Y’all hoteps and noteps better leave Michelle Obama alone.
Commentary by Black Kos Editor Denise Oliver-Velez
It has come to my attention that certain online social media elements have decided to make the attempt to go after the most beloved black woman in America and the most admired woman in the world. Those asswipes who have jumped into the “trash Michelle” sewer need to be put in check — toot suite.
Chile…
The anti-Michelle agenda has come from several directions.
There was this story headline from The Daily Beast
It was then retweeted by Eugene Scott from the Washington Post — which got pushback, but a lot of haters jumped in to go after Michelle. I’m not posting their tweets, and have blocked as many as I can.
I congratulate Hannah Jones for her Pulitzer — however she fell for the clickbait. Sad.
After getting ratioed — The Daily Beast has now changed its headline to “Michelle Obama Is Mad at ‘Our Folks,’ Not Trump Voters: ‘That’s My Trauma.’”
And then there is the latest diversion, distraction event. How many times does Michelle have to repeat she ain’t interested in running for office?
ABC then reports this as news
Chile...
The wingnuts and MAGAts have already lost their minds because Don Lemon threw shade about Melania.
They are once again posting thousands of hate tweets — which I won’t post examples of, suffice it to say they claim she never gave birth to Sasha and Malia because there is no proof and she is not a female.
Meanwhile, our Forever FLOTUS is announcing her premiere.
Looking forward to watching.
On top of that — check this out:
Now that’s a FLOTUS and a POTUS!
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NEWS ROUND UP BY DOPPER0189, BLACK KOS MANAGING EDITOR
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The family of Ahmaud Arbery is asking for justice more than two months after he was shot and killed in Georgia. No one has been arrested or charged in the death of the 25-year-old black man.
Police say Arbery was chased by two white men in Brunswick who suspected him of a crime, but his family says all he was doing was jogging.
"Ahmaud is no longer with us and he's not with us because two men followed him while he was jogging and killed him," Arbery's mother Wanda Jones told CBS News correspondent Omar Villafranca. "An arrest should have been made already."
According to neighbors, there had been break-ins in the area. Arbery was allegedly spotted at a home that was under construction before he began to run. 911 calls came in moments later.
A dispatcher on one 911 call can be heard asking, "and you said someone is breaking into it right now?"
"No, it's all open, it's under construction. And he's running right now. There he goes right now," the caller says.
The dispatcher then asks what the man is doing and the caller says, "running down the street."
According to a police report, Gregory McMichael said he saw Arbery run by and recognized him from the break-ins. He and his 34-year-old son Travis McMichael then grabbed a shotgun and a pistol and got into their truck to go after Arbery, the report says.
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In April, Darlene “Lulu” Benson-Seay became the first woman incarcerated by New York State to die from Covid-19. Should she have been in prison in the first place? The New Republic: Death of a Survivor
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In the free world, Darlene “Lulu” Benson-Seay would get dressed up just to sit on a porch: matching hat, outfit, shoes, all immaculate. During her nearly seven years at Bedford Hills Correctional Facility, New York’s maximum-security prison for women, Lulu coordinated her pressed uniform with her sneakers to play cards in the rec room with her close-knit group of friends. She was, her loved ones on the outside and inside recalled, “feisty,” “stubborn as hell,” and “a beautiful soul.” Lulu was a sister, friend, mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother. She had a broad smile, an irrepressible sweet tooth, and a wicked sense of humor.
And, like the overwhelming majority of women ensnared in the criminal justice system, she had lived a life of enormous trauma—and resilience. “She had more than nine lives,” said her sister Brenda Benson. “She had 15 lives. She had been stabbed, beaten, raped. She just got up. Nobody could take her down.”
Then the pandemic struck. On April 28, 13 days before her 62nd birthday, Lulu died of Covid-19, the first such death of a woman incarcerated in a New York State prison. “There is no reason why she had to die in prison,” Kelly Harnett, an incarcerated woman who works in the law library at Bedford Hills and knew Lulu and her case, wrote to me over the prison email system. “She shouldn’t have even been here to begin with.”
