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Black Kos Tuesday: On those boycotts... [1]
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Date: 2025-05-27
On those boycotts…
Commentary by Chitown Kev
As most people know, I have a little trouble walking because of atherosclerosis which primarily affects my left leg.
I can walk normally for roughly five minutes and then the pain starts in and I start to get a limp. The pain never gets overwhelming, exactly, and roughly 10 minutes of resting the leg and I can walk normally for another...5 minutes or so. Rinse and repeat.
The closet retail store to my house is a Target roughly three blocks away. I do live near three other grocery stores but I do not consider them to be “walking distance” for me anymore, although when I do catch a ride, I opt to go to those stores.
Even though I use public transportation, very often when I go another store for, say, office supplies or a new notebook I cannot find the the item that I’m looking for. I know that I can always look up and then (usually) find any item that I need at Amazon and sometimes I do.
I’m quite aware that I should not want to shop at a place like Target because of their rollback on diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts. In fact, I don’t want to shop at Target. I would love to participate in the Target boycott and I am delighted that it has been effective. But it is, by far, the most convenient store for me to go and get needed items.
I’m fortunate that I have never had the addiction to Amazon shopping that I see that so many other people have. However, when I am looking for, say, a used and out of print book or a certain kind of shoelaces, Amazon is usually the only place where I can find such items in a pinch.
It’s tempting to renew the subscription to The Washington Post that I kept for a few years; the paper does continue to have vital news and opinion pieces that I would like to read. But after that sh*t with the Kamala endorsement and Bezos’s statements since then...That’s a line that I’m not willing to cross yet.
So I still need a few alternative outlets to shop for things (that is while they are still affordable!). I’m not physically able to follow up on some of my personal convictions regarding, say, Target (though I do try to spend as little as possible when I shop at Target). I feel a little guilty about that. But I can only do what I can do and, at the very least, I do attempt to make the bare minimum purchases that can.
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News round up by dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor
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As the dean of New York’s delegation and the first Black chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, he was a powerful political force for decades. New York Times: Charles B. Rangel, Longtime Harlem Congressman, Dies at 94
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Charles B. Rangel, the former dean of New York’s congressional delegation, who became the first Black chairman of the powerful House Ways and Means Committee, only to relinquish that position when he was censured for an ethics violation, died on Monday in Manhattan. He was 94.
His death was announced by his family. His friend Lloyd Williams, the president of the Greater Harlem Chamber of Commerce, said he died in Harlem Hospital, on 135th Street and Malcolm X Boulevard.
“Charlie was born on 132nd Street between Lenox and Fifth, and when he became successful he moved to 135th Street between Lenox and Fifth,” Mr. Williams said. “He used to joke about moving up — three blocks.”
A mainstay of Harlem’s Democratic old guard, Mr. Rangel was first elected to Congress in 1970, toppling the raffish civil rights pioneer Adam Clayton Powell Jr., a 13-term incumbent. He went on to serve in the House longer than any other New Yorker but one: Emanuel Celler, who represented Brooklyn for nearly 50 years until his defeat in 1972.
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Today, I am resigning from the National Science Board and the Library of Congress Scholars Council.
Even as the White House threatens the foundational tenets of constitutional democracy and continues to slash funding for essential social services, it is tempting to hope that the public institutions charged with promoting and protecting knowledge will, nevertheless, soldier on with their mission. I did.
Since January 2025, scientists and librarians, program officers and policy analysts at the National Science Foundation, the Library of Congress, and other federal offices and agencies have focused on their work, despite an increasingly hostile political environment. We’ve also seen civil servants fired and accused of not making the mark, vendors’s contracts ignored, and grants and fellowships cancelled.
Perseverance has its limits. The erosion of these institutions’ integrity—and the growing realization that it is impossible to fulfill their missions in good faith—has made the cost of continuing untenable. This is why I must step away from my work with two federal institutions I care deeply about.
In both these roles, over the past few years, I've been asked to serve on diverse bodies that offer guidance about how the Executive and Legislative branches can be stewards of knowledge and create structure to enable discovery, innovation, and ingenuity. In the instance of the National Science Board, this ideal has dissolved so gradually, yet so completely, that I barely noticed its absence until confronted with its hollow simulacrum.
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As the city of Minneapolis and the nation commemorated the fifth anniversary of George Floyd‘s murder this past Memorial Day weekend, the years-long national movement to reform police interactions with Black and brown communities–sometimes deadly–has seen both progress and major setbacks.
The Black Lives Matter movement, following Floyd’s death in May 2020, aimed to transform the way police departments interact with Black and brown communities, garnering massive support from corporations and institutions–including commitments to investing in DEI and other programs intended to eliminate racial disparities.
The organized movement for police reform also resulted in the election of President Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, the nation’s first Black vice president, and their administration’s executive actions to curb police violence and reframe the issue as a broader public safety policy issue. Five years later, however, President Donald Trump, reelected to the White House last year after initially being rebuked in 2020 for his stance on policing, reversed course on measures to hold police departments accountable.
Last week, the U.S. Department of Justice’s civil rights office rescinded several reform agreements, known as consent decrees, with police departments in Minneapolis, where Floyd was murdered by former officer Derek Chauvin, and in Louisville, Ky., where officers fatally shot Breonna Taylor months before. The Trump DOJ also closed several Biden-era investigations of other local police departments.
President Trump also rescinded Biden’s executive order on policing, which included measures restricting chokeholds and police no-knock warrants and established a national misconduct database for federal police.
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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.
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