R-E-S-P-E-C-T
Commentary by Chitown Kev
1) So...I was up early this morning and decided to watch Morning Joe (sans Joe and Mika) and I saw Karine Jean-Pierre...yet again...being interviewed about her encounter with a protestor, Aidan Cook, that invaded the space of three women of color at a MoveOn.org event in California and grabbed the mic from Senator and Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris.
Goodness, Ms. Jean-Pierre has to be a little tired, I thought. After all, she was talking about the same incident yesterday on Deadline White House and The Rachel Maddow Show.
Look.
I’ve never been a fan of protestors that rush the stage and grab the mic of the selected speaker; I didn’t like it when the two Black Lives Matter-affiliated young ladies did it to Bernie Sanders during the 2016 primary campaign in Seattle and I didn’t like what I saw Saturday at the MoveOn panel that featured Senator Kamala Harris.
I don’t think that Mr. Cook had any racist intent at all; after all, he did the same thing to Bernie Sanders during the 2016 primary season.
But...I am going to restate what I said in the comment thread...in fact...I’ll copy and paste it.
But I say that it’s about time that white folks and others with privilege were fully cognizant of “optics”...after all, those who are marginalized have had to be aware of optics for most of our lives...which is why “respectability politics” is a thing...it quite literally is and has always been a matter of life and death.
In short, while I don’t necessarily agree with all the various reactions to the Cook-Harris incident on Saturday, I ain’t at all mad about some of the reactions to them.
It’s about time that many white folks adapted some sort of respectability and respectfulness in their encounters with black folks and other POC.
2.) Impeachment.
I stand by my view on the matter even more so now, especially since the Trump Administration’s lawlessness continues.
I understand that a) Speaker Pelosi probably does not have the 218 votes needed to open an impeachment inquiry and b) Speaker Pelosi is trying to protect the Conor Lambs and Lauren Underwoods of her caucus; that is, those that represent closely contested congressional districts.
But most of the recent polling that I have seen says that 70-75% of Democrats support opening an impeachment inquiry and support for impeachment of President Trump has been sky-high with African Americans for some time.
The potential political costs of NOT opening an impeachment inquiry is more complicated than we usually talk about it.
Having said that, I know that my support for impeachment is grounded in an understanding of the impeachment process, historical context, and the present-day lawlessness of Trump’s Administration.
I honestly feel that some people’s endorsement of impeachment is grounded in their animosity for Speaker Pelosi.
Ususally, those in that category bring up Pelosi’s refusal to impeach President Bush and/or the the typical far-left criticisms of Ms. Pelosi.
First of all, I supported her resistance to impeachment from 2006-08; in the last two years of a presidential term, you let the people render that verdict; the grounds for impeachiing President Bush were murky, at best.
Now I still like Speaker Pelosi...a lot...and I am actually in favor of her slow-footing impeachment but this is getting ridiculous...then again, I don’t think that she has the votes.
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News round up by dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor
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It’s difficult to discuss inequality without a discussion on racism. Case in point, a recent report is the 1st to put a dollar value on the wealth extracted from Chicago’s black community in the 1950s and 60s through home sale contracts. Chicago Sun Times: ‘A plunder of black wealth’: Predatory housing contracts gouged Chicago’s black homeowners.
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Black homebuyers in Chicago lost at least $3.2 billion in today’s dollars because of racist real estate policies and predatory contracts between 1950 and 1970, according to a report published Thursday.
In those 20 years, black Chicagoans purchased 60,100 homes. More than 75% of those homes were sold through so-called “home sale contracts.” Those contracts allowed the seller to hold the deed until the buyer paid off the home in full. Until then, buyers did not accumulate equity in the home and owners were allowed to evict them for missing a single monthly payment.
“These contracts offered black buyers the illusion of a mortgage without the protections of a mortgage,” according to a report published by Duke University’s Samuel DuBois Cook Center on Social Equity.
The average price markup for homes sold through contract was around 84%. Typically, homes in Chicago “purchased by a speculator for $12,000 would be resold days or weeks later on contract to a black buyer for $22,000,” the report said.
Adjusted for inflation, black contract buyers in Chicago ended up paying an average $71,000 more for their home than they would have paid with a conventional mortgage.
“The total amount expropriated from Chicago’s black community due to land sales contracts,” the report concludes, is anywhere “between $3.2 billion and $4 billion.”
A man looks out from a third-story window in North Lawndale, April 15, 2016. According to a new report, more than 75 percent of the homes in North Lawndale sold to black buyers between 1950 and 1970 were sold on contract.
Ashlee Rezin/Sun-Times
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For all of the much-derided mega-developments—like the Millennium Tower, a 58-story luxury apartment building which tilts because it was too heavy for the landfill it was built on, or the Salesforce Tower, a phallic abomination piercing the otherwise quaint San Francisco skyline—most neighborhoods, particularly the more affluent, restrict anything aside from single-family homes. As The New York Times’ Farhad Manjoo noted, many residents and politicians in the famously liberal city have resisted proposals to loosen zoning rules, thereby increasing housing density and affordability.
