Thank you Propane Jane
Commentary by Black Kos Editor Denise Oliver-Velez
I have no idea how many Daily Kos readers follow Propane Jane (a pseudonym) on twitter, or who have read her pieces at Daily Kos. She is one of my favorites. She told her own story here, in Becoming Propane Jane, back in 2016.
The story of Propane Jane begins deep in the heart of Texas. It's a story about a black woman who was raised in a predominantly white suburb of Houston, and grew accustomed to being the only one of her kind in the room. It's a story about having an opinion that’s controversial simply because it's different. It's a story about fearless self-expression that started not too long after I learned to speak.
My family would be the first to tell you that I've been an unrepentant motor mouth for pretty much the entirety of my almost 35 years on this earth. I was the kind of kid who wouldn't just talk to my dolls, but would hold an Oprah-esque town hall with them to get down to the root of all their "problems." Looking back now it only seems fitting that I find myself chatting up a storm online, but I assure you this wasn't always in the cards. I never aspired to be a writer, blogger, or Twitter influencer; I wanted to be a healer. Ironically enough, it was my journey to become a physician that turned me into all of the above.
As the daughter of two college-educated, East Texas-born Jim Crow survivors, I didn't have the choice to not be politically engaged. My parents took us to the polls on Election Day and taught us the Democratic Party platform as a lesson in self-preservation, because they were taught the same. I saw them roll their eyes at Reagan and G.H.W. Bush, then applaud every word of Bill Clinton's biography at the 1992 Democratic National Convention.
She talked more about herself in this interview.
Being a Texan and being from the south, I am shedding some light on my perspective on politics, which I don’t think is a widely shared perspective, in terms of what we see and hear in the media. I grew up in Missouri City, I went to the University of Texas at Austin, I spent two years at Texas Tech in Lubbock, I went to Baylor for medical school. I’ve been all over Texas, lived in different places in Texas and I feel like I know the state and who we are. I’ve always had a chip on my shoulder — I’m a political junkie and I get into conversations with people who know nothing about Texas, who think there’s nothing liberal in Texas except Austin, that we’re all a bunch of rednecks, all the stereotypes you’re familiar with. We have all this diversity and all these people that Trump is vilifying. So many of my colleagues are not Christian, from all different backgrounds. The perception of Texas doesn’t match, it doesn’t comport with my day-to-day life living in Houston, Texas.
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I work in Harris County and I live in Fort Bend County. When I look at the place I was raised and see how much it’s changed — I was the only black girl in my class from second grade to fifth grade. And I have two kids now and they are in school in Fort Bend County, and it looks like the United Colors of Benetton! I look at my neighborhood, the Indian restaurants and Vietnamese restaurants down the street, with the New York Times calling us the most diverse county in America and I think — y’all are sleeping on Texas! Harris County had 160,0000 more votes for Hillary — that’s gigantic. That fueled my optimism. People didn’t want Texas to continue with its reputation. It feels confirmatory and that something is brewing and that will continue to get better and better; at the same time, I’m feeling that the country is going backwards.
Twitter has limitations — 280 characters — which many of us who use it get around by posting “threads.” PJ has posted some serious threads over the years — and thanks to an application called “Thread Reader App” you can read them in their entirety elsewhere, if you simply ask for an ‘unroll’.
On my way to the hospital to visit my husband I scrolled through twitter, and landed on one of PJ’s more recent threads — addressing Obama and Hillary bashing, the Democratic party base, black voters, coalition building, and the current state of the nominee race...in her own inimitable way.
Will post a few snippets here. Suggest you read the whole thing.
She opened with this salvo:
There’s NO path to the 2020 Democratic nomination that includes talking specious bullshit about Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton. You can’t begin the primary process by alienating the base that ultimately decides the outcome but still expect to win it all. Stop it.
Belittling the efforts of PBO and HRC is an overt appeal to Independents and White “moderates” who continue to narcissistically think only they have the perfect solutions for centuries of intentional and systemic inequality in American society. Privilege.
She continued:
This is an outright and consistent refusal to fully understand or pragmatically combat the entrenched, culturally charged obstruction of GOP forces that will ALWAYS be aimed at ALL elected Democrats, no matter their melanin content or populist plans.
