2021 Year In Review
Commentary by dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor
We’ve nearly reached the end of another long year. December is when we the editors at Black Kos enjoy looking back at the highlights of our writing throughout the year. We covered a lot of ground on Black Kos in 2021, from criminal justice and protest, to history and law, politics and international events, prose and poetry, great black scientists and vile right-wing racists.
But we have now come to the time of the year, when we the Black Kos editors take our annual holiday break. We will not be returning until Friday January 7th, 2022. But before we go, I would like to once again thank everyone who reads and participates in Black Kos for continuing to support us. Putting these diaries together is both a group effort and a lot of individual work. I have always viewed it as a blessing that our diaries are so well received.
But as for 2021, let’s look back at this year. One of the things I have always enjoyed is to spend a little time each year looking back at the great work this team has put together. Here are some of the highlights from this year’s edition of Black Kos. So on behalf of Deoliver47, Justice Putnam, JoanMar, Chitown Kev and myself, I would like to say thank you to all our readers.
Have a safe holiday season, and a happy new year.
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A New Hope for A New Change
BY DOPPER0189, BLACK KOS, MANAGING EDITOR
2020 was an exhausting year. When we started 2020 I wrote in last year’s opening that Cynicism Is The True Enemy Of Progress. This will be an important lesson to remember as our new President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris will be governing with a slim majority in the House, and they will be squaring off against an arch-obstructionist like Senator Mitch McConnell. I hope this week’s events clearly spells out that both parties are not the same, and that the GOP will tolerate anything as long as and until it threatens their chances to wield power.
Obstructionism isn’t just about stopping a movement once, it’s about breeding frustration and cynicism into the very system until you stop trying. This is why I’ve long believed cynicism is the real enemy of progress.
“BECOME THE CHANGE YOU WANT TO SEE”
When I worked for the first Obama Presidential campaign in 2008 that phrase has always stayed with me. If you want to see more woman in office, donate your time and money, to support and encourage more woman in public office. The same thing goes for people of color. If you believe there should be more people of color in office, donate your time and money to support and encourage more POC in public office. But most importantly if you’re blessed with the time, resources, and experience go forward and become a force for change in your community. Run for local office, join a local planning board, volunteer for a campaign, advocate for your position on a public event, donate to a local candidate, start local and become the change. But don’t let a set back or momentary defeat stop you from your goal.
The national media is obsessed with the middle aged white guy at a truck stop in the rust belt and Midwest as the key constituency Democrats need to cater to. But as Chitown Kev wrote a few years back I’m a Midwesterner, Too… the drop off in black voter turnout in 2016 cost the Democrats the same states that these mythical persuadable Trump voters live in. A large part of the Biden/Harris victory can be attributed to one part of the Democratic base that rose to the forefront in the previous year’s primaries. BLACK WOMEN.
But the Obama years not only taught us that HOPE is a powerful motivator but that CHANGE is hard. Just voting in Presidential years won’t bring change. Ignoring local elections won’t change how police or local DAs behave. Knowing when to primary a politician (the better Democrats part) and knowing when to back a politician even if they aren’t as liberal as you like because they can win their district, is how things change. Just as 2021 bring New Hope, we need to spend 2021 bringing this New Change in understanding on how politics work.
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Isn’t it about time Black folks get more than just “thank you”?
Commentary by Black Kos Editor Denise Oliver-Velez
Watching the chaotic events of the last few days unfold, with the nation’s cadre of white supremacists flexing their un-hooded muscles, spewing hate from every pore of their being, while the heroic actions of Black Capitol Police officer Eugene Goodman prevented what could have amounted to a major tragedy during the domestic terrorist incursions into Congress, has got me to thinking.
All this has happened right after having celebrated a major victory in Georgia — allowing Democrats to take control of the Senate, due to the efforts of Black folks — especially Black women.
I’ve seen a slew of tweets and posts saying, “thank you Black people” for saving America, yet again.
My problem is, thank you’s, while nice and feel goody, don’t do anything to change the objective conditions under which we live in the country we built on our backs, after y’all stole the land from Native Americans.
Though it seems a lotta folks, mostly not-Black, are “surprised” by the current level of white vitriol, I’m not. Been watching it, and experiencing it my whole life. It’s been around since slavery times, and it ain’t going away any time soon.
The good news is that we now have control of the White House, the Senate and the Congress. I make no predictions about what will happen during midterms (I hope fingers-crossed — we’ll maintain that, but who the hell really knows?)
So, while we have a certain level of political power, best to strike when we can and turn those thank you’s into concrete legislation and reparations for Black folks. We can’t eat acclamation, thank you’s don’t make a dent in housing segregation, segregated school systems, racial disparities in health care, or income differentials by race.
Yes, I said “the R word.” I am thinking back to “A forum on "The Case for Reparations" held right here on Daily Kos, hosted by Black Kos, on Tuesday June 03, 2014. Quite a lot has happened since then, and I think it is time to revisit the issue. FYI — not talking about the ADOS trolls version, which I discussed in “We should be discussing reparations for slavery. Beware those with a right-wing agenda.”
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Commentary by BlackKos Editor JoanMar
On so many levels Wednesday, January 20, 2021, was a most beautiful day. We who survived the looong, traumatic nightmare of the past four years were finally able to exhale. We exhaled hate, cruelty for its own sake, pettiness, and we inhaled a refreshing, cleansing lungful of hope, and beauty, and possibilities.
On Wednesday, Queen Michelle reminded us that she still reigns supreme; Kamala Devi Harris became Madam Vice President of the United States of America; Doug Emhoff stepped into his role as the first Second Gentleman; a fundamentally honorable man became the 46th President of these United States, and the nation and the world were introduced to Amanda Gorman.
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Black Historia
A Comment by Chitown Kev
So here we are at the opening of yet another Black History Month.
Which has always seemed to me to be the most important book report month, as some teachers rush to teach what should have been taught all along.
It’s not fair to the kids or the discipline of history, IMO.
The reminder that the root word of history, the Greek word historia, an inquiry or investigation of past events is important to me here.
The past is the past which, at minimum, is elucidated by a certain set of facts.
One of the things that I love most about The 1619 Project is that it does so much more than the simple book report, the simple recitation of past events wound into a narrative.
The past isn’t even the past; there can be no understanding of current events in this country, for example, without an understanding not only of the known facts and evidence, without the removal and challenging the “whitewashing” process, without ignoring points of view that have been distorted over time.
And context is everything.
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Commentary by BlackKos Editor JoanMar
Does the name Andre Hill mean anything to you? Have you heard that name before? In a perfect world, there’d be no need to know his name. Before we explore who he was, let’s look at what he wasn’t: He wasn’t a teenager with sagging pants, he wasn’t someone in the throes of a psychotic episode, he wasn’t an insurrectionist, and he wasn’t jaywalking. In a perfect world, 47-year-old Andre would still be here providing emotional and loving support for his daughter, his grandchildren, and others of his family, and also to provide financial support for his friends when they need it. Even in this messed up, racist, imperfect world, Andre Hill should be alive, dammit.
The family described Hill as a kind man with various interests, including chess, cooking and helping his family with projects around the house.
On Dec 22, 2020, Andre took the time to drive to his friend’s home to give her Christmas money. As he sat in the garage of his friend’s home minding his own damned business, busybody across the way decided to police his neighbors and their visitors not by talking directly to them, of course, but by calling the cops on them. To be fair, Zimmerman-lite called the non-emergency 311 because he “couldn’t see who it was.” The cops responded and within 10 seconds of arriving on the scene, Office Adam Coy exercising the power invested in him by the city of Columbus had murdered the Black man for the crime of breathing while black. Ten seconds! It’s important to note that even after shooting him, Andre might still be with us if Coy, or his partner, or any of the tens of cops who showed up at the scene had done even the bare minimum and rendered aid to the wounded man. Not one of them stepped up to do the professional, ethical, or humane thing. Instead, 15 agonizing minutes dragged by before there was any move to do anything for the innocent man they’d fatally shot. Anything to help, that is. They did remember to handcuff Andre’s lifeless body.
The city under Mayor Andrew Ginther, to their credit, did most of the right things in this instance.
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Things I Didn’t Know About Black History (Until Recently)
Commentary by Chitown Kev
A few years ago, I was rereading Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass and I happened to take particular note of the sheer rage that Edward Covey held for Douglass, in particular, even given Covey’s reputation as a slave-breaker. (At other times, I have been fascinated with the story of Douglass’ uses of “a certain root” over a hundred years before anyone was described as using a literary device called “magic realism”...but I digress...). To be sure, in the beatings of other slaves and Douglass himself, Covey was certainly sadistic (an essayist in the anthology Erotique Noire/Black Erotica pointed out the sexual tensions implicit in some of the slave beatings in the Narrative in the early 90’s...a reading that has stuck with me all these years). On rereading the Narrative, I didn’t get the impression that Covey’s rage at Douglass was sexual, but it did seem...out of proportion even for a man with “a very high reputation of breaking young slaves.”
Douglass describes Covey as “a poor man, a farm-renter” (economic anxiety!) as well as “a professor of religion—a pious soul— a member and class-leader in the Methodist church.” And here was the 16-year old Frederick Douglass: long-time city dweller, obviously highly intelligent and quite literate.
I wondered if Covey was jealous of what he saw in the young Frederick Douglass; particularly the literacy part. After all, I had always been taught that there were laws against slaves learning or being taught to read write and here, in front of Covey, is this obviously intelligent and highly literate teenage slave, I thought. For some reason, I decided to look up the Wikipedia page on anti-literacy laws in the United States and discovered...well the issue of slave literacy is a bit more complicated than what I knew.
In Frederick Douglass’ case, there was no legal prohibition in attaining literacy nor was it illegal for Sophia Auld to teach him. There were never any laws prohibiting slave literacy laws in Maryland, Kentucky, and Tennessee.
(Granted, most slaveowners did not want their slaves to learn reading and especially writing but it wasn’t always explicitly prohibited by law.)
In fact, Antonio L. Bly points out in his essay, “Slave Literacy and Education in Virginia,” that some slaveowners thought that, for religious purposes, teaching slaves to read (not so much to write) was a part of their Christian duty. (in the course completing this essay, this link broke...CK) [Link is live again...CK 2/17/21 437am CST]
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Commentary by Black Kos Editor Denise Oliver-Velez
Today is the birthday of William Edward Burghardt Du Bois (W.E.B. Du Bois); sociologist, historian, civil rights activist, socialist, co-founder of the NAACP and author, who was born in Great Barrington, Massachusetts on February 23, 1868.
This is not the first time we have celebrated Du Bois here at Black Kos, and it will not be the last. I was delighted to see attention being paid to his life and work on social media today. The first tweets I saw were from The W. E. B. Du Bois Center at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, who have these biographical details on their website:
W. E. B. Du Bois’s 95-year life was truly astonishing. He attended Fisk University, Harvard, and the University of Berlin. As a scholar he helped invent the field of Sociology as we know it today. As an activist he helped found the NAACP. As a writer he penned some of the finest works of prose to come out of America in the Twentieth Century, including The Souls of Black Folk and Black Reconstruction. As a public intellectual Du Bois fought injustice, inequality, and prejudice wherever he found it through public debates, speeches, countless editorials, and essays. As a propagandist he took on prevailing assumptions of his own time with powerful rhetoric, and compelling imagery. More often than not, his mouthpiece was The Crisis Magazine, which he edited for almost a quarter of a century. Du Bois was a global figure, a world traveller, a convener of Pan African Congresses, and an enemy of colonialism. He fought for peace throughout his life, and this eventually brought him into conflict with the United States Justice Department, who were caught up in the Red Scare of the 1940s and 50s. Du Bois was persecuted, hand-cuffed at his arraignment, vilified, put on trial, but acquitted. Nevertheless, he chose to leave the US behind him and emigrated to Ghana, at the invitation of President Kwame Nkrumah, where he spent the rest of his life.
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The African Muslim origins of the Blues — The Story of the How The Music of Africa Took Over the World, Part 1
By dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor
I went to the crossroad, fell down on my knees
I went to the crossroad, fell down on my knees
Asked the Lord above, "Have mercy, now, save poor Bob if you please"
Ooh, standin' at the crossroad, tried to flag a ride
Ooh-ee, I tried to flag a ride
Didn't nobody seem to know me, babe, everybody pass me by
Standin' at the crossroad, baby, risin' sun goin' down
Standin' at the crossroad, baby, eee-eee, risin' sun goin' down
I believe to my soul, now, poor Bob is sinkin' down
*Side note: The Crossroads have a deep meaning in African mythology
The Blues is a musical genre born in the Deep South, created by African-Americans in the 1860’s. The Blues also form the base from which jazz, R&B (rhythm and blues) and rock and roll all later came from. The Blues are one of the most influential musical art forms in the world, and forms a large part of the DNA for most modern American popular music. But as well know as the Blues are, two important historical facts of its origins are often overlooked. The first is that many elements of the Blues, such as the call-and-response format and the use of blue notes, can be directly traced back to the music of Africa. The second is that many features of the Blues including the long “wavy intonation” notes and the instrumentation, have direct origins from West Africa Muslims. From the 1600’s to the mid-1800’s, tens of thousands of Muslim slaves from West Africa were taken by force to the United States. Based on where most American slaves were taken from 20%-30% percent of the African slaves taken to the United States were Muslims.
