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A Brief Commentary by Chitown Kev
Well...
I’ve been hemming and hawing about this for some weeks now but I find myself...at home, back in Detroit.
Well...not exactly.
Mom moved to a Macomb County suburb over a decade ago, so while this Detroit suburb is generally recognizable as the Detroit area, these aren’t my streets. These are not my people. And they may never be.
Then again, I never felt at home in Detroit “proper”; St. Clair-Jefferson, Roland-Van Dyke, The Two-Flat on McDougall Street, Young-Gratiot being the primary areas.
Most of my childhood memories are of the need to get away from this “home”, to move...anywhere.
Nowadays, the older I get, the more I do identify Detroit as...home.
Not necessarily in a physical sense (although being here helps!) but in terms of mental and emotional impressions.
So...I’m here for a family reunion and my family is as much my family as I’ve ever felt though I desired for a time to eradicate them from my consciousness as well.
At this point, I will just accept it all. Detroit, Macomb County, my family, my memories (good, bad, and indifferent) and simply enjoy it.
It’s good to be...home.
(And I need some sleep!)
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News round up by dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor
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Though the issue of policing and race in America was a signature issue in the 2020 presidential cycle, resulting in the historic election of President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, three years later, policing has found a snag in Washington.
Even with the U.S. Department of Justice’s recently announced a federal pattern-or-pratice probe of the Memphis Police Department after the beating death of Tyre Nichols, attempts to achieve police accountability on the federal level have been met with obstacles on Capitol Hill and at the White House.
A renewed effort to address the national concern of police brutality and misconduct in the Capitol was led by U.S. Senator Cory Booker. A source on The Hill with knowledge of Booker’s legislative work told theGrio that the New Jersey lawmaker attempted to link COPS grant funding for new law enforcement hires to police accountability measures in the 2024 fiscal year budget. However, any such police funding agreement is not expected to make the upcoming appropriations bill, the source said.
Booker notably led previous negotiations on the Hill related to police accountability with the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act. The bipartisan effort tanked in 2021 after lead Republican broker, Sen.Tim Scott of South Carolina, now a 2024 presidential candidate, pulled out of negotiations over the issue of qualified immunity.
Civil rights lawyer Ben Crump, personal attorney for the family of George Floyd, told theGrio that linking funding to police accountability would’ve been the “easy part” compared to getting the needed support for the Floyd bill in Congress.
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Black women in public life, including Kamala Harris and Fulton DA Fani Willis, face untold levels of harassment online and in person. Why won't anyone stop it? The Root: Why Are Prominent Black Women Facing a Wave of Harassment?
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On July 18, 2016, police shot unarmed caretaker Charles Kinsey, who was trying to assist his 27-year-old autistic patient. With his arms in the air, Kinsey repeatedly told police that the patient was holding a toy, not a gun. But officers shot Kinsey in the leg in an attempt to shot his patient.
Gunder took to the streets of North Miami along with other activists to demand justice for Kinsey. But as her public profile grew so did the hate directed her way. Around the same time her goddaughter, Jada Page, was shot and killed, a fact which Gunder says only animated the attacks against her. She recalls messages saying, “tell that fat bitch to find the killer herself,” referencing her search for Page’s killer.
“Even my address was leaked,” she says. “People would sit at my house.”
Despite the attacks, Gunder continued her work as an activist, fighting for issues like felony disenfranchisement. But the fear continued to eat away at her. “They know where I live,” she says, “They know my email address. I’m lucky I haven’t been physically harmed.”
Gunder’s experience as a Black woman with a public profile is unfortunately not unique. According to a 2018 Amnesty International Study, Black women are 84% more likely to be abused on social media than white women.
Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis, has spoken publicly about the hate messages she’s received. Willis is expected to announce charges against former President Donald Trump for election fraud, which has fueled the racist and misogynistic attacks against her. Earlier this month, Willis, said she received a message calling her a “Jim Crow Democrat whore,” in addition to other hateful comments.
We All Deserve Safety and Peace, an anti-hate and safety platform, exclusively shared a report with The Root detailing the experiences of three Black women who were the victims of online and in-person harassment. The three storytellers dubbed, “Imani, Sankofa, and Nia,” remained anonymous in their report, to avoid further harassment, but their stories are still worth discussing.
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The Smithsonian’s human brains collection was led by Ales Hrdlicka, a museum curator in the 1900s who believed that White people were superior. Washington Post: REVEALING THE SMITHSONIAN’S ‘RACIAL BRAIN COLLECTION’
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The young woman — whose family was Sami, or indigenous to areas that include northern Scandinavia — had traveled with her mother by ship from her Alaska hometown at the invitation of physician Charles Firestone, who had offered to treat the older woman for cataracts. Now, Firestone sought to take advantage of Sara’s death for a “racial brain collection” at the Smithsonian Institution. He contacted a museum official in May 1933 by telegram.
Ales Hrdlicka, the 64-year-old curator of the division of physical anthropology at the Smithsonian’s U.S. National Museum, was interested in Sara’s brain for his collection. But only if she was “full-blood,” he noted, using a racist term to question whether her parents were both Sami.
The 35-year-old doctor removed Sara’s brain after she died and mailed it to Washington, D.C., where Smithsonian officials tagged it with a reference number and stored it in the museum, now the site of the National Museum of Natural History, alongside scores of other brains taken across the world.
