What is your knowledge and understanding of Black History?
Commentary by Chitown Kev
This past Sunday, I republished and modified a diary about Frederick Douglass, in part, because the current occupant of the Oval Office attempted to “name drop” the name of the great former slave, abolitionist, and women’s suffragist in a way that I felt was cheap and exploitative of the man’s legacy.
The honest truth, though, is that Mr. Trump is far from the only person that shamelessly name drops and exploits names, places, and events of black history of which they understand little
For example, in the aftermath of the passage of Proposition 8 in California and, more specifically, the scapegoating of black voters (and please, let’s not go there!), white gay folks sure loved to throw up the names of Dr. King and Bayard Rustin into the faces of black progressive folks, including myself (a black gay man).
I had absolutely no problem ever calling out the name dropping and selective quotations as a racial tinged attempt to browbeat black people.
(To be sure, there were homophobic black people that attempted to do the same in support for their homophobic positions. One of the most unforgettable blog encounters I ever had was when I responded to a homophobic black commenter at another blog with former Black Panther co-founder Huey Newton’s 1970 plea that black liberation movements should form “a working coalition with the gay liberation and women’s liberation groups.” The poster responded by reducing Huey Newton to being merely a “crackhead” and The Black Panthers to merely being the group from which Californian drug gangs originated.)
During the 2016 primary season, I was just as annoyed and resentful of the attempts at Daily Kos and other blogs to link Bernie Sanders to Dr. King (in fairness to Senator Sanders, this was always something that he personally downplayed unless he was asked a direct question about the 1960’s. I have no beef with Sanders, himself on that score).
In terms of using black history in a cheap and exploitative way, Mr. Trump is far from the first or even the worst offender; it happens on the right and the left sides of the political spectrum.
And all points in between.
The word “history” is ultimately derived from the Greek word historia and was, in fact, a rather scientific term meaning “investigation” or "a learning or knowing by inquiry; an account of one's inquiries, history, record, narrative.”
“History,” in other words, is not the mere recitation of facts, events, and important people. History is also the study of the causes and conditions of how those facts, events, and people came to be.
“History” is, also, the narratives of the past and the stories that we tell about that past.
It was, in large part, because of the stories that African American children were told of the past and their past that Dr. Carter Woodson began to pioneer "Black History Week" which has now become Black History Month.
As a child, I don’t recall having a great deal of classroom instruction in black history. I was fortunate to have grown up in a family that did value the study of black history in a way that was...well, difficult to avoid.
In fact, to this day I don’t think that I have ever taken a course in black history (or literature, for that matter); my knowledge of black history has largely been a matter of self-study.
As a result, I have a lot of weak areas in my own largely self-studies of black history.
For example, I’ve read very very little precolonial history of the African continent; what little I have read was largely as a result of having studied (and majored in) classical civilization (I have read Martin Bernal’s Black Athena but I am nowhere near proficient enough in the requisite languages to have an informed opinion on specific areas of that controversy).
I know so little about the history of black people in colonial America (other than that African were brought here to be slaves and that from capture to enslavement, the experience of African slaves was absolutely horrific) that merely looking at this timeline of the 17th century was informative. The only personalities that I am familiar with from that time are Crispus Atticus (which many of us learn about in school) and the Salem “witch,” Tituba.
I’ve read much about Frederick Douglass but, for the most part, I only know about the events leading up to the emancipation of black slaves through Douglass’ writings or the writings of abolitionists or through my studies of Abraham Lincoln. I am aware, for example, that even among free blacks of that time, there were discussions of “violence vs. non-violence” as a means of achieving liberation and emancipation but I have not done a sustained study of those positions and those who articulated them.
I pretty much know facts and figures of the era from the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation though the founding of the NAACP but, for the most part, I only know the period through the eyes of Dr. W.E.B. DuBois.
The period from the founding of the NAACP (1909) through the end of the Second World War is probably the period of black history that I’ve studied the most and that I know the best. I have been very fortunate in this regard because, as a kid, I heard riveting accounts of this era from family members who have now passed and I have read many of the second-hand and even, in some cases, first-hand sources of that period of time.
And, of course, I have a pretty good knowledge, I guess, of the period from 1945 to the present day only because I have studied it and, in some cases, lived it and through it.
Plus, my family remains a family of great storytellers. Some of the stories they tell are, of course, family gossip while other stories really do fit the rough meanings of the word “history.”
I have been very fortunate in that regard.
I have also been quite literally blessed with the gift of nosiness.
So I still ask lots of questions and I feel that I know nowhere near enough about black history (in some ways, I am almost ashamed to say it). My mind is always open to learn more, though.
