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.
Coy was fired and now he’s been arrested and charged with the murder of Andre Hill.
An Ohio grand jury has indicted former Columbus police officer Adam Coy in the shooting death of Andre Hill, an unarmed Black man. //snip//
Coy, 44, is also facing one count of felonious assault and two counts of dereliction of duty – one for failing to turn on his body camera when he responded to the scene and another for failing to inform his fellow officer that he felt Hill presented a danger.
Coy was arrested Wednesday afternoon, Yost said. Coy had a history of complaints and issues with excessive force during his time with the police division.
It is more than likely that his short time in jail (because we know he’s gonna be granted bail), the anxiety he felt as he fretted about whether he’d be indicted will be all that Adam Coy pays for the murder of Andre. We have been down this road a time or two before. According to Vox, despite thousands of killings over the last 15 years, only 126 cops have been arrested and charged and of that amount, only 44 were convicted.
About 1,000 fatal police shootings are reported each year in the US — so the arrest rate is around 1 percent, never higher than 2 percent. Some, perhaps most, shootings are justified. But the number of police officers prosecuted “seems extremely low to me,” Stinson told me. “In my opinion, it’s got to be that more of the fatal shootings are unjustified.”
Of those 126 officers, just 44 were convicted (with 31 cases still pending). Many of those convictions came on lesser charges: Just seven officers have been convicted of murder in police shootings since 2005, with their prison sentences ranging from 81 months to life. The remaining 37 were convicted on charges ranging from manslaughter to official misconduct, in some cases serving no prison time.
Yep, the odds that the murderer will be held accountable are not at all in our favor. All the stars must be perfectly aligned for us to see justice or any semblance of it. The prosecution has to do its job, the jurors have to do their jobs, and the presiding judge cannot be a white supremacist in legal garb.
As we await the trial, let’s remember Andre Hill’s name. #JusticeForAndre.
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NEWS ROUND UP BY DOPPER0189, BLACK KOS MANAGING EDITOR
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Black Americans have been dying of COVID at disproportionate rates. What does that mean for the vaccine rollout? Ebony: Black Americans and COVID Vaccine
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Racial and ethnic minorities have been bearing the brunt of the COVID-19 pandemic. Black Americans have higher case, hospitalization and death rates than White Americans.
These statistics raise urgent questions about how the vaccine will be distributed to communities of color. Last week, Scientific American reported that Black Americans are getting vaccinated at lower rates than White Americans. Health workers have been the focus during the first phase of vaccination rollout. Yet, the data reveals that Black people account for only a small share of total vaccinations even in states where they make up a significant portion of the healthcare workforce.
There has been a significant amount of coverage on resistance to the vaccine within the Black community. The United States’ history of medical racism certainly has an impact on perceptions of the vaccine, but this type of reporting can be misleading. Data from Kaiser Family Foundation shows that vaccination acceptance is going up across all racial groups. Their findings also suggest that the majority of Black Americans are willing to get vaccinated. Vaccine disparities are not the result of Black resistance to the vaccination; they are the result of structural inequality and uncoordinated government response.
Local, state and federal response agencies know which communities have been hardest hit but have failed to reach a consensus on how to best reach those communities. Last week, Dallas County proposed a vaccination plan that would have prioritized zip codes with the highest rates. The plan would have given many primarily black and brown neighborhoods first access to the vaccine. They reversed course after the Texas Department of State Health Services rejected the plan and threatened to reduce the number of doses allocated to the county. This disagreement between local and state officials highlights the need for national guidance.
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Historically, women have had slightly higher rates of voter turnout in every U.S. presidential election since 1984. When we look at eligible voters by race, Black women have also had higher voter turnout in comparison to Black men. The Pew Research Center reported that “in 2016, 64% of eligible Black women said they voted, compared with 54% of Black men.” Mondale Robinson, the founder of the Black Male Voter Project, is working to increase the number of Black men who participate in electoral politics and beyond.
Robinson is the National Political Director for Democracy for America, as well as a political contributor for The Village Celebration and a political consultant. With 20 years of political consulting and political work experience, he founded the Black Male Voter Project after repeatedly witnessing white political consultants mismanage the motivations behind Black men’s participation in electoral politics.
He shares, “The Black Male Voter Project was founded as a way to address all of the problems that are inherent in traditional campaigning, meaning the temporary way in which campaigns show up trying to convince Black men whatever candidates or party they are selling is the best candidate, or it’s the most important election. None of that reigns true, especially when you consider the lessons learned from Maslow Hierarchy and Needs that tells you, ‘A person or people without having their basic needs met cannot consider things that are self-actualization.’”
