Rudy G. and Donnie T. Two racist pricks in a pod
Commentary by Black Kos Editor Denise Oliver-Velez
Due to all the recent media coverage of the seemingly endless piles of steaming mess surrounding Donald Trump and the verbal braying of his new legal team member and bloviating booster— former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani — I’ve been forced to think about similarities between the two New Yorkers. Those of us black folks who had to suffer through “the reign of Rudy” would probably recognize them, though I haven’t seen it mentioned.
Both of these men have chosen to build their political capital and their fan base demeaning and denigrating the achievements of their predecessors — while at the same time co-opting those achievements as their own.
By now it should be clear to everyone not blinded by Trump bling and lies that he loathes President Barack Obama — and cannot stand the fact that a black man is more beloved than he is, and will go down in history with a legacy of accomplishments dwarfing all of Trump’s efforts to undo them.
No coincidence that Trump has embraced racist fellow traveler Giuliani.
Trump fires up his crowds of bigots as “the anti-Obama” while his slobbering adherents spew the n-word. Those of you not from New York, or who are too young, may not remember that this was a Giuliani tactic that propelled him into the mayoral office and Gracie Mansion.
Probably one of the best descriptions of one of Rudy’s moves was written by jazz critic, and civil libertarian Nat Hentoff in 2016.
Rudy’s Racist Rants: An NYPD History Lesson
It was one of the biggest riots in New York City history.
As many as 10,000 demonstrators blocked traffic in downtown Manhattan on Sept. 16, 1992. Reporters and innocent bystanders were violently assaulted by the mob as thousands of dollars in private property was destroyed in multiple acts of vandalism. The protesters stormed up the steps of City Hall, occupying the building. They then streamed onto the Brooklyn Bridge, where they blocked traffic in both directions, jumping on the cars of trapped, terrified motorists. Many of the protestors were carrying guns and openly drinking alcohol.
Yet the uniformed police present did little to stop them. Why? Because the rioters were nearly all white, off-duty NYPD officers. They were participating in a Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association demonstration against Mayor David Dinkins’ call for a Civilian Complaint Review Board and his creation earlier that year of the Mollen Commission, formed to investigate widespread allegations of misconduct within the NYPD.
In the center of the mayhem, standing on top of a car while cursing Mayor Dinkins through a bullhorn, was mayoral candidate Rudy Giuliani. “Beer cans and broken beer bottles littered the streets as Mr. Giuliani led the crowd in chants,” The New York Times reported.
Now, almost 25 years later, Giuliani continues to fan the flames of racial division. The two-term mayor, who has been a prominent surrogate for presidential candidate Donald Trump and is his likely choice to head the Department of Homeland Security, recently made headlines for condemning the Black Lives Matter protests as being “anti-American” and arguing that the term itself is “inherently racist.” But Giuliani has yet to condemn the blatant racism that rippled through the crowd during the 1992 demonstration.
Newsday columnist Jimmy Breslin described the racist conduct in chilling detail:
“The cops held up several of the most crude drawings of Dinkins, black, performing perverted sex acts,” he wrote. “And then, here was one of them calling across the top of his beer can held to his mouth, ‘How did you like the niggers beating you up in Crown Heights?’”
The off-duty cops were referring to a severe beating Breslin suffered while covering the 1991 Crown Heights riots in Brooklyn. Breslin continued: “Now others began screaming … ‘How do you like what the niggers did to you in Crown Heights?’ “ ‘Now you got a nigger right inside City Hall. How do you like that? A nigger mayor.’
“And they put it right out in the sun yesterday in front of City Hall,” Breslin wrote. “We have a police force that is openly racist …”
Newsday reported on other instances of racial abuse. City Councilwoman Una Clarke, a petite black woman, was blocked from crossing Broadway “by a beer-drinking, off-duty police officer who said to his sidekick: ‘This nigger says she’s a member of the City Council.’”
Just as Trump took credit for any upticks in the economy attributable to Obama. Giuliani rode into the Mayor’s office in NYC taking and being given credit for by the sycophantic media much of what were actually the accomplishments of David Dinkins as his own. Dinkins — the first black mayor of New York has been virtually erased from political discourse, though I read a disparaging remark about him recently, (which lauded Rudy G) here on DKos which prompted this commentary.
In Another Look at the Dinkins Administration, and Not by Giuliani back in 2009, the NY Times reported:
Do you really want to go back to the bad old days of Mayor David N. Dinkins?
Rudolph W. Giuliani, as he had done before, indelicately broached this rhetorical question while campaigning a week ago for Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg. If you elect the Democratic mayoral candidate, Mr. Giuliani, the former Republican mayor, warned a mostly Orthodox Jewish audience in Brooklyn, New York could well return to a time when a feckless liberal Democrat let services decay and crime and homelessness run rampant.
