#i’m talking about the south african elections

[hey-its-sybarite]

This year I had surprise major surgery, lost an organ, broke my own tooth on my birthday, went to get the tooth fixed but they just… removed it, my dog died suddenly, my uncle died suddenly, my parents’ home was hit by a TORNADO. We don’t even have tornado warnings there, because there’s never been a tornado before.

Also Deadpool 3 was disappointing.

[ausetkmt]

Ga. islanders vow to keep fighting change favoring rich buyers

DARIEN, Ga. - Descendants of enslaved people living on a Georgia island vowed to keep fighting after county commissioners voted to double the maximum size of homes allowed in their tiny enclave.

Residents fear the move will accelerate the decline of one of the South’s few surviving Gullah-Geechee communities.

An aspect of the ordinance that residents take issue with is the fact that it erases a clause about protecting the island’s indigenous history.

During public meetings leading up to the vote, the zoning board proposed changes to the ordinance of lowering the newly allowed home size and removing talk of golf courses being added to the island.

Black residents of the Hogg Hummock community on Sapelo Island and their supporters packed a meeting of McIntosh County’s elected commissioners to oppose zoning changes that residents say favor wealthy buyers and will lead to tax increases that could pressure them to sell their land.

ISLAND’S HERITAGE

Gullah-Geechee communities like Hogg Hummock are scattered along the Southeast coast from North Carolina to Florida, where they have endured since their enslaved ancestors were freed by the Civil War. Scholars say these people long separated from the mainland retained much of their African heritage, from their unique dialect to skills and crafts such as cast-net fishing and weaving baskets.

Regardless, commissioners voted 3-2 to weaken zoning restrictions the county adopted nearly three decades ago with the stated intent to help Hogg Hummock’s 30 to 50 residents hold on to their land.

Yolanda Grovner, 54, of Atlanta said she has long planned to retire on land her father, an island native, owns in Hogg Hummock. She left the county courthouse Tuesday night wondering if that will ever happen.

“It’s going to be very, very difficult,” Grovner said. She added: “I think this is their way of pushing residents off the island.”

Hogg Hummock is one of just a few surviving communities in the South of people known as Gullah, or Geechee, in Georgia, whose ancestors worked island slave plantations.

MORE | Mom in Grovetown calls cops on U.S. energy secretary’s staff

Fights with the local government are nothing new to residents and landowners. Dozens successfully appealed staggering property tax hikes in 2012, and residents spent years fighting the county in federal court for basic services such as firefighting equipment and trash collection before county officials settled last year.

“We’re still fighting all the time,” said Maurice Bailey, a Hogg Hummock native whose mother, Cornelia Bailey, was a celebrated storyteller and one of Sapelo Island’s most prominent voices before her death in 2017. “They’re not going to stop. The people moving in don’t respect us as people. They love our food, they love our culture. But they don’t love us.”

Merden Hall, who asked not to be on camera, has lived on Sapelo his whole life. He says he’s worried about the sizes of homes now allowed on the island.

“I’m not comfortable with this. They approved the 3,000 square feet, that’s the only thing I disapprove of, because that’s going to raise property taxes,” he said.

Hogg Hummock’s population has been shrinking in recent decades, and some families have sold their land to outsiders who built vacation homes. New construction has caused tension over how large those homes can be.

Commissioners on Tuesday raised the maximum size of a home in Hogg Hummock to 3,000 square feet of total enclosed space. The previous limit was 1,400 square feet of heated and air-conditioned space.

Commissioner Davis Poole, who supported loosening the size restriction, said it would allow “a modest home enabling a whole family to stay under one roof.”

“The commissioners are not out to destroy the Gullah-Geechee culture or erase the history of Sapelo,” Poole said. “We’re not out to make more money for the county.”

Commission Chairman David Stevens, who said he’s been visiting Sapelo Island since the 1980s, blamed Hogg Hummock’s changing landscape on native owners who sold their land.

“I don’t need anybody to lecture me on the culture of Sapelo Island,” Stevens said, adding: “If you don’t want these outsiders, if you don’t want these new homes being built ... don’t sell your land.”

County officials have argued that size restrictions based on heated and cooled spaced proved impossible to enforce. County attorney Adam Poppell said more than a dozen homes in Hogg Hummock appeared to violate the limits, and in some cases homeowners refused to open their doors to inspectors.

Hogg Hummock landowner Richard Banks equated that to the county letting lawbreakers make the rules.

“If everybody wants to exceed the speed limit, should we increase the speed limits for all the speeders?” Banks said.

Hogg Hummock residents said they were blindsided when the county unveiled its proposed zoning changes on Aug. 16. Commissioners in July had approved sweeping zoning changes throughout McIntosh County, but had left Hogg Hummock alone.

Commissioner Roger Lotson, the only Black member of the county commission, voted against the changes and warned his colleagues that he fears they will end up back in court for rushing them.

Two attorneys from the Southern Poverty Law Center sat in the front row. Attorney Anjana Joshi said they had “due process and equal protection concerns” about the way the zoning ordinance was amended.

