We need an all out effort to combat hoteps and conspiracy theorists. Black celebrities with huge social media followings need to step-up and speak out to get our folks vaccinated.
Commentary by Black Kos Editor Denise Oliver-Velez
By now, most of us are well aware of the racial disparities in COVID-19 deaths during this epidemic. We are also continuing to see racial differences in willingness to get vaccinated. Here are two examples, out of many news articles addressing the issue; one recent, and one from back in July, during the Trump regime.
President Biden and MVP Harris have both addressed the issue of the death disparities, and have, along with former POTUS Obama, been photographed being vaccinated. The most recent Black celebrity who has stepped up, is Samuel L. Jackson, who has over 6 million followers on Twitter, and Instagram.
The shout-out to celebrities did take place under Trump.
Adams says he hasn't been able to personally reach out to LBJ with the request -- but he said if he were able to get a hold of the L.A. Lakers champ, he'd tell him to urge others to donate plasma as well.
"Take the shot, LeBron," Adams said. "Take the shot. And encourage people to go to TheFightIsInUs.org, LeBron, and give plasma ... that's how they can save a life this holiday season."
The majority of responses were negative.
“Lemme guess if a prominent black man takes it then the blacks will follow?!? Smh they always urge blacks to take something first...which should be the first sign of...FUCK NO!!!!”
“Bron gon be by himself not following shit”
“It’s a scam. They put the chip in the vaccine”
Even some doctors have been skeptical.
Dr. Ala Stanford wrote:
I reflected on this complex relationship between racism and mistrust as I considered whether to take the Covid-19 vaccine. As an emergency medicine physician with regular exposure to Covid-19 patients, I knew I would be prioritized for vaccination. However, for many months, I was decidedly and definitely against being among the first to get the shot. Instead, I planned to wait and see how others did with the vaccine. I suppose I am wary of the very system to which I have dedicated nearly two decades of my career.
To be clear, I am not a vaccine skeptic — my three children are fully vaccinated and I dutifully take my flu shot year after year. But I had serious doubts about the speed of the Covid-19 vaccine development process, which seemed to me to be a political tool then-President Donald Trump was trying to use to win re-election. How could a vaccine developed under a president who displayed repeated acts of racism and who actively enabled white supremacist groups be trusted? Across the country, many Americans are wrestling with similar concerns.
Here she is on MSNBC.
Vaccine mistrust continues to be a major hurdle for communities of color, despite doctors getting vaccinated. Stephanie Ruhle speaks with Ford Foundation President Darren Walker and Black Doctors COVID-19 Consortium Founder Dr. Ala Stanford for their message to those who aren’t so eager to get the vaccine.
Believe me, I understand the suspicion of research in our community, rooted in history, and the racial inequities Black folks face when dealing with doctors and hospitals — as a medical anthropologist I’ve studied it first hand.
However, that’s not the only problem we face. Just as MAGAs, Proud Boys, QAnon and company have used social media to advance their white supremacy — sadly there is an entire underbelly of Black CT spreaders as well. Far too much of that CT is anti-vax.
The Root discussed some of it.
If you missed it first time around — read Michael Harriot’s take:
Round 1: Where Did the Coronavirus Come From?
HOTEP: Same place all evil comes from—the white man. It was devised in the same lab as AIDS, the Tuskegee experiment and crack cocaine.
Everyone knows that white people have biological weapons labs hidden in mattress stores all over America in case the race war starts. Why do you think there are so many mattress stores? Steve Harvey told us that white people don’t sleep!
MAGA: Easy. Koreans, which is my way of saying Chinese people. Chinese people eating baked bat wings and dragons. Everyone knows that Obama enjoys basketball and the Dream Team played China in what, 2008? And no one likes to talk about it, but this whole plan was devised during that trip to Beijing with Obama.
Round 2: Who Would Do Such a Thing?
