The George Floyd Justice in Policing Act.
Commentary by Black Kos Editor Denise Oliver-Velez
In case you were unaware of what has been happening with the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act — the call has gone out for people to become citizen co-sponsors.
DEADLINE: Sign up by July 23 to have your name entered into the Congressional Record as a citizen cosponsor.
On June 25th, the US House of Representatives passed the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act to address the systemic racism and police brutality that have led to the murder of far too many Black people in America. Among other provisions, this bill will prohibit racial profiling by law enforcement, ban chokeholds and no-knock warrants, limit the transfer of military-grade equipment to local law enforcement, increase accountability and transparency on police misconduct, invest in community public safety initiatives, and create new training programs to change the culture of law enforcement.
JusticeInPolicing.us was created by the office of House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer to help the public learn more about the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act and enable Americans from across the country to sign on as citizen cosponsors and add their voices to this important national discussion.
You can help spread the word by signing, and then posting to Twitter and Facebook, like I just did.
We need to create a groundswell — both in educating the public about the bill passed by the House, and also to pressure for Senate passage (and to garner support for those Senate candidates who are fighting to replace the Trump enablers)
We know that as things stand, the Senate controlled by Moscow Mitch won’t let this bill pass. That should not stop anyone from speaking up in support.
If you haven’t signed on yet...what are you waiting for?
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NEWS ROUND UP BY DOPPER0189, BLACK KOS MANAGING EDITOR
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Health disparities predate Covid-19, of course, as Jamila Taylor recently reviewed for the Century Foundation: Black Americans live shorter lives than white Americans, they have higher rates of chronic disease, they report worse mental health, they have less health care access, etc.
“Whether it’s from violence in the street or violence in the health care system, Black Americans have been dying for not just the last three months but the last three centuries,” Utibe Essien, a practicing physician who teaches at the University of Pittsburgh’s medical school, told me.
Let’s start with the obvious problem: interpersonal racism, whether tacit or explicit, directly harms Black people’s health. So does the distrust it has created between Black Americans and American institutions. This problem goes back centuries: US slaves were experimented on, and more recently, there are horrifying stories like the Tuskegee syphilis experiment. Numerous studies, some of them conducted as recently as 2016, have found Black people were less likely to be given pain medication in an emergency department.
And in the middle of the Covid-19 crisis, a new report found that Black people who reported Covid-like symptoms — namely, fever and cough — were less likely to be given a test for the virus compared to white people with the same symptoms. In all these ways, internalized and interpersonal racism lead to worse health outcomes for Black Americans.
But structural racism is also usually, and correctly, proposed as a critical explanation for these inequities.
After speaking last month with half a dozen Black scholars, I came to believe the best place to start in understanding how structural racism breeds racial health disparities is residential segregation. Where a person lives has direct health effects and, maybe as importantly, it will situate them for economic success or failure for the rest of their lives — which we also know is an important determinant for health.
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Across the country, students of color have been demanding change from their schools. At one Denver school, the push for a more inclusive and diverse curriculum came last year, from a group of African American high school students at Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Early College.
Black students at the joint middle school and high school say they didn't see their history and culture reflected in the curriculum at a school that's named after the civil rights leader.
The school's principal, Kimberly Grayson, says that it was a trip to the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, D.C., in October, that prompted a some of her high school students to demand revisions to their history curriculum.
Grayson, who is Black, tells All Things Considered that the museum trip she led gave her students a clearer picture about the teachings that they thought were missing in their classroom.
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Growing up, Thomas Adetomiwa wasn’t too keen on his dad’s origin story of how he got to the U.S. from Nigeria. He’d often tell Thomas how his acceptance into the University of Houston meant that he’d be the first person in their family to come to America, and how he had to simultaneously work four jobs while sending money back home to his grandmother and brothers.
“It’s funny to think about it now because I would think it was annoying,” Adetomiwa recalls. Yet his father’s perseverance has passed on to him. Adetomiwa persevered, despite three rejection letters from Southern Methodist University, to eventually earn a Master’s in science and management and then an MBA from SMU. The 27-year-old now works at IBM. His family’s story may be remarkable but it’s not unique.
