“I's Tired” — Commentary by Sephius1, Black Kos Editor
Most of you know me for the "science" section of Black Kos, however I have been mulling over a diary for some time now, specifically to do with police brutality. And the recently release dash cam video of Laquan McDonald just struck a nerve with me for some reason. A brew of mental illness, intolerable police zealotry, and political cover-up. I sense there is a building up of tension in black/brown communities, and our white allies are filling frustrated that they are not being able to affect change in the way that it needs to implemented. Over these last few months my spirit has been bruised, but not broken. I'm reminded of big momma have moments of frustration and simply saying: I's tired
I's tired....as well. It seems like everything that black people do is criminalize.....blackness is being criminalize. Then you have idiotic comment like those from RZA, implying that if black youth just dressed better then the cops wouldn't visit brutality on them. First, that sounds a lot like "...if that woman had dressed modestly then she wouldn’t have been raped...". Second, all the early civil rights activist were dressed head to toe, even stylishly in some cases, and that wasn't enough to stay Jim Crow's hand. Again....I's getting pretty tired.
I'm tired of burying black people who are being executed by cops AND being denied there day in court. When someone says "Black Lives Matter", we are not saying there should be a get out of jail free card for black people. If someone does something that is illegal, then arrest them and give them their day in court. Cops are choosing to use lethal force against black/brown people when other forms of subduing tactics could be used. We've seen several cases of bean bags being used for caucasian criminals.
I'm tired of instant appeals for calm....and forgiveness. Forgiveness, sure.....at some point, but not at the same time that grief is occuring.
I'm tired of thinking that if I gesture wrongly, if I walk a little fast, if my facial features may make me look "threatening", if my have something in my hand is confused for gun means I forfeit my life.
I'm tired of my grandfather being proven right. I remember conversations with my grandfather giving me "pearls of survival" (my title). He used to tell me "...never walk close behind a white person, always walk a good distance behind...", "...if you are in a close setting cross your legs and place your hands in front of you...", or my favorite (/sarcasm) "...never correct a white person even when you know they are wrong or are insulting you...". During those young years of my life, I usually just nodded my head in agreement. Unfortunately, the seed was planted and I find my self doing these thing....subconsciously. It's like willingly putting a chain on your mind.
I’m tired of being an intellectual mammie for the media.
I'm tired of my weekly phone calls with my mother change in tone. Now, she doing the "...make sure you do this..." thingy. "...make sure you check the lights on you car, you know that girl died cause she didn't use her signal...", or "...make sure your medicine is label clearly, you don't want the cops mistaken them for drugs...". Again the seed was planted, not just in me put my parents too. Don't get me wrong my parents are strong people, but they grew up in the dangerous South during the 50's. So I get it....truly I do.
Like I said before, my spirit has been bruised but not broken, but that doesn't mean that I also don't get tired....sometimes.
For the second consecutive year, no minorities were nominated in any of the four acting categories. One year after the critically acclaimed "Selma" was largely snubbed by academy voters, sparking protests, actors and filmmakers of color are again being ignored -- and Twitter is not happy.
"It's actually worse than last year. Best Documentary and Best Original Screenplay. That's it. #OscarsSoWhite," tweeted April Reign, an editor who was credited with launching that hashtag in protest after last year's nominations were announced.
Idris Elba had been expected to score a nomination for his performance as an African warlord in "Beasts of No Nation," but he was passed over. Other hopefuls such as "Concussion" star Will Smith, "Creed" star Michael B. Jordan, that movie's writer-director, Ryan Coogler, and the cast of N.W.A biopic "Straight Outta Compton" also were ignored.
Kerry Washington was just 14 when the groundbreaking Anita Hill-Clarence Thomas investigation riveted a nation.
Now the woman best known for bringing Washington to its knees each week as the go-to Beltway fixer in the ABC hit "Scandal" finds herself playing the woman who shook up the political class in HBO's "Confirmation."
Washington portrays Hill in the film that covers the 1991 monumental sexual harassment allegations that changed the way we talk about victims rights and race relations. Hill, a young African American law professor, was thrust into the spotlight after she accused her former boss and Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas (Wendell Pierce) of sexual harassment.
