Black History is all year round. We cover it.
Commentary by Black Kos Editor Denise Oliver-Velez
As we enter into this year’s Black History Month, with white supremacist forces threatening to ban Black books and whitewash already sanitized school curricula, while bomb threats are being made to our HBCUs, our history as Black people becomes even more important to disseminate. A history with roots on the African continent, and sustained through the time of enslavement in the New World by the hands of multiple European colonizers throughout the Caribbean, Central and South America as well as here in the United States. It is a vast history that spans many millennia, passed on in multiple languages through numerous cultures.
Our history here in “the New World” is not simply a story of pain and suffering — though rooted in travail. It is a story of rich survival and uplift, of creativity and passion, of the arts and sciences, of the human strength and will to face all odds and win. We win because in spite of everything thrown at us we have made an indelible mark on this world, and we continue to do so. Every day.
What would the world be without our beauty, our music and arts, our spirituality, and our passionate embrace of freedoms?
Here at Black Kos we cover all aspects of Black, history, politics and culture twice a week, on Tuesdays and Fridays at 5PM EST, all year round. If you feel that Black contributions to the world we live in are important, especially now that we are all imperiled, we are asking you to step up your support for our team effort. To be honest — it is a bit disheartening that for the most part, after all the years we have been here at Daily Kos, with Black Kos having 1.0k followers, and with the Black Kos Community having 438 members, and 983 followers, that we hear from so few of you each week.
A little history:
For those of you who are not Daily Kos "old timers," Black Kos, was founded by David Reid, screen name dopper0189, on Tue Jan 02, 2007, as an open thread, which evolved into Black Kos: weekly round up, and then became Black Kos: Week in review. On Fri Mar 21, 2008 dopper published "My last Black Kos week in review diary," and Black Kos as a user ID was born.
He wrote in 2016:
The reason I started Black Kos way back when was in the hope that it would allow Daily Kos members, who in their day to day lives, may not have much exposure to the everyday lives of black people. When I write of personal interaction, I don’t mean the professional interactions at work, but what life is like for everyday black people for the majority of their day. See I'm quite aware a majority of our readers at Black Kos are white. If I wanted to only address a black or mostly black audience I could more easily do so elsewhere. Think about it. I'm a member of a half dozen other majority black blogs. So why do I bother to post here?
I did it because of what the the image of the progressive Net Roots was at that time. I'm writing specifically of 2003-2005. I remember watching endless hours of TV punditry, on how the Net Roots (then Yearly Kos) were all “lily white” basically the old "limousine liberal" smear. Now think to yourself, when was the last time you have heard that on a Sunday Morning talk show? Go back and look at the coverage of the first Yearly Kos convention (Net Root’s nations predecessor). The number one question then was “where are the Black (and Brown) folks?” I believe that a more visible minority presence helped combat those smears, because we were always here just not visible. (By the way, I did enjoy back before anybody knew what race I was, the discussions were often fun and lively, but I decided on my own to step up and out because sometimes you do need visible members).
But now with the election of Trump who openly espouses bigotry, America seems more racially divided. But maybe it’s really because we’re more aware of our racial shortcomings. Many white Americans have a shocked response to claims of white privilege, unfairness and discrimination. Maybe they have this reaction because it’s outside their daily experience. If you ask many white people, “Do you think traffic stops are done unfairly?” the majority of whites probably would say “NO” because it’s not something they experience. It’s not because of racism; it’s just that it’s not something that they see. Unfortunately personal experiences often are the most powerful foundations of belief systems.
Six years have passed since David wrote that. We now have a Democratic administration back in the White House, and America’s first Black female VP. President Biden will be nominating a Black woman to the Supreme Court, and supremacists are flipping out. We’ve lived through an attempted coup, we are struggling with a pandemic and open racial hostility, antisemitism and xenophobia are epidemic, while voter suppression efforts by Republicans across the nation are relentless.
Faced with this many people are disheartened; others are afraid.
We need each other more than ever, to share our strengths and lift each other’s spirits. We here at Black Kos need to hear from you. Please Join us in the comments section below, and please take the survey poll below.
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News round up by dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor
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Gebru said she was pushed out of her job at Google after pointing out how AI has been harmful to people of color. Now she's launching her own research institute. NBC NEWS: Timnit Gebru is part of a wave of Black women working to change AI
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A computer scientist who said she was pushed out of her job at Google in December 2020 has marked the one-year anniversary of her ouster with a new research institute aiming to support the creation of ethical artificial intelligence.