This epitomizes the hubris of privilege. It presumes easier terrain for White candidates who most closely align themselves w/the very same Independents and White “moderates” who’ve literally been the rate limiting step on progress since America’s founding. It’s stuck on stupid.
I’ll skip quite a bit.
She includes some of her tweets from the past, to discuss the Southern Strategy:
People have been so thoroughly convinced that identity politics are a 3rd rail that they’re obfuscating & belittling the identity of the Democratic base & the party’s extremely popular standard bearers to make it more welcoming to people who aren’t exhibiting reliable allyship.
FYI this reimagining of the Democratic coalition typically works as its architects intend until the primary reaches the South and they run out of Indies/White “moderates” to sell it to b/c the D/R alignment is so sharply divided along racial lines. That’s when the game changes.
That’s when you find out who’s never been there and who hasn’t done the work to build a coalition w/Black voters who are the lifeblood of the Democratic Party in the South. Shitting on PBO and HRC won’t get you the secret passcode and the billionaire crusade won’t make up for it.
Not only will Black voters be more concerned with how socioeconomics and social justice intertwine, but White voters in the South are also more smitten with Trump’s crusade against brown people than they are with the blue state liberal crusade against the 1%.
She concludes:
Y’all have spent the last 11 YEARS making up every excuse in the book to sugarcoat and normalize blatant racism and civil unrest as “economic anxiety” and the “failings of neoliberalism”. You’ve used fragility as a free pass to deny reality and the whole 🌎 is suffering in turn.
Adding further insult to injury, the base of the Democratic Party has now been subjected to months of microaggressions about how the only bloc of voters that matters is the one that includes all the White people who voted for a White supremacist/sexual predator/sociopath/traitor.
None of this shit is IT.
None of the excuses being made are going to fix this disaster. Blaming Obama for not being magical and Hillary for not being perfect is never going to take the blame away from the GOP or any of the RACIST AMERICANS who willfully voted for fascism in ‘16.
Go read the whole thing. Then come back and discuss.
Flame on Sis!
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News round up by dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor
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LGTBQ characters of color on television are steadily increasing, especially on television, where 47 percent of all regular characters on broadcast scripted TV series are people of color, a three percent increase and a record high, according to a new report released by GLAAD. In addition, and for the second year in a row, the report titled “GLAAD we’re on TV” confirmed that LGBTQ characters of color are outnumbering their White counterparts, representing 52 percent compared to 48 percent. GLAAD had challenged all platforms–broadcast, cable, and streaming–to make at least half of LGBTQ characters on each platform be people of color, within the next two years.
“Last year, GLAAD called on the television industry to increase the number of LGBTQ characters and more accurately reflect the world we live in, and they responded by exceeding this challenge,” Sarah Kate Ellis, president and CEO of GLAAD told Deadline in an article published today (November 8). “At a time when the cultural climate is growing increasingly divisive, increased representation of LGBTQstories and characters on television is especially critical to advance LGBTQ acceptance. Shows like ‘Pose,’ ‘Schitt’s Creek,’ ‘Batwoman’ and ‘Billions’ demonstrate that not only are LGBTQ stories and characters on TV becoming more diverse, but that viewers everywhere continue to respond with extreme positivity.”
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The penny about the US’s worldview dropped for me when I recently interviewed a highly educated, accomplished, politically and racially literate American. I mentioned something about the British empire and he looked at me blankly. “What is that exactly?” he asked.
This isn’t a criticism of individual Americans; many British people themselves don’t know their own imperial history. It’s a feature of what is taught in schools and purveyed in the media, which is myopic.
But news about the 2020 Oscars this week did bring that particular exchange back to mind. The Academy was considering a Nigerian movie called Lionheart in its best international feature film category. I watched Lionheart when it came out last year, partly because of the novelty of seeing a movie from Nigeria’s burgeoning Nollywood film industry on Netflix.
Directed by and starring the Nollywood titan Genevieve Nnaji, it is a captivating look at family, class, sexism, politics and the texture of life in the Niger delta. It’s both very Nigerian and very relatable for audiences who know nothing about Nigeria. It’s incredible that Nigeria has never had an Oscars submission before, but this is a good choice for its first. Yet Lionheart has just been disqualified because there is too much English in it.
