A Rebel Yell
Commentary by Chitown Kev
Don’t get me wrong, fam, I still think that Kanye West is both a jack*ss and a damn fool; I haven’t retreated from that position.
And I agree with many of the analyses of West’s comments to TMZ and to Charlemagne tha God, including, for the most part, Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Atlantic essay, I’m Not Black, I’m Kanye (linked and excerpted in dopper’s News Round-Up below this essay); links to Mr. Coates’ essay blew up my Twitter feed yesterday.
But...I have to be honest: Mr. Coates’ chronicle of the vicissitudes of black achievement, fame and what that all means made me viscerally cringe almost as much as of any Kanye’s recent comments.
Now Coates is surely right with this
West might plead ignorance—“I don’t have all the answers that a celebrity is supposed to have,” he told Charlamagne. But no citizen claiming such a large portion of the public square as West can be granted reprieve. The planks of Trumpism are clear—the better banning of Muslims, the improved scapegoatingof Latinos, the endorsement of racist conspiracy, the denialism of science, the cheering of economic charlatans, the urging on of barbarian cops and barbarian bosses, the cheering of torture, and the condemnation of whole countries. The pain of these policies is not equally distributed. Indeed the rule of Donald Trump is predicated on the infliction of maximum misery on West’s most ardent parishioners, the portions of America, the muck, that made the god Kanye possible.
And I suppose that Coates is right that Kanye, through the sheer force and magnitude of ‘’the consistent, amazing, near-peerless quality of his work,’’ has became a member of a pantheon of black popular music icons that includes Michael Jackson (in that scenario, I guess that Jackson remains a sort of Zeus-like figure).
Part of my cringe at Coates’ essay, I suppose, is that he gets part of the ‘’enigma and wonder’’ of Jackson wrong.
Or, to be more precise, incomplete.
Coates drones on and on about the collective ‘’we’’ generally and, more specifically, how much we black folks were ‘’tied’’ to Jackson. Coates neglects to mention that Jackson’s stage persona also challenged notions of black masculinity in ways that a lot of black folks didn’t necessarily like even as we listened to and loved and bought the music.
Prince did the same thing and Little Richard did it decades before...and all were ridiculed for it.
(Of course, the ‘’Kanye is gay’’ rumors have dogged West throughout pretty much the entirety of his career...but I digress...)
Coates is correct to situate both Jackson and West firmly in the black tradition
When Jackson sang and danced, when West samples or rhymes, they are tapping into a power formed under all the killing, all the beatings, all the rape and plunder that made America. The gift can never wholly belong to a singular artist, free of expectation and scrutiny, because the gift is no more solely theirs than the suffering that produced it.
But that tradition, that suffering is more...elastic and/or oppositional than Coates is willing to admit.
Let me be clear: I am not saying nor do I mean to suggest that Coates’ is homophobic, he’s a pretty solid LGBT ally...I am challenging his notion of what blackness is, though, and, more importantly, what ‘’black freedom’’ entails.
What Kanye West seeks is what Michael Jackson sought—liberation from the dictates of that we.
I agree with Coates that Kanye seeks liberation from the dictates of that ‘’we,’’ but, quite frankly, so do I, sometimes.
I understand that I can never entirely escape from those dictates; I’ve read enough Bertrand Russell and James Baldwin to know that. Heck, I’ve lived on this planet long enough to know that.
But that doesn’t mean that I shouldn’t ease on down the open road, ‘’finding and seeking,/Finding less than sought/Seeking more than found...’’ To be sure, I need an understanding of my original composition to best understand the point in the composition where it’s best to improvise.
‘’Home’’ is wherever I lay my damn hat, sometimes.
True enough, I would much rather Kanye West scream or perhaps even pursue a ‘’dangerous’’ freedom like the Cholly Breedlove character in Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye...well, provided he doesn’t hurt anyone in the process (as Cholly Breedlove did on multiple occasions)
A rebel yell is simply not a good look.
