#IStandWithMaxine
Commentary by Black Kos Editor Denise Oliver-Velez
Congresswoman Maxine Waters is righteously pissed about the fate of the children who have been removed from their parents at the border, thanks to Donald Trump. As she should be. As all of us should be.
Many thanks to Sis Joan Mar for posting, Auntie Maxine always has the last word! She responds to faux outrage #Civility which raises the issues I wrote about (and am ranting about) today.
My comments today are linked to a hashtag on twitter, which only represents a deeper issue — the dedication and persistence of my sister’s — black women, who are the backbone of the Democratic Party. We are the only electoral demographic that votes — almost unanimously for our party of choice.
Warning — this commentary will be twitter heavy, because much of our daily drama plays out on that platform.
I’ve written about this before — here’s a brief refresher. In Black women vote—and bring home wins in Virginia, I included this graphic:
In Dear Democrats: Time to wake up and smell the black coffee. We remember, I wrote
In spite of concerted and ongoing efforts by white people to suppress and disenfranchise the black vote—not just in Alabama—we continue to be the most dependable Democratic Party voting block. Period. Especially black women, though our brothers are far more often disallowed from voting due to having a record or being incarcerated.
While we have been dismissed, ‘buked, scorned and dubbed “low info,” and “not progressive” especially those of us who live in what are called “red states”—why is it you don’t get the fact that those states have been painted red with our blood ‘cause they are rigged for white racists?
Last year, I wrote about Maxine Waters, for her birth month of August:
Our Lioness in Congress
I have to admit to being totally biased about loving black women who do not bite their tongues. I grew up with aunts and older cousins and friends of my mom who we called — with all due respect— “Auntie,” whether or not there were any blood ties. And those Aunties were fierce. They knew if you were lying, they gave you side-eye and verbal flayings — but let anybody else try to mess with you they protected you by jumpin’ in their butts like mama lions guarding their cubs.
August born (Leo) Maxine Waters is a key example of black working class aunty-ism.
What some (mostly white) people need to get is that Maxine Waters — the longest serving black woman in Congress (first elected in 1990) represents more than just herself up there on the hill — she is our very own kick-ass momma, auntie, grandma, sister and friend.
When you come for Maxine, you come for all of us. You fuck with her and you are gonna hear from us. In spades, and with shade. Even some of us who may not agree with her on everything will jump up and have her back.
And those who think they are gonna silence black women — it ain’t gonna happen. No way, no how. They are attacking Joy Ann Reid, they are attacking April Ryan, Kamala Harris, Barbara Lee — and none of them are going to back down.
Sisters, and brothers I follow on twitter are letting it all hang out. No holds barred, and the hell with “civility”.
Do not talk to me about “civility.” Am watching Donald Trump and the Republican Party and the rabid racists who support them, launch attack after attack and we are supposed to be civil? Any one talking that shit is crazier than a bedbug.
I jumped in — and said my bit too, and was amazed to get close to 5K likes — for the first one — never had that kind of response before. It's all because of defending Auntie.
Standing up for Maxine, and pushing back against the civility bullshit, I had a very good time blocking trolls, bots, wimps and apologists on twitter. Had a “block party”..as did other folks.
One of them threatened me with the Secret Service. Hah! Bring it. Lived through Jim Crow and COINtelpro and I’ll live through this.
If you think I’m joking about Russia bots — check this out.
Explanation
The charts and graphs here display hashtags, topics and URLs promoted by Russia-linked influence networks on Twitter. Content is not necessarily produced or created by Russian government operatives, although that is sometimes the case. Instead, the network often opportunistically amplifies content created by third parties not directly linked to Russia. Common themes for amplification include content attacking the U.S. and Europe, conspiracy theories and disinformation. Russian influence operations also frequently promote extremism and divisive politics in Western countries. Just because the Russia-aligned network monitored here tweets something, that doesn’t mean everyone who tweets the same content is aligned with Russia. For a detailed discussion of this dashboard’s methodology, click here
Auntie is getting hit by Trump, the right, the MAGAmaniacs, the Russians, Media pun-idjits and sadly from too many wimpy Democrats and white fauxgressives.
