(*TRIGGER WARNING*...for reasons that will soon be obvious...prepare yourselves!)
Sitting at the BAR
Commentary by Chitown Kev
I will admit that about once a week, I do surf over to Black Agenda Report, that favorite blog of some white progressives that feel the need to put a black face on criticism of President Obama in order to throw the shade into the faces of President Obama's black supporters. (Of course, we've seen fewer references to BAR by white progressive critics of President Obama since the "Bernie Sanders is sheepdoggin'" piece!) Truthfully, I don't have a lot of antipathy to the points of view that I read at BAR; after all the leftist commentary that I read at BAR is far more inclusive of race and ethnicity in their class analyses than I find from white progressives, as a rule. I don't like some of the language that BAR uses to describe President Obama and I do think that their political analysis are a little off and BAR does advocate third-party (Green) politics, which I totally don't agree with at this time and moment in the American political landscape.
I have to admit that I loved BAR executive editor's Glen Ford's October 21 post, Blacks Will Transform America, and Free Themselves, But Not at the Ballot Box in 2016 for some of it's laugh-out loud nuggets and reminders, even if I ultimately disagreed with Mr. Ford's conclusions:
With Bernie Sanders making few inroads with the Black vote, corporate pundits have begun to describe both African Americans and Latinos as “traditional” and “more conservative” sectors of the Democratic Party – a ridiculous conclusion that cedes progressive politics to white left-liberals. (Publications like The Nation also believe in this fantasy.) Back in 2005, the directors of the Bay Area Center for Voting Research operated under the assumption that white liberal bastions like San Francisco, Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Ann Arbor, Michigan, were the most “progressive” cities in the nation. They were shocked when the center’s own survey revealed:
“The list of America’s most liberal cities reads like a who’s who of prominent African American communities. Gary, Washington D.C., Newark, Flint, Cleveland, Baltimore, Philadelphia, and Birmingham have long had prominent black populations. While most black voters have consistently supported Democrats since the 1960s, it is the white liberals that have slowly withered away over the decades, leaving African Americans as the sole standard bearers for the left.... The great political divide in America today is not red vs. blue, north vs. south, coastal vs. interior, or even rich vs. poor—it is now clearly black vs. white.”
The same Bay Area researchers did another survey of where “the Left” actually lives, in late 2013, with similar results. Of the top 20 “Most Liberal” cities of 100,000 population or more cited, 8 had Black majorities (Detroit, MI, Gary, IN, Newark, NJ, Flint, MI, Cleveland, OH, Baltimore, MD, Birmingham, AL, and St. Louis, MO); 8 were majority Black and Latino (Washington, DC, Oakland, CA, Inglewood, CA, Hartford, CT, Paterson, NJ, New Haven, CT, Chicago, IL, Philadelphia, PA), and only 4 were majority white (Berkeley, CA, Cambridge, MA, San Francisco, CA, and Seattle, WA).
Oops.
Glen Ford, Executive Editor of Black Agenda Report....when he's right, he's right.
I had to give Mr. Ford a "preach it" for those paragraphs.
Mr. Ford links to a 2005 Berkeley Daily Planet article which, in turn, had me to pull up the study cited in Ford's piece.
Link: The Most Conservative and Liberal Cities in the United States by The Bay Area Center for Voting Research
The attribution of “traditional” and “more conservative” viewpoints to African American and Latino Democrats by what Mr. Ford calls "corporate pundits" and even "white-left" magazines like
The Nation is, I assume, a thinly veiled reference (on the part of "white media," that is) to the prevalence of politically activist churches in communities of color. True enough, some individual black and Latino churches
can and do have conservative viewpoints on issues like marriage equality. But Mr. Ford is 100% correct to imply (if I am reading him correctly) that the white media (both MSM and The Left) paints a flat one-dimensional picture of the progressive role of black and Latino churches in their respective communities that takes no account of, for example, the different flavors of (Catholic and Protestant) liberation theology as preached and practiced by many of those churches in communities of color. So we get, for example, the curt dismissal of Dr. Rev. Jeremiah Wright as a "Goddamn-America" AIDS conspiracist loon or the light turnout at an ostensibly progressive conference (NN 14 in Detroit) for one of the progressive grassroots leaders in America today; a denial of the "progressive" label to black and brown left political activists and, to be honest, to black and brown people as a whole by many white progressives.
(And Glen Ford is no fan of black churches. Neither am I.)
"Progressive" or "liberal" or "the Left does not equal white (and really, it never did).
