Commentary by Black Kos editor JoanMar
Very few entertainers possessed the explosive vitality that Tina Turner brought to the stages she graced throughout her long career. The Rock & Roll Hall of Fame double inductee was simply the best at what she did. We lost her this week, and the world will never be the same again. Fortunately, she left a vast legacy of exquisite performances for us to enjoy.
Let’s celebrate her.
Teaching about love:
The day I first met Erwin, at an airport in Germany, I should have been too tired from my flight, too preoccupied with thoughts of my concert tour, and in too much of a hurry to get to my hotel to pay much attention to the young music executive who came from my record company to welcome me.
But I did notice him, and I instantly felt an emotional connection. Even then, I could have ignored what I felt — I could have listened to the ghost voices in my head telling me that I didn't look good that day, or that I shouldn't be thinking about romance because it never ends well. Instead, I listened to my heart. I left my comfort zone and made it a priority to get to know Erwin. That simple first meeting led to a long, beautiful relationship — and my one true marriage.
From her super fan Oprah Winfrey:
Haha. I remember this:
On aging gracefully:
From our Forever President:
From our own Sis Denise:
I saw a quote that some misguided writer posited that “Tina Turner was the female Mick Jagger on stage.” [insert eye roll here and understand the 400 years of history that informed it]
Mick Jagger missing his friend:
Angela Bassett should have won for her portrayal of the Queen in What’s Love Got To Do With It.
Out of the mouth of babes… little Mali Kabs adds her voice to the choir:
Fare thee well, Queen.
Some of my favorites: “Proud Mary”, “Simply The Best,” “It’s Gonna Work Out Fine,” “Rolling On The River,” “I Can’t Stand The Rain,” and “River Deep Mountain.”
What’s your favorite?
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News round up by dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor
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After Dr. Sarah Williams lost her husband Clarence to lung cancer in 2015, her grief was soon accompanied by financial worries about providing for their 9-year-old twins.
Affording basics like school supplies and field trips strained Williams' part-time professor salary in North Carolina for more than a year. Eventually she discovered her twins were eligible for federal survivor payments from the Social Security Administration (SSA) for children who lose a parent. Both children soon started receiving payments of hundreds of dollars a month, helping to alleviate the financial burden that came with their father's death.
But many Black children who lose a parent never see benefits like those that helped Williams' family, a problem that has drawn the attention of advocates and lawmakers who say the SSA should be doing more to close the racial gap that exists among children who receive benefits and those who don't.
Every employee in the U.S. pays Social Security taxes, and individuals who have worked long enough become eligible for monthly benefits when they retire or become disabled. When they die, their surviving family members might also qualify to receive benefits. Whether a child under 18 is eligible depends on several factors, but those who do qualify typically get 75% of the benefit the deceased parent was entitled to receive. Last year, surviving children who qualified for benefits got an average of $957.05 a month.
There are approximately 10.1 million Black children nationwide, and Census data reveals an alarming 9.6% of them, or about 975,000, had lost at least one parent as of 2021. That figure has doubled in the past decade, with a sharp increase due to the COVID-19 pandemic. One study found that Black children lost caregivers at twice the rate of White children from April 2020 until the end of 2022.
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Could sugar be modern capitalism’s original sin? It is closely associated in public imaginations with obesity and diabetes, which affect an increasing percentage of the world’s population, as global incomes rise and globalization makes sugar ever cheaper. (In 2021, the average global price was a mere 18 cents per pound.) Less obviously, demand for alternative fuel sources has driven deforestation as sugar cane is farmed to make ethanol. And unlike some other commodity histories, like that of salt or salmon, sugar’s past is just as inglorious as its present. The exploitation of labor and land is inextricable from sugar’s past 500 years.
A new book by Ulbe Bosma, The World of Sugar: How the Sweet Stuff Transformed Our Politics, Health, and Environment Over 2,000 Years, doesn’t so much show how sugar changed the world as explore how the emergence and evolution of capitalism changed sugar—from a luxury to a commercial commodity to a consumer necessity to a protected national industry.
Refined sugar—processed from sugar cane into white crystals—was originally a luxury reserved for Eurasian and North African elites. The refining process was capital intensive and extractive. Local rulers in India, “where it all began,” Bosma writes, owned refineries, and peasant producers sold their crop to the refiners. But elites’ demand for sugar didn’t benefit the peasant producers: The buyers of the sugar crop charged 17-20 percent interest for a half-year advance. Despite the expense, refined sugar was soon being traded across Central Asia and along the Bengal River. And the lure of exporting at great profit to Persia and Arabia led to innovations in the milling process, in the organization of labor, and in the search for new markets.
