Voices and Soul
by
Justice Putnam, Black Kos Poetry Editor
Ragtime composer and pianist, John William Boone was born in 1864 in a federal militia camp near Miami, Missouri. His mother was a "contraband slave" (a designation made by the US Army for escaped Southern slaves affiliated with the Union), who had been owned by descendants of Daniel Boone. At six months old, using a radical surgery to reduce swelling in the brain for civil war soldiers wounded in battle, surgeons removed both of his eyes to reduce the 'brain fever.”
He later attended the St Louis School of the Blind, where he first learned to play the piano. Not content to make the brooms the blind school was training him for, Boone was expelled for repeatedly sneaking off campus and making his way to the local bars and saloons to listen to the many and differing piano styles. Once on his own, he wandered Missouri with several musicians, playing occasionals at ballrooms and parlours, achieving some critical acclaim, but plagued by meager financial success. Kidnapped briefly by a gambler and sometime showman, Boone's stepfather finally rescued him in Mexico, Missouri, returned him home and to classes where he learned to properly play the European Masters, where the financial rewards that so eluded him, finally matched his critical success. By 1900, The Blind Boone Concert Company was one of the most popular music acts in the country, playing 300 dates annually, until Boone died of a "deflated heart" in 1927, at the age of sixty-three.
When I got old enough
I asked my mother,
to her surprise,
to tell me what she did
with my eyes. She balked
and stalled, sounding
unsure for the first time
I could remember.
It was the tender way
she held my face
and kissed where tears
should have rolled
that told me I’d asked
of her the almost impossible—
to recount my blinding
tale, to tell what became
of the rest of me.
She took me by the hand
and led me to a small
sapling that stood not
much taller than me.
I could smell the green
marrow of its promise
reaching free of the soil
like a song from Earth’s
royal, dirty mouth.
Then Mother told me
how she, newly freed,
had prayed like a slave
through the night when
the surgeon took my eyes
to save my fevered life,
then got off her knees
come morning to take
the severed parts of me
for burial—right there
beneath that small tree.
They fed the roots,
climbed through its leaves
to soak in sunlight . . .
and so, she told me,
I can see.
When the wind rustles
up and cools me down,
when the earth shakes
with footsteps and when
the sound of birdcalls
stirs forests like the black
and white bustling
’neath my fingertips
I am of the light and shade
of my tree. Now,
ask me how tall
that tree of mine
has grown to be
after all this time—
it touches a place
between heaven and here.
And I shudder when I hear
the earth’s wind
in my bones
through the bones
of that boxed-up
swarm of wood,
bird and bee:
I let it loose . . .
and beyond
me.
-- Tyehimba Jess
"Blind Boone's Vision"
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News round up by dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor
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It has been widely reported that medical care professionals often display bias and give inadequate care when it comes to African-American patients, but a new study shows that racial bias may keep ill Black people from even being seen by a doctor.
The study, “Dissecting Racial Bias in an Algorithm Used to Manage the Health of Populations,” found that less money is spent on Black patients who have the same level of need as White ones. The software used to determine who qualifies for care also erroneously determined that Black patients are healthier than Whites who have the same conditions.
Researchers at University of California, Berkeley analyzed patient data from a hospital in which the cost for Black patients was $1,800 less per year than White patients with the same chronic illnesses. The discrepancy is typical of those in hospitals across the nation who use this type of software “to identify patients with chronic or complex medical conditions and to enroll them in programs that help manage their care,” writes The Associated Press.
“The problem was the algorithm was built to predict who’s going to cost money next year, not who’s going to need health care,” lead researcher Dr. Ziad Obermeyer said in an interview with The AP, adding that updating the software could more than double the number of Black patients who are enrolled in programs.
The company that makes the software, Optum, told The AP that the study’s findings were “misleading,” asserting that hospitals should decide on their own how to use the data provided by the software.
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After two years of struggling to pass any of his community college classes, Jamarria Hall, 19, knows this for certain: His high school did not prepare him.