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News round up by dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor
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THE CONCLUSION OF SEVERAL PROMINENT ATTENDEES AT THE CONGRESSIONAL PROGRESSIVE CAUCUS’ ANNUAL RETREAT, WHEN A PROGRESSIVE CONGRESSWOMAN AND A PROMINENT PARTY STRATEGIST CRITICIZED DEMOCRATIC MINORITY OUTREACH. THE NEW REPUBLIC: THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY HAS A RACE PROBLEM.
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Belcher had his own harsh reprimands for fellow liberals. “When our young brothers and sisters want to talk about criminal justice reform, you in the progressive community can’t push their issue aside and want to talk about what your issue is,” he said. “We gotta meet them where they are. I was frustrated as hell this cycle working with progressives, because every progressive table I was around was like, ‘Okay, these are our four issues. Let’s talk to [voters] about our four issues,’ regardless of what these young folks’ four issues were. That shit’s gotta stop.”
Despite President Donald Trump’s success with the white working class, Belcher said courting these voters shouldn’t be progressives’ first priority. “When people say they want to take their country back, we should stop pretending we don’t know what that frickin’ means,” he said. “Democrats, you’re not going to win blue-collar whites anytime soon. You’re not.”
Instead, Belcher said Democrats should focus on turning out minority voters—starting with more political groups run and staffed by minorities:
Stop funding these one or two organizations that, quite frankly—how do I say this, congresswoman? maybe it’s ‘passive bigotry of progressives’?—where you fund these one or two primarily white organizations ... and they have to go communicate with people of color.... We shouldn’t go into another election cycle where there’s not a black or blown super PAC that has the funding that Priorities [USA Action] does.
Belcher said this progressive blind spot manifested itself in a central conceit of the Clinton campaign: that she’d do better than Obama among white women.
“She didn’t do better among white women,” Belcher whispered into his microphone, prompting nodding heads and murmurs of agreement in the crowd. In politics, he said, “race has trumped gender.”
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The first two weeks of Donald Trump’s administration have been chaotic, but the dominant themes have been civilizational conflict and trade protectionism. The president signed an executive order calling for the construction of a wall of undetermined type, length, and height along the southern border. When he insisted he’d figure out a way to make Mexico pay for the wall or face retribution—perhaps in the form of a 20 percent tax on Mexican imports—President Enrique Peña Nieto canceled his planned official visit to Washington. Then Trump signed an order banning Muslim refugees and permanent residents from seven predominantly Muslim countries (not a “Muslim ban,” we’re told, but a “ban” that overwhelmingly impacts “Muslims”) and all hell broke loose.
The bigoted undertones of Trump’s Mexico policy and the overtones of the ban are self-evident. But they are not incidental to the Fortress America that Trump hopes to create by keeping immigrants, refugees, and imports out of the country. If anything, the economic and security justifications for these policies are incidental, while the racial antagonism and scapegoating runs through the entirety of the agenda. Trump essentially promised us during the campaign that he would attempt to turn America into a white ethno-state, and now he’s making good on his promises.
It is very hard to know, on any given matter of importance, what Trump’s concrete, proximate goals are and how his administration plans to achieve them. This seems at times to be by design—a method of authoritarian control—and at other times an outgrowth of incompetence. But the overall whiff of bigotry is undeniable, exhibited most recently in Wednesday’s confusion over Trump’s phone call with Peña Nieto.
The Associated Press reported that during the call, Trump threatened to send U.S. troops over the border to take on “bad hombres”—the drug cartels and other high-level criminals, presumably. “You have a bunch of bad hombres down there,” Trump said, according to the AP. “You aren’t doing enough to stop them. I think your military is scared. Our military isn’t, so I just might send them down to take care of it.” The White House later insisted that Trump did not, in fact, threaten to invade our most important trading partner.
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IT IS a little after 10pm when the world’s oldest serving passenger ship makes her first stop. Rolling on a gentle swell, small wooden boats pull up alongside its riveted hull. Lights from the deck illuminate the packed vessels; ropes are flung up and tied to railings. Women in billowing wraps come on board with their suitcases, legs briefly flailing as they are pulled through the hatch. Men load enormous bags into a net hanging from a crane. In the other direction, boxes of gin, batteries, bags of clothes and, at one point, a sewing machine, are passed down perilously by hand. Miraculously, nothing and nobody falls into the black water.
