Beaten and battered for the crime of being Black in a public space.
Commentary from Black Kos editor JoanMar
It’s a beautiful afternoon, and I’m doing one of my favorite things: rather than jumping on the highway, I’m taking the backroads through the hills and valleys of Connecticut. Speed limit on this narrow, not much more than a pathway road is usually 25mph, and it is not unheard of to see police cruisers tucked into some nook or cranny waiting to catch unwise motorists who’d dare to disobey the posted warnings.
I consciously tucked all my troubles in the back of my mind and I’m living in the moment. Music is blasting, and I’m admiring the scenery and looking out for the majestic standout trees that grace this route. It’s a very good day.
Suddenly I became aware that the monster of a truck behind me seemed to be doing the most to catch my attention. Driving up right behind me and braking, blinking his lights, waving his arm… These are narrow, no-overtaking roads, but there have been times that I see someone acting as if they have to be somewhere in a hurry and if it’s at all safe, I’ll pull over and let them pass. Sometimes you’ll drive the whole 30-45 minutes and see two or three other vehicles tops; that day was not one of dem days. Long line in front of me, long line behind me. “Dude needs to relax,” I muttered to myself. “Where’s he gonna go?” I decided to ignore him and went back to actively listening to Mr. Beres Hammond:
Jah Jah children are rising
Brothers are fighting brothers
That ain’t no way to live…
Whoa! WTF! On this narrow road, in an oversized truck, the back of which seems to be as wide as the road itself, and with oncoming traffic, dude decided to overtake me and then he gave me the finger! Seeing his stubby little digit, I immediately understood his need to be driving this monstrosity around Connecticut. “Asshole!” I thought. But I will not allow him to push me out of my zone. I concentrated on slowing my heart rate and determinedly went back to Beres.
Double trouble is waiting
It’s wrapped up in my bed
I’m tired, I’m sleepy
Can’t taking the nagging in my head...
By this time we’d come to the end of this long, winding road. We are forced to turn right into two lanes: one going straight and the other turning left. We turn into bumper-to-bumper traffic and he’s right beside me as he chose the lane turning left. I smirked, thinking, “all of your antics and you are still right here.” I see him staring at me, rolling down his window, and gesturing. I should have gone about my business and left him to stew in his own misery. I rolled down my window and started to say, “What’s your problem, dude?” Before my sentence was complete, he yelled “Fucking nigger bitch!”
To what end this soul-sapping, spirit-crushing pervasive hate?
All assholes are not racists, but all racists are assholes. It tracks. I turned off my music and took stock of how I was feeling. The explosive violence of the delivery left me a little trembly. I didn’t feel angry, surprisingly. I’ve faced similar situations before and felt uncontrollable anger and the need to hurt someone. Here I felt violated. I felt vulnerable. I felt attacked. The words sent me hurtling back in time when defenseless Black, Brown, & Native people were forced to keep their heads down and scurry out of the way of entitled people. I wondered how many people were facing similar situations at that very moment. I felt an overwhelming urge to cry. I didn’t.
That unpleasant experience paled into insignificance when compared to some of the other incidents that made the news over the last couple weeks.
In DeathSantis’s Florida, a radicalized racist murdered 3 innocent people who were only going about their business of Living While Black. Rest in Power Angela Michelle Carr, 52; A. J. Laguerre, 19; and Jerrald Gallion, 29. Condolences to all their loved ones.
Kianna Cooper was sitting in her car and talking on the phone with her mom. She ended up battered, bruised, and bloody.
Did you hear the latest news? Fox News personalities are giddily sharing the grand tidings. According to these sages, the fact that the vile Orange Plague has a mug shot means that Black folks will be flocking to him in droves! Turns out that we Black people just luvz us some lowlife asshole criminals. Who knew? How do you spell “Fox”? R-A-C-I-S-T-S. The insult.
As Whoopi Goldberg’s character in Color Purple said to Danny Glover’s Mister, “Everything you done to me, already been done to you.” Good white folks, gather your skinfolk. They are out of control, and only you can fix them. You dare not fail at this, or we are all doomed.
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News round up by dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor
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When Florida rejected a new Advanced Placement course on African American Studies, state officials said they objected to the study of several concepts — like reparations, the Black Lives Matter movement and “queer theory.”
