On Colin Kaepernick...and that other announcement…
Commentary by Chitown Kev
Originally, today’s commentary was going to be about a change that I will be making in my bi-weekly commentaries. That announcement will still take place (albeit briefly) but I have a few thoughts that I would like to share about San Francisco 49er quarterback Colin Kaepernick and his political stance regarding his decision to sit for the national anthem.
1) Well...as a sports fan, I do have to say that there is one very noticeable difference between Kaepernick’s protest and the Tommie Smith/Juan Carlos Black Power protest at the 1968 Olympic Games an Muhammad Ali’s stance against the Vietnam War.
The Smith/Carlos protest took place from the medal ceremony itself (Smith won a gold medal and Carlos won a bronze medal in the 200-meter race).
When Muhammad Ali was denied his boxing license for refusing to be drafted by the Army, Ali was heavyweight champion of the world.
At the present time, Kaepernick has expressed a desire to be traded and is battling for the starting job in San Francisco...I guess.
I fully support Kaepernick’s actions with regard to his sitting for the national anthem, of course. However, questioning Kaepernick’s motivations for his doing so at this time in his NFL career is also fair. Had Kaepernick done this during the period he quarterbacked the 49ers to three NFC Championship Games and a Super Bowl, then the comparisons to Smith, Carlos and Ali would make more sense.
At least to this sports fan.
Having said that…
2) If anyone had taken a good look at Mr. Kaepernick’s social media then his actions would be much less of a surprise. Given the recent and frequent news stories coming out of San Francisco regarding the racist and homophobic police, no one shouldn’t be surprised that Kaepernick is increasingly becoming outspoken; after all, Twitter feed has been speaking out and retweeting links concerning police violence against African Americans (Shaun King is a favorite of Kaepernick’s, I see) ...no one was really paying attention to it….even some of the Hill-folk here at Daily Kos are clutching their pearls and are shocked, I tell you, SHOCKED, by how Kaepernick really feels…
3)
I don’t agree with Mr. Kaepernick about Hillary’s e-mails.
I kind of feel him (but don’t quite agree) on the “super-predator” comments and, in fact, Mr. Kaepernick and I probably strongly agree on Clinton’s 2008 campaign.
I don’t appreciate comments like ”I could piss on him” for his commentary on Clinton (and I did read that here at DK) or that he needs to be educated about Hillary’s saintliness any more than I appreciate being told that some of Hillary’s actions in 2008 were a media fabrication (hmmmmm....) or that I need to “get over it.”
Hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of people feel the same way about the presidential candidates that Colin Kaepernick does. Last I heard, I didn’t think that African Americans are voting for Hillary Clinton to become the Empress of Black Folks; they are voting for Hillary Clinton out of their own self-interest and policy concerns at this time in history.
Don’t get it twisted.
I have a few African-American acquaintances and one really good friend that feel exactly as Kaepernick does.
To my knowledge, most of my acquaintances are voting for Clinton in spite of their own misgivings about her.
The views of African Americans on political matters runs the gamut.
One of the reasons that I have greatly appreciated a couple of posts by a certain Kossack (whom I won’t name or link to) is that he has gone out there and done the voter registration work in black communities and heard things that I don’t think that he expected to hear...he’s got a bit of the flavor that hear quite frequently.
I greatly appreciate Colin Kaepernick’s continued pushing and striving to become “woke” even if I don’t (and probably won’t) agree with some of what he says or does. I stand with him because he’s making the effort (with some errors in judgment, in my opinion). And he is helping to lift others up in doing so. And that deserves to be applauded under any circumstance.
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Whew! I didn’t think that I had that much to say about this so this next part will be short.
I was really inspired by Miss Denise’s front-page post on Ethel Payne and black journalists.
And I really enjoy sephius1’s Friday posts on African American scientists, inventors, and mathematicians…
So, I thought, why not do the same for African American journalism and journalists with a focus on the black press; not only the people doing the work, but the events that they covered (and sometimes the takes on the same events covered in the white press were VERY different.)
So starting in two weeks, that is what my commentaries every other Tuesday commentaries will focus on; the history and even current goings-on in the African American press and with African American journalists.
