Congratulations to Ashley Etienne, Karine Jean-Pierre and Symone Sanders!
Commentary by Black Kos Editor, Denise Oliver-Velez
I broke into a big grin when I saw this tweet from Hillary Clinton.
All smart, competent women, including three Black women and one Latina.
Though some of us may be familiar with these sisters, I thought I’d post a little background about the three of them today, as an introduction for those who may not know much about them. Then realized that would be a very long diary, so I’ll start today with the sister I knew zilch about.
Probably the least familiar name and face to those of us outside of the inner workings of the Hill and White House staffers is Ashley Etienne’s. Curious to find out something about her, since I’ve seen both Jean-Pierre and Sanders in action, I decided to see what I could find.
Discovered this recent October 2020 interview with her, on Malik Boyd’s HeartcityTV program.
Ashley Etienne, Senior Advisor, Strategic Planning, Joe Biden for President Campaign join Malik L. Boyd for a discussion about their platform and the important issues for Black America in the upcoming election.
I like the way she addressed some of the concern’s Boyd raised re feelings some brother’s (especially) may have about Kamala’s record as a prosecutor.
This August 2020 article by Abigail Tracy, National Political Reporter for Vanity Fair, which I hadn’t seen, gave some real insights into just who she is, and why she is a powerful force behind the scenes.
“If I Can Unseat Him, That Would Be Incredible”: Political Strategist Ashley Etienne May Be Biden’s Deadliest Weapon Against Trump
Behind the scenes of last fall’s impeachment spectacle, Ashley Etienne was there pulling the strings. The “secret weapon in the war against Trump” is how Norm Eisen, who served as Democrats’ counsel on the House Judiciary Committee, characterized her. Even in her crucial role as Nancy Pelosi’s communications director and senior adviser, Etienne was inclined to dodge the cameras, making “secret” an apt description. But among Democrats and Hill reporters, her impact is indelible. Trump remains in office, but he was impeached with the support of a majority of Americans. Mitt Romney, a senator from his own party, voted to remove him—a first.
Now, Etienne is picking up her fight against Donald Trump from a fresh perch in the Joe Biden campaign, taking the lessons learned and mistakes made with her. Recruited by Anita Dunn, a top Biden adviser, Etienne is joining the campaign as a senior adviser for strategic planning. “This November’s election is going to be the ultimate verdict on this two-year drive to hold Trump accountable,” said Eisen, “and she’s been involved in every single part of it.”
She almost missed out on the impeachment push altogether. After serving as a communications director for the House Oversight Committee under the late Congressman Elijah Cummings, a stint in Pelosi’s office, helping to elect the first Black president, and putting in time in the Barack Obama White House as a special assistant to the president and director of communications for the U.S. Cabinet, Etienne thought the pinnacle of her political career was behind her, and set her sights out West. Then, Trump won, and Pelosi’s office called and offered her a job. After a conversation with her mentor Cummings, who implored Etienne to return to Capitol Hill, she made her decision. “The portfolio was oversight. That was the specific charge,” Pelosi deputy chief of staff Drew Hammill told me. Then, it “ended up morphing into an effort where we impeached the president of the United States.”
Some personal history. She was born Feb 21, 1978 in Galveston, Texas. Her 2015 wedding announcement filled in some of her background.
The bride, 37, is a special assistant to President Obama and the cabinet communications director at the White House, serving as the communications liaison with federal agencies. From 2012 to 2014, she was a spokeswoman for Nancy Pelosi, the Democratic leader in the House of Representatives. The bride graduated from Sam Houston State University in Huntsville, Tex., and received a master’s degree in political communications from Johns Hopkins.
She is the daughter of Avys Etienne Poe of Galveston, Tex., and John A. Foreman of Texas City, Tex., and the stepdaughter of Sherrod Poe. The bride’s father is the H.I.V. outreach leader at the Gulf Coast Center in Galveston, which provides services to those who are mentally disabled, have H.I.V. or who are seeking help with substance abuse problems. Her mother retired from the Texas Workforce Commission, where she was a payroll tax auditor in its Pasadena office.
This last tidbit about her didn’t surprise me; she is a member of the Divine Nine sorority, Delta Sigma Theta.
Looking forward to seeing this new team in action!
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NEWS ROUND UP BY DOPPER0189, BLACK KOS MANAGING EDITOR
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The police killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor set off protests like the nation has never seen — more than 15 million people marched in the name of justice for Black lives this summer. So it’s no surprise that the rallying cry out on the streets was still on voters’ minds when they cast their ballot in November.
According to preliminary data from AP VoteCast, a comprehensive survey conducted for the Associated Press by NORC at the University of Chicago, roughly a fifth of all voters said the racial justice protests were the single most important factor when voting in the election.
