2020 Year In Review
Commentary by dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor
Wow! We’ve nearly reached the end of what felt like the longest year in my lifetime. December is the time of the year we the editors at Black Kos always enjoy taking a look back at some of the highlights of our writing throughout the year.
I’ve been described as an optimist with a sunny disposition. But this year, 2020 well... between the outgoing President’s actions, the pandemic, the economic collapse, and general elevated stress levels, was a trying year even for me. The fact that 74 million Americans in the face of even all this would vote for 4 more years of Trump… well that gave even me pause.
In times like these I like to turn to history to make sense of the present and future. As a self taught student of history, I’ve observed that every forward progression of racial justice has been met with an inevitable racial backlash. We’ve seen this player out over an over again throughout American history. Jim Crow after Reconstruction, the “Red Summer” after WWI, the “Southern Strategy” after the Civil Rights Ear, etc. Then we saw it again with President Obama being replaced by President Trump. Two steps forward, one step back. But the thing that has always given me hope is that the march of American history has over the long term been toward more inclusion and diversity. Our newly elected Vice President Kamala Harris is testimony to this. Liberty and freedom are not inevitable as too many people assume. Instead these rights have to be battled for, won, and then most importantly defended. Black Kos will always be at the forefront of defending those gains as well as pushing forward towards a better future.
With the 2016 election of President Trump, a man whom openly espouses bigotry, America seemed too many more racially divided than it has been in maybe 50 years. But I felt at the time, and still do it’s really because we’re more aware of our racial shortcomings. Recent polling has shown white Democrats and white liberal especially are more likely to acknowledge American racism today than they were prior to 2016. The Black Live Matter rallies of the summer of 2020, after people finally had enough of the status quo, was a testimony to that. The fact that so many non-black allies participated in these marches should be a point of optimism moving forward.
But even with that, many white Americans still have a shocked response to claims of white privileged, social unfairness and discrimination. Maybe they have this reaction because it’s outside their daily experience. If you had asked many white people a few years ago, “Do you think traffic stops of Black people are unfairly racially biased?” the majority of whites probably would say “NO” because it’s not something they’ve personally experienced. Their answer wouldn’t arise because of personal racial animus, it’s just that it’s not something that they see. But with the rise of viral online videos many of the stories of victims of color are now visible for the general public to witness. Viral video lead push back on “Karens” calling the police on people of color for no good reason is an important step in America. Visual experiences are often the most powerful foundations of belief systems, people are most easily persuaded by their eyes.
Even with all of the above, according to the General Social Survey (taken before the 2016 election), only a quarter of whites would choose to live in a neighborhood that was half black. 1 in 5 whites would choose an all-white neighborhood as their ideal neighborhood, while 1 in 4 would choose a neighborhood without any blacks. A plurality of whites still say blacks aren’t hard working, or at least, not as hard working as whites. Pew also notes, a majority of whites say the country has “done enough to give blacks equal rights with whites.” That’s why I hope readers don’t confuse my optimism about race relations (how whites view blacks and other groups) with my more cautious optimism about racial progress (how groups fare in relation to each other). Trump’s now ending dumpster fire of a Presidency , has I hope illustrated the difference between the these two main points.
People not paying attention to the attitudes measured in the General Social Surveys, or who think most people “don’t see race” got a massive awakening with a Republican candidate who ran twice on a white (racial) identity platform, and openly governed on that platform. I also think the shock at how close Trump came to winning again in 2020 also so gave many people pause. To paraphrase a popular saying “racial supremacy is a hell of a drug”, racism is the true “opiate of the masses" in America.
Looking back further at politics in 2020, as maybe the largest most powerful constituency needed to secure the Democratic nomination, black voters gained particular attention during this year’s primary season. Sometimes that attention was positive, often it was not as the supporters of candidates not gaining traction with black voters vented their frustration online. But once black voters largely gathered around the candidacy of then Senator Joe Biden, he rode the wave through the primaries and into the White. Now moving forward our job will be to hold him accountable.
But no look at politics in 2020 would be complete without acknowledging the yeomen’s work Black woman did for Democrats in 2020. From leaders like now VP Kamala Harris and Stacey Abrahams, down to the precinct captains and poll workers who powered Democrats back to the White House. 2020 really highlighted #BlackGirlMagic!
Overall we covered a lot of ground on Black Kos in 2020, from criminal justice and protest, to history and law, politics and international events, prose and poetry, great black scientists and vile right-wing racists. But thankfully 2020 ends with a racist, xenophobic, misogynist, fascist being kicked out of the White House, powered by a multicultural, multigendered coalition. Amen.
But with all that being said we have come to that time of the year, when we the Black Kos editors take our annual holiday season break. We will not be returning until Friday January 8th, 2021. But before we go, I would like to once again thank everyone who reads and participates in Black Kos for continuing to support us. Putting these diaries together is both a group effort and a lot of individual work. I have always viewed it as a blessing that our diaries are so well received.
But as for 2020, let’s look back at this year. One of the things I have always enjoyed is to spend a little time each year looking back at the great work this team has put together. Here are some of the highlights from this year’s edition of Black Kos. So on behalf of Deoliver47, Justice Putnam, JoanMar, Chitown Kev and myself, I would like to say thank you to all our readers. Also I’s like to say a special thank you Sephius for all your years of writing, you were the last of the original editors, and you’ll be sorely missed.
Have a safe holiday season, and a happy new year.
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Cynicism Is The True Enemy Of Progress
BY DOPPER0189, BLACK KOS, MANAGING EDITOR
2019 was another exhausting year. It was a year that once again had our President thrusting racism and xenophobia to the forefront of America’s conscience. 2019 was also a year that again further seemed to bury the idea (and hope) of a post racial America. But 2019 is also year that Congress (or at least the House) reasserted it’s constitutional duties and role and impeached the President of the United States. A large part of the House’s ability to finally “do the right thing” can be attributed to one part of the Democratic base that rose to the forefront because of the previous year’s election. BLACK WOMEN.
“BECOME THE CHANGE YOU WANT TO SEE”
When I worked for the first Obama Presidential campaign in 2008 that phrase has always stayed with me. If you want to see more woman in office, donate your time and money, to support and encourage more woman in public office. The same thing goes for people of color. If you believe there should be more people of color in office, donate your time and money to support and encourage more POC in public office. But most importantly if you’re blessed with the time, resources, and experience go forward and become a force for change in your community. Run for local office, join a local planning board, volunteer for a campaign, advocate for your position a public event, donate to a local candidate, start local and become the change. But don’t let a set back or momentary defeat stop you from your goal.
Obstructionism isn’t just about stopping a movement once, it’s about breading frustration and cynicism in the very system until you stop trying. I’ve long believed cynicism is the real enemy of progress.
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He’s still my President. He gives me hope.
Commentary by Black Kos Editor Denise Oliver-Velez
As the United States spirals into chaos, with a dangerous, lying, racist, xenophobe at the helm, propped up by Republican sycophants and lackeys, I wanted to start the New Year off, back here on the Black Kos Tuesday’s Chile front porch with a reminder. In case you missed our return from the holiday break last week, please go back and read what our founder and Managing Editor Dopper0189 had to say in “Black Kos, New Year, same old opponent - The battle against political cynicism” (I hope he’s gotten over a bad case of the flu).
I can resist becoming a cynic for one reason.
I’m old enough to remember when we had a statesman at the helm.
A man with empathy, and intelligence. A man with a heart. Someone who made me really, really proud of my country, to paraphrase FLOTUS Michelle. That was not so very long ago, though these days a week feels like it lasts a thousand years.
I’ve been spending much of my time in this new year of 2020 tracking the news out of Puerto Rico. Was not surprised when I saw this tweet:
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COMMENTARY: AFRICAN AMERICAN SCIENTISTS AND INVENTORS
By Black Kos Editor, Sephius1
You don't have to be a rocket scientist to be successful—unless, like Aprille Ericsson-Jackson, your goal in life is to be an aerospace engineer. Ms. Ericsson-Jackson, the first African American female Ph.D. at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, delivered the Library's 2001 Women's History Month keynote address on March 6.
"Read, read, read, and learn, learn, learn," she advised the audience, which included third-grade students from Watkins Elementary School in Washington, D.C.
In addition to building satellites, delivering motivational speeches, mentoring young people and participating in a wide variety of sports, Ms. Ericsson-Jackson has made the time to read and learn about the technological contributions of women and minorities.
"If I'm a 'giant in science,' it is only because I stand on the shoulders of my forefathers," she said. "We must go back and reclaim our past so we can move forward."
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The more things change…
Rant by Chitown Kev
Good afternoon and it is good to be back on The Porch...for the first time in 2020.
And I have a lot of stuff planned for this year in this space but...it’s primary season and...you guessed it...I have a rant to get out.
Four years ago, I wrote this very mocking diary about how white Democratic contenders seem to always fall in love with people of color generally and black folks specifically every four years (luckily, the comment section of the linked diary was hijacked into a discussion of food!).
At the same time, people (and I presume that the overwhelming majority, at least here at Daily Kos, are white) are working themselves into conniptions asking why black people vote the way that they do.
Just as they did four years ago...and 12 years ago...and going way back, probably.
I mean, Black Kos appears here twice a week. Many Black Kos editors write individual diaries on some aspect of Black history, Black culture, Black something, and that includes Black voting behavior as evidence by exit polls and analysis and current polling
Here’s two of my own examples here and here.
Yet a lot of times it seems to me that instead of reading and studying a little bit on the subject (and there’s a loooooooot of available material on the subject even here in the Daily Kos archives) and accepting the black vote as it is and black people (including myself) as we (generally) are (in all of our diversity), people would rather project, make sinister accusations, etc.
I have very little patience for that in 2020 and after several election cycles, especially here at a place that’s supposed to be about electing more and better Democrats.
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“Hey, We’re Here”
Commentary by Chitown Kev
I just so happened to have a recent copy of The New Yorker laying around the house. If you haven’t read it, I highly recommennd that everyone reads the New Yorker’s profile with scifi/fantasy novelist N.K. Jemisin.
Midway through the profile, Raffi Khatchadourian does a brief overview of the topic of race as it related to two of Jemisin’s African American ancestors in the scifi genre; specifically Samuel Delany and Octavia Butler. And then...I read this...
Just before winning a Nebula for her tenth novel, Butler sat for an interview with Charlie Rose, who asked, “Are you trying to create a new black mythology?”
“No,” she said. “I am telling stories that interest me.” She spoke a little about what that meant, but Rose persisted: “What, then, is central to what you want to say about race?”
She replied, with a dismissive sting, “Do I want to say something central about race aside from ‘Hey, we’re here’?” She recalled a panel she had been on, in 1979, with another writer. “He thought that it wasn’t really necessary to have black characters in science fiction because you could always make any racial statement you needed to make by way of extraterrestrials,” she told Rose. “If he was trying to start trouble he certainly succeeded.” Butler later wrote a withering response to the writer’s comment, in Transmission magazine: “Science fiction reaches into the future, the past, the human mind. It reaches out to other worlds and into other dimensions. Is it really so limited, then, that it cannot reach into the lives of ordinary everyday humans who happen not to be white?”
(Fast forward to ~5:40 for the Butler/C. Rose exchange.)
A couple of things here.
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by Justice Putnam
Black Kos Poetry Editor
Nigerian poet, novelist and musician, Chris Abani has a prescience that is almost uncanny. His first novel, Masters of the Board, about a neo-Nazi takeover of Nigeria earned him praise as "... (A)frica's answer to Frederick Forsyth." The government, though, believed the book to be a blueprint for an actual coup and sent the 18 year old Abani to prison in 1985. After serving six months, he was released, but he went on to perform in a guerilla theatre group which led to his arrest and imprisonment at the notorious Kiri Kiri prison. He was released again, but after writing his play Song of a Broken Flute, was arrested a third time, sentenced to death and sent to the Kalakuta Prison, where he was jailed with other political prisoners on death row.
