Thoughts about Black Kos, (with a poll)
Commentary by Black Kos Editor Denise Oliver-Velez
After reading and responding to many of the detailed and thoughtful comments, in "How did you begin to unlearn racism?" on Sunday—some from people I've never seen comments from before, and others who I know are regular members or readers of Black Kos—it got me to thinking. We have an excellent resource right here at Daily Kos, for unlearning racism—a Black Kos community in which a majority of readers and members are white (even though assumptions are often made that they are black—just 'cause they are here) who have a real interest in interacting at Daily Kos with black folks and other people of color, and staying on top of news, and views from the black diaspora.
This comment from Black Kos community member joedemocrat touched me, and I thank him for making it.
Hi Denise and everyone (9+ / 0-)
I'll answer your question honestly as I can....
When I came to Daily Kos, I could recognize overt racism, but not the subtle kind. I had never heard the term white privilege or other terms. Also, I did not know how it was embedded or about issues like police brutality, and mass incarceration, etc..
I grew up in a small town in the midwest that was all white. I had high school teachers who were bothered by the idea of interracial marriage. I knew people who were furious there was an organization called NAACP thinking it a reverse form of racism.
People may say they aren't racist. But they support racist policies and racist politicians and political parties.
My mother didn't have those beliefs, so it wasn't taught at home. She was born in the early 1930's in Germany. She knew both poverty and war. She was a strong Democrat -
as strong as they come.
There were WWII Veterans who didn't like us. I was made fun of in school.
Also, unfortunately I had a verbally abusive father.
This has made me want to stick up for the underdog and the oppressed. That probably gave me an open mind to learn.
I feel I am slower to pick up on non-overt racism than you or others who participate in Black Kos are. I try to follow. If you or other Black Kos regulars are bothered by something and I don't understand, instead of thinking you overreacted I try to listen and learn.
We are all who we are politically due to our life experiences. Those experiences will be different. We can all relate best to ourselves and those like us. But sometimes you have to stop and ask yourself "What was it like to walk in these people's shoes?" And one reason this country is in so much trouble is very few people can do that. Oppression seems normalized in many ways. Anytime a group gets any kind of privileged status, they become disconnected from those who don't.
I think it is important to build bridges too because we are always stronger together than as individuals. And there are so many problems we need to work together.
In that effort to build bridges, and to look at where we've been and where we are today, we'd like to hear from you regulars but also those who "lurk" and read but may not comment.
It's been several years since I posted "A question for Kossaks (with poll)," which was followed by Black Kos, Tuesday's Chile: roll call and lurker come-out edition, which garnered 615 comments and 127 recommends. I decided it is time to do it again.
We have two new editors, Joan Mar and ChitownKev, (yay!) and new readers too.
First a little history:
For those of you who are not Daily Kos "old timers," Black Kos, was founded by dopper0189, on Tue Jan 02, 2007, as an open thread, which evolved into Black Kos: weekly round up, and then became Black Kos: Week in review. On Fri Mar 21, 2008 dopper published "My last Black Kos week in review diary," and Black Kos as a UID was born.
As you can see from reading this diary, Black Kos is "going community" on you! Starting next week Black Kos will be a group effort, Robinswing, Sephius1, Terrypinder, and myself will collaborate on writing "Black Kos week in review" diaries. The new home starting next week will be at Black Kos. Thank you Markos and Meteor Blades for giving us permission to do so (and understanding this isn't a "sockpuppet" but a community effort). So in the future please hotlist "Black Kos". Thank you everyone who read and helped make this diary possible, I will still be around as dopper0189, but the week in review will now be done by the group ID Black Kos. Once again thank you everyone!
Black Kos currently has 765 followers, and the
Black Kos community, was founded in 2011.
Black Kos has gone through some amazing highs over time, and our most recommended diary was ***Update: Statement of Opposition to Racist Labels Used by Kossacks to Criticize President Obama, with 2524 comments, 983 recommends, posted on April 16, 2013, followed immediately by Continued: Statement of Opposition to Racist Labels Used by Kossacks to Criticize President Obama, because the first diary became almost impossible to open.
We've been through meta, and pie wars, ups and downs, and each year end dopper0189 (David-who we affectionately call "Chief") publishes a Black Kos Year in Review.
We've covered the earthquake in Haiti, news out of Africa, and the ongoing protests and reactions to the killings of black folks here at home, as well as electoral politics, history, science, medicine, the environment, music, art, poetry, film and television.
