How long do we have to put up with this crap?
Commentary by Black Kos Editor Denise Oliver-Velez
As we watch yet another community suffer under a disaster caused by systemic environmental racism (right now our eyes are on Jackson, Mississippi) it’s the same ol’ story. Yet another rerun in a long list of racist reruns.
I just finished watching “Katrina Babies” on HBO. Hurricane Katrina took place 17 damn years ago and the traumatized kids who survived it have been deeply scarred by what became their lot.
If you haven’t seen it yet, please do. Here’s the trailer.
Kudos to filmmaker Edward Buckle’s Jr. From the film website:
From first-time filmmaker and New Orleans native Edward Buckles, Jr., Katrina Babies offers an intimate look at the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina and its impact on the youth of New Orleans.
Sixteen years after Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans, an entire generation still grapples with the lifelong impact of having their childhood redefined by tragedy. New Orleans filmmaker Edward Buckles Jr., who was 13 years old during Katrina and its initial aftermath, spent seven years documenting the stories of his peers who survived the storm as children, using his community’s tradition of oral storytelling to open a door for healing and to capture the strength and spirit of his city.
Katrina Babies details the close-knit families and vibrant communities of New Orleans whose lives were uprooted by the 2005 disaster. These American children who were airlifted out of the rising waters, evacuated from their homes to refugee-like centers, or placed in makeshift, temporary living situations, have been neglected. As families were tasked with reintegrating into new communities, having experienced loss, displacement, and lack of support from government officials, the children were left to process their trauma in a wounded, fractured city.
Buckles raises his camera to elevate the voices of his city; utilizing confessional-style footage, home movies, animation, harrowing archival footage, and candid interviews with Katrina survivors, Buckles unearths a reservoir of grief and suppressed emotion. Through these moving, first-hand accounts, Katrina Babies journeys toward healing, not just from the most destructive storm in U.S. history, but also from the multi-generational traumas of being black and disenfranchised in America. In the face of systemic racism, government neglect, and the unprocessed pain of family separations, the children of Katrina are left to chart their own path toward healing.
Filmmaker Buckles talks with Soledad O’Brien
This year marks the seventeenth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, that took 1800 lives and devastated hundreds of thousands of homes and livelihoods. Then 13-year-old Edward Buckles, Jr., saw his own life turn upside down before later documenting the stories of other children who survived the storm. Soledad O'Brien sits down with the filmmaker, whose first film, "Katrina Babies," is now airing on HBO and HBO MAX
Let’s now look at the Flint water crisis, which started in April of 2014. In 2021 60 Minutes featured this review, examining the impact on Flint’s children.
A judge has approved a $626 million settlement in the Flint water crisis case. In 2020, Sharyn Alfonsi reported on Dr. Mona Hanna-Attisha, the pediatrician who proved children in Flint were being exposed to high levels of lead in their drinking water.
Cornell University published this study in January of 2022.
Ripple effects: Flint water crisis has lasting health impacts on children
As many as a quarter of children in Flint, Michigan – approximately seven times the national average – may have experienced elevated blood lead levels after the city’s water crisis, and more children should have been screened, new Cornell University research finds. [...]
The symptoms can’t definitively be linked to the city’s tap water, but many are scientifically associated with bacterial and chemical contamination in water, said Jerel Ezell, assistant professor of Africana studies at Cornell, and lead author of the study.
“Our methods allow us to say that there was a substantial uptick in negative health outcomes among Flint children following the water crisis,” said Ezell.
In addition to answering questions about lead screening and diagnoses, caregivers reported that after the crisis their children had experienced – beyond a “normal” level – hyperactivity (44%); emotional agitation (39%); comprehension issues or learning delays (29%); and skin rashes (39%).
