50 years ago. It could be yesterday.
Commentary by Black Kos Editor Denise Oliver Velez
“When I watched U.S. Olympic champions Tommie Smith, John Carlos and Australian Peter Norman mount the dais on October 16th, 1968 in Mexico City, all three wearing human rights badges on their jackets, and the two black Americans solemnly raised their black gloved fists in the air, heads bowed as the Star Spangled Banner played— time stopped for me.”
Six years have passed since I wrote those words here.
Since that time black athletes have continued to raise the issues facing us here in the USA, and as long as objective conditions for black folks in America are still dire, I hope they will continue to do so.
From the BBC archives:
Two black American athletes have made history at the Mexico Olympics by staging a silent protest against racial discrimination.
Tommie Smith and John Carlos, gold and bronze medallists in the 200m, stood with their heads bowed and a black-gloved hand raised as the American National Anthem played during the victory ceremony.
The pair both wore black socks and no shoes and Smith wore a black scarf around his neck. They were demonstrating against continuing racial discrimination of black people in the United States.
As they left the podium at the end of the ceremony they were booed by many in the crowd.
'Black America will understand'
At a press conference after the event Tommie Smith, who holds seven world records, said: "If I win I am an American, not a black American. But if I did something bad then they would say 'a Negro'. We are black and we are proud of being black.
"Black America will understand what we did tonight."
Smith said he had raised his right fist to represent black power in America, while Carlos raised his left fist to represent black unity. Together they formed an arch of unity and power.
He said the black scarf represented black pride and the black socks with no shoes stood for black poverty in racist America.
Bow your head and raise a fist, or take a knee.
Then organize, keep fighting, protest, and vote, to end white supremacy.
I have nothing more to say.
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News round up by dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor
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Four years after the death of Laquan McDonald, Jason Van Dyke — the white Chicago police officer who shot the black teenager 16 times — faced his day in court. But in a trial where race was central to the case, there was only one black person on the jury. That’s in Cook County, where nearly a quarter of people are black. How did that happen? And how much does the racial makeup of a jury matter?
Study after study has shown that all-white juries are harsher on black defendants, make more errors, and discuss fewer of the case facts. And all-white juries, like in the case of Emmett Till, have historically been problematic. But they also aren’t a thing of the past.
In the jury selection process called “voir dire,” potential jurors are questioned and lawyers can dismiss jurors with cause for bias.
But each side is also allowed to strike a certain number of jurors without giving a reason — these are called “peremptory challenges.” This is where racial discrimination in jury selection becomes tricky.
Lawyers aren’t technically allowed to use these strikes to dismiss jurors based on race or sex, thanks to legal precedent set by Batson v. Kentucky. In that case, a prosecutor used his peremptory challenges to dismiss all four potential black jurors. The defendants appealed to the Supreme Court and won.
Today, if one side suspects jurors are being dismissed based on race, they can issue what’s called a “Batson challenge.” The judge must decide if a strike is discriminatory and can give the accused an opportunity to come up with a race-neutral reason for the dismissal of a juror.
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In the United States, nearly 70 percent of the people held in local jails are there for one reason: they don’t have enough money to pay bail. Here’s a look at how this came to be and what it would take to change it. Ideas.Ted.com: How the bail system in the US became such a mess — and how it can be fixed
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Here’s a riddle for you. In the past 15 years, the number of people jailed in the US has grown sharply (continuing a steady upward trend that started in the 1980s). But also in the past 15 years, the number of people convicted of crimes has stayed the same. What’s going on?
The alarming answer: More men and women are in jail simply because they can’t afford the price of bail. The crimes they’ve been charged with are often nonviolent — disorderly conduct, a probation violation — and the bail amounts are less than $1,000 — maybe $500 or $750, as Robin Steinberg of The Bail Projectexplains in her TED talk (What if we ended the injustice of bail?). But when a person can’t come up with the bail money — and a 2017 Federal Reserve report found that 4 in 10 Americans couldn’t cover an unplanned $400 expense — they’re forced to stay in jail until their court date. In the criminal justice system, this is called “pretrial detention,” and it can last for weeks, months or even years.
The United States Constitution says a person is considered innocent until they’re proven guilty — so that means more than 450,000 innocent people are currently in jail, simply because they’re too poor not to be there. “Bail was never intended to create a two-tier system of justice: one for the rich and one for everybody else,” says Steinberg. “But that is precisely what it has done.”
How the heck did this happen?
