Thank you for the shout-out to the Black press, Mr. President
Commentary by Chitown Kev
I didn’t watch the White House Correspondents’ Dinner for various reasons so I missed President Biden’s remarks giving a shout-out to the Black press.
The White House has posted a transcript of President Biden’s remarks.
Roy was born in Bormingham [sic] — born in Birmingham, Alabama. He graduated from a great HBCU, Florida A&M. (Applause.) He started in journalism to follow in the footsteps of his father, Roy Wood Sr., who covered the Civil Rights Movement.
During Black History Month this year, I hosted the screening of the movie “Till.” (Applause.) The story of Emmett Till and his mother is a story of a family’s promise and loss and a nation’s reckoning with hate, violence, and the abuse of power.
It’s a story that was seared into our memory and our conscience — the nation’s conscience — when Mrs. Till insisted that an open casket for her murdered and maimed 14-year-old son be the means by which he was transported. She said, “Let the people see what I’ve seen.”
The reason the world saw what she saw was because of another hero in this story: the Black press. (Applause.) That’s a fact. Jet Magazine, the Chicago Defender, and other Black radio and newspapers were unflinching and brave in making sure America saw what she saw. (Applause.) And I mean it.
Ida B. Wells — Ida B. Wells once said, and I quote, “The way to right wrongs is to turn the light of truth upon the wrongs.” “Turn the light of truth upon the wrongs.”
That’s the sacred view, in my view. That’s the sacred charge of a free press. And I mean that.
That’s what someone we still miss so much, who you honored posthumously, stood for. Gwen Ifill. (Applause.)
You know, she was among the very best. We talked about it at the table. She moderated my first debate for Vice President and was a trusted voice for millions of Americans.
Gwen understood that the louder the noise, the more it’s on all of us to cut through the noise to the truth.
The truth matters.
The entire history of Black press from its beginnings among free Blacks during slavery to Frederick Douglass’s newspaper The North Star to the antilynching activism of Ida B. Wells-Barnett (and don’t forget about her husband, Chicago-based lawyer Ferdinand Barnett) to The Crisis, Jet, The Chicago Defender, The Pittsburgh Courier, the Michigan Chronicle, the New York Amsterdam News, the Los Angeles Sentinel and countless other Black newspapers and radio stations big and small to Roy Wood, Sr., to today’s columnists, writers, editors, and commentators at major newspapers; all have a story to tell and are entrusted with what President Biden called a “sacred charge”.
To bear witness.
To bear witness and, in Mrs. Wells-Barnett’s words, “turn the light of truth upon the wrongs” being done to Black people and, really, to all people.
Black journalists have had to perform that duty in the face of threats to their life, the destruction of their newspaper headquarters, and an indifferent and even hostile mainstream (white) press designed (like all other institutions in American society) to protect white supremacy.
Black journalists, editors, and newspaper owners, had to perform their duty under circumstances every bit as harrowing as many of the situations that journalists face in foreign lands that The President started his remarks with.
And the Black press faced those conditions in their own country.
Yet in spite of working under those conditions in their own country, the Black press also took the column inches to make sure that its frequently weary Black readership also took time to laugh, to think, and, at times, to celebrate Blackness.
Thank you, President Biden for a few words honoring that continuing legacy.
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News round up by dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor
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For the first time in recorded history, the unemployment rate for Black Americans has fallen below 5 percent. According to the Bureau of Labor and Statistics, the rate reached 4.7 percent in April 2023. The rate at which Black people were unemployed hit its peak during the Covid-19 pandemic. In May 2020, it rocketed to a whopping 16.8 percent.
Additionally, the gap between Black and white Americans has fallen from 5.4 percentage points to 1.6 percent. Black unemployment has only been recorded since 1972, since then the gap between Black and white unemployment has averaged at 6.1 percent.
In an press release, President Joe Biden attributed these changes to his administration.
“The unemployment rate is close to the lowest it has been in more than 50 years and a record low for African Americans. Thanks to the policies we have put in place, the recovery is creating good jobs that you can raise a family on, which is pulling more Americans into the labor force. In fact, the share of working age Americans in the labor force is at a 15 year high,” Biden stated back in April.
Although more Americans are employed overall, many are still feeling the effects of inflation. According to the report released by the Bureau of Labor and Statistics, wages increased by 4 percentage points on average while inflation reached 5 percent in March.
