The Little Red Buggy et al.
A meditation by Chitown Kev
I remember:
A warm day in the mid-1970’s in Detroit.
Mom was driving with my brother and I in tow in her red 1974 Ford Mustang (which we still affectionally call Mom’s “little red buggy”) north on Dickerson Ave on Detroit’s east side, IIRC.
As we approached...maybe Warren Ave, maybe Canfield...Mom noticed a disturbance and a crowd on the sidewalk to the left (west) side of the street.
She parked the Little Red Buggy and got out of the car and we went to the scene of whatever was happening.
“The crowd” (about 3-5 people) were gathered around someone lying on the ground. A slightly obese man. African-American.
Shot to death for some unknown reason.
We looked at the dead man, somewhat like voyuers, maybe. I remember a woman jumping around and crying; she was old enough that I assumed that it was the young man’s mother.
Mom consoled her a little bit before deciding that we should return to The Little Red Buggy and continue the journey...home, I think.
Or maybe over to my aunt’s house. I do distinctly remember that we were silent for the balance of the trip; each of us, Mom, my brother, and I in our own thoughts.
I recall thinking, at that time, that that mother’s pain looked unbearable. I never wanted to see my Mom to go through that type of thing, I thought.
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January 1986: I was, remarkably, it now seems, in the men’s shelter at 8 East 3rd Street in Manhattan. There was a throng of folks in “the day room” waiting to line up for one of those awful dinners. I was in the middle of a conversation that I don’t recall; it was probably some sissy gossip with one or more of the other queens.
One second I heard a “pop” sound rather like a firecracker.
The next thing I remember is that one of the men that i seem to recall was on the periphery of the group that I was talking to (no more than 3 feet away, I think) fell to to the floor. Everyone in the day room scampered out onto 3rd Street.
The man was shot dead. I remember there being a blurb in The New York Times about the murder.
I also remember a faint whizzing past my left ear that I will never forget.
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Until today, I had not read this story.
I lived in that apartment building on that day. My first “sponsor,” M., sublet the 4th floor apartment to me after I had made a year clean and sober and decided to move in with his future wife.
The night before, I had relapsed after 13 months clean and sober. I was away from home on the day of that fire and was headed back home to watch more of the NCAA tourney. The -el took an abnormally long time to arrive.
The fire had just begun when I walked up to the building. People were evacuating the building and the building super stepped outside to call the fire department.
In time, in spite of the enormous guilt that I felt in having relapsed, I learned to be graeatful for that relapse.
I was away from home when that deadly fire happened. Had I not been invited over to a “friend’s” house, I would have been at home watching all of the NCAA tournament games the previous night and would have been watching them that day when that fire broke out.
I’ve never had anything like a feeling of...”gratitude” or a feeling that “God saved me” from being in that burning building at that time on that day; indeed, I get pretty grossed out when the very thought is mentioned to me.
I lived next door to the family of five that died in that fire. I believe that it was oldest child of that family, Gary, that used to tease me by calling me “Montel Williams” whenever he saw me in the hallway.
Upon learning of the death of my next door neighbors, I felt even then that they were more deserving of having the opportunity to live that I was at that time on that day.
I still feel that way, quite frankly.
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Today is my 50th birthday.
Honestly, I never expected that I would live to see 25 much less that I would live long enough to see myself grow the few grey hairs that I now have (and, yes, I do check everywhere!).
I’m aware of many of the statistics concerning people like me; a black, gay man who, at one time, was actively addicted to mood and mind-altering substances.
I’m quite aware of some of the senseless violence that engulfs portions of Chicago. I don’t talk about it much. but I know that others, like myself, will not, for whatever reason, have the longevity that I have had.
I’m aware that, relatively speaking, I started out better than many of my peers; a loving (if insane!) family, doors of opportunity that opened even in the darkest of times, people have always considered me to be “educated”; I am, in short, very aware of some of the unearned privilege that I possess.
I’m aware that I have thrown opportunities away, refused to open those doors of opportunity, engaged in things that I knew weren’t good for me, etc.
In fact. I don’t feel good at all about many of those lost opportunities and I have spent much of the day thinking of, pondering, lamenting, brooding over like (name of a character in a Dostoyevsky novel).
Yet somehow, someway, the silent promise that I made to myself (and Mom) in that Little Red Buggy almost four decades ago continues to be fulfilled, through no fault of my own.
