The Audacity of Free Association
Commentary by Chitown Kev
After waking up this morning, finding and claiming a street corner where I could preach about the approaching Apocalypse to passers-by seemed like a great idea.
Some of it has to do with IRL stuff.
Starting the morning off by reading the headlines on today’s Daily Kos “wreck list” and contemplating “internal matters” here at tGOS certainly didn’t help.
Some of it has to do with a deepening aura of despair that seems to have settled in and taken root since the 2016 general elections; an aura that has more to do with a sense of impending doom than anything else, at least it seems to me. I take no comfort in knowing that I’m not the only one that feels that way (at least if the comment sections here at tGOS are any indication).
Usually, it only takes a couple of cups of coffee or an inspirational reading or two for the “we’re all doomed” thoughts to subside.
But not this morning.
One of my “mind tricks” that I use to pull myself out of the funk so that I can, at the very least, be somewhat functional is based on a metaphor utilizing a portion of the narrative of the ancient Egyptian goddess Isis where Isis searches the land for the dismembered pieces of her husband, Osiris; I find it to be a usful metaphor for my own scattered and, sometimes, shattered thoughts.
I rambled though various things that I’ve read and remembered that part of my African American heritage is the knowing that my ancestors survived far worse circumstances than I have.
One of those mechanisms for that survival was their adopted and adapted religious faith.
I’m a pretty harsh critic of the African American church. I am not a believer (and probably will never be) but I understand.
Next, the title of President Obama’s second book, The Audacity of Hope, came to mind not so much because I miss having the 44th president in office (altough I do) but because I remembered that the book’s title was based on a sermon by the Rev. Dr. Jeremiah Wright.
I recalled browsing through a collection of Dr. Wright’s sermons years ago, remembered none of them, but I did want to read the sermon that was the basis of President Obama’s best-selling book.
I found the full-text of the sermon “Audacity to Hope”...and allowed the text to lead me.
Several years ago while I was in Richmond, the Lord allowed me to be in that city during the week of the annual convocation at Virginia Union University School of Theology. There I heard the preaching and teaching of Reverend Frederick G. Sampson of Detroit, Michigan. In one of his lectures, Dr. Sampson spoke of a painting I remembered studying in humanities courses back in the late '50s. In Dr. Sampson's powerful description of the picture, he spoke of it being a study in contradictions, because the title and the details on the canvas seem to be in direct opposition.
The painting's title is "Hope." It shows a woman sitting on top of the world, playing a harp. What more enviable position could one ever hope to achieve than being on top of the world with everyone dancing to your music?
As you look closer, the illusion of power gives way to the reality of pain. The world on which this woman sits, our world, is torn by war, destroyed by hate, decimated by despair, and devastated by distrust. The world on which she sits seems on the brink of destruction. Famine ravages millions of inhabitants in one hemisphere, while feasting and gluttony are enjoyed by inhabitants of another hemisphere. This world is a ticking time bomb, with apartheid in one hemisphere and apathy in the other. Scientists tell us there are enough nuclear warheads to wipe out all forms of life except cockroaches. That is the world on which the woman sits in Watt's painting.
Dr. Wright goes further to describe other details of the composition of “Hope,” including the detail of the broken strings on the harp being played.
A closer look reveals all the harp strings but one are broken or ripped out. Even the instrument has been damaged by what she has been through, and she is the classic example of quiet despair. Yet the artist dares to entitle the painting Hope. The illusion of powersitting on top of the worldgives way to the reality of pain.
From my perspective, I can’t tell whether the harp is actually being played, as Wright states, or whether Hope is being strangled (lynched?) by a broken string.
Where’s the “hope” in that?
The sermon eventually turns to the biblical text uner discussion, the story of Hannah in the First Book of Samuel, a text and a story that, in Wright’s narrative becomes wonderfully…. lurid and soap-opera-ish.
Then Wright comes back to an alternate view of Watts’ “Hope” prior to delving into a conception of “audacity.”
