In case you missed it this is an important cultural event. State of the Black Union.
Some of the most influential thinkers, entertainers, and political leaders of our time gather each year to discuss the State of the Black Union during Black History Month. Presented annually in February by Tavis Smiley Presents, the symposium was created to educate, enlighten and empower America by bringing people together and engaging them in thoughtful dialogue, leading the way to constructive action.
SPECIAL NOTE
Now that I feel Black Kos is somewhat established, I would like to move it to the next level. Starting in around this spring, I would like to make this a group effort. What I bring to the table is finding news across the web. I would like to get some better writers involved. (I'm an engineer so I'm better at numbers). I'm looking to eventually have 2-3 people colaborating on every Friday edition. If interested let me know in the comments. Enjoy!
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POLITICS
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I have to thank sephius1 for bringing this up Wednesday. Black Caucus Pitches Fit at Union Over Wynn Loss. There are 3-4 more CBC members that need to be primaried.
Members of the Congressional Black Caucus are "seething" with anger over Rep. Al Wynn's Democratic primary defeat at the hands of Donna Edwards, in Maryland earlier this month. The Service Employees International Union did what unions are supposed to do: financially support a progressive challenger over a corporate-bought incumbent. But enraged CBC members see the handwriting on the wall: they too can be ousted by Black progressive campaigns energized by labor dollars. Given the CBC's continuing drift to the Right, members feel threatened. In typical fashion, they insinuate that the heavily Black SEIU is meddling in intra-Black political affairs - when the truth is, Caucus members increasingly rely on corporate funding for job security, and vote accordingly. The CBC's panicked reaction to Donna Edwards' victory speaks volumes about their growing capitulation to Big Business.
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In an ugly fit of frustrated rage following the defeat of corporate-backed incumbent Rep. Al Wynn (D-MD) earlier this month, the Caucus lashed out at the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) for backing Black progressive challenger Donna Edwards. The Capitol Hill newspaper Roll Call reported CBC members were "seething" at SEIU's purchase of nearly $900,000 in television and radio ads supporting Edwards, a lawyer and nonprofit foundation executive who came close to ousting the eight-term congressman on a shoe-string budget two years ago.
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Like putting lipstick on a ELEPHANT Pig? GOP fears charges of racism, sexism.
Top Republican strategists are working on plans to protect the GOP from charges of racism or sexism in the general election, as they prepare for a presidential campaign against the first ever African-American or female Democratic nominee.
The Republican National Committee has commissioned polling and focus groups to determine the boundaries of attacking a minority or female candidate, according to people involved. The secretive effort underscores the enormous risk senior GOP operatives see for a party often criticized for its insensitivity to minorities in campaigns dating back to the 1960s.
The RNC project is viewed as so sensitive that those involved in the work were reluctant to discuss the findings in detail. But one Republican strategist, who asked that his name be withheld to speak candidly, said the research shows the daunting and delicate task ahead.
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It's hard to talk about politics at Black Kos without mentioning Obama, but he is causing people to examine many of the media dirty tricks. Why the Farrakhan litmus test must go.
Tuesday night's debate between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama took me back two decades. NBC newsman Tim Russert pointedly quizzed Obama about Farrakhan's recent speech in which he sang the Illinois Senator's praises. (Contrary to some reports, Farrakhan stopped short of endorsing him.) Still, Russert nudged Obama not only to denounce Farrakhan but to outright reject his support. It made me wonder when black people are going to stop being called to account for the deeds and words of other blacks.
First a word about Farrakhan. Yes, his history of anti-Semitism -- and make no mistake about it, that's what it is -- is ugly, hateful, and counterproductive. If Farrakhan were a white man who said about black Baptists what he said about Jewish people, many of us would call for his head. But would we ask every prominent white politician to stand up and publicly repudiate and reject him? Recent history indicates we would not. How many white politicians would even feel any compunction to actually do so?
The larger question is why Farrakhan is the litmus test for black politicians' views on race and not the politicians' own record of comments, actions and legislative votes? Why is it that only after they repudiate Farrakhan are they then deemed not to be closet black militants? Farrakhan does not have the political influence over black people that some white Americans apparently believe. Nor does Rev. Al Sharpton, or Rev. Jesse Jackson Sr., or any of the other prominent black people that the media treat as proxies for all black people.
Reporters did not run out in droves to ask white politicians to reject Don Imus after he made his remarks about the black female basketball players at Rutgers University. White politicians did not eagerly line up to do so. Nor did they repudiate fellow white politicians who did not. A few, and only a few, said they would no longer go on the Imus show. (Tim Russert, who appeared often on the Imus show, was not among those who said they would no longer be a guest.)
