Voices and Soul
by
Justice Putnam
Black Kos Poetry Editor
I've had this recurring dream since my early childhood about the loss of Self in a Universe of interconnectedness. Maybe it was watching Sal Mineo freak at the Griffith Observatory in cuffed-jean 1950's L.A. over the ever expanding Universe depicted in the Planetarium there. I could tell, even at the age of five, sitting wide-eyed in that summer night, staring up at the giant drive-in movie screen that Sal wasn't so tough. Recognizing our true place in the Universe will do that to you. Some might react to the revelation in a cool blue hot sun of simmering rage hidden beneath a mask of telegenic knowing, while others might be poor old Sal Mineo, literally stabbed in the gut for exposing his soft fear and latent innocence. In that moment though, he became interconnected with the Universal Mind of his mind. That's how interconnected we all are.
So I dreamed about synchronicity, and I dreamed about Love. I dreamed about dreams and the dream of a life flashing at the moment of death, not my own death, but the nightmare of a son dying in a interconnected universe of bubbles of memory falling in a whirling black hole of no more forever and ever and ever. Amen.
I dreamed of a generation of children become men if they were lucky, and I dreamed of young daughters left to wander in a stupor for years at the finality of Dad's last embrace and that feeling he is just right there if we believed it. I dreamed of the snow and I dreamed of guns and I dreamed of mothers pounding the chests of their fallen sons hoping to beat a signal in a heart already floating away in the electricity of the moment and of all eternity. I dreamed of that something there floating away at the speed of light and right here at the same time, just as the perfect knowledge of nothingness becomes a pulsar beacon fading and fading and fading. I dreamed of oxygen and I dreamed of fire and I dreamed of a tempest at sea and a sextant lost. I dreamed of stars and worms and laughter and sobbing over a childhood fever and a broken tooth and the sobs at funerals for friends shot dead by the police as sons and daughters watched that last look of "I'm sorry, baby… " just as a last breath escaped into the interconnectedness of it all. I dreamed of a son’s life flashing flashing flashing in an unconditional symmetry of quantum elements humming a beat of supernovas ejecting cosmic plasma in time with a memory of all this pain, and all this love, and all this wonder.
Except, I wasn’t dreaming. I was woke the whole time.
The fools nearly killed me trying to make me one of them:
a loaded word of bond with dress codes and penal codes,
postured allegiant to the culture as with the flying of flags
from knots tied on the back of head wraps worn hoods over.
I can’t gunpoint when the life of this alter ego began though
the possibility can’t be dismissed it began at gunpoint in a way,
with an icy pressure against the temple, the mind splitting into two
tracks while a circus of peers clowned.
Going back far too long
now, the camera has blurred my edges in the suggestion of motion
even if I stood as still as the air does before shit really hits the fan.
I truly went ass-first into fronting indifference, forbade my happy
teeth from public reveal lest they pop the balloon of my perfectly
round face, baby-angled, already read as kind or innocent or soft
from the jump when I wanted respect on my name and women on
my lap like it was said I should. And, shamefully, I did. Several
sistas come to mind here and this doesn’t make me feel good;
a tender touch in the moonlight goes only so far for a shadow.
I had to break it down for myself that being down represented
the fear of having fear.
I still shake when the wind blows,
scary as ever, thespian as always in all ways toward the ghost
of a threat or disrespect passed through me then through me,
through a thin skin then through the skin. So, to compensate—
a mask, what Dunbar’s bars beat home way back when about
standing in the presence of the pale folks, only that idea flipped
upside down, what’d be a forced smile slicing the face open like
some summertime melon instead setting scowl folds into smooth
forehead, brown eyes set at the mouth’s corners, fixing it in the
position of silence like rusty nails.
If carrying nothing else,
I learned to bring this exact look to the danger because being me
to the fullest would be a liability, provide a sharper image for the
hidden cameras to home in on; yes, just that fast—a certified blue,
strolling up to the screen door with a heavy hand for knocking and
his true hand resting so sweetly on his gun. My gun, I should say,
since in this case the cop is also me, like that little angel or devil
used as sitcom trope.
Just imagine the person coming for you
being you every time: don’t trip, you’d say, unless into the fight.
-- Cortney Lamar Charleston
"The Unauthorized Autobiography of Jung Thug"
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News round up by dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor
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How Videos of Police Brutality Traumatize African Americans and Undermine the Search for Justice. The New Republic: Killing us softly
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The nightmare haunts Victor Dempsey even in his waking hours, tightening his chest and snatching his breath. It is as if it’s waiting for him, and when he sleeps there’s no escape. The dream first came to him when he was waiting for the verdict in the 2017 criminal trial of the police officer who shot and killed—murdered, Dempsey believes—his unarmed brother, Delrawn Small. The two brothers are running, laughing, across rooftops, like they did as boys in their Brooklyn neighborhood of East New York. Then they come to a gap. Dempsey jumps for the next rooftop. He lands it. But as he looks back, calling his brother’s name, he sees Small fall into the inky darkness, and he jolts awake.
