Election watch: Black sisters
Commentary by Black Kos Editor Denise Oliver-Velez
As people head to the polls to vote today, and as we wait to hear election results come in this evening and late into the night—along with demographic data about turnout, and the inevitable dissections by pundits and analysts—one thing is clear, even before the results come in. We have been pushing hard to GOTV, and a key part of the mobilized electorate is black female voters. One major effort has been #BlackWomenVote. As they put it:
Black women had the highest voter turnout in the 2012 presidential election, representing almost 70 percent of the Black electorate and surpassing our 2008 record-breaking numbers. Many are expecting us to stay home on November 4th, in fact only 37 percent of African Americans normally show up to the polls for midterm elections.
Black women have the potential to take this country by storm. We have the collective power to elect representatives who will champion our interests and support legislative actions that will improve education, health care and economic opportunities for our communities.
The election of Barack Obama to the presidency—twice—and the upsurge in open racism, voter repression and resistance from the right, has had an effect on black voter push-back, the rise of new movements like Moral Mondays and Dream Defenders and has also heralded an upswing in black candidates for political office—locally, statewide and nationally.
According to a USA Today article published in early October, Black candidates for Congress hit record high in 2014
WASHINGTON — A record number of African Americans are running for federal office this year, but their advances in elected office have been met by increased racial polarization in politics, particularly in the Deep South. According to an analysis by David Bositis, an expert on African-American politics, there are 82 black nominees in the two major parties running in 2014, surpassing the 2012 record of 72 candidates. Of the 82 candidates running, 64 are Democrats and 18 are Republicans, and all but three are seeking election to the U.S. House. Two black Democrats, Sen. Cory Booker of New Jersey and Joyce Dickerson of South Carolina, and one black Republican, Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina, are on the ballot for U.S. Senate seats.
Among the candidates are four African-American women who are likely to be new additions to the U.S. House: Democrats Brenda Lawrence of Michigan, Alma Adams of North Carolina, and Stacey Plaskett of the Virgin Islands, as well as Republican Mia Love of Utah, who would be the first black Republican woman elected to Congress. Currently there are 44 African Americans serving in Congress, and their ranks are forecast to grow in November, which means next January will bring in a Congress with the highest number of blacks serving in U.S. history.
I'm interested in the Democrats (obviously) and thought I'd take a closer look at the three "D" sisters who are running.
Brenda Lawrence, bio from her campaign site:
Brenda Lawrence has lived in this district her entire life.
She was born and raised in Detroit, graduated from Pershing High School, married her high school sweetheart, bought her first home on Detroit’s east side, sent her children to Detroit Public Schools, worshiped here, worked here, and served in public office here.
In 2001, Lawrence became the first female and first African-American Mayor of Southfield. She was resoundingly re-elected three times and has served for over 12 years in the city of 72,000 residents. Under her leadership, Southfield has remained economically strong.
From income to race to educational attainment, the district is highly diverse. As Mayor of Southfield, Lawrence has a history of being inclusive and ensuring all voices are heard.
Lawrence is President of the National Association of Democratic Mayors. She was the Democratic Lieutenant Governor nominee in 2010 and was the first African-American female major party nominee for that position in Michigan’s history.
video interview with her
here.
Lawrence won the Democratic Party nomination on August 5, 2014, despite being outspent. She took the most votes in Oakland County, carrying the cities of Southfield, Pontiac and Oak Park, as well as Royal Oak Township. Although it was expected that Clarke would convincingly win the portion of Detroit within the district, where he lives and had previously held public office, Lawrence was competitive in the city and won more votes than all other candidates from voters who cast their ballot on Election Day in Detroit.
As the Democratic nominee for Congress, she faces Republican nominee Christina Conyers of Detroit in the November general election. The district has a history of voting heavily for Democratic candidates. Also facing off against Lawrence in the November election is Green Party nominee Stephen Boyle of Detroit and Libertarian Party nominee Leonard Schwartz of Oak Park.
Alma Adams - from her campaign site:
“As a mother, grandmother and teacher, I’m outraged by how Republicans in Congress keep ignoring the needs of our families. With your help, I’ll go to Congress and fight to stop them.”
- Alma Adams
For Alma Adams, education and women’s rights aren’t political issues, they are personal issues that have shaped who she is today and how she represents the people she serves.
Growing up in a single parent household, Alma saw that the best way to get ahead was through dedication and hard work. Her mother’s sacrifices motivated Alma to not only complete her own education, but to pursue a path that led her to teaching in the classroom too. Alma is a strong, divorced mother who raised two wonderful children–including a daughter who followed Alma’s lead and became a teacher herself.
