Many Immigrants and refugees are black, and are part of the “working class.”
Commentary by Black Kos editor Denise Oliver-Velez
I have been listening to, reading, and watching as many of the responses to the disastrous election of Donald Trump and his cut-buddy Mike Pence, as I can stomach. We are well aware of the white supremacist, anti-Muslim, anti-Semitic, anti-Hispanic, anti-refugee, xenophobic, KKKlan-embracing, misogynistic, homophobic, anti-disabled, ideology they espoused and have vowed to put into practice.
The antithesis to his agenda are the bright spots that have appeared on the electoral map like the election of Ilhan Omar to the Minnesota legislature. It is my belief that our focus must shift now to taking on governorships, and state legislatures, alongside of efforts to make inroads into the Congress.
We have an incredible pool of people to draw from to run for office. People like Ilhan Omar who are connected to communities of women and men who reflect the America we are moving forward with, not the “Make America White Again” past espoused by Trump and his predominately white supporters.
Ilhan Omar came to this country as a refugee.
Ilhan Omar's family migrated to the US while she was still in her teens. Prior to that, she had spent four years at a refugee camp in Kenya following their escape from the civil war in Somalia. Her family moved to Arlington, Virginia, before they finally settled in Minneapolis in 1997. She was able to learn English in three years and later graduated with a degree in political science.
Omar, a longtime political and community activist, previously worked as a senior policy aide and campaign manager for Andrew Johnson who is a member of the Minneapolis City Council. She currently works as director of policy initiatives for the Women Organizing Women Network. The group counsels East African women on civic participation and leadership.
Groups like the Women Organizing Women Network, are the grassroots that we need to tap to provide vigorous representative candidates
Women Organizing Women (WOW) Network aims to empower all women, specifically first– and second-generation immigrants, to become engaged citizens and community leaders.
Mission
Empower all women, specifically first– and second-generation immigrants, to become engaged citizens and community leaders, regardless of political affiliation. Work to build a world in which more women hold position of power and leadership in government, community, and business settings.
Core Values
- We are a nonpartisan civic leadership organization.
- We promote gender equality and we empower women.
- We are committed in removing any barriers that prevent full participation of women in the public sphere.
- We believe in reflective democracy.
- We believe that grassroots initiatives and consensus building are the strengths of our organization.
Omar did not have an easy path to winning the nomination and her ultimate electoral victory.
Her involvement in politics was met with resistance. Most notably, she was beaten into a concussion by seven or eight people during a heated caucus session that erupted in violence two years ago.
She still pursued politics and unexpectedly won a tight Minnesota Democratic–Farmer–Labor party primary race against Mohamud Noor, another prominent Somali American in the community, and the Minnesota state House’s longest-serving member, Representative Phyllis Kahn.
In a year when Trump has openly called for a ban on Muslims coming to the country and refused to rule out a Muslim ID system, the prospect of a visibly Muslim woman holding office drew national attention, and also brought Omar negative scrutiny.
Conservative websites began accusing Omar of immigration fraud shortly after her primary victory, as they believed an estranged husband who she’s in the process of divorcing, is in fact her brother, a charge she has denied.
You will probably not have seen her victory speech, given to the community who supported her when she won the nomination to run. It is a moving testimony to what we can do. She talks about those people who said that she could never be elected because of “misogyny” in her community. They were wrong.
She wins!
While her election wasn't a surprise in a reliably Democratic district — she was elected by almost 80 percent of the vote there — it carried huge symbolic importance in Minnesota, home to the nation's largest Somali immigrant population. It came just days after Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump ripped Somali immigration as a threat to Minnesota. Following news that the Associated Press had called her victory shortly after the polls closed,
Omar said the win was "icing on the cake" of a long campaign season and that she'd be a "voice for the marginalized" at the Capitol."I think I bring the voice of young people," she said. "I think I bring the voice of women in the East African community. I bring the voice of Muslims. I bring the voice of young mothers looking for opportunities."
As soon as Ilhan Omar walked into her victory party, she was crushed with hugs and kisses from anyone who could touch her. For nearly 20 minutes, photographers tried desperately to capture Omar as she moved around the room in her white headscarf.
"Minneapolis said no tonight, said no to hatred, said no to the narrative of making America hate again," Habon Abdulle, executive director of the nonprofit Women Organizing Woman, told the gathered crowd. "Minneapolis, and [the] 60B district particularly, you said Muslim women have space in the governing body of our state. Thank you."
Take a moment to share the joy in her campaign headquarters when she won.
