Commentary by Black Kos editor JoanMar
Oppressors have consistently relied on members of the oppressed class to promote and legitimize their repressive policies. History is replete with examples of those who were only too willing to dog out their communities for 30 pieces of silver or less.
"There are Negroes who will never fight for freedom. There are Negroes who will seek profit for themselves alone from the struggle. There are even some Negroes who will cooperate with the oppressors….
Byron Donalds is one such Negro. The man has big dreams. Talk on the streets is that The Convicted Felon is dangling the role of VP in front of him, so of course he’s gonna be tap dancing fast and furiously for his puppeteers. He can’t allow uncle Tim to have all the fun now, can he?
“You see, during Jim Crow, the Black family was together,” Mr. Donalds said. “During Jim Crow, more Black people were not just conservative — because Black people have always been conservative-minded — but more Black people voted conservatively.”
CNN’s Abby Phillips, a highly intelligent woman stuck in a dull and predictable show format, interviewed the wannabe sociologist, and it was hilarious. I was among the few thousand viewers she had who lingered to watch the spectacle. When confronted with his own words, the tool responded by accusing Democrats of gaslighting and deliberately misrepresenting his carefully crafted words. Said he, “I am, obviously, one of the better communicators in the Republican Party. I know how to put words together. I do it very, very often.” Haha! I hope the Convict saw that. But seriously, we are seriously screwed if he is one of the “better communicators” in one of the two major political parties in the land. To be fair, his was a difficult task: see, he had to deny that he said what he’d said, while simultaneously maintaining that Black people were indeed better off in the 19th century. His masters would be very unhappy were he to deviate from the core message. Caught between Scylla and Charybdis, he did what bullshitting politicians always do: bloviated his way through the interview.
Pathologizing Black folks is and has always been one of the most popular sports around town. It is one of the easiest and cheapest ways to get likes, follows, praises, and head rubs from racists. It is also very, very profitable for those who choose to engage in this activity. Club for Growth showed Donalds how good life can get and now, like Clarence Thomas and others of that ilk, he’s fully committed.
Just who is this MAGA darling who is showing himself so eager to use our bodies and our pain as fodder for his own personal glory? Well, like dear leader, like absolutely disgusting follower. Donalds promoted legislation that would treat youthful offenders as adult criminals and restrict the leniency that judges have to grant discretion during sentencing. He personally benefited from just such a “progressive soft-on-crime” mindset.
If it weren’t for mercy, an 18-year-old from Brooklyn popped on drug charges back in the ’90s may not have the extraordinary life he lives in Washington today, a life that’s becoming a headache for the residents of the nation’s capital. //
After getting a second chance on the drug charge thanks to a pretrial diversion program, he caught a bribery charge three years later. He got both records expunged and proved flexible sentencing can open doors to young people who make mistakes.
“This bill requires that we treat adult criminals as adults, like the rest of the country does,” said Donalds, who was legally an adult when his judges went soft on him.
Apparently, there aren’t enough Black people in prison for this congressman. There’s none so despicable as those who’ll use the plight of his skinfolks to curry favor with his kinfolks.
Donalds’ schtick is old and predictable, and in the now-immortal words of Kendrick Lamar, “Sometimes you gotta pop out and show [an idiot].” Future Speaker of the House Hakeem Jeffries did just that:
Representative Jim Clyburn also took him to the dog shed:
Donalds accepted the invitation to the Joy Reid Show and it was a big mistake on his part. Huge. Joy came prepared and in short order exposed him for the intellectual lightweight that he is. It just didn’t go well for him.
I’m beginning to think that this was not such a good week for Byron Donalds. He shoulda kept his mouth shut. But he won’t. He can’t.
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News round up by dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor
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White fortressing, and other kinds of opportunity hoarding, concentrates resources — such as well-funded public schools, access to local revenue and zoning control — among white communities that are already economically and politically advantaged. Meanwhile, they also constrain access to opportunity among people of color.
When white communities fortress themselves, they siphon away resources from the larger region, including communities of color. In Louisiana, it is estimated that St. George’s secession would take away $48.3 million in annual tax revenue from East Baton Rouge Parish — nearly 8% of the parish’s total tax revenue.
Racial segregation and the unequal allocation of resources have long shaped American cities, through a history of both overt and subtle racist policies and practices, including racially restrictive covenants, violent resistance to integration and White flight from desegregating communities.
The impact of these practices is well known. They perpetuate inequities in crucial ways, by limiting the quality and types of services that already-underserved communities receive, which adversely affects the health and wealth-building potential of people in marginalized communities for generations. In addition, having more governments in a geographical area — for example municipalities or school districts — has been shown to negatively affect health outcomes for Black Americans, but not for whites.
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“If I could find a white man who had a Negro sound and a Negro feel,” he said, “I could make a million dollars.”
What happened next for Phillips is, as they say, history. He'd go on to record Elvis Presley, a white man who achieved dizzying commercial success by molding his singing and dancing styles to the Black artists, both Gospel and secular, who had shaped the soundtrack of his youth.
But Elvis’ adoption/appropriation of Blackness is less critical to his stardom than his whiteness. If that wasn’t the case, the Black artists he emulated would’ve reached similar heights themselves.
