The Black Journalism Project
Commentary by Chitown Kev
I’ve had occasion here at Black Kos to write historical posts about Black journalists, the Black press, and to utilize Black press archives in writing stories relating to contemporary issues.
After reading Alice Randall’s Black Bottom Saints (a novel in which a real-life Michigan Chronicle gossip columnist, Joseph “Ziggy” Johnson, is the central protagonist) and listening to a couple of podcasts featuring Pulitzer Prize winner Nikole Hannah-Jones (at Columbia Journalism Review and “The Ezra Klein Show” at The New York Times) I’ve decided to do, again, a “Black Journalism” series for the biweekly posts that I do here at Black Kos.
First, the personal and practical (and honest) reason for reviving the series: I am writing a lot here at Daily Kos on a number of varied subjects on a weekly basis; enough so that I feel a little helter-skelter when I think of what to post in my biweekly diaries here. Frankly, when I look over some of the topics and content that I have written on here at Black Kos over the past six months to a year, I am not at all impressed with the quality of those diaries. I need to impose some discipline and structure on my poor psychedelic-like brain.
There is simply no better subject for me to write of here at Black Kos on a regular basis than to write about Black journalism and Black journalists.
Secondly, much of what now passes as current debate about news “facts” and “objectivity” would have taken place long ago if the black newspapers of old had a readership outside of black communities. To take two examples:
a) The Willis Ward story that I linked at the top of this diary. Major daily (white) newspapers like The Chicago Tribune willfully “spun” and, in some cases, out and out lied about a number of aspects of the Ward story.
b) The We Charge Genocide petition that was submitted to The United Nations late in 1951 specifically mentioned police brutality. Black newspapers specifically reported on police brutality and some of those newspaper articles were specifically cited as evidence in portions of that 1951 report.
It never has been true that the subject of anti-Black police brutality simply didn’t exist or, even it were true, that Black people never reported on it.
The mainstream white press simply ignored that particular issue unless some sort of “riot” or insurrection happened.
(In fact, reporting on various incidents of police brutality in, say, the pre-1950’s Black press is a topic that I will probably cover at some point.)
Thirdly, one of the reasons that I became interested in this topic in the first place was the idea that was strongly implied during the 2016 Democratic primary campaign that Black people (especially in, say, South Carolina, but in other places as well) that Black people did not have good enough internet connections to be properly updated with the news...or simply didn’t have good sources.
The truth is: many (if not most) Black people would read both the major dailies and the weekly (and sometimes dailies like The Chicago Defender) Black newspapers. For example, for my grandad, both The Detroit Free Press and The Michigan Chronicle, were must reads.
Traditionally, the Black consumer of news was (and perhaps still is) more informed about both “the white world” and his or her own community than the overwhelming majority of white folks ever were or are.
For this series reboot, I will not be limiting myself to Black journalism of the past: I will be taking a look at and profiling Black journalism and journalists currently working in the field (in fact, my first profile will be of a Black newspaper columnist still living but retired).
I also won’t be limiting myself to Black print journalism; Black radio has been and continues to be an important news source for Black Americans.
Lastly, don’t think that anyone or any publication that falls under the heading “Black journalism or journalists” is obscure: remember, Frederick Douglass owned and ran several newspapers including The North Star, W.E.B. DuBois was editor of The Crisis for 24 years and Langston Hughes wrote a column in The Chicago Defender for almost 20 years; Hughes’s Jesse B. Semple stories were also published in The Chicago Defender.
And any genre of journalism writing is fair game: even gossip columnists (as noted above with Joseph “Ziggy” Johnson) or even sports writers.
I’m really looking forward to doing this project.
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NEWS ROUND UP BY DOPPER0189, BLACK KOS MANAGING EDITOR
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I’m a fashion designer. My muses are working-class Black women, like my mom and grandma. The Atlantic: ALWAYS THE GOLD SANDAL
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My mom, Dana, built tool sets at a tool factory; on the weekends she became a sexy Donna Karan power woman. My Grandma Hattie was a factory knitter, but she moonlighted as a feline Patrick Kelly–esque dame, particularly on Sundays.
Growing up in small-town North Carolina in the ’90s, I loved watching them: their joie de vivre and sexual confidence contrasting with the blue-collar reality of their lives from 8 to 5 every weekday; their armor and shield, sword and dagger, in the form of suits, clutches, earrings, and sheaths. I became a fashion designer, and they are my consummate muses, working-class and Black.
High fashion has ignored these women’s stories. But they are a pillar of American fashion, a conduit of sartorial expression. These women took artistic license to write their own beauty narrative, one that refused to be boxed in by the utilitarianism of blue-collar work.
My grandma has passed, but memories of her are present: her coming home from work, the smell of machinery on her clothes, lint littering her short-cropped hair. Thirty years later, I can still feel that lint between my fingers. I would pick it from her hair, perching above her on the back of the sofa as we watched Wheel of Fortune.
But on the weekends, her hair and cocoa complexion served as the perfect canvas for the silky sheaths and matching clutch-and-pump sets she preferred. She was the epitome of elegance holding my hand on Sundays as we walked through the field from her house to church, my eyes on the patchwork design of her purse. I will always remember the floral broadcloth blouse, pedal pushers, sun hat, and cotton sneakers she wore while picking strawberries. I’ll never abandon the beauty of my nurturers.