To be sure, I have major issues with other parts of Mr. Ford's piece. For example, while I don't disagree that part of the reason that blacks continue to vote Democratic (as opposed to the Greens or another third-party) is out of fear, history also shows that "the black vote" has always been a pragmatic one that reflects contemporary political realities (after all, black people did not vote en masse for Henry Wallace and The Progresive Party in 1948, either, in spite of Mr. Wallace's willingness to take on segregation).
Mr. Ford's entire piece is actually well worth the read, even for the occasional wince and the occasional lapse into ODS.
Because (to paraphrase James Baldwin), the progressive white world is white no longer and it will never be white again (and truthfully, it never was white...but we knew that, right?).
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News by dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor
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How Jeb Bush perpetrated the Sunshine State's war on black voters. Mother Jones: I'll be the Judge of that.
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But like everyone convicted of a felony in Florida, Ghent permanently lost his right to vote, serve on a jury, and run for office. The only way to regain these rights was to petition the governor for clemency. Ghent believed voting "should always be a right," but he was also motivated by economic concerns. He couldn't receive a professional license to practice radiography unless the governor granted his petition. And so on that September morning, Ghent descended into the basement of the state Capitol with dozens of other petitioners for a unique Florida ritual: ex-felons entreating the governor and members of his cabinet for the restoration of their civil rights.
These hearings, held four times annually, begin promptly at 9 a.m. One by one, ex-offenders like Ghent approach a podium, where they have five minutes to make their case. A red light signals their time is up. If the governor recommends clemency, and if a majority of the cabinet members agree—and they almost always do—the ex-offender's civil rights are restored. If the governor feels otherwise, the petitioner returns home without the full privileges of citizenship.
Ghent was one of the last petitioners on the docket. His hopes rose and fell with the fortunes of the men and women before him. He compared their crimes with his own. Fearing he might miss his turn if he strayed to the cafeteria, he limited his breakfast and lunch to the slim pickings from a nearby vending machine. By the time his name was called, he was racked with stress.
Bush issued his verdict as soon as Ghent concluded his pitch. "I'm going to deny the restoration of civil rights," he said. He wanted to see Ghent remain on the straight and narrow a bit longer, to prove he had really changed his ways. "I hope you come back, and I wish you well."
Fifteen years later, Ghent remembers the sting of those words. "He was very dismissive," says Ghent. The ex-felon wanted to push back against Bush's decision. But he simply said, "Thank you," and turned away.
Ghent was destined to remain an unwilling member of an unlucky club: the legions of Florida citizens—disproportionately African Americans, like him—who since the Civil War have been barred from the democratic process because of past convictions. Florida is currently one of three states that permanently disenfranchise everyone with felony convictions, even after they have completed all the terms of their sentences—a practice that today excludes nearly 1.5 million Floridians from voting, including about 20 percent of the state's black voting-age population. Under Bush, some low-level offenders regained their rights without appearing in person. But for many ex-felons, including some convicted of minor drug crimes, the only way to prevail was to show up and plead for clemency.
Courtesy of Mother Jones
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Finally a prosecutor got caught using blatant racism. Slate: How Prejudiced Prosecutors Create All-White Juries.
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On Monday, the Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in a case involving outrageous racism at the death penalty trial of Timothy Tyrone Foster, a black man accused of killing a white victim. During jury selection, the prosecutor referred to three black prospective jurors as “B#1,” “B#2,” and “B#3” in his notes, and consulted with an investigator who warned him that he should avoid “having to pick one of the black jurors.” The prosecutor ultimately struck every black candidate from the jury pool until only whites remained.
Eliminating jury candidates because of their race is unconstitutional, as the Supreme Court has ruled over and over again. This kind of blatant racism by prosecutors sworn to uphold the law might sound like a once-in-a-lifetime mishap. It’s not. Exactly one week before arguments in Foster’s case, the Ninth Circuit overturned the conviction of another black man, Steven Crittenden, accused of killing a white victim and sentenced to death by an all-white jury. Taken in isolation, each case is deeply troubling. Taken together, Foster and Crittenden provide a glimpse into a criminal justice system infected with barely concealed racial bias.
But there was a problem: Not a single black person sat on the jury.
That wasn’t an accident. The jury pool initially included one black person, Manzanita Casey. On paper, Casey was, in one court’s words, a “model prosecution juror according to [the prosecutor’s] own criteria,” a married, churchgoing homeowner who proclaimed to be concerned about drugs and street gangs. In court, she remained a strong candidate, professing personal distaste for the death penalty but acknowledging that if the crime was “really bad … I don’t think I would hesitate” to impose it.
In his notes, the prosecutor rated Casey “XXXX,” his worst rating for prospective jurors, and quickly struck her. He now claims he struck her because of her ambiguous views on capital punishment. Yet his notes plainly belie this rationalization: He rated at least five other jurors either ✓✓ or ✓✓✓ despite their similar equivocations about the death penalty. In fact, several of these jurors openly opposed capital punishment—yet they still received positive marks and served on the jury. Each was similar to Casey in every way but one: They were white, and she was black.