When I hear arguments from Democrats which infer that the “working class” does not include immigrants, who are also people of color — I cringe, the same way I react to the idea that “working class” does not include black, brown, Asian and Native Americans. When I hear the cry that we need to reach out to “rural America” let me remind folks — rural should not be a code word for “white”:
More than half (55%) of the African American population lives in the South. Although the Black Population has increased in all US regions since 1990, the South has had the most growth. In 1910, 89% of all blacks still lived in the South, and 80% of these in rural areas.
Rarely do we hear “rural as Latino”: “The rural Hispanic population grew by 44.6 percent during the 2000 to 2010 period, faster than any other racial or ethnic minority.” Though increasing numbers of American Indians and Alaska Natives are moving into urban areas, the majority are still living in rural areas.
I read a post here, in which the author expressed “concerns” about immigration and assimilation, lauding the idea that the U.S. should let in only “the best and the brightest”. I responded. I think a lot of people didn’t really consider the implications of those thoughts, or read the paragraph because of the way it was formatted,
When the term “immigrant” is used, it is important to remember that we also have large numbers of immigrants here from the Dominican Republic, Jamaica, Haiti, and Trinidad and Tobago, as well as the 4.9 million U.S. citizens on the mainland, who are Puerto Rican — and not counted as immigrants.
When we come together to assess where we go from here, to strategize on how to salvage our democracy from the current travesty of the Trump/Pence ascendancy — the calls from some people on the left are leaving me distressed. I’d rather see less concern for engaging those people who voted for Trump, and more interest in activating both new communities like Omar’s and non-voters who “choose not to vote or are unable to vote,” many of whom lean toward Democrats. Key will be attacking the suppression we face — best done by taking on state government control by Republicans.
Can we do this? I believe we can, and I will keep Ilhan Omar’s face posted to my desktop as a reminder.
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News round up by dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor
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Gwen Ifill, who wrote for some of the country’s premier newspapers before transitioning to broadcast journalism and making her greatest mark as one of the most prominent TV anchors of her generation, died Nov. 14 at a hospice center in Washington. She was 61.
“The PBS NewsHour,” the program she co-anchored with Judy Woodruff, announced the death and said the cause was cancer. Ms. Ifill also was moderator of PBS’s “Washington Week” roundtable public affairs show. Earlier this year, she moderated a Democratic primary debate, but her ill health led to several leaves of absence from her PBS hosting duties.
Woodruff called Ms. Ifill a consummate communicator who exuded “the rare combination of authority and warmth. She came through the screen as a friend to people who watched her, but she also displayed the authority for people to believe you, to have credibility.”
In addition, Woodruff said, “She didn’t mind telling anyone when she thought they were wrong, on camera. She kept it respectful. She was one of the most graceful interrupters I have ever seen.”
Black television luminaries such as Bernard Shaw of CNN and Max Robinson of ABC performed highly visible anchor duties long before Ms. Ifill came on the national radar. But with her appointment in 1999 to lead what was then called “Washington Week in Review,” she became one of the first African American journalists to preside over a major national political show.
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I can’t count the number of times I’ve heard people utter this phrase, calmly walking back to the greenroom at CNN, MSNBC or Fox, heads craned forward to look at their phones. Twitter responses, especially negative ones, are like a rite of passage when you do television commentary. It shows that your words have power; that they have meaning in the lives of people watching. Of course, hate mail, angry phone calls and vulgar tweets are much more common if you are a person of color or a woman on television. That level of harassment—including threats of death, rape and other forms of bodily harm—just for having the nerve to speak out, have only increased during Donald Trump’s run for the presidency. We are entering an era where the president-elect has spent the last 18 months demonizing minorities and the media, so what if you are a member of both? What will a Trump presidency mean to the future of black journalism?
To be honest, things aren’t looking good.
African-American history has mostly been told through the eyes of black journalists and kept in the pages of black newspapers. The Chicago Defender, the New York Amsterdam News, great journalists like Ida B. Wells, Chuck Stone and Ethel Payne all had to tell our stories when white newspapers, radio and television denied our existence as anything other than a threat. If you want to know the story of protests against police brutality in 1920s Baltimore, you check out the archives of the Baltimore Afro-American. If you want to know how the Rosewood massacre in Florida actually started, it was in the black press.
