Differentness
Commentary by Chitown Kev
I’m coming off of working a split shift (last night and this morning) so I’ve felt like not doing much at all but doom-scrolling and I scroll past the news about the passage of the so-called “Don’t Say Gay” bill in the Florida State Senate.
James Call: USA Today/Tallahassee Democrat
Florida lawmakers on Tuesday passed a bill restricting speech in public school classrooms on sexual orientation and gender identity, sparked by one lawmaker's concern that children were being "trendy" in coming out as gay.
The legislation — titled "Parental Rights in Education" (HB 1557) but dubbed by critics the "Don’t Say Gay" bill — now heads to Gov. Ron DeSantis, who has suggested he will sign it into law. If so, it goes into effect July 1.
The 22-17 vote came after weeks of national attention over the measure, which has grabbed the attention of international newspapers, Hollywood actors and the White House.[...]
What has caused the most contention is one section of the bill: It prohibits public school teachers from "instruction" about sexual orientation and gender identity in kindergarten-3rd grade — though it's already not taught in those grades — and limits it to “age appropriate” in other grades.
The bill, however, doesn't provide a bright line between "classroom instruction" and "classroom discussion," which the bill's supporters say it won't prevent.
First of all, I understand that being gay is more acceptable nowadays than it was back in the 1980’s when I was a teenager but to say it’s “trendy” is to imply that a child has a choice whether to be gay or not to be gay based on its “trendiness” (never mind those teenagers who “experiment” with same-sex and those kids do exist).
Being LGBTQ is more acceptable but still, who comes out of the closet wanting to be “trendy” when so much prejudice and bigotry directed at the LGBTQ community still exists?
Yes, I am looking at this through my own personal experience of being a black gay man who came out during high school and...oh, let’s not forget that the state of Florida also banned the teaching of “critical race theory” (which isn’t taught in any Florida elementary or high school) which is really about (as one of the stories in dopper’s news roundup indicates) the deletion of Blackness from the national story.”
The Black Lives Matter movement has helped bring contentious discussions about race to the forefront of American discourse, and classrooms have become a battleground. Supporters contend that federal law has preserved the unequal treatment of people on the basis of race and that the country was founded on the theft of land and labor.
Opponents of critical race theory say schoolchildren should not be taught that America is fundamentally racist. Governors and legislatures in Republican-led states around the country are considering or have signed into law bills that would limit how teachers can frame American history.[...]
Florida law already requires schools to provide instruction on a host of fundamentals, including the Declaration of Independence, the Holocaust and African American history, but the topics have often been muddled. Current events, including the killings of Black people by police, have intensified debates.
The simple solution there, I would think, would be simply to go to the school library or even the public library in order to find the information that I had questions about. (For example, when I was in 3rd or 4th grade I noticed that there was a day marked on the calendar that Mom received from the insurance company that honored Jefferson Davis. I had never heard of Jefferson Davis, so I went to the library and looked it up.)
But...we now live in an age of book banning and even book burning; in some locales, even going to the library is becoming a contentious option.
Aristotle said something like, “All philosophy beings in wonder” and there seems to be nothing more natural for children than to wonder about this strange and frequently uncanny world that they find themselves in. Myself, I was (and still am) the nosiest child; I wanted to know about everything and everyone.
I embrace myself as a cosmopolitan in the original, Attic Greek sense of the word.
Granted, there are various things that are “age-appropriate,” I think that most children never stop wondering about things unless they forget them; no matter the roadblocks in their way.
Myself, I’ve always been fascinated about the differentness of people and the similarities that I have with those “different” people in spite of those differences.
And, of course, my own “differentness” has been scrutinized, pathologized, and demonized nearly to death.
You know what: I would not trade my “differentness” or my love of “differentness” for anything in the world; it has certainly led to me having a quite interesting life that is even as it’s also quite a normal and even bland life in many ways, as well.
Children should be left to and supported in their innate sense of wonder.
Of course, there are and should be some limits to that innate sense of wonder but my ideas of what those limitations should be could be not more different from the ideas of those that passed legislation such as what is soon to become Florida law.
To paraphrase Miss Denise, those ideas can get me killed or, at the very least, denigrate and deny my own existence.
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NEWS ROUND UP BY DOPPER0189, BLACK KOS MANAGING EDITOR
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Just hours after being arrested on a misdemeanor charge that was later dropped, Winston posted $100 bond and thought he would be released.
Under the law, he should have been set free. Instead, the Marion County Sheriff’s Office (MCSO) in Ocala, Florida, had moved him from a holding area and decided to keep him in an overcrowded housing area for a second night while repeatedly asking U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) whether it wanted to take him into custody.
Why?
Because of his nationality, and because the MCSO had a financial incentive to do so.
The fact is, Winston – whose name has been changed for this story – is a lawful permanent resident in a state with nearly 4 million people who were born in other countries and are now naturalized citizens or legal residents of the U.S.
A legal U.S. resident from Jamaica, Winston has never been convicted of any crime. As it turned out, ICE had not requested that he be detained and had no interest in him.
But for Winston, then age 57, the August 2020 detention was not only traumatic, it was consequential. Five days later, he was diagnosed with COVID-19 in a hospital emergency room.
In an effort to put an end to such unconstitutional practices, the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), the American Civil Liberties Union, the ACLU of Florida and Zuckerman Spaeder LLP have filed suit in federal court on Winston’s behalf.
