Cooper Elementary School, today. Cooper was the first of two elementary schools that I attended.
A Brief and Personal Note on "White Flight"
Commentary by Chitown Kev
A huge subtext in the Black Kos series on Thomas Sugrue's Sweet Land of Liberty is the phenomenon of "white flight," that is, the abandonment of big cities by hundreds of thousands of white families for racially homogenous suburbs and even rural exburbs.
Indeed, even Dr. Sugrue seems to have been a product of "white flight" as his Wikipedia bio reads:
Sugrue was born in 1962 in Detroit, Michigan and lived there until the age of ten, when his family moved to the suburbs. He graduated from Brother Rice High School (Michigan) in 1980
White flight was already well under way in Detroit by the time I was born in 1967, 10 days prior to the Detroit Race Riots. For example, my mother has told me that she went to a mostly white high school in Detroit and had white friends. She told me that she would even visit white friends at their house. She's told me of the time when the father of one of her friends entered the house and said, in her presence, that he didn't want niggers in his house.
As various family members became more financially stable, we moved further and further north in Detroit, usually to areas that were predominately white.
A number of my childhood playmates and schoolmates were white.
My oldest friend, Eddie, lived across the street from my aunt and uncle. Eddie's family had Greek-American origins and, in fact, my aunt was a good friend of Eddie's mother.
Later, when my aunt and uncle moved northeast to approximately Chalmers St. north of East Outer Dr., it was mostly a white area (I'd say about 70-30 white). All of us went to Gooddale Elementary School and we all seemed to get along without much racial tension.
Well, yeah, there was the time when one of my classmates, Sam T., decided to loudly nickname me "Bubblehead" and I was so humiliated by the laughter of the class that I turned around and knocked him dead in his eye, lol. After a period of time, though, we wound up being good friends.
There was another white boy, Raymond W., who was pretty much the class practical joker who lived two blocks from my aunt, on Rosemary. I can't remember the practical joke that I pulled on him but I do remember Raymond's revenge; I was walking home from the store and Raymond shot me dead in the ass with a BB gun; to this day I can hear his cackle as he scampered back into his house, lol.
I remember that we once lived next door to a large and very friendly Irish Catholic family. One of the young women of that household once did a substitute teaching gig in one of my classes. I was being my usual talkative self, disturbing the class, when she finally said, "Kevin if you didn't calm down, I'm going to tell everyone in this class your nickname." That did shut me up, lol.
I went to Hamilton Middle School in the early 1980's. There were a significant (but noticeably dwindling) number of white classmates. In fact, it was a white classmate that nicknamed me "Professor." And from what I was later told, I was voted by my middle school peers "Most likely to become President of the United States" in a landslide.
Truth be told, the facts and evidence of "white flight" were pretty evident on the ground even then. My Mom and stepdad filled in the blanks.
And of course, the bookshelves in libraries and bookstores groan with the weight of scholarly studies literature on the phenomenon for "white flight."
And, of course, I don't know the individual reasons that each of the families of so many of my playmates moved.
But the pattern is very, very clear.
I have been able to find some scholarly literature mainly on some of the psychological consequences of "white flight" for the white families that moved to the suburbs (i.e. north of Eight Mile Road or east of Moross Road, for a Detroit East Sider like myself) but I have seen very little literature on the psychological consequences for the black and white kids that often lost playmates and friends, like myself; after all, I don't think that we kids gave all that much of a shit about the race thing.
But I'll never truly know that for a fact, I guess.
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News by dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor
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Activists from across the nation converged in Cleveland this weekend for the Black Live Matters conference. Cleveland.com: Thousands of 'freedom fighters' in Cleveland for first national Black Lives Matter conference.
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Activists from across the nation converged in Cleveland this weekend for a conference meant to draw national attention to police brutality and race relations in the wake of a number of incidents involving police and black Americans.
The National Convening of the Movement for Black Lives began Friday at Cleveland State University where activists will attend sessions that range from viewing films to open discussions on topics that highlight issues that affect all aspects of black culture.
