Challenging media narratives about candidates, brains, and policy.
Commentary by Black Kos Editor Denise Oliver-Velez
In my twice weekly twitter round-up for Black Kos, I’ve been following our Black and Latino Democratic Party candidates — Cory Booker, Julián Castro, and Kamala Harris. The Daily Kos community currently has a support group for Kamala Harris (Kamala2020), and for Julián Castro (Kossacks for Julian). There is nothing here for Cory Booker.
Where we are in the long process:
In July of 2020, Democrats will gather to select a candidate to run for President of the United States. The primary process will begin in February of 2020, about 9 months from now. Along the way, the media develops a narrative about the candidates, as the individual campaigns attempt to shape their own stories — and raise funding to stay in the game. Though political pundits and junkies are watching early polling (as are campaign staffs) many of the current crop of candidates still have little or no name recognition. The first debates, for candidates who have qualified, are on June 26 and 27. We can expect to see a winnowing of the field as the year progresses. Daily Kos helps set the liberal-left online narrative, bolstered at Netroots Nation, with a candidate forum.
I’ve been perturbed to see certain themes take hold — already. The most disturbing for me, was illustrated in this piece from Politico (yes it’s Politico — ugh)
The battle of the ‘eggheads’? WTF?
Allow me a short rant here today.
First place, I have a long memory (being old helps). I remember the ‘egghead’ appellation applied to Adlai Stevenson, when he ran against Richard Nixon. Given that we have the stupidest President in American history in office at the moment, there is nothing negative about our candidates having brainpower. What I find problematic (and so did many other folks of color on social media) is the oft repeated meme of brains and policy being attributed mostly to white candidates.
This isn’t the fault of the candidates themselves. If I had a dollar for every time I’ve read about Mayor Pete being a Rhodes scholar — I’d be rich. Funny how Booker’s equal achievement got lost in the mayonnaise.
Here is some pushback:
Then there is the typecasting of Elizabeth Warren as a “policy wonk,” as if she is the only candidate churning out ideas, and legislation. I’ve actually read comments from some of her adherents — that make that claim.
Pure bs. Let’s look at a brief sample — readily available on social media.
Julián Castro
Cory Booker
Kamala Harris
With a long history of addressing maternal health issues — here’s what gets attention in this article — ironically about black women, and written by a black woman — Bari Williams
“The only candidate addressing black maternal health with policy positions is Elizabeth Warren.” linked to an op-ed, by Warren. There were quite a few other pieces similar to this — even here at Daily Kos.
Um. No. Just no. Cory and Kamala (Kirsten too) have legislation and policy positions.
I’m sorry that the site has no group supporting Cory Booker. Good ideas deserve dissemination. We strengthen the party as a whole by ensuring more coverage. I hope that readers here will follow Kossacks for Julian
We shoot ourselves in the foot when we allow a narrative to stand that privileges white brains and legislative savvy, over that of our candidates of color. I admit I’m biased in favor of Kamala Harris, which I’ve made no secret of. What I don’t like is to see our Black and Latino candidates so easily dismissed.
They are whip-smart. They have important ideas. They deserve to be considered.
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News round up by dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor
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Two days before he died, Everett Palmer Jr. called his brother, Dwayne, to tell him he was on his way from Delaware to New York to visit him and their sick mother. But first, he said, he wanted to resolve an outstanding DUI warrant from an incident in 2016 in Pennsylvania to make sure his license was valid for the drive to see his family.
The phone call was the last time the family would hear from the 41-year-old US Army veteran and father of two.
On April 9, 2018, two days later, the family was told that Palmer had died in police custody at the York County Prison. Fourteen months later, the Palmers say they still don't know what really happened. But they are suspicious because when Palmer's body was returned to them, his throat, heart and brain were missing.
"This entire case smacks of a cover-up," civil rights attorney Lee Merritt told CNN by phone.
The family hired Merritt to help find answers because so far, they have been unable to get them on their own, they say. Merritt says prison and county officials have not been cooperative with providing an official manner of death.
But York County Coroner Pam Gay said those organs were actually retained as part of the forensic autopsy for additional testing.
"There were never any missing organs," Gay told CNN on Saturday. "The lab that does our autopsies has the organs. Coroner's offices don't always have a morgue or a forensic pathologist. We contract those services out. We utilize a team in Allentown. That's who retains the specimens. They don't always tell us what they retain. We made that clear to the family from the beginning."
She noted that removing the throat is typical in this kind of investigation because "we have to make sure there wasn't any kind of component that caused asphyxia."
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As China pushes clean energy at home, it is exporting its high-pollution coal industry to pristine places like Kenya’s Lamu Island, with Nairobi’s seal of approval. Local residents fear it will destroy the environment they depend on. Foreign Policy: When Coal Comes to Paradise
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China’s ambition to become a world leader on climate change has led its government to pursue an ambitious initiative to reduce emissions domestically. Amid massive reforms to switch to cleaner energy sources such as natural gas, China has barred new coal plants in 10 regions and proposed suspending construction of more than 100 coal plants last year.
