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Commentary by Chitown Kev
The other day, I was telling my Mom that it seems as if I’m more of a Detroiter than anything else nowadays.
I read for Detroit news as much as I read Chicago news now; that hasn’t always been true. I feel as if Gretchen Whitmer is my governor rather than J.B. Pritzker (and I like J.B.)
And I’ll miss not being in Detroit for the upcoming holidays.
I think that a big part of it is politics.
For the election periods from ~2007-2016, it seemed as if Chicago was the center of the political universe, being the home of the 44th President of the United States.
(It was also in 2006 that I returned to Detroit after a nearly eight-year hiatus to attend my uncle’s funeral.)
Honestly...even through this period that I took an inordinate amount of pride in calling Chicago my home, I began to go back...home...to Detroit more frequently; so much so that I seemed to revive my childhood reputation as being a Detroit GPS system long before those devices ever existed.
And then the 2016 elections happened.
Donald Trump won Michigan’s 16 electoral votes by 10,704 and, along with the electoral votes of Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, the presidency.
And I took that personally.
After all, Michigan had not voted for the Republican candidate for president since 1988.
Furthermore, most of my family that remains in Michigan is split between Wayne County (where Detroit is located) and Macomb County (an Obama county that flipped for Trump in 2016).
Macomb County is where my Mom happens to live.
And I began to fear for her safety.
So I now visit a little more often. I watch for things on the ground. (Note: I have never felt unsafe in Macomb County). Parts of Macomb County have become incorporated in to the GPS System that I keep in my head.
I talk to people there when I’m there.
Detroit and the surrounding suburbs really, truly feels like home to me, again.
So when a bunch of white supremacists hatched a kidnapping plot (and more!) against Governor Gretchen Whitmer, I took it personally.
And when a bunch of white supremacists in power in the state of Michigan even think of disenfranchising so many of my family members of their vote, I take it personally. (See dopper’s news digest below).
I wasn’t quite prepared for that reaction.
Anyone who has read my work in this space over the past few years knows that I do struggle with my relationship with my hometown, Detroit, The Motor City.
Perhaps as a result of the past four years, I no longer struggle with that relationship; Detroit is as much my home as Chicago is.
Which sounds rather strange in that the very word “home” has been a problematic word.
But...it is what it is, for better or worse.
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NEWS ROUND UP BY DOPPER0189, BLACK KOS MANAGING EDITOR
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A group of Michigan voters has sued Donald Trump and his reelection campaign, asserting the president's legal challenges to the 2020 election violated the rights of Black voters.
In a lawsuit filed in D.C. federal court Friday, the group alleged the Trump campaign is attempting mass voter suppression — particularly among Black voters — by pressuring election officials into not certifying the election results in their state.
"Repeating false claims of voter fraud, which have been thoroughly debunked, Defendants are pressuring state and local officials in Michigan not to count votes from Wayne County, Michigan (where Detroit is the county seat), and thereby disenfranchise hundreds of thousands of voters," the lawsuit stated. "Defendants’ tactics repeat the worst abuses in our nation’s history, as Black Americans were denied a voice in American democracy for most of the first two centuries of the Republic."
The lawsuit aimed to halt any efforts by the Trump campaign and the president to push state officials into canceling their ballots or appointing electors who do not represent the election results in their state. It cited numerous efforts to cast doubt on the election, from Trump's personal tweets to a White House meeting Friday between Republican state lawmakers and Trump.
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One of the golden rules of etiquette is to avoid talking in polite company about politics, sex or religion. Some also add money. And a lot of people would love to add race to the very top of their taboo topic list.
The problem with the rules of etiquette is that the ruling elite wrote them. Indeed, so much of their privilege hinges on the politics of race, religion and sex/gender and the ways these connect with money and profit. So from their perspective, silence is soothing. Colorblindness is blissful. Avoidance is virtuous.
But if you identity with the ubiquitous 99 percent, you’ve probably come to realize that you’re not well served by all the silence. In fact, this Thanksgiving, you may actually want to ruffle a few feathers. Or at least, not let anyone ruffle yours and get away with it.
So it’s time to rewrite the rules of etiquette for talking about race at the Thanksgiving dinner table. Here’s a five-course menu to whet your appetite for turning the dreaded silence into some delicious conversation.
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President-elect Joe Biden is now in the process of staffing his administration and he’s highlighted a key priority: Building a team that “looks like America.”
According to data he’s shared, Biden’s transition team is one of the most diverse ever — representation that advocates hope they’ll continue to see as the administration works on broader White House staffing and Cabinet picks.
Thus far, 46 percent of Biden’s transition staff are people of color and 41 percent of senior staff are people of color. More than half of the transition staff — 52 percent — are women, and 53 percent of senior staff are women.
