And Now Things have Gotten a Bit More Personal
Commentary by Chitown Kev
Yesterday at Detroit’s Belle Isle marked the opening of a memorial for Detroit’s victims of the COVID-19 pandemic with a Memorial Drive in honor of the deceased.
Mayor Mike Duggan will join Gov. Gretchen Whitmer and Lt. Gov. Garlin Gilchrist to offer remarks to begin the Detroit Memorial Drive on Belle Isle to honor COVID-19 Victims on what is now the official Detroit Memorial Day. The celebration of life will comprise 15 funeral processions driving a dedicated route on Belle Isle and is the nation’s first citywide memorial to honor pandemic victims.
“Members of this community are grieving, it is important and necessary to provide an opportunity for families to celebrate those lost to this terrible disease and begin to heal,” said Mayor Duggan. “We are taking this time to reflect on what has been a very hard time for so many Detroiters and commemorate the lives of our neighbors who are no longer with us.”
“As we remember and honor all of those we have lost to this virus, we must not forget that COVID-19 is still very present in our state,” Governor Whitmer said. “Each life lost was a person who had a story: plans, dreams, and more life to live. We must all work together to slow the spread of this virus and prevent more devastation in our communities. We owe it to our families, our neighbors, the frontline workers, and to our fellow Michiganders to continue taking this virus seriously.”
More from the Detroit Free Press.
At 8:45 a.m. Monday morning, bells rang out across Detroit simultaneously in honor of the Detroiters whose lives were taken by COVID-19 since March.
And through a long, solemn day, numerous processions filled with cars and SUVs and led by hearses from area funeral homes, drove through Belle Isle.
Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, Lt. Gov. Garlin Gilchrist, Detroit Mayor Mike Duggan and the city's arts and culture director, Rochelle Riley, spoke at the opening of the memorial event. Riley headed the planning of the event.
"This city was hit harder than most. ... Last week, Michigan recorded our 100,000th case of COVID-19. We've now lost more than 6,750 Michiganders, more than 1,500 here in Detroit," said Whitmer, in her remarks.
"It's easy to get numb in this environment, but we must not just look at this as numbers. These are people. Men and women, fathers and mothers, daughters and sons, brothers and sisters, who had dreams and plans and a story. They weren't finished yet."
As I scrolled through the Free Press story I came across...a very familiar name.
A name that prompted a call to my mother.
“Yes, he’s one of us,” Mom said.
And then Mom described exactly how he’s related. (Describing the various ways in which people in my family were and are related can be a labyrinth in it’s own right.)
“Remember at the family picnic, that was him sitting right next to me and your auntie.”
Which...I have a couple of my pictures of Mom and my aunt sitting together at that family picnic but I was primarily focused on them at the time and not anyone else. But I remember him.
I said hello to him and introduced myself.
And then I remembered…
As the family picnic was reaching its end (and it was a picnic; our family reunions are really complicated affairs such that they are held once every five years, I believe), my cousin Miss E. asked us to get into groupings according to who was descended from what line of my great-great-great grandparents children.
So...it was possible that I had a picture.
And...
Second from the left in that group with the arms linked is my uncle, Alfred Lee Barrow, who passed due to COVID-19 on April 10, 2020. The young lady to the far right holding the big purse is Uncle Alfred’s older sister, my Aunt L. Picture taken on August 24, 2019.
I was always taught to respect and honor my elders; to cherish their lives here on Earth.
I have no type of understanding of the sort of heathens to would consider any elders merely to be a portion of a “herd” to be culled at the whim of a madman who can’t think of anything else to do in spite of having all of the resources to do something.
I wasn’t raised that way.
And while I didn’t know my Uncle Alfred all that well, it seems as if everything has become...a lot more personal now.
(Related: One mural. 900 faces: 'It didn't have to be this bad')
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NEWS ROUND UP BY DOPPER0189, BLACK KOS MANAGING EDITOR
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Camelback acts as an incubator that helps support innovative and diverse leaders, so Walker and his team go out and recruit investors and philanthropies to fund their startups. Only, for people who look like him, there is a blatant disparity. He ended up holding on to the email, never expecting to come back to it.
Two years later, it’s time. “We have to begin telling our story,” Walker, 39, tells me. “There are so many other ways in which systems have their knee on our neck, and we also have to start talking about those systems as well.”
The proverbial knee, of course, is the one that remained on George Floyd’s neck for 8 minutes and 46 seconds. But it’s also the one that has been crushing the hopes and dreams of Black leaders and entrepreneurs throughout America. Their lack of access to venture capital is well documented, but it turns out the charitable organizations and foundations that are supposed to lift up those who need it most are also operating with blinders on. Philanthropic research film D5 Coalition reported that 92 percent of foundation presidents and 83 percent of full-time staff members are white.
Research by Bridgespan Group and Echoing Green, an early-stage funder in social innovation that has been collecting racial and ethnic statistics on applicants to its fellowship program for decades, found significant disparities in its Black Male Achievement fellowship. These organizations were all trying to achieve the same goal to lift up the Black community. Yet the Black-led groups had 91 percent less net unrestricted assets than white-led groups.
