Commentary by Black Kos Editor Denise Oliver-Velez
I offer my heartfelt congratulations to Kamala Harris for being Joe Biden’s pick for VP!!! (And now back to the scheduled commentary)
Today, I’d like to explore prominent Black women who could have a future role in Democratic administrations or on the Supreme Court. Meet Sherrilyn Ifill, President and director-counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, who is one of my favorite follows on Twitter. Last night she posted a Twitter thread which I would like you all to see.
Here’s Harry & his wife Harriette Moore. Mr. Moore was head of the state NAACP in FL. He organized against the wrongful conviction of 3 young Black men & killing of one by a racist local Sheriff. On Christmas Eve in 1951 racists bombed Moore’s home killing Moore and his wife.
In 1961 John Lewis and James Zwerg were savagely beaten by white racists in Alabama when they participated in the Freedom Rides, a non-violent campaign against segregation in public accommodation.
Maybe members of Congress were willing to sit down & debate with civil rights leaders? Here’s the “Southern Manifesto” signed by 101 members of Congress, in which they vowed to use all legal means to defeat integration mandated by Brown v Bd of Ed.
americanradioworks.publicradio.org/features/marsh…
Maybe they were willing to “sit down and talk to” civil rights lawyers? Here’s legendary atty C.B. King in 1962 (left) after he was bludgeoned by Sheriff Cull Campbell, when Atty King arrived at the jail in to check on a civil rights protester in Cull’s custody in Georgia.
Or perhaps there was a willingness to “debate” w/women civil rights leaders? Fannie Lou Hamer was savagely beaten in Indianola, MS in 1963 for attempting to register to vote. Amelia Boynton was beaten unconscious in Selma on Bloody Sunday in 1965 at a peaceful voting rights march.
Maybe it was better in the North. And surely everyone was ready to sit down and talk with civil rts activists after the passage of the Voting Rights Act. Here MLK’s aides try to protect him after he was hit by a rock at his non-violent march for fair housing in Chicago in 1966.
In Chicago, Fred Hampton, the charismatic chair of the IL Black Panther Party chair was assassinated by Chicago police in his bed. He was 21 years old.
And of course....
No matter the tactics, the region, the gender, the background, the demand - civil rights activists in the 50s and 60s were met with determined, unrelenting and often violent resistance by whites on the streets, in the halls of “justice,” in the statehouse and halls of Congress.
And for those who think it’s not worth it take on this kind of crap, I disagree. It is a monstrous affront to those who suffered and were martyred fighting for full citizenship for Black people and to make this country live up to its promise of equality.
Critiques of today’s activists that emanate from our own communities are too often a less offensive but still problematic version of the Kilmeade narrative. “If only our young ppl behaved like John Lewis!” Or “notice how well-dressed those young ppl were at the lunch counter.”
There’s no perfect way to confront the violence of white supremacy. And the pitched and often brutal response of white supremacist individuals and institutions to activists during the Civil Rights Movement demonstrates this.
In case you missed her interview on 60 Minutes back in June, here are segments.
"Not even when we're dying will they believe us."
Ifill, in her current position at the NAACP LDF is following in the footsteps of Thurgood Marshall. When people throw names around about Black women they would like to see on the Supreme Court, she is one of the first people who is not a judge, that comes to my mind.
A brief bio:
The youngest of 10 children, Ifill was raised in New York City and educated in the public schools. She graduated from Vassar College, and from New York University School of Law.
After graduating law school, Ms. Ifill served first as a fellow at the American Civil Liberties Union and then for five years as an Assistant Counsel in LDF’s New York office, where she litigated voting rights cases in the south. During her tenure at LDF, Ms. Ifill litigated numerous cases including the landmark Voting Rights Act case Houston Lawyers’ Association vs. Attorney General of Texas, in which the Supreme Court held that judicial elections are covered by the provisions of section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. In 1993, Ms. Ifill left LDF to join the faculty of the University of the Maryland School of Law, where, in addition to teaching Civil Procedure, Constitutional Law and a variety of seminars, she continued to litigate and consult on a broad and diverse range of civil rights cases. While at Maryland she developed an environmental justice clinical offering and co-founded one of the first legal clinics in the nation devoted to removing legal barriers to formerly incarcerated persons seeking to responsibly re-enter society. Ifill also created a clinical offering focused on advancing legal remedies for historical violations of international human rights law and norms.