The 5th anniversary of Hurricane Maria is next week. Environmental conditions around the island have worsened, power outages are so frequent it is now the new normal, and many people have been forced to move to the mainland. Here’s a look back on the impact of Hurricane Maria in 2017 on the island’s children
This article by Connor Maxwell was posted six months post Maria for the Center For American Progress
America’s Sordid Legacy on Race and Disaster Recovery
Six months have passed since Hurricane Maria struck Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands. The Category 4 storm destroyed houses and significant infrastructure, leaving mass devastation. Many Puerto Ricans—who are American citizens—remain without electricity, access to clean drinking water, employment, and even housing. While this storm’s ferocity was nearly unprecedented, the Trump administration’s reaction was predictable. People of color are frequently the victims of environmental disaster while their government neglects and underserves them time and again. Too often, public officials fail to make the necessary investments in preparedness and resilience solutions, then place savings and corporate profits over the health and well-being of residents of color. The global climate is changing, and extreme weather disasters will only increase in regularity. Unless the federal government prioritizes equity in preparedness and recovery policy, environmental hazards will continue to bring ruin, displacement, and death to communities of color.
Even in times without extreme weather disasters, the United States has an abysmal record when it comes to protecting people of color from environmental hazards stemming from dangerous industrial activity and harmful infrastructure. These failures undermine trust in government and persist even to this day.
Now let’s do Jackson, Mississippi. MSNBC host Mehdi Hasan opens this segment looking at history going back to the racist reaction to Brown v Board of Education
As long as this country continues with many red state governments pushing an agenda of deeply embedded racism, with a right-wing dominated Supreme Court that now has a vested interest in maintaining it, or if we allow Republicans to control the House and/or the Senate this November, it will not even be “same ol same ol” in the future for Black, Brown, Native and poor communities — it will get worse.
We have to GOTV like never before, not just for ourselves, but for our children and grandchildren.
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NEWS ROUND UP BY DOPPER0189, BLACK KOS MANAGING EDITOR
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FBI surveillance files tracking Aretha Franklin’s racial justice activism in the 1960s and ’70s were unsealed for the first time Thursday at the request of a journalist under the Freedom of Information Act.
The 270-page document, acquired by journalist and Courage News founder Jenn Dize four years after requesting them when Franklin died in 2018, “show[s] repeated and disgusting suspicion of the famed Black singer, her work, and activists around her,” according to tweets from Dize’s Twitter account.
Filling the pages are two decades worth of FBI agents’ records of performances, public appearances, telephone calls and more, including records of when Franklin attended a Southern Christian Leadership Conference convention held in 1967 under Dr. Martin Luther King’s leadership, according to PEOPLE.
Documents filed during the ‘60s include agents’ claims that “SCLC leadership has taken a ‘hate America’ and ‘pro-Communist’ line following public remarks about China made by Franklin’s father, Clarence “C.L.” Franklin, as reported by the outlet.
Following King’s death in 1968, Franklin performed at a memorial for the civil rights leader alongside Sammy Davis Jr. and The Supremes — an event that FBI agents tracked out of suspicion that it “would provide emotional spark which could ignite racial disturbance.” Agents also said that the group had “supported militant black power concept,” per the report.
Additionally recorded in the documents are two death threats the singer recieved, one over the phone in 1979 and one through the mail in 1974, per the outlet.
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A surge in oil prices can do astonishing things. In Saudi Arabia a futuristic city is planned to rise from the desert, replete with an artificial moon made of drones. Angola’s long-beleaguered currency has suddenly become one of the strongest performers against the greenback. In the Middle East and Central Asia oil exporters are cock-a-hoop, since they may pocket $320bn more in oil revenues this year than previously forecast. Yet there is a conspicuous absentee from this merry petro-party. The net effect of the high oil price for the country that is usually Africa’s biggest oil producer is “nil or negative”, laments Zainab Ahmed, Nigeria’s minister of finance.
Africa’s most populous country, around 220m-strong, desperately needs the money an oil boom could bring. Some 40% of its people live on less than the equivalent of $1.90 a day. The government is struggling to service its debts. Social services are dire. The woeful economy has contributed to the violence that afflicts much of the country. In the first half of this year, nearly 6,000 people were killed by jihadists, kidnappers, bandits or the army.
