From Black Kos editor JoanMar
If, like me, your soul yearns for a break from the incessant, unceasing, never-ending, cascading dumbfuckery and petty cruelties, then you’ll understand how happy I was to see and read our former president on the world stage. What a stark contrast! What a reminder of what statesmanship, dignity, class, intelligence, true leadership truly look like. Damn!
Cher: If I could turn back time …
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News round up by dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor
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Charlie Kirk supporters pushing anti-DEI and anti-immigrant rhetoric were escorted off Tennessee State University’s campus this week, raising alarm among advocates who say HBCUs are being deliberately targeted.
This confrontation came just a week after multiple HBCUs were placed on lockdown in the wake of Charlie Kirk’s murder, and only days after a highly politicized memorial service in Glendale, Arizona, led by the Trump administration.
The group, known as Fearless Debates, arrived around 3 p.m. carrying signs that read “DEI should be illegal” and “deport all illegals now.” TSU stated that the individuals were not affiliated with the school and had failed to seek prior approval, as required for campus demonstrations.
Campus police and staff quickly responded, removing the group from university grounds without incident. Moreover, TSU praised its students for remaining “professional and respectful” throughout the encounter.
The Nashville NAACP condemned the group’s actions, calling them an “intentional effort to antagonize, disrupt, and instill fear in a space created to be safe, affirming and supportive of Black students.”
The civil rights organization urged other historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) to remain vigilant against similar provocations, warning that such rhetoric echoes “a long history of exclusion, racism, and systemic oppression.
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The history of this country is haunted by white men hunting down Black women because their flight, their freedom, and their refusal to bow threatened the whole architecture of white power.
And now, here we are again. Donald Trump, a racist convicted felon, has made Lisa Cook his obsession. She is a Governor of the Federal Reserve Board, the first Black woman ever appointed to that role, a position no white man in history has ever had to defend so fiercely just to exist in.
Trump tried to fire her. The courts told him no. He tried again. They told him no again. Twice defeated, Trump escalated. And now, like a slavemaster who cannot abide the idea of a Black woman out of his grip, he has dragged her case all the way to the Supreme Court, demanding Cook’s immediate removal.
Because he cannot — he will not — let the rulings stand. He cannot allow a powerful Black woman to defy him, to survive him, or outlast his fury. Like the slavemasters before him, Trump cannot sleep while the “runaway negress” remains beyond his grasp.
Why is he so fixated?
Because Lisa Cook embodies the one thing Trump cannot control: legitimacy. She has the credentials, the expertise, the history-making role. She is a Black woman sitting in one of the most powerful positions in global finance and is entrusted with decisions that move markets and shape economies. Her presence alone dismantles his myth that only white men like him can govern. Her survival after his assaults would prove that Black women cannot be so easily erased. And for Trump, that is a wound his ego cannot survive.
But why her? Why Lisa Cook and nobody else on the Board?
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Melissa Harris-Perry, Tiffany Cross, Joy Reid, Jemele Hill, Don Lemon, Marc Lamont Hill, Karen Attiah, Amber Ruffin, and others. Their departures were met with either silence or outright hostility, and they happened in an industry already starved of Black voices.
What ties these exits together is not coincidence, but a pattern. Again and again, when media executives reshuffle lineups or chase ratings, it’s Black journalists who are first on the chopping block. When controversies arise, it’s Black journalists who get scapegoated. When budgets tighten, it’s Black journalists whose platforms vanish. And when the ax falls, there is rarely a national outcry, rarely a wave of solidarity from peers, and rarely the kind of handwringing we see now for Kimmel. And unlike Kimmel, none of them got the grace of a suspension followed by a red-carpet return.
Melissa Harris-Perry’s departure in 2016 was one of the clearest examples. Her weekend MSNBC show wasn’t just another block of pundit chatter. It was a rare space where academics, activists, and grassroots voices shaped the conversation. She covered voter suppression, Black feminism, hip-hop, and the politics of respectability in ways no one else was doing on cable news.
When executives sidelined her, she said bluntly that she refused to be a “token, mammy, or little brown bobble head.” Her words landed like a thunderclap, and then the story faded. There was no national panic about the loss of intellectual diversity, no handwringing about free speech. Just silence.
Fast forward to Tiffany Cross in 2022.
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It’s a sight that will stop you dead in your tracks. Brown bodies covered in black oil from head to toe. Shining like onyx stones in the sun. Helmets adorned with horns curved upward, sometimes accompanied by red, bloodied mouths, never far from a drum with a hypnotizing beat. Whether you are terrified or intrigued, there’s only one place on earth where these cultural masterpieces walk freest in their element: Grenada. Welcome to the land of Jab Jab and Spicemas.
As a journalist and storyteller, I’d long heard about Spicemas in Grenada. I knew it as the weeklong cultural tradition during carnival season — a time for revelry, heritage, and economy-boosting tourism. With the best fetes (parties) on this side of the equator, stadium-packed concerts, and island-fresh food from restaurants to the street, thousands of visitors pour into Grenada in search of a good time. This year, as part of the Spicemas Press Posse, I joined them for multiple aspects of the celebration.
I’ve visited many carnivals over the years, but coming to Spicemas to see the men (and women) in black, known as jab jabs or “devils,” was on my lifelong bucket list. In a world where people are bombarded with advertisements to lighten and “brighten” their skin, where little Black girls in classic literature wish for bluest eyes, and children are still told not to play in the sun too long lest they tan, here in the universe of Grenada, the rules were reversed like Uno. The blacker the better.
I’d seen a jab before I knew what a jab was, back in 2000, in Jay-Z and UGK’s “Big Pimpin” video, as they floated across the TV screen through Hype Williams’ lenses on another Caribbean island (Trinidad).
His all-black skin and horns were striking.
As soon as I touched down in Grenada, I was on a mission to see jab jabs in motion, to understand the history behind how Blackness became supreme here, and to unpack the sometimes misunderstood tradition of dressing up as a jab. Was this really about devils or something deeper?
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Human rights activists have voiced outrage after Rio de Janeiro’s parliament approved plans to pay police officers a “wild west bonus” for “neutralizing criminals” during operations.
The move is a throwback to the mid-1990s when Rio’s then governor, Marcello Alencar, introduced similar legislation that caused an explosion of extrajudicial killings in the city’s favelas.
That law was scrapped in 1998, after three years of bloodshed, but on Tuesday lawmakers voted by 47 votes to 15 to revive the policy as part of new legislation relating to Rio’s civil police. Under the rule, civil police officers would be paid bonuses of between 10% and 150% of their salaries for capturing high-caliber weapons and “neutralizing criminals”.
The move’s supporters – many of them allies of Brazil’s former far-right president Jair Bolsonaro – argue that an iron fist was the only way to defeat the heavily armed drug factions who rule many of the city’s favelas.
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WELCOME TO THE FRIDAY PORCH
IF YOU ARE NEW TO THE BLACK KOS COMMUNITY, GRAB A SEAT, SOME CYBER EATS, RELAX, AND INTRODUCE YOURSELF.