The conference is happening amid an escalating national discussion about law enforcement's interaction in black communities. Those issues are illustrated through several high-profile incidents that began in the summer of 2014 with the shooting death of Michael Brown Jr. by a Ferguson, Missouri police officer and continue through this month when Sandra Bland was found dead in a Texas jail cell where she was being held after a routine traffic stop.
The conference is being held in Cleveland, a city where two police officers remain under investigation in the Nov. 22, 2014 shooting death of 12-year-old Tamir Rice. The Cleveland police department is now operating under a federal reform agreement that came after the U.S. Justice Department's two-year-long probe of the department's use-of-force practices and policies.
Attendees of the Convening's opening ceremony raise their fists as a symbol of power during an organizer's speech.
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Obama is speaking out in Africa. Slate: Obama Calls for Gay Equality in Africa, Kenyan President Says it’s a “Non-Issue”.
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President Barack Obama did it. After speculation, warnings and threats, Obama addressed gay rights during his first full day in Kenya, saying everyone should be treated equally under the law. "As somebody who has family in Kenya and knows the history of how the country so often is held back because women and girls are not treated fairly, I think those same values apply when it comes to different sexual orientations," Obama said, according to the BBC.
Standing alongside Kenyan President Uhuru Kenyatta at a joint press conference, Obama emphasized that he believes "in the principle of treating people equally under the law" and noted that "the state should not discriminate against people for their sexual orientation." He also likened gay rights in Africa to the civil rights struggle of African-Americans in the United States, saying he was “painfully aware of the history when people are treated differently under the law.”
"That's the path whereby freedoms begin to erode and bad things happen," Obama said, according to the Associated Press. "When a government gets in the habit of treating people differently, those habits can spread."
Yet Kenyatta quickly made it clear Obama’s words weren’t about to shake up the longstanding discrimination against gays and lesbians in Kenya, noting that it “is really a non-issue" and that it's not "really an issue on the foremost mind of Kenyans. And that is a fact.”
US President Barack Obama and his Kenyan counterpart Uhuru Kenyatta give a joint press conference afteir their talks at the State House in Nairobi on July 25, 2015.
Photo by SAUL LOEB/AFP/Getty Images
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Obama attempts to bring peace to one of the world's most war torn regions. Bloomberg: Obama Wants African Leaders’ Buy-in for South Sudan Plan.
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President Barack Obama will try Monday to sell regional leaders on a strategy to pressure warring South Sudanese factions into a peace deal by mid-August, an administration official said.
Obama will seek a unified stance on penalties if an Aug. 17 deadline is missed. That could include an arms embargo and sanctions targeting individuals’ assets and ability to travel, the official said. The goal would be to impose sanctions backed by some combination of the U.S., European Union, regional countries and the United Nations. It’s unclear how quickly the sanctions could kick in.
The president will press the strategy at a meeting Monday in Ethiopia’s capital of Addis Ababa with leaders of Uganda, Kenya, Ethiopia, the chair of the African Union and the foreign minister of Sudan.
Fighting between South Sudanese government and rebel forces that erupted in December 2013 has left tens of thousands of people dead and more than 2 million displaced, according to the United Nations.
U.S. officials have been laying the groundwork for Obama’s participation in the meeting for weeks, with calls to regional leaders by Secretary of State John Kerry and National Security Adviser Susan Rice, among others.
The administration isn’t expecting a breakthrough by the Aug. 17 deadline. The official said a positive outcome is unlikely, meaning the U.S. will probably ramp up its own measures and move to a Plan B.
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Hissène Habré, the former president of Chad, scuttled his trial for mass crimes by turning the principles of human rights defenders against them. New York Times: For Hissène Habré, a Trial by Refusal.
