Lou Dobbs - ¡Hasta la vista xenofobista!
Glen Beck - buh bye bigot
Buchanan - You were never my Uncle. Thankfully.
Rush - I hope you lose every radio station.
The Battle Against the Bigots
Commentary by Black Kos Editor Denise Olver-Velez
We know these faces. Angry, bigoted, racist, sexist, hate-spewers.
Anti-black, anti-immigrant, anti-women, anti-gay, anti-Muslim, anti-Jewish, anti Democrats, anti-President Obama (and his family).
Though the amount of overt outspoken racism and bigotry that is broadcast around us seems to exponentially increase as we draw closer to the next election, we all realize that the election of Barack Obama was the impetus for unleashing the flood waters of hate.
Though these bigots were on-air before Obama, they certainly increased their output after his election.
The good news is that we have engaged them in battle-and we are winning...one bigot at a time.
We should take a time out for a bit to review the results of our actions to stem the tide of hate speech on our airwaves.
We should applaud Color of Change, Media Matters, the Southern Poverty Law Center, and other groups, as well as our own Kossaks who have been fighting and will continue to take it to them.
Lou Dobbs, Glenn Beck, Pat Buchanan and now Rush Limbaugh and there will be more.
This video will remind you that we do have power.
Video celebrating the victory of ColorOfChange, Jewish Funds for Justice, and Media Matters for America over infamous race-baiter, conspiracy theorist, and provocateur Glenn Beck.
Remember this guy?
He pushed hate against immigrants and birther ct.
Let us not forget that we are experiencing our own invasions here at Daily Kos.
Monday I was stunned to see a truly vicious troll comment which attacked a Black Kos community member.
I’ve edited the now thankfully hidden comment–for obvious reasons.
Kudos to TUs and Markos for swift hide rates and banhammers. A thank you and a hug to TrueBlueMajority for remaining steadfast.
Well well well if it isn't True Blue Majority (0+ / 12-)
Recommended by:
Hidden by:
Lost and Found, Unit Zero, Statusquomustgo, MBNYC, doroma, Denise Oliver Velez, roadbear, pot, lostboyjim, TrueBlueMajority, Safina, Pam from Calif
Your profile says your a faithful Christian, yet you support fa_ _ots. You are a member of Black Kos. Is that because you are a nig_er, or because you want to be included in the nig _er community? I have an important quote for you, "Nig _ers destroy; it's all they do. Even birthing a niglet is an act of destruction. If a nig _er's house is robbed, the real crime is that the nig _er had a house in the first place."
Think about it.
by MegPeg2 on Mon Mar 12, 2012 at 04:10:47 PM EDT
We need to stay alert.
We need to keep up the pressure–and not just on media personalities–though they have the ability to spread and promote hate widely.
In the years ahead we have to re-double our efforts to un-elect racist, sexist, homophobic and xenophobic politicians.
Our voices count.
Our petitions count.
Our votes count.
Keep fighting the hate. It’s a long struggle but we will win the war.
Do you have Color of Change on your blogroll?
Who do you think should be focused on next?
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News by dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor
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A video decrying the leader of the Lord's Resistance Army has gone viral on YouTube — but also drawn criticism as oversimplifying a complex tragedy. LA Times: Video on Ugandan militia leader Joseph Kony sparks an uproar
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Even after decades of well-documented murder and plunder, even after the International Criminal Court indicted him and a U.S. president dispatched a special forces team to help catch him, African warlord Joseph Kony remained largely obscure to the West.
That changed with startling swiftness this week, with the viral proliferation of a smoothly produced 29-minute video, "Kony 2012," that calculatedly taps the power of social media in an effort to make the fugitive leader of the Lord's Resistance Army a figure of global infamy.
By Thursday, three days after its release on YouTube, the video had been viewed 40 million times, fueled by Tweets from celebrities including Rihanna, Oprah Winfrey and P. Diddy.
"Can I tell you the bad guy's name?" Jason Russell, co-founder of the San Diego-based non-profit Invisible Children, asks his young son in the video. Russell then shows him Kony's photograph, and explains to viewers that the LRA abducts children like him for use as sex slaves and child soldiers. Then he inveighs against the possible withdrawal of U.S. troops sent by President Obama last year to help African troops catch Kony.
* Note there are questions surrounding the group that created this video, and how they spend the money they raise, but it doesn't take away from the message of this video.
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As rightwing media attempts to smear one of the biggest names in the study of race in America, Colorlines.com invites his students, mentees and those touched by him to chime in and define Bell’s legacy—before Fox News re-defiines it. ColorLines: Who Is Derrick Bell?
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On Wednesday, Breitbart.com and Fox News’ Sean Hannity began circulating a 1990 news video of President Obama at a Harvard Law School rally in support of diversity in hiring of tenured professors. Hannity and others on the right have argued the video is controversial because of the figure at the center of the rally—Harvard’s famous law professor Derrick Bell, who passed last year. Bell is considered by many to be among the intellectual fathers of the critical study of race, certainly within American law.
As rightwing media attempts to smear Bell—as they did Shirley Sherrod—we invited one of Bell’s students from that 1990 academic year, who was also present at the diversity rally, to reflect on the professor’s legacy. As City University of New York law professor and Colorlines.com board member Victor Goode put it, “Derrick’s literally got a few thousand students out there, all lawyers who will stand up.” Are you among them? Did Professor Bell’s work touch your life or your work? Don’t be silent. Chime in with your own reflections, in the comments below.