Bail has been problematic since the beginning. The concept of bail — a payment made by a defendant or their loved ones after their release from jail to ensure that they show up for their trial — is startlingly old; the Roman historian Livy notes its use back in 461 BC. But it became more common in medieval England. Officials did not create the bail system to be used as punishment for a crime; instead, it was meant to give a person a concrete incentive to show up for their trial rather than disappear. But because it ties freedom to the ability to pay, it’s been inherently flawed from the start.
It took Americans to make bail into a big business. A pair of San Francisco brothers, Peter and Thomas McDonough, are credited with taking it to the next level. As the story goes, they were working at their father’s bar when they overheard lawyers talking about loaning their clients bail money and charging them fees. Spotting an opportunity, in 1898 the pair opened McDonough Brothers, a saloon and a bail bond underwriter for people charged at the nearby Hall of Justice. Many competitors and imitators followed suit, advertising their willingness to lend defendants bail money in exchange for fees and interest. Since then, commercial bail bonds have spread, becoming a $2 billion a year industry in the US.
The bail bond business does help some people get out of jail — but it’s also led to ruthless business practices.
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The Republican candidate and Georgia Secretary of State Brian Kemp denies charges that he is attempting to suppress African American turnout for political advantage—but advocates say barriers to the ballot help his cause all the same. The Atlantic: In the Georgia Governor’s Race, the Game Is Black Votes
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In the 2018 midterm elections in Georgia, the math is simple. If turnout among black voters is low—somewhere near 2014’s midterm mark of 41 percent—the Republican gubernatorial candidate and Georgia Secretary of State Brian Kemp will probably win. If black turnout is high, and registrations among eligible black voters are solid, the Democratic candidate Stacey Abrams will probably win. All of the traditional campaign goals in a southern state, such as fundraising, figuring out how to build multiracial and cross-class coalitions, and identifying the policies that resonate with a broad range of voters, still matter. But when it really comes down to it, the game is black votes.
That means, then, that much of the game could be diminishing the black vote. Given the state’s huge population of black residents, voter suppression is historically a pillar of Georgian politics. From the days of Jim Crow violence and the all-white primary and on, strong black political participation and turnout have been more aspirational than they are reality, and plans to decrease black electoral strength have long existed alongside policies and organizing designed to boost it. And this week, the revelation that tens of thousands of black voters could potentially be disenfranchised just weeks before the election between Kemp and Abrams has brought the old game back into the spotlight.
Tuesday, on the deadline for registering for the upcoming election, the Associated Press reported that over 53,000 voter applications are currently on hold in Kemp’s office. The source of those holds is a policy instituted by the Georgia state legislature called “exact match,” a verification process that requires voter information to be identical to information kept on file either at state drivers’-license offices or the Social Security Administration. Typos, clerical errors, or missing accents or punctuation in names all became grounds for elections officials to challenge voter-registration applications. Challenged applicants have 26 months to remedy their situation by showing a government-issued photo identification to elections officials, but many of those whose applications have been placed on hold say they were never informed about the holdup, and many could see—or could have seen—deadlines come and go, and could be deleted from the voter system altogether without knowing.
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National Book Award and a Pulitzer Prize-winning author Colson Whitehead (“The Underground Railroad”) announced his next novel, “The Nickel Boys,” with tweets of the title and cover art yesterday (October 10).
Whitehead told The New York Times that he tabled plans for a Harlem crime novel to write “The Nickel Boys.” The novel focuses on two Black teenage boys at the fictional Nickel Academy, a segregated reform school in 1960s Florida. The friends have different reactions to the rampant battery and sexual abuse of students; Elwood Curtis tries to channel the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and face the horrors with love, while Turner rejects Curtis’ hopefulness. “Their diverging views drive the plot, leading to a decision that has profound consequences,” The Times reports.
The novelist took inspiration from the real life story of the Arthur G. Dozier School for Boys in the Florida Panhandle. The Atlanta Black Star reported last year that the school for juvenile offenders had a longstanding reputation of abuse, including sexual violence and forced labor. It operated from 1900 to 2011; alumni testimonials eventually forced a state investigation, as well as an official apology from the Florida Legislature last year. Archeologists investigating the segregated campus grounds found 55 graves and other student remains that the school either glossed over or didn’t correctly mark in official records. According to the researchers’ 2016 report, 75 percent of the students acknowledged in death certificates were Black.
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The Guadeloupean writer Maryse Condé won The New Academy Prize in Literature, a new prize established by a group of over 100 Swedish cultural figures as a substitute for this year’s Nobel in Literature, which was not awarded for the first time since 1949 because of a sexual misconduct scandal.
