Blown Away
Commentary by Chitown Kev
One of my YouTube addictions for the past six months or so has been watching old tennis videos. Borg-McEnroe, 18-16 tiebreak in the 4th set. Graf-Seles. Federer’s win over Pete Sampras (i.e. the changing of the guard!). Those absolutely epic 2 hour long loud grunt matches between former world #1’s Serena Williams and Victoria Azarenka...the list could go on.
So I’d been following a few of the storylines at the 2025 French Open. The men’s final was, simply, one of the greatest tennis matches I have ever watched. Probably the best storyline was the improbable leap of France’s Lois Boisson from a wildcard entry and through 2 Top 10 players into the French Open semifinals and watching the Paris crowds go wild.
But...Boisson ran into possibly the top clay court player in the world right now, America’s Coco Gauff. Gauff defeated Boisson 6-1, 6-2 in that semifinal and then won her first French Open title and her second Grand Slam, defeating world #1 Aryna Sabalenka 6-7 (5), 6-2, 6-4 on a windy and chilly day in Paris where the officials decided to keep the roof open.
And then...Sabalenka said a few things which you have probably heard by now.
Poor sportsmanship at best. The most crude type of racism at its worst, the kind where Black people don’t get any type of credit for being professionally at the top of their game in all sorts of ways.
Sabalenka walked back her incendiary comments after heavy criticism from sports pundits and former players.
After watching her post-Grand Slam-final interviews at the 2023 U.S. Open (when she also lost to Coco Gauff) and the 2025 Australian Open (when she lost to American Madison Keys), I think I am willing to give Sabalenka the benefit of the doubt as she did compliment both players for beating her at that time. Sabalenka also seems aware that she has emotional difficulties when playing high stakes matches and she’s been known for breaking a racket or two (but is Sabalenka any worse than, say, John McEnroe in his prime?).
I have one more small comment about the reaction Gauff’s win based on something I heard from a commentator on the Dan Le Batard Show.
I get it. Most sports (individual and team) are statistics driven so I get the need to compare Coco to Serena Williams, just as LeBron James was frequently compared to Michael Jordan when James was still in high school. I think that I want to enjoy Coco Gauff for being the first Coco Gauff for now. Comparisons can come later.
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News round up by dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor
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One month after shutting down the MET Gala carpet, TikTok sensation Khabane "Khaby" Lame has become the latest target of President Donald Trump's deportation agenda. The content creator is known for his silent reaction videos on social media, but even his status as a beloved influencer couldn't protect him from a face-to-face meeting with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).
Lame was detained by U.S. immigration at the Las Vegas airport over the weekend. ICE confirmed the news to Men’s Journal in a statement saying, "U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement detained Seringe Khabane Lame, 25, a citizen of Italy, June 6, at the Harry Reid International Airport, Las Vegas, Nevada for immigration violations."
Apparently, Lame's dance with ICE came after he overstayed his U.S. visa. The 25-year-old came into the country on April 30, but his visa has since expired, ICE officials said. This led to authorities catching him at the Vegas' airport and detaining him briefly.
The Senegal-born TikToker likes to keep his personal life private— which is probably evident by his silent persona. He first rose to fame in 2020 as his entertaining TikToks took over social media. He is currently the most followed influencer on the app, with over 162.2 million followers. Forbes estimates his net worth is $20 million.
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Tyler Perry wasted no time tearing into Trump’s administration and the divisive state of America during the BET Awards Monday night.
After sharing a brief story about his son, the billionaire media mogul launched into an impassioned State of the Union-esque address to condemn what has been happening in the country as of late — specifically with the erasure of Black history.
“I want you to pay attention to— don’t miss this,” he began onstage. “They are removing our books from libraries. They are removing our stories and our history. They are removing our names from government buildings as if someone wants to erase our footprints.”
“Because what we need to understand is that if our children don’t know our history, they won’t know our power,” Perry added.
The filmmaker pointed his message to Black viewers, telling them, “The truth of the matter [is], it’s impossible to erase our footprints, because we left them on water. What I mean by that is, we were snatched from our homeland, bought across the ocean and left footprints all the way to America.”
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Ten years after making history as the first Black female principal dancer at American Ballet Theatre, Misty Copeland announces her retirement — closing one chapter while expanding her legacy offstage. The Grio: Misty Copeland broke barriers in ballet. Now she’s retiring and moving to ‘the next stage’
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Ten years ago this month, Misty Copeland sat in front of a hastily arranged news conference at American Ballet Theatre, fighting back tears of pride over her new role: principal dancer.
