Talking to the Hand.
Commentary by Chitown Kev
First, I would like to congratulate former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton on her hard fought razor-thin victory in the Iowa Caucuses last night (the first woman to ever win the Iowa Caucuses!). I would also like to congratulate Senator Bernie Sanders for being far far more competitive than anyone ever thought that a self-proclaimed “democratic socialist” would be. Both of the remaining Democratic candidates for the 2016 Democratic presidential candidate would be a great nominee for the Democratic Party for different and varied reasons.
Either Democratic nominee would be far more preferable to any nominee that Republican Party voters will offer in 2016; there can be no doubt about that.
There can also be no doubt that either President Sanders or President Clinton will have to pick, choose and prioritize what they get done from many varied items on their campaign agendas.
And history clearly shows that, inevitably, for black people (and all people of color, really), all of the various campaign promises and rhetoric that we hear now will give way to the harsh electoral and political realities.
As it relates to the electoral and political aspirations of American presidents (even, at times, the current occupant of the Oval Office, Barack Obama), black people are every bit as much of “a problem” as Dr. W.E.B. Dubois eloquently stated over a hundred years ago.
Inevitably, I begin to think of the picture that headlines this commentary which I first saw within a Democratic Underground thread almost three months ago.
This picture of then-Milwaukee Councilwoman Velvalea “Vel” Rodgers Phillips and future president John Kennedy was taken during civil rights demonstrations at the 1960 Democratic Convention in Los Angeles at the Shrine Auditorium. According to the LATimes, then-Senator Kennedy respectfully told the photographer, “No pictures, please.”
To be fair, the LATimes link does not speculate on why Senator Kennedy asked for the picture not to be taken. Given the political realities of the Democratic Party in 1960, we can probably make some educated guesses as to why the Democratic nominee would not want his picture taken with a black politician and committed civil rights activist during civil rights demonstrations at the 1960 Democratic Convention.
Of course, nowadays, a Democratic presidential nominee would wave for the photographer to come closer; in fact he or she would be on the lookout to get more blacks and POC in the picture, given the contemporary demographics of any given Democratic electorate.
Heck, even the Republicans/Dixiecrats do that at their convention, FWIW.
So as the New Hampshire primaries come and go and the 2016 primary calendar shifts to states with more people of color, trust me, black people can hear the lofty affirming sound and fury of Democratic campaign rhetoric coming from a loooooooong way.
We know that pretty much every fifth word that comes out of Secretary Clinton’s mouth will be “Barack Obama” and why (FYI, Secretary Clinton, it gets really irritating hearing it over and over and over...we heard you the first time).
(To be fair, I suppose that’s an improvement over hearing words and phrases like “super-predator” and “working, hard-working Americans, white Americans”...among other things.)
We know that Bernie “marched with King” and got arrested in civil rights demonstrations in 1960’s and has a “100 rating” on voting for all of the essential things (And I doubt that we’ll hear much about the differences between rural guns in Vermont and urban guns in Chicago...among other things).
Black people know what presidential candidates say.
And we know what elected Presidents do, in varying degrees.
I can’t think of a president that the history books labels as a “friend of the Negro” that is an exception to that rule. Not one.
Black people don’t need to be reminded this by “nice white progressives” or anyone else. We have lived it.
And we still are.
H/T commenter “KIndofBlue” at Democratic Underground
The death of public housing in New York City is a slow-motion crisis. The New Republic: How Do You Fight a Housing Market Gone Mad?
Earlier this month, New York City mayor Bill de Blasio attempted to assuage the fears of public housing residents in a rapidly gentrifying neighborhood in Brooklyn. At issue was a proposal to start leasing the public land abutting their homes to developers in order to replenish the New York City Housing Authority’s depleted coffers. It was a difficult task for de Blasio: For decades federal and state funds for public housing have disappeared, leaving the New York City Housing Authority—the nation’s largest public housing authority, by far—with deteriorating buildings and enervated organizational capabilities. Ignored by previous mayors and governors, the public housing authority now needs a staggering amount of money to adequately serve the people it houses: The organization faces $17 billion in capital debt.
