On the Matter of Wanting to Throw Some [Hot...Very Hot!] Grits
Commentary by Chitown Kev
I believe that it was earlier this year in February that I ran into someone that I know to be a Daily Kos reader (and one of my regular readers, as it turns out) on my job. He’s a nice guy, very encouraging and complimentary of my writing, actually, and when I do see him we occasionally briefly discuss a piece that I wrote.
So on this occasion in late February when I encountered this Daily Kos...lurker?, he asked me a simple question: Why didn’t black voters seem interested in (the name of a Democratic primary candidate)?
I could have easily answered the question; it has been much discussed here on Daily Kos, at other Democratic-leaning blogs, and in other social media forums like Facebook and Twitter. Instead, I muttered something that I don’t remember, shrugged my shoulders, and kept on working.
That late February encounter was one of the first things that came to mind when I read André Naquian-Wheeler’s interview with San Francisco Mayor London Breed posted at Vogue magazine; an interview that, for a time, focused specifically on so-called white activism on behalf of black folks and Mayor Breed did not hold back.
Does it feel like the concerns of San Francisco’s Black communities are being heard right now?
What’s happening in San Francisco now, and has for so many years, is you have a progressive movement made up of people who are mostly white and feel that they know what’s in the best interest of Black people. I’m over that.
I think it’s important that we support and respect the Black people here enough to know that we have a mind of our own. Because half the policies pushed in San Francisco are “progressive policies” that don’t work for Black people. Because, if they did, why are things far worse for Black people here? In San Francisco, a city where less than 5 to 6% of the population is African American and yet we are disproportionately overrepresented in everything that’s bad: high school dropouts, arrests, homelessness. You name it.
Later in the interview, Mayor Breed responded to Mr. Naquian-Wheeler’s question about protestors that staged a demonstration outside of her home.
...But then they get to my house and start shooting these fireworks off and aiming them at my window and banging on the gate and calling me names to come outside. It was like, what? In the projects, when you come to somebody’s house, you are coming to get your butt beat. Because I will come out and throw some grits on you if you don’t back up! [Laughs] If you’re gonna come protest, come protest on something real. Not on some hypocrite stuff.
OK, first of all, I do have to say that about 98.3% of black people, upon hearing a sista saying anything like “I will come out and throw some grits on you,” will think of how tired they are of being alone or, maybe, a little love and happiness.
If you know what I mean.
It was my very first thought on reading that quote.
When I think about the throwing of [hot...very hot!] grits as a metaphor of a certain...sense of partnership, betrayal, and even, perhaps, love, it does make for a compelling symbolism illustrating the case that Mayor Breed is trying to make.
What’s happening in San Francisco now, and has for so many years, is you have a progressive movement made up of people who are mostly white and feel that they know what’s in the best interest of Black people. I’m over that.
I think it’s important that we support and respect the Black people here enough to know that we have a mind of our own.
I read and hear this complaint about white progressives by black people a lot.
My Twitter TL is filled with this complaint at this very moment. This complaint is, ultimately, at the source of a lot of pie-fights here at Daily Kos. The fraught relationship (and very specific charge) is attested to in written histories of Black Civil Rights Movements and histories of The Left in America. I hear it offline in general conversation.
The way I see it is that it’s yet another side of the coin of white supremacy/superiority: The idea that we know what’s good for you better than you do.
That’s not to say that Mayor London Breed has always been correct in her decision-making as Mayor of San Francisco (in fact, I’m certain that she hasn’t always been correct; no one is).
That’s not to say that “black opinions” are right all of the time...or even most of the time, for that matter.
Even about ourselves and our well-being as a group.
It is saying that black points of view (and there are multiple points of views on a host of issues) should be respected and heard and listened to and considered especially as it concerns our survival and well-being as a group.
And, besides, it’s not as if black people haven’t noticed that maybe white people across the political spectrum aren’t the best-decision makers, either.
(As for my acquaintance, M., we have not had an extended discussion as of yet about politics but I will say that I do know him to be the listening type.)
