A moment in time
A thought by Chitown Kev
I’ve spent most of today (and I have the day off from work) being a dutiful American citizen and watching Day 3 of the impeachment hearings. I’ve been pretty active on Twitter with the impeachment hearings and the race for the 2020 Democratic nomination.
I’ve also spent much of last night sloooooowly reading over the various transcripts released pertaining to the impeachment inquiry. I’ve been talking about impeachment and other related matters with some of my neighbors, friends, and other people that I know.
Both online and IRL, there’s something that simply...jumps out at me.
I read the stuff I read, I say what I say, I hear what I hear, and I can’t but come to the conclusion that an awful lot of people in the white majority still can’t or don’t or won’t seem to realize that black Americans are American citizens; citizens that have a specific and particular and pecuilar experience of being an American.
[For reasons that I won’t get into here...but that I should probably start writing about, I’ve almost always felt very...ambivalent (and not apathetic) about being an American citizen.]
Sometimes, I get the feeling that black Americans are doomed to be considered to be the...play-doh of American society; a people that need to be shaped and constructed according to the current needs of the majority...or whomever...things without any soul or conscience or intelligence other than...well, not to be inconvenient.
And if that sounds like I feel that, in the popular imagination of the majority of white Americans, across the political spectrum, that black Americans have not come very far from slavery at all; of being considered their property to be manipulated as property...well, that’s exactly right.
We’re no longer property by the letter of the law but the mindset, by and large, remains.
And for the past...week or so...I’ve gotten a little tired of it…for a host of reasons.
...now...maybe I need to take a break from some of the twittering and the diarying...then again, maybe I need to do much more of it...maybe it’s only me that’s trapped in sort of a false dilemma of choices...I simply know that it’s not a comfortable place to be or a comforting thought to be aware of.
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News round up by dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor
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Chloe McKenzie crouches on the floor, a gaggle of children sitting criss-cross applesauce around her.
“What do you do with an apple seed?”
“Water it!” the preschoolers chorus.
McKenzie, the founder of BlackFem — a nonprofit focused on teaching financial literacy to disadvantaged students — nods in response. The kids gazing up at her are bright and curious. But they aren’t here for storytime. This is an introductory economic lesson, and the students — from financially disadvantaged households in the D.C. area — will leave the classroom with an understanding of compound interest.
McKenzie hopes this lesson will lay important groundwork for the children to grasp the concepts of financial literacy, wealth and economic power, three categories that fall under the umbrella of “wealth justice.”
“A lot of people in [the financial industry] continue to think that wealth is just something that you put on a balance sheet, but there is [a] much deeper, more humanistic meaning,” says McKenzie, 27. This ethos is built into BlackFem, as well as McKenzie’s consulting company. While she earns a living by partnering with institutions on finding ways to close the wealth gap, she also provides $5 wealth coaching sessions for women of color.
Why $5? “Because right now, the median net worth of a woman of color is $5. And I want to change that. I want people, especially women of color, to know that you do enough, you are enough, you have enough,” McKenzie explains. Starting small is an essential reminder in a world where 40 percent of adults faced with an unexpected expense of $400 would either not be able to pay it or would sell something or borrow money to cover the cost. McKenzie wants to drive home the point that $1, $5 or $20 can be the building blocks of wealth. “Start there and then begin building,” she says.
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In one of the most concentrated investigations of discrimination by real estate agents in the half century since enactment of America’s landmark fair housing law, Newsday found evidence of widespread separate and unequal treatment of minority potential homebuyers on Long Island. Newsday: Long Island Divided
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The three-year probe strongly indicates that house hunting in one of the nation’s most segregated suburbs poses substantial risks of discrimination, with black buyers chancing disadvantages almost half the time they enlist brokers.
Additionally, the investigation reveals that Long Island’s dominant residential brokering firms help solidify racial separations. They frequently directed white customers toward areas with the highest white representations and minority buyers to more integrated neighborhoods.
They also avoided business in communities with overwhelmingly minority populations.
The findings are the product of a paired-testing effort comparable on a local scale to once-a-decade testing performed by the federal government in measuring the extent of racial discrimination in housing nationwide.
Regularly endorsed by federal and state courts, paired testing is recognized as the sole viable method for detecting violations of fair housing laws by agents.
Two undercover testers – for example, one black and one white – separately solicit an agent’s assistance in buying houses. They present similar financial profiles and request identical terms for houses in the same areas. The agent’s actions are then reviewed for evidence that the agent provided disparate service.
