Commentary by Black Kos Editor JoanMar
I’m not one to throw out the baby with the bathwater. In the fight for racial justice, we need allies and sometimes our allies get it all wrong; not out of malice, mind you, but out of profound ignorance. And sometimes, as all humans are wont to do, they just plain misspeak. Whatever the motivation, when our friends get it wrong, we must call them out — not in anger or with condemnatory language — but call them out we should...and we will.
Take the case of Ron Perlman for example:
As a white man, you’d think that Mr. Perlman would be lecturing his fellow white men and calling them to action, right? After all, if there’s one demographic we can hold responsible for the narcissistic incompetent’s presence in the WH, it is white men.
The gender gap in voting preference is not new, but it is at least as wide as at any point over the past two decades, according to exit polls by the National Election Pool, as reported by CNN. Women favored the Democratic candidate in their district by 19 percentage points (59% to 40%) while men voted for the Republican 51% to 47%…
As was the case in the 2016 presidential election, white men voted Republican by a wide margin (60% to 39%) while white women were divided (49% favored the Democratic candidate; as many supported the Republican).
I have absolutely no doubt that this ally meant well; no doubt that he didn’t intentionally set out to insult Black voters, but his tweet exposed a connecting theme to a prevailing narrative. Here’s a recently banned Kossack with the blatantly racist version of Ron’s tweet:
Every informed citizen should know by now that the “black voters” (Please google: “black vote 2016”) are the reason Hilary Clinton lost the election, and as well as why their country is dying by way of Trump. If it turns out we actually survive it will be a very close call and everyone who has suffered under this fascist regime is due, in part, to the “black voters” of 2016.
So, uh, yeah… the “most loyal base — black voters” has totally fucked you, me and all of the democrats these past 3.5 years.
Again, all you have to do is google “black vote 2016” and you will be at least a little bit informed.
Both posts are flavored with the same patriarchal sentiment and with the same expectation that it’s up to Black folks to save the day. Both lazy racists and well-intentioned allies seem to agree on this one point: if Black folks had only come out in greater numbers Hillary would have won. If we just come out in great numbers come Nov. 3 The Damn Murderous Fool (thanks Kev) will lose.
There’s a history to this, you know. For over 400 years Black people have been giving to, and rescuing, and spoiling an ungrateful nation and it has not been enough. It’s not enough that for generations our fore-parents toiled from sun-up ‘til sundown to build the American empire for free. It’s not enough that the separation of Black families was the easiest and surest way to replenish depleted coffers caused by mismanagement and extravagance. An economy built on the free labor of generations; on the blood, sweat, and tears of Black folks and it’s still not enough. Now here again, in 2020, we are being tasked with the thankless job of saving the country from the racist actions of racists and racist sympathizers.
In 2016, of the over 250M eligible voters, approximately 140M bothered to exercise their right to participate in the electoral process. The vast majority of those who stayed home were white. Blame them for trump. Of those who voted, 63% of White men voted for the narcissistic con artist from Queens, New York. Why are white men given a pass? Blame them for the 180,000+ innocent Americans dead from COVID-19. Appeal to them to do the right thing...if you can. A mindblowing 52% of white women voted for a man who openly bragged about sexually assaulting their sisters. Blame them for all the trauma visited on little Brown children at the border. Seniors voted 53-47 for the vulgarian; blame them for the daily psychological torture of watching the occupant so blatantly misuse the office of the presidency. As to white evangelicals, those holier-than-thou folks? A whopping 81% of them went for the twice-divorced, pornstar-humping, daughter-lusting snake oil salesman. Blame them for breathing oxygen into hatemongers.
No, we are not surprised that when racists cast their jaundiced eyes around for someone to blame for today’s misery, they would land on Black folks. It is as it has always been...except, that we are no longer having it. Not this time. We’d advise that you remove the beam from your own eyes before you come for us. We know what we’ve got to do. Do you?
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NEWS ROUND UP BY DOPPER0189, BLACK KOS MANAGING EDITOR
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A group of athletes led by NBA star LeBron James will roll out a multimillion-dollar program in the next few weeks to recruit poll workers in heavily Black electoral districts for November’s election, a person familiar with the plans said on Monday.
More Than a Vote, a group of prominent athletes fighting voter suppression, will collaborate with the NAACP Legal Defense Fund on the program in a dozen states, including battlegrounds such as Georgia, Michigan, Florida and Wisconsin, where disenfranchisement affects Black voters, the source said.
