Thoughts on Black Media.
Commentary by Black Kos Editor Denise Oliver-Velez
The graphic above is one of the earliest covers of The Crisis Magazine:
founded by W.E.B. Du Bois as the official publication of the NAACP, is a journal of civil rights, history, politics, and culture and seeks to educate and challenge its readers about issues that continue to plague African Americans and other communities of color. For nearly 100 years, The Crisis has been the magazine of opinion and thought leaders, decision makers, peacemakers and justice seekers. It has chronicled, informed, educated, entertained and, in many instances, set the economic, political and social agenda for our nation and its multi-ethnic citizens.
The Crisis archives can be found using google books.
Please give a listen to Rev. William Barber, President of the North Carolina NAACP, and architect of the Moral Mondays Movement, speak in Asheville NC this last weekend about the power we have as bloggers to carry the message:
We must utilize social media, text, twitter, facebook, whatever. We must get our story out Mainstream media doesn't always tell our story. We had 100,000 people in the street in North Carolina on a winter day.. but you know who tells that story? You do. A movement is only as strong as those who stand together. We have music and storytelling and spoken word and the arts.
He also named us "Baruch" (messengers) and I thought about how important Black Kos is, not just carrying the message to readers who don't post here, but to people we interact with in the blogosphere, especially people who are not black. We are certainly a small group, with 786 Daily Kos followers, as well as having readers on Motley Moose, though we have no current data about how many people read us.
Many of us who are black grew up in two media worlds, one that was black; with magazines and newspapers that targeted us directly, and the other was a white media world, which covered us infrequently, and not always with any particular understanding or empathy. We learned to deal with both.
Pew Research did a recent study, African-American Media: Fact Sheet, which showed interesting data on black print newspapers, magazines, broadcast television, and digital media:
To get a sense of the current digital footprint of African-American media, Pew Research analyzed audience data for 18 African American-oriented websites and associated apps tracked by the Maynard Institute, an organization aimed at helping news media accurately portray all segments of society. The set of web entities includes entertainment and lifestyle outlets as well as news organizations. Thirteen garnered 1 million or more monthly unique visitors in January 2015, according to data provided by the analytics firm comScore, four of which are outlets dedicated to news: The Root, NewsOne, The Grio and Huffington Post Black Voices.
Pew discussed
black radio, in an earlier piece.
I wonder how many folks who aren't black regularly read black media, or subscribe to black publications?
In Asheville I asked the assembled bloggers, and attendees, almost all of whom were white how many of you are members of The Black Kos community? Several said they would be joining us. That is a good thing, and I hope it happens, but I also challenge readers here to expand their horizons. My friend Yasuragi regularly forwards me "Racism Review," which I recommend highly. Check it out.
I don't want to make this a poll, but I am curious. What black media do you read, listen to or view regularly?
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News by dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor
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The two largest markets for illegal ivory agree to enact a nearly complete ban on the import and export of ivory to help reduce the loss of elephants to poaching. The Guardian: China and US agree on ivory ban in bid to end illegal trade globally.
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While differences on cyber security and talk of sanctions dominated the headlines for Chinese president Xi Jinping's visit to the US, the two countries also signed up to a major agreement to end the global trade in ivory. In a statement released by the White House on Friday, the two countries which are the largest markets for illegal ivory said they would enact a nearly complete ban on the import and export of ivory.
The ban would cover significant and timely restrictions on the import of ivory as hunting trophies as well as unspecified significant and timely steps to halt the domestic commercial trade of ivory.
China is the biggest market for poached ivory with some estimates putting the US in second place.
The announcement follows a decision by China to phase out the legal, domestic manufacture and sale of ivory products in May. In December, a report released by Save the Elephants and the Aspinall Foundation found that the wholesale price of raw elephant tusks had tripled in just four years since 2010.
Elephant in Tanzania
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Small farmers in Africa need to produce more. Happily that is easier than it sounds. Economist: Wake up and sell more coffee
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Millicent Wanjiku Kuria, a middle-aged widow, beams under an orange headcloth. Cash from coffee has already allowed her to buy more land and a cutting machine that prepares fodder for a dairy cow that lows softly in its thatched shed. Her bumper crops are largely a result of better farming techniques such as applying the right amount of fertiliser (two bags, not one) and pruning back old stems on her trees. Simple changes such as these can increase output by 50% per tree. Her income has increased by even more than this, because bigger berries from healthy trees sell at twice the price of their scrawnier brethren, says Arthur Nganga of TechnoServe, a non-profit group that is training Mrs Kuria and thousands of other smallholders in Kenya, Ethiopia and South Sudan. This year's crop will pay for a pickup, she says, so she no longer has to hitch rides on a motorcycle.
Mrs Kuria's success invites a question. If it is so easy to raise a small farmer's output, why haven't all the small farmers managed it? To say that the answer matters is a wild understatement. Afr's poorest and hungriest people are nearly all farmers. To lift themselves out of poverty, they must either move to a city or learn to farm better.
It should be possible to grow much more in Africa. The continent has about half of the world's uncultivated arable land and plenty of people to work it. It is true that erratic rainfall adds to the risks of farming on large parts of the savannah, but switching to drought-tolerant varieties of plants or even to entirely different ones;cassava or sorghum instead of maize, for instance can mitigate much of this problem. Indeed Africa has in the past given glimpses of its vast potential. Five decades ago it was one of the world's cocoa, Nigeria was the biggest exporter of palm oil and peanuts, and Africa grew a quarter of all the coffee people slurped.
