The legacies we receive, the legacies we leave
Commentary by Chitown Kev
On February 23, 1993, I walked into the shelter I was living in, drunk as usual. Very drunk.
I knew that the man who was the overnight manager in the shelter, V.G., was sober and was encouraging me to stay sober but this night wasn’t it. I was such a nuisance and, dare I say, a threat to the safety of others in the shelter that V. called the police.
The police came, talked to me, and then I started fighting with them; at one point I even got a punch in. The policeman kindly brushed that punch off and he and his partner both picked me up and carried me out to the squad car and to another night in the lock up on Addison and Halsted, two blocks down the street from Wrigley Field.
By February 25, I was in detox. When I got out of detox 5 days later, scared shitless, I ran into V. on the el. We talked, not so much about my very obvious problems, but about some difficulties he was having.
V. passed on sometime ago. He was such a stalwart to the community of Rogers Park and Evanston for so many reasons that the alderman and a few other public officials were at his funeral.
I could never measure or payback or even name precisely the hope that V. gave me. I do remember something that he said often.
“Always think about what you would like for your legacy to be.”
Legacies.
I’ve thought a lot about the subject of legacies ever since I was a child.
I had occasion to think again on the subject once John Clifford Floyd III, the father of Fulton County DA Fani Willis, “took the stand” to clear some things up about...well, whatever the hell they were in court about.
Mr. Floyd was charming, articulate, funny, a true elder of the community, lots of experiences that span the globe. It’s easy to see that Fani Willis is a bit of a “daddy’s girl” and why he had such a towering influence on that sista.
Legacies.
I think of learning earlier this month about Joseph Henry Douglass, the first internationally-renowned Black American concert violinist and the grandfather who taught him to play the violin.
I’m sure that there were a very very few greater pleasures in the last days of Mr. Frederick Douglass than the privilege of seeing and hearing his grandson playing the violin professionally.
Legacies.
I can recite, verbatim, some of the most complex sentences ever written by my favorite writer, James Baldwin. Yet the sentence of Mr. Baldwin’s that means the most to me is very simple and at the end of the introduction to his first book of essays, Notes of a Native Son.
“I want to be an honest man and a good writer.”
I mean, what are we even talking about in Black History Month but the legacies that were left behind for us to ponder and to build upon?
That’s what my friend and mentor, V.G., was teaching myself and others: legacies are not something just to sit on and contemplate or to brood over.
Legacies, however big or small, are something to build upon. And it’s something that we can all do, in big ways, small ways, and in our own way.
And pass it on.
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News round up by dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor
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Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis is used to prosecuting high-profile, challenging cases. But as she parried questions about her own personal conduct from the witness stand against the legal teams for defendants her office has accused of election interference, many Black women recognized a dispiriting scene.
“It absolutely feels familiar. There is no secret that the common sentiment among Black women in positions of power (is that they) must over-perform to be seen as equals to their counterparts,” said Jessica T. Ornsby, a family litigation attorney in the Washington, D.C., area.
“Here, Ms. Willis is being scrutinized for things that are not directly related to her job performance, in ways we see other Black women regularly picked apart,” Ornsby said.
Willis testified during an extraordinary hearing that could result in her office being removed from the state’s election interference case against former President Donald Trump. She was questioned Thursday about her relationship with the attorney leading her office’s prosecution, Nathan Wade.
Willis and Wade have acknowledged they had a “personal relationship” but have denied any improper conduct.
Regardless of the legal merits of the claim by Trump and his co-defendants that Willis’ conduct was improper, relationships between coworkers are often prohibited or must be disclosed in many workplaces, including at major private law firms. Willis has faced criticism from many legal experts otherwise supportive of the case due to her relationship with Wade.
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Peanuts’ Franklin has been a controversial character for decades. A new special attempts reparations. Slate: It’s Flagrant Tokenism, Charlie Brown!
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Snoopy Presents: Welcome Home, Franklin is a most unfortunate 39-minute program centered on the first Black character introduced by cartoonist Charles M. Schulz. The Peanuts franchise has programmed the show for Black History Month, that much is clear. But are we honoring Franklin for breaking down racial barriers and integrating the most popular comic strip of all time? For blazing a path followed by Beetle Bailey’s Lt. Jack Flap? Or will it suffice to consider the special problems in representation presented by Charlie Brown’s Black friend?
Franklin, inked into existence a little more than half a century ago, is a good kid in a difficult position, created to serve as a token figure. In April of 1968, Schulz received a letter urging him to diversify the strip. This is Franklin’s creation story: A nice white lady from Sherman Oaks—an “active citizen” from a “totally Peanuts-oriented family”—thought it important to promote social change by including Black kids among the characters. The writer, Harriet Glickman, had been moved to act by the recent assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., a clause which feels to me somehow hideous to type; this particular juxtaposition of hard news and funny pages feels uniquely obscene (or maybe just especially American).