In fact, according to data collated by the Migration Policy Institute from the Census Bureau and American Community Surveys:
40 PERCENT OF IMMIGRANTS TO THE U.S. FROM SUB-SAHARAN AFRICA HOLD AT LEAST A BACHELOR’S DEGREE
That’s compared to 31 percent for the country’s overall foreign-born population and 32 percent for those born in the U.S. Nigerians and South Africans are the most highly educated, with 61 percent and 58 percent, respectively, holding at least an undergraduate degree. “Our families had to finesse their ways into this land and find ways of making money,” says Adetomiwa. “We’ve seen what our parents did just to get us inside the house. So it was our duty to show that their efforts and stress aren’t taken for granted.”
For sure, the comparison between immigrants and native-born Americans in education isn’t entirely fair, says Jeanne Batalova, a senior policy analyst at the Migration Policy Institute and co-author of the report. Many foreign immigrants leave their country for the U.S. already possessing skills and an education base that give them an academic edge in their new home.
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Three African American men running for U.S. Senate, Jaime Harrison in South Carolina, Mike Espy in Mississippi and Raphael Warnock in Georgia say they are responding to the moment and have jointly contributed the following essay exclusively to BET.com.
The marches in recent weeks have extended far past the city limits of places like Charleston, Atlanta and Jackson. In the Deep South, the calls for equality and equity in the way law enforcement treats American citizens have ricocheted from state to state — from the quiet streets of rural towns like Loganville, Georgia and Petal, Mississippi, to the glittering metropolises that drive Southern economies. Even in places like Easley, South Carolina, where nearly 85 percent of the population is white, almost 100 people gathered to demand justice during a City Hall protest.
Watershed moments of public outcry like these are a sign of people feeling unheard and underrepresented, and decisions our leaders make today can have wide-ranging impacts on the lived experiences of Black Americans. For the first time in history, we saw people in all 50 states stand together to protest the racial injustices that have become all too common in our country.
As Black fathers, brothers, sons and men dedicated to making our communities stronger, each of us has built campaigns and made promises to fight tooth and nail to stop these injustices.
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The New York Times and FX Networks teamed up to examine the violent killing of Breonna taylor by Louisville police in a new monthly series called ‘The New York Times Presents. Variety: FX, New York Times to Produce Breonna Taylor Doc as Part of New Series
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The Disney-owned cable network and the newspaper are teaming up for a new series called The New York Times Presents, which is set to premiere July 10. FX has ordered 10 episodes of the show, which will air monthly and premiere simultaneously on FX and Hulu on Friday nights.
Among the subjects planned for the new series are a documentary about Breonna Taylor, the 27-year-old Black woman who was killed by police officers while she slept in her home in Louisville, Kentucky. Director Yoruba Richen (The New Black) and Times reporter Rukmini Callimachi will explore Taylor's life and investigate the circumstances of her death on March 13.
Like The Weekly, each episode of The New York Times Presents will cover a single subject, but installments will run an hour rather than a half-hour. The team from The Weekly, including Red Arrow Studios' Left/Right, is producing the new show as well.
The New York Times Presents will debut July 10 with "They Get Brave," a portrait of doctors and nurses in New York City at the height of the coronavirus pandemic. Samantha Stark, Alexandra Garcia, John Pappas and Lora Moftah are producers/directors.
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As U.S. policymakers grapple with systemic racism, it’s time to start tapping the expertise of diasporas. Foreign Policy: Decolonize the State Department
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The toppling of symbols of oppression—from King Leopold II’s statues in Belgium to Confederate monuments in the United States—has been a long time coming. The former Belgian king was one of the cruelest leaders and colonizers in world history. It’s fitting that statues honoring his legacy are being removed right as the Democratic Republic of the Congo—where his most violent crimes took place—celebrates 60 years of independence from Belgium on June 30.
