Commentary by Black Kos editor JoanMar
New York is a blue state. True, they’ve had Republican governors and mayors, but there are more than twice as many registered Democrats in the state as there are any other political party. In the last general election, Joe Biden beat the Cretin with over 60% of the votes. New York is definitely not trump’s country. How then do we come to have both New York’s Finest (cops) and New York’s Bravest (firefighters) be such ardent and vociferous supporters of the con artist from Queens? How does it happen that professional bodies, whose salaries are paid by taxpayers, do not reflect the opinions of the majority of the citizens of that state?
Letitia James, in her capacity as New York’s Attorney General, attended a NYFD ceremony to honor that body’s first Black female chaplain and this happened:
New York Attorney General Letitia James was booed and drowned out by chants of "Trump" on Thursday while delivering a speech at the New York Fire Department promotion ceremony.
While speaking at the ceremony, James is heard thanking FDNY Commissioner Laura Kavanagh just before numerous people in the crowd are heard chanting former President Donald Trump's name.
I have no problem with them booing an elected official. They are allowed to show their displeasure. I even understand their anger. Imagine this Black Woman having the audacity to take on their dear white leader and to actually emerge victorious against him! That’s just too much to swallow! I get it. What I had a huge problem with was the prolonged chants for the former racist-in-chief. It wasn’t just one or two people shouting out the name of the maladjusted buffoon; this was several minutes of sustained chanting. How can any member of a marginalized community in New York trust any firefighter after witnessing their public show of support for an avowed racist and xenophobe?
There have been some posts on Twitter expressing surprise, and shock, even, that firefighters could be involved in an action that so reeks of racism. I’m not surprised. I’m well aware that firefighters are drawn from the same pool as cops and that those two institutions have a shared history of systemic racism. Why would we expect that firefighters would be any less racist than cops?
A Harvard study found that, “Ninety-six percent of U.S. career firefighters are men and 82% are white.“
While Bloomberg’s stop and frisk policy has received a great deal of attention, what is less known is his opposition to the effort launched by black firefighters to end the racially discriminatory methods used to keep black and brown people as well as women out of the New York City Fire Department. David Goldberg’s Black Firefighters and the FDNY is a fascinating work chronicling the long history of activists trying to end the exclusion of blacks from what has remained the whitest municipal agency in the city and one of the least diverse large city fire departments in the nation. But as the Vulcan Society, a caucus of black firefighters pursued a number of avenues to end the exclusion of blacks in the department, white fire fighters, under the leadership of their union, the FDNY, and, city officials launched a crusade to maintain a lily white and practically all male agency.
(my bold)
Some of those firefighters who actively fought to keep their stations lily white are still serving.
Just recently, this same FDNY again exposed themselves and their white sheets:
But after the murder of George Floyd more than a year ago touched off protests against racism and violence in policing, the culture inside New York City's firehouses deteriorated beyond repair, Mr. Charles and other Black firefighters said.
White firefighters shared racist messages and memes on their phones mocking Mr. Floyd's dying moments. They gloated about how police could "legally shoot Black children." And lieutenants discussed turning fire hoses on protestors, prompting debates about whether the tactic would work, because "wild animals like water."
After several Black firefighters saw the messages and complained, the department quietly suspended nine firefighters without pay, for periods ranging from a few days to six months. One of the firefighters is set to leave the department after his suspension concludes, the commissioner said.
The sentiment expressed below is not uncommon in the firefighting community:
“But, according to station WHIO, a recent Facebook back-and-forth caught the 20-year-old writing that in a burning building he would choose to save a dog before an African American because “one dog is more important than a million [expletive],” he wrote, using the n-word.”
Racism in fire departments across the country is a feature and not a bug. They’ve been fighting to keep Black people out of serving since Molly Williams joined the company in the early 19th century… and they’ve been leaving Black people to burn even before then.
