You will not erase us.
Commentary by Black Kos Editor Denise Oliver-Velez
Watching the latest attempts by the current administration to whitewash Charlie Kirk’s racism, to push anti-DEI policy, to attack Black women and Black men in positions of authority and to erase our history in this country and hemisphere means we have to step up our battle to ensure that they fail.
Peter (formerly identified as "Gordon")
None of us should ever forget the slogans shouted by our homegrown Nazi klan:
Hence we need to forcefully proclaim “You will not erase us”
For those of you who are still on TwitX (most Black folks did not migrate to Bluesky) Jazz the Professor posts Black History every day — yet only has 2,594 followers.
Rev. Graylan Scott Hagler recently wrote for Word In Black:
American History Is Black History: We Will Not Be Erased
The Trump/MAGA/white supremacist administration is ordering the removal of displays of information and depictions of the era of slavery in the United States. One of the most emblematic images of enslavement is the graphic and soul-shocking image called “The Scourged Back” that depicts the back of Peter Gordon, photographed circa 1863 in Louisiana.
It graphically shows his bare back with healed but visible keloid scars. The photograph of his scarred back yells loudly the horrors and brutality of enslavement. The wounds on Peter Gordon’s back were inflicted on him by his so-called owner.
The Whitewashing of America
To remove the histories and experiences of Black people in the U.S. is part of the educational pogrom enacted to “whitewash” America’s real history. To “whitewash” history is the political project to change the narrative of America and make that narrative into the blessings and triumphs of white people, while ignoring the blemishes, scars, and overcoming that is as great a part of America’s history as any other.
President Trump’s executive orders have sought to reframe the history of race and culture in America. Erica L. Green, a White House correspondent for The New York Times, describes the efforts to erase Black history
Head of Smithsonian’s Black Museum resigns amid Trump’s attacks
Kevin Young, the director of the National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC) in Washington, D.C., resigned as President Donald Trump stepped up attacks with plans to overhaul the Smithsonian’s landmark museums and cultural institutions.
In a statement, the museum said that Young wanted to focus on his writing and his position as poetry editor of The New Yorker magazine.
Young reportedly went on leave indefinitely on March 14 before the order was issued. Shanita Brackett, the museum’s associate director of operations, reportedly serves as the museum’s interim director.
Before serving as the NMAAHC’s director, Young was director of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, a New York Public Library division, and poetry editor at The New Yorker magazine.
At the Schomburg, Young presided over the archives of Harry Belafonte, Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee, Sonny Rollins and Fred Brathwaite, known as Fab 5 Freddy.
Since opening its doors under President Barack Obama in 2016, the NMAAHC has been one of the most popular museums among the Smithsonian’s 21 museums. The museum’s five floors are packed with artifacts, objects, documents, and interactive exhibits that tell the story of Blacks’ struggles and achievements from slavery to Jim Crow to the Civil Rights Movement to modern times.
I’ve been searching social media sites daily to see who is continuing to raise the issue of erasure. Found this well produced video — by a group I’m unfamilair with. Give it a listen:
I get up every morning at 3AM to begin to collect editorial cartoons like these to post to the daily Abbreviated Pundit Roundup series at 7AM. I hope more people will share them.
I hope more of us will push back, use the social media platforms you belong to, to ensure that our history does not disappear.
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News round up by dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor
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Our society has actively promoted two-parent families for decades, but today we’re in a particularly intense moment. We have books getting published like Get Married: Why Americans Must Defy the Elites, Forge Strong Families, and Save Civilization and The Two-Parent Privilege: How Americans Stopped Getting Married and Started Falling Behind. Social conservatives are talking about establishing a “Manhattan Project” for boosting birth rates and nuclear families, and some on the right are even musing about ending no-fault divorce.
Sociologist Christina Cross’s new book, Inherited Inequality: Why Opportunity Gaps Persist Between Black and White Youth Raised in Two-Parent Families, seeks to challenge these stories and solutions. Cross studies the outcomes of kids who grow up in two-parent Black families — a group of people she argues tends to “escape our collective imagination” — despite all the intense focus on single-parent households.
