Commentary by Black Kos editor JoanMar
A white woman claims a Black child is trying to steal from her and her child. As a civilized adult, she has a few options to deal with the problem — if one existed outside of her fetid imagination, that is. Even if one were to accept the worst possible interpretation of what she claims, this was not a life-threatening situation. Mom, and we’ll allow that she may have been a bit anxious to reunite her baby with a missing toy, could have simply asked the little boy to return it. Or, she could have engaged the other parent/guardian and asked that they facilitate the return of the toy. But Miz Shiloh Hendrix, blinded by hate and motivated by racism, chose neither of those two deescalating options. Instead, she launched a racist attack against the Black child and proceeded to attribute the worst possible motives to him. When challenged on her hate filled rant against a child, Miz Karen doubled down. She was unapologetic. She loudly and proudly claimed her racism with her whole chest.
But that’s not the worst thing about this one incident — an incident that is sadly illustrative of where we are in the age of emboldened trumpism. This woman who so disgustingly abused a Black baby over a toy is being richly rewarded for her gross, full-frontal attack on that defenseless child. Racists near and far heard about their white damsel in non-distress and crashed the gates in their haste to show their support, contributing close to $1M in mere days!
An online fundraiser purported to be for a woman in Minnesota who admitted in a viral video to calling a child the N-word at a public park has garnered more than $675,000 in donations, many of which came with comments espousing white supremacist views.
Many of the racist comments were posted by anonymous users or those using racist handles...
A white woman caught on camera verbally abusing a child over a toy and she’s not shamed, silenced, or shunned, instead she’s celebrated and rewarded. But then, racists are well known for their habit of celebrating cruelty. That’s just who they are and what they do.
Of course, this isn’t happening in a vacuum. The gun that Zimmerman used to kill Trayvon Martin went for a cool quarter million. Kyle Rittenhouse was feted and made into a star on the right-wing talk circuit. There was debate about offering Daniel Perry the keys to the city of New York, and after he was acquitted of the murder of homeless, food-deprived Jordan Neely, no less a person than the current VP had him as a plus-one at an event. And that’s just recent history.
We all know that historically, racists have been rewarded for their racism through the social, political, economic, religious, and legal systems that were designed to uphold white supremacy on one hand, while simultaneously robbing Black, Brown and Native people of their land, labor, rights, and humanity on the other. How else were slave masters and mistresses (never forget the mistresses) able to generate and preserve their wealth?
After watching Ryan Coogler's amazing film Sinners, it struck me that racists are a lot like vampires: they suck your life blood so as to sustain themselves. And, as our own mohistory often reminds us, just like vampires, they are then trapped in debilitating darkness themselves. Hatred imprisons its host. Did you notice that the woman had her own impressionable child in her arms as she spewed all that bile?
But wait! Some good news about Miz Shiloh accessing that million dollars! She may not see one red cent of it! And somehow, I think that will be so much more devastating to her than if racists hadn’t rushed to her side at all. That, to me, is deliciously satisfying.
Sending waves of fierce, protective love to the little one who was so violently unseen by an adult too blinded by hate to recognize his humanity and his innocence.
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News round up by dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor
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Three former Memphis officers were acquitted Wednesday of all state charges, including second-degree murder, in the fatal beating of Tyre Nicholas after he ran away from a traffic stop, a death that sparked nationwide protests and prompted renewed calls for police reforms in the U.S.
An out-of-town jury from a majority-white county took about 8 1/2 hours over two days to find Tadarrius Bean, Demetrius Haley and Justin Smith not guilty on all charges after a nine-day trial in state court in Memphis, which is majority-Black. After the jury’s verdict was read, the defendants hugged their lawyers as relatives of the former officers cried. Outside the courtroom, one relative yelled, “Thank you, Jesus!”
Martin Zummach, Smith’s attorney, told The Associated Press by text: “It’s easy to defend a good person. It’s nerve racking to represent an innocent man. “
The three defendants still face the prospect of years in prison after they were convicted of federal charges last year, though they were acquitted of the most serious charges then, too. Two other former officers previously pleaded guilty in both state and federal court, including Emmitt Martin, who defense attorneys blamed for the majority of the violence.
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Kiandria Demone, an entrepreneur and activist based in Atlanta, Georgia, with a growing online platform, has become known to, in her own words, “bully racists” off the internet or to stop doing whatever it is they’ve done.