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Mr. Habré, the 72-year-old former president of Chad, is accused of crimes against humanity, war crimes and torture regarding the deaths of an alleged 40,000 people during his rule between 1982 and 1990. July 20 was the first day of his trial before the Extraordinary African Chambers, a special court he has repeatedly denounced as “illegitimate and illegal.” And almost as soon as it started, it stopped: Mr. Habré, and his lawyers, refused to participate, and on the next day the proceedings were suspended.
The Habré trial is the event of the year in the field of international criminal law. With tensions growing between the African Union and the International Criminal Court — which African states accuse of being biased against them because it prosecutes mostly crimes committed in Africa — the E.A.C. was being touted, at least by Senegal’s justice minister, as the advent of an “Africa that judges Africa.”
Hissène Habré after a court hearing in Dakar in June. Credit Seyllou/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images But on the first day of what may be the court’s only trial, Mr. Habré derided the E.A.C., or C.A.E. in French, as the “Comité administratif extraordinaire,” the Extraordinary Administrative Committee. He called the judges — two from Senegal, one from Burkina Faso — “simple functionaries tasked with carrying out a political mission.” As the hearing was about to begin, Mr. Habré stood up and shouted, “Down with imperialism! Down with traitors! Allahu Akbar!” A dozen of his partisans rose from their seats nearby and chanted: “Long live Chad!” “Long live Habré!” “Mr. President, we are with you!”
The Habré case suffers from the same types of deficiencies that have plagued other international criminal trials. Idriss Déby, the president of Chad since 1990, whose government covers more than one-third of the E.A.C.’s budget, was Mr. Habré’s army commander in chief. But he will not be judged in Dakar. Neither will France nor the United States, even though both countries — which are also funding this trial — supported Mr. Habré during his rule. And so naturally, Mr. Habré’s defense strategy rests on denouncing the court for being biased and partial, and calling it a front for Western governments and nongovernmental organizations.
Other defendants in recent major trials for mass crimes have also been defiant. At the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, both Slobodan Milosevic and Vojislav Seselj dismissed their lawyers and claimed the right to defend themselves. Jean-Bosco Barayagwiza called his trial before the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda “a masquerade,” boycotted it and refused to meet his court-appointed lawyers. (After being sentenced to a long prison term for genocide, he did pick a new counsel for the appeal.) But even that Mr. Habré will not do. In the view of François Serres, one of Mr. Habré’s lawyers, responding to the charges in the indictment, even with outrage, or simply appearing in court would lend too much credibility to the proceedings.
Hissène Habré
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The last time the USA started passing gun control laws was when black people (Black Panthers) started exercising their right to open carry rifles. Google Reagan and gun control.
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Voices and Soul
by Justice Putnam
Black Kos Poetry Editor
When all seems hopeless, when the hyena cackle of defeat is biting at pant cuffs and frayed nerves, when the crushing weight of today is laying low and leaden tomorrows cast dust devils across a vacant lot, when the heat stroke of burned out ambitions are sweating inside an oppressive solitary cage, a cage that is bolted in a boxcar rattling along this penal colony railroad earth, it is important to remember that other time when it was time to get out of Dodge, to swim that river home, to hoe that last row and pray tell...
Of Darker Ceremonies
Dear god of armed robberies and puff-puff-pass,
a chalk outline unpeels from the street, smashes
every windshield, and leaves florid temples of crack
on porches. Burnt-black pleats of joint-pressed lips
prophesied your return. Please accept these nickel bags
as offerings. Brick bastions of piss-stench thresholds
and boarded windows require a weekly sacrifice.
Is there a Tarot card called “The Corner,” a shrike
shown lifting a corpse from the pike of a middle finger?
Children speak to their murdered brothers with a cereal box
and construction paper cut into a Ouija’s tongue that licks
yes when asked if liquor could polish a skull in a way
pleasing to the dead, licks no when asked for a name.
-- Phillip B. Williams
"Of Darker Ceremonies"
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Welcome to the Black Kos Community Front Porch!
Pull up a chair and sit down a while and enjoy the company.