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NEWS ROUND UP BY DOPPER0189, BLACK KOS MANAGING EDITOR
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LEWIS, WHO SERVED 17 TERMS IN CONGRESS AND WAS ONE OF THE ORGANIZERS OF THE MARCH ON WASHINGTON, HAD BEEN BATTLING STAGE 4 PANCREATIC CANCER. Essence: John Lewis, Congressman And Civil Rights Icon, Dead At 80
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Representative John Lewis, longtime congressman and Civil Rights Movement luminary, died Friday following a battle with pancreatic cancer. He was 80 years old.
“It is with inconsolable grief and enduring sadness that we announce the passing of U.S. Rep. John Lewis,” his family said in a statement. “He was honored and respected as the conscience of the U.S. Congress and an icon of American history, but we knew him as a loving father and brother. He was a stalwart champion in the ongoing struggle to demand respect for the dignity and worth of every human being. He dedicated his entire life to nonviolent activism and was an outspoken advocate in the struggle for equal justice in America. He will be deeply missed.”
Lewis, who protested alongside Martin Luther King and braved state violence on “Bloody Sunday,” the 1965 voting rights march from Selma to Montgomery, was an activist who helped galvanize some of the most important movements for racial equality. He was the last surviving speaker of the 1963 March on Washington, which he helped organize, and where King delivered his historic “I Have a Dream” speech.
In December, Lewis announced that he was battling stage 4 pancreatic cancer.
“I have been in some kind of fight—for freedom, equality, basic human rights—for nearly my entire life. I have never faced a fight quite like the one I have now,” Lewis said in a statement at the time. “While I am clear-eyed about the prognosis, doctors have told me that recent medical advances have made this type of cancer treatable in many cases, that treatment options are no longer as debilitating as they once were, and that I have a fighting chance.”
The announcement of Lewis’s death followed earlier news Friday of the passing of another civil rights leader, Rev. C.T. Vivian.
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“Sorry for asking, but do you understand that the money belongs to the company and is not your personal fund?”
When Jesse Ghansah saw this question in an email from a prominent white investor in San Francisco while fundraising for his first startup four years ago, he refused the deal.
The 28-year-old Ghanaian entrepreneur, whose business is in Ghana, and his co-founder found it condescending when they were already in Silicon Valley’s prestigious startup development program Y Combinator. “I really doubt that a white founder would be asked the same. There are a lot of systemic issues as a black founder raising money abroad,” he says.
His experience is not uncommon.
While many were wary of speaking publicly, African entrepreneurs told the Guardian about humiliation, discrimination, stereotyping and sometimes racism that they endure in interactions with some of the world’s most prominent investors.
North America-headquartered investors accounted for 42% of all African venture capital deals in the last five years, according to the African Private Equity and Venture Capital Association. Only 20% of venture cash came from Africa-based investors, forcing the continent’s entrepreneurs to seek support from westerners.
Of the top 10 African-based startups that received the highest amount of venture capital in Africa last year, eight were led by foreigners, the Guardian’s analysis of public data revealed.
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Hogan portrays himself as a moderate who cares about minorities, but his decisions tell a different story—particularly his decision to cancel Baltimore’s Red Line. Politico: How Larry Hogan Kept Blacks in Baltimore Segregated and Poor
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In the wake of George Floyd’s killing, the term “structural racism” has moved from the academic world into the public conversation — a shorthand way to talk about why Black Americans can do everything right and still find themselves with less income and wealth than white Americans of similar education, consigned to live in poorer neighborhoods, with fewer opportunities, more repressive policing and worse life outcomes.
If the idea still sounds abstract to policymakers in Washington, they don’t have to look far to observe its realities. They can just drive an hour north, to Baltimore — and see what is not there.
Sorely missing is a long-planned east-west transit route that would connect isolated Black Baltimore neighborhoods to downtown and suburban job centers and to other rail lines. In 2014, the Obama administration offered Maryland a selective “New Starts” grant of $900 million to finally build what was called the Red Line — a project that would not only have connected thousands of Black Marylanders to better jobs but would also create a comprehensive transit system that might restart the Baltimore region’s economy and improve race relations by building literal connections between communities.
