Commentary by BlackKos Editor JoanMar
Republicans on Capitol Hill claimed that they had never heard about Breonna Taylor, but ask them about #DefundThePolice and they’ll most assuredly have heard about it and will have definite views about how destructive it will be for our country. How one could have managed the unimaginable feat of hearing about one and not the other is beyond me, but we do know that there are only a few things Republicans are good at and one of them is mental contortions.
I’ll readily admit that when the term “Defund the Police” entered the lexicon this summer, I too thought that it could be at least a little problematic; that this particular election period wasn’t necessarily the best time to be using that phrase. Folks, I just wanted/want donald trump gone and I was/am willing to put everything on the back-burner until I see them drag his sorry ass outta the White House. I didn’t want us doing or saying anything that could breathe oxygen into his campaign. Some long time ago I learned that “if you are explaining you are probably losing” and “Defund the Police” did call for a lot of explaining. Let’s face it, Rethugglicans tend to be more successful at this messaging thing — not because they have any particular genius in crafting their messages, but because lazy media personalities just love parroting right-wing framing of the issues. For example, I remain firmly convinced that CNN’s Alysin Camerota played a pivotal role in both elevating and demonizing what was hitherto only a rallying call at the protests against the public lynching of George Floyd. “What if, in the middle of the night my home is broken into. Who do I call?” she asked on her morning show. The trump campaign wasted no time in turning her words into a campaign ad. See here.
People of good conscience on this very liberal site voiced their disapproval of or discomfort with the term. It’s unnecessarily alienating, they argue. “We are going to lose support!” Members of the Democratic caucus, including the very influential James Clyburn, blamed “Defund the Police” for the loss of seats in the last election.
"'Defund the police' is killing our party, and we've got to stop it," the South Carolina kingmaker said in an interview with CBSN Monday. It was a topic he said he and the late civil rights leader and Congressman John Lewis discussed.
"John Lewis and I were very concerned when these slogans came out about 'defund the police,'" he said. "We sat together on the House floor and talked about how that slogan... could undermine the BLM movement, just as 'burn, baby, burn' destroyed our movement back in the '60s."
Joe Biden was repeatedly forced to declare that he does not support defunding of the police, even though he seems to understand exactly what the term means:
Biden's campaign rejected the phrase "defund the police" and called for more funding for police departments to implement policy changes. But the former vice president also supports some of the principles the phrase's advocates champion.
In the statement, Bates said that Biden supports "the urgent need for reform -- including funding for public schools, summer programs, and mental health and substance abuse treatment separate from funding for policing -- so that officers can focus on the job of policing."
(my bold)
For the record, this is the meaning of “Defund the Police”:
Defunding the police does not necessarily mean getting rid of the police altogether. Rather, it would mean reducing police budgets and reallocating those funds to crucial and oft-neglected areas like education, public health, housing, and youth services. (Some activists want to abolish the police altogether; defunding is a separate but connected cause.) It’s predicated on the belief that investing in communities would act as a better deterrent to crime by directly addressing societal problems like poverty, mental illness, and homelessness — issues that advocates say police are poorly equipped to handle, and yet are often tasked with. According to some estimates, law enforcement spends 21 percent of its time responding to and transporting people with mental illnesses. Police are also frequently dispatched to deal with people experiencing homelessness, causing them to be incarcerated at a disproportionate rate.
Really, what is there to disagree with?
I chose this tweet to illustrate a point. Scott Walker and his ilk do not believe there’s any need to reform the police...have never shown any interest in reforming the police. He’s quite happy with the status quo. He and his MAGAt brigade glommed onto #DefundThePolice and is milking it for all they are worth, but it’s just a game to them...a sick, macabre game but a game nonetheless.
Personally, I’d love a total reimagining of policing not only in this country but the world over. I’d love to see a community-based, empathic, sophisticated force, but I know it’s not going to happen anytime soon. For far too many people that is too much to ask and too much power to relinquish. Police unions are powerful entities and with tentacles embedded deep and wide in the criminal (in)justice system; Republicans see no evil...or love the evil they see, and the majority community just love their cops exactly as they are. In the short term, it seems the most we’ll get is incremental-tinkering-around-the-edges kinda changes...and that’s nowhere near good enough. Will the term “Defund the Police” bring us any closer to our goal? I’ll love to hear your thoughts.
What I do know for sure is that history shows that slogans do not have the power to overcome generations of intransigence. For the people who oppose change, no slogan — however provocative or emotive — will move them to view our cause with less jaundiced eyes and more receptive hearts. For the enablers, the language is never right, has never been right, and will never be right and the time is never now, has never been now, and will never be now. So, what the heck, #DefundthePolice! #BlackLivesMatter.
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NEWS ROUND UP BY DOPPER0189, BLACK KOS MANAGING EDITOR
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A viral clip showed a Michigan-based entrepreneur firing back at the two Republican members of the Wayne County Board of Canvassers who first voted against verifying the election results.
Read More: Michigan’s largest county reverses course, certifying election results for Biden
During a virtual meeting hosted on Zoom Ned Staebler on Tuesday, the chief executive of TechTown and a poll challenger in the city, countered William Hartmann and Monica Palmer‘s initial decision to vote against certifying Michigan votes, calling their motives racist. He did not hold back when confronting the Republican members who cited minor yet common issues as their reasoning.
He noted that the pair had no issue verifying the votes in suburban areas but not the votes from Detroit, a predominantly Black city. The board only consists of four members which resulted in a deadlock verdict.