Instead, in America – a predominantly white society with a very long record of white supremacist ideologies – whiteness becomes the primary standard by which all is measured and, in business, the primary market to which all products are targeted. It's why the word “mainstream” is used to refer to outlets or platforms with largely white audiences, and why so many nonwhite artists and entrepreneurs still strive for that ever elusive, ever lucrative “crossover.”
It’s also why Mattel didn’t release its first official Black Barbie until 1980, more than 20 years after the original, blonde-haired and blue-eyed Barbie debuted (though white Barbie was given a Black friend, Christie, in 1968).
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Long before Juneteenth, enslaved and free Black New Yorkers celebrated African culture during a holiday that eventually made white people feel threatened.
Pinkster (Dutch for Pentecost) marked the outpouring of the Holy Spirit on Jesus Christ’s disciples. The religious celebration was a little-known African American holiday with roots in 17th-century Dutch colonial New York. Over time, the festival evolved into “a form of cultural resistance,” that included African dance and drum performances.
“It was a way for Africans to hold onto their traditions by using European institutions,” Dr. A.J. Williams-Myers, the former chair of SUNY New Paltz Black Studies Department, told the Albany Times Union.
White folks eventually grew nervous about seeing large groups of unrestrained Black people gathering together, fearing that the enslaved and free Blacks were scheming against them.
Whether the plots were real or imagined, there was good reason to fear the people they shackled and brutalized after reading news of Black uprisings, including Haitians violently overthrowing their French enslavers in 1804 and the 1811 Louisiana Slave Revolt.
In 1811, New York banned Pinkster gatherings, claiming that the festivities were rowdy. Penalties for violating the ban included fines and jail time.
In a symbolic gesture, city lawmakers in New York’s capital, Albany, unanimously repealed the law in 2011. And a movement is now underway to reinstate Pinkster.
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The pink house where Muhammad Ali grew up dreaming of boxing fame — and where hundreds of fans gathered for an emotional send-off as his funeral procession passed by decades later — is up for sale.
The two-bedroom, one-bathroom house in Louisville was converted into a museum that offered a glimpse into the formative years of the boxing champion and humanitarian known worldwide as The Greatest. The house went on the market Tuesday along with two neighboring homes — one was turned into a welcome center-gift shop and the other was meant to become a short-term rental.
The owners are asking $1.5 million for the three properties. Finding a buyer willing to maintain Ali’s childhood home as a museum would be “the best possible result,” co-owner George Bochetto said.
“This is a part of Americana,” said Bochetto, a Philadelphia attorney and former Pennsylvania state boxing commissioner. “This is part of our history. And it needs to be treated and respected as such.”
The museum opened for tours shortly before Ali’s death in 2016. Bochetto and his business partner at the time renovated the frame house to how it looked when Ali — known then as Cassius Clay — lived there with his parents and younger brother.
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There's a pattern to who has access to pharmacies, with gaps forming in urban and rural neighborhoods. The Grio: As pharmacies shutter, Black and Latino communities are left behind
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Opening stores used to mean everything to pharmacy chains.
CVS Health once boasted of opening or buying more than 2,900 locations in a five-year period. Now it’s shuttering hundreds, while Walgreens, Rite Aid and independent drugstores also pull back.
An industry that saw waves of store growth before the COVID-19 pandemic faces headwinds like falling prescription reimbursement, persistent theft and changing shopping habits. But as drugstores right-size their physical footprint, experts say they can leave behind communities that have come to depend on them as trusted sources of care and advice — both of which can be hard to find in many urban and rural areas.
“That trust, you just can’t quantify it,” said Omolola Adepoju, a University of Houston health services researcher. “And I don’t think it gets spoken about enough when we talk about pharmacy closures.”
There’s a pattern to who has access to pharmacies, with gaps forming in urban and rural neighborhoods.
Residents of neighborhoods that are largely Black and Latino have fewer pharmacies per capita than people who live in mostly white neighborhoods, according to an Associated Press analysis of licensing data from 44 states, data from the National Council for Prescription Drug Programs and the American Community Survey. It’s consistent with prior research that documents where urban “pharmacy deserts” are more likely to be concentrated.
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South Carolina is about to trade its all-male state Supreme court for an all-white one.
The General Assembly, which picks almost all state judges, is expected Wednesday to elevate Court of Appeals Judge Letitia Verdin to the high court. The white woman will take the seat of Chief Justice Don Beatty, who has reached the mandatory retirement age of 72. Beatty is Black.
Verdin is the only candidate left after two others dropped out when they realized they couldn’t get enough votes in the 170-seat Legislature. One candidate was a Black woman and the other was a white man.
“She will be an excellent Supreme Court justice. I’m glad we now have that diversity present,” said Sen. Tameika Isaac Devine, an African American Democrat who was a law school classmate of Verdin. “But we shouldn’t trade diversity. We need to take a look across the court system.”
Over the past 17 years — and all but seven years since 1984 — South Carolina has had a Black judge on its highest court. Either a woman or a Black man has been chief justice for all but one of the past 30 years.
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