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.
We’ve already had to go through the “having a bad day” crap re domestic terror against Asian-Americans this week.
We sit here and watch this play out, again, and again, and again.
Lest we forget:
Yet, we’re the “scary” Black people, who live mostly segregated from nice middle class white people.
I have nothing else to say. Will wait for the day that Black folks don’t die at the hands of police.
It’s gonna be a long wait.
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NEWS ROUND UP BY DOPPER0189, BLACK KOS MANAGING EDITOR
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Someday I hope I can end my crusade against the arrest of young children. What monster files charges against a 6 year old, what kind of police officer files the criminal complaint, what kind of prosecutor decides to press charges? Winston Salem Journal: North Carolina sends 6-year-olds to court. Why some say it's time for change.
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The 6-year-old dangled his legs above the floor as he sat at the table with his defense attorney, before a North Carolina judge.
He was accused of picking a tulip from a yard at his bus stop, his attorney Julie Boyer said, and he was on trial in juvenile court for injury to real property.
The boy's attention span was too short to follow the proceedings, Boyer said, so she handed him crayons and a coloring book.
"I asked him to color a picture," she said, "so he did."
He didn't know it, but no matter what the judge decided, the experience could change the boy's life, experts say, from how he sees the court system to increasing his chance of getting into trouble again and being sent to alternative school.
Boyer and others say children that age don't have the mental capacity to understand the juvenile justice process and its consequences. They can't make informed decisions, like whether to talk to police and what to tell them, whether to go to trial and whether to admit to the accusations against them, which are called complaints.
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From the port where enslaved Africans entered America to the home where Medgar Evers was murdered, a new guidebook helps readers explore for themselves the history, the landmarks and the watershed moments of the Black American struggle for equality and justice.
In “Moon U.S. Civil Rights Trail: A Traveler’s Guide to the People, Places and Events that Made the Movement,” author Deborah D. Douglas explores destinations like Selma, Alabama, and Memphis, Tennessee — with historical background, itineraries and maps to help the traveler trace the steps of the heroes of the civil rights movement — and understand the agonies that befell them and the triumphs they achieved.
“Exploring the civil rights trail is a way of linking our lived experience to a time when Black Americans became united, committed and stronger,” Douglas says in the book’s preface.
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In the Spring of 2020, with Maryland’s stay-at-home order lifted, a new ritual was born on a cul-de-sac in North Baltimore’s affluent Homeland neighborhood. A group of moms gathered on Friday evenings to commiserate about the sudden pivot to remote learning. Seated in physically distanced chairs under a maple tree, Annette Anderson and her friends talked about the stresses of managing their own jobs while overseeing their children’s schoolwork. As summer arrived, the weekly conversations turned to speculation over the Baltimore City Public Schools plan for reopening in the fall. Other moms were clearly ready to turn their children back over to full-time teachers. But Anderson was a firm no.
The Black mother of three had watched her children blossom during the spring semester. Freed from transporting three teens—a sophomore, an eighth grader, and a seventh grader—to athletic games and extracurriculars, Anderson (no relation to me) was more engaged in their lives, and her children were thriving academically, more attuned to their online classes and more self-directed in their learning. She was also skeptical that Baltimore schools had figured out how to do in-person instruction safely. As the deputy director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Safe and Healthy Schools, she spends her days giving policymakers the tools they need to make evidence-based decisions. Conflicting research on safely reopening schools, coupled with a lack of direction from the federal level, told her it was better to sit this one out.
“At the same time that people were talking about reopening, we were seeing [COVID-19] case numbers go up astronomically,” she recalled. “There was no clear guidance. It was just, ‘Trust us, send the kids back, and it’ll be okay.’” When Anderson queried other Black families to see how they were feeling, she discovered she was not alone.
Few issues this year have been as rife with division and drama as the on-again, off-again efforts of school districts to restart in-person learning. President Biden vowed to open most public schools in his first 100 days—but his pledge was quickly scaled back to only a majority of elementary schools. Both Republican and Democratic governors have directed schools to open; teachers unions have balked at returning until staff is vaccinated; and parents across the political spectrum have protested and petitioned to resume in-person learning. Citing the need to reduce COVID-related learning gaps and provide working parents some relief, education systems sought to bring at least some younger students back to classrooms.
Amid the fierce debate, Black parents across the country have largely resisted the push to return to public schools. According to a December report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 62 percent of white parents strongly or somewhat agreed that school should reopen this fall, while less than half of Black parents agreed. In a Pew Research survey conducted in mid-February, Black adults were the most likely of all racial groups to worry about the health risks of reopening—80 percent of Black adults wanted kids to stay remote until teachers were vaccinated, for example, while only 51 percent of white adults felt the same.
