The Case of Kyle Kashuv
Commentary by Chitown Kev
I have enough going on IRL at the moment that I really didn’t need to see this Kyle Kashuv hot mess up and down my Twitter feed.
Harvard has previously taken back admission from prospective students over racist memes, plagiarism -- and even murder. Those cases are newly relevant in the wake of Kashuv's news, which he laid out Monday in a Twitter thread.
Kashuv, a prominent gun rights advocate who has met with President Donald Trump at the White House, acknowledged that he and classmates made "abhorrent racial slurs" in digital messages, before the shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School.
Harvard told Kashuv in a May letter that it "reserves the right to withdraw an offer of admission under various conditions, including 'if you engage or have engaged in behavior that brings into question your honesty, maturity, or moral character.'"
In response, Kashuv apologized, said he was "mortified and embarrassed" by the comments and wrote that he had matured since he wrote them.
First of all, I don’t think that Harvard (and many other schools) simply tells you that upon admission; you’re informed of something to that effect when you apply.
For example, I applied to a very competitive public university when I was ready to transfer from community college and I distinctly recall their asking a similar question (which covered all crimes...not simply felonies...I have no felonies). I answered the question honestly and was admitted to the school (notably, in that and other applications to 4-year universities that I submitted in 2002-3, I declined to state my race/ethnicity...that’s another story!).
[In one of my previous jobs, the same standard applied for background checks (which were just beginning at that time) my employer wanted prospective employees to be honest; depending on the nature of the offense and the job being applied for, they were willing to work with you.]
So from one perspective, Harvard rescinded Kashuv’s admission simply because he wasn’t fully honest with the admissions office...never mind what he was dishonest about.
And Conservatibve Twitter has gone more bat-shit loony than usual…
“Wrecking a kid’s life?”
Pardon me, Trayvon Martin and Tamir Rice and seventeen of Mr. Kashuv’s former Marjory Stoneman Douglas classmates are dead...they no longer have a life to be “wrecked”...I would assume that Mr. Kashuv has other options besides attending Hah-vahd...and some damn good ones, too...spare me the drama.
And besides...it seems to me that Mr. Kashuv publicized this fact and not Harvard.
And what in the fu*k is Michael Tracey talking about with this students have to be “career-minded, perfect little angels” in order “to gain admission to elite institutions?’
Plenty of students get into “elite institutions” that aren’t “perfect little angels” but either they decide to keep it quiet or they’ve used the opportunity to make a learning experience of their past mistakes; the second option was open to Kashuv and he refused to take it...probably because he has no regrets about his past racism.
And why should he?
After all, we now live in a country where even the person that occupies the highest elected office in the land acts with utter impunity and without consequence and is as offensive as he can possibly be to a number of people in some of the same blatant ways that Mr. Kashuv has shown himself to be.
Oh, and David Brooks has lost his damn mind over this incident.
Actually, as a rule, what Brooks calls “moral formation” is, at bottom, simple.
I mean, I could “go there” on the “reward theory” part...one should do the right thing simply because it is the right thing to do without any thought of reward but...hell, there’s usually the idea of some form of “reward” in the back of my mind, if I am really honest about it.
And as we all know, white privilege and white supremacy is amply rewarded in American society...so maybe Mr. Kashuv is getting what he (or his parents) feels is due him.
And as great and as problematic an institution that Harvard University is (and will be) I am glad that they refused to reward Mr. Kashuv’s white supremacy.
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News round up by dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor
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Talking to the people in Youngstown, Ohio, that the national media usually ignores. Slate: The Nonwhite Working Class
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In 1984, Lewis Macklin stood up at a community meeting and argued that city officials should shut down his high school. It had been seven years since Black Monday—when Youngstown Sheet & Tube announced it was closing its largest factory, costing 5,000 people their jobs and setting off a chain of plant shutdowns that sent the city’s population into free fall. Youngstown could no longer fill its schools, so one would have to close.