China’s carbon-dioxide emissions grew by 2.3 percent in 2018, and are set to peak in 2030. (There has been some easing of restrictions, Bloomberg reports, indicating how coal-dependent China remains.) Still, the growth is slower than climate researchers expected. With investments in alternative energy increasing and domestic demand for coal-fired power dropping so quickly, China has been left with a surplus of labor, technology, and equipment. To remedy this, China’s coal industry has been encouraged by the government to look to outside markets for its survival.
While China is on track to meeting its Paris climate agreement targets domestically, it continues to invest in and profit from coal power projects across the world. Domestic restrictions do not apply to projects abroad, and compiled by Global Energy Monitor’s Global Coal Plant Tracker, an industry watchdog. China invested in eight of those African countries, six of which have no existing coal-related infrastructure, after its commitment to the Paris climate agreement in 2015. Once completed, these projects would generate 102 gigawatts in coal power globally, locking countries that currently have little to no coal capacity into coal dependency, according to a statement from Urgewald, a German environmental rights group. Lamu Island, 200 miles north of the Kenyan port of Mombasa, is one of the places that China’s industrial surplus is poised to transformed.
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Botswana’s High Court on Tuesday overturned the southern African country’s colonial-era gay sex laws that criminalized homosexuality. The ruling is seen as major victory for LGBTQ rights in the country and has raised hopes that the case can be harbinger of change across the continent where conservative societies and archaic colonial-era laws have proven resistant to expanding rights to the LGBTQ community. In its ruling, the court said the right to privacy includes sexual orientation and that the law should not penalize people for private acts between consenting adults.
The ruling comes shortly after a similar case in Kenya saw the High Court affirm the country’s ban on homosexuality. Earlier this year, Angola similarly decriminalized same-sex activity while outlawing discrimination based on sexual orientation. In Botswana, one of the most stable and democratic nations on the continent, the country’s ban on homosexuality under the 1965 penal code had persisted. Under the law, “carnal knowledge of any person against the order of nature” could lead to seven years in jail and “acts of gross indecency,” whether in public or private, carried a two-year prison term. Prior to Tuesday’s ruling, there had been some opening up on the issue as societal norms shifted. “While homophobic attitudes continue to prevail in parts of the country, Botswana’s LGBTQ activists and supporters have marked some victories for the movement in recent years,” CNN reports. “The 2010 Employment Act made it illegal for employers to terminate contracts on the basis of sexual orientation, and two landmark rulings in October and December 2017 laid the foundation for trans people to more easily change their official gender on identity documents.”
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Black women have long been used as symbols in debates over welfare, but a movement of poor black women who fought to radically redefine aid to the poor as a guaranteed right has been mostly forgotten. NPR: The Mothers Who Fought To Radically Reimagine Welfare
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President Clinton ran on a campaign promise to "end welfare as we know it," but that bill sat on the back-burner until Congressional Republicans swept the 1994 midterms and decided to hold him to it. Clinton would sign welfare reform into law the summer after that New Republic cover story ran. The bill was enormously controversial; one of Clinton's top economic advisers resigned in protest, saying the plan would cut millions of poor people off from much-needed help.
At the Rose Garden ceremony for that bill's signing, Clinton was flanked by Lillie Harden, a black single mother and former welfare recipient from Arkansas. She said that Bill Clinton's previous efforts to reduce the welfare rolls as governor of that state had set her on the path to work and self-sufficiency.
"Going to work gave me independence to take care of my children and to make sure there was always food on the table and a roof over their heads," Harden said at the signing ceremony. "Having a job gave me a chance to focus on school and getting a good education."
Harden stood on the dais with Penelope Howard, another former welfare recipient, surrounded by powerful, smiling white people, seemingly happy to usher millions like them into a new life of independence from the state. Again, the optics were hard to miss.
Lillie Harden's real story turned out to be much more complicated — unsurprisingly, since life in poverty is complicated. But like the unnamed woman on that magazine cover, she had been flattened into a talking point about welfare. In the case of the unnamed woman, she was an example of urban indolence. In Harden's case, she was an example of paternalistic resilience. But as always, these black womLarry en on welfare were presented a problem to be solved.
Premilla Nadasen, a historian at Barnard College, wrote in her book Rethinking The Welfare Rights Movementthat arguments for cutting or restricting welfare relied less on data than it did on anecdote and racialized insinuation.
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I Wish I’d Had These Classics by Black and Brown Authors on My High School Reading Lists. Slate: Invisible
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When executive director for the National Book Foundation Lisa Lucas asked on Twitter in March of this year, “Did you read James Baldwin as part of your high school curriculum?,” I eyed the few respondents who replied “yes” with emerald envy. I only came upon his work in law school, amid the backdrop of Eric Garner’s and Michael Brown’s deaths at the hands of police who were never held to account. Baldwin’s work spoke to me in a way I’d never experienced before and assured me I was not crazy for feeling as black and menaced as I felt.
