How Are You?
Commentary by Chitown Kev
To this point I am doing...OK under the shelter-in-place orders in Illinois.
For the most part, when not at work, I’m usually at home or out at other loosely structured activities, so being at home, in and of itself, is no biggie.
I have received my emergency relief check from the IRS along with, yes, that shitty letter with The Damn Fool’s name on it (which I threw in the trash instantly). Rent is paid thru the month. Refrigerator is kind of stocked right now..
I am currently on furlough, so I don’t have any income coming in. My landlord has already said not to worry about it but, considering that my job involves, in part, working with the public, I honestly don't see myself returning to work anytime soon. So the rent does worry me, a bit.
I am also realizing just how important work is in providing a structure to my day and week. I know that I have to be to work on certain days at a certain time and I also pretty much know the times that I can be called in to sub for someone else.
Without that structure and with the inability to attend my other structured activities...my days are absolutely wacked. There’s a day time and a night time, there are times when my regular diaries here at Daily Kos have to be posted and I try to stick around for those times. Otherwise, I would probably lose much of my sense of time and structure.
For the time being, I probably need to approach Daily Kos as sort of my “day job”: after all, other than this I don’t have much to tend to.
People contact via Zoom has been difficult because of the wifi in my building, I guess. A friend of mine gave me one of his PC’s and...sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t...I do the best that I can but that has also been a source of frustration.
The social distancing guidelines aren’t getting to me so much as people who do not wear their facemasks. In my town, therI can bute is a facemask requirement in order to go into any place of business; prior to the mask order that had been a problem. Outdoors is not that big of a deal; if you are six or more feet away from another person, you can lower the mask which I do sometimes. I do live in a building with small studios and one-bedrooms; many of my neighbors are classified as “essential workers.” I infrequently see them in the hall and when I do, more often than not, they are not wearing a facemask.
Particularly for the ones that are working and, in all likelihood, have to wear a facemask all day, I get it. For people that are simply...rebelling, I suppose, I get it.
This virus cares nothing about whether I work or not, whether I am rebeliious or not, whether I seek “freedom” or not, whether or not I’m lonely.
It’s a non-sentient force of nature that does what it does. I wish people would recognize that. But I can only control what I do.
As far as politics goes...I’ve read enough history to know that times such as the ones that we live in bring out both the best in humanity and the worst in humanity.
Ms. Mujinga has an 11-year old daughter. Who no longer has a Mom.
We’ve certainly seen no shortage of acts of both heroism and cruelty here in these United States.
Overall: I’m...OK. These times are beginning to get to me a bit; I’m sure I’m not the only one that feels that.
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NEWS ROUND UP BY DOPPER0189, BLACK KOS MANAGING EDITOR
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Ahmaud Arbery’s death is the worst fear of many black men, who experience a level of baseline fear and persecution during routine activities like jogging in majority-white neighborhoods that few others in America can understand. Hoping to understand more, I called Rashawn Ray, a sociologist at the University of Maryland and the Brookings Institution who studies the experience of African Americans in public spaces.
In 2017, Ray published a paper (titled “Black people don’t exercise in my neighborhood”) documenting a striking pattern in which middle-class black men exercise at much lower rates in majority-white neighborhoods than they do in majority-black or racially mixed ones. According to Ray, this reflects routine and commonplace experiences of harassment and mistreatment in white spaces — which they believe could lead to any one of them ending up like Ahmaud Arbery.
“Black men who I’ve spoken to, who have seen the horrific killing of Ahmaud, state that, wow, I’ve had similar sort of experiences where people have followed me: where cars have ran me off the road. Where dogs have chased me. Where people have called the police. Where people have crossed streets while I’m running. Where neighbors have shut their doors. Where they’ve given me negative looks,” Ray told me.
“I mean, these are the common experiences.”
Our conversation used this stark finding as a jumping off point to discuss the broader research on the black male experience — what it’s like to live in a society where police and civilians alike treat you as presumptively criminal, how that sense of threat profoundly shapes the way black men exist in a majority-white society, and what kinds of policy changes might enacted to make the world a safer place for men like Ahmaud Arbery. What follows is a transcript of that conversation, edited for length and clarity.
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Magnolia Earl has a lot to celebrate: she is the winner of Gerber’s 2020 Photo Search contest and also turns one-year-old today.
We’re not surprised that the baby food brand was won over by this cherubic cutie pie’s adorably gummy smile and fabulous head wrap game.
Magnolia was chosen out of 327,000 entrants, Gerber announced in a press release Friday, saying she “captured the hearts of the judging panel with her joyful expression, playful smile and warm, engaging gaze.”
She is the first adopted baby to win the photo contest, which is in its tenth year and was inspired by the company’s iconic logo.
“At a time when we are yearning for connection and unity, Magnolia and her family remind us of the many things that bring us together: our desire to love and be loved, our need to find belonging, and our recognition that family goes way beyond biology,” said Gerber.
