"When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross."
Before writing this year’s opener I first had to look back at the last two years of Black Kos openers.
When I wrote the opening to Black Kos 2016 what stuck out to me most was how hopeful I was at the beginning of that year. When in the opening commentary on Friday Jan 8th, 2016 “Why I’m still hopeful and optimistic about race relations in America. “ I wrote:
If to your eyes and ears, America seems more racially divided, maybe it’s because we’re all more aware of our racial shortcomings. Many white Americans have a shocked response to claims of white privileged, unfairness and discrimination. Maybe they have this reaction because it’s outside their daily experience. If you ask many white people, “Do you think traffic stops are done unfairly?” the majority of whites probably would say “NO” because it’s not something they experience. It’s not because of racism; it’s just that it’s not something that they see. Unfortunately personal experiences often are the most powerful foundations of belief systems.
I would be a liar if I didn’t say the results of November 8th 2016 didn’t give my optimism pause and make me question my conviction. I believe that’s why on the 2017 opening I wrote on Tuesday January 10, 2017:
But it is also true that I’m less stunned than many of my fellow travelers on the left, because I’ve always been a mix of both optimism and realism. As I’ve often written over the years, every major American advance of racial progress has been met with a stiff resistance and then a backlash. I never been a believer in the idea of a “post racial” America. Ideas of race do and are changing over time, just as they always have and always will, but the social concept of race and everything that idea entails is still with us. Denying that hard fact doesn’t make it disappear. As I’ve written America’s racial history is a series of advancements and then set backs.
Initially blacks and poor white Scot-Irish worked together to develop the “New World” only to see slave codes that prevented further side-by-side progress. The American Revolution saw both black and white Americans fighting together under the belief that all men were created equal only to see that all men legally were not treated equally. After the Civil War for a time black and whites equally participated in rebuilding America, as Mississippi elected two black Senators, and Louisiana elected a black governor who started to enact land reform. But the backlash to Reconstruction lead to Jim Crow. The optimism of post WWI “rag-time” America, was followed by record numbers of lynchings during the Great Depression. The Civil Rights era was followed by the “Southern Backlash”. On and on this pattern repeats itself. So now we find the Obama era followed by the election of Donald Trump.
Progress. Two Steps Forward. Backlash. One Step Back.
The wheel of time of racial progress continues to turn and follow this pattern throughout time. But being a student of history I often take and borrow hope from those kept hope during dark times. But just as the election of Donald Trump gave my optimism pause, the rise of the resistance has given me a hope that tempers my realism.
I have hope because historically after each racial backlash, the good people of America realize in shock that things were not as harmonious and rosy as they seemed. Americans of good faith, taking to heart the old axiom that “evil flourishes when good people do nothing” move to the streets, city halls, public forums, courts, but most importantly the voting booths, and become the change they want to see.
“BECOME THE CHANGE YOU WANT TO SEE”
When I worked for the first Obama Presidential campaign in 2008 that phrase has always stayed with me. If you want to see more woman in office, donate your time and money, to support and encourage more woman in public office. The same thing goes for people of color. If you believe there should be more people of color in office, donate your time and money to support and encourage more POC in public office.
"When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross."
This quote is often attributed to Sinclair Lewis’s great American novel It Can't Happen Here, although it never actually appeared in the novel, it does capture the warnings that Mr. Lewis was trying to make. The novel It Can’t Happen Here describes the rise of Berzelius "Buzz" Windrip, a politician who defeats FDR and is elected President, after Windrip foments fear and promises drastic economic and social reforms while promoting a return to patriotism and "traditional" values. After his election, President Windrip takes complete control of the government and imposes a plutocratic/totalitarian rule with the help of a ruthless paramilitary force.
Though having previously foreshadowed some authoritarian measures in order to reorganize the United States government, Windrip rapidly outlaws dissent, incarcerates political enemies in concentration camps, and trains and arms a paramilitary force called the Minute Men, who terrorize citizens and enforce the policies of Windrip and his "corporatist" regime. One of his first acts as president is to eliminate the influence of the United States Congress, which draws the ire of many citizens as well as the legislators themselves. The Minute Men respond to protests against Windrip's decisions harshly, attacking demonstrators with bayonets.
