Voices & Soul
by Justice Putnam, Black Kos Poetry Editor
She is a spectre, a ghostly presence that we can ignore until we can't. She is pushing a ragged shopping cart, she is stumbling with a cane, she is walking in the slow elegance of the elderly matron. Yet we don't see her, even though we move out of her way. She lives next door, down the street, across the river and under a freeway overpass. She is our mother, sister, cousin, aunt and grandmother.
She might have been great once, but we don't see her, we don't hear her. We ignore her, until we can't.
No one ever heard a small voice shout from the mountain top. It takes a large, resonant exuberance to shout a Story to the valley below. But before a Story is shouted, a Story must be learned so that the voice of the Ancestors can be heard in the laughs and shouts of the children as they dance in the sun. So that the confident shout can be heard far and wide, and deep in the Soul. This is not a small voice from a river deep and a mountain high. This is the voice of the first primordial suns exhaling universes full of plasma beats. This is the voice of cosmic waves in rhythm with crashing worlds in an endless void of time. This is not a small voice.
This is not a small voice
you hear this is a large
voice coming out of these cities.
This is the voice of LaTanya.
Kadesha. Shaniqua. This
is the voice of Antoine.
Darryl. Shaquille.
Running over waters
navigating the hallways
of our schools spilling out
on the corners of our cities and
no epitaphs spill out of their river
mouths.
This is not a small love
you hear this is a large
love, a passion for kissing learning
on its face.
This is a love that crowns the feet
with hands
that nourishes, conceives, feels the
water sails
mends the children,
folds them inside our history
where they
toast more than the flesh
where they suck the bones of the
alphabet
and spit out closed vowels.
This is a love colored with iron
and lace.
This is a love initialed Black
Genius.
This is not a small voice
you hear.
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News round up by dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor
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During the past few years, discussions about racism and social inequities have swelled, especially in professional settings. The main message: Racism is bad. Let’s shut it down somehow. Yet, we’re not seeing progress. Instead, we’re seeing the implementation of anti-affirmative action laws, the elimination of diversity and equity inclusion positions, and the censorship of books that critically examine racism’s legacy and its insidious nature. Living in this contradictory reality sometimes makes me want to yell, “Computer, end program!”
But I’m a gamer, so I stay in the game. What keeps me grounded and focused is that countless individuals share the vision of a more just and safe world — a world where we learn from our collective past and use that knowledge to cultivate systems that uplift — a world where cultural and systemic anti-Blackness is dismantled.
Professor Tricia Rose is one of those touchstones who makes me feel hopeful; she’s spent much of her career shedding necessary insight on how to confront pervasive issues directly. In her latest book, “Metaracism: How Systemic Racism Devastated Black Lives — and How We Break Free,” which drops on March 5, she delves fearlessly into the intricate web of institutional anti-Blackness, offering vivid analysis of its impact on all of our lives. By tracing racism’s insidious influence across generations and through various societal institutions, we can better understand how we can arm ourselves against it.
Ahead of her book release, I had the honor of chatting with Rose about what she feels are the most potent and pressing issues we, as Black and people of color, face today. Drawing from her extensive research, data analysis, and lived experiences, she provides powerful narratives and strategies for liberation and empowerment. In her work, she invites readers to critically engage with the systems perpetuating inequality, empowering them to become agents for change.
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There are 21 conferences in the National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics (NAIA). Only one is led by a Black woman commissioner.
Effective July 1, that league will have a new name that embraces its mission and membership: the HBCU Athletic Conference (HBCUAC), with the tagline, “Where Winners Thrive.”
After serving for three years in an interim capacity, Kiki Baker Barnes was installed as permanent commissioner of the Gulf Coast Athletic Conference (GCAC) in June 2022. She said her leadership team worked with Black-owned marketing firm Ten35 for two years before choosing the new name.
“We had operated as a conference and a collective of HBCUs since 2010, but there was no ownership,” Barnes told theGrio. “We wanted to think about a name that might be more fitting. I’m really excited about leaning into our identity and continuing to grow the conference. We have a strategic plan to get to 16 members.”
The GCAC was founded in 1981 with three HBCUs – Dillard, Tougaloo and Xavier-Louisiana – and four primarily white institutions located in three Gulf Coast states. Starting this summer, the conference will expand to 13 schools – all HBCUs – located in eight states and one U.S. territory.
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A Colorado grandmother has won a $3.76 million jury verdict after her home was mistakenly searched in a bungled 2022 SWAT raid for a stolen truck, guns and an iPhone based on information from Apple’s “Find My” app.
A jury sided with Ruby Johnson, 78, and determined Friday that Denver police Det. Gary Staab and Sgt. Gregory Buschy violated the state’s constitution by “hastily seeking, obtaining and executing a search warrant" on her home without probable cause or proper investigation, according to a Monday statement from the ACLU of Colorado, which filed a lawsuit on behalf of Johnson.
