Voices and Soul
by Justice Putnam Black Kos Poetry Editor
At a recent holiday gathering, a friend recounted a story told by Senator Al Franken, in which he balanced Liberal and Conservative approaches to the history of the United States. The Conservative, Franken said, loves America and its past like a four year old. Whereas, Liberals love America like adults.
The four year old loves mommy and mommy can do no wrong; and woe to those in the sand box who might question mommy's correct and consistent exceptionalism. The adult sees their parents as flawed but noble creatures who did the best they could. Could have been better, but the adult still loves them for the energy in protecting the family, for keeping the family together.
The adult cannot just explain away or ignore the terrible compromises their parents made along the way; the adult will acknowledge and attempt to better their own futures with the knowledge of those ancestral histories.
The Conservative either feigns ignorance or simply ignores the history, or conjures a child-like myth to scare away the bedtime ghosts of our past.
On the Steps of the Jefferson Memorial
We invent our gods the way the Greeks did, in our own image—but magnified.
Athena, the very mother of wisdom,
squabbled with Poseidon
like any human sibling until their furious tempers made the sea writhe.
Zeus wore a crown of lightning bolts one minute, a cloak of feathers the next,
as driven by earthly lust
he prepared to swoop
down on Leda. Despite their power, frailty ran through them
like the darker veins in the marble of these temples we call monuments.
Looking at Jefferson now,
I think of the language
he left for us to live by. I think of the slave in the kitchen downstairs.
-- Linda Pastan
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News round up by dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor
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Sitting outside of a Starbucks on the corner of a strip mall in Tuscaloosa late last year, Dr. Remona Peterson described her hometown of Thomaston, Alabama, population 400. “Everybody loves our grocery store. That’s, like, our pride,” she said with a laugh. She was in Tuscaloosa, Alabama’s fifth-largest city, finishing her medical residency when Dave’s Market opened in an old Thomaston high school gym last year. Peterson said it became the only place to buy groceries for miles in any direction, and it was one of the few changes to the town she can remember from the last three decades.
Peterson wants to be a part of positive change in the region, which is why she’s back after a circuitous journey through medical school. She was valedictorian of her 29-person high school class and graduated summa cum laude from Tuskegee University, where she earned a full scholarship and the university’s distinguished scholars award. She went on to medical school and got the residency in Tuscaloosa. It was her first choice; she felt that the University of Alabama would best prepare her for her long-term goal: to add her name to the short list of African-American doctors working in the Alabama Black Belt who were also born and raised there.
The Black Belt refers to a stretch of land in the U.S. South whose fertile soil drew white colonists and plantation owners centuries ago. After hundreds of thousands of people were forced there as slaves, the region became the center of rural, black America. Today, the name describes predominantly rural counties where a large share of the population is African-American. The area is one of the most persistently poor in the country, and residents have some of the most limited economic prospects. Life expectancies are among the shortest in the U.S., and poor health outcomes are common. This article is part of a series examining these disparities.
The disparities partly stem from a lack of access to care — but access is a complicated notion. Early in the Republican efforts to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act, the GOP homed in on the idea, saying the party wanted to guarantee “access to health care” for everyone. But the ongoing national policy conversation has hinged on insurance coverage, the main issue tackled by both the Affordable Care Act and the current GOP efforts. Yes, measuring who’s insured illuminates one way by which people have access to the health care system, but it’s only part of the picture. The term “access to health care” has a standardized federal definition that’s much broader: “the timely use of personal health services to achieve the best health outcomes.” And there’s a list of metrics to measure it. Researchers consider structural barriers, such as distance to a hospital or how many health professionals work in an area, to be important. As are metrics that gauge whether a patient can find a health care provider that she trusts and can communicate with well enough to get the services she needs.
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The year was 1983. Fannie Haughton—a name unfamiliar to most—was living in Oakland, California, under a poisonous Reagan regime, in the middle of a drug war. Much of her life as a student activist had involved working with her mentor, Angela Davis. Haughton taught and organized locally, a communal duty that included helping take over the Black Panthers’ Free Breakfast program for school kids in 1970, after Davis was detained (and later acquitted) for conspiracy charges. Oakland was home to Haughton then. But it was in Grenada, during the People’s Revolution, that she and other black Americans saw a free society and opportunity beyond what they felt America could provide. Haughton believed in the idea of Grenada as a social utopia. So in 1983, she packed up and moved there with her two kids.
The House On Coco Road serves as Haughton’s personal migration story, as witnessed by her son, filmmaker Damani Baker. The documentary doubles as a family heirloom and historical artifact of his mother’s unrecognized acts of resistance. In Grenada, Haughton found solace in paradise, and then found herself amid warfare when Reagan’s administration, viewing Grenada as a communist accomplice to Cuba and the Soviet Union, ordered a U.S. military invasion of the island. Coco Road—which hits Netflix on June 30 via Ava DuVernay’s distribution company, Array—brings familial and emotional context to the complicated story of Grenada, through interviews with Haughton and the other black women who fought with her.
