President Obama visits downtown Louisville, touts code training program (Insider Louisville Article)
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After a delay of roughly four hours, President Barack Obama apologized to the small crowd eager to hear him speak at the downtown Louisville headquarters of tech company Indatus on Thursday.
"Well, first of all, sorry I'm late," said Obama. "I had a couple things I had to do."
One of those "things" being his announcement in the White House rose garden of a major breakthrough in negotiations with Iran to prevent their ability to build a nuclear weapon, which in turn might prevent America from being involved in yet another large-scale war in the region. The crowd, made up of Indatus employees and select city leaders, certainly had no hard feelings for the commander-in-chief.
The purpose of Obama's visit was to tout the Code Louisville project, which recently received a $2.9 million federal workforce innovation grant to expand its free training in computer software coding. Indatus is one of 20 local companies pledging to hire those who have gone through the training, which does not require a college degree.
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I hate urban intra-racial crime and violence. I am distressed by multiple homicides in the Russell and Shawnee neighborhoods in Louisville, Kentucky, and the headline stories that pop-up on network news and social media across America. I am highly concerned about the nihilism and disconnectedness of some young Black men.
I was participating in another 'net discussion with some peers, and something came up. When the mafia was at its peak of criminal activity, were Italian-Americans a criminal population? The Irish? Jewish people?
It has been a running point of mine for the last few months that if you want to stop the killing, you have to stop the killers. Instead of putting focus on the 1-2% violent criminal minority of young males, law-enforcement in the role of overseers stop-and-frisk and zero-tolerate 98% of the total population of Black and brown males...all in the name of supposedly suppressing and try to get the tiny violent criminal minority.
And it is tiny. An act of violence casts an effect of sorrow - and FEAR - in a far greater proportion than the individual act itself. We allow those who are our direct enemies to assume without challenge, and unfortunately, too many of us accept the narrative, that the majority of young Black and Hispanic males SHOULD be profiled, for...well, just because...statistics!
A blogger colleague refers to it as a "war-on for morons." With such policies in effect, it is a revenue-generating self-fulfilling prophecy that grinds more of our young men into the gears of a system of plunder, pulling them in the "just-us" system for trifling, low-level offenses which gets them incarcerated and corrupted by the hardcore violent population in prisons...which also happens to disproportionally disenfranchise Black and brown men from employment and the vote. A compounded problem where Black folk are literally robbed of treasure and possibility.
This is why I no longer refer to this thing as "black on black crime." I cannot, when I know better, repeat racist conservative tropes. I certainly wasn't calling Italian Americans a criminal race after watching Goodfellas, Casino and The Sopranos.
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