Since returning to LDF in 2013, Ifill has increased the visibility and engagement of the organization in cutting edge and urgent civil rights issues including policing reform, voter suppression and housing discrimination.
She is the author of, with Bryan Stevenson, On the Courthouse Lawn: Confronting the Legacy of Lynching in the Twenty-First Century and co-author of A Perilous Path: Talking Race, Inequality, and the Law.
I hope, if you aren’t following her — you will.
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NEWS ROUND UP BY DOPPER0189, BLACK KOS MANAGING EDITOR
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The vast Black-white disparities in housing are the foundation of America’s systemic racial inequalities, and white folks of all political stripes are loath to upset the status quo. The Nation: Trump Supports Housing Segregation—and So Do a Lot of White Liberals
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In recent weeks, just after the umpteenth round of media reports about the president’s purported change in tone, Donald Trump resumed stoking white people’s fears of Black people. This time, his racist outbursts were directed at “all of the people living their Suburban Lifestyle Dream,” who he indicated would find themselves living in a multiracial nightmare if Joe Biden is elected.
“People have gone to the suburbs. They want the beautiful homes. They don’t have to have a low-income housing development built in their community…which has reduced the prices of their homes and also increased crime substantially,” Trump stated during a virtual rally with supporters. A day later in Texas, he picked up right where he left off. “I’ve seen conflict for years. It’s been hell for suburbia. We rescinded the rule three days ago. So enjoy your life, ladies and gentlemen. Enjoy your life.” The rule Trump rescinded was issued by the Obama administration in 2015 and required localities to track recurring issues around housing discrimination and create detailed plans for how to fix those problems. It aimed to strengthen the Fair Housing Act, the same anti-discrimination legislation the Justice Department sued Trump for violating in 1973. Almost 50 years after losing that case, he is still suggesting that whiteness should be the default measure of safety and affluence of a neighborhood while the mere presence of Blackness threatens both. The president says these kinds of overtly racist things partly because he believes them but also because—particularly when an election is on the line—they almost always work.
Even as the suburbs lean more Democratic than in the past, recent examples of white liberal NIMBYism prove that Trump knows precisely which anti-Black buttons to push. In Silver Spring, Md., as local officials consider proposals to eliminate exclusionary zoning policies that prevent more affordable housing from being built, residents have staged protests and taken to social media to register bitter complaints. (“I doubt that any of my neighbors want to stop living in their single family homes because an academic has told them it’s racist to own a house with a large yard,” one poster wrote.) Last year a group of wealthy homeowners in San Francisco launched a GoFundMe campaign to pay the costs of waging a court battle against a homeless services center slated to be built in their neighborhood. In Maplewood, N.J.—where, according to The New York Times, Black Lives Matter signs are a common lawn adornment—a group of Black parents had to file a lawsuit in 2018 to force the desegregation of district public schools. And in New York City, after learning their children would be rezoned to a majority African American school, white parents publicly worried about the danger posed by Black elementary schoolkids. The rezoning went forward as planned, but most of the white kids never made the transfer, presumably because their parents sought whiter learning environs.
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Since May, such empty denunciations of “systemic racism” have become all too common. The CEO of Taco Bell announced that “we have a lot of work to do to combat systemic racism in America”; the company that makes Tasers, of all things, wants to fight “systemic inequity, racism, and injustice”; and George W. Bush recently wondered, “How do we end systemic racism in our society?” (He pledged to “listen” more.) By invoking a system without naming one, they had managed to say as little as possible, and do even less.
