24th Annual ADODI Summer Retreat (2010)Colombiere Conference Center Clarkston, Michigan Wed. July 14th thru Sunday July 18th, 2010

ADODIonline.com

Greetings from The Brotherhood Of ADODI:
We invite all
same-gender loving men of African descent
to join us in the gathering for our
24th annual summer retreat:

“Approaching Silver:
Renewing the ADODI Spirit”



As we look forward to the 25th Annual Retreat in 2011, we felt it was only fitting to pause and reflect on the history of an organization which was started and sustained by SGL Brothers of Color. We are a people who believe in the concept of Sankofa; we should never go forward without looking back, and going back to reclaim what we may have forgotten so that the future can be assured.

This retreat is designed to explore the 24 year legacy of our fellowship. Through workshops, African inspired rituals, daily affirmations, sharing our stories and other activities we will:

• Revisit the ideals of the founders;
• Examine the changing face and needs of our community;
• Explore the diasporic nature of our membership;
• Discuss new directions for the future of ADODI nationally and locally

We will be exploring not only the theme, but our history as individuals, our relationships as a community, and our responsibility as ADODI Brothers.

We look forward to welcoming you on this adventure of celebrating our past and solidifying our future.

Yours in the Spirit of ADODI,
The 2010 Retreat Planning Committee



Registration Fee Information

If paid in full by April 14th, 2010 $450.00
If paid in full by June 1st, 2010 $500.00
After June 1st, 2010 $550.00

Please complete, detach and mail the registration form with your payment to:

ADODI National
P.O. Box 60501
Chicago, Illinois 60660-0501


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If you need a registration form you
can download a PDF (Adobe Acrobat) version from the
Nubian Knights Network YahooGroup
located under the FILES section here;

or email ME (ROD) at BIG.ROD02[at]GMAIL.COM
will the subject line clearly stating
ADODI Summer Retreat Registration Form Request
so that I know I'm NOT receiving SPAM or a VIRUS
from an unknown email address,
and I'll email you the form.

THANKS!
ROD

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Starting March 15, You may register online at www.ADODIonline.com using a credit card, paypal or still opt to mail a check. If you opt to mail a check it must be postmarked by the April 14th deadline to receive the early registration price.
A service charge is added to online registrations.
Online pricing is below:

If paid in full by April 14th, 2010 $465.00
If paid in full by June 1st, 2010 $515.00
After June 1st, 2010 $570.00

Pricing includes:

• Round trip transportation from Detroit Metro International Airport, and downtown Detroit.
• Dinner Wednesday; 3 meals Thursday, Friday and Saturday; brunch Sunday.
• Double occupancy rooms.
• All retreat materials and a retreat t-shirt are also included.

Partial payments may be made at any time, however to receive the early registration fee the full price has to be paid by the deadline listed above.

Full retreat fee payments made after July 1st
must be made in the form of cashier's check or money order.
(NO PERSONAL CHECKS ACCEPTED AFTER JULY 1ST).

Deposits and registrations are transferable but NON-REFUNDABLE.



Limited scholarships are available
to those who qualify for up to $225.00.
To request a scholarship application contact:

Paul Smith:
paulmsmith@yahoo.com
954.537.4848


What To Bring:

• Casual attire including comfortable shoes, workout clothing and swimwear.
• Personal toiletries, medication, a beach towel, insect repellent, a flashlight.
• A plain white T-Shirt or white African garment with no logo's, colors or colored stitching for the Tribute to the Ancestors.
• African drums and bells.
• Musical instruments, pre-recorded or sheet music, poetry, costume(s) or other accessories if you wish to participate in the Talent Sharing.
• A desire to let yourself participate in a community of men who wish to affirm and accept you just as you are.
• A desire to affirm and accept others.
• Your spiritual gifts and the desire to explore/share them.
• Music, DVD’s, board games, card games.

What NOT To Bring:

• Large sums of money or expensive jewelry.
• Illegal drugs
• Alcoholic beverages

Neither ADODI National
nor Colombiere Retreat & Conference Center
can assume responsibility for lost or stolen articles.

This is a drug and alcohol free weekend.