But the city did not want to shut down Macklin’s school, Wilson High, which was mostly white. Officials wanted to close the nearby black school instead. Macklin, who is black, recently told me the city’s argument was, “ ‘Keep Wilson open—if you close it down, the white community will move. We’ll take our children and we’ll move.’ ” That argument won. The city shut down the black school, South High, in 1993, and its students were sent to the district’s remaining schools. White families continued to flee the south side anyway, and by 2016, students in the Youngstown School District were 15 percent white and 64 percent black.
Like many buildings in Youngstown, South High School stands abandoned—a stately, stone Beaux-Arts building whose afterlife as a charter school never stuck. The hedges are trimmed, but the flagpole is bare. For Macklin, now a reverend at a nearby Baptist church, the building is a reminder of how deindustrialization, and the response to it, hurt not just the city of Youngstown, but the city’s black community in particular.
If you’ve heard about Youngstown lately, it is probably because the city has been held up—over, and over, and over again—as the locus of white working-class drift from the Democratic Party to Donald Trump. “The epicenter of the Trump phenomenon,” the public policy theorist Justin Gest called the city. It was here, the story goes, that Trump stoked white anxiety, pitched cures to roiling crowds, and brought white union workers into the GOP’s column for the first time in decades, where they appear to be staying put. Democrats underperformed in the region during the blue wave in 2018, and Youngstown will be represented by a Republican in the Ohio state Senate for the first time in 60 years.
“There’s no boom in Youngstown, but blue-collar workers are sticking with Trump,” the New York Times announced last month, in the latest of a series of Trump Country dispatches on the nation’s white working class. These heartland safaris exhibit a common media oversight: the compulsion to paint white, small-town manufacturing workers as the face of the working class, which is in reality mostly urban, racially diverse, and more likely to make burgers than automobiles.
In Youngstown, these stories exhibit another oversight: Youngstown is not white. In contrast to the largely white Mahoning Valley, for which it often serves as an unthinking stand-in, the city itself is 43 percent black and majority-minority. The mayor is black. In more than a dozen interviews in Youngstown’s black community, I could not find anyone who knew a black Trump supporter, let alone was one. But not all of the people I talked to voted for Hillary Clinton, either.
The collapse of manufacturing in the Mahoning Valley may have provoked a white identity crisis that the national media can’t get enough of, but the upheaval was more severe for black Americans. As Sherry Linkon and John Russo, onetime co-directors of the Center for Working-Class Studies at Youngstown State University, wrote in Steeltown U.S.A., their portrait of Youngstown after the fall: With less money saved, smaller pensions, and less valuable homes, black families, “suffered disproportionately when the mills closed.”
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Nine months into a nonprofit job that I loved — where I was the first woman of color in an executive role — I was forced to leave due to discrimination, exploitation, and retaliation from the young, liberal, white, woman executive director. After much reflection on my entire career, and countless healing conversations with other black women in leadership roles at “progressive” social justice organizations, I now understand that what happened to me is indicative of a much larger problem in the entire sector.
Leaders at the forefront of the fight for social justice need to learn to lead courageous dialogue about race. When social justice organizations are unable or unwilling to advance conversations about racial equity, both internally and externally, everyone loses: the community served, the frontline staff, and the donors who support their work.
I am a black woman, immigrant with a Latinx accent, who grew up in near-poverty, and went on to excel academically and professionally, in both the private and nonprofit sectors. Naively I thought that my contributions to the social justice sector would be enthusiastically welcomed. But I eventually realized that for my ideas and contributions to be taken seriously, they had to be delivered through my white male colleagues. Many of them were amazing allies and co-conspirators in navigating systems with racial and gender imbalances, and others were just happy to get credit for someone else’s ideas.
One common thread that I noticed in white-dominated leadership structures is a strong resistance to dialogues about race. Even as diversity and inclusion are becoming mainstream as a way of strengthening teams, conversations about diversity tend to be superficial and focus mostly on gender inclusion. In my experience, these cosmetic efforts result in people of color feeling unable to express all the ways in which our contributions are disregarded and our leadership invalidated, leaving us unable to participate in the development of a culture of inclusion and belonging.
Women of color, and particularly black women, are often left to deal on our own with the harm of conscious and unconscious bias in the work place. But we shouldn’t have to deal with it in the first place. Here’s how the industry — and especially the executive leadership teams — can create meaningful change:
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It’s a classic Washington catch-22: For years, Congress has chastised the agency that investigates workplace discrimination for its unwieldy backlog of unresolved cases while giving it little to no extra money to address the problem.