The New York Times first reported the effort, which will recruit young people as poll workers and include a paid advertising program and corporate partnership to encourage employees to volunteer as poll workers.
A shortage of poll workers to staff in-person voting sites amid worries about the coronavirus pandemic has led to dramatically fewer polling locations in some states that held primaries earlier this year, including Georgia and Wisconsin. That led to long lines, hours-long waits and widespread confusion, particularly in hard-hit African-American communities that felt the brunt of the cutbacks.
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Racism is alive in our society. It lives in store aisles, discriminatory 911 calls, policing, the racial wealth gap, and asymmetrical government responses to communities afflicted by COVID-19. Through protest, diverse voices are boldly standing up to racial injustice. And they are expressing anger while doing it. This rage is not a distraction, nor is it destructive to American ideals. It is playing a crucial role, politically and morally, in helping us build a better country.
The purpose of rage is not to make white people feel guilty. Rather, it communicates the value of Black lives and egalitarian principles. Anger, in this way, is not antithetical to love. It expresses compassion for the downtrodden and the desire for a better world. Anger at racial injustice makes people eager to do something about it. We cannot suppress anger, nor should we dress it up in the garments of respectability politics.
The anger we are witnessing at Black Lives Matter protests is more than emotional identity politics. Protesters’ anger signals that Black folks have moral worth and should be respected. It says that while the system may not hold Black people in high regard, those risking psychological discomfort, infection, and arrest do. This anger dignifies Black children who might have begun to think that their skin tone was a death sentence. It proclaims that Black lives do, in fact, matter.
Anger further expresses how much the protesters treasure justice. In June, the author and activist Kimberly Jones argued for the necessity and power of Black Lives Matter protests, saying the nation is “lucky that what Black people are looking for is equality and not revenge.” It is easy to see this statement as a threat. But Jones is underscoring that Black people’s anger asserts the values we all claim to hold dear in a liberal democracy. Black people and their allies are simply striving, through their anger, to advertise these shared values of equality and the necessity of putting them into practice.
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The Republican National Convention has been all about using Black people to convince white people it’s OK to vote for a bigot. The Nation: We Need to Talk About the GOP’s ‘Black Friends’
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In between the lies and the fearmongering and the stories about having intimate conversations with Jesus that somehow don’t include healing the sick or helping the needy, the goal of the 2020 Republican National Infomercial has been pretty obvious. Republicans are doing everything they can to give white people “permission” to vote for a white nationalist bigot, Donald Trump.
Of course most white Republican voters don’t need permission to vote for white supremacy. They’re racist themselves and think being racist is just common sense. This convention has plenty for them. The RNC featured Abby Johnson, an anti-abortion activist who, in a recent YouTube video, said it would be “smart” for cops to racially profile her brown son. The RNC also featured Mark and Patricia McCloskey, the white couple from St. Louis who pointed weapons at Black Lives Matter protesters who were walking past their house. The McCloskeys warned America about the danger to “their” communities from “radical leftists,” like soon-to-be Missouri Representative Cori Bush.
The message is not subtle, but Donald Trump’s willingness to say the quiet part out loud is why so many racists love him. The irreducible core of his base is white people who think being openly racist and violent toward Black people is an inalienable right that has been taken from them by “cancel culture.” Trump gives these people a bullhorn, and they love him for it.
Kentucky AG Daniel Cameron — Youtube Screen Shot
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Africa has declared victory over a virus that once paralysed 75,000 children on the continent every year.
Four years have now passed since wild polio was last detected in Africa. After a year of rigorously evaluating polio data from all 47 countries in the WHO’s African region, an independent body of experts announced during a virtual ceremony on Tuesdaythat the continent was free of wild polio.
The magnitude of this achievement cannot be overstated. It should inspire confidence in Africa’s ability to overcome even the most formidable public health challenges.
How we got here is a remarkable story that shows what Africa can achieve when its nations unite behind a common goal.
In 1996, African heads of state committed to eradicating polio at a session of the Organisation of African Unity in Yaoundé, Cameroon. That year, Nelson Mandela launched the Kick Polio Out of Africa campaign, with the support of Rotary International. Africans answered his call, setting in motion historic levels of international cooperation. In 2000, the first multi-country synchronised polio vaccination campaigns reached 76 million children across 17 countries in west and central Africa. Two million of these children had never been vaccinated.