I usually start my historical stories with accounts of when I first heard of a subject. But with the Blues I really couldn’t even begin to guess. growing up I heard a steady stream of Blues, Gospel, Reggae, R&B and Calypso from when I was a child. The Blues was one of the foundations of my musical upbringing as my parents played it on the old record player. I’m finally going to start a project I planned on starting year ago. I’m going to explore how African music crossed the Atlantic during the transatlantic slave trade, and birthed many of the most popular forms of music in the world.
The Blues has its roots in African musical traditions, African-American work songs, and in Negro spirituals. Blues mixed spirituals, work songs, field hollers, ring “shouts”, chants, and rhymed simple narrative ballads, into a new musical art form. The Blues are characterized by call-and-response patterns, the blues scale and specific chord progressions, of which the twelve-bar blues is the most common. Blue notes (or "worried notes"), usually thirds, fifths or sevenths flattened in pitch are also an essential part of the sound. Blues shuffles or walking bass reinforce the trance-like rhythm and form a repetitive effect known as the groove.
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The Soul of Evanston, Illinois
Commentary by Chitown Kev
When it comes to the issue of reparations for Black Americans, I tend to be a bit more “lowkey” than on other issues.
At the national level, I tend to shy away from even discussing the issue much, although I am on record for being in favor of targeted reparations for Black Americans.
The entirety of these United States simply is not ready to have that conversation; heck, far too many (white) Americans still don’t believe that Black Americans should have the right to vote and to have that vote counted, nowadays.
Yes, Ta-Nehisi Coates June 2014 essay “The Case For Reparations,” is probably the finest argument that I’ve read on the issue mostly, in that case, because of the “Jim Crow” portion of his argument, even in northern cities like Chicago (where, supposedly, Jim Crow wasn’t on the books!)
I knew that Evanston, Illinois, the home of Northwestern University and the city where I have resided for over a decade (on and off...mostly on), committed some tax revenues collected from the sale of recreational cannabis to a Housing Reparations Program, making Evanston the first municipality in the United States to have a funded program for reparations for its Black American residents. I’ve low-key followed the issue.
And now, in the premiere episode of ABC’s The Soul of a Nation, Evanston’s program to fund reparations for some of its Black American longtime residents takes a center stage.
And that premiere is...tonight!
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Commentary by BlackKos Editor JoanMar
I canceled Bill Maher a while ago, but truth be told, I allowed him to keep visiting in my living room long after I knew that he brought toxic energy. Maher’s hatred for Arabs/Muslims, and Palestinians in particular, always bothered me and I’m ashamed to admit that I continued to traumatize myself only because I liked his support for Obama and his disdain for the disgraced, twice-impeached, one-time former occupant of the WH. So why have I decided to spend some bandwidth on him today? Bear with me a little.
The NYT decided that now was an opportune time to launch a full-frontal attack against “cancel culture” and in so doing do a little canceling of their own of the lived experience of a Black woman who bravely came forward to share her humiliation at the hands of some employees of Smith College. A hit piece if I ever saw one in which the writer sought to paint the student as the elite who used her status at a liberal school to discriminate against the poor innocent hardworking, low-paid white workers. The school, we are told, hired an “independent” law firm to look into the case involving Ms. Kanoute and, of course, that independent body concluded that there was “no persuasive evidence of bias.” Note the word “persuasive” and may we ask, “Persuasive to whom?” Nothing new to us here, right? Haven’t we seen juries after juries after juries acquit murderous cops because they were not persuaded that a crime had been committed despite rivers of blood and hundreds of dead bodies? Nothing new here at all.
What happened to Oumou Kanoute was just one of the infuriating incidents to make it to the headlines in 2018. If you’ll recall, that year — and every year since — we could barely catch our breaths as we were hit with one example after another of blatant racism caught on camera. Incidents that didn’t need “independent” entities deciding the truth of the matter because the damning evidence was there for all to see on video. Vox in talking about the verified case of a white professor calling cops on a student for putting up her feet in class, noted some of the others:
The Monday incident thrust the university into an ongoing conversation about “Living While Black”: high-profile incidents where black people are treated with suspicion by those who may also call the police on them, for a range of innocuous things like babysitting white children, mowing lawns, selling water, eating at Subway, and entering their own apartment buildings. The topic was first thrust into the national spotlight after two black men, Rashon Nelson and Donte Robinson, had 911 called on them as they sat inside a Philadelphia Starbucks in April.
That was the backdrop for Ms. Kanoute taking to FB to share the lowering experience of being made to feel as if she didn’t belong on that particular campus.
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Commentary by Black Kos Editor Denise Oliver-Velez
White supremacist racists are at it again. Not that they have ever stopped trying to keep black folks from voting. They are simply doubling down without even trying to disguise their purpose. The Republiklan has made it very clear that since their coup didn’t work, they’ll just steal elections by disenfranchising Black voters.
Because it’s Women’s History Month, and our right to vote is under attack across the nation, I sat here today looking at the screensaver on my phone — which is a picture of Mrs. Fannie Lou Hamer, from an exhibition of the work of artist Robert Shetterly at Americans Who Tell the Truth.
Looking at her portrait, I feel like we need to invoke her spirit. Too many young folks today don’t even know her name. This makes me unbearably sad.
I’ve written about her multiple times here on Daily Kos and in Black Kos:
Black Kos, Tuesday's Chile. 'The flag is drenched with our blood.' Mrs. Fannie Lou Hamer. 1968
How black women helped shape history and today's Democratic Party
Stand up! We will survive, we will keep fighting—no matter what
The first commentary I wrote for Tuesday’s Chile, on October 06, 2009 was dedicated to her.
Meeting her, and getting to spend an entire day in her company during my first year in college in ’64 turned my world around. I left my comfortable almost all white school in New York City, to go to a Black college, where I met other Black activists who were ready, willing and able to fight. Voting was the key back then, just as it is today.
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Afro Latino Music — The Story of the How African Music Took Over the World ~ Part 2
By dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor
“Afro-Latina, camina conmigo.
Salsa swagger anywhere she go,
como ‘la negra tiene tumbao!
¡Azucar!’
Dance to the rhythm. Beat the drums of my skin.
Afro-descendent, the rhythms within.”
The influence of the African diaspora’s has been felt throughout the cultures of Latin American and the Caribbean. Among the greatest of these influences is how the music of Latin America has been shaped by the music of Africa. A majority of those enslaved in Latin America came from Africa, although Indigenous people were also enslaved. African rhythm were remixed through both Indigenous and Iberian filters to become the distinct sounds that are today known as Afro-Latino music. Latin musical forms like Cumbia, Bachata, Mambo, Samba and Son Jarocho while all distinctly different from each other all have roots in African musical forms practiced by enslaved Africans.
But just like it was in the USA, racism was also the “original sin” in Latin America and the Caribbean. At the beginning of the 20th century, African inspired music, performed and dance to by Afro-Latinos was often brutally discriminated against by white Latinos. This was especially true in Cuba, the Dominica Republic, and Brazil, although unlike in the USA African drumming was never as strongly repressed. Today many forms of Latin music are still routinely subjected to whitewashing of their roots Afro-Latin. Regardless of this whitewashing Cumbia, Bachata, Mambo, Timba, Salsa, Samba, etc. are still very vibrant expressions of the Afro-Latino musical tradition. These traditional Afro-Latino genres have also influenced waves of new musical art forms, mixing with hip-hop, reggae, electronic, rock and jazz.
As a young Jamaican I didn’t really appreciate the Cuban music from the side of my family who migrated from there to Jamaica. My father liked Cuban music but I was obsessed with the rising Jamaican musical form of dancehall. Later as in life when I started to frequent Latin lounges and later married an Afro-Latino I gained a love of Latin music. Naturally with my love of history of the Caribbean and Latin America I wanted to know more about the source of this music.
With the start of the European conquest and colonization of the Americas in the 15th century, the Spanish and Portuguese brought their cultures, languages, traditions, and music to their newly conquered lands and enslaved indigenous peoples. The Spanish, in particular, carried a rich musical mix of European and Arab influences as their culture was tightly entwined with the Moors of North Africa. The Moors were Muslim inhabitants of the North African Maghreb, the Iberian Peninsula, Sicily, and Malta during the Middle Ages.
Along with music, the Spanish introduced instruments like the guitar and the guiro to the New World. The guiro in particular became a signature feature of multiple Latin musical genres like son, trova, salsa, plena, and the traditional Panamanian and Colombian music known as típico.
But the Portuguese and Spanish didn’t just bring their own musical culture to the New World, they also unwittingly carried the rich musical traditions of their African slaves. The African music these captured people brought with them became perhaps the single most recognizable element of Latin music.
Drumming was the very pulse of religious ceremonies in Africa. These rhythmic drum beats were seemly imbued with the very spirit of Africa and her children. During the slave trade era, drumming served as a form of communication, and a way to send codes over long distances (including assisting in slave rebellions). Drumming (unlike in North America including the American colonies) and dancing was one of the few rights that wasn’t taken away from the African people in Caribbean and Latin America. Drumming became a backdrop for free form dancing and grew into perhaps the purest source of joy for enslaved people in Latin America and the Caribbean, rivaled only by religion.
At busy ports all over the Americas and the Caribbean, African slaves and enslaved indigenous peoples of the Americas mingled and exchanged their unique takes on rhythms, dances, and songs, giving birth to a uniquely Latino spontaneous musical collisions. The great tragedy of slavery still gave rise to something beautiful as Africa children turned pain and heartache into art and love through music.
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What to do about disinformation within Black communities
Commentary by Chitown Kev
Early on when the COVID-19 pandemic reached this country and then began to spread rapidly, I heard a rumor that Black people could not contract the coronavirus chiefly because of the melanin in their skin. I checked out that rumor myself and reported on it here in a comment section of Black Kos then Miss Denise did a full diary on COVID-19 and racial myths generally and, specifically, that very rumor that Black people could not contact the coronavirus.
To this day, I’m angry about that particular rumor, especially as Black communities (and communities of color, generally) have disproportionately suffered during this pandemic in terms of cases, hospitalizations, and deaths; so much so that overall Black life expectancy is suspected to have declined by more than two years simply because of COVID-19.
Misinformation and disinformation targeting Black populations continues even now that we’ve reached the phase of having available COVID-19 vaccinations.
Jessica Guynn/USA Today
Name a COVID-19 vaccine conspiracy theory circulating on social media, and hairstylist Katrina Randolph has heard it. So every time a client slides into her chair, she snips away at fears and misconceptions.
No, the vaccine isn’t an effort to sterilize Black people. It can’t alter your DNA. It won’t implant a microchip to track your movements. And no, people of color are not being used as guinea pigs.
Randolph has put herself on the front lines of the Black community’s fight against COVID-19 vaccine misinformation, part of a network of barbershops and beauty salons working with Dr. Stephen B. Thomas, who runs the Maryland Center for Health Equity at the University of Maryland School of Public Health.
The Health In-Reach and Research Initiative – or HAIR – used to focus on educating people about chronic diseases such as diabetes and colon cancer, Thomas says.
I have a couple of close relatives that have fallen victim to some of the vaccine disinformation and refuse to get the vaccine, in spite of the lack of ill effects of taking the vaccine by other family members (including myself).
Of course, disinformation regarding various aspects of the COVID-19 pandemic isn’t the only time or issue that Black communities have been specifically targeted with misinformation and disinformation. Take, for instance, the 2016 and 2020 elections ( and do note that it appears that the primary actors pushing disinformation into Black communities during the two election cycles appear to have been different).
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Commentary by Black Kos Editor Denise Oliver-Velez
While we continue fight for justice for all the Black folks murdered by police, we have to watch yet another white male mass shooter arrested alive; the latest one in Boulder, Colorado even killed a cop. The fact that he has been identified as ”Ahmad Alyssa” after the fact doesn’t change what happened — though I’m sure the narrative will now shift.
His white skin kept him alive.
