To Thine Own Self...
Commentary by Chitown Kev
Between everything going on in the world, the massive amounts of reading that I had to do for what was going to be today’s essay on E. Franklin Frazier, and reading Hamlet and feeling excited about finally seeing Hamlet (yes, Hamlet is black in the production I’ll be attending tonight) and other life stuff, I’m going to put off the Frazier essay so that I can more fully digest the material. So in lieu of that, I just have a couple items that I want to touch on.
1) Speaking of E. Franklin Frazier...for years I have intermittently picked up that definitive tome of the Harlem Renaissance, The New Negro and read Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Burce Nugent, Alain Locke himself. I had never even glanced far enough in the table of contents to know that E, Franklin Frazier also had an essay in that volume; also about the black middle class in Durham, North Carolina (page 333).
In fact, Frazier’s views about the black middle class changed over time and I do want to chart that change, which means that I have to read him even closer.
Given the bite of his best known work on the black middle class, Black Bourgeoisie, I did begin to wonder something that Miss Denise explicitly stated in an exchange of Kos-Mails: was Frazier “self-hating?” A traitor to his class?
After all, Frazier taught at Howard for 28 years; he was a “bourgie.”
I’m still kicking the question around, reading a lot of the material but, at the moment...I think that Frazier set very high standards for himself and others in term of achievements and even if he criticized...pretty much every black leader and scholar of the time, he had a true appreciation for real achievement.
And that topic of achievements is what connects his 1925 writing on the black middle class of Durham, NC and Black Bourgeoise three decades later.
In short...I would have liked to have had Dr. Frazier as a professor and a mentor even if he would have worked me to death…but more on that in two weeks.
2. A week ago, Yahoo Sports writer Flinder Boyd did a long and informative write-up on former University of Missouri football player Michael Sam.
Michael Sam's pursuit of happiness
He’d arrived in L.A. a few months earlier with lofty ambitions. His NFL dreams might have been dead but he hoped to reinvent himself as a TV personality.
It started promising; he had interviews with a handful of large media companies. But then the callbacks didn’t come and the rejections piled up. And as they did, Sam dove head-first into L.A.’s seductive nightlife scene.
He drank, did hard drugs — MDMA and cocaine. He had many “associates,” but few friends.
After one night out, he got into a heated argument with a group of men, yelling and cursing — “I will lay your ass on the ground,” he screamed at one man. The scene was recorded and sold to TMZ. His shame mounted.
And so on that August morning, looking in the mirror, he knew he had to leave. He packed up everything, got in his Audi and headed back home to Texas. He wanted to call someone, but who? He rarely spoke to his best friends, the love of his life was moving on, and his family was estranged. To know him was to leave him.
Somewhere between Phoenix and Dallas, he was overcome by his emotions.
Mr. Sam is pursuing his happiness, he seems in a good place now...well, a better place than he was a couple of years ago.
Sam’s story is very much like mine...well, I didn’t have as much tumult with the family growing up, and I didn’t have the pressure of being the first at anything that I did, much less the first openly gay NFL player.
As a lifelong football fan, I have debated with myself and others whether I would have come out of the closet when he did and in the way he did and...I have my opinions, to be sure but...each person’s coming out is their own journey (right, Aaron?).
That “double-consciousness” that Dr. DuBois wrote about over 100 years...it’s triple or even quadruple-consciousness for people like Sam and myself.
I simply get in where I fit in nowadays (and that’s a very situational thing for me). I mean, it’s hard enough navigating through people and the world when you’re black and gay as it is; never mind having a public persona when doing it; not knowing where to turn or who to trust most of the time; even and especially with regards to the “communities” that claim you or that you name as being your own.
The best that Michael Sam can do or I can do or that anyone can do, ultimately, is to follow the advice that William Shakespeare put into the mouth of Polonius:
Polonius:
This above all: to thine own self be true,
And it must follow, as the night the day,
Thou canst not then be false to any man.