HOTEP: Well, everyone knows Jay-Z and Beyoncé joined the Illuminati, but most people don’t know about the Bilderbergs and the United Nations. And Russia, probably. But mostly, it’s the Jews.
MAGA: The government (and by government, I mean Obama) and the Jews. And also kneeling during the national anthem of our great country and Colin Kaepernick and Black Lives Matter movement, which is nothing but a terrorist organization designed to poison the economy with terrible t-shirt designs. And, Obama.
I did some Twitter surfing — and found lots of tweets (and push back, thank you Black Jesus) spouting hotepery. Like this one:
This Twitter conversation, between Chris, Kev and me, sparked today’s commentary.
We need to step up our attack on the areas of the internet frequented by our folks that are chock full of nuts and dangerous crazy. It ain’t just white Magats who have bought the okie doke. At this point, as more and more of us die, we need to get more people who Black folks trust (not talking about politicians) to help change minds, and we need to accelerate our debunk, block and report game.
Time for celebs who have spoken out about the racial disparities, to also push folks to get vaccinated.
Case in point, Colin Kaepernick.
Checked his site — it has excellent information, however there is not one word about vaccine.
His tweet stream is full of CT.
I’m using Kaepernick as an example, simply because he has 2.4 million followers. I did a Beyoncé search (she has 15 plus million followers), no vaccine references.
I found this lonely tweet.
I don’t have a list of suggestions for who younger folks might be willing to listen to. Perhaps you do?
Let me know in the comments section.
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NEWS ROUND UP BY DOPPER0189, BLACK KOS MANAGING EDITOR
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On TikTok and in virtual hangouts, a younger generation is sharing the origins and nuances of Black American Sign Language, a rich variation of ASL that scholars say has been overlooked for too long. New York Times: Black, Deaf and Extremely Online
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“I have to make sure my hands are not ashy before I sign,” Nakia Smith, who is deaf, explained to her nearly 400,000 followers.
In one of the dozens of popular videos she posted to TikTok last year, Ms. Smith compared her habit of adding a quick dab of lotion to her hands before she starts signing to the sip of water a hearing person takes before beginning to speak.
Since Ms. Smith created her account last April, the small ritual has caught millions of eyes, drawing attention to a corner of the internet steeped in the history and practice of a language that some scholars say is too frequently overlooked: Black American Sign Language, or BASL.
Variations and dialects of spoken English, including what linguists refer to as African-American English, have been the subject of intensive study for years. But research on Black ASL, which differs considerably from American Sign Language, is decades behind, obscuring a major part of the history of sign language.
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Kamala Harris, the first Black and south Asian vice president, has elevated the names of Black designers by wearing their clothes on the biggest public stage possible.
Harris’ fashion statement was loud and clear when she dressed in designer labels such as Pyer Moss, Christopher John Rogers and Sergio Hudson during last week’s inauguration events. By wearing the creations of designers of color, Harris was aligning the new administration’s commitment to diversity with the fashion industry’s attempt to move past systemic racism into a new era.
In this new era, designers of color get the same opportunities that their white counterparts have enjoyed for years.
“When it comes to inauguration events, Black designers have been almost exclusively absent,” said author Ronda Racha Penrice, “so it was nice to discover that the fabulous outfits were created by Black designers.”
On the eve of the inauguration, the concept of “the new” was displayed when Harris attended an event paying tribute to those lost to the pandemic. She wore a camel color coat featuring a distinctive water design on the back.
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Security forces in Uganda are yet to withdraw from around the home of presidential challenger Bobi Wine, despite a ruling by a judge on Monday rebuking authorities for holding the candidate under house arrest 11 days after a disputed election.
Wine, whose real name is Robert Kyagulanyi Ssentamu, has been unable to leave his home since 14 January, when Ugandans voted in an election in which the 38-year-old reggae star turned politician was the main challenger to 76-year-old Yoweri Museveni.
Ugandan authorities have said Wine can only leave his home on the outskirts of the capital, Kampala, under military escort because they fear his presence in public could incite rioting.
