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.
I was gonna post some examples of what I’ve seen online, but changed my mind. They are simply too horrid. I could cite some examples I’ve seen on Daily Kos, mostly now in hiddens, but can’t and won’t. That would violate “the rules of the road” here. So I’m just going to vent in this mini-rant on the Black Kos front porch.
Seeya in the comments section.
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NEWS ROUND UP BY DOPPER0189, BLACK KOS MANAGING EDITOR
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On Sunday, a police officer shot and killed Daunte Wright, an unarmed Black man, after pulling him over for hanging an air freshener from his rearview mirror. Wright’s death is just the latest instance of police assaulting and killing drivers—specifically, Black men who pose no danger—following a routine traffic stop. Philando Castile, Walter Scott, and Sam DuBose were all shot and killed by police after a traffic stop; none of them posed any danger to the officers who took their lives.
Racism surely plays a role here, but there is another reason so many appalling police shootings involve motorists: Law enforcement officers are taught that routine traffic stops pose extreme danger to their own lives. Courts have seized upon this idea to water down the constitutional rights of drivers, justifying police brutality on the grounds that officers must act quickly to protect themselves against the random violence that always lurks just around the corner.
This theory has pervaded American law and law enforcement for decades. It is also untrue. In a 2019 article published in the Michigan Law Review, Jordan Blair Woods demonstrated that violence during traffic stops is, in fact, extremely rare. Woods, a professor at the University of Arkansas School of Law, also found that it is officers, not drivers, who frequently escalate those few stops that lead to actual violence. In a forthcoming article in the Stanford Law Review, Woods proposes removing police from traffic enforcement altogether to prevent more violence against motorists, especially Black civilians, during traffic stops. On Thursday, we spoke about his articles, which are tragically topical in light of Wright’s killing. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
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Black and brown people’s defiance is not the problem. Our compliance is not the solution. The Atlantic: Compliance Will Not Save Me
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“Stop right now!” the officer yelled at Adam Toledo, a 13-year-old seventh grader at Gary Elementary School. “Hands. Show me your hands. Drop it. Drop it.”
A video taken by Stillman’s body camera shows Toledo apparently complying.
He appears to drop something.
He stops.
He turns around.
He shows his hands.
Stillman fires a single shot, killing Toledo.
Afterward, Stillman’s attorney insisted that the fatal shooting was justified. “The police officer was put in this split-second situation where he has to make a decision,” said Timothy Grace, a lawyer retained by the Fraternal Order of Police in Chicago.
But it was Stillman who put Toledo in a split-second situation where he had to make a decision. Toledo decided to do everything the officer asked him to. He complied, but he is not alive today.
For Black and brown people, this is the terror of American policing. When we do not comply, we die like Daunte Wright did. When we do comply, we die like Adam Toledo did.
Compliance will not save our lives. Compliance will not save us from being brutalized and debased like U.S. Army Second Lieutenant Caron Nazario was in Virginia. Even when we are forced into a compliant position—handcuffed and prone and kneed like George Floyd was, incarcerated like Sandra Bland was—we may end up dead.
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If you open up your preferred music streaming service and browse its library of curated playlists, you’re bound to find a slew of them labeled “Smooth R&B,” “Chill R&B,” “90s Slow Jams,” or even “Bedroom Jams.” The artists within those playlists might range from recent R&B powerhouse singers like H.E.R and SZA to classic mainstays like Roberta Flack and Anita Baker.
These playlists have gained massive followings over the past few years, but they aren’t a new innovation. In fact, they owe their success and sound to a 40-year-old staple of Black radio: Quiet Storm.
In the video [below], I’m joined by ethnomusicologist Fredara Hadley, along with former and current radio hosts Angela Stribling, Al Wood, and John Monds, to explore the roots of this iconic late-night radio format.
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Backed by SiriusXM and the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum, Black Diamonds, hosted by museum president and historian Bob Kendrick, will explore the history of the Negro Leagues and the players, people, and events that brought it to life. It will also highlight its achievements and the multitude of innovations it introduced during a time of segregation and far more pronounced racial inequality.
“For 30 years, the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum has given voice to a powerful and compelling story that had escaped the pages of American history books,” Kendrick said in a statement to The Root. “Our collaboration with SiriusXM to produce the new Black Diamonds podcast not only amplifies that voice but provides an incredible platform that will bring the inspirational story of the Negro Leagues to life. As host of the show, I’m excited to take listeners on a nostalgic journey as we celebrate baseball’s unsung heroes who overcame tremendous social adversity to play ball.”
