Pride
Commentary by Chitown Kev
Sunday, June 30, 1996 was the day of the Gay Pride Parade in Chicago.
It was around 6:40 am when the strange woman finally unperched herself from the window sill of my apartment and joined the strange man and left the house to get more bags of crack.
My home smelled of crack smoke just as it had many days and times before but some reason...it got to me this time.
It was either continue on and kill myself (which is what I wanted) or I would continue on and exist continuing to do what I was doing (which I feared the most; that was a fate worse than death).
Or I could stop everything altogether and try living instead of existing yet again.
None of the three options particularly appealed to me at 6:45 that morning. Alone with my thoughts, at least for a brief time, until the strangers returned.
By 6:47 am, I made the phone call to a good friend of mine that also managed a recovery house. I was surprised that he picked up the phone so early in the morning, as it was Gay Pride Day and he probably needed his rest because...there was a lot to do later.
“J., come pick me up,” I wearily said into the phone.
I was out of the house by about 6:50 am waiting for the pickup on the side of the apartment building where I could not see the front door.
J. drove up in his car by 6:54 am and picked me up.
(Later I was to find out that those two strangers had returned to the house by 6:57 am.)
***
Traffic on Lake Shore Drive was light at ~7:10 am as the sun beamed down; June 30, 1996 was as perfect a morning in Chicago, weather-wise, as September 11, 2001 was to be. As we were speeding down LSD, a lesbian acquaintance of mine, sober, was also speeding by (barbecue pit in tow and tied down to the hood of her car) and waved at us; a recognition that the morning was The Day of Pride. J. and I waved back and J. continued to speed down LSD until we hit the exit street and drove to the bare doors of the detox place.
I got out and walked inside. About 7:25 am or so.
I had been around recovery circles since the winter of 1992-93, so I should have expected that there were some people in the detox center that I knew but I was still rather surprised by it.
And rather ashamed about it….or, rather, I was ashamed at my being there. I was tired, weary really, and could get no rest.
The guilt of being there, in detox, of FAILURE, had so overwhelmed me that I began babbling about it to any of the staff that would listen to it.
I honestly can’t blame any of the detox workers for not responding(or even listening) to my babble but one person did...and responded.
“You did it, it’s over and done with, and you have to move on.”
I went to sleep after pondering what the detox worker said. The next morning, I walked out of the detox; everyone advised against it but I knew what I needed to do. And I had a incantation to carry with me.
I walked out of the detox at 8:05 am Monday, July 1, 1996.
And began trying to live again.
***
Life has certainly been no crystal stair since I walked out of that detox center but at least I have lived it.
***
The idea of Pride has always had a more... holistic (?) meaning for me than being gay; I had known and accepted being gay long before July 1, 1996. In fact, because of that day and time that I became sober (well, dry, really) Pride seems even more like my holiday. Yes, I celebrate being gay.
I also celebrate the continuing fulfillment of the lyric located at Psalm 139:14.
A final story: At an earlier point in another period of sobriety (this would be 1994), I was loading some boxes for a food donation into a truck and suddenly some of my co-workers looked at me horrified.
I had unknowingly...flexed my hypermobility.
I felt myself falling into that shame of being a “freak” that I was so familiar with but I noticed a much older man watching me out of the corner of his eye and then he walked toward me.
“Do that again,” he said.
So I did.
Then the older man did something with his right leg that I can’t really describe other than: it appeared to melt! That totally freaked me out.
And then we had a conversation about how special I was...which was a first as it concerned my hypermobility.
Truth was— and is— I had felt like a “freak” long before I recognized that I was gay.
After the older man talked to me, I don’t think that I felt any less of a “freak,” really, but I have never forgotten the feeling that I was no longer alone in The Universe.
Freaks are called freaks and are treated as they are treated -- in the main, abominably-- because they are human beings who cause to echo, deep within us, our most profound terrors and desires.
Most of us, however, do not appear to be freaks -- though we are rarely what we appear to be…
James Baldwin, “Freaks and the American Ideal of Manhood” Playboy magazine, January 1985
Celebrate Pride and all that you are.
Get your freak on!
And don’t allow a text source or anyone to distract you into forgetting that, yes, you are, too, “fearfully and wonderfully made” and absolutely “marvelous.”
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NEWS ROUND UP BY DOPPER0189, BLACK KOS MANAGING EDITOR
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Dr. Safiya Noble, a UCLA associate professor and author, explores the dangers of handing over too much of our knowledge discovery to Big Tech platforms. Color Lines: How Google Search Can Serve Up Racist Results
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Many of us see Google Search as a cross between a massive digital library and the world’s biggest Yellow Pages. Whether you want to know what time a soccer game comes on, when George Washington was born or where to get Jamaican food locally, the quickest and easiest way to answer simple inquiries is to Google it.
