John Lewis was a man of amazing grace.
Commentary by Black Kos Editor Denise Oliver-Velez.
There are really no words that can adequately express how we feel about the loss of our brother, leader, fighter, representative, and family member. As tributes pour in from across the nation and around the globe for John Lewis, and as people from all walks of life bid him farewell, I’m simply going to post the moving rendition of “Amazing Grace,” sung by Dr. Wintley Phipps, in the Capitol Rotunda as he lay in state.
Thank you John Lewis.
I would normally post these tweets to the Twitter Roundup in comments — thought it would be appropriate to post them here.
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NEWS ROUND UP BY DOPPER0189, BLACK KOS MANAGING EDITOR
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I could practically hear Lauren put her hands on her hips as she asked, “What’s going on here? I’m Dr. Morgan. What seems to be the issue, officers? Carl?”
I took a deep breath, knowing that she would not be the one to resolve this situation. I just needed 170 more seconds to wrap up my work so I could smooth things over in triage. I also knew that I had to give Lauren a chance to at least attempt effective mediation. She was, after all, my trainee, and thus my obligation for the next nine hours, 47 minutes, and 32 seconds.
I took a deep breath for another reason: I wanted so badly, when I entered the triage area, to see Black officers and a white prisoner, or at least one Black officer and a non-Black prisoner — anything other than the stereotypical white cop/Black prisoner scenario. But I had already surveyed the scene, so I already knew — I made myself take another breath — that in triage was the configuration of characters I least wanted to see.
It could not be delayed any longer. I stood up and removed my gray fleece and put on my long white coat. At that time in my career, I always had my white coat with me. In truth, I used it more to hold a collection of medical references and my favorite pen light, which had pupil measurements on its side, than to show everyone that I was a doctor. In fact, I almost never wore it. I found it cumbersome to run around an ER wearing a long coat with full pockets. And indeed, it became a liability in the department: just another item I had to protect from blood, vomit, and bedbugs. But apart from what I could stash in its pockets, there were times when it was a useful costume. Sometimes I had to explain to a family member that her courageous mother had just passed away, or ask another if his father’s end-of-life wishes included cardiopulmonary resuscitation. The coat was my garment of choice for such conversations. It was a uniform that signaled expertise, authority, confidence. And now, here was another scenario in which I had found it came in handy.
As I approached, Lauren was looking directly at the patient and saying, “Sir, you are going to have to do what we say. You did something that is dangerous and life-threatening. Now you are under arrest. You must get in this gown, and then we will examine you.” No invitation, no question. Simply her interpretation of the events and a directive to comply.
No one moved.
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Each fall, the Rev. Rob Newells urges the congregation at Imani Community Church in Oakland, Calif., to get a flu shot. He builds bridges everyday between the country’s most vulnerable, marginalized communities and the medical system, defusing suspicion about HIV prevention treatments and educating people about medical research. He prods health-care leaders to think harder about their messengers: Don’t send a white doctor to tell black people what they “need” to do for their own good.
But with the first massive coronavirus vaccine trial in people set to start Monday, Newells finds himself in an unfamiliar place: on the fence about what to tell his colleagues, his community, his cousins. Biomedical research, Newells knows, is a long and painstaking process — and he is concerned about a vaccine campaign that seems so narrowly focused on speed.
“What are we doing that we haven’t done before? I haven’t got good enough answers for me to tell my community, ‘This is just like we have been doing in HIV, where I’m comfortable there’s community at the table,’ ” Newells said. “What are we sacrificing for the speed, and if we’re not sacrificing anything, why couldn’t we move at this speed with other studies?”
The unprecedented scientific quest to end the pandemic with a vaccine now faces one of its most crucial tests, and nothing less than the success of the entire endeavor is at stake. A vaccine must work for everyone — young and old; black, brown and white. To prove that it does, many of the 30,000 volunteers for each trial must come from diverse communities. It’s a scientific necessity, but also a moral imperative, as younger people of color die of coronavirus at twice the rate of white people, and black, Hispanic and Native Americans are hospitalized at four to five times the rate of white people in the same age groups.
