Editor’s note: A nationally syndicated columnist, Roland S. Martin is the author of “Listening to the Spirit Within: 50 Perspectives on Faith” and “Speak, Brother! A Black Man’s View of America.” Visit his Web site for more information. For the next few months, he will be hosting “No Bias, No Bull” at 8 p.m. ET on CNN while Campbell Brown is on maternity leave.

Roland Martin says rules in the U.S. should be loosened to encourage adoption of American children.

(CNN) — Pop star Madonna is back in the news; this time, heading back to the African nation of Malawi to adopt her second child.

You might remember all of the drama a few years ago when Madonna adopted a Malawi boy. Now she wants to adopt a girl, and a judge has said she will have to wait until Friday to see if she will get the go-ahead.

Madonna has been quoted in the Malawi newspaper Nation as saying, “Many people, especially our Malawian friends, say that David should have a Malawian brother or sister. It’s something I have been considering, but would only do if I had the support of the Malawian people and government.”

It seems that anytime we hear about celebrities like Madonna adopting, the children are from another country. I’m not at all opposed to children being adopted from Africa, China or any other country, but it does raise the question: What’s wrong with adopting American children?

Now I’m not against anyone providing a secure, loving home for a child, but it seems to me that these stories often reinforce a growing public image of adoption for many Americans: that of a rich, famous individual going to a developing country to adopt a child.

According to various adoption and governmental agencies, more than 500,000 American children are under foster care, and many of them are waiting for adoption. From coast to coast, babies to toddlers to teens are desperately looking for a home where they can be loved, nurtured and provided for.

Now, it would be easy to blast these celebrities by saying it’s the hip thing to walk around with an international child, but truth be told, we’ve got a serious adoption problem in this country.

Single mothers have a difficult time adopting a child, and several I know personally have gone overseas. And let’s not even talk about the red tape and bureaucracy!

American parents are made to jump through enormous hoops, and the process takes years, instead of months. And all too often, single people and married couples simply grow disenchanted with the process.

We can sit here and criticize Madonna all day, but enough with ripping her. Our energy should be put into a call for massive adoption reform. Don’t just bang out an e-mail or blog and get caught up in the celebrity hype.

If you think it should be easier to adopt American children, demand that your local, state and federal election officials clear the pathway to make the process easier. And let’s have more consistency. Having 50 different states set their own policy, is frankly, nonsense. With so many rules, no wonder folks throw their hands up and move on.

The goal of adoption is to put children in loving homes and not have them be the responsibility of the state. Making it harder to adopt affects you in your pocketbook because taxpayer money is spent to care for the children. So changing the laws not only helps the child, but also is fiscally prudent.

So what are you prepared to do?

The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of Roland Martin.

Commentary: Why aren’t celebrities adopting U.S. kids? – CNN.com.

CHRIS PALADINO, a Microsoft employee who was hired in 2006, didn’t worry too much about his job when the economy began to sour last fall. The company employs nearly 90,000 people.

“I thought Microsoft was so stable, it wouldn’t be touched,” he said. Now, as one of the 1,400 employees who received layoff notices in January, Mr. Paladino is worried — about making the mortgage payments on his home.

Mr. Paladino gathered user feedback for the Xbox games division of Microsoft. This month he started his own consulting company, Promethium Marketing, with two colleagues who were also laid off.

But, “I would never have chosen to leave Microsoft,” he said. “I had a great job. I worked with a great team.”

Leaving the company has not always been so traumatic. Microsoft has a long history of making employees part-owners of the company, by granting them stock and stock options.

From executive to secretary, many employees received thousands of stock options. Microsoft’s stock price rose from about $2.50 a share in 1992 to almost $60 in 1999, and roughly 10,000 of those employees became millionaires.

When employees left the company in those days, it was overwhelmingly by their own choice. They were off to a new adventure, starting a business or a charity, or just planning to have fun, said Rob Horwitz, the chief executive of Directions on Microsoft, an information technology analyst firm that has been tracking the company for 17 years.

Notable alumni from that time rebuilt the Professional Bowlers Association; created the charity Room to Read, which builds schools in poor countries; and founded the Cranium game company (which was sold to Hasbro).

Other Microsoft alumni started venture capital firms or followed more personal dreams, creating enterprises like the Cameron Catering Company of Seattle, which focuses on green events, or the Casa Cupula, a bed-and-breakfast for gay travelers in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico. One alumnus built his own airplane and another rode along with Russian cosmonauts on a space mission. The sky was literally the limit.