“In our view, this was not done correctly,” said Joshi, who added: “We’re just getting started.”

Located about 60 miles south of Savannah, Sapelo Island remains separated from the mainland and reachable only by boat. Since 1976, the state of Georgia has owned most of its 30 square miles of largely unspoiled wilderness. Hogg Hummock, also known as Hog Hammock, sits on less than a square mile.

Hogg Hummock earned a place in 1996 on the National Register of Historic Places, the official list of the United States’ treasured historic sites. But for protections to preserve the community, residents depend on the local government in McIntosh County, where 65% of the 11,100 residents are white.

[archiveofkloss]

Home sweet home! And a bit sour at the moment? My home state of Missouri was one of 13 that enacted trigger laws that functionally outlawed abortion after the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision in 2022. (In a feat of diabolical efficiency, Missouri’s attorney general bragged about being the first state to pass the law less than 10 minutes after the court’s decision.) That’s why I joined Karlie Kloss, my fellow St Louisian and self-appointed kid sister, in an activist homecoming this week to advocate for Amendment 3, a bill that would end the abortion ban and is on the ballot on November 5. Karlie and I spent the day knocking on doors in South County with our pals Jen Rubio, Selby Drummond, and Molly Howard.

In addition to canvassing, Karlie hosted a screening of two short films she commissioned with Gateway Coalition, a collective she founded to provide support to women's health clinics in the Midwest, and Chelsea Clinton organized a panel discussion with Amanda Zurawski, a Texas woman who lost her baby—and almost her own life—under the draconian abortion laws that prevented her from terminating a failing pregnancy. FYI: States like Missouri and Texas currently outlaw abortions in nearly all circumstances, including cases of rape and incest, which means pregnant women in traumatic situations are being turned away from hospitals while their health deteriorates.

Chelsea and her mother, Hillary Clinton, spent two years working on Zurawski v Texas, a documentary about courageous women in Texas who sued their state for being denied medically indicated abortion care, even when at the brink of death. (One of the filmmakers, Abbie Perrault, was on the panel.) It’s moving, surreal, and infuriating. Amanda Zurawski received a well-deserved standing ovation at the screening at Chase Park Plaza theater (where, incidentally, I saw American Beauty for the first time in 1999).

Why do I care so much about abortion? I can already hear the trolls commenting that an unplanned pregnancy is pretty low on the list for a gay guy like me. But what’s terrifying about this law—and why I’m willing to travel across the country to advocate for Amendment 3—is the risk of what could follow if we don't send a message to our local and federal legislatures. Today, we’re talking about abortions. Will IVF be next? Gay rights? Gay marriage? I feel passionately that Missourians—actually, all Americans—and their families should have the freedom to make their own decisions about pregnancy and abortion in the same way that I'm passionate about my right to love who I want to love and create a family of my own.

So to my fellow Missourians: Please go to the polls on November 5 and vote YES on Amendment 3. (Similar bills are on ballots in Arizona, Colorado, Florida, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New York, Rhode Island, and South Dakota.) And to all Americans: I encourage you to vote with your conscience in this year’s presidential election.

P.S. Don’t think this trip to St Louis didn’t include a stop at the St Louis Art Museum, which has a fabulous “Narrative Wisdom and African Arts” show up at the moment.

P.P.S. I also introduced these girls to our local cuisine: Imo’s pizza, Ted Drewe’s ice cream, and ooey gooey butter cake. Antacids not included.

[yourreddancer]

from Darren Cook FB comment:

The google search “did Biden drop out?” surged on Election Day. The problem was NOT the message or the messenger, Harris & Walz were phenomenal and I’m still not entirely sure if it wasn’t fraudulent somehow with Musk and his billions. Trump had been saying for weeks “we don’t need your vote, we have enough votes” and he had a little secret with Mike Johnson who trump said is going to be there a long time. He knew he was going to win somehow. 

Then at the end of the race he just appealed to the raunchiest fans by performing a sex act on a microphone and talking about Arnold Palmers junk. He was making a mockery of the contrast between him and her flawless campaign? Anyway that’s just a theory. It is our reality now. 

He is a white supremacist. Russia is an all white society and america is about to become more white. There will be no limit on the cost to deport the 11m illegal immigrants, estimated at $88B per year. Wonder if that will cause inflation? This man cannot take the presidency with absolute immunity for official acts, which would be anything he chooses. He will do whatever he pleases. I don’t know why there isn’t a 5 o’clock alarm. But it doesn’t matter. Vance is 40 years old and completely controlled by Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, and David Sacks who are products of South African apartheid (white supremacists as well)

This isn't a coincidence. Now they’ve got the presidency with total immunity and a Supreme Court with 6 of his justices.

A large swathe of young people do not consume legacy media and have no idea what’s happening in the world. They listen to and watch misogynistic bro casts where they lame everything that is wrong in their lives on transgenders and illegals. Where they promote ”Trad wives” who stick to their gender roles and the women stay home barefoot and obey their husbands. I just hope when they make the lives of transgender people a living hell that if they decide they can’t take it anymore, I hope they make a spectacle of their suicides and do it in groups in front of the White House. Perhaps it will wake some people up. 