On those nights, Dempsey, 33, leaves his fiancé and his three-year-old son, and stumbles sleepily down the stairs of their home in Queens. He sits at the computer and watches the surveillance footage from an auto shop security camera in East New York of the final moments of his brother’s life. The footage, a minute and 45 seconds long, shows two cars stopped at a red light. One carries Small, driving his girlfriend, their young son, and teenaged stepdaughter home from a July 4 barbecue. The other, Wayne Isaacs, a 38-year-old police officer who had just finished a 4 p.m.-to-midnight shift at the 79th precinct in Bedford-Stuyvesant.
Police later told the media that the two drivers had gotten into a traffic dispute moments before Isaacs fired his gun at Small. The video shows Small exiting his car and walking up to Isaacs’s unmarked vehicle. Within seconds, from inside his car, Isaacs shoots Small three times. (The autopsy showed that one bullet pierced Small’s chest, another his stomach, and a third grazed his head.) Small falls back, gets up, lurches a few steps, and collapses between two parked cars.
“I know that video,” Dempsey told me recently. He has watched it hundreds of times, pausing, rewinding, and studying it frame by frame, so carefully that the images of it loop in his mind long after he has left the glare of his computer screen. “I can look at it without looking at it,” he said. The images also torment him with questions: Why didn’t Isaacs roll up the window? Or drive away? Or brandish his badge instead of his gun? “Why did he feel he had the authority to kill my brother?”
Small was the first of three black men whose death at the hands of police over the course of three days in July 2016 gained media attention. On July 5, Alton Sterling, 37, died after police in Louisiana tackled and shot him outside the convenience store where he was selling CDs. The following day, Philando Castile was shot and killed by police in Minnesota during a traffic stop. The horrific eyewitness videos of both shootings immediately went viral on social media. One social media post of the leaked video of Small’s death has since been viewed more than 70,000 times.
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I’ve been thinking about the complexities around confession and forgiveness. As a psychotherapist for 25 years who has worked immersed in issues of race and racism, I believe it is important for white people to find spaces where we can name our past racist failures and identify the ways we have been both contaminated by racist systems and have perpetrated racist acts.
But it is important to remember that to inflict such confessions on people of color without their consent is a kind of psychological violence. We have to think about the settings we speak into, and how they may inflict further injury.
I was taught this lesson many years ago as a social work intern working in a clinic for kids in Brooklyn that served a diverse community. The frontline staff was almost as diverse as our clients. A newly hired supervisor gathered the team together and announced that we were having a workshop to talk about race and racism. She asked us all to think of the first moment that we felt racism and awoke to the effect it would have in our lives. She then asked people to share.
An overeager intern, I was the first to go. I told a story from preschool, about visiting a friend’s house. I was surprised to see that she had a white mom and a black dad, when I had expected both of her parents to be black. Excited by this discovery, I shared it with my parents at dinner. My father chewed his food in silence and stared at his plate. I saw his jaw clenching, and I felt in my bones I would never get to play with my friend again. I didn’t know if this was because my classmate was black or because of her parents’ interracial marriage. I was filled with a nauseating shame realizing that there was something very wrong inside my father.
After a few minutes of silence, another volunteer spoke — a white man who had discovered his grandfather was a Klansman — when a black woman across the circle from me stood up saying:
“NO. NO. This is not happening. I am not doing this. This is not okay.” And she walked out.
The air was frozen. We sat stunned and silent for a moment, before the supervisor dismissed us. Once I shut my office door behind me, I inhaled — and thought about what just occurred. Her voice saying, “I am not doing this. This is not okay,” rang in my ears. It seemed to be filled with deep exhaustion. There was no way for this “sharing” to be equal. It would be a kind of violence to force her to sit there and listen to the dehumanizing racism that had been an everyday part of our white lives, the language we were taught to speak at home.
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Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. is often remembered for his nonviolent fight for civil rights and his moving calls for justice. And as a reverend, the Atlanta native also called on congregations nationwide to take on the same fights when he echoed his views from church pulpits.
“A lot of the movements grew out of the church,” especially in the American South according to the Rev. Theresa S. Thames, D.Min., who is the associate dean of religious life and the chapel at Princeton University. The black church, in particular, was vital in the fight for social justice and the importance of its role became even more solidified during the 1950s and ’60s. The religious institution currently, however, faces a major problem.
“I do believe that the black church will continue to struggle if there isn’t this wrestling with how to realize all of the ways that blackness shows up in theological and holy spaces,” said the Rev. Thames in reference to those who may feel marginalized and excluded from the church, including members of the LGBTQIA community and women.
Despite the black church remaining a male-dominated space, Thames said women have always been the foot soldiers of the church—from the people in the pews to running Sunday school and cooking post-service meals in the back.