But just like Americans’ views on wearing a mask or social distancing, the protests have become a politically divisive issue — 53 percent of those voters went for Biden, 46 percent voted for Trump. Some conservative voters focused on the small percentage of looting and vandalism associated with the unrest, calling the protests “childish,” according to interviews conducted by the New York Times, while progressives and first-time voters were inspired by the movement to make radical change.
In the end, the Black Lives Matter movement and protests shaped the results of the election: Many organizers worked to get people out to vote, with Black voters turning out in droves, despite obstacles of voter suppression. Black voters also helped flip key battleground states like Georgia and Pennsylvania to elect Joe Biden, while voters in cities across the country approved ballot measures on police accountability.
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How the white political establishment anointed Charlamagne tha God as the spokesman for all Black voters. Slate: The Voice of Black America?
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On election night, amid the slow trickle of results, Stephen Colbert checked in with a guest familiar to viewers of his deeply uncomfortable 2016 election night show. “One thing we do know is that Donald Trump is definitely going to lose Black voters,” Colbert announced on his live special, “and here with his thoughts on why … is host of The Breakfast Club, Charlamagne tha God.” After a video collage of Trump back in 2016 asking Black voters “what they had to lose” by voting for him, Charlamagne launched into a bit called “Charlamagne tha God’s List of Things We Had to Lose”—a litany that included voting rights and health care. “Black people have long been the soul of this country,” Charlamagne said, from behind his anchor desk. “Because we have to believe in the promise of equality and justice that America provides.”
At this point, it’s no surprise that Charlamagne, who rose to fame as host of the nationally syndicated radio show The Breakfast Club, the self-styled “world’s most dangerous morning show,” was Colbert’s choice to comment in sweeping terms on the Black perspective in 2020. In October, Colbert wrote in Interview magazine that Charlamagne had “remade The Breakfast Club, a longtime weather vane of the hip-hop world, into a destination for progressive politicians looking to amplify their message.” In 2016, Hillary Clinton famously revealed that she carries hot sauce in her bag — launching a news cycle that attempted to delineate the fine line between pandering and authenticity. Since then, Charlamagne’s evolution from shock jock to political pundit has accelerated, and his profile has only risen. Barack Obama did an in-person interview on the show last week to promote his presidential memoir, despite never having appeared during his time in office. The Breakfast Club was in 90 national markets at the end of 2019, and now airs on more than 100 stations nationwide.
In the decade they’ve been on the air, Charlamagne and his co-hosts Angela Yee and DJ Envy built their audience on scandalous interviews with guests from Kanye West to Louis Farrakhan to Dick Gregory. Snippets of their conversations have become viral memes, with Birdman’s “put some respeck on my name” and Soulja Boy’s “Draaake” two of the more lasting ones. The provocation for provocation’s sake ethos of the show could in theory have relegated Charlamagne to a realm of diminishing influence—like talk show host and former shock jock Wendy Williams, a mentor of his. Instead, Charlamagne has managed to leverage his outrageous, irreverent interviewing style into lasting cultural, and now political, cachet.
Charlamagne has also long been a contentious figure in his own right. There was the sexual misconduct allegation from a woman who claims he assaulted her nearly a decade ago when she was 15, and who recently sought to reopen the case. (Charlamagne denies the allegation, which was originally dropped in the absence of DNA evidence and after the woman decided not to cooperate; her 2018 push to reopen the case was unsuccessful.) And there’s his history of disturbing comments about women—the time he said publicly that he’d drugged a woman and had sex with her, then later claimed he’d misspoken; the time he casually said that his first sexual encounter with his wife was basically rape and again said he’d misspoken.
Yet Charlamagne was inescapable this election cycle, and not just on his show. There he was in April on CNN, telling Erin Burnett that Pete Buttigieg was built for the spotlight, or in August, declaring that Kamala Harris was terrible in the presidential debates. There he was in October, opining to Don Lemon that young Black male voters are drawn to Trump because the president tries to court them. Democratic long shots like Tom Steyer and Seth Moulton had turns in The Breakfast Club’s hot seat. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren made their way into the Tribeca studio before their first debate. And then there was the Joe Biden interview in May, when Biden ended up gaffe-ing his way into one of the most cringeworthy lines of his entire campaign: “If you have a problem figuring out whether you’re for me or Trump, then you ain’t black.”
It’s easy to see why the show appeals to Democratic politicians desperately trying to attract young, Black voters. According to Nielsen, it currently has 8 million listeners a month, 70 percent of whom are Black and most of whom are under 45. Charlamagne is a charismatic interviewer, and for some candidates, the show’s informal vibe and loose conversational style makes it a useful forum for projecting “authenticity.” But it was still frankly exhausting to see Charlamagne invoked again and again and again, in media outlet after media outlet, to comment on the priorities and values of Black voters.