“What Republicans want to do with I.C.E. and border walls, wealthy progressive Democrats are doing with zoning and Nimbyism,” he wrote. “Preserving ‘local character,’ maintaining ‘local control,’ keeping housing scarce and inaccessible—the goals of both sides are really the same: to keep people out.”
While a touch hyperbolic, it’s certainly an apt description of the origin of San Francisco’s housing restrictions, which were every bit as racially motivated as President Trump’s immigration policies today. Decades before my grandfather came to San Francisco to live out his version of the American Dream, zoning laws targeted the poor and people of color, setting the stage for the crisis today.
Anti-Chinese groups in San Francisco first pushed housing restrictions in the 1880s with the Cubic Air Ordinance, which required 500 cubic feet of space for any one person in a room of lodging. Though it was a city-wide limit, the bill was created with Chinese immigrants in mind—impoverished workers often packed into rooms, sleeping in multi-tiered bunkbeds—and they were the targets of hundreds of arrests. As a centennial report from San Francisco’s Planning Commission put it, “the ordinance was created by populist, nativist politicians who consistently scapegoated the City’s already disenfranchised Chinese laborers in the name of concerns for white working class laborers.” The ordinance also set a dangerous precedent for housing restrictions to come.
In the wake of the 1906 earthquake, which destroyed 28,000 buildings, regulators took the opportunity to rethink the city’s layout. They spent years creating and appointing a planning commission, and the first zoning code passed in 1921. It separated industrial areas from homes, keeping noxious commercial work on the waterfront and away from residential neighborhoods. Yet, as Amit Ghosh, former director of the San Francisco Planning Department, told Collectors Weekly, “the underlying use of zoning to segregate people and income levels is undeniable. It was part of the original intent.” Wealthy neighborhoods were kept hyper-exclusive by limiting the housing density allowed there and, though such provisions were later removed from the plans, there were attempts at blatant segregation, such as designating sections of the Fillmore District as residential to block more Japanese businesses from opening there.
Where the city couldn’t legally segregate, landowners did so themselves. Many inserted ownership requirements into building deeds, known as “racially restrictive covenants,” to selectively filter potential buyers. (Though no longer enforceable, even today some Bay Area homebuyers have been shocked to find such requirements still in their property’s title report.) Regulators turned a blind eye. This particularly hurt black families, who also faced the nearly impossible obstacle of obtaining loans, as most financial institutions refused to lend to them. (Even in 1957, the Giants’ baseball legend Willie Mays had trouble buying a home near the affluent St. Francis Wood area, no thanks to racist neighbors.) Poor neighborhoods and areas dominated by non-white residents were also redlined, meaning that developers and banks avoided investing in those areas or loaning to those who lived there.
In 1945, a new Master Plan was envisioned to improve public transit, parks, and major roadways. City officials also targeted the Western Addition, SOMA, Mission, Chinatown, and Bayview-Hunter’s Point neighborhoods—home to many working-class and non-white families—as areas of “blight” that required widespread demolition. That word—blight—“was a deeply political term firmly rooted in structural racism, which relied on fears of white flight and urban disinvestment to justify the wholesale removal of communities of color,” states the Planning Commission’s centennial report. The city bought these homeowners out at bargain rates, and booted stubborn ones under eminent domain. In the Western Addition alone, a predominantly black section of the Fillmore District (which saw a major influx of African-American residents post-WWII), 883 businesses and 4,729 households were forced out. Many had nowhere to go, even as sections of their neighborhoods remained empty for years. (This loss is the foundation of the upcoming film The Last Black Man in San Francisco.)
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Pioneering LGBTQ+ activists Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera will soon be honored with monuments in New York City. New York City’s First Lady Chirlane McCray announced the builds—billed as the first public art monuments in the world to honor trans women—at a press conference yesterday (May 30).
Standing at a podium that read “Trans Dignity, Trans History,” the McCray said that from their leading role at the Stonewall uprising—which marks its 50th anniversary this June 28—to their revolutionary work supporting transgender and gender nonconforming youth, Johnson and Rivera charted a path for all the activists who came after them.
“Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera were unapologetic about who they were at a time when living their truth meant arrests, beatings, unemployment and homelessness,” McClain said. “They were social justice warriors who never stopped fighting for liberation.”
The yet-to-be commissioned statutes will be erected on Christopher Street and are part of the city’s 2018 She Built NYC campaign, which seeks to honor trailblazing women via monuments in every borough.
Trans activist Marsha P. Johnson, along with Sylvia Rivera, will be honored with a monument in New York City.
Illustration: Courtesy of Mayor Bill de Blasio, via Twitter (@NYCMayor)
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Black architectural and cultural heritage sites are in grave danger of disappearing or being beyond repair, unless members of the public mobilize to save them, the National Trust for Historic Preservation announced today.
Four of the sites on its 11 Most Endangered Historic Places list are significant to Black culture and history. The Excelsior Club in Charlotte once hosted musicians Louis Armstrong and Nat King Cole, and has been a Green Book site since it opened in 1944. It needs significant repairs. Mount Vernon Arsenal and Searcy Hospital in Mount Vernon, Alabama, was occupied for 200 years as an arsenal, a prison and then as a mental health facility for Black people. It closed in 2012 and currently sits vacant. Tenth Street Historic District in Dallas, one of the few remaining Freedmen’s towns in the country, is being eroded by demolition. Willert Park Courts in Buffalo, New York, was the first public housing project in the state made available to Black residents; it is currently vacant and deteriorating.
