The Personal and Political
Review by Chitown Kev
On the Other Side of Freedom: The Case for Hope
by DeRay McKesson
Viking, 240pp., $26.00
To this occasional student of theology and perpetual theo-skeptic, there initially seemed to be something rather... formulaic in the manner in which activist DeRay McKesson lays out, in the opening chapter of On the Other Side of Freedom: The Case for Hope, his collection of personal essays, the distinction between faith and hope.
After all, one can read enough black theology and other materials within the scope of African American studies to get tired of black folks forever hoping for better days and a more just world...it makes you want to scream, at times. This is even and, perhaps, especially true when black folks are doing something. It’s as if the opening of doors leads to an infinite regression of closed doors. But McKesson’s own outline of the theology of hope; ultimately, the idea that hope is ‘’rooted’’ in a ‘’possibility’’ that, succinctly, requires ‘’work’’ also happens to be the lesson of The Book of Job.
One cannot live forever in a state where one curses the day that he or she was born. Nor can one live passively ‘’patient’’ waiting for the Lord God, a whirlwind, or any other of the ‘’powers that be’’ to do right. Most importantly, one cannot and must not accept given narratives that renders one without hope and with very little (if any) faith; one must either find alternative narratives or create one’s own.
It is in that search and in that journey for one’s own narrative that one finds whatever mix of hope and faith necessary to survive.
In On the Other Side of Freedom, McKesson weaves some rather startling ‘’hard data’’ (there were fourteen police departments, all large metropolitan areas, where the police ‘’exclusively killed black people’’ in 2015), personal activist experiences (being served a lawsuit filed by the Baton Rouge police department upon arriving at his home in Baltimore), personal memories (being abandoned by an alcoholic mother, sexual abuse) and imagination and nostalgia (McKesson feels the same way about the X-Man Storm that I do about Reed Richards).
On the Other Side of Freedom is driven by the attempt to reconcile seeming binaries; faith and hope, hard data and imagination, the personal and political, individual and community. But, most significantly, it is about reclaiming one’s own narrative and showing other how to do the same. Some of this material fits into the typical ‘’boxes’’ usually reserved for ‘’the black experience” better than others.
Then again,On the Other Side of Freedom is all about how Mr. McKesson continues the journey to love his blackness in all of its facets; a blackness that does not have to fit into any established narrative.
It is up to each of us to find and go toward that love of our own blackness, wherever it may lead.
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News round up by dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor
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A class action lawsuit filed by a group of Black farmers who were allegedly sold fake seeds will move forward, a judge decided.
The next hearing to present more facts involving bogus seeds sold to Black farmers by the Stine Seed Company is scheduled on Jan. 3, the Commercial Appeal reports.
The farmers say the proof that they were sold inferior seeds that cost them millions of dollars in sales is in the lack of crops they produced. With the help of science testing experts at Mississippi State University, the farmers discovered that the seeds they were sold were impotent. The farmers believe they are being purposely targeted in a multi-million dollar scheme to take their land from them.
“They swapped seeds and they sold the farmers fake seeds, but billed them for certified seeds,” Thomas Burrell, president of the Black Farmers and Agriculturalists Association, told the Memphis newspaper.
“Mother nature doesn’t discriminate.
“No matter much rain Mother Nature gives you, if the germination is zero the seed is impotent,” Burrell reminded.
Burrell said Black farmers were getting a fraction – one-tenth – of the yield as their white neighbors.
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When I play the 911 call for Byron Ragland — the emergency call about him — I study his face. I expect that maybe he’ll get angry.
Instead he looks sad. When it ends, after three minutes, he sits back across the table and his eyes mist up a bit.
“What’s my reaction?” he says, after I ask. “My reaction is that this was just another Wednesday.”
It was a week ago Wednesday when Ragland was sitting in a Kirkland Menchie’s, the frozen-yogurt franchise. Ragland, 31, is both a court-appointed special advocate and a visitation supervisor, so his job is to oversee meetings between kids and the parents who have lost custody of them.