But what happens when you ask questions that are more subjective, nuanced and may need much more context, such as “Why did the Troubles happen in Ireland?” or “Why was the Civil War fought?” or “What is critical race theory?” Dr. Safiya Noble, an associate professor at the UCLA Department of Information Studies, warns that we are handing too much of our knowledge discovery over to Big Tech platforms like Google.
Dr. Noble co-founded (along with Dr. Sarah T. Roberts) the Center for Critical Internet Inquiry at UCLA. The center investigates the social impact of digital technologies on the broader public good. She also wrote the book “Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism,” which explains how racist and sexist ideas get encoded into Google search results.
In this interview with Colorlines, Dr. Noble explained how search engines actually work, what users are getting wrong when they think of Google as a “fact-checker,” the ways in which Google and other platforms play a role in the spread of misinformation and propaganda, what societal problems technology can’t fix, and more.
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Many U.S. companies have rushed to appoint Black members to their boards of directors since racial justice protests swept the country last year.
But in the two preceding years, progress on increasing racial diversity on boards stagnated, a new study revealed Tuesday. Black men even lost ground.
The study, conducted by the Alliance of Board Diversity and the consulting firm Deloitte, points to the steep deficit companies face when it comes to fulfilling pledges to diversity in their ranks. An overwhelming 82.5% of directors among Fortune 500 company boards are white, according to the Missing Pieces Report: A Board Diversity Census of Women and Minorities on Fortune 500 Boards.
The study suggests that, until the May 2020 police killing of George Floyd galvanized a national reckoning on systemic racism, attention to racial diversity took something of a backseat to gender equality in boardrooms.
Between July 2020 and May 2021, some 32% of newly appointed board members in the S&P 500 were Black, according to an analysis by ISS Corporate Solutions, which advises companies on improving shareholder value and reducing risk. That was a leap compared to 11% during the previous year.
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After a year of protests over police brutality, some Republican-controlled states have ignored or blocked police-reform proposals, moving instead in the other direction by granting greater powers to officers, making it harder to discipline them and expanding their authority to crack down on demonstrations.
The sponsors of the GOP measures acted in the wake of the nationwide protests that followed George Floyd’s death, and they cited the disturbances and destruction that spread last summer through major U.S. cities, including Portland, New York and Minneapolis, where Floyd died at the hands of officers.
“We have to strengthen our laws when it comes to mob violence, to make sure individuals are unequivocally dissuaded from committing violence when they’re in large groups,” Florida state Rep. Juan Fernandez-Barquin, a Republican, said during a hearing for an anti-riot bill that was enacted in April.
Florida is one of the few states this year to both expand police authority and pass reforms: A separate bill awaiting action by the governor would require additional use-of-force training and ensure officers intervene if another uses excessive force.
States where lawmakers pushed back against the police-reform movement included Arizona, Iowa, Oklahoma, Tennessee and Wyoming, according to an Associated Press review of legislation.
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As this year’s Juneteenth celebrations begin—commemorating when enslaved people in Galveston, Texas, were told that the Civil War had ended and they were now technically free—thinking about place can be illuminating. America has a long history of denying and violating the basic rights of Black people, leading many of these citizens to carve out spaces that celebrate and recognize their full humanity. In a new essay as part of our project “Inheritance,” the historian Daina Ramey Berry argues that Juneteenth should also be a celebration of the ways Black people created and found freedom on their own terms, including through networks, events, and spaces that extolled the values of abolition, self-liberation, and defiance.
In an article adapted from her book On Juneteenth, the Harvard professor Annette Gordon-Reed examines the history of Black people in the United States before 1619, focusing on the story of Estebanico, one of the first people of African descent to enter the historical record in the Americas. Estebanico has been sidelined in histories for years, but Gordon-Reed proposes that he is integral to African Americans’ origin story. And in an essay adapted from his book How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning With the History of Slavery Across America, The Alantic’s Clint Smith grapples with Americans’ beliefs about the Confederacy by exploring locations and attending events tied to the Civil War and slavery.
Thinking of place as a more figurative concept, the author Sasha Banks, in her essay “The Problem With Patriotism,” contends with her role in the United States, which she felt alienated from as a girl and young adult. Instead of conforming to a national identity, she journeys to define herself, eventually identifying as a “confessor” who names the ways the country has failed Black Americans. And in “The Coal Cellar,” the poet Nikki Giovanni transports readers to a tender moment with her grandmother in which the interplay of place and history leads to the inheritance of knowledge.
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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.