I now have trolls attacking me on Twitter because to them “Muslim” is a race, which shows how ignant they are.
The story as it unfolded.
We don’t want these dudes dead. We want our “suspects” alive. Each time we watch this happen, we grow more and more convinced that justice means just-us-white people.
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The African origin of Afro Caribbean music, Reggae, Calypso, Compas, and Zouk - The Story of the How the Music of Africa Took Over the World, Part 3
Don't care where you come from
As long as you're a black man
You're an African
No mind your nationality
You have got the identity of an African
'Cause if you come from Clarendon
And if you come from Portland
And if you come from Westmoreland
You're an African
No mind your nationality
You've got the identity of an African
'Cause if you come Trinidad
And if you come from Nassau
And if you come from Cuba
You're an African
By dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor
The influence of the African diaspora has been felt stronger in the Caribbean than anywhere else in the Americas. Among the greatest of these influences is how the music of the Caribbean islands have been shaped by the music of Africa. Caribbean musical forms like Reggae, Calypso, Zouk, Mento, Soca, Compas, while all distinctly different from each other all have roots in African musical forms practiced by enslaved Africans. As I combined the music of the Spanish speaking Caribbean in an earlier story I’ll focus on the West Indian Islands of the Caribbean.
I usually start my historical stories with accounts of when I first heard of a subject. But I really couldn’t even begin to guess. when this music first touched me. I’m sure my mom sang mento and calypso to me when I was developing in her womb. Growing up I heard a steady stream of Jamaican Gospel, Reggae, R&B and Calypso from when I was in diapers — or as we say in Jamaica “from wi eye deh ah knee ” (literally a kid’s eyes at an adult’s knees). Later as a teen I was obsessed with the rising Jamaican musical form known as dancehall, as my cousins and I built our own “sound system.”
In this third part of this series, I’ll take a tour of the musical traditions of the Caribbean, which includes the English speaking nations of Belize and Guyana, as well as the French and Creole speaking parts of the Caribbean,
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At the end of the first quarter...
Commentary by Chitown Kev
(...said in my best Pat Summerall voice...)
1) At the moment, my desk is overflowing with material to read, projects to do, and a need to be organized. One look at my most recent WAYR list, though, can give you a small preview of coming attractions in this specific space (there was no way I could have done what was needed for today’s post).
2) I received the second Moderna shot received as of last Thursday afternoon around 2:25 pm. For a couple of days, there was a barely perceptible pain in the portion of my arm where I received the shot and I could only feel it when I stretched out. Even that little bit of pain is gone now.
So...a week from this coming Thursday will make two weeks since I received the second Moderna dose. I’ll make a return to doing some normal things very slowly while observing all protocols like distancing and masking.
3) I always feel guilty when I have neither the desire nor the will to watch certain news-making events or happenings or press conferences. Watching the news, after all, is supposed to be a part of what I consider to be my job.
I saw the entire video of former Minneapolis police officer’s murder of George Floyd once in May 2020. I have not looked at a second of that video since.
Nor will I be watching all of the trial minutiae. We have all been down this road before with these damned police brutality/killing/murder trials. I am tired of (usually dead) Black lives being paraded on screens as if they were some sort of 21st century death games at The Colosseum (no, not the one in Los Angeles!). I’ll follow the coverage through my regular news sources and I may comment on it from time to time and that’s about it.
4) The longest that I have ever waited in line to vote was for 20 minutes in 2008 when I stood in an early voting line in order to vote for future President Barack Obama.
On a few occasions, I have gone to polling place in PJ’s and house shoes, voted, and went back to bed.
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Commentary by BlackKos Editor JoanMar
George Floyd’s public lynching was traumatic for Black folks; it ought to be 100 times more so for the majority community. But that’s not a debate the nation is interested in having...not yesteryear, not today, not ever. We continue to focus on the victims and what it means to us but no discussion about the perpetrators and what it says about them and the community from whence they come.
Chris Cuomo, in talking about the trial and what it means to race relations to see the public lynching of a handcuffed black man, said "I don't live it, I don't understand it...all I can do is listen."
He was back at it last night, “This is so traumatic for people of color.” It’s the Pontius Pilate defense, “It’s got nothing to do with me. I’m just an impartial bystander.”
News flash, Chris! It’s got everything to do with you! And that’s why it was so refreshing to listen to Mitch Landrieu on Don Lemon’s show this last Wednesday night.
We’ve gotten so used to pathologizing black folks that it has become well nigh impossible to shift the conversation — to poke and prod at the big white elephant on the public stage. “It breaks my heart to see what they did to that poor man.” “Nobody deserves to be treated like that.” “Black lives matter.” Yeah, all of that is important, but those sentiments do not even begin to come close to the come-to-Jesus discussion we must have if we are ever to save ourselves...if we are ever to keep this fragile, frayed social contract from just totally unraveling.
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Commentary by Black Kos Editor Denise Oliver-Velez
When life feels grim, and we are faced with what often seem like overwhelming challenges, the Black community has always turned to music as a source of both strength and inspiration to “keep on, keepin’ on.” This has been true during the Covid-19 pandemic which has disproportionately affected us, both in death rates and vaccine access.
It is not surprising to see how many folks of all ages have sought relief via online musical offerings — some of the most successful of which have been the Verzuz battles, which I wrote about last year when Miss Patti LaBelle faced off with her friend Miss Gladys Knight.
Some background.
Verzuz’s Founders Timbaland and Swizz Beatz
Super-producers Timbaland and Swizz Beatz came up with the idea for Verzuz nearly half a year ago, when Covid-19 started shutting down live events all over. The battles offer a pleasant shot of nostalgia, as veteran songwriters, producers, and artists revisit their classic hits from 10, or 20, or 30 years ago, as well as a chance to catch some friendly competition at a time when the pandemic had mostly forced sports off the air.
Viewership for Verzuz has been phenomenal, bringing new music to older generations, and awakening interest in “oldies” with audiences who were not even born when some classic R&B and soul hits were recorded.
I don’t know how many Daily Kos readers tuned in on Easter Sunday, but I can assure you that Black Twitter folks of all ages were watching Earth Wind & Fire vs The Isley Brothers Verzuz Battle LIVE, on multiple platforms.
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Commentary: Black Scientists, Explorers, and Inventors
By dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor
The Sanitary Pad was developed by a black woman named Mary Beatrice Davidson Kenner of Monroe, NC (May 17, 1912 – January 13, 2006). However due to racial discrimination her patent for the sanitary belt was prevented for thirty years, and then stolen. Kenner eventually received five patents, which includes a carrier attachment for invalid walker and the bathroom tissue holder.
Kenner came from a family of inventors. The young Kenner had an active, inventive mind that would often keep her up at night. Her father, whom she credited for her initial interest in discovery, patented a clothing press which would fit in suitcases, though he ultimately made no money on the invention. Her father also patented a window washer for trains and invented a stretcher with wheels for ambulances. Her grandfather invented a light signal for trains, though this invention was stolen from him by a white man. Her sister, invented and commercially sold board games.
Kenner graduated from high school in 1931. She attended Howard University, although she was unable to finish due to financial difficulties. Women at the time were kept out of scientific establishments or academic institutions, but this did not prevent women from continued to put their efforts toward their accomplishments. Kenner and her family moved to Washington D.C. when she was young and here is where she stayed to keep updating on her opportunities to have her ideas patented at the United States Patent and Trademark Office.
Until sanitary pads were created, women used all kinds of reusable fabrics to absorb menstrual flows. In 1956, she was finally able to save up enough money to get her first patent on it. However, the company that first showed interest in her invention, the Sonn-Nap-Pack Company, rejected it after they discovered that she was African American. Kenner never made any money off of the sanitary belt, because her patent expired and became public domain, allowing it to be manufactured freely.
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Mothers of the Movement
A Review by Chitown Kev
The Three Mothers: How the Mothers of Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, and James Baldwin Shaped a Nation
by Anna Malaika Tubbs.
Flatiron Books, 272 pp., $28.99
Anna Malaika Tubbs admits, in the Introduction to The Three Mothers: How the Mothers of Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, and James Baldwin Shaped a Nation, that her book’s overall theme is not only about the substantial biographies of the mothers of the three Black civil rights activists, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, and James Baldwin, but also about honoring “Black motherhood as a whole” celebrating “knowledge passed from generation to generation through the bodies and teachings of black women.” At that point, one might be resigned to relegate the text as another book of Black feminist history and theory (texts which certainly need to read!) that is superficially propped up by the barest of biographical sketches of the mothers of three icons of the Black Civil Rights movement of the 1960’s. Instead, The Three Mothers really is a substantial tribute to the lives of Alberta King, Louise Little, and Berdis Baldwin, as well.
Sequentially and topically arranged according to the lifespans of the three women specifically and of black women in certain social contexts, what becomes evident early in The Three Mothers is the specificity with which Berdis Baldwin, Louise Little, and Alberta King bequeathed very distinct legacies to their children, including their eventually famous sons, that are easily recognizable. For example, I have read, I would guess, about 98-99% of the work that James Baldwin published in his lifetime and I never would have guessed that Berdis Baldwin was a poet and writer in her own right. Ms. Tubbs describes Mrs. Baldwin’s early life in a historic Black church in Deal Island, Maryland with Mrs. Baldwin “developing a love of writing and poetry” and performing “her pieces in front of her family members.” My own assumption, based on multiple close readings of James Baldwin’s work and a couple of James Baldwin biographies, was that while Berdis Baldwin was a necessary rock and emotional support for Baldwin while Baldwin’s stepfather and some of his teachers (mostly white teachers but also including the Harlem Renaissance poet Countee Cullen) were the primary contributors to Baldwin’s love of reading and writing and his distinctive use of language that eventually blossomed into Baldwin becoming one of the great writers of the 20th century. Berdis Baldwin certainly was more of a literary muse to and for her son than previously thought.
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Commentary by Black Kos Editor Denise Oliver-Velez
As a Black woman, and political activist, I have fought long and hard to see my sisters represented in political office; locally, statewide and nationally. Thanks to the efforts of many groups and organizations across this nation, that long struggle is becoming a reality. With those victories however, comes an ugly backlash, which we see daily on social media and in the news. The level of sheer vitriol, hate, and open death threats against our sisters has escalated, and I refuse to stand by and remain silent, no matter who is slinging shit. We can of course expect this from the right-wing Klan who have historically believed it was their right to brutalize, rape and “breed” Black women. The double jeopardy of misogynoir, faced by Black women is not new.
What is currently pissing me off, big-time, is to see certain elements who lay claim to “woke-ism” use the ugly tools of the right to excoriate our new crop of Democratic Black women mayors, and others, as if they can somehow magically change a system of white-supremacy which is embedded into the foundations of this nation.
Goddess don’t like ugly.
Y’all know I’ve fought for now Madame Vice-President Kamala Harris, since she first ran for the Presidency, and will continue to do so. The attacks on her have not ceased. I love me some Auntie Maxine, who reminds me of many of my own family aunts. #IStandwithAuntieMaxine.
I don’t live in Chicago, Atlanta, DC, N’Orleans or San Francisco, but have watched, blocked and reported far too many social media accounts which have posted what amounts to racist, sexist porn when attacking the Black women who currently hold office in those cities. In the case of Chicago Mayor Lightfoot, throw homophobia into the mix.
Are there valid critiques of any elected Democrats? Sure.
However, at a time when we have white supremacist Nazi’s who having attempted an overthrow of our government are now frantically passing legislation to remove our voting rights in Klan controlled legislatures, in states which are promoting the spread of COVID, and in a nation where rogue racist pigs, backed by supremacist police unions kill Black folks with impunity — any person who thinks that their main priority is primarying Black female Democrats, and attacking “identity politics” is an asshole.
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How different musical elements of the African diaspora gave birth to Hip Hop - The Story of the How the Music of Africa Took Over the World, Part 4
BY DOPPER0189, BLACK KOS MANAGING EDITOR
New York City is one of the world’s great melting pots. One of the prime manifestations of that melting pot is music. In part one The Story of the How The Music of Africa Took Over the World I wrote on the The African Muslim origins of the Blues, in part two I wrote on Afro Latino Music, in part three I wrote about African origins of Caribbean music. So what happens when all three of these elements collided in the late 1970’s Bronx, New York? One result of this musical and cultural fusion is what we now know as Hip hop.
Hip hop is an artist culture that was created by African American, Caribbean American, and Afro-Latino Americans in the South Bronx (although there is still a small contingent arguing hip hop started in the West Bronx). Hip hop culture is a flexible, creative form of expression that innovates with whatever is around, making the old, raw and new. Ultimately, it was the blending of African American, Afro-Caribbean, and Afro-Latino cultures, that lead to the creation of a genre that is extremely popular worldwide. One of the original, primary strengths of hip hop was that it allowed young, creative Black and Latino youth to create art that reflected the reality of their lives, of the neighborhoods around them, and of the wider social circumstances in which they found themselves.