And that is what the audacity to hope will do for you. The apostle Paul said the same thing. "You have troubles? Glory in your trouble. We glory in tribulation." That's the horizontal dimension. We glory in tribulation because, he says, "Tribulation works patience. And patience works experience. And experience works hope. (That's the vertical dimension.) And hope makes us not ashamed." The vertical dimension balances out what is going on in the horizontal dimension. That is the real story here in the first chapter of 1 Samuel. Not the condition of Hannah's body, but the condition of Hannah's soulher vertical dimension. She had the audacity to keep on hoping and praying when there was no visible sign on the horizontal level that what she was praying for, hoping for, and waiting for would ever be answered in the affirmative.
I’ll be honest with you: I am nowhere near so sanctified that I am about to do anything like glory in my troubles.
Frankly, I’m more like Job; I’ll bitch, whine, and moan my way through my troubles (don’t be fooled, Job isn’t exactly a patient guy!)
But...audacity is such a wonderful word with its esteemed Latinite roots.
1) A willingness to take bold risks.
‘he whistled at the sheer audacity of the plan’
2) Rude or disrespectful behaviour; impudence.
‘she had the audacity to suggest I'd been carrying on with him’
The secondary sense of “audacity”, the rude or disrespectful” (uppity?) sense of the word, sounds best in a British or even Southern accent, perhaps, coming out of the mouth of a lady clutching quite real pearls.
Certainly, my African American ancestors were “audacious” in both senses of the word (someone was going to be pissed off!)
It also seems to me that ths sense of “audacity” in African American history or life is in binary opposition to the notion of safety or “respectability.”
And just as ancient Greek theatre consists of the magnificant tension between the Apollonian and the Dionysian (according to Nietzsche), just as African American music culture consists of the magnificant tension between the spirituals and the blues (according to black theologian James Cone), there’s something...magnificant and very...African American about the tension between safety and audacity.
So in these times of apparent impending doom, where my first instinct, perhaps, is to seek shelter and safety, perhaps this is, instead, the time to exist, persist, resist, and be audacious.
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News round up by dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor
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Police officers like the killer of Philando Castile have an unbeatable defense when their victims are black: They were scared. Slate: The Cloak of “Fear”
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Alone among citizens, police have the right to use deadly force to compel compliance and obedience. As a society, we give them broad discretion to do so, judging them on a standard of “objective reasonableness,” where an officer’s use of force “must be judged from the perspective of a reasonable officer on the scene.” If an officer believes someone could imminently cause serious injury or death—or if he fears for own his life—he can shoot. And when the victim is black, that fear is often all it takes to avoid official sanction.
Fear, for example, is why Officer Jeronimo Yanez was acquitted in the killing of Philando Castile. The day after the shooting, he attested to it in an interview with the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, a state investigative agency. “I thought, I was gonna die,” said Yanez, recounting the seconds after Castile had alerted him to the presence of a weapon in the vehicle.
For the jury that heard Yanez’s testimony, the officer was right to be afraid, even as his dashcam footage depicts a polite and compliant passenger. After the trial, a spokesman for the Minnesota Chiefs of Police Association affirmed Yanez’s fear. “We can’t see inside the vehicle and, most importantly, we can’t feel officer Yanez’s fear,” Andy Skoogman told the Minneapolis Star Tribune.
This same credulous acceptance of the narrative of fear is why Officer Betty Jo Shelby was acquitted in the killing of Terence Crutcher (she was “fearing for her life”); why a grand jury declined to charge Officer Timothy Loehmann in the killing of Tamir Rice, a 12-year-old (he “had a reason to fear for his life”); and why a jury deadlocked in the case of Michael Slager, a South Carolina police officer who shot and killed Walter Scott during a traffic stop (he felt “total fear”).