“If this is a vaccine trial that enrolls a bunch of 20-somethings or white college graduates, it will not give us the information we need,” Francis Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health, said in an interview.
Newells has experienced the reality behind the grim statistics within his own family. A cousin in St. Louis was on a ventilator for three weeks in March. An aunt and an uncle were hospitalized with covid-19, the illness caused by the virus. His professional experience as a biomedical advocate and executive director of the AIDS Project of the East Bay has taught him how crucial it is to include minorities in trials, if a treatment or drug is to succeed in the real world.
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[Two weeks ago], Vanity Fair unveiled the cover of its July/August 2020 issue, which features a striking portrait of Oscar-winning actress Viola Davis. Adorned in a midnight blue coat dress, Davis sits with her back — most of it exposed — to the camera as she fixes her gaze to the left. The colors of the portrait create a regal mood, one that suggests classic Hollywood, with Davis’s tightly coiled Afro sitting high and obscuring much of the magazine’s name.
Praise for the image came swiftly as people admired the power the photo exudes. Plus, it was captured by Dario Calmese, who was the first Black artist to photograph the cover of the 106-year-old Conde Nast publication — a feat both newsworthy and shocking for such an overdue “first.”
But then more details came to light about what influenced the portrait. The New York Times revealed that Calmese positioned Davis to recreate the well-known image “The Scourged Back” — a harrowing 1863 photo that shows Gordon, a formerly enslaved man, sitting shirtless and slightly hunched over to display his back that is deeply furrowed from whiplashes. It is a brutal image, easily evoking both revulsion and deep sorrow.
While not much is known about Gordon himself, abolitionists circulated the photo widely, using it as propaganda to change the hearts of Americans at a time when the Civil War was being waged to determine the fate of slavery in America. The image’s gravity and reach are so potent that generations have come to see the weight of slavery through the permanent grooves and engravings on Gordon’s back.
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Cotton, widely seen as a possible presidential candidate in 2024, made the comment in an interview with the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette published on Sunday.
He was speaking in support of legislation he introduced on Thursday that aims to prohibit use of federal funds to teach the 1619 Project, an initiative from the New York Times that reframes US history around August 1619 and the arrival of slave ships on American shores for the first time.
Cotton’s Saving American History Act of 2020 and “would prohibit the use of federal funds to teach the 1619 Project by K-12 schools or school districts”, according to a statement from the senator’s office.
“The entire premise of the New York Times’ factually, historically flawed 1619 Project … is that America is at root, a systemically racist country to the core and irredeemable,” Cotton told the Democrat-Gazette.
“I reject that root and branch. America is a great and noble country founded on the proposition that all mankind is created equal. We have always struggled to live up to that promise, but no country has ever done more to achieve it.”
He added: “We have to study the history of slavery and its role and impact on the development of our country because otherwise we can’t understand our country. As the Founding Fathers said, it was the necessary evil upon which the union was built, but the union was built in a way, as [Abraham] Lincoln said, to put slavery on the course to its ultimate extinction.”
Nikole Hannah-Jones, who was awarded this year’s Pulitzer Prize for commentary for her introductory essay to the 1619 Project, said on Friday that Cotton’s bill “speaks to the power of journalism more than anything I’ve ever done in my career”.
On Sunday, she tweeted: “If chattel slavery – heritable, generational, permanent, race-based slavery where it was legal to rape, torture, and sell human beings for profit – were a ‘necessary evil’ as Tom Cotton says, it’s hard to imagine what cannot be justified if it is a means to an end.
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It’s a short drive in Lexington from a home on Confederate Circle past the Stonewall Jackson Memorial Cemetery and over to the Robert E. Lee Hotel, where locals like to stop for a drink.
