blog entries.”

The tendency to network away from the confines of the Web could be because blacks have a  propensity toward being involved in a physical community, rather than a virtual one.

I recently interviewed one business owner on the West Side of Chicago who told me he was always skeptical when potential investors would try to make contact with him over the phone instead of coming to his restaurant to introduce themselves.

“With us black people, it’s the trust issue,” he said. “We prefer face-to-face contact.”

Fox News reported Wednesday that inner city neighborhoods are conducting health screenings at local barbershops and beauty salons, places that have traditionally served as gathering points for black men and women.

Black men are at greater risk of contracting and dying from major diseases, like cancer, heart attack and stroke. Black women are less likely to get breast cancer, but almost twice as likely to die from it than white women.

According to the “Atlas of Racial and Ethnic Disparities among Men with Heart Disease,” black men over the age of 35 are 26 percent more likely to die from the disease than their white counterparts and almost 50 percent more likely to die from it than Hispanics.

The barbershops and beauticians have employed many strategies to address these health disparities. Four thousand barbers are part of Prostate Net,  a program which provides information on screening and affordable  health services. Others have been trained to test for high blood pressure and obesity.

Dr. Wayne Giles, director of the Division of Adult and Community Health at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said these efforts are a form of community activism that can save lives.

“The idea that people can do things to prevent chronic conditions is a message that doesn’t resonate with many African-Americans,” Giles said. “More and more communities of color are doing what affluent communities have done for decades. They are empowering themselves to take control of their environment.”

The election of America’s first black president has left many Americans–both black, white and in between–with the sense that America has made significant racial progress.

However, our country still has a long way to go in overcoming racial prejudice, according to people interviewed for a recent article in the New York Times.

In workplaces across the country, people are more open to talking about race, an often taboo and contentious subject. Some blacks interviewed for the story said they noticed more civility and friendless between them, their non-black colleagues, friends and even strangers passing by on the street:

Samuel Sallis, a 69-year old black man from Milwaukee, said: “Since President Obama started campaigning, if I go almost anywhere, it’s: ‘Hi! Hello, how are you, sir?’ I’m talking about strangers. Calling me ‘sir.’ ”

He added: “It makes you feel different, like, hey — maybe we are all equals. I’m no different than before. It’s just that other people seem to be realizing these things all around me.”

White Americans also said they felt a change.

“I feel a lot more comfortable starting up a conversation with people of other races on the streets now than I did before,” said Mitch Hansch, 29, who is white and works as a waiter in New York City. “Since Obama was elected, racial tensions seem a little lower. I think it’s fantastic.”

It would seem hard to imagine a place where children attend more funerals than weddings. A place where a mother—almost certain her children would not reach adulthood—pays $80 a month for burial insurance, even though they have barely reached adolescence.  But this is the case for Lafayette and Pharaoh Rivers, their mother LaJoe and almost everyone else in their family. Alex Kotlowitz’s “There Are No Children Here” details two years in the lives of the Rivers boys, humanizing the problem of urban poverty by portraying its most helpless victims—the children who are forced to live in it.

Long before Hurricane Katrina had U.S. politicians decrying the problem of urban poverty and lamenting about “Two Americas,” Alex Kotlowitz wrote about Lafayette and Pharaoh Rivers, two brothers living in the Henry Horner housing project on Chicago’s West Side. Kotlowitz first met the two boys in the summer of 1985, when he was writing the text for a friend’s photo essay on children living in poverty. Kotlowitz returned to Horner two years later to write on a similar topic for the Wall Street Journal. It was then he asked LaJoe, the boys’ mother, to chronicle the lives of her sons.

With his meticulous reporting and apparent empathy, Kotlowitz portrays the struggles of 12-year-old Lafayette and his 9-year-old brother, Pharaoh. The boys live in an apartment with cinder block walls, a tub with a perpetually leaky faucet, and a bathroom toilet whose putrid smells may be the result of at-home abortions performed by the previous tenants. Shootings, between rival gangs and by the police, are part of the reality for Lafayette and Pharaoh. Throughout the book, the boys lose friends and family to gun violence, drugs and prison.