Previously, Haughton’s activism and life in Grenada was known mostly to her family. Baker’s purpose is to present a stark opposition to American history and certify his mother’s place in it. “The history books don’t acknowledge a long list of frontline change-makers that were doing very simple things that have had profound impact on all of us,” he tells me. “That kind of genius is so important and so fascinating.” Here’s my lightly edited conversation with Baker about his mother the activist and what his film means.
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The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences announced Wednesday that it had invited a record 744 new members to its governing body, surpassing the 683 invitations issued in 2016.
The Academy has been under pressure to diversify its membership for several years, reaching a crescendo in 2015, when all 20 acting nominees were white, prompting the viral hashtag #OscarsSoWhite and a collective push to ensure the awards show’s governing body included more women and people of color.
In the announcement unveiling this year’s invitees, the Academy president, Cheryl Boone Isaacs, wrote: “We’re proud to invite our newest class to the Academy. The entire motion picture community is what we make of it. It’s up to all of us to ensure that new faces and voices are seen and heard, and to take a shot on the next generation the way someone took a shot on each of us.”
This year’s class, 39% of which is comprised of women, reflects a 359% jump, from 2015 to 2017, in the number of women invited to join the Academy. People of color make up 30% of the 744 added members, a group that includes Barry Jenkins, whose film Moonlight won Best Picture at the 2017 ceremony, Janelle Monáe, who appeared in Moonlight and the Oscar-nominated Hidden Figures, and Jordan Peele, whose film Get Out has been one of 2017’s biggest commercial and critical hits.
Isaacs will be stepping down as president of the Academy next month, having completed four one-year terms. Under her leadership, the Academy pledged to open up its membership, which in 2016 was 92% white and 75% male, to more women and people of color. In its announcement, the Academy touted its diversified group of invitees with different graphics – one stating that seven of its 17 branches had invited more women than men, another detailing the different married couples offered membership, including the actors Anna Faris and Chris Pratt; and Adele Romanski and James Laxton, the producer and cinematographer, respectively, of Moonlight.
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As one of 19 siblings, I grew up with a very particular relationship to the concept of invisibility. My parents did the best they could with what little they had to make all of their children feel as if they mattered—to feel seen. But there is only so much attention poor Black parents can give to that many children when the world is intent on taking everything away from them.
As I got older and began to accept my queerness, this feeling of invisibility evolved from a universal fault to a much more complicated experience. Even though I had resented the lack of attention I was afforded growing up, I began to cherish those same moments of solitude—those times where I could build my own queer-friendly communities without fear of having them barreled over by family members working clumsily through their internalized queer antagonism, if they were working through it at all.
While establishing this community, I noticed how so many Black queer folks have been forced to do the same—manifesting entire worlds of (often temporary, but always necessary) safety by ourselves, as epitomized in the creation of phenomena like ball culture. At the same time, there remains a constant push from mainstream LGBTQ organizations to increase the “visibility” of these experiences and communities in order to build empathy for and normalize them. But what, if anything, gets barreled over in that process of exposure?
Visibility efforts have long been a staple mainstream queer liberation movements. Projects like Transgender Day of Visibility and the It Gets Better campaign rely on the same premise, perhaps best exemplified by (white) queer icon Harvey Milk who continuously pressured queer people to “come out”: If only queer folks were seen, and seen more frequently, they would be respected.
These projects are commendable enough on the surface. But in the aftermath of Philando Castile’s murderer being acquitted, even with video evidence and witnesses—after the similar end to many other comparable cases—at some point the question must be asked: Can visibility, based as it is in a notion of shared humanity, work for us if Black people aren’t seen as fully human?
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In her 2016 book Pushout: The Criminalization of Black Girls in Schools, writer and activist Monique Morris wrote about the “age compression” experienced by black girls in America. Black women are often stereotyped as dominant or hypersexual, and black girls, in turn, are frequently treated as adults. “Half of us look older than our age,” one 13-year-old tells her, speaking about her experiences evading arrest for truancy. “By whose standards?” Morris writes in response.
A disturbing new report confirms that 13-year-old’s assessment of how she is perceived by the world. “Girlhood Interrupted: The Erasure of Black Girls’ Childhood,” from the Georgetown Law Center on Poverty and Inequality, details what it calls the “adultification” of young black girls. Compared to white girls of the same age, black girls are perceived as needing less nurturing, comfort, and protection. They are also perceived as being more independent and knowing more about sex and other adult topics. And the bias begins early: Black girls are seen as older and less innocent than their white peers starting as young as age 5.
The phenomenon of viewing black students as miniature adults means they are likelier to be punished harshly within the school system, and their cases are likelier to be passed along to the juvenile justice system rather than handled within the school. Think Progress reported last year that black preschool students were 3.6 times likelier than white children to receive an out-of-school suspension, for example. A paper published earlier this year in the journal Urban Education found cases where elementary-school girls were handcuffed and removed from school property in police cars for infractions as small as having a tantrum. Overall, black girls receive out-of-school suspensions at higher rates than any other group of female students in the American public school system.
