Voices and Soul
by
Justice Putnam, Black Kos Poetry Editor
On the evening of 4 June 1968, at the age of thirteen, I accompanied my father to the Ambassador Hotel in downtown Los Angeles. For several years, he had been writing policy and research papers for the California State Democratic Steering and Platform Committees. I had walked precincts and volunteered at the Kennedy Campaign Headquarters in the San Gabriel Valley for the preceding two months, so as a sort of reward, I was allowed to stay up past my regular bedtime to go with my father to what was, we were certain, to be a victory celebration.
Dad and I had been at the Ambassador since around 8:30 p.m. It was a huge and boisterous crowd. Normally, I retired before 10 p.m., so by the time Kennedy entered the ballroom around 11:30 p.m., I was pretty bushed. His speech would be broadcast on the radio, so Dad and I headed home. On the way, we heard Kennedy and five others had been shot.
I was at a department store near our home, in the television department when the news of Martin Luther King's assassination was broadcast on 4 April 1968. Dad had been teaching his history classes at Cal State Fullerton that day and evening; and had not heard the news, so my revelation was the first he had heard of it. I never had seen my Dad cry, but he teared up when I told him. At that point, I had been a Eugene McCarthy aficionado, but I changed allegiances after listening, with my father, to Kennedy's speech in front of a black audience in Indiana, informing them of MLK's assassination.
Kennedy is reported to have questioned earlier, when informed of King's killing, "When will this violence stop?" It is a question that is still shouted to high heaven today.
Black and Brown people are fed up in Minneapolis and around the country. But when a black reporter and his crew are arrested on live television for reporting the riots while being black, and a white officer is taped chocking off a black guy with his knee for almost 9 minutes and is not initially charged at yesterday’s news conference (though he was today,) because there might be some exonerating evidence somewhere, I doubt very much the violence will stop soon.
(and they were coming toward him in rough ranks.
In seas. In windsweep. They were black and loud.
— Gwendolyn Brooks, "Riot")
All day was filled with the floating dead
of clouds. Children
throwing birds, guns for thumbs
and forefingers.
My heart is a mine shaft of canaries
and shells.
My smell is filled with flying
and what a sky this is.
The northern European still lifes
depicted so many flowers.
Lying on my side, looking. Where his eyes might be.
The dead teach us that kind of patience.
How different the drawings of a people must be
who have always had this kind of time.
***
A brief history of rope:
Some of us are brown
as starvation.
Happenstance is the color
of our eyes.
***
What happens when you stare into the sun?
A crow is born. From here, I think
about the image of God.
He set jagged stars
in the square holes of us.
***
And what are groups of us called?
It is an unkindness
of ravens, for instance. For instance,
a dole (an offering)
of doves. We've always been more glorious as a flock.
Groups of us are congregations.
What is more godlike than peace (other than insurgence),
than quiet, as of the breathing of evening
birds, the low warble of our people in the trees.
***
Sometimes a dream is a fist you grow into,
but more often, a routine, like watering a weed in your stomach.
***
We haven't been made afraid of trees. Nor the bottoms of cars.
Windows, the gavel, the sea.
***
A feather is caught in the rapture of a fence,
keeps struggling—can't come to terms—
cannot unthink that it's a bird.
***
What gives the ground the right
to gravity? No building.
I want to widen the eyes of God.
Every amendment has followed through
against our bodies.
Icarus leapt. We will fly,
be black together in the sun.
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News round up by dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor
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A photograph of President Trump and his top four-star generals and admirals, tweeted in October by Defense Secretary Mark T. Esper, was meant as a thank-you to the commander in chief. But it angered a lot of others, and not just those who erupted on Twitter.
“You would have thought it was 1950,” said Lt. Col. Walter J. Smiley Jr., who is African-American and fought in Iraq and Afghanistan before retiring last year after 25 years in the Army. Dana Pittard, a retired major general, also African-American, was equally frustrated. “It’s America’s military,” he said. “Why doesn’t this photo look like America?”
