There are no safe spaces for Black people.
Commentary by Black Kos Editor Denise Oliver-Velez
We are not safe in our own homes. We are not safe in church. We are not safe sitting in a park playing. We are not safe riding a subway. We are not safe shopping. We are not safe driving to work.
The irony of the term “wellness check” used for calling the police to ensure a person’s safety is patently obvious when the person one is concerned about winds up dead. And those people blaming the neighbor who made the call — should stop. He didn’t pull the trigger.
I went to sleep thinking about this tweet from sister Selena Adera:
It isn’t just the police. As long as racism continues to be an integral part of the American ethos — we will not be safe.
We live with this, go about our lives, work, go to school, eat, sleep, socialize, and yet, we know we are not really dealt with on the same level as white Americans.
We know.
No sooner than we heard of yet another unnecessary death, we knew that somehow it would be insinuated that the victim was at fault.
We are a “perceived threat.”
We knew.
There was a rush, on our side, to point out that Atatiana Jefferson was a college graduate. “A good person.” We know we have to be respectable in death to warrant white outrage.
We know that we will be besmirched.
I followed the white media coverage — aka — mainstream media, and turned away.
I have no idea how many Daily Kos readers regularly follow, and read black media sources. Hell, I have no idea how many people read Black Kos, for that matter.
Bruce C.T. Wright, who is the Managing Editor at NewsOne.com. has been covering the story from a black pov.
Police Try To Assassinate Atatiana Jefferson’s Character After Killing Her In Her Own Home
“Cops seemed to be justifying the shooting and blaming the victim in a press release.”
When Should Black People Call Police? Atatiana Jefferson Shooting Reignites Debate
“Many questions have arisen from the tragic Fort Worth shooting.”
Public Executions Of Black People Are Showing No Signs Of Ending
“The most recent instance came when a Texas cop shot a Black woman through her home's window.”
I like their use of strong, blunt language in the headlines.
I wonder what they will have to say about this:
On top of this, we got this news:
Back in August, News.one had this story.
64 Black Men And Boys Killed By Police
As NewsOne continues covering these shootings that so often go ignored by mainstream media, the below running list Black men and boys who have been shot and killed by police under suspicious circumstances can serve as a tragic reminder of the danger they face upon being born into a world of hate that branded them as suspects since birth.
It reminded me of a diary that Sis shanikka wrote here in 2012:
Hey America! Can you please stop killing our (usually) innocent Black male children now?
She followed it up two years later with:
Not to repeat myself, BUT: Can we please stop killing (usually) innocent black children now?
Sis JoanMar, has relentlessly covered injustice, in diaries like this one:
The murder of another defenseless black woman. JusticeForPamela #BLM
As we watched the cop who killed Botham Jean get a slap on the wrist (10 years for murder, and she can be out of prison in 5) Bro Chitown Kev blasted the whole forgiveness meme for the consumption of white people in:
Rant: I wish that black people would stop making a public spectacle of forgiving white folks.
Yesterday, Sis TulsaGal wrote an epic rant:
Rant on the Cop-Murder of Atatiana Jefferson
Black folks will continue to tell our stories. We’ll write about our pain, and justice denied. We will continue to fight.
“Being black in your own home shouldn’t be a death sentence.” Kamala Harris
It was.
It will happen again.
We will not be safe — until white America changes.
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News round up by dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor
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Firing through a window, a white Fort Worth officer fatally shot a black woman inside her home early Saturday after police were called to the house because its doors were open, according to police and the neighbor who summoned them.
Atatiana Jefferson, 28, died in a bedroom, according to the Tarrant County Medical Examiner’s Office.
Officers responded at 2:25 a.m. to the house in the 1200 block of East Allen Avenue. James Smith, who called a non-emergency police number, said he saw the doors were open and the lights were on, which struck him as unusual. He knew Jefferson, his neighbor, was home with her 8-year-old nephew.
Police parked around the corner, and the woman could not see them, according to Smith, 62. About 15 minutes later, he said, he heard a loud bang and saw several more officers rush inside.
Body-worn camera video police released shows two officers using flashlights to check the perimeter of the house, inspecting two doors that are open with closed screen doors. At the back of house, one officer appears to see a figure through a dark window, and he quickly twists his body to the left.
“Put your hands up! Show me your hands!” he shouts through the window, his gun drawn. He then fires a single shot through the window.