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A group including basketball legend Shaquille O’Neal, TV producer Kenya Barris and rapper 50 Cent is among the potential bidders for a majority stake in Paramount Global’s PARA -2.34%decrease; red down pointing triangle BET Media Group, according to people familiar with the situation.
The three celebrities have teamed up with Group Black—a company that aims to invest in and grow Black-owned media firms—private-equity firm CVC Capital Partners and Authentic Brands Group, which develops and licenses its brands to retail operators, the people said.
Barris is already a minority stakeholder in BET Studios, a production division of BET, along with Rashida Jones and Aaron Rahsaan Thomas.
Bids for BET Media Group — which owns the VH1 and BET cable networks and the BET+ streaming service — reportedly are due later this month. With support from cable tycoon John Malone, Robert Johnson established BET in 1980. It was the first national television network aimed primarily toward Black viewers. Viacom, now known as Paramount Global, purchased BET in 2000 for $2.3 billion in shares and $570 million in existing debt.
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France, the second biggest market for rap music in the world after the US, will host its first awards ceremony for rap, R&B and Afrobeats music on Thursday, after years of criticism that the popular genres are woefully under-represented at the country’s mainstream music awards.
Rap, R&B and Afrobeats dominate streaming downloads in France in what is considered to be a new golden age for French rap, four years after the US hip-hop magazine DJBooth deemed the greater Paris area the world’s most successful city for hip-hop.
Last year, more than half of France’s 20 top-selling albums were by French rappers. Rap accounted for 65% of downloads on streaming platforms last year, but beyond the specialist radio stations Mouv’ and Skyrock, it makes up only 12% of music broadcast on French radio.
Rap’s absence from France’s mainstream music awards has long been a source of controversy and scandal. There was a wave of indignation when the rising young star Tiakola was overlooked for “revelation of the year” at February’s Les Victoires de la Musique awards, despite his acclaimed performance on stage.
Now two media companies, Booska-P and Yard, have organised the first awards ceremony – Les Flammes – to recognise and celebrate culture they say grows out of working-class neighbourhoods, “and the creativity of the people that make it”.
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The same week the United States commemorated the life and legacy of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Jamaica's prime minister, Andrew Holness, instructed his nation's government to "move ahead with speed" in abolishing the country's constitutional monarchy–the final move in erasing the island nation's formal connection to Britain, along with the colonialism and racialized past that comes with it.
"It is time that Jamaica becomes a republic," said Holness, 50. "For us, the process is not simple, and we have known this since we started on this journey. And we are making sure that we check every box as we move deliberately in that regard."
Though Jamaica became independent of the United Kingdom in 1962, the British monarchy remained as the head of state. The Jamaica Observer conducted a poll in 2020 that found 55 percent of Jamaicans wanted to abolish the monarchy while 30 percent supported the status quo.
Jamaican newspaper The Gleaner said that Holness made his remarks during a reception after reports surfaced about the stalling of plans to make Jamaica a republic. The delay stemmed from the question of who would serve on the Constitutional Reform Committee–a body created to oversee the transition from constitutional monarchy to republic.
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When Dr Harold Young, an eminent Belizean political scientist, takes visitors on a journey around Belize City, the first stop is an unremarkable building, whose basement entrance is partly shrouded by creeping pink bougainvillea.
Its padlocked gates and broken windows back on to a parking lot in the city’s historic centre. Most passersby ignore the innocuous plaque outside. Belize, a country of 400,000 citizens, is geographically located in Central America but a part of the English-speaking Caribbean. A former British settlement and then colony, it is one of the region’s eight remaining Commonwealth realms – independent countries where the monarch remains the head of state. Belize is the only Commonwealth realm King Charles has never visited.
The building is blocked from public entry but is known locally as the former headquarters of a TV station and production company once owned by the Conservative peer Lord Michael Ashcroft, who has sprawling business investments around Belize.
But for those who are aware, the building serves as a horrifying reminder of the brutality of British rule here. “It’s the last remnants of a holding dungeon for slaves,” Young says. “Before they were put out for sale.”
Unlike the island states in the Caribbean, where plantation slavery underpinned the colonial economy, enslaved labour in Belize revolved around the logging of mahogany at camps in the country’s interior.
The major settlements in British Honduras, as it was known until 1973, were thus sparsely populated, and the remnants of violent enslavement are now mostly absent from public view.
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