Timnit Gebru, a known advocate for diversity in AI, announced the launch of the Distributed Artificial Intelligence Research Institute, or DAIR. Its website describes it as “a space for independent, community-rooted AI research free from Big Tech’s pervasive influence.”
Part of how Gebru imagines creating such research is by moving away from the Silicon Valley ethos of “move fast and break things” — which was Facebook’s internal motto, coined by Mark Zuckerberg, until 2014 — to instead take a more deliberate approach to creating new technologies that serve marginalized communities. That includes recognizing and mitigating technologies’ potentials for harm from the beginning of their creation process, rather than after they’ve already caused damage to those communities, Gebru told NBC News.
“If those are our values, we can’t achieve them without slowing down and without putting in more resources per project that we’re working on,” she said.
Gebru said she learned from a December 2020 email from her manager’s manager that she had apparently resigned from her high-profile position as a co-lead of Google’s ethical AI team.
Gebru said she never resigned, but was instead fired after requesting that executives explain why they demanded that Gebru retract a paper she co-authored. It was about how large language models — or AI trained on large amounts of text data, a version of which underpins Google’s own search engine — could reinforce racism, sexism and other systems of oppression.
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Biden is diversifying the courts in other ways, too. According to our analysis, many of Biden’s appointees have professional backgrounds that aren’t typical for federal judges. In the past, a common pathway for judges was to work as a prosecutor: About 40 percent of Obama’s appointees and Trump’s appointees had worked as a prosecutor at one point or another. Biden’s appointees are different, though. They’re much less likely to have worked in prosecution — and more more likely to have worked in advocacy and public defense.
Biden might be trying to avoid nominating additional white, male former prosecutors to the bench — but he’s not avoiding other traditional qualifications for judges. In fact, when it comes to education, Biden’s appointees are even more highly credentialed than other presidents’ appointees. Nearly 30 percent of Biden appointees attended Ivy League universities for their undergraduate degree, and nearly 60 percent attended a top-ranked law school.
Rather than being less qualified than their white counterparts, Black women are actually more highly credentialed than the average Biden judge. We found that Black women were particularly likely to have attended an elite institution. [emphasis mine] More than one-third (36 percent) of Black women that Biden named to the courts attended an Ivy League university, and 82 percent attended a top-ranked law school. 2022 list compiled by U.S. News and World Report.
Overall, we found that Black judges actually had lower ABA ratings than white judges, but that shouldn’t be interpreted as a sign that they’re less qualified. Political scientists have found that minority judicial nominees tend to receive lower ratings than white nominees, even controlling for education and experience. The vast majority (82 percent) of the Black women nominated by Biden received the ABA’s highest rating when they were first nominated to the federal bench, however. That’s all the more impressive when you factor in that it’s harder for Black judicial nominees to receive a high ABA rating.
This shows that Biden isn’t sacrificing traditional qualifications in pursuit of diversity. If anything, he seems to be prioritizing Black women with highly burnished legal resumes for judicial appointments — perhaps doing so in anticipation of exactly the kinds of complaints about “diversity picks” that we’re already seeing.
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The Supreme Court is likely to hand down a decision soon in Merrill v. Milligan, a case where the worst-case scenario for democracy would neutralize one of the few remaining prongs of the Voting Rights Act that the Court has not yet dismantled.
The case concerns Alabama’s new congressional districts, and whether they violate the Voting Rights Act’s prohibitions on racial gerrymanders. Days before the state of Alabama asked the justices to carve another chunk out of America’s voting rights laws, a three-judge panel ordered the state of Alabama to redraw its congressional maps. Notably, two of the judges on this panel were appointed by former President Donald Trump.
Among other things, the panel’s opinion in Singleton v. Merrill explains that Black Americans make up about 27 percent of Alabama’s population, but they would only have a real shot of electing their candidate of choice in one of the state’s seven congressional districts under the new map based on the 2020 census. Thus, while Black Alabamans represent more than a quarter of the state’s population, they only control 14 percent of the state’s congressional delegation.
The lower court ordered the state legislature to redraw the map, relying on a provision of the Voting Rights Act banning racial gerrymanders. To reach that decision, the three judges spent 225 pages walking through the exceedingly complicated test announced in Thornburg v. Gingles (1986), which asks whether a state election law that imposes a disproportionate burden on racial minorities “interacts with social and historical conditions to cause an inequality in the opportunities enjoyed by [minority] and white voters to elect their preferred representatives.”