Now we would like to hear from you—our readers.
Please take the poll at the bottom of the diary, and we hope some of you will de-lurk to say hello. We'd like to hear from regular members too, about when and why you joined.
One of the things we learned in the last poll was that many people don't comment because they feel they "don't want to intrude" in a "black space," not realizing that this is an integrated space with more white than black members.
If you would like an invitation to join, let us know in comments. You can also check the heart next to Black Kos up top to follow us.
I just want to add yet another thank-you to our Chief—for having sustained this series for so long, to previous editors, and most of all to our readers and members.
See you on the porch.
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News by dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor
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The Austin, Texas, native who fought at Iwo Jima in World War II credits his longevity to whiskey and cigars. Bloomberg: Photographer: /Pablo Martinez Monsivais/AP Photo Richard Overton, America's Oldest Veteran, Is a Favorite Among Politicians.
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To hear Richard Overton tell it, he never thought he "would be that important."
Born in Bastrop County, Texas, in 1906, by the time Overton celebrated his 109th birthday on May 11 of this year, he had already gotten used to his celebrity as America's oldest living combat veteran.
Having served in the Pacific theater during World War II from 1942 to 1945, Overton was part of the all-black 1887th Engineer Aviation Battalion, fighting in places like Iwo Jima and Okinawa. While he saw his share of enemy fire, he says "didn't get a scratch," and left the service after attaining the rank of Sergeant. While his role in the war has brought him fame, the memories of battle have been a burden.
“War’s nothing to be into. You don’t want to go into the war if you don’t have to.”
“War’s nothing to be into,” Overton told USA Today in 2013. “You don’t want to go into the war if you don’t have to. But I had to go. I enjoyed it after I’d went and come back, but I didn’t enjoy it when I was over there. I had to do things I didn’t want to do.”
As an ambassador for the memory of those who served, Overton has proven himself exemplary. In that role, the Austin, Texas, native has been regularly praised by politicians of both parties, many of whom have come to pay tribute to him and listen to his stories of war.
Official White House Photo by Lawrence Jackson
President Barack Obama greets Richard Overton in the Blue Room of the White House, Nov. 11, 2013.
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A week after a shootout between bikers in Texas and a year after three died in Myrtle Beach, Bikefest attendees say they are not being treated equally. The Guardian: 'Black Bike Week' riders cry foul over security increase at annual gathering.
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The 2015 Bikefest, however, was different. Ocean Boulevard, a two-lane commercial strip running parallel to the Atlantic Ocean, was partially closed. Hundreds of police officers enforced a one-way traffic pattern that clogged streets for miles and forced motorcyclists to idle in gridlock for hours. Much to the dismay of riders, pedestrians walked faster than bikes.
Outside the Sandy Beach Oceanfront Resort, Sean Robinson watched the stop-and-go traffic from the seat of his parked 2008 Harley Davidson, his arms crossed. For the sixth consecutive year, he had traveled five hours from Richmond, Virginia, to attend Bikefest, which is known to most attendees as “Black Bike Week”. He was upset with the way things had changed.
“I’ll never come again,” said Robinson, blasting Migos’ hit song Hannah Montana from the stereo of his bike. He said his group of friends spent more than $20,000 on lodging for a week-long stay, with little return.
“We’re spending a whole lot of money,” he said. “You can’t ride a Harley. You can’t move. It used to be open and you could go both ways, sideways, everything.”
An estimated 400,000 people were expected to travel to Myrtle Beach for the holiday weekend. But one week after nine people died in a white biker gang shootout in Waco, Texas, Myrtle Beach officials invoked public safety as they ramped up police presence and enacted their controversial traffic plan.
Last year, the vast majority of riders peacefully partook in Bikefest. But three people were shot to death and several others suffered gunshot wounds. South Carolina’s governor, Nikki Haley, called for city officials to end Bikefest for good. Local officials decided to keep Bikefest going, albeit with some drastic changes.
Sean Robinson, a Harley Davidson enthusiast from Richmond, Virginia does not plan to return to Bikefest. Photograph: Max Blau
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As public sector employment, once a dependable pathway to success for many blacks, was cut in the downturn, African-American communities suffered an outsize toll. New York Times: Public-Sector Jobs Vanish, Hitting Blacks Hard.
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For the Ingram clan, working for the Miami-Dade County transit system has led to regular paychecks, a steady advance up the economic ladder and even romance.