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This blog mirrors many of my thoughts on race and politics, I'm hopefull on this, we will see how this plays out in 2008.The Politics of Multiethnic Relations.
We need to recognize that the concept of "race relations" we have inherited from the twentieth century is impoverished in two fundamental ways. First, studies of relations between races often reinforce the wrongful impression that "races" are fixed metrics, when the crucial thing to understand is how our notions of racial identity are constantly evolving. Second, the idea of "race relations" is generally premised on the existence of a white majority and a black minority or other ethnic minorities. But the white majority, a distant memory in California, is fading from the national scene faster than one can regret saying "macaca."
When we move beyond fixed and outmoded conceptions of race, we can develop a better appreciation of how and why interethnic attitudes tend to be contradictory. In December 2007, a collaborative of ethnic news organizations, New American Media, released the findings of what it called "the nation's first multilingual poll, which examines how the nation's largest ethnic groups feel towards each other." Not too shocking, given the general lack of multiethnic awareness in America, the poll revealed some "deep divisions" between communities of color. For instance, 47% of Asians and 44% of Latinos agreed with the statement, "I am generally afraid of African Americans because they are responsible for most of the crime." Meanwhile, 52% of African American respondents agreed with the statement, "Most Asian business owners do not treat us with respect." Poll respondents from all three groups also tended to socialize and date primarily members of their own group.
At the same time, the vast majority of Latinos (92%), African Americans (89%), and Asian Americans (86%) agreed with the statement, "African Americans, Latinos, and Asians have many similar problems. They should put aside their differences and work together on issues that affect their communities." Seemingly, most people of color embrace an ideal of multiethnic solidarity, but many tend to act on the basis of real or perceived divergence of interests. Overcoming this contradiction in the future will necessitate telling a new story about the past.
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Yes I am an Obama supporter, but I'm including this more because I'm tired of the media and there race war script.Blacks and Latinos Should Rally Around Obama.
In the midst of Obama's unimaginable ten-state sweep, with everyone talking about unity -- black and white, blue and white collar, old and young -- black-brown unity regrettably lags behind. Tensions between blacks and Latinos, painfully hyped by the media in the run-up to the California primary, could be fatal to the country's best present hope for a progressive movement. Progressives must take heed as we approach the critical primary contest in Texas.
The harsh reality is that both Latino and black communities around the country are in peril. Even at a time when real earnings for white workers have declined significantly compared to wealthy Americans, Latina women earn less than half of what white men earn. African American men, despite gains in education over recent decades, earn three-quarters of white men's earnings.
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This is one of the most interesting post I have read. White Men Seen All Wrong.
Washington analysts are beginning to notice a curious fact of the Democratic race. In a primary contest between the first black or female nominee, white men are the critical swing vote. Yet despite white males still disproportionately representing us in politics, we still misunderstand them as voters.
There remains a chasm between our conception of the powerful executive and the reality of the everyman. Our culture continues to define the typical white man more for his vice than virtue. The perception of the "angry white male" has not left us. Many still remain apprehensive to discuss white men as a constituency. They are, after all, supposed to be the reason we have to focus on constituencies. Even many pundits who viscerally understand these men, like Chris Matthews, have recently misperceived what motivates this bloc's choice between Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama.
This past weekend, on his weekly Sunday morning show, Matthews asked writer Gloria Borger: "Is there a resistance to an African-American candidate by white men? Is there resistance to Hillary?"Borger replied: "...I think the answer is yes and yes."
The facts demonstrate otherwise. In the Democratic primary white men have been the most willing to shift between the two candidates.
In the two-dozen Democratic primary contests where delegates were at stake, and exit or entrance polls took place, Clinton lost Latinos twice and white women three times (all by narrow margins). Obama, meanwhile, has never lost blacks. It has only been white men who have consistently swung between Obama and Clinton.
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INTERNATIONAL
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The New Republic has captured something much of the media has missed about Bush's African legacy.President Bush has been celebrated for his Africa policies by conservatives and liberals alike. Is that some kind of cruel joke?
"I'm here to really confirm to the people of Benin and the people on the continent of Africa that the United States is committed to helping improve people's lives,'' Bush declared on his first stop. To showcase compassion in action, and highlight his administration's focus on HIV, Bush visited a hospital in Tanzania for a photo opportunity and then declared that his aid programs were "God's work."