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With a struggling economy and few work prospects, Bessemer, Alabama, has been called an “unlikely” place for an epic union battle with Amazon. They don’t know Bessemer. VOX: An unholy union
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Bessemer, Alabama, is a city of 27,000 souls and dozens of churches. There are at least six Christian bookstores within a three-mile radius of the Waffle House, and a billboard screaming “When You Die, You Will Meet God!” not far from the local Walmart.
More than a quarter of those souls — about 71 percent of whom are Black — live below the poverty line. Sixteen miles from Birmingham proper, the city’s borders are liminal; Bessemer bleeds into nearby Brighton and Lipscomb to the north and McCalla to the south, and is sandwiched among wildlife refuges, cemeteries, and the Alabama Adventure & Splash Adventure waterpark. The precious few green spaces strain to offset the sprawl crowding the highway that cuts through town. Chain restaurants, car dealerships, and big-box stores line the route to Powder Plant Road, which leads to the former site of a US Steel factory. Now that hilly ground is home to an Amazon fulfillment center, and the site of one of the most important labor battles in America.
The more than 5,000 workers at Amazon’s Bessemer warehouse — called BHM1, it is one of more than 100 fulfillment centers across the US — are in the midst of the nation’s first attempt to unionize one of the e-commerce giant’s warehouses, where they spend long hours on their feet picking, packaging, and shipping items as quickly as they can. Their days, workers told Vox, are dictated by algorithms that survey their every move and dole out punishments when targets are not met or workers go over their allotted “time off task” (better known as TOT); workers compare the environment to “a sweatshop,” and have lodged complaints about the excessive heat in the building.
Workers say they are allowed two 15-minute bathroom breaks during their 10-hour shifts, which amounts to mere minutes to navigate a warehouse roughly the size of Buckingham Palace and get back to work on time. Though the Covid-19 pandemic continues to tear through Alabama and the rest of the world, the $2-per-hour “hazard pay” bump that the company touted at the beginning of the pandemic lapsed last June.
When Amazon announced in 2018 that it would be building a $325 million fulfillment center in this town of the faithful and bringing 1,500 jobs with it — the number ballooned in the ensuing months — the news sounded like a blessing. The company trumpeted its starting hourly pay rate of $15.30 and benefits; today, it wields them as a reason a union is unnecessary, without mentioning that wages in nearby unionized warehouses and poultry plants are much higher for similar work.
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Voices and Soul
by Black Kos Poetry Editor, Justice Putnam
What I experienced over the weekend, (when literally thousands of racist gun nut TrollBots™ descended on my social media to attack me for daring to post, “Stop racist violence against Asians”) was disappointing, but not wholly unexpected. There is something that triggers the racists to respond in such a hive mentality. I tried explaining it from the 1619 Project perspective, without naming the project of course, I mean, we’re dealing with unreconstructed racists here, I tried explaining that one is either a racist, or an anti racist. There is no such thing as not being racist. I told them I was an anti racist, and then I asked which were they? You would have thought I slaughtered their child and ate the pudgy mess in front of them (which I was actually accused of), they just could not wrap their heads around the concept. Their anger, their denials, their wailing and gnashing of teeth just proved a point I’m sure was noticed by those who follow me on social media, the racists realized the racist bone is inside of them, and no matter how much the deny it is within them, they know we see it. They know it deep down in the most racist bone of their racist bone.
I know this is a real thing, because
When I was a kid, my big sister took me
To the Capitol Theater, in my hometown
Of Rochester, NY,
And there was a movie that afternoon,
The Tingler, which starred Vincent Price,
And what I remember best about the film
Was that it was about this extra, insect-like gland, that
We all appeared to have been born with,
But nobody but sci-fi movie scientists knew about.
If it wasn’t fed properly, it would crawl up
Your leg, and choke you to death with its claws!
Your only hope was if you saw it coming, and knew
What it was, you could scream—loud.
Which we did, when it crawled across the screen.
Then the lights blacked out, and Vincent Price
Shouted it had skittered off the screen, hungry—which it hadn’t;
The Capitol was the Black movie house—25 cents a seat,
The last drop of profit squeezed from the theatrical run.
No need to pull Mr. Castle’s hokey string and rubber model
Down the aisle for the likes of us.
In our heads The Tingler scurried, our darkest screams,
The horror we know, but won’t talk about,
From the mouth of the corpse
Like a weevil, looking for a home.
So many characters perished
In that movie—they never believed they had it in them
Until those pincers closed.
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