“Our duty is your protection”? A confession:
Alion said the man told him he used to be a firefighter in the 60s and 70s which he described as a “very different time.” He then said that it was very common in those days for “firefighters who look like him” to leave people that look like Alion (ahem, Black people) in burning houses and write it off as not being able to get to them. He then recalled to Alion hearing the screams of the Black people and children left in houses, cars or even stores that were set ablaze. The man said he pretended he didn’t hear it.
The old man told Alion his last straw was when it came to saving an infant. Despite making eye contact with the baby, he faked as if he was going to save them and left the child. Then, he quit the fire department. Since then, the man told Alion he still suffers with nightmares from those instances and hasn’t forgiven himself for what he’d done.
Personally, I really don’t care what happens to those who chanted for Herr Air Fraud in violation of their professional and possibly ethical codes. However, I do find it pretty sickening that a tax-payer funded organization dedicated to public service should be so loudly, blatantly, and proudly partisan.
Letitia James’s tenure as attorney general of New York will go down as one of the most consequential in the history of the state and of the country. She’s taken on and defeated one of the biggest conmen this country has ever seen. She’s knocked Andrew Cuomo off his pedestal (who took his obnoxious brother Chris with him on the down escalator). She’s slapped Wayne LaPierre and his blood-soaked NRA upside the head and all but put them out of business. From the Washington Post:
Fire in the belly. That’s what prosecutors need. James embodies all of the qualities one should expect in the people’s lawyer: fearlessness, persistence, a keen grasp of the law and the ability to recruit a skilled team. She understands that her job entails aggressive pursuit of justice. She is not one to wait passively for cases to fall into her lap, shy from controversy for fear of politicizing her office or refuse to proceed unless success is assured. She unabashedly defends her mission to the public, her team and herself.
Come to think of it, she would be a marvelous U.S. attorney general in a second Biden term.
Letitia (Tish) James deserves to be respected and celebrated. In this Women’s History Month, we salute you, Madame Attorney General. Now let the haters stew in their own misery.
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News round up by dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor
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Vice President Harris traveled to Minnesota on Thursday to visit a Planned Parenthood health center that provides abortions in what is believed to be the first time an American president or vice president has toured such a facility while in office.
Her visit underscores the emphasis that Democrats are placing this election year on abortion access, an issue they believe heavily plays to their advantage.
Harris, the first female vice president, has become a leading voice on reproductive rights for the Biden administration since the Supreme Court’s decision in June 2022 to overturn Roe v. Wade. Her visit to the Minneapolis-St. Paul area is part of a multistate tour on the heels of President Biden’s State of the Union address last week.
Harris arrived at the St. Paul facility Thursday afternoon, where she was greeted by Sarah Traxler, chief medical officer for Planned Parenthood North Central States, and embarked on a tour. She was joined on the tour by Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz (D) and Rep. Betty McCollum (D-Minn.).
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Dalila Scruggs joins Smithsonian American Art Museum as the museum’s first-ever Augusta Savage curator of African American art.
Scruggs has a background in both educational and curatorial roles, with experience across numerous mediums including painting, prints, sculpture and photography from the 19th and 20th centuries.
Her position is named in honor of Augusta Savage, an artist, teacher, and community art program director associated with the Harlem Renaissance. In her new role, Scruggs will contribute to the museum’s exhibition program and collecting priorities related to African American art. She will also contribute to the cross-departmental initiative “American Voices and Visions” to reinstall the museum’s collection. Scruggs begins her new position on April 22.
“I am delighted to welcome Dalila Scruggs to SAAM as the inaugural Augusta Savage Curator of African American Art,” Stephanie Stebich, director of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, said in a statement. “SAAM is home to one of the most significant collections of African American art in the world, and I am so pleased that Dr. Scruggs will bring fresh, thoughtful analysis to these works that evoke themes both universal and specific to the African American and the American experience.”
Since 2021, Scruggs has been the curator for photography and prints at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in New York. In 2020, she was a guest curator at the Brooklyn Museum. Prior that, she was a consulting curator at the Paul R. Jones Collection of American Art at the University of Alabama, an assistant curator of American art at the Brooklyn Museum, and a curatorial fellow at the Williams College Museum of Art.