Lulu was born in 1958, in Buffalo, the sixth of 13 children. As a child, she was sexually assaulted by multiple family members, and beaten into a coma. In 1966, Lulu’s mother was stabbed to death. JET Magazine ran a two-paragraph item about the killing, beneath a black-and-white photo of a dozen grieving, wide-eyed children, dressed in blouses and formal clothes. To the far right, Lulu, skinny, eight years old, stares into the camera, her dark braid fastened with two ribbons. The magazine reported that the “young mother” was knocked off a bar stool by her boyfriend, who then “pulled a knife and ‘hacked’ her many times.”
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Nikole Hannah-Jones was awarded the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for Commentary for The 1619 Project, The New York Times Magazine’s groundbreaking exploration of the legacy of Black Americans starting with the arrival of the first enslaved Africans in 1619.
As The 1619 Project’s official education partner, the Pulitzer Center has connected curricula based on the work of Hannah-Jones and her collaborators to some 4,500 classrooms since August 2019.
Highlights of the Center’s 1619 Project education work include:
- Tens of thousands of students in all 50 states engaged with the curricular resources, which include reading guides, lesson plans, and extension activities.
- Tens of thousands of copies of the magazine were shipped by The New York Times and the Pulitzer Center to students and educators at K-12 schools, community colleges, HBCUs, and other campuses.
- Five school systems adopted the project at broad scale: Buffalo, New York; Chicago; Washington, DC; Wilmington, Delaware; and Winston-Salem, North Carolina.
Pulitzer Center events were organized with Hannah-Jones in five cities and at educational institutions including Whitney Young Magnet High School, Wilbur Wright College of City Colleges of Chicago, University of Chicago, School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Winston-Salem’s RJ Reynolds High School, Washington, DC’s Dunbar High School, and HBCUs Howard University, Hampton University, and Huston Tillotson University.
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About a year ago I made up my mind to never give birth to a child in the United States. The decision came after I stumbled into an urgent care clinic in the Chicago neighborhood I lived in, after hours of lying on the couch in my apartment feeling weak and severely dehydrated yet unable to keep down even sips of water.
My body started trembling uncontrollably while I was on the phone with my grandmother in Jamaica who was prescribing me a home remedy, and she was worried enough about the trembling to tell me to take myself to a doctor even though she doesn’t think they know all that much.
When I walked into the clinic, the nurse who manned the reception desk was talking compassionately to a white couple trying to get vaccination records fast-tracked. My memory is fuzzy and I was bent over the check-in desk trying not to faint at the time, but I don’t remember it sounding like they needed the records for an emergency. Still, the nurse talked to them at length about how he could help them out—giving them tips and telling them to come back soon—before he waited to acknowledge me.
After the couple left the nurse asked me brusquely what I needed. When I told him I couldn’t keep any water down he said that I was probably fine and just needed to drink some Pedialyte. Then I made the mistake of asking how soon I would be able to see a doctor. For some reason, that made him enraged. He yelled at me to get out of the clinic and shouted that I was probably a drunk or a druggie.
Outside on the sidewalk, as I shakily dialed up an Uber to take me back home, I remember thinking to myself, what if I was dying? What if I was having a baby?
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A global shutdown can hurt not just governments, hotels and tour vendors, but the writers and entrepreneurs whose blogs, businesses, and livelihoods are supported by trips to far-away destinations. “When the reality and permanence hits everyone, it’s almost a second sense of grief,” Greaves-Gabbadon said.
As with many other parts of the virus’s impact, it has especially been a body blow to African Americans and a nascent boom in the black travel industry. Staying home are now the nearly 17% of African Americans who take one or more international trips a year. According to a study by Mandala, a marketing research group, the economic value of African American travelers increased from $48bn to $63bn between 2010 and 2018.
Losses especially threaten Caribbean and African nations where black American travel had become a vital and growing industry, largely spurred by cultural and heritage links. The African Development Bank estimates some countries could see their economies shrink by an average of 3.3% this year. Popular tourist spots such as Seychelles, Cape Verde, Mauritius and Gambia could shrink by as much as 7%.
Meanwhile in the Caribbean, Barbados’ cancelled Crop Over festival could be the final blow for a region already devastated by the outbreak. Many had hoped the Caribbean would be spared as the virus emerged at the end of peak season, but most destinations have since cancelled their summer carnivals.
“It’s not just a matter of ‘I can’t go to Barbados for Crop Over and see Rihanna’,” Greaves-Gabbadon said. “These journeys mean so much to us on a cultural level, that when you take them away, it’s rough.”