The New Academy Prize is accompanied by one million kronor, or around $112,000. The Nobel prizewinner would have received nine million kronor from the Swedish Academy, which intends to award the prize next year.
Ms. Condé is the author of “I, Tituba: Black Witch of Salem,” a historical novel about a black woman condemned during the Salem witch trials; “Segu,” set in 18th-century West Africa; “Windward Heights,” a Caribbean reimagining of “Wuthering Heights”; and other emotionally complex novels that reach across history and cultures.
“It is impossible to read her novels and not come away from them with both a sadder and more exhilarating understanding of the human heart, in all its secret intricacies, its contradictions and marvels,” Howard Frank Mosher wrote in his review of “I, Tituba” for The New York Times in 1992.
Born the last of eight children in 1937 in Pointe-à-Pitre, Ms. Condé wanted to be a writer since encountering Emily Brontë’s “Wuthering Heights” as a child.
“I decided that one day I would write a book as powerful and beautiful,” she said in an email. Nonetheless, she did not publish her first novel until she was nearly 40, she said, because, “I didn’t have confidence in myself and did not dare present my writing to the outside world.”
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“Zora and Me: Cursed Ground,” the second volume in the Zora and Me series, is a fictional mystery about the childhood adventures of writer Zora Neale Huston as seen through the eyes of her best friend, Carrie Brown. The story delves into the legacy of slavery, and shows how that painful time connects directly to Jim Crow and The Movement for Black Lives. We spoke to author T.R. Simon* about what her book can teach Black children about themselves, and why it’s so urgent for them to know the truth about their history and the power that lives inside them.
Your book reads like a beautiful love letter to Zora Neale Hurston. At the same time, it’s painfully honest with its young audience about the horrors and lasting traumas of slavery. Why did you choose to be so brutally honest with young readers?
I have this whole philosophy I call “hard history.” I believe that young people do not benefit from being lied to, or from having the truth defanged in the way that a kind of White middle-class idea of childhood values innocence over knowledge and truth. And whenever they say innocence, I perceive this as just another way of saying we’re going to preserve the status quo no matter what. This line of thinking leads to false equivalencies like White and Black folks were trapped in slavery together. I’m like, “No, we were not trapped together. We were enslaved and you were raping and beating us and selling us away from each other.” I don’t deny the truth. I hold the truth with love. I wanted to tell my daughter the story of slavery in a way in which a Black girl wasn’t broken by it, but could also get her mind around it—without having to pretend that it was something that it wasn’t.
As we all do our best to navigate this divisive and scary political climate, what lessons can our children take from your story and apply to their own lives?
Narratives that Whitewash slavery are doing so to mask complicity; so we must be wary of these narratives. When my daughter was 11 years old last year, her class read the book “Chains.” And the group had a conversation about who was kinder, the mistress or the master? My daughter listened for a couple of minutes as students debated over who was cruel and who was kind. She then raised her hand and said, “I don’t get this conversation. How can we talk about someone being kind when they owned slaves?” And then the teacher shut the conversation down. I told my daughter that was the mask. That’s when you’re supposed to say to them, “I forgive you and it’s okay.” And they don’t have to feel culpable. And if they don’t feel culpable, they don’t have to make reparations. And by reparations, I mean identify and act against their White supremacist privilege. These are the kinds of things we talk about.
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With works by more than 200 artists, a São Paulo exhibition is a hemispheric treasure chest about resistance to racism. And its timing is apt, our critic writes. New York Times: An Enthralling Show of Afro-Atlantic History Illuminates Brazil
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It’s worth going a distance for greatness. And great is what the exhibition “Histórias Afro-Atlânticas” (“Afro-Atlantic Histories”) is. With 450 works by more than 200 artists spread over two museums, it’s a hemispheric treasure chest, a redrafting of known narratives, and piece for piece one of the most enthralling shows I’ve seen in years, with one visual detonation after another.
Its timing, for better or worse, is apt. In national elections scheduled for late this month, a right-wing populist candidate, Jair Bolsonaro, has a strong chance of becoming Brazil’s next president. He’s been vocal in his hostility to the nation’s Afro-Brazilian community, calling current immigrants from Haiti, Africa and the Middle East “the scum of humanity.” The exhibition, which focuses on the dynamic African-influenced New World cultures that emerged from three centuries of European slavery, takes precisely the opposite view.
