I’m a Black voter and I voted for Democrats.
Commentary by Black Kos Editor Denise Oliver-Velez
Black voters vote. I don’t care what the latest polls say. I don’t care what pundits predict. I don’t care about exit polls. All I can say is I’m gonna keep doing what I’ve been doing since I was eligible to vote. I voted today. For Democrats. The media circus trying to do click bait horse race shit ain’t gonna interview me in the local diner.
I know that Republicans don’t want me or mine to vote. That’s what voter suppression bills are all about. If the Black vote was irrelevant they wouldn’t expend so much energy trying to suppress us.
Sure, there are some Black folks who stay home. Sure there are some who vote against our best interests and are quisling tap dancers for the right wing. They are exceptions that highlight the norm.
This is gonna be a very short commentary today.
Anybody encouraging Black folks to withhold our votes can KMBA.
Period.
There is a sister I follow on Twitter who has had a similar response to folks discouraging us from voting.
Check out her thread.
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NEWS ROUND UP BY DOPPER0189, BLACK KOS MANAGING EDITOR
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The racism baked into America's spookiest holiday caused me to abandon it. The folktales of my Caribbean birthplace helped me reimagine it for my children. The Root: How Folklore Helped Me Reclaim Halloween: An Afro-Caribbean Tale
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“Nothing too expensive,” she warned, pointing to the affordable section of children’s costumes plastered onto the store’s walls on display.
I scanned my options: a purple witch costume pictured with a broom and long, black matching wig as accessories; a nurse or doctor; a pumpkin; a fairy; and various cartoon and superhero characters. The photos of the child models wearing the costumes all revealed children with silky straight hair and white skin. None of them looked like me; but I immediately identified with one choice, nonetheless. I wanted to be Superwoman.
On the day of the parade, I slipped into my costume and mom put glitter, lipstick and red blush on my face. She carefully braided my hair and secured two buns with matching bubble barrettes. I spent that day parading, eating cupcakes topped with candy corn, trick-or-treating in my town and then retreated home to stuff my face with candy, eat popcorn and watch my favorite Halloween movie: Hocus Pocus. I loved the tale of love, magic spells and witches, even if none of the characters in the movie looked the way I did.
In fact, by then, I had grown accustomed to the fact that it was rare for anything having to do with the spooky day to have faces that were brown, like mine. The world of magic, ghosts, witches and goblins was a white one. As a little Black girl, I was just happy to be able to be a part of it. But as I grew older, participation in the festivities became more troubling.
“It’s just a costume,” I heard a white man say in between hysterical laughs when I was in my 20s and at a bar in New York City.
He had his face painted brown and was wearing a long, dreadlocked wig. I cringed and told my girlfriend I was ready to leave.
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Say hello to Puleng, Fikile, Wendy, Rue, Julien and Zoya. They are the characters riding a new wave of teen TV told from the oft-ignored point of view of Black girls. The shift isn’t seismic yet, but it is a change deeply felt for both those behind the scenes and audiences watching at home.
“The conversation has shifted,” said Joshua Safran, creator of the new “Gossip Girl.” “We are looking at the perspectives of BIPOC in these spaces,” referring to those who are Black, Indigenous and people of color.
Gen Z, he said, is an audience that isn’t afraid to call the media to the mat. Safran’s decision to give two women of color top billing on his reboot of a predominantly White series (on which he also worked) was not only intentional but also a sign of the times.
The South African Netflix original “Blood & Water” also stars two Black actresses, but creator Nosipho Dumisa-Ngoasheng said that, even in a majority-Black country, her show is breaking new ground.
“We haven’t seen ourselves depicted this way on-screen,” she said. And that “we” reaches across the ocean.
When it debuted in 2020, “Blood & Water” was the first South African show to break into Netflix’s Top 10 list in the United States. The series, a hybrid mystery and elite private high school drama set in Cape Town, is “Veronica Mars” meets “Gossip Girl” meets “The O.C.,” but with much better beaches and a mostly Black cast.