Newsday conducted 86 matching tests in areas stretching from the New York City line to the Hamptons and from Long Island Sound to the South Shore. Thirty-nine of the tests paired black and white testers, 31 matched Hispanic and white testers and 16 linked Asian and white testers.
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The Representative from Massachusetts introduces legislation that calls for a “decarceration-focused” system that is “smaller, safer, less punitive and more humane.”Color Lines: Ayanna Pressley Seeks to Remake Criminal Justice System
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On Thursday (November 14), Representative Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.) introduced The People’s Justice Guarantee, a bill that calls for a sweeping overhaul of the justice system that centers “the voices of the people most impacted by injustice in America,” per a statement. From Pressley in the statement:
You cannot have a government for and by the people if it is not represented by all of the people. For far too long, those closest to the pain have not been closest to the power, resulting in a racist, xenophobic, rogue and fundamentally flawed criminal legal system. The People’s Justice Guarantee is the product of a symbiotic partnership with over 20 grassroots organizations and people impacted by the discriminatory policies of our legal system. Our resolution calls for a bold transformation of the status quo—devoted to dismantling injustices so that the system is smaller, safer, less punitive and more humane.
Pressley hopes to use policy to shift “the purpose and experience of the criminal legal system,” while dramatically reducing the U.S. prison and jail population. The proposed legislation calls for decriminalizing migration, ending mandatory minimum sentencing and abolishing the death penalty and sentences of life without parole. Per the statement, the legislation is based on five “guiding principles”: shared power, freedom, equality, safety and dignity.
The resolution highlights the need to uphold the dignity and humanity of those impacted most by the criminal justice system, and it proposes tax incentives to encourage local governments to decarcerate and moves to decriminalize sex work. Pressley also pushes for an end to the “draconian systems of mandatory detention and automatic deportation” of people crossing the U.S. border. Additionally, the resolution stresses the need to allow “transgender individuals to be housed in a facility that conforms with their gender identity” and calls for federal Pell grants to be rewarded regardless of incarceration status.
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On the streets of Dakar, Abidjan or Lagos, you’ll be hard-pressed to see the Afros now commonplace in Nairobi, Johannesburg and New York. You might conclude that the natural hair movement has failed to take root in West Africa. But you would be wrong: More and more people are carrying their natural hair these days. They might be wearing it under braids, head scarves, wigs and, yes, even weaves. They might be closeted naturalistas, but they’re naturalistas nonetheless.
That wasn’t the landscape Linda Dempah encountered when she visited her Ivory Coast hometown, Abidjan, over the past decade. Dempah, a New York-based strategy consultant at the time, had seen women who’d tried natural hair go back to perms, disappointed that their hair didn’t “look like that of people they have seen in the West.” More than a century of colonial influence and the dominance of perms had resulted in a loss of knowledge about how to take care of African hair. Equally, the high cost and limited availability of products for natural hair were a deterrent. So in 2015, she began the groundwork to launch Adeba Nature, a hair product line in Abidjan that uses local ingredients and technical expertise from her pharmacist mother and her sister, who has a Ph.D. in pharmaceutical chemistry.
Adeba Nature is among a cluster of companies, hair salons and communities emerging across West Africa that’s sparking a shift in the region’s approach to natural hair. They’re tapping into a growing natural hair market across Africa. South Africa alone has a natural hair market valued at more than $300 million.
Since 2016, Kinky Apothecary, Nigeria’s first natural hair products firm, has held natural hair and beauty shows — effectively festivals where experts from around the world speak and share their expertise and experiences with natural hair. Natural Nigerian, which started as a blog, now holds quarterly meetups in Lagos for women wearing natural hair there, and has held similar meetups in the cities of Ibadan, Calabar, Enugu and Abuja.
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Squint at the grasslands of northern Mozambique and they look a bit like the cerrado, a savannah in central Brazil. Could they be transformed by intensive farming, just as the thickets of the cerrado have given way to fields of soya that transformed Brazil from a food importer to one of the world’s great breadbaskets? That was the thought behind Prosavana, a programme bringing Brazilian and Japanese expertise to Mozambique. Initiated in 2009, it aimed to lift agricultural production across an area of 107,000 square kilometres, roughly the size of Bulgaria.
Politicians heralded Prosavana as a landmark example of “South-South” co-operation. Few farming projects in Africa could match its ambition. It painted a future of which many agronomists on the continent dream: productive and commercially astute smallholder farmers and large plantations exporting to the world. Yet it became a study in hubris, and an illustration of why top-down schemes so often fall short of expectations.