Languishing most of the time in solitary confinement, Abani was finally and fortunately released in 1991. He lived in exile in London until 1999, when, fearing for his life, he emigrated to the United States. Currently living in Chicago, he is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a Board of Trustees Professor of English and comparative literary studies at Northwestern University.
With Nigeria recently added to Trump’s travel ban, one can only wonder what fate awaits Chris Abani, this time.
There are stones even here
worn into a malevolence by time
gritting the teeth and tearing
the eyes with the memory.
Out in the desert, the wind
is a sculptor working the ephemera
of sand. Desperately editing steles
to write the names of thousands of slaves
who died to make Pharaoh great.
It is a fool’s game.
And we are like the blind musician
at the hotel who tells us with a smile:
I’ll see you later.
The guard at the pyramid eyes me.
Are you Egyptian? he demands,
then searches my bag for a bomb.
At the hotel they speak Arabic to me,
don’t treat me like the white guests,
and I guess, even here, with all
the hindsight of history we haven’t
learned to love ourselves.
I cannot crawl into the tombs, and cannot
explain why. How do you say: In my country
they buried me alive for six months?
And so you lie and tell yourself this is love.
I am protecting the world from my rage.
Rabab tells me: We know how to build graves
here. I nod. I know. It is the same all over Africa.
Do you have a knife? Do you have one?
the guards at the museum ask Breyten and me,
searching us. We call this on ourselves. We
are clearly political criminals.
I trace the glyphs chipped into stone.
As a writer I am drawn to this. If I could
I too would carve myself into eternity.
Breyten watching me says: Don’t tell me
you’ve found a spelling mistake in it!
A line of miniature statues is placed
into the tomb to serve the pharaoh.
One for each day of the year. Four hundred.
The overseers are a plus. I think
even death will not ease
the lot of the poor here.
Statues: it seems the more I search the world
for differences the more I find it all the same.
Perhaps the Buddha was a jaded traveler too
when he said we are all one.
Mona argues about who should pay
to see the mummies. It isn’t often I can
treat a girl to a dead body, Breyten insists.
A woman nearby tells her husand she can see
dead bodies at work. Why pay?
Do you think she works in a hospital? I ask.
That or the U.S. State Department, Breyten agrees.
From the top of Bab Zwelia, flat rooftops
spread out like a conference of coffee tables.
Broken walls, furniture, pots, litter the roofs
like family secrets sunning themselves.
Two white goats on a roof chew
their way through the debris.
On the Nile, Rabab sings in Arabic, tells me
she wants to be Celine Dion.
She is my sister calling me home to Egypt.
Perhaps one day I will be ready.
For now it is enough to know I can
be at home here.
-- Chris Abani
“Hanging in Egypt with Breyten Breytenbach”
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Today is Gloria Richardson Day in Maryland
Commentary by Black Kos Editor Denise Oliver-Velez
I am always curious about who gets attention during Black History Month and who are the people who don’t become household names. No disrespect meant to iconic folks like the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Frederick Douglass, and Harriet Tubman, however the list of those folks who are not well known, invisible, or misrepresented like Rosa Parks (who was not just some tired old lady who sat down on a bus one day) piques my interest.
Coverage of the Civil Rights Movement (CRM), which is de rigueur for February, is one of my major irritants. Irritating because it erases so many of the very people who made it happen.
Not much attention is paid to the long list of Veterans of the Civil Rights Movement in the south — though they have a movement archive; covering organizers, volunteers, local participants, and protesters who were involved in CORE, NAACP, SCLC, SNCC, SCEF, SSOC, Delta Ministry, Deacons for Defense, and other Southern Freedom Movement organizations during the years 1951-1968.
Over the years here at Daily Kos, I have attempted to write about some lesser known history, as well as featuring some of the people whose actions and commitment inspired me to join the ongoing struggle.
Last year, I wrote about Gloria Hayes Richardson.
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Oshun — West African, Afro-Latino, and Afro-Caribbean, Love Goddess — by dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor
“Oshun is beneficent and generous, and very kind. She does, have a malevolent and tempestuous temper, although it is difficult to anger her.”
“Oshun has excellent cooking skills.”
The Ifa Literary Corpus
Across the ancient world’s many civilizations, love was usually a goddesses’ domain. In the Mediterranean Aphrodite and Venus were the love goddesses of the Greek and Roman pantheons. Egypt had the goddess Isis. In the Middle East, love was personified by the goddesses Ishtar and Astarte. In West Africa, the Yoruba people believe in a love goddess by the name of Oshun. Today being St. Valentine’s Day and with this also being Black History Month, I thought this would be a perfect time to write about Oshun West Africa’s Love Goddess.
I first heard of Oshun while doing research on Afro-Caribbean religions (Black Kos) and later through some conversations about orisha with our own Denise Oliver Velez who is a practitioner of an Afro-Caribbean religion. Because of the forced migrations of West African people through the trans-Atlantic slave trade, Oshun was widely worshiped and venerated throughout the New World in the folk religions of African slaves and later through their descendants (especially in Brazil, Cuba, and Colombia).
Oshun (known as Ochún or Oxúm in Latin America), is an orisha, a spirit, deity, or a goddess that reflects one of the manifestations of the Yorùbá Supreme Being in the Ifá oral literature and Yoruba-based religions. She is one of the most popular and venerated orishas. Oshun is also an important river deity among the Yorùbá people of Nigeria and Benin. She is the divine feminine, fertility, beauty and love. She is connected to destiny and divination.
In Yoruba religious traditions, god and goddess are often famous kings, queens, and wise people, whom after their deaths are considered the reincarnation of primordial spirits. Thus most Yoruba gods and goddesses are both a mixture of historical figures and divine beings of creation. This rather unique mixture of the historical and the divine is a hallmark of the Yoruba.
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Commentary: African American Scientists and Inventors
By dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor
It’s with sadness I have to announce that Sephius1 is stepping down from Black Kos. Due to his work schedule he has only been able to write and not participate for the past 18 months. He has given me his science links and I’ll try to continue on in his tradition. Thank you sephius for helping to make Black Kos, what it is today.
dopper0189
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She was no longer hidden. RIP Katherine G. Johnson.
Commentary by Black Kos Editor Denise Oliver-Velez
I never thought I would live to see the day that a black woman would be honored around the globe for her skills in math and science. Katherine G. Johnson was that woman, and she will live on in the hopes, dreams, and minds of many young girls of the future who will follow her blazing trail and make their marks on history.
Johnson, along with Dorothy Vaughan, and Mary Jackson, were the black women whose contributions had been hidden, and brought into the light, via the book, Hidden Figures: The American Dream and the Untold Story of the Black Women Mathematicians Who Helped Win the Space, by Margot Lee Shetterly, which later became the 2016 film, Hidden Figures.
Black Kos Editor Sephius1 covered her here in 2016, and again in 2017.
From her NY Times Obituary:
They asked Katherine Johnson for the moon, and she gave it to them.
Wielding little more than a pencil, a slide rule and one of the finest mathematical minds in the country, Mrs. Johnson, who died at 101 on Monday at a retirement home in Newport News, Va., calculated the precise trajectories that would let Apollo 11 land on the moon in 1969 and, after Neil Armstrong’s history-making moonwalk, let it return to Earth.
A single error, she well knew, could have dire consequences for craft and crew. Her impeccable calculations had already helped plot the successful flight of Alan B. Shepard Jr., who became the first American in space when his Mercury spacecraft went aloft in 1961.
The next year, she likewise helped make it possible for John Glenn, in the Mercury vessel Friendship 7, to become the first American to orbit the Earth.
Yet throughout Mrs. Johnson’s 33 years in NASA’s Flight Research Division — the office from which the American space program sprang — and for decades afterward, almost no one knew her name.
We know her name now.
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The Master’s Tools Still Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House
Commentary by Chitown Kev
Black lesbian poet Audre Lorde’s dictum that “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house” is a staple of multiple academic disciplines (cultural studies, feminist literature, black literature) and is as popular in some circles as Sojourner Truth’s rhetorical question, “Ain’t I a Woman?”
I first read the essay (collected in Lorde’s 1984 essay collection Sister Outsider in my early 20’s and I am pretty sure that I’d heard the saying before then. Last Saturday, I decided to read the essay for the first time in a number of years and I was reminded I why I liked the essay from the moment that I read it and why the essay has especially resonated with me in the last couple of weeks.
The context first: Lorde was asked to participate in an academic conference and comment “upon papers dealing with the role of difference within the lives of American women: difference of race, sexuallty, class, and age.” She then goes on to describe multiple ways in which the conference failed to take those difference sinto account.
I think that from my first reading of the “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House,” I found Lorde’s discussion of “difference” to be refreshing and even unusual.
Even as a kid, I’ve always been fascinated by the differences that I can see in people and things; perhaps it’s because I always felt out of place. Seeking out and finding similarities among people: I certainly found it to be necessary— and I still do. But I have to confess that I find something rather...I don’t know, boring (?) about that whole process. It seemed to me then...and now...that there’s only so much that I can learn about myself and others through a recognition and study of similarities.
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The True Story Of Yasuke, Japan’s African Samurai
By dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor
Yasuke (written various ways in Japanese as 弥助, 弥介, 彌助, or 彌介 ) was a samurai warrior of black African origin who served under Japanese (daimyō) general Oda Nobunaga during the Sengoku period. Yasuke arrived in Japan in 1579 in the service of an Italian Jesuit missionary named Alessandro Valignano. Valignano had first served in a Catholic Missions in the East Indies (modern South East Asia) before sailing to the Land of the Rising Sun.
Yasuke was famously in Japan during the Honnō-ji Incident, the forced hara-kiri (suicide) of Oda Nobunaga at the hands of his samurai general Akechi Mitsuhide on June 21st 1582. In Japanese popular culture, Yasuke is widely believed to have been the first African that Nobunaga had ever seen. But later studies have shown he was only one of dozens of Africans to have come to Japan with the Portuguese during the Nanban trade period. Instead it was most likely a mix of both Yasuke’s great size combined and his “exotic” African origins that endeared him to Oda Nobunaga.
I first heard of Yasuke in a rather odd manner. I was a fan of the Cartoon Network’s animated show Afro-Samuria (which was voiced by Samuel Jackson) around 2009. I don’t remember why but he became popular with my co-workers too after I told them I watched it. I then went online to print a picture of him to hang on my cubical’s wall and while looking him up I was stunned to discover he was inspired by a real historical figure. Now I was of course aware that many people of African origin whom sailed with European explorers barely get mentioned in history classes. I also was aware that many of these individuals later whom went on to great fame is completely ignored. But I was shocked that Japan a country often stereotyped as not particularly welcoming to foreigners had such a famous historical figure that I knew nothing about. From that day I first heard the name Yasuke I became fascinated by him. With the 2020 Olympics being held in Tokyo Japan (hopefully the corona virus scare will have abated by then) my mind returned to Yasuke. So even though the story of Yasuke may sound like a plot to some fantasy novel, Yasuke did in real life fact don a kabuto (samurai helmet) as history’s first and only African samurai.
The 1500s to put it lightly, wasn’t a good time to be an African in the company of most Europeans, but this was especially true of the Portuguese. Portugal’s maritime empire was the first European kingdom to exploded both the trans-Atlantic and the Indian Ocean slave trade to the Arab world (Black Kos, Week In Review — The Arab slave trade in Africa). Furthermore Portuguese captains often brought enslaved Africans with them as they traveled all over the world. Sanitized stories from the era refer to Jesuit missionaries with “African servants” in Japan, but the term "servant" is just a euphemism for slavery.