That’s what he was doing at the store — he was supervising an outing between a mother and her 12-year-old son. The boy wanted ice cream, so the three drove to Menchie’s, arrived together and had been sitting there for about half an hour, visiting, when Ragland looked up to find two police officers standing at the table.
“They asked me to leave,” Ragland said. “They asked for my ID. They told me the manager had been watching me and wanted me to move along.”
Ragland did “move along,” he says — though that phrase, as if he were a stray dog, made him bristle. The police report reflects that the Kirkland officers were told he was there working. In fact he was legally required to be there overseeing the mother and son.
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She didn’t look like Alyssa Milano.
But maybe that’s because Tarana Burke, founder of the #MeToo movement that has led to complaints and indictments against dozens of men — and some women — for sexual harassment and assault, is a big, bold, fierce, powerful, outspoken black woman, who is finally being seen.
And in a keynote address at the Facing Race conference that brought more than 3,500 people to Detroit to discuss social justice, Burke brought down the house, defiantly challenging the movement she started a decade before movie producer Harvey Weinstein was outed for his behavior, saying that it better pay attention to the original survivors.
Those are the young black and brown girls in urban and indigenous communities where she has worked since age 14, women whose poverty and powerlessness made them easy prey.
“The No. 1 thing I hear from folks is that the #MeToo movement has forgotten us,” she said of black, Hispanic and Native American women. “Every day, we hear some version of that. But this is what I’m here to tell you: The #MeToo movement is not defined by what the media has told you. We are the movement, and so I need you to not opt out of the #Metoo movement. ... I need you to reframe your work to include sexual violence. That’s how we take back the narrative. Stop giving your power away to white folks."
Burke said she will not let her movement that she founded in 2006 and that has resulted in her getting death threats and having to challenge black leaders to support it, be co-opted by pretty girls and Hollywood.
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At a processing plant in Zambia, Glencore was buying up all the ore containing copper it could get its hands on when technicians noticed something extraordinary. One trader consistently rolled in with rocks showing levels of purity that were off the charts—not just for copper, but also for the blue metal cobalt. Glencore’s men asked the trader to take them to the source, and Glasenberg joined the contingent that trekked to the site some weeks later. The trader led them up a bumpy track of red earth that crossed into the Democratic Republic of Congo and led to a meadow covered with bluish-purple flowers. Locals dug up rocks by hand and shoveled them into threadbare sacks. The place was called Mutanda.
In 2007, Glencore bought a large stake in Mutanda, assumed operational control, and fenced off the property. The subsistence miners who were locked out had unwittingly discovered the richest vein of cobalt on earth. Cobalt is essential for the batteries that power electric vehicles and our ubiquitous mobile devices, and Congo produces two-thirds of the world’s supply—it’s the Saudi Arabia of the electric vehicle age, in the words of one analyst. With demand skyrocketing, the price of the metal has tripled since mid-2016, and at one point had quadrupled. Mutanda produces more cobalt than any other mine, and the only one likely to overtake it anytime soon is nearby and also owned by Glencore.
Glasenberg couldn’t have known just how important cobalt would become when he invested in Mutanda, but he did know Congo would yield something special. And he understood that in a country as physically and politically unnavigable as Congo, Glencore would need good relations with its temperamental government. The solution he struck upon served the company well for many years: He teamed up with a brash Israeli diamond trader named Dan Gertler, who’d been forging bonds with Congolese elites for a decade.
Just six months ago, Glasenberg sounded confident that the crowning moment of his journey remained ahead, reminding shareholders of predictions that the world would need to triple cobalt production by 2030 to meet demand. “We’re the best placed of all the large-cap companies to take advantage of this electric vehicle phenomenon,” he said at Glencore’s annual meeting in May. But in July that promise clouded. Glencore announced that the U.S. Department of Justice had subpoenaed documents and other records related to its Congolese investments and other deals, and was examining its compliance with U.S. laws on foreign corruption and money laundering. The U.K.’s Serious Fraud Office is also considering whether to open an investigation, people familiar with the agency’s thinking told Bloomberg Businessweek. These actions do not necessarily mean that the company committed any wrongdoing or that charges will be filed. Glencore and Glasenberg declined to comment for this article.