Alma’s introduction to politics was on the Greensboro City School Board, where she became the first African-American woman elected to that body and a strong advocate for educational opportunities for everyone in her community. After serving on the Greensboro City School Board, Alma was elected to the Greensboro City Council where she led efforts for affordable housing and neighborhood revitalization programs. Alma served on the Greensboro City Council until she was appointed to the General Assembly in 1994 by Governor James B. Hunt.
Alma’s service in the North Carolina House of Representatives has been distinguished by her efforts to improve the lives of women, children and families. She has sponsored and supported legislation to strengthen domestic violence laws; worked to improve adolescent pregnancy programs; and supported legislation for quality, affordable health care for seniors and children. As a former chair of the North Carolina Women’s Legislative Caucus, Alma has helped to introduce numerous bills to strengthen laws to protect children, women and families and has been a key and vocal supporter of women’s health and reproductive rights. As an educator and artist, Adams has been a strong supporter of North Carolina’s colleges, universities and schools and she has been a strong advocate for the arts and culture.
Rarely does the major U.S. media pay any attention to the
non-voting representatives elected to Congress, from Puerto Rico, the District of Columbia, Guam, the U.S. Virgin Islands, American Samoa, and the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands.
Given the large population of blacks in the U.S. from Caribbean countries, it behooves us to know more about women like Stacey Plaskett, currently running for election to Congress from the U.S. Virgin Islands.
Stacey is an attorney with experience, knowledge and passion to serve as the Virgin Islands Delegate in Washington, DC. Immediately after obtaining her undergraduate degree from Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service, she worked for Delegate Ron de Lugo and then with a Congressional lobbying group to Congress on health care issues. After receiving a law degree from American University, Stacey worked as a prosecutor in the Bronx, NY, then returned to Washington as a Counsel to the U.S. House of Representatives Ethics Committee. There Stacey gave advice to and investigated Members of Congress as well as updating ethics rules.
She then served at the U.S. Justice Department ultimately as Senior Counsel to the Deputy Attorney General. During her time at Justice, Stacey was the highest ranking woman of African descent and headed up the Tobacco litigation (the largest civil litigation in US history), worked on the September 11 Victims Compensation Fund, the Terrorism Task Force and assisted in presenting the Department’s $28 billion budget to Congress. Stacey was a Deputy General Counsel with AmeriChoice, a division of United HealthGroup. AmeriChoice is the public sector health program serving clients in Medicaid, Medicare. Since coming home to the Virgin Islands, Stacey has worked as General Counsel with the Virgin Islands Economic Development Authority on numerous economic growth programs and creation of new legislation.
She is now in private practice. She is involved in numerous non-profit organizations through Board service and volunteer work including the Boys and Girls Club, Lutheran Social Services, the Caribbean Museum for the Arts and Choate Rosemary Hall (where she was a scholarship student, Board Member and then parent).
As Dopper often points out, the key to politics and political engagement is local and in the states. We have been paying close attention to organizing sweeping the South, and it is certainly having an impact in states like North Carolina and Georgia.
Record five black women seek state offices in Georgia, showing shift
(Reuters) - Five black women are on the November ballot for statewide offices in Georgia, a record in a state that just 11 years ago featured a Confederate battle emblem on its flag.The candidates, all Democrats, have come to be known as the "Georgia Five." Political commentators say that while only one of them has a real shot at cracking the Republican stronghold on statewide offices in Georgia, their nominations signal a shift in where the state's politics are headed. "It's a sign of tremendous change happening right now in Georgia politics," said Sean Richey, an associate professor of political science at Georgia State University. "I'd say within 10 years that Georgia will turn from a reliable Republican state to a battleground state."
An increase in minority residents is playing a role. In 2000, Georgia was 65 percent white and 35 percent black and non-white. Now the state is about 54 percent white and 46 percent black and non-white, according to 2013 U.S. Census estimates. The old-guard whites voted mostly Republican, but blacks and other non-whites tend to vote Democratic, Richey said. An influx of white voters from northern states is further tipping the balance toward Democrats in Georgia.
