Is My Lipstick A Lethal Weapon?

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Danny Sola, senior, applies Jordana Squeeze ‘n Shine “I hope my brand’s not toxic.”

by Sana Saeed

Lipstick makes your lips silky and bright. It may even make you feel more feminine.

But it may be hazardous to your health.

So says the latest study by University of California at Berkeley researchers, who found metals in every one of 32 lipsticks and lip glosses like Burt’s Bee that they tested. These metals included lead, cadmium, manganese and chronium, which are used as color additives.

“It scares me that (metals) are getting in my skin,” said Danny Sola, a senior.

In a small study published last week, researchers asked teenage girls to hand over their lipsticks and glosses and tested them for toxic metals, including lead and cadmium.

Even though the metal content was different for each brand, researchers found that women who apply lipstick two to three times daily can ingest a significant amount—20 percent of the daily amount that’s considered safe in drinking water or more—of aluminum, cadmium, chromium, and manganese.

Women who slathered it on (14 times a day or more) met or surpassed the daily recommended exposure to chromium, aluminum, and manganese.  Lead, a metal that humans should avoid, was detected in 75 percent of the samples.

Darlisha McClothen wears Maybelline Baby Lips. “I never thought of lipstick as being dangerous.”

Students said they expected the government — specifically The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) — to protect them from dangerous cosmetics. “It’s very horrible, so horrible (that the FDA is not looking out for us), ” said 16-year-old Katina Degraffenreed, whose favorite brands were on the list. “Now, I won’t wear it much, now that I know it has lead.”

Right now, the FDA regulates how much of these substances can be in pigment, but doesn’t specify how much metal overall is allowed in a tube of lipstick. And the FDA itself doesn’t test the dozens of dyes used in cosmetics or set the maximum amounts of metals in them, UC Berkeley researcher Katharine Hammond told The San Francisco Chronicle.

As for students,  not all are ignoring the study. “From now on, I’m using olive oil,” said Sola.

What “Healthy Environment” Means to Mack Students

by Janiero Rodriguez

This week, two youth groups at Mack — YOLO and Real Hard — are promoting the idea of “healthy environment.”

I asked several students and a tutor to define “healthy environment.”

Kardel Howard (not photographed), a sophomore, said

“Water is clean. No trash on the street. The air is clean and smells like trees.”

Miles Mitchell, sophomore:

“A healthy environment to me is violence free environment and an environment that is very green.”

Daishawn Shannon, sophomore:

“Keep everything clean, not just your own neighborhood.”

Bomani Bassette, sophomore:

“To keep your neighborhood streets clean.”

Tutor Amy Nickersen said:

“A healthy environment is an environment where you can thrive physically, emotionally and spiritually, physically — clean, safe, makes you feel good. Emotionally — inspiring environment, creative, where you can think productive thoughts.”

Macksmack writers win state high school journalism awards

Miles Mitchell wins 2nd place in environmental reporting for story on McClymonds garden

Two McClymonds students, senior Romanalyn Inocencio and sophomore Miles Mitchell, have won journalism awards from the California Press Women’s Association.

Mitchell won second place in environmental reporting for a story about the vegetable garden at McClymonds, which appeared in macksmack blog on June 11 2012.

Romanalyn Inocencio (second from left at a journalism workshop at the Sacremento Bee last fall) wins 3rd place in two highly-contested categories: news and opinion

Inocencio, a senior, won third place in news for a story on changes (new teachers, restorative justice  and added AP classes) at McClymonds that was published in Oaktown Teen Times in January.

She also won third place in opinion for a piece opposing a teen curfew in Oakland.

Winning students’ films explore Black Panthers and homelessness

By Anthony Beron

A 17-year-old Skyline sophomore’s video based on an R & B song by Moria Moore that uses footage of the history of Black Panthers won the Judges Award last week at  Project YouthView.

Lily Yu, a Chinese immigrant who plays jazz bass, created the R&B film Limitations, which revisits the Black Panther Party’s lasting presence in West Oakland.  She won a $500 cash prize, a Kindle and and a private screening of her film and luncheon at the Dolby studios in San Francisco.

