Centering Blackness
A comment by Chitown Kev
There were a couple of comments in the Sunday Pundit Round-up (one now hidden) that I wanted to respond to today in a general way.
The gist of that decided minority of comments was that the good white folks of places like SE Michigan and the Philadelphia suburbs deserved as much credit for flipping Michigan and Pennsylvania from Trump back to Biden and the Democrats.
and...sure, there’s some truth to that.
Oakland County, Michigan is far from the Oakland County that I remember growing up.
Washtenaw County is the home Ann Arbor, Michigan (University of Michigan), Ypsilanti, and other Democratic cities.
The same goes for Chester County, Pennsylvania along with a number of the other “collar counties” around Philadelphia and even Atlanta, Georgia.
I wouldn’t even dispute that.
Here’s my thing.
After the 2016, there was a lot of vitriol spewed in the press and even by some Democrats here on this blog about low-voter turnout of Black folks in Midwest urban centers like Milwaukee, Detroit, Cleveland, and Philadelphia (well, Philly is not a “Midwestern” city although Pittsburgh is).
In 2020...these cities showed the fu*k out.
Detroit
Philadelphia
Fulton County, Georgia
Milwaukee County, Wisconsin
Municipalities and counties with heavy Black populations that provided a sheer number of votes and huge margins that flipped those states.
Also...I don’t see the Republican Party giving a whole lot of bluster to votes and voters in Oakland County or Chester County, PA, TBH (as Nancy Laffer of the Detroit Free Press pointed out).
So my simple question for those that want to extol the “white vote” is...
If there wasn’t a problem in “centering Blackness” in terms of the 2016 election, then what is the deal in not wanting to “center Blackness” for the 2020 election?
That was the gist of Elie Mystal’s point.
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NEWS ROUND UP BY DOPPER0189, BLACK KOS MANAGING EDITOR
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As the rites of settling the 2020 Presidential election stretched past Tuesday night and into Wednesday morning, the weary analysts on cable news began sounding a similar theme. The Presidency would be decided not simply by a handful of swing states but by a small grouping of districts within those states. That responsibility fell largely to Milwaukee, Detroit, Philadelphia, and Atlanta—places with disproportionately Black and Democratic voting populations. Two of the four cities, Philadelphia and Atlanta, experienced high-profile shootings of Black men by police in the months leading up to the election; a third, Milwaukee, is just forty miles north of Kenosha, Wisconsin, where a third such incident took place. “Democracy is on the ballot,” we have heard ceaselessly since the beginning of the Presidential primary season. The nation could not come back, many warned repeatedly, from a second term under Donald Trump. The fact that a congenitally moderate figure such as Joe Biden could draw this conclusion gave ballast to an idea that many people have recognized from the moment that Trump’s 2016 campaign began to gather momentum: that he represents an existential threat to the nation’s democratic traditions. And, if this is true, it also means that, to a great degree, the future of American democracy hinges on the actions of Black people living in places that this system has consistently failed.
This year marks the centennial of the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment and the hundred-and-fiftieth anniversary of the ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment. Between them, the two acts enshrined the franchise for women and for Black men—an expansion of the compact of democracy that seems even more notable given that, in this election, Black women, a population that required two Constitutional amendments and the Voting Rights Act to gain the franchise, have voted for Biden at a rate of ninety-one per cent. The Nineteenth Amendment, which came in the midst of Progressive Era reforms to American society, was the yield of an interracial movement that pushed for suffrage as a fundamental right of citizenship—and its significance has been rightly commemorated this year. But the animating principles of the Fifteenth Amendment have gone comparatively unnoticed. The Amendment was part of an audacious Republican plan to create a new—and, likely, Republican—Black electorate to counterbalance the white, mostly Democratic voting bloc in the South. In 1860, Southern Democrats, flush with the disproportionate power granted to them by the Electoral College, had torn the Union in half and instigated four years of bloody internecine warfare. Mindful of this history, in December, 1868, Senator Aaron Cragin, of New Hampshire, and Representative William Kelley, of Pennsylvania, introduced drafts of what eventually became the Fifteenth Amendment. Black voters were meant to be a bulwark against a similar regime arising to again threaten national unity—which is to say that people who had scarcely ever experienced democracy were now among its chief safeguards. The lynching campaigns and terrorism that disenfranchised Black people in the South in the decades that followed weren’t only an expression of racism, though they were very much that; they were an attack on the mechanisms that were put in place to inhibit one of the nation’s worst habits: a gleeful expression of defiance toward a government that dared try to uphold democracy.