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News round up by dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor
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For the past few years, criminal justice policy has widely been considered an area ripe for reform from Democrats and Republicans. They want to make the system less punitive and pull back mass incarceration — a rare show of bipartisanship in an increasingly polarized political climate.
Then came Donald Trump.
On the campaign trail, the Republican presidential candidate has been somewhat of an enigma on criminal justice issues. Trump's website includes no platform on criminal justice issues. Reform advocates have long complained to me that they have trouble getting in touch with his campaign to get an idea of his views. And despite some vague remarks here and there, he's almost never talked at length about what he thinks about criminal justice issues. (His campaign didn't get back to me for this piece.)
But there are some big clues about what kind of policies President Trump would pursue — and none of them are good for reform.
To gauge this, I looked at Trump's comments over the past few decades, particularly his 2000 book, The America We Deserve, which has perhaps his clearest statements on criminal justice policy. I also looked at Trump's advisers — the people most likely to influence his thinking on criminal justice issues. And I looked at the few comments Trump has made on the campaign trail regarding these issues.
A clear trend emerged: Trump would very likely be "tough on crime" — he would very likely back tougher prison sentences and invasive policing practices, and would likely continue the more punitive aspects of the war on drugs.
To some degree, this isn't too surprising: Trump is an authoritarian strongman, so it makes sense that his approach to this issue, as with immigration and national security, would be to act as tough as possible. And he lived in New York City in the 1970s, '80s, and '90s, when the city was engulfed by violent crime — a time period that likely influenced his views.
Still, it shows that for all the discussion in media and politics about bipartisan criminal justice reform, the candidate for president on one side appears far from interested in making the criminal justice system less punitive. Here are three major pieces of evidence that demonstrate this point.
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THe COUNTRY with the 3rd largest population of people of african descent in the Americas has A chance to become a normal country. The Economist: Colombia’s peace accord, Unlearning war.
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GNARLED beams and splinters of wood are all that remain of many houses in Toribío, a town high in the Andes that saw some of the worst of the violence in Colombia’s war against the FARC, a left-wing guerrilla army. On one dwelling’s surviving wall graffiti in bold yellow letters reads: “I hate your war.” Over its 52 years, perhaps 220,000 Colombians died and 7m were displaced.
Now Latin America’s longest-running military conflict is over. On August 24th negotiators representing Colombia’s government and the FARC announced that they had reached a final agreement after four years of talks in Havana. Although violence subsided in recent years, especially after the FARC declared a unilateral ceasefire in 2015, the war’s formal end will allow Colombia at last to become a normal country, and to focus its attention on improving the lives of its 48m citizens. “Today marks the beginning of the end of the suffering, the pain and the tragedy of war,” said Colombia’s president, Juan Manuel Santos.
Now he will ask congress to convoke a plebiscite on October 2nd to seek voters’ approval. Meanwhile, the FARC will hold their tenth, and presumably last, congress as an armed group before transforming themselves into a non-violent political party. Mr Santos, and the FARC’s top commander, Rodrigo Londoño-Echeverry (known as “Timochenko”), will sign the agreement, probably towards the end of September. Even before the plebiscite, the FARC’s 6,500 troops and 8,500 militia will gather in 23 designated zones and begin handing their weapons to UN observers.
Some of the six points covered by the pact gave negotiators little trouble. They agreed years ago on programmes to foster development in rural regions, where poverty is rife and infrastructure is inadequate. The accord widens opportunities for small political movements, such as the FARC, to participate in elections. The FARC has committed itself to dismantling drug-trafficking operations, which channelled billions of dollars to the insurgents over the past 30 years, and to discouraging the cultivation of coca, the raw material for cocaine.
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Dozens of angry young men jumped off a truck in front of Agrippah Mutambara’s gate, shouting obscenities and threatening to seize his 530-acre farm in the name of Zimbabwe’s president. They tried to scale the fence, scattering only when he raised and cocked his gun.
Zimbabwe made international headlines when it started seizing white-owned farms in 2000. But Mr. Mutambara is not a white farmer. Far from it, he is a hero of this country’s war of liberation who served as Zimbabwe’s ambassador to three nations over two decades.