This narrative, in which more than a few heard a racial undertone last week, has dominated the city’s politics for 16 years. But as a critique, it is ripe for a revisionist second look. Taking office in 1990, just as a Wall Street and real estate collapse pitched the city into deep recession, Mayor Dinkins, the city’s first African-American mayor, stumbled more than once. But he also registered more successes than most New Yorkers realize, and so he laid part of the foundation for today’s New York.
“Dinkins faced a very sharp economic downturn, and he was in the very difficult position of coming in with high expectations from many constituencies,” said John H. Mollenkopf, a political science professor at the City University Graduate Center. “Yet he expanded the police force and rebuilt neighborhoods; he deserves more credit than he gets for managing that time.”
Mr. Dinkins’s most lasting achievement might have been in the very area where he now fares worst in popular memory. He obtained the State Legislature’s permission to dedicate a tax to hire thousands of police officers, and he fought to preserve a portion of that anticrime money to keep schools open into the evening, an award-winning initiative that kept tens of thousands of teenagers off the street. Later he hired Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly, and in the mayor’s final years in office, homicide began its now record-breaking decline.
His officials played a key role in negotiating the cleanup and revitalization of Times Square, persuading the Walt Disney Corporation to rehabilitate an old 42nd Street theater.
And as the tax receipts fell and the city budget bled red, the mayor continued a Koch-era program and poured billions of dollars into rehabilitating dilapidated housing. Tens of thousands of units of housing in northern Harlem, the South Bronx and Brooklyn stood pockmarked and vacant in 1989; today that housing owes much of its handsomely restored face to work begun during the Dinkins era. Over all, Mr. Dinkins rebuilt more housing in a single term than Mr. Giuliani did in two terms.
I have very clear memories of attending many meetings that black community members had about the crack epidemic at that time. Much to my Black Panther’ish surprise, neighborhood residents were calling for more policing — even though there was little love lost for police in general. We Panthers of course, called them “pigs.”
Dinkins answered the community by crafting — and getting funded, the Safe Streets, Safe City program — which got cops out of squad cars, onto the beat, and added officers to neighborhoods where they had been invisible when needed. It also incorporated youth programs.
Are there legit criticisms of Dinkins and Obama. Sure.
I just find it interesting that Dinkins and Obama have been used as the black boogeymen to elicit a Pavlovian response from a white racist electorate and that Rudy and Donnie opted for the same playbook. I’ve heard too many people blame Trump’s animus against Obama simply because of being roasted at the Press Club dinner.
Nope. Not buying it.
Not buying “economic insecurity” either. Which is a subject for another commentary.
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News round up by dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor
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Every year, more than 600,000 people are released from state and federal incarceration. Formerly incarcerated people face unprecedented barriers upon reentry, including diminished access to medical care, affordable housing and employment. In many states, they are legally barred from acessing federal safety net programsthat could help them secure economic stabilty. Meanwhile, much of this population must grapple with mental illness, disability, trauma and addiction with little help. In a country that imprisons more people than anywhere in the world—using a punitive system that’s inflexible to human error, especially for impoverished people of color—the concern of reincarceration looms large.
In his new book, ”Homeward: Life in the Year After Incarceration,” Harvard University sociology professor Bruce Western follows the lives of 122 men and women as they leave Massachusetts state facilities and return to their communities. Western and a team of researchers conducted in-depth interviews with many Black and Latinx people who hailed from segregated Boston neighborhoods.
While many studies on reentry track large datasets to explore rates of recidivism, Western argues that it’s an insufficient way to document people with histories of trauma and violence. Instead, he sought to examine the process of reentry itself. “This is a study of social integration where fortunes are shaped by race and poverty, and personal agency is tested by the frailty of mind and body,” Western writes in the introduction.
Western spoke with Colorlines about why racial inequity makes reentry even more challenging for formerly incarcerated Black and Latinx people and how the criminal justice system perpetuates cycles of violence in communities of color.
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Black New York City residents are arrested much more often than white people for marijuana-related charges, according to a new investigation from the New York Times.
The report is just the latest in a growing body of research that highlights a persistent racial gap in marijuana-related arrests.
Reporters examined the number of marijuana complaints sent through 911 or the city’s 311 help line from predominantly white neighborhoods and predominantly black or Hispanic neighborhoods in New York City. They then compared the number of marijuana arrests in those neighborhoods.
They found that black New Yorkers and, to a lesser degree, Hispanic New Yorkers were more likely to be arrested for marijuana-related offenses than white residents, despite government surveys finding that black and white people use marijuana at similar rates.
