Black women are the backbone of the Democratic Party
Commentary by Black Kos Editor Denise Oliver Velez
This subject seemed appropriate for today — election day Tuesday.
I went to vote at 6:30 AM, and took my husband with me. I had already printed out a sample ballot for him, and discussed the yes or no vote here in NY for a Constitutional Convention (we voted No). I’m only doing what I learned from my mom. She, my aunts and great aunts and female cousins would never, ever “not vote.” We were raised to understand how long and hard the price we had to pay for the franchise was—both as black descendants of enslaved persons, and as women.
I don’t know how well this ethic is being passed on to younger folks. I do want to highlight a group who is doing the work — and also encouraging sisters to not only vote — but to run for office.
Higher Heights is one such organization.
Higher Heights seeks to elevate Black women’s voices to shape and advance progressive policies and politics. By strengthening Black women’s civic participation in grassroots advocacy campaigns and the electoral process; Higher Heights for America will create the environment in which more Black women, and other candidates who are committed to advance policies that affect Black women, can be elected to public office.
Higher Heights is building a national infrastructure to harness Black women’s political power and leadership potential. Headquartered in New York, NY, Higher Heights for America, a national 501(c)(4) organization and its sister organization Higher Heights Leadership Fund, a 501(c)(3) organization, is investing in a long-term strategy to analyze, expand and support a Black women’s leadership pipeline at all levels and strengthen their civic participation beyond just Election Day.
- Reconfigure the make up of decision making tables to include Black women from across the socio-economic spectrums at all levels.
- Elevate Black women’s voices to shape and advance progressive policies and politics.
- Foster creative collaboration across constituencies and issues ensuring that race/gender equity and inclusion are incorporated in ongoing progressive based building efforts, issue-based advocacy campaigns, and in voter engagement campaigns and electoral strategies.
One of their blog posts — which is a subject I also saw discussed at Essence was
Is 2017 The Year Of The Black Woman Mayor?
Across the nation, black women are taking it upon themselves to impact their communities in the most direct way possible.
The current political landscape and activism across the country has brought increased attention to the power of mayors. Voters are increasingly concerned about the issues affecting their day –to-day lives, from affordable housing and education to building economically safe communities. With the political gridlock in Washington, they recognize the power of mayors to provide the leadership needed to transform our cities.
Tomorrow, voters in New Orleans will go to the polls to vote in their city’s primary to elect their next mayor. Two of the top-polling candidates are Black women, a grassroots activist turned city council member and a former judge. These women are examples of a growing cohort of Black women seeking to change the face of leadership in our country’s largest cities.
Since 2002, ten Black women have been elected to mayoral office, with five of those women serving simultaneously from January to June 2017, the largest number to serve at one time in history.
2017 is shaping up to be the year of the Black woman mayor. This fall, eight Black women will be on the ballot in primaries or have already advanced to general elections.
Those eight women are: Keisha Lance Bottoms ― Atlanta, GA, Vi Lyles ― Charlotte, NC, Yvette Simpson ― Cincinnati, OH, Rev. Diane Moffett ― Greensboro, NC, Rev. Dr. Nekima Levy-Pounds ― Minneapolis, MN, LaToya Cantrell ― New Orleans, LA, Desiree Charbonnet ― New Orleans, LA, and Paula Hicks-Hudson ― Toledo, OH.
I can’t discuss these candidates or their chances— the article has short descriptions. What I can say is that I’m glad to see black women getting out there and running.
Daily Kos, and Emily’s List have endorsed Stacey Abrams in her bid for the GA governorship.
Daily Kos has also endorsed Jennifer Carroll Foy (VA-HD-2), Latina candidates Elizabeth Guzman (VA-HD-31), and Hala Ayala (VA-HD-51) and Sikh-American Manka Dhingra (WA-SD-45).
Will be staying up late tonight to see how they do!
Vote!
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News round up by dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor
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Ms. Gorman is a poet, author and activist who is the first person to be named National Youth Poet Laureate. Celebrated by such prominent women as Hillary Clinton (Ms. Gorman helped introduce Ms. Clinton at the 2017 Vital Voices Global Leadership Awards in March) and Cynthia Erivo, her poetry is a cleareyed mix of autobiography, social issues like Islamophobia, and historical motifs picked up from her college’s library. “I want to create poems that stand the test of time and counter the fragmented news culture of today,” she said.