Today, there’s no construction of rail in Baltimore. The $900 million has been returned to the federal government. The state of Maryland redirected $736 million of state funds originally set aside for the Red Line to building roads instead — in predominantly white areas. And the U.S. Department of Transportation, which was supposed to investigate whether that decision was illegal and discriminatory, quietly closed the case without making any public findings.
Transportation investment and disinvestment have been central in Baltimore’s long saga of racial segregation and inequity, and the Red Line was the most recent chapter. Since Gov. Larry Hogan killed the Red Line in 2015, it has become a rallying cry for transit and racial-justice activists in Baltimore and beyond.
But the full extent of the injustice is just coming to light. Material obtained by a legal clinic I worked with at Georgetown Law School, through Maryland’s freedom-of-information statute, shows that federal officials acknowledged the potential racial impact of the decision to cancel the Red Line and the possibility that the decision violated civil rights law — and then for unclear reasons, dropped their investigation.
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On a road trip to Detroit, reflections on the car as a symbol of aspiration and adventure. But if you’re Black in America, that lovely machine isn’t always a refuge. New York Times: Black Behind the Wheel
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Driving across Woodward Avenue in Detroit a few weeks ago amid a spirited George Floyd demonstration — this one a 30-mile motorcade into the suburbs, billed as the “I Have a Dream Protest Cruise” — my mind drifted strangely to an empty two-lane highway in Arkansas near the Texas border. The memory was jarring, sweeping me away from this raucous caravan — honking horns, Black-power fists thrust from car windows, the whir of sirens — back to my youth in the spring of 1986.
Twenty-two years old, fresh out of college and cruising into one of the prettiest sunsets I’d ever seen, I was nearing the end of my 1,200-mile journey from Detroit to a summer reporting gig in Dallas. Somewhere outside Texarkana, Ark., the sun perched on the nose of my Honda Accord and guided me for miles like some mystical hood ornament. The moment was exhilarating. Enveloped in the dusky light, the narrow highway rushing toward me, Stevie Wonder’s “Hotter Than July” cranked high, I felt a new kind of freedom, the sort I’d only witnessed in those white boy coming-of-age films like “The Graduate.”
That is, until I heard the shrill siren of a patrol car, and saw flashing lights in my rearview mirror. I cut off my music, and pulled to the side of the highway. A white patrolman, hands on his holster, moved toward my vehicle. The flat endless horizon and dusky light took on a surreal aura. I was petrified. When the patrolman asked for my license and registration, and where I was going, I channeled my elders. I kept my hands visible and was performatively polite, even reverential.
This routine always fills me with self-contempt, but here, on this lonely highway, it seemed to be working. The policeman disappeared into his patrol car, and left me waiting and waiting. Eventually, he returned and without a word, handed me my I.D. and walked off. I sat there for a few moments, shaken. I lived. But a part of me died that day.
Few relationships in America are as complex as the Black man and his automobile. As a native Detroiter, my affection for cars — from the intricacy of their machinery to their potent mythology — is hard-wired into my psyche.
Both of my grandfathers worked in auto factories: Oldsmobiles on my mother’s side, and Buicks on my dad’s. Their labor would pave our way into the middle-class, or at least in aspiration. Family vacations were road trips; movies were drive-ins, Saturday pastimes were me and my buddies sitting on the curb gazing dreamily at passing cars, claiming the coolest, most decked out Corvettes, Mustangs, Trans-Ams and Cadillacs as our own.
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Cedars Memorial Garden in Mineola, Texas, just 75 miles east of Dallas, has ended its historically racist tradition of separating Black and white burial plots.
On Wednesday, Municipal crews dug out a fence that was separating the graves, NBC 5, reported.
The fence is another relic from the Jim Crow era. The cemetery was originally meant to only hold the graves of white people.
The removal of the fence began on Wednesday and was set to be completed in four days, according to the President of the Cedars Memorial Garden, David Collett.
The City Council, especially its manager Mercy Rushing, approved the funding to remove the fence.
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IF YOU ARE NEW TO THE BLACK KOS COMMUNITY, GRAB A SEAT, SOME CYBER EATS, RELAX, AND INTRODUCE YOURSELF.