So goes trade on Lake Tanganyika, the world’s longest lake. The ship is the MV Liemba, brought to central Africa as the Graf Goetzen by German colonists in 1913. Originally built in Lower Saxony, she was transported in 5,000 boxes by rail to Kigoma on the north-eastern shore of the lake and reconstructed there. During the first world war she served as a troop transporter and gunboat until 1916. After several skirmishes, fearing capture by either the British or the Belgians, her crew scuttled her. In 1924 she was fished up again and renamed. Among other distinctions, she is thought to be the inspiration for the gunboat Luisa in C.S. Forester’s novel, “The African Queen”.
Over a century later, the Liemba still carries passengers from Kigoma to Mpulungu in Zambia and back. She remains one of the largest boats on any of Africa’s lakes, just behind the MV Victoria further north. Operated by the Tanzanian government, the ship has become a vital link for people around the Great Lakes region of Africa, one of the continent’s most densely populated areas, with tens of millions of people. Yet her importance to the regional economy is also indicative of the failure to spread investment in infrastructure away from coastal cities to the places where most Africans still live.
Apart from a few tourists, most of the roughly 300 passengers on the Liemba are traders. “Almost every person travelling has their cargo,” says the captain, Titus Benjamin Mnyanyi. Middle-aged women buy third-class tickets for 34,000 Tanzanian shillings (about $15), stow their merchandise wherever they can and find spots to sleep on deck. On its way to Zambia, the ship stops at around a dozen places in Tanzania, where they sell their wares. On your correspondent’s journey, the main cargo was tonnes of tiny dried fish and pineapples, which filled almost every space not occupied by a human.
Many of those on board want to make their fortunes. Among them is Fidelis Uzuka, a 38-year-old from a village near Kigoma. Having farmed ginger most of his life, he recently switched to trading it. He pays around 1,000 shillings per kilogram in Kigoma; in Lusaka, Zambia’s capital, he can sell it for four times that. On the way back, he brings second-hand clothes. In a black notebook he diligently writes down the prices of different commodities at different places along the route. “I want to be a big businessman, like Donald Trump or Richard Branson,” he says, before asking where he can buy books to help him learn how to make money.
Yet the passengers are not only vendors; they are also customers. As she moves through the darkness, the ship is a continuous festival. Downstairs, men at trestle tables do a roaring trade in cheap cigarettes, plastic packets of konyagi (a cheap Tanzanian spirit) and biscuits throughout the night. According to one crew member, there are prostitutes and drugdealers on board (your correspondent failed to prove this allegation, but the close attention of Zambian customs officials suggests they believe it too).
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A cache of lost Bob Marley recordings has been discovered after lying for more than 40 years in a damp London hotel basement.
The 13 reel-to-reel, analogue master tapes were discovered in cardboard box files in a run-down hotel in Kensal Rise, north-west London, the modest lodgings where Bob Marley and the Wailers stayed during their European tours in the mid-1970s.
The tapes – known as “the lost masters” among elements of Marley’s huge fanbase – were at first believed to be ruined beyond repair, largely through water damage. Yet after more than 12 months of painstaking work using the latest audio techniques, the master reels have been restored, with the sound quality of Marley– who died in 1981 but would have been 72 on Monday– described as enough to “send shivers down one’s spine”.
The tapes are the original live recordings of Marley’s concerts in London and Paris between 1974 and 1978, and feature some of his most famous tracks including No Woman No Cry, Jammin, Exodus and I Shot the Sheriff.
The concerts – at the Lyceum in London (1975), the Hammersmith Odeon (1976), the Rainbow, also in London (1977), and the Pavilion de Paris (1978) – were recorded live on the only mobile 24-track studio vehicle in the UK at the time, loaned out to Marley and the Wailers by the Rolling Stones.
The tapes were rescued from the rubbish by Marley fan and London businessman Joe Gatt, who had received a call from a friend saying he had found what appeared to be some old Marley tape recordings.
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A trio of Oakland residents fights against displacement and climate change in the upcoming digital comedy series, "The North Pole."
Series writer and producer Josh Healey (NPR's "Snap Judgment") launched a Kickstarter campaign Wednesday (February 1) to crowdfund production for the seven-episode show. Healey named "The North Pole" after a term North Oakland residents use for their neighborhood. The campaign's promotional video features a polar bear (or, rather, an unidentified person in a polar bear costume using hella Bay Area slang) interrupting Healey and show star Reyna Amaya ("All Def Digital TV") as they pitch the series.
"The North Pole" focuses on three friends as they desperately try to keep their hometown from becoming unrecognizable. "Facing both gentrification and global warming, they combat evil landlords, crazy geoengineering plots and ultimately each other," reads the Kickstarter page description. Amaya stars alongside fellow Bay Area performers, including poet Donte Clark ("Romeo is Bleeding") and newcomer Santiago Rosas.