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When Nina Figueroa, 25, protested with fellow Puerto Ricans this summer to oust the then governor, Ricardo Rosselló, she believed she stood out to police. Figueroa, a college student studying comparative literature, had been arrested multiple times while in the streets and was starting to notice a pattern.
“I have been arrested in protests three times and all three times I was doing nothing,” says Figueroa. “I asked myself: ‘Why do the police arrest me so much?’ And obviously it wasn’t until I understood that I’m an easy target for the police because I’m a black woman.”
Figueroa is one of many vocal activists, scholars, legal advocates and residents, who say Puerto Rican police racially profile black and predominantly low-income communities, despite frequently held beliefs that the island is a racial melting pot without explicit racial problems.
“I’ve seen black people being policed at the entrance of the shops, how they follow me and they don’t do anything to my friends or to white people,” said Figueroa.
“The police in Puerto Rico are very racist and also have a lot of social stigmas because they believe that black people come from the hood, come to steal … that we are criminals.
“The police are the same as in the United States, the only difference is that here they don’t kill us,” said Figueroa.
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IIt all started in 2015 with a frantic message from a woman in Sudan who was having cold feet ten days before her wedding. The woman had a nagging feeling her husband-to-be was cheating on her, and she was desperate to find out the truth before she went through with the marriage. She decided to reach out to her friend Rania Omer, who had won a lottery visa to become a U.S. citizen five years earlier. Now Omer was 24 and studying at a college in Nebraska, but she still fancied herself an anti-matchmaker among her close-knit community back home in Khartoum. The friend wanted Omer’s help. Would she mind posting a photo of the potential husband to Facebook to see if other women could dig up information on him?
A few hours later, Omer had her answer: one commenter posted to say she was his wife. “His wife showed up and said please delete this picture and I was like, ‘Oh my!” said Omer in a phone interview with ELLE.com.
As more women began coming to Omer for information on men they knew, she decided to start a Facebook group called Minbar-Shat as a community of female “cheater detectives” who would work to police men’s behavior. Within a week, Omer said, the group’s membership grew to more than 10,000. That’s when she realized there was something more to Minbar-Shat than catching cheaters.
When Omer came to the U.S. from Sudan in 2010, her home country had been ruled by dictator Omar Al-Bashir for 21 years, more than the average age of the population. Most Sudanese citizens spent their lifetime under his rule, and many spent their youth protesting it. In July 2010, Bashir became the first head of state to receive an arrest warrant from the International Criminal Court, due to his involvement in wiping out non-Arab groups in Darfur. It was a momentous occasion that ultimately petered out without a prosecution, leaving newspapers constantly referring to him as the president “wanted for war crimes.” 2010 was also the year that Sudan’s National Security Act was repealed and replaced with a new one that granted the National Intelligence and Security Service (NISS) more power to arrest, detain, and torture protestors based on vague grounds. The government protected many NISS officers from prosecution after they were accused of sexual violence and publicly flogging women in the streets.
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Boomplay Nigeria, a Chinese-backed music-streaming startup, is targeting French-speaking nations four years after it first launched in West Africa.
“We have started to look at the Francophone regions such as Cameroon and Cote d’Ivoire, as well as the areas where there is a large diaspora community such as North America and Europe,” General Manager Dele Kadiri said in Lagos.
The company, owned by Transsnet Music Ltd. and backed by Shenzhen Transsion Holdings Co., has seen growth accelerate since raising $20 million from investors to expand in Nigeria, Kenya, Ghana and Tanzania. It now has more than 53 million users, up from 42 million in April, and is adding 2 million a month to make it Africa’s largest music-streaming platform, Kadiri said.
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Sierra Leone’s abrupt cancellation of an iron ore mining license last week has raised concerns about a resurgence of resource nationalism across the continent.
The action is the latest in a string of disputes between governments and mining companies in Africa, which is home to rich resources of iron ore, copper, gold and diamonds.
Gerald Group, a metals trader, said last Tuesday that its license to mine the steelmaking ingredient was canceled “with immediate effect” by the government, and it would pursue claims for more than $500 million in compensation.
A number of African governments are working to right what many see as historic imbalances in favor of foreign companies rooted in colonialism and to readdress contracts signed at earlier stages of certain economic cycles.
Commodity prices have rebounded since the end of the China-driven boom in 2015, with increased use of metals, including cobalt and copper, in renewable energy technologies such as batteries and wind turbines.