And with the bothersome exception of a semi-persistent cough that I attribute to smoking (and that I really should get checked out), I still feel that, as Robert Frost once said, I have miles to go before I sleep.
So...I’m “woke,” I guess.
Need to stay woke and to keep busy.
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News round up by dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor
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f you want to stop police from disproportionately ticketing black communities, a recent study has one potential answer: Elect more black people to local government.
The study, by political science researchers Michael Sances of the University of Memphis and Hye Young You of Vanderbilt University, had two major findings.
Using data from more than 9,000 cities, the researchers first found that cities with larger black populations rely more on fines and court fees to raise revenue. The average collection was about $8 per person for all cities that get at least some revenue from fines and fees, but that rose to as much as $20 per person in the cities with the highest black populations. The findings persisted even after controlling for other factors, such as differences in crime rates and the size of cities.
Then the researchers wanted to look at how much this disparity would be alleviated if at least one black person is on the city council. Using a smaller sample of about 3,700 cities due to data limitations, they found that having at least one black person on the city council reduced the relationship between race and fines by about 50 percent.
“What a lot of cities do is rely on a source of revenue that falls disproportionately on their black residents,” Sances told me. “And when blacks gain representation on the city council, this relationship gets a lot better. The situation doesn’t become perfect, but it becomes alleviated to a great extent.”
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When the president says being Western is the essence of America’s identity, he’s in part defining America in opposition to some of its own people. The Atlantic: The Racial and Religious Paranoia of Trump's Warsaw Speech.
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In his speech in Poland on Thursday, Donald Trump referred 10 times to “the West” and five times to “our civilization.” His white nationalist supporters will understand exactly what he means. It’s important that other Americans do, too.
The West is not a geographic term. Poland is further east than Morocco. France is further east than Haiti. Australia is further east than Egypt. Yet Poland, France, and Australia are all considered part of “The West.” Morocco, Haiti, and Egypt are not.
The West is not an ideological or economic term either. India is the world’s largest democracy. Japan is among its most economically advanced nations. No one considers them part of the West.
The West is a racial and religious term. To be considered Western, a country must be largely Christian (preferably Protestant or Catholic) and largely white. Where there is ambiguity about a country’s “Westernness,” it’s because there is ambiguity about, or tension between, these two characteristics. Is Latin America Western? Maybe. Most of its people are Christian, but by U.S. standards, they’re not clearly white. Are Albania and Bosnia Western? Maybe. By American standards, their people are white. But they are also mostly Muslim.
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SOUTH AMERICA’S only English-speaking country is one of its poorest. But perhaps not for much longer: Guyana has struck black gold. By 2020 ExxonMobil, the world’s biggest private oil firm, expects to be pumping oil in Guyanese waters, with Hess and Nexen, its American and Chinese partner firms. In the past two years they have found reserves of around 2bn barrels. Five more promising prospects will be drilled by 2018, and then perhaps a dozen more. Guyana could be producing 120,000 barrels per day by 2020, and more than 400,000 by the mid-2020s.
Even with oil at under $50 a barrel, this is vast wealth for a nation of just 750,000. But the Guyanese seem strangely underwhelmed. “It will not trickle down,” a street trader shrugs. Little of the work will be done onshore. Guyana has few engineers and no heavy industry. A global glut of refining capacity means there is no point in Guyana building its own. Oil will be pumped into giant vessels, then shipped directly to foreign markets.
So the main question is how the government will spend its share of the windfall. There is talk of a sovereign wealth fund and projects to boost long-term growth: an all-weather road linking the capital, Georgetown, to the interior and Brazil; a deep-water port; hydro-electric schemes; better health care and schools.
But Guyana already had diamonds and gold, and little of that wealth was shared. Horse-drawn carts still weave through the Georgetown traffic. Large new gold mines under Australian and Canadian ownership have boosted export earnings and the tax take. But small locally owned ones smuggle much of their output abroad, bypassing the taxman. State-owned sugar producers gobble subsidies. Cash will be tight until the oil starts flowing.
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ASK Anesi Chishiko about fertiliser, and she points to her goats and her trees. Manure and leaves are all that she folds into the earth on her family farm in Zambia. Inorganic fertiliser is too costly: the government offers subsidies, but only “clever people” know how to get them, she explains. Her maize sucks up nutrients more quickly than she can replace them. Each year, she says, the soil gets worse.
