A Mini-Rant
Commentary by Chitown Kev
There was something said at this past Netroots Nation in New Orleans that irked the heck out of me.
I don’t recall the specific session but I was sitting in the front row of the session next to shanikka with Miss Denise and Armando two and three seats to my right.
It was during the question and answer period near the end of the session; I don’t remember the specific question, to be honest, but I do remember that the questioner asked something or another about differences between the ‘’progressive and marginalized communities’’ or how could both communities could be helped or could help each other...something like that.
I am pretty sure that I scrunched my face at the implication of the question that was asked.
’’Excuse me, what is the difference between the progressive community and the marginalized communities?,’’ I whispred into shanikka’s ear.
Shanikka simply shrugged and shook her head and said, ‘’I don’t know.’’
For starters, it would seem to me that a ‘’marginalized community.’’ by definition, would also be a progressive community; after all, striving to move from an ‘’unimportant’’ or ‘’powerless’’ position in a given society to having some power and a voice is progressive by definition, I think.
Now there can be competing versions of what constitutes ‘’progress’’ or ‘’progressivism’’ that can be reconciled but who controls these definitions and language?
I found it rather ironic that a white woman was the one that asked the question, given that any white woman would, in accordance with the power dynamics in this society, would occupy both a privileged and a marginal position in this society...as do most of us, in some respects.
It is a construction that I have heard before and it irritates me to no end; it’s as if there are separate and distinct communities instead of intersecting communities (think of your Venn Diagrams!)...and for much of the history of progressivism, that has, indeed, been the case.
After all, from the very beginning of what might be considered to be historical progressivism or what Dr. Charles Mills, Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the CUNY Graduate Center, calls racial liberalism, that separation has been apparent.
Mills: Yes, sure. The reason for engaging with Kant and Rawls is that the plausibility of my case will be enhanced if I can demonstrate that two of the most important white moral/political philosophers of the modern period were “racial liberals.” Kant was a racial liberal in the straightforward old-fashioned racist sense—he said we should give respect to all persons while simultaneously declaring that blacks and Native Americans were natural slaves. Rawls is a racial liberal in the subtler contemporary sense—he condemns racism while devising a theory of justice which launders European colonialism and imperialism, structurally excludes the correction of historic racial injustices, and is basically oriented by the perspectives and priorities of the white settler population (Native Americans make no appearance in the 2000 pages of Rawls’s five books.) Moreover, Kant and Rawls are linked in that Kant is the most important inspiration for Rawls’s “deontological liberalism,” a liberalism supposedly predicated on justice and respect for equal persons.
Yesterday on Morning Joe, Princeton University Professor Eddie Glaude said that,’’Oftentimes, African Americans are treated as a cause or a problem.’’
Between me and the other world there is ever an unasked question: unasked by some through feelings of delicacy; by others through the difficulty of rightly framing it. All, nevertheless, flutter round it. They approach me in a half- hesitant sort of way, eye me curiously or compassionately, and then, instead of saying directly, How does it feel to be a problem? they say, I know an excellent colored man in my town; or, I fought at Mechanicsville; or, Do not these Southern outrages make your blood boil? At these I smile, or am interested, or reduce the boiling to a simmer, as the occasion may require. To the real question, How does it feel to be a problem? I answer seldom a word.
Yeah…when I heard the question that the young lady posed, I heard that same question...’’the real question’’ that would be posed in a variety of ways to Dr. Dubois over a century ago...and I presume that question was posed all the way up to the very end of his life on the eve of the 1963 March on Washington.
How does it feel to be a problem?
Yes, I’m black. I’m gay. I’m one of working poor, living from paycheck to paycheck.
Don’t assume that I am powerless or that I don’t have a voice or a brain with opinions, my own ideas of how this world should work; my own experiences from my own point of view...of course I do.
I can allow that I still have much learn...a lot to learn, really.
Then again...take it away, Professor Davis
Black people have exposed, by their very existence, the inadequacies of not only the practice of freedom, but of its very theoretical formulation.
