Commentary by Black Kos editor JoanMar
In their pre-Super Bowl program, CBS, in collaboration with the NFL, featured a segment reflecting on the activism of NFL players following the murders of George Floyd and Michael Brown and the all-too familiar list of names that we’ve come to know by heart. For the life of me, I cannot find the video, even after reaching out to CBS. The tightly produced piece brought back memories, and it also left me with a feeling of profound sadness. It reminded me that I truly thought that the massive, hitherto unseen-in-its-scope, protests nationally and internationally would have an impact on the powers-that-be, and that the end product would be a sophisticated national police force that would respect the lives and rights of the citizens of this country. While it was good to be reminded of the players who were willing to sacrifice for the greater good, the production missed the mark for me. I found it to be largely self-congratulatory and celebratory, even; suggesting as it was, that we had made significant strides and that the problem was largely solved. There was no sense of urgency.
The idea that over-policing and police brutality are largely contained is false. Nothing could be further from the truth:
Sadly, the trend of fatal police shootings in the United States seems to only be increasing, with a total 101 civilians having been shot, 6 of whom were Black, as of January 25, 2024.
Do you remember the massive protests in the wake of the execution-style murder of teenage Michael Brown? Remember members of Congress participating in the “hands up, don’t shoot” demonstration? Remember the sights of doctors & nurses doing lie-ins; students walking out of classes to show solidarity? Remember the hard, self-sacrificing work put in by members of our group, Support the Dream Defenders, working with a sense of urgency to draft bills that we then sent off to civil rights organizations, members of Congress, celebrities, and anyone we believed could shake the needle even a little? I remember.
Reflecting on those times, I realized that I truly believed that messages were being sent that would be received by those who could make a difference. I remember feeling/hoping that “good cops” would see what was happening and would begin to police their own. And yes, we had some successes. We tinkered around the edges of the problem and we got some concessions. And then it got worse.
In 2014, the year Michael Brown, little Tamir Rice, and Eric Garner were killed, cops killed 1047 people.
In 2020, the year Derek Chauvin murdered George Floyd and Louisville cops took out Breonna Taylor, cops killed 1152 people.
According to Mapping Police Violence website, US cops killed a whopping 1349 people in 2023.
In the year that cops killed 1349 people, there were no major nation-wide protest. And while the brutalization of Tyre Nichols got some national attention, the conversation quickly devolved into the issue of “trauma porn” rather than the act of violence itself.
Police killed more than 1,300 people in 2023, a year that saw several high-profile cases including the fatal beating of Tyre Nichols in Memphis, Tennessee, the shooting of an environmental activist who was protesting the construction of a police and fire training center near Atlanta and the death of a Virginia man who was "smothered" in a hospital. There were only 14 days without a police killing last year and on average, law enforcement officers killed someone every 6.6 hours, according to the report, which is primarily based on news reports and includes data from state and local government agencies.
What we missed (1):
Two cops respond to a call from a senior living complex. Friends of a 67-year-old blind, suicidal woman are concerned that she might hurt herself. When the cops got to her apartment, they found the door locked which she refused to open. They, of course, kicked down her door and “found [her] shouting from under the covers of her bed, asking the officers who they are and telling them to leave.” Cops claimed they pulled the covers off her and saw a gun. The result of this “welfare check” is that they ended up firing 15 shots at a 67-year-old blind, suicidal woman in her bed. Fifteen shots.
What accounts for lack of interest?
1) Are we tired of fighting for something that seems unachievable in this lifetime? Hmm… maybe. But we just cannot afford the luxury of becoming complacent.
2) The BLM movement has been largely defanged. Much as they did to ACORN, the right wing succeeded in demonizing BLM. True, the documented greed and overreach of some prominent members of the leadership group didn’t help, but there is no denying that Fox and its affiliates, combined with lazy journalism, succeeded in their mission to delegitimize BLM. They are no longer a potent force. The voices of NAACP and other prominent civil rights organizations seem muted.
3) The backlash against the “Defund the Police” slogan. Not only did right wing types successfully use the slogan against us, but there was also vociferous pushback from within our own communities. It pushed us on the defensive and forced us to put precious time and energy into explaining. The forward march sputtered and lost its momentum.