On the ground, however, Bush's Africa record hardly looks divine, which might come as a shock to those, including Democrats, who feel as if Africa has been one of the few successes of the Bush presidency. In a column entitled "Bush, A Friend of Africa," New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof wrote, "Mr. Bush has done much more for Africa than Bill Clinton ever did," citing Bush's new African aid programs. And there's no question that Bill Clinton's Africa legacy is weak. He intervened disastrously in Somalia and then did not intervene, also disastrously, during the genocide in Rwanda. But Clinton at least generally tried to promote democratic reform in Africa, building links to emerging democrats like South Africa's Thabo Mbeki, helping promote democratic change in strife-torn nations like Mozambique, and making good governance and political reform centerpieces of his Africa policy.
Consumed by the war on terror, Bush has taken a far different approach. Rather than supporting democratic institutions and criticizing a new generation of African authoritarians, the Bush administration has backed whatever African leader claims to be battling militant Islam. For example, the White House has developed a close relationship with Ethiopia's thuggish leader Meles Zenawi, supposedly an ally in the war on terror and a partner in battling militancy in neighboring Somalia. The administration has provided military aid to Ethiopia with virtually no conditions on the assistance. It has also offered advisers to support Ethiopia's invasion of neighboring Somalia, an invasion which only led to more chaos in that benighted nation. Meanwhile, in recent years Zenawi's government has overseen a massive crackdown on opposition activists and a brutal offensive in the country's Ogaden region; in 2005, after disputed elections, the Ethiopian government arrested over 30,000 of its own people.
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I must admit I have been avoiding this subject for all the years I have been on Daily Kos. When I go on vacation next time I will have to do a dairy just on this subject. I want to do this subject justice, being both a progressive AND someone who grew up in the caribbean culture I think I need to address this.Attacks Show Easygoing Jamaica Is Dire Place for Gays.
One night last month, Andre and some friends were finishing dinner when a mob showed up at the front gate. Yelling antigay slurs and waving machetes, sticks and knives, 15 to 20 men kicked in the front door of the home he and his friends had rented and set upon them. "I thought I was dead," Andre, 20, a student, recounted in a faint voice, still scared enough that he was in hiding and did not want his full name to be used.
The mob pummeled him senseless. His right hand, the one he used to shield himself from the blows, is now covered with bandages. His skull has deep cut marks and his ear was sliced in half, horizontally. Doctors managed to sew it back together and he can hear out of it again.
Being gay in Jamaica is not easy. For years, human rights groups have denounced the harassment, beating and even killing of gays here, to little avail. No official statistic has been compiled on the number of attacks. But a recent string of especially violent, high-profile assaults has brought fresh condemnation to an island otherwise known as an easygoing tourist haven.
There is also this story from NYC area.Queer, Dead and Nobody Cares. (Why two violent deaths produced two totally different reactions.) Unfortunately stories like this usually generate threads with comments like "homophobia is everywhere in the black community" or gays live in the same city but look down at black people, I want to do something that tries to foster some understanding. Stay tuned.
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Could this actaully be the good news we have been waiting for? I think it finally is! Kenyan President Mwai Kibaki and opposition leader Raila Odinga have signed an agreement to end the country's post-election crisis.
At a ceremony in Nairobi, the two men put their signatures to a power-sharing deal brokered by ex-UN head Kofi Annan.
A coalition government comprising members of the current ruling party and opposition will now be formed. Some 1,500 people died in political violence after Mr Odinga said he was robbed of victory in December's polls. International observers agreed the count was flawed. Violence has mostly receded, but tensions are still running extremely high.
Negotiations between the government and Mr Odinga's Orange Democratic Movement (ODM) lasted more than a month, stalling several times. Discussions centred on the creation of the post of prime minister, which will be taken by Mr Odinga, who heads the largest party in parliament.
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One of my life goals is to make it to Brazil. Echoes of Amado in the Dark and the Light.
IN Portuguese, "amado" means "beloved," and in more than a score of novels, the Brazilian writer Jorge Amado made clear his eternal passion for Salvador da Bahia, the city that took him in as a teenage boarding student and became his home. Salvador, in turn, loved him back, and even now, more than six years after his death, Amado’s exuberant spirit, aesthetic and characters seem to permeate the streets of the place he described both as "the most mysterious and beautiful of the world’s cities" and "the most languid of women."
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But Amado always felt a special affection for the more austere Igreja de Nossa Senhora do Rosário dos Pretos because of its links to the historic suffering of the blacks who make up the majority of the city’s population. The church is at the foot of Pelourinho Square, where in colonial days slaves were flogged, and Amado, sometimes unjustly accused by his critics of favoring exoticism and sentimentality over substance, never forgot that.
