I’m back from my talks in Iowa (thank you Astrid Henry! thank you Renee Kramer!), back in action, and wanted to follow Shira’s awesome inaugural post (welcome, Miss Shira!) with an updated plug for The Masculinity Project. This amazing project sponsored by Black Public Media “uses media to create a virtual community record of the true issues affecting black men and black community in America” and includes a blog, BLACKstream, film shorts, forums, and more.  The hope, according to the press release, is that it become a repository of work by the next generation of storytellers and filmmakers, fostering cross-cultural dialogue that “reaches our neighborhoods as well as our policymakers.”

Why now?  Because:

This year Barack Obama made history when he was elected as president of the United States on November 4, 2008. His candidacy has trained significant public and media attention to issues of race and the challenges facing black men in this country. While President Elect Obama ran for the highest office in the land, he also hails from Illinois, a state where the prison population is 63 percent African American—an incarceration rate nine times that of whites. But what does it all mean?

Check it out! www.masculinityproject.org