In turn, officials at the US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission have found a workaround: Close more cases without investigating them.
Since 2008, the EEOC has doubled the share of complaints involving companies or local government agencies that it places on its lowest-priority track, effectively guaranteeing no probes, mediation, or other substantive efforts on behalf of those workers. About 30 percent of cases were shunted to that category last year, according to internal data obtained by the Center for Public Integrity through a public records request.
The EEOC said it has focused its limited resources “on charges where the government can have the greatest impact on workplace discrimination.” But as it cut its backlog by 30 percent in the last decade — much of that in the past two years — the already-low share of workers getting help has dropped. Only 13 percent of all complaints the EEOC closed last year ended with a settlement or other relief for the workers who filed them, down from 18 percent in 2008.
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The classic American rogue returns to the big screen this summer, out now, Ebony: Shaft X 3: A Family Affair
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This year’s Shaft—starring Samuel L. Jackson, Jessie T. Usher, Richard Roundtreeand Regina Hall—revives the much-loved franchise of the early ’70s trilogy: Shaft(1971), Shaft’s Big Score! (1972) and Shaft in Africa (1973). Legendary photographer Gordon Parks first told the story of private eye John Shaft, a kick-ass Black investigator in his late 20s whose exploits in New York City’s seedy Times Square and heroin-era Harlem had rarely, if ever, been depicted in film. Shaft curses out White cops, has sensuous sex scenes (with a Black and a White woman), trades racist barbs with an Italian gangster, then takes on the Mafia and wins. Moviegoers used to the likes of Sidney Poitier and Harry Belafonte had never seen anything like Roundtree’s Shaft.
“I had to do some research,” admits Usher, 27, who portrays John “J. J.” Shaft Jr. in the latest installment. “Initially, I kind of knew what I was getting [into] because I hear the way people speak about Shaft and how they call him a neighborhood hero, the way that he’s looked at and respected. I understood, everybody felt at the time needed to be done. It wasn’t just for entertainment; it was like: ‘We need this. This guy, he’s a champion for us. And he’s to be respected.’ And I loved that.”
Shaft led directly to 1972’s Super Fly (directed by Gordon Parks Jr.), 1973’s The Mack and The Spook Who Sat by the Door and other Black films, including a slew of ’70s action-adventures starring bombshell Pam Grier (e.g., Foxy Brown, Coffyand Sheba, Baby). The so-called “blaxploitation” films showed African-Americans as we’d never been seen before: fighting back against White supremacy, making love and looking sexy, using our agency. No longer the servants or sidekicks that mainstream audiences were used to, the heroes and sheroes of these movies usually existed in their own Black universe. The shift changed Hollywood forever, setting the stage for directors such as Spike Lee, Tyler Perry, Ava DuVernay, Steve McQueen, Ryan Coogler and others to tell our stories, for us by us.
Such is the legacy of Shaft.
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Back in 1980 when Harlem was still a byword for poverty, criminality and the decline of New York City, black men in the neighbourhood had a worse chance of living to the age of 65 than men in Bangladesh did. At that time Harlem’s residents—almost all of them black, and many of them poor—died of heart disease at double the rate of whites. They died of liver cirrhosis, brought on by alcoholism or hepatitis, at ten times the rate of whites. And they were 14 times likelier to be murdered. Today the prominent corner of Malcolm X Boulevard and West 125th Street houses a Whole Foods, an upmarket grocery chain, and life expectancy is up to 76.2 years. That is still five years behind the rest of the city, but the gap is no longer so egregious.
The case of Harlem exemplifies a remarkable trend in American public health that is seldom noticed: the persistent gap in life expectancy between whites and blacks has closed substantially, and is now at its narrowest ever. In 1900, the earliest date for which the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) publishes statistics, the life expectancy for black boys at birth was 32.5—14.1 years shorter than for white boys. Put another way, the typical black boy had 30% less life to live. Incremental progress, however fitful, was made for the next century, but epidemics of crack, HIV and urban violence threatened to reverse it. By 1993, a peak year for violent crime, the life-expectancy gap between black and white men had widened again by nearly three years, to 8.5 years.