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Voices and Soul
by Black Kos Poetry Editor, Justice Putnam
I was thinking about Kurt Vonnegut the other day. I was thinking about the firebombing of Dresden and the burning of Beatles albums in the South. I was thinking about the destruction of the Library in Alexandria and dynamiting of the Buddhas of Bamyan. I was thinking of laws that prevented blacks from reading, and if there were no laws, the local Citizens Council made sure no reading occured.
Vonnegut was not the only one to call the bombing of Dresden an act of terror. Even British Air Commodore Colin McKay Grierson, a confidant of Churchill, admitted to AP war correspondent Howard Cowan, that the raid also helped destroy...
... what is left of German morale.
Cowan then filed a report that the allies had resorted to terror bombing.
The firebombing of Dresden, a center for Art and Literature, was a strategic act of terror. The burning of Beatles albums was a conscious act by white supremacists and one meant to intimidate. Laws to prevent the education of blacks and brown peoples are making a virulent resurgence. In fact, black and brown peoples are now routinely locked up in ice box baby gulags, and a pandemic has further fractured an already fractured world.
Which reminds me of another knock-on-wood
memory. I was cycling with a male friend,
through a small midwestern town. We came to a 4-way
stop and stopped, chatting. As we started again,
a rusty old pick-up truck, ignoring the stop sign,
hurricaned past scant inches from our front wheels.
My partner called, "Hey, that was a 4-way stop!"
The truck driver, stringy blond hair a long fringe
under his brand-name beer cap, looked back and yelled,
"You fucking niggers!"
And sped off.
My friend and I looked at each other and shook our heads.
We remounted our bikes and headed out of town.
We were pedaling through a clear blue afternoon
between two fields of almost-ripened wheat
bordered by cornflowers and Queen Anne's lace
when we heard an unmuffled motor, a honk-honking.
We stopped, closed ranks, made fists.
It was the same truck. It pulled over.
A tall, very much in shape young white guy slid out:
greasy jeans, homemade finger tattoos, probably
a Marine Corps boot-camp footlockerful
of martial arts techniques.
"What did you say back there!" he shouted.
My friend said, "I said it was a 4-way stop.
You went through it."
"And what did I say?" the white guy asked.
"You said: 'You fucking niggers.'"
The afternoon froze.
"Well," said the white guy,
shoving his hands into his pockets
and pushing dirt around with the pointed toe of his boot,
"I just want to say I'm sorry."
He climbed back into his truck
and drove away.
-- Marilyn Nelson
“Minor Miracle”
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Racial myths can kill you.
Commentary by Black Kos Editor Denise Oliver-Velez
It has been difficult watching the racism that has affected the Asian-American diaspora, putting members of that global community at risk for violence from ignorant racists. One of the worst offenders is our own impeached POTUS.
His weasel words (lies) are already affecting people in other countries.
Global epidemics are not new, and racist responses aren’t either. Our Black Kos Editor Chitown Kev, has been looking into the history of epidemics and their impact on black communities.
The Crisis, highlighted this story from CityLab by Brentin Mock, “Why You Should Stop Joking That Black People Are Immune to Coronavirus.”
Lining’s medical briefs became the reference manuals for another physician, Dr. Benjamin Rush, when in 1793 a yellow fever outbreak took hold of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, which at the time was the nation’s capitol. Close to 20,000 people — half of the population — fled Philly that year, while many African Americans actually stayed in the city at the request of Rush, who wanted to train them to nurse, care-take, and dig graves for the thousands of people dying of yellow fever.
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Commentary: African American Scientists, Explorers and Inventors
By dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor
Matthew Alexander Henson (August 8, 1866 – March 9, 1955) was an American explorer who accompanied U.S. Navy engineer Robert Peary on seven voyages to the Arctic over a nearly 23 year period. Henson is best known for his participation in the 1908-1909 expedition that claimed to have reached the geographic North Pole on April 6, 1909. Henson said he was the first of their party to reach the pole. Henson’s lifetime achievements were largely ignored by the general public and the popular media because of his race.
I first heard of Matthew Henson when I was a young child and I was taken ice fishing by a family friend. This friend was a history teacher who had worked with my mom, and knowing I had a love of history he always shared some tidbit of history with me. I was the only black kid on a frozen lake in NH and he wanted to make sure I knew I wasn’t the only black person who had “explored the frozen tundras” as he called our adventure.
Matthew Henson was born in Nanjemoy, Maryland, to sharecropper parents who were free people of color before the Civil War. When Henson was 4 years old, his father moved the family to Washington, D.C., in search of work opportunities. Henson’s father died there a few years later, leaving Matthew Henson and his siblings in the care of other family members.
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Commentary by Black Kos Editor Denise Oliver-Velez
One of my favorite follows on Twitter is a sister named Reecie Colbert, who goes by the handle of BlackWomenViews @blackwomenviews on Twitter, has a YouTube channel and is also a guest commentator on Roland Martin Unfiltered.
Sister Reecie is outspoken, pulls no punches (as #KHive members are already aware of) and is an astute observer of electoral politics.
Saw her tweet, and the accompanying thread, and wanted to give her props for highlighting these sisters — as well as others who were named by folks who participated in the conversation.
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Plus ça Change
News with a little bit of commentary by Chitown Kev
I mean, I do have thoughts nowadays; thoughts that remain a bit jumbled and confused as I seem to be taking in everything that I am reading and hearing about the coronavirus pandemic that we are facing.
But...and particularly after my own scare with my own rising temperature last Thursday evening/Friday morning, I’m doing more news and pundit reading than I ever have...it’s difficult for me to concentrate (I think that the now-nearly daily sweep and disinfecting of my desk is helping somewhat).
1.) So...I was reading this AlJazeera essay by Robtel Neajai Palley and...on one hand, from the standpoint of someone living in a country that puts up with daily assaults of white supremacist braggadocio from a damn fool that doesn’t know what the hell he is doing, one of my instinctual thoughts is that it’s a little to soon for an essay like this.
On the other hand, upon reading the essay, I instantly wanted to edit the headline to read “Who’s the Shi*hole Country Now?”
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Black Caesar’s Rise From Enslaved African Warrior Chief to Pirate of the Caribbean — by dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor
Black Caesar (place date of birth unknown — died 1718) was a legendary 18th-century Caribbean pirate of West African decent. For nearly a decade, he raided ships from the his home base in the Florida Keys and later served as one of the infamous pirate Captain Blackbeard's (Edward Teach's) head crewmen aboard the Queen Anne's Revenge. Caesar was one of the few surviving members of Blackbeard's crew following his death at the hands of Lieutenant Robert Maynard in 1718. Caesar's Rock, one of three islands located north of Key Largo, is named in his honor, and is the site of Caesar’s original headquarters.
I first heard of Black Caesar when I was a child, after meeting an older relative who named his large dog Caesar (actually it was a HUGE dog). I had at first assumed he named the dog after Julius Caesar the Roman Emperor, one of my cousins later corrected me and told me he was named after Black Caesar the pirate. Years later in college I got into a discussion with some black friends about the blaxploitation flick Black Caesar, they didn’t know the name had come from the pirate so I looked him up and showed them.
During the ”golden age” of piracy in the late 1600s and early 1700s, a pirate ship was one of the few places a black man could attain power and money in the Western Hemisphere. Some of these black pirates were fugitive slaves in the Caribbean or other coastal areas of the Americas. Others joined pirate crews when their slave ships or plantations were raided; it was often an easy choice between perpetual slavery and freedom through piracy.
Historians estimate that approximately 1/3 of the 10,000 pirates during the golden age of piracy were former slaves. While many were still mistreated and forced to do the lowest tasks aboard ship, some captains established revolutionary equality among their men, regardless of race. On these ships, black pirates could vote, bear arms, and receive an equal share of the booty. However back on dry, justice for black and white pirates was not equal. White pirates were usually hanged, but black pirates were often returned to their owners or otherwise resold into slavery, a fate often worse than death.
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Remembering Nina Simone, and Lorraine Hansberry in the time of COVID-19
Commentary by Black Kos Editor Denise Oliver Velez
My eyes filled with tears when I saw this photo of five year old Skylar Herbert, who is a victim of COVID-19. All of our condolences go out to her family.
I found myself humming “Young, Gifted and Black,” in my head — the tribute to our young people composed by Nina Simone, with lyrics by Weldon Irvine. Simone wrote the song in memory of her friend, playwright Lorraine Hansberry, author of “A Raisin in the Sun, who died of pancreatic cancer on January 12, 1965, at the age of 34. A play honoring Hansberry’s life and work, To Be Young, Gifted and Black: Lorraine Hansberry in her Own Words, written by her ex-husband Robert B. Nemiroff, ran from 1968 to 1969 off Broadway.
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Voices and Soul
by Justice Putnam
Black Kos Poetry Editor
Two quotes by Malcolm X resonated with me during my early childhood in Oregon and resonate still.
"We didn't land on Plymouth Rock, my brothers and sisters, Plymouth Rock landed on us!"
and
"I have no mercy or compassion for a society that crushes people, and then penalizes them for not being able to stand up under the weight."
I was thinking about Tupac Shakur the other day and of the first time I heard the term, “a pandemic of racism.” Tupac was certainly a child and man of his times, and he died far too early. His social commentary and poetry of the human condition, particularly, the condition of black men and women, is certainly informed by the two quotes I cited. His poetry addresses the plain facts of what it is to live under a dual system of Due Process and Equal Protection, one bleached white and disinfected with Lysol, the other renditioned to a literal black site with a drop of the gavel. It might be argued that the "apartheid" Jim Crow laws were forever overturned in the public and private arenas, but Shakur saw how that Jim Crow mentality is alive and well in the most cherished of our "Ideals." Millions of black men and women are incarcerated and war criminals walk free, grifters and charlatans prey on the backs of the disadvantaged and then claim, Justice is Blind. Essential workers are those who serve the monied and the privileged, while black grandmothers gasp a death rattle gasp after being sent home because the ventilator clinic is all full.
There are two systems. One that seeks Due Process and Equal Protection for All, and another that seeks Life, Liberty and the Pursuit to Infect as Many as Possible.
Liberty Needs Glasses
excuse me but lady liberty needs glasses
and so does mrs justice by her side
both the broads r blind as bats
stumbling thru the system
justice bumped into mutulu and
trippin on geronimo pratt
but stepped right over oliver
and his crooked partner ronnie
justice stubbed her big toe on mandela
and liberty was misquoted by the indians
slavery was a learning phase
forgotten with out a verdict
while justice is on a rampage
4 endangered surviving black males
i mean really if anyone really valued life
and cared about the masses
theyd take em both 2 pen optical
and get 2 pair of glasses
-- Tupac Shakur
“Liberty Needs Glasses”
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Is this what you call freedom?
Rant by Chitown Kev
I was just entering my 40’s, I think, when I read these words delivered by Angela Davis in 1970 in what is now commonly called her “Lectures on Liberation” The words were delivered during her first lecture on “The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass.”
Is man free or is he not? Ought he be free or ought not he be free? The history of Black Literature provides, in my opinion, a much more illuminating account of the nature of freedom, its extent and limits, than all the philosophical discourses on this theme in the history of Western society Why? For a number of reasons. First of all, because Black Literature in this country and throughout the world projects the consciousness of a people who have been denied entrance into the real world of freedom. Black people have exposed, by their very existence, the inadequacies not only of the practice of freedom, but of its very theoretical formulation. Because, if the theory of freedom remains isolated from the practice of freedom or rather is contradicted in reality, then this means that something must be wrong with the concept — that is, if we are thinking in a dialectical manner.
At the time, I had read a lot of the works of various philosophers that would expound on so-called “freedom” and “liberty” .
I had also read a number of slave narratives by former slaves like Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs.
I had never thought to connect the two experiences and I was...somewhat ashamed that I had not made that connection.
To be fair to myself, I was not born in a time or place such that my thinking would even be structured in such a way.