Yet the picture of the president surrounded by a sea of white faces in full military dress is an accurate portrait of the top commanders who lead an otherwise diverse institution.
Some 43 percent of the 1.3 million men and women on active duty in the United States military are people of color. But the people making crucial decisions, such as how to respond to the coronavirus crisis and how many troops to send to Afghanistan or Syria, are almost entirely white and male.
Of the 41 most senior commanders in the military — those with four-star rank in the Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines and Coast Guard — only two are black: Gen. Michael X. Garrett, who leads the Army’s Forces Command, and Gen. Charles Q. Brown Jr, the commander of Pacific Air Forces.
Gen. Paul M. Nakasone, whose father is second-generation Japanese-American, leads the United States Cyber Command. The Army has sometimes counted Gen. Stephen J. Townsend, the head of Africa Command and the son of a German mother and an Afghan father, as a minority commander. There is only one woman in the group: Gen. Maryanne Miller, the chief of the Air Force’s Air Mobility Command, who is white.
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As director of international original films for Netflix, Nigerian-American Funa Maduka built an Oscar-winning powerhouse Because she’s lifting up untold African stories to a global audience. Ozy: SHE PUSHED NETFLIX’S FOREIGN FILMS TO THE OSCARS. NOW IT’S TIME TO MAKE HER OWN
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It started at the Oprah Winfrey Leadership Academy for underprivileged girls in South Africa, where Maduka rose to become dean and saw the girls go on to pursue PhDs, fight for social justice and even share the stage with Michelle Obama, accomplishments she reels off with pride.
It continued when she got to Netflix in early 2014 and didn’t see any content from Africa. “I naturally just asked why,” she says, eventually helping lead a global film powerhouse as its director of international original films.
Now Maduka is placing her boldest bet yet, leaving the streaming giant last year to work on her own projects. “I’m taking a break from corporate life and speaking more about telling our stories,” she says, declining to reveal any more details.
Her fascination with film was forged early. Born in Port Harcourt, Nigeria’s oil capital, to a doctor dad and engineer mum from southeastern Nigeria, the family relocated to the Maryland suburbs of Washington, D.C., in the 1990s. The area has a huge population of Nigerian immigrants, and as a young girl she made regular visits to a salon belonging to one of them, to get her hair braided.
There, she would stare transfixed at the Nollywood movies playing on the screen in all their melodramatic glory. At home, there were bits of her African heritage floating around in the food, Igbo language and physical memorabilia as the self-confessed goofball and “former prankster” grew up. There was also her grandmother, who constantly preached the need for girls to be educated.
Then came her time at Ivy League schools Cornell and Harvard where she bagged a history degree and an MBA, respectively, with a stint at the Sorbonne in Paris between. She breezed through Goldman Sachs, McKinsey and the Clinton Foundation before settling for four years at the Oprah Academy. She joined Netflix in 2013, when the service was a U.S. phenomenon — but not yet a global one.
“It was an environment that encourages you to ask ‘why’ all the time, and come up with a solution,” she says of her pledge to tell more African stories. “At that time, we were getting ready to go global and constantly thinking about new audiences and growing the business.” During her tenure, Netflix acquired dozens of titles across Africa, and commissioned original flicks from Nigeria and South Africa.
“Nigerians’ films are a mainstay on Netflix now but it hasn’t always been so,” says Lagos-based film critic Wilfred Okiche. “A lot of the credit must go to Maduka, whose work with the streamer licensed a couple of films and put them on the global map. There is some observation that maybe she could have done more, especially with supporting and engaging local filmmakers, but she left a pretty decent catalog at Netflix.”
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Serena Williams reigned over the tennis world not just as a Grand Slam champion, but as the highest-earning female athlete in any sport. Now, even with tennis on hold due to COVID-19, another tennis player has taken that title away.
Naomi Osaka, 22, earned $37.4M last year, the most ever in one year by a female athlete, according to Forbes. That beat Williams’ 2019 earnings by $1.4 million.