Volunteer community mobilizers (VCMs) hold flip charts used for educating parents about polio and other routine immunizations at a health center in Kano, Nigeria, on July 23. Andrew Esiebo/Courtesy of the U.N. Foundation
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Abena and Alex Horton wanted to take advantage of low home-refinance rates brought on by the coronavirus crisis. So in June, they took the first step in that process, welcoming a home appraiser into their four-bedroom, four-bath ranch-style house in Jacksonville, Fla.
The Hortons live just minutes from the Ortega River, in a predominantly white neighborhood of 1950s homes that tend to sell for $350,000 to $550,000. They had expected their home to appraise for around $450,000, but the appraiser felt differently, assigning a value of $330,000. Ms. Horton, who is Black, immediately suspected discrimination.
The couple’s bank agreed that the value was off and ordered a second appraisal. But before the new appraiser could arrive, Ms. Horton, a lawyer, began an experiment: She took all family photos off the mantle. Instead, she hung up a series of oil paintings of Mr. Horton, who is white, and his grandparents that had been in storage. Books by Zora Neale Hurston and Toni Morrison were taken off the shelves, and holiday photo cards sent by friends were edited so that only those showing white families were left on display. On the day of the appraisal, Ms. Horton took the couple’s 6-year-old son on a shopping trip to Target, and left Mr. Horton alone at home to answer the door.
The new appraiser gave their home a value of $465,000 — a more than 40 percent increase from the first appraisal.
Abena and Alex Horton talk to reporters about their experience with getting their house appraised for refinancing.
Screenshot: WTHR 13
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The video of Jacob Blake, a 29-year-old Black father of six, being shot seven times by Kenosha, Wisconsin, police hit the NBA and its players in waves this week.
"Why does it always have to get to the point where we see the guns firing?" LeBron James asked Monday night. He'd just won a playoff game, but couldn't enjoy it.
"My emotions are all over the place," he said, as if an apology was necessary.
The next night, LA Clippers coach Doc Rivers, who is the son of a police officer, choked back tears and said, "We keep loving this country, and this country does not love us back."
Wednesday afternoon, another wave swept through the Milwaukee Bucks' locker room before a first-round playoff game against the Orlando Magic.
"I came into the arena thinking I was going to play," one Bucks player said.
The next night, LA Clippers coach Doc Rivers, who is the son of a police officer, choked back tears and said, "We keep loving this country, and this country does not love us back."
Wednesday afternoon, another wave swept through the Milwaukee Bucks' locker room before a first-round playoff game against the Orlando Magic.
"I came into the arena thinking I was going to play," one Bucks player said.
Milwaukee's coaches went through pregame media sessions. Brook Lopez and Eric Bledsoe were among the players who warmed up on the court.
The reality of Black pain is breaking American sports' status quo.
Giannis Antetokounmpo — Milwaukee Bucks
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Nationwide protests this summer have brought much attention to a crisis as old as our country — the countless Black lives lost to police violence. But there is another invisible war that Black Americans are losing: the battle against Covid-19. To date, more than 5.7 million people have been reported to be infected with the disease in the US; more than 178,000 have died. And the country’s most vulnerable communities have had to bear the brunt of America’s failure to contain the disease.
According to a June Washington Post poll, one in three Black Americans personally knows someone who has died of Covid-19, compared to 17 percent of Hispanics and 9 percent of white adults who said they have lost a friend, acquaintance, or loved one to the disease.
Yet the disproportionate toll the coronavirus has taken on communities of color was easy to anticipate. From historical redlining and segregation that created environments where Black people are packed into densely populated housing “projects” to the wealth gap spurred by years of discriminatory practices to systemic health care discrepancies, it is clear that Black America has long been battling to survive.
For many Black Americans, the impacts of the pandemic are compounded. Many have one or more family members who have died of the disease on top of neighbors, friends, friends of friends, or others in their communities. Facebook feeds are full of posts announcing another death, another virtual funeral, another remembrance page.
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The father of Jacob Blake, a Black man who was shot by police in Kenosha, Wisconsin, says his son was left paralyzed from the waist down.
Blake’s father told the Chicago Sun-Times that he was told his son was shot eight times during the Sunday evening confrontation with police, which was captured on cellphone video and led to two nights of unrest in the city between Milwaukee and Chicago.
The father, who is also named Jacob Blake and who was driving from Charlotte, North Carolina, to Kenosha to be with his son, told the newspaper that he learned Sunday night that officers had shot his son eight times and that he saw the now-viral video of it online a few minutes later that appears to show police shoot his son in the back.
He said his son now has “eight holes” in his body and is paralyzed from the waist down, though doctors don’t know if the paralysis will be permanent.