In addition to these actions, Windrip's administration, known as the "Corpo" government, curtails women's and minority rights, and eliminates individual states by subdividing the country into administrative sectors.
The government of these sectors is managed by "Corpo" authorities, usually prominent businessmen or Minute Men officers. Those accused of crimes against the government appear before kangaroo courts presided over by "military judges". Despite these dictatorial (and "quasi-draconian") measures, a majority of Americans approve of them, seeing them as necessary but painful steps to restore American power. Others, those less enthusiastic about the prospect of corporatism, reassure themselves that fascism cannot "happen here", hence the novel's title.
I believe that one weakness of understanding the term fascism in America is that when it is used, most people (including those on the left) immediately associate it with Hitler. The chance of Nazi style fascism arising in America are slim to none. American fascism instead more closely resembles the fascism that has plagued Latin America since the 1930’s. The longest serving fascist leader in the world was Spanish dictator Francisco Franco, who came to power during the Spanish Civil war (aided by Mussolini and Hitler) and ruled until the 1970’s. His form of fascism called Falangism quickly crossed the Atlantic into Spanish (and Portuguese) speaking Latin America and quickly gained favor and currency with reactionary conservatives in that region. Falangist of Spain combined a nationalism that often bordered on racism, with a strong belief in what they call the Corporate state (more or less that nations are best organized as “company towns”).
Like the USA most of Latin America has a large amount of inequality that is clearly divided along racial lines. A combination of large land owners, large corporate interest, social conservatives, and the military supported fascist movements across Latin America and the Caribbean. Unfortunately many of these same elements exist in the USA (much more so than say Europe) which creates more similarities with the history of Latin America fascism. For example American fascist like groups like the KKK more closely resemble the Latin American death Squads that have killed hundreds of thousands of left leaning, poor, and people of color in El Salvador (Escuadrón de la Muerte, "Squadron of Death"), Brazil (Scuderie Detetive Le Cocq “Shield of Detective Le Cocq”), Colombia AUC, Honduras ( Battalion 3-16), and Haiti ( Tonton Macoute), than the largely state driven ethnic cleansing and exterminations that we associate with European far right fascist states. Know your history or be bound to repeat it.
Trump with his love of military parades, hypocritical support from organized religion, appeal to racist, corporate backing, cult of personality, policies that exacerbate inequality, corruption of judiciary, and attempts to coop and suppress the press, all point us towards a Latin American style crony government. It’s important that we understand this, learn from our allies there, and not let it happen here.
It can happen here, unless we make sure it can’t happen here. Black Kos has always spent a a considerable amount of time reporting news from Latin America, because it really doesn’t get enough attention in the US Press. The dangers of Latin American style fascism arriving in the US are real. The toll it has taken on liberals, leftist, and people of color through out the Americas is devastating. It’s why 2018 has to be a year of all out resistance to it. Unity. Organization. Intersectionality. We all need to do our part to ensure we don’t lose this great country we all love. For all it’s flaws, America is still our home that we love. 2018 is the year we clean our house, and restore it once more to greatness.
GOTV (get out the vote) like your life depended on it, because for some people like DACA recipients and refugees at risk of deportation, their life actually does depend on it…….
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If it were not for the Canadian leaf tattoo on his wrist, Chris Gustave may not be behind bars.
In October, 24 year old Gustave was staying at a weekly motel in Phoenix when police arrived searching for his friend, who had violated parole. At first, “all the attention was on him,” Gustave told me in a phone interview last month. But then, Gustave claimed, an officer noticed the tattoo. “The dude just asked if I was Canadian, the next thing I knew I was in here”—“here” being the remote and sprawling Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention center in Eloy, Arizona.
Gustave is one of more than half a million black unauthorized immigrants in the United States—about 575,000 as of 2013. Last week, The New York Times reported that the presence of immigrants from Haiti and Nigeria, who together represent roughly 20 percent of the foreign-born black population, vexed president Trump. The Haitians “all have AIDS,” Trump said in a June meeting with his top advisors according to the Times, while the Nigerians would not “go back to their huts” after seeing America, he said. (The White House denied the comments.)
