I Think the Kids Are Gonna Be OK
Commentary by Chitown Kev
I have talked at great length here at Black Kos about The Black Church generally, and the role of The Black Church (and all churches, really) in American political culture, specifically.
I’m simply not comfortable with the extent of the involvement of the church in black political and civic life. Sometimes, it seems as if political candidates don’t even acknowledge that a black political and civic life exists outside of the church. Whenever the local news covers something or another on the South Side of Chicago (usually a shooting), you don’t even have to count to ten before some camera-hogging pastor shows up on the television screen.
I’m sure that many of us can increase that list.
Having said that, I understand and get why The Black Church remains the iconic institution of African-American communities that it does. As I stated in my 1/27/15 commentary:
...The Black Church is still the primary place (at least as far as “bricks and mortar” are concerned) where black people (and others) can go for “acceptance, healing, and to feel good about themselves in a hostile world.”
I can’t think of a secular “integrated” institution within American society that offers that degree of safety or understanding. Not to black people.
To be sure, not every black person within the “safe space” of the church is exactly “safe”; indeed, there is no such thing as a 100% safe space.
And that’s doubly true for spaces that carry the veneer of being “racially integrated.”
These were among the reasons that I greeted Atlantic correspondent Emma Green’s March 22 article titled Black Activism, Unchurched with my usual combination of skepticism and cynicism...but also with a smile.
But in the black- and youth-led political activism of the last several years, the church hasn’t been nearly as visible as it was in the civil-rights movement of the 1960s. After many decades in which the most prominent black activists were ministers, religious leaders seem to be playing supporting roles in the most recent wave of activism. In Baltimore, this is particularly stark. Nearly a year ago, the city saw widespread riots and political outcry after the death of Freddie Gray, a 25-year-old man who died of spinal injuries while in the custody of police. The long vibrant local activist community caught national attention, including a widely shared moment in the conflict when community leaders stood shoulder-to-shoulder with gang members in a northwest Baltimore church. In an earlier generation, Baltimore’s churches might have been the primary staging grounds for organizing protests and political action. Increasingly, though, the church is more of a backdrop.
This was evident even during the Ferguson protests of 2014 when prominent church leaders like Jesse Jackson were, if anything, shunned by some of the Ferguson protestors; a fact that was not lost on one of the Baltimore religious leaders that was on the scene in Ferguson, Jamal Bryant:
Even Bryant—a fairly prominent figure in national protest movements, who was arrested in Ferguson and briefly mounted a campaign for Congress in September—sees a limit to his leadership in this movement. “The difference between the Black Lives Matter movement and the civil-rights movement is that the civil-rights movement, by and large, was first out of the church. The Black Lives Matter movement, largely speaking, is not,” he said. “The church is having to readjust: How do you become a part of something you don’t lead?”
My first thought on reading this somewhat pompously phrased rhetorical question of Mr. Bryant’s was, “Well, I’ve always been told to get in where you fit in and, besides, who’s asking you to lead, sir?”
Much like previous generations, this generation of young black activists seems tired of black respectability politics; a kind of politics that, perhaps, is best exemplified within the institution of the church.
I will confess that one thing that put a smile to face and, in many respects, distinguishes the newer generation of black activists from other youth activism that I have read of is the gratitude and respect the newer generation has for their elders while, at the same time, criticizing them as needed.
At least in this city, the “intergenerational beef,” as another organizer called it, between young activists and their elders might be trumped up. “The people who were organizing in the ’60s—we call them our OGs,” Gilliam-Price said. These were the men and women who stood at the front of protests against discrimination in schools, organized rallies after the death of Martin Luther King Jr., and sat at the tables of voter-registration drives. “Organizing through the churches made sense,” said Musgrove, the UMBC professor. Groups like the NAACP tapped into the money and large communities of congregations, and “they were able to run a lot of the campaigns for desegregation for public facilities in downtown Baltimore—from right after World War II all the way until the sit-ins at Morgan.”