When it comes to the Agency Review Teams (ART) — individuals who are focused on the transfer of power at individual agencies — a majority of the roughly 500 people on them are also women, and about 40 percent are members of groups underrepresented in the federal government, including people of color, members of the LGBTQ community, and people with disabilities. As the Associated Press reported, Black men and women are leading over a quarter of the ART teams.
Biden and his team have repeatedly emphasized that diversity is a major priority for them as they prepare for the change in administration. And America supports this move: According to a Vox/Data for Progress poll, 49 percent of all likely voters and 72 percent of Democrats believe his Cabinet should reflect the gender and racial diversity of the country.
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President Donald Trump and his campaign have filed more than two dozen lawsuits around the country seeking to undermine the legitimacy of the election. His unsubstantiated claims of fraud have mostly been leveled at voters in urban centers of the states with the closest vote margins. The strategy, while so far ineffective, makes clear a larger goal of Trump’s. According to an analysis of his litigation by Votebeat, the counties the Trump campaign and his supporters have targeted with postelection lawsuits have the highest Black or Latino populations in their states. The counties Trump sued in Pennsylvania, for example, were Philadelphia, Montgomery, Delaware, Allegheny, Chester, Centre, and Northampton. That includes four of the Blackest counties in Pennsylvania and, together, accounts for more than 74 percent of the state’s Black population.
Election experts have repeatedly called Trump’s effort to discount the election results a public relations stunt to save his image and to defend himself from the reality of his loss. But what hasn’t been acknowledged as widely is Trump’s more pernicious goal: to scapegoat Black and Latino voters for his loss, and to implicitly argue that their votes shouldn’t decide elections.
“It’s just a continuation of a pattern of denigrating people of color and Black people especially,” said Anne Houghtaling, deputy director of the Thurgood Marshall Institute at the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, who works on voting issues. “The fact that the president is lying about how this process works and trying to say whose votes don’t count is just wrong.”
In Pennsylvania, Trump’s approach was not just to question votes in the most Democratic counties. If that were his strategy, he would have also filed legal challenges in Lehigh or Lackawanna counties—largely white counties that also voted for Biden.
Instead, Trump’s focus on locations where people of color primarily live has been relentless. Trump has brought litigation in six of the seven states where the vote margin between him and President-elect Joe Biden is less than 3 points (he won the seventh state, North Carolina, so has not accused its voters of fraud). In all six of those states, Trump’s campaign has targeted the counties with the highest Black populations.
The Trump team is complementing this legal strategy with racist rhetoric. Two days after Election Day, Trump said in a press conference that “Detroit and Philadelphia are known as two of the most corrupt political places anywhere in our country—easily.” It was just the first example of the president and his close allies questioning the integrity of the vote in two of the largest cities in swing states known for their large Black populations. Since then, Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani has accused voters in Camden, New Jersey (a 40 percent Black city), of streaming across the Delaware River to vote in Philadelphia.
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A Black man died after being savagely beaten by two supermarket security guards in southern Brazil late Thursday, igniting widespread outrage in a country increasingly grappling with structural racism and the violent treatment of Black Brazilians by security forces.
Video shows a man identified as João Alberto Silveira Freitas, 40, being held by one of the security guards as another struck him repeatedly in the face outside the entrance of a Carrefour grocery store in the city of Porto Alegre. The man can be heard crying out, and he is forcefully brought to the blood-slicked ground and restrained. Video afterward shows emergency responders failing to resuscitate him.
The two guards, one of whom was an off-duty police officer, were arrested and are being investigated for homicide.
In a country increasingly reckoning with racism and the enduring imprint of its history of colonialism and slavery, the grisly beating of an unarmed Black man by two security guards reported to be White was met by rage and horror.
It immediately dominated newscasts and the homepages of the country’s biggest newspapers. Activists planned protests. Politicians on both the left and right expressed condemnation. Many said it was disturbing that the death occurred on the eve of Brazil’s Black Consciousness Day. Others compared it to the death of George Floyd in the United States.
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One of Africa’s best-known artists has made an impassioned appeal for governments and communities across the continent to preserve their traditions and culture in the face of globalisation.
Esther Mahlangu, 85, said that she was worried young people in Africa were losing a sense of their roots.
“I am surprised that people are running away from their own culture. Our culture is good,” she told the Guardian. “The importance of our culture is to know where they are coming from. The children, the grandchildren must know which roots they are coming from. If the young children don’t learn from the elders, then everything will vanish.”
Mahlangu’s pioneering use of the crafts of her Ndebele people of south-eastern Africa has brought her huge success on the world’s art markets, shown and sold from Australia to New York, and she continues to travel and exhibit widely. Her work has been seen by millions of people on British Airways planes, vodka bottles and billboards.
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