Despite the depression that surrounds them, Lafayette and Pharaoh maintain some of their innocence. They play on railroad tracks and believe they’ll find leprechauns and a pot of gold after they see a rainbow. Though the boys know many people who go to prison, during a school spelling bee Pharaoh is unable to spell the word cellblock, an irony that shows he is still a child and can’t fully comprehend what could await him in the future.

Kotlowitz does a stellar job of linking the problems in Horner to bad public policy and neglect by Chicago city officials. The Chicago Housing Authority had lost control of its housing complexes to street gangs and seemed to have long forgotten about its residents or improving their living conditions.  Some of the police responded to violence in Horner and other projects by treating many of the residents like possible criminals.  As Kotlowitz puts it, “white opposition on the Chicago City Council gummed up most efforts by the administration to do much of anything” to change the city’s public housing.

Throughout the book, it becomes apparent Kotlowitz may have become too involved in the lives of his subjects. He doesn’t impose the same standard of accountability on the residents of public housing or examine why they made certain choices, sometimes even pardoning their mistakes as the inevitable consequences of being black and poor. While some kids did get lost to the neighborhood, as Kotlowitz says, one has to wonder where LaJoe Rivers was when Lafayette and Pharaoh were out late at night watching cars at the Chicago Bears Stadium. Why did LaJoe allow her grown daughter, her three children, her daughter’s boyfriend and his brother, none of whom paid bills, to move into her already cramped apartment? No one is blaming her and other Horner residents for living in poverty, but it seemed as though they were resigned to their fate.

“There Are No Children Here” is timeless in its portrayal of urban poverty. Chicago’s Plan for Transformation has changed Henry Horner into mixed-income, low-rise housing, but that change may be more structural than substantive. Many of the problems that plagued Lafayette and Pharaoh still exist today. No one has created a solution to dealing with persistent poverty in this country, but the answer may start with the children who live in it. Kotlowitz implies it is society’s communal responsibility to give these kids a fighting chance. Educating them and giving them the same opportunities as middle class kids in the suburbs is a starting point. Unlike Lafayette, those children don’t have to worry about what they’ll become if they grow up. For them, as it should be for all children, growing up is never a question of if, but of when.

Black women are losing inches, but not in the way you might think.

They’re getting shorter generation after generation, according to recent data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The CDC’s National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey concluded that black women born in the 1980’s were more than a half an inch shorter than those born in the 1960’s.

Some experts argue that socioeconomic factors are reasons for this disparity.

“Height is a very good overall indicator of how well the human organism thrives in its socioeconomic environment,” said John Komlos, an economist and historian quoted in a Chicago Tribune article about the height gap.

One interesting finding is that black women who have more dough in their wallets also have a few inches on lower and middle-income black women.

“While the heights of low- and middle-income black women are plummeting, upper-income black women are growing taller and rapidly closing the gap with their white counterparts,” according to the study.

Taller and richer? Life is so unfair.

It would seem like an odd place to give kudos to the next president, but at a party for the Florida Classic on Saturday almost everyone was giving musical props to President-Elect Barack Obama.

The Florida Classic, an annual college football game between Bethune Cookman College and Florida A&M University, was held this weekend in Orlando.

Some people didn’t attend the actual game, but came to the City Beautiful to party the entire weekend.

One of the biggest gatherings was at BB King’s at Pointe Orlando. More than 700 people were packed like sardines in the blues club.

Probably the weirdest moment of the entire evening came when the DJ screamed for everyone to put their O’s in the air. O’s for Obama, that is.

As a journalist, it was pretty awkward to be asked to give a presidential endorsement while I was trying to shake my tailfeather, but I stayed true to what I learned in journalism ethics 101: No spoken political affiliation of any kind, even if it met dancing with my arms at my side while everyone else was waving their hands in the air.