The OGs of political activism were church people, but Gilliam-Price and many of her peers are not. Religion is “just not me,” she said. She had harsh words for a class of pastors, including Jamal Bryant, whom she referred to as “poverty pimps”—“nominal church leaders who are definitely just out there for their names and for their brands,” she said. “I went to a protest in Freddie Gray’s neighborhood in Gilmor Homes, and there was a pastor marching with his Instagram handle on his shirt. Church leaders have been exploiting this movement for everything that it has.”
Yes, these young activist black men and women profiled by Ms. Green are giving proper (and due and overdue) respect to their “OGs”: something that I don’t typically see with other youth activism, say in, the LGBT movement, by and large (online and offline). Yet they’re not exactly thirsting for the “leadership” that Mr. Bryant seems so eager to provide; instead, they are looking for models of leadership to emulate and to try on their own terms as opposed to terms already esteemed to be “proper.”
And like the “OGs,” they will win some battles and lose others. Some have and/or will find their vocations in this work be it as elected officials, lifelong activists, artists, or maybe even as clergy, themselves.
These young activists will be all right. And so will we.
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News round up by dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor
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In "The South Side: A Portrait of Chicago and American Segregation,” reporter Natalie Y. Moore explores why Black neighborhoods in her city remain segregated, regardless of class. Color Lines: 'The South Side' Offers a New Take on an Old Problem: Segregation
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The South Side is a magical place, writes Natalie Y. Moore in her new book, “The South Side: A Portrait of Chicago and American Segregation.” The WBEZ South Side Bureau reporter reminds readers that alongside Chicago’s storied architecture, dynamic skyline and vibrant culture, the vestiges of 20th Century redlining, bad mortgages, racial steering and failed school policies continue to impact many South Side communities. More than half of the Black population in Chicago live in only 20 of the city’s 77 communities, and Moore illustrates the ways housing segregation touches the lives of South Siders, from employment to food access to education to violence.
In “The South Side,” Moore interweaves academic expertise, reporting and personal narrative resulting in an accessible work that puts modern segregation under a microscope. We spoke with Moore about her book, which came out yesterday (March 22).
You’ve wrote, “Black residents in Baltimore and Ferguson, Missouri, have taken to the streets not just to protest the deaths of Freddie Gray and Michael Brown at the hands of police. Those two locales have something in common with[B]lack Chicago communities and other [B]lack urban areas: state sponsored segregation.” How?
Twentieth-century housing policies linger today, and they’re why our neighborhoods look the way they do. Take redlining, for example, how no one moves out of Black neighborhoods. You might have immigrants who are in a neighborhood and then they move up and out and another group comes in. That doesn’t happen in Black neighborhoods. The government encouraged White flight by building expressways to the suburbs and favoring loans to the suburbs that were all White. With White flight, you had the sucking of resources out of Black neighborhoods. You have these Black communities, particularly in the Northeast and Midwest, that became stuck.
Based on your reporting, how is race—not class—the pulse that keeps segregation alive in the South Side of Chicago?
Middle- and upper-class Black people who live in these neighborhoods are affected. You can earn $100,000 a year and still live in a food desert. You can buy a house and be upwardly mobile, but if you’re in a Black neighborhood you’re going to have the Black tax where goods and services nearby are more expensive and you may lack city services that other neighborhoods have.
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Most recognized for her role as Michonne on The Walking Dead, the Yale grad is also creating theatrical opportunities for women of African descent to shine. The Root: As a Playwright, Danai Gurira Gives Voice to African Women.
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The Walking Dead fans have known her as badass Michonne since she joined the AMC show’s third season in 2012, but Danai Gurira was an important, emerging playwright even prior to her television stardom. Although born in the U.S. to parents from then-Rhodesia, Gurira returned to the new nation of Zimbabwe at a young age.
And it is Africa—the voice of African women specifically—that fuels her plays. Eclipsed, her best-known creation to date, about Liberian women during the war there—is currently on Broadway and has generated lots of attention, largely because of Oscar winner Lupita Nyong’o’s role in the bold work. The Root caught up with Gurira to talk Eclipsed, Lupita, creating opportunities for other African actresses, playing Afeni Shakur in the Tupac biopic, what attracted her to Michonne and her off-Broadway play, Familiar.