The four years he spent at Detroit’s Osborn High School were “a big waste of time,” he said, recalling 11th and 12th grade English classes where students were taught from materials labeled for third or fourth graders, and where long-term substitutes showed movies instead of teaching.
What’s less certain, however, is whether Hall's education in Detroit’s long-troubled school district was so awful, so insufficient, that it violated his constitutional rights.
That’s the question now before a federal appeals court that heard arguments last week in one of two cases that experts say could have sweeping implications for schools across the country.
The cases, now snaking their way through the federal courts, could yield “enormous, almost earth-shattering change in terms of educational funding and educational opportunity,” said Derek Black, a law professor at the University of South Carolina whose research has focused on educational rights and constitutional law.
The Detroit case was filed in 2016 on behalf of Hall and other students who attended rodent-infested, crumbling schools that lacked certified teachers and up-to-date textbooks. It argued that appalling conditions, including an eighth grader who taught math to his classmates for a month after his teacher quit, denied students a basic right to literacy.
A similar case was filed on behalf of students in Rhode Island last year, asserting that they were denied a basic civics education.
If either case succeeds and is ultimately upheld by the Supreme Court, Black said, it would establish for the first time that students have a “fundamental right” to an education that meets minimum standards of quality.
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The NCAA's top policy-making group on Tuesday voted "unanimously to permit students participating in athletics the opportunity to benefit from the use of their name, image and likeness in a manner consistent with the collegiate model," the association said in a news release.
The release followed a Board of Governors meeting in Atlanta at which the group received a report from a special working group that had been appointed in May to examine the name, image and likeness issue.
The statement about the board action did not provide specifics, but said changes to NCAA rules in each of the three divisions could occur immediately, as long as they occur within principles and guidelines that include:
►Assuring student-athletes are treated similarly to non-athlete students unless a compelling reason exists to differentiate.
►Maintaining the priorities of education and the collegiate experience to provide opportunities for student-athlete success.
►Ensuring rules are transparent, focused and enforceable and facilitate fair and balanced competition.
►Making clear the distinction between collegiate and professional opportunities.
►Making clear that compensation for athletics performance or participation is impermissible.
►Reaffirming that student-athletes are students first and not employees of the university.
Speaking in Atlanta immediately after the board meeting, even NCAA President Mark Emmert said that threading those general principles into meaningful rules changes for for Division I schools will be challenging.
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For 85 years, the Apollo Theater has been a self-described “partner in the projection of the African-American narrative” that “envisions a new American cannon centered on contributions to the performing arts by artists of the African diaspora, in America and beyond.” Countless stars have graced its stage, including Billie Holiday, Aretha Franklin, Stevie Wonder, Luther Vandross, Dave Chappelle and Lauryn Hill. On November 6, the world-famous theater’s own story will be told via “The Apollo,” a documentary making its television debut on HBO.
Created by Academy- and Emmy Award-winning director Roger Ross Williams (“Music by Prudence,” “Traveling While Black”), “The Apollo” mixes music, archival and contemporary footage of comedy and dance performances, and behind-the-scenes peeks at the theater team. Interviews with Black luminaries from music, media and literature—including Patti LaBelle, Smokey Robinson, Pharrell Williams and Jamie Foxx—add personal flavor to the narrative about this historical arts center in the heart of Harlem.
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Even Dickens did not describe harder toil. Life for the child of a tenant farmer who works the tobacco fields of Malawi is unimaginably arduous: up at 4am for several hours of labour with no breakfast, cutting into the earth with a heavy hoe.
School – if they go to school – is a brief respite. The first and often only meal of the day, maize porridge, is eaten when they get home, before more digging. Sleep is on the bare earth under a straw roof.
Now, however, British American Tobacco is facing a watershed legal action on behalf of potentially hundreds of these children and their families. Human rights lawyers Leigh Day argue that the company is getting rich while the children and their parents who do this backbreaking work are trapped in grinding poverty, which they say amounts to “unjust enrichment”.
