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Black Kos Tuesday: Accidents [1]

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Date: 2023-07-04

Accidents

Commentary by Chitown Kev

I’ve never been a “patriotic” person, tbh.

I was born in a specific place and in a specific time with two specific parents and under some very specific circumstances.

That doesn’t make me or those circumstances any more special than anyone else, really. After all, the “accident” of my birth could have happened any place else and at any time and under those different circumstances I would have a different religion or a different skin complexion or a different sexual orientation, etc.

Based on those circumstances of time and space I’ve lived a certain life; not always a “good” life, mind you, but...good enough. I try to make the best of it, not always successfully.

Today is Independence Day in America, the day which Americans celebrate the “unalienable rights” of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” pursued separately from their colonial masters, the British.

I think of the man who wrote those words. Mr. Thomas Jefferson also wrote these words in an early draft of the Declaration of Independence.

He has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life and liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating & carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither. This piratical warfare, the opprobrium of infidel powers, is the warfare of the Christian King of Great Britain. Determined to keep open a market where Men should be bought & sold, he has prostituted his negative for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or restrain this execrable commerce. And that this assemblage of horrors might want no fact of distinguished die, he is now exciting those very people to rise in arms among us, and to purchase that liberty of which he has deprived them, by murdering the people on whom he has obtruded them: thus paying off former crimes committed again the Liberties of one people, with crimes which he urges them to commit against the lives of another.

When I was in Philadelphia for the Netroots Nation conference in 2019, I walked past Declaration House a few times on the way to the convention center. It never failed that I’d get angry when I walked by the site.

Thomas Jefferson resided here with his enslaved servant, Robert Hemings, while drafting the Declaration of Independence. Working in rooms rented from bricklayer Jacob Graff, Jefferson drafted a declaration espousing the political ideas of enlightenment philosophers. In little more than two weeks, Jefferson finished his timeless defense of, "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness."

Really?

Such strong language there, Massa Jefferson, with a slave dressing you and feeding you all that time?

The reasons that paragraph was excised from the Declaration aren’t fully known but I do know that a mere “accident” of my birth could have, at one time, deprived me of those “unalienable rights.”

True enough, we’re over 160 years removed from the institution of slavery in this country (well, if you’re not in prison or otherwise convicted of a crime) and the United States has made a lot of progress. But even a cursory glance at news headlines over the past couple of weeks show that “unalienable rights” can be excised just as easily as the Second Continental Congress did 247 years ago.

For what amounts to...an “accident?”

It’s one the reasons why I have preferred to identify myself as a “cosmopolitan” more than anything else and definitely not “patriotic” (although I bear no ill will against what I consider to be “true” patriots).

I may be here as a mere “accident” but there is a reason and purpose for me being here.

I will not allow any person, group of 6, or a government to dissuade me or discourage me from that purpose.

It is that purpose that I believe I will find “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”

And that ain’t no accident.

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News round up by dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor

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Challenging the grandfather clause admission Associated Press: Activists spurred by affirmative action ruling sue Harvard over legacy admissions

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A civil rights group is challenging legacy admissions at Harvard University, saying the practice discriminates against students of color by giving an unfair boost to the mostly white children of alumni.

It’s the latest effort in a growing push against legacy admissions, the practice of giving admissions priority to the children of alumni. Backlash against the practice has been building in the wake of last week’s Supreme Court’s decision ending affirmative action in college admissions.

Lawyers for Civil Rights, a nonprofit based in Boston, filed the suit Monday on behalf of Black and Latino community groups in New England, alleging that Harvard’s admissions system violates the Civil Rights Act.

“Why are we rewarding children for privileges and advantages accrued by prior generations?” said Ivan Espinoza-Madrigal, the group’s executive director. “Your family’s last name and the size of your bank account are not a measure of merit, and should have no bearing on the college admissions process.”

Opponents say the practice is no longer defensible without affirmative action providing a counterbalance. The court’s ruling says colleges must ignore the race of applicants, activists point out, but schools can still give a boost to the children of alumni and donors.