Research suggests that because black people in the United States are more likely to be stopped, arrested, and incarcerated, black immigrants may be disproportionately vulnerable to deportation. The criminal-justice system acts like a “funnel” into the immigration system, said César Cuauhtémoc García Hernández, a University of Denver law professor who studies the nexus of policing and immigration law. New York University law professor Alina Das said black immigrants are “targeted by criminalization.”
While the Obama administration prioritized immigrants with felony convictions for deportation, President Trump’s executive orders effectively made anyone in the country illegally a target for removal. Arrests of non-criminals more than doubled, and among those who have been charged with a crime, the top three categories are “traffic offenses – DUI,” “dangerous drugs,” and “immigration,” which means illegal entry, illegal reentry, false claim to US citizenship, and trafficking, according to ICE. In fiscal year 2017, almost 74 percent of people arrested by ICE had a criminal conviction—arrests the agency uses to argue “that its officers know how to prioritize enforcement without overly prescriptive mandates.”
But Hernández sees something different in the large number of criminal convictions among ICE detainees. “Racial bias present in the criminal-justice system plays itself out in the immigration context,” he said. “There are so many entry points” to deportation, said Das, “when you are a person of color who is also an immigrant, you face a double punishment.”
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A ProPublica analysis shows that women who deliver at hospitals that disproportionately serve black mothers are at a higher risk of harm. ProPublica: How Hospitals Are Failing Black Mothers
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When Dacheca Fleurimond decided to give birth at SUNY Downstate Medical Center earlier this year, her sister tried to talk her out of it.
Her sister had recently delivered at a better-rated hospital in Brooklyn’s gentrified Park Slope neighborhood and urged Fleurimond, a 33-year-old home health aide, to do the same.
But Fleurimond had given birth to all five of her other children at the state-run SUNY Downstate and never had a bad experience. She and her family had lived steps away from the hospital in East Flatbush when they emigrated from Haiti years ago. She knew the nurses at SUNY Downstate, she told her sister. She felt comfortable there.
She didn’t know then how much rode on her decision, or how fraught with risk her delivery would turn out to be.
It’s been long-established that black women like Fleurimond fare worse in pregnancy and childbirth, dying at a rate more than triple that of white mothers. And while part of the disparity can be attributed to factors like poverty and inadequate access to health care, there is growing evidence that points to the quality of care at hospitals where a disproportionate number of black women deliver, which are often in neighborhoods disadvantaged by segregation.
Researchers have found that women who deliver at these so-called “black-serving” hospitals are more likely to have serious complications — from infections to birth-related embolisms to emergency hysterectomies — than mothers who deliver at institutions that serve fewer black women.
Still, it’s difficult to tell from studies alone how this pattern plays out in real life. The hospitals are never named. The women behind the numbers are faceless, the specific ways their hospitals may have failed them unknown.
ProPublica did its own analysis, using two years of hospital inpatient discharge data from New York, Illinois and Florida to look in-depth at how well different facilities treat women who experience one particular problem — hemorrhages — while giving birth.
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The former football star George Weah has won Liberia’s presidential election, defeating the vice-president, Joseph Boakai, in a runoff with 61.5% of the vote.
Thursday’s announcement by the country’s election commission chair, Jerome Korkoyah, means Weah will succeed Ellen Johnson Sirleaf as Liberia’s president next month, after an election fraught with accusations of fraud and irregularities. It will be the country’s first democratic transition since 1944 and follows two devastating civil wars.
The commission said Weah had taken 61.5% of the vote, based on 98.1% of ballots cast..
Spontaneous celebrations erupted in the capital, Monrovia, a Weah stronghold. Supporters danced, clapped and sang “Olé, olé, olé” outside the electoral commission’s offices as the results were read out.
Weah, a national sporting hero, topped the first round of voting in October with 38.4% but failed to win the 50% necessary to avoid a runoff. Boakai came second with 28.8%.
The runoff was delayed twice after several parties took their allegations of malpractice to the supreme court , but it finally took place with a low turnout on 26 December.