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Georgia Senate candidate Raphael Warnock has made his faith a defining element of his candidacy. The GOP aims to make it his fatal flaw.
Republicans are taking to the airwaves and social media to frame the pastor as a radical and tool of the "extremist" left. Using sound bites from his past sermons, they’re making the case to Georgia voters that the Democrat is anti-police and anti-military. TV ads play up his criticisms of police officers and try to connect him to polarizing figures like Fidel Castro, who visited Harlem’s Abyssinian Baptist Church in 1995 while Warnock was a youth pastor there. Taking several pages out of the 2008 playbook, they’ve also tried to tie him to Jeremiah Wright, the former senior pastor of Trinity United Church of Chicago, whom Republicans used to try to sink Barack Obama’s presidential campaign.
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For 24-year-old Ugandan climate activist Vanessa Nakate, climate change is not an abstract concept — it’s personal. She witnesses the impact of it on her country every day.
“I have seen it in my country, I have seen how the changing weather patterns have destroyed homes, have destroyed farms, destroyed businesses, and left people with nothing,” Nakate said. “And that is what I want to change.”
In January 2018, after educating herself about the seriousness of the environmental issues facing her community, Nakate began staging climate strikes every Friday to raise awareness. Her efforts appeared to have paid off when the Arctic Basecamp, a team of researchers and scientists, invited Nakate to participate in a workshop with other climate activists in Davos, Switzerland, during the World Economic Forum in January 2020.
Following a successful and enjoyable week, Nakate was photographed alongside several other young climate activists, including Greta Thunberg. But when the Associated Press published the photo, Nakate saw she had been cropped out — leaving just the four other activists — all of whom were white — in the photo.
Being cut out of the photo made Vanessa feel like “she wasn’t there” and was symbolic of what often happens in many climate talks and negotiations: the Global South, and the African continent, are often left out.
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Because Advancing Black Entrepreneurs by Chase for Business enables Black business owners to address immediate financial needs and build resiliency. Ozy: IT’S TIME TO HELP BLACK-OWNED BUSINESSES
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It’s no overstatement that Black-owned U.S. businesses are in a state of crisis due to the economic fallout from the coronavirus pandemic. From February to April of this year alone, 440,000 Black-owned businesses closed their doors permanently, with thousands of jobs and millions of dollars in worker income lost.
At the core of such closures is an unfortunate reality: Most Black-owned businesses within majority Black communities are undercapitalized and unable to withstand the type of economic shock we’re experiencing right now. Cash liquidity is a key predictor of a small business’ ability to survive and grow, and our research shows that far too many Black-owned businesses continue to lack the resources they need.
According to the JPMorgan Chase Institute, most small businesses in majority Black communities entered this crisis with fewer than three weeks of a cash buffer and less cash liquidity than businesses in white communities. The Institute also found that Black-owned businesses could require more recovery assistance than others due to severe revenue shocks in recent months.
The businesses that will be best positioned to succeed post-crisis are those that have managed their cash flows effectively and pivoted business models where necessary — all while strengthening ties to their local communities and keeping employees and customers safe.
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When Marcella Nunez-Smith started treating some of the first hospitalized Covid-19 patients in Connecticut this March, she huddled with fellow doctors to try to understand this deadly new disease. But she wasn’t surprised that it was hitting minorities so brutally hard.
Health crises often hit minorities hard. And this one was a bigger crisis than most, twinned with an economic collapse that was also hitting with disproportionate force.
Eight months later, President-elect Joe Biden tapped Nunez-Smith, an expert on health care inequality, to help lead the transition’s coronavirus advisory board. That puts the fight against the virus in devastated Black, Latino and Native American communities smack in the center of his pandemic response.
His selection of Nunez-Smith, a Yale researcher who was born in the U.S. Virgin Islands, for such a visible post reflects how his incoming administration is trying to reach minority voters, who helped revive his lagging bid for the Democratic nomination and who have often felt ignored by the outgoing Trump administration. It also shows Biden recognizes that the pandemic can’t be beat without going to where it’s doing the most damage.
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This September, the art world was rocked when four major museums — the National Gallery of Art in Washington; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; the Tate Modern in London; and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston — postponed a planned retrospective of the art of the modernist painter Philip Guston. The reason? They worried their audiences might blanch at his paintings of Klansmen.
The exhibit, which included two dozen of Guston’s depictions of the Ku Klux Klan, had already been postponed once because of the pandemic. In delaying the show until 2024, the museums said in a joint statement, “We think that the powerful message of social and racial justice that is at the center of Philip Guston’s work can be more clearly interpreted.”
Art world onlookers were furious. Guston, who was Jewish, always wrote clearly that he saw his KKK motif as an exploration of evil. Within days, more than 100 of the biggest names in the art world — including Adrian Piper, Martin Puryear, Matthew Barney, Coco Fusco, Benjamin Buchloh, and Zoe Leonard — had signed an open letter denouncing the decision.
“Rarely has there been a better illustration of ‘white’ culpability than in these powerful men and women’s apparent feeling of powerlessness to explain to their public the true power of an artist’s work,” it read. Instead, it argued, the postponement served to illustrate that the museum leaders had failed to prepare themselves for America’s reinvigorated racial justice movement.
The letter went on to critique not just these particular museum leaders, but also the institution of the museum itself. Because these particular museum leaders must realize, it said, that “to remind museum-goers of white supremacy today is not only to speak to them about the past, or events somewhere else. It is also to raise uncomfortable questions about museums themselves — about their class and racial foundations.”
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