Back in 2007 a couple of representatives from the Rainbow/Push coalition met with Atlanta Braves GM John Schuerholz about the lack of American-born black players on the team. As you might expect, word of the meeting was met with typical accusations of double standards or playing the infamous "race card." While I wouldn’t strongly argue against those charges, frankly, I don't think it's terribly unreasonable to observe that the team in America's "black (as in African-American) Mecca" didn't have a single freaking African-American (AA) on the roster. Certainly AA players are not nearly as abundant as they once were in MLB, but every other NL East team somehow managed to accomplish this in 2007 (e.g. Moises Alou, Marlon Anderson, Dontrelle Willis, Dmitri Young, Ryan Howard, Jimmy Rollins). I remember a time when the demographics of Turner Field weren't as close to Cumming, Georgia as they are now and those were the days of Ron Gant and David Justice.

In the aftermath of this little dust up, Schuerholz made two seemingly related moves. The first was trading left fielder Ryan Langerhans to the Washington Nationals and bringing in Georgia-born AA left fielder Willie Harris from the Oakland Athletics. Braves fans who were around at this time will remember that Mr. Harris joined the team and tore the cover off of the ball for six weeks before regressing back to his fairly average career statistics.

Two months later, a much more significant second move was made. The Braves used their number one pick in the 2007 draft to pick a 17 year old kid named Jason Heyward. The Braves are big on two things in their recruiting: local talent and personal makeup. Heyward played in the local Atlanta suburb of McDonough and was raised in a strong, stable home by two Dartmouth graduates.

Oh, and Mr. Heyward is AA.

We will never know for sure whether the Braves picked Mr. Heyward because he so perfectly fits the mold they prefer for their young players or because they were kowtowing to some extent to Rainbow Push (even in this false dichotomy most likely it would be a combination). Most likely the former because Heyward was projected to be a top 10 pick and ended up going #14. Should Heyward turn out to be a bust, I'm sure that some might bring up that April meeting in 2007 and point to it as a peril of Quotas/Affirmative Action/whiny-bitchy-cause-of-the-moment, but if Heyward turns out to be what many signals are pointing to - a Frank-Thomas like combination of power and plate discipline - and that Rainbow / Push meeting caused the Braves to look a little bit harder at the community relations benefits of a franchise African American player then I say God bless JJ and the institution of Affirmative Action.

P.S. It's worth nothing that Heyward's High School batting coach has started an organization called L.E.A.D. (Launch, Expose, Advise, Direct) that is designed to promote baseball among AA youth.

I recently had the opportunity to visit the Lone Star State on a business / pleasure trip. Here's a recap.

Houston

- My hotel was in Downtown Houston and I was generally impressed with the area. While it lacked much nightlife on the southern stretch, things picked up mightily in the northern "Theater District" as well as the curiously named Midtown (curious because it was south of Downtown).



- I saw my good friend Trenee who I hadn't seen in a few years. She looked great and took time out of her weekend to take me to some rodeo festivities and an authentic Texas Barbeque spot.



- The rodeo in Houston felt like a NASCAR wekend on steroids with downtown parades and lots of other stuff.



- Trenee, myself, and her mother went to a carnival outside of Reliant Stadium (the place where the Rodeo goes down) that touted a barbeque contest. We strolled over to see what we could see and the whole thing turned out to be a big tease. There was an area they called the "Chuck Wagon" which was a little public tent where people picked up little beef barbecue sandwiches that looked and tasted like they came out of an elementary school lunch room. Beyond the chuck wagon was about two football fields worth of tents where the contestants held private parties and teased passers-by beyond belief with the smell of their pits and singing sauces. After about an hour of torture we broke camp and hit up a local barbecue spot on the north side of town that was very very good.



- Houston has a light rail system called the METRORail. It's definitely "light" as it only covers about 7.5 miles of the majorly spread out city but it does a great job of providing accessibility to the city's urban core. What's strange is that it works on some sort of demi-honor system where the transit authority apparently only checks tickets randomly. I rode the train maybe three times and never had my tickets checked. Also, imagine my annoyance when I bought two tickets (one for each way) and found out that the tickets simply cover time intervals and not the number of train rides.



- Minute Maid Park from a distance was a sight to behold. I would like to come back in August (ugh) when the 'stros play the Braves so that I can enjoy it in operating capacity. I just have to decide whether I want to endure the sweltering Houston heat. On second thought, maybe I'll just wait for the Falcons to make a trek to Houston.