For more information please contact:
Westley Gillard.......917/428-4809
Vincent Bates.......508/755-1145
Clarence Brown (Registration).......773/643-8265
Larry Rogers (Online Registration).......773/274-4093
Rickie Green (Workshops).......443/803-6909
Yes Jihad (Homestays).......734/846-6545

Email: info[at]adodionline.com

Email: BIG.ROD02[at]GMAIL.COM

Colombiere Conference & Retreat Center is nestled on 420 acres of mature pines and hardwoods in Clarkston, MI. less than an hour drive from Detroit. Conference attendees avoid the distractions of the city and surround themselves with acres of towering pines, oaks and walking trails. Gardens and pathways are open invitations for quiet walks.

The gymnasium is located on the 2nd floor and is set up for volleyball, basketball or badminton, but is also available for general exercising. We also features an out-door heated pool. Pool activity is not supervised by a lifeguard, and towels are not provided. Overnight accommodations are available in dormitory style rooms for a maximum of 150 people depending on the use of the rooms. Bed linens and towels are provided.

SAVE THE DATE! EARLY PLANNING

ADODI's SILVER AGE 25TH ANNIVERSARY & ANNUAL
SUMMER RETREAT
White Eagle Conference Center
Hamilton, New York

July 20th - 24th, 2011

Flipping The Script: Beyond Homophobia In Black Hollywood,Venue: Writers Guild of America, West Tuesday, March 23rd, 2010 @ 7:30PM

This event appears to take place in California.

Man! I wish I could be out there for this event. Now, THIS IS AN INTERESTING TOPIC OF DISCUSSION!!

Anyone willing to fly me out there for this event? I'd be humbled and grateful

- ROD (aka BIG ROD)

Originally Posted On Shadow&Act.com:

By Tambay, on March 12th, 2010

FLIPPING THE SCRIPT: BEYOND HOMOPHOBIA IN BLACK HOLLYWOOD – African American writers, actors, directors, producers, and execs explore LGBT portrayals on TV and film.

WHAT: Co-sponsored by the Writers Guild of America, West’s Gay & Lesbian Writers Committee and Committee of Black Writers, FLIPPING THE SCRIPT: BEYOND HOMOPHOBIA IN BLACK HOLLYWOOD on Tuesday, March 23rd is set to be a revealing and enlightening look at key issues involving African American gay and lesbian characters on the big and small screens. The evening’s dialogue will explore both positive and negative portrayals of LGBT characters, recurring homophobia (within black society as well as among black filmmakers/producers) that has limited and/or informed such portrayals, stereotyping controversies and contradictions, and positive gains that have been made – and need to continue to be made – within the entertainment industry.

WHO: Panelists currently scheduled to appear include: Paris Barclay (producer-director The Good Wife), Quincy LeNear and Deondray Gossett (writers-producers-directors, The D L Chronicles), Jasmine Love (writer, The District), Maurice Jamal (writer-producer-director, Chappelle’s Show), Tim McNeal (VP, Talent Development and Diversity, Disney/ABC Television), Brian White (actor, Men of a Certain Age), and Tajamika Paxton (GLAAD Director of Entertainment Media). The panel will be moderated by award-winning stage and screen actress Sheryl Lee Ralph (Dreamgirls, Moesha).

WHEN: 7:30 PM, Tuesday, March 23

WHERE: Writers Guild of America, West

NFL Player Myron Rolle Told He's Too Smart To Play In The League

NFL Player Myron Rolle Told He's Too Smart to Play in the League
By Dr. Boyce Watkins, PhD
Mar 7th 2010 6:56AM

College Player Myron Rolle

You would think that Myron Rolle, the NFL super-stud who also happens to be a Rhodes Scholar, would be the kind of man who makes us proud. You would expect that his status as being the man who represents the future of the black athlete in America would make the NFL happy to have him on the roster of one of their teams. Not only is Rolle brilliant, but he is also tough as nails and fast as lightning. The man has the whole package.

But at least according to some NFL coaches, Rolle may not be committed enough to be a part of their league.

Myron Rolle Conversin'

"We'll have to find out how committed he is," an NFC assistant coach said, repeating the sentiment of five other NFL officials who said the same thing.
When I founded ALARM, the Athlete Liberation Academic Reform Movement, my goal was to create athletes just like Myron Rolle. I was growing tired of seeing black men display brilliance on the field, only to be convinced to become dummies in the classroom. In my own experience as a black athlete, I found that academic excellence could be achieved with the same skill set I picked up as a football and basketball player - the same discipline, consistency, courage, focus and determination that wins championships can also create outstanding scholarship and empowered black leadership. I also found that brothers can find easier paths to financial and professional success than sweating all day and breaking their bones on the football field. I earned far more as a Finance Professor and businessman than the average college athlete earns in his professional career, and to be honest, I hated school until I figured out what education could actually do for me. Playing sports is cool and fun, but going through life without education always makes you an easy target to be pimped, controlled and ultimately robbed by those who care nothing about you.