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Amidst protests, the Democratic front-runner announced three new platform initiatives Friday. The New Republic: Hillary Clinton's Racial Justice Platform Is Finally Taking Shape.
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This is the America that Hillary Clinton sought to address and presumably ameliorate when she took a stage in Atlanta on Friday in front of a legion of students from local historically black universities. After facing protesters who chanted and sang the Janelle Monae anthem "Hell You Talmbout" over the first part of her speech, the former secretary of state eventually advocated for a number of key racial justice reforms: A long-overdue overhaul of drug sentencing laws, legislation to prohibit racial profiling, and “banning the box,” a federal ban on employers asking applicants about their criminal history—a proven barrier to readjustment after prison. She also came out against the private sector's encroachment of the prison system. "We need to end private prisons and detention centers once and for all," Clinton said. "Protecting public safety is the core responsibility of the government, and it should never be outsourced."
Even with the #Hillary4Who action at her event, it was likely a relief to many to see the Democratic presidential front-runner finally articulating her formal platform to address and end structural racism. She was there, after all, because she has been pushed by Black Lives Matter and other citizens demanding to know her plans. But she was also there because we’re still trying to fix Ronald Reagan’s mistakes.
Drafted in a haste after the sudden overdose death of NBA draftee Len Bias, the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986 established, among other harsh penalties for drug offenses, the 100-to-1 cocaine disparity. Essentially, you’d get the same time for possessing five grams of crack cocaine as you would for 500 grams of the powdered version of the same drug. While President Obama sought to reduce the disparity to 1-to-1 in his Fair Sentencing Act five years ago, Republicans forced a compromise of 18-to-1. Even with the U.S. Sentencing Commission making retroactive reductions for inmates convicted under the old ratio—thousands of whom were released on Friday—Clinton made clear in her address that the adjusted disparity still reflects bad assumptions about the drug.
Carl Hart, a Columbia psychology and psychiatry professor who studies the effects of drugs on the body and behavior, agreed. In remarks sent to the New Republic prior to the speech, Hart offered a scientific explanation for why crack and powder cocaine are the same thing, and should be treated as such by the legal system. “It is true that the effects of smoking crack cocaine tend to be more intense than swallowing or snorting powder cocaine—but that increased intensity is due to route of administration, not the drug itself,” he wrote. “Injecting powder cocaine dissolved in water produces nearly identical intense effects as smoking crack.”
The scene in Atlanta was resonant coming in a week in which we saw the South Carolina high school incident transpire.
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“Nobody should be president for life,” declared U.S. President Barack Obama during a pointed speech in July before the African Union in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. ... Foreign Policy: Uganda’s Would-Be ‘President For Life’ Can Be Beaten.
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Nobody should be president for life,” declared U.S. President Barack Obama during a pointed speech in July before the African Union in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. As parts of Africa boast rising standards of living, more stable democracies, and burgeoning modern industries, the scourge of prominent autocratic leaders who perpetuate their rule through meticulously stage-managed elections remains a deadweight that is holding down a continent on the rise. Chad’s Idriss Déby has reigned for almost 25 years; Sudan’s murderous Omar al-Bashir for 26; Cameroon’s Paul Biya for almost 33; Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe for 35; and Republic of Congo’s Denis Sassou Nguesso for 31 in two separate stints at the helm (on Oct. 25, voters will decide whether to change the constitution so that he can seek yet another term in 2016).
Among the most wily and influential of Africa’s gang of would-be lifers is Uganda’s Yoweri Museveni, who has ruled over the country of 37 million since 1986. A professed proponent of term limits when he first entered office — “The problem of Africa in general and Uganda in particular is not the people, but leaders who want to overstay in power,” he wrote in 1986 — Museveni amended his country’s constitution in 2005 to eliminate presidential term limits and pave the way for his own reelection to third and fourth terms.
In February 2016, Ugandans will again go to the polls, potentially cementing Museveni’s hold on power through 2021. By that time, Ugandan students who graduated university when the president first took office will be nearing the end of their statistical life expectancy of 59 years. Sick of widespread cheating at the ballot box, payoffs to parliamentarians, and narrow Supreme Court majorities rejecting challenges to Museveni’s rule, Uganda’s opposition politicians are trying to make 2016 a historic turning point: A fragile opposition coalition known as the Democratic Alliance (TDA), which includes several high-profile former Museveni allies, is scrambling to mount a united front to finally push the longtime president from power. But without international support for transparent and fair polling, a clear plan for power-sharing, and a message to Museveni that the election shenanigans must come to an end, Obama’s July pledge before the African Union will remain empty words to a generation of Ugandans.
