Voices and Soul
by Justice Putnam
Black Kos Poetry Editor
We Americans have a peculiar habit of building up our Heroes, only so we can tear them to shreds at the smallest imperfection. So it always seemed odd to me to put a woman on a pedestal. Take the Statue of Liberty, for instance. I figured it was only a matter of time before virulent haters would tear her to shreds, and I was right. But stand on the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty and call for the reunification of children ripped from their parent’s embrace, and those same haters will muster in the millions to cries of sacrilege perpetuated on the most sacred of national icons and how dare she endanger the lives of first responders who were pulled from abusing six year-olds who were illegally speaking Spanish without a green card the army of vermin infesting our shores shouldn’t have anyway. How dare she remind us of what we do to our own children in God’s name. How dare she.
“10-Year-Old Shot Three Times, but She’s Fine”
Dumbfounded in hospital whites, you are picture-book
itty-bit, floundering in bleach and steel. Braids untwirl
and corkscrew, you squirm, the crater in your shoulder
spews a soft voltage. On a TV screwed into the wall
above your head, neon rollicks. A wide-eyed train
engine perfectly smokes, warbles a song about forward.
Who shot you, baby?
I don’t know. I was playing.
You didn’t see anyone?
I was playing with my friend Sharon.
I was on the swing
and she was—
Are you sure you didn’t—
No, I ain’t seen nobody but Sharon. I heard
people yelling though, and—
Each bullet repainted you against the brick, kicked
you a little sideways, made you need air differently.
You leaked something that still goldens the boulevard.
I ain’t seen nobody, I told you.
And at A. Lincoln Elementary on Washington Street,
or Jefferson Elementary on Madison Street, or Adams
Elementary just off the Eisenhower Expressway,
we gather the ingredients, if not the desire, for pathos:
an imploded homeroom, your empty seat pulsating
with drooped celebrity, the sometime counselor
underpaid and elsewhere, a harried teacher struggling
toward your full name. Anyway your grades weren’t
all that good. No need to coo or encircle anything,
no call for anyone to pull their official white fingers
through your raveled hair, no reason to introduce
the wild notion of loving you loud and regardless.
Oh, and they’ve finally located your mama, who
will soon burst in with her cut-rate cure of stammering
Jesus’ name. Beneath the bandages, your chest crawls
shut. Perky ol’ Thomas winks a bold-faced lie from
his clacking track, and your heart monitor hums
a wry tune no one will admit they’ve already heard.
Elsewhere, 23 seconds rumble again and again through
Sharon’s body. Boom, boom, she says to no one.
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News round up by dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor
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“What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July?” Famed black abolitionist and former slave Frederick Douglass posed this question before a large, mostly white crowd in Rochester, New York on July 5, 1852. It is “a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim,” Douglass explained, adding that he felt much the same: “I am not included within the pale of this glorious anniversary! ... This Fourth [of] July is yours not mine.”
A little over a decade later, however, African Americans like Douglass began making the glorious anniversary their own. After the end of the Civil War in 1865, the nation’s four million newly emancipated citizens transformed Independence Day into a celebration of black freedom. The Fourth became an almost exclusively African American holiday in the states of the former Confederacy—until white Southerners, after violently reasserting their dominance of the region, snuffed these black commemorations out.
Before the Civil War, white Americans from every corner of the country had annually marked the Fourth with feasts, parades, and copious quantities of alcohol. A European visitor observed that it was “almost the only holy-day kept in America.” Black Americans demonstrated considerably less enthusiasm. And those who did observe the holiday preferred—like Douglass—to do so on July 5 to better accentuate the difference between the high promises of the Fourth and the low realities of life for African Americans, while also avoiding confrontations with drunken white revelers.
Yet the tables had turned by July 4, 1865, at least in the South. Having lost a bloody four-year war to break free from the United States and defend the institution of slavery, Confederate sympathizers had little desire to celebrate the Fourth now that they were back in the Union and slavery was no more. “The white people,” wrote a young woman in Columbia, South Carolina, “shut themselves within doors.”
African Americans, meanwhile, embraced the Fourth like never before. From Washington, D.C., to Mobile, Alabama, they gathered together to watch fireworks and listen to orators recite the Emancipation Proclamation, the Declaration of Independence, and the Thirteenth Amendment, which abolished slavery when it was ratified in late 1865.
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Donald Trump is leading the Republican charge to preserve a shrinking white majority. Slate: White Fight
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Under the Trump administration, even naturalized citizens are now a target. The government agency that oversees immigration applications is hiring lawyers and immigration officers to review cases of immigrants suspected of obtaining citizenship through fake identities or other false information on their applications. Cases would be referred to the Department of Justice, where offenders could lose their citizenship or legal status.
“We finally have a process in place to get to the bottom of all these bad cases and start denaturalizing people who should not have been naturalized in the first place,” L. Francis Cissna, director of the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, said in an interview with the Associated Press last month. “What we’re looking at, when you boil it all down, is potentially a few thousand cases.”
The small scale of this effort belies its significance. As a country, the United States makes few distinctions between naturalized citizens and their native-born counterparts. The naturalization process, which includes long-term residents with deep ties to the U.S., is assumed to be permanent. This new task force on denaturalization throws that permanence into question, bringing suspicion on anyone who received their citizenship through means other than birth.
There’s no guarantee this effort will stay confined to cases of cheating and fraud. The Trump administration has shown, in its drive to criminalize asylum-seekers, that the existing processes for seeking legal status can effectively be criminalized at any time. The president’s willingness to demonize all immigrants as intruders on American soil offers little comfort.