Since then it has shifted from being a net exporter of food to an importer. Sub-Saharan Africa's share of agricultural exports has slipped to a quarter of its previous level; indeed, the entire region has been overtaken by a single country: Thailand (see chart). This is largely because Africa's crop yields have improved at only half the pace of those elsewhere and are now, on average, a third to a half of those in the rich world. Farmers in Malawi harvest just 1.3 tonnes of maize per hectare compared with 10 tonnes in Iowa.
Kenyan farmer, Millicent Wanjiku Kuria - courtesy of The Economist
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John Ellis Bush, known to us by his initials and the accompanying exclamation point, has proven in this presidential race that he is an awful politician. The New Republic: Jeb Bush Doesn't Care About Black Voters.
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After a man stood up in the mostly monochromatic crowd at the dinner, pointed to it, and asked Bush how he planned to attract the support of black voters, Bush responded with Obama’s 2008 slogan: “Our message is one of hope and aspiration,” he replied. He’d have been wrong even if he stopped there; it’s clear from how black voters and activists are responding to Democratic candidates and their initially clumsy approaches to racial justice that the African American electorate is past “hope and change.” But Bush made it worse when he went on to say that his message “isn't one of division and get in line and we'll take care of you with free stuff. Our message is one that is uplifting—that says you can achieve earned success.”
That last part is funny, coming from a Bush. It's also a very odd thing to say if you’re actually interested in the black vote. Bush's statement presumes that most or all black voters either need “free stuff,” such as food assistance or health care, from the government to survive—or that the desire for handouts from the federal government trumps our work ethic and inclination to provide for our families. As Alec MacGillis observed, it also hearkens back to 1994, when then-gubernatorial candidate Jeb Bush responded to an African American woman asking what he planned on doing for black people in Florida by saying, “Probably nothing.”
It was a very odd thing to say if you’re actually interested in the black vote.
The derisive mention of “free stuff” also evokes the remarks of the most recent Republican presidential nominee, Mitt Romney, during the 2012 campaign. Telling a Montana fundraiser crowd that “if they want more stuff from government tell them to go vote for the other guy—more free stuff” was offensive enough, but Romney compounded it by, in part, attributing his loss that November to the “gifts” voters of color had received and could expect from President Obama, our Santa Claus in the White House.
Bush’s “earned success” phrase is similarly telling; it is the rhetoric of stereotype, not motivation. It implies, as Republicans have since Reagan—and as white people have since the beginning of the nation—that black folks, whose ancestors provided white Americans with generations of unpaid labor, are lazy and aspire to be freeloaders. Such an appeal serves to feed a white conservative base that subsists on the notion that this country somehow belongs to them, and that their racial angst and fear will somehow help them keep it, demographics and logic be damned.
Jeb! has made no effort to address what black voters have say they want: protection from police abuse, and to support policies that cut off the tentacles of structural racism.
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Voices and Soul
by Justice Putnam
Black Kos Poetry Editor
To be the "wise elder" is a tough proposition, especially when the currency of time is devalued down through the ages. What intrigued us when we were young, may or may not intrigue our young charges today. But one truth remains,
It isn't a circle--it is simply a long line--as in geometry, you know, one that reaches into infinity. And because we cannot see the end--we also cannot see how it changes. And it is very odd by those who see the changes--who dream, who will not give up--are called idealists...and those who see only the circle we call them the "realists"!
Lorraine Hansberry
Raisin
I dragged my twelve-year-old cousin
to see the Broadway production of A Raisin
in the Sun because the hip-hop mogul
and rapping bachelor, Diddy, played
the starring role. An aspiring rapper gave
my cousin his last name and the occasional child
support so I thought the boy would geek to see a pop
hero in the flesh as Walter Lee. My wife was newly
pregnant, and I was rehearsing, like Diddy
swapping fictions, surrendering his manicured
thug persona for a more domestic performance.
My cousin mostly yawned throughout the play.
Except the moment Walter Lee's tween son stiffened
on stage, as if rapt by the sound of a roulette ball.
Scene: No one breathes as Walter Lee vacillates,
uncertain of obsequity or indignation after Lindner offers
to buy the family out of the house they've purchased
in the all-white suburb, Walter might kneel to accept,
but he senses the tension in his son's gaze. I was thinking,
for real though, what would Diddy do? "Get rich
or die trying," 50 Cent would tell us. But my father would
sing like Ricky Scaggs, "Don't get above your raisin',"
when as a kid I vowed to be a bigger man than him.
That oppressive fruit dropped heavy as a medicine
ball in my lap meant to check my ego, and I imagined
generations wimpling in succession like the conga
marching raisins that sang Marvin's hit song. Silly,
I know. Outside the theater, my cousin told me
when Diddy was two, they found his hustler dad
draping a steering wheel in Central Park,
a bullet in his head. I shared what I knew of dreams
deferred and Marvin Gaye. (When asked if he loved
his son, Marvin Sr. answered, "Let's just say I didn't
dislike him.") Beneath the bling of many billion
diodes I walked beside the boy through Times Square
as if anticipating a magic curtain that would rise,
but only one of us would get to take a bow.
-- Gregory Pardlo
"Raisin"
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Pull up a chair and sit down a while and enjoy the company.