There may be tourists there looking for directions to the Lee Chapel, or one of the two Stonewall Jackson statues in town. They might see a Washington and Lee University student paddling a canoe down the Maury River, named for the Confederate oceanographer Matthew Fontaine Maury.
If medical treatment is needed, residents can head to the Stonewall Jackson Hospital. For groceries, there’s a Food Lion at Stonewall Square, which isn’t far from Rebel Ridge Road, near the corner of Stonewall Street and Jackson Avenue.
For 150 years Lexington, a picturesque city nestled in Virginia’s Blue Ridge Mountains, has been known to the outside world as the final resting place of Lee, the Confederacy’s commanding general during the Civil War, and Jackson, whom Lee referred to as his “right arm.” They form the basis of a daily existence here that has long been tethered to the iconography of the Civil War and its two most famous Confederate generals, whose legacy has seeped into the town’s culture like the July humidity.
But Lexington is no longer a bastion of conservatism. It is a liberal college town of about 7,000 people that voted 60 percent for Hillary Clinton four years ago, and in 2018 gave 70 percent of its vote to the Democratic Senate candidate, Tim Kaine. Black Lives Matter signs dot the windows of downtown stores, and residents haven’t backed a Republican for president since Ronald Reagan.
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We may never know what killed Alejandra Monocuco.
It might have been COVID-19. That’s what her housemate feared when she called the emergency hotline. She said Monocuco was struggling so hard to breathe that it seemed like she was choking, or maybe suffocating.
t might also have been something else. After the paramedics who arrived to treat Monocuco learned that she was living with HIV, her housemate Leidy Tatiana Daza Alarcón said they told her it looked like an overdose. Daza said the paramedics told her not to give Monocuco any food or water since she was in respiratory distress, and to calm down, saying, “Take it easy...nothing will happen to her.”
When a second ambulance arrived a few hours later, Monocuco was dead.
For Daza and many others, though, the real reason that Monocuco died is clear: The paramedics didn’t provide appropriate care because Monocuco was a Black trans sex worker living with HIV.
Monocuco — which is a nickname, her given last name is Ortega — was born in a small Colombian city called Magangué in 1981, around the time that a conflict between drug cartels and guerillas flared up, and the same year that homosexuality was decriminalized in Colombia. She told researchers in 2014 that she had faced violence and harassment throughout her life because of her identity.
As historic protests over racial injustice and the murders and mistreatment of trans people have ricocheted around the world, Monocuco’s death has provoked outrage in the Colombian capital of Bogotá, where she lived, and beyond.
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As Latin America battles the advance of Covid-19, which has now claimed more than 160,000 lives in the region, it is also fending off a tsunami of online disinformation designed to bamboozle and deceive.
From the Mexican state of Chiapas to Ceará in Brazil, social networks are awash with quack cures and fantastical conspiracies that can carry an all-too-real human cost.
The misinformation streaming through millions of Latin American mobile phones and computers ranges from the bizarre to the ridiculous.
In recent weeks, there have been claims that Brazilian coffins were being filled with rocks to inflate the country’s Covid-19 death toll; that drones were being used to deliberately contaminate indigenous communities in Mexico; that the CIA was helping spread the coronavirus in Argentina; that seafood in northern Peru was not safe to eat because the corpses of Covid-19 victims were being dumped in the Pacific Ocean; and even that the World Health Organization chief, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, had been spotted boogying and boozing at a bar on the São Paulo coast.
Many of the false claims include miracle Covid-19 cures including Peruvian sea water, Venezuelan lemongrass and elderberry tea and supernatural seeds being hawked by one Brazilian televangelist.
In Bolivia, politicians have been promoting the use of a toxic bleaching agent as a potential cure – with panicked residents in the hard-hit city of Cochabamba reportedly lining up to buy the poisonous product.
“Some clearly represent political or commercial agendas, others are just absurd,” said Jorge Bruce, a Peruvian newspaper columnist and psychoanalyst who studies the phenomenon.
“The problem is these are spread around by well-intentioned people in family WhatsApp chats probably because they can create a sense of control over a situation which is out of control.”
