Commentary by Black Kos editor JoanMar
The media’s reporting on the disappearance of Gabrielle Petito was triggering for me. I’m a Black mother who has buried a daughter. I know something of the suffering that will now be Gabby’s mom’s constant companion. Nobody should have to deal with the pain of not knowing where your child is; not knowing but strongly suspecting that they are in serious danger, and then having to deal with the reality that the last time you spoke to them, the last time you hugged and kissed them was indeed the last time. I wanted to concentrate on sending fortifying vibes to the family, and comforting energy after her body was found. I wanted not to feel resentful, angry, and bitter, but racism comes for Black folks from all different angles. Racism doesn’t give us a moment of peace. Racism messes with our bodies and our minds.
Racism's Psychological Toll:
In a 2013 Psychology Today article, Williams wrote that “much research has been conducted on the social, economic and political effects of racism, but little research recognizes the psychological effects of racism on people of color.” Williams now studies the link between racism and post-traumatic stress disorder, which is known as race-based traumatic stress injury, or the emotional distress a person may feel after encountering racial harassment or hostility. Although much of Williams’s work focuses on individuals who have been directly targeted by racial discrimination or aggression, she says race-based stress reactions can be triggered by events that are experienced vicariously, or externally, through a third party — like social media or national news events. She argues that racism should be included as a cause of PTSD in the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (D.S.M.). (my bold)
As a Black mother, racism does not allow me the luxury of just empathizing with Gabby’s mother and join in the communal outpouring of outrage on her behalf. Racism does not allow me the space to grieve her senseless murder in unity with the majority community. No, racism has something extra in store for me. Along with everything else I was/am dealing with (the anniversary of my own daughter’s death, the anniversary of my mom’s death, the death of my brother from COVID), the blatant shout out to white supremacy and white skin privilege meant that I’d feel resentment and anger every time I see another newscast about the missing now dead girl; and then go on to feel guilty that I’m having those emotional responses to the coverage of an untimely death. Racism had me rolling my eyes every time guest analysts would describe “the beautiful, smart, innocent girl.” Decoding the quote: White. Never forget white. The word “white” trembled on the lips of John Walsh as he frothed at the mouth in impotent rage at the idea that a young white woman would be so brutalized. Don’t ever remember John Walsh getting upset about the brutalization of the thousands of young Black, Brown, and Native women and men who have gone missing and or who have been found dead.
In the meantime, more guilt that I’m focusing on speech and attitude rather than the fact that a young woman is missing and possibly dead.
Anderson Cooper can try to ‘splain it away all he wants, but the wall-to-wall coverage of the disappearance of Gabby Petito was all about cementing the supreme desirability of the white woman...the superiority of the white skin. At no time did the media attempt to broaden the conversation to domestic violence, to mental health, to travel safety, or to spare a minute to mention anyone else. How hard could it have been for one — just one! — newscaster to say:
According to the National Missing and Unidentified Persons (NamUS) database, which is funded by the U.S. Department of Justice, more than 600,000 persons of all ages go missing every year, and approximately 4,400 unidentified bodies are recovered every year.
From The Grio:
There are currently over 50 Black girls missing from New York and New Jersey with nearly 20 going missing in the first few months of this year, according to the Center for Missing and Exploited Children.
An investigative report by New York’s Amsterdam News has detailed multiple cases of missing Black adolescent girls who range in ages from 15 to 19.
Missing Indigenous People:
At least 710 Indigenous people, mostly girls, went missing in Wyoming from 2011 to 2020, according to a January report published by the state's Missing and Murdered Indigenous People Task Force. The vast majority, 85%, were kids, while 57% were female.
The report found 50% of missing Indigenous people are found within one week, while 21% remain missing for 30 days or longer. Only 11% of white people remain missing for that long, according to the report.