“You go down the list: everything costs money. Everything costs money,” de Blasio told the group of public housing residents, who live a few blocks away from Brooklyn’s newly minted mega-venue, the Barclays Center (part of a private development project that will receive $1.6 billion in government funding), “So what can the city do for itself?”
In a sentence, de Blasio had summarized the main housing issue that all large and diverse American cities have faced since the Reagan administration. Robbed of nearly all federal support for housing initiatives, cities have been left to figure out how to themselves create and maintain housing for residents who cannot keep up with market-rate rents. New York City, for example, once had a diverse set of subsidized programs that allowed residents to pay under market rates for housing—such as Section 8, Mitchell-Lama, and NYCHA’s own initiatives. The city has then watched as a large amount of this subsidized housing has evaporated; some from the lack of federal support, and some because of landlords exiting the subsidized programs to make more money on wealthier tenants.
Market-rate rental prices across the country have proved just as destructive to affordable housing stocks as the lack of federal support for it—last year, rents in five of the ten priciest American cities had double-digit percentage increases for the price of an average rental. There’s more money than ever to be had building market-rate housing, which takes away much of the leverage cities and states had to entice developers to agree to build low or moderate income housing. Before, the city offered cheap land to developers as well as subsidized mortgages for construction, which are no longer so attractive as they once were. When de Blasio asked, “So what can the city do for itself?”, he might have also said: What can a city do, left almost completely on its own, to fight against a housing market gone mad?
A mainly Caribbean community has become a mainly African one—and is poised to become more successful. The Economist: Black Britons, The next generation.
Black British history did not begin in the 20th century. In 1578 George Best, a travelling diarist, wrote of meeting “an Ethiopian as blacke as a cole brought into England”. But it was after the 1940s that Britain’s black population really began to grow, with two waves of immigration. The first, from the 1940s to the 1960s, carried poor Caribbeans to British shores. The second, beginning in the late 1980s, came from Africa, as wealthy Nigerians and Ghanaians arrived alongside rural migrants and refugees from Somalia and Zimbabwe.
Britain’s black population is now about 2m, or just over 3% of the total. The census divides it into two main categories: “black African” and “black Caribbean”. Until the turn of the century, Caribbeans were in the majority. But in the ten years to 2011, the African population doubled. And that is not the end of the changes: although Caribbean Britons are substantially better off than their African neighbours, demographic and educational trends suggest that the tables may soon be turned.
Thamesmead, an east-London suburb that is home to Britain’s most-concentrated African population, illustrates the group’s struggles. Its bleak residential towers, where Stanley Kubrick shot “A Clockwork Orange”, are overcrowded, says Mabel Ogundayo, a 24-year-old local councillor. Most of its crammed-in residents are tenants; nationwide, less than one-quarter of Africans are owner-occupiers, compared with nearly one-half of Caribbeans. That is partly why Caribbean households are, on average, much better off: in 2009 the Office for National Statistics (ONS) found that the average one had £76,000 ($109,000) in assets, against £15,000 among Africans.
Caribbeans also fare better at work. Africans are less likely to be employed, and more likely to toil in low-skilled occupations. Much of this is down to their more recent arrival: although four out of ten have degrees—more than any ethnic group other than Chinese and Indians—many studied at unrecognised foreign universities, and some speak little English. As a result, 41% of African graduates work in non-graduate jobs, compared with 28% of Caribbeans. Their employment rate is dragged down by some groups that have particularly struggled: few from the mainly refugee Congolese or Somali communities are in work, for example.
Festivals slowly return to normality in country renowned for its musicians, following years of sharia law crackdown in restive north. The Guardian: Mali's irrepressible musical spirit resounds after jihadi-imposed silence.
In the courtyard of a colonial villa in Bamako, four young men crouch around a tiny camping stove. The Malian tradition of simmering tea for hours is as old as the ancient trade routes crossing the Sahara desert. There is even a saying behind the practice, says Aliou Touré, a singer in the Mali band Songhoy Blues.
“Here in Mali we say that the first cup is bitter like life, the second is sweet like love and the third is soft like the breath of a dying man,” he says.
Songhoy Blues are one of the latest musical acts to emerge from the west African country that has produced artists such as Salif Keita and Toumani Diabaté – both multiple Grammy winners – Tinariwen, Ali Farka Touré, Bassekou Kouyaté, and Rokia Traoré.