Society is disintegrating. We can’t let this happen in Canada. Read project 2025. It’s a horror show. Trumps got free rein. He’s immune. Male white supremacy is taking over. The handsmaid tale is coming true. Either that or I’m losing my mind. Society has become so fragmented and we each go into our own silos and we haven’t been paying attention to how these young men have been radicalized by the algorithms of Elon Musk and Peter Thiel. The border wall is getting built now. Even if congress doesn’t grant him the money, he’ll use an executive order. Unconstitutional? It’s an official act. He’s immune.

I’m starting to think Australian Rupert Murdoch, who has been radicalizing people for 30 years, Musk, Putin and Trump are all working together to recreate white supremacist authoritarian oligarchies like in Russia where a few dozen straight white men control every and all the wealth while the poor suffer. 

They will probably default on all US debt and obligations, and switch to cryptocurrency for the great “reset”. Everything will be worthless and the billionaires will buy up everything with their crypto. Russia has said since the 50’s that they would destroy America from within. They have succeeded in getting the presidency with immunity. After the insurrection he committed crimes he knew he would be charged for and challenged them and got rewarded with immunity, just in time for his second term. Was covid actually released by China to make this all happen cause China was promised Taiwan? Am I a conspiracy theorist or am I finally seeing clearly? We’re fucked. These billionaires around the world are collectively worth trillions and they are taking full control of society. I feel like it’s an episode of Black Mirror. He’s going to have Elon’s robots protecting him, AI will not be controlled legislatively, neither will social media or the algorithms.

[newsource21]

The raucous early morning celebration in Miami’s Little Havana neighborhood was of a magnitude not seen since the Cuban dictator Fidel Castro died eight years previously. In the immigrant-saturated suburb of Westchester, too, Latinos partied beyond daybreak as Donald Trump’s return to the White House was confirmed.

Wednesday morning’s revelry in south Florida reflected a stunning victory for Trump in the previously solid blue, Hispanic-majority county of Miami-Dade that had not been won by a Republican presidential candidate in more than 30 years.

His victory, fueled largely by support from Latino and Hispanic voters, particularly Latino men, was repeated in county after county in swing states as the Democrats’ blue wall crumbled and it became clear Trump would once again be president.

In Pennsylvania, hordes of Puerto Ricans who saw their homeland demeaned as a “floating island of garbage” at Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally barely a week before, flocked to give him their vote.

In Wisconsin, exit polls showed a six-point rise from 2020, to 43%, in Trump’s Hispanic support, despite his condemnation of certain immigrants as “drug dealers”, “murderers” and “rapists”, and promise to conduct the largest deportation effort in US history soon after he takes office.

And among other minority groups, Arab and Muslim Americans in Michigan also seemed able to overlook Trump’s full-throated support of Israel’s military onslaught in Gaza to show up for him in large numbers. In large part, that move was as much an effort to vote against Kamala Harris as many in the Arab and Muslim American communities have expressed anger with the Biden administration – and, by extension, Harris – for its support for Israel.

Analysts, while noting that the election was only a few days ago and a full picture of voting patterns has yet to emerge, suggest a multitude of reasons why a candidate so openly hostile to immigrants would be championed by them in such large numbers. Fault, they say, can be attributed to Democrats’ failure to understand the nuances of the Hispanic and Latino voting populations. There were clear signs as early as January that then candidate Joe Biden’s support from that demographic had cratered, and Trump’s was rising.

Ultimately, it was Republicans’ economic messaging that broke through most, several experts said. That was then combined with an admiration for Trump’s bombastic and pugnacious style among Latino men who, as much as white men and women who form his base, have no problem with his insults, racism and threats, because they don’t believe he is talking about them.

“There seems to be an attraction to Trump among Latinos, Latino men, that could be a kind of defensive reaction to his aggression and aggressive rhetoric,” said Guillermo Grenier, professor of sociology at Florida International University and the co-author of the book This Land is Our Land: Newcomers and Established Residents in Miami.

“It could be they’re saying: ‘I’m not one of them, you know? I’m an American citizen, I’m voting for you, I’m not the rapist scum, I’m not with them. That’s the other guys, the other immigrants, not the voting immigrants.’”

Grenier also points to the “arrogance” of Democrats in assuming Latinos, and other minority voting groups would gravitate towards them.

“They always have a kind of a sense of entitlement to the minority vote. They don’t put the muscle in but think African Americans should vote for them, that Latinos should vote for them, because they’re the big tent party,” he said.

“But we’re in an age of identity politics. You can’t just talk generally about ambitions and accessibility and dreams if the opposite side is digging very deeply, focusing and talking directly to the people they need to attract … When people talk about why they like Trump it’s that kind of directness, and if you don’t have a strategy to counter that delivery then you are just kind of flailing.”

Carlos Suárez Carrasquillo, political science professor at the University of Florida’s center for Latin American studies, sees Latino men as equally susceptible to Trump’s braggadocio and misogynistic proclivities as any other group of males.

