Voices and Soul
by Justice Putnam
Black Kos Poetry Editor
It is a common literary trait to read and write history with its inevitable conclusion as being our own current time. In our finite observations of Time and Space, everything leads up to this now. A supernova explosion a billion years ago and trillions of parsecs away, is only now reaching the range of our most powerful telescopes. Our abilities of observation are limited by what we perceive as an enslavement to this Time and this Space.
But Time and Space are not so finite. There is no such thing as a bright light in space instantaneously becoming a dark and impenetrable region.
Light fades ever so slowly over Time and Space. Light resonates and casts shadows and expands until it seemingly disappears.
But only seemingly, Forever.
On Disappearing
I have not disappeared.
The boulevard is full of my steps. The sky is
full of my thinking. An archbishop
prays for my soul, even though
we met only once, and even then, he was
busy waving at a congregation.
The ticking clocks in Vermont sway
back and forth as though sweeping
up my eyes and my tattoos and my metaphors,
and what comes up are the great paragraphs
of dust, which also carry motes
of my existence. I have not disappeared.
My wife quivers inside a kiss.
My pulse was given to her many times,
in many countries. The chunks of bread we dip
in olive oil is communion with our ancestors,
who also have not disappeared. Their delicate songs
I wear on my eyelids. Their smiles have
given me freedom which is a crater
I keep falling in. When I bite into the two halves
of an orange whose cross-section resembles my lungs,
a delta of juices burst down my chin, and like magic,
makes me appear to those who think I've
disappeared. It's too bad war makes people
disappear like chess pieces, and that prisons
turn prisoners into movie endings. When I fade
into the mountains on a forest trail,
I still have not disappeared, even though its green façade
turns my arms and legs into branches of oak.
It is then I belong to a southerly wind,
which by now you have mistaken as me nodding back
and forth like a Hasid in prayer or a mother who has just
lost her son to gunfire in Detroit. I have not disappeared.
In my children, I see my bulging face
pressing further into the mysteries.
In a library in Tucson, on a plane above
Buenos Aires, on a field where nearby burns
a controlled fire, I am held by a professor,
a general, and a photographer.
One burns a finely wrapped cigar, then sniffs
the scented pages of my books, scouring
for the bitter smell of control.
I hold him in my mind like a chalice.
I have not disappeared. I swish the amber
hue of lager on my tongue and ponder the drilling
rigs in the Gulf of Alaska and all the oil-painted plovers.
When we talk about limits, we disappear.
In Jasper, TX you can disappear on a strip of gravel.
I am a life in sacred language.
Termites toil over a grave,
and my mind is a ravine of yesterdays.
At a glance from across the room, I wear
September on my face,
which is eternal, and does not disappear
even if you close your eyes once and for all
simultaneously like two coffins.
Black folks are not just worried about gun-toting cops. We’re tax-paying, family-raising, just as stressed by the sorry state of education for our kids, and the scarcity of jobs and access to high-quality health care. The Root: Stop Treating Black People Like a One-Issue Voting Pony.
Admit it: When you finally tuned out (or logged out) of this past Sunday night’s Democratic presidential-primary debate in Charleston, S.C., you walked away with the distinct feeling that black people have only one or two issues to worry about.
Watching headlines and candidate sound bites, the nation might be under the impression that the only things black people are pressed about are traffic stops gone bad, gun-blazing cops andgetting dissed in Oscar nods. But the issues are varied, numerous and complex. Despite assumptions, black folks—tax-paying and family-raising—are just as stressed by the sorry state of K-12 education for their kids, the scarcity of jobs, tight wages, access to high-quality health care, Social Security, economic displacement and all of the above. Now repeat.
And black voters are as savvy and discriminating about those issues as any other group. The most recent YouGov-Economist poll (pdf) found black voters ranking issues like Social Security, the economy and health care on their top 3 list (true: YouGov might want to throw police brutality on the list, just to see how it compares). That’s been firmly consistent throughout this cycle, with Medicare, Social Security (yes, you really need to watch that reliable black senior vote, fam) and education, in particular, getting very high numbers among black election watchers.