By driving buses in Miami’s sun-scraped communities, Richard Ingram and his wife, Susie, were able to join the ranks of the black middle class, moving with their four sons from a rental in the down-and-out neighborhood of Overtown eventually into their own house in central Miami.
Two of their children later followed them to the county bus depot. The eldest son, also named Richard, met his future wife there when she was assigned to the same route as his father.
“I tell you, my job is a godsend,” Richard Ingram Jr. said.
Now his older son, 21-year-old DQuan, is applying to take the transit system test, hoping to become a third-generation driver. But Mr. Ingram said that unlike when he was hired, today the competition is tougher and the jobs are a lot scarcer.
For the Ingrams and millions of other black families, working for the government has long provided a dependable pathway to the middle class and a measure of security harder to find in the private sector, particularly for those without college degrees.
Roughly one in five black adults works for the government, teaching school, delivering mail, driving buses, processing criminal justice and managing large staffs. They are about 30 percent more likely to have a public sector job than non-Hispanic whites, and twice as likely as Hispanics.
Richard Ingram Jr., with his son Richard, is a second-generation Miami-Dade County bus driver. Credit Angel Valentin for The New York Times
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Miami Herald: Faith-based leaders unite Republicans and Democrats to reduce youth arrests.
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Myles, an elder at Bethel Community Baptist Church and director of its truancy intervention program, was part of a loose-knit coalition of activists, faith-based leaders and service providers who traveled to Tallahassee to change the way Florida law treats juvenile offenders. They were pushing for an expansion of civil citations, an alternative to arrest.
Their bill was among 200 proposals that made it to Gov. Rick Scott’s desk — no small accomplishment in a year that saw the House adjourn early because of a tense budget standoff. The issue didn’t attract much attention, but it prompted an emotional and often divisive debate. Powerful business interests fought against an early version of the proposal. And tough-on-crime conservatives tried to water it down.
For the advocates, it was an eye-opening and exhausting look into the complicated inner-workings of state government.
“We’re not lobbyists,” Myles said after the 60-day legislative session came to an end earlier this month. “We just knew this makes sense. It was something our lawmakers couldn’t say ‘no’ to.”
Florida law has long allowed police officers to issue civil citations to young people who are first-time offenders. The citation itself is akin to a traffic ticket. The teenagers must pay restitution, perform community service or receive counseling services. But they are not left with a criminal record, which could derail future opportunities for jobs, scholarships or college admission.
The hope: young people will learn from the experience and avoid future run-ins with the law.
“What it allows us to do is to intervene and assess that youth early, and to provide the opportunity to keep those kids from going deeper into the system,” Department of Juvenile Justice Secretary Christina Daly said.
A decade ago, most of Florida’s civil citation programs existed in affluent communities. That troubled Wansley Walters, who was then director of the Miami-Dade Juvenile Services Department. Her office teamed up with the Miami-Dade schools police department and the state attorney’s office to launch a countywide initiative. The program quickly led to a 30 percent drop in youth arrests, according to published reports.
When Walters was tapped to lead the state Department of Juvenile Justice in 2011, she helped pass legislation to spread the concept across the state. It wasn’t an easy sell in some communities, Walters recalled. But law enforcement agencies in 59 of Florida’s 67 counties eventually came on board.
James Myles of St. Petersburg is the executive director of Bethel Community Foundation Inc., CINS FINS Truancy Intervention Program Services. He poses outside of the Bethel Community Baptist Church.
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Police officers earn more than you think for a job that’s less dangerous than you imagine. Slate: The Myth of the Hero Cop.
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It’s hard to prosecute cops. There are two main reasons for this: The first is the special deference that jurors, judges, and prosecutors show officers thanks to the widespread perception that they are heroic public figures valiantly trying to protect us. The second is the bevy of special laws around the country that are designed to shield police officers from the very tactics the police regularly use on ordinary suspects. For example, in most states, law enforcement officers cannot be questioned until they have been given a few days to get their stories straight. And many states have passed laws—such as Section 50-a of New York’s Civil Rights Law—that are specifically designed to make it almost impossible to obtain or use at trial records of a police officer’s prior brutality or misconduct. These two factors can make convicting police officers extremely difficult, and it is no accident; it is the direct result of the sustained effort by police unions to protect officers from even the most deserved discipline or prosecution.
It is far safer to be a NYPD officer than an average black man in Baltimore.
