Strength
Commentary by Black Kos Editor Deoliver47
I rarely write commentaries directly about our President, though I have included him, and his role, in discussions of race, racism, foreign and domestic policy from time to time – where relevant.
I was very pleased to see a flurry of diaries on the recommended list which responded to the news that broke about the end of Osama bin Ladin, and subsequent analyses of that event, POTUS' role, and its impact on the US political landscape and geopolitics.
As a person who worked in the World Trade Center I had my own personal responses to the event – shared by many others.
Mulling over much of what has occurred since Sunday night, I was struck by a picture of Barack Obama, posted to whitehouse.gov from the situation room. It is not smiling, nor is it in campaign mode, nor posed for cameras. It catches – what to me is one of the most important qualities I admire about the man we have elected as POTUS and Commander in Chief.
Strength.
And for me, as a feminist, strength has nothing to do with macho posturing, bluster, bullying, bogarting, or even dogmatic adherence to one ideological position or another. Strength for me encompasses empathy, reflection, and intellect.
I have not for one day forgotten the strength it takes for him to show up to work each morning and the burden of not only being POTUS, but the "peculiar to the US" circumstance of him being the first black president as well, and subject to daily humiliations from many quarters.
Several pundits, since Sunday night, among them Lawrence O'Donnell (The Re-Write:Who's soft on defense?) have addressed the Republican meme of the “essential weakness” of Democrats in general, and Barack Obama specifically and refuted it.
In the symbolic personage of our POTUS – he gets it double (dare I say in spades) since he is not only a Democrat, he is also an anomaly – a black man, with an odd name, sitting in the oval office.
While he quipped and laughed at the recent White House Correspondent’s event where Seth Meyers remarked on his graying hair: “If your hair gets any whiter, the tea party is going to endorse it” I thought back to the youthful, basketball bounce -stepped candidate Obama. We still see glimpses of that Barack, but his gravitas has deepened under the daily stresses of his office.
No man (or future woman) can take on the mantle of the Presidency without being affected by it. Only those who have "been there done that" know the toll it takes. How they handle it, or evade those responsibilities is a matter of history and for historians to postulate about. Yes – he’s gotten grayer, and lines in his face are evident.
I have been vocally unhappy with those who have chosen certain adjectives to describe their disagreements with the President and his administration and couched them in language that has denigrated him personally as weak, or somehow deficient in some macho testicular qualities, which in turn have been metastasized into discussions of racism and castration.
I will continue to push-back at any and all of these depictions, while continuing to express both my unqualified support of his next term, and my own views – both critical and supportive of Administration policies.
Anyone who doubts this man’s strength to make difficult decisions and to hold this office as a stellar example of what Presidents should be needs to take a time out and back off. I have no patience for those who compare him to other past Presidents – good, bad or indifferent and in doing so attack the content of his character.
He is himself. Barack Hussein Obama.
Today I salute his quiet strength.
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News by dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor
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Can you believe the nerve of this woman? Wanting her child to get an education? She faces a potential 20 year prison sentence. (yes folks that's snark). The Grio: Homeless mom faces jail for enrolling son in school
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A homeless single mother who lives in her van pleaded not guilty Wednesday to stealing nearly $16,000 worth of education for her son by enrolling the kindergartener in her baby sitter's school district.
Tanya McDowell, 33, was arraigned in Norwalk, where she was arrested April 14 on felony charges of committing and attempting to commit first-degree larceny.
Prosecutors say McDowell used her baby sitter's address to enroll her son in Norwalk schools in the fall but should have registered the boy in nearby Bridgeport, a significantly poorer urban district and the location of her last permanent address.
Officials call it the first known case of its type in Connecticut, although similar conflicts have played out elsewhere in the U.S. as districts try to ensure their scarce local tax dollars are used for local students.
"He's only 5 years old and it's hard like to explain to a 5-year-old kid, you know, 'You got kicked out because we don't have a steady address yet,'" said McDowell, an unemployed cook.
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Like most change it starts with education. Colorlines: Three Hip-Hop Scholars Talk About Combatting Homophobia
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To some, the concept of meeting people where they’re at is tired. But in the case of homophobia—a complex mix of religious doctrine, cultural ideas, sexism, peer pressure and general insecurity about identity—that principle seems to be the best hope. In the wake of recent sex panics in the hip-hop world, first around Hot 97 DJ Mister Cee’s arrest and then Malcolm X’s biography, I asked three educators talk about how they’ve approached this huge topic in their hip-hop classes. (Yes, universities today have classes that address hip-hop culture as an important part of American life and history.)
Student reaction ranged from the good to the bad to the ugly. But the classroom conversations are an honest start, and they offer insights for all of us.