Between Houston and San Antonio

- After my time was done in Houston, I had to make my way to San Antonio for my conference. Since it was only a few hundred miles away, I decided that I would jump on a Greyhound for the trek. I actually like travelling by bus quite a bit. I don't get hassled because of my name, every 80 miles or so I get to stop at a place where I can stretch and actually acquire a full 16 oz. drink, and the boarding / unloading process is a million times more streamlined.

- The bus was late leaving Houston.

- Somewhere not far out of Houston, a motorcyclist got splattered on the Interstate and a helicopter actually landed on the street to take what was left of him or her to the hospital for salvaging.

- The bus door wouldn't close flush which meant that, after we made a stop and got back on the highway, it would shake violently making a lot of noise and letting in outside air. The bus driver would have to pull the bus over and fiddle with it for a few minutes to get it to act right. Once the problem was fixed, it took several minutes to find a gap in Interstate traffic to pull the bus out into the lane.

- There was a pregnant woman on the bus who was having some sort of sickness and forced the driver to drop her off.

- Did I mention traffic?

- When I got to San Antonio and told a friend about the trip they asked: "How many clucking chickens were there riding with you?"

San Antonio

- When I told people I was going to Houston and San Antonio I got responses similar to when I would talk about Los Angeles and San Francisco. Lots of San Antonio praise and Houston derision normally in the form of "Why in the hell would you want to go to Houston?" Since I had a great time in Houston, I was really looking forward to checking out San Antonio.

- Downtown San Antonio is beautiful. The Riverwalk is a breathtaking example of boldness in urban design. For me though, after getting over the initial wonder, the whole thing came off as being very manufactured - I was constantly waiting for a cadre of mechanical animals and Presidents to jump out and serenade me (I subsequently came to find out that Marco Engineering Company of California - desingers of Disneyland - played a part in the Riverwalk project). Regardless, the achievement is so remarkable that any qualms about authenticity gave way to serious admiration for the type of effort it must have taken for such a daring undertaking on premium urban real estate.





- The conference was cool. I made a couple of key contacts, but most importantly I was able to get good perspective on the work my team and I recently completed. Phase I of the PeopleSoft implementation was rife with things that could have been done a whole lot better and failures on my part certainly contributed to this reality. However, being around others in my industry reminded me of the simple fact that rolling out ERP systems is hard. Very hard. Things are even worse when you're implementing a product for which nobody on staff has any experience and non-consultants that do have experience are few and far between.

- In San Antonio I had the two best Mexican meals of my entire life. If you're ever there, just outside of downtown is a restaurant called Rosario's. Make it a stop. The second great Mexican meal was in the freaking San Antonio airport of all places!

- Got a chance to see the Alamo. When I hear the story of the fight at the Alamo I always think of the Battle of Badr. No I don't think these two events are even remotely the same in how they played out - come on, one was a victory and one was a loss - however, the impact each fight had on their respective movements was very similar. It just shows how there are numerous ways the tide can turn.



- For the record, I did not get my hands swabbed on my trip and I was even allowed to check in to my flight back to Atlanta without seeing an agent. If my memory serves correctly, that's probably the third time in the last five years (roughly 24 trips) I've been able to do that. The second time was a couple of months ago when coming back from Chicago. Maybe it's just the Atlanta Airport that has it in for me now.

- I just had a 2+ week vacation where I planned on getting a lot of things done. I got a lot of things done but not everything I needed. My failure to complete my list of tasks largely has to do with my laptop biting the dust on me halfway through. I didn't realize how much of a slave I am to that thing until it went down. For ten years I have owned nothing but Thinkpad laptops (this is my 4th) and this is the first major hardware failure I've had. Fortunately the machine is still under warranty (didn't know what to expect there since I bought it from somebody on Craigslist) so this will only be equivalent to a temporary lobotomy and I'll get these monkeys off my back soon enough.

- One of the things I got done was migrating the RZMCOM codebase to .NET 3.5 and xNET 3.0. This was the first step I needed to take before revamping the site interface and took way more time than I thought as the xNET 3 API still needed a few small tweaks to accommodate my needs here. Unfortunately, the laptop - which contained all of the up-to-date source code (and the source code repository) - died before I could finish everything. Currently the site performs marginally better than before but I have finally figured out the bottlenecks and expect things to speed up considerably once I get my environment back up and implement the optimizations I was working on the second it went down.