Trainer Tom Shaw, who worked with Rolle over the past year, finds the criticism to be almost silly. Shaw has trained guys like Peyton Mannin and Deion Sanders, along with 118 former first-round draft picks and NFL MVPs. He argues that the critique against Rolle shows ignorance.

Myron Rolle Workin' Out On The Field

"I hear all the negative things that he has too many things going on in his life," Shaw said. "But if [the NFL] is saying that Myron Rolle is a bad example, that's a joke. ... Myron is what you want all these kids to be. Every one of these kids should want to be Myron Rolle. "The reason I say he's going to be a 10-year veteran is he's a guy who is going to out-work everybody. He's not just going to rest on his athletic ability."

"When coaches ask you what's important in your life, usually you can get away with saying God, then family, then football. But a lot of coaches out there want to hear football, then God, then family."

Rolle has just returned from Oxford University in England, where he studied for a master's degree in Medical Anthropology. He's now studying while training for football and hopes to one day become a neurosurgeon.

"The impression I get from people around the NFL – not necessarily in it, but around it – is that the NFL wants players for whom football is their No. 1 priority, their No. 2 priority and their No. 3 priority," Rolle said. "For me, I've never been someone with a singular talent. I have other abilities and interests and I think I would be doing a disservice to me, my team, my family, everyone who has invested stock in me if I was just so isolated in one thing. ... The thing I always try to present to people in the NFL as far as my commitment is that my academics and my concerns at Oxford or as an outside philanthropist can help my football abilities. It can help me be someone more disciplined on the field, help me be someone more balanced and knowledgeable. It can help the other guys if they want to get involved in the foundation or the community rather than going out and partying or getting in trouble somehow."

NFL Great (And Hard Hittin' Knock Ya Lights Out Player)
Ronnie Lott (left) And Myron Rolle (right)

During an interview with some NFL professionals, one of the coaches actually asked Rolle what it felt like to dessert his team this year in order to pursue his Rhodes Scholarship.

"I hadn't heard that one before," said Rolle. "My initial reaction was a bit of confusion. It never was anger, but I was more bothered by the question because if anyone knew my involvement with my teammates, how much they care about me and how much I care about them."

Here's the deal on Myron Rolle:

I spoke this weekend at a symposium on Barack Obama and Democracy, hosted by Dr. Peniel Joseph at Tufts University. One of the issues that came up is the impact that President Obama has had on the intellectual pursuits of African American males. I would argue that the effects of Myron Rolle and Stephen Stafford (the 13-year old who is now a junior at Morehouse College), were they sufficiently well-publicized, could be just as dramatic as that of Obama. This shift in perspective is dramatic in light of the historical abuse taken by NFL athletes, many of whom are disabled when their playing careers are over. One prominent Historian at the conference, Dr. Mathew Whitaker from Arizona State University, described the significant physical and psychological toll that a professional sports career can cause, and how so many black males are lured into sacrificing everything for a dream that hardly ever comes true.

I love the way the NFL coaches are dissing Rolle and I think there are a long list of lessons that can be learned by all athletes across America, especially black males. As a college professor who has watched this kind of thing happen for the past 20 years, I can tell you that this kind of behavior is also common at the college level, where millions of dollars are put in coaches' bank accounts in exchange for them getting players to put everything else to the side in order to win games. Academics is almost never a priority, and it is only allowed to become a priority after football issues are taken care of.

This leads to many black male athletes across America abandoning their interest in academic pursuits, all for the sake of their sports. Black men like Myron Rolle are not cheered for by coaches - they are typically despised. They are told that they are not committed enough, and by spending their time in a book rather than volunteering for the physical break down of college and professional sports, they are considered to be just as unruly and volatile as prison inmates. The truth is that by breaking out of the brain-washing process of their NFL and collegiate pimps, they have become something that society does not want them to be.

By becoming a neurosurgeon, Myron Rolle will make far more money than most of his NFL colleagues. Most NFL players have very short careers, and 10 years later, they've only got bad knees and aching bodies to show for their careers. What is most interesting is that it is actually easier to become a neurosurgeon than an NFL player. Those men who have gambled their entire future and livelihood on sports need to realize that there are easier and better ways to make a living.




Keep going Myrone Rolle - I am incredibly proud of you. You are everything the world needs you to be.