Systemic racism has various synonyms, notably “institutional racism,” the phrase made famous by Charles V. Hamilton and Stokely Carmichael in their 1967 book, Black Power. “Racism,” they wrote, “takes two, closely related forms: individual whites acting against individual blacks, and acts by the total white community against the black community. We call these individual racism and institutional racism…. When a black family moves into a home in a white neighborhood and is stoned, burned or routed out, they are victims of an overt act of individual racism which many people will condemn—at least in words. But it is institutional racism that keeps black people locked in dilapidated slum tenements, subject to the daily prey of exploitative slumlords, merchants, loan sharks, and discriminatory real estate agents.”
Hamilton and Carmichael had hoped the idea of “institutional racism” would compel people to name the guilty institutions. “Systemic racism,” on the other hand, offers little more than a gesture of recognition that racism is deeply rooted in American life. It alludes to a system as ubiquitous as oxygen, conjuring something pervasive and placeless, and hence blameless. This is perhaps why corporations feel comfortable using it. But if a problem has deep roots, then it needs to be attacked there, and not just with words. No listening tour, lip-quivering confession, or strongly worded statement about “systemic racism” can topple the institutions that sustain a racist society—schools, where police enforce discipline with violence; prisons, the backbone of a vast carceral economy; shuttered public hospitals; dilapidated city parks; or segregated, unaffordable housing.
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As a nurse, pastor, single mom, and Black Lives Matter Ferguson activist, Cori Bush has been on the frontlines for years, which also means she’s not Missouri’s average representative. Yet those are the attributes that led Bush to win her primary race last night (August 4), 48.6 percent to 45.5 percent, against the 20-year incumbent Rep. William Lacy Clay (D-MO.), CNN reported today (August 5). Bush had also run against Clay in 2018 but lost.
“They counted us off. They called me, you know, I’m just the protestor. I’m just the activist with no name, no real title and money,” Bush said at the start of her acceptance speech. “That’s all they said I was, but St. Louis showed up today.” If Bush is elected in November, it’ll be the first time her state will send a Black woman to Congress.
Bush’s political trajectory started six years ago when 18-year-old Michael Brown was killed by Ferguson police on August 9, 2014. (No charges will be brought against the former officer who shot and killed him, the Washington Post reported on July 30.) “I was maced and beaten by those same police officers in those same streets,” Bush said during her speech. “Six months from now as the first Black Congresswoman in the entire history of the state of Missouri, I will be holding them accountable.”
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Victories haven’t come so easily for progressive Democrats in the past few years. But that’s changed because of the major crises of the moment as the country is roiled by a long-overdue reckoning on racism, triggered by protests against police mistreatment of Black Americans.
“I think the environment is being largely driven by conversations on race. And I think increasingly that is through the lens of economics as well,” the veteran Democratic strategist Brandon Davis said. “It’s broadly defined. I think increasingly that is through the lends of economics as well. It’s broadly defined to the extent these candidates are leaning into these issues, they’re finding more traction.”
The lead-up to 2020 has been marked by a wave of outside groups boosting progressive candidates. Some of those groups enhanced their infrastructure while others emerged with very specific missions.
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Born in Rio’s favelas, Anitta became Brazil’s biggest pop star. Then a political awakening made her even more influential. She talks Bolsonaro, Black Lives Matter and bisexuality. The Guardian: Brazilian pop sensation Anitta: 'Run for president? I'm 27!'
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Some Latin pop stars such as Maluma and Bad Bunny sing in their native language as a marker of authenticity, but Anitta says that because Brazil hasn’t had a major international pop star before, she’ll use whatever language will get the market’s attention. “They didn’t need [to sing in English] because they already had representatives like Shakira, like Ricky Martin, like J-Lo,” she says. “There’s no person in Brazil that did it.” She jokes she’ll keep learning whatever language she has to to teach people about the sounds and culture of Brazil.
