Leaderboard

Everything seems so incidental after seeing the heartbreaking Facebook video posted by Diamond Reynolds as her boyfriend Philandro Castile, is dying after execution by a Minneapolis police officer because of a broken taillight. Compounding the tragedy is the sympathetic voice of their four-year-old daughter who witnessed his brutal slaying. Day’s prior a similar horrific depiction in New Orleans ((Alton Sterling). The pattern is statistically unavoidable---minor traffic infractions, selling looseys or CDs, wearing a hoodie, are a pretext to stop, frisk, searches and shoot black people, see http://mappingpoliceviolence.org/unarmed/. Profiling of African Americans is sanctioned for government control, historical/contemporary oppression and revenue. We must candidly face the systematic devaluation of black lives in all our institutions, not just criminal justice system. When all else has failed the courts and prison become societies response to racism, disparities, poverty, unemployment and hopelessness. The prison removes the reality from view and is the least capable institution to resolve the racial chasm. Maybe the visual of Philandro’s death at the hands of state action will awaken the self-denial of the majority. I have to assume humanity, empathy and truth will prevail. But I recall saying the same thing after witnessing Rodney King’s brutal beating, Trayvon Martin, Walter Scott, Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Freddie Gray, Tamir Rice and seeing in Jet magazine the open casket of Emmet Till. To the African American spirit that has suffered for so long, this must end. Hearts and minds, in a just society, can no longer accept the inhumanity and ugliness including the police assassinations in Dallas that we all witnessed this week.

Earlier this year we killed a project we worked on for over two years called the Power List. It was an attempt to fill in the void left when Essence Magazine abandoned their bestsellers list almost a decade ago. Unfortunately, the Power List was never embraced enough to make it worth the effort to continue producing. After I started the AALBC.com website upgrade, allocating resources to maintaining the Power List, was impossible to justify. Especially when you consider that I'm expanding AALBC.com's Bestsellers list The really interesting thing is that people still cite the Essence's list even though the list has been defunct for years. I received a galley in the mail and the publisher boasted that the author was a "#1 Essence bestseller." I'm saying to myself, "Well sheesh, I guess this authors must not have accomplished anything lately..." Even at it's prime the Essence's list and it's methodology wasn't anything to write home about. Once Time, purchased the magazine Essence's coverage of books suffered, skewing heavily toward the most popular and celebrity driven titles. It was not long before the bestsellers list was abandoned. After Essence ditched the Black bookseller at their music festival, I cancelled my subscription and have not really thought about them very much since. Still, the Essence brand carried a lot more clout and their bestsellers list definitely gained much more traction that the Power List ever did, and Black books and authors benefited as a result--which is all I really cared about. I hoped the Power List would recreated that benefit. But hey the AALBC.com list has been around 18 years and is getting stronger each period. The more authors who boast about making AALBC.com's bestsellers list the more we all benefit.

Cool I will quote you :-) @CDBurns I'll update your individual book pages with the same widgets when I get a chance. Once that is done, I'll probably roll out the service. Well if you are talking about Facebook or Twitter promotion you can do that on your own as if it was your own website. The benefit however is that I can help you measure relative effectiveness of those promotions.

@CDBurns I figured out what to do with that extra space :-) Check out the revised page: http://www.christopherdburns.com/ and let me know what you think. For authors taking advantage of this service I've swapped out all the advertisements and replaced them with widgets. Take a look at my profile page for an example: A calendar widget (I'm using Google's calendar, but any embeddable version is supported) RSS Feed Widget (I'm pulling in my Blog) Facebook Widget Twitter Widget Related Content from AALBC.com Chris on your page you have everything by the calendar, if you want me to add a calendar let me know. My thinking it is that authors who do a bunch of events or who are on tour can benefit most from this. For authors who are active on social media, this is a way for them to capture some of the benefit their activity on their own platform. I can even create an ad unit such that the authors can monetize their pages if they liked. I plan to update the links for the book pages, so that they have the widgets instead of the advertisements. The real benefit to the author, and AALBC.com is that their website will get more traffic than if it was unaffiliated wiht AALBC.com and if the author does any promotion of their own site AALBC.com can benefit too. Win-Win! I'm almost ready to roll service out, so I'm still open to ideas and suggestions.

I'm becoming more and more convinced that there just simply are not that many smart, conscientious, and righteous people. We all want police officers with all of these qualifications; but where are they going to come from? Cops are asked to put their lives on the line, work crazy hours, and deal with the worst of humanity all for a relatively low wage. It is simply unrealistic for us to expect exemplary behavior from all of them at all times What surprises me is that we don't have more low life racist cops doing evil things. If you want cops to behave better you really have to compensate these professionals accordingly. Cops as have to be treated professionally by their superiors. Cops in my neighborhood seems to be under a great deal of pressure to give out tickets. This is stressful for both the community and the police officers. Of course this increases the number of confrontations and the likelihood another brother gets killed. Usually the extra, and unnecessary, pressure cops are put under is political in origin.

With this being an election year I was thinking the same thing about Trump. This incident will probably benefit him because it will stoke the fears of an already on-edge White conservative demographic. As far as the shooting...... They say only one man was involved but when it first broke out I saw reports where SEVERAL people were being held in custody. I know they say the guy was ex-military but wouldn't it be pretty hard for one lone man to gun down 11 trained officers. As with most muliple shootings that are covered in the media, the "facts" keep changing over and over again. Like I said numerous times. The solution to this problem of police brutality and racism is to have MORE well trained Black police officers who know our people and can deal with them justly instead of overreacting, which ultimately leads to situations like this