Commentary by Black Kos Editor Denise Oliver-Velez
I’m sitting here wondering if there is a handbook for racist bigots, or a college course called “Creative Methodologies for Murdering Black People (and getting away with it) 101.
A case study of U.S. history provides an endless list of ‘slaughter Black folks” techniques.
How can I kill thee...let me count the ways...(apologies to Elizabeth Barrett Browning)
I can enslave you, sell you, work you to death, starve you, torture you, lynch you, lock you up in prisons for life, and fry you in an electric chair.
Those of you who survive this onslaught can have your towns burned down.
Then I can segregate you, force you to live in environmental hazard zones, shop in food deserts, and get asthma from roaches.
I will rape you, breed you, police you, shoot you, and then I will take your music, the blues you cried out ‘cause of all of the above, and I will play it, sing it and make millions off of it.
I will figure out ways to justify your murders and sound very rational. I will create media networks to bombard the minds of other white people to ensure no one forgets the hate lessons they learn at grandpa’s knee. I will reinforce the home-schooled lessons in churches with a white Jesus smiling beatifically at burning crosses on parade.
I will write best-selling books with academic imprimaturs pointing out and re-enforcing the notion that you are born with lesser IQs, and therefore are only allowed to hang around if you perform useful labor for us. Or entertainment.
When any other white people step out of line and start having guilty feelings about your treatment, or *gasp* empathy (a curse word), I will challenge their whiteness, brand them race traitors, or communists. I don’t worry though. We’ve managed to do this for 500 years and they haven’t stopped us, so we’re assured of decades...or centuries more.
I guess you can tell — I’m pissed (to put it mildly). The latest racist outrage du jour that tipped me into anger mode is that some Black people’s murder by police assassinations has been blamed on ….ta da...sickle cell anemia trait. But wait...read that again...not sickle cell anemia itself, but the trait. Lauren Floyd wrote about this latest story for Daily Kos in “It's not cops beating Black people to death. It's the sickle cell trait, medical examiners allege”
I have friends that have sickle cell trait. I also have some that have full blown sickle cell disease. The two things are not the same.
This video from Cincinnati Children's Hospital, gives a simple explanation.
The fact that yet another manufactured excuse for dead Black folks has been used to obfuscate, and explain away murder pushed me over the anger edge when I read the The New York Times report.
I want to get a few things straight. Firstly, as pointed out Black health care activist Laurie Bertram Roberts, sickle cell trait and disease are found in populations who are not Black.
Leading physical/biological anthropologist Michael L. Blakey, who was one of my professors in grad school, wrote about sickle cell trait over 30 years ago, in "Scientific Racism and the Biological Concept of Race"
"High frequencies of sickle cell trait[...]are found in parts of Central Africa, Southern Europe, and South Asia. Low frequencies are found in southern Africa and northern Europe. Thus, the distribution of sickle cell trait is independent of racial categories"
So let’s just stop with the “Black folks are genetically responsible for our own doom,” defense of murder. In case you missed it, Chauvin’s defense team tried to throw sickle cell into their bag of tricks.
When we are killed by racist cops or vigilantes, just watch the dog and pony show trotted out about why we are at fault for our own deaths. We are demonized as brutes, thugs and criminals. We are grown men and women when we are actually boys and girls. We wear hoodies. We carry cell phones. We may have a drug and alcohol use history (as if a majority of white folks don’t).
What’s next?
We are guilty — of being Black in a society where whiteness is still the centered norm.
End of rant.
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NEWS ROUND UP BY DOPPER0189, BLACK KOS MANAGING EDITOR
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The Reconstruction era saw the establishment of multiracial democracy in the United States—as well as the shortcomings that would later allow its suppression. Historian Alexander Keyssar wrote that the debate over what would be the Fifteenth Amendment “marked the first time since the constitutional convention in Philadelphia that the national government of the United States had grappled directly and extensively with the issue of voting rights.” Members of Congress considered two versions during the monthslong debate. One of them, proposed by Massachusetts’s George Boutwell in the House and Nevada’s William Stewart in the Senate, banned restrictions on suffrage on the basis of race, color, or prior enslavement.
It was a clean, simple attempt to solve the complex problem of protecting freedmen’s voting rights in the Southern states. Some Radical Republican senators, such as Indiana’s Oliver Morton, questioned why the amendment did not go beyond race. “I think there is no more principle, there is no more justice in requiring a man to have a certain amount of property before he shall be allowed to exercise this right that is indispensable to the protection of his life, liberty, and happiness than there is in requiring him to have a white skin,” he argued. By refusing to ban literacy tests or property tests, Morton feared, the Fifteenth Amendment would merely invite alternative forms of suppression.
A group of like-minded senators rallied around a far more sweeping version proposed by Massachusetts’s Henry Wilson. It would have barred discrimination “in the exercise of the elective franchise or in the right to hold office in any State on account of race, color, nativity, property, education, or creed.” None of the proposals would have extended suffrage to women, which led to a schism among nineteenth-century feminists over whether to oppose the amendment. But Wilson’s version would have still struck down a wide swath of existing restrictions on the franchise. Many of the Jim Crow measures used to suppress Black political participation in the South, like literacy tests and poll taxes, would not have survived even the most conservative interpretation of its text. But Wilson’s version failed amid unease from moderate Republicans and opposition from Democrats, so the narrower version of the amendment won the day.