The new report builds on experimental research on how black boys are perceived as older and more criminal than their peers. Social psychologist Phillip Goff has found that black boys are perceived as older and less innocent than their white peers starting at age 10. In one experiment, undergraduate subjects were shown photographs of white, black, or Latino boys between ages 10 and 17, alongside descriptions of crimes. The subjects overestimated the ages of the black boys by an average of 4.5 years, and found them likelier to be guilty of crimes.
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Tanzania’s president, John Magufuli, who has been leading a crackdown on LGBTQ rights in the country, just said he believes that “even cows disapprove of” homosexuality. And before you ask, no, he didn’t say that as a joke.
In a strikingly homophobic rant last week, Magufuli slammed foreign NGOs that campaign for gay rights and Tanzanian LGBTQ activists, saying, “Those who teach such things do not like us, brothers. They brought us drugs and homosexual practices that even cows disapprove of,” according to the AFP.
Unfortunately, his remarks aren’t all that surprising. Far from Western eyes, Tanzania is rapidly becoming one of the worst countries in the world for LGBTQ individuals. Homosexuality is a crime punishable by up to 30 years in prison, and under Magufuli, who came to power in 2015, the government is cracking down even more.
Tanzania isn’t the only African nation enforcing harsh laws targeting LGBTQ citizens. Homosexuality is illegal in 38 of 54 countries in Africa, and is punishable by death in Mauritania, Sudan, and Somalia, according to Amnesty International.
Magfuli doesn’t go that far, but his government is steadily making life harder for Tanzania’s LGBTQ community.
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Last month, the Pentagon declared mission accomplished on its six-year, $800 million hunt for Joseph Kony. Though it failed to kill or capture the notorious leader of the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), a brutal Ugandan rebel force that has terrorized civilians across a wide swath of Central Africa for the past three decades, it succeeded in wearing down the group to its weakest point ever. Fewer than 80 armed fighters remain, down from 2,500 at the height of the LRA’s murderous rampage in the late 1990s. They are scattered across remote parts of three countries, where their primary objective is not to topple the Ugandan government but to survive another day.
But while it does not “currently threaten U.S. or Western interests in the region,” as Gen. Thomas D. Waldhauser, commander of the U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM), said in recent congressional testimony, the LRA is not an entirely spent force. It has found a lifeline in wildlife poaching and other criminal activity, and its core leadership, including Kony’s two sons, who were both born into the group, has proved remarkably resilient over the years. In a region with little government presence and no effective national armies, the LRA could easily regroup. That possibility is made more likely by the U.S. military’s premature exit, which comes as its main partner in the hunt for Kony, the Ugandan military, is also picking up and leaving.
Failure to deliver the knockout blow means that the American effort to capture Kony, which began in 2011, may ultimately go down as a massive waste of taxpayer money. Without critical U.S. interests at stake, Barack Obama’s administration was unwilling to risk the lives of American soldiers. Hence the “advise and assist” mandate that left AFRICOM dependent on its Ugandan partners, who chafed under American tutelage and often resisted taking the fight directly to Kony and his inner circle.
Codenamed Operation Observant Compass, the U.S. anti-Kony mission was launched in October 2011 after years of lobbying by human rights advocates culminated in the passage of the Lord’s Resistance Army Disarmament and Northern Uganda Recovery Act of 2009, which Obama signed into law in May 2010. Approximately 100 American Green Berets, many with previous tours of Afghanistan and Pakistan, deployed to Uganda, South Sudan, and the Central African Republic (CAR) to aid the Ugandan Army in its ongoing campaign against the LRA. Beginning in 2012, U.S. forces participated in some joint patrols with the Ugandans, but mostly they provided intelligence, air, and logistics support.
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The inaugural People of the Global Majority in the Outdoors, Nature and Environment (PGM ONE) Summit kicked off yesterday (June 28) in Berkeley, California. It ends today (June 29).
The first of its kind, the summit is an environmental convening only for people of color. White people aren’t supposed to attend the conference, according to event organizers, which has caused a degree of controversy.
Glenn Nelson, a Japanese man who founded media venture The Trail Posse, which covers the outdoors with a spin on race and diversity, took issue with the summit's exclusivity and won’t be attending. He wrote, in an online post, that he “cannot in good conscience attend an event that excludes anyone.”
So he won’t be there, but others will, including Latino educator and advocate José González, Green 2.0 Executive Director Whitney Tome and Angela Park, a consultant, researcher and writer who worked under the Clinton-Gore White House.
Last night, keynote speaker Carolyn Finney discussed the various opportunites for people of color to improve the environmental sector. Finney is a geography professor at the University of Kentucky, as well as a member of the U.S. National Parks Advisory Board. She examines systems of power and how they selectively push narratives.
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