David Hill: Reflections on My Professor
One of the highlights of my time at Harvard Law School was Professor Derrick Bell’s Constitutional Law course during my second year. And I participated in many of the protests in support of greater faculty diversity, including the one in support of Professor Bell that has been making the rounds on social media in the past few days.
Professor Bell was a real live hero in our midst. Here was a man who had quit working for the Justice Department in when asked to resign his membership in the NAACP. Here was a lawyer who had worked with the luminaries of the legal battles for civil rights in America: Thurgood Marshall, Constance Baker Motley and Robert Carter, among others. Who had suffered the indignity of having judges in southern courtrooms turn their backs on him but still continued to zealously represent his clients. Professor Bell achieved a pinnacle of legal academia when he became the first African-American tenured professor at Harvard Law School but he gave it up twice (he first left HLS in the early 1970s in protest) to stand on principle. While many of us were trying to figure out which high paying law firm job we would take coming out of HLS, here was a man who sacrificed his tenured six figure salaried position to agitate for a more inclusive, useful educational experience for all of us. What you see in the faces of my fellow students in the video clips of that 1990 rally was the profound admiration and respect for a man who stood tall, put his beliefs into actions and sacrificed much for doing so.
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For years, Chicago has served as an incubator for privatization schemes such as unelected school boards, mayoral control and charter schools. But Chicago also boasts some of the best-organized resistance to those policies. Watch this report to hear from some of the organizers leading that fight. Urban Report: Struggle against school closures and 'turnarounds' heats up in Chicago
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The clash between tourist and members plays out every Sunday. In many ways it's a matter of (a lack of) respect. NewsOne: Harlem Churches See Tourist Boom On Sundays
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The stern warning issued from the pulpit was directed at the tourists – most of whom had arrived late – a sea of white faces with guidebooks in hand. They outnumbered the congregation itself: a handful of elderly black men and women wearing suits and dresses and old-fashioned pillbox hats.
“We’re hoping that you will remain in place during the preaching of the Gospel,” a church member said over the microphone at this Harlem church on a recent Sunday morning. “But if you have to go, go now. Go before the preacher stands to preach.”
No one left then. But halfway through the sermon, a group of French girls made their way toward the velvet ropes that blocked the exit. An usher shook his head firmly, but they ignored him and walked out.
The clash between tourists and congregants plays out every Sunday at Mother African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church, the oldest black church in New York state. It’s one of many Harlem churches that have become tourist attractions for visitors from all over the world who want to listen to soulful gospel music at a black church service. With a record number of tourists descending upon New York City last year, the crowds of foreigners are becoming a source of irritation among faithful churchgoers.
To preserve the sanctity of the service, pastors struggle to enforce strict rules of conduct. But the reality is that these visitors are often filling church pews that would otherwise remain empty – and filling the collection basket with precious dollar bills.
“Our building is in need of repair,” church member Paul Henderson said after the service. “We need assistance. They’re helping to sustain us.”
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Voices and Soul
by Justice Putnam
Black Kos Poetry Editor
Two plus two equals four. One Apple plus two Oranges equals three pieces of fruit.
But what happens, when no matter how we try, things just don't add up?
The Book of Equality
Here the readers gather to watch the books die. They die suddenly, as if thrown from an airplane, or from spontaneous cardiac arrest. They live, and then suddenly they die, and the reader who watches this is at the moment of the books' death bombarded with images documented through the smiling lipstick face of a journalist who has shown up to report on the death of the books. The milk was poisoned and forty-two babies died, she laughs, as she fondles the ashes of the dead books. And the death of forty-two babies is equal in value to the death of this book which is equal in value to the ninety-year old woman who shot herself while the sheriff waited at her door with an eviction notice which is equal in value to the collapsing of the global economy which is equal to the military in country XYZ seizing the land of the semi-nomadic hunters and cultivators of crops who have lived in the local rain forest for thousands of years. The reader opens a dead book and finds an infinite amount of burnt ash between the bindings, and when the ash blows in the wind the lipstick says that every death in the world is equal to every other death in the world which is equal to every birth in the world which is equal to every act of dismemberment which is equal to the death of a jungle which is equal to the collapse of the global economy; and hey look there’s another lady falling out of a window; she looks about equal to the poet hurled out of his country for words he wrote but which did not belong to him and whose death is about equal to the girl who was shot on the bus on her way to school this morning which is just about the same as the bearded man whose head was shoved into a sac while water was dumped over it and he died for an instant and came back to life and talked and talked and that’s about equal to the steroid illegally injected into the arm of a beautiful man who makes forty million dollars a year for injecting his arms with steroids so he can more skillfully wave a wooden stick at a ball, and in the ash we see the truest democracy there ever was: hey look it’s a little baby found in a dumpster how equal you are says the smiling lipstick to the civilized nation whose citizens walk the flooded streets looking for their homes, and in the ashes of the dead book the dead streets are equal to the eating disorders of movie stars which are equal to the dead soldiers who are equal to the homeruns which are equal to the bomb dropped by country ABC over weddings in the village of country XYZ which is equal to the earth swallowing up and devouring all of its foreigners which is just about equal to the decline in literacy in the most educated nation in the planet. There is no end to this book. There are no paragraph breaks to interrupt the smiling lipstick that goes on and on in one string of ashy words about how the declaration of peace is equal to the resumption of war and how the bodies that fall are equal to the birds that ascend and how the bomb in the Eiffel Tower is equal to the rising cost of natural gas, and the murmurs of the voices in the mud are equal to the murmurs of the expensive suits falling out of buildings and these are equal to the silence that kills with one breath and coddles life with another.
-- Daniel Borzutzky
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