Is man free or is he not? Ought he be free or ought not he be free? The history of Black Literature provides, in my opinion, a much more illuminating account of the nature of freedom, its extent and limits, then all of the philosophical discourses on this theme in the history of Western society. Why? For a number of reasons. First of all, because Black Literature in this country and throughout the world projects the consciousness of a people who have been denied entrance ito the real world of freedom.Black people have exposed, by their very existence, the inadequacies not only of the practice of freedom, but of its very theoretical formulation. Because, if the theory of freedom remains isolated from the practice of freedom or rather is contradicted by reality, then this means that something must be wrong with the concept...
Or, in the context of my theme here…to separate the ‘’progressive’’ and the ‘’marginalized,’’ as that young lady along with so many (white) progressives do doesn’t simply brand me a ‘’problem’’...or maybe even a ‘’cause’’...not only does it open me up to be patronized or even entirely erased... there can be no reciprocity of knowledge or experience.
And I won’t be the only one to lose out under that scenario.
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News round up by dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor
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On Saturday, many tennis fans witnessed an emotional, gut-wrenching conclusion to the U.S. Open. They also witnessed exactly what women of color lifting each other up looks like—even during personal devastation.
In this case, 20-year-old Naomi Osaka, who was born in Japan to a Japanese mother and Haitian father, won her first ever Grand Slam title by defeating her tennis idol, Serena Williams. But the mood in the wake of the game was hardly celebratory.
For many, the joy for Osaka’s hard-won victory was soured by the way Williams was treated during the match. During the second set, the chair umpire, Carlos Ramos, gave Williams a game penalty after he said that she had accrued three violations: receiving coaching, smashing a racket in frustration, and then verbally abusing the umpire after the initial penalties.
Williams refuted two of the three penalties, growing angry at the notion that the umpire thought she was cheating by receiving advice from her coach. “I don’t cheat to win, I’d rather lose,” she said. As she tried to defend herself against the umpire’s call of verbal abuse minutes later, after she called him a “thief,” she was heard saying: “There are a lot of men out here who have said a lot of things and do not get that punishment. Because I am a woman you are going to take this away from me? That is not right.”
The crowd loudly booed U.S. Open officials after the match, leaving Osaka in tears as she stood on the podium, awaiting her trophy. When given the mic, Williams used her platform not to trash talk the umpire or the U.S. Open, or lament her loss, but to ask the crowd to stop booing and instead use the moment to celebrate Osaka’s victory. “Let’s make this the best moment we can and we’ll get through it,” she said. “Let’s give everyone the credit where credit’s due.”
For her part, Osaka spent much of her victory lap thanking her parents and praising Williams, saying that it was an honor and dream to play her in such a high-stakes game. In a post-match interview, Williams said that during the trophy ceremony she looked at Osaka, and thought, “I definitely don’t want her to feel like that.”
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“Tonight’s honorees represent our radiance and our royalty … Thank you all for showing the world how bright we shine and how hard we rock,” said Black Girls Rock! founder Beverly Bond, speaking to the audience at the New Jersey Performing Arts Center during the Black Girls Rock! Awards, which aired on BET on Sunday night.
Lena Waithe, Naomi Campbell, Tarana Burke, Mary J. Blige, Judith Jamison and Janet Jackson were all on hand to receive their awards at the 12th annual awards ceremony, which honors the unique greatness and accomplishments of black women. Also saluted were the Coca-Cola-sponsored “M.A.D. Girls”: first national Youth Poet Laureate Amanda Gorman, Every Kid Fed founder Shanay Thompson and child activist Naomi Wadler, who said in a taped interview:
“As long as you have made an impact, you have been successful and you have made a difference.”
“Collectively, you all represent why black girls rock,” host Queen Latifah told the honorees, each of whom had major words of inspiration to share with those of us watching. We encourage you to print them out, post them on your mirror, or tattoo them on your arm, as needed.
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Step up to a traditional samba circle in Brazil and you’ll find this: a group of 5 to 15 men, each playing an instrument — a tambourine, a cavaquinho, a drum. Then you’ll typically see women, not playing music, but rather shimmying in the front row of the crowd, dancing to the pounding syncopations.
