Commentary by Black Kos Editor Denise Oliver-Velez
Some of you have seen this photo of me, attached to the story “I am not non-white,” which has been my “pinned tweet” ever since I wrote it back in 2020. I am well aware that this thing called “race” is a social construct—I am a cultural anthropologist, and have written about that too. Race may be constructed out of white supremacist thin air; however it can get you dead it 10 seconds flat. Such is the world we live in as Black citizens of a still-racist country. I have also written about right-wing Black folks who call themselves “ADOS,” pushing an agenda that excludes anyone here with a Black history that isn’t U.S. slavery-based.
However, this isn’t what I want to rant about today, though it’s related—and yes, this is one of my rants.
It started for me when I saw this tweet and responded.
This new wave of “race gatekeepers” is going after MVP Kamala Harris with a vengeance, similar to what POTUS Barack Obama was faced with—however this new wave is even more vitriolic. It isn’t just about MVP either—it also targets Black folks from the Caribbean, Afro-Latinas especially, who have a hard enough time dealing with racism in their own countries.
Going back even further in our troubled history with colorism, Ibram X. Kendi wrote in 2017 “Colorism as Racism: Garvey, Du Bois and the Other Color Line.”
Instead of viewing light-skinned Blacks as naturally equal to dark-skinned Blacks from an antiracist standpoint, Garvey fashioned the other less acknowledged ideological side of colorism. Garvey more or less looked down on light-skinned Blacks as inferior, holding dark-skins as the standard of Blackness, as some Black power activists did fifty years ago, and as some Black activists do today.
I used to be reeling from this other side of colorism. I can still remember when I was an awakening undergraduate student at Florida A&M University. I made it my mission not to date light-skinned women. My friends thought I had lost my mind. I desired dark-skinned women: the darker the better, and I looked down on my friends who desired light-skinned women: the lighter, the better. I hardly realized my own racist hypocrisy–that in turning colorism on its head I was still exhibiting colorism.
[...]
We should also not keep Du Bois as a static figure. By the 1930s, he had shed much of his elitism, and his elitism and colorism seemed to be interspersed. He had moved to the right side of history, this time engaging in the very public debate against the new NAACP executive secretary, Walter White. A strident integrationist and assimilationist, raging the newfangled Black nationalism of Du Bois, White once reportedly expressed that “unmixed” Negroes were “inferior, infinitely inferior now.”
From an antiracist perspective, no group of Black folk are inferior–not now, not ever–not dark-skins, not light-skins. A century ago, both Du Bois and Garvey were wrong. We have to recognize light-skin privilege and the other color line. We have to recognize that dark skin is not the essential and pure standard of Blackness. We have to recognize colorism as racism.
What I found interesting was the pushback, some of which I’m including here.
FYI, “DSBW” stands for “Dark-Skinned Black Woman.”
Discrimination within our community, against darker-skinned Black folks—especially women—is real, very painful, and has existed for many, many generations—that is true in the Caribbean as well. It’s a subject I’ve written about here at Daily Kos. I went into great depth back in 2009 in one of my first stories, “The social significance of Michelle Obama's skin color.”
One of my earliest schoolyard memories was a group of children in Baton Rouge, Louisiana cruelly taunting another child, as children are wont to do, repeating over and over the refrain:
If you're light you're all right
If you're brown stick around
If you're black, stay back, stay back stay back...
This was not a case of "southern racism", since all of the children involved were "black" by American standards. The children doing the taunting were all the children of college professors, on the campus of Southern University, where my father was teaching. Southern University is an ostensibly black school, or at that time was a "Negro" college. The child upon whom the invective was being heaped was from the "town" of Scotlandville, which was outside the gates of the campus; a few local children had been allowed to attend the on campus school. They were the children of local laborers. What made them different from the children of the professors and graduate students who lived on campus was not only their class, but their color. All of the "campus brats were light-skinned. Some would have been accepted as white anywhere. All of the "townies" were dark-skinned. As a northern black child, also light complexioned, I didn't know the rules of the game, or why they were even playing it. Attempts to make friends with the town children were met with suspicion, and hostility on their part, and I was warned by a campus brat that I would be ostracized if I continued to make overtures toward the "niggers".
This was my first introduction to social stratification within the African-American community rooted in color, and phenotype. It was not to be my last, and I have continued to observe the phenomenon over the years, finding to my surprise, that it not only existed in the South, but throughout the United States, wherever there are black communities. And when my family moved back to New York, I found that this strange color hierarchy and prejudice existed in the Puerto Rican, and West Indian community as well.