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Y’all hoteps and noteps better leave Michelle Obama alone.
Commentary by Black Kos Editor Denise Oliver-Velez
It has come to my attention that certain online social media elements have decided to make the attempt to go after the most beloved black woman in America and the most admired woman in the world. Those asswipes who have jumped into the “trash Michelle” sewer need to be put in check — toot suite.
Chile…
The anti-Michelle agenda has come from several directions.
There was this story headline from The Daily Beast
It was then retweeted by Eugene Scott from the Washington Post — which got pushback, but a lot of haters jumped in to go after Michelle. I’m not posting their tweets, and have blocked as many as I can.
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How Are You?
Commentary by Chitown Kev
To this point I am doing...OK under the shelter-in-place orders in Illinois.
For the most part, when not at work, I’m usually at home or out at other loosely structured activities, so being at home, in and of itself, is no biggie.
I have received my emergency relief check from the IRS along with, yes, that shitty letter with The Damn Fool’s name on it (which I threw in the trash instantly). Rent is paid thru the month. Refrigerator is kind of stocked right now..
I am currently on furlough, so I don’t have any income coming in. My landlord has already said not to worry about it but, considering that my job involves, in part, working with the public, I honestly don't see myself returning to work anytime soon. So the rent does worry me, a bit.
I am also realizing just how important work is in providing a structure to my day and week. I know that I have to be to work on certain days at a certain time and I also pretty much know the times that I can be called in to sub for someone else.
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Thoughts on Harry and Meghan, POTUS Obama and virulent racism.
Commentary by Black Kos Editor Denise Oliver-Velez
I don’t often write about international celebrities like the Duke and Duchess of Sussex; though they have been covered here on Daily Kos, I find the Duchess of Sussex, formally Meghan Markle (and her mom, Doria Ragland) of interest, simply because far too many folks who purport to be “on the left” continue to push the “white Trumpists aren’t racist, it’s economic anxiety or Brexit wasn’t about race” memes. I keep being told that equal access to money, and education will somehow magically solve racism.
Um. No.
So when I woke up today to find the 2nd wedding anniversary of #HarryandMeghan trending on social media I took a look.
It was interesting to see the tweets of support.
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The Siddi — The 1400 Year History of Africans In South Asia
By dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor
The Indian subcontinent is home to over 1.7 billion people or about 22% of the world’s total population. In the ages of antiquity no empire (with the notable exception of China) has been as large, wealthy, and powerful as India for as long a period of time. For the purpose of this diary when I refer to India, I will speaking of the entire Indian subcontinent. As the modern nations of India, Pakistan, later Bangladesh and Sri Lanka were formed out the 1947 political fragmentation of what was historical a united Indian empire. To be more accurate this diary is about the people of African decedent who live in South Asia.
During almost all of recorded history, Indian sailors and traders traveled the relatively warm calm waters of the Indian Ocean from present day Indonesia all the way to Mozambique. India traded extensively with all these area, and vice versa. One of the least recognized historical facts in the West is the presence of people of African descent in India. I may be speculating, but I believe that’s because people from Southern India share the darker skin tones of black Africans. Thus this migration hasn’t been as noticeable to Western eyes. Never the less, Africans have been present in India for fourteen centuries. People of African descent in South Asia are known as the Siddi.
On a personal note, my family is from the Caribbean where there are a large number of people of East Indian decent, with some countries in the Caribbean being as much as 50% East Indian (that’s a whole other example of unrecognized facts). I personally have a number of people with East Indian blood in my family. The Caribbean is one of the world’s great melting pots, as evident in Jamaica’s and Trinidad’s curry dishes, introduced by East Indian indentured workers almost two centuries ago. I have always had a fascination with Indian culture, but it was only as an adult I realized that historically the Indian subcontinent had both a significant presence and contact with ancient Africa. But it was only even more recently that I learned of a significant presence of Africans in India known as the Siddi.
There are various hypotheses on the origin of the name Siddi. One theory is that the word derives from sahibi, an Arabic term of respect in North Africa, similar to the word sahib in modern India and Pakistan. A second theory is that the term Siddi is derived from the title borne by the captains of the Arab vessels that first brought Siddi settlers to India. These captains were known as Sayyid.
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Voices and Soul
by
Justice Putnam, Black Kos Poetry Editor
On the evening of 4 June 1968, at the age of thirteen, I accompanied my father to the Ambassador Hotel in downtown Los Angeles. For several years, he had been writing policy and research papers for the California State Democratic Steering and Platform Committees. I had walked precincts and volunteered at the Kennedy Campaign Headquarters in the San Gabriel Valley for the preceding two months, so as a sort of reward, I was allowed to stay up past my regular bedtime to go with my father to what was, we were certain, to be a victory celebration.
Dad and I had been at the Ambassador since around 8:30 p.m. It was a huge and boisterous crowd. Normally, I retired before 10 p.m., so by the time Kennedy entered the ballroom around 11:30 p.m., I was pretty bushed. His speech would be broadcast on the radio, so Dad and I headed home. On the way, we heard Kennedy and five others had been shot.
I was at a department store near our home, in the television department when the news of Martin Luther King's assassination was broadcast on 4 April 1968. Dad had been teaching his history classes at Cal State Fullerton that day and evening; and had not heard the news, so my revelation was the first he had heard of it. I never had seen my Dad cry, but he teared up when I told him. At that point, I had been a Eugene McCarthy aficionado, but I changed allegiances after listening, with my father, to Kennedy's speech in front of a black audience in Indiana, informing them of MLK's assassination.
Kennedy is reported to have questioned earlier, when informed of King's killing, "When will this violence stop?" It is a question that is still shouted to high heaven today.
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Commentary: African American Scientists, Explorers and Inventors
By dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor
Theodore Roosevelt Mason "T. R. M." Howard (March 4, 1908 – May 1, 1976) was a Civil Rights leader, entrepreneur and surgeon. He also helped mentor activists such as Medgar Evers, Charles Evers, Fannie Lou Hamer, Amzie Moore, Aaron Henry, and Jesse Jackson. Howard founded Mississippi's leading civil rights organization in the 1950s, the Regional Council of Negro Leadership; and played a prominent role in the investigation of the kidnapping and murder of Emmett Till. He was also president of the National Medical Association, chairman of the board of the National Negro Business League, and a leading national advocate of black businesses.
Howard was born in 1908 in Murray, Kentucky to Arthur Howard, a tobacco twister, and Mary Chandler, a cook for Will Mason a prominent local white doctor and member of the Seventh-day Adventist Church. Dr. Mason took note of the boy's work habits, talent, ambition, and charm. He put him to work in his hospital and eventually paid for much of his medical education. Howard later showed his gratitude by adding Mason as one of his middle names.
Because inpatient care was nonexistent for most African-Americans in Mississippi, several black fraternal organizations built and staffed their own hospitals. One of these, the Taborian Hospital, was established in the all black town of Mound Bayou, Mississippi, in 1942.
Theodore Roosevelt Mason Howard, MD, arrived as Chief Surgeon of the Taborian Hospital in 1947. Howard was not only a surgeon but also an entrepreneur, orator, politician, big game hunter, and “raconteur”. His enterprises included a thousand-acre plantation, a home construction firm, an insurance company, the first swimming pool for blacks in Mississippi, a restaurant with a beer garden, a small zoo, and a hospital that gave affordable care to tens of thousands.
He angered whites by his success, flamboyant lifestyle, and outspoken civil rights activism. With Mississippi National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) leader Aaron Henry, he organized the Regional Council of Negro Leadership in 1951 and sponsored visits to Mississippi by black leaders and celebrities unpopular with whites.
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The Talented Tenth in an Age of Blue-Checks
Commentary by Chitown Kev
I suspect that most black people know a little something about “The Talented Tenth.” The term might be considered synonymous with the occasional pejorative “bougie.” (Personally, I have been acquainted with the term since I was a child.) Many people associate the term with something that Dr. W.E.B. DuBois wrote a long time ago (true enough, Dr. DuBois popularized the term but it’s origins go back a little further). I think that very few people know precisely what Dr. DuBois meant by the term and how Dr. DuBois own understanding of “the Talented Tenth” changed over time.
As Dr. DuBois originally conceived it, “The Talented Tenth” was to be an “aristocracy” of “college-bred” men who were to be:
...the group leader, the man who sets the ideals of the community where he lives, directs thoughts, and heads social movements.
At the time, Dr. DuBois noted that the preachers, however “ignorant and immoral,” were the group leaders by the way of the foremost institution in black life: the black church. DuBois’ aim was that these “college-bred men” would, in large part, supplant the role of the preacher in black life and provide guidance and teaching to others.
Importantly, DuBois did not seek to deprecate other professions or other forms of education; not even technical and industrial education of the type advocated by Booker T. Washington. But he did think that college-bred men that entered teaching and other professional jobs (Dubois provides a chart showing the various professions that college educated black people were entering) were to be the leaders and teachers of black people.
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Black Power
Commentary by Black Kos Editor Denise Oliver-Velez
It was June 16th, 1966 in Greenwood, Mississippi. A large crowd of Black people were gathered, awaiting chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) Stokely Carmichael’s release from jail. Civil rights activist James Meredith had been shot by a white sniper only 10 days earlier, while undertaking his solitary “March Against Fear.”
Just south of Hernando, on the second day of his solitary march, a white man by the name of Aubrey James Norvell stood along the roadside and raised his shotgun, then fired three loads of buckshot at him. Several pellets struck Meredith in the head, neck, and body while horrified onlookers watched. Almost immediately, civil rights leaders from different organizations rushed to Meredith’s bedside at a Memphis hospital with plans to continue the “March Against Fear” while he recuperated. Martin Luther King and CORE national director, Floyd McKissick, met with SNCC’s Cleveland Sellers, Stanley Wise, and newly-elected SNCC chairman, Stokely Carmichael, who stressed that the march was an opportunity “to organize in communities along the march route.” SNCC wanted the march to focus attention on local voter registration efforts by bringing marchers and reporters to Mississippi towns where most Black people were still unregistered as voters. They also insisted that marchers use civil disobedience in communities where they encountered resistance.
Rev. Martin Luther King was the march’s most visible figure. Black people in Mississippi and throughout the South idolized King and trusted his leadership. King, for his part, was aware of a new anger among young Black people in SNCC and elsewhere, and one could detect in his speeches during the march, attempts to reflect the new racial mood without abandoning the ideals of nonviolence and brotherhood.Though respecting King, SNCC participants sought opportunities to convey the idea that beyond getting more Black people registered to vote, a more radical approach to change was now necessary. It was within this context that SNCC’s Willie Ricks and Carmichael shouted out “Black Power”–a shortened version of “black power for black people.” SNCC organizers had been using the phrase in Alabama.
The decision made that day by the SNCC contingent would change the course of Black struggle. The call for “Black Power” — not simply, “Freedom Now,” would challenge the established movement leadership positions. The people who delivered that message were Stokely Carmichael, and Willie Ricks (whose name you may not know).
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The History of Juneteenth
By dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor
Juneteenth is the oldest nationally celebrated commemoration of the ending of slavery in the United States. Celebrations of Juneteenth date to 1866, and at first involved church-centered community gatherings in Texas. Juneteenth soon spread across the South and became more commercialized in the 1920s and 1930s, often centering on a food festival. During the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s, Juneteenth was eclipsed by the struggle for postwar civil rights, but it grew in popularity again in the 1970s with a focus on African American freedom and arts. In the 21st century, Juneteenth in celebrated in most major cities across the United States. Activists are campaigning for the United States Congress to recognize Juneteenth as a national holiday. Juneteenth is recognized as a state holiday or special day of observance in 47 of the 50 U.S. state.
