Commentary by BlackKos editor JoanMar
19-year-old Alexis C. Wilson may have gone out for a bite to eat, or it may have been that she went out to have a good time with her boyfriend and then the two decided to go get something to eat; however she came to make the decision to visit Baba's Famous Steak & Lemonade restaurant in Illinois, it would turn out to be a tragic one. She would not make it home.
To value the life of others
Is to acknowledge the sanctity of yours
To feel for the ruin of others
Is to respect the existence of yours
To fight for the freedom of others
Is to preserve the liberty of yours ~ Ali Farah
It took the
Illinois State Police 10 days to release Alexis’s murder tape; enough time for the news media to do their assigned job of promoting and solidifying the narrative of the violent black teenager intent on killing two cops. And yes, I said “murder tape,” and don’t even come at me with your enabling nonsense today. Despite everything
we have seen and heard over the past few years, journalists still continue to accept and share cops’ version of events as the unassailable truth. Check out this article about
"the death" of Alexis:
As one of the officers tried to remove her from the car, the woman sped off and dragged the officer with him hanging halfway out of the window, Howard said. Another officer then fired three times into the car, Howard said.
The woman ran over that officer and crashed into a squad car, Howard said. She continued to drive one block and crashed into an unoccupied bicycle shop on Sibley, he said.
The woman died at the scene, Howard said. It’s unclear if she died from gunshot wounds or from the crash.
Spot the bias? Alexis had a run-in with workers at the drive-through restaurant...that’s not a capital offense. That happens at least once every single day and twice on Sundays. Cops responded to the calls and ordered the teenager and her boyfriend out of the vehicle. Alexis told them that she was naked. They confirmed that she was naked from the waist down, which means that she’s not gonna want to get out of her car without putting up a fuss. And wouldn’t a sophisticated, emotionally intelligent professional understand the teenager’s plight? Displaying his impatience, his arrogance, and his total lack of professionalism, brawny cop number one decided to forcibly remove the naked girl from her vehicle. The video showed him repeatedly punching her in the face.
[L]awyers for Wilson’s family say a snippet of the video shows police punching the teen in the face, precipitating her attempt to escape.
“The officer is attacking this young lady,” Wilson’s brother, Joseph Williams, told reporters on Wednesday, July 28. “As she’s attacked, she’s trying to get away from the officer. So, she’s scared. She’s 19-years-old.”
Now, this is where it gets very interesting. She’s being beaten, who knows how her foot got on the accelerator...or just got off the brake pedal? The vehicle starts moving, the cop could have easily jumped out of way, no? They can always go pick her up tomorrow...after all, she hadn’t killed anyone. And who knows if she was just having a bad day? And what would have been the charges anyway? Interfering with police? Resisting arrest? But that’s not how racist, malicious Keystone Kops behave. With cop number one still hanging on to the vehicle, cop number two decided to pump multiple shots at the teen, and then cop number one joined in the fun of taking out another black human. How many times have we seen videos of drivers desperately trying to avoid hitting cops who then kill them and with the excuse that the victims were trying to run them down? Chances are Alexis was dead after the first few shots and all the other stuff about running down the second cop and injuring him were all predictable lies.
I know, I know, I know. I know I don’t really have to prove it to you because you already know of the millions of examples, but indulge me for the few seconds it’s gonna take for you to read the quote below, and after reading you’ll get to guess the race of the suspect.
When authorities arrived, Greene was sitting in a chair in the garage next to his vehicle holding a small caliber handgun to his head, according to police. Officers closed off the area and tried to speak to Greene, police said. While they were "in the process of establishing a rapport" with him, he is alleged to have fired a .22-caliber handgun twice in the officers' direction.
None of the officers were struck, but one suffered a minor leg injury. Greene then got into his vehicle and fled "despite several officers attempting to block his exit and gain entry to the vehicle as it sped away," police said.
He was still armed when he was later found outside a hospital, according to police.
"Officers approached the subject and he was physically taken to the ground, restrained and taken into custody," police said. The firearm was seized.
That was good/great policing. Cops managed to disarm and arrest a white dude who’d shot and injured one of them...and after he’d fled. Worth noting that of the 71 people killed by cops who were said to be fleeing in cars, 23 were identified as white, which means that the other 48 killed were people of color. Something is very wrong with this picture.
Alexis by the numbers
And so, 19-year-old Alexis C. Wilson became the fourth (or maybe the ninth) black woman to be shot dead by police this year. She is one of 27 women killed by cops since the beginning of 2021. The teenager is one of 106 (329?) black people killed by our police force year-to-date. She's one of three black teenage girls killed by cops this year. The other murdered teens were 16-yr-old Ma’Khia Bryant and 19-yr-old Briana Sykes.
Who was she?
Loved ones of 19-year-old Alexis Wilson, from Homewood, described her as a loving person who was about to start her freshman year of college this fall.