When Democrats later recaptured state legislatures across the South, they soon devised ways to exclude large numbers of Black voters without running afoul of the Fifteenth Amendment’s limited bounds. So it lay largely dormant, like Excalibur at the bottom of the lake, for nearly a century, until the federal government suddenly remembered that it could protect and promote multiracial democracy in America.
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Florida Rep. Val Demings is planning to run for the U.S. Senate, rather than governor, providing Democrats with a big-name candidate to take on Republican Sen. Marco Rubio next year.
For months, Demings mulled which statewide office to pursue, but decided she could do the most good by taking on the two-term senator, according to several Democrats familiar with her thinking.
“I would’ve supported her running for governor, but this is the right fit for her and for us,” said Alex Sink, a former Florida chief financial officer who narrowly lost her 2010 bid for governor against Rick Scott, who is now a senator.
“She’s going to draw a contrast between who she is and how she represents Florida vs. Marco Rubio, who a lot of people where I live never see him.”
Sink said she was recently on a Zoom call with Demings and activists with Ruth’s List, the Florida-based organization dedicated to electing women who support abortion rights, and it was clear that she and national Democrats felt she would represent the party’s best chance to put Republicans on defense as they try to take back the U.S. Senate.
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Barry Jenkins vividly recalls the moment he first heard about the Underground Railroad.
“I was around 5 or 6, and when I first heard those words, it wasn’t even imagined — I saw Black people on trains that were underground,” he recalled. “My grandfather was a longshoreman, and he would go to work with his hard hat and tool belt. I imagined someone like him building the Underground Railroad. The feeling was beautiful because it was purely about Black people, this idea of building things.”
The youngster would eventually learn that “Underground Railroad” was actually a colorful term for a network of safe houses and routes utilized by slaves to escape their oppressive masters in the antebellum South. But the image stayed with him into adulthood as his films, including the Oscar-winning “Moonlight” and the romantic drama “If Beale Street Could Talk,” made him one of Hollywood’s most respected filmmakers.
Jenkins brings his childhood vision of the railroad full circle with the highly anticipated “The Underground Railroad,” Amazon’s limited series based on Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize-winning historical novel about a runway slave named Cora (Thuso Mbedu) and her desperate, often hellish quest for freedom as she flees the shackles of bondage.
Whitehead reimagines the Underground Railroad as a boxcar powered by a steam locomotive transporting slaves to free states though subterranean tunnels. The author is an executive producer on the adaptation, which premieres Friday on the streaming service.
The drama marks another high-profile touchstone for Jenkins, who won an adapted screenplay Oscar along with Tarell Alvin McCraney for “Moonlight.” He was nominated for best director for the 2016 gay coming-of-age drama, which won the Oscar for best picture.
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A Black LGBTQ high school student was found dead in the woods near Boston last month. Her family has called for an independent autopsy and is fundraising for their search for justice. Vox: We should be talking about the death of Mikayla Miller
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It’s been nearly a month since 16-year-old Mikayla Miller was found dead, with a belt around her neck and tied to a tree, in Hopkinton, Massachusetts. It remains unclear what happened to the Black teenager, who identified as LGBTQ — both before she died and how she died.
What is apparent is the girl’s family does not want the local authorities to be the ones in charge of finding out. The case, which is only now starting to garner national attention, is becoming another tragic example of law enforcement failing to adequately investigate the death of a Black victim, address immediate concerns raised by grieving loved ones or communicate effectively to those demanding accountability.
Miller’s mother, Calvina Strothers, has remained vocal in her criticism of both Middlesex County District Attorney Marian Ryan and other authorities involved with the investigation. Per the family’s spokesperson, activist Monica Cannon-Grant of Violence in Boston Inc., the family is calling for an independent investigation and autopsy. (The district attorney’s office said earlier in May that the case remains open.)
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For some Americans, history isn’t the story of what actually happened; it’s the story they want to believe. The Atlantic: Why Confederate Lies Live On
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Outside, lawn mowers buzzed as Black men steered them between tombstones draped in Confederate flags. The oldest marked grave at Blandford dates back to 1702; new funerals are held there every week. Within the cemetery’s 150 acres are the bodies of roughly 30,000 Confederate soldiers, one of the largest mass graves of Confederate servicemen in the country.
From 1866 into the 1880s, Ken told us, a group of local women organized the tracking-down and exhuming of those bodies from nearby battlegrounds. “They felt that the southern soldier had not been treated with the same dignity and honor that the northern soldiers had,” and they wanted to do something about it. Most of the bodies were not identifiable; sometimes all that was left was a leg or an arm. Nonetheless, the remains were dug up and brought here, and the ladies refurbished the old church as a memorial to their fallen husbands, sons, and brothers.