But the state did not say that in many instances, its reviewers also made objections in the state’s attempt to sanitize aspects of slavery and the plight of African Americans throughout history, according to a Miami Herald/Tampa Bay Times review of internal state comments.
For example, a lesson in the Advanced Placement course focused on how Europeans benefited from trading enslaved people and the materials enslaved laborers produced. The state objected to the content, saying the instructional approach “may lead to a viewpoint of an ‘oppressor vs. oppressed’ based solely on race or ethnicity.”
In another lesson about the beginnings of slavery, the course delved into how tens of thousands of enslaved Africans had been “removed from the continent to work on Portuguese-colonized Atlantic islands and in Europe” and how those “plantations became a model for slave-based economy in the Americans.”
In response, the state raised concerns that the unit “may not address the internal slave trade/system within Africa” and that it “may only present one side of this issue and may not offer any opposing viewpoints or other perspectives on the subject.”
“There is no other perspective on slavery other than it was brutal,” said Mary Pattillo, a sociology professor and the department chair of Black Studies at Northwestern University. Pattillo is one of several scholars the Herald/Times interviewed during its review of the state’s comments about the AP African American Studies curriculum.
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Miners in the Democratic Republic of Congo face few protections in the global rush for metals for the energy transition—as well as a toxic legacy from a previous rush to mine for nuclear weapons. The New Republic: First They Mined for the Atomic Bomb. Now They’re Mining for E.V.s.
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Cobalt has become the center of a major upsurge in mining in Congo, and the rapid acceleration of cobalt extraction in the region since 2013 has brought hundreds of thousands of people into intimate contact with a powerful melange of toxic metals. The frantic pace of cobalt extraction in Katanga bears close resemblance to another period of rapid exploitation of Congolese mineral resources: During the last few years of World War II, the U.S. government sourced the majority of the uranium necessary to develop the first atomic weapons from a single Congolese mine, named Shinkolobwe. The largely forgotten story of those miners, and the devastating health and ecological impacts uranium production had on Congo, looms over the country now as cobalt mining accelerates to feed the renewable energy boom—with little to no protections for workers involved in the trade.
The city of Kolwezi, which is 300 km (186 miles) northwest of Lubumbashi and 180 km from the now-abandoned Shinkolobwe mine, sits on top of nearly half of the available cobalt in the world. The scope of the contemporary scramble for that metal in Katanga has totally transformed the region. Enormous open-pit mines worked by tens of thousands of miners form vast craters in the landscape and are slowly erasing the city itself.
The global shift toward renewable energy has hugely increased the world’s demand for metals for batteries, creating a new opportunity for Congo, the world’s largest producer of cobalt. Companies like Tesla, Apple, Samsung, and Chrysler source significant percentages of their cobalt from the country.
Much of the cobalt in Congo is mined by hand: Workers scour the surface level seams with picks, shovels, and lengths of rebar, sometimes tunneling by hand 60 feet or more into the earth in pursuit of a vein of ore. This is referred to as artisanal mining, as opposed to the industrial mining carried out by large firms. The thousands of artisanal miners who work at the edges of the formal mines run by big industrial concerns make up 90 percent of the nation’s mining workforce and produce 30 percent of its metals. Artisanal mining is not as efficient as larger-scale industrial mining, but since the miners produce good-quality ore with zero investment in tools, infrastructure, or safety, the ore they sell to buyers is as cheap as it gets. Forced and child labor in the supply chain is not uncommon here, thanks in part to a significant lack of controls and regulations on artisanal mining from the government.
Congo’s mineral resources are found in two broad geographical curves, arcs of mineral-rich surface-level rock that converge on the city of Lubumbashi. This region, known as the Copperbelt, has been mined for more than a century for minerals like copper, cobalt, nickel, gold, and uranium. Some of those deposits are among the richest of their kind in the world, and the workers in those mines are among the most exploited on the planet. Conditions in the mining regions have changed little in the century since the opening of the Shinkolobwe mine, whose highly concentrated uranium ore supercharged both the U.S. and German military projects to develop atomic weapons during World War II.