The economy has changed all that. With Microsoft’s stock price now below $20 a share, any stock options granted in the last 10 years have little to no value, and the outright stock grants have lost value.

So rather than leaving on their own terms for a new adventure, some recently separated employees are now looking for any professional job they can get. (Microsoft declined to comment for this article.)

Read More…

A New Crop of Job Hunters, With Microsoft Résumés – NYTimes.com.

REMEMBERING The historian John Hope Franklin took pains to remind us of how much of his and our history we would like to forget.

When he was a boy in segregated Oklahoma, where he was born in 1915, John Hope Franklin used to indulge in a subversive bit of wordplay like a small act of public and private theater.

“My mother and I used to have a game we’d play on our public,” Dr. Franklin said not long ago, his voice full of artful pauses, words pulled out like taffy. “She would say if anyone asks you what you want to be when you grow up, tell them you want to be the first Negro president of the United States. And just the words were so far-fetched, so incredible that we used to really have fun, just saying it.”

Even in a country where the far-fetched, for better and for worse, so often becomes reality, few historians achieved the stature, both as scholars and as moral figures — and as combinations of the two — that Dr. Franklin did. When he died last week, at the age of 94, an American epoch seemed to vanish with him.

Dr. Franklin was first and foremost a major historian, whose landmark book, “From Slavery to Freedom: A History of African-Americans,” first published in 1947, was a comprehensive survey that sold more than three million copies. The book also permanently altered the ways in which the American narrative was studied.

“What distinguishes his history or historiography is that he, like few other historians, wrote a book that transformed the way we understand a major social phenomenon,” said David Levering Lewis, the New York University historian, who like Dr. Franklin studied under Theodore Currier at Fisk University in Nashville.

“When you think of ‘From Slavery to Freedom,’ there’s before and there’s after, there’s the world before and then we have a basic paradigm shift,” he said. “Before him you had a field of study that had been feeble and marginalized, full of a pretty brutal discounting of the impact of people of color. And he moved it into the main American narrative. It empowered a whole new field of study.”

Dr. Lewis and others argue that Dr. Franklin’s work helped empower not just African-American studies, but the whole range of alternative stories — of women, gays, Hispanics, Asians and others — now so much a part of mainstream academia.

Dr. Franklin accomplished this not through advocacy but rather through the traditional means of scholarly inquiry. In his discussion, for instance, of the intersection of race and imperialism at the turn of the 20th century, Dr. Franklin observed: “The United States, unlike other imperial powers, had a color problem at home and therefore had to pursue a policy with regard to race that would not upset the racial equilibrium within the United States. In Puerto Rico, for example, approximately one-third of the population was distinctly of African descent, and many so-called white Puerto Ricans had sufficient black blood in their veins to qualify as African-Americans in the United States.”

Complete Story Here…

John Hope Franklin, Scholar and Witness – NYTimes.com.

Exploring the life of an Afro-European Virtuoso through Verse and Violin

Sarah Wade, Cavalier Daily Staff Writer
Published: Wednesday, March 18 2009
Human history is as much a product of forgetting as it is of remembering. What actually goes down in the pages of history can be unpredictable and seemingly arbitrary.

Listen to Beethoven’s famed Sonata No. 9 in A Major, Op. 47, commonly called the Kreutzer Sonata after the French violinist Rodolphe Kreutzer. It is sometimes assumed that Beethoven originally dedicated the sonata to Kreutzer. In reality, Kreutzer never could perform the sonata.

Instead, he reportedly told Beethoven the piece was “impossible to play” — a notable complaint, given that Kreutzer was considered one of Europe’s top violinists at the time.

But it was not impossible. By this time, Afro-European violinist George Polgreen Bridgetower had already played the sonata, said Creative Writing Prof. Rita Dove, who recently wrote a book about the musician.

Bridgetower was a Mulatto violin virtuoso. His musical talent was so impressive that Beethoven originally wrote the piece for him, not Kreutzer, Dove said. Why, then, did Beethoven rededicate the sonata to Kreutzer, a violinist who refused to play it? Also, why did history subsequently forget George Polgreen Bridgetower?

Dove, a former U.S. Poet Laureate, said she aims to recover Bridgetower’s lost significance in her latest book of poetry. “Sonata Mulattica” dramatizes in lyric verse the life of the violinist and the different factors that led him to historical obscurity rather than fame.
“I wanted to discover [Bridgetower], Dove said, “and poetry was the way I wanted to discover him.”