Its popularity in the United States was a shock to Dumisa-Ngoasheng at first but was more understandable once you take into account the dearth of shows like it.
Young Black audiences are “looking to see themselves,” said Valerie Adams-Bass, a developmental psychologist who teaches a course about adolescents and the media at the University of Virginia. “It’s super important to see people your age who look like you. To see how they’re managing these encounters, how they navigate the racial tensions, the class tensions that have to do with your identity.”
Since the fanatical success of “Beverly Hills, 90210” in 1990, teen television shows have largely been concerned with one particular point of view — of the White and wealthy.
At the genre’s mid-aughts peak, the list of network-anchoring series stretched far. There was “Dawson’s Creek,” “Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” “One Tree Hill,” “The O.C.,” “Friday Night Lights,” “Veronica Mars” and “Gossip Girl,” just to name a few. Each glossy reimagining of high school assembled a cast of soon-to-be Hollywood stars and starlets, their brooding, squinty-eyed faces staring at viewers from promotional posters. The characters were almost always on the verge of some homecoming-induced crisis — and the cast was almost always entirely White.
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A takeover by military leaders is threatening the country’s democratic transition. But protests are erupting in response. Vox: The coup in Sudan, explained
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Sudan’s move toward democracy is in peril, after the military seized control of the country’s transitional government in a coup.
The country’s democratic project began just two years ago, after Sudan’s longtime dictator Omar al-Bashir was ousted amid mass protests in 2019. Civil society and protest leaders and the military ultimately reached a power-sharing arrangement that put both in charge of the country with the commitment of transitioning to full civilian rule, which would lead to a new constitution and elections in 2023.
Monday’s coup has upended that entire endeavor, fracturing what was already a tenuous arrangement between the military and civilian factions and jeopardizing any gains made. Lt. Gen. Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, Sudan’s top general, orchestrated the power grab, detaining the civilian prime minister Abdalla Hamdok and other civilian leaders, and firing ambassadors who resisted the takeover.
But the coup also reignited resistance, as protesters returned to the streets in cities and towns across Sudan to denounce the military takeover. The Sudanese military shut down the internet, making it difficult to fully understand the scope of the resistance — and the security forces’ response to it — especially outside major cities like Khartoum. At least 170 people have been injured, and at least seven people killed in Monday’s protests, according to data compiled by the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA). Some pro-democracy leaders have reportedly been detained.
All of this makes for a very volatile, and unpredictable, situation. Despite international and regional pressure on the Sudanese military to restore the transitional government, experts said it is difficult to see a way forward under the same framework. “The trust has been broken,” said Michael Woldemariam, director of the African Studies Center at Boston University. “The military has really bared its teeth here — and the more that we see violence deployed by the security forces, the more difficult it’s going to be to go back to this old arrangement.”
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Nigerians are drawn to the spectacle of horror. It’s not conscious, perhaps not entirely willing, but it’s always there. It’s there when law enforcement failure create macabre spectacles of vigilante revenge. It’s there when an oil tanker explodes thanks to reckless driving or bad roads, bystanders gawping at the inferno until firefighters arrive—if they ever do. It’s there when older people send WhatsApp broadcasts of strange happenings to their friends and family, saying the world is about to end. That same sense of horror birthed Nigeria’s film industry.
Nollywood—a term coined in the early 2000s—started with low-budget, do-it-yourself horror films in the 1990s. It was the season of the witch. In producer Zeb Ejiro’s Nneka the Pretty Serpent (1994) and Sakobi: The Snake Girl (1998), shapeshifting femme fatales doom gullible men. In director Christian Onu’s Karishika (1996), the titular succubus seeds misery on earth. Directors Fred Amata and Sunny Collins’ Witches (1998) has a swarm of sorceresses.
Although Christian themes were implicated in some of them, there were also explicitly evangelical horror films such as director Teco Benson’s End of the Wicked (1999) and director Mike Bamiloye’s The Ultimate Power (1994), in which witches sided with the devil in apocalyptic battles.