The word Juneteenth is a portmanteau of June and nineteenth and it is also known as Freedom Day, Jubilee Day, and Liberation Day. Today Juneteenth observance is primarily in local celebrations. Traditions include public readings of the Emancipation Proclamation, singing traditional songs such as "Swing Low, Sweet Chariot" and "Lift Every Voice and Sing", and reading of works by noted African-American writers such as Ralph Ellison and Maya Angelou. The Mascogos, descendants of Black Seminoles, of Coahuila, Mexico, also celebrate Juneteenth.
I first heard of Juneteenth as a young child, but I didn’t participate in any celebrations until my sophomore year at the University of Michigan. As the years have gone on the holiday has gained more traction in more and more regions of the United States. In my experience it is eclipsing Kwanza as the most significant African-American holiday.
On June 19th 1865 Union soldiers, led by Major General Gordon Granger, landed at Galveston, Texas with news that the war had ended and that the enslaved were now free. Note that this was two and a half years after President Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation which had become official on January 1, 1863. The Emancipation Proclamation had little impact on Texas due to the minimal number of Union troops to enforce the new Executive Order. However, with the surrender of General Lee in April of 1865, and the arrival of General Granger’s regiment, the forces were finally strong enough to influence and overcome the resistance.
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Reject self-appointed gatekeepers of blackness
Commentary by Black Kos Editor Denise Oliver-Velez
Today marks the birthday of songstress, actress and civil rights activist Lena Horne, born on June 30, 1917. Sitting here thinking of her, the barriers she faced as a Black woman thrown into the racially segregated world of Hollywood, her commitment to uplifting the troops in WWII, her work with the civil rights movement…
Horne never had a leading role in her early films due to racism. While entertaining troops at Fort Reilly, Kansas during World War II, Horne filed a complaint with the NAACP because African American soldiers in the audience had to sit in back seats behind German POWs. Horne financed her own travel to entertain black troops when MGM Studios pulled her off its tour. In the late 1940s, Horne sued a number of restaurants and theaters for race discrimination and also became politically allied with Paul Robeson in the liberal organization Progressive Citizens of America. She joined Eleanor Roosevelt's unsuccessful campaign for anti-lynching legislation and worked on behalf of Japanese Americans who faced discrimination. During the anti-communist hearings in the U.S. Congress in the 1950s, Horne was among hundreds of entertainers blacklisted because of political views and social activism. In the 1960s, she performed in the South at rallies for civil rights, participated in the 1963 March On Washington, and supported the work of the National Council for Negro Women.
She her own personal struggles dealing with the privileges of and resentments against her for her very light skin, and I feel sad, and angry that at this crucial moment in our history, as crowds gather around the world to support #BlackLivesMatter, that some of us are going backwards —into a kind of reverse colorism, aided and abetted by right wing funding for ADOS.
Colorism, and the rejection of dark skin within our own community is an ugly cancer — which has not yet been excised. So to add to the toxic mess we are facing, yet another “who is really black” bomb, echoing the crap thrown at Barack Obama, is more than just tiresome — it is damaging to our body politic. As we get closer to Joe Biden’s selection of his Vice Presidential pick, bots, trolls and malcontents are reviving their “Kamala Harris is not black” campaign which was trotted out during the debates.
We Black folks are a rainbow.
A large chunk of that rainbow was painted with a brush steeped in pain. Poet and writer Caroline Randall Williams, laid part of the story out in her powerful opinion piece for The New York Times; “You Want a Confederate Monument? My Body Is a Confederate Monument”
The black people I come from were owned and raped by the white people I come from. Who dares to tell me to celebrate them?
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Summer Interlude
by Chitown Kev
Look, y’all...I need an interlude today so…
Y’all know that most discussions of soul/R&B music will, at some point, simply become a contest between Detroit soul and Philly soul.
You know it, don’t deny it...it just...is.
And when it comes to the Aretha/Patti battles, I am on Team Aretha...of course.
I don’t recall seeing this tribute to Aretha where Patti sang “Ain’t No Way” but...as the tweeter here says, Aretha’s nod says it all!
Chile, Patti put her foot in this!
Not bad for an “Illuminati globalist puppet,” now is it?
Chile...my week got started off ALL wrong with that shit!
(Yeah, that was the same dude that took a joke that Beyonce was really Italian seriously and just blew it up).
Honestly, this stuff is kinda funny on one hand.
On the other hand, the QAnon folks are serious about their batshit and, therefore, they put other in danger.
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The George Floyd Justice in Policing Act.
Commentary by Black Kos Editor Denise Oliver-Velez
In case you were unaware of what has been happening with the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act — the call has gone out for people to become citizen co-sponsors.
DEADLINE: Sign up by July 23 to have your name entered into the Congressional Record as a citizen cosponsor.
On June 25th, the US House of Representatives passed the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act to address the systemic racism and police brutality that have led to the murder of far too many Black people in America. Among other provisions, this bill will prohibit racial profiling by law enforcement, ban chokeholds and no-knock warrants, limit the transfer of military-grade equipment to local law enforcement, increase accountability and transparency on police misconduct, invest in community public safety initiatives, and create new training programs to change the culture of law enforcement.
JusticeInPolicing.us was created by the office of House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer to help the public learn more about the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act and enable Americans from across the country to sign on as citizen cosponsors and add their voices to this important national discussion.
You can help spread the word by signing, and then posting to Twitter and Facebook, like I just did.
We need to create a groundswell — both in educating the public about the bill passed by the House, and also to pressure for Senate passage (and to garner support for those Senate candidates who are fighting to replace the Trump enablers)
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The Abaco and The Bahamas — How the most successful slave revolt in US history actually occurred in the Bahamas
By dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor
The story of the most successful slave revolt in US history was a rather convoluted international affair and actually occurred in the Bahamas. In 1840 on the Bahamian island of Abaco a revolt started on the American slave ship the Creole. The series of events that lead up to the revolted started when a black man named Madison Washington who had previous escaped slavery (and had made it to Canada) tried to return to the US to free his wife. Madison was caught in Maryland by slave catchers taken to Virginia, and put on the slave ship, the Creole, with other slaves destined for sale in Louisiana. Madison was onboard a slave ship that contained 135 Africans and 17 white people. The white slavers only carried one gun because of the fear slave would revolts and arm themselves.
I first heard of this story during last years’ Hurricane Dorian that devastated the Bahamas. I considered myself somewhat of an expert on Caribbean history but this was story I was not previously familiar with. I was aware the Bahamas had long cultural ties with African-Americans, and many Floridian slaves had escaped there, but I didn’t know how active the Bahamas had been in opposing US slavery.
First a little of the backstory on the Bahamas, and why the islands became a beacon for enslaved African-Americans to escape to. The Bahamas became a British crown colony in 1718, when the British clamped down on piracy and formally occupied the archipelago of 200 some islands. After the American Revolutionary War, the British Crown resettled many of the white Southerners who were loyal to Britain, numbering thousands of American Loyalists, to the Bahamas which was largely uninhabited at that time. Many of these white settlers brought their enslaved Africans with them. They then established plantations on British land grants. But harsh weather conditions and tropical diseases made many of the white settlers leave after a couple of decades, without the large number of blacks they had taken there.
Because of this history, African slaves and their descendants constituted the majority of the population from this period to the present. Then in 1807, the British abolished the trans-Atlantic slave trade. During the following decades, the British Royal Navy intercepted any slave trade ships, the navy then resettled emancipated slaves in The Bahamas. Many of those freed Africans who were liberated on the open seas went to the Bahamas as free people, they numbered thousands of Africans liberated from the slave ships.
In 1818, the British Home Office in London had ruled that "any slave brought to the Bahamas from outside the British West Indies (Caribbean) would be manumitted (emancipated)."Up to the point the British Home Office had ruled escaped African slaves were emancipated if they reached the Caribbean, the Bahamas had been a regular stop in the Atlantic slave trade. Furthermore shipwrecked US vessels had often ended up there.
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On the Matter of Wanting to Throw Some [Hot...Very Hot!] Grits
Commentary by Chitown Kev
I believe that it was earlier this year in February that I ran into someone that I know to be a Daily Kos reader (and one of my regular readers, as it turns out) on my job. He’s a nice guy, very encouraging and complimentary of my writing, actually, and when I do see him we occasionally briefly discuss a piece that I wrote.
So on this occasion in late February when I encountered this Daily Kos...lurker?, he asked me a simple question: Why didn’t black voters seem interested in (the name of a Democratic primary candidate)?
I could have easily answered the question; it has been much discussed here on Daily Kos, at other Democratic-leaning blogs, and in other social media forums like Facebook and Twitter. Instead, I muttered something that I don’t remember, shrugged my shoulders, and kept on working.
That late February encounter was one of the first things that came to mind when I read André Naquian-Wheeler’s interview with San Francisco Mayor London Breed posted at Vogue magazine; an interview that, for a time, focused specifically on so-called white activism on behalf of black folks and Mayor Breed did not hold back.
Does it feel like the concerns of San Francisco’s Black communities are being heard right now?
What’s happening in San Francisco now, and has for so many years, is you have a progressive movement made up of people who are mostly white and feel that they know what’s in the best interest of Black people. I’m over that.
I think it’s important that we support and respect the Black people here enough to know that we have a mind of our own. Because half the policies pushed in San Francisco are “progressive policies” that don’t work for Black people. Because, if they did, why are things far worse for Black people here? In San Francisco, a city where less than 5 to 6% of the population is African American and yet we are disproportionately overrepresented in everything that’s bad: high school dropouts, arrests, homelessness. You name it.
Later in the interview, Mayor Breed responded to Mr. Naquian-Wheeler’s question about protestors that staged a demonstration outside of her home.
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Commentary: Black Scientists, Explorers, and Inventors
By dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor
Bessie Coleman (January 26, 1892 – April 30, 1926) was an early American civil aviator. She was the first woman of African-American descent (also the first of Native-American descent) to hold a pilot license. She earned her pilot license from the Fédération Aéronautique Internationale on June 15, 1921, as the first black person to earn an international pilot's license.
Bessie Coleman was born in a one-room shack in Texas in 1892. An intelligent young girl, she attended school faithfully and was active in her Baptist church – that is, when she was not needed in the cotton fields to help her large family survive (there were 13 Coleman children altogether). She worked as a laundress to save money to attend college in Oklahoma, but her money ran out after only one semester. Hoping for better things, she moved north to Chicago to stay with her older brother. Although she found life there difficult, with her work as a manicurist neither lucrative or fulfilling, she overheard and was entranced by the stories of pilots who had recently returned from the airfields of World War I. She made up her mind to be a pilot.
In 1918, except for the occasional wealthy socialite, female pilots were rare and African American female pilots were non-existent. Coleman was stonewalled by sexism and racism from American pilots who scoffed at her desire to fly. Hearing of her woes, Black newspaperman Robert Abbott, the publisher of The Chicago Defender, encouraged her to go to France to learn how to fly. He financed a trip to Paris in 1920, and for seven months, Coleman trained with some of the best pilots in Europe. Despite being the only Black person in her class, she was treated with respect and earned her international pilot’s license by 1921. When she returned to America, newspapers caught wind of the unusual story and she became a minor celebrity almost overnight.
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John Lewis was a man of amazing grace.
Commentary by Black Kos Editor Denise Oliver-Velez.
There are really no words that can adequately express how we feel about the loss of our brother, leader, fighter, representative, and family member. As tributes pour in from across the nation and around the globe for John Lewis, and as people from all walks of life bid him farewell, I’m simply going to post the moving rendition of “Amazing Grace,” sung by Dr. Wintley Phipps, in the Capitol Rotunda as he lay in state.
Thank you John Lewis.
I would normally post these tweets to the Twitter Roundup in comments — thought it would be appropriate to post them here.
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PSA
Commentary by Chitown Kev
Perhaps it is for the best that I will give my current project another two weeks (and no more!) for marinating; I do have a public service announcement.
