Again. Rest in peace and pride young brother — Richard Collins III.
Commentary by Black Kos Editor Denise Oliver-Velez
Today was to have been the day that newly commissioned Second Lieutenant Richard Collins III would have been graduating from Bowie State, with proud family members watching.
Instead they are now faced with funeral plans and a life of grief ahead.
He was commissioned through Bowie State’s ROTC program on Thursday and was slated to graduate with a business degree on Tuesday.
Collins, a fourth generation member of the armed services, was to report to Missouri’s Fort Leonard Wood and train for countering weapons of mass destruction, according to his commission ceremony.
I say —again—since we face the deaths of our brothers and sisters as a result of white supremacist domestic terror, all too frequently. Not that this is new. We live with a history filled with massacres and violence against us. It will not stop until we significantly change this nation, and eradicate white supremacy from our collective consciousness.
I really have no more words today—other than condolences to his family, friends and fellow students.
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News round up by dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor
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The first Spanish-language U.S. No. 1 hit since “Macarena” sees Justin Bieber jumping on a music style of fraught racial lineage in Latin America. The Atlantic: ‘Despacito’ and the Revenge of Reggaeton
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Kornhaber: Your book is partly about the racial dynamics in reggaeton. Can you talk about that a little?
Rivera-Rideau: We wouldn’t have reggaeton if we didn’t have complicated historical patterns of migration in the Caribbean basin. A very basic idea of what ingredients produced reggaeton would be hip-hop coming from the U.S., dancehall based out of Jamaica, and a type of music called reggae en español from Panama in particular. There’s debate about the origins: Did Puerto Ricans make reggaeton or did Panamanians make reggaeton? One of the things that brings all of these things together is that many of these musics come from urban, predominantly black, working-class communities—whether they’re from Kingston or Panama City or New York or San Juan.
My book talks specifically about the Puerto Rican context. In Puerto Rico, there’s a sense that the island’s trinity of races—black, Spanish, and indigenous—has produced a harmonious society with no racism. But when you look at things like who has access to education, or at housing segregation, it’s very clear Afro-Puerto Ricans are discriminated against. Reggaeton provided a space to talk about those issues. Tego Calderón, who was really the person who brought reggaeton to the mainstream in Puerto Rico before “Gasolina,” has a song called “Loíza” in which he talks about institutional racism in Puerto Rico. Eddie Dee wrote songs about the discrimination he faced as a rapper and as someone of African descent.
At the same time, the story of reggaeton's emergence in Puerto Rico also exposes the persistence of anti-black racism there. In Puerto Rico, reggaeton was tied to public-housing developments that in the ’90s were part of an anti-crime initiative called Mano Dura Contra el Crimen, headed by the then-governor Pedro Rosselló. The discourse around the campaign was heavily racialized: Young, predominantly non-white men were seen as perpetrators of crime. At the same time that started happening, reggaeton was becoming more popular. Crime and drugs, which were the issues that provided the so-called justification of Mano Dura, became attributed to reggaeton singers and fans. It became a very maligned music.
In the mid 1990s, Puerto Rican police went into malls and took reggaeton recordings and tried to charge the store owners with peddling obscenities, and that got thrown out by the courts. At the same time, when the government targeted reggaeton, it got publicity: People who hadn’t heard of it started hearing about it, which taught artists that there might be a bigger market for them than they originally thought.
In 2002, there was another censorship campaign in Puerto Rico, this one called the Anti-Pornography Campaign, concerned with visual representations of sexuality on TV. They really targeted reggaeton music videos for their portrayals of women, and the ultimate result of that campaign was the passing of laws similar to what we have for parental warnings on TV in the U.S. Again, it gave reggaeton artists publicity and expanded their market. If you read interviews with artists in the early 2000s, they realized that if they changed their presentations in a particular way they could become more popular.
It’s shortly after that that we see “Gasolina” come out in 2004. Then as it enters the pop world, reggaeton’s reputation shifts a little bit. Its reputation doesn't ever totally go away, but it becomes less prominent.
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In England, few musicians have a higher profile than the grime star Stormzy: Adele recently acknowledged him from the stage during a performance; he vocally supported the Labour politician Jeremy Corbyn; and it was national news when a neighbor called the police on him as he was returning to his home in a well-to-do West London neighborhood. He makes a cameo on the current season of the tastemaking British TV hit “Chewing Gum” and appears on “Good Goodbye,” a song from the new Linkin Park album, and on an official remix of “Shape of You,” Ed Sheeran’s global pop hit, which the two performed together at the Brit Awards in February, a year after Stormzy publicly criticized the event for its lack of recognition of grime.
