Commentary by Black Kos editor JoanMar
The world of politics has not been the most welcoming of spaces for Black folks, and especially not for Black women. That we continue to enter the fray despite having to fight off microaggressions on a daily, if not hourly, basis is a testament to our indomitable will. We are, after all, the children of the survivors. Today we celebrate just a few of the women who, in the face of virulent racism and pervasive misogynoir, continue to let their Black Girl Magic shine.
#BlackGirlMagic #1: Congresswoman Jasmine Crockett
Malcolm X once famously said, “The most disrespected person in America, is the black woman. The most un-protected person in America is the black woman. The most neglected person in America, is the black woman.” That total disrespect for Black women is what informed that obnoxious, classless trump toady from Georgia to go after Congresswoman Jasmine Crockett’s appearance. Well, as the new saying goes, “She f***ed around and found out.” Quickly. Decisively. Ms. Crockett delivered a beatdown that was Kendrick Lamar level delicious.
What was meant for evil was repurposed for good. Jasmine Crockett is now thee shining star on The Hill. Unlike the disrupting, Putin-loving MTG, Rep. Crockett understands the reason she was elected and takes her job seriously. Here she is fighting for Snap benefits for all those who need it.
#BlackGirlMagic #2: District Attorney Fani Willis
If there’s one activity #VonShitzNPantz and his fascists followers have perfected, it has got to be the art of projection. If that foul traitor opens his McDonalds-hamburger-gobbling hole to accuse you of an act, you can bet your last dollar that it is something he’s guilty of. And so it is that even as he whines about a “weaponized justice system,” people operating on his behalf were busy doing just that against Fani Willis. Well, she won her primary contest. And the smart money should be on her winning the cases against him and his toadies.
#BlackGirlMagic #3: Marilyn Mosby
Former State Attorney Marilyn Mosby was facing 40 years in prison for the crime of daring to seek justice for Freddie Gray.
Former Baltimore State’s Attorney Marilyn Mosby was sentenced Thursday to one year of home detention for her perjury and mortgage fraud convictions, and ordered to forfeit her Florida condo.
U.S. District Judge Lydia Kay Griggsby handed down a sentence of three years of supervised release, opting against sending Mosby to prison. Prosecutors had sought 20 months in prison.
Glory be!
#BlackGirlMagic #4: Stacey Plaskett
Delegate Stacey Plaskett has the dubious pleasure of sharing chairing duties with Jim (Gym) Jordan on the House Judiciary Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of Federal Government. She has the patience of Job and the wit of King Solomon. Little Gymmie has not been faring well.
#BlackGirlMagic #5: Cassie Ventura
I was never a fan of Sean Coombs and I became less so after watching an episode of one of his reality shows where, on the spur of the moment, he decided that he wanted cheese cake from Manhattan. He had some 6 or 7 young people walk(!) from Brooklyn to Manhattan through the night to go get him cheese cake from his favorite restaurant. When they finally found their way back to him with the thing, he didn’t want it. That single act screamed to me that the man was abusive and drunk on his own power. I didn’t need to see the video of him brutalizing her to believe Cassie’s allegations against him. She deserves all the praise and support for finally striking the blow that will see his empire come tumbling down.
“Thank you for all of the love and support from my family, friends, strangers and those I have yet to meet,” Ventura wrote in a post shared on Instagram. “The outpouring of love has created a place for my younger self to settle and feel safe now, but this is only the beginning.”Ventura continued, “Domestic Violence is THE issue. It broke me down to someone I never thought I would become.
With a lot of hard work, I am better today, but I will always be recovering from my past.”
Yep, all the obstacles and still we rise.
You may write me down in history
With your bitter, twisted lies,
You may trod me in the very dirt
But still, like dust, I'll rise.
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News round up by dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor
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A Barack Obama appointee, Reeves sits on a U.S. District Court in Mississippi. His latest opinion was sparked by facts that he sees all too often and has written about before: the egregious violation of a criminal suspect’s constitutional rights as an innocent person wrongly charged with a crime. It began when detective Jacquelyn Thomas of Jackson, Mississippi, accused Desmond Green of murder. The detective’s only evidence was a statement made by Green’s acquaintance, Samuel Jennings—after Jennings was arrested for burglary and grand larceny, and while he was under the influence of meth. Thomas allegedly encouraged Jennings to select Green’s picture out of a photo lineup after he identified someone else as the killer. Allegedly, she also misled the grand jury to secure an indictment, concealing Jennings’ drug abuse as well as the many inconsistencies and inaccuracies in his statement.
