Racism is a part of how Puerto Rico and Puerto Ricans are dealt with.
Commentary by Black Kos Editor Denise Oliver-Velez.
I’ve been tweeting about Puerto Rico like crazy, and trying to get folks to understand that the protests on the island are not just about some chat nasty.
Meanwhile, in NY I saw some old friends in a tweet about a spontaneous protest at Grand Central Station.
I spoke on the phone today with one of the participants and she said even the tourists joined in!
FYI: I am not Puerto Rican. I am a black American. I have been engaged in and with Puerto Rican struggles, and the communities here on the mainland and on the island for 50 years. I wrote about some of that history in 'Mapping Resistance': Activism past and present and the New York Young Lords, last Sunday. It goes beyond politics. It is also personal. (Yes, I know ‘the personal is political’)
My husband is Puerto Rican. A black Puerto Rican. I have cousins by marriage who are Puerto Rican. My religious godparents are Puerto Rican. I have Puerto Rican godchildren. I have worked as a medical anthropologist on Puerto Rican HIV/AIDS issues on the island and in New York City. I lived for many years in two predominately Puerto Rican areas of New York City. I introduce these observations today, simply to correct certain mistaken assumptions that often occur when I talk about Puerto Rico. People often assume I am Puerto Rican. I’ve had to correct journalists and authors, and folks who post pics to Instagram and even encyclopedia. I get it. But it pisses me off because somehow — the only people bothering to give a damn about Puerto Rico, or Puerto Ricans are assumed to be Puerto Rican or Latinx.
I say all this to say I can’t speak for Puerto Ricans. I can however quite comfortably state I have clear positions on, and experiences with the racist treatment of Puerto Ricans by the U.S. government, and by the appointed and now elected government on the island (as well as the appointed Fiscal Control Board — called La Junta) .
In ‘What Trump and Congress are doing to Puerto Rico is blatantly racist’ I discussed some of that history.
The “othering” of Puerto Ricans has been going on since the United States seized the island, and made it a colony. Though Puerto Rican is a nationality, and an ethnicity, in the eyes of many here on the mainland — they are not-white, Spanish-speaking and as a result, permanently part of an underclass, and subject to discrimination. Our current occupant in the White House has a long history of hating on Puerto Ricans, including housing discrimination and his attacks on the Central Park Five, not just his paper towel-throwing exhibition and blockage of funding.
What complicates this history, and the current situation is that it is simplistic to dub Puerto Ricans as “people of color” or “oppressed people of color” in leftist shorthand. It doesn’t deal with the hierarchies of power on the island, nor account for those Puerto Ricans who vote Republican, and are conservatives — and yes, racist. A glance at a photo of the Puerto Rican legislature, makes it patently clear, if you are looking, that the reins of power on the island are held by a predominantly white, male, elite. When I use “white” I’m speaking about Puerto Rican constructions of race, which don’t always align with those on the mainland. This power hierarchy reflects the hierarchy here on the mainland, a majority of the Senators are ‘white’ and elite (with a token black female arch conservative evangelical who beats the drum for gay conversion) as are the members of the house of representatives.
Grappling with questions of internalized racism — gets even more complicated. To be “black” in Puerto Rico is to be part of a culture that is celebrated, since much of the islands Caribbean culture is derived from its history as a slave-state, and at the same time discriminated against. Much of the music that is being heard and danced to throughout the recent protests, is the traditional bomba of Puerto Rico —it is Afro-Boricua.
The “folk music” label doesn’t clarify that the “folk” who made this music were black folks.
I had to grin when someone got on twitter to gently “suggest” an update to another tweet about bomba.
I’ve written about the African roots of Puerto Rican culture here in Black Kos, and for the rest of the site in the past — for example this history of bomba.
It is more difficult to address how ‘race’ and ‘class’ intersect on the island.
In “The Crisis in Puerto Rico Is a Racial Issue. Here’s Why,” Frances Negrón-Muntaner wrote for The Root, right after Maria:
Trump’s brief visit to Puerto Rico’s “best” neighborhoods also exposes another racial layer. Whereas elsewhere in the U.S., Puerto Ricans are collectively considered nonwhite, on the island, additional racialized power dynamics apply. Some of the poorest and hardest-hit areas like the municipality of Loiza are predominantly black. Assistance, however, has tended to come faster to less affected but more affluent and whiter cities like Guaynabo. Equally revealing, island politicians and government spokespeople are largely light-skinned Puerto Ricans.
For those of you who might want to explore this in more depth, I have two suggestions for further reading.