“If white males find Trump appealing as a candidate, why wouldn’t Latino males?” he said.

“A larger conversation is whether the constituency of Latino males is inherently Democrat. Or maybe aspects of gender that Trump plays up really well is a dynamic pitching at Latino males.”

Suárez also suggests Trump’s growing appeal to male Latino voters – he was the first Republican presidential candidate to win them outright – could be that it makes them feel more American.

“You can imagine that in some Latino quarters, supporting Trump is a way to assimilate, to incorporate,” he said.

“Is the Latino experience in the US becoming slowly but surely more similar to the American white experience? Could this also be a sign that the voting behavior of Latinos, slowly but surely, start to resemble more that of white America and, in this case, white males? The argument could be made.”

Grenier, meanwhile, sees Latino voters frustrated when they feel they are being patronized.

“In the political narrative of both parties they are treated as not American, or as a special kind of American,” he said.

“Democrats come down and give their foreign policy speech about communism and authoritarianism like it’s their number one issue, and treat these south Floridians, whether they’re Venezuelans, Cubans or [other Hispanic or Latino nationalities], as refugees, immigrants or exiles.

“But their top three issues, like anywhere in the country, are the economy, healthcare and immigration, boom boom boom.”

Other analysts agree that the Harris campaign’s failures can help explain Latino turnout for Trump, which saw a 14-point increase since the 2020 election.

“The Latino vote was the parties’ to win, not the other way around. A significant proportion of Latinos do not have strong ties to either party,” said Ana Valdez, president and chief executive of the Latino Donor Collaborative, in a statement.

Valdez noted that while “rhetoric from the right has been hurtful and horrible,” the “Democratic party has let many Latinos down.”

“They promised much and delivered little,” she said, adding that promises to tackle issues like immigration reform fell short.

“Many Latino voters feel ignored and unrepresented [and] Trump’s team made calculated moves to reach culturally conservative Latinos. They tapped into something real for these voters, the appeal to traditional values, economic opportunity,and a message that resonated on a personal level.

She continued: “With wealthier Latinos, his team pushed concerns over taxes and inflation with a directness that resonated. When it comes to young Latinos, the Trump campaign clearly did more to build their platform digitally, studying and investing more in targeting Latinos on social media.

“The Latino vote continues to be the biggest blind spot for both parties. But this massive shift compared to 2020 highlights that the winning side better understood the frustrations of the Latino community and took advantage.”

[socialjusticeinamerica]

People say well Trump still would have won if the Stein voters and Dearborn, Michigan had voted Harris. That’s not the entire point. There were millions of protest voters who stayed home and a few million who did vote but not for President. Even if you could make a credible case about Stein not being a significant reason that does not absolve her. Stein was groomed and funded by Putin that is election interference and treason. Further it’s no secret that Republican donors funnel money into Independent, Green, and Socialist campaigns because they know it will siphon off votes. These 3rd party candidates are a backup plan in case of a close election and they often work in lesser elections and occasionally In presidential elections.

Ralph Nader virtually handed the 2,000 election to George W Bush. Stein and the Bernie Bros (started as a Republican dirty trick) elected Trump in 2016. Propagandists give these independent voters false hope to hurt the Democrats. The South Florida Cubans have kept that state largely red for decades. Border counties in states that have Hispanic majorities have largely kept those stated red for decades as well.

Pointing this out isn’t dumping on marginalized communities. Early reports on the Democratic loss have shown that an inability to stop these groups from voting against themselves cost the Dems dearly. The Biden and then Harris campaigns spent days and weeks debating how to be extra P.C. in their messaging to marginalized groups instead of just targeting districts and groups with direct and blunt messaging. You can be direct without being offensive or patronizing, it’s not hard. Many insiders are already on the airwaves talking about how the Dems were crippled by their internal arguments over not ruffling the slightest feather in marginalized communities. Now they lost and those communities will be savagely persecuted by the Republicans.

If your messaging is not geared towards the middle, the people who vote in the largest numbers, you won’t win. If you don’t win you can’t protect marginalized people. Democrats want to help all the people but that message is lost because out-of-touch elitist ultra-liberals are calling the shots. Republicans fight dirty and constantly keep the Democrats on the defensive. Slogans like defund the police are going to win the middle. Even Obama came out and said to stop repeating that because it was a gift to Republican campaign strategists. Think about other slogans and movements form our side. Look at them objectively and dispassionately and imagine how you would feel if you were a barely informed voter sitting on the fence.

I’m not saying we should abandon the marginalized in our party, although someone with poor comprehension skills will invariably accuse me of that. Just the opposite is true we need to include them but bring in more decent people who aren’t as well informed. We need outreach programs to the Hispanic community in particular. We need to bring in Muslim and Jewish voters. We need outreach into the younger African-American demographic. We need to sway the Log Cabin Republicans. But we also need to hang on to union members and most importantly bring in that middle group that is largely uninformed or feels that their vote won’t matter.

