#WaitForIt
Commentary by Black Kos Editor Denise Oliver-Velez
Election day, the day we’ve been waiting for is finally here, and many of us have already voted. Some of us are elated and feeling victory in the air, others are nervous and tense. Some of us are afraid due to the lunatic in the White House urging his supporters to do violence.
I’m feeling okay and pretty upbeat. I plan to stay away from most TV watching today, especially the pundits who ramp up anxiety, and do their usual “bothsiderism.” I haven’t forgotten that they helped us get into this mess in the first place by normalizing the white-supremacist currently occupying our White House when he was running against Hillary, and they’ve continued since then.
Here’s hoping the networks and cable news outfits don’t pull their usual bullshit by calling stuff before most votes are counted, and allowing whatever Trump madness gets spewed to be broadcast— however I have little faith that in their battle for viewers and clicks they will abstain from increasing tensions, and spreading disinformation. For them, this is a horse-race and ratings battle. For us it’s about life and death.
I’m still feeling good though, especially because I see a lot of our young folks heading out to vote. They are our future.
The video message posted yesterday by Hamilton star Leslie Odom, Jr. is good advice. I’m posting both his tweet and the YouTube. Please share them.
We’ve waited for this for 4 long years. Let’s get the votes counted — and then we will celebrate.
See you on the other side.
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NEWS ROUND UP BY DOPPER0189, BLACK KOS MANAGING EDITOR
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Fewer Black Americans voted in 2016 than did in 2012.
And while some election watchers, like the New York Times’s Nate Cohn, have argued that a shift of white voters from Democrats to Republicans was the source of Trump’s victory in 2016, others, like Osita Nwanevu for Slate, have posited that lower Black turnout cost Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton the election.
Black voter turnout decreased by 7 percentage points from 2012 to 2016. It was the first decline in Black voter turnout in 20 years, according to the Pew Research Center, and the steepest decline in participation by any ethnic group since white turnout fell by about 10 percentage points from 1992 to 1996.
It is possible the decline is due to Barack Obama not being on the ticket; the last election without him, held in 2004, had a Black voter participation rate of 60.3 percent, 0.7 percentage points higher than in 2016. Other hypotheses have been raised as well — like that Black voters soured on Clinton due to her association with criminal justice policies that negatively affected Black communities (and her use of racist language to defend them) or that the Black vote was suppressed by Russian actors and Republican policies.
Whether any, or all of these, or something else entirely was the root cause of the decline is difficult to say — and that’s something that’s still being researched today. But the 17 activists, party officials, and voters that I spoke to across the country said they think things might be different this time.
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Thirty years after the Americans with Disabilities Act became law, those on the frontlines say the next wave in the movement demands disability justice. ColorLines: To Be BIPOC, Disabled and Fighting for Justice
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Last month, the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) celebrated its 30th anniversary since becoming law on July 26, 1990. The ADA made it illegal to discriminate against anyone who is disabled, and much like the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which it was modeled after, and Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, which says that the disabled cannot be denied federal funding, the ADA was a result of a long- and hard-fought battle.
“It gave us our rights,” acknowledged National Center for Law and Economic Justice civil rights attorney and disability advocate Britney Wilson, who is the same age as the ADA.
While many applaud the law that protects anyone who has “a physical or mental impairment that substantially limits one or more major life activities, a person who has a history or record of such an impairment, or a person who is perceived by others as having such an impairment,” disabled people of color and advocates say a lot more work needs to be done to advance the cause of disability justice.
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“The way my friend was driving, I was scared, I thought we were going to wreck,” White recalled recently. And she was frightened by Talladega police. She ran past some houses, jumped a wire fence and hid in a knot of trees.
Racing off leash, a big police dog tracked her. Its handler, Officer Daniel Chesser, lifted it over the fence. It bounded into the thicket. That’s when White, 26 years old at the time, began to scream in terror, “It’s a girl! It’s a girl!”
Police body camera footage, made public here for the first time, shows White lying face down on the ground to surrender as the dog tore into her backside. “I was helpless,” she said in an interview. “I was already down so the dog grabbed my butt, and he started shaking. He tasted that blood.”
It took a long time for Chesser to pull the dog off. White’s ordeal was only beginning.
The attack in June 2015 was not the first nor the last in the one-year reign of Andor, a Belgian Malinois who bit people in Talladega for minor offenses, for running from police, and sometimes for no crime at all. All but one of those mauled were Black. They didn’t use weapons, and the city dropped most charges against them.
From the summer of 2014 to the summer of 2015, Andor sent at least nine people to the hospital, brought the FBI to Talladega and prompted five lawsuits from people he bit. His story, pieced together mostly from thousands of court records and police videos, reveals what can go wrong when a small town employs a powerful animal to police petty crime.
