(Black Population Map - US Census)
We are still southern
Commentary by Black Kos Editor Denise Oliver-Velez
I happen to enjoy census data. Not just the numbers, but teasing out meaning from them.
So I was interested (as usual) in reading this latest report from the 2010 census.
Black Population Concentrated in South: Census
(the full report is here in pdf)
The majority of the United State’s population that identifies itself as black or African American is concentrated in the southern states, according to a new report by the Census Bureau. According to the new analysis, the DMV is home to one of the largest populations that identify as black or African American in the country.
In the most recent Census survey, respondents could check more than one box on the questionnaire surveying race. In its report, the Census Bureau counted those respondents that only checked the box that read “Black or African American” as black alone. Those that checked the box and also another race category are considered black-in-combination. The Census report found that most of those (60 percent) who counted themselves as black or black-in-combination with another race were concentrated in just 10 states.
Maryland, with a population of 1.8 million that counts itself as black alone-or-in-combination, and Virginia, with a population of 1.7 million identify as black alone-or-in-combination, are among those 10 states.In Census population reports, the District gets treated as a state in. When compared to the other 50 states, D.C. has the highest percentage black alone-or-in-combination population, at 52 percent. The size of the black population in D.C. has actually declined by 10 percent since 2000, according to Census data, but increased in every other state. Florida is the state where the population identifying as black-alone-or-in-combination grew fastest in 2010.
Coupled with these data are migration trends:
In all, about 57% of U.S. blacks now live in the South, a jump from the 53% share in the 1970s, according to an analysis of census data by William H. Frey, a demographer at the Brookings Institution. It was the surest sign yet of a sustained reverse migration to the South following the exodus of millions of blacks to the Midwest, Northeast and West in the Great Migration from 1910 to 1970.
"African Americans are acting as other Americans would — searching for better economic opportunity in the Sun Belt," said Isabel Wilkerson, author of "The Warmth of Other Suns," a detailed history of the Great Migration. "But there is also a special connection. As the South becomes more in line with the rest of the country in social and political equality, many are wanting to connect with their ancestral homeland."
...
Frey noted that the continued Southern migration of blacks, who tend to vote Democratic, could have political implications as they flow into mostly Republican-leaning states. In 2008, Democrat Barack Obama was able to win in traditionally GOP-leaning states such as Virginia, North Carolina and Florida after a jump in black voter turnout.
"While much attention is currently given to Hispanic and Asian immigration to new parts of the South, the return migration of African Americans seems to have flown under the radar," Frey said. "It's a factor which should not go unnoticed by politicians and those creating new congressional districts in growing parts of the South."
One other important statistic in the report was this:
According to the Census Bureau, 14 percent of Americans identified themselves as black alone-or-in-combination in 2010, a total of 42 million people. Over the past decade, that number has grown by 15 percent, faster than the country's overall population growth. Since 2000, the U.S. population increased by 9.7 percent.
So we are still growing as part of the electorate, and politically we need to focus organizing a greater portion of our efforts in the South, not just northern urban areas.
Research organizations like The Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, track the number of black elected officials, reporting the states with the highest numbers are:
Mississippi, Alabama, Louisiana, Illinois, and Georgia.
While I continue to hear south bashing from some folks on the left, I never forget that many of us born in the north have southern roots, ties and family. Not only do we have those family ties, much (not all) of what we consider to be "black culture" is southern, whether it is food, speech patterns, or music.
Yes - we have mixed feelings. Nothing to love about Confederate flags, Klan terrorism during reconstruction, Jim Crow... but don't forget that slavery thrived north of Dixie, along with racism and riots.
I believe there will be a new south soon. One free of the Dixiecrat turned Republican stranglehold. Not tomorrow - but we are on our way.
What will hasten it is that black southerners also have the opportunity to forge stronger coalitions with other groups; like those being built in Alabama, around opposition to the draconian new immigration law HB56; coalitions of civil rights organizations, churches, and students.
We are Tuesday's Chile, not Tuesday's Child - 'cause our porch has a southern drawl.
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News by dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor
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Works by leading black artists in the contemporary art realm are going on view at Washington’s Corcoran Gallery of Art to tackle issues of racial, sexual and historical identity. Washington Post: Leading black contemporary artists featured in new show at DC’s Corcoran Gallery of Art
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The exhibit, “30 Americans,” opens Saturday and will be on view through February. It features such artists as Jean-Michel Basquait, Hank Willis Thomas, Kehinde Wiley and others. The 76 works come from Miami-based collectors Don and Mera Rubell.