We need to make it clear we protect not just marginalized people but all segments of society from poor to upper middle class (the millionaire class will likely always vote Republican). Next we need to focus on our policy proposals. We need clear and polished messaging that is consistent across the board. We need the public to know of our past accomplishments and our plans to build upon that. That messaging simply did not reach enough households during the Biden administration and the Harris campaign. We need a unified voice, we can’t be calling our president an agent of genocide because of what pro-Republican Netanyahu is doing and then expect to win. Republicans amplified our protests and disunity for their own purposes. We need them to be on the defensive and if that means calling out the media like Republicans do then so be it.

We lost for many reasons. The media wanted ratings so they hyped Trump. An incredible apathy on the part of the electorate. Protest votes encouraged by Republicans and Russians. Russian meddling online, dark money contributions, and even calling in bomb threats to Democratic leaning voting precincts. Third party candidates siphoning off votes, often with the support of Republican and Russian dark money. The most important cause was an over-reliance on demographics that don’t vote for us or don’t turn out in large enough numbers. Groups who vote against their best interests need to have it made known to them that they made a mistake and that it was counterproductive for them. They need to learn that they put a target on themselves. It’s a shame it’s come down to FAFO but many groups never fully understand the Find Out part. It has to be made clear to them that they voted for their tormentors instead of their protectors. Once they have been fully educated on the consequences they created for themselves then they can be brought back into the fold.

Our single biggest mistake is letting the Republicans define who we are by crafting a negative perception of us. We need to attract new voters who know the truth and stop relying on a disunited coalition of small and diverse groups. Leave none behind but welcome more in and set up a political machine that is nationally organized and focused on winning for all Americans.

We somehow lost 11 million votes since 2020 and Chump somehow gained 12 million since 2016.

🤔🤦🏾🤦

C’mon man…every poll, odds maker, every exit interview, every single indicator showed Harris either ahead or dead even. Plus Trump spent months telling his people not to vote because he didn’t need them as he already had enough to win. Something’s fishy.

[cyberneticpeoplespolis]

New Zealand’s Paternalism and Imperialism in the Pacific

This is something I wrote back in early march for mainstream news publishers, but didn’t get finished in time before the news cycle moved on from the PIF break up. I’m putting it here for posterity and it might also be of interest for anyone curious about why New Zealand still uses its diplomatic weight to bully its neighbors into line.

New Zealand is losing its grip on the Pacific. That might be a good thing.

This year is the 50th anniversary of the Pacific Islands Forum. Many are talking as though it will be the last.

Last month the Micronesian sub-region, comprising Nauru, Kiribati, Palau, the Marshall Islands, and the Federated States of Micronesia, left the PIF. Since only the Polynesian and Melanesian sub-regions remain, the forum now has a distinctly more South Pacific orientation. But alongside the island nations are three big powers who like to think of themselves as “first among equals”. Two are the settler-colonies of Australia, and New Zealand. The third is France, which effectively has two votes at the forum via its tightly-held colonies of New Caledonia and French Polynesia.

Ostensibly, the breakup is the result of a broken “gentleman’s agreement” wherein each sub-region takes turns providing a candidate for the role of General Secretary. This election was Micronesia’s turn, but instead of supporting Micronesia’s Marshallese candidate, Gerald Zackios, the forum instead elected Cook Islands PM Henry Puna.

Much has been made of this “gentleman’s agreement,” but it was an unwritten rule, and hardly a democratic one. The fact that it was made at all speaks to the low stakes of the forum, and the fact that it was broken speaks to the greater consequences for this election than those prior. 

These consequences will largely be felt by those outside the Pacific islands. The Pacific Islands Forum always meant a lot more to diplomats in Canberra, Wellington, Paris and Washington than islanders, who see it as relatively inconsequential. 

This was reflected in the coverage of the forum’s breakup. Australian, New Zealand, and U.S. outlets and pundits all vied to levy blame on one another for the catastrophe, and painted the election as part of a grand proxy war between competing powers.

Depending on who you talk to, it was all part of a scheme by Australia, New Zealand and France to snub the interests of the United States in the Pacific. Or it was all the result of New Zealand and Australia’s indifference and poor diplomacy. Or it was the result of U.S. militarisation of the North Pacific and strong-arming of island nations. Many pointed out that the split represented an opportunity for China. Great power conflict also affected the framing of the candidates. Zackios is seen as Washington’s man in the region, and this seems deliberate, since he has a long history of cooperation with U.S. military and diplomatic projects. Likewise Micronesians claimed Puna is a proxy for either New Zealand or Chinese interests, despite considerably less evidence for the claim. All of these narratives of great power diplomacy and conspiracies do have some truth to them, but the framing does seem to deny a lot of agency to Pacific peoples. Apart from a few Micronesian diplomats and politicians, few have expressed any appetite for cold warfare. In fact there is a great deal of anxiety around escalating tensions, reduced aid, militarised borders, and foreign navies.

