In the beginning…
Commentary by Chitown Kev
As 2025 begins and the new maladministration comes into power and media headlines appear, at first glance, to be imports from a surrealistic nightmare or two that I’ve had, apocalyptic scifi, and Salvador Dali paintings, I am doing all that I can to protect my mind.
I get it. All of a sudden, once-in-a-century catastrophes are a result of governmental policies of diversity, equity, and inclusion never mind that cis white men have been in charge of once-in-a-century catastrophes at least 20 times per every previous century and I might even have to include the brief portion of the 21st century that has already taken place in that assessment, including the current crisis taking place in California.
I’m...not supposed to know that.
Whatevs.
I’ve drastically altered my media diet. I still trust the legacy print media to give me the bare-boned facts of a particular story. I still haven’t closely watched any of the broadcast media since Nov. 7 other than about 10 minutes of Deadline White House just yesterday.
I’ve always had a penchant for the macabre, the weird, the somewhat scary (some of the first books that I’ve ever read were Mom’s Alfred Hitchcock Presents magazines). The very idea and possibilities of the United States buying Greenland is a little too macabre for me, though. I’ll stick with Poe, The Twilight Zone, Stephen King, N.K. Jemisin, thank you very much. Maybe I’ll even return from whence I came, that is, to Hitchcock. Or try my hand at writing my own stories of the grotesque.
Trying to feel more of a spiritual connection. I have been reading a lot of the Eastern traditions like Buddhism, Taoism, and Hinduism. I can throw some of the more esoteric Western traditions in there. The four anonymously authored Gospels do help. Anything but the dreck being passed off as religion by those now in power.
Now frankly, I am aware that all of this is a little...risky. Wonder-ful.
Much preferred to the slime and dreck that I can read and hear daily, which is dangerous for me and is intended to harm me.
I have already seen this danger among loved ones.
It’s not as if marginalized people don’t hear the dog-whistle and air-raid sirens meant for the majority.
Not only do we, the marginalized, hear them: some of us respond in the same way that straight white folks do. As intended.
That’s the first order of business for me in 2025: to protect my mind and thoughts.
By any means necessary.
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News round up by dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor
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Black physicians, who make up roughly 5.7% of the medical field, may become even rarer.
According to a new report published on Thursday by the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC ), enrollment in medical schools for Black and Hispanic students plummeted last year.
The report’s data shows that Black enrollees dropped by 11.6% while Hispanic enrollees fell by 10.8%. Even more troubling, the report found that the number of American Indians or Alaska Natives fell by 22.1%. Meanwhile, Native Hawaiian or Pacific Islanders fell by 4.3%.
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The far right is weaponizing a doctrine that granted rights and liberties in order to snuff out the citizenship of anyone who isn’t a white man. The New Republic: The GOP Is Rewriting What It Means to Be a Person
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It’s a chilling fact that the Project 2025 playbook written for Donald Trump’s administration is just a roadmap for the first 180 days. But based on the contents of that manual, the MAGA movement’s longer-term goals aren’t exactly a mystery. Still, if people want a broader sense of what’s coming down the pike in the months and years ahead, it’s instructive to look at litigation involving rights granted under a Reconstruction-era addition to the Constitution.
The Fourteenth Amendment was intended to extend full citizenship to formerly enslaved Black people, and it undergirds the right of all Americans to be treated equally under the law, no matter who they are or in which state they reside. Yet over the past year, conservatives have been increasingly open in their beliefs that pregnant women, transgender adolescents, affirming parents of trans kids, and immigrants are not legally entitled to the Fourteenth Amendment’s protections—all while arguing that fertilized eggs are. Republicans are using strategic litigation to effectively rewrite the Fourteenth Amendment to prioritize conservative white men and embryos above and beyond everyone else. They are warping something used to grant rights into a bludgeon to take them away, and are redefining who counts as a person in the United States.
“The selectivity about whom the Fourteenth Amendment ought to apply to is stunning,” said Khiara M. Bridges, professor at University of California at Berkeley School of Law. “It’s not demanded by the text of the Constitution at all. Instead, these are political choices that are being made, and they’re elevating certain individuals’ rights.”
Michele Goodwin, professor of constitutional law and global health policy at Georgetown Law, calls this process of picking and choosing “citizenship gerrymandering”—a process in which one’s rights are not necessarily granted by the Constitution but rather a live issue, subject to the whims—and more specifically, the prejudices—of state lawmakers and courts. The judiciary is already stacked with Trump picks, but in the next four years, it’s possible that half of all judges will be his nominees.
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A historic court ruling that found Belgium guilty of crimes against humanity during its colonial rule of central Africa has been hailed as a turning point that could pave the way for compensation and other forms of justice.
Belgium’s court of appeal ruled last month that the “systematic kidnapping” of mixed-race children from their African mothers in Belgian-ruled Congo, Rwanda and Burundi was a crime against humanity. The case was brought by five women who were removed from their Congolese mothers as small children between 1948 and 1953, and who now live in Belgium and France. Each was awarded €50,000 (£42,000) in damages.
The colonial-era policy affected thousands more métis, children of African mothers and European fathers whom imperial Belgium deemed a threat to the white supremacist order. Many lost all contact with their mothers after being moved hundreds of miles away to live in uncaring religious institutions with meagre rations and inadequate education.
The president of the Association of Métis of Belgium, François Milliex, said the decision “surely opens the door” to those seeking financial compensation for forced separation from their parents.
Milliex was moved to Belgium in 1960 aged 14, and was immediately sent to a children’s home with two of his brothers after being separated from his other siblings. The family was split although Milliex’s Rwandan mother and Belgian father were both alive, recognised and wanted to care for their children. He was stripped of his Belgian nationality the following year, leaving him stateless and unable to leave the country. As an adult he spent one month of salary in fees to regain Belgian nationality.
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If you sat down and created a long list of names of some of the most prominent Black people in entertainment, politics and so on, you’ll start to notice that many of them were born or raised in the state of South Carolina. We noticed it when we started searching for nominees for The Root 100 list in 2024. Since then, we have tried to crack the mystery of why are there so many Black superstars from this one troubled state.
People who aren’t from South Carolina may associate the state with racial trauma above Black Excellence: From way back to current day, the state has suffered more than its share of racially-charged killings: 2015 alone included the anti-Black massacre at Charleston’s Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, and that same year unarmed Walter Scott was fatally shot in the back by a white police officer who claimed Scott had tried to harm him. Between that and dismal statistics around education and incarceration, the state often has the odds going against it.
But people who hail from the state see it as much more. South Carolina was the first state to secede from the United States in 1860, leading to the start of the Civil War, but Black South Carolinians have helped to lead Black America to freedom. In the case of Walter Scott, a video showed what happened, protest emerged and the white officer who shot Scott was sent to prison. In other words, South Carolinians may have uphill battles, but they’re willing to take a stand up for what’s right and to fight for what they deserve.
“I believe a number of people have been driven to prove the skeptics wrong. For so many years South Carolina was considered one of the worst States when it came to education, incarceration rates and other key measures that are indicators of future success. Expectations were traditionally low,” businessman Walter Davis told The Root. “Self-determination and the desire to overcome the odds are important factors for many Black South Carolinians.”
Put even more succinctly by politician-businessman Stephen K. Benjamin: “Punching above our weight is simply what we do.”
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