Romare Bearden
Commentary by Black Kos Editor Deoliver47
Weeds and Bad Seeds
I am a gardener. I nourish my plants with sunlight and song and sweet words. They grow strong and healthy.
If I ignore weeds I will soon have no garden. No sweet fruits. No lushly scented roses.
The seeds of hatred and bigotry, of xenophobia and privilege wafted far and wide have a way of sprouting in all types of soil. You will never know where these weeds will crop up, watered by vitriol and toxic rhetoric, bathed in a lavish flood of oily smears.
Weeds don’t discriminate. They will spread quickly into my neighbors garden. They do not care what color I am, or my neighbor is. They don’t ask what political party I belong to.
We here at Black Kos have cried out a warning about the proliferation of weeds each week.
We have pointed to the seeds of hatred flung to the winds and many in the safety of their own gardens fenced-in with white pickets have ignored our call.
Ignore weeds at your own peril.
When we warned about the rising tide of hatred unchecked and unpruned against Barack Obama many did not listen. When we pointed to the warped seeds rooting and sprouting in the sandy soil of desert climes like Arizona few cared about the gardeners with names like Jose and Maria. Ignored are the terrace gardens of the Dineh and the Hopi, or the windswept soil of faraway gardens we have named "reservations".
The weeds wafted on the winds of radio wave frequencies floated farther. They put down roots and were watered with a urine that some have called "tea".
Yet some folks continued to doggedly mind their own separate plots.
So now we can see that we have reaped what has been sown. And it was not the crop that was expected.
The irony in all this amazes me.
Those who died in Arizona and those who were gravely wounded were not black or latino or native American. Not immigrants. Not even just "Democrats".
They were white. They were a child. A Democratic Congresswoman. A Republican. A judge. They were the elderly. Their garden was in a "Safeway" which was not safe from weeds.
As long as we refuse to tend our neighbors gardens as industriously as we till our own backyards the weeds will spread their root systems and strangle all the beauty we hope to harvest.
In my garden there are many flowers. I cherish the riot of color, the diversity of leaf and foliage.
My garden is watered with love.
But I can never take a time out from the task of weeding.
Romare Bearden
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News by dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor
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The economy seem sto be improving, but the benefits are unequal... Huffington Post: In Black America, The Depression Rolls On
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The latest snapshot of the American job market, released by the Labor Department on Friday, confirms what most ordinary people already knew without need of a government report: Little is improving quickly or broadly enough to dislodge the anxiety that has taken up long-term residence in many communities.
The unemployment rate fell to 9.4 percent in December, from 9.8 percent the month prior. But that had little to do with people actually finding work, and much to do with the jobless simply giving up and halting their searches, dropping out of the statistical pool known as the labor force.
A deeper dive past the headline numbers reveals a reality that ought to trigger national alarm but hasn't for the simple reason that it is already embedded in the country we have unfortunately become: the Divided States of America.
Among white people, the unemployment rate dropped in December to 8.5 percent -- hardly acceptable, but manageable were the government spending more to expand a fraying social safety net and generate jobs. For black Americans, the unemployment rate was 15.8 percent.
Professional economists will not pause for an instant at those figures. It is a truism that the black unemployment rate generally runs double the white one, and yet when did that become acceptable? How can there be so little discussion about a full-blown epidemic of joblessness in the African-American community, as if the commonplace incidence of despair -- and, more recently, reversed progress -- somehow amounts to old news?
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Ava DuVernay forms African-American Film Festival releasing movement New York Times: Building an Alliance to Aid Films by Blacks
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Ava DuVernay, the filmmaker and publicist, imagines a time when black-theme pictures will flourish in places where African-American film festivals have already found eager viewers.
Fifty such cities would be an ideal black-film circuit, Ms. DuVernay said. In March she will start with five.
"I Will Follow," which was written and directed by Ms. DuVernay and stars Salli Richardson-Whitfield ("I Am Legend," "Black Dynamite") as a woman sorting through memories of a dead aunt, is set to become the first film from the newly formed African-American Film Festival Releasing Movement.
The plan is to put black-theme movies in commercial theaters, initially from the independent film program recently begun by the AMC theater chain, for a two-week run supported by social networks, mailing lists and other buzz-building services at the disposal of allied ethnic film festivals.
The films will not be part of normal festival programs, but will screen in all cities simultaneously with promotional backing from the festival organizations, which will share in revenue. The inaugural group of backers is expected to include the Urbanworld Film Festival in New York, the Pan African Film Festival in Los Angeles, the ReelBlack Film Series in Philadelphia, the BronzeLens Film Festival in Atlanta and the Langston Hughes African American Film Festival in Seattle.