Cross’s work bucks an idea that has fundamentally shaped government policy since the Moynihan Report in 1965 through welfare reform and contemporary marriage promotion initiatives: that if Black families just got married and stayed together, racial inequality would largely disappear. Her research reveals that Black kids raised by two parents still struggle far more than white kids from two-parent families, and do only about as well as white kids who only had one parent at home.
The numbers are stark. Black children in two-parent homes were two to four times more likely to get suspended or kicked out of school than white children with both parents. When it came time for college, there was a 25-point gap between how many Black versus white kids from two-parent families actually enrolled. By their mid-twenties, Black young adults from these families were three times more likely to be unemployed than their white counterparts.
Despite representing half of all Black children in America, these two-parent Black families have been virtually ignored by researchers — just 2 out of 163 family structure studies published in leading journals between 2012 and 2022 examined their outcomes. Cross and senior correspondent Rachel Cohen Booth discussed the hidden costs of America’s marriage promotion spending, the research gaps that have allowed myths about Black families to persist, and why even two-parent Black households can’t escape structural racism. This conversation has been lightly edited and condensed.
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Former Washington Post columnist Karen Attiah revealed the publication’s true reason for firing her by posting the termination email she was sent. Attiah wrote that she posted the email to clear up misinformation that one of her posts, in which she quoted a racist comment made by Charlie Kirk, was what led to her termination.
”A narrative that has taken hold is that I was fired for mentioning Charlie Kirk’s views on Black women,” Attiah wrote on Substack. “And because I care about the truth, and even though this letter is already public, I wanted to clear things up myself.”
In the letter, which she shared on her Substack, Washington Post’s human resources chief stated that her posts on social media following the murder of Kirk “violate The Post’s social media policies, harm the integrity of our organization, and potentially endanger the physical safety of our staff.” According to Attiah, she was fired via email and did not have a conversation with her employer when the decision was made.
The termination letter cited multiple “public comments,” and the examples used were two posts on Bluesky where Attiah wrote, “Refusing to tear my clothes and smear ashes on my face in performative mourning for a white man that espoused violence is… not the same as violence,” and “Part of what keeps America so violent is the insistence that people perform care, empty goodness and abosolution for white men who espouse hatred and violence.”
Attiah was fired from the legacy newspaper on September 11, and posted her response on Substack on Monday, which was titled “The Washington Post Fired Me – But My Voice Will Not Be Silenced.” She had been on the Opinions team at The Post for 11 years, and worked as the Global Opinions Editor before becoming a columnist. While at The Post, she won the 2019 George Polk Award and was selected as the 2019 Journalist of the Year from the National Association of Black Journalists.
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People in parts of the Angolan capital, Luanda, are still afraid to talk openly about what happened in July when protests brought part of the city to a standstill and disturbances rocked other provinces too.
What began as a call among taxi drivers to come out against the jump in the price of fuel turned violent over three days with at least 30 people losing their lives and thousands subsequently arrested.
Roads were blocked with burning tyres, shops were looted and clashes erupted between demonstrators and police.
It was one of the most significant waves of protest since the end of the civil war in 2002.
In the run-up to oil-rich Angola marking 50 years of independence from Portugal on 11 November, the demonstrations highlighted continuing concerns about poverty and inequality.
In neighbourhoods where the demonstrations were strongest, few people are willing to speak openly, worried about reprisals or persecution in light of the numerous arrests during and after the protests.
"Things may have got a little out of control, but we needed to make that much noise to wake up those in power," a 24-year-old Luanda street vendor, who wanted to remain anonymous, told the BBC.
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Voices & Soul
“… There are so many things I want to tell you, I want to tell you about the years of abuse, I want to tell you how they break a man to confess to killing God, how they can make you confess to crimes committed by ancestors twenty years ago…” — Justice Putnam “I Have No Mouth”
by Black Kos Editor, Justice Putnam
I was mining some old manuscripts again and came across this prose piece I wrote when a dry drunk from Texas was running things. It still resonates.