Not only was it traumatic to see the hours of television and bandwidth of online coverage devoted to one white woman, but even more so was the I-don’t-give-a-f**k attitude of on-air personalities who assaulted us every day, on every program for the past two weeks while refusing to acknowledge the hurt they were inflicting on communities of color. And yes, it is callously inflicting psychological pain on our community as we are forced to watch them — the media and law enforcement — devote time, energy, and manpower to this one case while totally ignoring the pleas to spend just a minute to acknowledge that Black, Indigenous, and other people of color are going missing by the droves.
“My cousin was an amazing, beautiful woman. She loved everybody but she lived for her children. She was a bubbly person who could light up a room with her smile. You could trust her with your life,” said Fowler-Washington. ““She was my sacred person. I want people to remember her life.”
Twenty-six-year-old Destini Smothers, like Gabby Petito, was a New Yorker who went missing. Like Gabby, Destini got into an argument with her boyfriend who then turned up without her, claiming that she had walked off leaving her belongings in his car. She was found dead months later. Found by chance and without any active involvement from the police, the FBI, or the media. Rest In Peace, Destini. Your life mattered. We call your name.
Mary Johnson, a Native American woman who went missing from the Tulalip Reservation in Washington state in December 2020
Johnson is 5 feet, 6 inches tall and weighs 115 pounds. She has black hair, brown eyes and a "sunburst-type tattoo on her upper right arm," the FBI said. She also has a scar across her nose and a birthmark on the back of her neck, according to Tulalip news channel Tulalip TV.
Foster, 35, disappeared after leaving her Newnan apartment in March. Her car was found miles away in College Park with her purse and keys inside, but her phone missing.
Her daughter said she was going to the grocery store, but it's not clear if she ever made it there.
Please Help Find Daniel!! Daniel Robinson was last seen the morning of June 23, 2021 leaving his worksite in Buckeye, AZ. He was driving his 2017 blue/grey Jeep Renegade and is believed to have headed west into desert terrain. On Tuesday, July 20, 2021, Daniel's vehicle was found four miles from the worksite in a remote part of the desert. The vehicle was recovered, Daniel was not found.
Jelani disappeared a month ago. Rest in Paradise, young prince.
[His] body was discovered on Sept. 4 "floating near the south bank of the Illinois River approximately ¼ mile east of the Illinois Rt. 251 Bridge," was identified Thursday as Day, a 25-year-old reported missing in late August.
The cause of death was not immediately known and was pending further investigation and toxicology testing, the coroner's office said.
Day graduated from Alabama A&M University with a degree in speech language pathology. Bolden said her son was inspired to go down this career path after seeing a friend struggle.
***See Sister Denise's piece on the Missing White Woman Syndrome.
***For more information about Black, missing, and ignored people, check out the Black & Missing Foundation.
***For more information on missing Indigenous people, check out The Coalition to Stop Violence Against Native Women.
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News round up by dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor
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The creator of the Black Film Archive on her quest to introduce decades’ worth of movies to today’s viewers.
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Birthed from a Twitter thread, which was itself birthed from the much-ness of being Black during a pandemic and another round of Black Rights protests, writer Maya Cade’s Black Film Archive is now live.
Specifically tailored for the cinematically curious in the digital era, the archive catalogues Black films from 1915 to 1979 that are currently available on streaming services and online platforms. The films are categorized by decade, with easily accessible links to where they are streaming. Cade, who is an audience development strategist at the Criterion Collection, meticulously scours through streaming services on a regular basis, updating the archive weekly.
However, what’s so revolutionary about the project isn’t its collection, or even the daunting job of scouring through myriad streaming platforms, watching all of these films, and curating them in one place on a regular basis. The thing that truly sets her effort apart from other “best of” and “deep cuts” lists you’ve previously encountered is Cade’s goal to provide context to a history of Black cinema that is often forgotten. Knowing this, Cade has personally watched every film that she’s included on the site.
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Actor-writer-director-composer Melvin Van Peebles—a Renaissance man who promoted Black economic empowerment and helped usher in a new era of Black filmmaking with his best-known work, the 1971 film Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song—died Tuesday night at 89.
His death was confirmed by film distributor Criterion Collection in a statement from the family. No cause of death was given.