But given the condition that I have some knowledge and acceptance from whence I came and provided that I don’t hurt others in the process, any ‘’freedom’’ that I pursue can be properly termed a subset of a category called ‘’black freedom.’’
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News round up by dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor
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Black Americans are frequent users of technology, and have helped build social media platforms like Twitter and Instagram into the giants they are today. But they aren’t reaping the same economic benefits of the tech boom as white Americans, and low rates of black employment in the tech industry are a large part of the reason why.
A new study released Friday sheds light on this issue. The State of Black America 2018, a report published annually by the National Urban League, compares how black and white people fare in a number of areas, including housing, economics, education, social justice, and civic engagement.
This year’s report pays particular attention to black Americans’ access to jobs in the tech industry and STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) fields. The study reveals that while black people are one of the racial groups most likely to use smartphones and have created thriving communities on platforms like Twitter, those high rates of usage haven’t translated into employment.
And this is largely because the tech industry has failed to hire black STEM grads and transition them into careers in Silicon Valley, where many of these jobs are based.
“In the vast majority of [social media and tech] companies, fewer than five percent of the workforce is African American,” the authors of the report note. “By contrast, at least half of the workforce in these companies is white.”
Marc Morial, CEO of the National Urban League, notes that this isn’t new — black Americans have repeatedly been left behind when America’s technology makes a leap forward, be it when slavery and Reconstruction blocked black people from the benefits of farming technology, or when technological revolutions in the North were less accessible to poor black people fleeing the South. Over generations, the effect of this lack of inclusion has compounded, leading us to the disparities that exist today.
And, as the report indicates, none of this happens in a vacuum. When black workers are shut out of higher-income jobs, like in tech, it adds to the already significant income gap — the median income for white households is $63,155, while it’s only $38,555 for black households. There’s a persistent wealth gap as well, which hasn’t improved much since the 1960s.
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Nothing happens that way anymore. Nothing can. But this was 1982, and Michael Jackson was God, but not just God in scope and power, though there was certainly that, but God in his great mystery; God in how a child would hear tell of him, God in how he lived among the legend and lore; God because the Walkman was still uncommon, and I was young and could not count on the car radio, because my parents lived between NPR and WTOP. So the legends were all I had—tales of remarkable feats and fantastic deeds: Michael Jackson mediated gang wars; Michael Jackson was the zombie king; Michael Jackson tapped his foot and stones turned to light. Even his accouterment felt beyond me—the studded jacket, the sparkling glove, the leather pants—raiment of the divine, untouchable by me, a mortal child who squinted to see past Saturday, who would not even see Motown 25 until it was past 30, who would not even own a copy of Thriller until I was a grown man, who no longer believed in miracles, and knew in my heart that if the black man’s God was not dead, he surely was dying.
And he had always been dying—dying to be white. That was what my mother said, that you could see the dying all over his face, the decaying, the thinning, that he was disappearing into something white, desiccating into something white, erasing himself, so that we would forget that he had once been Africa beautiful and Africa brown, and we would forget his pharaoh’s nose, forget his vast eyes, his dazzling smile, and Michael Jackson was but the extreme of what felt in those post-disco years to be a trend. Because when I think of that time, I think of black men on album covers smiling back at me in Jheri curls and blue contacts and I think of black women who seemed, by some mystic edict, to all be the color of manila folders. Michael Jackson might have been dying to be white, but he was not dying alone. There were the rest us out there, born, as he was, in the muck of this country, born in The Bottom. We knew that we were tied to him, that his physical destruction was our physical destruction, because if the black God, who made the zombies dance, who brokered great wars, who transformed stone to light, if he could not be beautiful in his own eyes, then what hope did we have—mortals, children—of ever escaping what they had taught us, of ever escaping what they said about our mouths, about our hair and our skin, what hope did we ever have of escaping the muck? And he was destroyed. It happened right before us. God was destroyed, and we could not stop him, though we did love him, we could not stop him, because who can really stop a black god dying to be white?