Museum Director Fred Bollerer says the show marks an effort to undertake more daring exhibitions that examine serious issues and provoke debate.
Some images from Thomas are particularly striking. They include photographs of athletes playing basketball through a noose, instead of a hoop, and familiar logos branded on their skin.
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Sylvia Robinson, the pioneering cofounder of Sugarhill Records died of heart disease at age 75, she is best known for making hip-hop’s first commercial hit, “Rapper’s Delight. Colorlines: Show Some Love for the Hip-Hop Mama Who Birthed ‘Rappers Delight’
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Robinson was already a music industry veteran when she tapped three unknown rappers to record the infamous “hip, hop, the hibbit, the hibbidibit hip, hip hop and you don’t stop the rockin’” single. Three decades earlier, at just 14, the New Yorker born Sylvia Vanderpool made a blues record with trumpet great Hot Lips Page. In 1957, she scored a number one R&B hit with “Love is Strange,” a song she co-wrote and performed with Mickey Baker. Robinson also co-wrote 1968’s slow-jamming earworm, “Love on a Two-Way Street,” and returned to the number one spot in 1973 with her solo “Pillow Talk.”
By 1979, when Robinson conceived and produced “Rapper’s Delight,” she and her husband, Joseph, were looking for a way to save their failing record label. Robinson observed how folks at Harlem World night club went nuts for DJ Lovebug Starski’s raps and decided to put that magic on wax. (It’s widely believed that the rhymes Big Bank Hank recites on “Rappers Delight” were stolen from Grandmaster Caz, but that’s another story.)
While some would argue that selling eight million records made Robinson the Mother of Hip-Hop, what really stands out is how she pushed Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five to record “The Message.” In 1982, hip-hop was party music and the sinister track was declared commercial poison. But Robinson, the undisputed boss at Sugarhill, insisted: “The Message” would be the group’s second single. Period. Thanks to Robinson’s intuition, hip-hop became a vehicle for artists to protest injustice and express real-life pain.
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Most African Americans hail from just 46 ethnic groups, research shows. The Roots: Pinpointing DNA Ancestry in Africa
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Advancements in DNA analyses, along with African shipping records, have revealed that African Americans do not have roots in the entire continent. A relatively small number of African groups supplied the lion's share of the ancestral African population.
In fact, three large regions of Atlantic Africa were the major contributors to the slave trade: Upper Guinea, including the modern countries of Senegal, Mali, Gambia, Guinea, Sierra Leone and Liberia; Lower Guinea, including the southern portions of Eastern Ivory Coast, Ghana, Togo, Benin and Nigeria; and West Central Africa, which encompassed mostly the western portions of the Democratic Republic of Congo and Angola. In all, these regions made up only about 15 percent of Africa's total area, all on the Atlantic side of the continent.
People were once skeptical of claims made by early DNA ancestry-tracing services that they could identify a subject's "tribe" or "ethnicity" in Africa; the available data didn't seem to sustain such claims. But new ways of calculating ancestry from the genome and larger African samples can make determining ethnic identifications more accurate.
Today, speaking a common language is the primary way to identify an African tribal or ethnic affiliation. Since African languages are quite stable and reports of these languages demonstrate that there has not been any large population movement within the slave-exporting region of Africa in the past 400 years or so, it should be relatively easy to match modern ethnicities or tribes with those of the slave-trade era. However, the names of these languages and ethnic groups have changed over that period. For example, in 1767 a German missionary named Christian Georg Andreas Oldendorp did a survey of slaves living in the Danish West Indies to try to determine which languages should be used for evangelical purposes. The Danish West Indies received slaves from the same shipping route that North America used.
Oldendorp, calculating ethnicity by language, listed 30 apparently different languages (his terminology sometimes makes it unclear where political and where linguistic units divided), and he provided vocabulary for 26 of these languages, which allows us to be certain of the modern equivalent.
In the Americas, Africans were most likely to form social units with other people who spoke their language, even if they might belong to different political units; in Africa their identity was more likely connected to a political unit. Their rulers collected taxes, demanded service (including the military service that resulted in their enslavement) and rendered justice, while neighboring polities might well be hostile even if they spoke the same language.
