A comment about golden calves by Chitown Kev
I wanted to do something else for this space today but I also need to digest the material just a bit more. My “backup plan” is also covered, I see.
I will say this:
I’m not a religious person at all but I will always acknowledge that Black culture and my own biography is stitched through and through with religious themes. So I find it really offensive that the shoe salesman would hawk bibles for $59.99 on any day and during any week, much less Holy Week.
Though to be honest, I am neither surprised nor shocked that The Grifter would grift.
I’m not even angry about that. Now.
I’m angry at the (mostly) white Christian people that condemn nearly everything about modern society (including the person that I am for daring to be proud for who I am) but yet feel free to participate in old sin: the worship at the feet of a golden calf.
Heck, it’s not even a gold calf. It’s a gold-plated calf as if it were bought off of a man selling them The Deuce.
I was taught better. I remember better. I know better.
Not that these people didn’t always show themselves, but I can see them clearer than ever before.
And I am disgusted.
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News round up by dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor
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A century of history of Black country music, explained by Alice Randall. VOX: Beyoncé’s country roots
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If you somehow haven’t heard: Beyoncé’s Cowboy Carter, her eighth studio album and the much-anticipated sequel to Renaissance, drops on Friday. Its lead single “Texas Hold ‘Em” made history when it debuted at the top of the country charts last month.
“I feel honored to be the first Black woman with the number one single on the Hot Country Songs chart,” Beyoncé wrote in an Instagram post last week.
With this album, she’s not just racking up downloads and inspiring TikTok dances, she’s also drawing attention to the whitewashing of a genre that has long silenced its Black voices — and, predictably, drawing backlash from country music gatekeepers.
For over a century, Black artists have been central to country music — and for just as long, their work has been overlooked or under-compensated by the predominantly white country music establishment.
Just ask songwriter, educator, and New York Times bestselling novelist Alice Randall. She’s the first Black woman to co-write a No. 1 country song, with Trisha Yearwood’s 1995 hit “XXX’s and OOO’s,” and has written many other country hits ... all of which were performed by white artists.
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Jazmin Evans had been waiting for a new kidney for four years when her hospital revealed shocking news: She should have been put on the transplant list in 2015 instead of 2019 — and a racially biased organ test was to blame.
As upsetting as that notification was, it also was part of an unprecedented move to mitigate the racial inequity. Evans is among more than 14,000 Black kidney transplant candidates so far given credit for lost waiting time, moving them up the priority list for their transplant.
“I remember just reading that letter over and over again,” said Evans, 29, of Philadelphia, who shared the notice in a TikTok video to educate other patients. “How could this happen?”
At issue is a once widely used test that overestimated how well Black people’s kidneys were functioning, making them look healthier than they really were — all because of an automated formula that calculated results for Black and non-Black patients differently. That race-based equation could delay diagnosis of organ failure and evaluation for a transplant, exacerbating other disparities that already make Black patients more at risk of needing a new kidney but less likely to get one.
A few years ago, the National Kidney Foundation and American Society of Nephrology prodded laboratories to switch to race-free equations in calculating kidney function. Then the U.S. organ transplant network ordered hospitals to use only race-neutral test results in adding new patients to the kidney waiting list.
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The town of Newbern, Alabama, has not had a political election in the last several decades. But that could all change this November if a new motion is successful.
The Legal Defense Fund (LDF), an organization that focuses on racial and civil rights, along with an Alabama-based private law firm, filed a preliminary injunction to force Newbern, a town of about 133 people, to hold elections and allow its citizens to vote for the first time in years.
The town, about an hour and a half away from Montgomery, captured national attention last summer, after white officials had refused for three years to allow Patrick Braxton, the first Black mayor in Newbern’s history, to exercise his mayoral duties.
Newbern is about 80% Black and 20% white, but the town’s leadership, with the exception of Braxton and his town council, has been majority white for years. The defendants in the lawsuit, including the previous mayor and council, have refused to hold elections.
“[They’re] so stuck in their ways and don’t want nothing else for the town. They just want it to stay the same,” Braxton said last year. “I hope they break and just go ahead and release everything to me. If not, we’ll just go to court.”
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Angélica Sorrosa Alvarado is the curator, manager, tour guide, administrator, caretaker and cleaner at the Museo de las Culturas Afromestizas (Museum of Afro-Mexican Culture) in Cuajinicuilapa. “I am alone,” she says, gesturing at the cavernous halls of the museum, which she describes as “one of my proudest achievements”.
In the Costa Chica region, which is home to Mexico’s largest population of African-Mexicans, the museum is unique in the country. When it opened 25 years ago, it was heralded as recognition of the more than 2.5 million Afro-Mexicans in a country that had long overlooked them.
Now, however, the museum is now facing closure. Unpaid for 15 years and deserted by the founding committee who helped her create the space in 1999, Alvarado, 62, is fearful that she will soon have to retire. “They all left and now I am old and alone here,” she says.
Inside, painstakingly detailed dioramas depict white men flogging naked black figures, enslaved people who were brought to Mexico from Africa by the Spanish conquistadors in the 16th century. Etchings show hundreds of black people labouring in silver mines and plantations, and drawings show bodies hanging from wooden gallows.
As the exhibits move through the years towards the present day, a powerful and resistant identity emerges. Brightly coloured murals show Afro-Mexican cowboys on horseback next to flamboyant masks of devil-dancers, which symbolise slave resistance. There are paintings of Vincente Guerrero, Mexico’s second president. Guerrero, who was of African descent, abolished slavery in 1829 – 36 years before the US.
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A new drought has left millions facing hunger in southern Africa as they experience the effects of extreme weather that scientists say is becoming more frequent and more damaging. Associated Press: Extreme drought in southern Africa leaves millions hungry
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Delicately and with intense concentration, Zanyiwe Ncube poured her small share of precious golden cooking oil into a plastic bottle at a food aid distribution site deep in rural Zimbabwe.
“I don’t want to lose a single drop,” she said.
Her relief at the handout — paid for by the United States government as her southern African country deals with a severe drought — was tempered when aid workers gently broke the news that this would be their last visit.
Ncube and her 7-month-old son she carried on her back were among 2,000 people who received rations of cooking oil, sorghum, peas and other supplies in the Mangwe district in southwestern Zimbabwe. The food distribution is part of a program funded by American aid agency USAID and rolled out by the United Nations’ World Food Programme.
They’re aiming to help some of the 2.7 million people in rural Zimbabwe threatened with hunger because of the drought that has enveloped large parts of southern Africa since late 2023. It has scorched the crops that tens of millions of people grow themselves and rely on to survive, helped by what should be the rainy season.
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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.