Price controls are the biggest reason the boom is ruining the public purse. Elsewhere, as the price of crude rises, drivers pay more at the pump. Not in Nigeria. Petrol is about 175 naira ($0.42) a litre, among the world’s cheapest, yet the government has not raised the official price since December 2020. In January President Muhammadu Buhari reneged on his latest promise to reform the system, leaving the government to pay for the vast gap between Nigeria’s low fixed price and the global one. The state-owned Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (nnpc) covers the fuel subsidy from its profits and sends what is left to the government. But in the first half of this year it sent nothing at all.
The prognosis is grim. The World Bank forecast in June that the government will spend 5.4 trn naira ($12.6bn) on fuel subsidies this year, more than three times what it coughed up last year. That is more than the increase in revenue the government will get from higher crude oil prices, reckons the World Bank (see chart 1). As a result Nigeria’s net oil revenues are likely to be about 40% lower than last year, despite the high global price. That squeezes everything else. In this year’s amended budget the government allocated more to the fuel subsidy than to education, health care and welfare combined.
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Recent critiques of “presentism” fail to see that we can’t divorce the past from the present—and that supposedly objective scholarship has long promoted racist narratives and suppressed Black history. The New Republic: Black Historians Know There’s No Such Thing as Objective History
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In Raoul Peck’s documentary I Am Not Your Negro, writer James Baldwin observes, “History is not the past. History is the present. We carry our history with us. To think otherwise is criminal.” Baldwin’s remarks succinctly capture our relationship to the past. They also address the role of “presentism”—the use of a present lens to interpret the past—within the historical profession.
Historians often use the term “presentism” as a critique—to cast doubt on the objectivity of scholarship from those who consider the present in their analyses of the past. Scholars who resist “presentism” will argue that it somehow distorts the historical narrative. According to this thinking, one should never consider present circumstances when interpreting developments of the past—or when trying to understand figures from the past. To do so is to defy the very essence of the profession, one supposedly based on neutrality.
James H. Sweet, president of the American Historical Association, certainly seems to think so. In an essay titled “Is History History?” in the September issue of Perspectives, the AHA’s monthly magazine, he bemoaned a “trend toward presentism” in historical analysis, rhetorically asking, “If we don’t read the past through the prism of contemporary social justice issues—race, gender, sexuality, nationalism, capitalism—are we doing history that matters?” He later added, “If history is only those stories from the past that confirm current political positions, all manner of political hacks can claim historical expertise. Too many Americans have become accustomed to the idea of history as an evidentiary grab bag to articulate their political positions.”
Sweet’s critique ignited a broad debate about the role of the present in historical analyses. The backlash prompted Sweet to append an apology to his essay, which some on the right saw as caving to the “woke mob.” But as a Black historian who understands the power of my writing and research, there is little to debate. Black historians have long recognized the role of the present in shaping our narratives of the past. We have never had the luxury of writing about the past as though it were divorced from present concerns. The persistence of racism, white supremacy, and racial inequality everywhere in American society makes it impossible to do so.
Historians, like anyone else, exist in the present, and our work will always reflect contemporary realities—explicitly or implicitly. Contrary to popular belief, there is no standard or “neutral” interpretation of the past. The typical standard historical account of the United States, for example, is often distorted into narratives that deemphasize the contributions of people of color and uphold racial stereotypes. This was intentional. Consider the work of historian Ulrich Bonnell Phillips, widely recognized in his lifetime as one of the most influential historians of the South. His 1918 book, American Negro Slavery, was widely read and cited. Yet it offered no “objective” historical analysis. To the contrary, the book only served to perpetuate racist stereotypes about African Americans, and it helped to reinforce segregation and exclusionary laws in the U.S.
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“Learning loss,” “achievement gaps” and “recovery” dominated headlines last week with the recent news of a decrease in scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress’s (NAEP) latest testing of the nation’s 9-year-olds—including the largest decline in reading in over three decades and the first decline in math scores in almost half a decade. Results show that Black students’ scores declined by 13 points in math, which can be equated to a year of schooling, compared to where Black students scored in 2020. Predictably, these headlines have also triggered panic about Black students’ educational outcomes.