However, as we continue to wage internal struggles against colorism, it is suicidal for us, a community under attack, to then allow people to start un-Blacking us based on skin tones or hair texture or facial features.
Do not ever, ever step to me, and tell me I’m not Black. An ADOS tried that on Twitter a while back and got his damn fool head handed to him. I can start naming names and putting up photos, but the list would be too long—for example Brother Malcolm X had freckles and was nicknamed “Detroit Red,” yet these fools and asshats would put him on their “not Black” list.
I guess this really wasn’t a rant. However, I am pissed, and I decided I didn’t want to break the cuss jar today.
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NEWS ROUND UP BY DOPPER0189, BLACK KOS MANAGING EDITOR
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For those of us privileged enough to have attended an HBCU, or have at minimum shown up to a homecoming game to restock your mixtape collection, we know that besides the vendors, the food, and the fits, the band performance is the best part of the afternoon. For those of you not as fortunate, the CW is ready to fold you into the culture with its new show, ‘March’ giving you a birds eye view of the drama that takes place on and off of the field.
The docuseries set to premier in January of 2022, focuses on the Prairie View A&M University Marching Band, The Marching Storm. According to Deadline, cameras follow the journeys of both the student performers and the staff who support the massive machine that is the university band, (approximately 300 people in total), from musicians to flag dancers. Prairie View A&M is known for having one of the most prestigious music programs offered by an HBCU, and the 8 part series captures the pressures the band members face to make it on the field, while maintaining the high grade point averages required for participation.
The show also highlights just how much of an integral role both the band and the university play in southern, Black culture. The stories told are as captivating as they are entertaining, and if you’re hoping for a performance worthy of your halftime attention, look no further. The homecoming show performed at the Texas A&M and Southern University game will make you think twice about getting up to circle back for that incense on sale at the gate.
“The world of the HBCUs has not been seen on American television this way,” said Warner Bros. TV Group Chairman Channing Dungey.
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President is returning to South Carolina, the state that played a pivotal role in his march to the Democratic presidential nomination and the White House, as the featured speaker at the graduation ceremonies this coming week at a historically Black university.
Biden on Friday will attend the December commencement at South Carolina State University, according to announcements Saturday by the White House and the school.
The Orangeburg school is the alma mater of U.S. House Majority Whip Jim Clyburn, the top-ranking Black member of Congress. On Saturday, Clyburn tweeted that he would walk across the commencement stage with graduates to get the diploma that he did not have the chance to receive in 1961. The school said it did not hold December ceremonies at that time, so Clyburn got his credential by mail.
The trip will reunite Biden with Clyburn in the state credited with turning around Biden’s flagging presidential bid in 2020. On the cusp of South Carolina’s key first-in-the-South primary, Clyburn gave his public backing to Biden, a longtime friend and political ally whose campaign had struggled through less-than-stellar performances in earlier-voting states.
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The world’s big multilateral institutions are always keen to trumpet their global outlook. Art from far-flung corners of the world adorns their headquarters—and should a visitor ever need to consult a massive map of the world, one is rarely far away. Yet in one area their global credentials have not always matched up: leadership. Most of the bosses of multilateral institutions have been white men. Sub-Saharan Africans, especially, have been overlooked. Until 2017 only one had led a big multilateral organisation: Kofi Annan, who ran the UN, which rotates its top job by region, from 1997 to 2006.
Today Africans lead several global institutions. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, an Ethiopian, has steered the World Health Organisation (who) through the pandemic. Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, a Nigerian, heads the World Trade Organisation (wto). Makh tar Diop, a Senegalese, presides over an investment portfolio worth about $64bn at the International Finance Corporation (ifc), the semi-independent arm of the World Bank that invests in private firms. A stitch-up gives the top jobs at the World Bank and IMF to America and Europe. But for just the second time a sub-Saharan African, Antoinette Sayeh of Liberia, is a deputy managing director of the IMF.
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With 1bn doses of Covid vaccines expected to arrive in Africa in the coming months, concern has shifted to a global shortage of equipment required to deliver them, such as syringes, as well as insufficient planning in some countries that could create bottlenecks in the rollout.
After a troubled start to vaccination programmes on the continent, health officials are examining ways to encourage take-up as some countries have had to throw away doses.
Critics have blamed hoarding of vaccine doses by a handful of western countries for a situation in which only 7.5% of people in African countries have been vaccinated – which some argue led to the emergence of the Omicron variant in southern Africa – but health experts point to a wider series of issues.