In modern times, you can see African American journalists and commentators operating in predominately white newspapers, online magazines and 24-hour cable networks. Yet the dance and negotiation of expressing African-American views in majority white spaces continues. There are only more than a handful of African Americans leading major network television news programs heading into the Trump presidency—Charles Payne at Fox Business, Don Lemon at CNN, Joy Reid, Al Sharpton and Tamron Hall at MSNBC, Leston Holt at NBC and Roland Martin at TV One. While there are a smattering of paid and unpaid political commentators across various networks, the truth is that the voice of African Americans was precariously small in 2016 and all signs point to it being even smaller heading into the coming year.
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IN MANY of the poorest African dictatorships of recent decades, the best-paved road ran from the presidential palace to the airport, in case the Big Man and his entourage needed to escape in a hurry. That is still the case in Harare, Zimbabwe’s capital, where the president’s cronies know that they are not universally popular.
Some leading figures in ZANU-PF, the ruling party, are said to have shipped belongings abroad already. Some apparently keep bags packed for the moment that Robert Mugabe, the 92-year-old president who has ruled for 36 years, keels over or is pushed aside in a palace coup. Others are said to be sleeping in different places every night, to confound potential assassins or soldiers who they think might be sent to kill or arrest them.
They have reason to be nervous. The regime’s collapse has often been predicted before, and the pundits, including this newspaper, have always been proven wrong. Still, Mr Mugabe cannot live for ever, and the economy is in an even worse state than usual.
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Sam Rutherford wouldn’t necessarily call himself a daredevil but he admits he is about to embark on an act of derring-do. Whether that act is brave or foolhardy he will soon find out. So, too, will the 40 men and women – husband-and-wife teams, fathers and daughters, even entire families – who have decided to fly more than 8,000 miles across Africa in aircraft that were designed to do little more than short-distance hauls in perfect conditions.
“It would be fair to call them antiques,” says Rutherford of the 15 single-engine biplanes participating in the race. “They were built to go no further than 400 miles. The pressure is going to be unrelenting, a bit like a Formula One driver pushing himself to do one race after another over 35 days.”
That’s not the only potential hitch in the so-called Vintage Air Rally: as antiques go, the open-cockpit aircraft are also noisy. Piloting them is like doing a precision task in the middle of a nightclub, adds Rutherford.
“It’s not just being exposed to the elements – which are brutal and cruel – or the oil, which continuously splashes back from the engines,” he told the Observerbefore the vintage planes took off from an airstrip on the south-eastern tip of Creteon Saturday. “It’s the constant battery of noise.”
A former helicopter pilot in the Army Air Corps, the endurance enthusiast – whose logistics company, Prepare2go, has organised the rally – was attracted to the endeavour by the “intriguing mix” it offered of adventure, jeopardy, ardour and competition.
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Army Veteran Ernest Walker posted video on Facebook of the incident, which occurred at a Chili’s in Cedar Hill, Texas, AP reported.
According to Walker, he went to Chili’s, which was offering free Veterans Day meals, with his service dog and was waiting for his to-go order when an older white man questioned him about his military service.
"[He] asked me what unit did I serve in the 24th, I said no the 25th. He said he was in World War 2 in Germany and we did not see people like you over there,” Walker wrote. “They would not allow blacks.”
Walker said he just listened to the man, who was wearing a Trump shirt, and continued to wait for his food.
While the waitress was putting his food in a container, Walker said a manager walked over to him.
“The manager comes and says some guests at the restaurant say that you’re not a real Soldier,” Walker wrote. “I reply, ‘what are you serious what guest?’ The manager Wesly Patrick said can I see military ID? I felt that was reasonable, most people ask for that, so I showed him my ID it checked out.”
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For a certain type of conservative, one of the great outrages of the Obama era was an obscure 2015 rule from the Department of Housing and Urban Development called “Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing.”
AFFH was more interesting than its name. It was the Obama administration’s attempt to battle neighborhood segregation, the inequities of which are the invisible foundation of American crises like the racial wealth gap and disparity in public education.
How will Donald Trump approach that legacy? There are rumors that Trump’s choice for HUD secretary might be Westchester County, New York, executive Rob Astorino, a Republican who has made his career fighting against integration in Westchester and would almost certainly undo HUD’s enhanced scrutiny of racial discrimination in housing.
When HUD put pressure on Westchester last year to build more affordable housing—and not just in Westchester’s poorest corners—Astorino said the agency was engaging in “social engineering.” What’s next, he asked: Is the federal government going to break up Chinatown?
The rhetorical question was disingenuous in the extreme. Westchester County, which has nearly 1 million residents, is bound by a 2009 consent decree to build a mere 750 units of affordable housing. Why? Because it was sued for accepting tens of millions in federal fair housing money while lying about existing barriers that kept its wealthy, white villages wealthy and white.
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