Voices and Soul
by Justice Putnam
Black Kos Poetry Editor
Two quotes by Malcolm X resonated with me during my early childhood in Oregon and resonate still.
"We didn't land on Plymouth Rock, my brothers and sisters, Plymouth Rock landed on us!"
and
"I have no mercy or compassion for a society that crushes people, and then penalizes them for not being able to stand up under the weight."
I was thinking about Tupac Shakur the other day and of the first time I heard the term, “a pandemic of racism.” Tupac was certainly a child and man of his times, and he died far too early. His social commentary and poetry of the human condition, particularly, the condition of black men and women, is certainly informed by the two quotes I cited. His poetry addresses the plain facts of what it is to live under a dual system of Due Process and Equal Protection, one bleached white and disinfected with Lysol, the other renditioned to a literal black site with a drop of the gavel. It might be argued that the "apartheid" Jim Crow laws were forever overturned in the public and private arenas, but Shakur saw how that Jim Crow mentality is alive and well in the most cherished of our "Ideals." Millions of black men and women are incarcerated and war criminals walk free, grifters and charlatans prey on the backs of the disadvantaged and then claim, Justice is Blind. Essential workers are those who serve the monied and the privileged, while black grandmothers gasp a death rattle gasp after being sent home because the ventilator clinic is all full.
There are two systems. One that seeks Due Process and Equal Protection for All, and another that seeks Life, Liberty and the Pursuit to Infect as Many as Possible.
Liberty Needs Glasses
excuse me but lady liberty needs glasses
and so does mrs justice by her side
both the broads r blind as bats
stumbling thru the system
justice bumped into mutulu and
trippin on geronimo pratt
but stepped right over oliver
and his crooked partner ronnie
justice stubbed her big toe on mandela
and liberty was misquoted by the indians
slavery was a learning phase
forgotten with out a verdict
while justice is on a rampage
4 endangered surviving black males
i mean really if anyone really valued life
and cared about the masses
theyd take em both 2 pen optical
and get 2 pair of glasses
-- Tupac Shakur
“Liberty Needs Glasses”
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News round up by dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor
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Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and truly one of America’s last hopes, was the latest guest on Will Smith’s Snapchat series Will From Home, where he informed viewers about COVID-19 facts, and more specifically, its devastating impact on the black community. The episode hit the social media app on Tuesday.
“It’s really terrible, because it’s just one of the failings of our society, that African Americans have a disproportionate prevalence in incidents of the very comorbid conditions that put you at a high risk,” Dr. Fauci explained of the staggering number of COVID-19 deaths amongst black Americans. The “comorbid conditions” include hypertension, diabetes and obesity.
“If you get infected, you’re going to have a poor outcome,” Fauci continued, adding that the pandemic is “a bright shining light on what disparities of health mean.” He also described the four main types of coronaviruses humans can get, from the common cold to what is happening now.
“It has the characteristics of very efficiently transmitting from human to human,” he explains of this particular outbreak.
Many of the questions Dr. Fauci answered during his appearance on the show were asked by young people. When one young girl asked if the shelter-in-place and social distancing precautions were going to happen for the rest of our lives, Dr. Fauci assured her this won’t last forever.
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With many hospitals and healthcare workers focusing predominantly on COVID-19, Black mothers-to-be in Tennessee, Arkansas and Mississippi, who fear contracting the virus, are attempting to deliver their babies at home without medical assistance, according to a recently published Pew article.
“They’ve told us they’re going to risk it all and have an unassisted home birth,” Nikia Grayson, a certified nurse-midwife in Memphis, Tennessee, told Pew about mothers who have been calling in for help, mainly from rural areas. “That’s very scary, and that’s what people are researching and seeing as a viable option.” Grayson also said that she is the only midwife in the state who does at-home births.