It is so hard to honestly discuss the menace without forgetting. It is hard because what happened to America in 2016 has long been happening in America, before there was an America, when the first Carib was bayoneted and the first African delivered up in chains. It is hard to express the depth of the emergency without bowing to the myth of past American unity, when in fact American unity has always been the unity of conquistadors and colonizers—unity premised on Indian killings, land grabs, noble internments, and the gallant General Lee. Here is a country that specializes in defining its own deviancy down so that the criminal, the immoral, and the absurd become the baseline, so that even now, amidst the long tragedy and this lately disaster, the guardians of truth rally to the liar’s flag.
Nothing is new here. The tragedy is so old, but even within it there are actors—some who’ve chosen resistance, and some, like West, who, however blithely, have chosen collaboration.
West might plead ignorance—“I don’t have all the answers that a celebrity is supposed to have,” he told Charlamagne. But no citizen claiming such a large portion of the public square as West can be granted reprieve. The planks of Trumpism are clear—the better banning of Muslims, the improved scapegoatingof Latinos, the endorsement of racist conspiracy, the denialism of science, the cheering of economic charlatans, the urging on of barbarian cops and barbarian bosses, the cheering of torture, and the condemnation of whole countries. The pain of these policies is not equally distributed. Indeed the rule of Donald Trump is predicated on the infliction of maximum misery on West’s most ardent parishioners, the portions of America, the muck, that made the god Kanye possible.
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Last summer, a black woman in Michigan defended herself, her mother, and her 2-year-old daughter with a registered (and unloaded) gun against a woman who she and her attorneys say tried to hit them with a car. She was a concealed carry permit holder and living in an open carry state — one with a “stand your ground” law in place.
Now, Siwatu-Salama Ra is serving a two-year prison sentence at Huron Valley Correctional Facility for felonious assault and felony firearm convictions. She’s seven months pregnant, and according to her attorneys, she’s receiving insufficient medical care — including being shackled to her bed during a vaginal exam — even though her pregnancy is high-risk. The case is under appeal, but the judge deciding Ra’s fate, Thomas Hathaway, has already denied a request to postpone Ra’s sentence until she gives birth.
Ra’s case is yet another instance of a black gun owner, with the permits to legally carry, defending themselves against violence — and getting punished for it.
I spoke with Patrisse Cullors, co-founder of Black Lives Matter, who told me, “Siwatu should be home getting ready to deliver her baby, and being with her family. Instead, she is suffering and isolated being punished for protecting herself, her child and [her] mother. This is a shameful, shameful reality, and it’s clear that we need to challenge a criminal justice system that would try a pregnant black woman for upholding ‘stand your ground’ laws and her Second Amendment rights.”
Black gun owners, particularly black women, face unequal treatment under local laws
While concealed carry permit application numbers for both black Americans and women are rising steadily, and the number of black gun owners in total has spiked since the 2016 election, they have long been unable to access the same protections their white neighbors enjoy when it comes to exercising their gun rights, including in “stand your ground” states.
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Reusing shower water, limiting toilet flushing and night-time irrigation were among measures that saved South Africa’s second city from running dry. The Guardian: How Cape Town was saved from running out of water
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Late last year, as the South African government faced the prospect of its largest city running out of water, they took an unprecedented gamble.
The government announced “day zero” – a moment when dam levels would be so low that they would turn off the taps in Cape Town and send people to communal water collection points.
This apocalyptic notion prompted water stockpiling and panic, caused a drop in tourism bookings, and raised the spectre of civil unrest.
It also worked. After years of trying to convince residents to conserve, the aggressive campaign jolted people into action. Water use was (and still is) restricted to 50 litres per person per day. (In 2016, average daily per capita use in California was 321 litres.) Households that exceed the limit face hefty fines, or having a meter installed in their home that shuts off their water once they go over.
Capetonians started showering standing over buckets to catch and re-use that water, recycling washing machine water, and limiting loo flushes to once a day.
“It was the most talked about thing in Cape Town for months when it needed to be,” says Priya Reddy, the city’s communication director. “It was not a pretty solution, but it was not a pretty problem.”