Director Chris Obi Rapus’ occult horror film Living in Bondage (1992), the industry’s first offering, did not focus on witches but mythologized the acquisition of wealth through blood sacrifice. Ritual killings were fears that tore apart the 80s and 90s and arose out of the need to make money quickly because people lived quite poorly. This became part of the Nollywood horror tradition and inspired films.
But gender also played a major role. In a male-dominated industry, female villains had to be tamed and defeated, and in the end it was struck by disaster. Occasionally, witches appear in a better light, such as Full Moon (1998) by director Chico Ejiro, in which moon-driven women take revenge on bad men.
Although there were male occultists and fictional men doing terrible things, gendering women as witches left no room for much complexity. Compared to these men, who were still allowed to be family patriarchs, business owners, or valuable members of society, they were often flattened for their lurid, diabolical desires.
Notions of witchcraft are commonplace in Nigeria. Before colonization, witchcraft was broadly linked to African spirituality and religious practices. In Yoruba cosmology, for example, witches are creations of Olorun, the supreme deity that exists to ensure that people are loyal to him. They were blamed for famine, misfortune and strange diseases – but sometimes also revered as healers, herbalists and fortune tellers.
The arrival of Christianity demonized these practices, but witches remained a real and malevolent force in the popular imagination. And while the early wave of Christian missionaries largely dismissed witchcraft as paganism and fiction, the Pentecostal churches that sprang up in Nigeria in the 20th century took supernatural evil much more seriously.
These churches waged spiritual warfare against imaginary witches. A new spiritual economy combined faith and capital, with the right church seen as the path to prosperity – be it through supernatural blessings or the connections made possible by the church. As a result, witch allegations became widespread because financial success and spiritual happiness were closely related – and if you didn’t succeed, someone else had to be blamed.
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The Center for American Women and Politics and Higher Heights finds that less than 2% Black women serve in this capacity in the United States. Of the 310 statewide executive offices nationwide, there are six Black women currently serving in this position. They are: James, Sheila Oliver, who is the lieutenant governor of New Jersey, Sandra Kennedy, who is the corporation commissioner in Arizona, Sabina Matos, the lieutenant governor of Rhode Island, Juliana Stratton, who is the lieutenant governor of Illinois, and Shirley Weber, who is the secretary of state of California.
All of these women are Democrats. To date, there have been 17 Black women who held statewide elected positions. To be sure, women of all racial and ethnic backgrounds are often absent from statewide executive positions. Only 94 women in the nation are currently elected or appointed to these positions.
Perhaps inspired by Stacey Abrams‘ 2018 campaign to be the first Black women governor, others are following her example and mounting their campaigns for the 2022 election cycle. Abrams provided a model for other Black women – who are also highly accomplished political leaders – to use as a template for their own gubernatorial pursuits.
Indeed, six Black women ran for governor in 2018. The burgeoning 2022 election cycle already has six Black woman gubernatorial contenders and it’s only October 2021. In addition to Tish James of New York, Danielle Allen (D-MA), Deidre DeJear (D-IA), Deirdre Gilbert (D-TX), Connie Johnson (D-OK), and Mia McLeod (D-DSC) have announced their candidacies. While each woman faces unique challenges and opportunities within varying political contexts across their respective states, they all share the possibility of becoming the first (and perhaps, second and third … ) Black woman to occupy the highest-elected office in their states. Furthermore, they are likely to be joined by other Black women candidates who may announce as the 2022 election cycle continues.
My research on Black women candidates demonstrates that this group of office seekers must overcome the deeply racialized and gendered barriers to achieve electoral success. In sum, misogynoir is very real for Black women candidates. The women in my research document experiences of sexual harassment on the campaign trail, difficulties with fundraising, little or no support from their political party, media bias, lack of access to political networks, critiques on their appearances, as well as racialized political hierarchies.
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