Farmers in sub-Saharan Africa use little fertiliser: the region accounts for just 1.5% of the world’s consumption of nitrogen, a crucial nutrient. Governments, who want them to use more, spend nearly $1bn annually on subsidies. That is good business for traders, and good politics for leaders chasing rural votes. But it is not the best way to help small farmers like Ms Chishiko. Fertiliser often reaches them late, or not at all. And the cost saps budgets as surely as overcropping saps the soil.
An earlier generation of subsidies was phased out in the 1990s, at the behest of international lenders. Then, in 2005, Malawi revived its fertiliser scheme. Crop yields soared. Experts gushed about a “Malawi miracle”. Governments from Tanzania to Nigeria started forking out for fertiliser again. By 2015, they declared, African farmers would be using 50kg per hectare. The target was missed: south of the Sahara, farmers use only a third of that amount. But subsidies persist.
Cheaper fertiliser has pepped up farm production and, in places like Malawi, raised incomes. But it does not always help the neediest. In Zambia, studies have found that a third of subsidised fertiliser never reaches the intended beneficiaries, and is probably resold commercially, with crooked middlemen pocketing the subsidy. Much of the rest goes to bigger farmers, who could afford to buy their own. The system is a “failed project”, the country’s agriculture minister said last year. Past governments in Zambia have directed fertiliser to electoral strongholds. (In Ghana, by contrast, vouchers have been used to woo opposition voters.) The biggest schemes resemble welfare programmes. Zambia spends five times as much on farm subsidies as it does on cash transfers to the poor.
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The Moonlight director, Barry Jenkins, has announced his next film will be an adaptation of James Baldwin’s novel If Beale Street Could Talk.
The novel, originally published in 1974, is set in Harlem and charts the love story of Fonny and Tish. Jenkins, who wrote the screenplay in the summer of 2013 while he was also working on Moonlight, has wanted to adapt the novel for years.
The director, who will also write and direct a TV adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Underground Railroad, praised Baldwin in a statement released Monday.
“James Baldwin is a man of and ahead of his time; his interrogations of the American consciousness have remained relevant to this day,” Jenkins, who was nominated for best director at the 2017 Oscars, said.
“To translate the power of Tish and Fonny’s love to the screen in Baldwin’s image is a dream I’ve long held dear. Working alongside the Baldwin estate, I’m excited to finally make that dream come true.”
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HBO’s latest web-series acquisition eschews Brooklyn for a queer, multiracial, multiethnic arts landscape in Chicago. Welcome to Fatimah Asghar and Sam Bailey’s world. The Atlantic: All the Brown Girls on TV
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Sam bailey lit a cigarette, lost in what Fatimah Asghar later called “stunned silence.” The women do most things together these days—ever since Bailey, 28, wrote and Asghar, 27, directed a new web series—Brown Girls, set in Chicago, where they live. But that January afternoon, they shared a bench outside Sony Studios in Los Angeles. For days, they’d felt a thrill new to those born black (Bailey) or Muslim (Asghar): affirmation. Hollywood executives loved the world the two 20-somethings made, one where no one is white and everyone is “brown”—Spanish-speaking, black, South Asian, queer. Off-white. The same only in that they are different. Emails from HBO, Comedy Central, and TBS started the day Brown Girls went online. Visions of strange new viewers loomed: accountants in Ohio, yoga-addicted housewives, maybe even politicians in Washington.
They hadn’t meant to stray past their tribe—the friends Asghar kept in mind as she wrote or the strangers who could have been her friends, or characters. Like the girls of color on Remezcla, the Latin site that drove the bulk of their views and search traffic from the day their trailer beamed from it like a bat signal. Soon screenings materialized, in London, Spain, the Brooklyn Museum of Art—where brown girls in Hatecopy shirts partied with queer black boys in one of the largest temples to African art in the world. For those primed to get it, the series was “hard to miss,” said Aymar Jean Christian, an academic at Northwestern University, which in part funds the series via the media incubator OpenTV (Beta). Founded by Christian, OpenTV gave birth to the show. “I’ve been studying web series for eight years,” he told me, “and I strain to think of a web series that got as much press.” Twitter, a measure of what people care about right this second, registered the interest, too. On premiere day, #browngirls was high enough to be seen by anyone glancing at the site’s trending hashtags.
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