She doesn’t just want to be a musical ambassador, but to paint a full picture of Brazil in 2020, including its harsher realities. She says she “doesn’t approve Bolsonaro’s administration” and that he hasn’t “brought benefits to our nation”. She’s started Instagram Live sessions with Gabriela Prioli, a lawyer who gives classes on Brazilian legislation. Anitta has also spoken out about environmental challenges and, in more recent weeks, the Black Lives Matter movement and colourism – prejudice against darker skin among ethnic minorities – an issue that manifests in injustice and police brutality in predominantly black favelas. In Rio, where Anitta still lives, police killed 606 people between January and April this year.
There are other markers of severe racial inequality. She brings up a much-discussed case in Brazil that has bleakly exposed questions of race and class: Mirtes Santana, a black domestic worker, left her five-year-old son with her boss, a white woman named Sarí Gaspar, while she ran an errand. When she returned, she found Gaspar had left the little boy alone in the elevator of her apartment complex. He wandered toward a window and fell to his death from the ninth floor. Gaspar was arrested but released on bail after paying £3,200. “Now imagine if it was the opposite,” Anitta said. “If there was a cleaner, a black woman, who’d left a kid alone in the elevator, do you think it would have been different?” Her voice shakes with anger.
Despite how vocal Anitta is today, it took a long time for her to speak up. In 2018, eagle-eyed followers noticed she had followed a pro-Bolsonaro Instagram account, and demanded to know if she was planning to support his conservative, anti-LGBTQ campaign. When she didn’t comment, an #AnittaIsOver hashtag began trending on Twitter. She says she had been busy reading everything she could find on Bolsonaro to establish an informed opinion, and after several days shared that he was “not the [candidate] who represented her”. But her statement was too late for some – even now, they see her politically active turn as a marketing strategy.
She doesn’t regret that it took her time to find her political voice. “I don’t have any shame in that, because I’m 27,” she says. “I started to have access to a good education after I got money, after I learned – by myself – how to build my company, how to run my own career. I think that it’s never too late. I’m proud of myself, that I woke up and I was like: ‘It’s important for me to get involved’.”
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Oil production is coming to two “culturally Caribbean” nation on the Caribbean coast of South America, will oil be the curse it has been in most nations?
For five months Guyana has waited to see if the stand-off between its president, David Granger, and the opposition would end in violence, a coup or a peaceful transfer of power. On August 2nd peace prevailed. The Elections Commission declared that Irfaan Ali, the opposition’s candidate, had won the election held on March 2nd. He took office the same day.
Mr Ali had a minuscule lead on election day, but a disputed tally by the chief elections officer gave victory to Mr Granger. A drawn-out recount and legal battles followed. It looked as if Mr Granger, a former army brigadier, was determined to remain in office. He relented under pressure from other countries such as the United States and Britain, the former colonial power, plus regional organisations such as the Caribbean Community. Independent media and Guyana’s private sector lobbied for Mr Granger to go. His supporters plan a court fight, but have little prospect of success.
The transfer of power comes just as Guyana begins to cash in on massive offshore oil deposits (see chart). Thanks to them, the imf expects the economy to grow by 53% this year. In a few years, South America’s third-poorest country, which has one of the world’s highest rates of emigration, will probably be one of its richest. The chance to control the bonanza raised the stakes in the bitter rivalry between Mr Granger’s mainly Afro-Guyanese coalition and Mr Ali’s mainly Indo-Guyanese People’s Progressive Party (ppp), which began before independence in 1966. The winner could hope to stay in power for decades.
in neighboring Suriname
Suriname’s new president, Chan Santokhi, also wondered whether he would take office after winning an election. His period of suspense was shorter. The vote took place on May 25th, and he was sworn in on July 16th. The doubt was whether President Desi Bouterse, who has dominated Suriname’s politics for more than 40 years and was convicted last year by a military court of murdering 15 political opponents in 1982, would yield power.
