Commentary by BlackKos editor JoanMar
In her emotional victim impact statement, Chyna Whitaker, the mother of Daunte Wright’s son, said, “I’m now a single mother, not by choice, but by force.” Kim Potter killed her son’s “Dada,” and Chyna wants the world to know that young, though he may have been, Daunte understood what it meant to be a father. And once again, one little Black boy will grow up fatherless and the same people who deprived him of that loving presence will one day sneer at him when they ask “Do you even have a father?”
Ask Taco Bell and the majority community, and they will gladly inform you that Black fathers are to be found on the bottom rung on the fatherhood ladder. Truth be told, a lot of Black folks also subscribe to what the media has been relentlessly peddling for generations. The prevailing narrative is that Black dads are sperm donors and are absent from the family and home because they are inherently unloving and irresponsible...and ungodly, let’s not forget how good Christian people see Black folks. I still remember that one of the first times I gave my favorite president the side-eye, was when he went to a church in Chicago and found himself lecturing Black people. True, he did say “absent” fathers, but haters inserted “all Black fathers.”
Heaven knows, the gatekeepers of white supremacy did everything in their mighty power to perpetuate those preconceived notions about Black men. From the ghastly, dehumanizing practices during slavery to the welfare programs of the 1960s; from over-policing so as to feed the prison system to the not too subtle media campaigns, powerful forces have been working against our menfolk to rob them of their manhood and of their right to call themselves fathers. Raping and whipping them in front of their womenfolk, selling their children, controlling their sex lives, calling grown men boys in front of their families, letting them know in no uncertain terms that they are unable to protect their women and children against attacks... yes, Black men could be forgiven if they had allowed historical traumas and generational shame to keep them from looking into their women’s eyes or to see the censure in those of their children. Ah, but we as a people are made of very stern stuff.
And still, the forces of evil will not let up. I just watched a documentary about the show Good Times which showed how hard Esther Rolle had to fight Norman Lear and his producers to get a responsible father figure on her show...a show about a family, let’s be clear. Lear is an enlightened, liberal man who was instrumental in getting a lot of Black actors on TV, but systemic racism is insidious and good men like Lear can be just as blind as their openly racist brethren...a function of generations of unchallenged assumptions and deliberate lies. I was still marveling at the bravery of Ms. Rolle when I was hit with one of the latest pieces of evidence of insidious racism at play: Taco Bell’s new ad campaign. In 2022!
Someone(s) at an advertising company sat down and designed an ad for Taco Bell. They took it to their Advertising Manager who approved it. It was then taken to the Public Relations Manager or whoever at Taco Bell who just loved it and enthusiastically gave it the green light. It would show Black & White kids and Black & White parents, but with one HUGE difference: the white kids would have two loving parents while the Black kids would have only the mother. Was there a discussion around a table to decide the final details for this ad? Did they decide that the Black father was unnecessary? Or was it that an absent Black father was seen as an accurate portrayal of the Black family? Which audience do you suppose this ad was meant for?
Taco Bell’s PR department seemed to have done one thing right. It appears that they were successful in scrubbing the ad from the internet. It cannot be found anywhere. But we can still give them a call and let them know that we see them : (949) 863-4500.
But lo and behold, despite everything they’ve done and are still trying to do, guess what?
According to a study by the Centers for Disease Control, black fathers were the most involved with children no matter if they lived with them or not. A greater percentage of black fathers, when compared with white and Hispanic fathers, fed or ate meals with children daily, bathed, diapered or dressed children daily, played with children daily, and read to children daily.
Yes, Black fathers understand their assignment and have been doing far more than fathers of other communities. Put some respect on their names, please. Big up to all the fathers on the Porch.
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News round up by dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor
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President Joe Biden has selected D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson as his nominee to succeed retiring Justice Stephen Breyer, making history by picking a Black woman for the nation’s highest court, the White House announced Friday.
In a message posted on Twitter, Biden called Jackson “one of our nation’s brightest legal minds” and he said she “will be an exceptional Justice.”
Jackson, 51, was long considered the leading contender for the post, particularly after Biden elevated her last year from the trial court bench to the appeals court seen as second in power only to the Supreme Court.
Jackson is popular with liberal legal activists looking to replace Breyer with a justice willing to engage in ideological combat with the court’s conservatives, who now hold a formidable six-justice majority.
However, the White House moved quickly to shore up Jackson’s right flank by emphasizing her ties to law enforcement.