As we all know, The United States is currently undergoing sustained and constant attacks on its Constitution and institutions by a damn dangerous fool that currently occupies the Oval Office.
That includes two institutions that are explicitly mandated by the U.S. Constitution.
First, the 2020 Census.
NPR:
The U.S. Census Bureau is ending all counting efforts for the 2020 census on Sept. 30, a month sooner than previously announced, the bureau's director confirmed Monday in a statement. That includes critical door-knocking efforts and collecting responses online, over the phone and by mail.
The latest updates to the bureau's plans are part of efforts to "accelerate the completion of data collection and apportionment counts by our statutory deadline of December 31, 2020, as required by law and directed by the Secretary of Commerce" who oversees the bureau, Director Steven Dillingham said in the written statement posted on the bureau's website.
These last-minute changes to the constitutionally mandated count of every person living in the U.S. threaten the accuracy of population numbers used to determine the distribution of political representation and federal funding for the next decade.
With roughly 4 out of 10 households nationwide yet to be counted, and already delayed by the coronavirus pandemic, the bureau now has less than two months left to try to reach people of color, immigrants, renters, rural residents and other members of historically undercounted groups who are not likely to fill out a census form on their own.
As Chair of the Congressional Black Caucus Karen Bass and former minority leader of the Georgia House Stacey Abrams say in the Washington Post, The United States Census is an important snapshot of who and what the United States is at a critical juncture in our history.
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Commentary by Black Kos Editor Denise Oliver-Velez
I offer my heartfelt congratulations to Kamala Harris for being Joe Biden’s pick for VP!!! (And now back to the scheduled commentary)
Today, I’d like to explore prominent Black women who could have a future role in Democratic administrations or on the Supreme Court. Meet Sherrilyn Ifill, President and director-counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, who is one of my favorite follows on Twitter. Last night she posted a Twitter thread which I would like you all to see.
Here’s Harry & his wife Harriette Moore. Mr. Moore was head of the state NAACP in FL. He organized against the wrongful conviction of 3 young Black men & killing of one by a racist local Sheriff. On Christmas Eve in 1951 racists bombed Moore’s home killing Moore and his wife.
In 1961 John Lewis and James Zwerg were savagely beaten by white racists in Alabama when they participated in the Freedom Rides, a non-violent campaign against segregation in public accommodation.
Maybe members of Congress were willing to sit down & debate with civil rights leaders? Here’s the “Southern Manifesto” signed by 101 members of Congress, in which they vowed to use all legal means to defeat integration mandated by Brown v Bd of Ed.
americanradioworks.publicradio.org/features/marsh…
Maybe they were willing to “sit down and talk to” civil rights lawyers? Here’s legendary atty C.B. King in 1962 (left) after he was bludgeoned by Sheriff Cull Campbell, when Atty King arrived at the jail in to check on a civil rights protester in Cull’s custody in Georgia.
Or perhaps there was a willingness to “debate” w/women civil rights leaders? Fannie Lou Hamer was savagely beaten in Indianola, MS in 1963 for attempting to register to vote. Amelia Boynton was beaten unconscious in Selma on Bloody Sunday in 1965 at a peaceful voting rights march.
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Commentary by Black Kos Editor JoanMar
The podcast revolution passed me by. Really, I don’t know how people do it. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, DailyKos, family, job, bills, friends, TV, cellphone, texting, reading, AND podcasts? That’s too much for me. That’s overstimulation. “You don’t have to make time for them,” I’ve been told repeatedly. “You can listen when you are driving or at bedtime.” Hmmm...no thanks. Listening to music while driving is my therapy. Music keeps me sane. Bedtime is for reading.
True, I have thought about testing the waters a time or two. There’s Pod Save America hosted by that exceptional group of writers who helped President Obama produce some of the greatest speeches of all time. Thus far, I’ve succeeded in resisting the temptation, but I hear that they are really good.
A political podcast for people who aren’t ready to give up or go insane. Pod Save America is a no-bullshit conversation about politics hosted by former Obama aides Jon Favreau, Jon Lovett, Dan Pfeiffer and Tommy Vietor. It cuts through the noise to break down the week’s news, and helps people figure out what matters and how they can help. They’re regularly joined by journalists, activists, politicians, entertainers, and world leaders. New episodes come out on Mondays and Thursdays. Text the hosts at (323) 405-9944
Then there's Don Lemon who was recently gifted with his own podcast — Silence is Not an Option — and I was tempted...for a minute.
America is in crisis right now. A lot of people want to help, but have no idea where to start. In our new podcast, we’re going to dig deep into the reality of being Black and Brown in America, and explore what you can do to help find a path forward. We’ll have tough conversations with activists, artists, and thinkers about our nation’s deep racial divide. As we look for meaningful and lasting solutions, there is a lot to learn and unlearn. These conversations are going to be challenging—even uncomfortable—but they’re important. Because this time, we get to rebuild America together.
The problem with listening to Don Lemon expounding on race and racism is that I have a long memory. When it comes to calling out and ridiculing “The Damn Fool,” (thanks Kev) nobody does it better than Don Lemon. Nobody. But Wolf Blitzer and CNN have Malcolm X rolling in his grave. I hate to tell you, Wolf, but Don Lemon is not a leader in or of the Black community. Yes, he spoke out forcefully after the public lynching of George Floyd, but I remember him finding common cause with Bill O’Reilly in blaming Black teens for their own victimization. It was Lemon who posited that if young Black men were to just pull up their sagging pants they would avoid being stopped and frisked and humiliated by over-zealous racist cops. I’ll never forgive him for that. When it comes to race, Don Lemon is not quite Terry Crews or Charles Barkley, but he is a johnny-come-lately to this fight and no, I’m not inclined to listen to a 50+-year-old man spout off on his newfound convictions. I’ll pass.
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Mental Health
Commentary by Chitown Kev
FLOTUS Michelle Obama gave an absolutely amazing speech last night at the Democratic National Convention in support of the Biden-Harris ticket as well as giving The Damn Fool a well-deserved torching.
And The Damn Fool didn’t appreciate it, if his Twitter feed and his public comments today are any indication.
I also feel that one other message of FLOTUS needs to be increasingly amplified as we get closer and closer to Election Day (the day when all of out energies need to be focused on making sure that The Damn Fool loses his job).
In the second episode of her new podcast, The Michelle Obama Podcast, Mrs. Obama acknowledged, in a conversation with Dr. Michelle Norris, that she has been some form of “low-grade depression.”
“There have been periods throughout this quarantine where I just have felt too low,” Mrs. Obama said, adding that her sleep was off. “You know, I’ve gone through those emotional highs and lows that I think everybody feels, where you just don’t feel yourself.”
“I know that I am dealing with some form of low-grade depression,” she added. “Not just because of the quarantine, but because of the racial strife, and just seeing this administration, watching the hypocrisy of it, day in and day out, is dispiriting.”
I think that the big and bold national headlines about Mrs. Obama’s admission are yet another indication of how stigmatized even the discussion of mental illness and health remain in this country.
More importantly, I’ve long held the view that some depression and anxiety is actually a natural reaction for most of us to the goings-on in this country the past four years; a view that Mrs. Obama later confirmed in an Instagram post.
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Commentary: Black Scientists, Explorers, and Inventors
By dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor
With the news headlines still unfortunately dominated by Covid-19 there couldn’t be a better time to profile Dr. Kizzmekia "Kizzy" Corbett who is helping lead the war to stop the pandemic in its tracks. Dr. Corbett is a doctor specializing in viral immunlogy based at the Vaccine Research Center (VRC) at the NIH’s (National Institutes of Health) department of NIAID (National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases) in Bethesda, Maryland. Dr. Corbett was appointed to the Vaccine Research Center's in 2014, and is the scientist leading its Coronavirus team. Dr. Corbett research is aimed at producing novel coronavirus vaccines. The scope of her research includes discovering a vaccine for the Covid-19 coronavirus currently ravaging the world. Kizzy Corbett received a B.S. in biological sciences and sociology from the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC) in the Meyerhoff Scholars Program. In 2014, Dr. Corbett received a PhD in microbiology and immunology from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Dr. Corbett was born on January 26, 1986 and was raised in Hillsborough a small rural North Carolinian town, with a large family including step and foster kids. As a child Kizzy Corbett’s fourth grade teacher encouraging Kizzy's mother to place her in advanced classes.
The teacher, Myrtis Bradsher recognizing Kizzy's talent at an early age, saying in a 2020 interview with The Washington Post.
"I always thought she is going to do something one day. She dotted i’s and crossed t’s. The best in my 30 years of teaching,"
Last year as the COVID-19 pandemic began to spread, Dr. Corbett began working on a vaccine to inoculate against the highly contagious virus. Dr. Corbett soon recognized that then novel Covid-19 virus was similar to the SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome ) virus that had ravaged the world several years earlier. Dr. Corbett's team utilized previously research on the optimal coronavirus S proteins to tackle this new novel Covid-19’s similarly structured S proteins. The S proteins on this family of viruses form “crowns” on the surface of coronaviruses that serve as crucial structures for the engagement of a host cell receptors. This process is know as membrane fusion in a viral disease. But serendipitously these same viral “crown” structures creates an Achilles heel that can bet targeted by prophylactics and therapeutic treatments.
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Volunteer for the Freedmen’s Bureau Transcription Project
Commentary by Black Kos Editor Denise Oliver-Velez
I’m one of the very lucky Black Americans who have been able to trace many of my ancestors who were enslaved. When I first got involved in tracking and tracing my Black family history, back in 2003, I got an incredible amount of help from researchers at a website, called AfriGeneas, where I met genealogists who were assisting people who were desperately trying to get past “the brick wall” of the 1870 census — the first Federal census in which formerly enslaved African Americans were officially listed by name.
One of those genealogists was Hollis L. Gentry, a Genealogy Specialist at the Smithsonian Library. She made all of us aware of the fact that there were records — lots of them, at the National Archives, however back then they were not digitized, and not really accessible to the general public. In 2015, that would change, with the announcement that Freedmen’s Bureau records of 4 million former slaves were going to be released.
The Freedmen’s Bureau was organized to assist freedmen in 15 states and the District of Columbia after the war. The bureau opened schools, managed hospitals and gave support to an estimated 4 million slaves. The 1.5 million images released Friday are from the actual reports filed by the 900 agents of the Freedmen’s Bureau who were located across the country.
Hollis Gentry, a genealogist with Smithsonian Institution, said they were very interested in partnering with the church and genealogical groups to make records available to a wider audience. “One of the biggest challenges in researching the Freedmen’s Bureau records are the number of handwritten reports that are in the form of letters. The agents may have been reporting on deaths or marriages.”
“Because the Freedmen’s Bureau was an agency within the government the records have been in the custody of the National Archives and available only in Washington DC.,” Gentry said. “Now 1.5 million images have been scanned in and digitized and we estimate that they contain the names of up to 4 million slaves.
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Commentary by Black Kos Editor JoanMar
I’m not one to throw out the baby with the bathwater. In the fight for racial justice, we need allies and sometimes our allies get it all wrong; not out of malice, mind you, but out of profound ignorance. And sometimes, as all humans are wont to do, they just plain misspeak. Whatever the motivation, when our friends get it wrong, we must call them out — not in anger or with condemnatory language — but call them out we should...and we will.
Take the case of Ron Perlman for example:
As a white man, you’d think that Mr. Perlman would be lecturing his fellow white men and calling them to action, right? After all, if there’s one demographic we can hold responsible for the narcissistic incompetent’s presence in the WH, it is white men.
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And Now Things have Gotten a Bit More Personal
Commentary by Chitown Kev
Yesterday at Detroit’s Belle Isle marked the opening of a memorial for Detroit’s victims of the COVID-19 pandemic with a Memorial Drive in honor of the deceased.