The move to denaturalize some citizens is just the latest in a larger drive by Republicans—led by key figures in the Trump White House—to preserve a white majority in American politics. At the state level, Republican lawmakers take steps to protect GOP districts, dampen voter turnout, and otherwise hinder participation, which raises the chances of Republican victories for Congress and the White House. In turn, Republicans in Washington nominate and confirm judges who give voter suppression the cover of law, giving incentive to new efforts at restriction and disenfranchisement. What Donald Trump brings is an explicit effort to write nonwhite immigrants out of the body politic, removing as many as possible and presenting the rest as a suspect class.
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Environmental groups involved in running two wildlife reserves in the Democratic Republic of Congo said they oppose plans by the government to open the areas to oil exploration.
Congo’s cabinet last month authorized the creation of an inter-institutional committee that will discuss declassifying parts of the Virunga and Salonga national parks to permit a search for crude. Virunga is home to most of the about 1,000 mountain gorillas still alive, while Salonga is the world’s second-largest tropical rainforest reserve. Both are UNESCO World Heritage sites.
The committee, to be made up of officials from the presidency, members of parliament, the government and civil-society groups, will recommend whether or not the authorities should proceed with plans to remove the protected status from 22 percent of Virunga and about 40 percent of Salonga.
The World Wildlife Fund, which co-manages Salonga, and the Wildlife Conservation Society, which provides funds to both parks, oppose oil exploration and production in areas that are currently protected, WWF Congo spokesman Dandy Yela and WCS Communications Director Stephan Sautner said Wednesday.
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My heart goes out to anybody who arrives at Kevin Macdonald’s new Whitney Houston documentary expecting a celebration of music and once-in-a-generation talent. Those are both present — the songs, that voice. But they’re heavy with cost. They’re warped, enlisted to indict rather than delight. The goose bumps Houston’s singing gives you in “Whitney” are the goose bumps you get anytime you hear her sing. There’s a clip of her, at 19, on “The Merv Griffin Show” doing “Home” from “The Wiz,” and the chills that come are involuntary. Here was a fever you wanted to catch.
Even at this early point, the movie urges you to think about Houston as someone other than — or in addition to — one of the three or four greatest vocalists in the history of American popular music. It presents her life anew and reconsiders the very private suffering with which she might have lived it. How did someone whose nickname was Nippy, go so suddenly from angel to ghost?
“Whitney” is too funereal to be a party, too sad, strange and dismaying to cheer. Yet, in its grim, guilt-inducing way, the film works, even on the occasions when it’s working against itself. What Mr. Macdonald wants to do is a kind of cultural psychobiography. The movie comprises a range of footage (famous and mostly rare) along with one-on-one interviews with her family and friends and exes and collaborators about her childhood, fame, sexuality, technical ingenuity, drug addiction, and the raising of her daughter, Bobbi Kristina, who was also an addict. Houston’s mother, the singer Cissy Houston, her ex-husband, Bobby Brown, and the music executive L. A. Reid seem self-protective in their reticence and deflection. But most participants, like her aunt and personal assistant Mary Jones, gush memories, analysis and feelings.
Together, it all becomes a roiling drama built around Houston’s celebrity. No one person is responsible for her drug-related bathtub drowning in 2012. Guilt here is powerfully diffuse. Yet when one of Houston’s two brothers leans forward and stage-whispers something like, “This family is full of secrets,” it sounds like histrionics. But this family really was. It was rich in lies and charades, too, like Cissy and her ex-husband, John, going out in public as a couple to bolster the wholesome, whiter image they and the Arista records executive Clive Davis wanted for Houston.
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Not long ago, Clifford Joseph Harris Jr.--the rapper, actor, and fashion impresario who's better known as T.I.--took a hard look at the once-vibrant neighborhood he grew up in. By the age of 14, he'd been arrested several times on drug charges. To flip the script for kids like him, in 2017 he founded Buy Back the Block, a real estate venture that reimagines his old neighborhood one building at a time. --As told to Sheila Marikar
I grew up in the 1980s and '90s in the Center Hill section of Atlanta, just off Bankhead Highway. Back then, that part of town was considered the lower end of the middle class. After the crack era, the community stalled, and from 1994 to 2012, it became an extremely desolate area for business. There's no major grocery store chain. There's no fresh produce. There's no CVS. There are liquor stores.
Now, with the BeltLine and Mercedes-Benz Stadium a stone's throw away, there's an incentive to redevelop. But I didn't want it to be one of those situations where luxury condos go up, and people who are native are pushed out to the fringes because they can't afford to live there. I wanted to provide development that would allow people from the area, who love the community, to be able to afford to stay.
I partnered with [Atlanta rapper] Killer Mike and other developers to purchase the Bankhead Seafood building. There is a corner where I have an assemblage of lots that I acquired with another partner. There's another, bigger lot that I am acquiring on my own. I've gone in on six buildings and spent more than $2 million. I don't have private equity financing or anything like that. It's my personal finances and sweat equity.
The cornerstone of wealth is home ownership. It does something for the psyche of a person to know that all of the work they do comes back to this. A lot of the buildings I've bought, we're turning into mixed-use housing. One of the smaller residential projects will hopefully be ready by the end of 2019. We're aiming to complete a larger development--more than 100 units--around the same time. I'm working with a seasoned real estate agent, Krystal Peterson, to ensure prices are within the range of what people who live in the neighborhood can pay. I'm constantly out there, on the ground, talking to people. They are very pleased to see that I'm involved, that I'm taking steps to have ownership within the community--they know I'm a product of it. But they also wonder what's going to happen.
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