People collecting information about identity in America were likely to choose linguistic units, while those commenting on it in Africa were more likely to focus on political units. This created an interesting paradox: The names of African "nations" in America often did not match exactly with the names of "nations" in Africa.
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The race politics of “Ultimate Justice” Race-Talk: Killing to govern
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We know the statistics because they are so very proud of them: Rick Perry, Governor of Texas, has overseen more than 230 executions, the most of any governor in modern history (his predecessor, George W. Bush, still holds the record for the executions-per-year with more than 30). For the right wing of the Republican party, these are numbers to cheer, as recent debates have demonstrated—and the fact that both governors quite likely executed innocent men and unquestionably executed individuals who were never given a fair trial troubles not a whit the sleep of these men or their supporters.
And then there are the other statistics, which somehow never come up as talking points in Republican debates. In roughly 80% of death penalty cases, the victim is white, even as 50% of all homicide victims are African Americans. In the state of Georgia, where Troy Davis was executed this past week, the vast majority of executions involve white victims even African Americans continue to suffer disproportionately as victims of homicide. Nationally, less than 15% of all death penalty convictions involve African American victims despite the fact that African Americans make up roughly half of the murder victims in the United States. Black defendants are almost 40% more likely to get the death penalty than non-Blacks. Finally, white district attorneys outnumber African American district attorneys in death penalty states, at least as of 2003, by roughly an 80:1 margin. There is simply no way to absorb these numbers and still believe that, as defenders insist, race does not play a major factor in who we kill in the name of the state, and why.
As Ta-Nehisi Coates reminds us, responding to the applause that greeted the announcement of Perry’s record-breaking execution rate, “This is still the country where we took kids to see men lynched, and then posed for photos.” Then as now those receiving “justice” at the hands of the cheering mob were overwhelmingly black men being killed for crimes against whites. When the victims were black, as they were (then and now) in staggering numbers, lynch law had little interest. When the victims were white, then and now, Governors ran for office on the backs of the black men they had put to death.
I am not being hyperbolic here. Governor Jeff Davis of Arkansas celebrated the visit by President Theodore Roosevelt in 1905 by publicly lecturing the president on the virtues of lynching as state policy. In 1913 Governor Blease of South Carolina enthusiastically defended before a governors convention the practice of lynching black men accused of crimes against white women. And three-term Georgia governor (and aspirant to the White House), Eugene Talmadge, was a prime suspect in FBI files for his involvement in a lynching in his state in 1946, just after winning what would have been his fourth term had he not died before resuming office.
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The most popular contraceptive for women in eastern and southern Africa, a hormone shot given every three months, appears to double the risk the women will become infected with H.I.V., according to a large study published Monday. New York Times: Contraceptive Used in Africa May Double Risk of H.I.V.
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The most popular contraceptive for women in eastern and southern Africa, a hormone shot given every three months, appears to double the risk the women will become infected with H.I.V., according to a large study published Monday. And when it is used by H.I.V.-positive women, their male partners are twice as likely to become infected than if the women had used no contraception.
The findings potentially present an alarming quandary for women in Africa. Hundreds of thousands of them suffer injuries, bleeding, infections and even death in childbirth from unintended pregnancies. Finding affordable and convenient contraceptives is a pressing goal for international health authorities.
But many countries where pregnancy rates are highest are also ravaged by H.I.V., the virus that causes AIDS. So the evidence suggesting that the injectable contraceptive has biological properties that may make women and men more vulnerable to H.I.V. infection is particularly troubling.
Injectable hormones are very popular. About 12 million women between the ages of 15 and 49 in sub-Saharan Africa, roughly 6 percent of all women in that age group, use them. In the United States, it is 1.2 million, or 3 percent of women using contraception. While the study involved only African women, scientists said biological effects would probably be the same for all women. But they emphasized that concern was greatest in Africa because the risk of H.I.V. transmission from heterosexual sex was so much higher there than elsewhere.
“The best contraception today is injectable hormonal contraception because you don’t need a doctor, it’s long-lasting, it enables women to control timing and spacing of birth without a lot of fuss and travel,” said Isobel Coleman, director of the women and foreign policy program at the Council on Foreign Relations. “If it is now proven that these contraceptions are helping spread the AIDS epidemic, we have a major health crisis on our hands.”
The study, which several experts said added significant heft to previous research while still having some limitations, has prompted the World Health Organization to convene a meeting in January to consider if evidence is now strong enough to advise women that the method may increase their risk of getting or transmitting H.I.V.