Dr. Boyce Watkins is the founder of the Your Black World Coalition. To have Dr. Boyce commentary delivered to your email, please click here.

A Past, Denied: The Invisible History of Slavery in Canada, A New Documentary Film

Official Website: apastdenied.ca

History is not the past, it is how we recount the past. A Past, Denied: The Invisible History of Slavery in Canada is a feature-length documentary by independent filmmaker Mike Barber. The film, which is currently in production, explores how a false sense of history—both taught in the classroom and repeated throughout our national historical narrative—impinges on the present. It examines how 200 years of institutional slavery during Canada’s formation has been kept out of Canadian classrooms, textbooks and social consciousness.

The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade effectively started in 1444 when Portuguese pirates, operating under the auspices of Prince Henrique, kidnapped 235 Africans from a village near the mouth of the Senegal River and brought them back to Portugal where they were sold as slaves. From that point forward, over 15,000,000 Africans would be forcibly removed from their homeland and sold into slavery in Europe and the Americas; over 30,000,000 others would die in slave wars, work camps, or during transit aboard slave ships until the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade ended in the 1860s.

Today in North America, the use of African slave labour is seen as a uniquely American institution. Canada is reputed as being the promised land to the North to where slaves could escape and live as free men and women. The Underground Railroad is our claim to fame, and we toot that horn proudly. Our history textbooks—and much less, our national historical narrative—rarely, if ever mention the two centuries of institutionalized slavery and its role in the founding of Canada.

The version of history taught in Canadian schools tends to serve the interests of nationalist pride rather than education. Figures such as René Bourassa, Colin McNabb, Joseph Papineau and Peter Russell have been made into historical icons, honoured in our texts and on our landscape. All were slave owners and some were rabid advocates of slavery, though today one would never know it. Among the multitude of authoritative biographies on such founding figures, these facts have a tendency to escape any mention, either because the authors chose not to include these facts or because they simply were not aware. Whether this act of censorship is intentional or not the error is compounded, the cycle of ignorance is perpetuated.
History Matters

The subtle underlying message this selective and filtered history conveys is one of white superiority. When students are taught that it is only white people who tend to do anything of historical importance it effectively instills them with a “white people belong on top, people of colour belong on the bottom” outlook on the world. Fed the same false sense of history, white students feel good about their heritage at the expense of non-white students who feel alienated to the point that they begin to tune out. According to figures from the Toronto District School Board, by age 16 more than half of black male teens are at risk of dropping out. In Montréal, the dropout rate among black youth is an estimated 48 per cent. The history curriculum is not solely responsible for these alarming statistics, but it is culpable.

There is a direct cause-and-effect relationship with our collective past and our collective present, as well as our collective future. To fully understand the context of current conflicts and events, we need to know the relevant past and its causal relationship. In his book Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong, historian and sociologist James Loewen explains “slavery’s twin legacies” to the present as “the social and economic inferiority it conferred upon blacks and the cultural racism it instilled in whites.” Both of which, he adds, “continue to haunt our society.” Removing this substantial part of our nation’s development from our historical narrative is not just an academic or moral problem. It has deprived and continues to deprive generations of the ability to identify “the dynamic interplay between slavery as a socioeconomic system and racism as an idea system.”

The film will show the connections between the practice of slavery in the past with racial disparity, tensions, and racism in the present. It will illustrate why telling history in a neutral, accurate and more complete manner is vital to understanding the causal relationship between past, present and future. The overarching point being more than just “history matters,” but rather honest history matters.

Despite the Country's Progressive Laws, Homosexuals Are Still Under Attack In South Africa (CNN Report)

Microsoft Leaps From "Surface Computing" To "Mobile Surface"

Microsoft's impressive Surface Computing (SEE HERE) technology now takes a leap to Mobile Surface.

In the video the gentleman's English is not great (the one explaining and demonstrating the experiment, plus there's high chatter talking in the background which makes understanding him harder), but the demonstration is worth viewing if you're a technology interest person like me.

The 3 parts of this 3D gesture experience that make it work are a mobile device (phone), a projector and a camera (motion) sensor.

And I had previously reported on the Gesture Cube (SEE HERE) which is mad crazy qool!

Racism and Xenophobia in Portugal, "Respect The Immigrant " Commercial ...And THEN Racist House Parties By White U.S. Students!!

This commercial (first video) was FAR TOO POWERFUL for me not to post and share it with the FAM. WOW!!