He did, but has left Mr Santokhi with a mess. Before leaving office Mr Bouterse gave public servants a 50% pay rise, which the government cannot afford. The budget deficit last year exceeded 10% of gdp. Mr Santokhi persuaded public-sector unions to wait for the pay rise. He has begged banks for cash, raised income-tax rates and deferred payment of a loan taken out last year to buy a hydroelectric dam.
Suriname, like Guyana, is an emerging petro-power. Apache, an American oil company, and its French partner, Total, announced this year three big oil finds offshore. Others are about to drill. Surinamese may share Guyanese worries over how well the windfall will be managed. Mr Santokhi is a former police commissioner and justice minister but the new vice-president, Ronnie Brunswijk, seems less strait-laced. He began his career as Mr Bouterse’s bodyguard, fought a guerrilla war against his former boss in the 1980s, and has been convicted by a Dutch court for cocaine smuggling. He owns a football club and a gold-mining business.
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Paisley’s story is one of many like it. Long before the pandemic hit, Black pregnant and birthing people around the country were reporting that doctors disregarded their concerns, ignored their wishes, and put them at risk. Out of 10 similarly wealthy countries, the US had the highest number of maternal deaths per capita in 2018. Black women are disproportionately impacted, dying in childbirth at three to four times the rate of white women.
Now, birthing people and their advocates say the Covid-19 crisis is only exacerbating the discrimination that Black patients and other patients of color already face from providers — one of the main drivers behind their higher rates of maternal mortality. In response, some people are looking outside of hospitals, to midwives, home births, and birthing centers they feel are more likely to provide them with the care they deserve.
Increasing access to such out-of-hospital care is critical to making birth more equitable for Black Americans and others who have faced discrimination in medical settings. But so is improving the health care system at all levels so that people who do give birth in a hospital receive good care there, too.
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Voices and Soul
by
Justice Putnam, Black Kos Poetry Editor
Last Thursday a black woman from Medford, Oregon attempted to conduct a workshop for the Rogue River City Council on systemic racism. After introducing herself and giving a short description of her group and what they do, and even before she could begin her presentation, she was peppered with aggressive questions about why she thought Rogue River was racist and demanding just one piece of evidence that supported a claim of systemic racism.
One would think the knee jerk anger and the impatient questioning would have been proof, but when she pointed out all the Trump signs in town and then took a breath to explain what she meant, that is when Rogue River Police Chief Whipple went off and bellowed she was a commie Trump hater and there is no such thing as systemic racism because it’s a Antifa hoax. She was so shaken she’s gone into hiding and just communicated with a friend a day or so ago to relay she is still shaken, but doing fine.
I decided to pose a public question that I decided to share publicly, is Rogue River a racist town?
“Is Rogue River a racist town? Well, it sure has a lot of unrepentant racists unafraid to be racists. If Rogue River is not a racist town, it sure has a lot of loud mouth racist bullies. Too bad Police Chief Whipple and the City Council enable the racism. How many times has the Dixie Swastika flown in the parade and been sold at Rooster Crow, and then when questioned about it, the racists threaten you? Is Rogue River a racist town? What will the City Council do about plummeting property values because of it and the rampant covid denial? I suspect Rogue River wants to be the Mecca for racists and the Q cult.They sure do seem to attract them. Time to insist Whipple stand up and be a leader, instead of a Trump toadie. Time for the City Council to address the inevitable loss of property values, address the racism and the QAnon covid denial. The time is NOW.”
I intend to get it in the letter’s to the editor here in the region, it already has some social media traction.