A few things here are broken but if they are broken they will probably go away in the next UI refresh. I hadn't worked on the site in a while and it was fun to get under the hood and play around. You might also notice that my Twitter status is now on the main weblog page. The plan going forward is to create a superfeed that puts my status updates, weblog posts, and image uploads inline. The key here is that RZMCOM becomes authoritative for all of this stuff. My statuses, posts, and images are very important chronicles of my life and I don't like the idea of Twitter or Facebook or Flickr or whatever being the primary source. Now that I have the integrations figured out, I'll just syndicate this stuff out and remove dependencies to the social networking app du jour.

- So a couple of months ago I had a recurrence of an excruciating problem that hit me five years ago. While getting tended to, I found out that either the initial problem never properly healed or I had a particularly ugly form of cancer. In order to answer that question I had to have a colonoscopy - an experience that, for the sake of separating out the gross stuff, will get its own post. I scheduled it during my time off so I would have adequate recovery time before the grind machine of my job fired up again.

I'm pleased to report that it was the former scenario and - outside of that - my colon came back A OK. The treatment I got causes a lot of discomfort and will likely be with me for another week or so, but it beats the hell out of the alternative.

- For the final part of the break I went to Chicago to see my good friend Rene. Nene and her wonderful family were so gracious putting me up for the weekend and going out of their way to ensure my comfort. Between reattaching my frozen toes every few steps, I learned a bit of Chicago history, did some dancing, saw a bit of Theatre and hung out at the top of the Hancock Building. I also learned a couple of new card games: Tripoley and Mafia. Even my supreme post-banding discomfort couldn't sour an excellent weekend and start to the New Year.

After the -14 wind chill up there, the mid teens temperatures we're going through here in Atlanta are downright cozy.

- Happy New Year all...

I keep getting pinged about my thoughts on a recent ABC News story regarding black women and marriage. I get tired of repeating myself so here are some quick thoughts in one place. To make my points I am going to touch a lot of subjects that won't be given anything near the time that they deserve so I apologize in advance. Here we go.

The story is what I generally expect from the media: sloppily over-pursuing tangents to the point where the real issues are obfuscated beyond recognition. My biggest problem with it was the poor - almost negligent - use of statistical data in the early parts of the presentation.

Staggering fact:

"Black women outnumber black men by 1.8 million"

Women always outnumber men as they live significantly longer - no doubt because they do much less stupid crap when they are young - so just throwing this number out there with no context whatsoever is irresponsible. White women outnumber white men by 2 million, does that mean white women are worse off? No, because 2 million makes up a lower percentage of the white population. White men are 49.59% of the white population while black men are 47.98% of the black population. Going by the widely used but, in my opinion, very flawed idea that what's white statistically is right statistically, that's a pretty significant deviance over millions of people.

So you might say: "Ok, Rashid, so they didn't get into as much detail as your geeky ass would like. Regardless, all you just did was prove their base point that the 1.8 million man deficit is significant." Good point, but one thing they leave out is the fact that roughly 25% of black people live in poverty. This is a very important statistic in the context of the article.

Let's start at 1:32 where they take 100 black men and then subtract the number with no high school diploma (21%), no job (17%), or incarcerated (8%*).

I have the asterisk by the 8% because, for some inexplicable reason, they only included incarcerated black men between 25 and 34. Apparently getting locked up only counts you out of dating eligibility for 9 special years where having no job or high school diploma constitutes permanently elimination. Seriously, what group are we talking about here? a) all black men b) black men between the ages or 25 and 34 or c) some completely arbitrary mix of the two? If we're talking c here (and we are), this data is pretty much useless.

It gets worse.

The real problem with the data in the story is this: the women being profiled are professional, middle class women yet the data they present applies to the entire spectrum of black men. Doing this assumes that every black man is in the dating pool of these women. While black women might be more likely to date somebody from a lower social class than other races of women, this is absolutely not the norm. I don't think these "MBAs, MDs, and JDs" are giving much play to dudes who are only bringing the letters "E&J."

This is extremely important, because when you start looking at those outcomes listed earlier, particularly high school dropouts - an activity that correlates very highly with incarceration (I wonder if they accounted for that overlap in their statistics, for some reason I doubt it) - you'll find that most of the black men who fell into that trap came from impoverished surroundings and these ladies most likely did not. That means that while Nichole quite rightly laments the fate of the gentlemen she processes and prosecutes in the legal system (1:49), had they not been arrested she probably wouldn't have given them the time of day anyway.

According to census data from 2002 (old yes, but I think it makes the point) there were 3.3 million black men living below the poverty level against 4.8 million black women. When this data was gathered, there were 36 million black people in America 16.6 million men and 19.2 million women. That is a 2.6 million person disparity(!!!!) of which over half (1.5 million) is accounted for in the bottom 22.7% of the population.