The symmetry of the two moments, then and now, is nearly too heavy-handed to be believed. But here we stand, a century and a half later, biting nails and trading Internet memes about which OutKast song best describes the undeterred tide of Black voters in Fulton County, Georgia—part of the late John Lewis’s district—who, it had been hoped, would deliver the state to Biden and put the election in the history books. On Tuesday night, in an overt attempt at voter suppression, the President tweeted that the ongoing tallying of votes was a “fraud” and an attempt to steal the election from him. The next day, the Administration filed suit to prevent the counting of votes in Michigan and Pennsylvania, a move that echoed the lawsuit filed by Texas Republicans to throw out a hundred and twenty-seven thousand votes in Harris County, Texas, which happens to be among the most ethnically diverse counties in the country.
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Kamala Harris just made history in her speech as the first woman to be elected vice president of the United States.
“America’s democracy is not guaranteed. It is only as strong as our willingness to fight for it,” Harris declared. Dressed in a suffragette white suit and a (possibly pointed) pussy-bow blouse, Harris thanked all the poll workers and elected officials who worked on this week’s long election, saying, “You have protected the integrity of our democracy.”
Harris, who is also the first Black person and first South Asian elected vice president, spoke of the women who have “paved the way for this moment tonight,” sparing particular attention for “the Black women who are too often overlooked, but so often prove they are the backbone of our democracy.” She added that she wanted to prove to all children watching that America “is a country of possibilities.” For that reason, she declared, “I may be the first woman to hold this office. But I won’t be the last.”
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The nation may yet know who the next president is, but voters made history on Election Day with their support of LGBTQ+ congressional candidates, including Mondaire Jones (D-NY) and Ritchie Torres (D-NY)—both of whom will become the first openly gay Black members of the House of Representatives—the Victory Fund announced. Torres also holds the distinction of being the first openly LGBTQ+ Afro-Latinx member of Congress.
The Victory Fund—which advocates increasing LGBTQ+ representation in government—confirmed that a history-making 26 openly LGBTQ+ candidates ran for a U.S. Senate or House of Representative seat this Election Day (Nov. 3).
In celebration of Jones’ and Torres’ wins, Houston’s former mayor and Victory Fund president Annise Parker said in a statement:
Mondaire and Ritchie have shattered a rainbow ceiling and will bring unique perspectives based on lived experiences never before represented in the U.S. Congress. As our nation grapples with racism, police brutality and a pandemic that disproportionally affects people of color and LGBTQ people, these are the voices that can pull us from the brink and toward a more united and fair society. Their elections will end any doubts about the electability of Black LGBTQ men to our nation’s highest legislative body. It will also inspire more young LGBTQ leaders and leaders of color to run and serve.
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Her presence on that stage speaks of the influence of Black women in our democracy, but also the ways in which respect for their intellect, their womanhood and their individuality has been slow to come. Harris’s rise reflects the intellectual might of historically Black colleges and universities and their commitment to telling the story of African Americans as central to our nation’s narrative, not as an addendum. Harris chose Howard University because it was the crown jewel of the realm and because its law school educated Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall. But it was also a place that allowed her to come of age surrounded by the richness of the Black diaspora.
Her mother, who was born in India, raised Harris, as well as her younger sister, to move through a world in which they would be seen as Black women. Howard was a place that allowed for the vastness of the Black experience, whether it be the first-generation college-goer from a small town in the South or the scion of a family of professionals from Chicago or a wealthy international student from Ghana.
The idea that Blackness could be many things — none of which required an apology or dilution — was a core tenet of Howard and one that speaks to the essence of Harris herself. She was someone who contributed to the richness of Howard’s diversity. She was a child of immigrants from India and Jamaica. She was born in Oakland, Calif., and went to school in Berkeley and then Montreal and finally law school at the University of California’s Hastings College of the Law. She’d led a life that had her walking in many different environments in her formative years, and all of them became part of her identity.
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The summer was marked by the collision of the COVID-19 pandemic and civil unrest over racial injustice, prompting the creation of the $5 million Google for Startups Black Founders Fund. The tech giant has now announced the startup Black businesses that will be the benefactors of the grant.
Pharaoh’s Conclave, founded by Jakita and Erich Thomas, was created to provide career pathways for Black and Latinx youth in esports. The Atlanta-based brand is one of the 76 startups selected by Google to buoy and provide more resources to underrepresented communities with cash awards up to $100,000.
“You’re really seeing the need from our founders and particularly zeroing in on the layering of problems that came upon this year related to COVID-19 [and how it] had an outsized impact on Black-owned businesses,” Jewel Burks Solomon, Head of Google for Startups in the U.S., tells the theGrio exclusively.
“And then you layer on top of that the egregious instances of racial injustice that we saw earlier this year, starting in June with George Floyd and continuing with Ahmaud Arbery and Breonna Taylor and the list goes on and on.”
Burks Solomon also cites Google’s $175 million commitment, championed by Google CEO Sundar Pichai, towards economic opportunities for Black business owners.
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WELCOME TO THE TUESDAY PORCH.
IF YOU ARE NEW TO THE BLACK KOS COMMUNITY, GRAB A SEAT, SOME CYBER EATS, RELAX, AND INTRODUCE YOURSELF.