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In what may be the first known case of its kind, a faulty facial recognition match led to a Michigan man’s arrest for a crime he did not commit. New York Times: Wrongfully Accused by an Algorithm
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On a Thursday afternoon in January, Robert Julian-Borchak Williams was in his office at an automotive supply company when he got a call from the Detroit Police Department telling him to come to the station to be arrested. He thought at first that it was a prank.
An hour later, when he pulled into his driveway in a quiet subdivision in Farmington Hills, Mich., a police car pulled up behind, blocking him in. Two officers got out and handcuffed Mr. Williams on his front lawn, in front of his wife and two young daughters, who were distraught. The police wouldn’t say why he was being arrested, only showing him a piece of paper with his photo and the words “felony warrant” and “larceny.”
His wife, Melissa, asked where he was being taken. “Google it,” she recalls an officer replying.
The police drove Mr. Williams to a detention center. He had his mug shot, fingerprints and DNA taken, and was held overnight. Around noon on Friday, two detectives took him to an interrogation room and placed three pieces of paper on the table, face down.
“When’s the last time you went to a Shinola store?” one of the detectives asked, in Mr. Williams’s recollection. Shinola is an upscale boutique that sells watches, bicycles and leather goods in the trendy Midtown neighborhood of Detroit. Mr. Williams said he and his wife had checked it out when the store first opened in 2014.
The detective turned over the first piece of paper. It was a still image from a surveillance video, showing a heavyset man, dressed in black and wearing a red St. Louis Cardinals cap, standing in front of a watch display. Five timepieces, worth $3,800, were shoplifted.
“Is this you?” asked the detective.
The second piece of paper was a close-up. The photo was blurry, but it was clearly not Mr. Williams. He picked up the image and held it next to his face.
“No, this is not me,” Mr. Williams said. “You think all black men look alike?”
Mr. Williams knew that he had not committed the crime in question. What he could not have known, as he sat in the interrogation room, is that his case may be the first known account of an American being wrongfully arrested based on a flawed match from a facial recognition algorithm, according to experts on technology and the law.
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Voices & Soul
by Justice Putnam, Black Kos Poetry Editor
When all seems hopeless, when the hyena cackle of defeat is biting at pant cuffs and frayed nerves, when the crushing weight of today is laying low, when the heat stroke of burned out ambitions are sweating inside an oppressive solitary cage, a cage that is bolted in a boxcar rattling along this colonial plantation rail roaded earth and the destination is the ice box baby gulag, when the ties that bind are nooses in magnolia trees and twenty foot street lamps, when the Barney Fife Robocop is programmed by thirty-something melanin deprived incels in a Teutonic rage, when the last of the Heroes are buried and the last resonance of Amazing Grace echoes among the last purple mountain majesties, when gaslighting modern day Torquemadas testify in the light of day that a knee to the throat is just a necessary evil to keep Black Lives Matter Nationalists from voting to their heart’s content, when it’s a toss up whether the lead in the water or the virus in the schools will kill a kid first, when Confederate Battle Flag Moms point loaded AK-47’s to make sure they get a Big Mac and a perm, when your last grip on patience is matched by your last gasp of outrage by the seemingly never ending outrageous outrage, that is the time to get to work.
under volcanoes & timeless years within watch
and low tones. Around corners, in deep caves among
misunderstood and sometimes meaningless sounds.
Cut beggars, outlaw pimps & whores. Resurrect work.
Check your distance blue. Come earthrise men
deepblack and ready, come sunbaked women rootculture on the move.
Just do what you're supposed to do, what you say you gonta do
not the impossible, not the unimaginative,
not copy clothed as original and surely
not bitter songs in european melodies. Take hold
do the necessary, the possible, the correctly simple
talk of mission & interpret destiny
put land and selfhood on the minds of our people
do the expected, do what all people do
reverse destruction. Capture tomorrows
-- Haki Madhubuti
“destiny”
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