Mayor Mike Duggan will join Gov. Gretchen Whitmer and Lt. Gov. Garlin Gilchrist to offer remarks to begin the Detroit Memorial Drive on Belle Isle to honor COVID-19 Victims on what is now the official Detroit Memorial Day. The celebration of life will comprise 15 funeral processions driving a dedicated route on Belle Isle and is the nation’s first citywide memorial to honor pandemic victims.
“Members of this community are grieving, it is important and necessary to provide an opportunity for families to celebrate those lost to this terrible disease and begin to heal,” said Mayor Duggan. “We are taking this time to reflect on what has been a very hard time for so many Detroiters and commemorate the lives of our neighbors who are no longer with us.”
“As we remember and honor all of those we have lost to this virus, we must not forget that COVID-19 is still very present in our state,” Governor Whitmer said. “Each life lost was a person who had a story: plans, dreams, and more life to live. We must all work together to slow the spread of this virus and prevent more devastation in our communities. We owe it to our families, our neighbors, the frontline workers, and to our fellow Michiganders to continue taking this virus seriously.”
More from the Detroit Free Press.
At 8:45 a.m. Monday morning, bells rang out across Detroit simultaneously in honor of the Detroiters whose lives were taken by COVID-19 since March.
And through a long, solemn day, numerous processions filled with cars and SUVs and led by hearses from area funeral homes, drove through Belle Isle.
Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, Lt. Gov. Garlin Gilchrist, Detroit Mayor Mike Duggan and the city's arts and culture director, Rochelle Riley, spoke at the opening of the memorial event. Riley headed the planning of the event.
"This city was hit harder than most. ... Last week, Michigan recorded our 100,000th case of COVID-19. We've now lost more than 6,750 Michiganders, more than 1,500 here in Detroit," said Whitmer, in her remarks.
"It's easy to get numb in this environment, but we must not just look at this as numbers. These are people. Men and women, fathers and mothers, daughters and sons, brothers and sisters, who had dreams and plans and a story. They weren't finished yet."
As I scrolled through the Free Press story I came across...a very familiar name.
A name that prompted a call to my mother.
“Yes, he’s one of us,” Mom said.
And then Mom described exactly how he’s related. (Describing the various ways in which people in my family were and are related can be a labyrinth in it’s own right.)
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The Story of Ethiopia's Jewish Warrior Queen Gudit (እሳቶ) “The fire”
By dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor
Gudit (Ge'ez: ጉዲት) which translates as beautiful in Geez (the ancient language of Ethiopia), was an Ethiopian Jewish Queen from the 9th century AD. Ethiopia’s historical chronicles tell of Gudit laying waste to Ethiopia’s ancient capital of Axum and the surrounding areas. Gudit enacted her historic act of revenge in retaliation for the mistreatment she received as a Jewish young princess from a mainly Christian Ethiopian royal family. Upon Gudit’s triumphant return from exile she destroyed churches, monuments, and attempted to exterminate the members of the dynasty of the Kingdom of Axum.
Gudit’s deeds are recorded both in Ethiopian oral traditions and contemporaneously in various historical accounts by outside sources chiefly Arab and Egyptian Orthodox Christian (Coptics). According to the best dating of the Ethiopian chronicles, Gudit’s reign lasted from 850 to 890 AD.
I first heard of Gundit as a kid in Jamaica when I snuck out of my uncle’s house to listen a Rastafari ceremony known as a reason (Rastas have a complex relationship with both Ethiopia and to some extent Judaism). Years later as an adult, I then brought up Gudit’s name when I met some Beta Israeli (Ethiopian Jews) and was surprise when they told me a number of sources I could use to look her up (Funny side note, at the time I thought her name was Judith, because Judith pronounced with a Jamaica accent sounds like Gudit). They were quiet familiar with Gudit and assured me she was a real historical figure. With today of course being Rosh Hashanah (The Jewish New Year) I thought it would be a great opportunity to write on the long history of Judaism in East Africa by exploring one of Africa’s most famous Jewish Queens. In this story I’ll tie together a number sources to try and give a full picture of Gudit’s reign.
The Ethiopian chronicles are early texts written both in Ge'ez (ancient Ethiopia’s scrip) and Greek (the main language of Orthodox Christianity). The chronicles include manuscripts and inscriptions on both monumental stelae and obelisks that documented historical events. Written history only became an established genre during the early Solomonic dynasty (1270–1974). So the history by most native Ethiopian literary accounts were written a few hundred years after the events themselves. Never the less the Ethiopian chronicles of Gudit line up quite well with the first accounts of her from Arab sources which mention an Ethiopian capital other than the famous ancient Ethiopian capital of Axum. In most accounts Gudit and her family are said to have ostracized by the majority of the Ethiopian royals and powerful families because they refused conversion to the Eastern Orthodox Christianity that was rabidly gaining converts in North East Africa. This mistreatment appears to have been the driving force that motivated her to overthrown the reigning Orthodox Christian leadership of Axum.
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Commentary by BlackKos editor JoanMar
I happen to despise black men who allow themselves to be used as tools against their community, and I loathe liars. The Attorney General of Kentucky, Daniel Cameron, is both a willing tool of whiteness and a mendacious liar to boot. He certainly earned that pat on the head from his mentor Mitch McConnell as he did his best “yes-sir-massa” jig on Wednesday. Below, we’ll take a look at the transcript of his press conference as he goes out of his way to cover for white supremacy and a criminal justice system that was not designed to recognize the humanity of people who look like him. Made me sick to my stomach as I watched him employ obfuscating legalese to ‘splain away how three white cops murdered an innocent Breonna in her own home and how he and his office did their darnedest to not only deny her justice but to also murder her stellar reputation in the process.
No earthshattering news here, but they lied to us. To be specific, Daniel Cameron lied to the people of Kentucky and to everybody who, despite the history, held out hope that just maybe this time around the system would deliver for us. The liar told us that his office had convened a grand jury to investigate the shooting of Breonna. Wasn’t true. Before they presented the case to the GJ, toady Daniel Cameron and his experts “with more than 200 years of combined career experience” had already decided to exonerate the murderers.
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A Cleopatra Note
by Chitown Kev
Let me be blunt about it.
I don’t really care who plays Cleopatra.
Gal Gadot’s starring role in a new telling of Cleopatra was criticized on social media just as soon as it was announced.
The Wonder Woman star confirmed Sunday that she’s teaming with the director of that film, Patty Jenkins, and Alexander screenwriter Laeta Kalogridis for the project. She noted that they planned to tell the story of the Egyptian queen in a way that hasn’t been done before, because it will be from the perspective of women. The most famous depiction of Cleopatra onscreen, of course, is Elizabeth Taylor’s take in the 1963 film of the same name written and directed by Joseph L. Mankiewicz.
First of all, before Cleopatra was anything else, she was Macedonian Greek and part of the Ptolemaic line of succession, no matter what her overall ethnic background was. For that matter, her overall ethnic background is unknown and in the Alexandria, Egypt of its day, the most cosmopolitan city in the world up to that time, it could have been anything.
And besides, however we consider matters of race/ethnicity to be nowadays, how we classify who is what race has nothing to do with what and how the peoples of that time thought of “race” (it’s one of the more fascinating things to study about classical antiquity).
Far as I’m concerned, Elizabeth Taylor was great in the role. Gal Gadot might be great playing Cleopatra. Or not. Lena Horne could have convincingly played the role, IMO, as well as Halle Berry or any number of actresses from a variety of ethnic backgrounds and with a variety of skin tones.
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The Story of the warrior Queen Nzinga Mbande of Angola
By dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor
Queen Nzinga Mbande 1583–1663 (also spelled Njinga), was a monarch of the Mbundu people. Mbande was a resilient leader who fought the Portuguese’s expanding slave trade in Central Africa. Nzingha Mbande was the queen of the ethnic Mbundu kingdoms of Ndongo and Matamba, located in present-day northern Angola. (The Ambundu “Mbundus” are Angola’s second largest ethnic at about 25% of the population). The kingdoms she created would be a refuge for runaway slaves and a safe haven from European conquest for over two centuries after her death. Her actions as a women defying both male and colonial domination has also made her an important inspiration for more recent African feminists.
I first heard of Queen Nzinga during studying the Angolan civil war and Angolan wars for Independence. During the cold war when Angola was fighting for independence from a fascist Portuguese government Cuba sent troops to aid the rebels. Cuba has a famous Afro-Cuban slave rebellion leader Carlota Lucumi, La Negra Carlota de Cuba (see: Black Kos, La Negra Carlota de Cuba) that had some parallels to Queen Nzinga, so she became a rather noted figure in the Caribbean. I thought about her after Chitown Kev wrote in a comment Black Kos, Tuesday's Chile: A Cleopatra Note (after the kafuffle of casting of Gal Gadot as Cleopatra) that: Good afternoon...I mean, there are puh-lenty of great and powerful and significant black queens in world history to choose from. That reminded me that I had promised abluerippleinohio a diary on Queen Nzinga.
Nzinga reign was during a period of rapid growth in the African slave trade with the Portuguese Empire encroachment in South West Africa. Born into the ruling family of the Ndongo, the then princess Nzinga received military and political training as a child. Later as an adult she demonstrated an aptitude for defusing political crises as an ambassador to the Portuguese Empire. Portugal was attempting to corner the Atlantic slave trade. Nzinga fought for the indepence and stature of her kingdoms against the Portuguese and reigned for 37 years. Queen Nzinga's rise to power and her actions as a warrior, diplomat and nation builder would be an inspiration to those who would later fight for Angolan independence in the 20th century.
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Celebrating Kamala’s birthday and our HBCUs
Commentary by Black Kos Editor Denise Oliver-Velez
I literally wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for our Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs). Not only did my mom and dad meet at one — West Virginia State, but my mom’s dad was able to make it possible for her to go to college, because he graduated from one, Wayland Seminary (which became Virginia Union) barely 20 years after the end of the enslavement period.
Thanks the the historic candidacy of Kamala Devi Harris, more and more Americans, who are not part of our Black communities are learning something about the role HBCUs have played in our history. Harris, is a graduate of Howard University, in Washington, DC, one of the flagship HBCUs.
Throughout her early campaign for POTUS, and now during her candidacy for the Vice Presidency, Harris has always given credit to the role attending an HBCU played in her life, and the lives of so many black folks, and she has also demonstrated the bonds of sisterhood she formed early on with the members of her sorority, Alpha Kappa Alpha. In doing so, she has openly embraced the entire “Divine Nine” — the federation of nine black fraternities and sororities, sending media outlets scrambling to do stories explaining us, to a world that has had very little understanding (if any at all).
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Commentary by BlackKos editor JoanMar
I had no intention of watching ABC’s Michael Strahan interview with Sgt. Jon Mattingly. For one, I wondered why ABC would send an entertainer/sports personality to conduct a face-to-face that has nothing to do with either sport or entertainment. Secondly, having seen the email the unrepentant cop sent out after his part in Breonna’s execution became public, I didn’t think it prudent to subject myself — especially my heart — to even a few minutes of listening to him. But then I thought, if I’m gonna bear witness, it had better be accurate, no? And so I watched it. Michael did a barely tolerable job.
I didn’t expect any genuine remorse from the man whose hand glows red from Breonna’s spilled blood, and I was not disappointed. What Mattingly was intent on having you understand from the get-go, however, was that Breonna’s death was different from all those other race killings. This murder, he wants you to know, had absolutely nothing to do with race. Nothing at all...because he doesn’t have one racist bone in his body, don’t ya know.
"This had nothing to do with race," he said. "Nothing at all...“This is not us going, hunting somebody down. This is not kneeling on a neck. It's nothing like that.”