As I’ve written, the legal rule that the Court announced in Gingles — which governs many redistricting cases filed under the Voting Rights Act — is a mess. It advises courts to weigh at least nine different factors. And it would be reasonable for a state to ask the Supreme Court to come up with something less unwieldy to help lower courts sort through these sorts of cases. Alabama could have gone this route, and if it had proposed a reasonable modification to the Gingles test, it’s possible that such a modification could have helped them defend their maps.
But Alabama does nothing of the sort in the Merrill case. Instead, it proposes a new rule that, if adopted by the Supreme Court, could effectively make it impossible to challenge a racial gerrymander in federal court.
Currently proposed (L) and hypothetical nonpartisan Alabama congressional map (R) with a second VRA district
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In an act of political muscle-flexing, Val Demings and Cheri Beasley managed to clear the Democratic field in two of the nation’s most prominent Senate races. Politico: How 2 Black women conquered Senate primary politics
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As Black women running in two of the nation’s most closely watched Senate races, Democratic Rep. Val Demings of Florida and former North Carolina Supreme Court Justice Cheri Beasley are poised to make history if they’re successful in November. But that’s only part of what makes their campaigns stand out this year.
Demings and Beasley have drawn notice — and a heavy dose of respect within their party — for accomplishing a feat that has all-too-frequently eluded candidates of color, especially Black women: Managing to clear their Senate primary fields of heavyweight competition.
In the process of squeezing out top prospective challengers with a show of political force, the two Democrats managed to break through a different kind of barrier to high office — longstanding perceptions about the profile of an electable statewide candidate. In the past, those perceptions have often worked against Black candidates. Now, two Black women are frontrunners and poised to appear on the ballot in at least two top Senate races in November.
“This is definitely, I think, a paradigm shift,” said Stefanie Brown James, co-founder and senior adviser to the Collective PAC, which supports Black progressive candidates for office. “We’ve had qualified candidates all along. The problem is that we’ve had to spend too much of our time having to convince people that what you see in these candidates is enough to stand toe-to-toe with anybody else that’s in the race. But we don’t have to do as much convincing.”
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Here’s a striking and mysterious debut from the Dominican Republic, where film-maker Nino Martínez Sosa recounts a fascinating true-life story of occupation and resistance from the turn of the last century. Olivorio Mateo was a peasant and faith healer who became known to his disciples as Papa Liborio; he built a self-sufficient community in the mountains. But when US forces occupied in the 1910s, Liborio was branded a bandit, and killed.
Not that you’d know any of the historical facts from watching this, which is set squarely in the arthouse endurance-test genre: there is little to no scene-setting or explainers, with the kind of pacing often euphemistically described by critics as “deliberate”. It begins after Liborio vanishes from his village during a hurricane, presumed dead. When he is found alive, he claims to have returned from God with healing powers and takes a band of followers up into the mountains.
Is he a charlatan? Madman? Or simply an inspirational community leader? Director Sosa’s answer seems to be that the truth is unknowable. So he tells the story through the eyes of six believers, beginning with Liborio’s son. But the most moving is from the perspective of a woman who begs Liborio to bring back her infant child from the dead. A powerfully charismatic leading performance by Vicente Santos is the force of gravity here. He plays Liborio as an ambiguous character: sometimes he seems high on a messiah complex; at others his spirituality feels genuine. In the end he becomes a tragic hero. Santos’s performance is a reminder that awards season only dishes out gongs to a small corner of the film-making world.
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Ghuan Featherstone grew up in South Central, Los Angeles in the 70’s and rode his first horse in Griffith Park where his parents took him for the experience. And although he didn’t continue riding throughout his youth, he forever remembered how free and powerful he felt that day.
“I felt like the Lone Ranger,” he mentioned during a NPR Storycorps interview with a 13 year old horseback rider by the name of Jordan Humphreys. “I felt like I could conquer anything.”
While Featherstone served 8 years in the army, he eventually returned to his hometown to realize a dream once deferred. At “The Hill” stables in Compton, CA, the new cowboy finally learned to ride like a pro. The riders would find joy in taking their horses into the city streets despite the reigning gang violence. Sadly in 2012, a mysterious fire burned down the stables. A documentary by the name of “Fire On The Hill” tells the story.
Determined to preserve the Black cowboy culture of Los Angeles, Featherstone opened his own stables in South Gate. In 2019 he launched Urban Saddles, a non profit organization which according to the website is dedicated to “Building hope and opportunity for youth and community through the equine experience and the cowboy code of the west.”
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