As an 80’s kid I closely followed the rise of hip hop. After the culture shock of going from almost all black Jamaica to being the only black boy in my entire school in NH, music alongside sports became one of my escapes. Getting those first hip hop mix tapes and later watching videos on YO! MTV Raps, it felt at times like hip hop was the only anchor to my blackness. So I grew up on hip hop, both the music and dancing.
In the 1970’s an underground urban movement known as "hip hop" began to form in Bronx, New York. It focused on MC’ing over music at house parties and outdoor neighborhood block events. This movement became what is now known as hip hop culture. Hip hop music became a powerful medium for protesting the dispirit impact of institutions on minorities, particularly police and prisons. Hip hop culture arose out of the ruins of post-industrial South Bronx. It grew as a form of expression of urban Black and Afro-Latino youth, whom felt the public and politicians had written off their marginalized “ghetto” communities. The Bronx hip hop scene began to emerged in the mid-1970’s from two main innovators. One were the neighborhood block parties thrown by the Black Spades. the Black Spades were an African American group that has been described as being a gang, a club, and a music group. The other main innovators credited for the rise in the genre were the brother and sister Jamaican born duo of DJ Kool Herc and Cindy Campbell, hosting DJ parties in the Bronx.
Since its early unheralded rise Hip hop culture has spread to both urban and suburban communities throughout the United States and subsequently the world. But part of this unheralded rise was from black and Afro-Latino immigration to New York city. This merging of different parts of the African diaspora was the leading influence on hip hop’s early beginnings. The blending of music from immigrant and African American cultures spread from the Bronx to other neighborhoods, like Harlem, Flatbush, East Elmhurst, and finally the Lower East Side. Without the influence of Afro-Latino, Caribbean, and African American culture, the genre would not be what it is today.
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Commentary By Black Kos Editor Denise Oliver-Velez
Somebody needs to tell Tucker Carlson not to mess with Black women. His latest snide supremacist sneers and jeers got slapback from his target, MSNBC’s Joy Ann Reid, host of The Reid Out. She sliced and diced him with humor after his latest wimpy set of twit-isms, characterizing her as “The Race Lady.”
The Root’s Stephen A. Crockett Jr. commented.
I don’t enjoy violence.
In fact, after being forced to see months of killings of unarmed Black men, women and children shot and killed by police, I’m good if I never see another violent thing ever again.
Except, I wouldn’t mind seeing Tucker Carlson get his ass beat by MSNBC host Joy Reid. Reid is, of course, too classy for this level of ratchetness. But man, I can’t tell you how much I would enjoy watching Reid take off her earrings, pin her hair back, apply Vaseline to her face and then Sharkeisha the fuck out of Carlson.
Mostly because Reid is a Black American hero and you don’t fuck with Reid. Ever.
Well, she didn’t take off her earrings Brooklyn style, so no Vaseline needed. She did respond, and it was epic.
.
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Commentary: Black Scientists, Explorers, and Inventors
By dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor
Dr. Solomon Carter Fuller (August 1, 1872 – January 16, 1953) was a pioneering Liberian and African-American physician, psychiatrist, pathologist, and professor. Born in Monrovia, Liberia, he completed his college education and medical degree in the United States. He studied psychiatry in Munich, Germany, then returned to the United States, where he worked for much of his career at Westborough State Hospital in Massachusetts.
In 1919 Fuller became a member of the faculty at Boston University’s School of Medicine where he taught pathology. He made significant contributions to the study of Alzheimer's disease during his career. He also had a private practice as a physician, neurologist, and psychiatrist.
Solomon Fuller was born in Monrovia, Liberia to Americo-Liberian parents of African American descent. His father Solomon had become a coffee planter in Liberia and an official in its government. His mother, Anna Ursala James, was the daughter of physicians and medical missionaries. His paternal grandparents, John Lewis Fuller and his wife, had been slaves in Virginia. John Fuller bought his and his enslaved wife's freedom and they moved to the city of Norfolk, Virginia. The couple emigrated from there to Liberia in 1852, to a colony set up in West Africa by the American Colonization Society beginning earlier in the century. They helped establish the nation developed by African Americans and liberated African slaves.
He was one of five research assistants selected by Alois Alzheimer to work in his laboratory at the Royal Psychiatric Hospital in Munich, an experience that arguably paved the way for trailblazing research in Alzheimer's disease. Dr. Fuller was the first to translate much of Alzheimer's pivotal work into English, including that of Auguste Deter, the first reported case of the disease. He published what is now recognized to be the first comprehensive review of Alzheimer's disease, in it reporting the ninth case ever described. His achievements, in a period when African‐American physicians were under‐represented, merit greater recognition.
Fuller spent the majority of his career practicing at Westborough State Hospital in Westborough, Massachusetts. While there, he performed ground-breaking research on the physical changes that take place in the brains of Alzheimer's patients. In 1909 Fuller was a speaker at the Clark University Conference organized by G. Stanley Hall, which was attended by such notable scientists and intellectuals as anthropologist Franz Boaz, psychiatrists Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung, philosopher William James, and Nobel laureates Ernest Rutherford and Albert A. Michelson.
In 1919, at age 47 years, Fuller resigned from Westborough Hospital and dedicated his time to medical education at Boston University.
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Commentary by Chitown Kev
One thing that spurred me into taking a series of online courses in foreign policy and international relations these past few months is that I remembered my fondness for the subject matter as a teenager. To give two examples, when the Detroit Free Press arrived at the house, I always grabbed the international news sections, I studied all of the various debates. I also remember being one of the high school students practically begging one of our teachers in the high school to start a class in something relating to international relations which...she did...we didn’t even have a standard textbook, we simply studied the daily headlines. I believe that the course that a few of us students lobbied for, called “Global Awareness,” is still being taught at my old high school.
I wanted to study foreign policy, international relations, and diplomacy in college but I simply didn’t have the grades to get into what I thought was the best school in the subject matter at the time, Georgetown University.
I did get accepted to Howard University, though, although I did not matriculate there. (I have long considered that one of the bigger regrets of my life.)
Had I known of anything even resembling what Robert Vitalis, a political science professor at the University of Pennsylvania and author of White World Order, Black Power Politics: The Birth of International Relations, now calls the “Howard School of International Relations Theory,” I would have chosen to go to Howard if, for no other reason, to examine those archives of Howard University’s scholars in the field, for myself. From the blog “This Disorder of Things,” on a symposium on Vitalis’ work:
Vitalis’ White World Order, Black Power Politics shows what is lost when histories of International Relations (IR) are “about white political scientists teaching in white departments and publishing in white journals” (p.13, italics his). For one, ongoing debates on the nature of order and stability; of power and hierarchy; of dependency and interdependence; and of territorial sovereignty and transnationalism can be related to their mid-twentieth century classics—Aron, Butterfield, Carr and other ABCs—only by ignoring, wilfully and otherwise, the path-breaking scholarship of what Vitalis calls the “Howard School of international relations theory,” a group of extraordinary African American IR-ists who operated between the late nineteenth century and the middle years of the twentieth century.
I purchased Vitalis’ book and I am now reading it but, in the process, my FUBU-style reading of international relations has taken me down another rabbit hole: the career of the woman who taught foreign policy and international relations at Howard University for 35 years and was an advisor to President Eisenhower:
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Commentary by BlackKos editor JoanMar
The Washington Post reports his death as, “An unarmed 29-year-old Black man, was shocked with a stun gun and shot on April 14, 2021, in Honolulu, Hawaii.” Just a one-sentence entry. Only one of the 330 people killed by cops since the beginning of the year 133 days ago. One of 65 (or as much as 172) Black people to be taken out by cops year-to-date...and the earth continued on its journey around the sun. Just another police killing in a country where individual law enforcement officers are given the power to be judges, juries, and executioners.
Lindani Myeni, a South African native, was a married father of two, a rugby player, a former contestant on the South African version of “Idols,” and a prince of the Zulu tribe. (You need another example of racism in action? Notice that all the editors who deigned to mention that he was of royal blood put the word prince in quotation marks? He’s a Black South African and those people cannot really be of “royal” blood now, can they? That’s a whole ‘nother story...)
Nobody knows for sure why Lindani entered that house. It could be that he mistook the house for the temple next door. We note that the occupant of the house said he told her his name, he took off his shoes to show respect, and when he saw that he was not welcome, he left without harming her or her husband before the cops arrived. While I’m tempted to dub her a Karen, in fairness, I’d be scared out of my wits if a stranger entered my apartment and just wandered around (as she claimed he did). I’m sure that I’d have called the cops, too. She did lie to the dispatcher when she told them that it was a burglary. She would not have known, but Mr. Myeni, it seemed, was a well-connected, independently wealthy young man.
In a court filing reported by the Star-Advertiser, lawyers argue that after Mr Myeni became aware he was unwelcome he left the house peacefully.
“Plaintiff alleges that the response by the occupants of the Property was motivated by Mr Myeni’s race and constituted racial discrimination in public accommodation,” the lawsuit alleges.
“As Mr Myeni stood still, unarmed, on the side of the driveway just a few feet off the street, one of the Officers, while hysterical screams of ‘that’s him’ emanated from a person standing in the doorway of the house on the Property, suddenly shone the flashlight directly in Mr Myeni’s eyes and held a pistol in the flashlight beam pointed at Mr Myeni."
No, my beef is not with the woman who called the cops — though her statements to the dispatcher betrayed a Karen-like mindset. My problem is with the quality of policing in this country. You watch the kill video and see that the vigilante cops arrived on the scene, jumped out of their vehicles with guns drawn, and in an aggressive and offensive manner immediately ordered him to get on the ground. All this without identifying themselves. It was only after they’d stunned him and fired three shots that I heard the words “police!” Why? Lindani was peacefully standing outside when they got there. Why not, “Good day, sir. I’m Officer John Jones, can you tell me what’s going on?”
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Commentary by Black Kos Editor Denise Oliver-Velez
I’m sitting here wondering if there is a handbook for racist bigots, or a college course called “Creative Methodologies for Murdering Black People (and getting away with it) 101.
A case study of U.S. history provides an endless list of ‘slaughter Black folks” techniques.
How can I kill thee...let me count the ways...(apologies to Elizabeth Barrett Browning)
I can enslave you, sell you, work you to death, starve you, torture you, lynch you, lock you up in prisons for life, and fry you in an electric chair.
Those of you who survive this onslaught can have your towns burned down.
Then I can segregate you, force you to live in environmental hazard zones, shop in food deserts, and get asthma from roaches.
I will rape you, breed you, police you, shoot you, and then I will take your music, the blues you cried out ‘cause of all of the above, and I will play it, sing it and make millions off of it.
I will figure out ways to justify your murders and sound very rational. I will create media networks to bombard the minds of other white people to ensure no one forgets the hate lessons they learn at grandpa’s knee. I will reinforce the home-schooled lessons in churches with a white Jesus smiling beatifically at burning crosses on parade.
I will write best-selling books with academic imprimaturs pointing out and re-enforcing the notion that you are born with lesser IQs, and therefore are only allowed to hang around if you perform useful labor for us. Or entertainment.
When any other white people step out of line and start having guilty feelings about your treatment, or *gasp* empathy (a curse word), I will challenge their whiteness, brand them race traitors, or communists. I don’t worry though. We’ve managed to do this for 500 years and they haven’t stopped us, so we’re assured of decades...or centuries more.
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The Roots Themselves, Traditional African Music and Dance — The Story of the How the Music of Africa Took Over the World, Part 5
BY DOPPER0189, BLACK KOS MANAGING EDITOR
We are Africa,
We are the rhythm and we are the beat of the drums,
This is how the African learnt to dance…
We learnt to dance to the lilt of our hearts,
Feet stamping steadily to the constant concord of living,
Feet racing rapidly to the quick frenzied patter-patter of panic.
We learnt to dance to the rhythm of the raindrops on rooftops,
Arms swaying softly in the drizzling dew decorating the dawn,
Hands beating a stroppy tempo to the thunder and the storm,
This is how the African learnt to dance…
By Foluke Ifejola Adebisi
I have previously written on how Hip hop (Black Kos, Hip-Hop's origins from the African diaspora) was the fruit that grew out of three branches of the African music diaspora, African American (Black Kos, The African Muslim origins of the Blues), Afro-Caribbean (Black Kos, African origins of Caribbean music), and Afro Latino (Black Kos, The History of Afro-Latino Music), but what about the roots themselves of the New World’s African diaspora’s music? What about African music itself? This story will attempt to answer that question. First I will look at the the historical records of the music of African, and then later I’ll concentrate more on the dances this music inspired.