But then it began a sustained, steady fall. In 2011 the black-white gap had narrowed to 4.4 years for men (5.7% less) and just 3.1 years (3.8% less) for women. Though progress then leveled off until 2016, the most recent year available from the CDC, the trend is stable and not reversing.
The downward trajectory can be explained by several simultaneous phenomena, not all of them cheerful. Among the elderly, more of whom die after all than the rest, the narrowing is due to mortality from heart disease and cancer declining faster for blacks than for whites. But for premature deaths, racial gaps—especially between black and white men—have also narrowed because of substantially reduced mortality from homicide, the result of the great crime decline, and HIV, the result of improved medical therapies. Yet the emergence of the opioid epidemic, which kills whites at higher rates than other races, has also hastened the racial convergence.
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If you venture outside Bangui, the capital of the Central African Republic, it’s dangerous to travel alone. Journeying from village to village means navigating jungle or savanna without paved roads or reliable communication networks. CAR straddles one of the world’s largest magnetic anomalies, so compasses often err. And conflict among more than a dozen armed religious groups has balkanized the country.
Amid all of this, one unlikely institution has become crucial to the country’s survival: the Boy Scouts. Like scouts the world over, members wear trim shorts and multicolor neckerchiefs—but their youthful uniform belies a grander-than-average sociopolitical mission. When they aren’t earning badges for cooking and woodworking, they’re guiding ailing villagers to hospitals, or distributing mosquito nets and food at refugee camps. Last year, the boys investigated rumors of Ebola in a remote part of the country. The year before that, they helped negotiate the release of a Muslim community held hostage by armed groups.
Since 2013, when rebels staged a coup and religious violence flared, CAR has been in a state of civil war. Today, the enfeebled government in Bangui relies on foreign aid agencies to hold the country together—and the agencies in turn rely on the country’s 20,000 boy scouts, who surpass CAR’s largest armed factions in both size and geographic reach. UNICEF, for example, deploys boys to public squares to perform plays about hand-washing, and sends them door-to-door to promote the polio vaccine.
The peacekeeping role that scouts play in CAR is more fitting than it might at first seem. Founded in 1907 by the British army officer Robert Baden-Powell, the scouting movement combines military reconnaissance tactics with a pacifist philosophy—in his famous book Scouting for Boys, Baden-Powell urged readers to think of themselves as “peace scouts.” According to Elleke Boehmer, a professor at Oxford, scouting technique was also strongly influenced by Baden-Powell’s observations during his extensive African travels. “The Ingonyama chorus—a central scouting chant—is a Zulu chant,” she told me. And the wooden beads on the uniform were inspired by “a Zulu necklace he once found during a raid.”
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Meet Didi Winston, a Bajan trans pioneer, LGBTQ activist, and flag-waving champion. Slate: “I Don’t Just Win, I Conquer”
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Flag-waving at Carnival is a Caribbean art form steeped in tradition, with flag-bearers sometimes referred to as “the forgotten soldiers of the steel pan world.” To win the competition at Barbados’ annual summerlong Crop Over festival, a flag-waver must make “the most spectacular use of the flag” in leading the charge of the band. In this role, as well as many others in her life, Didi Winston is usually out front and center.
Winston is the first transgender woman entertainer Barbados has ever known. A trained dancer who performed at the popular Plantation Garden Theatre Dinner Show for years, a makeup artist for the Caribbean Broadcasting Corp., and a multiwinner (20 times!) of the Winston Jordan Flag Person of the Year Award, Winston recently parlayed her movement expertise into running a fitness class. For $50, get five weeks’ worth of one-hour sessions, so you too can learn how to “wuk-up” (Bajan for a local gyrating dance move) and wave to the pulsating soca beat. Flawless legs like Winston’s are not guaranteed.
Right now, Didi is busy prepping for Crop Over’s big finale (Kadooment Day on Aug. 6) and rehearsals for the upcoming Pride parade (June 30), all while working as an Inglot cosmetics artist.
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