“This is it,” she said, with emotion. “This has been my dream since I was 13.”
The occasion was highly unusual — normally, when a dancer is promoted, a brief press release is issued. But this was Copeland, a crossover star with fame far beyond the insular world of ballet. And now she was becoming the first Black female principal in the company’s 75-year history — just days after her New York debut as the lead in “Swan Lake” brought a refreshingly diverse, packed audience to the Metropolitan Opera House.
Now, a decade and many accomplishments later, Copeland is retiring from the company she joined as a teenager.
“It’s been 25 years at ABT, and I think it’s time,” Copeland, 42, told the Associated Press last week ahead of Monday’s official announcement of her move. “It’s time for me to move to the next stage.”
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The first thing you notice, stepping from the scorching Sahelian sun into the laterite-stone dome, is how cold it is. There is no air-conditioning, just shade and natural ventilation; nor is there plaster. Diebedo Francis Kere, the architect behind the new mausoleum in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso’s capital, strives to use only what can be sourced nearby. “I’m a construction-material opportunist,” he says. “I look around at what is most abundant, and how people use it, and try to do something new.” The result is a building so austere, low-tech and elegant that it is like entering a temple of the ancient world.
In 2022 Mr Kere became the first black architect to win the prestigious Pritzker prize (considered architecture’s equivalent of the Nobel). He is the best known of a cohort of African architects whose ideas are at the profession’s cutting edge. In particular, they are showing how to build sustainably for a warming, changing planet; what’s more, they are doing so on the cheap. At a time when African-made music, art and TV is crossing into the global cultural mainstream, the continent’s architecture and design are becoming increasingly influential, too.
For a long time, ideas flowed the other way. Since the 1950s, many of the most important public buildings in Africa have been modernist in style and monumental in scale. The “tropical modernism” of the post-war era—a style inspired by the radical functionality of Le Corbusier, a Swiss-born architect—was a way for newly independent African states to assert themselves on the world stage, says Tosin Oshinowo, a Nigerian architect. But the architects behind these buildings, who mostly did not come from Africa, often used materials unsuited to local climates, such as concrete (which can crack and blister in humidity) and plate-glass (which can make buildings oppressively hot inside).
Shiny buildings still have appeal: some African elites “want something that they’ve seen in the global north or Dubai”, says Kunle Adeyemi, another Nigerian architect. This can lead to staid uniformity at best and cheap mimicry at worst. In Ethiopia, for instance, the historic heart of Addis Ababa, the capital, is currently being demolished to make way for bland, identikit high-rises implanted from the Gulf.
Mr Kere and his peers point to another way. They draw inspiration from the immediate and familiar rather than styles and materials imported from elsewhere. The rustic appearance of the John Randle Centre (JRC), a museum which opened in Lagos last year, aims to evoke the mud rendering used for centuries by the Yoruba, one of Nigeria’s largest ethnic groups. Seun Oduwole, who designed the JRC, says too many new buildings in Lagos are “white boxes divorced from their surroundings”. He aims to create edifices that are in harmony with “nature and the physical environment”.
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A crying parent with an unpaid tuition balance walked into the staff room of a Catholic private school and begged the teachers to help enroll her son.
The school’s policy required the woman pay at least 60% of her son’s full tuition bill before he could join the student body. She didn’t have the money and was led away.
“She was pleading, ‘Please help me,’” said Beatrice Akite, a teacher at St. Kizito Secondary School in Uganda’s capital city, who witnessed the outburst. “It was very embarrassing. We had never seen something like that.”
Two weeks into second term, Akite recounted the woman’s desperate moment to highlight how distressed parents are being crushed by unpredictable fees they can’t pay, forcing their children to drop out of school. It’s leaving many in sub-Saharan Africa — which has the world’s highest dropout rates — to criticize the mission-driven Catholic Church for not doing enough to ease the financial pressure families face.
The Catholic Church is the region’s largest nongovernmental investor in education. Catholic schools have long been a pillar of affordable but high-quality education, especially for poor families.
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WELCOME TO THE TUESDAY PORCH
IF YOU ARE NEW TO THE BLACK KOS COMMUNITY, GRAB A SEAT, SOME CYBER EATS, RELAX, AND INTRODUCE YOURSELF.