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#WaitForIt
Commentary by Black Kos Editor Denise Oliver-Velez
Election day, the day we’ve been waiting for is finally here, and many of us have already voted. Some of us are elated and feeling victory in the air, others are nervous and tense. Some of us are afraid due to the lunatic in the White House urging his supporters to do violence.
I’m feeling okay and pretty upbeat. I plan to stay away from most TV watching today, especially the pundits who ramp up anxiety, and do their usual “bothsiderism.” I haven’t forgotten that they helped us get into this mess in the first place by normalizing the white-supremacist currently occupying our White House when he was running against Hillary, and they’ve continued since then.
Here’s hoping the networks and cable news outfits don’t pull their usual bullshit by calling stuff before most votes are counted, and allowing whatever Trump madness gets spewed to be broadcast— however I have little faith that in their battle for viewers and clicks they will abstain from increasing tensions, and spreading disinformation. For them, this is a horse-race and ratings battle. For us it’s about life and death.
I’m still feeling good though, especially because I see a lot of our young folks heading out to vote. They are our future.
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Centering Blackness
A comment by Chitown Kev
There were a couple of comments in the Sunday Pundit Round-up (one now hidden) that I wanted to respond to today in a general way.
The gist of that decided minority of comments was that the good white folks of places like SE Michigan and the Philadelphia suburbs deserved as much credit for flipping Michigan and Pennsylvania from Trump back to Biden and the Democrats.
and...sure, there’s some truth to that.
Oakland County, Michigan is far from the Oakland County that I remember growing up.
Washtenaw County is the home Ann Arbor, Michigan (University of Michigan), Ypsilanti, and other Democratic cities.
The same goes for Chester County, Pennsylvania along with a number of the other “collar counties” around Philadelphia and even Atlanta, Georgia.
I wouldn’t even dispute that.
Here’s my thing.
After the 2016, there was a lot of vitriol spewed in the press and even by some Democrats here on this blog about low-voter turnout of Black folks in Midwest urban centers like Milwaukee, Detroit, Cleveland, and Philadelphia (well, Philly is not a “Midwestern” city although Pittsburgh is).
In 2020...these cities showed the fu*k out.
Detroit
Philadelphia
Fulton County, Georgia
Milwaukee County, Wisconsin
Municipalities and counties with heavy Black populations that provided a sheer number of votes and huge margins that flipped those states.
Also...I don’t see the Republican Party giving a whole lot of bluster to votes and voters in Oakland County or Chester County, PA, TBH (as Nancy Laffer of the Detroit Free Press pointed out).
So my simple question for those that want to extol the “white vote” is...
If there wasn’t a problem in “centering Blackness” in terms of the 2016 election, then what is the deal in not wanting to “center Blackness” for the 2020 election?
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Commentary: Black Scientists, Explorers, and Inventors
By dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor
Elijah J. McCoy (May 2, 1844 – October 10, 1929) was a Canadian-born engineer and inventor of African American descent. McCoy is notable for 57 US patents, most having to do with the lubrication of steam engines. McCoy was born in Canada, to parents who fled slavery in the US. As a teenager, McCoy trained in Scotland as an engineer. Later as an adult, unable to find work as an engineer in the United States, he took a job working for a railroad. Working around trains, McCoy subsequently invented a lubrication device to make railroad operations more efficient. There is also evidence that although a popular expression was not created by his admirers, fans of his work made it popular.
Elijah McCoy was born on May 2, 1844, in Colchester, Ontario, Canada, to George and Mildred Goins McCoy. The McCoys were fugitive slaves who escaped from Kentucky to Canada via the Underground Railroad. In 1847, the large McCoy family returned to the United States, settling in Ypsilanti, Michigan.
Starting at a young age, McCoy showed a strong interest in mechanics. His parents arranged for him to travel to Scotland at the age of 15 for an apprenticeship in mechanical engineering. He returned home to Michigan after becoming certified as a mechanical engineer.
Despite his qualifications, McCoy was unable to find employment as an engineer in the United States due to racial barriers. In the 1890’s skilled professional positions were not available for African Americans regardless of their education. So McCoy accepted a position as a fireman and oiler for the Michigan Central Railroad. It was during working directly on trains that he developed his first major inventions.
After studying the inefficiencies inherent in the existing system of oiling axles, McCoy invented a lubricating cup that distributed oil evenly over the engine's moving parts. He obtained a patent for this invention, which allowed trains to run continuously for long periods of time without pausing for maintenance.
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Commentary by BlackKos Editor JoanMar
Republicans on Capitol Hill claimed that they had never heard about Breonna Taylor, but ask them about #DefundThePolice and they’ll most assuredly have heard about it and will have definite views about how destructive it will be for our country. How one could have managed the unimaginable feat of hearing about one and not the other is beyond me, but we do know that there are only a few things Republicans are good at and one of them is mental contortions.
I’ll readily admit that when the term “Defund the Police” entered the lexicon this summer, I too thought that it could be at least a little problematic; that this particular election period wasn’t necessarily the best time to be using that phrase. Folks, I just wanted/want donald trump gone and I was/am willing to put everything on the back-burner until I see them drag his sorry ass outta the White House. I didn’t want us doing or saying anything that could breathe oxygen into his campaign. Some long time ago I learned that “if you are explaining you are probably losing” and “Defund the Police” did call for a lot of explaining. Let’s face it, Rethugglicans tend to be more successful at this messaging thing — not because they have any particular genius in crafting their messages, but because lazy media personalities just love parroting right-wing framing of the issues. For example, I remain firmly convinced that CNN’s Alysin Camerota played a pivotal role in both elevating and demonizing what was hitherto only a rallying call at the protests against the public lynching of George Floyd. “What if, in the middle of the night my home is broken into. Who do I call?” she asked on her morning show. The trump campaign wasted no time in turning her words into a campaign ad. See here.
People of good conscience on this very liberal site voiced their disapproval of or discomfort with the term. It’s unnecessarily alienating, they argue. “We are going to lose support!” Members of the Democratic caucus, including the very influential James Clyburn, blamed “Defund the Police” for the loss of seats in the last election.
"'Defund the police' is killing our party, and we've got to stop it," the South Carolina kingmaker said in an interview with CBSN Monday. It was a topic he said he and the late civil rights leader and Congressman John Lewis discussed.
"John Lewis and I were very concerned when these slogans came out about 'defund the police,'" he said. "We sat together on the House floor and talked about how that slogan... could undermine the BLM movement, just as 'burn, baby, burn' destroyed our movement back in the '60s."
Joe Biden was repeatedly forced to declare that he does not support defunding of the police, even though he seems to understand exactly what the term means:
Biden's campaign rejected the phrase "defund the police" and called for more funding for police departments to implement policy changes. But the former vice president also supports some of the principles the phrase's advocates champion.
In the statement, Bates said that Biden supports "the urgent need for reform -- including funding for public schools, summer programs, and mental health and substance abuse treatment separate from funding for policing -- so that officers can focus on the job of policing."
(my bold)
For the record, this is the meaning of “Defund the Police”:
Defunding the police does not necessarily mean getting rid of the police altogether. Rather, it would mean reducing police budgets and reallocating those funds to crucial and oft-neglected areas like education, public health, housing, and youth services. (Some activists want to abolish the police altogether; defunding is a separate but connected cause.) It’s predicated on the belief that investing in communities would act as a better deterrent to crime by directly addressing societal problems like poverty, mental illness, and homelessness — issues that advocates say police are poorly equipped to handle, and yet are often tasked with. According to some estimates, law enforcement spends 21 percent of its time responding to and transporting people with mental illnesses. Police are also frequently dispatched to deal with people experiencing homelessness, causing them to be incarcerated at a disproportionate rate.
Really, what is there to disagree with?
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Home
Commentary by Chitown Kev
The other day, I was telling my Mom that it seems as if I’m more of a Detroiter than anything else nowadays.
I read for Detroit news as much as I read Chicago news now; that hasn’t always been true. I feel as if Gretchen Whitmer is my governor rather than J.B. Pritzker (and I like J.B.)
And I’ll miss not being in Detroit for the upcoming holidays.
I think that a big part of it is politics.
For the election periods from ~2007-2016, it seemed as if Chicago was the center of the political universe, being the home of the 44th President of the United States.
(It was also in 2006 that I returned to Detroit after a nearly eight-year hiatus to attend my uncle’s funeral.)
Honestly...even through this period that I took an inordinate amount of pride in calling Chicago my home, I began to go back...home...to Detroit more frequently; so much so that I seemed to revive my childhood reputation as being a Detroit GPS system long before those devices ever existed.
And then the 2016 elections happened.
Donald Trump won Michigan’s 16 electoral votes by 10,704 and, along with the electoral votes of Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, the presidency.
And I took that personally.
After all, Michigan had not voted for the Republican candidate for president since 1988.
Furthermore, most of my family that remains in Michigan is split between Wayne County (where Detroit is located) and Macomb County (an Obama county that flipped for Trump in 2016).
Macomb County is where my Mom happens to live.
And I began to fear for her safety.
So I now visit a little more often. I watch for things on the ground. (Note: I have never felt unsafe in Macomb County). Parts of Macomb County have become incorporated in to the GPS System that I keep in my head.
I talk to people there when I’m there.
Detroit and the surrounding suburbs really, truly feels like home to me, again.
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Congratulations to Ashley Etienne, Karine Jean-Pierre and Symone Sanders!
Commentary by Black Kos Editor, Denise Oliver-Velez
I broke into a big grin when I saw this tweet from Hillary Clinton.
All smart, competent women, including three Black women and one Latina.
Though some of us may be familiar with these sisters, I thought I’d post a little background about the three of them today, as an introduction for those who may not know much about them. Then realized that would be a very long diary, so I’ll start today with the sister I knew zilch about.
Probably the least familiar name and face to those of us outside of the inner workings of the Hill and White House staffers is Ashley Etienne’s. Curious to find out something about her, since I’ve seen both Jean-Pierre and Sanders in action, I decided to see what I could find.
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Commentary by BlackKos Editor JoanMar
The talking heads at Fox, the heads of the various chapters of the police union, unrepentant cops nationwide, and GOP spinmeisters are laughing their asses off roundabout now. Democrats are currently engaged in an intraparty slugfest over the slogan “Defund the Police,” and the people who created this distraction are having fun at our expense.
President Obama has (intentionally?) jumped in the fray.
"If you believe, as I do, that we should be able to reform the criminal justice system so that it's not biased and treats everybody fairly, I guess you can use a snappy slogan like 'Defund The Police,' but, you know, you lost a big audience the minute you say it, which makes it a lot less likely that you're actually going to get the changes you want done," Obama told Peter Hamby on Snapchat's "Good Luck America" when asked what his advice is to an activist who believes in using the slogan although politicians are likely to avoid it.
"But if you instead say, 'Let's reform the police department so that everybody's being treated fairly, you know, divert young people from getting into crime, and if there was a homeless guy, can maybe we send a mental health worker there instead of an armed unit that could end up resulting in a tragedy?' Suddenly, a whole bunch of folks who might not otherwise listen to you are listening to you."
My first thought upon hearing the president’s take on the issue was that if anybody could explain the slogan — and the pre-existing policy proposals that were shoved under the umbrella of Defund the Police after the attacks — and have that explanation fall on receptive ears, it would be him, so why on earth wouldn’t he have used the opportunity to do just that? My second thought was that that was precisely the problem with the slogan: it requires explanation. Yes, as you can see, I’m torn.
But just a few pushbacks against what my president said. As he well knows, for generations, folks have been talking about reforming the police and police accountability and it has gotten us exactly nowhere. Cops continue to kill at will, to brutalize, and to lie with impunity. Since the public lynching of George Floyd in May, cops have taken out over 525 human beings more and we still have 26 days to go in the year. This despite worldwide protests and condemnation of police using deadly force.
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THANK YOU EVERYONE SEE YOU IN 2021
THE PORCH IS NOW CLOSED