As previous reports have shown, the virus is disproportionately affecting Black communities and even before the crisis, Pew reported that Black mothers were wary of the healthcare system. And there is ample reason to be. The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) in 2019 reported that “Black, American Indian, and Alaska Native women are two to three times more likely to die from pregnancy-related causes than White women.” A root cause is a lack of access to quality healthcare as well as systemic racism in the U.S. medical system.
“The intersectionality of being a Black woman and that the rural South chose not to provide insurance coverage is a deadly combination for many,” said Joia Crear-Perry, president of the National Birth Equity Collaborative.
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Somalia has recorded a rise in coronavirus cases in the past week, with the majority of those affected reportedly young people.
So far there have been 237 confirmed cases and eight deaths in the country. A member of parliament and a state minister are among those who have died.
“The sharp increase is due to the fact that we are testing patients with all symptoms, not necessarily contact tracing,” said Dr Mohamed M Ali Fuje, the government’s newly appointed chief medical officer.
Ninety per cent of the confirmed cases are in the capital, Mogadishu, and although the government has introduced measures to contain the virus, widespread behavioural change is proving difficult. People continue to congregate in mosques, and gather in groups at teashops and restaurants, increasing the risk of infections.
“Life is normal here,” said Khadija Hassan, a resident in Mogadishu. “It is like the global pandemic has not reached us yet. Personally, I won’t leave my house for two weeks because I see people in my neighbourhood showing symptoms of the coronavirus. They talk of loss of smell, fever and cough and they say it is just a common cold as they continue to mingle with no isolation or social distancing.”
Last week the government imposed a night-time curfew and schools have been closed, but the streets have remained full.
“It is as though the schools were closed for public holiday,” Hassan said. “Students and children are freely loitering in the streets, playing football and gathering in crowds in the neighbourhood.”
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With barely 60 ventilators for 11 million people, Haiti is the most vulnerable nation in the Americas to the coronavirus. BBC: We are not prepared at all': Haiti, already impoverished, confronts a pandemic
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The reality inside Haiti's intensive care units is even bleaker than that number - taken from a 2019 study - suggests. According to Stephan Dragon, a respiratory therapist in the capital, Port-au-Prince, the true number of ventilators is actually closer to 40, and maybe 20 of those aren't working.
"We also have a very, very limited group of doctors who know how to operate them," Mr Dragon said.
The Haitian government has recently attempted to buy much-needed equipment - from ventilators to PPE, including tens of thousands of facemasks from Cuba - but Haitian healthcare practitioners like Mr Dragon fear it is too little, too late.
"To tell you the truth, we are not prepared at all," he said.
So far, this small impoverished nation has only registered three deaths from the virus and 40 confirmed cases, but many more cases may be going unreported, especially in remote areas.
Levels of testing are low and enforcement of social distancing is patchy at best. The Haitian population also suffers high levels of diabetes and other health conditions, and a major coronavirus outbreak would place an unbearable strain on a collapsing healthcare system.
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From his office in central Khartoum, Ahmed al-Mufti prepares every day for what he believes is the water war to come.
This conviction led Mufti, a prominent human rights lawyer and water expert, to quit the Sudanese delegation that is negotiating Nile water issues with Egypt and Ethiopia.
He was angry at Ethiopia’s decision to build the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance dam (Gerd), a $4.5bn (£3.6bn) mega-project on the Blue Nile river that runs from Lake Tana in Ethiopia to meet the White Nile in Khartoum, flowing north into Egypt. The dam project will affect water levels downstream, depending on how fast Ethiopia fills its 74bn cubic metre reservoir.
“I believe in one, two, 10 … 100 years, this will cause instability in the region. These are the germs of instability, and it will cause a water war,” he says emphatically. “If not under this government then under another, as no population will see itself dying of thirst when they know that there is water very close by. This was my position when I quit, and every day since then I find more evidence that supports this.”