Josie Pickens counters a recent opinion piece disputing the #BlackGirlMagic hashtag. Ebony: How Elle Misses the Point of #BlackGirlMagic.
Although my mother didn’t call me magic, she did tell me every chance she got that I was special and worthy and full of somebody-ness. What I believe was missing from my conversations with my mother, and what I try to add to the talks I have with my daughter, is that we, Black girls and women, are enough. That our lives and our pain matter, that we don’t have to work and cook and clean and fight and give until we are mentally emotionally and physically bankrupt. That we can be none or all of what we have learned Black women should be, and that regardless of who we choose to become, we still shimmer like the sun.
If I were to answer Elle writer Linda Shavers’s question about whether Black women calling themselves magic takes away some of our ordinary humanity, I’d say that the opposite is true. If we taught Black women we are magic just as we stand, that we don’t have to be some fictitious, perfect mix of saint and vixen, down chick and goal chaser, successful, high-earning housewife and PTO president—if we didn’t expect Black women to be so much of everything to everyone but ourselves—then the Black superwoman schema would not exist.
But that is not what we do. We teach Black women that our magic is a goal—a destination instead of something we are born with. As a community, it seems we agree with the world when it says Black women are the opposite of beautiful or desirable or even kind. The world covets and exalts what Black women fashion out of little to nothing, then refuses to acknowledge the origin of [insert amazing thing that is commodified]. Collard greens are the rave now, and so are fat asses, and goddess braids, and baby hairs, and full lips—as long as none of them are donned by Black women.
To be adored yet abhorred in the countless way Black women are, to be told over and over again that we are unwanted and unvalued and plain ugly, and still strut through life as we do… baby if that ain’t magic, I don’t know what is.
#Blackgirlsaremagic upholds the humanity of Black women and Black girls, it doesn’t subtract from it. Dr. Yaba Blay, Dan Blue endowed chair in political science at North Carolina Central University and creator of #PrettyPeriod, agrees.
In less than two weeks, former Oklahoma City Police Officer Daniel Holtzclaw will be sentenced for the rapes and sexual assaults of seven black women and one black child. And if this is to be a rare instance in which Lady Justice holds black women in her unfamiliar embrace, he will serve 263 years in prison.
Justice, however—no matter how poetic the vengeance may seem in theory, no matter how primal the violence may taste tickling the tongue—is never rape. Despite popular opinion, we do not get to pick and choose when rape is acceptable, nor which victims are respectable. We do not get to joke about “Don’t drop the soap” and “Big Leroy,” then pretend to fight against the stereotypical depictions of black men as savages deserving of the state-sanctioned terror inflicted upon them.
We do not get to find joy in black men serving as white devils by proxy, willing to rape any vulnerable inmate in their paths in the interest of “justice,” then feign concern about the complete eradication of rape culture.
Rape culture, a culture that promotes the systemic devaluation of bodies that have been sexually assaulted; a culture that houses, encourages and protects the triggering and blaming of its victims; a culture that thrives on misogyny, homophobia and abusive power. Rape culture thrives behind prison walls across this country, and it’s a conversation that needs to be tackled unflinchingly, not wrapped in the punch lines and pathology that we’ve either grown accustomed to or grown accustomed to ignoring.
Human Rights Watch estimates that approximately 140,000 men have been raped behind bars, largely by other male inmates, despite the passage of the Prison Rape Elimination Act of 2003 (pdf). Still, despite the disproportionate number of black men who are targeted on the streets by racist policing tactics—see: the recent New York Times report that found that 1.5 million black men are missing from society, in large part because of mass incarceration—black men rarely view themselves as potential victims of sexual violence.
On a cold New York afternoon, heavily armed police stood suspiciously close to people who weren’t scary. Another example of how black unarmed protesters are treated differently than white armed “protesters”. EBONY: Are Haitian Picket Signs a Terrorist Threat?
The most peculiar thing took place in midtown Manhattan Tuesday – peculiar and unnecessary.
Fewer than a dozen people, most of them seemingly middle aged or older, stood on a sidewalk on Avenue of the Americas right across the street from Radio City Music Hall. They brandished picket signs protesting what they say is mismanagement of funds that were supposed to go to the victims of Haiti’s devastating earthquake in 2010.