“Because of her diverse and broad public service, Judge Jackson has a unique appreciation of how critical it is for the justice system to be fair and impartial. With multiple law enforcement officials in her family, she also has a personal understanding of the stakes of the legal system,” a posting on the White House website said. CNN broke the news first earlier Friday morning, and several other news outlets, including POLITICO, quickly confirmed that Jackson was the pick before the White House released its official statement online.
Biden and Jackson are expected to appear together at the White House at 2 p.m. Friday for a formal announcement of the nomination. Vice President Kamala Harris was scheduled to travel to Louisiana Friday but postponed her visit there as signs loomed of the selection.
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Jenice Hodge has been pulled over before.
So on July 12th, 2019, as Hodge delivered food in northeast Minneapolis, she prepared herself for a routine traffic stop when she saw red and blue flashing lights in her rearview mirror.
Police body camera footage shows Minneapolis Park Police Officer Calvin Pham explaining that he pulled Hodge over because her phone was in her hand and she wasn’t wearing her seatbelt.
But sixty seconds after approaching Hodge’s car, Officer Pham suddenly pulled his gun out of his holster and ordered the 42-year-old woman out of the car.
“I didn’t even have my driver’s license out of the sleeve and I had a gun pointed at my head,” she said.
Hodge, who is Black, said she was scared and confused.
“Phone in one hand, wallet in the other,” Hodge pointed out, as she watched the video back in January. “Where’s the threat to pull your firearm out?”
With her hands through the sunroof, the video shows Hodge telling the officer repeatedly to “calm down,” as he ordered her out of the car.
In the body camera footage, which led to a six-figure settlement late last year, it is not clear why Pham pulled his gun.
The officer later wrote in his incident report that he believed “Jenice may have a gun” after he noticed a permit to carry card in her wallet. But Pham never wrote in his report that he saw a gun. [emphasis mine]
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When Black Leopard, Red Wolf, the first book in Marlon James’ Dark Star trilogy, was published in 2019, James described it as “an African Game of Thrones,” only to backpedal in a later interview and call that tagline a “joke.” It’s not clear what James doesn’t like about the comparison, because reading the newly published second volume in the trilogy, Moon Witch, Spider King, makes it seem even more apt. James’ trilogy is indeed a lot like George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire series of novels. It’s set in a vast imaginary region full of often fantastical city-states. There are monsters, witches, sorcerers, and even dragons, plus a teeming cast of characters whose quests and ambitions set them on the road to adventure. There’s also plenty of action, skullduggery, ruthlessness, violence, and sex (some of which is violent).
In fact, the best way to experience James’ trilogy is as an African Game of Thrones. One of the pleasures of genre fiction is the way authors openly converse with the books of their predecessors, expanding the reader’s understanding of whole field and what it can do. To read one book is to engage with many. Martin famously did this by killing off a character who seemed to be the series’ hero, and by depicting a fantasy version of the European Middle Ages much less pastoral and idealized than that of J.R.R. Tolkien and his imitators. That’s how a subgenre of epic fantasy known as “grimdark” was born. Some fans were put off by the harshness of the world Martin created, but others were thrilled by the way he broke some of the genre’s conventions while still delivering on many of its satisfactions. Why shouldn’t fantasy also be realistic?
James’ Dark Star trilogy lands solidly in the grimdark camp, but the publication of Moon Witch, Spider King makes his contribution to the genre even more evident. As with Black Leopard, Red Wolf, and as befits a winner of the Booker Prize (for 2014’s A Brief History of Seven Killings), this novel’s prose style, inspired by the grammar of African languages, has an intoxicating swagger and energy. Black Leopard, Red Wolf is narrated by Tracker, a man with a preternatural nose who can follow the scent of a human target for miles. He’s also what the people of James’ invented world call a “man lover,” as well as a woman hater. A cocky mercenary with a complicated love life, Tracker gets hired as part of team in search of a kidnapped boy whose real identity is one of the puzzles of Black Leopard, Red Wolf. Another member of this largely self-serving fellowship, a woman named Sogolon, represents everything Tracker mistrusts. She’s a witch, the kind of woman who, as Tracker sees it, exterminates “mingi” children like the boy he once was. The mingi are much like the mutants in the X-Men comics, a favorite of James’. They are weird outcasts but have special powers, and while Tracker isn’t sentimental about much, in the most idyllic period of his life, he and a lover from a far-off land take in a handful of these kids, forming a family of sorts.