Salvador, Brazil "The church was all blue in the late afternoon, the church of the slaves in the square where the whipping post and pillories had been erected," he wrote in "Tent of Miracles," published in 1969. "Is that the reflection of the sun or a smear of blood on the cobblestones? So much blood has run over these stones, so many cries of pain rose to heaven, so many supplications and curses resonated on the walls of that blue church."
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Just an interesting read. Born Irish, but With Illegal Parents.
Cork-born and proud of it, George-Jordan Dimbo is top to toe the Irish lad. He studies Gaelic, eats rashers, plays hurling, prays to the saints, papers his walls with parochial school awards, and spends Saturdays at the telly watching Dustin the Turkey, a wisecracking puppet, mock the powerful. If the Irish government has its way, he may soon be living in Africa.
George, 11, is an Irish citizen and has been since his birth when Ireland, alone in Europe, still gave citizenship to anyone born on its soil. His mother and father, Ifedinma and Ethelbert Dimbo, are illegal immigrants from Nigeria, who brought him back to Ireland three years ago, judging it the best place to raise him.
Since then, the unusual trio — the Irish schoolboy and his African parents — have shared a single room in a worn Dublin hostel while facing a prospect dreaded by children on both sides of the Atlantic, a parent’s deportation."Dear justice minister," George wrote when he was 9. "I heard my Mommy and Daddy whispering about deportation. Please do not deport us.""Remember," he added, "I am also an Irish child."
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Yemen’s Marginalized Class.
By day, they sweep the streets of the Old City, ragged, dark-skinned men in orange jump suits. By night, they retreat to fetid slums on the edge of town. They are known as "Al Akhdam" — the servants. Set apart by their African features, they form a kind of hereditary caste at the very bottom of Yemen’s social ladder.
Degrading myths pursue them: they eat their own dead, and their women are all prostitutes. Worst of all, they are reviled as outsiders in their own country, descendants of an Ethiopian army that is said to have crossed the Red Sea to oppress Yemen before the arrival of Islam.
"We are ready to work, but people say we are good for nothing but servants; they will not accept us," said Ali Izzil Muhammad Obaid, a 20-year-old man who lives in a filthy Akhdam shantytown on the edge of this capital. "So we have no hope."
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CULTURE
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THE ROOT included two article near to my heart.
Invisible and Not Really Black? What people say when they don't know you're an immigrant. Then Don't Sleep on the Black Immigrant Vote It's strategically placed and could hold the key in the general election. (note: I personally think this is only true in FL and VA)
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RACISM
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Sometimes I feel we should protest conferences like this, other times I think we just give them attention. Protest at a Conference on Race.
Fairfax County police yesterday blocked a group of protesters who sought to enter a hotel near Dulles International Airport to disrupt a conference of people who promote belief in the need for white racial preservation.
Inside the Crowne Plaza Dulles Airport Hotel in Herndon were more than 100 attendees, most of them white men, of the American Renaissance Conference. Among the seminars were "Understanding the African Mind" and "Mexico From the Inside: Who the Mexicans Are and Why They Do What They Do.'' For sale outside conference rooms were neckties decorated with Confederate emblems and books such as "Race Differences in Intelligence'' and "Zoological Subspecies of Man.''
On the sidewalk outside -- just off the Dulles Toll Road -- stood a young, racially mixed group of three dozen protesters with megaphones and drums. They carried posters decrying Nazism, racism and fascism as they tried in vain to pass a police phalanx and enter the hotel to disrupt the conference.
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ODDS and ENDS
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LOL Bill Maher hit the nail on the head when it comes to Black phrases.
New Rule: Ebonic Plague
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Diaries of Note
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This mirrors my opening story. State of the Black Union on C-SPAN--Live Blogging the Afternoon Session by wscrews
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Black History Month: The Irish Patriotic Strike by lao hong han
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Wow. This is the actually copy of the secret GOP race baiting questioneer I am ascared of Black people [] Yes [] No []Maybe (check the box!) by dearmurray
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I have to give the source credit Congressional Black Caucus Shows Their Ass by sephius1
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RNC Orders Diversity Training for the Party of Hate by Avenging Angel
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This is sad. To my Black friends, why send me Obama e-mail by niteskolar
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RIP
A year without Steve Gilliard by
desmoinesdem
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Clinton TX supporter: Obama has a problem, he happens to be black by electopundit