In western media narratives, we can see the lingering spectres of both cold war proxy warfare and colonial entitlement. Western nations are framed as enlightened protectors shielding islanders from threats they couldn’t possibly understand. It is an unwritten assumption that this  paternalistic form of leadership endears western powers to the South Pacific. In reality, the former colonial powers are perceived as unwelcome interlopers. For New Zealand especially, the rhetoric used mirrors the way we talk about our own indigenous relations. There are pretensions of partnership, but always with the Crown as the ‘major’ partner. Beneath the surface lurks an uncritical, vestigial paternalism from days gone by. The question of whether New Zealand is fit to be a regional leader is never asked, just as similar questions are never asked in Canberra, Paris or Washington.

This paternal attitude is a complex thing. It is equal parts denial of past abuses, denial of present economics and new cold war paranoia.

An inconvenient past

There is an unspoken assumption that  New Zealand is a benign force of leadership and regional cooperation. However, this assumption becomes stranger and stranger the further back we look. Holding it necessarily entails forgetting about New Zealand’s long history of open and shameless colonialism, from Seddon’s project for a “Britain of the South Pacific” to Massey’s acquisition of Samoa at Versailles. It means forgetting the unnecessary deaths of a fifth of Samoa from pandemic mismanagement, and disregarding the Black Saturday massacre on the streets of Apia. It might be said that those incidents are too distant to be relevant today. How about something more recent, like the environmental devastation of strip-mining Nauru for phosphate, conducted under a New Zealand-Australian joint venture, or decades of using Vanuatu as a tax haven for New Zealand businesses? Even that’s a bit far back. What about in 2015, when the GCSB was found to be conducting a massive spy operation across the Pacific through Waihopai, while simultaneously operating a hidden spy outpost, codename “Caprica,” in the Solomon Islands? 

All of these events represent massive breaches of trust, yet New Zealand often acts as if recent history is the ancient past when it comes to the Pacific. It takes its diplomatic relationships for granted and expects neighbors to forget about the past, and turn a blind eye to the present. 

Trade Imperialism

The fact is that the most detrimental effects New Zealand has on the Pacific aren’t even intentional; it’s the passive, downstream consequences of the New Zealand economy and its trading relationships which undermine Pacific islands the most.

It’s a truism of economics that good businesses buy low and sell high. But what happens when that takes place on the scale of whole nations? When low-waged countries countries trade with high-waged countries, their goods often fetch a uniformly low price regardless of quality or productivity. On the flip side, high waged countries can always get a good price, often more than their goods are worth. This is a phenomena called “Unequal Exchange,” first noticed in the context of recently-decolonised African nations in the 1960s. The reasons for this are complicated, and have a lot to do with the fact that people can’t move between international industries as easily as money, but suffice to say that the Pacific’s trade with New Zealand is a perfect example of the problem. While Pacific peoples earn an average of only $300 a month, New Zealanders earn about $2,800. The end result is that the goods produced by a New Zealand employee in one day can be worth as much as 9 times the amount a Pacific worker could produce in the same time.

This means that when Pacific nations trade with New Zealand, they immediately lose a lot of money paying for overpriced goods, and can’t make enough off their own exports to cover the cost. Even with the Government’s “Pacific Reset” policy which increased the dwindling Pacific aid budget, the small amounts New Zealand pays in aid are overshadowed by its profits.

Naturally, a lot of island nations want to trade with each other instead. By building up each other’s industries and establishing equal terms of trade, they can avoid the crushing dependency on goods made in New Zealand, Australia, and the U.S. But New Zealand exporters would be vehemently opposed. If Pacific nations  were to shake their dependency, they might get a fair price for their goods, and eventually compete with New Zealand business on an equal playing field. 

Instead, Australia and New Zealand often use the Pacific Islands Forum and other regional bodies to torpedo any proposals for deals that don’t include them, and push their own trade deals. One recent deal was PACER Plus, which was criticised heavily by groups like the Pacific Network on Globalisation for the effects it would have on Pacific communities. One Canadian expert also claimed that deals like PACER Plus are precisely what makes Pacific nations want to trade with China instead.

A Cold War in the Pacific

In recent years the Pacific has split down the middle on the question of addressing trade imbalances. It’s one of those problems everyone recognises, but each solution comes with significant risks. On the one hand, groups like the Wellington-based Pacific Co-operation Foundation argue that unbalanced trade deals like PACER Plus are a positive trend, and any imbalance in outcomes only reflects the poor terms of trade already in place. They say Pacific economies need a chance for capital inflows from New Zealand and Australia, even if the latter countries ultimately benefit much more than the islands ever could.

While once upon a time, this was all that Pacific islands could hope for, nowadays there are other options. Semi-developed economies like China can offer many of the same products as much richer countries, at prices Pacific nations can actually afford thanks to much lower wage costs. But in the context of escalating trade warfare – and possible military conflict – between China and the United States, some island economies have chosen to tie their fates more tightly to superpowers in the hopes of receiving more aid and investment. The U.S. in particular requires new island construction sites across the Western Pacific in order to give strategic depth to its plans for an extensive network of missile and aircraft bases to be aimed at China by 2022.