Photo by BitBoy
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The Root: Black Filmmakers Poised to Convene in Miami
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Get ready to be dazzled by a vast array of independent moviemakers, aspiring starlets and leading actors when the 15th Annual American Black Film Festival convenes in Miami this July 6-9. The festival staged a vodka-fueled "Buzz Party" in Atlanta Thursday night that attracted about 200 people interested in joining the black Hollywood ranks.
At the festival, filmmakers will seek exposure and funding to back their projects, which range from documentaries to short films in the dramatic and comedic genres. Amid all the networking, screenings, seminars and assorted other festivities, Keenen Ivory Wayans will have the ABFF's Entertainment Icon award bestowed upon him for his long track record of writing, directing and producing. And to mark the 20th year since his breakout film, Boyz in the Hood, debuted, director John Singleton will present a behind-the-scenes documentary about the production.
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The struggle for racial equality in the UK Colorlines: New UK Doc Asks U.S. How To Fight for Racial Justice
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The opening voiceover of ‘Number Games’ is calculated to scare the pants off anyone who lived through Reagan (or Thatcher). As the camera pans over Britain’s great architectural victories, new British PM David Cameron informs us that government is the problem, and that the taxpayers’ money is being wasted. In context, Cameron’s proposed anti-government ‘Big Society’ sounds all too familiar: tax cuts for the predominantly white upper class, and spending cuts for the poor, increasing racial disparities and pushing the UK’s immigrant communities and people of color even further into the shadows.
So where can the UK turn for advice for how to best handle its newfound, um, ‘freedom’? The folks behind ‘Number Games,’ UK-based Runnymede Trust and Feedback Films, turned to the United States.
The film also visits us — as in, you know, us! Berkeley and his one-man crew, Johnathan Tetsill of Feedback Films, were in attendance at Facing Race 2010, our publisher’s semiannual conference for racial justice leaders, activists, and media. And in the second half of the film, you’ll see keynote speaker Melissa Harris-Perry exploding myths about Obama, racial achievement, and the ‘Black imagination,’ to a packed house.
This 25-minute film lets us look over the shoulder of Runnymede director Dr. Rob Berkeley as he explores the perpetually segregated city of Chicago, and follows community organizers from Action Now. The dapper Brit sees firsthand how an underserved neighborhood is brought out, person by person, to rally around a neighbor whose house is getting foreclosed on. A winning campaign is heady stuff, even for the most jaded of organizers, and seeing it through Berkeley’s eyes makes it all the more exciting.
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Voices and Soul
by Justice Putnam
Black Kos Poetry Editor
The Supreme Court denied review Monday, without comment, the case of the Texas cheerleader who was kicked off the squad for refusing to cheer for her rapist. A federal appeals court ruled in September, that the young woman was speaking for the school and not herself, when called on to cheer, by name, the athlete who assaulted her.
It makes one wonder if the majority of this 5-4 Court of last recourse, sees a woman's place to be somewhere on the dark side of the Magna Carta; and just to the right of Caliphate of the Ottoman Empire.
Because it is not only a leap back to the time of women as chattal; it is also, obviously...
A Double Standard
Do you blame me that I loved him?
If when standing all alone
I cried for bread a careless world
Pressed to my lips a stone.
Do you blame me that I loved him,
That my heart beat glad and free,
When he told me in the sweetest tones
He loved but only me?
Can you blame me that I did not see
Beneath his burning kiss
The serpent’s wiles, nor even hear
The deadly adder hiss?
Can you blame me that my heart grew cold
That the tempted, tempter turned;
When he was feted and caressed
And I was coldly spurned?
Would you blame him, when you draw from me
Your dainty robes aside,
If he with gilded baits should claim
Your fairest as his bride?
Would you blame the world if it should press
On him a civic crown;
And see me struggling in the depth
Then harshly press me down?
Crime has no sex and yet to-day
I wear the brand of shame;
Whilst he amid the gay and proud
Still bears an honored name.
Can you blame me if I’ve learned to think
Your hate of vice a sham,
When you so coldly crushed me down
And then excused the man?
Would you blame me if to-morrow
The coroner should say,
A wretched girl, outcast, forlorn,
Has thrown her life away?
Yes, blame me for my downward course,
But oh! remember well,
Within your homes you press the hand
That led me down to hell.
I’m glad God’s ways are not our ways,
He does not see as man,
Within His love I know there’s room
For those whom others ban.
I think before His great white throne,
His throne of spotless light,
That whited sepulchres shall wear
The hue of endless night.
That I who fell, and he who sinned,
Shall reap as we have sown;
That each the burden of his loss
Must bear and bear alone.
No golden weights can turn the scale
Of justice in His sight;
And what is wrong in woman’s life
In man’s cannot be right.
-- Frances Ellen Watkins Harper
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The Front Porch is now open. Grab a chair, sit down and chat with us a while.
Front Porch music today is from the "Godfather of Soul" on his birthday.
James Brown was born in Barnwell, South Carolina on May 3, 1933.