The pulse of a culture is made palpable through the musical instruments it produces and plays. Whether the music is vibrating strings, a throbbing percussion, soulful woodwinds, or as in the West Africa the iconic cross-beats and off-beats that it creates. Just as important as the music is the dancing a culture’s music inspires. The moves, rhythms, and rituals so central to African life survived slavery and Western cultural appropriation to influence modern Western society and choreography while still remaining a vibrant part of modern Africa’s traditions.
Historians widely acknowledged that African music has undergone frequent and decisive changes throughout the course of its history. What is today deemed traditional African music is almost certainly different from what was historically African music. Furthermore, because of intra-African trade, African music historically wasn’t rigidly linked to specific ethnic groups. Individual African musician, each with their own style and creativity, have always played an outsized role in African music.
Just as a side note, for some of modern historian’s best estimation of historical African music and dances, the source will sometimes be their “musical daughters” it begat in the New World. Because of these historical cultural ties to the Americas, I will mostly focus on those parts of Africa that share the strongest cultural links with the Americas that were forged during the transatlantic slave trade. This is case both for brevity’s, and to focus on areas I have expertise in.
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We are Black, Proud, and Queer
Commentary by Black Kos Editor Denise Oliver-Velez
June 1 kicks off Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender and Queer (LGBTQ) Pride Month, which evolved from events honoring the 1969 Stonewall Uprising in Manhattan. Over our years here at Daily Kos, Black Kos editors and members of the community have written many stories featuring Black members of the LGBTQ community, because “they” are very often “us” and very much a part of being “Black and proud” both historically and in our struggles ahead. I sat here today thinking about that history, and how easy it is to forget how many towering Black figures in literature, arts, politics, and activism, who are no longer with us, whether or not they were “out,” got us to where we are today.
James Baldwin, Bayard Rustin, Audre Lorde, Barbara Jordan and Alvin Ailey come to mind immediately. Over the years, Justice Putnam has featured many LGBTQ poets like June Jordan in Voices and Soul.
It’s amazing how things have changed in what to me seems but a brief moment in time. I could never have imagined an out Black lesbian Lori Lightfoot as mayor of Chicago even 10 years ago, or an openly gay Black State Rep. Malcolm Kenyatta running for the Pennsylvania Senate, and a Karine Jean-Pierre holding White House Press briefings.
Our own history here at Daily Kos has had major bumps on the Black LGBTQ road, with massive blow-ups and in-fighting, some of it dating back to around the time of Prop 8 in California, which was dealt with by our sister shanikka, in her now epic diary “Facts Belie the Scapegoating of Black People for Proposition 8, which got 1021 recs and had 2004 comments (a whole lotta pie).
I realize that change is often slow, setbacks are frequent, and there are days when we look at the nightmare mob of racists and homophobes spewing hate, death and division and we don’t even want to get out of bed some mornings.
Don’t be discouraged. Don’t give up the fight. We owe it to those who came before, who knocked down walls and opened doors, to the young folks who now lead the struggle, and to generations who will take our places soon enough.
We are Black. Some of us are queer. All of us are loved.
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Commentary: Black Scientists, Explorers, and Inventors
By dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor
Dentistry is recognized as one of the world’s oldest medical professions with a documented history dating back as far as 5000 B.C. But the modern medical field of dentistry as we know it today, wasn’t truly modernized until the 1700s. But throughout this period of modernization, African Americans experienced great difficulty in seeking dental care, while also finding it even more difficult to locate dentists of color.
Robert Tanner Freeman (1846–1873) was born near Washington, D.C. in 1846. He was the son of a carpenter who had bought his family's freedom and then moved to Raleigh North Carolina. During his late teens he found and worked for a mentor named Dr. Noble, a white dentist in Washington. He developed an interest in dentistry after working for Dr. Noble. After being rejected from two dental schools because of the color of his skin, Dr. Freeman went on be accepted and enrolled into the Harvard University School of Dental Medicine.
In the 1860’s the Harvard School of Dental Medicine had introduced new faculty with a more unbiased policy towards race. Freeman was then accepted after being interviewed by the first dean, Dr.Nathan Cooley Keep alongside five others becoming one of "the first six" to study at Harvard Dental School. On March 10th, 1869 Tanner became the first African American to graduate from Harvard Dental School while also becoming the first African American to be awarded a dental degree in the United States.
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Commentary by Black Kos Editor Denise Oliver-Velez
As you all probably know by now — Val Demings has stepped up to the plate and decided to go after Sen. Marco Rubios’ seat in Florida.
This was her first campaign video:
Here’s her campaign website:
Rep. Demings is ready to throw down. Do. Not. Mess. With. This. Sistah.
A reminder:
Just to be clear, the “we” I’m talking about is not Daily Kos, or Black Kos.
“We” are a loosely knit group of folks who have banded together on social media to challenge the misogynoir that is hurled frequently in the direction of sisters running for office and to give them our support.
We have an AKA as MVP. Let’s put a Delta in the Senate.
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Commentary by BlackKos editor JoanMar
“A woman’s hair is her crown and glory” (or variations of that) is a phrase I’ve been seeing in books since I first started reading. I have no doubt that the authors who wrote the books I read as a child were not using the words “crown” and “glory” to describe Black hair.
Oh, the crosses we have been forced to bear. Malcolm X once wrote that:
“The most disrespected person in America is the Black woman. The most unprotected person in America is the Black woman. The most neglected person in America is the Black woman.”
And if there’s one thing, other than the color of our skin, that is, that makes us stand out and thus even more open to vicious abuse, discrimination, and dehumanization, it is our hair. Our hair and hairstyles are only to be celebrated when appropriated by white women.
tell the black girls
how special powers
are interwoven
in their braids and cornrows.
god gifted
in the tips
of their twists and locs.
This tweet from VP Kamala Harris’s niece brought back memories:
My 5-year-old wanted beads like Venus and Serena. Her mama is not really the best at doing hair, but for her baby girl, she was going to do it herself. She’d not entrust this job of making her baby’s dream come through to anyone else. I went around town searching for just the right beads and the tools I’d need for this assignment. Getting my baby her Venus&Serena-do turned out to be an all-day affair. She was so patient, so well-behaved, and we had tons of fun sorting out beads, singing favorite songs, doing quizzes, she reading out loud to me and me answering a million questions. It was a labor of love and a time for bonding as generations have done before us. At the end of it all, she had a headful of beaded individual braids that she joyfully swung back and forth as she twirled and twirled and twirled and then jumped in her mom’s arms for a long hug. I was a proud mama.
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Pride
Commentary by Chitown Kev
Sunday, June 30, 1996 was the day of the Gay Pride Parade in Chicago.
It was around 6:40 am when the strange woman finally unperched herself from the window sill of my apartment and joined the strange man and left the house to get more bags of crack.
My home smelled of crack smoke just as it had many days and times before but some reason...it got to me this time.
It was either continue on and kill myself (which is what I wanted) or I would continue on and exist continuing to do what I was doing (which I feared the most; that was a fate worse than death).
Or I could stop everything altogether and try living instead of existing yet again.
None of the three options particularly appealed to me at 6:45 that morning. Alone with my thoughts, at least for a brief time, until the strangers returned.
By 6:47 am, I made the phone call to a good friend of mine that also managed a recovery house. I was surprised that he picked up the phone so early in the morning, as it was Gay Pride Day and he probably needed his rest because...there was a lot to do later.
“J., come pick me up,” I wearily said into the phone.
I was out of the house by about 6:50 am waiting for the pickup on the side of the apartment building where I could not see the front door.
J. drove up in his car by 6:54 am and picked me up.
(Later I was to find out that those two strangers had returned to the house by 6:57 am.)
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Voices & Soul
by Justice Putnam, Black Kos Poetry Editor
The Prison Industrial Complex insists that it is a growth industry, and it's hard to argue with that assessment. With the building of ever more prisons, both by Government and Private Industry, with mandatory sentencing and inflexible drug laws, the resonant cadences of chain gangs past can be heard echoing from sea to shining sea.
It is presumed that Drug Prohibition began with the Harrison Act of 1914, but California enacted the Nation's first anti-narcotics law in 1875 in response to anti-chinese sentiment. Ostensibly enacted to crack down on opium dens, the law was used to incarcerate or banish Chinese nationals deemed as unfair competition with white workers. When several boatloads of Punjabi Sikhs landed in San Francisco in 1910, it sparked an uproar of protest from Asian exclusionists, who pronounced them to be even more unfit for American civilization than the Chinese. Immigration authorities capped the influx at little more than 2,000 in the state, mostly in agricultural areas of the Central Valley. Even so, the Sikhs remained a popular target by racists of the times, and were accused of many crimes, all while under the influence of hashish or marijuana. In the 1920's and 1940's, when Braceros and other workers from Mexico were no longer needed, even harsher laws were enacted to hasten their exodus. Anti-narcotics laws were also enacted in the South to intimidate the black population and used as an excuse to deny them the vote.
To ignore the racial animus that drives the Prison Industrial Complex, is to ignore the obvious, it is to ignore the history of our nation.
Divide and Conquer is a strategy used by military and political professionals alike. If people can be divided by culture and race, the job of the General or the Oligarch runs smoother. It runs smoother still, if the divisions extend within those very cultures and races, as well.
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Still wondering how many people would vote “yes” to sending all Black folks off with space aliens
Commentary by Black Kos Editor Denise Oliver-Velez
I never expected to see The Wall Street Journal featuring a piece on Professor Derrick Bell, who is often dubbed “The Godfather of Critical Race Theory.”
Adam Kirsch writes:
In 1971, Bell became the first Black professor to receive tenure at Harvard Law School. As he writes in “Faces,” “When I agreed to become Harvard’s first black faculty member…I did so on the express commitment that I was to be the first, but not the last, black hired. I was to be the pioneer, the trailblazer.” But the school was slow to hire more Black faculty, leading Bell to leave in protest in 1990. He ended up spending the last part of his career at NYU Law School.
These experiences inform “Faces at the Bottom of the Well,” which is made up of nine fables, some with a science-fiction twist. In one story, a new continent emerges in the Atlantic Ocean, with an atmosphere that only African-Americans can breathe. In another, the U.S. institutes a system where whites can pay for permission to discriminate against Blacks—a kind of cap-and-trade scheme for bigotry.
These far-fetched scenarios allow Bell to explore very real questions about belonging and trust. Are Black people at home in America, or should they think of themselves as sojourners in a land that will never belong to them? Is racism a social problem that can be solved, or is it a permanent condition like mortality, which can only be met with defiance?
Not every story in “Faces” has a dark ending, but most do—especially the last and most famous, “The Space Traders.” In this tale, aliens arrive on earth and make the U.S. government an offer: In exchange for miraculous technologies that can heal the environment and ensure prosperity, they demand to carry off the entire Black population of the U.S. in their spaceships. When a referendum is held on whether to accept the aliens’ offer, “yes” wins with 70% of the vote.
As a result of right wingnuts latching onto Critical Race Theory (CRT) as their latest hysterical bludgeon to scare whyte people about the coming Black takeover of all things American (they are clueless about CRT — but it is “Black”...soooooo…) Professor Bell’s existence has now entered the mainstream arena, along with his book of fables, “Faces at the Bottom of the Well.”
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Commentary by BlackKos editor JoanMar
Fighting for police reform has been largely left up to black folks because police brutality is seen as a problem affecting only marginalized communities. Good, well-intentioned white folks speak about being “allies in the fight for justice” after incidents of over-policing make it to the national news or on Twitter. True, black, brown, and native folks are killed and brutalized at a higher rate — and with a viciousness that was only reserved for enslaved people who were treated worst than animals back in the day — but, my friends, white lives are also being snuffed out at an alarming rate unmatched in the “developed” world. Your relatives battling with mental illness, your youngsters, your lovers, your womenfolk are also at risk.
At least 130 white people killed by police since Jan. 1, 2021. I say “at least” because there’s a whopping 193 murders/deaths tucked into a category labeled as “unknown,” and another 241 to be found under “other.”
Get off the sidelines and begin fighting as if your life is at stake...because it is!
White teenager, 17-year-old Hunter Brittain is described by those who knew him best as hardworking, respectful, kind, and an all-around good kid. Hunter’s passion was building and repairing trucks and that was what he was doing on June 23 when he had an encounter with Officer Mike Davis...an encounter that he would not survive.
