Creating unhealthy perceptions, and celebrating a hero.

If you figured out right away what is wrong with this picture good for you. If not, well, you are reading the right blog, because you have a lot of learning to do when it comes to America's problem with racial perceptions.


Now I am sure that the person who is responsible for creating the Baby K'Tan ad isn't necessarily a racist, but it just goes to show you the level of cluelessness and ignorance that is prevalent in yet another industry that has a tremendous influence over popular culture and thought.


It's all about the narrative, people, and in America, more than anywhere else, perception is reality.


You Negroes were understandably upset, and given our history with these types of issues I can't say that I blame you.


Finally, in honor of Veteran's Day, a little history lesson.


"The one life that U.S. Marine Dan Bullock had to give for his country lasted just 15 years, five months and 17 days.


The Brooklyn teen, after using a doctored birth certificate to enlist, became the youngest U.S. casualty of the Vietnam War when he was gunned down on June 7, 1969.


 It wasn’t until reporters visited the Marine’s family in Williamsburg that the nation learned the young man had been born on Dec. 21, 1953.


Forty-five years later, Bullock’s legacy is largely as a trivia answer in a fight that America would rather forget.


His old boot camp buddy Franklin McArthur says it shouldn’t be that way.
“He’s the youngest kid killed, and hardly anybody knows his name,” McArthur said from his Florida home. “It bothers me because he’s an historical figure, and everybody should know who he was.


“And hardly anybody does.”


A picture of Bullock’s boyish face adorns a wall at the city’s Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Lower Manhattan.


The slain teen looks forever east — frozen in time beneath his white dress hat, his lips pursed and his eyes fixed straight ahead.


His name adorns a street in his old Brooklyn neighborhood and a Veterans of Foreign Wars post in Honolulu. His grave in North Carolina bears a stone paid for years ago by talk show host Sally Jesse Raphael.


Much of that attention was generated by McArthur, who says he remains haunted by the 15-year-old’s sudden and violent death.


Bullock was just 14 when he appeared with his bogus proof of age at the Albee Square Marine recruiting station in downtown Brooklyn.


He was a bright kid and big for his age — standing about 5-foot-9 and 160 pounds. But the rigors of boot camp at Parris Island, S.C., were too much for the recruit, who was still just 14.


“He had already kind of washed out when he got to my platoon,” McArthur recounted. “He had trouble keeping up.”


McArthur made it his mission to aid the young Marine, at times carrying the exhausted teen through the rigorous training. He made the commitment because he knew what put a rifle in Bullock’s hands.


“Dan joined the Marine Corps to help his family out,” McArthur recalled. “His father was a lumber worker and a sharecropper. He didn’t have any skills to get work in New York.”


The two men said farewell after boot camp. Bullock left behind his dad, his stepmom and his 13-year-old sister, Gloria, and wound up about 8,500 miles from Brooklyn.


The rifleman with the Second Platoon of Company F was at the An Hoa Combat Base in Quang Nam Province when a 1 a.m. firefight began on June 7, 1969.
The heroic teen, realizing his fellow Marines guarding the base perimeter were outgunned, began running back and forth to deliver much-needed ammunition for the better part of an hour.


Bullock’s commander, unaware of the dead Marine’s tender age, provided the details in a June 11 letter to his parents on Lee Ave. in Brooklyn." [More]


Come on Hollywood, give us a movie. Start working on it now so that you can release it in time for next Veteran's Day.