The samba circle, or roda de samba, is a Unesco-recognized part of Brazil’s cultural heritage. These communal releases of weekday worries crop up across the city regularly. The samba circles are free, they’re rowdy and, increasingly, they’re changing.
With astonishing speed, over the past couple of years, female musicians in Brazil have in the past couple of years begun breaking into the male realm of samba circles, taking a seat at the table both literally and figuratively. Just a few years ago, the musicians playing in a samba circle jam session used to be almost all male. In 2018, though, a clutch of all-female samba groups have set out to change that, and in doing so, they have generated what could be a sea change for this beloved Brazilian musical genre.
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Emotional viral video about being the country’s only black TV presenter leads to national debate. The Guardian: Cécile Djunga: ‘It hurts – so we must talk about racism in Belgium’
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It took just five minutes to film on her iPhone. But 2.1 million Facebook views later and Cécile Djunga’s emotional account of her first year as Belgium’s only black TV presenter has sparked a national debate about racism, drawn promises of a sea change in the representation of ethnic minorities in the media and led to an intervention from the prime minister.
Djunga, 29, a weather presenter on the French-language public service broadcaster RTBF, had not expected any of it. “If I knew it was going to go viral I would have made it shorter and done my hair,” she told the Observeron Saturday.
The video that has sent Belgium agonising over race – a reckoning that many believe has been a long time coming – had been intended as a light-hearted response to some of the more bizarre racist comments Djunga has endured since being announced in 2017 as the face of the weather on the channel La Une.
“If you want a good laugh, I’ve got a good one for you today,” she told her followers in last week’s post, before recounting the tale of a woman who had called in days earlier to complain that the presenter was “too black and all people could see were my clothes”.
Her colleague, tongue-in-cheek, had responded to the complainant that perhaps she could change the contrast on her television.
Djunga laughs along in her film at the “absurdity” of it all, but her eyes well up. Something catches in her throat. “It doesn’t stop. I’ve been doing this job for a year and I’m fed up of getting tonnes of racist and insulting messages,” she said. “It hurts because I’m a human being.”
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Filming a movie about the Black Lives Matter movement and police brutality can be daunting. But for the cast and crew of “The Hate U Give,” which had its world premiere Friday night at the Toronto International Film Festival, they took the opportunity to pay respects to those who’ve lost their lives.
“The whole process of filming felt like a grieving process, a space and time to honor the lives of those who’ve been killed by police, to think about the significance of their lives...” said Amandla Stenberg, who leads the film as Starr, a high schooler who witnesses her best friend being shot and killed by a white officer.
Directed by George Tillman Jr., “The Hate U Give,” also stars Regina Hall, Russell Hornsby, Algee Smith, Common, Issa Rae and KJ Apa. It will hit theaters Oct. 19.
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Like many women in media—particularly women of color—Keli Goff wanted to be like Oprah. But not for the fame or the Oprah-size paychecks.
“I always admired the fact that, for her, being on camera was really a starting point,” Goff said, praising the media’s mogul’s ability to transform that platform into other avenues to tell stories.
Oprah “[meets] people where they are,” she observed; and that’s what she’s hoping her latest work does.
Goff, a screenwriter, playwright and journalist, recently produced her first film, the timely Reversing Roe, which debuts on Netflix on Sept. 13. Originally, Goff had envisioned the documentary as an Eyes on the Prize—the revered documentary series on the Civil Rights movement—for reproductive rights.
“I was interested in sort of doing a deep dive into the first 100 years of Planned Parenthood,” Goff told The Root. “Then I realized there hadn’t actually been a film or series of films that told the story of the reproductive justice movement in America.”
Over several years, the idea evolved—the result is a 90-minute documentary that focuses on the judicial and political battles around reproductive rights that began shortly before Roe v. Wade, the landmark Supreme Court decision that codified a woman’s right to choose whether or not to abort a pregnancy.
As The Hollywood Reporter wrote in its review, the Ricki Stern and Annie Sundberg-directed documentary takes a cerebral approach to its subject, choosing to gather a variety of voices and perspectives to illuminate how we arrived at the current moment, where the right to an abortion is among the most divisive and polarizing issues in America.