Ethiopia is due to begin filling the dam’s reservoir later this year, following a decade of fraught negotiations between the Nile Basin countries. In early April, Ethiopia’s prime minister, Abiy Ahmed, declared that construction would be completed despite the challenges of the pandemic, with the reservoir to be filled during the rainy season that starts in June. “Saving lives is our priority, while second to this we have the Gerd,” he told Ethiopians.
Sudan’s prime minister, Abdalla Hamdok, proposed “joint management” of the dam, which will deplete Sudan’s water from the Blue Nile while potentially providing much-needed cheap electricity in future. Further downstream, however, Egypt has long seen the Gerd as an existential threat that could deprive its 100 million people of the water they need to survive in a changing climate. Some Egyptian officials have even discussed bombing the dam.
Ethiopia and Sudan say the dam’s hydropower is essential for their citizens to develop and thrive.
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In a deeply fractured opinion, the Supreme Court held on Monday that states must rely on unanimous juries to obtain criminal convictions. (Oregon and Louisiana had previously allowed nonunanimous juries to convict individuals.) The opinion reveals different divisions among the justices, including about when to adhere to the court’s prior opinions. But perhaps the most revealing division was about how and when to talk about racial bias in law.
The nonunanimous jury rule at the core of Ramos v. Louisiana has transparently racist origins, which Justice Neil Gorsuch detailed in the majority opinion, joined in most respects by Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor, and Brett Kavanaugh. Louisiana’s rule was adopted at an 1898 constitutional conviction together with a package of other reforms with the shared purpose of excluding black Americans from the United States political system: a poll tax, a literacy and property ownership test for voting, and a grandfather clause that exempted many white residents from the requirements. One committee chairman explained that the purpose of the convention was to “establish the supremacy of the white race.” As Sotomayor wrote separately to underscore, the nonunanimous jury rules have a “sordid history”: “the legacy of racism that generated Louisiana’s and Oregon’s laws.” Kavanaugh echoed this claim in his own separate writing: “The convention approved non-unanimous juries as one pillar of a comprehensive and brutal program of racist Jim Crow measures against African-Americans.”
This language acknowledging this history outraged the dissenters—Justice Samuel Alito, Chief Justice John Roberts, and Justice Elena Kagan. Alito’s dissent claimed that the talk of racism was getting in the way of pure legal reasoning. “Too much public discourse today is sullied by ad hominem rhetoric, that is, attempts to discredit an argument not by proving that it is unsound but by attacking the character or motives of the argument’s proponents. The majority regrettably succumbs to this trend.” The dissent maintained that “all the talk about the Klan, etc., is entirely out of place” and failed to “set an example of rational and civil discourse instead of contributing to the worst current trends.”
For the dissenters, the act of pointing out the rule’s unmistakable racist origins—of accusing the state of being racist—was worse than the sordid, racist history itself.
This is not the first appearance of this division between justices who are willing to grapple with race and racist history and those who are not. The justices have been divided on this issue in important voting rights cases as well as in criminal procedure.
Take, for example, Shelby County v. Holder, where a conservative majority of the court invalidated a provision of the Voting Rights Act that required certain states (mostly in the South) with particularly grotesque histories of racial discrimination to pre-clear changes to their voting laws with the federal government. With no discussion of the violent and extraordinary measures that states deployed to prevent black Americans from voting, the conservative majority referred to that past with this sanitized language: “The conditions that originally justified these measures no longer characterize voting in the covered jurisdictions” today. “Nearly 50 years later, things have changed dramatically,” Roberts wrote. The dissent, by contrast, engaged with the racist history, and acknowledged it as racist history, to explain why the act should be kept intact. The “blight of racial discrimination in voting,” Ginsburg’s dissent argued, proved hard to stamp out: “Early attempts to cope with this vile infection resembled battling the Hydra. Whenever one form of voting discrimination was identified and prohibited, others sprang up in its place.”
Acknowledging racism and racist history is not just symbolically important. The history is, after all, a part of our past; failing to grapple with it omits important context to legal disputes.
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