Organized by Alternatives in Action, Project YouthView, which took place last Thursday at the Alameda Theatre in Alameda, screened films by nine finalists. “Human,” a film by Fremont High School graduates Andy To and Dara So, which tells the story of a local homeless man, won the Audience award.

For Yu, film was a new venture. “I really love music,” Yu says, “I’m in my school’s jazz band. I had just started in film, and I didn’t know much about it, so I decided to do a music video.”

Since filming Limitations, she’s contributed to three videos for KQED chronicling the Oakland dropout crisis.

The Skyline High School student came to film through the Bay Area Video Coalition, or BAVC, a group that organizes classes, events, after-school programs, and resources to help students. Yu found her inspiration in BAVC member, Moria Moore, who has since moved to Los Angeles.

“[Limitations] talks about African- Americans, and it came from Moria Moore’s album, History in the Streets,” Yu says. “I used found footage from documentaries about the Black Panthers, and I decided to focus the video on that. You’ll see [Moore] in the spots that the Black Panthers were in many years ago,” she told Oakland Magazine.

Yu said she did not show her family the video until it was completed, as it was so different from anything she’d created before. “I didn’t know if they’d understand,” she said. But they did.

Her BAVC mentors helped her shape her story. ” I had to write out locations for each shot—‘Where do I imagine this part of the song?’”

Sustainable Future for Oakland: Students Care

by Anthony Beron

Oakland High senior Kasey Saeturn relies on the bus for the long trek to school every day. It’s already overcrowded and unreliable.

Her nightmare could end: an alternative plan known as Scenario 5 could make Oakland more “sustainable” while investing more money in buses to restore service to levels that existed in the past, she told  at an environmental impact report hearing on April 16.

“Buses are overcrowded,” she said.  She also supports ”eco-friendly buses.”

Saeturn was one of several students to testify at the hearing about the Environmental Impact Report, which analyzed several alternatives to Plan Bay Area.

In their testimony, students supported Alternative 5, touted as “the environmentally superior alternative,”  which would decrease greenhouse gases and particulate pollution that triggers asthma. It would also budget more money for affordable housing and buses.

The other students were graduates of McClymonds, Street Academy and Bentley high school, who are now attending college. The Rose Foundation’s summer program “New Voices Are Rising” had stirred interest in the plan.

Woody Little, a student at UC Berkeley who grew up in Rockridge, urged that any plan avoid displacing people from their current neighborhoods and create more affordable housing.

Plan Bay Area is a long-range transportation and land-use/housing plan for the entire San Francisco Bay Area. It includes the Bay Area’s Regional Transportation Plan (updated by the Metropolitan Transportation Commission), and the Association of Bay Area Governments’ demographic and economic forecast.

This is the first time legislation is asking MTC and ABAG to adopt a Sustainable Communities Strategy, which will coordinate land use and transportation in the regional transportation plan. The aim is to reduce greenhouse gas emissions for cars and light-duty trucks in the nine-county region.  If the plan succeeds in getting people out of their cars, there would be more people riding buses and BART.

Pamela Tapia, a McClymonds graduate, told the story of her family’s displacement: that her mother now has to travel four hours to work and spends $60 a day. “The EIR fails to factor in the impact of gentrification on housing costs in neighborhoods that historically have been home to low-income residents.” Another McClymonds graduate, Devilla Ervin, talked about his foster mother having to move to Sacramento to find affordable housing.

Brenda Barron, who graduated from Street Academy and now attends San Francisco State, testified about changes in transportation: there are no buses near her home after 10 pm. She said that public transit  should be more affordable and frequent  and matters to younger people.

Another public hearing is scheduled in Fremont on May 1 at 6 pm at the Mirage Ballroom.

Why Urban Fiction Makes Me Believe

by Khristan Antoine

When Cupcake Brown talks about her mother’s addiction to drugs and her kids being taken away and placed under foster care,  I related it to my life and friends I have lost because of this same issue.   Books like “A Piece of Cake” by Cupcake Brown — urban literature — make me smile, laugh, cry, and see my life in a different perspective.