The World Health Organization says a shortage of syringes – in particular a 0.3ml syringe version required to deliver the Pfizer dose – may slow delivery, and it has stepped up technical assistance missions in 15 countries that have lagged behind.
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Voices and Soul
by Justice Putnam, Black Kos Poetry Editor
On the evening of 4 June 1968, at the age of thirteen, I accompanied my father to the Ambassador Hotel in downtown Los Angeles. For several years, he had been writing policy and research papers for the California State Democratic Steering and Platform Committees. I had walked precincts and volunteered at the Kennedy Campaign Headquarters in the San Gabriel Valley for the preceding two months, so as a sort of reward, I was allowed to stay up past my regular bedtime to go with my father to what was, we were certain, to be a victory celebration.
Dad and I had been at the Ambassador since around 8:30 pm. It was a huge and boisterous crowd. Normally, I retired before 10 pm, so by the time Kennedy entered the ballroom around 11:30 that night, I was pretty bushed. His speech would be broadcast on the radio, so we headed home. On the way, we heard Kennedy and five others had been shot.
I was at a department store not from our home, near the television department when the news of Martin Luther King's assassination was broadcast on 4 April 1968. Dad had been teaching his history classes at Cal State Fullerton that day and evening, and had not heard the news, so my revelation was the first he had heard of it. I had never seen my Dad cry, but he teared up when I told him.
We now live in a time, where in certain parts of the country, the simple recollection of those events is being criminalized. Proud Boy Nazis and White Citizen’s Council goons have taken over local school boards. The old Sundown Towns are reemerging, and night riders are exacting vigilante justice on anyone who dares open their mouth.
I for one am not taking it laying down. If they think for one moment their storm trooper, book burning brownshirts can get away with it, they are sorely mistaken. Democracy and the free exchange of ideas is not a floral landscape they can destroy by plowing there and leveling here. Democracy and the free exchange of ideas revert back to impenetrable weeds that sprout a multitude-fold when harmed. It becomes the mycology webbed across continents and fruiting in the rain. It becomes the voice of Art and Memory and Action until it becomes once again the fragrant floral landscape of thorns and sustenance that we live with, not against.
We don’t die. We fruitful & multiply like
The Good Master say. Fields of okra, snap peas,
Collards, cabbage spring out the ground, so many
Bullets sagging on the vine, you can hear ’em holla
Pull me. Cut me. Watch me grin. We oblige. So much
Green ’tween our waists & toes, we can’t see
The clay caked in the spurs cutting our heels
For the pines that shade us. We tramp
Them cones they shed that seed the soil
That keeps us alive, our loins spilling,
More mouths begging to be filled
Every day. Them peckerwoods would turn
Every limb into a grave, if our Maker let ’em.
You talk ’bout how they strung up Claude,
But you done forgot that high yella sot Cellos.
Smashed his skull twain under that magnolia
Over yonder, where he seasoned these here roots
I’ll boil to break that fever you so ’fraid
Won’t loose you, but every season, more squash,
Kale, peanuts, melon split open, so sweet, so sweet,
Every body beg to sink they teeth in deep. Like
Them weeds we yank from this here earth,
We won’t die. We your worst nightmare.
Shoot one of us down, & our chirren’s chirren’s
Seeds’ll take root & shoot up right here like
Our pappy’s pappy’s done. Mustards, limas,
Sweet potatoes, whites, too. Our roots too deep.
You can’t kill us all. Think of all that cane
You so keen to suck on. Drag that stalk
Too long, that juice’ll turn bitter as the laughter
In your throat & choke. Don’t let them fool you
Into cuttin’ your tongues out your own
Mouths. These here is the best of times, where
The sun don’t stop shinin’ till you can smell
The moonshine midnight riders crawlin’
Out they bed to climb in yours & rub
’gainst you till you sang like locusts
In heat, a low hum, a steady moan, till they
Kingdom come & morning light appear.
(Notes:
Before Claude Neal could face trial for the accused murder of Lola Cannady, a white childhood playmate and presumed lover, a lynch mob killed and dismembered him on October 26, 1934, outside Marianna, Florida, exhibiting and distributing his body parts among the several thousand who had traveled from far and wide to witness the spectacle. On June 16, 1943, after Cellos Harrison won a two-year battle to overturn a murder conviction with a state Supreme Court ruling, another lynch mob took him outside town and murdered him as well. Burden Hill is one of this rural North Florida town’s oldest Black communities, and this speaker is the persona of an ancestor who survived these traumas.)
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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.