Here she is in fierce warrior mode:
I am not a fan of Chris Hayes. Some of y’all probably like him. I don’t. Maxine handled him just fine.
She did not get drawn into smacking back at Pelosi and Schumer for their public chiding of her. She handled it with grace and stuck to her point about the children. She’s a hard core Democrat and she’s playing by the rules.
The rest of us don’t have to — so Nancy and Chuckie are getting heavy push-back. As is David Axelrod.
I’m in agreement with Armando.
Lord – where do they find these people? Look at this crap on MSNBC last night. It is really a sad day when the hustler-pimp who sits by the Republican door — Michael Steele, came off better than Nancy Cook...or Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer, for that matte. Not that I agree with him dissing Auntie.
I’m done. Rant over, for the moment. Before I went out to vote — I saw that Ryan opened his mouth to demand an apology.
My response:
#IStandWithMaxine #VoteLikeBlackWomen
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News round up by dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor
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When Starbucks opened here in 2016, politicians celebrated, predicting that the coffee chain would revitalize a city marred by violent protests over Michael Brown’s killing two years earlier.
Other corporations jumped in with multimillion-dollar commitments to help rebuild the majority-black town that became a global symbol of racial and economic inequality.
But four years after the unrest, nearly all of the new development is concentrated in the more prosperous — and whiter — parts of town, bypassing the predominantly black southeast neighborhood where Brown was fatally shot by a police officer while walking to his grandmother’s home.
The investments, rather than easing the economic gap, have deepened that divide.
“This is the forgotten Ferguson,” said Francesca Griffin, a St. Louis native who moved to the inner-ring suburb 13 years ago for the more-affordable home prices. “Time and time again, West Florissant Avenue just gets left out. And people are losing hope.”
The growing disparity is the result of decisions, large and small, that capture the difficulties of overcoming a legacy of racial segregation, economic exclusion and political disenfranchisement.
In Ferguson’s case, obstacles have included a corporate mind-set willing to take on only so much risk, a seeming lack of political will and a disadvantaged community’s inability to promote its own interests.
Of the more than $36 million in bricks-and-mortar development that poured into the city after 2014, only $2.4 million — for a job training center — has directly benefited this isolated pocket of Ferguson, according to an analysis of building-permit data provided by the city.
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Thursday afternoon, the House narrowly passed a Farm Bill that, if it were to become law, would vastly expand work requirements for SNAP (formerly “food stamps”) recipients, putting more than 2 million people at greater risk of hunger. The vote is the latest in a coordinated GOP effort to ration everything from health care to housing according to work status. The vote came on the heels of a sweeping proposal from the Trump administration to reform several federal agencies, including rebranding the Department of Health and Human Services as the Department of Health and Public Welfare—presumably to make its association with the now-pejorative welfare even more obvious to the public—with an explicit emphasis on standardizing work requirements across public assistance programs.
This “illusory emphasis on employment” was part of a multifaceted condemnation of the Trump administration’s approach to poverty in a report presented to the U.N. Human Rights Council early Friday. Hours before the House vote, Nikki Haley, the U.S. ambassador to the U.N., rebuked the report as “misleading,” arguing that “being able to provide for one’s self and family is empowering, both economically and spiritually.”
Haley’s comments fit right into the Trump administration’s crusade to sell work requirements as measures that promote the “dignity of work“ and incentivize “community engagement.” In truth, work requirements devalue work and demean the people doing it. People in poverty are required to accept jobs on any terms, while the labor they already perform within their homes and communities is disregarded entirely. This narrow framing of work and productivity has deep historical roots, and stems from a long tradition of exploitation that, then as now, disproportionately affects women of color.
Absent any evidence that they’re necessary or effective, work requirements gain traction because they play into the public perception that people in poverty—especially black women in poverty—are lazy, irresponsible welfare queens. At a political moment when policymakers are deliberately broadening the scope of what’s considered “welfare,” it’s clear that consequences of the American pastime of embedding—and accepting—racism in public policy will ultimately envelop anyone below a certain net worth. In states where Trump’s agenda is already in practice, we can glimpse what’s in store for millions more Americans if this vision is fully realized.