However, Justice Michael Elubu said in his ruling that Wine’s home was not a proper detention facility and noted that authorities should criminally charge him if he threatened public order.
“It is my finding that the continued indefinite restriction and confinement of the applicant to his home is unlawful. [As a] result … his right to personal liberty has been infringed … Consequently, an order for the restoration of the personal liberty of the applicant [is] hereby issued,” the judge said.
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No image better symbolises the fall from power of the Tigrayan People’s Liberation Front (tplf), the party that had called the shots in Ethiopia for almost three decades. Sebhat Nega, one of its founders, was pictured this month in handcuffs, wearing a rumpled tracksuit and a single sock. The 86-year-old, long one of Ethiopia’s most powerful men, had been captured by the army. His party, which was pushed out of power amid massive protests in 2018, has been fighting the government led by Abiy Ahmed for the past two months. It is not going well.
Several other senior tplf figures have been killed by the army. Among them was Seyoum Mesfin, Ethiopia’s longest-serving foreign minister. The killings and arrests appear to have left the tplf in disarray. Its leaders, including the ousted president of the Tigray region, Debretsion Gebremichael, have been in hiding for over a month. Although the tplf still controls sizeable swathes of rural Tigray, it holds no towns or cities. Allies of Abiy, who has already declared victory, believe it is only a matter of time before the rest of what he calls the “junta” are captured or killed.
But time is not a luxury Tigrayans can afford. For weeks the vast majority of the region’s roughly 6m people have been without adequate food, water or medicine. According to the interim administration of Tigray, which Abiy appointed last month, more than 2m civilians have been driven from their homes. The state-appointed human-rights commission has warned of a “humanitarian crisis”. According to the Famine Early Warning Systems Network, run by the American government, parts of central and eastern Tigray are probably one step from famine. “We could have a million dead there in a couple of months,” frets a Western diplomat.
It is impossible to know how bad the crisis is because phone lines are down and the government has barred journalists from going to most of Tigray. It also restricts the movement of aid workers. But accounts are trickling out. In some places, especially in the north, crops have been burnt. In others, farmers abandoned their fields
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Republican lawmakers across the country are preparing numerous new voting restrictions after former President Donald Trump’s election loss.
After Democrats narrowly took both Georgia Senate seats and President Joe Biden won the state by an even smaller margin, Georgia will be the focal point of the GOP push to change state election laws.
Republicans in red states as well as battlegrounds continue to repeat Trump’s baseless claims of voter fraud during the 2020 election and are using those claims as an excuse to tighten access to the polls.
Some Republican officials have not bothered to hide their motivations, making it clear that they don’t believe they can win unless the rules change.
“They don’t have to change all of them, but they’ve got to change the major parts of them so that we at least have a shot at winning,” Alice O’Lenick, a Republican on the Gwinnett County, Ga., board of elections in suburban Atlanta, told the Gwinnett Daily Post last week. She has since resisted calls to step down.
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The quieter phenomena of white complacency, downplaying, and silence are what gave whiteness the guts to violently storm government buildings. Slate: What the Trump Era Showed White Americans About Whiteness
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As insurgents stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, a certain shock and awe settled over many white Americans. On Twitter, politicians, cable news hosts, and regular everyday white folks seemed unable to understand how an attempted coup was playing out, not “in a third-world country,” but right here in the USA. Those who’d been paying attention, however, recognized that Jan. 6 was neither unprecedented nor foreign. It was plain American whiteness—emboldened beyond measure under Donald Trump.
The attack on the Capitol and the apparent plans to harm lawmakers were extreme reactions to a lost election. But this was a response already programmed into Trumpism, an ideology made possible by its forefather, white supremacy. Trump was, as Ta-Nehisi Coates explained in 2017, the first American president to exist purely because of his whiteness. He brought no credentials or qualifications to the position outside of his role as a shamelessly racist retort to the political success of the disciplined and highly qualified first Black president.