“Across the city, black people were arrested on low-level marijuana charges at eight times the rate of white, non-Hispanic people over the past three years,” the reporters noted. The Hispanic arrest rate was roughly five times that of whites.
The NYPD has argued that these disparities are the result of people in predominantly black and Hispanic neighborhoods placing more calls about marijuana.
But the NYT analysis argues that more calls from these neighborhoods isn’t the cause of the difference. When reporters directly compared black neighborhoods and white neighborhoods with a similar number of complaints about marijuana, they found that far more arrests took place in the black neighborhoods. When arrests did take place in white neighborhoods, they disproportionately affected the small number of black and Hispanic people living in those areas.
In Brooklyn, for example, officers working in the predominantly black Canarsie precinct arrested people at a rate four times higher than in the predominantly white Greenpoint precinct, despite the fact that residents called in with marijuana-related complaints at similar rates.
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Faced with police shakedowns and abuse, rejection from religious conservatives and rampant discrimination, Kenyan LGBT rights activists are challenging provisions of this former British colony’s Victorian-era penal code that implicitly outlaw gay sex.
In a move that could spawn copycat tactics across Africa and beyond, three Kenyan LGBT rights groups have petitioned a court in Nairobi to scrap those legal clauses and grant LGBT Kenyans the same rights to privacy, equality and dignity as other Kenyans. If the groups succeed, Kenya would be the second country in Africa — after South Africa — to do so.
Court hearings in February and March pitted ardent activists against those who believe that Christianity, the majority faith here, is more in line with inherent local values than what they see as a pernicious Western import: homosexuality.
The latter group says it represents the values not only of most Kenyans but also of most Africans, and it has funded its own polls to provide proof, using the surveys to argue that Kenya’s courts should respect the “moral majority.” In this view, which is often echoed by prominent government officials, gay sex is unnatural, un-African and unconstitutional in a country that is 83 percent Christian and that cites God in its law and national anthem.
The LGBT rights groups have argued that the case is about basic human rights.
“There are times when the court has to be the trailblazer and teach society,” said Paul Muite, a renowned lawyer representing the National Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission. “This is one of those times.”
At its core, the dispute stems from what was known in British law as the “sodomy offense,” which criminalized “carnal knowledge of any person against the order of nature.” The prohibition has bedeviled LGBT people across the former British Empire for more than a century.
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The black student, who prefers not to be identified, says that when she got into publicity and advertising at the Faculdade Cásper Líbero (college) in the city of São Paulo, she expected to encounter some racist episode when she stepped into that space – which, until a few years ago, was almost exclusively white, like all Brazilian higher education. “Because of being an elitist college, I figured I would experience something,” she says. What she didn’t expect was the of a professor.
During a class on March 22, flipping through a student’s World Cup photo album, the professor commented that in Croatia “there are only beautiful people” and, faced with the images of the Nigeria national team, she said “I wanted to know how this one here combs his comb hair, it must be a nest,” according to some students. At the end of the class, the student and her classmates contacted the teacher to question this and other statements she considered discriminatory. During the conversation, the teacher denied that she was a racist, said there was no racism in Brazil (“there is even another black at Cásper”) and she even put her hand in the girl’s hair, claiming “curiosity”.
The episode was taken to the directors of Cásper Líbero by the Africásper students’ collective. That week, the school fired the professor who didn’t have her name disclosed. “After analyzing the notes reported by the student body and listening to the parties involved, Faculdade Cásper Líbero opted for the dismissal of the teacher for the use of inappropriate expressions and attitudes. The college reinforces that repudiates any discriminatory connotation and prejudiced attitude, whether in public or private space,” said the direction of the College, in a note published on Thursday.
Episodes like this have been shown to be common in the University environment, revealing the racism of the most schooled. According to data obtained by G1 in conjunction with the Secretaria Estadual da Segurança Pública de São Paulo (State Department of Public Security of São Paulo), the state registered, between 2016 and 2017, a case of racial insult in educational institutions every five days.
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African economies often seem like victims of divine whimsy. Most of the continent’s workers are farmers, reliant on the rains. Much of its wealth comes from oil and minerals, at the mercy of markets. When prices are high, as they were in the first decade of the century, Africa booms. But in recent times drought and a commodities slump have stymied growth. In 2016 economies in sub-Saharan Africa grew by just 1.4%, the slowest rate for two decades.
Now the gods are smiling, faintly. Commodity prices are up. Better harvests have helped reduce inflation. Governments in the region have already sold about $12bn of international bonds in 2018, a full-year record. In its latest regional update, published this week, the IMF forecasts growth across sub-Saharan Africa of 3.4% this year.