Cultural and genealogical travelers are the biggest spenders. The average traveler in that group shells out $2,078 per trip versus $1,345 for all African American tourists.
Barbados also postponed its genealogical tourism promotion encouraging descendants to visit in 2020, modeled after that of Ghana.
Considered the ancestral home of many black Americans, Ghana hit a record 1 million foreign visitors in 2019 from its marketed “Year of the Return”. The campaign enticed people of African descent to visit in the 400th year since the Atlantic slave trade began.
“It’s hard to put into words what happens to us when we visit but it activates something in our DNA” said Diallo Sumbry, Ghana’s first African American tourism ambassador. “It helps to reconnect an identity, the freedom of being able to express that unexplainable feeling that’s beneath all of our skin.”
This year’s Back to Africa festival, promoted as a “birthright trip” for African Americans, narrowly missed the US’s travel ban. But cultural expeditions across the continent remain at risk as the world confirms more than 2.5m cases of coronavirus.
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The collapse of medical supply chains has been a catastrophe for women in developing countries. Lockdowns have made matters worse. Foreign Policy: The Coronavirus Is Cutting Off Africa’s Abortion Access
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When Shali Iminza, 27, missed her period in March, the married mother of three felt her stomach sink with dread. Iminza, whose first name has been changed for privacy reasons, works as a farmer in western Kenya, and her husband is a motorcycle taxi driver. Together, they barely make enough money to feed their family. “Sometimes we eat three times [per day], sometimes two,” Iminza told Foreign Policy and Type Investigations over the phone. “Things are very expensive, and to get money nowadays, it’s hard.”
Unable to care for another child, Iminza visited a local health clinic, walking more than 3 miles to save money on the taxi fare. When she arrived, the doctor informed Iminza that the pills she would need to terminate her pregnancy were unavailable because of shortages caused by the novel coronavirus. “I’m very angry because the more the days are going, the pregnancy is now growing, so I don’t know what to do,” said Iminza, her voice trembling from stress.
COVID-19 has created delays and disruptions in every step of the supply chain that brings critical safe abortion medication and contraceptives from Asia to East Africa—halting factory production, delaying air and sea shipments, complicating customs approvals, and restricting in-country transport from seaports and airports to hospitals, pharmacies, and health care clinics. Lockdowns and curfews have added to the crisis, preventing women from traveling to clinics to get critical family planning and reproductive health care, and blocking service providers from conducting outreach in hard-to-access rural areas.
The outcome could be disastrous for women and girls, according to experts, who expect to see a rise in unintended pregnancies and unsafe abortions in a region where thousands of women already die each year due to restrictive abortion laws and lack of access to reproductive health care and family planning supplies.
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Twelve friends fill hundreds of carefully arranged aid packages into four cars, then trail through Oniru’s empty streets, past sky-coloured luxury apartment blocks.
In what is notionally an affluent suburb along Lagos’s coastline, the cars stop outside the shells of abandoned, part-constructed buildings, and the friends file into the informal housing compounds that sprawl within.
They unload packages and tick off names from a growing spreadsheet of hundreds of families in need of food and other supplies.
For years, the group of professionals in their 30s and 40s have delivered weekly or fortnightly packages to the poor in Orile, an underprivileged area of Nigeria’s largest city, and Oniru, where they live.
But since a lockdown was imposed to curb the spread of coronavirus, their task has become more urgent.
“As soon as the lockdown hit we knew we needed to do more,” says Fifehan Osinkanlu, one of the friends. “You could see how desperate people are, it was really overwhelming and glaring.”
The lockdown in Lagos, which accounts for more than half of Nigeria’s 2,000 confirmed infections, is due to gradually ease from Monday. Yet the impact on millions, particularly those living on the edge in daily informal labour has been acute.
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America’s response to the pandemic harkens back to ugly times in our country’s history. But to recognize that, we need to know our elders’ stories. The Atlantic: We Are Losing a Generation of Civil-Rights Memories
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I knew it was only a matter of time before coronavirus deaths hit my social-media feeds—before people I knew would grieve, or even become ill and die themselves—but I wasn’t prepared for the speed or relentlessness with which it happened. Or that most of the victims I’d see would be black. I knew that to a large extent this reflected the people and topics I followed, but it was something bigger too, a hint of the grim reality that was only just emerging.