Hamlet 1.3.78-81
(Although within the context of Hamlet, I’ve found these lines to border on the almost-ridiculous because Polonius is probably the most two-faced character in the play...but that’s a topic for another day!).
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News round up by dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor
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Before Gamergate, before the 2016 election, they launched a campaign against Twitter trolls masquerading as women of color. If only more people had paid attention. Slate: The Black Feminists Who Saw the Alt-Right Threat Coming
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Shafiqah Hudson remembers the moment she realized something was off. She saw a tweet from an account she had never seen before: “#EndFathersDay because I’m tired of all these white women stealing our good black mens.” Something about the grammar—not to mention the idea that black women wanted to abolish Father’s Day because of interracial dating—just felt too cartoonish to be real. That day, Hudson, who tweets as @sassycrass, had a job interview. It was June of 2014, the Friday before Father’s Day. As she typed out her follow-up thank-you note and went through what she calls “the unemployment shuffle”—toggling between social media and email and playing with her cat—she spotted some reactions from people she followed to other suspiciously inflammatory tweets posted by a handful of new Twitter accounts claiming to be black feminists. “#EndFathersDay,” read one. “We’ll bring it back when men stop raping and killing us.”
Hudson began to dig, following “this trail of terrible tweets.” She asked if anyone on her timeline had any idea what was up. No one she knew could verify that the women behind these accounts actually existed. No one had met them in person or encountered them on earlier blogging platforms like LiveJournal or Tumblr or BlackPlanet. Many of the accounts didn’t follow the feminists they were parroting or even the tastemakers of Black Twitter, like Desus and Mero. But more than anything, Hudson said, the clearest red flag was the accounts’ inability to hide their contempt for the very people they were attempting to imitate. They tweeted about collecting welfare checks and smoking weed, with an occasional screed against white people. And most of these accounts spoke a version of African American Vernacular English that no real black person had ever used. “#EndFathersDay,” said one, “until men start seeing they children as more then just ‘fuck trophies.’ ” To casual observers online, #EndFathersDay appeared to be the work of militant feminists, most of whom were seemingly women of color. To Hudson, the ruse was never anything but transparent. “No one who knew or liked a black feminist,” she told me, “was fooled.” But the hashtag was already trending worldwide.
She had a hunch that many of the Twitter accounts were fake. They had handles like @NayNayCantStop, @LatrineWatts, and @CisHate, and bios like “Queer + black + angry.” They dropped words like intersectional and patriarchy. And Hudson found herself horrified by how easily people on social media could be lured into believing a stereotype of black women. While she watched a credulous rage build online, not just against these fake Twitter accounts but against the black feminists she called friends, her own anger grew as well: “No one is going to come into my house and start breaking shit,” she said.
The mockery #EndFathersDay made of an increasingly influential online feminist movement became predictable catnip to conservatives. Tucker Carlson devoted a segment to it. Ashe Schow in the Washington Examiner called it the latest “drivel” “from the feminist outrage machine.” Dan McLaughlin tweeted that the hashtag was “a neat illustration of the cultural trajectory of progressivism.” “#EndFathersDay Because it’s really just Second Caregiver of Unspecified Gender Identity Day, you cisnormative a**holes,” mocked Ben Shapiro. What these commentators were missing was that the #EndFathersDay campaign was a hoax, started by anonymous trolls on 4chan to engender exactly the vitriol that pundits so readily stepped up to spew.
Exposing #EndFathersDay ultimately took the work of a group of black women who were determined not to let the ruse spiral, sensing just how poisonous this kind of trolling could be. And yet, in the years since, even as journalists have publicly asked themselves how they missed the rising threat posed by far-right extremists radicalized online, somehow one of the earliest crowdsourced anti-misinformation campaigns on the internet has been mostly ignored by the mainstream media. To I’Nasah Crockett, who, along with Hudson, helped uncover the #EndFathersDay hoax, watching the events of the past few years has made her feel like she was “a canary in a coal mine.”
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The much-anticipated series chronicling the Central Park Five, When They See Us, is nearing its debut, and we now have more footage to whet our appetite.