The band is one of a dozen acts at this week’s Bamako acoustic festival, the first major music festival in the capital since 2012, when Islamist extremists seized northern Mali and imposed their hardline interpretation of sharia law that, among other things, banned music.
Such a ban would be unthinkable in most places but was especially painful in Mali, where music is woven into the fabric of everyday life. The jihadis enforced sharia law in places that had been Muslim for centuries, banning radio stations, TV sets, bars and nightclubs, effectively putting life on hold.
“It was truly devastating”, said musician Toumani Diabaté. “I grew up with the Qur’an and the kora [a west African instrument]. To even imagine that I would be in trouble for playing a traditional Malian instrument, a part of our culture, I would have never imagined this in Mali.”
The occupation forced the cancellation of the country’s many world-famous festivals, with events such as the acclaimed Festival in the Desert near Timbuktu suspended indefinitely.
Revealing moments in black history, with unpublished photos from The New York Times’s archives. New York Times: Unpublished Black History.
Hundreds of stunning images from black history, drawn from old negatives, have long been buried in the musty envelopes and crowded bins of the New York Times archives.
None of them were published by The Times until now.
Were the photos — or the people in them — not deemed newsworthy enough? Did the images not arrive in time for publication? Were they pushed aside by words here at an institution long known as the Gray Lady?
As you scroll through the images, each will take you back: To the charred wreckage of Malcolm X’s house in Queens, just hours after it was bombed. To the Lincoln Memorial, where thousands of African-American protesters gathered, six years before the March on Washington. To Lena Horne’s elegant penthouse on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. To a city sidewalk where schoolgirls jumped rope, while the writer Zora Neale Hurston cheered them on, behind the scenes.
Photographers for The Times captured all of these scenes, but then the pictures and negatives were filed in our archives, where they sat for decades.
This month, we present a robust selection for the very first time.
Before "homophobia" and "Islamophobia," there was “colorphobia” and “Negrophobia.” And it all started with the word for rabies. The New Republic: The Anti-Slavery Roots of Today’s “-Phobia” Obsession.
Where do phobias come from? And how do they become political? In a recent New York Times article, Amanda Hess addresses these questions in an investigation of phobia’s rise as a sociopolitical register. Titled “How ‘-Phobic’ Became a Weapon in the Identity Wars,” the essay shows that the “modern ‘-phobia’ boom” can be traced back to New York psychologist and gay rights activist George Weinberg, who coined the term “homophobia” in his 1972 book Society and the Healthy Homosexual. “‘Homophobia’ was a hit,” Hess explains. It became the go-to “descriptor for the intolerant” and a rallying point for gay liberation worldwide. Since then, phobia has fully infiltrated activist lingo. “Islamophobia,” “xenophobia,” “transphobia”—each fulfills a hallowed role for a corresponding social movement, organizing an array of discriminatory acts into an all-purpose buzzword.
But if we want to understand the origins of this phenomenon, we have to look beyond the history of homophobia in the twentieth century. For more than two hundred years, Americans have been using the “phobia” suffix as a political weapon. In fact, the first progressives to recognize its rhetorical power were not gay rights activists but nineteenth-century abolitionists. Two terms became especially prominent: “colorphobia” and “Negrophobia.” Armed with these neologisms, abolitionists developed a vocabulary that not only contested the slave system, but also unearthed an emotional basis for slavery’s persistence. In their eyes, racial phobia was a malevolent force—one that threatened to tear the nation apart. It was not uncommon for pieces published in Frederick Douglass’s The North Star, William Lloyd Garrison’s The Liberator, Charles Bennett Ray’s The Colored American, and Lydia and David Child’s National Anti-Slavery Standard to focus entirely on rooting out “cases” of “colorphobia” and “Negrophobia.” At the end of the Civil War, newspapers on both sides of the Atlantic had published hundreds of editorials tackling race prejudice in these terms.