Nearly 100 years later, Sara’s brain is still housed by the institution, wrapped in muslin and immersed in preservatives in a large metal container. It is stored in a museum facility in Maryland with 254 other brains, amassed mostly in the first half of the 20th century. Almost all of them were gathered at the behest of Hrdlicka, a prominent anthropologist who believed that White people were superior and collected body parts to further now-debunked theories about anatomical differences between races.
Most of the brains were removed upon death from Black and Indigenous people and other people of color. They are part of a collection of at least 30,700 human bones and other body parts still held by the Natural History Museum, the most-visited museum within the Smithsonian. The collection, one of the largest in the world, includes mummies, skulls, teeth and other body parts, representing an unknown number of people.
The remains are the unreconciled legacy of a grisly practice in which bodies and organs were taken from graveyards, battlefields, morgues and hospitals in more than 80 countries. The decades-long effort was financed and encouraged by the taxpayer-subsidized institution. The collection, which was mostly amassed by the early 1940s, has long been hidden from view. The Washington Post has assembled the most extensive analysis and accounting of the holdings to date.
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A current buzzword in Nigeria is japa, a Yoruba verb meaning to run, flee or escape. So many Nigerians, most notably doctors and nurses, are seeking jobs abroad that politicians are bemoaning the “japa syndrome”—and have been debating ways to stem the outward flow. No one yet has an answer.
Meanwhile hospitals are losing qualified staff at an alarming rate, as droves of doctors and nurses head for America, Britain, Canada, the Gulf states and elsewhere in search of better pay and working conditions. In the past eight years, by one count, at least 5,600 doctors have left for Britain, leaving only 24,000 registered doctors to cater for a burgeoning population of around 220m. The Association of Resident Doctors fears that 85% of those left behind are planning to emigrate, too.
MPS complain that countries such as America, Canada and Saudi Arabia, which often stage recruitment drives for doctors in Nigerian cities, are in effect exploiting the country’s highly subsidised medical-education system at the expense of Nigeria’s own suffering people. The government has been half-heartedly scrambling for clever ways to persuade medical professionals to stay. A parliamentary bill proposed that new doctors would be legally bound to stay in Nigeria for at least five years after qualifying. In the face of the doctors’ threat to go on strike if this were enacted, the government backed down.
Many thousands of other talented Nigerians are trying to leave. Britain offers a “global talent” visa valid initially for five years and doles out thousands of student visas. The recipients often fail to return home. Many of those less fortunate strike out across the Sahara desert, putting their lives in the hands of smugglers and traffickers to take them on perilous voyages across the Mediterranean to Europe. Some drown, or end up in thrall to Arab slavers in Libya or in vile detention camps across north Africa.
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Twenty-five years ago, to get to school in the morning, Godfrey Molwana would walk 2 miles from his home in Witrandjie, a small village in South Africa. His route passed through communal grazing lands for cattle and goats—a rolling expanse of acacia trees and hardy shrubs, interspersed with the corn plots of subsistence farmers. Some families had graves on the land. “This area was for everyone,” Molwana recalled.
Close to the village lay the remains of a chrome mine, with derelict buildings and dumps of discarded ore where children from the community would play. Chrome is essential for manufacturing stainless steel. South Africa has the largest deposits in the world, but this mine, no longer profitable, had been shuttered for decades. Some older men in the community had worked there as laborers, earning the low wages designated for Black people during apartheid.
The ground beneath the village was rich, but its residents had remained in poverty, even after White rule ended in 1994. Then, in the mid-2000s, a new market for chrome arrived in Witrandjie (pronounced “VIT-rind-key”). It began with a company that purchased the old mine dumps and hauled them away for reprocessing.
Later, more outsiders showed up, promising lucrative payouts for villagers who allowed the establishment of new mines. Here, it appeared, was an opportunity to profit directly from mining, an industry that had contributed greatly to the dispossession of Black South Africans in the past. Excavators moved onto the grazing area, and cargo trucks departed with massive loads of ore.
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Universities can continue to target recruitment efforts at predominantly Black and Hispanic high schools even if race can’t be used as a factor in admissions, the Biden administration said in new guidance released Monday.
The parsing is part of a package of materials responding to the June U.S. Supreme Court decision overturning affirmative action in admissions. The education and justice departments — which argued in favor of maintaining racial preferences in admissions — said summer enrichment camps for students from groups underrepresented in college are also allowed, as well as “pathway” programs that guarantee high school graduates a spot in the freshman class. Awarding slots in those programs based on race, however, would “trigger … strict scrutiny” from courts in light of the ruling against Harvard and the University of North Carolina.
“This moment demands a sense of urgency,” U.S. Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona said in a call with reporters. “This moment demands the same courageous commitment to equal opportunity and justice we saw from leaders at the height of the civil rights movement.”
The release of the resources — a letter to institutions and a question-and-answer document — is the second formal action the administration has taken on admissions since the decision. Last month, the Education Department held a day-long summit on ways colleges and K-12 schools can continue to legally foster diversity. And in a few weeks, Cardona said, the department will issue a report on strategies colleges already use.
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WELCOME TO THE TUESDAY PORCH
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