Weah, 51, is the only African to be Fifa’s world player of the year or to have won the Ballon d’Or for Europe’s best player. At the time, Nelson Mandela called him the “pride of Africa”.
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The statue of Confederate Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest had stood in Memphis for more than a century—and inspired protest for decades—when Bruce McMullen, the city attorney who has sought for two years to find a legal way to rid the city of this monument to the first grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, began to feel a sense of urgency.
In the fall, as Memphis pressed the case for removal with the Tennessee Historical Commission, a state group that must approve any changes to public monuments, McMullen felt a drop-dead date inching closer. April 4, 2018, is the 50th anniversary of the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, and the occasion for a citywide commemoration. Forrest, and a nearby statue of Confederate president Jefferson Davis—erected in 1964, the same year as the passage of the Civil Rights Act—had to be gone by then.
That reason for haste was joined by another: the January return of the Tennessee state Legislature, a mostly white body that for the past five years has successfully outflanked this mostly black city’s drive to unseat Davis and Forrest. In the new year, McMullen worried, Nashville would tighten the language to make it all but illegal to take down the statues. Its most recent effort, the Tennessee Heritage Protection Act of 2016, modified an eponymous 2013 law to prohibit the unauthorized “removal, renaming, relocation, alteration, rededication, or otherwise disturbing or alteration” of any historic monument located on public property.
On Dec. 20, Memphis sold for a token sum the two parks containing the two statues to a newly created nonprofit called Greenspace, headed by Van Turner, a county commissioner of Shelby County, which includes Memphis. The statues were removed that night. The city footed the bill for security; Greenspace paid for their careful removal and storage, in an undisclosed location. “You can’t drop one,” McMullen said. “There will be a war if you drop one.”
And so Memphis joined a list of cities, including Baltimore and New Orleans, that have removed confederate monuments since the deadly rally of white nationalists in Charlottesville, Virginia, once again drew attention to their racist symbolism.
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Halsey Street, a debut novel from Naima Coster, is a story about family, a story about art, and a story about gentrification; more specifically, it is a story about family splintering and evolving and art cracking and expanding under the pressures of gentrification.
Penelope Grand grew up in Brooklyn, in pre-gentrification Bed-Stuy. Her black father, Ralph, owned a record store that was a neighborhood icon; her Dominican mother, Mirella, resentfully cleaned houses. Both were committed to raising Penelope up, to giving her a better life than they had. But as Halsey Street opens, Penelope is returning to Bed-Stuy for the first time in five years, having dropped out of art school and made a failed go at becoming an artist.
Now, Penelope is working as a substitute art teacher, and the only place she can afford is a rented attic room in a wealthy white family’s Bed-Stuy brownstone. She’s back in town to take care of Ralph, who years ago was forced to give up his record store under pressure from rising rents. Mirella is long gone, having returned to the Dominican Republic to live lavishly on the money she made from 20 years of cleaning wealthy white people’s homes in New York City.
Over the course of the book, Coster pivots back and forth between Penelope’s perspective — furious with her mother, heartbroken for her father, ridden with guilt for failing to live up to both parents’ expectations, and deeply resentful of the white people who have changed her neighborhood — and that of Mirella, waiting hopefully in the Dominican Republic for Penelope to come and see that Mirella has made a good life for herself.
The result is a quiet and introspective book, never flashy and rarely shocking. Instead, Halsey Street pays careful, detailed attention to the ways family ties can splinter and fester and ache, and the way a neighborhood that used to be familiar but no longer is creates a feeling of isolation.
It’s in passages about Penelope’s artistic practice, and the slightly depressed dutifulness with which she undertakes it, that Coster shines most. Penelope is certain that her art is no good, and that it will never become good enough for her to make a living from it. Yet she is not particularly interested in improving, and she still draws every day. “The drawing was an exercise, as much a part of her routine as evening tea, morning runs, these sips of gin,” Coster writes, in a scene that will click with recognition for anyone who has made art without quite seeing the point. “The sketches kept her muscles working; they tempered her moods.”
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THE PORCH IS NOW OPEN