Most attention in Georgia this election cycle has been focused on its governor and the U.S. Senate races, where Democrats have proven competitive in their fight to wrest control of those seats from the Republican party. The "Georgia Five" are hoping enthusiasm among Democratic voters about those races might give them a boost in their tough down-ticket contests in the Nov. 4 elections. Four of the women face entrenched incumbents with vastly larger campaign war chests. In the secretary of state race, for instance, Republican incumbent Brian Kemp raised $1.06 million compared with candidate Doreen Carter's $10,000. Carter said despite having little to spend, she has been encouraged by the largest-ever slate of black female candidates. Her colleagues are running for lieutenant governor, state school superintendent, insurance commissioner and labor commissioner. "We didn't set out to be the Georgia Five, it just happened," she said. "But it feels like something different is happening in politics, not just in Georgia, but the whole country. Look who our president is." The change is happening in a state where the Confederate emblem - viewed by some in the South as a symbol of southern soldiers' valor but by many as a relic of the disgraced institution of slavery - was voted off the state flag only in 2001 and finally removed in 2003.
(Photos from left: Courtesy of Robbin Shipp for Labor Commissioner, Courtesy of Connie Stokes for Governor, Courtesy of Doreen Carter for Secretary of State, Courtesy of Liz Johnson for Insurance Commissioner, Courtesy of Valarie Wilson for State School Superintendent)
BET had this feature:
Meet the Georgia Five: Black Women Running for Statewide Office
These women are part of a history-making ballot in the Peach State.
On Election Day, political observers around the nation will have Georgia on their minds. Jason Carter, grandson of former President Jimmy Carter, hopes to unseat incumbent Gov. Nathan Deal. The outcome of the race between Michelle Nunn, daughter of former congressman and senator Sam Nunn, and Republican opponent David Perdue is a key factor in whether Democrats will be able to maintain their fragile control of the U.S. Senate.
But there are five other reasons to keep an eye on Georgia: the ballot will for the first time feature five African-American women running for statewide office. Their fates are far from certain, but their mere presence will help decide if it's Deal or no Deal and whether Democrats can turn the red state blue.
"We are hopeful that the African-American community, which is key to the November election, is energized and excited by the historic nature of this ticket," said Robbin Shipp, who is running for labor commissioner. Even though women make up more than half of the population and minorities comprise roughly 48 percent of the state's population, "all of the constitutional offices in Georgia, from the top to the bottom, are held by white males," she adds, a wrong that she hopes the Georgia Five, as the women have been called, can help right.
Let us know about new black Democratic candidates from your areas, and upcoming local elections. Black voter registration has surged in places like
Ferguson.
Today's election is simply one more step in the process of moving forward. Win or lose we will continue the struggle. And our sisters are going to play an important role in that process.
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News by dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor
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Her one-woman show, As I Remember It, reflects a woman who celebrates every phase of life and has loved performing. The Root: Carmen de Lavallade Still Captivates Onstage at 83.
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Carmen de Lavallade calls herself a woman of her time.
During her one-woman stage show, As I Remember It, the 83-year-old star dancer of stage and screen recounts growing up during the Great Depression and being raised by her father after her mother died in a sanatorium. She remembers listening to programs on the radio and making a game of empty oatmeal boxes.
“The world is so busy now,” de Lavallade says after a recent performance of As I Remember It at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. “There’s nothing wrong with it. It’s of its time.”
Still, de Lavallade, now a teacher, warns, “There’s a lot of eye and ear garbage going on. ... You don’t want to be a copy of someone else. I tell my students to go hug a tree.”
Her “Go live life, don’t just watch it on your smartphone” mantra is one she has lived herself. Never one to sit on the sidelines, de Lavallade went for the full experience at a time when the full experience was denied to most African Americans because of segregation.
In her show she recounts how, when de Lavallade was 17, Lena Horne introduced her to filmmakers at 20th Century Fox, where she would go on to appear in four films, including Carmen Jones. She tells stories about legends like Alvin Ailey and Lester Horton, who were her friends. She recalls reducing Louis Armstrong to tears with her performance as Billie Holiday, and receiving four kisses from Duke Ellington, who whispered that they were “one for each cheek.”
Actress and choreographer Carmen de Lavallade attends the 14th annual Monte Cristo Award at the Edison Ballroom April 21, 2014, in New York City.
MONICA SCHIPPER/GETTY IMAGES
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The leading writer on racism in America today is the subject of a cerebral profile. Columbia Journalism Review: Ta-Nehisi Coates defines a new race beat.