On Atlanta’s Martin Luther King Jr. Drive, another reverend is changing the common perception of what clergy members look like and how they uphold the principals of Dr. King’s legacy.
“We have a responsibility in every day and age to fight for the marginalized, to speak for those who are voiceless,” said the Rev. Lisa Allen-McLaurin, Ph.D., of West Mitchell Street CME Church. And Rev. Allen-McLaurin admits that it’s not going to just happen without action.
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A common response to products like the Gucci blackface sweater is that there should have been a Black person "in the room" to save the company, but We need to talk what The cost is to get into the room and stay there. Color Lines: The Real Cost of Being the POC 'In the Room' Required to Shut Down Obviously Racist Products
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These days “diversity” and “inclusion” are all the rage in progressive corporate cultures. As the line goes, “it is not only the right thing to do—it’s also good business.”
Most corporations do need more women, more LGBTQ folk, more people of color, more people with disabilities, and the list goes on. But we need talk about what most of us who have “made it” to that room don’t talk about in public—the cost to getting in the room and and what we have to pay to stay.
As the one “in the room,” you are othered and then pressured to help the company save money through your insights on your otherness. You are supposed to raise red flags before problematic products go on shelves, like Prada’s monkey keychain, Marc Jacobs’dredlock wigs and the Sambo sweater that Gucci just had to pull out of stores. You have to save your company from its racist self and it’s demoralizing and infuriating.
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Dressed in a white outfit delicately striped with gold and carrying a white tambourine, one of the contenders in Nigeria’s presidential election steps out of a white Rolls-Royce and strides up the aisle of the Household of God, flanked by bodyguards.
Chris Okotie, a 1980s pop star turned pentecostal pastor and four-time presidential candidate, is leading the service in the church he founded 32 years ago. For close to five hours his glamorous congregation is kept rapt with a medley of his greatest gospel hits, interspersed with prayer, speaking in tongues and a sesquipedalian sermon on the five foolish virgins. Young women in sweeping sparkly dresses sing along adoringly as ageing Nollywood stars boogie at the back.
In 2003 Okotie became the first pentecostal pastor to run for president of Nigeria, which heads to the polls on Saturday. Since then the pentecostal churches – which place a special emphasis on a direct personal experience of God – have continued their exponential growth across the country and continent. Pentecostals make up 35% of all Christians in Africa, according to the World Christian Database, up from 13% in 1970. In Nigeria, their leaders have come to wield major political power.
This year, the two presidential frontrunners are both Muslim – the incumbent, Muhammadu Buhari, and the former vice-president Atiku Abubakar.
But the “pentecostalisation” of politics, which began 20 years ago, is continuing unabated, experts say, and the democratic process is shaped by powerful pastors, who regularly weigh in on elections. Some pastors even tell their flocks which way to vote. With no pope or archbishops to tell them what to do or say, and therefore no limit to their political activities, pastors have grown in their ambitions.
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Though she lives in one of the world’s poorest countries, Drocella Yandereye is a picture of upward mobility. Her small farm in Rwanda, where she grows maize, beans, bananas and coffee, is thriving. She has built a new house and turned her old one into a chicken shed. Her interests range well beyond her village, evidenced by the two posters on her living-room wall showing African leaders and the countries of the world. What makes her even more unusual is that she has electric light.
It is not the kind of bright, leave-it-on light that people in rich countries take for granted. A small solar panel on Ms Yandereye’s roof is connected to a wall-mounted battery, which powers a radio and three led ceiling lamps. Ms Yandereye also uses the battery to charge her mobile phone and a portable lamp that she hangs around her neck. All the lamps are rather dim. But they produce just enough light to allow her children to study after sunset, and they do not kick out foul fumes, like the kerosene lamps she used to depend on.
Almost 140 years after Thomas Edison began selling filament light bulbs, just under 1bn people worldwide still lack access to electricity, according to the International Energy Agency, a research group. Almost two-thirds live in Africa, mostly in the countryside. The un believes all should have power, and has set a target date to achieve universal access of 2030. That sounds plausible—since 2000 the number of people without power has fallen by 700m. Sadly, it is unlikely to happen. And recent economic research shows that rushing to illuminate the world is a bad idea.
The old-fashioned way of bringing electricity to the masses entails building power stations and transmission lines. This is still popular. Last year India’s government claimed that it had connected every village to the power grid, although this does not mean every household is connected, still less that power is available 24 hours a day (see article). Myanmar and Senegal are racing to do the same.
In the past few years, though, governments and aid agencies have put more faith in solar power. They have built or paid for “mini-grids” that can power a village or a school. More often they have given tax breaks and subsidies to firms that sell small solar kits. In Bangladesh, the number of solar home systems (that is, closed electricity systems powered by a small panel on the roof) shot up from 16,000 in 2003 to 4.1m by the end of 2017. Ethiopia’s “national electrification programme” calls for connecting 35% of the population to small solar systems by 2025. That proportion is expected to decline thereafter as more homes are plugged into the grid.
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