Our Lioness in Congress
Commentary by Black Kos Editor Denise Oliver-Velez
I have to admit to being totally biased about loving black women who do not bite their tongues. I grew up with aunts and older cousins and friends of my mom who we called — with all due respect— “Auntie,” whether or not there were any blood ties. And those Aunties were fierce. They knew if you were lying, they gave you side-eye and verbal flayings — but let anybody else try to mess with you they protected you by jumpin’ in their butts like mama lions guarding their cubs.
August born (Leo) Maxine Waters is a key example of black working class aunty-ism.
From her bio:
Maxine Moore Waters (born August 15, 1938) is an American politician, serving as the U.S. Representative for California's 43rd congressional district, and previously the 35th and 29th districts, serving since 1991. A member of the Democratic Party, she is the most senior of the 12 black women currently serving in the United States Congress, and is a member and former chair of the Congressional Black Caucus. Before becoming a member of Congress she served in the California Assembly, to which she was first elected in 1976. As an Assembly member, Waters advocated for divestment from South Africa's apartheid regime. In Congress, she is an outspoken opponent of the Iraq War and Donald Trump.
Waters was born in 1938 in Kinloch, Missouri, the daughter of Velma Lee (née Moore) and Remus Carr. Fifth out of thirteen children, Waters was raised by her single mother once her father left the family when Maxine was two. She graduated from Vashon High School in St. Louis, and moved with her family to Los Angeles, California, in 1961. She worked in a garment factory and as a telephone operator before being hired as an assistant teacher with the Head Start program at Watts in 1966. She later enrolled at Los Angeles State College (now California State University, Los Angeles) and graduated with a sociology degree in 1970.
She married former NFL player Sidney Williams in 1977. Williams was appointed Ambassador to the Bahamas by President Bill Clinton in 1994.
I’ve heard teeth gnashing from right wingnuts (and some ultra-leftists) about the fact that Auntie and her husband live in an expensive house. Same racist shit different day when black people succeed financially, which was her opinion in a recent New York Times interview:
Tucker Carlson went after you recently: He used some very loaded language about your home, which he implied you could not afford on a government salary.
I own several properties. The way he talked about it is: What right does an African-American woman have to do well? He doesn’t know anything about my investments, about the house that I’ve lived in for 25, 30 years. This idea of ‘‘how could she afford that?’’ is racist, and I just dismiss it.
As I pointed out last Sunday, Congresswoman Waters is also one of the founding members of the Congressional Progressive Caucus.
Her internet presence on the issues and dealing whup-ass to Trump, has become legendary, and she has 485K followers.
Her pinned tweet:
She speaks out for black women
She has Session’s number:
She pulls no punches on Trump
Nor is she willing to let House witnesses off the hook:
Her “reclaiming my time” has even inspired a gospel tune:
Our beloved "Auntie" Maxine Waters laid this sermon down so good that I had to sing about it! Whenever anybody tries to distract me or block me (even with praise or platitudes) I'm gonna have to let them know that I'm #ReclaimingMyTime!!!!!!!
Make a note on your August calendar — to send her birthday wishes on Tuesday the 15th.
May she continue to roar for many years more!
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News round up by dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor
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SOUTHERN American food’s most famous ambassador is Harland Sanders, the white-coated, goateed marketing genius whose recipe for pressure-fried chicken became Kentucky Fried Chicken. Sanders hated the chain’s food, calling its heavily breaded birds a “damn fried doughball put on top of some chicken”. What he loved was the chicken of his youth, which had almost certainly been prepared by black hands. Southern food, explained Edna Lewis, America’s most lyrical cookery writer, is “mostly black, because blacks—black women and black men—did most of the cooking in private homes, hotels and on the railroads.”
Michael Twitty runs with this thesis in “The Cooking Gene”, a sprawling blend of culinary history, memoir, travel writing and personal narrative. Mr Twitty contains multitudes: he is a gay, African-American convert to Judaism who taught Hebrew to white children from suburban Washington, DC. He is a prolific blogger and tweeter, and he stages historical cooking demonstrations, dressing in “transformative historical drag” and using 18th- and 19th-century recipes and cooking methods.
