Just Another Day In Gunmerica

Steve M. on how Gunmerica has worked for decades:

 

To the members of the gun community, the danger to democracy is a feature, not a bug. Gun absolutists don't want to live in a society where people who disagree with them -- on guns or on most other issues -- wield enough power to enact laws they don't like. Outside of blue states and big cities, gun absolutists have democracy right where they want it: Large majorities of Americans support tighter restrictions on gun ownership, but the vast majority of white people always vote Republican, so it's next to impossible to tighten gun laws.

Gun absolutists want some citizens to be intimidated. They say they just want criminals to be fearful (as well as the government), but they know that many of the people they detest are unlikely to own guns, and the power inequality is precisely what they're after. They want liberals and LGBTQ people and feminists to feel like second-class citizens. They want the option of intimidating protesters they disagree with, in a potentially deadly version of the hecklers' veto. And, obviously, they want to scare off anyone who might support laws making it harder to obtain and brandish weapons. Hey, what do you think "Try That in a Small Town" was all about? It sure as hell wasn't about democracy or upholding the First Amendment right to protest.

It's possible to imagine a society in which everyone lives the way gunners say they want everyone to live -- every law-abiding citizen across the political spectrum might accept our gun culture as unchangeable and might decide that it's necessary to own weapons, and to wear them in public at all times wherever that's legal. Liberals might reluctantly do this. Feminists and queers might do this. In theory, even gun control advocates might do this, telling themselves that while an extremely armed society is bad, it's clear that we already live in one, and until that changes, it's suicidal to go unarmed.

But the gunners wouldn't like that. They like the advantage they have over the rest of us. They enjoy our fear.

 

Adding, if you're Black or brown, owning a gun gets you killed even faster. Police don't bother to check if you're a law-abiding citizen practicing your Constitutional Second Amendment rights for home ownership of a firearm, legal concealed carry, or god forbid, open carry. You'd get executed on the spot.

 

Firearms are a privilege afforded to white Americans only. Everyone else gets murdered. This is why I don't own a firearm. It would make no positive difference to increase my survivability rate as a Black man in America, and in fact it would massively increase my odds of being shot and killed by law enforcement. 

Nobody with a firearm would ever see a Black civilian as a "good guy with a gun". Ever. A group of armed Black people practicing open carry in an open carry state would be butchered by police.

Think about that really hard.

In Republican red state America, in 2023, your rights are solely determined by your race (and gender, when we talk about women also being second-class status.) Your "inalienable" rights are provisional depending on the situation and person, and that includes the right to bear arms.

Spare me the whining about your Second Amendment rights, and talk about mine for once.

Last Call For Vote Like Your Country Depends On It, Con't

Yet another 2022 GOP state redistricting gerrymander struck down as unconstitutional for disenfranchising Black voters, and this time the state in question is Georgia.

 

A federal judge ruled Thursday that Georgia’s district lines must be redrawn to ensure adequate representation of Black voters in Congress and the General Assembly, finding that the state’s maps illegally weakened their political power.

The decision could result in the election of additional Black representatives next year, with Democrats hoping to gain a seat in the U.S. House, where Republicans currently hold a 222-212 majority and control nine of 14 Georgia congressional seats. Before the General Assembly’s 2021 redistricting, the GOP held an 8-6 advantage in Georgia.

U.S. District Judge Steve Jones concluded that the Republican-controlled General Assembly violated the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which prohibits racial discrimination in elections.

Jones’ order requires legislators to create an additional majority-Black congressional district west-metro Atlanta by Dec. 8. His ruling also calls for two more state Senate districts and five more state House districts with Black majorities in the Atlanta and Macon areas.

“Georgia has made great strides since 1965 towards equality in voting,” Jones wrote in his 516-page order. “However, the evidence before this court shows that Georgia has not reached the point where the political process has equal openness and equal opportunity for everyone.”

Georgia Democratic Party Chairwoman Nikema Williams called Thursday’s ruling a “resounding victory” for democracy.

“Republicans knew they couldn’t win on their ideas, so they resorted to redrawing the maps in their favor instead,” she said.

Josh McKoon, chairman of the Georgia Republican Party, called Jones a “partisan Democrat ally.” Jones was appointed to the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Georgia in 2011 by then-President Barack Obama.

“It is simply outrageous that one far left federal judge is invalidating the will of the elected representatives of the people of Georgia who drew fair maps in conformity with longstanding legal principles,” he said.

 

If by "conformity with longstanding legal principles" you mean "the centuries-long history of Southern states disenfranchising Black folk" then yes, Goergia's GOP is definitely conforming.  

Black voters in Georgia accounted for nearly half of the state’s sharp population growth — over 1 million new residents during the past decade — but state legislators shaped districts in a way that resulted in Democrats losing a seat in Congress during last year’s elections. Black voters overwhelmingly support Democrats while most white voters back Republicans.

Bishop Reginald T. Jackson, who leads more than 500 African Methodist Episcopal churches in Georgia and was a witness in the redistricting trial, said Thursday’s order was a “long march to justice.” His organization, the Sixth District of the A.M.E. Church, was a plaintiff in the lawsuit.

“It is unfortunate that, decades after the Civil Rights Movement, we still need to defend and promote the right for the African-American community to vote (but) make no mistake that we will continue to fight for these causes, not only because the facts and the law are on our side, but because democracy is our country’s most important tenant and is always worth fighting for,” Jackson said.

 

You're damn right they are worth fighting for.

 

Black Lives Still Matter.

Ron's Gone Wrong, Con't

Ahh, but we can't have an Israel-Palestine conflict without Florida coming in and reminding everyone that the fascist authoritarians running the place like GOP Gov. Ron DeSantis want to make sure that Palestinians have no voice in the Sunshine State.

 

Florida’s university system chancellor, responding to a push by Gov. Ron DeSantis, directed state universities Tuesday to disband campus groups with ties to the national Students for Justice in Palestine organization, marking the first punishments handed down to colleges here amid the Israel-Hamas war.

In a memo to school leaders, the state ordered a “crack down” on campus events led by the pro-Palestinian organization that the DeSantis administration claims amount to “harmful support for terrorist groups” like Hamas, which attacked Israel in early October. Florida, under Republican presidential candidate DeSantis, has staunchly supported Israel during the ongoing war and was monitoring college protests that have since ignited.

“Based on the National SJP’s support of terrorism, in consultation with Governor DeSantis, the student chapters must be deactivated,” state university system Chancellor Ray Rodrigues wrote Tuesday.

There are at least two Students for Justice in Palestine chapters at Florida universities facing cancellation through ties to the national organization, according to Rodrigues, who did not specify where the groups were located in the memo. The University of Florida and University of South Florida, though, both appear to have active SJP chapters.

 

Free speech is not something Florida Republicans believe in, you see. If you thought they only wanted to get rid of SJP, well, they want Black Lives Matter gone too, starting with both Florida GOP senators, Rick Scott and Marco Rubio.

Some Republican lawmakers are calling on Washington, D.C., Mayor Muriel Bowser to rename the two-block area in front of the White House that was dubbed “Black Lives Matter Plaza” three years ago amid a wave of racial justice protests.

Groups affiliated with the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement have faces a backlash after messages sent out following the grisly Oct. 7 Hamas attacks on Israel appeared to support terrorists and express anti-Israel sentiment.