In a joint concert with Dave Matthews Band violinist Boyd Tinsley, Dove will celebrate the release of “Sonata Mulattica”  Friday evening as part of the 15th Annual Virginia Festival of the Book. The blending of poetry, music and conversation will begin at 8 p.m. in the Paramount Theater.

“[When] Dove mentioned that Boyd Tinsley was cited in one of her poems … we all agreed that it would be fantastic if there could be a joint program,” said Nancy Damon, program director of the Virginia Festival of the Book. Kevin McFadden, the festival’s associate director and a former University student, said he felt that there would be “large interest” in the program, and eventually the festival invited Dove and Tinsley to perform together at the Paramount. Dove used Tinsley’s name in her poem, “The Bridgetower,” describing him as one of today’s gifted people forgotten by time. She said she contacted him after finishing writing “Sonata Mulattica” to let him know he was featured in it.

Dove and Tinsley enjoyed working together on the upcoming event, Dove said. “He works similarly [as] I do … on improvisation,” Dove said, adding that both are artists who experiment with their craft to expand its scope and range of expression. Combining the two crafts of poetry and violin music to share one message is in itself a chance for improvisation.

“It’s been a great process of getting to know one another,” Dove said of her collaboration with Tinsley, who, like Dove, is a Charlottesville resident. Dove added that Tinsley wants people to remember what happened between Beethoven and Bridgetower in 1803. Both Tinsley and her aim to “connect the dots from Bridgetower all the way up to Tinsley,” Dove said.

Damon said she anticipates that the event will be “a very exciting combination of words and music which fits perfectly into [the festival’s] goal of encouraging people to read.” She added that “with any success, the story contained in Dove’s book and Tinsley’s music — the life of George Polgreen Bridgetower — will encourage people to explore what they read more deeply, to examine the personal significance every story offers them.”

Dove said her initial decision to versify Bridgetower’s 200-year-old story happened largely by chance. As a former cellist, she heard Bridgetower’s name long ago but did not give it much thought. That changed years later when she glimpsed a portrayal of Bridgewater’s genius in the 1994 film, “Immortal Beloved.”

By the age of 10, Bridgewater, already a prodigy, was on the road performing.

“That was really interesting — a little boy, half-black and half-white, playing in concert halls across Europe,” she said.

As a young man, Bridgetower came to Vienna, where he impressed and befriended the already legendary Ludwig van Beethoven. The friendship, however, was short-lived.

“The Bridgetower,” which was printed last November in the New Yorker, explains why: In May 1803, Beethoven and his new friend first performed their new sonata together with the German on pianoforte and the Afro-European on violin. The performance moved the composer so deeply that he “leapt up to embrace his ‘lunatic mulatto,’ the playful nickname he had given Bridgetower.

“[But then they had a] falling out over a girl nobody remembers, nobody knows.”

Bridgetower apparently insulted a woman who was one of Beethoven’s acquaintances. In response, the composer chose to dedicate the sonata to another musician. The pair would never renew the friendship.

How might racial categorization both in and beyond classical music be different if Bridgetower’s fame had survived the first round of history’s cuts? How many more figures like Bridgetower might there be today if their names were better remembered? His own mulatto identity literally bridged African and European cultures, and his technical abilities surpassed even those of the famous Kreutzer. Beethoven’s sole reason for renouncing Bridgetower had nothing to do with music and everything to do with emotion. But because of a chance combination of factors, Bridgetower “has kind of dropped out of history,” Dove said. Remembered here and there, maybe, but more as an interesting detail than as anyone historically influential, she added.

For Dove, obscure stories like Bridgetower’s history point out the shortcomings of history and the need for something beyond it that can be used to remember human life.

Around every famous historical figure, there are countless other people — “living, breathing people,” Dove said — who were just as significant. Perhaps these nameless contributors would be the ones in history books instead if a few circumstances had worked out differently.

For those select few that history does remember, it seems to do so incompletely, which offers the world only small, scattered windows into past lives as vibrant as the ones that people are living now, Dove noted.

“What has always fascinated me [is] the realization that we all have interior lives,” Dove said. “What history does is to point out, rather graphically, just how little of that interiority can be passed down through generations.”

This is one of Dove’s main reasons for writing poetry, she said. She aims to acknowledge and explore that interiority with the intent to expose the personal, emotional side of history.

“History … tells us what happened. It doesn’t tell us why it was worth it,” Dove said. “That’s the job of poetry.”

via Cavalier Daily.