The book’s central argument is Lewis’s, but extended: Southern cuisine’s roots are not merely African-American, but African. Africans imported some of its defining ingredients—okra, peanuts and sorghum, for instance—and African skills and labour produced the crops. He structures this story as a series of chapter-length digressions on themes—his conversion to Judaism, his search for his white ancestors, the crops that slaves farmed—rather than as a straightforward, historical narrative.
(break)
John Edge’s work, “The Potlikker Papers”, is a far tidier affair. Divided into five sections, it uses food to tell the history of the American South from the mid-1950s, when the bus boycotts began in Montgomery, Alabama, to today. He paints a wonderfully vibrant portrait of Gloria Gilmore, who fed early civil-rights leaders out of her kitchen, and explains how Lyndon Johnson used to describe the toilet arrangements that segregation imposed on his cook, Zephyr Wright, to make the indignities of segregation vivid to his white interlocutors.
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The circumstances that drove the city’s 1967 uprising still haunt America to this day. The Atlantic: Newark's Long Hot Summer
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Few corners of American life looked as dire or as combustible as Newark, New Jersey in the summer of 1967. In an application for a Federal grant that year, officials noted that, of every major city, Newark had “the highest percentage of substandard housing, the most crime per 100,000 people, the heaviest per capita tax burden and the highest rates of venereal disease, new tuberculosis cases and maternal mortality.”
The brunt of that pain was felt by the city’s African-American community. While the dual forces of the Great Migration and white flight had made Newark one of the first black majority cities in the country, the local power structure, led by its Italian-American, Democratic mayor, Hugh Addonizio, shut out its black citizens from any meaningful place in city governance. And then there was the city’s police force, which was 90% white, and as author Brad R. Tuttle wrote in How Newark became Newark, black residents had come to expect “unfair, sometimes brutal treatment” at the hands of the city’s police.
In previous years, black activists in Newark had voiced their frustration with repeated strikes, marches, and other more traditional forms of protest. But this was the “Long Hot Summer” —the Black Power movement was in ascendance, patience was waning, and the weather had a way of bringing long-simmering tensions to a boil. It was not only radical voices in the city, like the poet and playwright Amiri Baraka, who foretold the unrest to come. Earlier that year, even Martin Luther King Jr. had called Newark one of several “powder kegs” around the nation, ready to “explode in racial violence.”
So, fifty years ago this month, on the evening of July 12, when a black cab driver named John Smith was beaten bloody by a pair of white cops, the city erupted. After residents saw the officers hauling Smith’s pummeled body into the Fourth Precinct, word spread that he might have died and a rabble quickly formed. Organizers tried calm but soon enough someone threw a molotov cocktail and the pandemonium began. The incident resonated not because it was spectacular but because it felt so maddeningly familiar to African-Americans in Newark, who were long accustomed to the realities of police brutality. Even the cab driver’s name—John Smith—conjured an image of an archetypal everyman.
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Community and police relationships have been strained in recent years, to put it lightly. The two groups have apparently reached a stalemate, with communities furious over the recent slate of officer-involved shootings—when all too often the officers walk away with barely a reprimand—and with the police feeling as if they are being unfairly attacked. Neither group really seems to trust the other.
And then there are those like Dana Rachlin, the founder of NYC Together, a nonprofit youth organization that pairs police officers and minority youths in hopes of mending the tense relationship through what Rachlin likes to call a “slow-motion miracle.”
“I think that the police officers and the young people are equally feeling frustrated—obviously it has way harsher ramifications for the young people—but I think that both parties are feeling really frustrated with the current infrastructure and systems that are set up,” Rachlin told The Root. “And so we provide this opportunity for them to connect in ways that are meaningful.”