“BLM chapters across the nation have circulated disturbing anti-Semitic rhetoric and images on social media, encouraging the spread of pro-Hamas propaganda,” the group of more than 20 House and Senate members, all Republicans, wrote in a statement accompanying their letter.

“Continuing to honor terrorist sympathizers with a plaza in our nation’s capital is a slap in the face to all Americans, especially Jewish and Israeli Americans.”

Among Republicans signing the letter: Sens. Marco Rubio (Fla.), Thom Tillis (N.C.), Lindsey Graham (S.C.), Rick Scott (Fla.), Josh Hawley (Mo.), Marsha Blackburn (Tenn.) and Bill Cassidy (La.); and Reps. Elisa Stefanik (N.Y.), Jim Banks (Ind.) and Jeff Duncan (S.C.).

The mayor’s office didn’t immediately respond to The Hill’s request for comment on the letter or plans for the plaza.

Immediately after Hamas’s deadly blitz on Israel, which included attacks on multiple kibbutzim and an outdoor music festival, some BLM chapters expressed sympathy with Palestine and appeared to justify the aggression against Israel.

A BLM Chicago chapter posted on X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter, an image of a paraglider with the message “I stand with Palestine.” BLM Phoenix shared statements declaring that “Palestinian freedom fighters are not terrorists!,” and “The Palestinian attack was a revolution and attempt to reclaim their freedom.”

BLM chapters are run independently and can be unaffiliated with the broader Black Lives Matter organization, which hasn’t commented on the latest Israeli-Hamas conflict.

 

Sure seems like cancel culture to me. Free Speech only for approved groups is not how it works, gang.

 

And Black Lives Still Matter.

Sunday Long Read: Black Lives Still Matter

Black Lives Matter in America, but I can't blame Black folk for leaving a country that never wanted us as anything more than slaves while we wait for the end of the Civil Rights era. Our Sunday Long Read icomes from the LA Times, where the Blaxit is happening, Black folks leaving a country that has wanted us gone all our lives. Some of us are gone for good, moving to other countries where we're Black folk are treated like -- wait for it -- actual human beings.

 

Filmmaker Jameelah Nuriddin was locked down in Los Angeles during the pandemic, watching as the nation convulsed in protest over the murder of George Floyd, when she had an epiphany: “America does not deserve me.”

As a Black woman, Nuriddin always tried to work twice as hard as those around her, thinking: “If I’m smart enough, pretty enough, successful enough ... then finally people will treat me as a human being.”

But as she grieved yet another unarmed Black man killed by police, she decided she was done trying to prove herself to a society that she felt would never really love her back.

So Nuriddin, 39, packed her bags and left.

She ended up in Costa Rica, in an idyllic beach town on the Caribbean coast that has become a hub for hundreds of Black expatriates fed up with life in the United States.

She now spends her days working for U.S. clients from chic cafes, leading healing ceremonies at a local waterfall and trying to figure out who she is, exactly, outside of an American context.

“It’s like leaving an abusive relationship,” she said of exiting the United States.

The expats forging new lives in Puerto Viejo are part of a wider exodus of Black Americans from the U.S. in recent years, with many leaving for reasons that are explicitly political.

Exhausted by anti-Black discrimination and violence back home, they are building communities in countries such as Portugal, Ghana, Colombia and Mexico.

Often referred to as “Blaxit,” which combines the words “Black” and “exit,” the movement has been boosted by social media, where influencers share inspirational posts about their odysseys abroad and challenge others to join them.

It is also aided by a new industry of businesses that provide relocation services specifically for African Americans, and by Facebook and WhatsApp groups such as “Black in Bali,” “Black in Tulum” and “Brothas & Sistas in Mexico City,” whose members share tips on everything from how to pay local bills to where to find good hairstylists.

There are no official statistics on how many have left the country. But academics say it may be one of the most significant emigrations of African Americans since the first half of last century, when many Black artists decamped to Europe.

The late writer James Baldwin, who was part of that earlier wave, said he moved to France in 1948 “with the theory that nothing worse would happen to me there than had already happened to me here.”

Seven decades later, the U.S. is still grappling with racism, with Black people twice as likely as white people to be killed by police and Black workers earning less on the dollar than their white counterparts. In Florida, a new law forces teachers to downplay the impact of slavery, and across the country, far-right activists are seeking bans on books touching on Black history.

Americans of all races have been leaving the U.S. thanks to the pandemic shift to remote work. But for Black Americans, many of whom were distraught over the political and racial divisions the pandemic years highlighted, the decision to move abroad is about more than just saving money or having an adventure.

“It gave people time to question,” said Chrishan Wright, who launched a podcast in 2020 that documented her move to Lisbon. She now works as a relocation consultant and is helping about a dozen families restart in Portugal. They are mostly Black professionals with children, she said, in search of “a better quality of life without the emotional and psychological strain.”

 

Why stay in an abusive relationship with a country that has been trying to kill us for 400 years? I don't have an answer for that. But for more and more of us, the search for that answer is taking us outside America, and frankly I don't find anything wrong with that. "Nobody loves America like Black folk" the saying goes, "But America never loved us back."

 

When you fall out of love, there's increasingly little reason to stay.

 

Black Lives Still Matter.  Even ex-pats.

Black Lives Still Matter, Con't

Black churches in Florida are stepping up with teaching lessons now that Black history has been outlawed in Florida schools.

 

They filed into the pews one after the other on a sweltering Wednesday night, clutching Bibles and notepads, ready to learn at church what they no longer trusted would be taught at school.

“BLACK HISTORY MATTERS” proclaimed television screens facing the several dozen men and women settling in at Friendship Missionary Baptist Church. An institution in the predominantly Black neighborhood of Liberty City, “The Ship” had borne witness to many of the seminal events of the past century, shepherding its followers during Jim Crow and the heyday of the KKK, through the civil rights movement to the racial justice protests of recent years.

Now, as a new school year started, the Rev. Gaston Smith was standing at the pulpit with a lesson on one of those chapters. After months of controversy over new directives governing classroom instruction in Florida — changes that critics said sanitized or even distorted the past — he and other Black pastors across the state agreed their churches had no choice but to respond.

They would teach Black history themselves.

“Whenever there has been any kind of movement, particularly in the African American community, it started in the house of God,” said Smith, 57, a commanding presence with a resonant voice. “We cannot be apathetic, we cannot sit back, we cannot be nonvocal. We have to stand our ground, because the Bible says we have to speak up for those that cannot speak up for themselves.”

Their resolve has drawn a groundswell of support. A nonprofit coalition of religious institutions, Faith in Florida, put together an 11-chapter tool kit to guide the churches and suggest books, articles, documentaries and reports covering the Black experience through what it calls “the lens of truth.” The chapters, featuring content for all ages, cover a lot of ground. “From Africa to America,” one is titled. Another highlights “Race, Racism & Whiteness.”

Some 200 faith leaders quickly signed up to use it, representing African Methodist Episcopal, United Methodist and other denominations. Each committed to weave teachings on Black history into their sermons or Sunday school classes or Bible study sessions. That way, they’d be reaching parents as well as children.

The churches’ involvement harks back to the pivotal role many played in the struggle to end segregation and advance voting rights.

“There’s always been that connection,” said Loren Lyons, a spokesperson for the coalition. “And so, we pretty much said that because of what’s going on in the curriculum and what’s going on in Florida right now, it’s time that we took back that power.”