“Because of the way we present politics in this country, the way we play them in a temporary measure in an electoral cycle instead of having consistent relationships with people, they seem like self-actualization and not as tools to address what’s really ailing Black men.”
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[When] Black Lives Matter protests spread around the globe, scholars of international relations are resurrecting difficult conversations about the detrimental ways in which the field has ignored race and racism. Those who study history and Africana studies have long shown how racism weaves through national and international affairs, knotting domestic and foreign policy at key junctures. Many IR experts, however, have carefully avoided reflecting on the role race plays in our field. If IR scholars hope to truly understand the current global turbulence, we must recognize that racism can’t be solely a domestic issue.
The exploration of race is hardly foreign to IR; up until World War II, the study of race and of IR were inexorably linked through a debate over imperial administration (in which colonies are governed in order to maintain the rule of a white and usually overseas elite over a nonwhite indigenous populace). Throughout the 20th century, Black intellectuals, organizations, and movements considered racism in the United States to be a global issue that demanded a similarly global solution.
In the early 1900s, the African American sociologist W.E.B. Du Bois famously proposed the color line as the “relation of the darker to the lighter races of men in Asia and Africa, in America and the islands of the sea.” He viewed it as an analytical device with which to unpack the trajectory of U.S. development as part of a global power relations, even employing it as a tool to reexamine the international causes of World War I.
By the end of the next world war, domestic racism within the United States remained critical to understanding and shaping world affairs. In 1945, Metz Lochard, the Haitian-born editor in chief of the influential African American newspaper the Chicago Defender, proposed that: “The World Security Conference in San Francisco has but one meaning to the Negro people—that is, how far democratic principles shall be stretched to embrace the rights of our brothers in the colonies and to what extent the American Negro’s own security at home shall be guaranteed.”
Lochard’s hopes were widely shared. For many Black Americans the United Nations seemed to offer new avenues for redressing the racism that was endemic in the United States. At the end of 1948, the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide was unanimously adopted by the U.N. General Assembly. In 1951, a triad of left-leaning groups (the International Labor Defense, the National Negro Congress, and the National Federation for Constitutional Liberties) came together in Detroit to form the Civil Rights Congress. The organization documented cases of racial violence with a view to charging the United States with genocide at the Paris General Assembly of the U.N.
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A retrospective of the work of Patrick Kelly, the black fashion designer who confronted racist stereotypes, will be staged in the autumn.
Patrick Kelly: Runway of Love will open at San Francisco’s de Young Museum on 23 October, celebrating his short but hugely influential career. The exhibition originally ran at the Philadelphia Museum of Art in 2014, but will be expanded for the West Coast.
Born in 1954 in Vickburg, Mississippi, Kelly began selling his designs from a shop inside an Atlanta beauty salon. He became friends with the black model Pat Cleveland, who suggested he move to Paris where he established his own fashion house, Patrick Kelly Paris, in 1988. His designs were worn by stars including Madonna, Princess Diana, Grace Jones, Cicely Tyson and Bette Davis.
“He was a trailblazer,” Laura Camerlengo, the associate curator of costume and textile arts at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, told the fashion industry publication WWD.
“He was born during the time of the segregated south, grew out of that most racist violent environment, and worked his way to Atlanta, to New York and to become the toast of Paris who had a successful multimillion-dollar company when he died. And remarkably, he was lauded with accolades while being and remaining one of the few designers of any colour to directly address race in his work.”
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When the leaders of the “Big Green” environmental groups realized last fall that they’d be confronting, at best, a closely divided House and Senate with only a wavering appetite for carbon restrictions, they knew President-elect Joe Biden would need an all-star EPA chief with the savvy necessary to use existing laws to lead the fight against climate change.
He needed Mary Nichols.
The California air cop had engineered secret climate deals with major automakers, infuriating President Donald Trump. Her command over the Golden State’s environmental rules gave her unparalleled clout within the movement. She implemented one of the country’s largest greenhouse gas emissions trading schemes to blunt global warming.
But the environmental organizations that quietly backed Nichols and allies like Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer who publicly promoted her did not anticipate the backlash she would ignite within Black, Latino and Indigenous communities. Complaints that Nichols had failed to adequately address local pollution concerns in urban neighborhoods in California derailed her candidacy to lead the Environmental Protection Agency. Biden ultimately nominated Michael Regan, a North Carolina environmental regulator, who is Black and has scored victories for communities in a state considered the birthplace of environmental justice.
Environmental influence in U.S. politics is ascendant. Big Green groups have pushed Biden, whom most would never confuse with a crunchy activist, into crafting the most aggressive environmental platform in the nation’s history that calls for spending $2 trillion.
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