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Janet Yellen mAKES THE CASE FOR BIDEN ECONOMICS TO THE ESSENCE FESTIVAL Associated Press: Yellen addresses Essence Festival crowd, discusses economy, efforts to enfold minority communities

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U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen on Friday touted the Biden administration’s efforts to build a “fairer economy.”

“I strongly believe that our racial equity work is not just the morally right thing to do. It’s in the best economic interests of our entire country,” Yellen told a crowd gathered for the Global Black Economic Forum held at this year’s Essence Festival of Culture.

Yellen, the first treasury secretary to attend and speak at the festival, was warmly greeted by the mostly Black audience.

“I appreciate all of you for being here today — and for taking time away from the music and other attractions. I know that hip-hop icons like Megan Thee Stallion are playing in the next few days and that I am just a warm-up act for them,” she said, drawing a round of laughter and applause.

Yellen said the enactment of the “American Rescue Plan to support families, keep businesses open and ensure that critical services could continue to function” amid the COVID-19 pandemic and expansion of the Child Tax Credit were moves that helped the economy recover.

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Close to half of Haiti’s people, 2.2 million adults and 3 million children, need humanitarian aid and thousands of youngsters face “staggering levels” of gender-based violence, the head of the U.N. children’s agency said Thursday.

“Haitians and our team, they’re telling me it’s never been worse than it is now — unprecedented hunger and malnutrition, grinding poverty, a crippled economy, resurgence of cholera, and a massive insecurity that creates a deadly downward spiral of violence,” said Catherine Russell, the executive director of UNICEF.

Russell said what was clear during her just-completed visit was that the police don’t have the capacity to secure the country and protect the population from violent gangs and “something needs to change.”

“We have to, as an international community, say we can’t watch this country completely fall apart,” she said. “And so my job is to try to bring some attention to that problem and to make sure people understand how terrible the humanitarian crisis is, what kind of impact that’s having on children.”

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A visit to Nairobi’s archives led to a ‘eureka moment’ for Kenyan Chao Tayiana. She set out to retell colonial narratives – using digital technology to bring lost and suppressed stories to light. The Guardian: Meet the ‘headstrong historian’ bringing Africa’s past to life – for Africans

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When Chao Tayiana was growing up in Ngong town, west of Nairobi, she heard many stories about the Tsavo man-eaters, a pair of lions that “terrorised” and killed African and Indian railway workers during the construction of the Kenya-Uganda railway in the late 1800s – and were later “heroically” shot by John Patterson, a British officer.

The man-eating big cats lent drama to the romanticised view of railways as a way for Europeans to penetrate “the deep dark interiors of Africa”, or as a symbol of Britain’s grand designs for development of the “wild” African continent. The photo of Patterson posing with one of the dead lions became synonymous with white conquest.

The railway, which was built by the British as a way to gain control over the source of the Nile, Lake Victoria in Uganda, had broader implications for the UK’s trade relations with Europe and the rest of the world; and the mainstream narratives about it had been told from a western perspective. Tayiana’s school history lessons were little different, and it didn’t occur to her at the time to question these accounts.

But when she was in her early 20s she realised a “different kind of story needed to be told”. At university, while she was studying computer science, she started a history blog for fun – and received dozens of messages from Kenyans across the country and in the diaspora in response to a post she wrote about the birth of Nairobi.

Around the same time, on one of her regular visits to the national archives in Nairobi, she spotted an unusual reference among the standard reports. It suggested that among some communities, there was a belief that the Tsavo lions were the spirits of dead chiefs who were resistant to the construction of the railway.

Intrigued by this interpretation of events Tayiana was keen to find out what the railway had meant to other Kenyans who lived around the stations, or worked in them, and decided to investigate. Over the next four years, she visited more than 55 stations across the country, taking photos and speaking to people, in a project she would later call Save the Railway.

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WELCOME TO THE TUESDAY PORCH

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/7/4/2178987/-Black-Kos-Tuesday-Accidents

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