 

Cynical me wonders just how long Ron DeSantis's government will wait before Black churches become targets of investigation for being terrorist hotbeds, this of course coming from people who will tell you that white Christians are the most persecuted group on Earth and that religious freedom is the bedrock of American society.

 

Black communities taking education of kids and families into their own hands, often through Black churches, is nothing new. We've been doing it for decades if not centuries. From spirituals to Dr. King's SCLC to the Black Panthers to today, we survive and thrive though that community.

 

But Depressing Realist Me wonders why DeSantis would lift a finger when Black churches are technically making his case that public education is broken and that religious education for students is the answer. That this effort will be hijacked in order to push public education dollars going to churches and religious schools is inevitable.

So no, I'm not celebrating this at all. I fully expect Republicans to co-opt this movement for evil.

Black Lives Still Matter though.

Orange Meltdown, Con't

Trump can't stop lying to everyone: the press, his MAGA flunkies, and to himself.

 

Former President Trump is pushing his mug shot, arrests and criminal charges to try to claim new solidarity with Black voters — a group that has largely shunned him in elections.

Why it matters: Trump has latched on to a narrative promoted last month by Fox News commentators and others in conservative media — that his arrests could boost his standing among African Americans who believe the criminal justice system is unfair.

The big picture: There's little evidence he's getting an indictment bump among Black voters, despite his claim that support rose after the mug shot from his arrest in Atlanta was released. But his team believes he can make inroads with Black voters by pushing an I-am-a-victim-just-like-you storyline.

Zoom in: Trump claimed in a recent interview with conservative host Hugh Hewitt that his poll numbers among Black voters "have gone up four and five times" since his mug shot was released.That's not true, as CNN reported.

And it's unclear whether Trump's favorability with Black voters has increased beyond the 8% or so share he received in 2020. (Recent polls have suggested Trump's support among Blacks is improving, but pre-election polls in 2020 overstated his support.)

Driving the news: In recent weeks Trump has promoted videos of Black people defending him, and senior Trump advisers have kept in touch with Black celebrities who have supported him publicly.Trump campaign spokesperson Steven Cheung posted on X a TikTok video of a 34-year-old Black man saying, "We rocking with Trump, man. Even the youth, they know what time it is."

"I just think — especially, again with the (Black) men — they're going to see through" the charges against Trump, "because they've been dealing with this for a long time," Donald Trump Jr. told Newsmax.

Black artists including Lil Pump, Kodak Black and Chief Keef have posted mugshots of themselves next to Trump's, shared supportive messages, or otherwise indicated they're rooting for him. Keef mused that Trump would "run the prison" if he's convicted. Another artist, Bandman Kevo, got Trump's image tattooed on his leg.

Several artists have pointed to actions Trump took while in office, including passing the First Step Act and PPP loans, as reasons for their support.

Yes, but: Critics of the former president see irony in his push for African Americans' support.Trump is charged in Fulton County, Georgia, with trying to overturn the 2020 election results. The charges stem from an alleged conspiracy in which Trump's team sought to invalidate votes in heavily Black urban areas across the country after the election.
Democratic pollsters doubt that Trump's support among a few Black artists will help him significantly. A bigger issue in a general election matchup against President Biden could be Biden's slipping numbers with non-white voters who don't have college degrees.

"The best way to describe (Trump's) political efforts here is pissing in windmills," former South Carolina state Rep. Bakari Sellers told Axios.

"I love Kodak. I love his music, but that doesn't mean that his thoughts on Donald Trump are going to be pervasive."

 

They accept us as long as we're willing to grovel to them. They'll take our street cred and our voices if it means they can use them to control the rest of us.

 

I don't think I will do that, thanks.

 

Last Call For A Stone Rolled Out

Rolling Stone magazine co-founder Jann Wenner managed to roll his nearly six-decade music journalism legacy off a cliff over the the space of 24 hours because he decided that white men were the only people who mattered in the history of rock 'n' roll.

Jann Wenner, the co-founder of Rolling Stone magazine, has been removed from the board of the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame Foundation, which he also helped found, one day after an interview with him was published in The New York Times in which he made comments that were widely criticized as sexist and racist.

The foundation — which inducts artists into the hall of fame and was the organization behind the creation of its affiliated museum in Cleveland — made the announcement in a brief statement released Saturday.

“Jann Wenner has been removed from the board of directors of the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame Foundation,” the statement said. Joel Peresman, the president and chief executive of the foundation, declined to comment further when reached by phone.

But the dismissal of Mr. Wenner comes after an interview with The Times, published Friday and timed to the publication of his new book, called “The Masters,” which collects his decades of interviews with rock legends like Bob Dylan, Mick Jagger, John Lennon, Bruce Springsteen and Bono — all of them white and male.

In the interview, David Marchese of The Times asked Mr. Wenner, 77, why the book included no women or people of color.

Regarding women, Mr. Wenner said, “Just none of them were as articulate enough on this intellectual level,” and remarked that Joni Mitchell “was not a philosopher of rock ’n’ roll.”

His answer about artists of color was less direct. “Of Black artists — you know, Stevie Wonder, genius, right?” he said. “I suppose when you use a word as broad as ‘masters,’ the fault is using that word. Maybe Marvin Gaye, or Curtis Mayfield? I mean, they just didn’t articulate at that level.”

Mr. Wenner’s comments drew an immediate reaction, with his quotes mocked on social media and past criticisms unearthed of Rolling Stone’s coverage of female artists under Mr. Wenner. Joe Hagan, who in 2017 wrote a harshly critical biography of Mr. Wenner, “Sticky Fingers,” cited a comment by the feminist critic Ellen Willis, who in 1970 called the magazine “viciously anti-woman.”

In a statement issued late Saturday by a representative for Little, Brown and Company, the publisher of his book, Mr. Wenner said: “In my interview with The New York Times I made comments that diminished the contributions, genius and impact of Black and women artists and I apologize wholeheartedly for those remarks.

“‘The Masters’ is a collection of interviews I’ve done over the years,” he continued, “that seemed to me to best represent an idea of rock ’n’ roll’s impact on my world; they were not meant to represent the whole of music and its diverse and important originators but to reflect the high points of my career and interviews I felt illustrated the breadth and experience in that career. They don’t reflect my appreciation and admiration for myriad totemic, world-changing artists whose music and ideas I revere and will celebrate and promote as long as I live. I totally understand the inflammatory nature of badly chosen words and deeply apologize and accept the consequences.”

Robert Johnson, Sister Rosetta Tharpe, Little Richard, Ray Charles, B.B. King, James Brown, but OK there Jann.

Hey, if the consequences are that his book crashes and burns, he's off the Rock 'n' Roll Hall board for good and he gets to live alone with his ghosts, I'm fine with that. Sadly, he's probably going to be booked by Tucker Carlson or Ben Shapiro and he'll be fine little martyr for the "we're just asking questions" set.

Still, it may be the most Jann Wenner thing ever to distill six decades of music down to Bono, Spingsteen and John Lennon. Never did like the guy.

Last Call For Reparation Nation, Con't

A new LA Times poll finds that Californians are massively opposed to cash reparations for Black citizens in the state as Oakland and other municipalities are suggesting be looked into.

 

California voters oppose the idea of the state offering cash payments to the descendants of enslaved African Americans by a 2-to-1 margin, according to the results of a new poll that foreshadows the political difficulty ahead next year when state lawmakers begin to consider reparations for slavery.