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Joe Bennett, a Black man who was filming police as they stopped another Black motorist in Jeffersontown, Kentucky, was ordered to stop filming by a cop.
When Bennett politely cited his right to keep filming, the cop told him he was involved in the incident. At that point, the cop approached Bennett and punched him, for apparently no reason.
According to TMZ, Police Chief Richard Sanders said his department is conducting an internal affairs investigation into the incident and the unnamed officer involved is currently on administrative leave.
The chief of police would not comment on why the officer said on tape that Bennett was “involved” without clarifying what he was involved in. The chief added, “I don’t think he was involved [in bank fraud] but that’s what I’m trying to find out.”
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When I went to London for the first time, I thought it was Jamaica. As a nine-year-old born and raised on the Caribbean island, I thought of the UK in terms of what I’d seen on TV and read in the literature books set in Britain that were part of my primary school curriculum—as a place that was grey-scale and rainy, inhabited by funny accents like the one my now-British father had, and a truly foreign chilly climate. My father, also a born and raised Jamaican, was living there, which occasioned my visit.
It turned out that this place which was situated literally across the world from where I lived was more colorful and familiar than I had imagined (though even colder). Most of what I remember from this trip came back vividly as I watched Steve McQueen’s “Lovers Rock,” the second installment of his anthology film series Small Axe, which focuses in on the story of the Caribbean people who made England their home. The film brought back for me how effectively these transplants were able to stake their flag in a powerhouse country which for centuries had colonized the nations in the Caribbean they came from, like Jamaica.
The opening scene of the film licked me with that same sense of joyful recognition I had as a little girl who’d landed in England, stunned to hear Jamaican patois expressed just as sharply and authentically by people there as it was by those back home. The film kicks off with British-based actors Kadeem Ramsay, Romario Simpson, and Alexander James-Blake talking to each other in pitch-perfect Jamaican accents while maneuvering furniture out of a house in preparation for a party, signaling that Lovers Rock will be richly populated with sounds and visuals that reflect the aforementioned authenticity. As the men chat, women gather and sing in a kitchen while kneading flour for dumplings and chopping up onions, tomato, and thyme to cook up a rich curry goat that I could almost smell from memory.
Of course, Jamaican music is seminal to the film, which is named after that sub-genre of reggae concerned with giving couples something to slowly “wine” to. The recognizable bass drop under tracks sung by crooning reggae greats like Dennis Brown and Gregory Isaacs underscore the prevalence of Jamaican music wherever people who appreciate good music are present.
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Ethiopian armed forces are “fully in control” of the city of Mekele after a Saturday offensive against the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF), according to a statement by the country’s prime minister, Abiy Ahmed Ali.
The assault on the city marks the latest clash in a conflict between Ethiopia’s federal government and the TPLF, an Ethiopian political party, that began earlier this month when the TPLF launched what it called a preemptive strike against a federal military facility in Tigray, a region in northern Ethiopia. The federal government claimed the party hoped “to loot” the base, and responded to the attack with a full military offensive that is now pushing the country toward a massive humanitarian crisis.
Mekele, with a population of about half a million people, is the capital of Tigray, which is governed by the TPLF. The group dominated national politics in Ethiopia until Abiy became prime minister in 2018 and ushered in a series of reforms — including the dismissal of TPLF officials accused of corruption.
Last Sunday, Abiy delivered an ultimatum demanding the peaceful surrender of TPLF leaders “within the next 72 hours, recognizing that you are at a point of no return.” That deadline expired unmet, and Abiy responded with Saturday’s offensive.
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Sudanese authorities have announced they will end child marriage and enforce the country’s ban on female genital mutilation (FGM), in a major step forward for the rights of women and girls.
Police officers were told on Wednesday they must inform local communities that FGM is illegal following new laws passed in July that make it punishable by up to three years in jail.
“Police officers will have a major responsibility to intervene and curb this crime against humanity,” said the director general of police, Ezzeldin El Sheikh, adding that religious leaders in the largely Muslim country would play a key role in ending the practice.
The move should go some way to allay concerns the practice was so deeply entrenched in society the law could not be enforced.
According to the UN, 87% of Sudanese women have undergone FGM, which involves the partial or total removal of the female external genitalia for non-medical reasons. Girls are typically cut between the ages of just five and 14.
The council of ministers also announced this week it is to end child marriage and adopt all articles of the African charter on the rights and welfare of the child, which came into force in 1999.
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Glenn Cantave claims to have been a “hyper” kid — whose youth was all about his large family and his soccer obsession. But there are a couple of salient moments from his childhood in Long Island that provide clues of who Cantave, now 27, would become.
