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September 2 Update: Well, this sucks. A Slate investigation has concluded that Roxanne Shante’s story of her life after hip hop is pretty much all fake. Literally almost all of it. It’s mind-boggling.
Whoever drew up Roxanne Shante’s contract at Warner Music in 1984 probably figured he’d earned his bonus.
Shante, a 14-year-old MC from Queens, had a big hit that fall with “Roxanne’s Revenge,” an early hip-hop smash. But though the song sold hundreds of thousands of copies and Shante went on to make two albums for Warner, she never saw much in the way of royalties.
The one upside of her contract, from Shante’s perspective, was a clause committing Warner to pay all of her educational expenses … for life.
Warner most likely assumed that there wasn’t much chance they’d have to pay out much under that clause — Shante was a kid from the projects, and a single mom at 14. And when she did decide to go to college five years later, Warner gave her the run-around.
But Shante found an administrator at Marymount Manhattan College who was willing to give her a hand. Marguerita Grecco, Marymount’s dean, helped Shante to press Warner to make good, and let her take classes for free while she negotiated.
Warner eventually blinked after Shante threatened to go public, and the label wound up paying not only for her undergraduate schooling but also for the Cornell doctorate in Psychology that Shante earned in 2001. (All in all, they wound up paying out $217,000 for her educational expenses.)
Today Shante has a therapy practice serving the black community, owns an ice cream parlor in Queens, and funds a $5000 annual college scholarship for female rappers.
(Hat tips to PostBourgie and Hoyden About Town.)
I’m not planning to blog regularly about AMC’s early-sixties drama Mad Men, but there are aspects of the stories it tells that connect up with the stories I tell in my work as a historian, and I’m going to talk a bit about that this morning. Spoilers for previous seasons, and for last night’s season three opener, follow.
LGBT/Ally group Campus Pride is warning LGBT students to take Princeton Review’s ratings of gay-friendly campuses with a big grain of salt.
Princeton Review’s guide to The Best 371 Colleges ranks schools on how inclusive and welcoming they are to members of the LGBT community, but it does it on the basis of a single survey question, asking responders whether they agree or disagree with this statement: “Students, faculty, and administrators treat all persons equally regardless of their sexual orientation and gender identity/expression.”
That’s it. That’s the whole basis for the ranking.
As Campus Pride points out, “the majority of students responding to such a question — irrespective of response — will be straight. Their perceptions of equality are likely quite different from those of LGBT students.” Without knowing what conditions on the campus actually are, or what LGBT students actually think, it’s hard to put much weight on the results of a single survey question.
Campus Pride isn’t quite a disinterested bystander on this issue, since they publish a guide to gay-friendly campuses and maintain a LGBT “campus climate” website. But their point is a good one, anyway. Asking straight students whether a campus is a good environment for LGBT students doesn’t give you much information at all. In fact, it may give you the opposite of the information you need.
If a campus has an active LGBT student community, and a climate of openness to LGBT issues, straight students are likely to know about any difficulties that LGBT students are confronting and reflect that awareness in their answers to the Princeton Review survey. If such a climate doesn’t exist, straight students may assume that there aren’t any problems, since they haven’t heard of any. So a gay-friendly campus could easily rank lower on the Princeton Review ratings than one with a less supportive environment.
PR should really rethink this survey for next year’s edition of their guide.
A Mississippi student is suing her high school after a cheerleading coach demanded her Facebook password, then used it to access and disseminate private email.
According to the lawsuit the coach, Tommie Hill, told the Pearl High School cheerleading squad that they would all have to give her their Facebook passwords. Several squad members responded by deleting their accounts from their cell phones, but sophomore Mandi Jackson complied with the request.
The suit claims that Hill accessed Jackson’s account later that day, and forwarded Jackson’s private Facebook messages to at least four other school officials. The officials then “publicly reprimanded … and humiliated” Jackson, suspended her from cheerleader training, and banned her from other school events.
Jackson’s attorney, Rita Nahlik Silin, told the Student Press Law Center that Hill’s actions were “a blatant violation of her right to privacy, her right to free speech, her right to free association and her right to due process. It’s egregious to me,” she said, “that a 14-year-old girl is essentially told you can’t speak your mind, can’t publish anything, can’t be honest or have an open discussion with someone without someone else essentially eavesdropping.”
As Lee Baker of the Citizen Media Law Project notes, this incident reflects a not-uncommon belief on the part of authority figures that “they have the right to invade others’ privacy and eavesdrop on private or semi-private conversations merely because these conversations take place online.” In Baker’s words, “asking for a student’s Facebook password in order to read private messages is akin to asking the student’s permission to install a wiretap on his or her phone.”
With Judge Sonia Sotomayor’s confirmation hearings getting underway this morning, now seems like as good a time as any to revisit the Supreme Court nominee’s past as a student activist.
The Daily Princetonian has posted seven letters and articles by or about Sotomayor from her undergraduate days, and taken together they reveal her to be a committed advocate for Latinos and Latinas on campus, an opponent of anti-gay violence, and as the recipient of the university’s highest undergraduate honor for her “dedication to the life of minority students at Princeton.”
In a May 10, 1974 letter, Sotomayor explained a complaint filed by “the Puerto Rican and Chicano students of Princeton” alleging “an institutional pattern of discrimination” at the university. In it she noted that there were then only 31 Puerto Rican and 27 Chicano students enrolled at Princeton, and rebuked the university for its “total absence of regard, concern and respect for an entire people and their culture.” (Sotomayor is quoted in two Daily Princetonian articles on the complaint as well.)
In a letter published on September 12, 1974, Sotomayor and five other student advisors to a search for a new assistant dean for student affairs laid out their criticism of the lack of direct student involvement in the search and the racial and ethnic dynamics of the process. (Sotomayor is quoted directly on the controversy here.)
In a group letter from February 27, 1976, Sotomayor and 38 other members of the campus community condemned the recent vandalism of a dorm room that was home to two students active in the Gay Alliance of Princeton.
And on February 28, 1976, it was announced that Sotomayor was one of two co-recipients of Princeton’s M. Taylor Pine Honor Prize, “the highest honor the university confers on an undergraduate.” The Princetonian article on the honor referred to Sotomayor as having “maintained almost straight A’s for the last two years, but” being “especially known for her extracurricular activities.” (The photo at above right accompanied this article.) A follow-up piece two days later noted that Sotomayor was the first Latino student to win the award.
studentactivism.net 
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