The UC Berkeley Institute of Governmental Studies poll, co-sponsored by The Times, found that 59% of voters oppose cash payments compared with 28% who support the idea. The lack of support for cash reparations was resounding, with more than 4 in 10 voters “strongly” opposed.

“It has a steep uphill climb, at least from the public’s point of view,” said Mark DiCamillo, director of the IGS poll.

Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom and state lawmakers created California’s Reparations Task Force in 2020 with the goal of establishing a path to reparations that could serve as a model for the nation. After two years of deliberations, the task force sent a final report and recommendations this summer to the state Capitol, where Newsom and the Democratic-led Legislature will ultimately decide how the state should atone for slavery.

The group suggested providing cash payments to all descendants based on health disparities, mass incarceration and over-policing and housing discrimination that have adversely affected Black residents compared with white Californians.

The remedies recommended in the report also go far beyond cash payments and include policies to end the death penalty, pay fair market value for jail and prison labor, restore voting rights to all formerly and currently incarcerated people and apply rent caps to historically redlined ZIP Codes that disadvantaged Black residents, among dozens of other suggestions.

 

This will never happen, of course. The closer California actually got to reparations, to resolving the core causes of the egregious economic imbalance between Black and white folks in even a state as liberal as the Golden State, the easier it becomes for Republicans and other opposition groups to kill any reparation measures at all. 

There's no faster way to get white, Asian, and Hispanic voters back on the GOP train, enough so to turn Cali back into the Pete Wilson/Arnold Schwarzenegger red state that it was 15, 20 years ago than meaningful reparations. Republicans would be crazy not to drive that wedge into everything from school boards to the Governor's mansion.

Reparations are still the moral thing to do, but there will be consequences to the point where I can see California Republicans taking every dime back and charging Black folk for interest.

Just to be assholes.

Vote Like Your Country Depends On It, Con't

Last night I had much to say about Republicans refusing to redraw Voting Rights Act-compliant congressional districts that didn't disenfranchise Black voters in multiple states, and that SCOTUS had all but eliminated any enforcement power to remedy it.

Today, a three-judge federal panel unanimously found Alabama's GOP was violating the VRA and ordered a court-drawn map.

A panel of three federal judges on Tuesday rejected Alabama’s latest version of its congressional map, saying the state’s Republican-led legislature did not follow a court order to comply with the Voting Rights Act when it last redrew districts in July.

The judges have directed a special master and cartographer to create a remedial map.

“We do not take lightly federal intrusion into a process ordinarily reserved for the State Legislature. But we have now said twice that this Voting Rights Act case is not close,” the judges wrote in the order. “And we are deeply troubled that the State enacted a map that the State readily admits does not provide the remedy we said federal law requires.”

The order also says the judges were “disturbed by the evidence that the State delayed remedial proceedings but ultimately did not even nurture the ambition to provide the required remedy.”

The U.S. Supreme Court had issued a decision in June upholding the panel’s earlier ruling, which found that the Alabama legislature drew congressional districts that unlawfully diluted the political power of Black residents in violation of the federal Voting Rights Act. The three-judge panel had ordered the state to produce a new congressional map that included either an additional majority-Black district or a second district in which Black voters otherwise would have an opportunity to elect a candidate of their choice.

The redrawn map was approved by the Republican-controlled Alabama legislature in July. It had apportioned the state’s 7th Congressional District to include a population that is 50.65 percent Black and its 2nd Congressional District to have a population that’s 40 percent Black. The Alabama Senate voted 24-6 to pass the new plan, and the House approved the map 75-28.

Challengers argued that lowering the percentage of Black voters in the map’s sole majority-Black district and allocating a 40 percent Black voting population to another district did not meet the court’s requirement to produce a district that is “something quite close to” a Black majority.

In Tuesday’s order, the panel of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Alabama, Southern Division, took particular issue with the legislature’s failure to comply with a federal court order.

“We are not aware of any other case in which a state legislature — faced with a federal court order declaring that its electoral plan unlawfully dilutes minority votes and requiring a plan that provides an additional opportunity district — responded with a plan that the state concedes does not provide that district,” the judges wrote. “The law requires the creation of an additional district that affords Black Alabamians, like everyone else, a fair and reasonable opportunity to elect candidates of their choice. The 2023 Plan plainly fails to do so.”

 

But as I said last night, "What difference does it make?" 

We know this will be appealed to the 11th circuit and overturned, or if upheld, will go to SCOTUS, and that's if Alabama Republicans don't gum up the works with another map on an appeal.

The point is, the odds of this ruling actually being carried out are nil. I've been wrong before and I hope I'm wrong here. Alabama Republicans and Republicans in a number of other states deserve to be made examples of.

We'll see how far this goes, but I'm expecting the case to be dragged out for months until the courts rule that, as with Ohio, the unconstitutional districts have to remain lest the entire state be disenfranchised.

Ron's Gone Wrong, Con't

The battle over Florida's position on slavery as Black history was far worse than previously thought, as the state objected to AP Black History being taught in the state because the course refused to consider the benefits of slavery for Black Americans, and it was too hard on the slave traders, nearly all of them white.

When Florida rejected a new Advanced Placement course on African American Studies, state officials said they objected to the study of several concepts — like reparations, the Black Lives Matter movement and “queer theory.”

But the state did not say that in many instances, its reviewers also made objections in the state’s attempt to sanitize aspects of slavery and the plight of African Americans throughout history, according to a Miami Herald/Tampa Bay Times review of internal state comments.

For example, a lesson in the Advanced Placement course focused on how Europeans benefited from trading enslaved people and the materials enslaved laborers produced. The state objected to the content, saying the instructional approach “may lead to a viewpoint of an ‘oppressor vs. oppressed’ based solely on race or ethnicity.”

In another lesson about the beginnings of slavery, the course delved into how tens of thousands of enslaved Africans had been “removed from the continent to work on Portuguese-colonized Atlantic islands and in Europe” and how those “plantations became a model for slave-based economy in the Americans.”

In response, the state raised concerns that the unit “may not address the internal slave trade/system within Africa” and that it “may only present one side of this issue and may not offer any opposing viewpoints or other perspectives on the subject.”

“There is no other perspective on slavery other than it was brutal,” said Mary Pattillo, a sociology professor and the department chair of Black Studies at Northwestern University. Pattillo is one of several scholars the Herald/Times interviewed during its review of the state’s comments about the AP African American Studies curriculum.

“It was exploitative, it dehumanized Black people, it expropriated their labor and wealth for generations to come. There is no other side to that in African American studies. If there’s another side, it may be in some other field. I don’t know what field that is because I would argue there is no other side to that in higher education,” Pattillo said.

Alexander Weheliye, African American studies professor at Brown University, said the evaluators’ comments on the units about slavery were a “complete distortion” and “whitewashing” of what happened historically.

“It’s really trying to go back to an earlier historical moment, where slavery was mainly depicted by white historians through a white perspective. So to say that the enslaved and the sister African nations and kingdoms and white colonizers and enslavers were the same really misrecognizes the fundamentals of the situation,” Weheliye said.

The objections are an example of how Florida education officials are enforcing broad state laws and rules that restrict how schools can teach about racism and other aspects of history — and how the College Board’s pilot African American Studies course became a casualty of those policies.

 

To recap, everything I said earlier this year about Republicans withing to eliminate Black history and replace it with a white-friendly version where the "exploitation of human beings may have been bad but" nonsense is active, systemic racist violence against the children of an entire state and especially against the descendants of those Black slaves.