In an unparalleled career distinguished by relentless innovation, boundless curiosity and spiritual empathy, Melvin Van Peebles made and indelible mark on the international cultural landscape through his films, novels, plays and music. His work continues to be essential and is being celebrated at the New York Film Festival this weekend with a 50th anniversary screening of his landmark film Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song…
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Outside Mariama Sonko’s home in the Casamance region of southern Senegal pink shells hang on improvised nets that will be placed in mangroves to provide a breeding spot for oysters.
Normally, women collecting oysters chop at the branches – a method that can harm the mangroves. But these nets allow them to harvest sustainably, says Sonko, who is trying to revolutionise agriculture in west Africa.
Sonko, 52, heads Nous Sommes la Solution (NSS, We are the Solution), an ecofeminist movement of more than 500 rural women’s associations in Senegal, Ghana, Burkina Faso, the Gambia, Guinea-Bissau, Guinea and Mali. The movement promotes sustainable agroecology and fights large-scale industrial farming.
“We promote agroecology and food sovereignty in Africa. Women are invaluable actors for the development of the rural areas,” she says. “We want to valorise this tireless work of women who are concerned about the environment and the health of their families. They have always worked in agriculture, and they do not use the products that ruin the ecosystem nor the health of humans.”
In Senegal, the network is made up of nearly 10,000 women in more than 100 local associations across the south.
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On September 8, the California Senate advanced a bill that would eliminate fines for crossing the street outside of a crosswalk — the practice better known as jaywalking. Proposed by Assemblyman Phil Ting of San Francisco, AB 1238 is part of a wave of similar decriminalization efforts across the nation, following a turbulent year of norm-shifting public crises.
In March, Virginia led off by striking jaywalking as a primary offense — police can no longer stop pedestrians specifically for jaywalking. Kansas City, Missouri, followed by eliminating its local jaywalking ordinance in May. A Nevada law went into effect last week striking the offense from its criminal code. Similar legislation has even been introduced in Texas, after an 18-year-old Black man in Plano was arrested and jailed overnight for walking in the roadway as he tried to make his way home in a snowstorm after his shift at Walmart.
The movement to eliminate jaywalking laws is an idea with a strong underlying rationale. We’re currently in the midst of a 10-year escalation in pedestrian deaths, with the annual toll topping 6,300 in 2019. (About one in six of those deaths occurred in California.) Many experts are skeptical that jaywalking enforcement is effective for pedestrian safety, and for good reason: As investigations in Florida and Illinois have shown, these laws are unequally enforced, with young Black men being the favorite target. Data from the California Racial and Identity Profiling Act (RIPA) collected by the bicycle advocacy group CalBike shows Black people in California are over five times more likely to be stopped for a walking infraction than white people.
Jaywalking, it seems clear, is often used by police as a pretext for stopping people who “look suspicious.” Those encounters can escalate into police violence. In September 2020, a Black houseless man named Kurt Reinhold was shot and killed during a police stop for jaywalking in San Clemente, California.
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Democrats lead by Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey, and Senator Tim Scott Republican of South Carolina were “negotiating” on a bill but everyone knows the GOP would just kill it when push came to shove. New York Times: Bipartisan police overhaul talks are officially dead on Capitol Hill.
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The announcement by Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey, Democrats’ lead emissary on the issue, acknowledged what had been apparent for months, as talks had fizzled with no sign of a breakthrough. It all but closed off the possibility that Congress would act on an issue that President Biden had promised to tackle, amid a groundswell of public support for addressing systemic racism in law enforcement.
A group of Republicans and Democrats began negotiating in April following the guilty verdict of a police officer in the George Floyd murder trial, hoping the ruling would provide momentum to break an impasse that had persisted since Mr. Floyd’s death in 2020. But for months preceding Wednesday’s announcement, negotiators had been unable to come to an agreement on a slew of issues, including whether to change criminal and civil penalties to make it easier to punish police officers for misconduct.
“We weren’t making any more meaningful progress on establishing really substantive reform for Americans’ policing,” Mr. Booker said at a news conference on Wednesday.
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