A “SWAT team ransacked Ms. Johnson’s home of 43 years based on an alleged location ping from an iPhone’s 'Find My' app that the officers did not understand and for which they had no training. Ms. Johnson lived alone in her Montbello home and was in her robe, bonnet, and slippers when she was subjected to the terrifying police raid,” according to the ACLU. “Donning body armor and automatic weapons, police officers searched Ms. Johnson’s home for stolen items from an incident that she had absolutely nothing to do with.”
The verdict included $1.26 million in compensatory damages and $2.5 million in punitive damages.
A representative with ACLU of Colorado told NBC News on Tuesday the city of Denver will be responsible for paying the $3.76 million. However, Staab and Buschy, may have to pay up to $25,000, if the city proves in a separate lawsuit, the officers acted in bad faith, the ACLU said.
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Eliana Alves Cruz and Branca Vianna grew up at a similar time in different neighbourhoods of Rio de Janeiro. But the two Brazilian women had very different experiences of their family history.
Cruz, 57, was always surrounded by elderly relatives, yet struggled to get them to recount stories about the men and women who had preceded them. In contrast, Vianna remembers the omnipresent figure of her grandmother’s great-grandfather, who died in 1868. There was even a painting of him hanging in the family home where Vianna, now 61, spent her holidays as a child.
Cruz is Black and, she has since discovered, descended from a west African woman who was trafficked to Brazil in the early 19th century. Vianna is white and her great-great-great-grandfather was an enslaver who made a fortune in coffee.
Their stories reflect a common pattern among Brazilian families: while European ancestry tends to be remembered and celebrated, institutionalised silence around how the African diaspora shaped the country has robbed its descendants of their personal history.
Many Black Brazilians feel keenly the absence of this history – but attempting to recover it can be the work of a lifetime.
“Everyone, one day, wonders about where they come from. And in Brazil, for the Black population especially, it’s something of a thorny issue. It’s uncomfortable,” said Cruz.
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Homophobia is not uncommon in Ghana, where gay sex is already against the law and carries a three-year prison sentence, but now the LGBTQ+ community is feeling terrorised. BBC: Ghana's LGBT terror: 'We live in fear of snitches'
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A new bill, passed by MPs last week, will impose a jail term of up to three years for simply identifying as LGBTQ+ and five years for promoting their activities.
"A relative told me if this bill is passed, any chance he gets, he is going to poison me because I am an abomination to the family," Mensah, whose name has been changed to protect his identity, tells the BBC.
Dressed in an all-black outfit, the young man in his late teens looks visibly terrified: "I am very worried anyone can snitch on me, even in my own neighbourhood. It's going to be very hard to live here." He has been living for some time with sympathetic friends in Ghana's capital, Accra, since falling out with his family.
It is not clear how large the LGBTQ+ community is in Ghana, a religious and traditionally conservative nation, but they tend to help each other out when one of them faces life as an outcast.
Mensah says when his mother discovered several years ago that he was attracted to boys, she started taking him to churches for prayers with the hope he would change. "No friends except my church friends were allowed to see me. I had to study the Bible 24/7, pray and I would sit at the back anytime we went for meetings."
He says he was practically shunned at home - the wider family would not talk to him and he found their stares unbearable.
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A stone’s throw from Harlem, on the stately campus of Columbia Journalism School, a two-day conference took place recently celebrating the legacy of hip-hop journalism. With panel discussions, recorded oral histories from former rap magazine editors, and stately portraits shot by Rog and Bee Walker, nuanced writing devoted to hip-hop culture finally got its flowers as a modern-day literary movement of sorts. When the time came for my own interview, I recalled being directly inspired by both the Black Arts Movement and the Harlem Renaissance, hoping the future would look back on us having continued the tradition of documenting the Black creative expressions of our own time.
Those thoughts came up again walking by the 160 paintings, sculptures and collectibles on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s latest exhibit, “The Harlem Renaissance and Transatlantic Modernism.” Seeing magazines like Fire!! (published in 1926 by literary luminaries like Zora Neale Hurston, Countee Cullen and Langston Hughes) and The Crisis in glass display cases made me feel like part of a cultural continuum. Running until late July, the exhibition intends to “explore the comprehensive and far-reaching ways in which Black artists portrayed everyday modern life in…Harlem and nationwide in the early decades of the Great Migration.” Toward that end, Met curators did the thing — it’s a resounding success.
As historical tomes like Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts’s excellent “Harlem Is Nowhere” have explained, New York City landlords originally meant the north Manhattan neighborhood of Harlem as a location for upper-class white residents in the late 19th century. Overdevelopment resulted in their desperation to fill empty buildings as best they could — with Black folks, leading to white flight. By the 1920s, Harlem had swiftly turned into a major Black mecca of the United States, attracting more than its fair share of painters, writers, poets, musicians and intellects in one concentrated ‘hood.
Divided into sections like “The Thinkers” (said thinkers including W.E.B. DuBois, Alain Locke and Aaron Douglas), “Nightlife,” “The New Negro Artist Abroad” (featuring film clips of Josephine Baker dancing the Charleston) and “Luminaries” (spotlighting collaborations across the pan-African diaspora), the Met exhibit covers a wide expanse of those Harlem Renaissance years — which last roughly from 1918 to 1937.
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WELCOME TO THE FRIDAY PORCH
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