Some 60% of people in sub-Saharan Africa earn a living from their fields. Most of them do not use improved seeds or fertiliser. A typical farm in Kenya or Uganda produces about one-third as much maize per hectare as one in China, and about one-sixth as much as an American one. Africa also has much of the world’s remaining uncultivated land. Stories of untapped potential are drawing commercial farming to the continent. Some agri-businesses cultivate vast holdings of their own. Others enter arrangements to buy cash crops from locals. They often run into opposition, not least over land. Many quietly retreat.
Prosavana encountered similar suspicion. A decade on there is nothing to show for it except a small research lab and a few model farms. In a field outside Ribaue, a northern town, farmers have been helped by technicians to check market prices and start a savings group. Onions grow in neat rows. But this is merely a scratch on an immense landscape. With the main phase of Prosavana not yet begun, the project has mostly had the effect of planting the seeds of a civil-society movement.
The first that many Mozambicans heard of Prosavana was an article in a Brazilian newspaper in 2011. “Mozambique offers land to Brazilian soya”, ran the headline. The story described Mozambique as “Brazil’s next agricultural frontier” and cited a claim by a Brazilian agronomist that half of northern Mozambique was “unpopulated”. In 2013 a Prosavana planning document was leaked. Although it stressed the importance of small farmers, it also envisaged linking them to corporate farming clusters. A private-equity fund hoped to raise $2bn for related agri-business projects.
Activists denounced the scheme as a “massive land grab”. They went on a study trip to the cerrado and joined forces with movements in Brazil and Japan, in a mirror of Prosavana’s trilateral structure. An open letter calling for the suspension of the project was signed by 23 organisations in Mozambique and 43 abroad. Each side of the argument saw the other as out of touch and vaguely foreign—shills of evil corporations or dupes of clueless ngos.
A gulf opened between two irreconcilable world-views.
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A radical experiment to genetically modify a strain of mosquito in order to stop them breeding malaria-carrying daughters is one of the latest efforts to tackle the deadly Disease. The Guardian: Wiping out the daughters: Burkina Faso's controversial mosquito experiment
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“The rainy season has started,” says Sami Palm, head of the clinic. “That means more mosquitos. I’m certain that almost everyone here has malaria.”
Two red lines on the detection strip confirm malaria. “He doesn’t need to stay in the hospital, because he isn’t vomiting and isn’t extremely sick,” Palm says. Osman is sent home with medication – the Burkinese government covers treatments for children aged five and under.
Each year around 400,000 people worldwide die from malaria, half of them in seven countries in Africa, including Burkina Faso. Despite progress in reducing deaths since 2000, cases have been gradually increasing. “We’re having more and more problems with resistance – from the parasite, which knows how to counteract the medicines, and from the mosquitoes, which are getting less sensitive to the insect poisons applied to the mosquito nets,” says Palm. “On top of this, there are many remote areas we can’t reach.”
A radical trial using “gene drive” technology is currently taking place in Burkina Faso, that will see the release of genetically modified mosquitoes in an attempt to wipe out the carriers of the disease.
“We’re developing mosquitoes here that can only have sons. Those sons will also only be able to produce sons, causing the population of females, the only gender that bites, to dwindle until the mosquito is extinct,” says Moussa Namountougou, head of the insect farm of the Institut de Recherche et Sciences de la Santé (IRSS), just a few kilometres from the hospital.
“To do this we have added a bit of genetic information from a slime mould to the mosquito DNA. That extra bit contains the instructions to break down any sperm cells that could produce a daughter mosquito.”
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In an essay titled “Navigating a World That Sees My Black Son’s Suffering as Incidental,” Jerald Walker, author of “The World in Flames: A Black Boyhood in a White Supremacist Doomsday Cult” and professor of creative writing at Emerson College, navigates racism as he seeks a diagnosis for his 12-year-old son who had recently suffered a seizure. From the three-hour wait to the doctor who suggests that the child has syphilis, it’s a troubling journey.
“A good father, if you think about it, would not have bought a house in a small White town so that when medical emergencies arise paramedics take you to the nearby small White hospital instead of to Boston, 30 miles away, where the world’s best hospitals receive Black people all the time,” he writes in the piece, which was published on Wednesday (November 13), on Literary Hub.
In the excerpt below, he breaks down how stress and fighting for your child’s life can have unintended, dangerous consequences:
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