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When the Louisiana State Militia finally arrived at the Colfax courthouse on April 15, 1873, all it could do was bury the bodies. Two days earlier, a large force of white supremacists had taken control of the courthouse from the mostly black faction protecting it. J. R. Beckwith, the U.S. attorney for New Orleans, told Congress that in the aftermath the ground was “strewn with dead negroes,” their bodies plundered by whites who had come to watch the bloodshed. The dead remained “unburied and mutilated,” Beckwith said, until federal troops arrived days later to shovel them into a mass grave.
“Not a single negro had been killed until all of them had surrendered to the whites who were fighting with them,” The New York Times reported at the time, “when over 100 of the unfortunate negroes were shot down in cold blood.” Some were killed as they tried to surrender, and others as they attempted to flee the courthouse, which had been set on fire. President Ulysses S. Grant called the Colfax massacre a “butchery” that “in bloodthirstiness and barbarity is hardly surpassed by any acts of savage warfare.”
Many white Southerners saw it differently. Robert Hunter, the editor of The Caucasian, a Louisiana newspaper, told Congress in 1875 that some of his own staffers had participated in the massacre. “I approved it, as most of our people did,” Hunter testified. “Had not the Colfax affair ended as it did, not less than a thousand niggers would have been killed later.”
Seventy-two men were ultimately indicted for their role in the Colfax massacre, charged under the Enforcement Acts of 1870, which were passed to help the federal government suppress the Ku Klux Klan. But their convictions were overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court, which concluded that the federal government lacked the authority to charge the perpetrators. Justice Joseph Bradley, a Grant appointee, wrote that the United States had not clearly stated that the accused, in slaughtering more than 100 black men, had “committed the acts complained of with a design to deprive the injured persons of their rights on account of their race, color, or previous condition of servitude.” And it wouldn’t have mattered if they had, argued the Grant-appointed Chief Justice Morrison R. Waite, because the Fourteenth Amendment’s powers did not cover discrimination by individuals, only by the state. “The only obligation resting upon the United States is to see that the States do not deny the right,” Waite wrote. “This the amendment guarantees, but no more. The power of the national government is limited to the enforcement of this guaranty.”
This decision, in United States v. Cruikshank, the legal historian Lawrence Goldstone argues, provided a guide for the campaign of racist terrorism that would suppress the black vote and enshrine a white man’s government for generations. “The Colfax defendants would have had to announce their plan to violate their victims’ rights on account of the color of their skin in order to be culpable,” Goldstone wrote. “Justice Bradley had thus communicated to any Redeemer with violent intent that to avoid federal prosecution one need simply to keep one’s mouth shut before committing murder.”
Grant was enraged that “insuperable obstructions were thrown in the way of punishing these murderers … and the so-called conservative papers of the State not only justified the massacre, but denounced as federal tyranny and despotism the attempt of the United States officers to bring them to justice.”
The decision in Cruikshank set a pattern that would hold for decades. Despite being dominated by appointees from the party of abolition, the Court gave its constitutional blessing to the destruction of America’s short-lived attempt at racial equality piece by piece. By the end, racial segregation would be the law of the land, black Americans would be almost entirely disenfranchised, and black workers would be relegated to a twisted simulacrum of the slave system that existed before the Civil War.
The justices did not resurrect Dred Scott v. Sandford’s antebellum declaration that a black man had no rights that a white man was bound to respect. Rather, they carefully framed their arguments in terms of limited government and individual liberty, writing opinion after opinion that allowed the white South to create an oppressive society in which black Americans had almost no rights at all. Their commitment to freedom in the abstract, and only in the abstract, allowed a brutal despotism to take root in Southern soil.
The conservative majority on the Supreme Court today is similarly blinded by a commitment to liberty in theory that ignores the reality of how Americans’ lives are actually lived. Like the Supreme Court of that era, the conservatives on the Court today are opposed to discrimination in principle, and indifferent to it in practice. Chief Justice John Roberts’s June 2018 ruling to uphold President Donald Trump’s travel ban targeting a list of majority-Muslim countries, despite the voluminous evidence that it had been conceived in animus, showed that the muddled doctrines of the post-Reconstruction period retain a stubborn appeal.
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