But when he defected from President Robert Mugabe’s party to join the opposition a few months ago, he immediately put his farm at risk.
“When it was happening to the whites, we thought we were redressing colonial wrongs,” said Mr. Mutambara, 64, who got his farm after it had been seized from a white farmer. “But now we realize it’s also coming back to us. It’s also haunting us.”
Zimbabwe is suffering one of its worst economic crises in years. Banks have run out of cash. The government is struggling to pay its workers. Public protests, including one in July that shut down the capital and a united show of force by the nation’s biggest opposition figures on Friday, have rattled Mr. Mugabe’s government.
Desperately seeking loans, Zimbabwean officials have visited Washington and European capitals in recent months, swallowing years of resentment toward the West to promise economic and political reforms, including ending the tortured pattern of farm seizures. Even Mr. Mugabe, now 92 years old and increasingly frail, has pledged to compensate white farmers.
But despite the promises, prized farms are at the center of heated political infighting in Zimbabwe. As the battle to succeed Mr. Mugabe intensifies, dozens of political figures who have fallen out of favor, like Mr. Mutambara, are facing the seizure of their farms. With the economy in peril and the governing party split in a scramble for power, land is being used as a vital tool in the struggle for control.
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w do great romances start? In most cases, especially in the days before the internet, there’s a meeting, a mutual attraction or interest, followed up by a first date. And that’s where we find Barack (Parker Sawyers) and Michelle Obama (Tika Sumpter) in the new film Southside With You.
Writer-director Richard Tanne’s imagination fills in the blanks of the Obamas’ actual first date to offer a believable picture of what that initial outing might have been like for the professional colleagues who would, years later, become the first African-American president and first lady.
There is a visit to an art exhibit, a movie, ice cream and a bit of tension, and not just the kind caused by attraction. A young Barack tries to hide his smoking habit at first, and Michelle is adamant about maintaining the lines of professionalism. The conflict, a mandatory element of any rom-com worth the popcorn, only serves to make their final kiss goodnight that much sweeter.
Along the way, there are four notable elements that make Southside With You a film that sets itself apart from other romances:
Black Culture on Display
Pay attention and there’s a lot of African-American culture to soak up in the movie, which features songs by Janet Jackson, Slick Rick, Al B. Sure and Soul II Soul as its backdrop. The couple also discusses artists like Gwendolyn Brooks and Ernie Barnes. There are also shoutouts to Spike Lee and Stevie Wonder.
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Discussing this election is a challenge even for people whose lifeblood is elections, because so many of its participants and observers react to the introduction of clarity as if it were foreign tissue.
Speaking in Reno, Nevada, on Thursday, Hillary Clinton laid out in painstaking detail all the ways Donald Trump is mainstreaming racial hatred in the country, and facilitating the white-nationalist right’s efforts to supplant the leadership of Republican Party.
“This is what I want to make clear today,” she said. “A man with a long history of racial discrimination, who traffics in dark conspiracy theories drawn from the pages of supermarket tabloids and the far reaches of the internet, should never run our government or command our military.”
Clinton’s comments hit pretty close to the mark, but the subject matter made them extraordinary, and thus alien—unconformed to the conventions of partisan campaigning.
Consider these blinkered responses from across the political system.
- Anticipating the speech, the Associated Press compared her plan to note Trump’s actual embrace of a real fringe movement to Trump-camp conspiracy theories like birtherism. “Clinton has largely avoided discussing the conspiracies, leaving it to members of her campaign team or allies. But she is preparing a Reno, Nevada, address on Thursday that will accuse Trump of supporting an “alt-right” campaign that presents “a divisive and dystopian view of America.”
- Trump himself attempted to neutralize Clinton’s detailed critique by repeatedly calling her a “bigot” who takes minority votes for granted.
- Faced with dueling but by no means equivalent accusations of racism, The Washington Post threw up its hands and declared itself unable to adjudicate the he-said-she-said: “Clinton, Trump exchange racially charged accusations.”