But watch how presidential campaigns and the Fourth Estate actively sterilize the notion of any comprehensive, multi-issue black agenda. In case you didn’t notice (or don’t live it), there is one. The problem, though, is that candidates don’t want black people (or their white friends) to know it. Particularly the Democratic candidates, who—after many forced tooth extractions—begrudgingly offer placating shoutouts to Black Lives Matter and then yell “Police reform!” for exit claps and giggles.
Yet many black people, hit with high poverty, unemployment and underemployment, are just focused on the details of getting by. Old, middle-aged and millennial. Most of them, who on average lack assets or multigenerational wealth, wonder about the next paycheck, the level of that worry determined by their place on the income scale. Few, if any, are hearing any presidential candidate talk about it. South Carolina, as an example of what wasn’t discussed recently, has a black below-poverty rate of 30 percent (nearly double the overall state rate, more than double the white rate). You’d think that someone onstage in Charleston might have had some sense to mention it.
In the fall of 2013 a young software engineer named Charles Pratt arrived on Howard University’s campus in Washington. His employer, Google, had sent him there to cultivate future Silicon Valley programmers. It represented a warming of the Valley’s attitude toward Howard, where more than 8 out of 10 students are black. The chair of the computer science department, Legand Burge, had spent almost a decade inviting tech companies to hire his graduates, but they’d mostly ignored him. Pratt began teaching computer science classes, helping to revamp the department’s curriculum, and preparing students for Google’s idiosyncratic application process. It was one of several initiatives meant to get the school to churn out large numbers of engineers. Two and a half years later, that hasn’t happened. The slow progress reflects the knottiness of one of Silicon Valley’s most persistent problems: It’s too white.
Howard, founded in 1867, has long been one of the country’s most eminent historically black colleges and universities. Thurgood Marshall went there, as did Toni Morrison; the writer Ta-Nehisi Coates, who attended Howard, called it the Mecca—the place where he realized the black world “was more than a photo negative of that of the people who believe they’re white.” Still, it’s not among the elite science-oriented universities where tech companies have focused recruitment—places like Stanford, MIT, and Carnegie Mellon. Pratt arrived in Washington as traditional hiring practices were being scrutinized.
In one study, white men took part in a simulated job interview. When they were told that the company they were interviewing with embraced diversity, they worried about being at a disadvantage—and their heart rates rose, suggesting they felt threatened. In another, white participants were told that a company had a statement affirming its commitment to nondiscrimination. The mere existence of the statementconvinced the participants that the company treated minorities fairly—even when they were presented with clear evidence of bias. It seems that diversity policies can create an “illusion of fairness” that causes white people to discount complaints of discrimination—making things worse, rather than better, for minorities. That may be why courts often defer to companies that are sued for discrimination when those companies have diversity policies on their books.
Diversity training sessions can backfire, too—especially when the trainings are mandatory and emphasize the legal consequences of discrimination. Attempting to change attitudes about diversity by emphasizing the social unacceptability of prejudice actually increases prejudice by triggering “a direct counterresponse (i.e., defiance) to threatened autonomy” (in other words, by triggering people’s inner toddlers). And policies that constrain managers—for instance, requiring them to consider job tests and performance reviews when making hiring and promotion decisions—seem to reduce diversity rather than increase it. Researchers hypothesize that managers “who lack autonomy try to assert control through sabotage, goldbricking, and resistance to organizational goals.”
“Policies and trainings tend to piss people off more than anything,” one corporate diversity professional in New York told me. “It causes resentment.”
That doesn’t mean all diversity policies are counterproductive. It’s true that most such programs aren’t tested for effectiveness before implementation, which means that many executives are spending money on useless or counterproductive initiatives. But longitudinal research shows that some kinds of diversity programs succeed in increasing the numbers of racial minorities and women in management roles.