At the center of it all: a two-decade swath of corruption allegedly cut across Congo by Gertler. Public and confidential records, some of them contained in the Paradise Papers obtained by the German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung and shared by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, as well as interviews with three dozen sources, including government officials, people who’ve worked on Glencore’s Congolese operations, and mining executives, show the business relationship between Gertler and Glasenberg is deeper than was previously known. It’s becoming apparent that Glasenberg’s ties with Gertler could threaten not only Glencore’s cobalt dreams but also, perhaps, Glasenberg’s career and legacy at the very moment he appears poised to own the future.
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In 1876 tetteh quarshie, a blacksmith, smuggled the first cocoa beans into Ghana, hidden beneath his box of tools. He is now celebrated as a national hero; his trees, planted in the hills outside Accra, are a tourist attraction. But did cocoa make him rich? “No,” says a guide. “He harvested for the first time, and then he died.”
West Africans have been seeking fortunes in cocoa ever since. Like Mr Quarshie, they have been short of luck. Ghana and Ivory Coast produce about 60% of the world’s cocoa. Yet they mostly sell unprocessed beans. Their cocoa-export earnings are equivalent to less than a tenth of world chocolate sales. Power lies with a small group of trading firms and chocolate-makers in rich countries. “We send raw materials, they add value,” sighs Owusu Afriyie Akoto, Ghana’s agriculture minister.
Ghana and Ivory Coast are trying to claw up the value chain. Ghana is close to finalising a $600m loan from the African Development Bank, some of which is expected to support cocoa processing. It is also seeking Chinese help to build a state-run processing plant. Observers see cocoa as a test-case for African industrialisation. But it is not a very useful model. Cocoa is unlikely to bring much revenue or many jobs.
Granted, there have been some successes. About 21% of the world’s cocoa is ground in Africa, up from 15% a decade ago. Ivory Coast grinds nearly a third of its beans and rivals the Netherlands as the world leader by volume. In Ghana’s Tema “free zone”, the smell of cocoa is in the air. Niche Cocoa, one of several processors there, ships cocoa butter, liquor and cake abroad, while selling chocolate at home. Customers cannot believe it is made in Ghana, chuckles Lloyd Ashiley, the plant manager.
Most of the processing in the region is done by the same multinationals that were already grinding cocoa in Europe or elsewhere. In Ghana, firms in free zones get tax breaks. The government, which dominates the cocoa industry, gives a discount on smaller, “light-crop” beans to encourage local processing. But when the cheap beans run out, machines sit idle. Nearly half of capacity is unused.
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In Brown v. Board of Education, the Supreme Court identified America’s system of public education as “the very foundation of good citizenship.” An educated public is critical to a system that relies on popular elections, which is why Justice Felix Frankfurter referred to public school teachers as “the priests of our democracy.” Yet in recent decades, politicians and educators have downplayed this reality, viewing public schools primarily as places to equip students to become skilled workers. “A world-class education,” President Barack Obama argued in 2011, “is the single most important factor in determining not just whether our kids can compete for the best jobs but whether America can out-compete countries around the world.” Educators adopted the mantra that schools must enable students to be “career and college ready,” with little thought for preparing them to be good citizens.
How do we go about putting democracy back into public education? Two new books from University of Chicago professors—one a legal scholar, the other a sociologist—offer important answers. The law professor Justin Driver traces the efforts of the Supreme Court to uphold the principles of the Constitution in the education system in his engaging and absorbing new book, The Schoolhouse Gate: Public Education, the Supreme Court, and the Battle for the American Mind. “No civic task is more essential,” he writes, “than ensuring that the Constitution is viewed in public schools not as some abstract piece of parchment” but as “a vital, meaningful document whose principles inform students’ lives every time they step within the schoolhouse gate.”
Yet in tackling issues from the use of corporal punishment to a student’s right to equal educational resources, the courts have fallen short.
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