BAT says it tells farmers not to make their children work. The lawyers say they have no choice. Most children are deprived of an education, which should be a path out, because their families struggle to afford even the small fees, exercise books and uniforms required.
The World Health Organization (WHO) agrees. “Tobacco growing, manufacture and distribution is simply incompatible with the wellbeing of a child,” says Dr Vera Luiza da Costa e Silva, head of Secretariat of the WHO’s Framework Convention on Tobacco Control.
“Using children as workforce in any industry defeats the global fight against child labour. In the case of tobacco, children have a particularly heavy burden to carry.
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In South African politics it is a feat to make the African National Congress (ANC) look harmonious. Yet over the past week the Democratic Alliance (DA), the country’s main opposition party, has done just that. On October 20th Helen Zille, its outspoken former leader, was elected to chair the da’s federal council, a key party post. That decision prompted the DA’s Herman Mashaba to resign as the mayor of Johannesburg. Two days later Mmusi Maimane, the party leader, also said he was stepping down.
The resignations of the DA’s two most prominent black politicians ultimately reflect the party’s failure to resolve its position on the most emotive of South African issues: race. In the 1990s the Democratic Party (DP), the forerunner of the DA, was an avowedly liberal movement. In the view of its then leader, Tony Leon, the best way to tackle the poverty and inequality left by apartheid was through economic growth and education reform, not, for example, affirmative action. “Race is a red herring,” stated the manifesto of the DP in 1999.
Whatever the merits of that stance, it gave the DP a clear brand. It became the main repository for white and mixed-race voters, increasing its share of the national vote from 2% in 1994 to 10% in 1999. In the early 2000s, after evolving into the DA, it took power in Cape Town, then became the kingmaker in the Western Cape, which remains its power base.
Yet if the DA was to challenge the ANC’s hold on national politics it had to win over black South Africans, who make up 81% of the population. Ms Zille, who took over from Mr Leon in 2007, groomed Mr Maimane to succeed her in 2015. The party shifted its position on affirmative action. In 2019 the DA’s manifesto stated that the party “supports a programme of race-based redress”.
So long as the DA kept increasing its vote share at elections, the tension between its mostly white liberal core and its newer members was kept subdued. It won 27% of the vote in local elections in 2016, its best ever performance. But that success was aided by widespread contempt for Jacob Zuma, South Africa’s former president.
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In a busy recruitment agency in Nairobi’s central business district, dozens of women line the halls. All hope that today they will secure a job as a domestic worker in the Gulf states, cooking, cleaning and caring for another family thousands of miles from their own homes.
Pamela Mbogo* is one of them. The 29-year-old has found a job in Saudi Arabia starting next month. It’s not her first time as a domestic worker. On the previous occasion she lived and worked for a family in Bahrain, where she was abused and locked inside the house for days at a time. Yet, this time, Mbogo believes it will be different.
“The first time I went, I went in an illegal, chaotic situation through brokers who did not prepare us for what lay ahead,” says Mbogo. “I am more confident this time. I believe all will be well.”
Her confidence comes from a raft of legal reforms that
Kenya has recently put in place to try to make it safe for women to travel to the Gulf to work.
The region is the most dangerous place in the world to find work for migrant domestic workers such as Mbogo. The Gulf has long been notorious for labour trafficking, with the 2.5 million-strong domestic workforce particularly vulnerable to widespread physical and sexual abuse, and having their passports and salaries withheld by employers.
Underpinning this abuse is the kafala system, which prevents migrant workers from changing jobs without their employer’s consent. It can mean that women who face abuse at the hands of their employers are left trapped and facing arrest if they try to flee.
Reports of east African workers being raped and tortured across the region and haunting videos of Kenyan women pleading for help after allegedly being abused by their employers saw the Kenyan government follow other countries such as Indonesia and the Philippines in banning its citizens from travelling to work in the Gulf in 2014.
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WELCOME TO THE FRIDAY PORCH
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