The story of the westward African diaspora has been told many times, but never, in my experience, with this breadth or geographic balance. The European trade in black bodies hit South America early in the 16th century, and lingered late. By the time slavery was officially abolished in Brazil in 1888 — the show coincides with the 130th anniversary of that event — the country had absorbed well over 40 percent of some 11 million displaced Africans. Today it is home to the world’s largest black population outside of Nigeria.
Installed at the São Paulo Museum of Art, known to everyone as MASP, and the smaller Tomie Ohtake Institute, the exhibition is divided into eight thematic sections. Afro-Brazilian material dominates — which is fine; we hardly ever see what’s here in New York and much of it will be new to many museumgoers in Brazil. And it’s generously interspersed with work, old and new, from other parts of South America, the Caribbean, North America, Europe and Africa itself.
In the opening section, we find ourselves literally at sea in a clip from Brazilian filmmaker Glauber Rocha’s 1967 “Entranced Earth,” showing, in aerial view, a swelling, glittering, apparently horizonless Atlantic Ocean. This is the “Black Atlantic,” as defined by the historian Paul Gilroy, an alchemical terrain in which Africa, America, and Europe met, merged and generated new hybrid identities.
Images of boats recur. A contemporary São Paulo artist, Rosana Paulino, incorporates 18th century diagrams of slave ship interiors into a quilt-like fabric hanging. In a wood wall piece, a veteran local artist, Emanoel Araújo, gives a ship a half-abstract shape suggesting both a chained man and an African god. (Mr. Araújo is the founding director of São Paulo’s extraordinary and eccentric Afro Brasil Museum.)
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Voices and Soul
by
Justice Putnam
Black Kos Poetry Editor
It is now often told that Hitler modeled part of his Final Solution on the eugenics movement in the United States, and we know how that turned out. It has been the dream of every sociopath to disappear a whole civilization of people before they even had a chance to appear, but until that glorious day, disappearing six million here and there will have to do. Hitler also mentioned the mass extermination of the native Americans and the mass enslavement of black men, women and children to bolster an economic model that would become the model of the world, so why not model that which has worked so well but would work better if superior German engineering was brought to the fore, and it was.
But as precise and exact as the Final Solution was built to be, it failed in its exactness, precisely because it factored the American Amnesia quotient in the equation. Teutonic game theorists in the Third Reich figured that as in America, given enough time, who would care about a bunch of chattel and flotsam that got in their way, but they were wrong.
Those steel-booted bürgermeister bureaucrats failed to factor the rage built over hundreds of years, and exacerbated anew every day, from yet another black girl disappeared from that hillside yonder, another black girl disappeared from that train car passing by, disappeared from the arms of the mother seeking work north of the mesquite, and disappeared from the corner of the eye. They failed to factor in the resolute resolve of a heartful of rage over disappeared black girls disappeared from the fractured mirror of a nation’s soul, and reported in a ghost newspaper delivered in a bundle at the edge of town.
They always do.
To disappear Black girls at a low volume of sustained public panic is to insinuate the inconstancy of Black girls. The disposability of Black girls who are prone to disappearance. A body bag somewhere waits with little hoopla about its lot. Absence becomes the lot of Black girls.
_________ will eventually accept as fact that absence becomes a lot of Black girls. In what becomes the normal day-to-day, Black girls are harder to find, _________ would think first, not that there are few attempts to find them. The question isn’t whether Black girls often go missing. If no one else, Black girls miss each other.
_________ would be remiss to not recognize how everything is made less in the absence of Black girls, if _________ could miss what _________ have never been required to recognize, such as:
Unlike missing Black girls, taking Black girls is a Western custom. It seems likely that such a statement will soon appear inaccurate: the white space in new textbook editions will have nothing to say about it, if the white spaces behind those textbooks have anything to say about it. That Black girls are quintessential American palimpsests is not a question but an anxiety. _________ would rather forget that Black girls were made receptacles for what the authors of Liberty and Independence would not speak. That Liberty and Independence were imaginable only in the absent-presence of taken Black girls, enslaved Black girls, Black girls on whom a foundational economic system so depended that white men would kill each other and take taken Black girls.
The constancy of Black girls is someone’s anxiety. The soil is thick with hidden Black girls, the myth that only quiet Black girls are worthwhile Black girls. The soil turns as _________ turn away from loud Black girls and their cacophonic insistence on Black girls.
_________ have not insisted enough upon the fact of Black girls, are often loudly shocked to find Black girls disappeared. Loud, unsustainable shock has a way of disappearing Black girls. Outrage, too, has a way of being disappeared.
— Justin Phillip Reed
"Pushing Up Onto Its Elbows, the Fable Lifts Itself into Fact”
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