 

They want that history gone, if not criminalizing its teaching. 

Republicans hate us. They want to exterminate our history, so they can exterminate us.

Don't expect us to forgive you if you facilitate this brutality.

Black history, Black lives, they all matter.

Last Call For Black Lives Matter

 They keep killing us, as they have been for 400 years, the American dream and all. Sometimes we live, and sometimes we die for no reason other than we are Black.

Three people were killed Saturday in a racially motivated attack after a gunman targeted Black people at a Dollar General store in Jacksonville, Florida, in one of several weekend shootings that again shocked Americans in public places – from stores to football games to parades.

“This shooting was racially motivated and he hated Black people,” Jacksonville Sheriff T.K. Waters said at a news conference early Saturday evening.

Waters said the shooter, who he described as a White man in his 20s, shot and killed himself after the attack. The suspect left behind what the sheriff described as three manifestos outlining his “disgusting ideology of hate” and his motive in the attack.

All three victims, two men and one woman, were Black.

Waters said the shooter lived in Clay County, Florida, south of Jacksonville, with his parents. Jacksonville is located in northeast Florida, about 35 miles south of the Georgia border.

Waters said the shooter told his father by text to “check his computer.” The father found documents described by Waters as manifestos and called authorities.

But Waters said by the time authorities were alerted about the manifestos, the gunman had already started the attack in the Dollar General.

The shooting started shortly after 1 p.m. ET, blocks away from Edward Waters University, a historically Black school where students living on campus were told to stay in their residence halls. Waters said the gunman was seen on the school’s campus before heading to the Dollar General. No one was injured on the campus.

“He took that opportunity to put his bulletproof vest on outside and to put his mask on outside and then proceed to the store where he committed this horrible act,” Waters told CNN’s Jim Acosta.

Edward Waters University officials said the shooter was turned away from its campus after refusing to identify himself.

“The individual returned to their car and left campus without incident. The encounter was reported to the Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office by EWU security,” according to a university news release.

Jacksonville Mayor Donna Deegan said the gunman barricaded himself inside the store after the attack. It was not immediately clear if victims were shot inside or outside the store.

The sheriff said investigators believe the gunman acted alone and wore both a tactical vest and mask during the attack. He was armed with an AR-15 style rifle and a handgun.

To recap, a white supremacist armed with weapons and protecting himself with a tactical vest and mask went to a private Christian historically Black university with the intent of killing Black people. When the security staff turned him away, he went to a Dollar General in Jacksonville and killed three Black people and then himself.

Maybe he would have killed dozens or more. In America, being Black means that sometimes, we take comfort in the fact that fewer of us are killed by fate, mourning three instead of three dozen.

Sixty years ago this weekend Dr. Martin Luther King gave his famous Dream speech on Washington DC. Several states will barely teach current students about that fact, and they definitely won't cover King's other speeches where he dismantled the notion that his dream was possible without real work from white moderates, and that they needed to get started on that. Sixty years later, not much has changed.

But Black Lives Still Matter. 

Our Little White Supremacist Domestic Terrorism Problem, Con't

DC Federal Judge Tanya Chutkan is already getting death threats serious enough to prompt an arrest for being the presiding judge over his January 6th trial, months before the proceeding have even started.

A Texas woman was arrested and has been charged with threatening to kill the federal judge overseeing the criminal case against former President Donald Trump in Washington and a member of Congress.

Abigail Jo Shry of Alvin, Texas, called the federal courthouse in Washington and left the threatening message — using a racist term for U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan — on Aug. 5, court records show. Investigators traced her phone number and she later admitted to making the threatening call, according to a criminal complaint.

In the call, Shry told the judge, who is overseeing the election conspiracy case against Trump, “You are in our sights, we want to kill you,” the documents said. Prosecutors allege Shry also said, “If Trump doesn’t get elected in 2024, we are coming to kill you,” and she threatened to kill U.S. Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, a Texas Democrat running for mayor of Houston, according to court documents.

A judge earlier this week ordered Shry jailed. Court records show Shry is represented by the Houston public defender’s office, which did not immediately return a message seeking comment on Wednesday.

Trump has publicly assailed Chutkan, a former assistant public defender who was nominated to the bench by President Barack Obama, calling her “highly partisan” and “ VERY BIASED & UNFAIR!” because of her past comments in a separate case overseeing the sentencing of one of the defendants charged in the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol.

Chutkan in a hearing Friday imposed a protective order in the case limiting what evidence handed over by prosecutors the former president and his legal team can publicly disclose. She warned Trump’s lawyers that his defense should be mounted in the courtroom and “not on the internet.”

 

How dare a Black woman preside over a federal criminal case against Donald Trump, right? Of course she's getting death threats, along with repeated Trump target Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, also Black. Hell, Fulton County, Georgia DA Fani Willis has been getting death threats for years now. 

 

What they really hate is Black people - particularly Black women -- daring to have power over America's favorite white supremacist.  Don't think for a second that race isn't playing a heavy part in these threats against the prosecutors and judges involved in Donald Trump's dozens of indictments.

And don't think for a second that Trump will hesitate to turn up the heat until someone is hurt or killed.

Black History Matters

Black History Matters, because Black History is American history, but in Ron DeSantis's Florida, it's propaganda and indoctrination designed to take history away from everyone.

 

Slavery was a compromise. The Black Lives Matter movement led to more crime. Masculinity helped win World War II.

Those are some of the lessons included in PragerU Kids videos, an educational entertainment program created by PragerU, a right-wing advocacy group long criticized for its content being “misleading” or factually inaccurate. Its videos have prompted even more backlash online since PragerU CEO Marissa Streit announced last month that the group is partnering with the state of Florida as an education vendor to provide supplemental lessons.

Among the PragerU Kids videos making the rounds on social media is one called “Leo & Layla Meet Frederick Douglass,” in which a pair of children go back in time and meet an animated depiction of Frederick Douglass. In the video, Douglass, an abolitionist who devoted his life to anti-slavery efforts, describes slavery as a compromise between the Founding Fathers and the Southern colonies for the benefit of the U.S. The depiction also criticizes fellow abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison.

The animated video drew swift criticism from social media users who deemed it propaganda, and condemned an apparent reference to the police violence protests of 2020, in which a purported Douglass said “William refuses all compromise, demands immediate change, and if he doesn’t get what he wants, he likes to set things on fire,” referring to Garrison.

“This is some of the most dangerous & false propaganda I’ve ever seen,” one person tweeted. “The description of Frederick Douglass in this animation is a flat out lie and the concept that children should be learning from this should scare everyone.”

Another added: “This video bastardizes the essence of Frederick Douglass. It’s insulting for me as a former history/govt teacher. I can’t imagine how devastating it must feel for Black people to see this dehumanizing curriculum implemented (or continued) in Florida public schools.”

Streit, though, said in a phone interview Thursday, that any educational offering could potentially include material that could be deemed offensive.

“I challenge those same people to look through every word that Scholastic has printed or, or every word that BrainPOP has published, and tell me that you’re not going to find something that you are not offended by," she said. "But you know, I completely stand by what’s in our videos. I actually think that our Frederick Douglass video is a great one.”

Streit contends that critics have only read one version of history — a progressive one, documented in works like "A People's History of the United States" by Howard Zinn. "The fact that people are so upset is actually a sign of the fact that there has been one way of doing things for a very long time," she added.

