Commentary by BlackKos editor JoanMar
I had no intention of watching ABC’s Michael Strahan interview with Sgt. Jon Mattingly. For one, I wondered why ABC would send an entertainer/sports personality to conduct a face-to-face that has nothing to do with either sport or entertainment. Secondly, having seen the email the unrepentant cop sent out after his part in Breonna’s execution became public, I didn’t think it prudent to subject myself — especially my heart — to even a few minutes of listening to him. But then I thought, if I’m gonna bear witness, it had better be accurate, no? And so I watched it. Michael did a barely tolerable job.
I didn’t expect any genuine remorse from the man whose hand glows red from Breonna’s spilled blood, and I was not disappointed. What Mattingly was intent on having you understand from the get-go, however, was that Breonna’s death was different from all those other race killings. This murder, he wants you to know, had absolutely nothing to do with race. Nothing at all...because he doesn’t have one racist bone in his body, don’t ya know.
"This had nothing to do with race," he said. "Nothing at all...“This is not us going, hunting somebody down. This is not kneeling on a neck. It's nothing like that.”
Did you pick up that he repeated verbatim the words of race traitors Shaq and Charles Barkley? That’s how these clueless Black men continue to allow themselves to be used as weapons against our community. Despite the quote above, Mattingly quickly forgot his premise and spilled the beans:
"There's a reason the police were there that night," he said. "And if you're law-abiding citizen, the only contact you'll probably ever have with the police is running into them in Thorntons or if you get a speeding ticket. Other than that, unless you know them, you're not really dealing with the police. (my bold)
Just a reminder that the so-called “war on drugs” is, for the most part, a pretense to target, harass, criminalize, and imprison Black and Brown people and as such, what brought them to that apartment on that night have everything to do with race. I’ll bet my dinner money that on the night those three cops took out Breonna because she had an association with a known petty drug dealer, there were more drugs in the rooms of any number of white college kids than anything Jamarcus Glover has seen in his life.
The war on drugs thus offers seamless continuity with the most shameful episodes of our past. Slaves were bound in plantations from which they could not escape. Now, it is prisons that deprive black men of their freedom. For African-American men between the ages of 20 and 29, almost one in three are currently under the thumb of the criminal justice system.6
The drug war's uncanny revisiting of the badges and indicia of slavery began, ironically enough, as a slogan from the Party of Lincoln: a ""war on drugs"" to outdo the Democrats' ""war on poverty.""
It wasn’t about race, he insists, but I’m hard put to find any daylight between Mattingly’s view of Black people and that of the KKK...or donald trump, for that matter.
“I didn't understand the racial injustices as a kid because my friends were Black,” Mattingly said. “Just, it didn't click to me that there was this, this visceral hate out there. I didn't know that. So when somebody calls me a racist, I do (find) it offensive.”
In talking about Black protestors, the newly-minted sociologist said:
“They'll try to blame it on coronavirus, but that's not the case,” he said. “I think it's put a very ugly look on the city. I don't know what it's gonna take to recover from that.”
Like all of his fellow racists, this cop claims to be very upset about property damage in the city even while at the same time he cannot begin to fathom why protestors would be upset about the loss of innocent human life. True to form, he went on to attribute Black anger, Black anguish, Black frustration to “visceral hate.”
Michael Strahan was so not prepared for the interview...and it showed. Here are some questions I’d want Mattingly to answer:
1. You expected Ms. Taylor to be alone; did you consider her to be armed and dangerous?
2. What was so urgent about this case that you were forced to kick down Breonna’s door in the middle of the night?
3. Does a black man have the right to protect his castle? To protect his woman?
4. What did you recover from Ms. Taylor’s apartment? Did you find the drugs you convinced your superiors would be there? Did you find the wads of cash? The cache of weapons?