The Root: When did you develop Eclipsed and why?
Danai Gurira: I started writing Eclipsed in, like, 2008. All my plays are about women on the [African] continent or women from the continent. So this was a subject that [matched] my artistic mandate, which is about giving voice to African women through my work. ... I was in grad school, and [there] was an article in the New York Times about women who were rebel fighters during the Liberian War ... and I had just never seen an image of African women that looked like that. ... little cute jeans and pumps and really cute hairdos, but AK-47s on their backs; very formidable women of war.
I had grown up in southern Africa, but I had never seen anything like that because I was not anywhere near western Africa, where this was happening. I was very much about celebrating the specificity of the continent, so I wanted to learn more about those African women, which led me to go to Liberia, do a lot of research and meet women, learn a lot, and create the narrative that ended up being Eclipsed.
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Comedian Chris Rock and feminist writer, bell hooks have something in common.
Both have the ability to answer grave misrepresentations of the Black experience with piercing retorts. Both came to mind after reading a recent article (“We’ve Officially Reached Peak Fried Chicken Sandwich Mania”) in Bon Appetit’s first-ever Culture Issue, in which the popular food magazine extended a barrage of accolades for the concept of the fried chicken sandwich, extolling honors from the “sandwich of the year” to the “sandwich of the millennium.”
Respectfully, the article includes a recent historic timeline of the fried chicken sandwich, various reviews and references to several chain restaurant offerings, but not one mention of Black chefs, restaurants or family traditions. Instead, fast food chicken franchise, Chick-fil-A’s late founder, S. Truett Cathy, is credited for providing the very first fried chicken sandwich in the 1960s, completely disregarding and disrespecting the same fried chicken sandwich our parents and grandparents grew up enjoying many decades before and subsequently passed down in soulful appreciation.
As a lifelong fan of fried chicken and fried chicken sandwiches, my inner cultural critic sent me to the Black newspaper archives to prove this article wrong. There, I found several rebuttals to any Chick-Fil-A invention, including a small ad in Topeka’s Kansas Whip newspaper for a fried chicken sandwich special featured at the Booker T Café all the way back in 1936.
Why have so many Black influences and contributions been erased from America’s culinary repertoire? Perhaps the answer can be found in bell hook’s 1992 essay, Black Looks: Race and Representation Within Consumer Culture, where she says, “…ethnicity becomes seasoning to spice up the dull white palate. It is something to be eaten, consumed and quickly forgotten.”
It’s easy to dismiss something thought to be as insignificant as chicken, but University of Maryland professor, Psyche Williams-Forson said it best in her award-winning book, Building Houses Out of Chicken Legs: Black Women, Food and Power. “Objects are politicized by the meanings inscribed in their uses and associations historically and contemporarily. This is particularly salient to an object like chicken that is perceived to be generic in its uses among many races and ethnicities of people. The meaning that chicken holds for Black people are as diverse as they are.”
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As more and more sickle cell patients are living into adulthood, options for care are limited by the lack of medical expertise and a disrespect for those who suffer from the illness. The Root: How Race, Economics Affect Treatment of Adult Sickle Cell Anemia.
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When Janoi Burgess was a child, he thought doctor appointments were fun.
“I used to love it because they had a section where you could play games,” said Burgess, who was born with sickle cell anemia, an inherited blood disorder. “They were really nice and friendly.”
But when he turned 21, the South Florida resident could no longer go to his pediatric specialist. Instead, he “bounced around” to various adult primary care doctors, none of whom seemed well-versed in the details of his condition. When he had a painful sickle cell crisis two years later, his only choice was to go to a hospital emergency department, where, he says, he waited three hours for pain medication.
“They triage you based on severity, and pain is not something that they consider as severe” as other conditions, he recently recalled. “One doctor even said, ‘Your labs are OK so you’re not in pain.’ It was crazy and insulting at the same time.”