A teaser trailer for the upcoming limited series was released in March, now it’s time for the full trailer.
“Every black male who was in the park last night is a suspect; I need all of them.”
Those words, expressed by the New York City Police Department in the new trailer, represents the moment Antron McCray’s, Yusef Salaam’s, Raymond Santana, Jr.’s, Kevin Richardson’s and Korey Wise’s lives were unfortunately changed forever.
The synopsis, as provided by press release:
Based on a true story that gripped the country, When They See Us will chronicle the notorious case of five teenagers of color, labeled the Central Park Five, who were convicted of a rape they did not commit. The four part limited series will focus on the five teenagers from Harlem — Antron McCray, Kevin Richardson, Yusef Salaam, Raymond Santana and Korey Wise. Beginning in the spring of 1989, when the teenagers were first questioned about the incident, the series will span 25 years, highlighting their exoneration in 2002 and the settlement reached with the city of New York in 2014.
When They See Us was created by Ava DuVernay, who also co-wrote and directed the four parts. Jeff Skoll and Jonathan King from Participant Media, Oprah Winfrey from Harpo Films, and Jane Rosenthal, Berry Welsh and Robert De Niro from Tribeca Productions executive produced the limited series alongside DuVernay through her banner, Array FilmWorks. In addition to DuVernay, Attica Locke, Robin Swicord, and Michael Starrbury also served as writers on the limited series.
The series stars Emmy Award Nominee Michael K. Williams, Academy Award Nominee Vera Farmiga, Emmy Award Winner John Leguizamo, Academy Award Nominee and Emmy Award Winner Felicity Huffman, Emmy Award Nominee Niecy Nash, Emmy Award Winner and two-time Golden Globe Nominee Blair Underwood, Emmy Award and Grammy Award Winner and Tony Award Nominee Christopher Jackson, Joshua Jackson, Omar J. Dorsey, Adepero Oduye, Famke Janssen, Aurora Perrineau, William Sadler, Jharrel Jerome, Jovan Adepo, Aunjanue Ellis, Kylie Bunbury, Marsha Stephanie Blake, Storm Reid, Dascha Polanco, Chris Chalk, Freddy Miyares, Justin Cunningham, Ethan Herisse, Caleel Harris, Marquis Rodriguez, and Asante Blackk.
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Genealogy company Ancestry has apologized for a commercial that depicted a Civil War slavery theme and said it is in the process of pulling. CNBC: Ancestry is pulling ad with apparent slavery-era theme
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Genealogy company Ancestry has apologized for a commercial that depicted a Civil War slavery theme and said it is in the process of pulling the ad from television.
The spot, titled “Inseparable,” depicted a white man urging a black women to “escape to the North … across the border” to be together. The ad then cut to black with the text, “Without you, the story stops here,” with a voiceover reading “Uncover the lost chapters of your family history with Ancestry.”
The ad from began rolling out in Canada earlier this month and was part of a campaign including two other spots. A spokeswoman didn’t immediately respond on whether the ad had only appeared in Canada or if it appeared in other markets.
The spot was widely criticized on Twitter, where one called it “abhorrent” and another said it creates an “irresponsible, ahistorical depiction of the relationship between white men & black women during the period of chattel slavery that completely disregards its power dynamics & the trauma of sexual exploitation.”
Another said “We shouldn’t whitewash history through media.”
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“Fast Color” opens in theaters today (April 19) and stars Gugu Mbatha-Raw as a woman hiding from the all-male powers that be. When she reunites with her daughter and mother, the trio is forced to conceal their superpowers from the world or face harsh repercussions.
“The idea that we have power within us is something that I’ve always been interested in—whether it has been suppressed historically or by our society, outside forces, or by our own disbelief in our abilities,” Mbatha-Raw told NBC News. “It’s liberating to know that we can unlock that power by connecting with other women. That’s something that we’ve seen play out in our culture.”