Jennings later recanted, admitting that, in his meth-addled state, he’d provided a bogus tip. A judge finally dismissed the charges. By that point, Green had spent 22 months in jail, serving pretrial detention. The facility was violent. The food was moldy. He slept on the floor. His cell was infested with snakes and vermin.
Green then sued Thomas, accusing her of malicious prosecution in violation of the Constitution. Thomas promptly asserted qualified immunity to defeat the lawsuit. This doctrine protects government officials from liability unless they run afoul of “clearly established” law. In other words, there must be an earlier case on the books with similar, “particularized” facts that explicitly bars the official’s actions. If there is no near-identical precedent that unambiguously prohibits those acts, qualified immunity kicks in, the lawsuit is tossed out, and the case never even reaches a jury.
This shield has allowed a repulsive amount of wrongdoing by police and prosecutors to go totally unpunished. Cops are permitted to brutally beat, murder, steal from, and conspire against innocent people because the rights they violate are, ostensibly, not “clearly established.” Courts regularly apply the doctrine when there is a tiny discrepancy between a previous case and the facts at hand as an excuse to let the officer off scot-free. And over the past few decades, SCOTUS itself has expanded qualified immunity to new extremes. The result, as Reeves wrote, is “a perpetuation of racial inequality”: Black Americans experience more violations of their civil rights than any other class, yet qualified immunity denies them a remedy in even the most appalling circumstances.
Here, though, Reeves refused to let the doctrine devour the Constitution. He concluded that there is sufficient on-point precedent to show that Thomas’ malicious prosecution, if proved, violated Green’s “clearly established” rights. So the case may go to trial. That, however, was not the end of his analysis—because, as he pointed out, the concept of qualified immunity is unlawful, unworkable, and indefensible.
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The Supreme Court sided with South Carolina Republicans in a racial gerrymandering case that’s the Republican-majority court’s latest ruling curbing voting rights.
Justice Samuel Alito wrote the 6-3 ruling, joined by his fellow Republican appointees in the majority and with Democratic appointees dissenting.
The Supreme Court has disallowed racial gerrymandering but enabled partisan gerrymandering. Of course, it can be difficult to distinguish between the two. Chief Justice John Roberts, who authored the 5-4 decision in 2019 effectively blessing partisan gerrymandering, noted during the October argument in this South Carolina case that “disentangling race and politics in a situation like this is very, very difficult.”
Following the 2020 census, South Carolina Republicans pushed a congressional map that kicked out more than 30,000 Black people from the state’s 1st Congressional District. Rep. Nancy Mace, R-S.C., had won the seat in 2020 by barely beating a Democrat. Republicans apparently didn’t want to chance another close one, and Mace won by a wider margin in 2022 with the new map in place.
But a three-judge panel in January 2023, which evaluated evidence and witnesses, said the South Carolina map is an illegal racial gerrymander that pushed Black people out for predominantly racial reasons. The panel cited Supreme Court precedent that said sorting voters on racial grounds is suspect even if race is used as a proxy for politics.
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I first came to Washington in 1994 as a 17-year-old freshman studying political science at Howard University and working part time as an intern journalist for The Palm Beach Post in South Florida and the Cox Newspapers chain, roaming the halls of Congress right after Republican Rep. Newt Gingrich’s conservative revolution.
Washington Post journalist Leon Dash visited my freshman English class to talk about his multi-year study of a Black family of addicts and petty thieves in Washington, “The Rosa Lee Story,” that won the 1995 Pulitzer Prize for explanatory journalism. In 1998, as an intern at The Wall Street Journal’s bureau in the District of Columbia, I crossed paths with journalist Ron Suskind, who was then promoting “Hope in the Unseen,” the book version of his investigation of “inner city Washington, D.C.” which also won a 1995 Pulitzer. Suskind investigated a young Anacostia high school student who was the only person at his school who wanted to learn or had any human-resembling qualities. We even saw the genre recently, in a Washington Post “deep read” by Emily Davies, a tear-jerking dive on a Washington teenager solemnly waiting for his turn to have a funeral. The Jan. 20 report is destined to land in journalism award submissions.