He vividly remembers the time his first-grade teacher told his class to color in an illustration of Christopher Columbus’ famous ships: the Niña, the Pinta and the Santa María. Like most American schoolchildren, he memorized the names of the boats and learned that Columbus first set sail for the so-called New World in 1492, but he didn’t hear much about the mass killing of Native Americans that followed. He remembers the teacher telling him how George Washington “treated his slaves nicely.”
What he also remembers is his first brush with immersive technology. “When I was 9, my mom bought me a VR helmet. And I was really excited about it. And I put it on, and it was super underwhelming. Just years ago, a friend introduced me to Google Cardboard and I was blown away.”
Those two threads joined together when Eric Garner was killed after Daniel Pantaleo, a New York City Police Department officer, put him in a prohibited chokehold while arresting him. “My mother took me to that protest in 2014. And that was kind of a trigger.”
Cantave’s activism now comes with an app. Movers & Shakers, a New York City-based educational advocacy group he co-founded with Idris Brewster, is rewriting Black and brown narratives into American curricula — with a little help from augmented reality (AR). His app has a catalogue of “heroes you never learn about in school” — women, people of color, members of the LGBT community, etc. Students use the app to select an underrepresented icon and then advance to doing assignments on them. Plus, they can take selfies with their chosen icon, download them and share.
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Voices and Soul
by Justice Putnam,
Black Kos Poetry Editor
Guardian Angels come in many forms, if one wants to follow the metaphor. They might be in the guise of a beloved aunt, or respected uncle. They might be the shopkeeper with the warm table on a cold winter day. They might be the stranger with directions needed, or they might be the Pullman Porters caring for a fourteen year old boy with a limp, traveling from Chicago, on a trip to visit relatives in Mississippi.
This is for the Pullman Porters who organized when people said
they couldn’t. And carried the Pittsburgh Courier and the Chicago
Defender to the Black Americans in the South so they would
know they were not alone. This is for the Pullman Porters who
helped Thurgood Marshall go south and come back north to fight
the fight that resulted in Brown v. Board of Education because
even though Kansas is west and even though Topeka is the birth-
place of Gwendolyn Brooks, who wrote the powerful “The
Chicago Defender Sends a Man to Little Rock,” it was the
Pullman Porters who whispered to the traveling men both
the Blues Men and the “Race” Men so that they both would
know what was going on. This is for the Pullman Porters who
smiled as if they were happy and laughed like they were tickled
when some folks were around and who silently rejoiced in 1954
when the Supreme Court announced its 9—0 decision that “sepa-
rate is inherently unequal.” This is for the Pullman Porters who
smiled and welcomed a fourteen-year-old boy onto their train in
1955. They noticed his slight limp that he tried to disguise with a
doo-wop walk; they noticed his stutter and probably understood
why his mother wanted him out of Chicago during the summer
when school was out. Fourteen-year-old Black boys with limps
and stutters are apt to try to prove themselves in dangerous ways
when mothers aren’t around to look after them. So this is for the
Pullman Porters who looked over that fourteen-year-old while
the train rolled the reverse of the Blues Highway from Chicago to
St. Louis to Memphis to Mississippi. This is for the men who kept
him safe; and if Emmett Till had been able to stay on a train all
summer he would have maybe grown a bit of a paunch, certainly
lost his hair, probably have worn bifocals and bounced his grand-
children on his knee telling them about his summer riding the
rails. But he had to get off the train. And ended up in Money,
Mississippi. And was horribly, brutally, inexcusably, and unac-
ceptably murdered. This is for the Pullman Porters who, when the
sheriff was trying to get the body secretly buried, got Emmett’s
body on the northbound train, got his body home to Chicago,
where his mother said: I want the world to see what they did
to my boy. And this is for all the mothers who cried. And this is
for all the people who said Never Again. And this is about Rosa
Parks whose feet were not so tired, it had been, after all, an ordi-
nary day, until the bus driver gave her the opportunity to make
history. This is about Mrs. Rosa Parks from Tuskegee, Alabama,
who was also the field secretary of the NAACP. This is about the
moment Rosa Parks shouldered her cross, put her worldly goods
aside, was willing to sacrifice her life, so that that young man in
Money, Mississippi, who had been so well protected by the
Pullman Porters, would not have died in vain. When Mrs. Parks
said “NO” a passionate movement was begun. No longer would
there be a reliance on the law; there was a higher law. When Mrs.
Parks brought that light of hers to expose the evil of the system,
the sun came and rested on her shoulders bringing the heat and
the light of truth. Others would follow Mrs. Parks. Four young
men in Greensboro, North Carolina, would also say No. Great
voices would be raised singing the praises of God and exhorting
us “to forgive those who trespass against us.” But it was the
Pullman Porters who safely got Emmett to his granduncle and it
was Mrs. Rosa Parks who could not stand that death. And in not
being able to stand it. She sat back down.
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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.