Screen shot
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It is almost dizzying to count all the ways Rittenhouse appears to have broken the law on Tuesday. He allegedly twice drove across state lines carrying a firearm he was not legally permitted to possess. He then illegally brandished this firearm in the streets. He violated the Kenosha curfew that provided the basis for police to arrest protesters. He fled out of state after shooting three people. And, most obviously, he killed two protesters. The footage indicates that two—and possibly all three—of Rittenhouse’s victims were trying to disarm him.
And yet, almost as soon as video of the shootings emerged, conservative media began to defend Rittenhouse. They mocked Huber for using a skateboard to “attack a man packing a rifle.” Erick Erickson said Rittenhouse was “not the bad guy” because he “was firing on people who were attacking him.” Fox News guests asserted that Rittenhouse effected “vigilante justice” because he filled “a void” left by police. And all these claims built toward the inevitable conclusion: Rittenhouse didn’t commit first-degree intentional homicide; he didn’t even commit murder at all. He was merely defending himself against a pack of thugs hellbent on beating him, possibly to death, because he tried to keep the peace. In Tucker Carlson’s words: “How shocked are we that 17-year-olds with rifles decided they had to maintain order when no one else would?”
This narrative transforms Rittenhouse from an unstable killer to a Second Amendment hero. And you need only accept a few fictions to buy into it. First, you must believe that the protesters chasing down Rittenhouse and attempting to wrest his gun away were not trying to prevent further bloodshed, but simply to brutalize him. Second, you must agree that even if these protesters were trying to confiscate Rittenhouse’s gun, they were wrong to do so, because they were the vicious lawbreakers and he was the vulnerable peacekeeper. Third, you must embrace a definition of self-defense so capacious that it allows a gunman to legally shoot a civilian dead when that civilian is trying to seize a weapon the gunman has used to kill someone. Or, as the New York Times’ Jamelle Bouie put it, “if someone is trying to stop you after you killed someone, you can continue shooting and killing in ‘self-defense.’ ”
It is much easier to accept the first two propositions if you are predisposed to believe that white people are more likely to uphold the law and Black people are more likely to break it. Like many protesters in Kenosha, Rittenhouse’s victims were white. But they were part of a diverse group that pursued the 17-year-old in an apparent effort to stop him from shooting more people. That group included many Black people, who were also imperiled when Rittenhouse tripped and fired his weapon indiscriminately. The claim that these protesters had a malign plan to assault or kill Rittenhouse, rather than disarm him, rests on the racist assumption that a white vigilante’s motives must be purer than a racially diverse group of demonstrators.
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Today’s Google Doodle celebrates the work of Alexandre Dumas, the French writer who penned swashbuckling adventure novels like The Three Musketeers and The Count of Monte Cristo. It’s The Count of Monte Cristo that has an anniversary today — its serial publication first began on August 28, 1884, making it a sprightly 136 years old — and that means we have an excuse to dive into the novel’s secret history.
The Count of Monte Cristo wasn’t just a book for Dumas. It was a revenge fantasy he wrote on behalf of his father, a Black general who fought in the French Revolution and was ultimately betrayed by Napoleon. The novel tells the story of one Edmond Dantès, a promising young man whose friends, jealous of his charisma and professional abilities, secretly betray him to have him locked up in prison. Dantès eventually escapes, becomes impossibly rich after digging up a buried treasure trove, and while in disguise as the Count of Monte Cristo, wreaks implacable vengeance on all those who have wronged him.
It’s a rich and satisfying story for anyone who has ever felt betrayed: This is how I’ll get mine if fate is just, you might think, seething. But Dantès’s betrayal bears a startling resemblance to the real-life story of what happened to Dumas’s father — only he never got his revenge.
Dumas’s father was also named Alexandre Dumas, but we’ll call him Alex here (his preferred nickname) to distinguish him from his famous son. As chronicled in Tom Reiss’s excellent The Black Count, Alex was born in 1762 in what is now Haiti, the son of a white French count and a Black enslaved woman. The French empire offered legal protections to mixed-race people at the time, so at age 14 Alex made his way to France and enlisted in the army. Charismatic and principled, he shot up through the ranks as the revolution caught fire.
Alexandre Dumas — Screenshot Google Doodle
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WELCOME TO THE FRIDAY’S PORCH
IF YOU ARE NEW TO THE BLACK KOS COMMUNITY, GRAB A SEAT, SOME CYBER EATS, RELAX, AND INTRODUCE YOURSELF.