They passed out fliers, spoke to passersby, chanted, but really didn’t seem to be disturbing the normal ebb and flow of a typical busy New York afternoon.
A few feet away, behind metal barricades stood four NYPD officers, three of which were wearing protective armor and armed with automatic assault rifles.
It gave me pause as I happened upon the scene because I couldn’t help but think of the many times I’ve seen demonstrations of all types on this very street over the years.
I’ve seen hundreds march the street in pro-Israel and pro-Palestinian demonstrations. The Free Tibet movement has also been a regular fixture there, as well as countless environmental protests, Greek austerity demonstrations, people shouting down the occupation of the Ukraine by Russia. If there’s an issue in this world, rest assured people have marched on this street to make their voices heard.
Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders and Martin O’Malley answered pointed race questions from Fusion at the oldest people-of-color focused presidential debate in the country. Color Lines: Dem Presidential Hopefuls Talked White Privilege, Deportation, Diversity at Iowa Forum.
Plenty of race questions were on the table when Democratic presidential candidates Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders and Martin O’Malley sat down for the Iowa Black and Brown Forum last night, January 11, at Drake University in Des Moines.
The moderators from news site Fusion, got right down to business when one asked O’Malley why more than 80 percent of his campaign staff is White. He responded with the (irrelevant) fact that he had a diverse staff back when he was mayor of Baltimore and governor of Maryland.
Clinton was put in the hot seat when moderator Jorge Ramos asked her if she'd commit to stopping the deportations of Central American children fleeing drug gang violence in their home countries. “I can’t sit here and tell you I have a blanket rule,” the former Secretary of State responded. “Let me say this. I will give every person, but particularly children, due process to have their story told.”
Sanders clearly stood out as the crowd favorite. He had the audience on its feet with talk of “political revolution," “radical ideas” and government-funded college tuition for all. When asked if Black people are justified in their mistrust of police officers, Sanders responded, “Do I think the Black community has a right to be nervous and apprehensive about police? Absolutely.”
The largest hydroelectric project in Africa (The Grand RENAISSANCE Dam) has so far produced only discord. The Economist: Egypt, Sudan and Ethiopia are struggling to share the Nile.
A sense of mistrust hangs over the dam’s ultimate use. Ethiopia insists that it will produce only power and that the water pushing its turbines (less some evaporation during storage) will ultimately come out the other side. But Egypt fears it will also be used for irrigation, cutting downstream supply. Experts are sceptical. “It makes no technological or economic sense [for Ethiopia] to irrigate land with that water”, as it would involve pumping it back upstream, says Kenneth Strzepek of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
A more legitimate concern is over the dam’s large reservoir. If filled too quickly, it might for a time significantly reduce Egypt’s water supply and affect the electricity-generating capacity of its own Aswan Dam. But the Ethiopian government faces pressure to see a quick return on its investment. The project, which is mostly self-funded, costs $4.8 billion.
Some experts say filling the reservoir could take seven years. But “having a fixed time to fill it may not be the best way to do it, because there can be extremely dry years and extremely wet years,” says Kevin Wheeler of Oxford University. He recommends releasing a fixed amount of water from the dam each year, leaving the reservoir to fill at a pace set by nature.
A potential wild card in the negotiations is Sudan, which long sided with Egypt in opposition to the dam, some 20km from its border. But as the potential benefits to Sudan have become clear, it has backed Ethiopia.
Short on energy itself, Sudan will receive some of the power produced by the dam. By stabilising the Nile’s flow, it will also allow Sudan to prevent flooding, consume more water and increase agricultural output (once old farming methods are updated). Currently much of the country’s allocation of water under the 1959 treaty is actually consumed by Egyptians. To their chagrin, the river will no longer gush past their southern neighbours during monsoon season and end up in Lake Nasser, the huge reservoir behind the Aswan Dam.
How much water Sudan uses in the future, and other variables such as changes in rainfall and water quality, should determine how the dam is operated. That will require more co-operation and a willingness to compromise. Disagreement between Egypt and Sudan over such things as the definition of “significant harm” bodes ill. But all three countries will benefit if they work together, claims Mr Strzepek, citing the dam’s capacity to store water for use in drought years and its potential to produce cheap energy for export (once transmission lines are built).