4) The right’s mission to go after CRT, woke, and DEI gained traction and picked up speed. The Supreme Court’s affirmative action ruling had its intended effect. The narrative became that we’ve already achieved racial justice and that police brutality was no longer an issue.
5) The pushback against Black trauma porn. While there is legitimate concern about the effect of showing Black bodies being brutalized, not showing the result of the trauma has not eliminated the trauma itself. The conversation surrounding BTP eclipsed that of police accountability and overpolicing.
What we missed (2):
55-year-old Mario Bonilla was considered missing and endangered.
"When [cops] encountered the individual, he got out of the vehicle. He was armed with a weapon. He was given verbal commands to drop that weapon. He did not. Instead, he charged at the deputies, causing one of the deputies to fire his weapon," BSO spokesperson Veda Coleman-Wright said.
He died on the scene.
Reflecting on the Super Bowl, seeing the league that banished Colin Kaepernick for daring to use his earned platform to advocate for justice, now portraying themselves as champions against injustice, felt sorta surreal to me. The job is far, far from being done. The end zone is nowhere in sight and there ought to be no spiking of the ball. The fact that they’d dare to suggest that there was any reason to celebrate, makes me wanna think that this is just another attempt to dilute and or derail the movements for change.
What do you think?
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News round up by dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor
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Romantic relationships are in a weird place right now.
Sure, I have anecdotal evidence; I could open my phone and see a dating app horror story in any one of my group chats.
But I don’t have to take you through the dating woes of DC 30-somethings because data supports this too. Statistically, things are shifting. According to Pew Research, back in 1980 about 6 percent of Americans aged 40 and over had never been married. Now that number sits around 25 percent. If you’ve looked at the op-ed pages of any major newspaper, you’ve probably seen the hand-wringing about this falling marriage rate.
If you are or know a single person, this probably doesn’t come as too much of a surprise. But as I was looking at the numbers, one thing did surprise me: just how much lower the rate is for Black people. It’s always been lower, but the gap is now huge.
Back in the ’70s, a little over 20 percent of Black women had never been married. Now it’s nearly 48 percent.
Why do Black people get married less, and why does it matter?
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Washington’s handling of the Israel-Palestine conflict appears to be hurting the president’s credibility among African Americans. Foreign Policy: Is Biden’s Gaza Policy Alienating Black Voters?
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In the beginning of January, in an attempt to boost political morale among his most loyal constituency, Biden made an appearance at the Mother Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina—where nine Black Americans were gunned down by a white supremacist shooter in 2015. At this sacred site, it was fitting that Biden spoke about domestic issues such as racism and political violence. Unfortunately, Biden’s foreign-policy woes followed him to the pulpit, where he was interrupted by protesters demanding a cease-fire in the Israel-Hamas war.
Churches like Mother Emanuel AME play a key role in shaping the voting decisions of the larger Black community. More and more members of the clergy are speaking out from the pulpit against Biden’s support for Israel. A recent New York Times article revealed that over the past several months more than 1,000 Black pastors—ranging from conservative Southern Baptist churches to progressive nondenominational congregations in the Midwest and Northeast—have called for an end to Israel’s offensive operations in Gaza as well as the release of all hostages held by Hamas. As in other parts of the American public, much of the momentum behind Black faith leaders’ calls for a cease-fire is coming from younger congregants.
THE GROWING DISCONTENTMENT with Biden’s handling of the conflict was in some ways foreseeable. A Carnegie Endowment for International Peace survey of Black American opinion on the conflict conducted in October 2023, long before the death toll in Gaza had mounted, already revealed that 95 percent of Black Americans rejected the idea of “unwavering support” for Israel. Furthermore, while most Black Americans (65 percent) did not feel any worse about Biden in this early period of the conflict, Black Americans under the age of 30 were 33 percent more likely to report feeling worse about the president compared to the rest of respondents.
As one pastor in the swing state of Georgia stated, “It’s going to be very hard to persuade our people to go back to the polls and vote for Biden.” This comes on the heels of polling that reveals that Black voters’ approval rating for Biden in recent months is down nearly 20 percentage points. It is more and more difficult to view the mounting number of civilian deaths and worsening humanitarian crisis in Gaza as being in line with the human rights commitments Biden ran on in 2020.