Big Break Inspired by a speech that Malala Yousafzai, the Pakistani activist and Nobel Prize laureate, gave in 2013, Ms. Gorman became a youth delegate for the United Nations at the age of 16. “It really opened my eyes to the possibilities of what I could accomplish,” she said. Soon after, in 2014, she was namedthe inaugural Los Angeles Youth Poet Laureate. The following year, she published her first poetry collection, “The One for Whom Food Is Not Enough.”
Latest Project “What’s really funny about being National Youth Poet Laureate is that not everyone even knows it exists,” said Ms. Gorman, who was given the honor in April. “I feel in many ways like a unicorn.” That’s not to say she isn’t taking her new role seriously. “I did a lot of sitting back and thinking about what I wanted for myself and what I wanted for my country: more unity, more support for the arts and more opportunities for young writers from marginalized groups,” she said.
Next Thing Between courses in sociology and her laureate obligations, she continues to lead One Pen One Page, an organization she founded in 2016 that provides platforms “for student storytellers to change the world.” She is also putting the final touches on She the People, an experiential virtual reality project that seeks to empower teenager girls. “I’m navigating all that while also being a young black woman navigating the intersectionality of my identity,” she said.
Amanda Gorman, student, poet, author and activist, on the Charles River near Harvard University in Cambridge, Mass. CreditTony Luong for The New York Times
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In the wake of this summer’s white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops decided to create a new, ad hoc committee against racism. According to Anthea Butler, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, it is the U.S. Church’s first major effort to deal with race since 1979.
This is an appropriate moment for the Church to confront this issue. In August, The Washington Post reported that an Arlington, Virginia, priest named William Aitcheson had been arrested in the ’70s for burning crosses and threatening African American and Jewish families as a member of the Ku Klux Klan—and he never paid restitution or apologized to the victims. More broadly, the Church is increasingly experiencing divisions over politics along racial lines: In the 2016 election, 56 percent of white Catholics voted for Trump, compared to only 19 percent of Hispanic Catholics, according to the Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate at Georgetown University.
But racial struggles in the Catholic Church are not just about white versus black or white versus Hispanic. Many black Catholics have struggled over their identity in the Church, writes Matthew Cressler, an assistant professor of religious studies at the College of Charleston, in his new book, Authentically Black and Truly Catholic. In the mid-20th century, the big question was how to reconcile the universal message of a Church that claims to transcend race with evidence that it is a “white racist institution,” as activists put it.
This struggle to be “authentically black and truly Catholic” took many forms, Cressler writes. Some African Americans were attracted to the quiet formality of a traditional mass. Others found ways to incorporate African iconography into church spaces: At one “Black Unity Mass” in 1969, Chicago priests stood before an altar draped in a tiger skin and decorated with an African shield.
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The Red Cross has admitted that millions of dollars meant for fighting the deadly outbreak of Ebola in west Africa were siphoned off by its own staff.
The organisation’s own investigations uncovered evidence of fraud, with more than $2.1m (£1.6m) lost in Sierra Leone, probably stolen by staff in collusion with local bank officials, according to a statement. In Guinea, a mixture of fake and inflated customs bills cost it $1m.
The Red Cross, the world’s oldest humanitarian organisation, said it was “outraged” at the losses but its statement did not contain any apology.
It said it was “committed to holding all those involved in any form of fraud to account, and to reclaiming all misappropriated, diverted, or otherwise illegally taken funds”.
Any immunity from prosecution would be waived to ensure any corrupt staff were held to account, it added. An earlier investigation found that in Liberia the prices of relief goods and payrolls were inflated to the tune of $2.6m.
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KENYA, according to its deputy president, William Ruto, “is not the type of country where you find a president getting 99% of the vote”. That statement, made on October 16th, was tested just a week later when Kenyans went to the polls for a re-run of the election on August 8th, which the country’s supreme court annulled. When the final results were announced by the electoral commission on October 30th, Uhuru Kenyatta, the incumbent, had won (again) with 98.3% of the vote. Yet the sweeping victory seems unlikely to bring to an end Kenya’s political and emerging economic crises.