5. Why did you not render aid to the injured woman? You wanted her dead, didn’t you?
6. You initially blamed Ms. Taylor’s killing on her boyfriend; why did you lie?
7. Your department stalked Ms. Taylor for 2 ½ months; you knew she wasn’t involved in any drug ring and yet after you killed her — and failed to find any incriminating evidence in her apartment — the decision was made to bribe her ex into implicating her. Why?
8. Given that the evidence shows that white people both sell and consume drugs at a greater rate than Black people, you care to share how many “no-knock” or “knock-and-announce” raids you have personally led in white neighborhoods?
I have no idea why ABC thought it judicious to allow itself to be used as a vehicle for the further gaslighting of our traumatized community. I personally didn’t hear anyone clamoring to hear Mattingly’s “side of the story.” Did you? We are perfectly content to wait to hear his side of the story when it’s presented by his defense at his trial. I certainly do hope that he’ll still be forced to explain to a jury of his peers all the happenings of the night of March 13, 2020.
In the meantime, year-to-date, cops have killed 999 people. We still have 70 days to go. Clearly, the fight continues...
Rest in peace, Breonna.
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NEWS ROUND UP BY DOPPER0189, BLACK KOS MANAGING EDITOR
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Zeek is an autistic young African American male with elite memory, intellect and a mind that can see everything. Li is a witty Asian American girl who, while born blind, has super smell and other enhanced senses thanks to her cross-modal neuroplasticity disorder. Sweet Pea, Zeek’s little sister, has sickle cell disease, but also a “melting hearts” superpower that allows her to manipulate minds to make any adult or child more loving, understanding and humble. They are part of Team Supreme — an animated series about a crime-fighting group of special-needs kids whose disabilities double as superpowers, currently in development with producers Lena Waithe and Jason Weaver.
“I want to see different-looking characters, man,” Joshua Leonard, the show’s creator, tells me passionately over the phone. “And because the animation industry didn’t have Black creators or Black animators like they should, that was me slapping them back.”
Leonard, 37, is an animator and character designer for Netflix, whose journey has been all but easy. Born in Miami to a military family as the youngest of three boys, Joshua lived everywhere from Alaska to D.C. before finally settling in Mississippi. He and his brothers were all athletic too, playing football and baseball. Leonard had big-time college potential as a running back, but a knee injury turned him off the sport. His love has always been drawing — ever since kindergarten, when his eldest brother taught him. “Once I learned how to draw Garfield, I never put that pencil down,” he says.
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It’s official. Channing Dungey has been named Chairman of Warner Bros. Television Group.
Dungey succeeds Peter Roth, who revealed on Friday that he was leaving the studio after 22 years.
The move comes ten days after Deadline revealed Dungey had stepped down as VP Original Content and head of drama at Netflix after 20 months at the streamer to pursue another opportunity.
It also follows the surprise departure of WBTV President Susan Rovner, who was widely considered Roth’s heir apparent, to become Chairman, Entertainment Content for NBCUniversal’s TV & streaming unit.
Dungey, who will join the studio in early 2021, will report to Ann Sarnoff, Chair and CEO, WarnerMedia Studios and Networks Group.
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Malaria kills hundreds of thousands of people every year, especially young children. It’s also exceptionally dangerous to another at-risk group: pregnant women.
Researchers have estimated that 10 to 20 percent of maternal mortality in countries where malaria is endemic is malaria-related. That’s almost 30,000 women every year. Pregnancy loss, and long-term disability caused by exposure to malaria in utero, are even more common. And many drugs that are used to save people dying of malaria are not safe to use during pregnancy, or are not widely used even though they are safe.
A new study published in The Lancet: Child and Adolescent Health offers a comprehensive account of just how much this deadly disease affects pregnant women — and suggests that changing treatment options could significantly improve the situation.
Even as we’ve fought to combat malaria deaths worldwide, we haven’t done as much as we could for pregnant women — and the overall toll of malaria is much larger than we might realize, when its effects on pregnancy loss are fully considered.