The Japanese/Haitian player, who was planning to play for Japan in the postponed Tokyo Olympics this summer gained much of her newfound fame by defeating Williams in a controversial U.S. Open final in 2018.
In 2019, Osaka became the first back to back Grand Slam champion since Willams by becoming the Australia Open champion. Though Osaka describes herself as painfully shy, endorsements soon followed.
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The number of working African American business owners in the United States plummeted more than 40 percent as the coronavirus shut down much of the economy — a far steeper drop than other racial groups experienced, according to an analysis confirming fears the pandemic would deepen inequalities in the business world.
Closures and social distancing to slow the virus’s spread have taken a disastrous toll across racial groups, with the total number of active business owners dropping 22 percent from February to April, based on granular data from the federal government’s employment surveys that was made available last week. But minority-owned businesses have suffered disproportionately in a crisis that’s also killing nonwhite Americans at higher rates and eliminating more of their jobs.
Experts have voiced concerns that wealth gaps, trouble accessing government aid and concentrations in reeling industries have left these companies and the families they support more vulnerable to the pandemic’s fallout. But they’re still working to understand and measure the colliding hardships making the future of minority-owned businesses especially precarious. The new data on ownership by racial group is “devastating,” said Robert Fairlie, an economics professor at the University of California at Santa Cruz, who plans to post a working paper on his findings.
“We already have disparities. African Americans have the lowest business-ownership rate in the population. … And so here we’re creating a situation of closures that’s hitting the groups with the lowest rates even harder,” he said.
Minority-owned companies often create jobs for people from the owner’s ethnic or racial group, he said, and their success radiates out in the community. Research links business ownership to long-term wealth.
“We’re just going to see further increases in inequality that has been so hard to change,” Fairlie said.
As of April, the country lost nearly 450,000 active African American business owners as the pandemic intensified, he found. But the disparities extended into every minority group. The number of working Latino business owners dropped 32 percent from February to April, while the number of Asian business owners decreased by about a quarter.
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Dixon to CNN’s Christiane Amanpour: “We’ve never been safe, we lost our bodily autonomy in the Atlantic slave trade and I’m hoping that we as a society can digest this information about Russell Simmons.” Color Lines: Drew Dixon Goes 'On the Record' Against Russell Simmons
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The much-anticipated documentary “On the Record”—in which former music executive Drew Dixon tells her story of becoming one of the first women of color in the #MeToo movement to publicly accuse Def Jam Recordings co-founder Russell Simmons of having raped her—premiered Wednesday (May 27) on the streaming service HBO Max.
Helmed by Academy Award-nominated directors Kirby Dick and Amy Ziering, the doc also features Black feminist author Joan Morgan (“When Chickenheads Come Home to Roost”) who shares her perspective on the culture of the music industry during that time. In advance of the film airing, the two women spoke with CNN’s Christiane Amanpour about the historical struggles that Black women have faced in the country, including within the #MeToo movement.
“When I first began to hear about the #MeToo movement, when it first manifested itself in 2017 with the allegations against Harvey Weinstein, I was amazed and grateful that the women who were coming forward were being believed and heard and seen,” Dixon said. “I certainly never imagined that the conversation would expand to include Black women.”
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Within weeks, the U.S. has seen two distinct mass protests break out. The first was organized in opposition to state government shutdown orders to limit the spread of COVID-19. The more recent protests are in opposition to police killings of black people, set off by images of George Floyd begging for his life as a Minneapolis police officer kneeled on his neck until his body went limp.
These protests couldn’t look more different. Many who attended the anti-lockdown protests across the country were armed with guns. In North Carolina, at least one protester was armed with a bazooka. They were all met by a line of disciplined police officers who were reserved and measured with the amount of force they used. In Michigan, for example, protesters were allowed to flood the capitol building where a session was underway. Police stood quietly as the anti-lockdown activists came within inches of their faces. At no point did any of the officers use force to push back, or clear the space, even as armed men loomed above the legislators. Eventually, concerned about the death threats against Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, the lawmakers decided to close down the capitol and end the legislative session rather than risk violence.
