#black lives

[alwaysbewoke]

[ifelllikeastar]

Willie Mays amazes centerfield fans with a leaping, one-handed catch of Duke Snider's long drive in 1954.

[onlytiktoks]

@a-captions-blog

[mos-twin-mattress]

It's so crazy... 2020 feels like a complete fever dream... I thought and hoped and prayed that we would keep the BLM momentum going like it was that year... But we didn't .... People started to forget and speak on it less.

I posted and still post as much as I can ab Black lives on my Facebook... Ab other social justice issues. Sometimes it felt like I was just screaming into a void... I still feel betrayed at times, by the white girlies who just a few years ago were in the streets saying "if they start shooting stand behind me"

My life doesn't feel important to most ppl. They talk a big game ab caring and wanting things to change, but at the end of the day most ppl don't want the status quo to change. They just want to do enough to look like a good person.

If this post makes you angry, makes you feel some typa way then I URGE you to look inwards and figure out WHY it strikes such an uncomfortablity in you. Figure out what you could be doing more...

I know it's difficult to hear these words, I know looking inwards is hard and uncomfortable, I've been there, I STILL have a cop in my head that I need to kill. We ALL do!

[without-ado]

The True America l Ernest Cole

The first publication of Cole's photographs depicting Black lives in the United States during the late 1960s and early 1970s l Magnum Photos

[framed-dreamz]

Labor Day Parade 2014 NYC & Culture!!! Curl Fest NYC 2019

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

By: Robert Meranto, Wilfred Reilly

Published: Jan 22, 2025

Successful policy innovations often come from the most unexpected people and places. As citizens quipped for a half century, only arch Cold Warrior Richard Nixon could open up Communist China. Today, perhaps, only some Donald Trump acolytes such as Elon Musk can make black lives matter, undoing years of bloody damage from progressive activists and indifference from everyone else. If there was ever a tempting target for the Trump administration’s proposed Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), American policing and criminal justice is it, boasting whole orchards of low-hanging fruit. Success in protecting black (and all other) lives could simultaneously increase President Trump’s already substantial support among racial and ethnic minorities and free sensible Democrats from the grip of their party’s extremists.

For more than a decade — Trayvon Martin was killed in 2012, Michael Brown in 2014 — Black Lives Matter has been an untouchable sacred cow for progressive Democrats, attracting at least $10 billion in donations and goosing progressive voter turnout, per serious scholars such as Harvard’s John Della Volpe. The dominant BLM narrative paints police as an existential threat to black people. Activists even claim, falsely, that modern police evolved from antebellum patrols organized to apprehend escaped slaves. In reality, of course, such institutions as the city watch and the king’s guard date back to an era when there were walled cities and kings. Robin Hood’s great opponent was the sheriff of Nottingham, and, as Guy de la Bédoyère notes in his excellent book Praetorian, the first true lawmen were probably pensioned-off Roman legionnaires. Any paradigm that simply denies all of this essentially requires that activists smear critics as racist, contributing to the toxic state of contemporary discourse.

Moreover, progressives sympathetic to the BLM narrative, and some of the movement’s scrappers, occupy key positions in governmental and private bureaucracies, which — as we noted at a recent conference — they use to censor others. The paradigmatic example is Harvard administrators’ attempt to fire star economist Roland Fryer after he published a sophisticated article showing that, controlling for behavior, police do not disproportionately kill black people. Sociologist Musa al-Gharbi details how thousands of woke activists and bureaucrats have until recently enjoyed high salaries for and considerable emotional satisfaction from their imposing the “correct” paradigm and purging critics.

This sort of virtue-signaling seriously damaged Democrats at the polls, likely enabling Donald Trump’s decisive electoral win this past November. But has it saved black lives? Sadly, it has not, and neither have activist reforms. Nevertheless, since the BLM era began around 2014, more police have died on the job, and activists’ demonization of cops has likely contributed to this trend.

In fairness, the 2014–19 period saw a small decrease in police killings of civilians, with about 200 fewer dead. Alas, as we document in “Black Deaths: How Black Lives Matter Took Lives That Better Policing Could Save,” thousands more citizens, mostly black citizens, died during this period as homicide rates among black males spiked from 30 to 56 per 100,000. And even the era of declining police homicides — for all groups — appears to be over. As Covid-19 and the post–George Floyd anarchy contributed to a striking surge in crime, American law enforcement officers fatally shot 1,050 people in 2021, 1,097 in 2022, and 1,164 in 2023, compared with 995 in 2015.

For all our lambasting of activists and academics, city mayors and officials have hardly covered themselves in glory. The graphic murder of a single wealthy white tourist in 1991, with its implications for the travel industry, turned New York City policing around in ways that the killings of thousands of regular New Yorkers could not.