Silencing Race: Disentangling Blackness, Colonialism, and National Identities in Puerto Rico
Silencing Race provides a historical analysis of the construction of silences surrounding issues of racial inequality, violence, and discrimination in Puerto Rico. Examining the ongoing racialization of Puerto Rican workers, it explores the 'class-making' of race.
Winner of the 2014 Puerto Rican Studies Association's Frank Bonilla Book Award
"From former slaves' murmurs of discomfiture to the loquacious assertions of powerful men, this book listens hard to conversations about race. It resonates in multiple registers, forcing readers to pay attention not just to what people say, but to what they don't say. Rodriguez-Silva has transformed Puerto Rican history." - Alejandra Bronfman, University of British Columbia
"Ileana Rodríguez-Silva has produced a masterful account of racial formation in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Puerto Rico and its connections with slavery, emancipation, gender, and colonialism. Her multilayered analysis of the 'silences' surrounding everyday forms of racialization is original, fascinating, and persuasive." - Carlos Aguirre, University of Oregon
Countering the popular misconception that racial discrimination has largely not existed in Puerto Rico, Jay Kinsbruner’s Not of Pure Blood shows that racial prejudice has long had an insidious effect on Puerto Rican society. Kinsbruner’s study focuses on the free people of color—those of African descent who were considered nonwhite but were legally free during slavery—in order to explore the nature of racial prejudice in nineteenth-century Puerto Rico. In considering the consequences of these nineteenth-century attitudes on twentieth-century Puerto Rico, Kinsbruner suggests that racial discrimination continues to limit opportunities for people of color.
Following a discussion of Puerto Rican racial prejudice in historical perspective, Kinsbruner describes residential patterns, marriages, births, deaths, occupations, and family and household matters to demonstrate that free people of color were a disadvantaged community whose political, social, and economic status was diminished by racism. He analyzes the complexities and contradictions of Puerto Rican racial prejudice and discrimination, explains the subtleties of “shade discrimination,” and examines the profoundly negative impact on race relations of the U.S. occupation of the island following the Spanish American War.
Looking behind the myth of Puerto Rican racial equity, Not of Pure Blood will be of interest to specialists in Caribbean studies, Puerto Rican history, and Latin America studies, and to scholars in a variety of fields investigating questions of racism and discrimination.
I hope that some of you will explore these books. I’ll be posting more, in the future.
Before I forget — I’ve agreed to do a “twitter discussion” I sure hope some of y’all will join (and have my back)
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News round up by dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor
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One of the bombshell announcements during Marvel’s Hall H presentation at San Diego Comic-Con tonight was that the studio would be rebooting Blade, with True Detective and Luke Cage actor Mahershala Ali set to star.
The character was one of the first of Marvel’s superheroes to become a notable hit as a film: Blade was released in 1998, starring Wesley Snipes as the titular vampire hunter, a role he’d go on to reprise in 2002 for Blade II, and in 2004 for Blade: Trinity. Marvel reacquired the rights to the character, as well as Ghost Rider and the Punisher back in 2013. Marvel brought in Ghost Rider (which had been a pair of films starring Nicholas Cage), and the Punisher (another two films), for Agents of SHIELD, and its Netflix superhero franchise, starting with Daredevil, respectively.
Marvel didn’t release any additional details about when we’ll see Blade back in action, nor what form — at this point it could be either a series for Disney+ or a feature film. There are certainly plenty of opportunities for both in the coming years.
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Jermaine got a call from his sister that their mother, 65-year-old Sheila, who is bed-ridden, couldn't get out of her 15th floor apartment.
He rushed over to the scene. Jermaine first attempted the front door, but it was blocked by police.
"They said the elevators are not working. I said, 'No problem. I'll take the steps. I just want to make sure my mother- my mother is sick, she's bed-ridden. So I need to get up there," Jermaine said. "They were like 'we can't let you in.' I took it upon myself because that's my mother. There's no limits. That's my mother."
Earlier that day, Jermaine fell and cracked his hip on a set of stairs. His crutches sat next to him on the couch as he was being interviewed by Action News.
Despite his injuries, adrenaline took over. Jermaine started to scale the fenced-in balconies of the building, with wire cutters in hand. He was familiar with the layout of the complex because he had lived there in the past.
"When I grabbed a gate, at the top of the gate, there was a ledge. Then I could step on top of the ledge and reach up to the other gate, and keep climbing my way up," Jermaine said.