So it was shocking when I started to get push back about systemic racism in Rogue River on the Southern Oregon BLM Facebook group. When I explained what had happened on the last work shop day and the history of Proud Boy belligerence, armed guards at the bridge for fear of busloads of BLM Antifa commies invading town and killing us in our sleep, and just the casual white Karen bigotries, I started to get the “boomer” cancel from members of the group, which made me wonder a bit. The group seemed to populated by a lot of white kids, and I thought that could be a good thing, the admins I conversed with were not people of color, but I didn’t think that should matter. But later I found out the admins of the Southern Oregon Black Lives Matter FB group kicked me out and deleted all my posts about systemic racism in the region and Rogue River in particular, and also posts exposing obvious bot accounts calling for the death of boomers by covid, which plays into the RW trope of BLM being a violent terror group. I was attacked by libertarians and BernieBrats there that Biden is a racist and a rapist and to vote for the libertarian candidate. I would steer clear of that group, it is detrimental to the cause and should be exposed for the Vladian propaganda house it is, which seemed obvious after all. I figured and made it clear that if someone purporting to be black, who purports to be an American attending a university in Spain I found out is closed because of the pandemic, who doesn't know what "Auntie" means in the Black American lexicon, that has to be a 400lb guy sitting on a sofa somewhere in Macedonia.
But the clincher was when they accused my former rep Barbara Lee of being a neoliberal sell out and John Lewis a failure, it is clear the group has been taken over by bad actors from a hostile foreign power. I wasn't there to be liked, but because Black Lives Matter, and Black Lives Matter matter little to these Vladian agitators.
I'd never purport to speak for black people or any marginalized group as some paternal savior, but I have and will use my considerable white male entitlement to punch Nazis and bigots & get away with it, for a cause greater than whatever defines my Noblesse Oblige. It's not transactional.
It is what it is.
i’ve left Earth in search of darker planets, a solar system revolving too near a black hole. i’ve left in search of a new God. i do not trust the God you have given us. my grandmother’s hallelujah is only outdone by the fear she nurses every time the blood-fat summer swallows another child who used to sing in the choir. take your God back. though his songs are beautiful, his miracles are inconsistent. i want the fate of Lazarus for Renisha, want Chucky, Bo, Meech, Trayvon, Sean & Jonylah risen three days after their entombing, their ghost re-gifted flesh & blood, their flesh & blood re-gifted their children. i’ve left Earth, i am equal parts sick of your go back to Africa & i just don’t see race. neither did the poplar tree. we did not build your boats (though we did leave a trail of kin to guide us home). we did not build your prisons (though we did & we fill them too). we did not ask to be part of your America (though are we not America? her joints brittle & dragging a ripped gown through Oakland?). i can’t stand your ground. i’m sick of calling your recklessness the law. each night, i count my brothers. & in the morning, when some do not survive to be counted, i count the holes they leave. i reach for black folks & touch only air. your master magic trick, America. now he’s breathing, now he don’t. abra-cadaver. white bread voodoo. sorcery you claim not to practice, hand my cousin a pistol to do your work. i tried, white people. i tried to love you, but you spent my brother’s funeral making plans for brunch, talking too loud next to his bones. you took one look at the river, plump with the body of boy after girl after sweet boi & ask why does it always have to be about race? because you made it that way! because you put an asterisk on my sister’s gorgeous face! call her pretty (for a black girl)! because black girls go missing without so much as a whisper of where?! because there are no amber alerts for amber-skinned girls! because Jordan boomed. because Emmett whistled. because Huey P. spoke. because Martin preached. because black boys can always be too loud to live. because it’s taken my papa’s & my grandma’s time, my father’s time, my mother’s time, my aunt’s time, my uncle’s time, my brother’s & my sister’s time . . . how much time do you want for your progress? i’ve left Earth to find a place where my kin can be safe, where black people ain’t but people the same color as the good, wet earth, until that means something, until then i bid you well, i bid you war, i bid you our lives to gamble with no more. i’ve left Earth & i am touching everything you beg your telescopes to show you. i’m giving the stars their right names. & this life, this new story & history you cannot steal or sell or cast overboard or hang or beat or drown or own or redline or shackle or silence or cheat or choke or cover up or jail or shoot or jail or shoot or jail or shoot or ruin
this, if only this one, is ours.
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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.