Hugh Hamilton for The New York Times
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Baltimore police spokesman Anthony Guglielmi suggests that this is the case. "I can't see how this case is any different from Natalee Holloway," Guglielmi said, according to ABC News. "Is it because she's African American? Why?" Let me answer the question "YES!" ABC News: Search Continues for Phylicia Barnes, Missing for 10 Days After Trip to Baltimore
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"Our goal is to find our sweet beautiful sister, daughter, niece, friend - that's what she is to everyone," said Phylicia's father, Russell Barnes.
Aside from Baltimore and her hometown near Charlotte, N.C., Phylicia's disappearance has garnered little media attention, raising the issue of a double-standard because of her race.
"I can't see how this case is any different from Natalee Holloway," Guglielmi said. "Is it because she's African-American? Why?"
Phylicia Simone Barnes
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Other than the article's author not seeming to realize that children of black immigrants have always loved soccer, this is a good read. The Root: Darlington Nagbe of Akron and Christen Press of Stanford reflect the growing visibility of black athletes in U.S. soccer..
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Remember when soccer was a white suburban sport? Times have changed. In the last two years, three black players have been named the top collegiate soccer players in the U.S.
This week, a black man and a black woman were declared the best collegiate soccer players in the country and awarded the 2010 Missouri Athletic Club Hermann Trophy. The Hermann is collegiate soccer's annual equivalent to the Heisman Trophy in the other football. Coaches vote to select the best NCAA Division I players.
The winning woman is Christen Press, a senior forward on Stanford University's powerful women's soccer team. The communications major was one of three finalists and has golden soccer credentials. She was the 2010 Pac-10 Player of the Year, and she led her team to consecutive College Cup finals. Press was also the NCAA Division One leader in goals (26), points (60) and points per game (2.50). Ten of her goals were game winners, and she had eight assists. See her score in 2008.
Press was also a starter on the U.S. under-23 national team that played in Germany in May 2010. She was a four-year starter in high school in Palos Verdes, Calif., and a Parade-magazine All-American.
The male winner is Darlington Nagbe. He is a senior at the University of Akron. The son of Liberian immigrants, Nagbe was the captain of the Zips, the Akron men's soccer team that won the NCAA Division One soccer championship in 2010. Last season he scored seven goals and had 13 assists.
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The author of the first novel published by a black woman in the U.S. was also a leader of the Spiritualist movement that sought guidance from the dead. The Root: Harriet Wilson's Sunday School
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The more we discover about Harriet E. Wilson, the author of the first novel published in the United States by an African-American woman, the more startling her life becomes. Wilson -- born a free Negro in Milford, N.H., in the 1820s but doomed to serve a very harsh period as an indentured servant with the white Hayward family -- boldly captured the racism that she experienced in New England in her pioneering autobiographical 1859 novel, Our Nig; or, Sketches From the Life of a Free Black.
As Gabrielle Foreman and Kathy Flynn have shown, between 1857 and 1861 Wilson became an enterprising producer and marketer of "Mrs. H.E. Wilson's Hair Dressing," a hair "regenerator," which claimed to restore graying hair to its original color and was sold in smart green glass bottles that were advertised widely in newspapers throughout New England, New York and New Jersey, including the New York Times.
But far more important than this curious and brief interlude in her long career, Wilson (who often called herself "Hattie") also became a well-known and somewhat controversial "spirit guide" in Boston's popular Spiritualist movement, as Foreman detected. According to our research, this new chapter in Wilson's career began as early as 1867, just after the end of the Civil War.
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In reading the hallowed document on the House floor, Republicans tried to avoid the parts that referred to people as property, but this was as ineffective as censoring Huckleberry Finn. The Root: Skipping Over Slavery in the Constitution
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When the Republican-led Congress took to the House floor to read the entire U.S. Constitution, it omitted several provisions in the document, including two that allude to slavery: the "three-fifths compromise" and the fugitive-slave clause. While leaders like Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr. (D-Ill.) objected to such redactions that ignore the "long history of improving the Constitution," Republican organizer Rep. Robert W. Goodlatte of Virginia argued that they would "read the document as amended," leaving out any portion superseded by subsequent amendments, such as the one abolishing slavery.
Even in their attempt to present a slavery-free edit of the Constitution, they failed. Slavery is too deeply embedded and encoded in our nation's history and documents to be easily erased. When Rep. William Keating (D-Mass.) stepped to the podium and read Article I, Section 9 (19:44 into this video), about the "importation" of persons not being prohibited by Congress until 1808, did he even know what he was reading? This procedural, matter-of-fact reading failed to convey the gravitas of a congressional promise to protect the slave trade for 20 years.
