Question of the Day
Commentary by Chitown Kev
So….
If The Damn Fool feels that his impeachment is like a “lynching”, then do we get to throw a national picnic when the motherfucker is impeached and removed from office? (Tossing a sawbuck into The Porch cussjar!)
(I mean, that is the protocol, right? It is what the economically anxious do on such a occasion.)
Enquiring minds want to know.
As long as Karen doesn’t bring her potato salad (avec des raisins secs) to the presidential removal picnic...and Becky leaves her phone back at the house, I’m game.
(Note: I had to say something The Damn Fool’s tweet...but what?
There’s plenty of diaries like this one and this one and this one on the subject, I have articulated my own POV that I don’t even like it when black folks use lynching as a metaphor for a rhetorical pile-on, I’ve talked plenty about my class excursion to the Without Sanctuary exhibit at the Chicago Historical Society in 2005 that had white students excusing themselves to throw up, that made me angrier not and the lynchers, themselves, but at the crowd of the happy white people surrounding the lynched and often burned black bodies; a museum exhibit that elicited the admission from one of my classmates that his grandfather was in one of those lynching postcards that was exhibited.
I haven’t talked much about the fact that my own ancestors migrated from Alabama to Detroit in 1925 because my great great grandfather was stopped by a few good ol’ white men who fully intended to lynch him but...one of the white guys among the lynchers pronounced my great great grandfather to be a “good nigger” and allowed him to live…
I mean, how am I supposed to respond to the absurdity and obscenity of The Damn Fool’s tweet this morning and to Lindsey Graham’s “yesssuh” pile-on?)
shrug
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News round up by dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor
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Self-taught photographer Richard Samuel Roberts became famous for documenting, through portraits, South Carolina’s segregated Black community throughout the 1920s and 1930s. His images get the royal treatment October 18 through October 20 via a new multi-disciplinary event at the Columbia Museum of Art. Harlem South: A View Through the Lens will feature 132 photographs from the artist.
Using Roberts’s images as inspiration, which were originally published in 1986—and again earlier this year in the book “A True Likeness: The Black South of Richard Samuel Roberts 1920-1936”—the weekend-long event will include a mix of jazz and theatrical performances of historical fiction that chronicle Black life in Columbia, South Carolina, between 1920 and 1936. The program will feature jazz musician Ronald C. McCurdy, Darion McCloud of the NiA Theatre Company and performers from the University of South Carolina School of Music.
“We approach history as if it’s under glass, but what was it like? These were real people [in Roberts’ photographs],” McCloud told the Free Times in an article posted Wednesday (October 16). “Once you remove the glass, the stories, man—that’s the part that gets people.… We try to construct the world of Roberts, so that his characters can interact with each other.”
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In 1999 a Ugandan teacher decided to start her own school. Barbara Ofwono Buyondo had $350 of savings. Bankers would not give a loan without collateral, especially to a young woman. With no money for tables, children wrote on their chairs, kneeling. Today her company, Victorious Education Services, is one of the leading schools in Uganda. Over 4,000 fee-paying pupils attend its five campuses, swept up by a fleet of branded buses and welcomed by primly uniformed teachers.
Decent jobs are so scarce in Africa that, like Ms Buyondo, many people create their own. Surveys by the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor find that one in three working-age adults in sub-Saharan Africa either runs a new business or is trying to start one, compared with one in six Americans and one in 20 Germans. In Tanzania informal firms created four-fifths of new non-farm jobs between 2002 and 2012. Most such enterprises are also tiny. Schemes to help them emulate Ms Buyondo’s success have a mixed record.
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Maria Nantale is enjoying a beer at a rickety wooden bar after a long day’s work. “Forty people tested today,” she reflects. “Found three positives. One of them is in denial. She has run away.”
Twice a week, from dawn until dusk, Nantale holds an “outreach” in the town of Mbale, population 76,000. The aim is to combat HIV among those most at risk: LGBT Ugandans, drug addicts and sex workers.
She asks a local person to play some music while her “peer” educators discuss condom use and sexual health, and invite people to get tested for HIV. Her mobile lab is run by a trio of nurses, a lab technician and a psychological counsellor.
Uganda has the 10th highest rate of HIV in the world – 6.2% overall and 7.6% among women. Across the country, more than 1.2 million people are believed to carry the virus that causes Aids.
It is also one of the most homophobic countries in the world. Earlier this month an LGBT advocate was killed in the eastern Ugandan town of Jinja, not far from where Nantale works in Mbale. Last week, lawmakers said they would introduce legislation to bring in tougher punishments for homosexual acts, conjuring memories of the so-called “kill the gays” bill that was proposed in 2013 and initially included the death penalty for certain cases.