In many ways, Mississippi provides this playbook. Last April we interviewed women in Jackson about their experiences accessing supports like SNAP and TANF (cash assistance, or “welfare”). One woman, Carla (a pseudonym, which is standard in such policy research), has held numerous paying jobs in her adult life and now also cares for her two young children as well as a brother, who has a disability, and her elderly mother.
She also shows up for other families in her community. When the city stopped providing a school bus to her housing complex, Carla began driving the neighborhood kids to school herself, improvising a bus using her 18-passenger van. Noting the curvy road with no sidewalks, she explained, “I didn’t want to see them walking. It’s too much.” These forms of productivity, however, are invisible within the “work requirements” rubric. And so, attending to the needs of the community becomes a casualty of meeting the requirements of the state. As Carla says, “You get on this program and then now you’re neglecting everything else trying to deal with the stipulations of this program.”
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Amid the narrow streets and rusty docks of Georgetown, the quiet capital of Guyana, the first signs of an oil boom are visible. Steel pipe destined for deep-water projects can be seen stacked on wharves near the city center. Over at the Marriott, the country’s only five-star hotel, the bar fills up throughout the day with Brazilian oil workers and American contractors. Boats embark from a new depot on the Demerara River, ferrying supplies to oil projects hundreds of miles from the coast.
Driving much of this activity is ExxonMobil. Three years ago, the company’s Guyana subsidiary found crude in sandstone reservoirs about 120 miles offshore, the first of a string of offshore discoveries that have raised the country’s reserves to an estimated 3.2 billion barrels from nothing at all. Decades of dry wells had made such a cache impossible to imagine.
With ExxonMobil expecting “first oil” — that is, to start pumping crude — in 2020, Guyana is bracing for a wave of newfound money to hit government coffers. The government anticipates collecting $300 million in petroleum funds each year from the company’s initial phase of work on a single well — a sum that represents about a quarter of the current national budget. Analysts at a Norwegian energy consultancy are even more bullish, claiming the government could rake in as much as $5 billion per year from oil by the end of the next decade.
That money will go a long way in this sparsely populated former British colony of about 750,000, where political competition between the country’s African- and Indian-descended populations has long stunted development. The country’s needs are many. Guyana’s power supply is erratic, leaving even parts of the capital without electricity at times. Its infant mortality rate is almost double the average of Latin American and Caribbean countries. Its unemployment rate stood at 11.8 percent in 2017, according to the World Bank.
“This is the best thing that has ever happened to Guyana,” Minister of Finance Winston Jordan said in an interview. “I can say that not since perhaps when sugar was introduced in the colonies have [there been] such opportunities for massive transformation of the economy.”
Oil will also generate tremendous pressure on a country known for fragile government institutions, ethnic divisions, and little transparency. The speed and focus with which ExxonMobil and its partners, Hess and China National Offshore Oil Corporation, are doing their work aren’t always being matched by elected leaders in Georgetown, who are moving far more slowly in building government infrastructure to manage the oil industry. Officials insist they have time to develop those institutions.
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Seventy years ago today—June 22, 1948—a passenger ship carrying 492 Jamaican immigrants arrived in Essex, London. The Empire Windrush was the first of many ships to come, as the British government recruited migrants from the Caribbean Commonwealth to help rebuild the economy after World War II. These arrivals came to be known as the Windrush generation. “It is unclear how many people belong to the Windrush generation, since many of those who arrived as children travelled on parents’ passports and never applied for travel documents—but they are thought to be in their thousands,” according to the BBC.
These immigrants, now elderly, are legal UK residents. But since last year over 5,000 of them found themselves homeless, unemployed, denied health care, or deported altogether as a result of Theresa May’s “hostile environment” policy, which requires employers, landlords, banks and the National Health Service to conduct visa inspections. In April, high commissioners from all of the Caribbean Commonwealth nations rebuked the UK government over the scandal, the British home secretary resigned, and the Home Office assembled a Windrush task force. In a more symbolic gesture, the government designated today, June 22, as “Windrush Day.”