He did anything he could just to get to his mother."All for my mom's safety, period. I wasn't worried about mine at all. She can't get out of the bed or walk around so if there's a fire she needs help out," he said.
He made it all the way to his mom's balcony. Once there, Shelia saw her son outside her 15th floor apartment and assured him she was doing OK. She told him the fire was contained.
Jermaine said his mother did not yell at him for climbing up 15 stories, but, "She was more shocked. She's not surprised by the things that I do for her. She knows I'll go over and beyond for her."
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Soldiers have begun patrolling poor neighbourhoods on the outskirts of Cape Town in a controversial move aimed at curbing gang violence.
The South African president, Cyril Ramaphosa, signed off last week on the decision to send the army into the Cape Flats, a sprawling area of townships that is a legacy of the repressive and racist apartheid regime’s policy of separating white and non-white communities.
Bloodshed over the past seven months in mainly poor black and mixed-race areas has killed more than 2,000 people, almost half gang-related, provincial officials said.
The South African National Defence Force said it was deploying a battalion of several hundred soldiers with support elements to back up the police, who have struggled to contain the violence.
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When i open my phone, I am swamped by news,” says Matthew Stanley, a driver in Abuja, Nigeria’s capital. He scrolls through WhatsApp, a messaging service, bringing up a slick video forwarded into his church group. In a tone befitting a trailer for a horror film, the narrator falsely claims that Muhammadu Buhari, Nigeria’s Muslim president, is plotting to kill Christians. Mr Stanley squints at the tiny screen. “I think it’s fake news,” he says. “I need to check the source.”
If only everyone were so sceptical. WhatsApp, which has 1.5bn users globally, is especially influential in Africa. It is the most popular social platform in countries such as Nigeria, Ghana, Kenya and South Africa. In the West it is common for people to use multiple platforms such as Facebook and Twitter (see Graphic detail) but in African countries, where money is tighter and internet connections patchy, WhatsApp is an efficient one-stop-shop. The ability to leave audio notes makes it popular among illiterate people. But WhatsApp’s ubiquity also makes it a political tool.
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It started with angry words on a hot June evening. An off-duty police officer, in the park with his family, tried to stop a bunch of rowdy teenagers from fighting. Rocks were hurled, and then, according to an initial police investigation, the officer pulled his gun, firing a warning shot at the ground that ricocheted upward, killing an 18-year-old Ethiopian immigrant, Solomon Teka.
Teka’s death sparked an outpouring of anger and frustration, a rare display of acrimony by Israel’s 150,000-member Ethiopian Jewish community. The tragedy has also shed a spotlight on police prejudices and widespread racism that Jews of Ethiopian origin say they experience daily.
Two days after Teka’s death, in the hours after his family laid him to rest, tens of thousands of Israelis of Ethiopian heritage poured onto the streets, chanting “He was murdered only because his skin is black!” and holding banners drawing a parallel to the Black Lives Matter movement. Some protesters blocked main arteries, causing havoc on the roads, and cars were set on fire. In the July 2 protests, 60 people were arrested and nearly 50 police officers injured.
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Voices and Soul
by
Black Kos Poetry Editor Justice Putnam
I've been in a public spat with some white Trump voters here in my little burg in Southern Oregon, who want their state representatives to shoot state cops to prevent a vote on a cap and trade bill, who question the veracity of accounts of the Holocaust and who post numbers that show the "Holocaust" of white christians by Jews in the early Soviet Union were greater than by the Nazis in WWII, and who proudly crow when another "travesty" of the Black President is undone, so you can imagine their response when I gave a history of Sundown towns in Southern Oregon and the racist origins of the state as evidenced by the original state constitution. It's gotten so bad I introduce myself in town by my first name, really only used by family and a few childhood friends, because Justice triggers these bigots and Nazis, more than they are ever aware.
Holy the days of the prune face junkie men
Holy the scag pumped arms
Holy the Harlem faces
looking for space in the dead rock valleys of the City
Holy the flowers
sing holy for the raped holidays
and Bessie’s guts spilling on the Mississippi
road
Sing holy for all of the faces that inched
toward freedom, followed the North Star
like Harriet and Douglass
Sing holy for all our singers and sinners
for all the shapes and forms
of our liberation
Holy, holy, holy for the midnight hassles
for the gods of our Ancestors bellowing
sunsets and blues that gave us vision
O God make us strong and ready
Holy, holy, holy for the day we dig ourselves
and rise in the sun of our own peace and place
and space, yes Lord.
-- Larry Neal
"Holy Days"
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