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All of the social justice initiatives and protests surrounding the deaths of Black people at the hands of police have not changed one unconscionable fact — cops still shoot and kill African Americans at a higher proportion than any other ethnic group.
That’s the conclusion based on data from the Washington Post, which has been monitoring on-duty police shootings since 2017.
The data show that police-involved fatal shootings remain relatively steady at about 1,000 per year, with the stat in 2021 coming in slightly higher at 1,055.
The data also reiterate a scary proposition for Black people: although more than half of police shootings involved white victims, Blacks were shot and killed at a far more disproportionate rate.
The Post data show that 197 million white people live in America. More than 3,000 people of the demographic have been killed by police since the Post began tracking deaths, or about 15 per 1 million.
Black people, on the other hand, make up about 42 million people in the country but suffered nearly 1,600 deaths, or 38 per 1 million.
In other words, Black people are more than twice as likely to be killed by police. The news isn’t any better for Hispanics, who are killed at the rate of 28 per 1 million, nearly twice that of whites.
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The backlash against critical race theory has now become a crusade to delete Blackness from the national story. Young people deserve to know the complete American history — this month and the 11 others. VOX: The case for a Black History Year
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Of the nearly 240 students who currently attend Sprunica Elementary School, in Indiana’s rural Brown County, 97 percent are white. Recently, school counselor Benjamin White sent a letter to the parents of those students.
“February is a time for caring and growing for our students,” White’s letter begins. “In honor of Black History Month and Valentine’s Day, I will be coming around and teaching lessons related to equity, caring, and understanding differences.” White didn’t make clear precisely what those lessons would be, but assured parents that having “a greater understanding of diversity” would benefit both the students and the school as a whole. White then gave them the choice of opting their kids out of it.
That created a big headache for the Brown County school superintendent, Emily Tracy, who later apologized for White’s “unauthorized” letter and wrote in a statement that “our District does not permit students to opt out of history lessons — including ones based on historical injustices.”
None of us should be able to select, a la carte, which parts of history students learn so as to guard our political or cultural sensibilities. However, the Sprunica Elementary story comes amid an ongoing public and political crusade by conservative politicians, voters, and media figures against the teaching of Black history, during this month and the 11 others.
The battle over what conservatives mislabel as “critical race theory” has been raging across the country since the summer of 2020, coming in the wake of the global uprising following George Floyd’s murder. The politically conservative rebuke to an all-too-brief uptick in interest about Black lives and antiracism has been a campaign aimed at deleting Blackness from the national story.
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Glenn Youngkin is sticking to his campaign promises and killing the word “equity” in Virginia. The Republican governor has removed that one word from education-related systems.
Youngkin ran for governor, and won, on a platform that courted conservative voters inflamed by Critical Race Theory (CRT). CRT is an academic concept that says race is a social construct and racism is systematically embedded in social institutions. Educators in Virginia say CRT is not taught on the K-12 level.
Across the country, predominately white conservative voters flooded school board meetings to protest the teaching of “divisive concepts” like systematic racism. In many cases, they claimed these concepts made their white children feel bad about, and be blamed for, past racism.
Youngkin promised that, if elected, he would move to ban such “divisive” concepts. And while he has yet to explain why the word “equity” might be divisive, he and his team have pushed to make the change.
He unilaterally changed official references of “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion” to “Diversity, Opportunity and Inclusion,” even though his legislature rejected the change. This resulted in a change to the job title of VA’s top diversity officer, Angela Sailor.
The terms “resource equity,” and “responsibility to advance racial, social and economic equity” are also gone from all education systems, the Washington Post reported.
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Supermodel Winnie Harlow has always advocated for inclusive representation in the beauty industry. The Jamaican-Canadian model burst onto the scene in 2014 as a 19-year-old contestant on Season 21 of Tyra Banks’ competition show, America’s Next Top Model. Since then, Harlow has walked for many of the industry’s major fashion houses and even made an appearance in Queen Bey’s 2016 Lemonade video.
Proper sun care is a priority for Harlow, AKA Chantelle Brown-Young, who suffers from vitiligo. The long-term condition causes pigmentation in parts of the skin, leaving those areas to look white or pink. Since childhood, Harlow has known that protection from the sun’s harmful rays is critical because long-term direct sun exposure can worsen her condition.
“My parents were very adamant about putting sunscreen on me a lot, especially with my family being Jamaican and my dad living in Jamaica,” Harlow said in an interview. “Every holiday, summer and spring break, I was in Jamaica visiting my dad, and so I was in the sun a lot. Although she knew she needed to protect her skin from the sun, the model recalls hating the ashy tint it left behind on her skin.
But it was a two-day photoshoot in the Bahamas in 2018 which left her badly sunburned that compelled Harlow to find a more inclusive sun care option for all skin types. During the shoot, the model spent hours in the sun without sunscreen. The crew discouraged her from using sunscreen because they didn’t like the way the tint it left on her skin looked on camera. Hours of direct sun exposure without proper skin care left the model badly burned and permanently altered her vitiligo. “I got so badly burned. I was like a crispy lobster red, super tight, and in pain. I had to have doctors come to the hotel and give injections for pain and inflammation. It was really traumatic,” she says.
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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.