Through magic and other sci-fi conventions, the film explores the characters’ personal struggles, including addiction and the ups and downs of motherhood. “I realized I’ve never seen a movie starring a woman with superpowers who is also a mother,” Mbatha-Raw said. “We take bringing a child into the world for granted. It’s a huge responsibility and a miraculous event.”
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When clothing retailer H&M was embroiled in a public relations crisis over its decision to cast a black toddler in a sweatshirt referencing a monkey in a jungle, one fashion news site offered this advice to the Swedish brand: “One of the simplest solutions for any company is to diversify, to simply hire more people of color.” Similar sentiments have been expressed in the aftermath of Dolce & Gabbana’s anti-Chinesevideos and Instagram exchange, Prada’s anti-black figurines, Gucci’s blackface sweater, and Burberry’s hoodie and noose runway show—all of which occurred within a few months of each other. According to one fashion journalist, “Real change can only happen when diverse decision makers and executives are allowed to enter the highest levels of the industry.” The Washington Post reported that social media users saw “these blunders [as signaling] a need for brands such as Gucci and Prada to hire more people of color.” Another news site offers this quote from a professor of fashion business management: “sustainable change and accountability requires a strong commitment of hiring and promoting Blacks at every executive level within the fashion industry.”
I suggest that we need to rethink this reflexive call to hire more people of color in executive positions as a solution, or even as a first step toward a solution for fixing fashion’s racism. To begin, people of color in any corporate arena—from fashion to banking to academia—know that the presence of non-white executives and administrators provides no guarantee of racial affinity, much less a radical politics of labor and justice. As the popular saying goes, “all skinfolk ain’t kinfolk.” Bureaucratic diversity gives the lie to the myth of white innocence (e.g., white executives can’t prevent racism because they can’t see or detect racism) while making people of color solely responsible for fixing racism at their workplaces—an extra job responsibility that usually goes uncompensated and unvalued.
The idea that increasing the number of non-white people in top-level positions will produce anti-racist effects is what workplace researchers Devon W. Carbado and Mitu Gulati call the “racial trickle-down effect.” A key point they make is that “diversity” functions not as a corrective against, but as a continuation of corporate strategies that sustain business as usual. We see this in the fashion context where diversity clauses are the norm in fashion firms including Burberry, Prada, and H&M, as well as in trade organizations like the Council of Fashion Designers of America and the British Fashion Council. Yet despite the normalization of bureaucratic diversity, racism continues to permeate the fashion system. This contradiction is consistent with Carbado and Gulati’s findings. Under the pretext of diversity and progressivism, companies tend to hire and promote people of color into top positions who they perceive are unlikely to “rock the boat.” Worse, the focus on increasing people of color‘s access to high-level jobs misses the larger point that these elite jobs are conditioned on the exploitation of people of color in low-level fashion jobs. Plainly put, adding more people of color in high-value sectors like design, marketing, and advertising will do nothing to change the work conditions of people of color in low-value jobs in the cut/make/trim (CMT) sectors. The focus on executive diversity can provide a false sense of progress that allows fashion’s structural racism to become simultaneously more entrenched and more hidden.
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African-American men serve longer sentences than white men for the same crime, a new study by the U.S Sentencing Commission shows.
The commission's analysis of demographic prison data from 2012 to 2016 found that black men serve sentences that are on average 19.1 percent longer than those for white men for similar crimes.
The racial disparity in sentencing can't be accounted for by whether an offender has a history of violence, according to the study by the commission, an independent bipartisan agency that is part of the U.S. federal judiciary branch.
"Violence in an offender’s criminal history does not appear to contribute to the sentence imposed" except as it may factor into a score under sentencing guidelines, the study said.
When accounting for violence in an offender's past, black men received sentences that were on average 20.4 percent longer than that of white men, according to the commission's analysis of fiscal year 2016 data, the only year for which such data is available.
The new study updates an earlier commission report in 2012, known as the Booker report, that came after a Supreme Court decision in 2005, United States vs. Booker, which permitted judges to enhance an offender’s sentence based on “facts” determined by their own judgment. Before then, federal judges were only allowed to sentence an offender based on guidelines provided by the sentencing commission.
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