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Amid all the talk today about what sort of place Rick Perry comes from—and how much people there clung to their appellation of a certain piece of land —it's worth calling attention to what has to be one of the most telling and eye-opening maps of contemporary voting behavior. The New Republic: Rick Perry And The Map Worth A Thousand Words
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In 2004, George W. Bush beat John Kerry with 50.7 percent of the vote. Four years later, Barack Obama beat John McCain with nearly 53 percent of the vote. But amid this decisive shift to the Democrats, something funny happened: in nearly a quarter of the counties in the country, McCain got a higher percentage of the votes while losing nationally than did his fellow Republican Bush while winning nationally four years earlier. And as this map shows, these counties make up a clearly defined swath of the country: a nearly contiguous band running from southwestern Pennsylvania, down through Appalachia and then curving west across the Upper South, picking up northern Alabama, northeastern Mississippi and nearly all of Tennessee, Arkansas, Oklahoma and Louisiana.
The arc crosses into Texas, where it encompasses much of East Texas and then peters out in southern and far western Texas -- but not before taking in the two counties in the news today. Haskell County, where Rick Perry grew up, went 64-36 for Bush over Kerry in 2004. Four years later, McCain won more of the vote in Haskell than had Bush, the former Texas governor running against a French-speaking windsurfer from Beacon Hill—66 to 33 percent. In adjacent Throckmorton County, where the Perry family hunting ranch with the unfortunate name is located, Bush thumped Kerry 76 to 23. But McCain did even better against Obama—80 to 20. Again, this is in the context of an election where most other places were going the other way—Texas as a whole went 61 to 38 for Bush against Kerry, but only 55 to 44 for McCain over Obama.
It is hard to dispute that the map tells a story about political geography and race. Obama did better among white voters overall than did Kerry. But he did signficantly worse with white voters across one whole swath of the country—a band encompassing Appalachia, the upper South and the oil-and-ranch country of the Southwest, a band that is predominantly white, Scotch-Irish in ancestry and that is completing the same shift away from the Democrats that the Deep South made years earlier.
Rick Perry, of course, was one of the first to make that switch himself—he was so ahead of the curve when he jumped to the Republican Party in 1989 that his own county, Haskell, voted against him and for the Democrat when he ran for lieutenant governor in 1998. But his native ground has since caught up to him—and Barack Obama's candidacy helped accelerate the shift.
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Voices and Soul
by Justice Putnam
Black Kos Poetry Editor
What one reaps, one sowed; as the old saying echos across the generations. To toil alone in the world is to toil alone in the world.
But are we ever really alone?
Harvest Song
I am a reaper whose muscles set at sun-down. All my oats are cradled.
But I am too chilled, and too fatigued to bind them. And I hunger.
I crack a grain between my teeth. I do not taste it.
I have been in the fields all day. My throat is dry. I hunger.
My eyes are caked with dust of oat-fields at harvest-time.
I am a blind man who stares across the hills, seeking stack’d fields
of other harvesters.
It would be good to see them . . . crook’d, split, and iron-ring’d handles
of the scythes . . . It would be good to see them, dust-caked and
blind. I hunger.
(Dusk is a strange fear’d sheath their blades are dull’d in.)
My throat is dry. And should I call, a cracked grain like the oats
. . . eoho—
I fear to call. What should they hear me, and offer me their grain,
oats, or wheat or corn? I have been in the fields all day. I fear
I could not taste it. I fear knowledge of my hunger.
My ears are caked with dust of oat-fields at harvest-time.
I am a deaf man who strains to hear the calls of other harvesters whose
throats are also dry.
It would be good to hear their songs . . . reapers of the sweet-stalked
cane, cutters of the corn . . . even though their throats cracked, and
the strangeness of their voices deafened me.
I hunger. My throat is dry. Now that the sun has set and I am chilled.
I fear to call. (Eoho, my brothers!)
I am a reaper. (Eoho!) All my oats are cradled. But I am too fatigued
to bind them. And I hunger. I crack a grain. It has no taste to
it. My throat is dry . . .
O my brothers, I beat my palms, still soft, against the stubble of my
harvesting. (You beat your soft palms, too.) My pain is sweet.
Sweeter than the oats or wheat or corn. It will not bring me
knowledge of my hunger.
-- Jean Toomer
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