- Most tellingly, Republican Party leaders, who would normally be called upon to defend their nominee, said nothing. Not a word. A tacit admission that her critique captured something very real.
Silence was effectively the only option available to these Republicans. Disputing Clinton’s premise or any of her particulars would have drawn them into a losing debate over whether she had the goods on Trump, which she did. But this deer-in-headlights moment also grew out of something less pragmatic: Trump’s undisguised bigotries have robbed conservatives of the standard defenses they’d normally mount on behalf of a Republican standard bearer accused of racism.
Clinton’s efforts to reach anti-Trump Republicans is working, but only by positing a pre-Trump paradigm that overstates his novelty. Trump’s only defenders last week were himself and his truest believers. But the nature of their responses was so familiar that it likely made anti-Trump Republicans uncomfortable.
Voices and Soul
by
Justice Putnam
Black Kos Poetry Editor
Colin Kaepernick grew up in the Sacramento area of California and was routinely stopped by police for being black, even after his $20 Million dollar contract. When he made his silent protest by not standing for the jingoistic practice of the National Anthem during this year's preseason football games, the wrath of the usual suspects was palpable. Police Unions demanded he apologize, thus proving part of Kaepernick's criticisms. The Military pays the NFL millions to capitalize on the Patriotism brand, and Colin is ruining that. The common garden-variety racists stupidly spent over $130 for each Kaepernick jersey to burn.
Yet, Kaepernick is accused of not knowing what he is talking about. He is accused because he is not black enough, he is too rich, he is just a jock and jocks don't know shit.
Colin Kaepernick knows what he is talking about because Colin Kaepernick is The Lone German.
The Lone German's silent protest has a sad postscript, though. After his refusal to click his heels and yell "zieg heil" with a raised right arm, his Jewish wife and daughter were apprehended and later gassed. He was conscripted against his will into the infantry, and a month later, went mysteriously Missing in Action in Croatia.
Colin Kaepernick knows EXACTLY what he is talking about.
in the backseat of my car are my own sons, still not yet Tamir’s age, already having heard me warn them against playing with toy pistols, though my rhetoric is always about what I don’t like, not what I fear, because sometimes I think of Tamir Rice & shed tears, the weeping
all another insignificance, all another way to avoid
saying what should be said: the Second Amendment
is a ruthless one, the pomp & constitutional circumstance
that says my arms should be heavy with the weight
of a pistol when forced to confront death like
this: a child, a hidden toy gun, an officer that fires
before his heart beats twice. My two young sons play
in the backseat while the video of Tamir dying
plays in my head, & for everything I do know, the thing
I don’t say is that this should not be the brick and mortar
of poetry, the moment when a black father drives
his black sons to school & the thing in the air is the death
of a black boy that the father cannot mention,
because to mention the death is to invite discussion
of taboo: if you touch my sons the crimson
that touches the concrete must belong, at some point,
to you, the police officer who justifies the echo
of the fired pistol; taboo: the thing that says that justice
is a killer’s body mangled and disrupted by bullets
because his mind would not accept the narrative
of your child’s dignity, of his right to life, of his humanity,
and the crystalline brilliance you saw when your boys first breathed;
the narrative must invite more than the children bleeding
on crisp fall days; & this is why I hate it all, the people around me,
the black people who march, the white people who cheer,
the other brown people, Latinos & Asians & all the colors of humanity
that we erase in this American dance around death, as we
are not permitted to articulate the reasons we might yearn
to see a man die; there is so much that has to disappear
for my mind not to abandon sanity: Tamir for instance, everything
about him, even as his face, really and truly reminds me
of my own, in the last photo I took before heading off
to a cell, disappears, and all I have stomach for is blood,
and there is a part of me that wishes that it would go away,
the memories, & that I could abandon all talk of making it right & justice. But my mind is no sieve & sanity is no elixir & I am bound to be haunted by the strength that lets Tamir’s father, mother, kinfolk resist the temptation to turn everything they see into a grave & make home the series of cells that so many of my brothers already call their tomb.
-- Reginald Dwayne Betts
"When I Think of Tamir Rice While Driving"
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WELCOME TO THE TUESDAY’S PORCH