A sheriff’s deputy shot and killed a teenager in Lonoke County, Arkansas, during a traffic stop on Wednesday, June 23. Sergeant Michael Davis pulled 17-year-old Hunter Brittain over along Arkansas Highway 89 at 3:00 a.m. for unknown reasons.
The teen and his passenger were on a test drive at the time of the traffic stop, after Brittain had been trying to repair his pickup’s transmission, according to a report from Vice News. //
During the traffic stop, Brittain got out of his truck to place a jug of antifreeze behind the rear tire to stop it from rolling into the deputy’s car. The deputy then shot at the teenager as he was placing the jug down, according to the passenger and witness Jordan King.
The Lonoke County police department has yet to articulate a reason why the murderer stopped the youngster and ended his life. Had the teenager not thought of trying to stop his truck from rolling into the deputy’s car, both youngsters may have been killed as the murderous, reckless cop would have accused them of using the truck as a weapon against him. Hunter Brittain didn’t stand a chance that day.
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Nikole Hannah-Jones and Peak Excellence
Commentary by Chitown Kev
Earlier today, Project Creator for “The 1619 Project” and Pulitzer Prize-winning staff reporter for The New York Times Magazine Nikole Hannah-Jones announced that she was turning down an opportunity to teach journalism as a tenured faculty member in the journalism school at her alma mater, The University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill.
Instead, Hannah-Jones has accepted a position as Inaugural Knight Chair in Race and Reporting at Howard University. Hannah-Jones will be joined by National Book Award winner (Between the World and Me) Ta-Nehisi Coates.
Hannah-Jones’s decision comes after a protracted dispute with UNC in which she was initially the first Black Knight Chair to be denied full professorship and tenure at UNC’s Hussman School of Journalism and Media; an event that Hannah-Jones described, in an interview with CBS This Morning’s Gayle King, as “embarrassing.”
.
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The African American who introduce inoculation to the Western World
Commentary: Black Scientists, Explorers, and Inventors
By dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor
Fears and misinformation surrounding inoculation and vaccination are old themes in American culture. One piece of this disinformation campaign lost to history is that the principles of inoculation were first introduced to the Western world by a black African slave in Boston Massachusetts. But then just as now fear, racism, and religious bias lead to inoculation’s widespread rejection in the 1700s just as with the modern Covid vaccination campaigns
Onesimus (late 1600s–1700s) was a black man instrumental in the mitigation of a major 1721 smallpox outbreak in Boston, Massachusetts. Onesimus birth name is unknown. He was at some point enslaved and given in 1706 to a New England Puritan minister named Cotton Mather, who renamed Onesimus. Mather was the Puritan minister of Boston’s North Church (he was also a prominent figure in the Salem Witch Trials). Mather renamed his slave after a first-century slave mentioned in the Bible. The name, "Onesimus" means useful, helpful, or profitable.
I first heard of Onesimus growing up near Boston, but I didn’t know much about him other than he was part of the local black folklore. It was only years later watching PBS that I learned more about him. I was recently think that maybe he should be promoted as an antidote to many anti-vaxxers who have tried to worm their way into black cultural spaces.
Little is known of Onesimus early life as he was just one of the millions of Africans kidnapped from West Africa, and forced into a perilous transatlantic slave trade. Yet from these terrible beginnings Onesimus changed the course of history by spurring the first recorded use of inoculation in the New World. Onesimus’ knowledge helped pave the way for the development of the first vaccines 75 years later.
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The “NYC Draft Riot.” The massacring of Black people is a key part of the erased American history white racists don’t want our children taught
Commentary by Black Kos Editor Denise Oliver-Velez
While white supremacist legislators froth at the mouth like the rabid racists they are, passing bills to ensure that the children in their districts will be protected from the ugly reality of foundational parts of American History, we face yet another “anniversary” of the murder of Black folks this week. This time it’s the massacre of Black people in New York City which took place in July of 1863, which is called “the Draft Riots” obscuring much of what really took place.
Euell A. Nielsen, wrote this overview for BlackPast
The New York City Draft Riots (1863)
When the draft came to New York City in July 1863, anti-government anger turned to anti-government and anti-black violence. The anti-black violence was driven by the resentment that the Irish would have to compete with freedpeople for jobs in the city now that the Union had embraced emancipation.
On the first day of the draft, July 11, the city was relatively quiet. However, by day three, July 13, tensions boiled over. Volunteer firefighters from Engine Co. No. 33, were known for their violent nature. Angry at their commissioner, they set fire to their own company firehouse which attracted an angry mob. Led by the firefighters, the mob continued down 3rd Avenue, ransacking and burning businesses in their wake. They focused on those enterprises known to employ African Americans including Brooks Brothers, Harper’s Weekly, Knickerbockers, and other wealthy businesses. They also attacked the homes of prominent white abolitionists. When the mob reached the Colored Orphans’ Asylum, filled with mostly women and children, it began looting the building before setting it on fire. The 200 children inside were led out of the back by their benefactors and taken to safety.
There were many accounts in New York City newspapers of black individuals killed during the riot. Although there were an estimated 663 deaths, only 120 were reported to the police. Of those, however, 106 were African Americans. One account of Ebrahim Franklin’s death was typical. Franklin was in church, praying. He was a disabled man who made his living working as a carriage driver. He lived at home and supported his elderly mother. The mob reached him just as he was rising to his feet from his prayers and beat him to his death. They then dragged him outside and hung him in the church yard in front of his mother. Finally, they mutilated his corpse.
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Commentary by BlackKos editor JoanMar
A lot has been written about ESPN’s Rachel Nichols and her racist swipe and attempt of erasure against Black sportscaster Maria Taylor. Rachel, who some people thought to be an ally, showed her true colors behind closed doors when she thought she was speaking to a kindred spirit. Twitter blew up over Rachel’s spilled racist animus and she is currently paying the price for her transgression. On the other hand, not nearly enough has been said about Adam Mendelsohn. Personally, I found Mendelsohn's comment to be a betrayal of the highest order. I am not saying that LeBron James should fire him, I’m saying that his words capture the fear that we all live with...that the people we laugh and talk with spit with disgust as soon as our backs are turned.
I’m at an event in Connecticut. Place is full of mostly rich white Democrats, some very liberal ones, too. I’m one of less than a handful of black people there but I’m not feeling uncomfortable. I know some of these people. They are allies. The son of the family who invited me seeks me out. I’ve known him for a while and we are casual friends. His political beliefs align with mine. He was ready to leave the event and had no idea why he’d agreed to come in the first place. He despises the people in the room he told me. I don’t know how we got to talking about his mom, but suddenly he stops twirling the glass in his hand, captured my gaze, and said, “She’s a f**king racist.” “Who?” I asked in confusion. (He calls his mother by her first name which we’ll change to Karen.) “Karen,” he answered. I stared at him without responding. “When we were little she wouldn’t allow us to play with black kids and didn’t want them coming over to our house. As to the ‘Smiths,’ they positively f***ing hate black people. You wouldn’t spend one minute around them if you heard the things they say around the dinner table.” The “Smiths” were the close friends of his parents. He continued, “Karen was one of the first to get a copy of The Bell Curve and it’s still on her coffee table.
The betrayal:
- The longtime white public relations advisor to Black NBA superstar LeBron James last year told a white ESPN reporter during a call, “I’m exhausted. Between Me Too and Black Lives Matter, I got nothing left,” The New York Times reported.
- The comments by PR maven Adam Mendelsohn referenced catchphrases used for the movements seeking to reduce sexual violence against women and police violence against Black people, respectively.
Mendelsohn works for LeBron James who just happens to be one of the most politically active athletes of all time. James talks the talk and actually walks the walk as few others have done before him; he is actively and proactively fighting for his community. The athlete, businessman, visionary is involved in some of the biggest projects to be undertaken by a black man in this country and Adam Mendelsohn has been his PR man since 2010. You’d think the man [Mendelsohn] who’s so intimately involved in so many Black causes would be an ally in words and deeds, wouldn’t you?
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Commentary by BlackKos Editor JoanMar
A confession right up front: I have never watched an episode of Seinfeld. Never, ever. Never watched an episode of Friends, either. I do have friendly acquaintances who speak of both shows in very laudatory terms and look at me askance when I confess my sin of never feeling the urge to watch them. Both shows are said to be among the most popular sitcoms with Seinfeld in the running for the title of the greatest show ever.
CNN’s new series History of the Sitcom purports to take us back to the good ol’ days of the situation comedies that had us glued to our tv sets on those special nights.
History of the Sitcom reunites audiences with the television friends, families, and co-workers they grew up with while introducing cutting-edge comedies that are sure to be your next binge-watch. The eight-part docuseries produced by Cream Productions features over 180 original interviews with sitcom icons including Norman Lear, Tina Fey, Tracy Morgan, Lisa Kudrow, Jason Alexander, Kelsey Grammer, Kim Fields, Tim Allen, Carl Reiner, Dick Van Dyke, George Lopez, Mel Brooks, Isabella Gomez, Bob Newhart, Ted Danson, Joey Soloway, Jimmie Walker, Judd Apatow, Dan Levy, Zooey Deschanel, Chuck Lorre, Mara Brock Akil, Helen Hunt and many more, breaking down how sitcoms have helped generations of Americans navigate an ever-shifting cultural landscape.
Last Sunday, I had not really planned on watching the show, but I was too lazy to change the channel and so the latest episode became background noise, droning on as I got stuff done. Suddenly I heard something that had my ears perking up. “Seinfeld was a show about nothing.” Whoa! What was that? “Seinfeld was a show about nothing,” said someone. I’d heard that phrase before but somehow the smugness of the delivery grabbed my attention. The story goes that some white men went to NBC and pitched a show that had no plotline other than white men talking to each other and they were successful! They got it produced! The results for the first season reflected the creative talent of the main actors of the show — the show bombed and bombed hugely. The reviews were downright brutal, the ratings paltry, but NBC (all white men, of course) execs thought that what was then The Seinfeld Chronicles deserved more time to prove itself, and so they ordered more episodes. The execs were going to make this mediocre, unproven show into a hit because they had the power to do so. The network gave the show the prime-est primetime slot — right after Cheers which, at the time, was their most popular sitcom. With that massive lead-in audience, Seinfeld the show and Seinfeld the actor had no option but to succeed. Seinfeld the show became a household hit, Jerry Seinfeld became a multi-millionaire and gained the reputation for being a creative genius, and the rest is history. White men failing up.
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Baldwin’s Welcome Table (cont’d)
Commentary by Chitown Kev
While researching for the James Baldwin piece which posted on the FP yesterday (yay!) I came across a Baldwin interview that had the barest provenance and that began with the interviewer asking “about the traditional ethnic meals of black people, soul food, and how white Americans have taken it up as if it were some sort of exotic foreign cooking.”
BALDWIN: We are, in some peculiar way, the pacesetters of this nation—‘cause soul food, it was simply poor folks food, you know, white and black because people forget, time goes so fast, that when I was growing up in Harlem, Harlem was not yet entirely a black community. I lived next door, for example, to an Italian family, and we…what are we talking about, we’re talking about the early 30’s, middle 30’s, and we were all poor then and we all ate [unintelligible] food. You know there’s nothing…well, Tony, the boy next door, with whom I fought every campaign of the Italian-Ethiopian War, ate spaghetti, we ate spaghetti too, we ate pork chops, he ate pork chops too, we ate the cheapest things there were, you know.
INTERVIEWER: You know, you can go into a soul food restaurant right now and leave $50 for a dinner for two.
BALDWIN: Well, what has happened now is that it has become fashionable, you know. White people have discovered it whether they think they have discovered jive and jazz. It is, white people...white people in America are always, in a way, catching up with Black people and never quite understand what we’re doing. So the soul food craze is something that I really cannot begin to describe…
“That’s an odd subject for the beginning of an interview with James Baldwin,” I thought.
Some clues from the recording: At the end of the interview, the interviewer says that he is Steven/Stephen Banker and that Baldwin’s latest book is Just Above My Head, which does place the approximate time of the interview in mid to late 1979 and possibly as late as 1980.
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Anna Julia Cooper’s Birthday
Commentary by Black Kos Editor Denise Oliver-Velez
It does not have to be Black History Month, or Women’s History Month for us to honor Black women who made major contributions to getting us to where we are today. Sadly, many of those women have never become household names. I’m thinking about Anna Julia Cooper today on her birthday. She lived to the age of 105, spanning every major era of our history as Black people in the United States.
While I was collecting birthday names for today’s twitter roundup in the comments section, I was reminded by (and very glad to see) several tweets about her, though they have very few shares.