I can’t remember exactly when the “O” request came, but it may have been when the DJ was playing Young Jeezy’s “My President is Black.”

If you haven’t heard the song, all I can say is that the lyrics are about as shallow as a kiddie pool. Here’s a sampling:

My president is black, my Lambo’s blue
And I’ll be goddamned if my rims ain’t too
My momma ain’t at home, and daddy’s still in jail
Tryna make a plate, anybody seen the scale?
My president is black, my Lambo’s blue
And I’ll be goddamned if my rims ain’t too
My money’s light green and my Jordans light grey
And they love to see white, now how much you tryna pay?
Let’s go!

Young Jeezy isn’t the only rapper trying to make paper off the first black president.

Ron Brows has released a remix of the song “Pop Champagne,” featuring Juelz Santana Jim Jones and Busta Rhymes.

The remix, called “Pop Champagne for Barack,” includes such notable lines as “We pop champagne for Barack’s campaign” and “No disrespect to McCain and Palin.”

There’s also the Lil’ Wayne “A Milli” Obama remix, which features lyrics like:

His health care plan is so immaculate
So even if you broke you can afford to take a doc trip
You’ll be feelin’ much better not sick
And he’s ok but his wife’s sick
And her back’s thick and her walk’s sick
She’s a fly chick
Might hit

Despite that bit of misogyny to describe the next first lady, most hip-hop artists have produced music that admires the Obamas, rather than admonishes them.

A recent Washington Post article, discussed the many hip-hop artists–from Nas to Will.I.Am and Common–who have gotten behind the mic to write lyrics that mix cultural pride with lyrical artistry.

What all this means for presidential politics in the 21st century is unclear. Who knows if these rappers actually practiced what they preached, and hit the voting booth for Obama on November 4th. Their outspoken support of the candidate probably didn’t translate to gains in the electoral college or popular, nationwide support for his presidency.

Though music featured prominently throughout Obama’s 21-month campaign, ( Steve Wonder’s “Signed, Sealed, Delivered” played at campaign rallies and Obama admitted to listening to Jay-Z on his iPod) the backing of celeb rappers has probably done nothing more than to add a sense of modern, presidential coolness to a candidate that was already considered hip by many.

Since Obama’s election on November 4th, the American public has been inundated with all things Obama.

From which Cabinet appointments the 44th president will make, to what food the Obamas love and what puppy should grace the halls of the White House.

No to mention, entire photo galleries and montages have been devoted to the fashion choices of the future first lady, Michelle Obama.(according to Essence.com, she’s a “political fashionista”)

Even before Obama steps foot in the Oval Office, there’s an article from the Chicago Tribune about how he’ll rake in the big bucks after he leaves the White House.

There have even been articles on the fitness habits of the country’s 47-year-old president-elect.

Perhaps no subject has loomed larger than the one about what Obama’s presidency means for black America. Here are some notable ones:

-Obama Lifts Ceiling of Dreams for Black Men

-The Significance of Obama’s Victory for African-Americans

-In Poll, African-Americans Say Election Victory a ‘Dream Come True’

-Obama Election: A Turning Point in the Perception of Blacks?

The New York Times has an interesting article today about black voters in the Jacksonville, Florida area.

Many of the voters interviewed worried that their votes wouldn’t count. They were weary of early voting, saying they heard rumors that those votes would probably be thrown out.

Others, such as 27-year old Monica Albertie, were worried about mishaps on election day:

“I worry about getting there and all of a sudden the electricity doesn’t work. Anything can happen. I know that sounds silly, but these are real concerns. We have a record of getting excited, then being disappointed. You get paranoid. What if the bus system shuts down that day?”

In recent weeks, other publications have written articles about the nagging fears that some African-Americans harbor about voter disenfranchisement. The demographic, which polls have shown overwhelming support Senator Barack Obama, worries that they may see a Democratic defeat on election day. A Time magazine piece by Ta-Nehisi Coates and Randall Kennedy’s article in the Washington Post explore how black voters may react on November 5 if Senator Obama doesn’t become President Obama.