In other words, the majority (58%) of the male "shortage" - much of which is natural to begin with - is accounted for in 22.7% of the population. A group which is pretty much 100% likely to not be dating the women being interviewed. This strongly repaints the picture presented by the story.

The real note of concern is that there is an alarmingly serious numbers problem with black men in this country, but it is decidedly not with the men who the women being profiled would date. It is with the poor black men vastly outnumbered by women in their social class. The problems that these women have, unlike the women being interviewed, are exacerbated by their considerably lower probability of out marriage due to highly segregated living and lower levels of socialization. This is a huge problem with far reaching implications through all of America and is much more deserving of highlighting - particularly how "War on Drugs" has and does impact this situation.

Back to the subjects of the story. These women do face real issues pertaining to their standards, upper middle class "desirability" of black women, interracial dating, changing gender roles, and general gender politics which are worth their own analysis (and, to be fair, some were covered but just not covered all that well), but the "shock and awe" type numbers presented to make a case of slim pickings were specious to say the least.

Random Data Notes:

- I find it remarkable that there is a male deficit of just 1.8 million against 2.6 million nine years ago. I'd like to look deeper into it but, on top of a 5+ million population gain, that sounds like progress. However, it could just mean that there are a lot of black male babies, which could be all the more reason to worry.

- I was crunching some numbers comparing white male/female ratio to black male/female ratio and the black ratio just falls like a rock at age 24. From age 24 to 44 the percentage of men drops from 50.5% to 46.9 percent. White men fall 1 percent in that interval and take FIFTY YEARS to make a 4% drop. Wow.

Here's the table I built (2008 data) I am scared to see how this looks broken out by income (T = Total, M = Male, F = Female):

As the newly-elected VP of Community Relations for the Atlanta Downtown Neighborhood Association, one of the principal functions I will serve is that of public safety liaison for the neighborhood. In ramping up to fulfill this duty when my term begins in January, I attended my first NPU-M public safety committee meeting last week (more info on NPUs can be obtained from the City of Atlanta website).

The meeting was a fairly small gathering of community representatives along with one officer from the Atlanta Police Department and one from the MARTA police. The representatives discussed initiatives to address localized matters of public safety and the police officers gave data on crime trends and recent arrests in the NPU. The APD - and particularly the outgoing chief - has caught a lot of heat for being too numbers-oriented but I personally appreciate it. Even if the numbers are flawed, if they are flawed in a consistent manner they have value. One of the more fascinating tidbits of data was that there had been 118 arrests for car break ins in the last month and, collectively, the perpetrators has been arrested a total of more than 2200 times. On the list were guys that had been arrested 60 to 70 times individually - it's like these guys are playing Grand theft Auto.

The most thought provoking item was the story of a busted fencing operation. If you've spent any time downtown you've probably been told to make sure all things are hidden from view in your car - you've perhaps even been told not to lock your car doors. This is because there is a lot of opportunistic crime in the area along the lines of car break-ins. The logic behind keeping your doors unlocked is that fixing your broken window will probably be much more of a hassle than replacing anything that gets stolen. That is, unless your gun is stolen: the officers reported an astounding 129 guns lifted from cars Downtown. We really appreciate that influx of crime-ready guns in our hood.

So once your gun, iPod, laptop, GPS or whatever is stolen, chances are the thief will immediately try to sell it. Since most reputable Pawn Shops won't buy hot merchandise, the enterprising thief that doesn't want to hawk goods on the street has to find a fence to help them offload the goods. As you might expect, you don't just waltz into these kind of spots and do business - they need to know who you are and that you're a proven member of the underground community before they will even look you in the eye. This posed a problem for the police who knew about the operation but had a hard time infiltrating it.

That all changed when a certain business owner was robbed and a homeless guy who apparently was on good terms with this proprietor happened to recognize the stolen goods at the fencing front. An ensuing sequence of events kicked off that allowed the cops to make their move and recover tens of thousands of dollars in stolen goods. In addition, the lack of a place to sell stolen goods has caused a dramatic drop-off of break-ins in the area. Perhaps this can also serve as a reminder to not treat the homeless like criminals or aliens.

I also attended a Five Points Task Force meeting where much of the same was discussed but there was one notable tidbit that I wasn't privy to before. The Atlanta Police Department has a group of officers called the H.O.P.E. team that is specifically trained to deal with matters concerning the homeless - particularly the mentally ill. I'm trying to get more information on them, from what I've come across so far they seem to act as a conduit between these ill people and the various homeless services in the city. Good stuff.