The dip in enthusiasm for Biden is in part related to a feeling of Black-Palestinian solidarity among some of these disaffected Black voters. For others, lackluster support for Biden could also be a function of a limited appetite for yet another U.S. entanglement in the Middle East. For instance, the same Carnegie survey revealed that a quarter (24 percent) of Black respondents felt that the United States should not be involved in the Israel-Palestine conflict and that only 33 percent would be willing to send troops to the region if Israel is attacked by a neighboring state.
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“I’m very afraid,” says Colombian lawyer Adil Meléndez Márquez, the day after being presented with an award in London honouring human rights defenders.
Meléndez is no stranger to death threats, because of his work on cases related to Colombia’s decades-long civil war, environmental justice and corruption, but things have just got a lot scarier. With bitter irony, 20 minutes after receiving the Sir Henry Brooke award from the Alliance for Lawyers at Risk, his bodyguards called him to say that they had been stood down from, leaving him without protection.
In an interview with the Guardian in London, Meléndez said he is a rarity in Colombia, a human rights lawyer who hails from among those he represents. He is Afro Colombian and works predominately on cases for Afro Colombians and Indigenous communities, often in areas under the control of paramilitaries rather than the government. He was kidnapped when he was 12 so has first-hand experience of the violence which blights the country and has received threats since becoming involved with Movice (movement of victims of state crimes) in 2006.
After receiving threats Meléndez took a case to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights – an organ of the Organization of American States – which, in 2009, ordered Colombia to provide him with protection. For the first eight years this amounted to three personal bodyguards and a bulletproof car, then the bulletproof car was removed and later one of the bodyguards, leaving him with two until last week, he says.
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A protest march scheduled for Tuesday against Senegalese President Macky Sall’s controversial move to delay this month’s presidential poll to December has been postponed after authorities banned it, organisers said.
Elymane Haby Kane, one of the organisers of the march, told AFP news agency he received an official letter from local authorities in the capital, Dakar, that the march was banned as it could seriously hamper traffic.
“We will postpone the march because we want to remain within the law,” said Malick Diop, coordinator of a collective that called the protest. “The march was banned. There’s a problem with the route so we will change this.”
Mobile internet coverage was also restricted, just as it had been on the day of the parliamentary vote.
“Due to the dissemination on social networks of several subversive hate messages that have already provoked violent demonstrations… mobile data is suspended this Tuesday 13 February,” the Ministry of Communication, Telecommunications and Digital Energy said in a statement.
Sall’s decision to push back the February 25 vote plunged Senegal into a crisis that saw clashes between protesters and police in which three people were killed.
The Aar Sunu Election (Let’s Protect Our Election) collective, which includes some 40 civil, religious and professional groups, had called for a rally in Dakar on Tuesday at 15:00 GMT.
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In the middle of the night, dozens of masked figures burst on to a street in a blaze of colour, each clutching a stick from which hangs a rubber ball. As they prance through a crowd of raucous onlookers, they repeatedly slam the balls against the ground with a dull thud that gets lost in the crackle of fireworks overhead.
These are Rio de Janeiro’s bate-bolas, or ball-slammers. In the working-class suburbs, a world away from the glitzy Sambadrome parades and beachside street parties, it is these clown-like figures who reign over the pre-Lenten revelry, delighting and frightening in equal measure with their mesmerising costumes and playful antics.
“It’s our escape valve … When you slam the ball, you let out this cry, you release this energy, you let everything out,” said Bruno Nicolau Agnelo, 39, who 20 years ago founded a bate-bola group in Nilópolis, a satellite city north-west of Rio.
“Bate-bola culture helps us create bonds of friendship, brotherhood. We consider ourselves a family,” Agnelo added of his group of 140 men who roam the streets during carnival to the sound of favela funk music, clad head to toe in voluminous outfits and feathered masks – part of a tradition whose roots date back to medieval Celtic rituals in Portugal, researchers believe.
Some groups carry ornate parasols instead of a ball, and a growing number of women are also getting involved in what was originally a male pastime. Agnelo’s band, named Bombardeio do Paiol (Bombardment from Paiol) after their neighbourhood’s old gunpowder factory, has a sister group called the Bombardettes.
“It’s a culture that ends up mixing and combining different elements, and adapting over time,” said Gustavo Lacerda, a cultural producer who has studied Rio’s bate-bolas. “Today, the bate-bolas [exist] in multiple forms … but they are united in their extravagance.”
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