Commentary by Black Kos Editor Denise Oliver-Velez
I don’t care if we are talking about Herschel Walker, Clarence Thomas, Kanye West, Killer Mike, Candace Owens...or any other melanated political pawns and panderers to right-wing, supremacist politics. They all fit a pattern. They are tools of a white supremacist agenda to give license to their open suppression of Black folks. They are used as the “see, I’m not racist cause one of my besties is Black” facade that doesn’t begin to mask the virulent racism of the U.S. Republikklan Party and its MAGA adherents.
It isn’t just here either, and not just about putting blackface on right-wing politics — there’s brown face as well. Look at the Tory mess in England, where the Tories are celebrating the “first” South Asian Prime Minister as if that has any meaning at all for the people they oppress.
I’m in agreement with political commentator, author and lawyer Dr. Shola Mos-Shogbamimu:
Anybody here remember Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal?
Let’s also not forget that Ted “Cancun” Cruz and “Little” Marco Rubio are poster children for anti-immigration, racism, and homophobia.
So just remember, that the saying popularized by and attributed to Black anthropologist and author Zora Neal Hurston, that "All my skinfolk ain’t my kinfolk" remains true, and these folks ain’t getting invites to the BBQ.
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NEWS ROUND UP BY DOPPER0189, BLACK KOS MANAGING EDITOR
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Every night a little after 1 a.m., following her shift as a guard at a women’s prison, Reese Brooks would open her laptop, a second laptop, then her phone and a tablet, and begin scouring websites for sperm banks, opening dozens of tabs.
The websites offered hundreds of potential sperm donors, allowing Brooks to select for movie-star looks, height and hobbies, but when she filtered for Black or African American donors, her options swiftly dwindled.
The cryobanks gave Brooks a chance at motherhood, but they couldn’t provide what she wanted: a Black sperm donor who could give her a child who looked like her and shared her culture.
“I’d say I spent 40 hours a week looking for a donor. All together, I think I searched more than 800 hours,” Brooks said. But when it came to a Black donor, she said, the choices were slim to none.
Cryobanks reported that the number of Black women seeking their services to conceive rose sharply during the pandemic after increasing steadily over the years. Black women between the ages of 35 and 45 are far more likely to remain unmarried than women from other racial groups, according to the latest census data, with 44 percent of non-Hispanic Black women unmarried, compared with 16 percent of White women. Yet Black sperm donors represent just a fraction of available supply — fewer than 2 percent at the country’s four largest sperm banks, according to an analysis by The Washington Post.
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Take a walk down any Brooklyn street, and artists, fashion designers and other creatives are everywhere. But many find themselves having to schlep across the river into SoHo, TriBeCa or other trendy Manhattan neighborhoods to showcase their work. No one understands this better than Christophe Roberts. The Chicago-born, Brooklyn-based artist has lived that experience for over a decade.
His passions and interests were always on the other side of the Brooklyn Bridge, leaving him to wonder why the options were so limited in his Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood. So he decided to take matters into his own hands and embarked on a five-year journey developing the concept for SEED Brklyn, a space to nurture the creativity that Brooklyn has always been known for.
“There’s a world that exists here that I felt was missing an experience like SEED,” he said. “And I’m from the school where you build what you don’t have.”
Roberts and his team literally built SEED from the ground up. And he says he approached the design and construction like an art project. Everything about the space, which officially opens on October 21, is intentional and a treat for all of your senses.
“Post-COVID, any space you go into has to be multi-layered. You can’t just have a rack of clothes,” he said. “You need a narrative. You need to have an experience.” And as a multi-disciplinary artist, building experiences people can interact with is one of the things Roberts does best.
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The Federal Reserve has already raised interest rates four times this year to try to tame inflation, and more hikes are likely. It’s a tried-and-true method of getting rising prices under control, but it comes at a cost: American jobs, and in particular, Black American jobs.
By raising the cost of borrowing money, the Fed is essentially trying to bring consumer demand in line with supply while reducing the power of workers. In Fed parlance, that’s known as “softening labor market conditions.” What that amounts to is people losing work.
Larry Summers, a former treasury secretary who remains highly influential in the Biden administration, has argued the unemployment rate needs to hit about 5 percent to tame inflation. The overall unemployment rate is currently at 3.5 percent. But there is a painful fact that often goes ignored in this conversation: A 5 percent unemployment rate almost certainly means double-digit unemployment for Black workers.
“The ‘2X problem’ is this persistent, pernicious gap where Black Americans face twice the unemployment as white Americans, no matter what kind of an economy we have, a booming economy or a recession,” Neel Kashkari, president and CEO of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, told Vox recently. In September 2022, the Black unemployment rate was 5.8 percent.
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Voices & Soul
by Justice Putnam, Black Kos Poetry Editor
My 93 year old dad had a heart attack late Sunday afternoon. He smacked his head pretty good when he fell. They put a stent in the artery known as the “widow maker” and today he was explaining how good he felt, except for the bump on his head! He and I marveled at the medical advances that now sees heart surgery as an almost benign procedure, except for his age, it is almost considered an out-patient process. It’s a weird dynamic, though. I’ve been caring for my elderly mom here in Oregon, my sister in So Cal has been looking after our dad, and we all have steeled ourselves for their passing. It is inevitable.
That’s why it was so shocking to get a phone call this morning informing us our primary doctor passed away “suddenly and unexpectedly.” He was only in his late-40’s, seemed to me to be the picture of health, had a young family with another baby just a few months ago. He got his MD in Warsaw, emigrated to Canada from India and set up practice here in Southern Oregon around 2015. I spoke to him a few times about what it was like to be a doctor of color in an area of Sundown Towns that were active only about 20 years ago? He said it was challenging, but I could tell his cheery disposition brushed it off, and any concern about it never prevented his present and caring nature. We all loved him. But I couldn’t help thinking of his wife and young kids, his parents he just moved to the states a few years ago. I thought of their grief, and I thought of the empty place setting at the table. His place of Honor.
At what temperature does blood
begin to boil? Thicken into a
roux, slip between bits of
basil, minced garlic,
orecchiette;
Permeate chunks of spicy kielbasa,
bind a dash of salt, pepper, bubbles
roiling forth, then dissipating,
heat lowered to a hush;
Congeal from the shock of cool
clay dishes as a small mound
is delicately plated with a
large plastic spoon;
Spurt steam, burning both
nostrils, as we lean in to say
grace, my father’s seat empty,
placemat bare.
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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.