Reliance on test scores can be a narrow way of measuring student progress and those scores are often relied on to support stereotypes of Black children as unable to achieve and incapable of performing as well as their white peers. However, as many Black parents know, these stereotypes are based on racist tropes, and they don’t account for discriminatory laws and policies that have shaped inequities that impact Black children’s educational experiences and outcomes.
For example, research illustrates that school resources—particularly those like experienced educators, advanced courses, and quality facilities—impact educational outcomes. However, many school funding systems that rely on property tax revenue ignore how discriminatory practices like redlining (a practice of assigning Black neighborhoods lower property values) and segregation contribute to education funding disparities and, consequently, resource inequities between schools attended by Black students and those attended by white students. The pandemic worsened many of these longstanding resource inequities and exposed other inequities such as access to broadband.
Instead of focusing on a “return to normal,” Black parents can urge policymakers and school leaders to act to make schools safer and more equitable places where Black children can achieve and thrive. Here are some resources and recommendations for Black parents to consider as they advocate not just for recovery but for action to improve the educational experiences and outcomes of Black children:
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Voices and Soul
by Justice Putnam, Black Kos Poetry Editor
It almost seems since they can’t get away with burning witches at the stake, anymore, or hanging witches in the public square, that passing laws intended to kill women will have to do. Criminalizing a miscarriage is nothing new, but there is now a blitzkrieg of legislation to make sure it is codified for good. Goosestepping Christian Church-goers pray with Supreme Court justices in a circle of white crosses for the End of Days and if the prayers don’t work, the Seven Mountain Mandate, will.
It is difficult to find joy in the midst of all these manifestations of authoritarian kristalnachts. It is a little difficult to dance a seductive sashay to a heavy bass beat on the procession boulevard to the sea side promenade. It is so very, very difficult. To some.
Black woman joy is like this:
Mama said one day long before I was born
she was walking down the street,
foxes around her neck, their little heads
smiling up at her and out at the world
and she was wearing this suit she had saved up
a month’s paycheck for after it called to her so seductively
from the window of this boutique. And that suit
was wearing her, keeping all its promises
in all the right places. Indigo. Matching gloves.
Suede shoes dippity-do-dahed in blue.
With tassels! Honey gold. And, Lord, a hat
with plume de peacock, a conductor’s baton that bounced
to hip rhythm. She looked so fine she thought
Louis Armstrong might pop up out of those movies
she saw as a child, wipe his forehead and sing
ba da be bop oh do de doe de doe doe.
And he did. Mama did not sing but she was skiddly-doing that day,
and the foxes grinned, and she grinned
and she was the star of her own Hollywood musical
here with Satchmo who had called Ella over and now they were all
singing and dancing like a free people up Dexter Avenue,
and don’t think they didn’t know they were walking in the footsteps
of slaves and over auction sites and past where old Wallace
had held onto segregation like a life raft, but this
was not that day. This day was for foxes and hip rhythm
and musical perfection and folks on the street joining in the celebration
of breath and holiness. And they did too. In color-coordinated ensembles,
they kicked and turned and grinned and shouted like church
or football game, whatever their religious preference. The air
vibrated with music, arms, legs, and years of unrequited
sunshine. Somebody did a flip up Dexter Avenue.
It must have been a Nicholas Brother in a featured performance,
and Mama was Miss-Lena-Horne-Dorothy-Dandridge
high-stepping up the real estate, ready for her close-up.
That’s when Mama felt this little tickle. She thought
it might be pent-up joy, until a mouse squirmed out
from underneath that fine collar, over that fabulous fur,
jumped off her shoulder and ran down the street.
Left my mama standing there on Dexter Avenue in her blue
suit and dead foxes. And what did Mama do?
Everybody looking at her, robbed by embarrassment?
She said, “It be like that sometimes,” then she and Satchmo,
Ella, and the whole crew jammed their way home.
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WELCOME TO THE TUESDAY PORCH.
IF YOU ARE NEW TO THE BLACK KOS COMMUNITY, GRAB A SEAT, SOME CYBER EATS, RELAX, AND INTRODUCE YOURSELF.