Commentary by BlackKos editor JoanMar
I don’t know about you, but I say “oh shit” a lot. Just the other day I had an epic battle with a fly who somehow found its way into my kitchen. I meant to shoo the thing out through the door but I ended up killing it. “Oh shit, I’m sorry,” I said to the dead fly. Yesterday, I got ready to go out and was already buckled in when I realized that I’d left my phone inside the apartment. “Oh shit, I have to go back inside,” I muttered to myself. What about you? When was the last time you said “Oh shit”? And was it because you were distressed?
At first, I was a bit surprised at the speed at which the Brooklyn Center Police Department released the dashcam video. We all know that when the videos are deemed too damning, it takes months, years, and lawsuits to get them released. It didn’t take me long to figure out why the ex-chief decided to defy protocol — earning the displeasure of the agents at the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension (BCA) in the process — in his haste to publicize the video. What he tried to sell as “transparency” was merely an attempt to propose and solidify a narrative. He knew that all he had to do was to interpret the video in a manner most favorable to the killer cop and a complicit, enabling media would do the rest. The murder of Daunte Wright was not the ex-chief’s primary concern. After all, Daunte had an outstanding warrant for his arrest and he was driving with expired tags. He was no angel, don’t you know. Let's focus our attention on the poor, traumatized cop. No need for any further protesting. In fact, so lightly did he take the killing of the young, unarmed Black father, that he’d only placed his killer on administrative leave! That, the ex-chief was telegraphing to us, was enough punishment.
Let's take a look at what they want to convince us was distress. From The Washington Post:
In the chaotic seven seconds that follow, the female officer, who already has a weapon drawn, is heard yelling, “I’ll Tase you!” and then “Taser! Taser! Taser!” before firing.
Immediately after she is heard saying, “Holy s---, I shot him,” apparently realizing that she had fired her service weapon instead of her Taser.
I heard “oh shit,” but I’ll give this writer “Holy shit.” I’ve heard every anchor on CNN — even Don Lemon — say that the killer ex-cop was “quite clearly distressed.” What I heard from Potter was someone making a statement; not someone in distress. Twice in my life I’ve run over squirrels and in both instances, I was shaken, the first one for weeks. I may have said “oh shit,” I’m not sure, but I do remember saying “Oh G-d, no, no, no, no.” In both instances, I tried desperately to avoid hitting the stupid little critters.
I expect that if you’ve shot a living, breathing human being, especially one whom you didn’t intend to shoot, you’d be like, “I’m so sorry! I didn’t mean to shoot you! Don’t move. Please don’t move. Somebody get the ambulance here, now! Quick! Sir, please don’t move. Let me help you.” That would be showing distress, no? Instead, Potter made a statement of fact in a voice considerably less animated than when she announced her intention to tase. The statement was addressed to the other cops even as Daunte was still sitting in the car in front of her, and she made absolutely no move to attend to him. And no, John Berman (CNN), she most certainly didn’t say “Oh my God, I shot him!” She said, “Oh shit, I shot him.” Huge difference. See, the ex-chief knows the enablers well.
The ex-chief released the dashcam tapes to protect his killer cop. Had nothing to do with justice for Daunte. And the reason Potter and her trainee stopped Daunte was because they needed a guinea pig. They needed a body...and where else would the occupying force go when they need to provide training for young cops? And so Kim Potter, who was cos-playing as the-big-woman-in-charge-of-these-negroes, directed her trainee to pull over Daunte — who just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time — so that she could demonstrate how to handle “the blacks.” She decided to arrest him so that the newbie could get a chance to hone his skills, and when she had absolutely no reason to use force, she nonetheless decided to tase him...to kill him. She doesn’t get the benefit of the doubt. Because of her wanton disregard for human life, a mother is without her son, a father in mourning, a baby is without a father, a community is traumatized yet again. Killer cop Kim Potter must pay to the fullest extent of the law. Nothing else will do.
Rest in peace, young Daunte. Rest in peace, young Adam. Condolences to your grieving families.
The fight continues...