“There may be people in the philanthropic sector, just as in other sectors, that feel like they’re not racist or not trying to be racist,” says Lyell Sakaue, co-author of the research by Bridgespan Group. “But I think, and Ibram Kendi’s book [How to be an Antiracist] is very clear about, it’s not enough just to not be racist. It’s really important to be antiracist if you’re going to work against the 400 years of institutional history that has produced our current reality.”
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No amount of A.I. can save white America’s soul, or restore Black Americans’ long-foreclosed-upon and deferred dreams. Slate: Racism Cannot Be Reduced to Mere Computation
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Tochi Onyebuchi’s “How to Pay Reparations” spoke to me. Its themes rang virtually every note of my twentysomething-year-long career. In 1998, I made my first digital footprint with a signed online petition in support of reparations for the Tulsa race riots. I endured countless run-ins with Oklahoma good ol’ boys while crisscrossing the state, working for candidates representing a perpetually losing political party. As an academic, I researched Black politicians and white racial resentment, and testified as an expert in federal court about cases of reverse redlining and housing discrimination. And as a historian of technology, I’ve chronicled—like Onyebuchi—the stories of hope and despair wrought by computing technology on Blackness and Black people, in the service of an ever-triumphant white racial order.
Later on in the article
Neither reparations nor racism can be reduced to mere computation. When building the algorithm, Wendy was told to “focus on the tangibles.” We can quantify and model things like historical income disparities. Education outcomes. Geolocations of valuable institutions like grocery stores, hospitals, or banks. But Redacted, Onyebuchi’s data scientist, said it best. When asked, “What did you feed the algorithm?” Redacted responded: “They expect you to say something like ‘racism. We fed the formula 400-plus years of racism.’ Like it’s that simple.”
Exactly. How do you measure the loss of an Anthony Crawford, lynched because he was an uppity Negro? How do you measure who Mrs. Mary Turner might have been or what the baby in her belly might have grown up to do and be were their lives not stolen by a lynch mob’s noose? How do you quantify being left behind? That’s what happened to the Negro former farmworker whom civil rights activist Roy Wilkins was thinking of when he wrote, “The computer is but one more signal that he has been kept at arm’s length while the rest of America pressed forward into the computer era.” But all of this—the violence, the economic toll, the psychological toll—is also nebulous and unquantifiable in the same way that we cannot account for, much less model, the moral turpitude, and the social, economic, and political loss of what might have beenpossible.
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On Friday, football players from Ole Miss at the University of Mississippi chose to walk out of their practice in protest of the racist brutality that still kills Black men in America, their action ironically falling on the 65th anniversary of Emmet Till’s heinous killing in Mississippi.
“Police Brutality and other injustices occurring across our nation have to end,” said the players in a statement about their protest. “Our team stands united to embrace our diversity and promote a culture of peace, equality, and understanding.”
Videos posted on social media show the student players gathered under a Confederate monument in Oxford, Mississippi and calling out various protests like “hands up, don’t shoot.”
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A high-profile lawyer, constitutional scholar and head of the Port-au-Prince bar was gunned down Friday night in Haiti.
Just hours before, he called for “another kind of country, another state” during a radio interview in which he addressed several controversial topics including constitutional reform, elections and the breakdown of Haitian institutions.
The fourth murder in less than 48 hours, the assassination of Monferrier Dorval has left Haitians shaken. Haiti has been plagued by rising insecurity and criminality, and has seen at least 159 people killed by gang violence since January, according to statistics compiled by the United Nations Integrated Office.
“How can assassins decide to end the life of such a personality, useful for the country?” Renan Hédouville, director of the national Office for the Protection of Citizens said in a statement. “What a huge loss for the country, the university world and the bar of Port-au-Prince.”
Jacques Letang, president of the Haitian Bar Federation and founding member of the Human Rights Office in Haiti address the U.N. Security Council in June on the deteriorating human rights situation in Haiti. — Screenshot
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Cities across the U.S. are pledging to plant trees and restore urban forests to combat climate change and cool off disadvantaged communities. Bloomberg: Can Planting Trees Make a City More Equitable?
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As the U.S. grapples with natural disasters and racial injustice, one coalition of U.S. cities, companies and nonprofits sees a way to make an impact on both fronts: trees.
Specifically, they committed to planting and restoring 855 million of them by 2030 as part of the Trillion Trees Initiative, a global push to encourage reforestation to capture carbon and slow the effects of global heating. Announced on Thursday, it’s the first nationwide pledge to the program, and additionally noteworthy because the U.S. group — which includes Microsoft Corp. and Mastercard Inc. — will focus on urban plantings as means of improving air quality in communities that have been disproportionately affected by pollution and climate change.
“We’re passionate about urban forestry and the goal of tree equity,” says Jad Daley, president and chief executive officer of American Forests, the longtime conservation group that’s helped organize the pledge. “It’s not just about more trees in cities. If you show me a map of tree cover in any city, you’re showing me a map of race and income levels. We see this as nothing less than a moral imperative.”
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Boseman has battled colon cancer since 2016 and died at home with his family and wife by his side, according to a statement posted on his Twitter account. He was 43.
"From Marshall to Da 5 Bloods, August Wilson's Ma Rainey's Black Bottom and several more, all were filmed during and between countless surgeries and chemotherapy."
With his role as King T'Challa in the boundary-breaking film "Black Panther," he became a global icon and an inspiring symbol of Black power. That role was the "honor of (Boseman's) career," the statement said.
RIP — Chadwick Boseman
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