In fact, Lionheart does feature the Igbo language, which millions of people in eastern Nigeria speak. But the film reflects the way many Nigerians – as former imperial British subjects – speak in real life. As in most of anglophone west Africa, education, politics and formal economic activity is conducted in English, which people interchange with the dozens – in Nigeria’s case, hundreds – of African languages that they also speak. This is the legacy of empire. And this legacy of empire, even though they were once part of it, is what some American institutions don’t seem able to comprehend.
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The bad news arrived via Instagram: Pirated versions of Noel Durity’s innovative Twist It Up comb were popping up in convenience stores. Most entrepreneurs would quickly seek legal advice, maybe write a strongly worded letter. Durity instead channeled Liam Neeson. “I decided to confront them,” he says.
A solo tour to 100 stores in 24 cities — from New York down through the East Coast and ending in Texas — netted him 500 knockoffs of his device resembling a tennis racket to tease out Afrocentric hair. He also collected more than 40 invoices, a paper trail to the source of the knockoffs. For a budding businessman who looks in the mirror and sees a superhero, it was just another day at the office.
To figure out Durity, 31, you have to go all the way back to the start, when he was born two and a half months premature — his extended hospital stay nearly bankrupting his family, which had no insurance. “He is my million-dollar baby,” says Durity’s mom, Cheryl.
The youngest of three, Noel was born in San Fernando, in Trinidad and Tobago, and raised there and in the U.S. on a strict diet of discipline and accountability. Cheryl worked in the medical processing industry and Durity’s father, Julian, plied his trade as an entrepreneur — servicing Xerox copiers and venturing into the prepaid credit card business. Summer break for the Durity kids included four hours of daily reading and multiplication.
Noel would catch the entrepreneurial bug from his dad, who taught him to “respect your elders but always speak your mind.” Cheryl, meanwhile, stressed “discipline. My friends are not his friends. You call your teacher Miss Cathy — not Cathy.”
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From a one-story house with mustard-colored walls off a bustling road in Mauritius, Olivier Bancoult is defying the U.K. by plotting a return to the tiny tropical island where he was born.
A 55-year-old native of the remote Chagos Islands in the Indian Ocean, Bancoult heads a group of mostly elderly women who, like him, were expelled shortly after Britain bought the archipelago from its then-colony Mauritius in 1965. His campaign has taken him to London and the United Nations and secured him a meeting with Pope Francis.
As a young boy, Bancoult and the other roughly 2,000 inhabitants of Chagos were deported to the U.K., Mauritius and Seychelles. The new owners then gassed the residents’ pets, closed the coconut plantations and allowed the U.S. to build a military base on the biggest island of Diego Garcia. With the exception of the air force base seen as crucial for U.S. operations in the Middle East and Afghanistan, the U.K. has kept the islands free of inhabitants by declaring an area the size of France a protected marine reserve in 2010. Only a few people are allowed to visit briefly each year, and they can’t stay overnight.
“My mother died here, without ever having been back to her home,” Bancoult said in an interview. “I won’t let that happen to me.”
At a time when politicians in Britain are evoking its imperial past as the U.K. prepares to quit the European Union, the country is under international pressure to give up its last African colony, a sign of its diminished global importance when only 80 years ago it held sway over almost a quarter of the world’s population.
“What Britain is facing today is having to confront its colonial past, whether it’s Chagos or Northern Ireland,” said Philippe Sands, a London-based lawyer who serves as Counsel for Mauritius. “It’s the story of its empire coming back to haunt it.”
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Black Africans are at a disadvantage when it comes to drug treatments because they represent only 2% of the genetic samples used for pharmaceutical research, a new Nigeria-based genomics company wants to change that. BBC: How decoding African DNA could help fight disease
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This dearth of genetic studies on diverse populations also has implications for risk prediction of diseases across the world, according to a scientific paper published by US-based academics in March.
According to Abasi Ene-Obong, the founder and CEO of biotech start-up 54gene, black Africans and people of black ancestry are more genetically diverse than all of the other populations in the world combined, making their genetic information "a huge resource to be tapped".
He has set up a genetic research laboratory in Nigeria's largest city of Lagos, from where his team plans to analyse some 40,000 DNA data samples by the end of 2019, with a view to reaching 100,000 over the next 12 months.
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