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The Saints Marching In
Commentary by Chitown Kev
The Two-Flat on McDougall Street in Detroit is the spookiest house that I have ever been in, before or since. Mom says that The Two-Flat on McDougall Street always seemed spooky because it was always dark from the 40-watt lightbulbs that were used in the place for as long as she could remember. I’m talking about something else. After all, Mom remembers the Two-Flat on McDougall Street as teeming with siblings, aunts, and cousins at nearly all times of the day and night. On the other hand, I recall the aura of the place; a house of spirits if there ever was one, even though most of those spirits were still physically living in other parts of Detroit.
Still, I had some happy times in The Two-Flat on McDougall Street. I remember, for example, playing Gladys Knight and the Pips with my three second cousins. Big meals at the kitchen table that included white rice for every meal (some of my cousins can’t stand white rice to this very day). And many of those house spirits and auras, my family, were, as I have said, still physically living.
The Two-Flat on McDougall Street was located in The Black Bottom, a predominantly Black section of Detroit that, according to The Detroit Historical Society’s Encyclopedia of Detroit
Black Bottom was a predominantly Black neighborhood in Detroit, Michigan demolished for redevelopment in the late 1950s to early 1960s and replaced with the Lafayette Park residential district and a freeway. It was located on Detroit's near east side, bounded by Gratiot Avenue, Brush Street, the Detroit River, and the Grand Trunk railroad tracks.
My mother was born (but not raised) in The Black Bottom and remembers the place vividly and (when she speaks of it) fondly, with an air of reverence. I remember a corner store, lots of empty land, empty streets and, if I imagine deeply enough, the faintest hint of aura. A land hollowed out by the powers that were (and still be) and yet...hallowed.
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Voices and Soul
by Justice Putnam, Black Kos Poetry Editor
As Haiti and her continuing tragedies continue to fade from the collective memory of a Nation consumed with its own Exceptionalism, there remains a collective few who keep the memory alive. If we don't keep Haiti in the forefront of our concern, then we will have condemned the island and her people as we always have. Yet concern without action means we have condemned Haiti to an even greater tragedy.
“… What good are your tears?
They will not spare the dying their anguish.
What good is your concern
to a child sick of living, waiting to perish?
What good, the warm benevolence of tears
without action?
What help, the eloquence of prayers,
or a pleasant benediction… ?”
Tragedy and Redemption are constants in Caribbean culture, permanence and faith are tested by land-leveling hurricanes and island-forming tectonic shakings of economics and magma. Permanence is but smoldering paper, and faith can be snapped like a heated wire, where no matter how loud and constant a Belief might be shouted from the pulpit, Redemption and the renewal of Faith is sometimes found in the tragedy. It’s a sad truth in the physics of these things, that before a phoenix can rise, a city must burn. And it is also true in the biology of these things, that no phoenix will rise just wishing for it.
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Commentary by BlackKos editor JoanMar
19-year-old Alexis C. Wilson may have gone out for a bite to eat, or it may have been that she went out to have a good time with her boyfriend and then the two decided to go get something to eat; however she came to make the decision to visit Baba's Famous Steak & Lemonade restaurant in Illinois, it would turn out to be a tragic one. She would not make it home.
To value the life of others
Is to acknowledge the sanctity of yours
To feel for the ruin of others
Is to respect the existence of yours
To fight for the freedom of others
Is to preserve the liberty of yours ~ Ali Farah
It took the
Illinois State Police 10 days to release Alexis’s murder tape; enough time for the news media to do their assigned job of promoting and solidifying the narrative of the violent black teenager intent on killing two cops. And yes, I said “murder tape,” and don’t even come at me with your enabling nonsense today. Despite everything
we have seen and heard over the past few years, journalists still continue to accept and share cops’ version of events as the unassailable truth. Check out this article about
"the death" of Alexis:
As one of the officers tried to remove her from the car, the woman sped off and dragged the officer with him hanging halfway out of the window, Howard said. Another officer then fired three times into the car, Howard said.
The woman ran over that officer and crashed into a squad car, Howard said. She continued to drive one block and crashed into an unoccupied bicycle shop on Sibley, he said.
The woman died at the scene, Howard said. It’s unclear if she died from gunshot wounds or from the crash.
Spot the bias? Alexis had a run-in with workers at the drive-through restaurant...that’s not a capital offense.
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A Primer on the Karnofsky Shop and Residence and South Rampart Street
Commentary by Chitown Kev
Due to the post-Hurricane Katrina construction and refurbishing of the levees, the city and people of New Orleans avoided the complete failure of the same levees during Hurricane Ida; those levees that failed to hold back storm surge during Hurricane Katrina “performed exceptionally well.” However, it is important to note that some of New Orleans’ infrastructure did fail during Hurricane Ida. For example, all eight of the transmitters that carry power to the city were toppled by Hurricane Ida and it is estimated that it will take at least a week for some power to be restored to the city. Because of the widespread power outages, New Orleans mayor LaToya Cantrell has urged those residents that evacuated New Orleans in anticipation of Hurricane Ida not to return to the city at this time.
Along with the collapse of the energy transmitters, New Orleans Water and Sewer Board officials also reported problems with its sewage system caused by Hurricane Ida during and after the storm; problems which remain ongoing.
While the city of New Orleans, itself, is not out of the clear in terms of infrastructure damage and destruction due to Hurricane Ida, let’s not forget some of the topped levees and “catastrophic” damage to communities immediately outside and to the west of New Orleans like Jefferson Parish and to the east in Mississippi.
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Commentary by Black Kos editor Denise Oliver-Velez
There are actors. There are characters that actors play on stage, film and television. Only a handful of actors join the ranks of iconic portrayals of those characters which will live on beyond the lifespan of the individual. One of those actors was Michael Kenneth Williams. He left us yesterday, far too young at age 54.
For those of you who may have managed to be unaware of Williams, Imdb has a brief bio
Born in 1966 in Brooklyn, Williams was best known for his remarkable work on The Wire (2002). The wit and humor that Williams brought to Omar, the whistle-happy, profanity-averse, drug dealer-robbing stickup man, earned him high praise, and made Omar one of television's most memorable characters. Williams also co-starred in HBO's critically acclaimed series Boardwalk Empire in which he played Chalky White, a 1920's bootlegger; and the impeccably suited, veritable mayor of Atlantic City's African-American community. In 2012, Boardwalk Empire won a Screen Actors Guild Award for Outstanding Performance by an Ensemble in a Drama Series. He received his first Emmy nomination for Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Limited Series or a Movie for HBO's "Bessie" and subsequently received his second nomination for Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Limited Series for his portrayal of 'Freddy' in HBO's "The Night Of"
In 2018, VICE returned for its sixth season with an extended special season premiere produced by and featuring Williams as he embarked on a personal journey to expose the root of the American mass incarceration crisis: the juvenile justice system. "Raised in the System" offered a frank and unflinching look at those caught up the system, exploring why the country's mass incarceration problem cannot be fixed without first addressing the juvenile justice problem. Williams investigated the solutions local communities are employing that are resulting in drastic drops in both crime and incarceration. Michael garnered his first Emmy nomination as a producer for this incredible documentary and continues to host screenings across the country as a way to educate and raise awareness.
Giving back to the community played an important role in Williams' off-camera life. He launched Making Kids Win, a charitable organization whose primary objective is to build community centers in urban neighborhoods that are in need of safe spaces for children to learn and play. Williams served as the ACLU's Ambassador of Smart Justice.
No bio can capture the power of his performances or his person. Those who knew him, loved him, worked with him, and were affected by him over the years are sharing on social media.
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Something for me (and only for me) to remember before I point fingers
Commentary by Chitown Kev
As some of you who follow me in APR know, my neuropathy started to act up again this past Sunday morning in my right hand. As of this moment, I can type a little bit but I cannot sign my name or write as I am used to doing. I can only light a cigarette with both hands and can only hold one in my left hand. Clicking the mouse sometimes produces strange results.
In large part, it’s my own fault because I have not maintained the dietary guidelines that I should. There’s also been some family issues that have me a little stressed out. And other things.
So...At the tone, the time will be 1:21 pm. (I can not give you the seconds!)
Free writing/stream of consciousness time. Until post.
Besides, it will help my mood.
Now...to the matter of Ms. Nicki Minaj’s tweets about COVID yesterday (I’ll link the tweet but I’m not displaying that bull**it)...just unnecessary, stupid, and ignorant, first of all but it reminds me of something else that bears repeating…
There’s been centuries of negative disinformation, misinformation, and propaganda about Black folk transmitted through all different sort of media. None of it is merely dog whistles or air-raid sirens directed at white folk to maintain white supremacy or even to incite anti-Black violence, although it definitely does that.
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We go missing too. What’s also missing is mainstream media coverage of it.
Commentary by Black Kos Editor Denise Oliver-Velez
Black women and Native American women disappear, are murdered, and are never the topic of massive amounts of national media coverage. The late PBS journalist and anchor Gwen Ifill, coined the phrase “missing white woman syndrome” to address this.
Ifill famously coined the term “missing white woman syndrome” to describe the phenomenon of the media’s extensive (and obsessive) coverage of white, upper-middle-class women and girls who have gone missing. Social scientists have noted that white women’s disappearances are given disproportionate attention and media coverage, compared to when lower-SES women disappear, or when women, men or children of color go missing. Examples include the media’s coverage of Polly Klass, JonBenét Ramsey, Chandra Levy, Elizabeth Smart, Laci Peterson, Natalee Holloway, and Caylee Anthony, among others.
This was the topic of discussion between Charles Blow and criminal defense attorney and legal analyst Yodit Tewolde on his show on the Black News Channel (BNC) in response to the amount of coverage currently allocated to the case of missing Gabrielle Petito.
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Commentary by dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor
When groups of people who speak different languages come together, they sometimes inadvertently create a new ones. Groups speaking completely different tongues combine bits of their native tongues into a mixing pot so everyone can communicate easily. Linguists call these impromptu tongues “contact languages” – and they can extend well beyond the pidgin and creole that many of us have heard of. Tutnese was a creole used by African-Americans during the antebellum period. The Tutnese creole created by enslaved African Americans was mostly lost to the annals of times, until recently.
The origin stories of every contact language varies. Some are created peaceful when groups of people meet to trade and need a new lingua franca for commerce. Swahili for example is the lingua franca of the African Great Lakes region, as well as Eastern and Southern Africa (Tanzania, Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi, Kenya, Malawi, Somalia, Zambia, Mozambique, the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), and the Comoros islands), with 20% of the Swahili vocabulary derived from loan words mostly from Arabic. Swahili developed from the thousands of years of trade between the East Africa and Arabic worlds (see Black Kos, Week In Review — The Arab slave trade in Africa). But other contact languages were born of tragedy and violence – like Haitian Creole, Gullah Geechee, Jamaican Patois and many other lingua franca that arose from the Atlantic slave trade. Through out the New World African peoples combined several tongues with English creating new everyday languages used among the captive slave populations.
Jamaican patois was my mother tongue, so I’ve always been interested in the creolization of language. So although I’ve long been familiar with the Gullah Geechee of the coastal Carolinas I was surprised to learn that their actually was actually a more wide spread African American creole spoken among the captive slave population of the United States — Tutnese.
Although Gullah the language spoken in the Lowcountry region (both the coastal plain and the Sea Islands)of the states of Georgia, Florida, South Carolina, and North Carolina maybe more famous and better preserved. Tut was far more widespread in the antebellum South. The Gullah people speak an English-based creole language containing many African loanwords and influenced by African languages in grammar and sentence structure. Because of a period of relative isolation from whites while working on large plantations in rural areas, the Gullah Africans, developed a creole culture that has preserved much of their African linguistic and cultural heritage. Tut had a different origon, as it was developed by African Americans who had constant contacts with Whites.
Tutnese was invented and used in the American South, to teach spelling and conceal what was being said by blacks, at a time when literacy among slaves was forbidden. Tut is still taught in some African American families and communities as a way of communal and historical bonding. Tutnese was traditionally used by African Americans in the presence of slave holders and later police ("pupolulisus" or "pizolizice"). There was also a version used in some parts of the US called Yuckish or Yukkish, which uses more or less the same language constructs.
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I’m a Black voter and I voted for Democrats.
Commentary by Black Kos Editor Denise Oliver-Velez
Black voters vote. I don’t care what the latest polls say. I don’t care what pundits predict. I don’t care about exit polls. All I can say is I’m gonna keep doing what I’ve been doing since I was eligible to vote. I voted today. For Democrats. The media circus trying to do click bait horse race shit ain’t gonna interview me in the local diner.
I know that Republicans don’t want me or mine to vote. That’s what voter suppression bills are all about. If the Black vote was irrelevant they wouldn’t expend so much energy trying to suppress us.