Her sentiments echo her announcement last month that the K-12 “supplemental educational resources” are a response to U.S. schools being “hijacked by the left.” The news comes as Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who is running for president in 2024, has championed controversial changes to the state’s education curriculum. His administration has tried to block a high school Advanced Placement African American studies course and signed laws to restrict the instruction of reproductive health and gender identity in schools. Additionally, challenges to book access have reportedly increased as a result of DeSantis’ education bills.

In a statement, the Florida Department of Education said in part: “The Florida Department of Education reviewed PragerU Kids and determined the material aligns to Florida’s revised civics and government standards. PragerU Kids is no different than many other resources, which can be used as supplemental materials in Florida schools at district discretion.”

 

PragerU hogwash as an officially recognized supplemental lesson for kids in Florida is disturbing as hell. It's vile, and they give the excuse that the right-wing noise machine always gives: "Stupid libtards fear our real history in the marketplace of ideas!"

Well yes, "slavery was an acceptable compromise that helped the Blacks" is something that should be shunned along with flat earth nonsense and "your womb belongs to God and the state".

And I wish  Zinn's People's History of the US was as ubiquitous in high school or college as the right claims it is, Jesus.

Black History Matters.

That's The Sound Of The Police, Con't

The sound of these six white former Mississippi sheriff's deputies who tortured two Black men and shot one in the mouth is a guilty plea deal on federal civil rights charges.

 

Six former Mississippi law enforcement officers have pleaded guilty to charges related to the torture of two Black men, US Attorney for the Southern District of Mississippi Darren LaMarca said in a Thursday news conference.

The announcement comes after federal charges were filed against the former law enforcement officers, who “called themselves ‘The Goon Squad’ because of their willingness to use excessive force and not to report it,” according to a federal charging document.

“The people of Mississippi and those of Rankin County expect those who enforce the laws to follow the law, clearly these men did not – they held themselves above the law,” LaMarca said.

The charges include conspiracy against rights, deprivation of rights under color of law, conspiracy to obstruct justice and obstruction of justice, according to online federal court records.

Former Rankin County Sheriff’s Department deputy Hunter Elward faces the most serious of charges – discharge of a firearm during a crime of violence. Court documents name the other officers charged as Brett McAlpin, Jeffrey Middleton, Christian Dedmon, Daniel Opdyke and Joshua Hartfield.

The incident occurred on January 24 in Braxton, Mississippi, just southeast of Jackson. It came to light after two men, Michael Jenkins and Eddie Parker, filed a federal civil lawsuit. Many of the claims in the lawsuit were reflected in the federal charging document.

The two men, who are Black, say six White law enforcement officers entered the home they were in and tortured them for nearly two hours, culminating with Jenkins being shot in the mouth.

“The defendants in this case tortured and inflicted unspeakable harm on their victims, egregiously violated the civil rights of citizens who they were supposed to protect, and shamefully betrayed the oath they swore as law enforcement officers,” US Attorney General Merrick B. Garland said in a statement.

FBI Special Agent in Charge Jermicha Fomby described the alleged actions as “horrific.” He added, “I did not expect this to be the actions that we would have subjected upon our citizens in the year 2023.”

“On behalf of our clients Michael Jenkins and Eddie Parker, Black Lawyers for Justice thanks the United States Department of Justice for the historic legal results choices achieved today,” Malik Shabazz, the lead attorney for the victims, said in a statement.

In an interview last month, Parker told CNN: “Justice is what it all boils down to. I’m just like them, you know, whether they in uniform or not.”

 

These assholes are still facing state charges to boot and a plea deal on those charges is expected later this month, and I guarantee you that nothing would have happened to these bastard cops if Trump's "Justice Department" had been the ones in charge still. Merrick Garland got this done in seven months.

 

And yes, in 2023 we're still having to turn to Reconstruction-era anti-Klan laws to prosecute white supremacist bastard cops. Not a hell of a lot has changed for us Black folk, either.

 

Black Lives Still Matter.

 

Last Call For Black Lives Still Matter, Con't

Both Black Tennessee state lawmakers expelled from the state legislature earlier this year by angry, overwhelmingly white Republicans have easily won their special elections to be returned to Nashville, in time for a scheduled special session by GOP Gov. Bill Lee on gun safety measures.

The two Democratic state representatives in Tennessee who were expelled by Republicans in April for protesting in support of gun safety on the chamber floor won elections Thursday night for their old seats, The Associated Press projected.

Justin Jones won his election for his state House seat in Nashville, and Justin J. Pearson won his race in Memphis, according to AP projections.

Jones defeated Republican Laura Nelson, while Pearson won his race against independent candidate Jeff Johnston.

Both lawmakers had been reinstated by local government officials shortly after their expulsion in April, but they still had to run for their old seats — both in primary elections in June and in Thursday’s general elections.

While Jones and Pearson were heavily favored to win — each of their districts comprise heavily Democratic areas — their electoral success nevertheless delivered a resounding message to Republicans in the state Legislature that the lawmakers continue to enjoy robust support.

Their return may also provide momentum for Democrats and other lawmakers who support gun measures, ahead of a special legislative session scheduled later this month that Gov. Bill Lee, a Republican, called specifically to address gun reform.

Jones, in a tweet shortly after the AP projected his victory, addressed Republican House Speaker Cameron Sexton, who led the expulsion hearings, and signaled that he would continue pushing for gun legislation during the special session.

"Well, Mr. Speaker, the People have spoken. The FIND OUT era of politics is just beginning. See you August 21st for special session," Jones tweeted.

Pearson, too, signaled he would work to organize further protests supporting gun reform, as well as efforts to advance the issue, during the upcoming special session.

“This is only the beginning for this Movement. We will organize, mobilize and activate to work tirelessly for the day when there are no more calls to respond to mass shootings and gun violence," he said in a statement. "I look forward to heading back to the Tennessee state capitol Aug. 21 for the special session on gun legislation. We, the People, will march, rally and work to pass legislation."

The question is do Sexton and the TN GOP have the balls to try this again, proving to America and the world just how racist they are? It's been a PR disaster for them for months and these Black lawmakers are showing everyone that even in deep red Tennessee that there's a future for Democrats and the people who voted for them.

We'll see. They tried to martyr them once.

But Black Lives Still Matter.

 

RIP Sheila Oliver

New Jersey Lt. Gov. Sheila Oliver, a Democratic stalwart in the state's politics for decades, has died at the age of 71.

New Jersey Lt. Gov. Sheila Oliver died Tuesday, one day after she was rushed to the hospital for an undisclosed medical issue.

"It is with incredible sadness and a heavy heart that we announce the passing of the Honorable Sheila Y. Oliver, Lieutenant Governor of the State of New Jersey," the Oliver family said in a statement. "She was not only a distinguished public servant but also our cherished daughter, sister, aunt, friend, and hero."

Oliver was 71 years old.

She had been serving as acting governor with Gov. Phil Murphy on vacation. The Democratic Senate President, Nicholas Scutari, took over as acting governor when Oliver was rushed to the hospital Monday.

Murphy remembered Oliver as a "trailblazer" in announcing her death.

"When I selected her to be my running mate in 2017, Lieutenant Governor Oliver was already a trailblazer in every sense of the word," Murphy said in a statement. "She had already made history as the first Black woman to serve as Speaker of the General Assembly, and just the second Black woman in the nation’s history to lead a house of a state legislature. I knew then that her decades of public service made her the ideal partner for me to lead the State of New Jersey. It was the best decision I ever made."