The reason for Mr Kenyatta’s huge victory was that his main opponent, Raila Odinga, an opposition stalwart and perennial candidate, withdrew from the race and called on his supporters to refuse to vote. Turnout collapsed to just 38% from almost 80% in the annulled poll of August. In two of Kenya’s 47 counties—both strongholds of Mr Odinga in western Kenya—voting did not happen at all, as Mr Odinga’s supporters prevented officials from opening polling stations.
In the end, turnout strongly reflected Kenya’s political (and ethnic) make-up. In the central region, where Mr Kenyatta’s tribe, the Kikuyu, are most concentrated, voters still crowded the polls (see map). In Kiambu, his home county, turnout was 78%, compared with 83% in August. A similar pattern held in Mr Ruto’s Kalenjin heartlands in the Rift Valley. By contrast, in pro-Odinga areas, dominated by the Luo, the boycott was clearest. In Mombasa, Kenya’s second-largest city, turnout fell from 59% to just 14%.
The worry for Mr Kenyatta is what happens next. After the results were declared, Mr Odinga gave a speech in which he denounced the “sham election” and called for a “people’s assembly” to resist the government. He has said he will not go back to court, but if he does, the logic of the previous annulment suggests he has a chance of winning. Mr Kenyatta acknowledged as much in his victory speech, saying that his re-election “is likely to be subjected to a constitutional test through the courts”. His allies talk nervously about a Kafkaesque situation where Kenya keeps holding elections that are repeatedly rejected in court.
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With an endless array of pristine landscapes and animals that are native to no other region in the world, the country of Madagascar—located in the Indian Ocean—draws in hundreds of thousands of tourists every year from nearly every country in the world.
But beyond the images of lemurs and baobab trees that were made famous in the 2005 animated film Madagascar, the African nation of over 25 million people continues to be among the world’s leaders in health, educational and economic disparities on a yearly basis.
Unbeknownst to many, the island of Madagascar is one of the most racially diverse countries in the African Union, with historic and modern migratory flows from countries throughout Southeast Asia, India and continental Africa. Some anthropologists believe that settlers from Southeast Asian regions arrived to Madagascar over 1,000 years ago.
Still, despite the diversity that Madagascar often prides itself on, anti-black racism is an endemic aspect of Malagasy culture and is visible in advertising campaigns throughout the country that consistently favor lighter-skinned people of Southeast Asian descent over darker-skinned models.
Nirina and sons (Walter Thompson-Hernandez)
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At a doctor’s visit, on a college-admissions application, or even in a consumer-marketing survey, Americans are regularly asked to classify themselves by race. Some protest this request by “declining to answer,” as forms often allow. After all, racial categories are social constructs. They don’t connote biological or genetic difference.
As an African American, I have never had difficulty knowing which box I am meant to check. Whether I do so depends on my understanding of why the information is being collected. Similar questionnaires in the late 19th and early 20th centuries didn’t afford such choice. At that time, before the current practice of self-identification, an enumerator or census taker would have visited my home and classified me as free or enslaved, and then determined whether I might be colored, mulatto, quadroon (one-quarter black), or octoroon (one-eighth).
While early racial data were gathered to feed an obsession with racial purity, and were even used to locate Japanese Americans for internment during World War II, over time the Census Bureau settled on bureaucracy to explain its work. And yet, a simple count of the population remains ideologically loaded. These data are not neutral or objective information about the population. Instead they reflect changing political priorities and techniques to grasp how the country’s population is seen—and how resources are made available to them.
Shortly after the country’s founding, the U.S. government began collecting data on the racial and ethnic make-up of every person in each household. Every decennial ushers in some new language meant to enhance the accuracy and reliability of the census as a measurement of the entire national population. There’s symbolic power in being represented on the census—in being counted. But as the political scientist Melissa Nobles shows in her book Shades of Citizenship, these data also track compliance with civil-rights legislation, particularly voting districts. They are linked to federal resources, intensifying public agitation around the categories.
During the years between each census, researchers, activists, politicians, and interest groups lobby for the rewording of a label, the addition (or elimination) of a category, or the disaggregation of another, such as Asian or American Indian or Alaska Native. In 2000, for example, “Hispanic or Latino, or Spanish origins” was reclassified from racial to ethnic data. Respondents were also allowed to select multiple boxes to reflect multiracial heritage for the first time. Additional changes that affect how the racial makeup of the country is represented are underway, including the creation of a separate category for people of Middle Eastern and North African descent (referred to as MENA).
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