After my envy subsided, the predominant sentiment I felt was wonder. When I started high school at a New England boarding school almost 20 years ago, it didn’t occur to me that it was within the realm of possibility for a writer like Baldwin to be assigned reading anywhere in America. If you’d told me then that a book existed to help my wealthy, white schoolmates at Choate Rosemary Hall see me eloquently expressed in a piece of writing and that those schoolmates would have been required to read it, I’d have said you were delusional. To see myself eloquently expressed in a piece of writing we were required to read would have been the stuff of dreams.
My first exposure to this rarefied world was through my school’s summer reading assignment. One required book and two of the student’s choosing from a capacious list spanning many subjects. I don’t remember much of what was on the list that summer before I began high school, but I do remember that the required reading was Barbara Kingsolver’s Prodigal Summer. As the oldest son of a widowed Nigerian immigrant, enamored of anime and epic fantasy, I’d long grown accustomed to reading and caring about characters that in no important way resembled me. But, for whatever reason, this time I couldn’t. It is one of the only books I have never finished. I remember there were wolves in the book, or bobcats, or coyotes. And white people. With no superpowers or bloody revenge quests or any other compelling accoutrements. Just regular-degular, boring white people, and a pack of coyotes I seemed more interested in than did Ms. Kingsolver. A harbinger of what lay ahead.
After Kingsolver, once school started that fall, Choate fed me a steady, classroom-imposed reading diet of Emerson and Thoreau and Sophocles and Fitzgerald and Homer and Kerouac and Faulkner. The stories I began writing shared DNA with the stories I read. Was it any wonder that every tale I imagined could only be filled with white characters?
Privilege established the default. In our assigned reading, white characters were allowed the full depth and breadth of human experience. The few books we read by a black author (like Their Eyes Were Watching God, the brilliance of which I could not appreciate until much later in life) were laden with anguish, a chronicle of the burdens of being born my color in a country built and funded by the peculiar institution. Nonwhite Americans were uniformly reduced by adversity. Reduced to adversity. There were 1 million ways to be white. But to be black, you had to be suffering. One of the only books I remember reading with any sense of entrancement my senior year was John Gardner’s Grendel. I thought nothing at the time of how closely I identified with the monster.
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Voices and Soul
by
Black Kos Poetry Editor
Justice Putnam
I got into it with the neighbors here, again. I don’t want to imply that the whole town are a bunch of Nazi, racist, White Supremacist fascists, but the ones who are always are the most loud, the most threatening and the most triggered. An official school photo for the Rogue River High School showed several students flashing the Pepe white supremacist symbol, and an elderly lady pointed it out on the town Facebook page. She was dumped on in the most vile and threatening manner that she had to shut down her comments. Of course, I had to interject in a separate post to set things straight.
“The stiff armed salute wasn't always the salute to Hitler, but if anyone in my family did it, even if it was a long established "game," I would call them out publicly as being Nazis. The "circle game" has been co-opted by white supremacists world wide. But yes, go ahead, be the good Germans and make excuses. Bigots, white supremacists, the KKK and yes, Nazis make it their work here in our little hamlet to promote their hatred and I am tired of the apologies.”
So of course, a bunch of bigots, white supremacists, KKK and yes, Nazis, got all bent out of shape for bringing up that a bunch of bigots, white supremacists, KKK and yes, Nazis are a bunch of whiny ass loudmouths and yes, I am anti fascist and we kicked the fascist ass and we will again. Of course, I was accused of making violent threats and that they would kick my ass and punch me in the face and etc etc etc. I simply stated that they did not know me, and if they did, they would rescind the threats. That was, of course, making an even more overt threat of violence so even more descriptive threats to my life were made, and I was the racist and hater, after all.
A lot of good, progressive people are hunkered down here. When they do raise their heads, even an 80 year old woman afraid of kids flashing a fascist symbol, they are deluged with threats of violence and more. I’m hoping the admin of the town FB page will see through this. Probably not, though. If a liberal says anything counter to the MAGA cult here, they are the violent left and need to shut up, or else. But anyone who really knows me, knows I never shut up, even when threatened with, “or else.”
Holy the days of the prune face junkie men
Holy the scag pumped arms
Holy the Harlem faces
looking for space in the dead rock valleys of the City
Holy the flowers
sing holy for the raped holidays
and Bessie’s guts spilling on the Mississippi
road
Sing holy for all of the faces that inched
toward freedom, followed the North Star
like Harriet and Douglass
Sing holy for all our singers and sinners
for all the shapes and forms
of our liberation
Holy, holy, holy for the midnight hassles
for the gods of our Ancestors bellowing
sunsets and blues that gave us vision
O God make us strong and ready
Holy, holy, holy for the day we dig ourselves
and rise in the sun of our own peace and place
and space, yes Lord.
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