The Sierra Leonean government’s actions came as iron ore prices remain elevated at $94.5 a metric ton, having surged to a five-year high above $125 earlier this year.
Eric Humphrey-Smith, an analyst at risk consultancy Verisk Maplecroft, says that a new set of countries are engaging in tactics to pile pressure on mining companies.
“African countries which, up until now, showed less tendency toward resource nationalism are now trying their luck,” he says. “There is a significant trend and governments are sharing notes with peers.”
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Biles became the most-decorated gymnast, male or female, at the world championships Sunday, winning gold on balance beam and floor exercise. Those were her 24th and 25th medals at worlds, surpassing the previous record by Vitaly Scherbo.
Scherbo, who competed for the Soviet Union, Unified Team and Belarus at five world championships, had 23. Though he had two more events in which to collect his medals, mind you.
There was no mic drop when Biles finished floor, as she did to close out the all-around. Instead, she flashed a huge smile and blew kisses to the crowd. Coach Laurent Landi clapped his hands over his head, then gave her a big hug as she came off the podium.
She leaves worlds with 19 gold medals, extending her own record. It's the first time she's won five golds at the world championships, and will no doubt spark talk of her doing the same at next summer's Tokyo Olympics.
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Voices and Soul
by
Justice Putnam Black Kos Poetry Editor
A picture may indeed, be worth a thousand words. If done with precision though, a poem wouldn't nearly require that much verbiage for an image to occur. As more and more black women have their lives snuffed out for merely being in their bedroom at two in the morning, which is the most frightening thing to a cop sneaking around in their backyard, the Poet sets up the metaphorical camera focused on a crowded yet expansive vista? She adjusts the timer on the camera, moves and stands before it. She is determined as she raises her hands high and wide above her head, a moment before the time-trapping whirr and click of the shutter.
I waved a gun last night
In a city like some ancient Los Angeles.
It was dusk. There were two girls
I wanted to make apologize,
But the gun was uselessly heavy.
They looked sideways at each other
And tried to flatter me. I was angry.
I wanted to cry. I wanted to bury the pistol,
But I would've had to walk miles.
I would've had to learn to run.
I have finally become that girl
In the photo you keep among your things,
Steadying myself at the prow of a small boat.
It is always summer here, and I am
Always staring into the lens of your camera,
Which has not yet been stolen. Always
With this same expression. Meaning
I see your eye behind the camera's eye.
Meaning that in the time it takes
For the tiny guillotine
To open and fall shut, I will have decided
I am just about ready to love you.
Sun cuts sharp angles
Across the airshaft adjacent.
They kiss. They kiss again.
Faint clouds pass, disband.
Someone left a mirror
At the foot of the fire escape.
They look down. They kiss.
She will never be free
Because she is afraid. He
Will never be free
Because he has always
Been free.
Was kind of a rebel then.
Took two cars. Took
Bad advice. Watched people's
Asses. Sniffed their heads.
Just left, so it looked
Like those half sad cookouts,
Meats never meant to be
Flayed, meant nothing.
Made promises. Kept going.
Prayed for signs. Stooped
For coins. Needed them.
Had two definitions of family.
Had two families. Snooped.
Forgot easily. Well, didn't
Forget, but knew when it was safe
To remember. Woke some nights
Against a wet pillow, other nights
With the lights on, whispering
The truest things
Into the receiver.
A small dog scuttles past, like a wig
Drawn by an invisible cord. It is spring.
The pirates out selling fakes are finally
Able to draw a crowd. College girls,
Inspired by the possibility of sex,
Show bare skin in good faith. They crouch
Over heaps of bright purses, smiling,
Willing to pay. Their arms
Swing forward as they walk away, balancing
That new weight on naked shoulders.
The pirates smile, too, watching
Pair after pair of thighs carved in shadow
As girl after girl glides into the sun.
You are pure appetite. I am pure
Appetite. You are a phantom
In that far-off city where daylight
Climbs cathedral walls, stone by stolen stone.
I am invisible here, like I like it.
The language you taught me rolls
From your mouth into mine
The way kids will pass smoke
Between them. You feed it to me
Until my heart grows fat. I feed you
Tiny black eggs. I feed you
My very own soft truth. We believe.
We stay up talking all kinds of shit.
-- Tracy K. Smith
”Self-Portrait as the Letter Y”
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