The kids and the officers work on community projects together, and participate together in different activities—such as cooking and gardening. The officers mentor the kids, helping them with their homework and talking to them about whatever issues they have, creating a potential for connection and an opportunity for each side to see the other in a different light.
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Tyler, the Creator Calls Out Lack of Black Cartoon Characters on TV During Comic-Con Q&A. The Root: We Don’t Have Sh!t’
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Tyler, the Creator attended Comic-Con International in San Diego over the weekend to promote his Adult Swim cartoon, The Jellies! And everything was going quite well—until a white audience member asked the rapper why the main character of the cartoon was black.
“How many fucking black cartoon characters is it on TV right now?” Tyler responded. “Name five. I’ll give you time.”
Tyler continued: “It is none; it is none.”
“They canceled Static Shock. Nobody remembers Fillmore. Like, we don’t got shit,” he said. “The only other black character is this fucking weird-ass ... oh no, they killed Chef off fucking South Park. So we don’t have shit.”
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Voices and Soul
by
Black Kos Poetry Editor
Justice Putnam
Each epoch has its stories of a dead Hero and the Long Suffering Grieving Mother whose grief has evolved long past the years of wailing at the blood of her lost child lost long ago. Every epoch raises these players to a realm of Icon, at best a statue, a rigid frozen in time sculpture with the rigid outstretched hands of “Why,” and a frozen in time stone tear welling from a frozen hollowed out stone eye.
We forget these stories are not of statues, or of two dimensional black and white photographs archived at a national memorial. The Icon may still be alive in full living color, red blood coursing through a fragile body of strength and resolve. A living, breathing Mother of Us All living the small secret pleasures among the daily pain of painful memories, and a Prairie for solace.
Prairie winds blaze through her tumbled belly, and Emmett’s
red yesterdays refuse to rename her any kind of mother.
A pudge-cheeked otherwise, sugar whistler, her boy is
(through the fierce clenching mouth of her memory) a
grays-and-shadows child. Listen. Once she was pretty.
Windy hues goldened her skin. She was pert, brown-faced,
in every wide way the opposite of the raw, screeching thing
chaos has crafted. Now, threaded awkwardly, she tires of the
sorries, the Lawd have mercies. Grief’s damnable tint
is everywhere, darkening days she is no longer aware of.
She is gospel revolving, repeatedly emptied of light, pulled
and caressed, cooed upon by strangers, offered pork and taffy.
Boys in the street stare at her, then avert their eyes, as if she
killed them all, shipped every one into the grips of Delta. She sits,
her chair carefully balanced on hell’s edge, and pays for sanity in
kisses upon the conjured forehead of her son. Beginning with A,
she recites (angry, away, awful) the alphabet of a world gone red.
Coffee scorches her throat as church ladies drift about her room,
black garb sweating their hips, filling cups with tap water, drinking,
drinking in glimpses of her steep undoing. The absence of a black
roomful of boy is measured, again, again. In the clutches of coffee,
red-eyed, Mamie knows their well-meaning murmur. One says She
a mama, still. Once you have a chile, you always a mama. Kisses
in multitudes rain from their dusty Baptist mouths, drowning her.
Sit still, she thinks, til they remember how your boy was killed.
She remembers. Gush and implosion, crushed, slippery, not a boy.
Taffeta and hymnals all these women know, not a son lost and
pulled from the wretched and rumbling Tallahatchie. Mamie, she
of the hollowed womb, is nobody’s mama anymore. She is
tinted echo, barren. Everything about her makes the sound sorry.
The white man’s hands on her child, dangled eye, twanging chaos,
things that she leans on, the only doors that open to let her in.
Faced with days and days of no him, she lets Chicago — windy,
pretty in the ways of the North — console her with its boorish grays.
A hug, more mourners and platters of fat meat. Will she make it through?
Is this how the face slap of sorrow changes the shape of a
mother? All the boys she sees now are laughing, drenched in red.
Emmett, in dreams, sings I am gold. He tells how dry it is, the prairie.
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