Voices & Soul
by Black Kos Editor, Justice Putnam
When the Department of Education misspelled W.E. du Bois’ name back during Trump’s first foray in the destruction of the natural order, it was emblematic of a more systemic problem inflicted on the body politic, how entrenched opinions about race are predicated on a lack of knowledge and facts, knowledge and facts as basic as the spelling of a great man’s name.
I’ve heard it argued that political change takes time. I’ve heard we may never see the results of our activism. I’ve heard it argued that the irrevocable change of rocks being worn away by the crashing of the sea is the result of our actions, it may not happen in our lifetime, but change will indeed occur.
But what happens when the rocks need to be smashed with sledge hammers, that change and freedom in the future mean little when folks are suffering now? Will we continue to accept this safety in incrementalism? What happens when the gates need to be crashed and the walls of oppression need to be made to tumble down, now?
While waiting for Time to wear away oppression, those living in oppression remain oppressed.
When american Latino families are murdered by white nationalist vigilantes and forgotten, when black men and women are incarcerated in astronomical numbers, when income and housing inequality ravage communities, when segregation is not only prevalent, but surging, incrementalism is somewhat then, like a nice shiny ribbon on a gift. The package looks nice, but the hate contained within is not negated by the beauty of the bow.
There are no better angels at a postcard lynching.
We are living in a “gish gallop” of outrages. MAGA hopes to overwhelm with a constant onslaught of illegal dictates meant to divide and conquer. ActBlue is being accused of improper donations while Trump fetes Chinese and Russian oligarchs at his Perv a Lago money laundering headquarters, at a million bucks a pop. And now we learn Trump has ordered the Smithsonian to send back exhibit items to their rightful owners and dismantling them, starting with the 1960 Woolworth’s lunch counter sit-in exhibit.
Cultural and Ethnic Cleansing is a blitzkrieg. Incrementalism is “Peace in our Time.”
There has never been a better time to go Woke. The Time is Now.
This is how the story begins: a touch, a bump, a hot mouth,
jostled skin in an elevator, escalation, tension, even just the illusion
of trespass. It always seems the smallest contact triggers the fire,
the tip of a match struck along the lips of containment.
~
For a while, my sister and I thought the world had no color
until the 1960s, convinced that old movies and photos were true
representations of history, whole stories; that color came
between cartoons and Civil Rights and long before then the world
was two-toned, light and dark, sometimes with flecks or aberrations
in the corners. Upon seeing pictures of our parents both black-
and-white and in color, we asked: What changed? Upon seeing pictures
of Greenwood, both beautiful and burned, I ask: What stories
have I been taught to trust?
~
There are three parts to a ghost story:
The Specter—planes in the sky,
dynamite dropped on a Black crowd,
a white mob, a machine gun expelling
bullets, American flag high behind it,
fire and smoke in its wake, a long march
past husks of burned-out churches,
eight days of interment of Blacks
by the thousands, loops of litigation
spraining the language of massacre into
"riot," insurance claims lost in the litter
of legal destruction.
~
The Apparition—a flat view of Earth
has always made Africa look little,
smaller than Greenland; a flat view
of Earth is what schools only had
for us to see ourselves; a flat view
of us pinned back prosecution and
punishment for the mapmakers,
cartographing themselves out
of the haunted history lying
flat beneath the earth.
The Murmur—we know a lie when it unfurls
in our hands, how consequences char
irregularity into myth; we know our hauntings
because a family keeps its ghosts close; we know
pain, we know plunder, we know echoes.
~
This is how to listen to a ghost story:
Remember that there are no better angels
above or beneath our skies, above or beneath
charred churches and trees. These angels,
their halos falling augustly, deciduously.
stories strapped to a branch lost against the forest.
Heaven is a Black place, a smoky silhouette
the tintype tattles on. Heaven is full of anomalies.
How do I explain my homesickness for this?
I can't stop dreaming about flames
in my mouth, in my palms and eyes at all times.
I can't stop crying for Tulsa and a hundred years
spent dirt-deep and silent beneath our feet.
~
This is how to cross-examine a ghost: Rouse it with radar
and listen to the echoes of old fire. Sometimes it takes a mouth
to pronounce what the earth has been whispering for generations.
sometimes flecks in the corners of photos are more
than aberrations, the black and white of it lying in plain sight.
~
This is how to give a ghost a home: Touch the dirt
outside your house and ask how different it might feel
in Greenwood, ask if the sunken anomalies push
against the surface around town, if those anomalies
still burn down deep, if the anomalies are still hot
in their mouths, their tongues boxes of un-struck matches.