I enjoy reading urban fiction books (or street lit)  because they express fictional situations that are related to what happens on a daily basis in Oakland and portray people interacting with each other realistically. No aliens or vampires for me, please. They’re just too ugly and non-realistic.

Dialogue fuels urban fiction. I can relate to  and understand the dialogue because I see and hear most of the things described in these books or memoirs like “A Piece of Cake.”

I have nothing against mystery thrillers or romances, though they tend to be too predictable.  The closest novel to urban fiction is a classic, “Black Boy” a memoir by Richard Wright, which expresses so many of the experiences and characters that I see in my daily life: he is shuffled back and forth between his sick mother, his fanatically religious grandmother and various aunts and uncles. As he ventures into the white world to find jobs, he encounters extreme racism and brutal violence,  and some of the things he expresses I related to and understand deeply.

In her book, The Readers’ Advisory Guide to Street Literature, Vanessa Morris notes that some”classics”  could be considered the urban fiction or “street lit” of its day. Books like Stephen Crane’s Maggie, A Girl of the Streets or even Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens. So urban fiction is not just for African Americans or Latinos, but part of a long tradition of stories from diverse cultural and ethnic experiences. Just more readable — because of the street language — than Shakespeare.

Like Richard Wright, author of “Black Boy”, who writes about the failure of his environment to support and nourish him, I have found a literature that is appealing to me as well as easy to understand.  Urban literature allows a story to be told without the excessive use of an extensive vocabulary.  A language that is not often used and practiced in the streets of Oakland.  I am not able to connect with a story in a deeper way if I cannot understand a word the author is using.

“It was not a matter of believing or disbelieving what I read, but of feeling something new, of being affected by something that made the look of the world different,” -Richard Wright, “Black Boy.”

Mack Book Clubs: What’s Going On?

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by Anthony Beron and Jacob Miles

Readathon at McClymonds? Not quite, but after many years, McClymonds has initiated back-to-back book clubs in its after-school program.
After an attempt this fall to form a reading group, African American Culture teacher, La’Cole Martin (who graduated McClymonds in 2000) centered a reading club on African-American life. “This theme relates to students more,” said Martin.

At its first meeting, more than 12 students, mostly 9th graders participated. The book club meets Wednesdays after school. The first book is “Monster” by Walter Dean Myers.

“It opens our eyes to our cultural roots,” says freshman Mickey Sola. “And it further educates us on African-American history.”

Martin said the reason she launched the group was to “work with the students outside of class.” A year ago, while leading Culture Keepers and teaching journalism, she participated in a program at McClymonds, “In the West We Read,” which focused on the importance of reading. 

“A lot of students actually enjoy reading,” says Martin (who does offer extra credit for participation). “There are fewer distractions and we follow up with other activities” such as designing a bookcover or creating a soundtrack.

In a recent study of African-American and Latino high school students, Hunter College professor Jody Polleck found that book clubs can be used to enhance students’ social–emotional and academic learning. Polleck conducted a study in a small urban high school with two different book clubs. Qualitative data came from various sources, including observations, interviews, book club discussions, and surveys. Polleck’s study showed that book clubs promote academic literacy learning and the competencies of social–emotional learning.

A scan of Oakland high school websites showed than many used to offer book club as an after school activity but no longer do.
Students expressed enthusism aboute the new reading club. Freshman Janaya Andrews said it will help her in school as “it teaches us things we don’t normally learn in class.”

Martin said she offered book club as a chance to engage with students and help them benefit more from school.

An earlier book club, led by after-school program staff member Shelley Smith, disbanded after only several meetings last fall, due to a lack of interest from other students, Smith said.

“Not a lot of students here are interested in reading,” said Smith. “For those who do read, most of them don’t want to commit to anything.”

What makes Martin’s book club different from the earlier one? Students say it’s the food, a chance for extra credit for school, and the opportunity to socialize with friends.

Andrews believes the book club’s population is different, but only half are committed. “Probably 50 percent of the people in book club don’t take it seriously. They just come for the food and to mess around with the other students.” she said. With a sigh, she added, “Out of about four hours, we were only able to read four pages of our book.  Next time, we’ll be more focused.”