Sure, there are some Black folks who stay home. Sure there are some who vote against our best interests and are quisling tap dancers for the right wing. They are exceptions that highlight the norm.
This is gonna be a very short commentary today.
Anybody encouraging Black folks to withhold our votes can KMBA.
Period.
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Commentary by BlackKos editor JoanMar
Lorraine McGee will never, ever forgive herself. How can she? For as long as she lives she will be remembering the fateful day when she turned to the system for help and that system responded by sending murderers to her home rather than the angels of mercy she’d begged for. Johnny McGee, a 36-year-old Black man living with mental illness, was having a difficult morning. He was having one of his psychotic episodes and his mom didn’t think she could handle him or the situation anymore. She’d tried...she’d tried so hard but now she needed help from professionals. In desperation, she called 911. Her son suffered from bipolar disorder and schizophrenia and could they just send some help for him, please. She prepared the cops in advance:
"I called 911 and said 'My son is schizophrenic, bipolar, he has a mental disorder,' ” his mother, Lorraine Magee, said Tuesday. “I said when you come out here, I said send some policemen with experience in that area, so they won’t kill my child.”
“When he’s in his flash, when he flashes out, he’s like that, especially when you go up on him,” Magee said. “He’s going to start fighting. Yes, he’s going to start fighting to protect himself.”
She knew the danger. She is a Black woman who lives in the United States of America and she knew that there was a good chance that her son would not survive the day. What was a loving Black mother to do, America?! Imagine her heart pounding as she waited for the cops to arrive...she hoping and praying, “Please, G-d. Please, dear G-d...please don’t let them kill my son...”
Well, the cops came and promptly fired “at least” seven shots at her son killing him and plunging a mother into a world of unrelieving anguish.
Lorraine Magee said she begged police not to shoot.
“I said, 'Why you all shooting him?' ” Magee said. “He’s disabled. I said, 'He’s mental, he don’t know what he’s doing, he hears voices.' I said, 'Don’t kill him, please don’t kill him, please don’t kill him.' ”
[my bold]
Never accuse the media of not knowing their assignment.
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Here to Yonder: The Chicago Defender columns of Langston Hughes
Commentary by Chitown Kev
Langston Hughes is, of course, best known for his lyrical poetry depicting a picturesque vision and version of Black life in the early 20th century during the Black literary movement known as the Harlem Renaissance.
What’s sometimes not as well known about Hughes is that he also wrote two autobiographies, The Big Sea (published in 1940 and Hughes’ on account of his life up to the age of 28), and I Wonder as I Wander, published in 1956 and detailing his travels around the world during the 1930’s.
What’s even lesser known about Hughes is that he also wrote a newspaper column, called “Here to Yonder” in what some considered to be the premier Black newspaper of its time, The Chicago Defender; Hughes wrote that column for 20 years.
To the extent that Hughes’s Chicago Defender column is acknowledged, it’s usually for his series featuring the Black “Everyman,” Jesse B. Semple (“Simple” or, as Hughes would sometimes refer to him, my “Simple Minded Friend”). Here’s a description of the content of the Jesse B. Semple stories by Minnesota blogger Bernard James.
The indomitable spirit of Jesse B. Semple (aka “Simple”) was first introduced by Langston Hughes in 1943, through a series of stories that appeared in a column he wrote for the Chicago Defender. Simple’s legacy as a literary fixture was later cemented following the release of three compilations that made Hughes’ original content available for wider public consumption. The first was Simple Speaks His Mind, published in 1950, followed by Simple Takes a Wife in 1953 and Simple Stakes a Claim, released in 1957. Subsequent anthologies (The Best of Simple, 1961, Simple’s Uncle Sam, 1965 and The Return of Simple, 1994) sample from the earlier pieces to form new collections, but the charisma that is Simple and the grace with which Hughes delivers him to the page are no less impactful when viewed through this updated, curatorial lens.
Each story is presented as a conversation that opens a window onto the beauty of pedestrian encounters. Indeed, part of what makes them so beautiful is the ongoing discovery that Simple’s life (our lives) are not pedestrian at all. “Simple on Indian Blood,” “Simple Prays a Prayer,” “Temptation,” “Vacation,” “Letting off Steam…” The titles are succinct, the prose direct and easy to understand. Through Simple, Hughes elevates the ordinary and shines a spotlight on what is otherwise common. Simple becomes a metaphor for profound statements exploding from unassuming packages. Hughes’ abbreviated prose cuts to the chase and by intensifying the mood, brings his subjects into better focus.
Hughes’s Simple stories were, by far, the most popular of his Chicago Defender columns, however, it is important to remember that the Simple stories were not featured on a weekly basis; Hughes also wrote far more conventional oped columns that covered a variety of subjects ranging from Jim Crow to even U.S. foreign policy.
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Keep trying. Y’all MVP Harris haters are gonna get ratioed to a fare-thee-well
Commentary by Black Kos Editor Denise Oliver-Velez
I went back today to look at video coverage of our MVP Kamala Harris in Paris. The sound of cameras clicking was deafening. It looked like the entire European press corps was out in force. She made headlines wherever she went. Friendly headlines. There was thorough and respectful coverage.
Wish I could say the same for 24 hour US cable spews and some folks with Blue checks who call themselves “journalists” who should be assigned to cleaning out toilet bowls for a living.
What lifted my spirits though, was watching a crew of mean, nasty, petty, passive aggressive and sometimes openly hostile pun-idjits and reporters get ratioed to hell.
They tried it, they keep trying us —and we have risen up to smack their tacky asses back down. Ain’t nobody letting them slide. KHive was on the case (love y’all) but it wasn’t just us. It was sooooo damn patently obvious what was going on that folks I’ve never seen before on Twitter were kickin’ butt and taking names. The earrings were off, the Vaseline passed and the battle to stop the smears was on.
Fighting back against this shit is exhausting. We have a whole lineup of white supremacist, insurrectionist traitors aiming at overthrowing all we hold dear, gerrymandering us out of position, embracing racism, talking about burning books, banning abortion and birth control, TAKING AWAY OUR RIGHT TO VOTE, spreading COVID...applauding white murderers of Black citizens, and a white murderer who killed white people who stood up for Black folks…
Chile... the list of future (and present) horrors is wayyyy too long —and some of you want us to sit quietly, stand idly by and let these people undermine a POTUS and his MVP who helped put him where we needed him to be?
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Commentary by BlackKos editor JoanMar
I watched part of Travis McMichael's attempt to convince the carefully chosen jurors that he deserves to be sent home and that it was surely a travesty that he even has to be defending himself after he did such a grand deed for them and all his skin folks. Murderer and his defense lawyers made the decision for him to testify because they were so confident that no spot of blood would show up on his well-groomed person. Damn, if you didn’t know better, you’d think the murderer was a law professor or a representative of some such high falutin profession. If you didn’t know better you’d think the murderer was a law-abiding, Christian, all-American neighbor...not so funny thing is that those kinda murderers are usually just that.
The murderer cleaned up well. Soft-spoken, calm, elegantly dressed, even. And I swear I could smell all the ‘perfumes of Arabia” right through my TV screen. Certainly a far cry from the person who confronted Wanda’s son as he jogged toward his fate. The murderer on the stand was certainly a far different person from the red-faced, frothing, snarling, blood-splashed slave-catcher who was the last person Ahmaud Arbery saw before he closed his eyes one last time...forever.
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A Thought on Gratitude and Grace in these times
Commentary by Chitown Kev
Until a few years, I did not know that the words “grace” and “gratitude” both etymologically descend from the same Latin word, gratus.
Prior to learning this tidbit, I had always been a bit antagonistic to the very concept of grace; the idea that I had earned unmerited favor from some source or a god or whatever anyone would like to call such a thing.
The very concept of “grace” always seemed a bit too spiritual or religious to have any real use to me, a religious agnostic.
At university, I took a seminar course in dramatic literature called “Dramatic Revisions” (taught by this lovely woman who is now Professor Emeritus) and one of the concepts that I learned was the idea that even as “revision” is taking place on the page or stage, there’s always an “original” meaning or text that remains implicit in whatever message is being delivered.
I’m not one of those people who is perpetually grateful; “gratitude” has actually been somewhat difficult in thought and practice this year for many personal and even political reasons (deaths of relatives of my generation, family conflicts, some health problems, the seemingly broken politics of the American republic).
But I’m not antagonistic to the concept of “gratitude.” More often than not I have to look for it amid the drama and occasional ruins of watching and living, though.
I still don’t entirely get (or even agree with) the concept of “grace” but I know that when I am grateful for ______________, some notion of what we now call “grace” is more likely than not somewhere in that mix; after all the two words are etymologically conjoined.
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The Black Reporter Who Exposed The Military’s Lies About the Atom Bomb — by dopper0189,Black Kos Managing Editor
Charles Harold Loeb (April 2, 1905 – August 21, 1978) was an American journalist known for exposing the truth about radiation casualties from the Hiroshima bomb. Loeb's articles reporting on World War II were published in multiple newspapers with support of the National Newspaper Publishers Association (known then as the National Negro Publishers Association, or NNPA). Loeb served multiple terms as chairman of the Editorial Society for the NNPA. In the world of Black newspapers, his name alone was enough to attract readers. Charles Loeb defied the American military’s propaganda and denials to report on how deadly radiation from the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima sickened and killed people long after the event.
I thought about Mr Loeb Chitown Kev was musing about black reporters last month. Mr Loeb is among the greatest investigative reporters of 20th century but has never got the credit he deserves. I first learned about Charles Loeb years ago when I was watching a special on Hiroshima and a family friend mentioned his name. I later did some reserach on him.
In his ground breaking reports, Loeb explained how deadly radiation sickened and killed the city’s residents. His perspective, while at times coldly analytic, cast light on a major wartime cover up. His page one articles published in Black Newspapers directly contradicted the War Department, the Manhattan Project, and The New York Times star reporter, William L. Laurence, on what had become a bitter dispute between the victor and the vanquished. Japan insisted that the bomb’s invisible radiation at Hiroshima and Nagasaki had led to waves of sudden death and lingering illness. The United States, on the other hand emphatically denied the charge.
But or course history and science proved Loeb right. His reporting not only challenged the official government line but also echoed the skepticism of many Black Americans who worried that race had played a role in the United States’ decision to drop the experimental weapons on Japan but not Germany. Black clergy and activists at times sympathized openly with the bomb’s victims. “They were willing to question the main narrative,” said Alex Wellerstein, a historian who glimpsed this skepticism while researching his recent book, “Restricted Data: The History of Nuclear Secrecy in the United States.”
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Commentary by BlackKos editor JoanMar
I love old movies. I love the movies that my grandmother and my mom watched and loved. The overwhelming majority of the old movies that I love are by white directors, white actors and actresses, and are about white experiences told from the white point of view, and meant for white audiences. A Black person who is is even halfway aware of the history of racism pays a psychological toll for watching old movies. I watch and I am acutely aware that the people who look like me in those old movies produced in the Golden Age of Hollywood are often there to be ridiculed, to be maids, nannies, gardeners, porters, field hands, and the proverbial “bad guys.” And still, I watch.
Bette Davis is by far my favorite actress from those old films. It’s on my wishlist to see all of her movies. I also love Barbara Stanwyck, Joan Crawford, Deborah Kerr, Gregory Peck, Rock Hudson, to name a few. I will not watch anything from John Wayne.
Those old movies, in addition to the particular tales they tell, give us a front-row seat to racism and white supremacy in action from the other side of the divide.
Take for example the1943 Gainsborough production of The Man in Grey. This is a rather convoluted story that I will not even attempt to explain, but what caught my eye was the little Black boy, Toby, who played a pivotal role in the movie. I wanted to know what became of that child actor and so I went looking for Antony Scott. Every photo I saw of the grown-up Scott was of a white man. For a minute I was genuinely confused as to why dark-skinned Toby grew up to be a pale-skinned white man, and then it hit me. The little Black boy who was rolling his eyes and talking ‘bout, “Yaas suh, Massa. I’s be comin’, Massa” was a white child in blackface! Of course, that was a popular practice back then and I should not have been surprised. That movie was not the inspiration for this diary.
"If you ain't eating WHAM, you ain't eating ham!"
We all know of the over 250 years of forced labor that America stole from Black folks, but what is not often talked about is how whiteness liberally helped itself to the intellectual properties of the same people they denigrated, brutalized, and dehumanized. Amidst the glam and glitter, Old Hollywood — inadvertently, I’m sure — also told the stories of how white America continued to find ways to cheat Black folks long after slavery was abolished.
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THANK YOU EVERYONE SEE YOU IN 2022
THE PORCH IS NOW CLOSED