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An MLK scholar on how we lost sight of King’s nuanced politics — and how we can revive them today. VOX: The philosopher King
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Virtually every American knows the basic outline of what Martin Luther King Jr. did. But very few are familiar with the reasons he did it.
That’s what Brandon Terry, a professor of African and African American studies at Harvard, believes. In his research, Terry has delved into King’s voluminous public writings to try to understand the thinker behind the activist. What he found was an incredibly sophisticated body of work on racism, class, and democratic politics that goes well beyond what most people know about King. In 2018, Terry and co-author Tommie Shelby convened a group of leading scholars to write a book rescuing King’s political thought from the clutches of sanitized public memory.
After reading an essay Terry wrote on King in a recent issue of the Boston Review, I decided to call up him to ask about applying King’s ideas to some of the most pressing issues in contemporary American politics. What is King’s theory of racism, and to what extent is it an improvement on the way we talk about it today? How does King address the intersection between race and class? How could a Kingian politics improve on the way we do protest today or deal with the phenomenon of social media shaming?
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Last week, the United States hit one million “excess deaths” since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. Scholars and demographers define “excess deaths” as the number of deaths that happen within a specific timeframe outside of what is considered normal or expected.
As expected, the majority of excess deaths are due to the virus itself. However, according to the CDC, there has also been an increase in the number of deaths due to heart disease, hypertension and dementia. Robert Anderson, chief of the CDC’s mortality statistics department, spoke to The Washington Post last week after excess deaths reached 1,023,916. “We’ve never seen anything like it,” he said.
While the number of excess deaths has made a detrimental national impact, it has been uniquely felt in Black communities. In 2021, a collaborative study was conducted by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and National Cancer Institute (NCI) to explore the impact of excess deaths during the COVID-19 pandemic on minority communities. The study found that excess deaths in Black, as well as American Indian/Alaskan Native communities were three to four times higher than white communities.
The study noted that the total mortality rate for Black men had increased from 26 percent in 2019 to 45 percent in 2020. This increase also comes as Black men’s life expectancy was reduced by three years, the most of any demographic due to the pandemic. Additionally, in 2019, Black women’s mortality rate was 15 percent higher than white women’s. In 2020, that doubled to 32 percent.
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Solar panels are not a new way of providing cheap power across much of the African continent, where there is rarely a shortage of sunshine. But growing crops underneath the panels is, and the process has had such promising trials in Kenya that it will be deployed this week in open-field farms.
Known as agrivoltaics, the technique harvests solar energy twice: where panels have traditionally been used to harness the sun’s rays to generate energy, they are also utilised to provide shade for growing crops, helping to retain moisture in the soil and boosting growth.
An initial year-long research collaboration between the University of Sheffield, World Agroforestry and the Kajiado-based Latia Agripreneurship Institute has shown promising results in the semi-arid Kajiado county, a 90-minute drive from the Kenyan capital of Nairobi and this week the full project will be officially launched.
For example, cabbages grown under the 180, 345-watt solar panels have been a third bigger, and healthier, than those grown in control plots with the same amount of fertiliser and water.
Other crops such as aubergine and lettuce have shown similar results. Maize grown under the panels was taller and healthier, according to Judy Wairimu, an agronomist at the institute.
“We wanted to see how crops would perform if grown under these panels,” said Wairimu. But there is another pragmatic reason behind the technology: doubling up the output of the same patch of earth to generate power and cultivate food can go a long way towards helping people with limited land resources, she said.
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Tara Roberts is the first black woman explorer to cover National Geographic. She spoke with ABC News’ Linsey Davis about how her exploration into the wreckage of slave ships aims to humanize the story of the slave trade. Roberts was inspired by a single photo.
Roberts used to be an editor at CosmoGirl, Essence and Ebony until she was suddenly moved to quit her job and pursue the exploration of sunken slave ships, per National Geographic. Roberts told ABC that while attending the National Museum of African American History and Culture, she noticed a photo of a group of Black women in wetsuits on a boat: something she had never seen before.
“It completely captured my imagination. I ended up reading more about them and I discovered that they were a part of this group called Diving with a Purpose and that their mission was to search for and document slave ship wrecks around the world and I was blown away. I knew I had to be a part of this some way,” said Roberts via ABC.
However, upon embarking on her journey to the bottom of the sea, she didn’t anticipate the emotions that would come during her exploration.
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WELCOME TO THE FRIDAY PORCH
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