“Some people with sickle cell disease are actually living to be elderly, and the majority of patients are adults,” said Dr. Wally Smith of the Virginia Commonwealth University Medical Center. “We don’t have a health care system ready for that.”
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The abduction of about 270 school girls by Islamic militants from a school in Chibok on 14 April 2014, sparked international outrage and the campaign #bringbackourgirls. While about 50 of the girls managed to escape, 219 of these girls remain missing.
Military and local government sources on Friday reported that one of two girls arrested in northern Cameroon carrying explosives claimed to be one of the missing Chibok schoolgirls.
The girls were arrested after being stopped by local self-defence forces in Limani near the border with Nigeria that has been the target of frequent suicide bombings in recent months.
“We hope that the Chibok parents will be able to identify the girl and determine whether she is indeed one of their missing students,” Shehu said on Saturday.
Shehu said the government was keen to ascertain the girl’s identity so she can be brought back to Nigeria and possibly assist the government in investigations regarding the fate and whereabouts of the other missing Chibok girls.
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Voices and Soul
by
Justice Putnam
Black Kos Poetry Editor
The City of New Orleans suffered a decreasing population long before Hurricane Katrina displaced over a quarter of its residents. Residential segregation between 1900 and 1980 caused its poorer citizens to reside in low lying areas within the parish, making them even more susceptible to storm surges and flooding; and inevitable displacement. Also, after decades of a heavy reliance on oil and tourism, coupled with a steady migration for jobs to surrounding parishes, has seen the city shrink over 80 per cent of what it was in the early 1900’s.
Local programs though, enacted long after the hurricane, has fortunately resulted in the city’s population growing by almost 10,000 each year since the 2010 census.
Chocolate City may once again sashay in unbridled celebration to its exalted history.
It's all foreplay, really-this walk through the French Quarter exploring souvenir shops, each of them carefully deranged, as if dust were to settle
only at perfect intervals. Yes to the vetiver fan
that smells sweeter than sandalwood or cedar.
No to the mammy doll dinner bells.
No to the mammy dolls whose sewn smiles are as fixed
as the lives of too many poor Black women here:
motherhood at twelve, drugged, abandoned by fifteen,
dead by twenty (suicide, murder) so easily in Desire.
And yet, their voices sweeten the snaking air, providing the transvestites their proper Muses, all of whom have streets named for them in the Garden District.
A soft heat settles on Terpsichore, just inside the gay bar where the owner's pink flamingos complement silly songs on the rescued Rockola. Who can dance to that Lorne Greene ballad, "Ringo"?
Dixie beer is the beer of choice; marijuana the cheapest drug. Relaxation is key, since it's all a matter of waiting for the right body to stumble toward you.
Lust perfumes parties in the projects, barstool chatter at the Hyatt,
lazy kissing on the median strip stretching down Tchoupitoulas.
If Professor Longhair were alive, he'd teach a lesson in seamless motion: the perfect slide of a man's hand down a woman's back;
a lesson you learned long ago before you met me. We are making love as we did before in Austin and Manhattan. But in this room on this costly bed our lovemaking starts out the slowest grind, then, like this city's weather, goes from hot to hotter, from moist to rainstorm wet.
You're tall, A., and where there should be tribal markings there are scars-football, basketball, mid-sixties grind parties where something always got out of hand. There's the perfect
amen. You're your own gospel.
And you bring good news to me-the way you enter me
Like grace, the way you say my name, a psalm.
No. That's not it. It's the engineer in you that
gets me. Your search for the secret line that goes
straight to the center of the earth. Deeper and deeper you go until there's no earth left in me. And we hum and moan a song as old as our selves gone back.
There are too many souvenirs in your eyes. Gifts given too often, too hastily, never opened.
Outside a city sprawls its heat, seeks out every pore, licks every moment of sweat as we shiver in this chilly room taking each other's measure. We say good-bye again and again. As if every kiss, every touch we make will shadow All our celebrations.
And they do.
-- Patricia Spear Jones
"Encounter and Farewell"
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Welcome to the Tuesday’s porch