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Jacob Wohl, 22, and Jack Burkman, 54, were ordered on Wednesday to call back all the recipients of their robocalls whom they spread misinformation to by 5 p.m. on Thursday or they will be in contempt of court. The men are out of jail on a bond of $100,000 according to Metro Times.
They came together to allegedly spread false information to folks in places like Detroit and Ohio to stop them from voting.
“Mail-in voting sounds great, but did you know that if you vote by mail, your personal information will be part of a public database that will be used by police departments to track down old warrants and be used by credit card companies to collect outstanding debts? The CDC is even pushing to use records for mail-in voting to track people for mandatory vaccines. Don’t be finessed into giving your private information to the man, stay safe and beware of vote by mail,” the call said.
They made about 12,000 calls that were false and illegal in Detroit and U.S. District Court Judge Victor Marrero called it “electoral terror.”
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The National Fraternal Order of Police claimed in a post that the child was "wandering" barefoot during unrest in the city. "This child was lost during the violent riots in Philadelphia, wandering around barefoot in an area that was experiencing complete lawlessness" the post read. "The only thing this Philadelphia police officer cared about in that moment was protecting this child. "
The union tweeted out a statement on Friday saying they took the post down after learning there were "conflicting accounts of the circumstances under which the child came to be assisted by the officer."
A video of the incident appears to show the boy and his mother being pulled from their vehicle and being separated. The clip then appears to show the woman being assaulted by officers.
Attorneys Riley H. Ross III and Thomas O. Fitzpatrick, who are representing Young in a civil case, both called out the union. Ross tweeted the photo is "a lie."
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Voices and Soul
by Justice Putnam, Black Kos Poetry Editor
Today is Colin Kaepernick's birthday and it is important to remember he grew up in the Sacramento area of California and was routinely stopped by police for being black, even after his $20 Million dollar contract. When he made his silent protest by not standing for the jingoistic practice of the National Anthem during preseason football games, the wrath of the usual suspects was palpable. Police Unions demanded he apologize, thus proving part of Kaepernick's criticisms. The Military pays the NFL millions to capitalize on the Patriotism brand, and Colin threatened to ruin that. The common garden-variety racists stupidly spent over $130 for each Kaepernick jersey to burn.
Yet, Kaepernick is accused of not knowing what he is talking about. He is accused because he is not black enough, he is too rich, he is just a jock and jocks don't know shit.
Colin Kaepernick knows what he is talking about because Colin Kaepernick is The Lone German.
The Lone German's silent protest has a sad postscript, though. After his refusal to click his heels and yell "zieg heil" with a raised right arm, his Jewish wife and daughter were apprehended and later gassed. He was conscripted against his will into the infantry, and a month later, went mysteriously Missing in Action in Croatia.
Colin Kaepernick knows EXACTLY what he is talking about.
in the backseat of my car are my own sons,
still not yet Tamir’s age, already having heard
me warn them against playing with toy pistols,
though my rhetoric is always about what I don’t
like, not what I fear, because sometimes
I think of Tamir Rice & shed tears, the weeping
all another insignificance, all another way to avoid
saying what should be said: the Second Amendment
is a ruthless one, the pomp & constitutional circumstance
that says my arms should be heavy with the weight
of a pistol when forced to confront death like
this: a child, a hidden toy gun, an officer that fires
before his heart beats twice. My two young sons play
in the backseat while the video of Tamir dying
plays in my head, & for everything I do know, the thing
I don’t say is that this should not be the brick and mortar
of poetry, the moment when a black father drives
his black sons to school & the thing in the air is the death
of a black boy that the father cannot mention,
because to mention the death is to invite discussion
of taboo: if you touch my sons the crimson
that touches the concrete must belong, at some point,
to you, the police officer who justifies the echo
of the fired pistol; taboo: the thing that says that justice
is a killer’s body mangled and disrupted by bullets
because his mind would not accept the narrative
of your child’s dignity, of his right to life, of ?his humanity,
and the crystalline brilliance you saw when your boys first breathed;
the narrative must invite more than the children bleeding
on crisp fall days; & this is why I hate it all, the people around me,
the black people who march, the white people who cheer,
the other brown people, Latinos & Asians & all the colors of humanity
that we erase in this American dance around death, as we
are not permitted to articulate the reasons we might yearn
to see a man die; there is so much that has to disappear
for my mind not to abandon sanity: Tamir for instance, everything
about him, even as his face, really and truly reminds me
of my own, in the last photo I took before heading off
to a cell, disappears, and all I have stomach for is blood,
and there is a part of me that wishes that it would go away,
the memories, & that I could abandon all talk of making it right
& justice. But my mind is no sieve & sanity is no elixir & I am bound
to be haunted by the strength that lets Tamir’s father,
mother, kinfolk resist the temptation to turn everything
they see into a grave & make home the series of cells
that so many of my brothers already call their tomb.
-- Reginald Dwayne Betts
"When I Think of Tamir Rice While Driving"
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