Former New Jersey governor and 2024 presidential candidate Chris Christie tweeted, "It is a sad day for NJ and for me personally."

"I will miss Sheila. She served as Speaker in my first term and we treated each other with kindness and respect," Christie said. "She was a great person and partner."

 

It's notable in today's age of blisteringly partisan politics that a Republican 2024 candidate like Christie would have anything nice to say about any Democrat in America at all. Again, meeting the absolute minimum standards for human decorum, I guess.

Oliver leaves behind a nearly three-decade legacy of service to the Garden State.

Born and raised in Newark, Oliver graduated from the city’s Weequahic High School before earning a sociology degree from Lincoln University in Pennsylvania and a masters in planning and administration from Columbia University. She was an East Orange resident.

She later worked for a nonprofit social services organization and taught at Essex County College and nearby Caldwell University.

Oliver moved into politics when she was elected to the East Orange Board of Education, an office she held from 1994 to 2000. During that time, she served two years as vice president and ended her time as president of the board.

She concurrently served as an Essex County freeholder from 1996-99. And in between, she lost a bid for East Orange mayor by a mere 51 votes.

A few years later, Oliver moved up to Trenton. She was elected to the Assembly in 2003 and was chosen by her fellow Democrats to become the chamber’s 169th speaker in 2009.

Assemblywoman Shavonda Sumter, D-Passaic and chairwoman of the New Jersey Legislature Black Caucus, described Oliver as a beloved mentor and an inspiration.

“As a freshman entering the New Jersey General Assembly, I was fortunate to work alongside Lt. Governor Oliver. Having the privilege of witnessing her lead as Speaker of the Assembly had a powerful impact on me,” Sumter said. “Representation matters, and I was honored to have Lt. Gov. Oliver be my mentor and educate me on the history of the politics in the state of New Jersey and how to navigate through the Legislature.”

“Lt. Governor Oliver’s influence transcended generations and she paved the way for Black and Brown women to pursue higher office. She taught us the importance of being informed, skilled, and graceful,” Sumter said.

Oliver was the second woman after Marion West Higgins in 1965 and the second Black lawmaker, after S. Howard Woodson in 1974, to ascend to the powerful position. She was also the second Black woman in American history to lead a state legislative chamber, after Karen Bass of California.

 

That it took until 2009 to have just the second Black woman Speaker in a state legislature is ridiculous, but Oliver met that challenge -- and Chris Christie -- head on.

 

Here's to the fighters. Black Lives Still Matter.

Ridin' With Biden, Con't

Yet another WaPo piece on Black voter turnout, but at least this time we have the Biden administration and the DNC admitting that efforts at getting Black men to vote in 2024 will pay off more than appealing to white voters.

 

Democrats are worried about a potential drop next year in turnout among Black voters, the party’s most loyal constituency, who played a consequential role in delivering the White House to President Biden in 2020 and will be crucial in his bid for reelection.

Their concern stems from a 10 percentage-point decline in Black voter turnout in last year’s midterms compared with 2018, a bigger drop than among any other racial or ethnic group, according to a Washington Post analysis of the Census Bureau’s turnout survey. Such warning signals were initially papered over by other Democratic successes in 2022: The party picked up a U.S. Senate seat in Pennsylvania, Sen. Raphael G. Warnock won reelection in Georgia and anticipated losses in the House were minimal.

But in key states like Georgia, the center of Democrats’ plans to mobilize Black voters in large margins for Biden in 2024, turnout in last year’s midterms was much lower among younger and male Black voters, according to internal party analysis.

The drop in Black turnout has become a focus for Democratic leaders as the party reorients to next year’s presidential contest. Biden’s election in 2020 hinged on narrow victories in states like Georgia, Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania that former president Donald Trump had won in 2016. Democratic activists are cautioning that the party can’t afford to let support from Black voters slip.

W. Mondale Robinson, founder of the Black Male Voter Project, shared a dire assessment of Democrats’ potential turnout problems with Black men. In many of the battleground states, he said many Black men are “sporadic or non-voters,” meaning they are registered, but have voted in one or none of the past three presidential elections. Robinson said Democrats spend too much time focused on converting “conservative-leaning White women” in the suburbs who they see as swing voters. Instead, he said, they should focus more on turning out Black men, viewing them as swing voters who are debating whether to vote or stay home.

“The Democratic Party has been failing epically at reaching this demographic of Black men — and that’s sad to say,” Robinson said. “Black men are your second-most stable base overwhelmingly, and yet you can’t reach them in a way that makes your work easier.”

Biden’s political team says it has received the message and is taking action, especially among younger Black men.

“We have to meet them where they are and we have to show them why the political process matters and what we have accomplished that benefits them,” said Cedric L. Richmond, a former Biden adviser who is now a senior adviser at the Democratic National Committee. He said there will be a clear focus on making Black voters aware of how they have benefited from Biden administration policies, learning from the errors of past Democratic efforts that fell short.

“We will not make the mistake that others made of not drawing all the connections,” he said.

 

Good, because without massive Black turnout, Trump will be in the Oval Office again. We'll need major turnout across the board of course, but we have to have the basics down. Enough white, Asian, and Hispanic voters showed up in 2022 to soften the blow, but I said then that focusing on white, suburban issues would hurt Black turnout and it did. We got lucky that Trump and the GOP did such a bad job, and we still lost the House anyway.

Black voter advocates say the challenge is particularly acute among Black men, many of whom say they feel alienated from the political process and were hurt by policies pushed by both parties that led to increased incarceration and a decline in manufacturing jobs decades ago. Many say their lives haven’t improved regardless of which party was in power, and are dispirited after the country elected Trump, life was upended by a global pandemic and violence worsened in urban areas.

Many Democrats interviewed said they were less worried about Black women, whose voting enthusiasm has historically been more robust than that of Black men. Black women were a huge factor in Biden’s victory in 2020. Advocates expect that trend to continue, particularly with Vice President Harris on the ticket and the appointment of Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, who both made history as the first Black women in their roles.

Terrance Woodbury, chief executive of HIT Strategies, a polling firm focused on young, non-White voters, has been shopping around a PowerPoint presentation to liberal groups warning of the need to act soon to convince Black voters that they have benefited from Biden’s time in office.

Part of the problem, he argues, is that the party’s focus on Trump and Republican extremism is less likely to motivate younger Black men than arguments focused on policy benefits. The messaging, he has argued, must focus on how Black communities have benefited from specific policies.

His own polling has shown that voters’ belief that their vote doesn’t matter is the greatest barrier to voting among Black Americans.

 

This time around Biden and the Democrats do have a long list of accomplishments. How good at making people see how it will affect their lives for the better through is up to Biden, his party, and his campaign. You'd think "Bet the alternative is Trump" would be enough. It is for me.

 

It's not for other Black men. Recognizing this problem 15 months before the election however is a start.

Last Call For Black Lives Still Matter, Con't

Black Republicans are finding out the hard way what the rest of the party thinks of Black folk, and they're not liking the answer they are getting.

 

Rep. John James (R-Mich.) criticized Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) on Friday for his response to Republican lawmakers who called him out on his state’s new Black history education standards Friday.

“@RonDeSantis, #1: slavery was not CTE!” James posted on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter. “Nothing about that 400 years of evil was a ‘net benefit’ to my ancestors. #2: there are only five black Republicans in Congress and you’re attacking two of them.”