In the 17th century, India’s sugar producers who sought out new markets to their east were in competition with Chinese sugar. The Sung Dynasty (960-1279) fostered sugar’s mass appeal as it became a featured part of cooking as well as medicine. Marco Polo, the 13th-century Italian traveler, recorded edible sugar sculptures in the pages of Chinese cookbooks. And Taiwan’s mills were producing around 60,000 tons of sugar a year in the early 18th century. But even with the 18th-century emergence of Brazil, Cuba, Louisiana, and Hawaii as sugar cane rivals to Taiwan and India, supply could barely keep up with demand.
The central figures of Bosma’s story are global families, the bourgeois colonial producers. The World of Sugar shows the remarkable persistence of their model, which has withstood the rise and fall of empires, dynasties, nations, and economic ideologies. In addition to sugar, these families were also cultivating political power. Take the British Lascelles family, for instance, who owned sugar plantations in Barbados from 1648 until 1975. Henry Lascelles made a fortune in London “supplying loans and mortgages to West Indian planters and slave traders.” His son, educated at the University of Cambridge, used his inheritance to buy some sugar estates “at a bargain in the wake of the London and Amsterdam bank crisis of 1772-1773” and built a fortune on the back of enslaved labor, one that allowed his descendants to marry into the British royal family.
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TINA TURNER, THE raspy-voiced fireball who overcame domestic abuse and industry ambivalence to emerge as one of rock and soul’s brassiest, most rousing and most inspirational performers, died Wednesday at age 83.
“Tina Turner, the ‘Queen of Rock & Roll’ has died peacefully today at the age of 83 after a long illness in her home in Küsnacht near Zurich, Switzerland,” her family said in a statement Wednesday. “With her, the world loses a music legend and a role model.” A cause of death was not immediately available, though Turner had a stroke and battled both kidney failure and intestinal cancer in recent years.
Starting with her performances with her ex-husband Ike, Turner injected an uninhibited, volcanic stage presence into pop. Even with choreographed backup singers — both with Ike and during her own career — Turner never seemed reined in. Her influence on rock, R&B, and soul singing and performance was also immeasurable. Her delivery influenced everyone from Mick Jagger to Mary J. Blige, and her high-energy stage presence (topped with an array of gravity-defying wigs) was passed down to Janet Jackson and Beyoncé. Turner’s message — one that resounded with generations of women — was that she could hold her own onstage against any man.
RIP — Tina Turner
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The world’s hunger for chocolate is a major cause of the destruction of protected forests in west Africa, scientists have said.
Satellite maps of Ivory Coast and Ghana showed swathes of formerly dense forest had become cocoa plantations since 2000, according to a study.
It found cocoa production was linked to 360,000 of a total 962,000 hectares (37.4%) of the deforestation since 2000 of protected areas in Ivory Coast, and 26,000 out of a total 193,000 hectares (13.5%) of the deforestation of similar areas in Ghana.
The global trade in chocolate was estimated to be worth more than a trillion dollars last year. Cocoa, its most important ingredient, is produced from the seed of the tropical Theobroma cacao tree. It is native to South America, but most is now produced in Africa, with Ivory Coast and Ghana accounting for two-thirds of production.
An estimated 2 million farmers in west Africa, operating farms of an average of just three to four hectares each, rely on cocoa for their income – usually less than $1 a day. They supply a complex network of middlemen, including public and private companies, who connect them to the world market, making the supply chain opaque.
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President Joe Biden on Thursday afternoon capped off his nomination of General Charles “CQ” Brown Jr. to be the next chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff with a White House ceremony in the Rose Garden.
During the outdoor event, with Vice President Kamala Harris and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin in attendance — the first Black Americans to serve in their respective roles — the president hailed Gen. Brown as a “warrior” who reflects the “full diversity of our nation.”
If confirmed by the U.S. Senate, Brown would become only the second African American to serve as the top military official in the U.S. Armed Forces in the role’s 81-year history. It would also mark the first time that African Americans occupy the Pentagon’s top two positions. The other is defense secretary.
Brown is a U.S. Air Force four-star general and currently serves as chief of staff of the Air Force. As Biden noted in his remarks, the general is a descendant of a “proud line” of military veterans. His father, Colonel CQ Brown, served in the U.S. Army during the Vietnam War. His grandfather, U.S. Army Master Sergeant Robert E. Brown Jr., led a segregated unit during World War II.
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