Still mad about it
Commentary by Chitown Kev
Sooooooooooo….because of a stay in the hospital, I had to chuck my Black Kos entry for today (but never fear...two weeks from today!). I’m OK, although I do have to watch myself.
On extended hospital stays, I tend to choose certain TV obsessions. Last year it was Law and Order reruns. This past weekend, my obsessions were more divided between The Food Network, British mysteries on PBS, and, of course, the criminal trial of the shoe salesman in lower Manhattan.
One of the major reasons that I voted for Joe Biden is that I hoped that I wouldn’t have to hear from the orange shoe salesman mofo again other than watching him and his crime family get perp-walked behind bars.
There’s a very very slim chance that I may see the perp walk behind bars, still.
But really, I’m just sick and tired of hearing about him. He dominates the airwaves as much as he ever has. He won’t stop criming!
And there just may be enough people in the right places in this country to elect him POTUS yet again. All based on a platform of supremacy. White. Male. Faux Christian. I could add to the list but those are the major supremacies, I guess.
When I think of these so-called “supremacies,” there’s another thought that occurs to me and has occurred to me ever since he rode down that escalator in 2015.
Is this the best that y’all can do?
When America elected its first Black President in 2008, it was because one of the finest, smartest, and most ethical of Black Americans stepped into the arena (to borrow a phrase from Teddy Roosevelt).
And the response is...an admirer of a fictional cannibal?
I mean, the response does not even reach the level of mediocre!
You know what?
If they want to stay mad about someone who has not been in office for eight years now, who am I to stop them?
But don’t expect me not to rub it in their faces.
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News round up by dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor
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An all-white, local Virginia school board must think they’re slick because they just voted to roll back the renaming of two schools commemorating Confederate military and pro-slavery icons Stonewall Jackson, Robert E. Lee, and Turner Ashby.
In the wake of the 2020 Black Lives Matter movement, Virginia’s Shenandoah County school board changed the names of Stonewall Jackson High School and Ashby Lee Elementary School in Quicksburg, Virginia, to Mountain View High School and Honey Run Elementary School. Per American History, Jackson, Lee, and Ashby were all big on keeping Black people in bondage.
However, as reported by WTVR Richmond, the school board this week has voted 5-1 to reverse that decision and return to their roots, so to speak. The decision garnered celebrations from some and condemnation by others.
According to multiple reports, the reversal is considered to be the first case in our nation’s history that a school was reinstated with names associated with Confederate icons; with the ongoing war against all things diversity, equity, and inclusion that seems to be happening around the country, this seems to only be the beginning of a “realignment” with Confederacy.
Last month, a group of residents named The Coalition for Better Schools reportedly asked the school board to consider reinstating the names. In an April 3 letter to the school board, the organization said it believed “that revisiting this decision is essential to honor our community’s heritage and respect the wishes of the majority.”
One woman in favor of restoring the Confederate names said it was simply about “preservation,” WTVR reports. “I ask that when you cast your vote, you remember that Stonewall Jackson and others fighting on the side of the Confederacy in this area were intent on protecting the land, the buildings and the lives of those under attack.”
However, a Black eighth-grader by the name of Aaliyah Ogle had another take, the Daily Mail reported.
‘This year I played three sports at Mountain View. I’m a black student,” she said during the public school board session on May 9. By reinstating the Confederate names, “I would have to represent a man that fought for my ancestors to be slaves,” she explained. “That makes me feel like I’m disrespecting my ancestors and going against what my family and I believe, which is that you should all be treated equally and that slavery an awful thing.”
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A federal judge has ruled Arkansas cannot prevent two high school teachers from discussing critical race theory in the classroom, but he stopped short of more broadly blocking the state from enforcing its ban on “indoctrination” in public schools.
U.S. District Judge Lee Rudofsky issued a narrow preliminary injunction Tuesday evening against the ban, one of several changes adopted under an education overhaul that Republican Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders signed into law last year.
The prohibition is being challenged by two teachers and two students at Little Rock Central High School, site of the 1957 desegregation crisis.
In his 50-page ruling, Rudofsky said the state’s arguments make it clear the law doesn’t outright “prevent classroom instruction that teaches, uses, or refers to any theory, idea, or ideology.”
His ruling prohibited the state from disciplining the teachers for teaching, mentioning or discussing critical race theory — an academic framework dating to the 1970s that centers on the idea that racism is embedded in the nation’s institution. The theory is not a fixture of K-12 education, and Arkansas’ ban does not define what constitutes critical race theory.
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This Mother's Day will be especially poignant for a New Jersey woman who will not only celebrate being a mom, but also becoming a doctor.
Tamiah Brevard-Rodriguez was working on her doctoral dissertation presentation from Rutgers when she went into labor on March 25.
She was only eight months pregnant and was scheduled to deliver her dissertation defense that day.
"I was physically prepared for a pregnancy, mentally my brain was not on a baby," she said. "So I was having a very emotional response to knowing I was in labor, knowing I had this defense. I was literally shaking."
She had everything planned out with staff and faculty at Rutgers to examine standards Black women face on historically white college campuses. But things went off schedule when her water broke. Brevard-Rodriguez's wife rushed to their car after their doula told them to get moving as contractions increased.
The drive on the Garden State Parkway to the hospital was a race against time. "The doula is trying to tell me don't grunt him out, just breathe and I'm like 'this baby is coming,'" Brevard-Rodriguez said.
At that point, her wife, Alyza Brevard-Rodriguez, said she was probably driving 120 mph on the highway.
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A teenager who video-recorded his mother’s forceful arrest by Louisiana sheriff’s deputies in 2020 has been awarded $185,000 by a federal jury in a lawsuit filed over one deputy’s attempt to interfere with the recording.
De’Shaun Johnson was 14 when deputies arrived at his family’s home in St. Tammany Parish to question his mother, Teliah Perkins, about allegations she had ridden a motorcycle without a helmet — a charge her attorneys said was baseless and that was never prosecuted.
The confrontation turned physical, and video showed the woman being forced to the ground.
A lawsuit against the deputies was filed by the American Civil Liberties Union and the law firm of Reid Collins & Tsai as part of the ACLU’s Justice Lab project, aimed at addressing allegations of police abuses.
A federal appeals court largely sided with the St. Tammany Parish Sheriff’s Office on many of the allegations, squelching much of the lawsuit over the deputies’ use of force. But it allowed the litigation to continue over allegations that one deputy interfered with Johnson’s use of his phone to film the arrest. The ACLU said the deputy stepped in front of Johnson when he began recording the arrest and threatened Johnson with a Taser.
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The gangs in Haiti can't be ignored. This weekend they took the streets in their neighborhoods in a show of force. NPR saw dozens of heavily armed men, some wearing balaclavas in the blazing Caribbean heat, with handguns, with assault rifles with machetes.
And Jimmy Chérizier, known as Babekyou in Haitian Creole — or Barbecue — is one of the most powerful and notorious gang leaders. He heads the G9 federation of gangs.
He is the man who convinced many of Haiti's gangs to stop fighting each other and start fighting the government. The alliance of rival gangs is known as Viv Ansanm, or "Living Together."
Over the past two months, they've attacked government installations, brought down a prime minister and nearly paralyzed the capital city. Haitians have largely been left to fend for themselves.
The U.S. Treasury put him on a sanctions list in 2020, and the United Nations sanctioned him in 2022. He stands accused of human rights abuses, including taking part in massacres, along with other charges.
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