These narratives are problematic not because they are not technically true. They are problematic because of their parachute focus on maximizing pathology and limiting character development, ignoring historical structures and assets. My students call it “trauma porn.” The genre reveals a mass media blinder to the complexity, vitality and agency of Black people in these neighborhoods.
They miss some damn good stories, too.
These media distortions have consequences for democracy. We feel this acutely in D.C. because of the city’s status — not a state but essentially a colony of Congress with limited “home rule.” Our license plates say “Taxation Without Representation” because any otherwise irrelevant junior member of Congress could read a headline and decide to stop us from making decisions about our own rules or tax dollars.
Washington’s elected officials try to make policies that respond to their constituents. But they know that the Big Brothers and Sisters in Congress are watching, ready to shoot half-cocked. We saw this with the fevered national debate over the Washington crime bill. We also saw this when the mayor at first left student protests about Gaza alone and then changed her mind when Congress demanded it. City officials stay in a defensive position, trying to make sure they evade their colonial overlords.
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Brazil’s biggest pop star, Anitta, has released a music video depicting rituals of the Afro-Brazilian faith Candomble, sparking controversy in a country where religious intolerance is all too common. ABC: Anitta defends her Afro-Brazilian faith after new music video costs her some followers
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Her track — pointedly named “Accept” — has been viewed over a million times on YouTube since its release on Tuesday. It is a rare personal offering from the artist, who has long practiced the religion in Rio de Janeiro. Anitta said she lost 200,000 of her 65 million followers on Instagram after its release.
“I’ve already talked about my religion countless times, but it seems that leaving an artistic work in my catalog forever was too much for those who don’t accept that others think differently,” Anitta said on social media Tuesday. Trolls deriding Candomble appeared far outnumbered by those expressing support.
Criticism from a minority of social media users continued overnight, and she issued another statement Wednesday to denounce misinformation and jokes targeting Afro-Brazilian faiths.
“Its teachings and its people deserve respect like any other religion,” Anitta said.
Filmed in black and white, the video shows Anitta crouching naked as a priestess in traditional, white attire pours purifying water over her head. In some scenes, she wears a straw dress resembling the head-to-toe covering used by Obaluaê, the orixá or deity of earth and health. The video also showed Catholic iconography, an evangelical Christian service and a Jewish worshipper with a tefillin.
“Anita suffered religious racism, there’s no doubt about it. She can do whatever she wants to do as an artist. But her declaring herself as Candomble means she lost followers,” said Mother Nilce de Iansã, coordinator of the national network for Afro-Brazilian religions and health, during a webinar on the Rio-based Museum of the Republic’s planned exhibition on Afro-Brazilian religious belongings.
As Portuguese Catholic colonists brought African slaves to Brazil, the enslaved men and women developed syncretic blends of their traditional religions with Catholicism, now practiced by a small minority of Brazilians.
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Kenyan special forces police who have spent time battling al-Shabaab fighters in east Africa are expected to arrive in Haiti in the coming days, as the US secretary of state, Antony Blinken, warned the Caribbean country was “on the precipice of becoming an all-out failed state”.
A small advance group of Kenyan officers – part of a larger UN-backed “multinational security support mission” designed to stabilize Haiti after months of mayhem – landed in the capital, Port-au-Prince, late on Monday as the city’s airport reopened nearly three months after a gang uprising forced it to close.
Kenyan media reports said another 200 officers were due to arrive later this week with their deployment coinciding with a state visit the country’s president, William Ruto, is making to the US. A total of about 1,000 Kenyan agents are expected to join the mission, as well as officers from Chile, Jamaica, Grenada, Paraguay, Burundi, Chad, Nigeria and Mauritius.
A senior official from Kenya’s interior ministry told the Geneva-based civil society group Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime that “the first boots [would] hit the ground” in the coming days. “This time we are serious,” the official was quoted as saying.
Appearing in Washington DC before the Senate foreign affairs committee on Tuesday, Blinken claimed there was an “opportunity now” to achieve enduring stability after decades of turmoil.
Blinken said the reopening of Haiti’s main international airport was a clear sign of progress and anticipated US carriers would resume flights there “in the days ahead”.
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