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Haiti’s de facto president, Ariel Henry, announced his resignation Tuesday — the culmination of a political crisis at least two weeks in the making, but really three years or more.
Henry issued his resignation while stranded in Puerto Rico. A violent gang leader has cut off Haiti’s capital of Port-au-Prince from the rest of the country; blocked the main port, starving the country of food and fuel; and threatened “civil war that will lead to genocide.” But while it looks like the gang’s coup attempt was successful, that doesn’t mean its leaders have exactly wrested power from Henry. He has agreed to step down following the formation of a transitional presidential council — a long-sought but imperfect tool to hold elections and begin building Haiti’s governmental institutions.
The crisis has been unfolding, in some ways, for decades, as corrupt leaders who lack the support of the Haitian people have allied with gangs and other armed groups to protect their business interests or maintain political power. The US, France, and other powerful nations have also exacerbated the country’s instability for their material benefit or to suit their political interests — backing particular leaders at the cost of Haiti’s economic and democratic development.
Now, the country’s present political and security disaster — accelerating since the assassination of President Jovenel Moïse in 2021 — is at a boiling point. Armed groups, particularly the G9 alliance of gangs operating under Jimmy “Barbecue” Chérizier, have been menacing the Haitian people with near-total impunity as the unelected Henry hollowed out what remained of the country’s institutions.
The Biden administration’s support for Henry in the wake of Moïse’s assassination, alleged to have been carried out by a group of mostly Colombian mercenaries, helped chart Haiti’s course to the current moment. Rather than working with the various Haitian-led civil society groups that came together to offer durable solutions toward democratic consolidation, the US, France, Canada, and other international actors treated Henry as the legitimate interlocutor for the Haitian people despite his extreme unpopularity and the fact that he was never sworn in to his position.
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Much of west and central Africa has been left without internet service, as operators of several subsea cables reported failures.
The cause of the cable failures on Thursday was not immediately clear.
The African subsea cable operator Seacom confirmed that services on its west African cable system were down and that customers who relied on that cable were being redirected to the Google Equiano cable, which Seacom uses.
“The redirection happens automatically when a route is impacted,” it said by email.
Network disruptions caused by cable damage have occurred in Africa in recent years. However, today’s disruption “points to something larger [and] this is amongst the most severe,” said Isik Mater, director of research at NetBlocks, a group that documents internet disruptions around the world.
NetBlocks said data transmission and measurement showed a major disruption to international transits, “likely at or near the subsea network cable landing points”.
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The late Akira Toriyama’s manga and anime hit may not have been created for Black fans, but we made it our own anyway. Slate: Finding Ourselves in Dragon Ball
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On March 8, a few minutes after seeing the news that the titanic anime and manga creator Akira Toriyama had died on March 1 at the age of 68, I, like all Black men in mourning, started drafting a text to my group chat. But before I could fire off my reflexive expression of grief and celebration, my guy Daniel wrote simply: “RIP to our king.” The word “our” leaped out at me, striking in all that it represented. Black people claim Akira Toriyama; he was ours.
He was everyone’s, of course; I don’t mean to hog a man whose work has no borders. It’s difficult to sum up just how influential and universal Toriyama’s work was, but believe me when I say that you can see the impact of his oeuvre—especially Dragon Ball, one of the bestselling manga series of all time, which spawned a colossal anime and media franchise—across nearly every domain of pop culture, from music to sports to video games to comics to TV and film. “After filmmaker Hayao Miyazaki, Toriyama is likely the most influential Japanese artist of modern times,” Gene Park wrote for the Washington Post. Toriyama transcended language, race, and ethnicity, too; last year for the Los Angeles Times, JP Brammer penned the definitive essay about witnessing Toriyama’s most iconic character—the pure-hearted, spiky-haired hero Goku, who stars in each iteration of the Dragon Ball franchise—approach the status of secular sainthood in Mexico.
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