For my mom, proportion mattered. Her curvy body was accented by the sharpest shoulder pads; her red-earth skin complemented the most vibrant hues; even the gold hanging from her lobes was the shiniest. Getting ready for a girls’ night out, she’d arrange all her accessory options on the bed—jewelry, belts, scarves—and hang her favorite garments on the bedroom door. Sometimes she’d ask me to press her blouse or fetch her hose out of the drawer. The request was an invitation into her sacred process, a window into her thinking. “The ivory shoe or the gold sandal?” Always the gold sandal.
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The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) has announced it will launch a commission to tackle “racial equity issues” within the agency and its programs.
The move comes as Biden administration has made efforts in recent months to address the agency's history of discrimination against farmers of color.
The agency said on Friday that the new commission will advise Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack on identifying structures, programs and policy within the agency that “contribute to barriers to inclusion or access, systemic discrimination, or exacerbate or perpetuate racial, economic, health and social disparities.”
The agency will also be forming a Subcommittee on Agriculture, it confirmed, that will report to the new commission and make recommendations “on issues of concern related to agriculture.”
“The Equity Commission will deliver an interim report and provide actionable recommendations no later than 12 months after inception. A final report will be generated within a two-year timeframe,” the agency said.
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The Biden administration remains the target of intense criticism from Black and Haitian communities amid fallout from the mistreatment of Haitian migrants at the Del Rio, Texas southern border — even as President Joe Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris, and other administration officials, expressed their abhorrence at what transpired and touted the ongoing internal investigation at the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.
Now, Black immigration advocacy groups are applying greater pressure on the administration, demanding accountability and the halting of deportations of Haitian and African migrants.
Haitian Bridge Alliance, The UndocuBlack Network, Black Alliance for Just Immigration (BAJI) and African Communities Together on Friday sent a letter of complaint, obtained by TheGrio, addressed to the department’s head of Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties, Katherine Culliton-González.
Highlighting the graphic images and video of U.S. Customs and Border Patrol officers on horseback hitting migrants with horse reins used as whips, the complaint accuses the department of several violations and demands that DHS stop the deportation of migrants who were either victimized by CBP or were witnesses to abuses at the border.
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Johnny miller, a photographer, began taking drone footage of South African cities in 2016. Shots from Cape Town, Durban and Johannesburg depict adjoining neighbourhoods—but different worlds. On one side of a photograph might be a verdant suburb spattered with azure swimming pools; on the other a slum with tightly packed shacks.
Economic research into South African inequality has produced a less granular picture. Reports from the World Bank and other bodies draw on benchmark measures of income inequality, such as the Gini coefficient, to conclude that South Africa is one of the world’s most unequal countries. But they often say little about wealth, the role of government policy or, crucially, what has happened to the gap between blacks and whites since the end of apartheid in 1994.
Two recent papers from the academics Aroop Chatterjee, Léo Czajka and Amory Gethin fill some of these holes. In doing so they offer perhaps the most detailed picture of the haves and have-nots in South Africa in the democratic era. The research is crucial to understanding the profound discontent felt by many South Africans.
In their latest paper the economists combine household surveys, tax data and national accounts to track incomes from 1993 to 2019. They start by noting that, before taxes, the share of income going to the top 10% of earners grew from 57% to 66%—levels higher than in any other comparable country. The average income of the top 1% increased by 50%, while that of the poorest half fell by more than 30% after inflation. Even after taxes and transfers are included, the share of income going to the top 1% is roughly the same as it was at the end of apartheid—nearly one-fifth.
Since 1994 the ruling African National Congress (anc) has raised taxes and introduced welfare grants for pensioners and children. It has expanded public health care and education, which researchers count as “in-kind” income for the beneficiaries. On paper these transfers largely make up for the loss in pre-tax incomes for the poorest half of South Africans.
Yet it would be wrong to think that social policies have pushed back the tide of inequality. For a start, the authors note that regressive consumption taxes such as vat mean the poorest have high effective tax rates.
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Like just about everyone, Bernard Olayo watched with dismay as the coronavirus began to sweep across the globe last year. But he also sensed an opportunity. In 2014 he’d founded a company called Hewatele (“abundant air” in Swahili) to supply African hospitals with oxygen, and when the pandemic sent demand soaring he was able to quickly boost production.
His strategy of building small oxygen plants near hospitals differs from that of larger producers, which typically favor big, centralized facilities. Olayo says this “milkman model” has allowed him to undercut his competitors’ prices in a market where oxygen costs 10 times what it does in the U.K.
Hewatele has about 10% of the Kenyan market, serving about 250 hospitals. Olayo says he’s raised $4 million and is seeking at least $13.5 million to fund expansion; he hopes to build a liquid oxygen plant and start to export the gas to neighboring countries. Here are edited excerpts of our conversation.
When I worked as a doctor, I sometimes didn’t have enough oxygen for my surgery cases, particularly children with pneumonia. So I founded an organization called the Center for Public Health and Development to test some ideas I had. The first trials failed. We put very small oxygen plants in 14 health facilities across East Africa. After just 20 months, all of them had stopped working, as the hospitals had tried to repair the equipment themselves.
I realized that we needed to do it differently, so we came up with the milkman model, in which we build, own, and operate the plants. With adequate cylinders, a well-maintained plant, and a distribution truck or two, it’s possible to supply oxygen to all health facilities within a 100-kilometer radius.
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WELCOME TO THE TUESDAY PORCH.
IF YOU ARE NEW TO THE BLACK KOS COMMUNITY, GRAB A SEAT, SOME CYBER EATS, RELAX, AND INTRODUCE YOURSELF.