With Micronesia situated close to the massive US naval base at Guam, it is not surprising that the Mircronesian bloc at the Pacific Islands Forum has taken a strongly anti-Chinese stance, in some cases going further than Washington itself. Three of the nations are official associates of the U.S., and three have fostered ties with Taiwan, a strong US ally which is itself heavily dependent on american military and political backing.

On the other side of the divide, most Polynesian and Melanesian nations have attempted to stay out of the escalating tensions. They have continued to trade with New Zealand and Australia, while simultaneously pushing for greater self-sufficiency, including a growing trade relationship with China. The reason for the shift is perfectly logical: China can offer better terms of trade, and its banks can fund major infrastructure projects that almost no western bank would even consider backing. But what of Chinese debt trap diplomacy? All of the Pacific island nations, apart from the Micronesian bloc, have repeatedly ignored the dire warnings by western diplomats about potential asset seizures for defaulting on their huge Chinese loans. The answer is simple: as an exhaustive analysis from The Atlantic recently pointed out, the debt-trap narrative was made up from the start. It’s one of those post-truth narratives that exist beyond debate no matter how many times it’s debunked. This is especially true in the Pacific, where despite obvious vulnerabilities, experts contend that there is no evidence of debt traps. None of that has stopped the spectre from being raised yet again in the wake of Micronesia’s walk-out.

With nothing much to offer except fearmongering and sabre-rattling, is it any surprise that Pacific nations are seeking alternatives to western trade and aid dependency? If New Zealand is serious about restoring trust and equality in the Pacific, it may want to start by recognising island nations can currently get better deals elsewhere, and try to match them. If it wanted to take a more transformational approach, it would consider something like a Pacific Common Travel Area that could allow labour to move as freely as goods, and permanently mitigate the effects of trade imperialism through better remittance income and wage equalisation. Of course, such things would run counter to too many vested interests to be considered.

Just another Pacific island nation

Returning for a moment to the coverage of the breakdown of the Pacific Islands Forum, let’s re-examine the implicit understanding that New Zealand ought to be taking a leadership role. Part of that is natural – New Zealand will always be the biggest island chain among many – but at least part of that sentiment echoes the colonial entitlement of Seddon or Massey. Why should New Zealand be taking a leadership role when its trade interests will always endanger Pacific sovereignty? What about the last century of Pacific-NZ relations would even remotely suggest that New Zealanders are trusted in the Pacific? This distrust is certainly apparent when it comes to Micronesian leaders, who have criticised Cook Islands PM Henry Puna as a lackey of New Zealand, since his islands are still part of the New Zealand Realm. This is hardly fair to Puna, as his personal positions are clearly at odds with New Zealand’s vision for the region, but the fact that his links to New Zealand are such a handicap speaks volumes about New Zealand’s image across the Pacific.

New Zealand’s foreign policy vacillates between an out-of-touch paternalism and an equally out-of-touch assertion that it is an equal member of the Pacific community. Government reports on the Pacific Reset and PACER Plus are filled with this confusing language, speaking of equal partnership one minute and unilateral leadership the next. Both positions are quite blind to New Zealand’s actual reputation, and its ongoing exploitation of Pacific workers via trade imperialism.

It also says a lot that in every opinion piece published on the PIF debacle, the writers have had but one concern: influence. Former Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd was one prominent voice bemoaning the loss of Australia and New Zealand’s influence in the island forum. But what are the actual consequences for island nations? As Stephen Howes and Sadhana Sen pointed out, there aren’t many. Countries were willing to risk a split because no one really had any stakes in the forum. No trade deals were directly tied to forum membership, even those negotiated through its channels, and most of the genuinely important regional initiatives like the University of the South Pacific won’t be affected. 

The only people really bemoaning the loss are those in New Zealand and Australia who used the forum as an opportunity to intervene in Pacific affairs, or those who wanted an opportunity to engage in some old-fashioned cold warfare. Regionalism and cooperation are very good things, but when it comes to diplomacy and trade deals between islands, maybe Australia and New Zealand should sit it out, as their idea of regional leadership is often closer to being the local bullies.

When New Zealand realises the immense imbalances in economic and political power it has perpetuated in the Pacific, maybe then it will be one island nation among many. Until then, it has to earn that right.

[letterboxd]

After Agnès: Ten French Filmmakers to Watch in 2021.

It’s not every day that a grass-roots fandom inspires a Letterboxd Easter egg, but the love for Portrait of a Lady on Fire was so strong that those flames are here to stay. With a new Céline Sciamma fairytale on the horizon, we invited Sarah Williams—one of the #PortraitNation instigators—to highlight ten femmes de cinéma with new works due out this year, and suggest films from their back catalogs to watch now.

Among many dramatic moments in cinema in 2020, there was the resignation of the entire César Academy board, following protests about the nomination of filmmaker and child rapist Roman Polanski (dubbed ‘Violanski’ by French feminists). Then there were the walkouts at the 45th César Awards ceremony itself, led by actress Adèle Haenel, after Polanski won there. Firm calls for change followed from Le Collectif 50/50, a movement that has urged parity on festival selection committees, after seeing how few female filmmakers were allowed into competition categories. (They have had some success, particularly with Cannes, where selection committees have moved towards more transparency and a better gender balance.)