So when followers across her platform began to share the story of Shiloh Hendrix—a white woman from Rochester, Minnesota, who has gone viral for launching a GiveSendGo campaign after footage of her targeting a young Black child with racial slurs on the playground surfaced—Demone looked into the matter. As she scrolled late into the wee hours, instead of seeing another potential opportunity to call someone out, she saw something much more sinister: a company profiting from hate speech.
“I was initially looking for things that were red flags as far as their compliance as a company,” she told theGrio during a recent phone interview. “I started thinking like, this isn’t going to be enough, because they’re just going to fix it and they’re going to keep operating.”
That’s when she remembered the fact that, “there’s a bank somewhere.”
“That’s who has some accountability,” she continued. “The bank can’t just do whatever they want to do. A payment processor they cannot just do whatever they want to do. They have a policy and they have regulations, there are laws, there are people who monitor that, there are people that the payment processor has to answer to.”
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President Donald Trump abruptly fired Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden on Thursday as the White House continues to purge the federal government of those perceived to oppose the president and his agenda.
Hayden was notified in an email late Thursday from the White House’s Presidential Personnel Office, according to an email obtained by The Associated Press. Confirmed by the Senate to the job in 2016, Hayden was the first woman and the first African American to be librarian of Congress.
“Carla,” the email began. “On behalf of President Donald J. Trump, I am writing to inform you that your position as the Librarian of Congress is terminated effective immediately. Thank you for your service.” A spokesperson for the Library of Congress confirmed that the White House told Hayden she was dismissed.
Hayden, whose 10-year term was set to expire next year, had come under backlash from a conservative advocacy group that had vowed to root out those standing in the way of Trump’s agenda. The group, American Accountability Foundation, accused her and other library leaders of promoting children’s books with “radical” content and literary material authored by Trump opponents.
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When Gibril Ali talks of “black gold”, he does not mean oil. He buys it in sacks, not barrels. He sells it to his customers in Nairobi, Kenya’s capital, from a metal shack. But in Kenya there is enough money in charcoal to make “big, big people” get rich by transporting it, he says.
Charcoal has fueled Africa’s urbanization. It is dense in energy and hard to regulate, much like cities themselves. Despite concerns about pollution, lost trees and illicit money flows, it refuses to go away. Nearly 200m Africans cook mostly with charcoal, including 27% of urbanites (see chart). The share has grown since 1990, offsetting the falling use of firewood. If there has been an African energy transition, it is from one kind of wood fuel to another.
The appeal of charcoal is its convenience. By weight it contains nearly twice as much energy as the wood from which it is made. That makes it easier to transport, helping megacities to outgrow their sketchy infrastructure. In Kinshasa, a Congolese metropolis of 18m people, almost everyone cooks with it. Never before, writes Jean-Baptiste Fressoz, a French historian, have cities reached such a size while relying so much on wood.
In the African countryside, tens of millions of people use earth kilns to make charcoal, outnumbering all the world’s coal miners. The process involves heating wood under low-oxygen conditions to remove moisture and volatile gases. Logs and branches are stacked into a pile, covered with grass and soil and burned for several days. This process yields between one and two tonnes of charcoal for every ten of dry wood. It emits much more carbon than transporting or burning it.
The wood often comes free, because producers harvest from their own land or from forests. Many are farmers who sell charcoal to traders when they need a bit of cash. Others are businessmen who bring in work teams from afar, dish out chainsaws, then pay off a landowner or chief. Locals often complain that outsiders take their trees. Vigilantes have attacked charcoal trucks in Kenya and Uganda.
The value of Africa’s charcoal trade is thought to be in the tens of billions of dollars, maybe more than Africans make from cocoa or coffee. The money trail often leads to soldiers or officials. The UN Security Council banned charcoal exports from Somalia because jihadists were making millions selling it to the Gulf, where shisha smokers prize the aroma of acacia wood.
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Food rations for a million people in Uganda have been cut off completely this week amid a funding crisis at the United Nations World Food Programme, raising fears that refugees will now be pushed back into countries at war.
The WFP in Uganda warned two weeks ago that $50m (£37m) was urgently needed to help refugees and asylum seekers fleeing conflicts in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, South Sudan and Sudan.
Uganda hosts Africa’s largest refugee population of 1.8 million, with 60,000 new arrivals in the last three months. Malnutrition rates had reached a crisis point, said the UN agency.
“Due to severe funding shortages, @WFP_Uganda has cut 1 million refugees entirely off from food assistance,” the agency announced via social media.
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