Decades later, top cops continue to protect important (and disproportionately white) people in downtown business districts and tourist spots, while throwing bones to progressives by de-policing the poorer, blacker parts of town that need protection the most, and where homicides have soared in the BLM era. One thing that police-union leaders and street activists have in common is a remarkable callousness toward poor lives, often “black lives.” That’s horrible but understandable given that high homicide rates among low-income minorities rarely get police commissioners fired or mayors voted out.

Enter the DOGE.

While supporters claim that the Department of Government Efficiency, headed up by Musk and until recently co-led by likely Ohio gubernatorial candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, can potentially save the U.S. hundreds of billions of dollars, smart critics note that most big federal spending today is in middle-class welfare programs such as Social Security and Medicare — the famous third-rail programs that politicos, including Trump, fear to slash. Absent such action, as National Review’s own Yuval Levin laments, “so far, the DOGE is pretty much a bunch of memes and an X account.”

With respect to Levin, he fails to see an opportunity. The reason to have smart, wealthy outsiders such as Musk onboard is that, unbound by the status quo, they can bring creativity and transparency to failing bureaucracies. Given that 87 percent of government employees are in state and local bureaucracies, there is no reason to limit the DOGE’s insights purely to the federal level of government. Though its role would be purely advisory, state and local governments that are open to unconventional ideas could greatly benefit from the DOGE’s counsel.

Regarding policing, for example, since the 1990s, the New York Police Department has transformed itself by learning how to hire better cops, fire bad cops, and use information technology to replace a costly paper-based system and position cops where crimes were most likely to occur. The results: an 80 percent reduction in police shootings of civilians and a more than 80 percent reduction in homicide, alongside a decrease in incarceration. In just a few years, New York went from being one of the nation’s most dangerous cities to one of its safest.

An agency like the DOGE could make suggestions of this kind to any governmental agency worth talking to. In the context of policing, this could look like advising departments not currently doing so to identify and incarcerate the few most serious criminals in every jurisdiction who are responsible for most crime, end the bizarre anarcho-tyranny of cities and larger entities that fund costly campaigns against such groups as clinic protesters and crosswalk desecrators while allowing theft below a certain dollar amount to go on at will, and most notably to ditch any expensive ceremonial activities unrelated to making arrests (“Throughout Pride Month, our painted cars symbolize . . .”).

If nothing else, the DOGE could intentionally become — as in some cases X/Twitter recently has — a go-to source for real data on topics that citizens fear to frankly discuss. High-dollar civic campaigns against “systemic racism and other root causes of crime,” for example, are unlikely ever to accomplish much — because “systemic racism” is not a significant causal factor for crime in 2024. In one of the most important and unremarked trends of the past 50 years, serious violent crime has increased by almost 400 percent between 1963 and 1993 — as welfare use increased and family stability dropped like a rock, but as racism steadily declined. This point should be made often and publicly.

Beyond policing, the potential scope of the DOGE is breathtaking. In our opinion, most things that large bureaucracies like government agencies and nonproductive Fortune 500 departments do are total wastes of space and time. Musk famously fired 80 percent of the staff of Twitter, and his platform runs slightly better today. That said, a very specific first goal for the DOGE should be to recommend that state and local governments cut the parasitical alphabet soup functions (BLM, DEI, CRT, ESG, SEL, NU-HR, AA) of as many public agencies as possible, at every level.

Doing that, and redirecting the focus of as many police departments as possible toward reality, would save not only billions of green dollars but also tens of thousands of black lives. Let’s go!

[ Via: https://archive.today/Fr6Qv ]

[ausetkmt]

Harlem was a whole different world in the 70's

[lebuc]

what matters

* '…or forever', said she, matter of factly

to my question as we worked the same shift,

about how long she would like to keep sharing our mutual lunchbreaks

usually lasting about an hour, generously speaking.

my iced tea tried to leap out of my mouth, requiring a Herculean effort to keep it all contained

as well as my raised eyebrow inclination & widened eyes.

i guess i did a pretty good job at both, to my dismay/chagrin,

when following an awkward silent pause post-swallow, she then said: '…or never';

if it doesn't really matter to you;

to which i later replied, after chewing: 'good sushi',

'cause good sushi matters. * 9/23 - lebuc - what matters *

P.S.: after lo' these many years, our daughter & son matter too - *with* good sushi...