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In the minutes before the shooting began, hundreds of mostly young protesters at a toll gate in Lagos, were sitting on the hot ground on a Tuesday evening, waving Nigerian flags, singing the national anthem and defying the government.
Protesters had braced themselves, prepared for when security forces would surely arrive, said 21-year-old Shola Abdul, a kitchen assistant, to enforce a 24-hour curfew across the state that effectively banned mass protests against police brutality.
“We thought if they came and saw we were with our flags, trying to move our country forward, that they would see that,” he said. “But then when they came they just acted like animals.”
The protests began earlier this month, over rampant abuses perpetrated by the notorious special anti-robbery squad (Sars), a police unit with a reputation for corruption and torture, capturing global attention.
According to witnesses, dozens of soldiers disembarked from at least four trucks, flanked by police officers. They approached the scene of a major protest site where more than a thousand people had taken over a toll gate in Lekki, a large district in Lagos Island.
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Kevin Glogower, who is now representing two anonymous grand jurors in the case, had previously asked the judge to release discovery information and to allow jurors to speak publicly, despite long-standing practices against doing so.
He said he filed the motion over concerns about public trust and transparency, and accused the Kentucky Attorney General Daniel Cameron of using the jurors as a shield to deflect accountability. Cameron's office denied those claims and said it was "confident" that it had presented a thorough case.
Glogower's clients released a statement following Tuesday's order, claiming that prosecutors only presented the three wanton endangerment charges against Hankison.
"Being one of the jurors on the Breonna Taylor case was a learning experience. The three weeks of service leading up to that presentation showed how the grand jury normally operates. The Breonna Taylor case was quite different. After hearing the Attorney General Daniel Cameron's press conference, and with my duty as a grand juror being over, my duty as a citizen compelled action," the statement said. "The grand jury did not have homicide offenses explained to them. The grand jury never heard anything about those laws. Self defense or justification was never explained either."
They said "questions were asked about additional charges," but the grand jury was told there would be none because the prosecutors didn't feel they could make them stick.
"The grand jury didn't agree that certain actions were justified, nor did it decide the indictment should be the only charges in the Breonna Taylor case," the statement said. "The grand jury was not given the opportunity to deliberate on those charges and deliberated only on what was presented to them. I cannot speak for other jurors but I can help the truth be told."
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Kwan’s “Chinese Protest Recipes” is a zine with a mission: to use Chinese food to foreground Asian American/Black American solidarity at a time when white supremacy poses an existential threat to Black communities. The project, produced in partnership with Ronald Tau of the Toronto-based design group Meat Studio, features a number of Chinese food recipes sprinkled with anti-racist reminders like “TALK TO YOUR ASIAN FAMILIES ABOUT ANTI-BLACK BEHAVIOR AND ATTITUDE” and “STOP KILLING BLACK PEOPLE.”
The zine is free to download, with the directive to donate to organizations that are already doing anti-racist work, like Color of Change or Black Women in Motion. It’s part of a growing movement to “food-fundraise” for anti-racism. In June, the celebrated executive pastry chef Paola Velez and two other Washington, D.C., chefs pulled their efforts together to create Bakers Against Racism, a decentralized bake sale that raised funds for existing anti-racist organizations. They raised $1.6 million their first week.
In the zine, the dishes themselves boast charged names that underscore the zine’s political messaging: A.C.A.B. crabs, anti-racist a-choy, and F.T.P. fried rice, for instance.
“[The zine] really came out of George Floyd’s death,” Kwan said, “and asking myself, ‘How can we be better friends and allies to the Black community, and how have I, as someone who is not going through the same experiences of police brutality but is frustrated by a lack of change, how can I continue to stay silent?’ … This is my version of really speaking up and saying enough is enough in the world that I know, which is as a Chinese person who cooks Chinese food.”
Kwan is Chinese-Canadian, but he has a nuanced take on the complicated relationship between Asian-American and Black American communities. He points to the way racial groups have historically been pitted against each other in mainstream narratives as a significant barrier to progress.
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