Peanuts introduced Franklin on July 31, 1968, as an amiable child on a seashore. He rescues Charlie Brown’s beach ball from the ebb current, then helps the hero shore up a shoddy sand castle, while also establishing his own credentials as a boy from a “good” home. As we all know, adults in the world of Peanuts are little more than weak bleats of muted horn, but the strip makes a point of explaining that Franklin’s father is absent only because he is serving in Vietnam.
In the parlance of the times, in the calculus of images, Franklin was a respectable Negro, a mild-mannered vision of a model minority. One official text—The Peanuts Book: A Visual History of the Iconic Comic Strip—describes the character as an outlier in “the neurotic world of Peanuts”—that realm where Charlie Brown is seized by insecurity and frozen with indecision, where Lucy thrives as a shameless sadist, where the gods of transitional objects cursed Linus to shoulder his baby-blue burden forever. Franklin, by contrast, is “calm” and “relatively well-balanced ” and “gets good grades.” He is canonically bland and perfectly innocuous, and he has nonetheless, or maybe therefore, often been marginalized. Thirty-odd years ago on Saturday Night Live, Chris Rock worked up a steamed analysis of the character’s isolation in a Weekend Update editorial: “They don’t invite him to the parties, no. But Snoopy’s dancing his ass off, right?”
Peanuts committed a notorious social faux pas in 1973, when finessing the dinner-party seating plan for A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving, a special in which Peppermint Patty pressures Chuck into hosting a meal. The relevant scene relegated Franklin to eat alone in a second-rate chair on the far side of the table. Last autumn, 50 years after the special’s release, a corner of pop-cultural discourse celebrated a special golden-anniversary edition of ritually regarding the segregation-ish arrangement with amused disgust.
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Zimbabwe’s powerful vice president said the government will block a university scholarship for young LGBTQ+ people, a move that human rights groups described Friday as a perpetuation of the African country’s homophobic practices.
The state university scholarship for people between the ages of 18 and 35 is sponsored by GALZ, a membership organization for LGBTQ+ people in Zimbabwe. The association started offering it in 2018 without incident. But a recent online advertisement inviting applications attracted a harsh response from Vice President Constantino Chiwenga, a self-proclaimed devout Catholic and former army commander.
In a strongly worded statement Thursday night, Chiwenga claimed the scholarship was “a direct challenge” to the government’s authority.
“Our schools and institutions of higher learning will not entertain applicants, let alone enroll persons associated with such alien, anti-life, un-African and un-Christian values which are being promoted and cultivated by, as well as practiced in decadent societies with whom we share no moral or cultural affinities,” he said.
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Misguided tree-planting projects are threatening crucial ecosystems across Africa, scientists have warned.
Research has revealed that an area the size of France is threatened by forest restoration initiatives that are taking place in inappropriate landscapes.
One project in particular, the African Forest Landscape Restoration Initiative, aims to plant trees across 100m hectares (247m acres) of land by 2030. Scientists have warned that the scheme plans to plant trees in non-forest ecosystems such as savannahs and grasslands, potentially disrupting or destroying intact ecosystems.
The research found that 52% of tree-planting projects in Africa are occurring in savannahs, with almost 60% using non-native tree species, which also brings the risk of introducing invasive species.
The researchers say the misclassification of grassy ecosystems including savannahs as “forests” could lead to misplaced reforestation and destruction of these ancient grasslands.
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A top court in St Vincent and the Grenadines has upheld laws that criminalize gay sex, in a blow to activists who have long decried the violence the LGBTQ+ community has faced on the conservative Caribbean archipelago.
The ruling on Friday by St Vincent’s high court stems from a 2019 case filed by two gay men from St Vincent who live in the UK and US. They sought to strike down colonial-era laws that call for 10 years in prison for anal intercourse and five years for “gross indecency” with another person of the same sex.
Cristian González Cabrera, a senior researcher at Human Rights Watch, called the ruling “a travesty of justice” and said it represented “tacit state endorsement” of the discrimination against the LGBTQ+ community.
“It is a sad day for human rights in St Vincent and the Grenadines, and the ruling will weaken the rule of law for everyone in the country,” he said.
It was not immediately clear if anyone planned to appeal the ruling.
Téa Braun, chief executive of the London-based human rights organization Human Dignity Trust, criticized that the decision was based in part on how the two men challenging the laws do not live in St Vincent.
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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.