Pride
Commentary by Chitown Kev
Pride.
Most times, I wish that I didn’t have to feel something like “pride” about being Black or being gay or being a Black gay man or any of the other permutations or combinations of who I am.
After all, I didn’t ask to be either one. I simply am Black. I simply am gay.
Whatever that means.
My skin tone is the color of caramel. I develop physical and emotional attachments with persons that are the same sex as myself.
Since I was a child, really, I never understood the problem with any of it. Those identifiers really don’t tell anyone very much about me, after all, although a lot of people think that those identifiers do give away the essence of what feel, how I act, who I am.
And, in various ways, the “normies,” those who become those in power, have constructed and organized a world where people like me are ostracized. Shut out.
Even subject to “elimination”, on occasion.
Simply for being. Existing.
I was taught that even feeling or being “proud” is a sin.
Haughty. Having an excessively high opinion of my worth.
For merely existing. Never mind having a life. Living.
When I think of what “normies” have done and continue to do to my people, perhaps pride is the exact mean that I am reaching for.
Damn right I’m “proud” not only to be but to live.
Damn right I should shake a tail feather to that.
Join me why don’t you?
Happy Pride, everyone!
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News round up by dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor
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Natalie Coles will never forget receiving an unexpected phone call in 2020. On the line was Virginia-based Dominion Energy, offering to give money to Wilberforce University, the small historically Black college where she is in charge of fundraising.
The company’s $500,000 donation went in part toward laptops and hot spots for students when the pandemic shut down the college’s campus outside of Dayton, Ohio.
“It was like manna from heaven,” Coles said.
Historically Black colleges and universities, which had seen giving from foundations decline in recent decades, lately are benefiting from an increase in gifts, particularly from corporations and corporate foundations. Some have received a new look from companies amid the reckoning over racial injustice spurred by the killing of George Floyd. But the colleges also have been pitching themselves, emphasizing their ability to deliver returns on the investment in student mobility.
Another factor in the giving by corporations has been the influence of their Black employees.
At the beverage company Diageo North America, the employee resource group for African Americans shaped a program that has provided almost $12 million to HBCUs, said Danielle Robinson, head of community engagement and partnerships for Diageo. The money has gone toward scholarships at 29 schools to lessen the debt burden on Black graduates.
“We talked about a lot of different things, but one of the things that kept coming up was the generational wealth gap,” Robinson said.
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In the United States, 1 in 5 girls have missed school because of a lack of access to period products, a disturbing statistic that puts both their confidence and their education at risk.
But 15-year-old twins Brooke and Breanna Bennett, are using their voice to make a difference. As the cofounders of Women in Training, Inc., a nonprofit organization on a mission to end period poverty, the Montgomery, Alabama-based sisters want to make sure menstrual hygiene products are available for everyone who needs them.
Their hard work is already paying off. The twins’ efforts led to the creation and passage of Alabama’s “Period Poverty Law,” which provided $200,000 to the Alabama Department of Education for grants for menstrual products for students in Title I schools. And they’re not stopping there. The Bennett sisters recently took their mission to Washington D.C. to advocate for change on the national level representing Always Period Heroes with Congresswoman Grace Meng (D-NY) to commemorate Menstrual Hygiene Day (May 28) and support her Menstrual Equity for All Act.
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Over the past several weeks, groups of Haitian citizens armed with machetes, sticks and other makeshift weapons have banded together to root out suspected gang members and try to end the killings, rapes and kidnappings destroying their communities.
The Centre d’analyse et de recherche en droits de l’homme (CARDH) rights group that Jean leads said suspects have been “chased, beaten, decapitated and then burned alive” by members of the grassroots vigilante movement – dubbed “Bwa Kale”, or “peeled wood” in Haitian Creole.
At least 160 suspected gang members were killed between April 24 and May 24, CARDH said in a report this month, and as a result, Haiti has seen “a dramatic decrease” in kidnappings, killings and other forms of violence linked to the armed groups.
However, Jean said while the movement has had “considerable” effects, it does not present a long-term solution to the violence gripping the Caribbean nation of about 12 million people. Instead, he said Haitian state institutions must be reinforced and take responsibility for protecting citizens.
“We’re in a situation in which the population has to defend itself,” Jean, CARDH’s executive director, told Al Jazeera in a phone interview. “Bwa Kale is symptomatic of the collapse of the state,” he said.