Cape Town’s water use dropped from 600m litres per day in mid 2017 to 507m litres per day at the end of April. That’s still short of the 450m the city should be using, but Reddy says it couldn’t have been achieved otherwise. “We really did need to make it alarming enough, otherwise day zero would have happened.”
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Africa’s second-largest oil producer is even more corrupt than Nigeria. President João Lourenço will struggle to clean it up. The Economist: Is Angola’s new president serious about reform?
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IF ANY country ever needed a fresh start, Angola does. It is more corrupt than Nigeria; its infant mortality is higher than Afghanistan’s. Until September it had been ruled by the same man, President José Eduardo dos Santos, for 38 years—more than twice as long as most Angolans have been alive. Even in retirement, many expected Mr dos Santos to continue pulling the strings; he remains head of the ruling party. Hardly anyone expected his successor, João Lourenço, to break the chokehold that the dos Santos family and their cronies have on the Angolan economy. So Mr Lourenço’s first few months in office have pleasantly surprised (see article).
He has ousted Mr dos Santos’s daughter, reputed to be Africa’s richest woman, from her perch at the top of the national oil firm, and sacked the former president’s son from his job running the sovereign-wealth fund. He has even allowed the junior Mr dos Santos to be charged with fraud, which he denies, over the transfer of $500m out of the country. That would never have happened under his father’s regime. The $640bn question is whether Mr Lourenço’s anti-corruption drive is real, or whether he plans to replace one set of snouts at the trough with another.
He has ousted Mr dos Santos’s daughter, reputed to be Africa’s richest woman, from her perch at the top of the national oil firm, and sacked the former president’s son from his job running the sovereign-wealth fund. He has even allowed the junior Mr dos Santos to be charged with fraud, which he denies, over the transfer of $500m out of the country. That would never have happened under his father’s regime. The $640bn question is whether Mr Lourenço’s anti-corruption drive is real, or whether he plans to replace one set of snouts at the trough with another.
$640bn is the amount of money that Angola is thought to have made from oil and gas exports since 2002. That was the year its ghastly, three-decade civil war ended, leaving its people traumatised and its soil studded with landmines. Soon afterwards oil prices surged, giving Africa’s second-largest oil producer a chance to reap a huge peace dividend and rebuild its bombed-out cities. This chance was not entirely squandered—Angola has more roads and dams and skyscrapers than before, and its people are a bit less poor. But the main benefits of the oil boom flowed to a tiny elite.
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MOZAMBIQUE is back,” says President Filipe Nyusi, hoping to persuade a recent gathering of fellow Commonwealth leaders that the buffeting his country has faced in the past few years is over. But his compatriots need convincing, too. Some point to dramatic changes in South Africa, Zimbabwe and Angola. Each has a new leader who vows to correct the bad habits of a recently ejected predecessor. Why, they ask, can’t Mr Nyusi, who succeeded Armando Guebuza in 2015, do the same?
Mr Nyusi has three hard tasks. First, he must accommodate Renamo, an opposition party that fought a guerrilla war from 1977 to 1992 and rebelled again more recently against Mr Nyusi’s Frelimo party, which has run the show since independence from Portugal in 1975.
Second, he must revive the economy by coming to terms with the IMF and foreign donors who suspended aid soon after a scandal involving $2bn of secret loans was exposed in 2016. Third, Mr Nyusi must chuck out and in some cases bring to book the old guard around Mr Guebuza, reputed to be one of Mozambique’s richest men.
Mr Nyusi has done best with Renamo. He has courageously met its long-serving leader, Afonso Dhlakama, in his hideout. Indeed, he is close to clinching a deal on
devolution that would let Renamo share or win power in some provinces. But the two still need to agree on how to demobilise their armed men. Mr Nyusi hopes all will be settled before national elections next year, though some in Frelimo still hanker after a “Savimbi solution”: that Mr Dhlakama should just be killed, as was Angola’s rebel leader, Jonas Savimbi, in 2002.
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