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Ugandan authorities have charged a man with aggravated homosexuality, which carries a possible death penalty, in the first use of the charge since the enactment in May of an anti-gay law that has been condemned by critics as draconian.
The law has widespread support in Uganda but has drawn pressure from abroad on Ugandan officials to repeal the measure. The World Bank earlier this month announced a decision not to consider new loans to Uganda because of the law, drawing an angry response from President Yoweri Museveni.
The suspect is identified as a 20-year-old “peasant” in the eastern district of Soroti who was charged on Aug. 18 with having unlawful sexual intercourse with a 41-year-old man, according to the charging document issued by police in the Soroti Central Division.
Aggravated homosexuality is defined as cases of same-sex sexual relations involving a minor and other categories of vulnerable people, or when the perpetrator is infected with HIV. The charging document does not clarify the aggravating factor in the case, or say how the victim might be part of a vulnerable population.
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“I don’t know what’s going on,” he said, seated and speaking in English. In the richly carpeted room, an image of former South African President Nelson Mandela sat on a bookshelf.
A longtime politician and one-time funk musician, the French-educated Bongo, 64, is a member of one of Africa’s political dynasties. He took office in 2009 after the death of his father, who ruled oil-rich Gabon for 41 years, and continued security partnerships with France and the United States.
His family’s longevity, perhaps, gave Bongo confidence in the face of the military coups shaking other parts of French-speaking Africa.
Still, there have been challenges. He won his second seven-year term by a narrow margin in 2016 amid violent protests. In late 2018, he had a stroke that kept him from his duties for months. Mutinous soldiers attempted a coup in early 2019 while Bongo was in Morocco recuperating. They were quickly seized.
It is not yet clear how the coup declared Wednesday, hours after Bongo was declared the winner of a weekend presidential election, will play out. The coup leaders said his family and his doctors were with him in his home. They did not give any details about his health.
Bongo has held power in a corner of Africa where heads of state find ways to stay in office for decades. Gabon’s neighbors are ruled by a trio of the continent’s longest-running leaders, including Teodoro Obiang in Equatorial Guinea, in office since 1979; Paul Biya in Cameroon, in office since 1982; and Denis Sassou Nguesso, in office from 1979-92 and again since 1997.
While Gabon’s oil reserves have enriched the country’s rulers, many linked by family ties, frustration has been growing among the population over the inequality on display.
“It is an oil emirate run like a family property for almost six decades,” Thomas Borrel, an analyst in France who studies Africa, said.
Bongo is one of Africa’s richest heads of state, and his wealth is likely to be scrutinized even more now, along with that of his family. Investigators in the U.S. and France have looked into millions of assets in both countries.
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A medical equipment sterilizing plant that uses a chemical whose emissions could lead to cancer and other health risks says it plans to close its Tennessee location by next spring, according to a letter sent by the company to U.S. Rep. Steve Cohen.
In the July letter, lawyers for Sterilization Services of Tennessee told the congressman that the company has dealt with issues relating to a lease extension for its Memphis plant and the facility will be closed by April 30.
The Environmental Protection Agency has said the plant has used ethylene oxide to sterilize medical equipment and materials. The facility has operated since 1976. The county health department’s air program has permitted the facility since 1985.
Ethylene oxide is used to clean catheters, syringes, pacemakers, plastic surgical gowns and other items.
While short-term or infrequent exposure to ethylene oxide does not appear to pose a health risk, the EPA said long-term or lifetime exposure to the colorless and odorless gas could lead to a variety of health problems, including lymphoma and breast cancer.
The EPA has regulated ethylene oxide emissions for 30 years. But in 2016 new scientific information revealed that the chemical is more toxic than previously understood, the EPA said.
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910AM Superstation, a Detroit-area Black talk radio station for nearly a decade, is going conservative.
The white, wealthy owner of the station, Kevin Adell, abruptly pulled the plug on Black talk radio earlier this month and will soon replace it with programming promoting right-wing outrage.
Adell plans to blanket the Detroit area with more than two dozen billboards advertising his new lineup of conservative voices. The first billboard, featuring The Glenn Beck Program and The Clay Travis and Buck Sexton Show, was erected Thursday along I-275 near Ecorse Road in Van Buren Township near the Detroit Metropolitan Airport.
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