Word.
The importance of the Negro Leagues has been understated throughout the course of history, but thankfully, Black Diamonds is armed with the knowledge and dedication to correct course.
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I’ve worked with Black girls intimately and often, hearing tales of beauty and transformation, often coupled with painful scars of violation. I knew violence all too well — political violence, violence in the classroom, interpersonal violence, sexual violence, and violence in all of its other iterations. After all, violence had mapped itself onto Black girls’ bodies, environments, and the very fabric of their lives.
I could relate because it mapped itself onto the Philadelphia neighborhood I grew up in, onto my immigrant family, and onto my young, Black female body, too. But it wasn’t until I entered ‘the field’ that I had named it.
To say “Jamaica is not a real place” is a running joke — usually expressed laughingly to reference one’s shock and inability to process some of the things that take place on the island. People use it jokingly, often signifying toward some fantastic clip that has surfaced on social media platforms. It signals that whatever portrayal of Jamaica presented is confounding — other-worldly — plainly incomprehensible.
A peculiar place — equal parts beauty and danger — Jamaica is truly a “confounding island,” as nicknamed by sociologist Orlando Patterson. Even more confounding is the prevalence of violence in the lives, environments, and unfortunate deaths of Jamaican women and girls.
I entered ‘the field’ in April of 2019, as a graduate student, but also as a Jamaican descendant whose life had been entirely shaped by a culture, a country, and a heritage from which I was removed geographically since I was a child.
After quelling my parents’ paranoia, I entered Kingston for the first time alone, as a sociological researcher, excited to study the lives and social processes of Black girls there. I visited local government and grassroots organizations, participated in community trainings, spent time in schools, universities, and inner-city communities, writing, interviewing, observing, and communing with my own friends and family — acquainting myself in the space.
Soon after each new encounter, in any one of these spaces, it never failed that I was met with an onslaught of stories or made witness to some conversation about the fate of violence that awaited Black women and girls, inevitably. As I continued in the field, it grew more and more apparent that the issue of violence against women and girls in Jamaica, like in many other parts of the Black world, was surreal and far more insidious than one could have imagined.
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For decades, South Africa was under apartheid: A series of laws divided people by race. Then, in the 1990s, those laws were dismantled. But many of the barriers they created continue to divide South Africans by skin color — determining their quality of life, access to jobs, and wealth. Racial division was built into the fabric of cities throughout South Africa, and it still hasn’t been uprooted.
That’s partly because while apartheid was the culmination of South Africa’s racial divisions, it wasn’t the beginning of them. That story starts closer to the 1800s, when the British built a network of railroads that transformed the region’s economy into one that excluded most Black people — and then made that exclusion the law.
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Voices and Soul
by Black Kos Poetry Editor Justice Putnam
Percy Shelley's sonnet, Ozymandias, was published in England in 1818. Earlier that year, Percy, with Mary Shelley and their children; and along with his sister-in-law Claire Clairmont, mother of Byron's child, expatriated to Bagni di Lucca, Italy. In the late summer, they moved to Este, near Venice to be closer to Byron's villa. At a time when the "Exceptionalism" of British colonial reach was unquestioned; in fact, exalted in verse, theatre and the academy, Shelly acknowledged the erosion Time has on all leaders and empires:
I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: "Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
`My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!'
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away".
-- Percy Bysshe Shelley
"Ozymandias"
Jamaican-born Claude McKay certainly channeled Shelley, when in 1922, he questioned the "Exceptionalism" of an America that held the "hand that mocked them and the heart that fed." McKay saw also, though few will admit the obvious erosion of Time, that even for America, there will be a future where the "lone and level sands stretch far away."
Although she feeds me bread of bitterness,
And sinks into my throat her tiger's tooth,
Stealing my breath of life, I will confess
I love this cultured hell that tests my youth!
Her vigor flows like tides into my blood,
Giving me strength erect against her hate.
Her bigness sweeps my being like a flood.
Yet as a rebel fronts a king in state,
I stand within her walls with not a shred
Of terror, malice, not a word of jeer.
Darkly I gaze into the days ahead,
And see her might and granite wonders there,
Beneath the touch of Time's unerring hand,
Like priceless treasures sinking in the sand.
-- Claude McKay
“America”
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WELCOME TO THE TUESDAY PORCH.
IF YOU ARE NEW TO THE BLACK KOS COMMUNITY, GRAB A SEAT, SOME CYBER EATS, RELAX, AND INTRODUCE YOURSELF.