In his address to the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation Awards Dinner last Saturday night, the President said that he’d be personally offended if the community didn’t get out and vote this November. “A personal insult,” he said.
There’s no such thing as a vote that doesn’t matter. It all matters. And after we have achieved historic turnout in 2008 and 2012, especially in the African-American community, I will consider it a personal insult, an insult to my legacy, if this community lets down its guard and fails to activate itself in this election. (Applause.) You want to give me a good sendoff? Go vote. (Applause.) And I’m going to be working as hard as I can these next seven weeks to make sure folks do. (Applause.)
I watched the speech and thought that particular paragraph was powerful and deserved a standing ovation. I agreed wholeheartedly with the President. In the Live Blog we did for the speech, I saw not one critical comment. Imagine my surprise when I ventured from the relative safety of DailyKos and out into the wild, wild ‘net and found that people were offended — offended, I tell ya — that Mr. Obama would dare ask people to protect his legacy by voting for Sec. Clinton.
From what I saw, it was not members of the community who were spitting fire, but rather people who professed to be insulted on our behalf. People who sought to protect us from the big, bad, abusive Obama. “Emotional blackmail,” some fumed. "He thinks African American are children to be told who to vote for,” still others complained. Well, whaddya know? Thank you so much for your concern trolling.
For the record, the president has a right to want to protect his legacy. He’s done so much, but it would all be in vain if Donald J. Trump were to get his tiny-fingered, clammy little hands on the President's signing pens.
Together, we fought our way back from the worst recession in 80 years -- (applause) -- turned an economy that was in free fall, helped our businesses create more than 15 million new jobs. We declared that health care is not a privilege for a few, but a right for everybody -- (applause) -- secured coverage for another 20 million Americans, including another three million African Americans. Our high school graduation rate is at an all-time high, including for African-American students. More African-Americans are graduating from college than ever before. (Applause.)
Together, we’ve begun to work on reforming our criminal justice system -- reducing the federal prison population, ending the use of solitary confinement for juveniles, banning the box for federal employers, reinvigorating the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, pushing to make sure police and communities are working together to make sure that our streets are safe and that our law is applied equally. We’re giving opportunities for kids so that they don't get in the criminal justice system in the first place. And I want to thank all of you who’ve helped us reach nearly 250 My Brother’s Keeper communities across the country. (Applause.)
And just this week, we learned that last year, across every race and age group in America, incomes rose and poverty fell. Folks’ typical household incomes rose by about $2,800 -- which is the fastest growth rate on record. Lifted 3.5 million people out of poverty, including one million children -- the largest one-year drop in almost 50 years. (Applause.)
I’d say those are gains worth protecting, wouldn’t you? So thanks but no thanks for your concern, trolls. A vote for Hillary is a vote for Obama. A vote for Hillary is a thank-you note to Obama. A vote for Hillary ensures that the gains of the last eight years will be preserved and expanded upon.
So, say it again, Obama!
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I apologize everyone, I’m so used to publishing anything JoanMar writes and places in the queue (she still is a Black Kos editor emeritus) that I published her opening remarks prematurely yesterday. So here is here opening commentary republished in it’s entirety. Or as we say in Jamaica “so nice, we had to do it twice” — dopper0189
News round up by dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor
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President Barack Obama said if black voters fail to vote in sufficient numbers and Donald Trump wins the presidency, he will consider it a “personal insult Bloomberg: a Says It Will Be ‘Insult’ If Black Voters Don’t Turn
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At times raising his voice during an impassioned 25-minute speech, Obama sought to rally his most loyal supporters to elect Hillary Clinton as his successor.
Obama’s remarks came a day after Trump acknowledged that the president was born in the U.S. Without apologizing, the Republican presidential nominee reversed himself after years of promoting a conspiracy theory that Obama was born in Kenya.
Obama took the opportunity to mock Trump during the speech to the mostly black audience.
“I don’t know about you guys, but I am so relieved that the whole birther things is over,” the president said, smiling. “In other breaking news, the world is round, not flat.”
Obama also took aim at Trump’s outreach to black voters. Trump has spent much of the past month making overt attempts to reach out to black voters, often describing their lives in apocalyptic terms. He has said Democrats are responsible for the challenges in the urban communities.
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One senior film critic discusses the harsh reality that Hollywood still has a serious problem with most of black humanity. New York Times: Hollywood, Separate and Unequal
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When the academy unveiled its monochrome slate of acting nominees in January, a burst of activism followed, summed up by #OscarsSoWhite. The focus was on awards and the frustrating, infuriating homogeneity of American movies. Now, this fall brings the release of several high-profile features about African-Americans, including Ava DuVernay’s documentary “The 13th,” Nate Parker’s “The Birth of a Nation,” Barry Jenkins’s “Moonlight” and Denzel Washington’s “Fences.”