So which diversity policies actually work? Sociologists Alexandra Kalev and Frank Dobbin have jointly published several papers assessing the effectiveness of various diversity policies, based on decades of data and surveys of more than 800 firms in various fields. In a paper published last year, Dobbin, Kalev, and their colleague Daniel Schrage argue that successful policies rely on engagement, accountability, and transparency. First, they engage managers in diversity efforts, so that managers feel like they’re a part of the solution rather than part of the problem. Diversity task forces “are just hugely effective compared to the other things that companies can do,” Dobbin told me. “What seems to make them effective is where they bring together high-level people with some regularity to look at the data and try to come up with solutions.” Mentoring programs that match managers with employees from underrepresented groups have also been shown to be effective.
The grand jury that opted not to indict Cleveland police officers Timothy Loehmann and Frank Garmback in the shooting death of Tamir Rice never actually took a vote on the matter, according to the Cuyahoga County Prosecutor's Office.
What actually happened in the most significant grand jury hearing in county history isn't quite clear, and the mechanism by which the grand jury "declined to indict" — in Prosecutor Timothy McGinty's own words — is equally unclear.
At the conclusion of a typical grand jury hearing, there are two possible outcomes achieved via vote: a "true bill," which results in criminal charges and a case number in the court system, or a "no bill," which is a decision not to bring charges. A "no-bill notification" is signed and stamped and kept on record at the county clerk's office.
Though Cuyahoga County Prosecutor Timothy McGinty never explicitly said the grand jury voted not to indict — nor did he utter the phrase "no bill" — in his Dec. 28 press conference, he declared that that grand jury had declined to indict.
How, then, if not by voting?
After learning and confirming on Jan. 15 that there was no "no-bill notification" on file at the county clerk's office for the Tamir Rice grand jury proceedings, Scene formally requested the document officially showing the decision, however it was reached, and wherever said document might be. We were told that it didn't exist. Employees at both the clerk's and prosecutor's officers were unable to explain the lack of paperwork.
Tuesday, Scene spoke with Joe Frolik, the communications director for the Prosecutor's Office, who said no no-bill record exists because, "it's technically not a no-bill, because they didn't vote on charges."
Freetown’s board houses are as old as the city itself, but they are fast disappearing amid rapid urbanization and a growing preference for concrete. New York Times: Part of Sierra Leone’s History Is Being Dismantled Board by Board.
On a busy roundabout in the heart of this nation’s capital stands an ancient cotton tree, marking the spot where Freetown was founded by freed slaves from North America more than 200 years ago. Walk for a few minutes toward the southeast, past the vendors who line the derelict remains of Victoria Park and through the bustling streets of the city center, and you will find at the corner of two rutted dirt roads a house that looks more suited to the American South than to a steamy West African capital.
The Young House, as it has been known for as long as anyone can remember, is a two-story dwelling constructed primarily from wooden boards and painted a bright lemon yellow, clashing starkly with the squat concrete buildings around it.
It is what is known here as a board house (or bod ose in the local Krio language), one of an ever decreasing number still standing in the capital and the surrounding villages. Its style is as old as the city itself, brought over from the Americas by the settlers who arrived in several waves from 1792 onward.
“Every day, more are being pulled down, to be replaced by modern concrete-and-glass buildings,” said Isatu Smith, who as the chairwoman of the country’s Monuments and Relics Commission is responsible for making sure that does not happen.But amid rapid urbanization, rampant poverty and a cultural preference for concrete, this architectural legacy of the city’s founding is fast disappearing.
“The scale of it is alarming,” she said, sitting in her cramped office a stone’s throw from the cotton tree. “If we cannot protect these houses, it will be a major part of our history and our heritage erased. They are a testament to the resilience of people who came from slavery to found this city. They’re iconic.”
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