By the late 1830s, colorphobia and Negrophobia had become central to national conversations about slavery and social life. Does this mean we have at last uncovered the origins of our many political phobias? Well, not exactly. It is precisely now, during a resurgence of the phobic imagination in political circles, that we should resist assuming a perfect correspondence between antebellum phobias and our own. Colorphobia and Negrophobia originated in a lexical relationship that has since faded from historical memory. The terms were, in fact, first imagined as analogies of a disease called hydrophobia, the predominant name for rabies until the late nineteenth century.
Though Sundance ends Sunday, the discussion it spurs each year about the films and the state of the American film industry at large will continue. New York Times film critic Manohla Dargis added an interesting element to the discourse on diversity in Hollywood in an essay presenting what she calls the “DuVernay test.” Dargis’ piece focuses largely on the role of Sundance, the larger cultural context that surrounds this year’s films, and the titles that earned distribution deals and awards, but perhaps the most impactful part of the piece comes when she discusses top prizewinner The Birth of a Nation. Dargis proposes what she calls the “DuVernay test,” in honor of
, the celebrated director of Selma. In essence, the DuVernay test is a racial analogue to the Bechdel test, offering a simple, widely-applicable metric for examining the way we talk about and treat the stories of minority characters in film and media.
Movies like “The Birth of a Nation” are helping to write the next chapter of American cinema. And, to an extent, that’s true of Sundance at its best...It’s also where numerous selections pass the Bechdel test (movies like the very fine “Christine” and “Sand Storm,” in which two women talk to each other about something besides a man) and, in honor of the director and Sundance alumna Ava DuVernay, what might be called the DuVernay test, in which African-Americans and other minorities have fully realized lives rather than serve as scenery in white stories.
Though the Bechdel test is, of course, an over-simplified yardstick for feminism in film, it remains a simple, straightforward way to begin the conversation about how any given movie humanizes its female characters. Perhaps it’s just as well that Dargis doesn’t propose any specific measure for the DuVernay test; rather than producing a simply binary yes/no, it can serve, similarly, as a way to begin discussing the diversity, representation, and the depth of the stories of minority characters in the films we make and watch.
Voices and Soul
by
Justice Putnam
Black Kos Poetry Editor
Radio has always been an important component in my life long, conscious action to broaden my horizons. I’ve written before about building my first crystal radio set as a child outside of Corvallis, Oregon and the short wave gear gifted to me a few years later. With that short wave, I picked up radio broadcasts from Paris, from Rome, even from Cologne. I became an avid listener to Radio Caroline when Wolfman Jack’s fire hose signal was moved such, that a notch of the Siskiyous blocked it enough that I had enough line of site for the British broadcasts. I’ve also written before about the impact Studs Terkel had on me, listening to the Chicago stations there. His interviews are classics in their own right. Chicago has always had memorable personalities emerge from it’s broad shouldered lake shore, but none so memorable as Herb Kent.
Your voice crawls across the dashboard of Grandma’s Dodge Dynasty on the way home from Lilydale First Baptist. You sing a cocktail of static and bass. Sound like you dressed to the nines: cowboy hat, fur coat & alligator boots. Sound like you lotion every tooth. You a walking discography, South Side griot, keeper of crackle & dust in the grooves. You fell in love with a handmade box of wires at 16 and been behind the booth ever since. From wbez to V103, you be the Coolest Gent, King of the Dusties. Your voice wafts down from the ceiling at the Hair Lab. You supply the beat for Kym to tap her comb to. Her brown fingers paint my scalp with white grease to the tunes of Al & Barry & Luther. Your voice: an inside-out yawn, the sizzle of hot iron on fresh perm, the song inside the blackest seashell washed up on a sidewalk in Bronzeville. You soundtrack the church picnic, trunk party, Cynthia’s 50th birthday bash, the car ride to school, choir, Checkers. Your voice stretch across our eardrums like Daddy asleep on the couch. Sound like Grandma’s sweet potato pie, sound like the cigarettes she hide in her purse for rough days. You showed us what our mommas’ mommas must’ve moved to. When the West Side rioted the day MLK died, you were audio salve to the burning city, people. Your voice a soft sermon soothing the masses, speaking coolly to flames, spinning black records across the airwaves, spreading the gospel of soul in a time of fire. Joycetta says she bruised her thumbs snappin’ to Marvin’s “Got to Give It Up” and I believe her.
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