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NEWS ROUND UP BY DOPPER0189, BLACK KOS MANAGING EDITOR
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Carol’s Daughter founder Lisa Price has partnered with doula Latham Thomas, founder of Mama Glow Foundation, to continue to bring awareness to the Black maternal health crisis with Love Delivered. The beauty mogul and birthing rights advocate, bonded over a shared interest in contributing to their community.
Love Delivered launches this week for Black Maternal Health Week (April 11-17th). Throughout the week, Price and Thomas will release conversations that will educate Black birthing people and allies about the disparities in Black maternal health, provide information to help expectant moms advocate for themselves, share in-depth conversations on the role of doulas and midwives, scholarship opportunities and information for upcoming Mama Glow Professional Doula Training programs and more.
The initiative will also be a safe space for women to share their birthing experiences.
During an interview with theGrio, Price revealed more about what inspired the initiative and partnership with Thomas.
She says as celebs like Serena and Beyoncé began to publicly speak out about the obstacles in their birthing experiences, she noticed other women on social media opening up and sharing their stories.
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Covid-19 vaccines are increasingly available, but not everyone wants to get a shot. Which raises a fraught question: Should it be up to each individual to decide whether or not to get vaccinated against a disease that poses a real threat to public health? Or do we all have a moral obligation to get vaccinated?
This has been a long-running debate among ethicists since well before the coronavirus pandemic. Some philosophers argue that everyone has a moral obligation to be vaccinated against infectious diseases like measles, while others say it’s not so simple. It’s a debate that gets at fundamental questions about individual liberty, bodily autonomy, and communal obligation.
I was curious about how these arguments have played out during the Covid-19 pandemic, and I’ve been speaking to bioethicists, epidemiologists, and thinkers to sort through these questions. One conversation I had was with Keisha Ray, a bioethicist and professor at the McGovern Medical School at the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston. Armed with a PhD in philosophy as well as her own experience as a Black woman in America, she’s become an unofficial ambassador during the pandemic, trying to convince people of color to get vaccinated against Covid-19.
I talked to Ray about the arguments she makes and which ones are most effective at swaying people.
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Amid a deep residue of mistrust, Western cautions on the AstraZeneca and Johnson & Johnson vaccines risk igniting an explosion of damaging anti-vaccine fervor in the global south. New York Times: Western Warnings Tarnish Vaccines the World Badly Needs
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Far beyond the United States and Europe, the safety scares engulfing the AstraZeneca and Johnson & Johnson vaccines have jeopardized campaigns to inoculate the world, undercutting faith in the two main workhorse shots and threatening to prolong the coronavirus pandemic in countries that can ill afford to be choosy about vaccines.
With a flood of new infections sweeping nearly every continent, the danger signs are flashing, most disconcertingly in Africa.
In Malawi, people are asking doctors how to expunge the AstraZeneca vaccine from their bodies.
In South Africa, health officials have paused giving the Johnson & Johnson shot, the only one they have, a repeat blow after dropping AstraZeneca from their arsenal in February.
In those countries and others, Western colonialism and unethical medical practices have left a residue of mistrust, one that health officials worry could kindle an explosion of anti-vaccine fervor if the perception takes hold that rich countries are dumping second-rate vaccines on the global south.
Already, doctors say, the recent pauses have vindicated vaccine skeptics and made many others feel duped.
“People, especially those who were vaccinated, felt like they had been tricked in a way — they were asking, ‘How do we get rid of the vaccine in our body?’” said Precious Makiyi, a doctor and behavioral scientist in Malawi, where health workers have been racing to empty their shelves of nearly expired AstraZeneca doses.
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You already know about LaTosha Brown’s work as the co-founder of Black Voters Matter, the Black Voters Matter Fund and Black Voters Matter Capacity Building Institute. The Alabama-born, Georgia-based activist is one of the anchors of the effort that turned Georgia blue this past election cycle, helping the Democrats gain a slim one-vote majority in the Senate with Vice President Kamala Harris‘ tie-breaking vote.