The existence of these movies is proof of progress in an industry that remains overwhelmingly white. They arrive in theaters as the United States is swept up in debates over mass incarceration, police violence, diversity and arguments about what “race” means. It is hardly just a black-and-white issue. But what the Swedish economist Gunnar Myrdal called “An American Dilemma” — the legacy of African enslavement and forms of white supremacy — remains polarizing.
And so, as we head into another fall movie season (#OscarsSoWhat) and the final months of the Obama presidency, it feels vital to look at where things are and what is to be done.
I recently watched an insightful, timely and at times painfully funny movie about a young African-American actor trying to break into the movies. Bouncing from one audition to the next, he finds that the available roles are limited and limiting. He can play a slave or a thug, a buffoon or a saint. The filmmakers and casting directors — virtually all of them white — urge him to shuffle and suffer, to clown and strut, and in every case to confirm their ideas of what a black person should be, which is not really a person at all.
That movie is Robert Townsend’s “Hollywood Shuffle,” and it was released in 1987. A year earlier, Spike Lee had arrived on the scene with “She’s Gotta Have It.” Eddie Murphy was at the peak of his stardom, having made the transition from funnyman to action hero with the “Beverly Hills Cop” franchise. The very existence of a movie satirizing Hollywood’s backward racial attitudes was surely a sign that they were on the way out. And things did change, somewhat. Mr. Lee and other black directors made inroads into the multiplexes and the art houses. I remember the lines outside Film Forum when it showed Julie Dash’s “Daughters of the Dust” in 1992 and the hum of excitement that greeted “Boyz N the Hood” the previous year.
Ancient history and also déjà vu. Dig beneath the surface — the breakthroughs and frustrations, the lightning-fast pendulum swing from “12 Years a Slave” to #OscarsSoWhite — and you find the same stubborn problems. “Hollywood Shuffle” doesn’t need to be remade. It’s been updated in countless Dave Chappelle and “Key & Peele” sketches, all of which make a joke out of the painful reality that Hollywood still has a serious problem with black humanity.
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American thinking on RACe has started to influence Brazil, A Country whose population waS shaped more than any others By the Atlantic slave trade The economist: slavery's legacy
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ALEXANDRA LORAS has lived in eight countries and visited 50-odd more. In most, any racism she might have experienced because of her black skin was deflected by her status as a diplomat’s wife. Not in Brazil, where her white husband acted as French consul in São Paulo for four years. At consular events, Ms Loras would be handed coats by guests who mistook her for a maid. She was often taken for a nanny to her fair-haired son. “Brazil is the most racist country I know,” she says.Brazil took more African slaves than any other country, and now has nearly three times as many people whose ancestors left Africa in the past few centuries as America does. Yet black faces seldom appear in Brazilian newspapers outside the sports section. Few firms have black bosses. The government has not a single black cabinet member; its predecessor, which called itself progressive, had one—for equality and rights. On average black and mixed-race Brazilians earn 58% as much as whites—a much bigger gap than in America (see chart).
Many Brazilians would bristle at this characterisation—and not just whites. Plenty of preto (black) and pardo (mixed-race) Brazilians, who together make up just over half of the country’s 208m people, proudly contrast its cordial race relations with America’s interracial strife. They see Brazil as a “racial democracy”, following the ideas of Gilberto Freyre, a Brazilian sociologist who argued in the 1930s that race did not divide Brazil as it did other post-slavery societies. Yet the gulf between white Brazilians and their black and mixed-race compatriots is huge.
The gap in Brazil, as in America, used to be even wider. Much progress has come from anti-poverty schemes, which, though colour-blind in design, benefit darker-skinned Brazilians more, since they are poorer. More recently, Brazil has started to try explicit racial preferences (known in America as “affirmative action”). But American ideas cannot simply be transplanted to Brazil. Differences in how the two countries were colonised, and how the slave economy operated, led to distinct ideas of what it means to be “black”—and different attitudes to compensatory policies and whom they should target.
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There is a new mosquito-borne illness in Haiti.
Infectious disease specialists at the University of Florida say they have confirmed the existence of the Mayaro virus in a patient in Haiti. The virus is closely related to the chikungunya virus but researchers say they do not yet know if it’s caused by the same Aedes aegypti mosquito that’s been linked to chikungunya and the Zika virus.
“We are not sure,” said Dr. John Lednicky, a University of Florida associate professor in the environmental and global health department of the College of Public Health and Health Professions. “Many different mosquitoes can carry the same virus.”