A much different sort of protest policing happened this week in Minneapolis. Things began peacefully there on Tuesday night, with organizers handing out face masks and encouraging social distancing among those gathered to protest the police killing of Floyd. From the images I’ve seen, those protesters did not appear to be armed, but eventually the night turned violent. Eyewitness accounts aren’t clear on exactly how things started to escalate, but protesters threw rocks and water bottles at police cars. Officers responded by spraying tear gas into the crowd and shooting rubber bullets at people, including one journalist. The protest devolved into a series of violent skirmishes as police used batons and stun grenades to try and disperse the crowds. Police climbed to high vantage points and fired projectiles. Wednesday, as protests spread to other cities, the violence got worse: People started setting fires and breaking into big-box stores in Minneapolis. Five people were shot, and one was killed by a pawn shop owner. Police in full riot gear attempted to bring order with even more force.
Wednesday night looked more like a war zone than a protest. It also looked just like the aftermath of the killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Freddie Gray in Baltimore, and Eric Garner in New York City. I covered all of those protests as a journalist and recognize the atmosphere in the images this week. I remember the police wearing gas masks while throwing stun grenades, and I remember people running for cover from the rising plumes of tear gas, just like they did on Wednesday night.
I have so many questions, and they are not new: Why do police react with restraint in one situation and extreme force in another? Why do they perceive some gatherings to be more dangerous than others? Why are groups armed with the same weapon used in countless mass shootings less threatening than protesters with bottles and camera phones?
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Not many reports have made been public regarding COVID-19’s outsize impact on the LGBTQ+ community, but the Human Rights Campaign Foundation (HRC) published a brief stating that the novel coronavirus puts gender nonconforming people at heightened risk because “LGBTQ Americans are more likely than the general population to live in poverty and lack access to adequate medical care, paid medical leave, and basic necessities during the pandemic.” On May 25, Vice published a story in which they examined how the pandemic is affecting Black LGBTQ+ people in particular.
Pittsburgh-resident Aiden James Nevils, a transgender man who works as a retail sales manager for a telecommunications company, told Vice he worried about being doubly discriminated against for being queer and wearing a mask while Black.
“Because my queerness is outward, people think, ‘Clearly you’re different and you’re also Black,’” Nevils said. “Now that I wear a mask, they’re even more like, ‘Ooh, I’m afraid about this.’” Now add an additional layer of avoidance by White coworkers, as they wear full-on ski masks, and discrimination can feel like outright racism. “That’s just the Black experience of wearing a mask,” Nevils said. “It makes me feel like even when I’m trying to be safe just like everyone else, that my safety is less important.”
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When Mugalu* was adopted, his birth family says they were told they would still be able to speak to him regularly and he would come back for visits. “They said we would be one big happy family,” says his mother, Sylvia, wiping away tears.
But Sylvia, 40, has not seen her son since he was adopted from Uganda almost seven years ago by an American couple. She is now fighting to get her son back, taking her case to the high court in Uganda and exploring her legal options in the US.
Mugalu’s adoption was arranged through an organisation called Amani Ya Zion, which claimed to be a non-profit that “raises orphans and disregarded Ugandans to be leaders through true self sustainability”, in Kampala.
Sylvia’s family say they were led to believe by Amani Ya Zion that Mugalu, who was five at the time, was going to the US to get a better education, and would be in the care of a couple from Louisiana.
“They [Amani Ya Zion] said we were blessed to have this chance,” adds Sylvia, who works for a telecoms company, and lives in Kampala with her husband, Alex, and their toddler, Lenz.
Legal loopholes in the adoption system in Uganda have allowed people from overseas to adopt children – usually from poorer families – through unregistered children’s homes, and organisations that can operate with little scrutiny or oversight.
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