The series also boasts cameos from famous local residents including comedian W. Kamau Bell ("United Shades of America"), former Black Panther Party leader Ericka Huggins and rappers Mistah F.A.B. and Boots Riley. The polar bear also makes a cameo. Writers Chinaka Hodge ("Chasing Mehserle") and Adam Mansbach ("Barry") serve as creative consultants.
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Voices and Soul
by
Justice Putnam
Black Kos Poetry Editor
I took the train to visit my Grandchildren in Salem, Oregon not long ago. I love to take the train. It was a practice our family embraced when I was a toddler in the late 50's, and I've used it often since. I enjoy the trains in Europe much more of course, but the Amtrak Coast Starlight is a great way to see the West Coast of the United States. Sitting in the Salem rail station for my return back to Southern Oregon, I engaged in a conversation with a young Army Ranger, dressed in desert camo and burdened with desert camo duffle bags, who was on his way to visit relatives in Portland. A pretty black-haired goth girl gave the perfunctory genuflection, uttering the requisite mantra of patriotic thanks. I was more curious when and where he was going back. I was more concerned he had to go at all.
On the train, I was sat next to a young man who works for an NGO in Ecuador building schools. In the mid-80's, I worked for a contractor hired by UNICEF drilling water wells for schools in Honduras; so we talked of Latin America and how the problems of abject poverty complicate matters. He was on his way to the offices in the Mission District of San Francisco, California, before traveling back to Guayaquil. He was then due to be in the tiny village of Puerto Baquerizo Moreno.
As I sat in the viewing car that night, watching the moon as we rolled through the Cascades, I thought of the petty nature of bigotry and how the actions of those two men, the actions of the marchers in DC, of the marchers across America and around the World stand against that pettiness. I thought how the struggle is long and hard and how we cannot allow that pettiness to go unchallenged, lest we return to another time, this time in 1937, when Rafael Trujillo, dictator of the Dominican Republic, ordered 20,000 blacks killed because they could not roll the letter “r” in perejil, the Spanish word for...
Parsley
1. The Cane Fields
There is a parrot imitating spring
in the palace, its feathers parsley green.
Out of the swamp the cane appears
to haunt us, and we cut it down. El General
searches for a word; he is all the world
there is. Like a parrot imitating spring,
we lie down screaming as rain punches through
and we come up green. We cannot speak an R—
out of the swamp, the cane appears
and then the mountain we call in whispers Katalina.
The children gnaw their teeth to arrowheads.
There is a parrot imitating spring.
El General has found his word: perejil.
Who says it, lives. He laughs, teeth shining
out of the swamp. The cane appears
in our dreams, lashed by wind and streaming.
And we lie down. For every drop of blood
there is a parrot imitating spring.
Out of the swamp the cane appears.
2. The Palace
The word the general’s chosen is parsley.
It is fall, when thoughts turn
to love and death; the general thinks
of his mother, how she died in the fall
and he planted her walking cane at the grave
and it flowered, each spring stolidly forming
four-star blossoms. The general
pulls on his boots, he stomps to
her room in the palace, the one without
curtains, the one with a parrot
in a brass ring. As he paces he wonders
Who can I kill today. And for a moment
the little knot of screams
is still. The parrot, who has traveled
all the way from Australia in an ivory
cage, is, coy as a widow, practicing
spring. Ever since the morning
his mother collapsed in the kitchen
while baking skull-shaped candies
for the Day of the Dead, the general
has hated sweets. He orders pastries
brought up for the bird; they arrive
dusted with sugar on a bed of lace.
The knot in his throat starts to twitch;
he sees his boots the first day in battle
splashed with mud and urine
as a soldier falls at his feet amazed—
how stupid he looked!— at the sound
of artillery. I never thought it would sing
the soldier said, and died. Now
the general sees the fields of sugar
cane, lashed by rain and streaming.
He sees his mother’s smile, the teeth
gnawed to arrowheads. He hears
the Haitians sing without R’s
as they swing the great machetes:
Katalina, they sing, Katalina,
mi madle, mi amol en muelte. God knows
his mother was no stupid woman; she
could roll an R like a queen. Even
a parrot can roll an R! In the bare room
the bright feathers arch in a parody
of greenery, as the last pale crumbs
disappear under the blackened tongue. Someone
calls out his name in a voice
so like his mother’s, a startled tear
splashes the tip of his right boot.
My mother, my love in death.
The general remembers the tiny green sprigs
men of his village wore in their capes
to honor the birth of a son. He will
order many, this time, to be killed
for a single, beautiful word.
-- Rita Dove
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WELCOME TO THE TUESDAY’S PORCH