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.
Former New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu to Americans: "Don't look away"
"The trial that is going on right now with Derek Chauvin for the death of George Floyd tells us not just about his murder and his humanity but it puts a mirror on who we are as a people."
(my bold)
Derek Smith was the EMT who had to ask the murderer to move his (mother%$#@&^) leg so that the murdered man’s pulse could be checked. He was a very strong witness for the prosecution, I thought. The judge asked him to repeat his name for the record. I watched as he spelled his first name which was the same as the murderer; he paused, and then he sighed. Given his testimony and his advocacy for the dying/dead victim, I interpreted his actions to be one of great regret that he shared anything with Chauvin. I imagine that of late, he has not been too proud to tell people his name for fear of being linked to the murderer. I feel for him. The majority community may not be too proud of Derek Chauvin, but he’s the product of 400 years of white supremacy. He is the very embodiment of a system founded on the oppression of people who do not share the color of his skin. Derek Chauvin lynched one of us, but he’s not our problem. We didn’t create him.
When will we begin that conversation about white accountability?
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NEWS ROUND UP BY DOPPER0189, BLACK KOS MANAGING EDITOR
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Maryland's oft-debated state song, a relic of the Confederacy that calls Union supporters "Northern scum," is one signature away from being repealed.
The state's House of Delegates
voted Monday to repeal "Maryland, My Maryland" as the state song. It's the closest legislators have come to removing the pro-Confederate song from the state canon in decades.
The most recent campaign to repeal the song was led by Maryland House Speaker Adrienne Jones, the first Black woman to serve in that position, and state Sen. Cheryl Kagan, who sponsored three previous attempts to repeal the song.
The renewed focus on racial injustice and the Black Lives Matter movement gave new urgency to the move to remove the song, Kagan said.
"There's a consensus that it was time to finally remove the offensive lyrics from Maryland's lawbook," Kagan told CNN.
The bill moves next to Gov. Larry Hogan's desk for approval. Spokesman Michael Ricci told CNN the governor "has never really cared for the song and plans to sign the measure."
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A group of prominent Black business leaders are calling on corporate America to do more to fight a raft of Republican-inspired restrictive voter laws being pushed in state legislatures across the country. The effort, led by former American Express chief executive Kenneth Chenault and Kenneth Frazier, the head of the pharmaceutical company Merck, is a direct response to the recent passage of a restrictive voter law in Georgia and many more on the horizon just like it that will make it harder for Black and minority communities to vote. The group published a full-page ad Wednesday in the New York Times to raise awareness and spur action.
The push by Chenault and Frazier comes as corporate America has been relatively silent on the issue of voting rights, other than to issue milquetoast affirmations of voting and democracy in general. Meanwhile, Georgia’s Republican-heavy state legislature plowed full speed ahead with a set of new voting laws enacted after they lost the 2020 presidential election, as well as both Senate seats. The law tightens ID requirements for absentee voting, curtails early voting options, and, perhaps more worryingly, gives the state legislature more authority over the local administration of elections, something that would have made it easier for Donald Trump to overturn the election last time, and possibly in the future.
The Black business executives are attempting to increase pressure on corporate America to do something. Corporate pressure has been applied on a host of issues, notably bathroom bills and anti-LGBTQ laws, creating a new set of consequences for local Republican lawmakers looking to discriminate. “You had 60 major companies—Amazon, Google, American Airlines—that signed on to the statement that states a very clear opposition to harmful legislation aimed at restricting the access of L.G.B.T.Q. people in society,” Chenault told the Times. “So, you know, it is bizarre that we don’t have companies standing up to this.”
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Even the reporters most wedded to access, and to the conventions of “both sides” journalism, were clearly describing what was happening in front of their noses. Reality was not determined by partisanship, situated somewhere between a comment from a Democrat and one from a Republican. The moment demanded journalism that was clearer and less “neutral.” American democracy itself was under threat.
There was a sense that the conventions that had defined political journalism for decades may have been shifting under the weight of the unfolding crisis. How can you practice both-sides journalism when one of the sides had turned its back on democracy? Media outlets became explicit: Any claim of fraud or a “stolen” election was not only a lie, but a big lie.
But a strange thing has happened over the last few months. Across the country, the Republican Party began proposing, then passing, sweeping new laws to restrict voting access—over 250 such proposals in 43 states, according to a Brennan Center study released two weeks ago. Last week, Republicans in Georgia, which just elected two Democrats to the U.S. Senate for the first time in decades, passed a bill that will add ID requirements to voting, decrease access to ballot drop boxes, and even block non-poll workers from providing food and drink to people waiting in line to vote.
The law also removes the secretary of state, who had resisted Trump’s efforts to overturn Georgia’s election results, from the Board of Elections, replacing him with a figure who answers to the legislature. If such a figure had been in place in the 2020 election, it is possible that Georgia’s electoral votes would have been baselessly handed to Trump last year.
The GOP is, in other words, laying the groundwork to steal elections, both by limiting access to poor and non-white voters and by making it easier to overturn unfavorable results. This is all happening as a direct result of Trump’s lies about a “stolen election,” which have, ironically, created the pretext for Republicans to do exactly that in states across the country. But despite this connection, the press is reverting to its old, bad ways, treating an existential threat to democracy as a mere partisan conflict.
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In February, Google announced that it was committing to training 100,000 Black women in digital skills. This announcement arrived as a PR Hail Mary amid the ever-growing industry and academic outcry over Google’s firing of prominent, brilliant, respected A.I. researcher Timnit Gebru and recruiter April Christina Curley, both Black women and both exceptional contributors at the company. (Google claims that Gebru resigned; she says she did not.) The backlash occurred during a year of widespread protest against the centuries-old violence of racism and racialized capitalism in the United States.
This is not the first time that a prominent tech organization has attempted to “train up” Black Americans. From 1968 to 1972, at least 18 programs to provide computing skills training to Black and brown Americans were established in the United States. They were located in East Coast and California cities, with one in St. Louis, Missouri. In some cases, they were provided by government or social welfare organizations; others were provided by professional organizations, including the Association for Computing Machinery. The programs often targeted young adults; one offered at Johns Hopkins University enrolled and graduated five Baltimore high school students. Another in the Albany, New York, area enrolled 31 Black students, of whom a third were women. Some of them taught keypunch or mainframe operation, which included batch processing, while others actually aimed to teach computer programming in COBOL or FORTRAN. This era was dominated by mainframe computers, when computer programs were typically communicated to a machine via a series of carefully pre-punched cards, and those programs were run one after another in sequences known as batches. Trainees in a few programs received hands-on experience running the IBM 1401, the (much-heralded) IBM 360 system, and the IBM 7030. Though their operations (and quality) varied by site, most programs were connected to the ACM; for example, members organized and volunteered in programs, and others reported on these training efforts at ACM conferences. At the national level, the organization launched the Committee on Computing and the Disadvantaged.
A unifying theme motivating the programs appeared to be the notion that providing some basic digital skills training for Black and brown Americans, and thereby preparing them for entry-level jobs in the tech industry, would be a way to give them an “advantage.” In the words of many of the program organizers, and the ACM itself, these Black and brown Americans were “disadvantaged.” One scholar who has studied these programs, Arvid Nelsen, explained that most of the programs were established by white volunteers, and they—like many others at the time and since—conflated communities of color with people experiencing poverty, and both of those with urban neighborhoods.
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