JP
“Like the wind crying endlessly through the universe, Time carries away the names and the deeds of conquerors and commoners alike. And all that we are, all that remains, is in the memories of those who cared we came this way for a brief moment.”
-- Harlan Ellison
“I Have No Mouth, And I Must Scream”
“Mes den hep tavas a-gollas y dyr”
From the Cornish, “the tongueless man gets his land took.”
--Tony Harrison
“National Trust”
I Have No Mouth
by Justice Putnam
I had to, don’t you see? You’d do the same if you were in my place, and a lot sooner too! I’d tell you if I could, but as you can see, one of the conditions of my release is that my mouth has been surgically removed.
I just couldn’t take it anymore. I couldn’t take standing for hours, the threats of beatings. Oh, they beat me, for sure. Early on the beatings were constant, so much that you expected them, so a mere threat was enough for some of us to literally piss our pants. I couldn’t take being forced awake after just a few seconds of sleep in seventy hours? Or was it a hundred? Did I sleep only an hour ago?
Don’t you see? This is what they have done to a man! I have lost all sense of time, a minute is a year and a year is a mere minute! Damn! Why won’t you listen to me? I’m blinking my eyes in Morse code! If you would just listen, you’d see that I am talking to you!
The first time they let me see the sky was after five months of darkness! They let me see the full moon, I only know this now, but at the time I thought it was the sun at noon! It was that bright and blinding and painful.
There are so many things I want to tell you, I want to tell you about the years of abuse, I want to tell you how they break a man to confess to killing God, how they can make you confess to crimes committed by ancestors twenty years ago. I want to tell you about why I chose to have my mouth removed so I could go home.
In fact, I planned this long ago. That’s why I taught myself Morse code. I started to teach myself sign language, but I was caught and isolated for another year and a half, or was it longer? Damn it! This is what they do! I see now on all the legal documents how long I was isolated at different times during my imprisonment. A year one time then out for four months, isolated for two years and then out for only three weeks, then another year long isolation.
It went on and on and on like that. So I taught myself how to blink my eyes in Morse code because I knew they would remove my mouth! I know they are fighting a war and wars are messy. I knew I had a story to tell and I would tell it, no matter what! If you would just listen, I’d tell you one.
In fact, I was not even a soldier. I only drove some soldiers to an airport in my cab! I even had the paperwork to prove it! It was that paperwork that convicted me, I see. The new laws they passed said I helped those soldiers by driving them to the airport.
Why won’t you listen to me? It’s so obvious! Look! Dot, dash, dot! Damn it, and all that follows! Someone has to know Morse code, here! Why won’t you listen to me? I’m looking right at you! Listen!
"Hey Sarge," the young reservist called to the military contractor, "look at that one there."
"Yeah," the military contractor, replied, "that one just got out of iso this morning and is being prepped for another cycle in a day and a half."
"But Sarge?" the young reservist asked, "what’s with his face?"
"That was one of the earlier ones we picked up," the military contractor informed, "the worst of the worse. After a while these little mama’s boys admitted to anything we wanted, which proved that they were capable of anything. But we also got tired of hearing day after day how they did this or they did that just so’s they can go home to their mamas. So we had one of our plastic surgeon contractors do a number on these slime ball’s mouths!"
"But what’s up with the eyes?"
"Oh, that!" the military contractor laughed, "one of our company’s division vice presidents for procurement made that call. Since we were moving these slime balls from one prison to another and we didn’t want them to know where they were; and also since all of them would be in isolation, it was decided it was more cost effective to just sew their eyes shut. Some of them don’t even know, they look around just like they can see, just like that one!"
"When does this one go back to iso?" the young reservist was looking at the prisoner’s chart.
"A day and a half." The military contractor replied.
© 2007 by Justice Putnam
and Mechanisches-Strophe Verlagswesen
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