“Alexis also helped take care and look out for her 9-year-old [brother with autism],” said Wilson’s brother Joseph Williams. “She was a caregiving soul that was always trying to make a difference and be supportive of her family.”
Alexis deserved better. Her family deserved better. Her life mattered. Say her name...please.
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News round up by dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor
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After the murder of George Floyd ignited nationwide protests, corporate America acknowledged it could no longer stay silent and promised to take an active role in confronting systemic racism.
From Silicon Valley to Wall Street, companies proclaimed “Black lives matter.” JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon adopted the posture of former NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick’s protests against police brutality and took a knee with bank employees. McDonald’s declared Floyd and other slain Black Americans “one of us.”
Now, more than a year after America’s leading businesses assured employees and consumers they would rise to the moment, a Washington Post analysis of unprecedented corporate commitments toward racial justice causes reveals the limits of their power to remedy structural problems.
Apple and AbbVie, Facebook and Pfizer, Johnson & Johnson and Procter & Gamble, and other top corporations made broad claims about what they would do, pledging to be a force for societal change and to fight racism and injustice, including violence against Black Americans.
Where and how they dedicated their money became the most visible signs of their priorities.
To date, America’s 50 biggest public companies and their foundations collectively committed at least $49.5 billion since Floyd’s murder last May to addressing racial inequality — an amount that appears unequaled in sheer scale.
Looking deeper, more than 90 percent of that amount — $45.2 billion — is allocated as loans or investments they could stand to profit from, more than half in the form of mortgages. Two banks — JPMorgan Chase and Bank of America — accounted for nearly all of those commitments.
Meanwhile, $4.2 billion of the total pledged is in the form of outright grants. Of that, companies reported just a tiny fraction — about $70 million — went to organizations focused specifically on criminal justice reform, the cause that sent millions into the streets protesting Floyd’s murder by a Minneapolis police officer.
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WWE superstar Bianca Belair's stunning defeat at SummerSlam draws attention to the WWE's troubling history with Black performers. The Root: Is the WWE Racist?
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Back in April, WWE superstars Bianca Belair and Sasha Banks made history (and broke the internet) when they became the first Black women to go head-to-head in a Wrestlemania title match. As the two performed in front of the WWE’s first live audience in over a year—a sold-out crowd of over 25,000 at Raymond James Stadium in Tampa, Fla.—it was a compelling, emotional affair in which Belair’s meteoric rise was justly rewarded with the WWE SmackDown Women’s Championship belt.
“I love the fact that this is not just something that’s just about me and it’s not just about making history,” Belair told the Tampa Bay Times prior to the match. “It’s about going out and representing for women and for Black women.”
Fast forward to August, and now wrestling fans are crying foul at the WWE’s perceived mistreatment of Belair in the aftermath of this weekend’s pay-per-view extravaganza, SummerSlam—and the prevailing belief is that racism was a contributing factor.
Becky Lynch, who had been MIA since May of last summer after announcing her pregnancy, made her long-awaited return to the mat at SummerSlam to the delight of fans everywhere. But what has Black Twitter seething with rage was how upon her arrival, Lynch—who shocked the crowd with her surprise appearance—put the beats on Belair and squashed the reigning champ in a grand total of 27 seconds.
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The world’s largest digitized and searchable collection of Freedmen’s Bureau and Freedman’s Bank records is now available on Ancestry.com, providing free online access to information that can help the descendants of formerly enslaved people in the U.S. learn more about their family histories.
This significant addition of more than 3.5 million records to the online family history resource can provide meaningful breakthroughs for African Americans trying to trace their family roots because the documents are likely the first time newly freed Black people appeared in records after emancipation in 1863. Prior to that, most enslaved people were excluded from the Census and federal documents.
“I think the data that is being made available now is just such an enormous wellspring of information to help, sort of paints a picture of what life was like then. As well as specifically for individuals, to connect them to people in the past who otherwise, they would never know about,” said African American history and Reconstruction era expert Michael B. Moore.
During a virtual roundtable, hosted by Ancestry, Moore along with professional genealogist Nicka Sewell-Smith and Morehouse Africana Studies professor Dr. Karcheik Sims-Alvarado discussed the establishment of the bureau, a critical, yet often overlooked part of American history.
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The World Health Organization said the third wave of Covid-19 infections in Africa appears to have stabilized, though cases remain high with almost 248,000 reported in the past week.
“There have now been almost 7.6 million Covid-19 cases and 191,000 Africans have sadly died,” Matshidiso Moeti, the organization’s regional director for the continent, told reporters during its weekly briefing Thursday.
Some 24 countries are experiencing a resurgence and deaths are rising in eight of them, including in Botswana and Ethiopia, she said.
At the same time, an estimated 13 million vaccine doses have been administered across Africa over the past week, triple the previous seven-day period, she said. The rollout in the continent has trailed much of the rest of the world, partly due to supply and procurement issues.
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