The New Republic spoke to Trevor Phillips, the former head of the British Commission for Equalities and Human Rights and co-author of 1999’s Windrush: The Irresistible Rise of Multiracial Britain, about the past, present, and future of the Windrush generation—of which he is a descendant.
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Emmerson Mnangagwa, the president of Zimbabwe, has called for peace, love and unity hours after escaping an apparent assassination attempt during an election campaign rally in the southern city of Bulawayo.
At least eight people were injured in the explosion, the state-run Herald newspaper reported.
Footage posted online showed Mnangagwa, 75, waving to the crowd in the White City stadium at about 2pm on Saturday afternoon, turning to step off the podium and walking into the open-sided VIP tent, where seconds later the explosion occurred. People ducked and screamed and smoke billowed. State television immediately cut its broadcast.
Images taken by photographers at the rally showed several injured people lying on the ground.
Local media said the vice-president, Kembo Mohadi, had leg injuries, while Constantino Chiwenga, a second vice-president and the former military commander-in-chief, had bruises on his face, the report said.
In a statement issued later in the afternoon, Mnangagwa said his thoughts and prayers were with “all those affected by this senseless act of violence.”
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Jamaica is known for sand, sun and sea. But could its cuisine soon be a tourism draw?
That's what the island's top chef and tourism officials are hoping after arriving in Miami this week to go head-to-head with some of the Caribbean's best chefs and mixologists during the annual Taste of the Caribbean cooking and cocktail competitions.
While not the popular Bravo TV reality "Top Chef" series — sorry, chef Tom Colicchio will not be doing a walk through the kitchen, questioning that choice of beef grade — Taste of the Caribbean does, however, offer up the same intense, nerve-wracking, knife-cutting competitive environment. Bragging rights go to the team and chef that ends up besting the competition.
"We are doing this for flag and country," said Michael Barnett, Jamaica's Chef of the Year, and first time competitor at Taste of the Caribbean, which runs Friday through Tuesday at the Hyatt Regency, 400 SE 2nd Ave. in Miami. "We're trying to promote our cuisine that a lot of persons know of, but we want to take it to the wider world. We want to market Jamaica as a food destination."
Over the course of several days, 11 national teams from throughout the Caribbean compete in categories for seafood, beef, pastries, chocolate and overall team lunch/ dinner competition, as well as a junior chef individual competition. Bartenders also compete in non-alcoholic, vodka, rum and mystery basket competitions.
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Cheo Hodari Coker infuses “Luke Cage,” his Netflix series about a bulletproof Black superhero, with a love of Black art and activism. He discussed those themes and more in an interview with The New York Times yesterday (June 21). Check out a few excerpts from the Q&A before you binge watch the second season of “Luke Cage,” available today (June 22).
On incorporating contemporary racial justice issues into the show:
“There’s no way I could have anticipated that not only would we have a president this obtuse, but this most recent thing, separating children from their families in terms of these border crossings. It’s unconscionable. Honestly, it’s all I’ve been thinking about right now. Not only if we can possibly address this kind of stuff in season three, but more just on a human level.
“In art, you can’t predict that, so the only thing you can do is basically be reactive from the standpoint of always being conscious. Sometimes you can anticipate it, sometimes you can’t. The power that you have as a storyteller is to be able to tell stories that are at once entertaining, but also never lose sight of what’s going on in the real world. Whether it’s ‘Black Lightning’ or ‘Black Panther’ or us, ‘Luke Cage.’ Whether it’s ‘Queen Sugar,’ even ‘Atlanta,’—especially ‘Atlanta’—all of us in different ways have figured out ways to speak to both.”
On hiring women, including women of color including Salli Richardson-Whitfield and Lucy Liu, to direct six of the season’s 13 episodes:
“I think what happens with a quote-unquote ‘brawny’ action show, people say, ‘Oh well, great, if you have a female director, she’s going to be great with the emotions, but then when it comes to the camera, when it comes to action, she’s not going to know what to do with it.’ And that’s just really—I mean, it’s frankly [expletive].
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