[fashionlandscapeblog]

I also live in a safe country outside of US so no need to worry about me but I appreciate your concern. All you did is the exact trite thing all liberal dems do. Play the empathy card. But there are fires all over the world all the time. So as long as there’s a crisis I don’t have the right to ask Dems to offer something better to me than “you’re a bad person bc you’re not thinking of the children” ??? Election cycle after election cycle there’re global crises - and how are my circumstances improving? How can I save others if my oxygen mask isn’t on? Go look at the stats for WOC you’re supposedly screaming on behalf of whose lives you don’t even understand bc you’re admittedly not connected to America. Straight out of their weak playbook 🤡 you mean well but do better.

I am not a f*cking liberal, less a democrat, why don't you understand this?

While I agree with everything you say, this is not Bush vs Clinton , this is about democracy versus sliding into fascism. The far-right is gaining ground all over the world and the U.S.A. is a role model and will have influence everywhere just like it did in 2016 coinciding with the rise of the far-right in Europe. With climate change, even the smallest differences in policies can have a huge influence in the future of the whole planet and humanity.

I have tried for many years to understand Black Lives and their circumstances, yet I will never be able to, because even if I am a WOC and already very f*cked by my ethnicity, I know you have it much worse than I can ever conceive. My life hasn't improved either, but I know when a f*cking psychopath is about to be the president of the biggest superpower of the world and believe me, I don't just mean well, I mean for all of us to save our lives with whatever means we can.

[alwaysbewoke]

this is chief among the reasons why i have no respect for black republicans.

[ifelllikeastar]

Howlin’ Wolf was one of the greatest blues artists of all time. A wonderful and unique vocalist, an uninhibited entertainer, a great band leader, and a magical recording artist.

Chester Burnett aka Howlin' Wolf was born June 10, 1910 in Whites, Mississippi.

[mosscaller]

Nothing like waking up to people spewing lies and vitriol about the gay and trans community.

No one in our community is harming children.

Try checking the church for that shit. Unlike them, we don't want to hurt anyone. The church has been harming marginalized communities for years, even documenting it in the name of their god.

So yeah, maybe fuck off?

[mos-twin-mattress]

I dream ab death almost everynight. I am a black woman afraid, terrified.

When i go outside, I am on hyper alert. When I see white people, my heart speeds up and I feel cold and clammy, mouth dry.

Police cars invoke the cruelest angers in me, I wish the most horrific hatreds and pains on the officers. I can not help it. I know they wish the same on me.

I feel so sick to my stomach, when I see the news. I feel so dog tired. Anxiously awaiting the next horrific story.

I don't trust my own chosen family, because they are white. The people who took me into their home, and made me feel loved. But I see all these stories of Black woman murdered by people who seem like friends. But they are wolves waiting to tear apart and scatter the pieces.

I am fearful of sleep, the death imagines always waiting to pounce and ruin my sleep and pyche. I am a ruined woman.

The child I once was, the child who thought the police would help, is dead. The child who was happy and bubbly and laughed a lot.

I am a broken woman, I am a sickly woman. The stress has destroyed my nerves. I am sickly already, my immune system is shot. I get infections often, I throw up near daily.

I just want to live in a world where I don't have to fear thy neighbor. I want to love thy neighbor. But my neighbors, some of them, are Nazis, are klanmen, are cruel and devious. They wish me harm, death, more.

When I open my eyes, I curse the fact. Curse that I am condemned to live another day in hell.

I want to be hopeful, I do. I am not tho. This has been going on for more than 200 years. We are a nation ravaged by sickness. We are all diseased. Touched by the racism that poisons us all. The white supremacy that permeates.

We are a nation divided, full of hate, cruelty, sickness. And I am ruined by it. I am destroyed by it.

I am tired

[shakespearenews]

It is this idea of reanimating the archive, and the Black lives Habib locates within it, that inspires the work of the poet Caroline Randall Williams, which I have been teaching and writing about. Williams’ Lucy Negro, Redux, published in 2019 with the subtitle: The Bard, a Book, and a Ballet, tells the story of Shakespeare’s Sonnets from the point of view of a figure from the archives who has been called “Lucy Negro”, and whom some have seen as a possible model for the so-called “Dark Lady” to whom the later part of the sequence seems to be addressed. 

“In August of 2012, I got it into my head that Shakespeare had a black lover,” Williams writes, “and that this woman was the subject of sonnets 127 to 154.” Lucy Negro, Redux intersperses Williams’ poems about Lucy with a prose account telling the story of her meeting with English professor Duncan Salkeld and, consequently, with the figure of “Black Luce” in the archives of Bridewell prison. Interweaving archival narrative with original poems Williams recovers and reclaims an overlooked Black life from the English archive in ways that resonate with Habib’s own critical and creative project.