Abebe Aemro Selassie, the director of the IMF’s African department, plays up the potential for faster growth. “The question I ask is why isn’t a country growing at 6 or 7%?” But he frets that the recovery is fragile. Rising debt or a weaker world economy could stop it in its tracks.
Aggregate figures for the region are driven by three big economies, all recovering from recession. Nigeria and Angola stumbled when oil prices fell; in the former, militants also choked off production by blowing up pipelines. Both made their situation worse by trying, quixotically, to prop up exchange rates. They have now seen some sense. Nigeria partly eased restrictions on its currency last year to encourage investment and is pumping more of the black stuff. Angola has let its currency slide by 28% against the dollar this year, though the adjustment will make it costlier to repay dollar-denominated debts.
South Africa, the third big beast, is also on the mend. Cyril Ramaphosa, its new president, took over in February with promises to lure $100bn of investment and stop the rot in state-run firms. That was enough to save the country’s only investment-grade credit rating. But Mr Ramaphosa will struggle to achieve many of his goals because of infighting in his party, the African National Congress, says Azar Jammine of Econometrix, a consultancy. One in four jobseekers can’t find work.
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The author of “Sing, Unburied, Sing” had a tough childhood in Mississippi, surviving Hurricane Katrina to become the first woman to win two US national book awards for fiction. The Guardian: Jesmyn Ward: ‘Black girls are silenced, misunderstood and underestimated
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If Jesmyn Ward’s fiction tends towards the epic, that is maybe because her life has been marked by monumental events. “I fought from the very beginning”, she says. Born prematurely at just 26 weeks, she was badly attacked by her father’s pit bull as a small child, her younger brother was killed at 19, and, along with several generations of her family, she sheltered from Hurricane Katrina in a truck. Yet today she is the first woman to win the US national book award for fiction twice, hailed by a leading reviewer as “one of the most powerfully poetic writers in the country”. And on the morning we meet, it has just been announced that she has been shortlisted for the Women’s prize for fiction for her novel Sing, Unburied, Sing.
Ward’s subject is what it means to be poor and black in America’s rural south, where “life is a hurricane”. Modern Mississippi, she says, “means addiction, ground-in generational poverty, living very closely with the legacy of slavery, of Jim Crow, of lynching and of intractable racism”. In her first novel, Where the Line Bleeds (2008), she felt she “protected” her characters from these brutal realities, because she knew and cared about them too much: “So I kept pulling my punches. And later I realised that was a mistake. Life doesn’t spare the kind of people who I write about, so I felt like it would be dishonest to spare my characters in that way.”
She kept this in mind with her second novel Salvage the Bones(2011), in which the struggles of a pregnant teenager are set against the approach of Hurricane Katrina. (Ward couldn’t write for two years after the storm, but then was compelled to do so by her fury at the response to the survivors: “I thought: you know nothing about the reality of life for most people who live down here.”) Her devastating 2013 memoir Men We Reapeddocuments the early, unrelated deaths of five young men in fewer years in her community, including her brother, who was killed in a hit and run by a white drunk driver. Grief, she says, nearly two decades later, “never goes away. I tell friends of mine who experience the death of someone close to them: ‘You will never stop waiting for that person to walk through the door, but you learn how to live with it’.”
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Voices and Soul
by
Justice Putnam
Black Kos Poetry Editor
My mother has always hated flowers on Mother’s Day, mostly because she says they remind her of a funeral home, but that is not quite the truth. My siblings and I know the real reason and respect her wishes. Flowers were always there after she was beat, or berated, or locked in a room, or forced to clean the floor at three in the morning. The flowers were always there, every time.
So, with a baby in arms and three toddlers, it was difficult to leave. The world seemed so large and inaccessible from the prison she was married into. But she did leave. It wasn’t easy, but the world became just a wee bit smaller when she did.
I call to ask my mother the name of the street where we bought the suitcases when we left
Brooklyn. A better question would have been how did it feel to be sliced from the rib of Pine and
Loring and sent, like a kite, up North. Or tell me what your mother said to you in her grand rear
room the night we left, seated on the edge of her bed in her nightgown, muted in the low light.
So many bellies in the house. Cacophony of kreyol and Brooklyn buk and sweet sweat across the
walls. Did she tell you to follow your husband. Did she tell you anything about us. How, above
all, you should keep us anchored to here, where the distance between comfort and safety is
measurable by the length of the hallway, the distance from one room to the next. The rooms, like
capsules, each with its own medicine for Black kids. Or, tell me what you wore on the plane
ride. I only remember what I wore: stockings and Mary Janes and the pink knit pleated skirt. I did
not remember this was your first time flying, a grown woman over thirty, and you had never seen
how small the world looked beneath your feet.
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