“For over 30 years, our 11 Most Endangered Historic Places list has called attention to threatened one-of-a-kind treasures throughout the nation and galvanized Americans to help save them,” Katherine Malone-France, interim chief preservation officer of the National Trust for Historic Preservation, said in an emailed statement. “As it has over the past three decades, we know that this year’s list will inspire people to speak out for the cherished places in their own communities that define our nation’s past.”
Excelsior Club in Charlotte is one of four Black sites on the National Trust for Historic Preservation 2019 endangered list. The club once hosted musicians Louis Armstrong and Nat King Cole.
Photo: Dan Morrill Mecklenburg, Courtesy of Historic Landmarks Commission
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Desus and mero are sitting and talking and making each other laugh. This is what they do, for hours on end, for growing audiences and rapidly increasing sums of money. The rooms change, the chairs change, but the basic idea remains. They sit. They talk. They laugh. They also drink: Desus takes slugs from a beer that’s been relabeled D+M, while Mero keeps a bottle of rum between his feet. This Thursday morning, Desus (a.k.a. Desus Nice, a.k.a. Daniel Baker) and Mero (a.k.a. The Kid Mero, a.k.a. Joel Martinez) are taping their new weekly Showtime series at a Manhattan TV studio that has been designed to look like a TV studio dropped onto a street corner in the Bronx, which is where they are from. The walls are graffitied. There’s a subway-etiquette poster, like the real ones New Yorkers see every day, only this one urges passengers not to blast music “unless that shit slaps.” Guests enter through a fake bodega storefront.
Right now, Desus and Mero are not just making each other laugh, but also waiting. The camera crew needs a few more minutes, so they kill time by serving as their own warm-up act for the studio audience. From a table just off camera, Julia Young, one of their producers, lobs topics that are in the news—the college-admissions bribery scandal, the 2020 presidential campaign, Jussie Smollett, the supposed “Jexodus”—and then watches, with a mixture of delight and dread, to see what will follow. A year ago, Desus and Mero were doing a version of this show four nights a week on Viceland, where they were limited to five fucks an episode. But Showtime is premium cable, with no advertisers to worry about; they’ve already aired a gleefully scatological ode to a very specific sex act, accompanied on piano by John Legend.
Desus asks for a recap of who’s running for president so far, and Young starts rattling off names, pausing after each one to give the guys time to riff: Elizabeth Warren. Amy Klobuchar. Bernie Sanders. Kamala Harris. Kirsten Gillibrand, who is an actual, real-life Desus & Mero fan and, as it happens, next week’s guest. Oh, and Beto O’Rourke.
Desus looks puzzled. “What is Beto running for?”
Young’s eyes convulse in their sockets. “President.”
Now it’s Desus’s turn to have a small stroke.
“Of America?!”
Outside this studio, O’Rourke might be the darling of progressive elites, but in here, he’s just another white guy tap-dancing for votes. Desus circles back to Sanders and asks whether he’s older than Trump. “By, like, 18 decades,” Mero cracks. Young does a quick Google search: “He’s 77.” “Wow,” Desus says, his eyes wide. “When do people die nowadays? Damn.” Mero starts giggling and rocking back and forth. His laugh sounds like a jug of water tipping over, and when Desus is next to him, it rarely stops. Desus, meanwhile, just grins like a villain.
All of this back-and-forth gives the audience ample time to consider Desus’s sneakers. For about 30 percent of viewers, his footwear is the episode’s biggest reveal; the identity of the guest—today, Ben Stiller—is a distant second. Desus feels a particular responsibility to delight deep-cut fans, the ones who have followed him and Mero from their first podcast for Complex, the street-style magazine and sneaker bible, through their stint on MTV2, through Viceland, all the way here.
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A woman in North Carolina raised $4500 to clear the debts of seniors at a local high school who would not have graduated otherwise.
Season Bennett, a barbershop owner, says she was inspired to give back to her community after hearing about the generous $40 million pledge by billionaire Robert F. Smith last month to clear the student loans debts of Morehouse College’s class of 2019.
“I thought, ‘Wow, that is just such a powerful thing for anybody,’” Bennett, who owns Headlines Barbershop in Charlotte, told CBS affiliate WBTV. “So many students go into so much debt just trying to get an education.”
So she contacted East Mecklenburg High School and asked for the total amount of debts of any seniors that would not be able to graduate.Theschool gave her 14 names of students who wouldn’t get their diploma until their school balances were paid in full. The amount totaled $4500.
With that number in mind, she launched a GoFundMe page to help raise the necessary funds. After raising $1000, the campaign got the boost it needed when North Carolina Panthers’ Thomas Davis also decided to donate money.
His daughter came across the campaign and told him about it.
“He said, ‘You know what, whatever need you have left over, we’re going to make sure these students graduate,’ ” Bennett said of the donation that allowed her to reach the goal.
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