As the law stands, homosexual acts can lead to sentences of up to 14 years in prison. LGBT people routinely face human and legal rights abuses by employers and police, or violence and harassment in their communities. Because homosexuality is illegal, LGBT people are often hesitant to seek medical attention for HIV/Aids.
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An African American security guard told a student to stop calling him the n-word. It cost him his job.
Marlon Anderson was a security guard at Madison West High School in Wisconsin. Last Wednesday, he was called in to help the assistant principal escort a student from school grounds, he told CNN.
The student was resisting, including yelling and pushing the principal. Anderson called for backup, and the student started yelling expletives at him, including the racial slur, Anderson said.
At first, Anderson said he asked the student to stop calling him that, without saying the word. But the student continued to call him different variations of the word.
Finally, Anderson said he responded: "Don't call me (n-word)."
That's the comment that got him fired.
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More than three decades since it first exploded onto the comic book scene, the mere mention of “Watchmen” still sparks excitement from diehard fans — and plenty of others enthralled by its revolutionary approach to conventional superhero storytelling. Employing pointed commentary, brutal violence and dark subject matter, including vigilantism and the specter of nuclear war, the series of stories about a ragged group of costumed crime-fighters has since been adapted into a feature film (directed by Zack Snyder) and now a highly anticipated HBO drama series.
But within the sprawling alternate America of “Watchmen,” one element was noticeably absent: diversity. In the original comics and the 2009 movie, all the heroes are white, and the only person of color — Doctor Manhattan, a genetically transformed nuclear physicist — is blue.
The new “Watchmen,” which premiered Sunday, reverses that dynamic in startling fashion, centering an African American woman, known as Sister Night, as its caped crusader protagonist, while injecting hot-button political issues — race and racism, white supremacy and police brutality against African Americans — into its main plot lines.
Even more striking, the fantastic world of “Watchmen,” with science-fiction flavored elements like flying ships and raining squid, has been merged with a story arc based on historical events, one that includes horrific images of black men and women being tortured and killed.
The opening scenes of the first episode, for instance, re-create the Tulsa, Okla., race riot of 1921, in which a prosperous African American community was savaged by angry whites, including the Ku Klux Klan. Black men are shown being dragged by cars. In a scene from a later episode, a black man is strung up, and the scene is shown from his point of view as he looks down in horror at his attackers, gasping desperately for air.
While hopeful that this fresh, progressive spin on the material will attract and engage an audience beyond the franchise’s existing fanbase, those responsible for HBO’s version are acutely aware that the series is a leap of faith, one that risks turning off both “Watchmen” devotees and potential newcomers who might feel the show is trivializing racism’s painful legacy.
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She is among history’s most famous Americans—a woman so courageous, she sought her own freedom from slavery twice and so determined, she inspired scores of other enslaved people to flee, too. Revered by some of her era’s most influential minds and given nicknames like “Moses” and “General,” she brought hope to generations of Americans, enslaved and free. She was Harriet Tubman, and her life contained both astonishing cruelty and unlikely success.
Born Araminta “Minty” Ross in Maryland around 1820, she was the daughter of enslaved parents. As a child, her labor was rented out by slaveholder Edward Brodess. When she was 13, an overseer threw a metal weight at an enslaved man in an attempt to make him return to work; it hit her instead, causing a traumatic brain injury. She began to have vivid dreams and symptoms similar to temporal lobe epilepsy; she interpreted her visions as divine symbols and became deeply religious.
As a young woman, she married John Tubman and changed her name. John was free, but his status was not enough to protect his new wife, now named Harriet, from being arbitrarily sold. In 1849, Brodess attempted to sell her but could not find a buyer due to her health. After he died, it looked certain that her other family members would be separated. So Harriet tried escape for the first time, along with her brothers. The attempt failed when her brothers returned to the Brodess household. Soon after, she decided to go it alone. (Explore the Underground Railroad's "great central depot" in New York.)
Tubman made her way to from Maryland to Pennsylvania with the help of the Underground Railroad. Once there, she attempted to guide other family members out of slavery. She would return to Maryland 13 times to rescue them. Along the way, she gave other enslaved people information to help their own flight. Armed with a revolver and her faith, she led at least 70 slaves to freedom.
Illiterate and without formal schooling, she nonetheless used her experiences with enslavement to aid the abolitionist cause. She befriended prominent abolitionists and intellectuals, white and black, and leveraged those sympathetic bonds into financial support for her cause. As the Underground Railroad’s most famous “conductor,” she earned the nickname Moses, a reference to the biblical figure who led his people from slavery.
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WELCOME TO THE TUESDAY’S PORCH
IF YOU ARE NEW TO THE BLACK KOS COMMUNITY, GRAB A SEAT, SOME CYBER EATS, RELAX, AND INTRODUCE YOURSELF.