While the rules that unfairly protect the police must be changed, it is also high time to re-examine the foundation of these policies: the public perception—lovingly curated by police unions—of the very nature of police work.
For the last three decades, police unions have managed to portray their members as indispensable heroes in a deadly and dangerous war. Fallen officers, like Benjamin Deen and Liquori Tate, who were shot in Mississippi on May 9, or Brian Moore, whose funeral in New York was a few days earlier, are uniformly described as heroes. One need only listen to the fife and drums, witness the squadron of NYPD helicopters flying the missing man formation, or gaze at the image of tens of thousands of white-gloved officers standing at attention to understand the profound nature of their particular brand of heroism.
But as we read the heartrending newspaper coverage and weep at the pomp that attends a line-of-duty death, we can become a party to a false and dangerous narrative that does more to rend our society asunder than heal our legitimately broken hearts. That’s because the story of the hero cop is also used to legitimize brutality as necessary, justify policies that favor the police, and punish anyone who dares to question police tactics or oppose the unions’ agendas. Quite simply, in the years since the Sept. 11 attacks, the story of the hero cop has become so powerful and pervasive that even questioning police behavior is decried as disloyal, un-American, and dangerous.
(continued)
The hero cop narrative is also belied by the facts. According to the United States Bureau of Labor Statistics, police work does not crack the top-10 list of most dangerous jobs. Loggers have a fatality rate 11 times higher than cops, and sanitation workers die in the line of duty at twice the rate that police do. Yes, police officers are sometimes shot and killed, but this is a fairly rare phenomenon. Indeed, according to the National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial Fund, of the 100 officers killed in the United States in the line of duty in 2013, far more crashed their cars or were hit by cars than were shot or stabbed. In fact, if you compare the murder rate among police officers with the murder rate in several American cities, you find that it is far safer to be a NYPD officer than an average black man in Baltimore or St. Louis.
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Voices and Soul
by Justice Putnam
Black Kos Poetry Editor
For those of the Black Community who have been incarcerated, Due Process was really a Dual Process; and Equal Protection was really Unequal. It is an old tale, as old as America, sadly; and one that seems to be unchanged now or in the future. Etheridge Knight spent eight years in Indiana State Prison. He chronicled his time there; and later, after his release in 1968, became an important part of the Black Arts Movement. Though many of his poems speak of redemption, many more also speak of hope lost; and of the mind-numbing passage of time, locked in a warren of oppressive authority.
Hard Rock Returns To Prison From The Hospital For The Criminal Insane
Hard Rock / was / "known not to take no shit
From nobody," and he had the scars to prove it:
Split purple lips, lumbed ears, welts above
His yellow eyes, and one long scar that cut
Across his temple and plowed through a thick
Canopy of kinky hair.
The WORD / was / that Hard Rock wasn't a mean nigger
Anymore, that the doctors had bored a hole in his head,
Cut out part of his brain, and shot electricity
Through the rest. When they brought Hard Rock back,
Handcuffed and chained, he was turned loose,
Like a freshly gelded stallion, to try his new status.
and we all waited and watched, like a herd of sheep,
To see if the WORD was true.
As we waited we wrapped ourselves in the cloak
Of his exploits: "Man, the last time, it took eight
Screws to put him in the Hole." "Yeah, remember when he
Smacked the captain with his dinner tray?" "he set
The record for time in the Hole-67 straight days!"
"O Hard Rock! man, that's one crazy nigger."
And then the jewel of a myth that Hard Rock had once bit
A screw on the thumb and poisoned him with syphilitic spit.
The testing came to see if Hard Rock was really tame.
A hillbilly called him a black son of a bitch
And didn't lose his teeth, a screw who knew Hard Rock
From before shook him down and barked in his face
And Hard Rock did nothing. Just grinned and look silly.
His empty eyes like knot holes in a fence.
And even after we discovered that it took Hard Rock
Exactly 3 minutes to tell you his name,
we told ourselves that he had just wised up,
Was being cool; but we could not fool ourselves for long.
And we turned away, our eyes on the ground. Crushed.
He had been our Destroyer, the doer of things
We dreamed of doing but could not bring ourselves to do.
The fears of years like a biting whip,
Had cut deep bloody grooves
Across our backs.
-- Etheridge Knight
-- "Hard Rock Returns To Prison From The Hospital For The Criminal Insane"
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Pull up a chair and sit down a while and enjoy the company.