My eyes began to search for COVID-19 in every death announcement. It wasn’t always there, as with the Reverend Joseph Lowery, known as the “Dean of the Civil-Rights Movement,” who died on March 27 at the age of 98, of causes unrelated to the coronavirus. But it often was, and as I scrolled past smiling photos of people of all ages—daughters, sons, cousins, matriarchs, and patriarchs—I wondered how American society would bear a loss of this magnitude, what it would do to our country to lose them and all they remembered.
I’ve been thinking about ancestral memories for a long time. In the mid-’80s, when I was 11, I interviewed my grandparents. For all the time I’d spent with them over the years—every day after school, plus all summer while my mom worked—I realized I knew little about their early lives and the stories of their families. Once in a while, they’d let slip little anecdotes—some amusing, others revealing of the discrimination they had endured during the brutal Jim Crow era. But much of their lives lay behind a heavy curtain that rarely opened. They didn’t like talking about the past, and if their conversation touched on it, they didn’t linger there.
As I slouched cross-legged on the variegated shag carpet in their Memphis bungalow, Grandma—a tall, lean, reddish-brown woman in her 70s—sat languid and elegant on a tufted gold velvet armchair, its plastic upholstery cover crinkling beneath her when she shifted. A few feet away, Granddaddy, a round man in his 80s with horn-rimmed glasses resting on his dark bronze face, perched on a red velvet damask armchair, also covered in plastic. They gazed at nothing in particular—nothing visible to me, anyway—while I formed my questions: What were the names of the Mississippi Delta towns where they were born? What were the names of their parents, grandparents, great-grandparents? What were the oldest tales they could recall?
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Voices and Soul
by Justice Putnam, Black Kos Poetry Editor
Early on, when I thought I could actually pursue successfully the mantle of Poet with a capital “P,” I learned that a Poem is one that is timeless and can be understood outside the history and personality of the poet who composed it. A Poem takes on a new life, independent of the motivations and actual experience that manifested the meter and beat. A Poem can be applied to the personal experience of the reader who reads it, and that is what makes it a Poem. Later, when the reader feels compelled to know a bit more about the poet and Poem, a more illuminating understanding can be had, an understanding of how the interconnected tethers of community between strangers can conjure a nightmare of the lash, and the blue smoke wisp from a midnight red ember crushed on skin that is personal and immediate.
A Poem can do that.
You have been burning
the cork of yourself. You crawl
the nightboards bare-assed, scratching
Negress against the grains, leaving fingernails
in invocation, dabbler, out out
your damn mind, summoning a phantom
the shape of my granny—that peerless apparition—
her halo of witch hazel and snuff,
her knuckles cracking the whip kept tucked
away in her attic like a hush of bastard fist.
You slip her on, hot to be hazed
dressed in a distinct leather’s stink.
The gaze of a husband who hates you less
bears down her living midriff, sniffs her
out as he would a bloom
of mold in your basement, its dank
souvenir. What blood ensues is the pink
in my palms and patter of rebel in my neck
when I, having slept wild again,
awake. About impossibility:
I am not unsympathetic. I get it.
He beasts you and you feel a need to pass
the buck. In my house, we call this
nothing much after all. When Freud
observed Verschiebung, he wasn’t looking at us,
how we assault the air with grudges
avoiding talk of our learned tortures.
I will not flash you the rattling quarters
of evening my mothers crowd inside
to seek their penny-wide retreats;
I’m going to unfatten your pockets.
Remind me again of your ghost ration.
What if you could eat your fill?
Have you? Haven’t you had enough?
What would you do, do, do without us?
In the poem I’d conjure to carry me
across the finale of my animal life
I can ride no skin but this one.
Sweat stifles its cells until they fungify.
The night choir-sways down my throat’s red aisle.
My muscles flaccid in felt ventriloquism.
The vessels sing a sequence of chains.
They chew through my confessional face.
My mouth lopsided as a fainting chaise,
My mouth clack-clicks back to work my teeth
Latchbolt into a snigger: tight bright luxe
enuff sighs the blue smoke the grin
cuts out of my bottom lip enuff
-- Justin Phillip Reed
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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.