A lot of white folks ate up this brand of nationalism because Trump promised to actively assure their dominance and power by any means necessary—an idea that clearly appealed to the white public, consciously or not. Trump was bold enough to say it openly, with his chest. His general theatrics managed to convince many observers that these assertions of raw power were somehow not real. People chose to believe he was simply a loudmouth who had accidentally become president, while his administration dismantled human rights protections at every turn. (“The very serious function of racism is distraction,” said Toni Morrison.)
Some of us saw him from the beginning as a real threat to the country’s very fragile social fabric. In 2016, even as much of the media wrote Trump off as an imbecile who wouldn’t be capable of orchestrating serious damage to American democracy, many Black and brown reporters, as well as those who cover extremism, warned against underestimating Trump and his followers. We urged against focusing on “economic anxiety” as he described predominantly Black countries as “shitholes” and called Mexicans criminals and “rapists.” We knew that white Americans had not voted against their own self-interest, but rather many believe that preserving whiteness in an unequal society is their best interest—even if it’s at the expense of the institutions that benefit many of them as well.
But for every white person yelling along at a Trump rally, there was another white person declaring that there was nothing to seriously worry about—and that the people who said the danger and damage were real were getting carried away. This is the pervasiveness of whiteness. It’s a force many white people have long seemed unwilling to deconstruct. It is why “well-meaning” white people will go to great lengths to superficially distance themselves from obvious racists while giving the benefit of doubt to their parents, aunts, uncles, siblings, cousins, and friends who fit the same paradigm.
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When Barack Obama campaigned for president in 2008, he was cautioned by his inner circle to downplay “any topic that might be labeled racial grievance” and not to “do anything that would box me in as ‘the Black candidate,'” he wrote in his recent memoir.
A little more than 12 years later, Vice President Kamala Harris is not being advised to tone down her Blackness or to try and make it more palatable. As she made her way into the White House as the second in command, being the proud alumni of historically Black Howard University is an integral part of her identity and part of her appeal to American voters.
There aren’t many differences in Obama’s and Harris’ tone. Obama referred to personal experiences when he spoke about the nation’s troubled racial history and Harris similarly has been able to interpret her personal encounters with the country’s racial divide for non-Black audiences.
Perhaps the Donald Trump presidency that placed white racial grievance at its center, a summer of nationwide protests over the abuse of Black people in the criminal justice system, as well as the Capitol siege this month in which Trump supporters waved Confederate flags, have all given Harris permission to lean harder into her public identity as a Black woman and to place societal racial gaps higher on her agenda, according to the LATimes.
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Voices and Soul
by Justice Putnam, Black Kos Poetry Editor
The indignities of life seem to follow us everywhere. We live in a time where no part of our existence is outside scrutiny. Banks acknowledge they investigate our Twitter and Facebook posts and friend lists to deny or approve credit, we are subjected to full body scans at the airport, we have to urinate in a jar to flip a burger. Facial recognition technology has been proved to not recognize Black and Brown faces with any degree of accuracy, yet it is a growth industry, on par with the private prison industrial complex, which is just a coincidence, I’m sure. We are born into pain and hate. We sense it from the womb. How else to explain the sonogram photos of a fetus with a clenched fist?
Born in epidemic—circa 1986 Jamaica,
Queens—when tiny white caps filled—
modern-day cotton—moored most under
a parking lot's dim cone of light—when
paraded in chambers of those born to triggers
was that sin which weaned father
from son; tricked out the best in us—
a resilient few kept from boxes,
though what was left was worsted in haze
on those horrid nights—when what was
promissory was plight was norm,
and what was dealt—mnemonic so strong
I kept it in my mind like one rehearsing
lines in an orograph for pain—
a pain, like bait, that turned gain
into the cleanest demise—when I stood
to cleave it, the fight empty as cavity,
the strife—marked by omission. Everything
I saw was enemy—even this face, fair game.
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