What makes that acceptance more striking is how circumstances don’t seem to matter. Loehmann and his partner, Frank Garmback, sped onto the scene, killing Rice within seconds of arrival. Walter Scott was running away when Slager shot him in the back. Castile, again, was polite and compliant. A video shows Crutcher with his hands raised and placed on the side of his vehicle when he was first tased and then shot. A dazed and unarmed Jonathan Ferrell had just been in an accident when he encountered Charlotte, North Carolina, police officer Randall Kerrick. In testimony, Kerrick described Ferrell as “aggressively coming towards” him. “He was going to assault me,” Kerrick said of Ferrell, who had been in a car crash, “I thought I was gonna die.” When Ferrell wouldn’t obey commands to “get on the ground,” Kerrick shot him 10 times. The jury couldn’t come to a decision, and Kerrick was acquitted.
Regardless of the situation or the facts on the ground, if a police officer says he was afraid, a jury will take that as reasonable. This raises a question: Are juries giving police the benefit of the doubt—or are they saying, in all of these cases, that it’s reasonable to be afraid of black people?
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Well, in the past 10 years, 123 people or groups have hit the Powerball jackpot. The Weather Channel estimates that on average, 49 people are struck by lightning every year. In the past 10 years, terrorists (including people committing hate crimes) have murdered about 18 people per year, according to FBI statistics.
But since June 2007, out of approximately 10,000 police shootings, only five white police officers have been imprisoned for killing someone black.
While there is no definitive resource that catalogs police killings by race, The Root looked at data from the Washington Post, Fatal Encounters, The Guardianand the National Police Misconduct Reporting Project from 2007 to 2017 and found only three cases of a white police officer serving time for killing an African American (in one case, three officers were charged with killing a 92-year-old grandmother).
Why does this happen? Instead of using psychological conjecture, legal hypotheses or emotional reasoning, we decided to use data and statistical analysis to examine why white police officers rarely serve time for taking a black life.
Is it really so rare that white police officers serve time for killing black men* and women? According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, 70 percent of people charged with some form of killing (including murder, manslaughter, homicide, etc.) in America are eventually convicted. That is what researchers call the “homicide conviction rate.”
But when it comes to police, that rate drops precipitously. Bowling Green State University’s Police Integrity Lost project shows that only 29 officers have been convicted for killing on duty since 2005, mostly on lesser charges. Police are 33 percent less likely than a regular citizen to be convicted of a crime, and the conviction rate for cops charged with some form of murder is 35 percent—half that of the normal population. In fact, in the last 13 years, only one officer has been convicted of intentional murder. And in the rare case in which a cop is convicted, the officer hardly ever does time for killing a black man.
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Ema Twumasi’s first ever collegiate goal was a spectacular bicycle kick against California Polytechnic State University in August 2016. The 19-year-old Ghanaian’s timely scoring during the remainder of the season propelled his team, Wake Forest University in North Carolina, to the NCAA championship game last December, where it lost to Stanford on penalty kicks.
Twumasi probably wouldn’t have made it this far were it not for Ghana’s Right to Dream academy, set up by the former Manchester United scout Tom Vernon almost 20 years ago.
Right to Dream (RtD) is one of a growing number of educational charities that have built a trans-Atlantic pipeline, sending young African soccer players to the U.S. to meet the demand of talent-hungry Division I collegiate programs.
Vernon, as well as others like him, say they aren’t in it for the money—most are registered charities or nonprofits and do not charge fees. Instead, they believe soccer can solve many of Africa’s social and economic ills, blending education, sport, and opportunity. Forty-three percent of Sub-Saharan Africa’s population is under the age of 15 (compared to just 19 percent of that in the U.S.), and much of that demographic is poor. These programs seek to provide students in Africa an education whose quality often exceeds the kind they’d get through government-funded schooling and help American schools improve and diversify their athletic programs.
But the academies hardly guarantee their participants a Hollywood ending, which can make them problematic if the teens who do eventually travel to the U.S. believe a professional soccer career is a sure thing, a means of feeding their families back home. The academies also form one small part of a global debate on the value and ethics of private versus public education—a debate that’s playing out in the U.S. but perhaps even more dramatically in many African countries—and raise questions about who their programs benefit most.