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e is the most celebrated journalist writing about race today, and yet Ta-Nehisi Coates’ ideas are surprisingly unoriginal. He would be the first to say so. Consider, for example, “The Case for Reparations,” Coates’ 16,000-word cover story for The Atlantic, where he is a national correspondent. Published online in May, it was a close look at housing discrimination, such as redlining, that was really about the need for America to take a brutally honest look in the mirror and acknowledge its deep racial divisions. The story broke a single-day traffic record for a magazine story on The Atlantic’s website, and in its wake, Politico named him to its list of 50 thinkers changing American politics. Coates has been on a whirlwind speaking tour, from Cleveland to Cornell, where listeners crouched outside an open window of the filled-to-capacity auditorium. He broke from the circuit only once, for a seven-week retreat to Middlebury College, where he spoke only French. The reparations essay has prompted thinkpiece upon thinkpiece, either praising or rebutting Coates’ case. How, many marveled, did he take on one of the nation’s most politically toxic issues and singlehandedly thrust it into the national conversation? He did it without providing readers much new information. The piece was more history than storytelling. Cinematic scenes seldom enliven it; extended passages from contemporary sociology are used instead. Its intellectual backbone—research by Yale historian David W. Blight, for instance, and Columbia professor Kenneth T. Jackson’s history of the suburbs—has existed in public for years. Coates, who used to write poetry, knows how to use his words, but this opus reads more like an elegant dissertation than the kind of groundbreaking work that typically makes people sit up and take note.
True equality, Coates says, will mean ‘black people in this country have the right to be as mediocre as white people. Not that individual black people will be as excellent, or more excellent, than other white people.’
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Going from victims to heroes. BusinessWeek: In Liberia, Ebola Survivors Find They Have Superpowers.
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Dr. Darin Portnoy, a family physician from the Bronx, completed his first rounds—60 patients, five of them children—in an Ebola ward of a treatment center in Paynesville, about 250 miles southeast of Monrovia, Liberia. He’s been impressed from the start by the efficiency of the clinic, but what struck him the most was watching as an Ebola survivor, a man he describes as looking a little like Mike Tyson, scooped up an 11-year-old boy in the infectious stages of the disease, carried him to a washbasin, and gave him a sponge bath, before carefully returning him to his cot.
Survivors, Portnoy says, are playing an increasing role in caring for the sick and the effort outside the wards to halt the epidemic. Ebola survivors are immune to the virus for as long as three months. This means they can risk getting close to those with symptoms, and even touch them—something that’s especially helpful with children, a number of whom are separated from their families. “It’s kind of like a superpower,” Portnoy says of the survivor’s immunity. “Even those who are not fully recovered, but that you can tell are going to clear the virus, they’ll help other patients before they’ve finished convalescing,” he adds.
This is Week One of Portnoy’s four-week stint at ELWA3, an Ebola treatment center with 250 beds in Paynesville. ELWA3 is operated by Médecins Sans Frontières/Doctors Without Borders, the privately funded relief organization often known simply as MSF. The center’s staff totals around 700, about 100 of whom are from outside West Africa. MSF has similar, smaller facilities in the neighboring countries of Sierra Leone and Guinea, where Ebola remains out of control.
Photograph by Malin Lager
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As diamonds run out, Botswana faces worrying times. The Economist: Losing its sparkle.
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But while Botswana is often held up as a model of African governance, the election result reflects growing dissatisfaction with the ruling party under its leader, President Ian Khama. For the first time, his Botswana Democratic Party (BDP), in power since independence in 1966, won less than 50% of the vote, though it retains a majority in the 57-seat parliament.
Mr Khama, 61, a former general and the son of the independence leader, Sir Seretse Khama, now begins his second and final term. He is beloved by his rural base but critics say he runs the country like a chieftain, expecting total control. Under Mr Khama, state-security agencies have expanded dramatically, and there have been troubling accusations of extrajudicial killings and other abuses. A newspaper editor was charged with sedition last month for a juicy story about Mr Khama being involved in a car crash. Even BDP members worry about the authoritarian trend.
City-dwellers voted in droves for the Umbrella for Democratic Change coalition, led by a Harvard-trained human rights lawyer, Duma Boko. He says he intends to fight abuses of power and corruption, in a newly competitive parliament.
A darker cloud looms over the genteel country: the diamonds that made the country rich are quickly running out. One Gaborone-based economist, Roman Grynberg, believes that GDP per person will fall by nearly half when the diamonds disappear, perhaps some time between 2029 and 2050. Already economic growth, which between 1966 and 1999 was running at 9% a year on average, has slowed to about 4% a year; persistently high unemployment is a worrying source of discontent.
President Ian Khama (pictured, left).