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Richard Penniman, better known as Little Richard, who combined the sacred shouts of the black church and the profane sounds of the blues to create some of the world’s first and most influential rock ’n’ roll records, died on Saturday morning in Tullahoma, Tenn. He was 87.
His lawyer, Bill Sobel, said the cause was bone cancer.
Little Richard did not invent rock ’n’ roll. Other musicians had already been mining a similar vein by the time he recorded his first hit, “Tutti Frutti” — a raucous song about sex, its lyrics cleaned up but its meaning hard to miss — in a New Orleans recording studio in September 1955. Chuck Berry and Fats Domino had reached the pop Top 10, Bo Diddley had topped the rhythm-and-blues charts, and Elvis Presley had been making records for a year.
But Little Richard, delving deeply into the wellsprings of gospel music and the blues, pounding the piano furiously and screaming as if for his very life, raised the energy level several notches and created something not quite like any music that had been heard before — something new, thrilling and more than a little dangerous. As the rock historian Richie Unterberger put it, “He was crucial in upping the voltage from high-powered R&B into the similar, yet different, guise of rock ’n’ roll.”
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The Heinz Endowments will invest $6.7 million to advance racial justice and social equity across the Pittsburgh area, the organization announced via press release on May 6. Included in the sum is funding totaling more than $2.3 million that will go toward local criminal justice reform efforts around research, advocacy, and policy and practices.
With COVID-19 wrecking the nation’s financial system, Heinz’s Endowments president said that as the crisis exposes issues around poverty and racial inequality, it is also worsening them. “We will never be able to create the resilient community of the future that we strive for unless we address directly the deep issues of inequity that afflict our community and our nation,” Grant Oliphant said in the statement.
The nearly $7 million package is part of Heinz’s three-year, $10-million Restoration Project initiative that launched in 2018. “The Restoration grants address access to legal representation and jail diversion, advocacy around targeted policy reform, research aimed at identifying the root causes of race-based disparities, and implementation of evidence-based practices to improve services for those affected by the criminal justice system,” said Carmen Anderson, Heinz Endowments chief equity officer.
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A group of white people armed with weapons demanded entry into the home of a black woman and her son in Pender County, North Carolina, late last Sunday night and refused to leave.
Reportedly leading the group was a member of the New Hanover Sheriff’s Office, Deputy Jordan Kita, who was armed and in uniform during the incident in question despite being off-duty and employed in a different county.
The mob claimed they were on the lookout for someone named Josiah in connection with the disappearance of a young girl, according to James Lea, an attorney now representing the family. They wouldn’t take no for an answer when Monica Shepard and her son Dameon, a high school senior, told them repeatedly that no one by that name lived at that resident.
From WECT:
When Dameon attempted to shut the door after telling the group who he was, Lea says the New Hanover County deputy stuck his foot in the door and demanded to come inside. Shepard woke up during this commotion and also tried to get the group to leave her property, indicating the person they were looking for did not live there.
Once again, according to Lea, the group continued to question the Shepards, demanding to come inside. The deputy also blocked Shepard from closing her door. Lea says at some point the group realized they were at the wrong residence and started disbanding, but by that time the Pender County Sheriff’s Office was called to the disturbance.
You won’t be surprised to hear that the members of the mob were allowed to leave the scene unscathed by the Sheriff’s Office.
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The Georgia Bureau of Investigation took over the investigation Wednesday and charged the McMichaels with murder and aggravated assault Thursday. A day later, the agency couldn’t help but take a swipe at the local investigation.
“Probable cause was clear to our agents pretty quickly,” Georgia Bureau of Investigation Director Vic Reynolds said during a press conference Friday, implying that it should have been just as clear to George Barnhill.
Barnhill, 63, has worked in relative obscurity as a small-town prosecutor for 36 years. He was assigned the case only after another prosecutor recused herself because Greg McMichael used to work in her office. In the letter to the police captain, Barnhill noted Greg McMichael also worked in a district attorney’s office where his son is a prosecutor.
“The victim’s mother has clearly expressed she wants myself and my office off the case,” Barnhill wrote. “She believes there are kinships between the parties (there are not) and has made other unfounded allegations of bias(es).”
A few weeks later, Barnhill requested the state assign another prosecutor to the case, but only after making clear that he saw “no grounds for arrest.”
Barnhill’s role in the Arbery shooting is his first real brush with national scrutiny. But I recalled Barnhill from an assignment in 2017, when he was doggedly pursuing Olivia Pearson on charges of felony voter fraud. Pearson, a 58-year-old black activist and city commissioner in the South Georgia town of Douglas, stood accused of improperly helping a woman vote—showing a young, first-time, black voter how to use a voting machine when she didn’t know how—in October 2012.
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WELCOME TO THE TUESDAY’S PORCH
IF YOU ARE NEW TO THE BLACK KOS COMMUNITY, GRAB A SEAT, SOME CYBER EATS, RELAX, AND INTRODUCE YOURSELF.