Community organizer, cultural activist and non-profit executive Margo Miller is another accomplished Black woman. The Tennessee native is the executive director of the Appalachian Community Fund, a non-profit seeking to counter poverty and improve the lives of residents of Central Appalachia, which includes East Tennessee, West Virginia, Eastern Kentucky, Southwest Virginia and all of West Virginia.
Given all that they already do, you’d think that their plates would be a little too full to do much more. But Brown and Miller want to empower others to continue in their footsteps. The two are part of the Southern Black Girls and Women Consortium, along with Felecia Lucky, president of the Black Belt Community Foundation, and Alice Jenkins, executive director of the Fund for Southern Communities.
The consortium has given itself the ambitious task of raising $100 million for Black women and girls over the next decade. They’ve already raised $10 million of that total and are in the progress of raising more. Some of those funds have already been distributed to community organizations in the form of grants. In just one example, two young women in Lowndes County, Georgia used a $250 grant to fund a drive-in screening of Black Panther to provide a safe entertainment alternative for their community as the pandemic continued.
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Mainstream media is saturated with Black death and suffering. Between real-time images of Black people being killed by police and the violence that is enacted against them in subsequent protests, Black folk are exhausted. So when the two newest projects dedicated to depicting racial violence in America were first unveiled, Black audiences were, understandably, pissed. In both Netflix’s Two Distant Strangers and the Prime Video original series Them, we are subjected to the same gratuitous use of violence that is quickly becoming the norm in Black film and television.
Them, a suburban race horror about a Black family that is confronted with both supernatural resistance and good ol’ 50s racism when they move into an all-white Compton neighborhood, fits right in with other civil rights-era works like The Help and Green Book, but is much more violent. Aside from the obvious and hugely problematic connections to Jordan Peele’s 2019 horror film Us, viewers will also have to contend with gruesome sexual assault, a drawn-out child murder scene, and a near-lynching that was so agonizing I had to skip through much of it.
Two Distant Strangers offers up a different brand of Black trauma. Rapper Joey Bada$$ delivers an endearing debut as a young Black man just trying to get home to his dog after a one-night stand, but who keeps being interrupted by a white police officer determined to kill him, one way or another. A film debut for writer and director Travon Free, this film is a more contemporary rehashing of all the ways we’ve seen Black men die over the last several years. A shot in the back. A no-knock raid at the wrong address. A knee to the neck where the actor actually says the words “I can’t breathe” (there are no words for the too soon-ness of this particular dramatization).
The day repeats itself in a Groundhog Day style that for all of the film’s problems, is at least somewhat successful in highlighting the relentlessness of police harassment against Black people, and the futility of trying to play by the rules in order to avoid it.
What these stories have in common is that they trade in tired, narrow renditions of racism that only manifest themselves through police brutality, Jim Crow and the KKK. And to put it simply, Black audiences are over it.
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At 8 p.m. on Jan. 12, 1865, days after his “march to the sea,” Maj. Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman met with 20 Black ministers on the second floor of his headquarters in Savannah, Ga.
The Civil War would soon end, and the matter at hand that night was urgent.
Sherman had called the Black ministers to confer with him and President Lincoln’s Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton. On the agenda were pressing questions: How would the country provide for the protection of thousands of Black refugees who had followed Sherman’s army since it invaded Georgia? How would thousands of newly freed Black people survive economically after more than 200 years of bondage and unpaid labor?
Four days after the meeting, Sherman would issue Special Field Order, No. 15, confiscating Confederate land along the rice coast. Sherman would later order “40 acres and a mule” to thousands of Black families, which historians would later refer to as the first act of reparations to enslaved Black people.
But the order would be short-lived. After Lincoln’s assassination on April 14, 1865, the order would be reversed and the land given to Black families would be rescinded and returned to White Confederate landowners. More than 100 years later, “40 acres and a mule” would remain a battle cry for Black people demanding reparations for slavery.
On Wednesday — the anniversary of Lincoln’s death — the House Judiciary Committee approved a bill that would create a commission on slavery reparations. H.R. 40 takes its name from the phrase “40 acres and a mule.”
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