Monuments like those of Leopold are constant reminders of the dehumanization, exploitation, and silencing of Black people in the Western world. It is estimated that 10 to 15 million Congolese were killed during Leopold’s reign of brutality. Thanks to the Black Lives Matter movement, Belgium is beginning to publicly acknowledge the Congolese people’s suffering over the last 150 years, as the country finally listens to activists familiar with this pain.
Now it’s America’s turn to listen, particularly as it charts its own plans for foreign nations. Calls for greater racial diversity are growing within the foreign-policy establishment. As former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Susan Rice famously said, the U.S. foreign-policy establishment is “white, male, and Yale,” and that must change.
But policymakers also need to ensure that as the field becomes more racially diverse, the contributions of diaspora communities are meaningful and robust. One of the clearest ways to do so is to change the terms of who gets to develop formal policy.
Personnel is policy, and, as it stands, white foreign-policy experts dominate both the discussion and the decision-making.Personnel is policy, and, as it stands, white foreign-policy experts dominate both the discussion and the decision-making. But the United States is home to sizable diaspora communities, such as those from India, Nigeria, and Haiti, which possess specialized knowledge, lived experience, and expertise. U.S. policymakers would be wise to seek out and include these voices.
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Voices and Soul
by Justice Putnam, Black Kos Poetry Editor
Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, though born a free woman in the time of slavery, was nonetheless, a fierce advocate for abolition and equal rights. She was part of the Free Produce Movement, a boycott of goods made with slave labor. "Free" meant, "not enlsaved" and "Produce" was any good or crop made or harvested by human effort. Some have argued how effective the movement was, given that slavery existed for almost a century before the movement's inception. But whether a boycott is against "Blood Diamonds", or "Sweat Shop Fabric", an individual stand, indeed, carries great power. It brings about irrevocable change. like waves wearing away rock along the coast line, or a tsunami tearing down the monuments to oppression in a moment. When asked by the landed gentry of the times, why she would boycott goods made by her "people", she insisted that what she owned was Free. What she owned was manufactured by men and women of their own Free Will, who were paid an honest wage for an honest day's work. She insisted that what she owned was not extracted by the whip and the lash, by the tearing apart of families, by the eternal scarring of the flesh and the Soul.
“… Oh, lightly shall it press my form,
Unladen with a sigh,
I shall not ‘mid its rustling hear,
Some sad despairing cry.
This fabric is too light to bear
The weight of bondsmen’s tears,
I shall not in its texture trace
The agony of years… “
- Frances Ellen Watkins Harper
“Free Labor”
That is why reparations are such an important dynamic in righting these wrongs. Families were torn apart, goods were manufactured by men and women against their free will and they are owed something, plus interest. And since property is sacrosanct in this country, and the god given right to pass property to our heirs even more so, it only seems fair that the descendants of slaves should be paid the wages, plus interest, owed to their ancestors brought here under the whip and the lash, and against Free Will itself.
It is impossible to come up with a fair metric for recompensing slavery ten
generations after slavery’s end.
—Ben Shapiro, Fox News
What apple, which conquistador
oats? Which ruby red
moat, what filet of bartered goat?
Which glazed carrot caught your nose,
drew you into the station
w/ blinders on? Horse’s ass.
Quaffed cad. Whatdoya call a
property tax on a revolving
accessory? What’s a loan
w/o a lessor, B? Which of these
eventualities is not like the other—free
& clear from the shattering / a mast
of tears makes / when it fractures /
scalpels away / silt / clean off
a runaway cliff,
before gashing the quarry w/ after-
shot? I’ll take my safety net in breakneck
class action union wage annuity checks
from Ancestry.com, 23 & Everybody
Who’s Made a Killing Trafficking
in Families & Trees. Run me my knot,
Money. Untie my limbs. Underwrite
the court costs, plus notary fees
to petition my change of surname.
Now multiply that expense by a modest
interest rate accrued over 154 summers,
give or take. Or strap weights
to your ankles / go float in a lake.
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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.