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MO I RANA, just south of the Arctic Circle in Norway’s Helgeland district, has always been a place of industry. Mining, fishing and boat-building were the business of this place from the 18th century. In 1946 the city was picked as the site of a steel mill by the Norwegian parliament; the first steel was produced in 1955. But the mill closed in the 1980s, and the Norwegian government decided to replace physical technology with information technology, building the Norwegian National Library’s storage facility in this northern city. And so it is here that the National Library’s entire collection—books, manuscripts, newspapers, television programmes, radio programmes, audiobooks, parliamentary reports—is being digitised. The process began in 2006, and is expected to take between 20 and 30 years to complete.
Norway has always been an outward-looking nation too, and this summer the library has begun a remarkable collaboration with the National Library of Nigeria. The Norwegian National Library holds a collection of works in 19 different languages, designed to serve the country’s immigrant population. But literature in other languages is hard to come by beyond the central library’s shelves in Oslo. So Aslak Sira Myhre, the Library’s Director, has begun working with Professor Lanre Aina, of the National Library of Nigeria in Abuja, to digitise works in three Nigerian languages, Yoruba, Hausa and Igbo, to make them more widely available.
The project began thanks to Mr Myhre’s regular visits to Nigeria. For the past seven years he has taken part in the Farafina Trust Creative Writers’ Workshop at the invitation of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, a celebrated Nigerian novelist. The partnership between the two libraries will ensure that Nigeria’s library will retain total control over the rights to these books. “It is unthinkable for us to be pirates in this,” Mr Myrhe says. (Just how many books in these languages are available has yet to be discovered, but the National Library of Nigeria is sourcing books and other written material from the 20 branches of the library situated all over the country.) The National Library of Nigeria hopes in time to establish its own digitisation programme; the Norwegians will support the institution in its effort to raise money.
The Nigerian diaspora in Norway is not large (though Nigerian disaporas elsewhere could benefit from the programme too, depending on how freely available the books are). But in any case, Mr Myrhe considers this a trial run for other languages and other collaborations: he mentions Somali, Hindi, Arabic and Urdu. The experiment uses technology already available to the library in Norway, and very well established—the Norwegian National Library is at the forefront of the development of digitisation, working with Stanford University, and other Ivy League universities America to set the agreed format for the digital reproduction of images and other technical standards.
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How Charlottesville, Virginia’s Confederate statues helped decimate the city’s historically successful black communities. Slate: Tools of Displacement
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[A few weeks ago], Corey Stewart came within a hair’s breadth of claiming the Republican nomination for governor of Virginia after having run on a revanchist campaign focused on battling local efforts to rename and remake Confederate monuments and spaces. Even as Stewart’s campaign ended, the fight over these monuments in Charlottesville, Virginia, continued. They might soon reach a new fever pitch, and as they do it’s worth considering an overlooked piece of history around these statues: Their role in displacements of former black residents.
First as an update, here’s where that fight currently stands: Earlier this month, a resolution to rename Charlottesville’s two Confederate parks was passed by the Charlottesville City Council unanimously. Lee Park, the home of a controversial Robert E. Lee statue that the council previously voted to remove, will become Emancipation Park, and Jackson Park, the home of a statue of Stonewall Jackson, will become Justice Park. Meanwhile, locals are working on ways to counteract a Ku Klux Klan rally, proposed for July 8, and an alt-right March on Charlottesville headed by Richard Spencer, proposed for Aug. 12, at the site of the Lee statue’s eventual removal.
On May 13, University of Virginia alum and alt-right activist Spencer led a nighttime rally in Lee Park in protest of the council’s plan to remove the statue. This protest brought national attention to the battle between local activists and the outside alt-right and white nationalist forces whose actions drew comparisons to the Klan.
What has been missing from this fight, though, is the specific history of Charlottesville’s Confederate statues. Intimately tied to Charlottesville’s city planning projects and its persistent displacement of black residents, that context is emblematic of the relationship in the South between urban renewal and gentrification, Confederate memorialization and Lost Cause white supremacy, and the town-and-gown dichotomy inherent in university communities.
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