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Presiding Bishop Michael Curry the first black leader of the U.S. Episcopal Church, urged Episcopalians to evangelize by crossing divides of race, education and wealth. Talking Point Memo: US Episcopal Church Installs First Black Leader.
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Curry used the example of his own mother being given Communion at a white Episcopal parish before desegregation, and how that act persuaded his father to join the denomination, and eventually become a priest.
"God has not given up on the world and God is not finished with the Episcopal Church yet," Curry said, during a joyous ceremony in the Washington National Cathedral.
Curry, 62, succeeds Katharine Jefferts Schori, who was the first woman in the job and is ending her nine-year term. He served about 15 years as leader of the Diocese of North Carolina before he was overwhelmingly elected last summer to the top church post. He grew up in Buffalo, New York, and earned degrees from Hobart College in Geneva, New York, and Yale Divinity School.
The New York-based denomination was the church of many Founding Fathers and now has about 1.9 million members. Episcopalians now are struggling with shrinking membership and ongoing tensions with fellow Anglicans around the world over the Episcopal support for gay marriage. Curry will represent the U.S. church in January, at a meeting of national Anglican leaders addressing the splits in their fellowship.
As the ceremony began Sunday, Curry rapped on the cathedral door with a wooden staff_a custom that symbolizes the ushering of a new leader into its halls, both physical and metaphorical. Jefferts Schori passed her staff to Curry, transferring the responsibility of leadership. Those assembled in the cathedral erupted in cheers.
"It is an understatement to say we live in a deeply complex and difficult time in the life of the world," Curry said. "This is a time when again it is an understatement to say there are challenges before the church and communities of faith. This is a time of difficulty and hardship for many. A time of goodness and joy for others. And a time when we must even find ways to save the mother earth, who is the mother of us all."
Episcopal Church Presiding Bishop-elect Michael Curry gives waves to the crowd as he arrives at the Washington National Cathedral, Sunday, Nov. 1, 2015, in Washington. Curry, who comes to the job after nearly 15 years leading the Diocese of North Carolina. (AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana)
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Voices and Soul
by Justice Putnam
Black Kos Poetry Editor
On this Election Day, as we cast our votes in a declaration of independence and civic duty as an affirmation of our heritage as Americans, I cannot help but consider that part of our Heritage that is like the crisp autumn leaves of dried blood on our hands. A heritage passed down by the spilled blood of brothers and sisters past, of the blood of grandfathers and grandmothers weeping from a round house. The blood of elk and bison spilled on sands and in forests. The blood of eagles on a snow-capped precipice and blood of mallards on a Cascade valley lake. The blood of our Heritage carried by blood-vein rivers across this vast red earth.
A heritage that preceded the landing at Plymouth Rock, even that of the landing of the Santa Maria. A heritage planted by a tribal people who also, nonetheless, in a vast and distant time, emigrated from the distant shores of another distant continent. Who, because of aeons of intimate connection with this landscape, believed that every thing is alive. So much so, that coastal tribes built their dugouts with hearts and lungs; because they believed the tree was still alive in the boat.
On this Election Day, as we make those important votes and then go about our daily routines, routines that take us along the corridors of pavement or through the static of the air; let us consider a once powerful people. A people subjugated, marginalized and weakened. A people caught between two worlds not of their choosing. A people left with only...
A Declaration, Not of Independence
Apparently I’m Mom’s immaculately-conceived
Irish-American son, because,
Social-Security time come,
my Cherokee dad could not prove he’d been born.
He could pay taxes, though,
financing troops, who’d conquered our land,
and could go to jail,
the time he had to shoot or die,
by a Caucasian attacker’s knife.
Eluding recreational killers’ calendar’s
enforcers, while hunting my family’s food,
I thought what the hunted think,
so that I ate, not only meat
but the days of wild animals fed by the days
of seeds, themselves eating earth’s
aeons of lives, fed by the sun,
rising and falling, as quail,
hurtling through sky,
fell, from gun-powder, come—
as the First Americans came—
from Asia.
Explosions in cannon,
I have an English name,
a German-Chilean-American wife
and could live a white life,
but, with this hand,
with which I write, I dug,
my sixteenth summer, a winter’s supply of yams out
of hard, battlefield clay,
dug for my father’s mother, who—
abandoned by her husband—raised,
alone, a mixed-blood family
and raised—her tongue spading air—
ancestors, a winter’s supply or more.
-- Ralph Salisbury
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Pull up a chair and sit down a while and enjoy the company.