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Priests and worshippers in Addis Ababa work by hand to replicate centuries-old religious manuscripts and sacred artwork. Aljazeera: Ethiopian quest to re-create ancient manuscripts
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Armed with a bamboo ink pen and a steady hand, Ethiopian Orthodox priest Zelalem Mola carefully copied text in the ancient Ge’ez language from a religious book onto a goatskin parchment.
This painstaking task is preserving an ancient tradition, all the while bringing him closer to God, the 42-year-old said.
At the Hamere Berhan Institute in Addis Ababa, priests and lay worshippers work by hand to replicate sometimes centuries-old religious manuscripts and sacred artwork.
The parchments, pens and inks are all prepared at the institute, which lies in the Piasa district in the historic heart of the Ethiopian capital.
Yeshiemebet Sisay, 29, who is in charge of communications at Hamere Berhan, said the work began four years ago.
“Ancient parchment manuscripts are disappearing from our culture, which motivated us to start this project,” she said.
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Senegal’s government temporarily suspended mobile phone data on Sunday as the country reels from days of deadly clashes between police and supporters of opposition leader Ousmane Sonko.
The ministry of communication, telecommunications and digital economy said that because of the diffusion of “subversive messages in a context of public disorder in certain localities,” cellphone internet data would be suspended during certain time periods.
The statement comes after days of deadly clashes throughout the West African nation between Sonko’s supporters and police. The official death toll is unclear. The government says that 15 people, including two members of the security forces, have been killed, while the opposition says 19 people have died.
The clashes first broke out on Thursday, after Sonko was convicted of corrupting youth but acquitted on charges of raping a woman who worked at a massage parlor and making death threats against her. Sonko, who didn’t attend his trial in Dakar, was sentenced to two years in prison. His lawyer said that a warrant hadn’t yet been issued for his arrest.
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Chuck Todd said on Sunday that he’ll be leaving “Meet the Press” after a tumultuous near-decade of moderating the NBC political panel show, to be replaced in the coming months by Kristen Welker.
Todd, 51, told viewers that “I’ve watched too many friends and family let work consume them before it was too late” and that he’d promised his family he wouldn’t do that.
Todd has often been an online punching bag for critics, including Donald Trump, during a polarized time, and there were rumors that his time at the show would be short when its executive producer was reassigned at the end of last summer, but NBC gave no indication this was anything other than Todd’s decision. It’s unclear when Todd’s last show will be, but he told viewers that this would be his final summer.
“I leave feeling concerned about this moment in history, but reassured by the standards we’ve set here,” Todd said. “We didn’t tolerate propagandists, and this network and program never will.”
Welker, a former chief White House correspondent, has been at NBC News in Washington since 2011 and has been Todd’s chief fill-in for the past three years. She drew praise for moderating the final presidential debate between Trump, a Republican, and Joe Biden, a Democrat, in 2020.
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A chef and food writer takes a hard look at the Mammy stereotype, the rare outliers who have achieved recognition for their cooking, and the inequity that still prevents most Black women from owning restaurants. Civil East: Op-ed: Black Women, Architects of the American Kitchen, Deserve a Rightful Place in the Sun
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There’s a moment in the 2009 animated Disney film The Princess and the Frog, when the main protagonist, Tiana, a New Orleans-born Black woman, is on the precipice of realizing her lifelong dream of owning a restaurant.
Then, a real estate agent, Mr. Fenner of Fenner & Fenner, who had been poised to sell Tiana her coveted restaurant space, tells her she has been outbid.
“A little woman of your . . . background would have had her hands full trying to run a big business like that. You’re better off where you’re at,” he tells her.
It doesn’t take much imagination to intuit what function that pregnant pause, and the word “background,” have in the scene. Disney, as much a mirror on American life as any media, was punctuating a disturbing American credo in that scene: the U.S., as represented by Mr. Fenner, thinks Tiana is better off as a laborer, nothing more.
After Mr. Fenner breaks the news, Tiana takes her place back behind the catering table at the Mardi Gras ball where she’s serving her specialty beignets. She trips and falls, all of the beignets she baked for the event go flying, and our heroine sits dejectedly in a dustbowl of powdered sugar and sorrow.
In his foreword to The Jemima Code, author Toni Tipton Martin’s presentation of more than 150 African American cookbooks, journalist John Edgerton wrote:
“Throughout 350 years of slavery, segregation, and legally enforced white supremacy, the vast majority of women of African ancestry in the South lived lives tightly circumscribed [to] . . . domestic kitchens. To them fell the overarching responsibility for the feeding of the South, as well as the duty of birthing and nurturing replacement generations.”
A still of Tiana from the Disney movie, “The Princess and the Frog.”
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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.