It's the silence of fire that remains spectral, substituted
for memory—but no more. Little Africa pounds
heart-first against the dirt and emerges tongue, tooth,
and throat in bonfire, heritage unmortgaged,
a ghost-girl beating back the map of her unmaking.
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News round up by dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor
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Senate Banking Chair Tim Scott (R-S.C.) has spent years boosting a federal program to support minority-owned businesses. President Donald Trump’s administration dismantled it in a matter of weeks.
Scott, along with other Republicans, was integral to congressional efforts to permanently authorize the Commerce Department’s Minority Business Development Agency, expand its services into rural areas and leverage the program to help minority-owned businesses during the Covid-19 pandemic.
Now, the program, which funds grants to business owners and provides technical assistance, support and mentorship, has had 100 percent of its staff, about 50 people, placed on administrative leave or redistributed within the Commerce Department, according to a Commerce employee and a Democratic staffer granted anonymity to discuss personnel matters.
For years, Scott has prioritized efforts to expand access to capital and economic mobility for underserved communities, like the one he says he grew up in, and minority businesses, like his own Main Street insurance agency. The MBDA dates back to the Nixon administration and was one outlet for this mission. But Scott has stayed silent publicly about the gutting of the agency.
“They are watching this happen, and they are doing nothing. That’s cowardice. And it cuts especially deep when the people you once believed were your champions turn their backs in silence,” the Commerce Department employee said of Scott's and other Republicans’ silence on cuts to the program.
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As he does one day each month, the Rev. Robert Turner hit the road from his home in Baltimore last week and traveled — on foot — 43 miles (69 kilometers) to Washington.
He arrived by evening on April 16 outside the White House, carrying a sign that called for for “Reparations Now.”
This time, Turner added another stop on his long day’s journey — the National Museum of African American History and Culture.
Turner knelt in prayer and laid a wreath at the entrance of the museum in support of its mission, which incurred President Donald Trump’s criticism alongside other Smithsonian Institution sites. In a March 27 executive order, Trump alleged that Smithsonian exhibits had disparaged the nation’s history via a “divisive, race-centered ideology.”
Turner wanted to show support for the museum, which opened in 2016 and received its 10 millionth visitor in 2023. The museum tells the history of chattel slavery, Jim Crow segregation and its lingering effects, but it also highlights the determination, successes and contributions of Black Americans and Black institutions.
“I laid my wreath down there to show solidarity with the museum and the history that they present every day,” said Turner, pastor of Empowerment Temple African Methodist Episcopal Church in Baltimore.
National Museum of African American History and Culture
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Earlier this month I was in Antananarivo, Madagascar, where I checked out the British-Nigerian artist Yinka Shonibare’s first major solo exhibition in Africa. For this week’s newsletter I caught up with him about the landmark show, and learned a lot about the growing Malagasy art scene.
Madagascar is not a country that figures prominently in media – western or otherwise (beyond the children’s film) – and as such it was difficult to know what to expect. I hadn’t imagined an opportunity to visit, and so Fondation H’s invitation to the capital to explore the art scene felt once in a lifetime. It was certainly a long way to travel for an exhibition: from London, with a stopover in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, the journey topped 15 hours, though as soon as I landed in Madagascar I was instantly taken by its lush, grassy plains and mountainous topography.
Arriving in Antananarivo, commonly referred to as Tana, is a visual feast, remarkable for its colour and vibrancy; the cityscape is defined by its rugged terrain, where houses of red, yellow, terracotta and turquoise resemble a hillside mosaic. At the heart of this beautiful city is the building of Fondation H, the Malagasy art foundation founded in 2017 to address the country’s lack of public modern art institutions, despite its reserve of creative talent. The building itself, a palace of red stones, was constructed under the French colonial administration but was renovated with old Malagasy techniques of tile-making, parquetry and carpentry.
Since opening its doors in 2023, Fondation H has hosted residencies and exhibitions from more than 30 African artists. And, as I learned on my trip, the foundation’s building welcomes 15,000 visitors a month, 90% of those being from Madagascar with a large proportion under the age of 25. This is a demographic composition that would be the envy of any art institution, particularly as galleries around the world fight to attract young, local audiences. In a country that lacks any big art schools, the foundation has presented a unique opportunity to invest in Malagasy youth through the organisation of training sessions and workshops, and provided a space for Malagasy artists to be judged by the international art market.
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