Tiffany Studios cut them a deal on the stained glass: $350 apiece instead of the usual price of about $1,700 ($51,000 today). Thirteen southern states donated funds. Ken outlined the aesthetic history of each window in meticulous detail, giving each color and engraving his thorough and intimate attention. But he said almost nothing about why the windows were there—that the soldiers memorialized in stained glass had fought a war to keep my ancestors in chains.
Almost all of the people who come to Blandford Cemetery are white. “It’s not that a Black population doesn’t appreciate the windows,” Ken, who is white, told me. “But sometimes in the context of what it represents, they’re not as comfortable.” He went on: “In most cases we try and fall back on the beauty of the windows, the Tiffany-glass kind of thing.”
But I couldn’t revel in the windows’ beauty without reckoning with what those windows represented. I looked around the church again. How many of the visitors to the cemetery today, I asked Ken, are Confederate sympathizers?
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Voices and Soul
by Justice Putnam, Black Kos Poetry Editor
When I was a kid, up early to watch the next space launch back in the early 60’s, and I thought to that distant future when we would land robots on Mars, and a satellite would be traversing through the Oort cloud and beyond, I never imagined all these Nazis. And that’s the problem. They were always there. They were there with clubs and badges in Selma and they were there in Boston screaming at black kids on a bus. They were there in our zoning boards and they were there on our school boards. They were there on our TV’s, our radios and those weird newsletters that showed up in the mail box mysteriously. They were there in our board rooms and our mail rooms and in our think tanks claiming a foundation of white heritage. They were there in the CC&R approved suburban housewife coffee klatch, and they were there naming another military base after another treasonous general who waged war against all reason and humanity. And now there is a Nazi next door, a Nazi down the street, and a Nazi driving a beefed up urban assault vehicle to force their way into another state house because they can’t stand public health.
When I was a kid, up early for my Catholic altar boy ablutions and contemplative prayers for a peaceful, loving future, I never imagined all these Nazis.
1.
Tonite in need of you
and God
I move imperfect
through this ancient city.
Quiet. No one hears
No one feels the tears
of multitudes.
The silence thickens
I have lost the shore
of your kind seasons
who will hear my voice
nasal against distinguished
actors
O I am tired
of voices without sound
I will rest on this ground
full of mass hymns.
2.
You have been here since I can remember Martin
from Selma to Montgomery from Watts to Chicago
from Nobel Peace Prize to Memphis, Tennessee.
Unmoved among the angles and corners
of aristocratic confusion.
It was a time to be born
forced forward a time
to wander inside drums
the good times with eyes like stars
and soldiers without medals or weapons
but honor, yes.
And you told us: the storm is rising against the
privileged minority of the earth, from which there is no
shelter in isolation or armament
and you told us: the storm will
not abate until a just distribution of the fruits of
the earth enables men (and women) everywhere to live
in dignity and human decency.
3.
All summerlong it has rained
and the water rises in our throats
and all that we sing is rumored
forgotten.
Whom shall we call when this song comes of age?
And they came into the city carrying their fastings
in their eyes and the young 9-year-old Sudanese
boy said, "I want something to eat at nite a
place to sleep."
And they came into the city hands salivating guns,
and the young 9-year-old words snapped red
with vowels:
Mama mama Auntie auntie I dead I dead I deaddddd.
4.
In our city of lost alphabets
where only our eyes strengthen the children
you spoke like Peter like John
you fisherman of tongues
untangling our wings
you inaugurated iron for our masks
exiled no one with your touch
and we felt the thunder in your hands.
We are soldiers in the army
we have to fight, although we have to cry.
We have to hold up the freedom banners
we have to hold it up until we die.
And you said we must keep going and we became
small miracles, pushed the wind down, entered
the slow bloodstream of America
surrounded streets and "reconcentradas," tuned
our legs against Olympic politicians elaborate cadavers
growing fat underneath western hats.
And we scraped the rust from old laws
went floor by floor window by window
and clean faces rose from the dust
became new brides and bridegrooms among change
men and women coming for their inheritance.
And you challenged us to catch up with our
own breaths to breathe in Latinos Asians Native Americans
Whites Blacks Gays Lesbians Muslims and Jews, to gather
up our rainbow-colored skins in peace and racial justice
as we try to answer your long-ago question: Is there
a nonviolent peacemaking army that can shut down
the Pentagon?
And you challenged us to breathe in Bernard Haring's words:
the materialistic growth—mania for
more and more production and more
and more markets for selling unnecessary
and even damaging products is a
sin against the generation to come
what shall we leave to them:
rubbish, atomic weapons numerous
enough to make the earth
uninhabitable, a poisoned
atmosphere, polluted water?
5.
"Love in practice is a harsh and dreadful
thing compared to love in dreams," said a Russian writer.
Now I know at great cost Martin that as we burn
something moves out of the flames
(call it spirit or apparition)
till no fire or body or ash remain
we breathe out and smell the world again
Aye-Aye-Aye Ayo-Ayo-Ayo Ayeee-Ayeee-Ayeee
Amen men men men Awoman woman woman woman
Men men men Woman woman woman
Men men Woman woman
Men Woman
Womanmen.
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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.