Lednicky, who runs UF’s laboratory in Haiti, said the Mayaro virus first was found in Trinidad and Tobago in 1954, and has been causing outbreaks in South America, mainly in the Amazon. It causes similar symptoms to chikungunya: fever, joint and muscle pain, rashes and abdominal pain.
“One can say it’s as bad as chikungunya, but there is so little information available,” he said. “Maybe it’s been in Haiti this whole time and no one checked for it.”
Whether the confirmed case signals the start of a new outbreak in the Caribbean region, researchers do not know, Lednicky said. Nor do they know if the virus is going to be widespread in Haiti where the Zika virus has been difficult to track because of the country’s weak health system.
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Voices and Soul
by
Justice Putnam
Black Kos Poetry Editor
When I was a young father and husband in my mid-20's, attending Portland State University to finish out my undergrad degree, one of the many jobs to make ends meet, was as a life form model in several Art Schools in town. It seemed curious to me at the time, why few of the student artists would draw the scars from my athletic injuries; tank track-like scars on my right shoulder and right knee, back in the day when they flailed you open to operate. I asked one of those student artists why that was so,
"Because," he sort of sniffed, "true Artists are only concerned with Beauty. By our efforts, we only want to immortalize that which is Beautiful."
And that summed up the dichotomy that presented itself, in Art generally, but Poetry in particular; is Poetry of the detached observer or of the active participant? Is Poetry to concern itself with Beauty only? How then, is Beauty defined? To that question, I had already concluded with Balzac and Baudelaire, that Beauty is in and can be found in, all things. Regardless, Art and Poetry are records, Art and Poetry are History. As the French academic, Fernand Braudel wrote:
For the historian everything begins and ends with time, a mathematical, godlike time, a notion easily mocked, time external to men, 'exogenous,' as economists would say, pushing men, forcing them, and painting their own individual times the same color.
-- Fernand Braudel
On History
And Victor Hugo punctuated,
One cannot be a good historian of the outward, visible world without giving some thought to the hidden, private life of ordinary people; and on the other hand one cannot be a good historian of this inner life without taking into account outward events where these are relevant. They are two orders of fact which reflect each other, which are always linked and which sometimes provoke each other.
-- Victor Hugo
Les Misérables
The Beats, The Harlem Renaissance and especially The Black Arts movement incorporated in their Ethos, The Primacy of Experience; one's primary experience is what one recorded. It followed then, that one's primary experience was usually that of the active participant. When the neighborhood is burning and dad is shot by vigilantes and mom is cursing the helicopter lights and moving shadows as the windows shake from the prop wash, it's a little difficult to meditate on the petals of an orchid.
So it was for me in the days and weeks after 11 September. I had already flirted with the cynicism brought on by multiples of personal, national and world tragedies; from love lost by absence, incarceration or death; to stumbling upon,
"... the gutted remains of Honduran peasants desiccated next to red bougainvillea, as green hummingbirds darted and stopped at delicate petals and darted away again. I have seen the blasted remains of the last hospital in Sarajevo spilling stone and beds onto the street."
In spite of these experiences, I was still able to hold onto some child-like wonder at the world. I visited New York before the month of September 2001 ended. I didn't find any answers, but I had many questions, questions that revolved around Time, around the change in a person's Heart; questions revolving around the steady erosion of Innocence and how the graduations of that erosion is marked by...
The Dates of Demarcation
by
Justice Putnam
How many times
Can a Heart be broken
How many times
Can a resolve be tested
Is this the meaning
Of Life?
To be reminded
At the most unexpected
Time of
Pain and impermanence
How many times?
I hear the voices
Of those whose
Memories of
Lost innocence
Are etched with the
Precision of a Calendar
On the Stone of History:
Jack London remembered
The Boxer Rebellion
Jack Reed recalled more
Than Ten Days
Hemingway remembered
A Hospital in Italy
Vonnegut talked of
Dresden’s fiery face
Our Grandparents
Think of the Seventh
Of December
While others recall
A day in Dallas
A balcony in Memphis
A hotel in LA
How many more times
How many more generations
Will be born into this
Impending loss?
How many more
Incidents of horror
Before the last
Vestige of innocence
Is carried away?
These questions
May seem on the surface
To be a plea
But
How many more times
How many more images
Of a woman
Her dress blown
In a fall among
Glass
Concrete
Steel
Fire?
(New York, September 2001)
from: The Nature of Poetics Collapsed Outside My Window
© 2006 by Justice Putnam
and Mechanisches-Strophe Verlagswesen
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