Both Rep. Byron Donalds (R-Fla.) and Sen. Tim Scott (R-S.C.) have criticized the new standards, which indicate that American slavery helped enslaved people develop “skills” that benefited them, in the past few days.

Scott rebuked the language during a campaign stop in Iowa on Thursday, claiming “there is no silver lining in slavery.”

“Slavery was really about separating families, about mutilating humans and even raping their wives,” he said. “It was just devastating.”

DeSantis responded to the lawmakers by saying they were falling in line with Vice President Kamala Harris, who called the guidelines “propaganda.”

“They dare to push propaganda to our children,” Harris said earlier this week in Jacksonville, Fla. “Adults know what slavery really involved. It involved rape. It involved torture. It involved taking a baby from their mother.”

James pleaded with DeSantis to change course.

“My brother in Christ… if you find yourself in a deep hole put the shovel down,” he wrote. “You are now so far from the Party of Lincoln that your Ed. board is re-writing history and you’re personally attacking conservatives like [Scott] and [Donalds] on the topic of slavery.”

“You’ve gone too far. Stop,” he added.

 

That was Friday. Today,  it was former GOP Rep. Will Hurd who found out.

A dozen of the Republican White House contenders who want to keep former President Donald Trump from winning the 2024 presidential nomination joined him here Friday for a dinner with hundreds of influential activists in the state that holds the first caucuses.

But as has been the case for months in a race in which Trump polls as the comfortable front-runner, few dared to take even an indirect shot at him. And the one who delivered the night’s most slashing attack, former Texas Rep. Will Hurd, was booed as he left the stage.

“Donald Trump is not running for president to make America great again,” Hurd said, invoking Trump's slogan before bringing up the legal troubles cascading around him, including a superseding indictment approved by a grand jury this week. “Donald Trump is running to stay out of prison.”

The loud jeers that rang out inside the Iowa Events Center ballroom at the state party's Lincoln Dinner were at once illustrative of the power and loyalty Trump still commands and the challenges faced by those trying to beat him.

“Listen, I know the truth,” Hurd said, talking over the crowd as he neared the 10-minute time limit given to all candidates. “The truth is hard. But if we elect Donald Trump, we are willingly giving Joe Biden four more years in the White House and America can’t handle that.”

 

Black Republicans, "My brothers and sisters in Christ", as it were, I have a message for you.

 

Black Lives Still Matter.

But not to Republicans. You will never be more than a second-class citizen in the GOP. They want that for the rest of us Black folk, including you. The question is, will you help them destroy the Black community for your own gain?

Not that I expect many Black Republicans to be ZVTS readers, but you still have a choice.

Black Lives Still Matter, Con't

President Biden will announce the designation of three historical sites as part of the Emmett Till National Monument this week, marking what would have been Till's 82nd birthday on Tuesday.

 

The new monument will be established across three locations in Illinois and Mississippi in an effort to protect places that tell Till's story, as well as reflect the activism of his mother, who was instrumental in keeping the story of Till's murder alive.

In August 1955, two white men abducted, tortured and killed Till, a 14-year-old Black boy, after he whistled at a white shopkeeper's wife in a grocery store in Mississippi. Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam were acquitted but later confessed to the killing in a magazine. Fifty years after the crime, the shopkeeper's wife, Carolyn Bryant Donham, also admitted to lying about Till touching her.

Among the sites that will be honored is Roberts Temple Church of God in Christ in Chicago, where Till's funeral service was held in September 1955.

About 1,700 people filled the church to its capacity, while 10,000 more stood outside and listened to the service over loudspeakers. The ceremony was also remembered for Till-Mobley's brave decision to keep the casket open, showing Till's mutilated body.

In Mississippi, Graball Landing will become a monument. Locals believe it is the spot where Till's body was recovered from the Tallahatchie River. In 2008, a memorial sign dedicated to Till was installed near the site.

But over the years, the sign was routinely stolen, vandalized or shot at and forced to be replaced. A fourth edition now stands at the site — this time bulletproof and details the history of vandalism.

The third monument location will be the Tallahatchie County Second District Courthouse, also in Mississippi, where Till's killers were acquitted by an all-white jury. In October 2007, Till's family visited the courthouse to receive an apology from the town's leaders.

 

The million-dollar question in a country where one party is dedicated to erasing the entire civil rights era of the last 60-plus years: Will the existence of this monument, the history of the events being marked, and the reasons why the monument is being created be taught in states like Florida at all, or is that illegal? 

Someone in our national media should ask Ron DeSantis, Donald Trump, and the rest of the GOP field if they agree with the national monument designation and if it's appropriate to teach this history in schools.

 

Even ten years ago this wouldn't have been controversial at all. Teaching that a Black man was lynched by white folk on the word of a white girl in the lifetimes of even some of you reading this right now should absolutely be taught as a lesson, and a national monument marking this tragedy, serving as a solemn reminder of America's dark past, would be universally agreed upon as necessary to prevent it from ever happening again.

But of course one political party doesn't see it that way, and the people running for president in that party should be made to answer about why that is, and why that history is being erased under penalty of law.

 

Black Lives Still Matter.

The GOP's Race To The Bottom, Con't

Chief Justice John Roberts all but begged for a case to outlaw diversity efforts by employers in his decision ending affirmative action in college admissions, and it looks like he's going to get one sooner rather than later.

 

More than a dozen Republican attorneys general sent a letter to major corporations Thursday warning them to refrain from using racial preferences in hiring and promotion decisions.

Pointing to the Supreme Court’s decision undercutting the use of affirmative action in college admissions, the group said that companies would expose themselves to “serious legal consequences” for discriminating against different groups “even for benign purposes.”

“The Supreme Court’s recent decision should place every employer and contractor on notice of the illegality of racial quotas and race-based preferences in employment and contracting practices,” the letter from 13 attorneys general states.

Though the high court’s ruling in the college admissions cases did not directly implicate so-called diversity, equity or inclusion policies that have seen widespread adoption among the country’s largest employers, many legal experts believe workplace diversity efforts will see additional challenges that they unlawfully boost some groups over others.

The letter, which was directed at Fortune 100 companies and other large businesses, alleges that racial discrimination is “all too common” and violates federal and state civil rights laws.

“Responsible corporations interested in supporting underprivileged individuals and communities can find many lawful outlets to do so,” wrote the group, led by the attorneys general of Kansas and Tennessee. “But drawing crude lines based on skin color is not a lawful outlet, and it hurts more than it helps.”

Conservatives have stepped up their attacks on businesses over what they perceive as “woke” policies, namely around diversity initiatives and ESG-related efforts.

DEI’s defenders note that many of the things that employers have adopted, such as statistical breakdowns of their workforce or setting hiring goals, are aspirational and nonbinding.

Nevertheless, the attorneys general argue that many of these efforts effectively serve as illegal race-based quotas and called on companies to stop.

“If your company previously resorted to racial preferences or naked quotas to offset its bigotry, that discriminatory path is now definitively closed,” the letter states, citing the Supreme Court opinion. “Your company must overcome its underlying bias and treat all employees, all applicants, and all contractors equally, without regard for race.”

 

As I said earlier this week:

 

Oh, and wait until the Roberts Court gets rid of the EEOC. If you're Black and employed in anything more than an entry-level minimum-wage job, well, that's affirmative action, and you need to be fired as a result.

 

It's bad enough having to constantly prove socially to people that as a Black person, you belong at the job you've been hired for.

 

Pretty soon, we'll have to prove it legally, too.