That same month, Stormzy released “Gang Signs & Prayer,” his first proper studio album following a few years of singles and freestyles. Ambitious and musically diverse, it shows a performer who easily navigates multiple spaces: relentless grime purist, on songs like “Return of the Rucksack” and “Cold”; contemplative family man on “100 Bags”; sensitive pop hitmaker on “Cigarettes & Cush.” It became the first independently released grime album to top the British album chart.
Stormzy’s ubiquity and success is perhaps the most visible example of how far grime — a hybrid of street-oriented hip-hop and eccentric-but-tough club music particular to England — has come from its beginnings in the early 2000s. Then, it was the insurgent sound of black youth in East London — lo-fi, muscular and brittle, full of intricate, chaotic raps. Over time, it began to birth stars who slipped into British pop: Dizzee Rascal, Kano, Tinie Tempah and more. But even though individual acts were thriving, the genre as a whole remained primarily an underground concern, influential but marginalized.
Which makes what has happened in the last couple of years so striking: Grime, in something close to its rawest form, is minting stars — Stormzy, Skepta and more — who are reaching the top of the British charts and exerting a global influence while continuing to wear the genre’s de facto uniform, a tracksuit, a rejoinder to the flash of what came before it and what surrounds it, as well as to American hip-hop excess.
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After more than three years in captivity, 82 of the Chibok schoolgirls have been reunited with their families amid tears, laughter, music and dancing. On an emotional day in the Nigerian capital city, Abuja, the young women and their parents wept as they embraced.
Some groups sank to their knees, giving praise and praying.
"Today I thank God, my daughter is alive," Yahi Bulata told NPR's Ofeibea Quist-Arcton as he hugged his now 21-year-old daughter, Comfort Bulus Bulata. He said he hoped she would now be able to continue her education. Mothers sang a song of thanks.
Jumping for joy, dancing and singing with delight, Godiya Joshua described it as "Christmas Day and New Year" rolled in one, before being reunited with her eldest child, Esther.
The 276 Chibok schoolgirls were abducted in the dead of night from their dorms by Boko Haram militants in April 2014, prompting international outrage and the Bring Back Our Girls campaign — backed by former first lady Michelle Obama. The girls who were reunited with their families Saturday were part of a recent exchange brokered by the Nigerian government with the help of the government of Switzerland, the Red Cross and other NGOs.
Three young women who've escaped are also included in the group. One girl escaped last May and two more escaped or were found last year. An initial group of 21 was released in October and was reunited with their schoolmates Saturday. The young women sang and danced separately and together.
Despite the celebratory atmosphere, 113 of the Chibok girls are still being held by the terrorist group. According to Nigerian psychologist Fatima Akilu, head of the Neem Foundation helping survivors of Boko Haram's extremist violence, the girls symbolize a much greater problem in troubled northeastern Nigeria. She specializes in deradicalization and reintegration and says her NGO is helping hundreds of people — girls, boys, men and women — who've survived captivity, like the Chibok girls, but are not in the public eye.
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ON A chilly night in January 2016, a 21-year-old Tanzanian student was beaten up and partially stripped by a frenzied mob in Bangalore, which also set her car on fire. The crowd was reacting to the death of a local woman in an accident involving a drunk Sudanese driver earlier in the evening. The woman did not know the driver, nor did the bunch of strangers on the road who morphed into a violent crowd in minutes.
Many Indians were shocked by the attack and expressed their outrage on social media. Yet this African woman remained nameless and faceless, and the outrage was brief, as though waiting for other news to come along. It was then that Mahesh Shantaram, a documentary photographer from Bangalore, went in search of those Africans in India who were increasingly living under the shadow of racism. Mr Shantaram was disturbed by the idea that Indians complain vehemently about facing racial discrimination in other countries, yet refuse to acknowledge racism at home. “To everyone in their right minds, it was clearly a racist attack, whereas the government was bent upon denying that racism had anything to do with it,” he says.