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Voices and Soul
by Justice Putnam
Black Kos Poetry Editor
I was involved in a rather spirited discussion recently, with some former classmates whose brains have been consumed by the ghastly TeaBircher walking dead; and have become mouth-gnawing-bone-breaking-mindless-shuffling-toward-any-loud-noise-or-smell-of-blood Zombies themselves.
It was sad to see once beautiful and sexy women reduced to spittle-flecked, red-eyed rage; and once lithe and athletic men now gray and bloody and mad, frantically tearing at corpses long void of any discernible nourishment.
These weren't Zombies from some Caribbean Mythic conjuring though; so I had no choice but to retreat to the high ground to gain some better bearings.
One would think, that if these Zombies looked in the mirror, they would know their mortal coil has been conquered, that their Souls have left the vessel; that their broken and flailing limbs, their skulls absent of brain tissue, the ganglia hanging loose and dripping a slimy green liquid; you would think that would give them a clue to their predicament. But they only respond to a bright flash, a jarring thud and the smell of raw meat. So they shuffle and grasp and mouth senseless words that are mere recitations embedded in a lizard-center of a forgotten hormonal gland activated by Fox News wireless electrical shocks.
Maybe it's cruel for me to say so, maybe it's inflammatory to call these folks the walking dead and use such ghastly, grade-b monster movie metaphor.
Maybe it's simplifying matters to call these folks mindless Zombies; when they know damn well what they are doing. Just as the Good Germans, they so mightily resemble, did before, during and after the fall of the Third Reich.
These TeaBirchers complain of brown people harassing them with cupped hands begging for something not due them. These TeaBirchers complain of the jobless as losers who should be left to disappear in some other ether; just don't park on their street or ask for a job at their shop. These TeaBirchers consume the most and give back the least; and cheer when doctors are assassinated while advocating for a woman's right to choose or demonize a nurse for cradling a black child in Africa who died of viral hemorrhagic bleeding.
The TeaBirchers say they hearken to the Silent Majority from the time of Nixon and Reagan. Rather than silent, they are a cruel majority; a cruel majority that would rather see a child die of sickness than extend healthcare. A cruel majority that will kick a man or woman when they are down and then penalize them for complaining about it. A cruel majority that expects the unflinching fealty any bully demands, from any who comes between them and what they wish to possess.
A Poem for the Cruel Majority
The cruel majority emerges!
Hail to the cruel majority!
They will punish the poor for being poor.
They will punish the dead for having died.
Nothing can make the dark turn into light
for the cruel majority.
Nothing can make them feel hunger or terror.
If the cruel majority would only cup their ears
the sea would wash over them.
The sea would help them forget their wayward children.
It would weave a lullaby for young & old.
(See the cruel majority with hands cupped to their ears,
one foot is in the water, one foot is on the clouds.)
One man of them is large enough to hold a cloud
between his thumb & middle finger,
to squeeze a drop of sweat from it before he sleeps.
He is a little god but not a poet.
(See how his body heaves.)
The cruel majority love crowds & picnics.
The cruel majority fill up their parks with little flags.
The cruel majority celebrate their birthday.
Hail to the cruel majority again!
The cruel majority weep for their unborn children,
they weep for the children that they will never bear.
The cruel majority are overwhelmed by sorrow.
(Then why are the cruel majority always laughing?
Is it because night has covered up the city's walls?
Because the poor lie hidden in the darkness?
The maimed no longer come to show their wounds?)
Today the cruel majority vote to enlarge the darkness.
They vote for shadows to take the place of ponds
Whatever they vote for they can bring to pass.
The mountains skip like lambs for the cruel majority.
Hail to the cruel majority!
Hail! hail! to the cruel majority!
The mountains skip like lambs, the hills like rams.
The cruel majority tear up the earth for the cruel majority.
Then the cruel majority line up to be buried.
Those who love death will love the cruel majority.
Those who know themselves will know the fear
the cruel majority feel when they look in the mirror.
The cruel majority order the poor to stay poor.
They order the sun to shine only on weekdays.
The god of the cruel majority is hanging from a tree.
Their god's voice is the tree screaming as it bends.
The tree's voice is as quick as lightning as it streaks across the sky.
(If the cruel majority go to sleep inside their shadows,
they will wake to find their beds filled up with glass.)
Hail to the god of the cruel majority!
Hail to the eyes in the head of their screaming god!
Hail to his face in the mirror!
Hail to their faces as they float around him!
Hail to their blood & to his!
Hail to the blood of the poor they need to feed them!
Hail to their world & their god!
Hail & farewell!
Hail & farewell!
Hail & farewell!
-- Jerome Rothenberg
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