In defense of Keating and the other organizers who may have missed this reference to slavery: It was the intent of the Constitution's framers that the word "slave" appear nowhere in the document. In the three-fifths clause in Article I, Section 2, every category of person is named ("free persons," indentured servants "bound to Service for a Term of Years" and "Indians"), leaving slaves to be referred to as "all other Persons." Likewise, a similar slight of language is used to refer to fugitive slaves in Article IV, Section 2, as "Person[s] held to Service or Labour."
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The map of Africa is about to change. The continent's largest country looks set to be split in two as southern Sudanese start voting in a referendum on independence this Sunday. BBC: Southern Sudan prepares to wave 'Bye bye Khartoum'
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This is no cliff-hanger - it would be a surprise if fewer than 90% of the votes were in favour of breaking away from the north.
"Bye Bye Khartoum," reads a banner outside a shop in Juba - the town which is surely going to become the world's newest capital.
The southerners, who are mostly Christian or follow traditional beliefs, deeply resent years of domination by the mainly Arab north whose politicians tried but failed to impose Islamic law right across the country, sparking two decades of war.
"I need separation because the Arabs have been sitting on the southerners," said Jimmy, one of the workers in the shop.
"We do not need any leadership from Khartoum. We have our own resources. We have been suffering for over 50 years," added the shop-owner, Francis.
"I was born in war. I grew up in the war. Throughout my education - war was there. I could only set up this business when the peace came," he added.
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Voices and Soul
by Justice Putnam
Black Kos Poetry Editor
Out of the tragedy in Tucson over the weekend, the invocation of false equivalencies was trumpeted from mountain high and valley low; the shooter was propelled to his act by the rhetoric of violence from the Left and the Right; or that he was an insane loner just like John Schrank, so politics had nothing to do with the act. Marshmallow Liberals fell to bended knees, as is their long history, to scrub any surface of the stain of calling a bigot a bigot; TeaBirchers fingered their guns and demanded we apologize for accusing them of intimidation.
What drove the shooter to commit carnage on that Saturday morning will be debated for years. What is obvious, is the irresponsible acts of the Right is rearing its ugly countenance and finding form in the insane among us.
It is true that a pound of lead and a pound of flowers, when dropped from the roof of a building, will strike the heads of pedestrians below at the same time. But whereas the lead will smash the heads of the pedestrians with life-ending force, the flowers will dissipate in a forceless explosion of color. They are not equivalent.
And the utterances of the Palins, the Becks and the Limbaughs do indeed have...
Consequences
I. Of Choice
Despair is big with friends I love,
Hydrogen and burning jews.
I give them all the grief I have
But I tell them, friends, I choose, I choose,
Don’t make me say against my glands
Or how the world has treated me.
Though gay and modest give offense
And people grieve pretentiously,
More than I hoped to do, I do
And more than I deserve I get;
What little I attend, I know
And it argues order more than not.
My desperate friends, I want to tell
Them, you take too delicate offense
At the stench of time and man’s own smell,
It is only the smell of consequence.
II. Of Love
People love each other and the light
Of love gilds but doesn’t alter,
People don’t change one another, can scarcely
By taking will and thought add a little
Now and then to their own statures
Which, praise them, they do,
So that here we are in all our sizes
Flooded in the impartial daylight sometimes,
Spotted sometimes in a light we make ourselves,
Human, the beams of attention
Of social animals at their work
Which is loving; and sometimes all dark.
The only correction is
By you of you, by me of me.
People are worth looking at in this light
And if you listen what they are saying is,
Love me sun out there whoever you are,
Chasing me from bed in the morning,
Spooking me all day with shadow,
Surprising me whenever you fall;
Make me conspicuous as I go here,
Spotted by however many beams,
Now light, finally dark. I fear
There is meant to be a lot of darkness,
You hear them say, but every last creature
Is the one it meant to be.
III. My Acts
The acts of my life swarm down the street like Puerto Rican kids,
Foreign but small and, except for one, unknived.
They do no harm though their voices slash like reeds;
All except one they have evidently been loved.
And down the hill where I’ve planted spruce and red pine
In a gang of spiked shadows they slouch at night.
I am reasonably brave. I have been, except on one occasion,
Myself: it is no good trying to be what you are not.
We live among gangs who seem to have no stake
In what we’re trying to do, no sense of property or race,
Yet if you speak with authority they will halt and break
And sullenly, one by one, show you a local face.
I dreamt once that they caught me and, holding me down,
Burned my genitals with gasoline;
In my stupid terror I was telling them names
So my manhood kept and the rest went up in flames.
‘Now, say the world is a fair place,’ the biggest one said,
And because there was no face worse than my own there
I said it and got up. Quite a lot of me is charred.
By our code it is fair. We play fair. The world is fair.
-- William Meredith
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