Although what happened in Bangalore was particularly shocking, the attack was not the first of its kind, and not the last either. In March this year, a family from Noida, close to New Delhi, complained that five Nigerian students living in the neighbourhood were cannibals who had murdered their son. As if to prove Thomas Fuller’s dictum that a mob has many heads but no brains this immediately led to random and unprovoked violence against Africans caught at the wrong time at the wrong place, from a lone Kenyan woman to a group of Nigerians at a shopping mall.
There are over 50,000 Nigerians living in India, and several thousand more Africans from other countries. Most of them come to the country as students pursuing advanced degrees. When not being totally overlooked, they are insulted to their faces, denied flats and profiled as drug-dealers and prostitutes by police. But this more mundane treatment hardly gets a look in the media between the spectacular instances of violence.
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CNN Money reports that Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa purchased Basquiat's "Untitled" at Sotheby's in New York City for $40.5 million more than the auction house anticipated. The 1982 acrylic, oilstick and spray paint work—which Sotheby's says depicts "the artist's anatomically rendered skull-like head"—was originally auctioned to an unknown private collector in 1984 for $19,000.
"Untitled" is one of only 10 works, and the first made after 1980, to sell for over $100 million. Its sale breaks the previous record for U.S. artists set by Andy Warhol's "Silver Car Crash (Double Disaster)," which was auctioned in 2013 for $105 million.
Maezawa surpassed the benchmark he set for Basquiat's art with last year's $57.3 million acquisition of another of his 1982 "Untitled" paintings. He told CNN Money that he will loan his latest purchase to museums around the world before exhibiting it in his own museum in Chiba, Japan.
"I hope it brings as much joy to others as it does to me, and that this masterpiece by the 21-year-old Basquiat inspires our future generations," said Maezawa, whose collection includes art from Pablo Picasso and Jeff Koons.
Born in Brooklyn to Haitian and Puerto Rican parents, Basquiat was one of the first Black visual artists to earn acclaim in Lower Manhattan's hip-hop- and punk-influenced 1980s art scene. Described by TheArtStory.org as a leader of the neo-expressionism movement, he entered "The 27 Club" when he died in 1988 from a heroin overdose.
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America's oldest civil rights group, The NAACP, After three years under Brooks' leadership is looking for a new president, while planning a "transformational retooling,". NPR: NAACP Is Looking For New President, 'Retooling' Entire Organization
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Brooks, who has been the president of the NAACP for three years, will not be retained once his contract is up at the end of June, the chairman and vice chair of the board of directors say.
The NAACP says the change is part of "an organization-wide refresh." The group is changing its structure and tactics in response to what it calls "audacious challenges" and "today's volatile political, media and social climates."
Brooks has been a high-profile leader of the group, engaging in protests — even getting arrested during a sit-in. The search for a new leader of the group will start immediately, chairman Leon Russell and vice chair Derrick Johnson told reporters on a conference call.
In the meantime, Russell and Johnson will handle day to day operations, they say, and carry out a listening tour." We want to be informed by those who are the people we serve," Russell said. "And to do so we have to see them, we have to meet them, and we have to listen to them."
Explaining the choice to replace Brooks, Russell and Johnson didn't identify a particular thing that Brooks had done wrong — or even one thing that the NAACP, as a whole, had been doing wrong.
But they said the group needs to be stronger in advocacy and education, and better equipped to support local activism.
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Voices and Soul
by
Justice Putnam
Black Kos Poetry Editor
The year eleven Israeli Olympians were massacred by Arab gunmen, was the same year the Watergate Scandal began. Hasboro released the Easy Bake Oven the same month Hurricane Agnes killed one hundred seventeen people in Pennsylvania, New York, Maryland and Virginia. Bobby Fischer beat Boris Spasky to become the World Chess Champion in Reykjavik, Iceland, and after 72 days, with no food, 16 members of the Uruguayan Rugby team, their friends and family, are rescued high in the Andes, rationalizing their survival by necrotic cannibalism as equivalent to the ritual of Holy Communion.
a harvest gold & avocado green leisure suit with fm radio, it was their,
well, daddy’s, mansion, his james brown conk cool, his funky country
on radials, power windows and doors a working class music. here is
our block-long plush, envy of uncles and teenage dolemite dreams. a
ms. cleopatra jones ride, showing yankees, john denver, the hippie nation
and everyone except texas the middle finger. kept the 25 gallon tank on
full. we drove to kentucky for my sister’s wedding on hot back roads, no
cracker corn farmer’s rifle loud enough to make daddy use a map.
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