Actress Adèle Haenel has a message for the 2020 César Awards, shortly before walking out of the ceremony.

This year’s Césars were tame, by comparison: actress Corinne Masiero stripped on stage, using her brief spotlight to focus on the pandemic and the crisis of shuttered cinemas across France. May they open as soon as it’s safe, because many of the filmmakers prominent in these social movements have new movies on the horizon. As the older generation retires, this newer group of progressive filmmakers is making waves on the festival scene, working from perspectives often denied or overlooked in mainstream cinema. French cinema is at a sort of crossroads, and the next Portrait of a Lady on Fire, Divines or BPM could be just around the bend.

Letterboxd members are well schooled in the power of Agnès, and Céline Sciamma has entered the worldwide critical sphere—and Letterboxd’s highest ranks—thanks to the success of Portrait of a Lady on Fire (🖼️🔥 forever), but there are many more French storytellers worthy of your watchlists. Alongside Sciamma, here are nine more for your consideration.

Céline Sciamma’s ‘Petite maman’.

Céline Sciamma

Coming soon: Petite maman Watch now: Water Lilies, Tomboy and Girlhood

Before her worldwide hit Portrait of a Lady on Fire, Céline Sciamma helmed a trilogy of acclaimed coming-of-age stories, Water Lilies, Tomboy and Girlhood. Her fifth feature, Petite maman, both lives in the world of this trilogy, and radically differs from the trio.

Petite maman premiered at the 2021 Berlinale, where the North-American rights were snapped up by NEON, Sciamma’s partner on Portrait’s release. In the film, Nelly (Joséphine Sanz) is eight years old when her grandmother dies, and she goes with her parents to help empty the house. One morning, her mother, Marion (Nina Meurisse) disappears, and she finds a young girl also named Marion (Gabrielle Sanz) building a fort in the same place her mother had as a child. A non-traditional view of motherhood, Petite maman’s supposed twist is never meant to be a twist at all, as this Miyazaki-like fairytale never tries to hide where Nelly’s mother really is.

Unlike other time-travel films, Petite maman is not concerned with physics. It’s a gentle act of love that blurs generational lines, answering the question of what it would be like to see life through your parents’ eyes at your age.

What Sciamma does here is radical even for her, creating an entire film that lies in a safer place of childhood. Where in Water Lilies, Girlhood and, especially relevant, Tomboy, shot in the same forests of Cergy, she depicts the full violence that comes with adolescence, the two young girls here console each other, and don’t have a camera on them for the rougher events of their childhoods.

Sciamma’s earlier films about youth feel like personal catharsis, but also unflinchingly show coercion, a child being outed, and teenage gang violence. With Petite maman, the two young girls are allowed to live in the more innocent parts of their childhoods, and though they deal with grief, worries of abandonment, and one nervously awaits a major surgery, Sciamma now tells a weighty story without needing to show pain on screen.

The end result is a warm, nostalgic film that isn’t bound by time period or the specifics of setting. It’s a live-action Ghibli fairytale that, despite having Sciamma’s youngest leads, has matured from her earlier work. The plays acted out by the children sometimes parallel their own stories, and once, in a scene of a countess and maid, almost seem to be calling back to past films, in this case Portrait of a Lady on Fire. Many times, including at the film’s Berlinale Q&A, Sciamma has said she does not write characters, but stories and situations to enter. This feels more than true with this latest effort, a steady hand extended to an audience, promising us that it will be okay, some day.

Alice Diop’s ‘We’.

Alice Diop

Coming soon: We (‘Nous’) Watch now: Towards Tenderness (‘Vers la Tendresse’)

Through the many shortcomings and scandals of France’s César Awards, a memorable win of recent years was Alice Diop’s 2017 award for best short film for Vers la Tendresse (Towards Tenderness), a prize she dedicated to victims of police violence. The film is a 38-minute poetic exploration of how men view sex and romance in the French banlieues (suburbs). One line in the film summarizes Diop’s central thesis: “It’s just hard to talk about love. We don’t know what it is.” These young men struggle to conceptualize love from what they are taught, and their flaws are laid bare in the name of understanding the limitations of masculinity.

Though more abstract, Diop’s new film, We, which had its premiere in the 2021 Berlinale industry selection, comes from a similar desire for collective understanding. The train line of the RER B crosses Paris from north to south, and with it, so does an attempt to connect fragmented stories around the city. The film heavily recalls the Varda tradition that a documentary can be made just by walking and waiting. Using a series of suburban vignettes, Diop is able to piece together a wildlife conservatory of ordinary lives, looking at her own community and trying to capture the warmer side of society. She talks to a mechanic, a writer, and even her own father, in a sort of David Attenborough of human landscapes. We weaves through parts of the city with overwhelmingly Black and immigrant populations, building a nostalgic breed of documentary not focused on the gotcha! reveal.

Rebecca Zlotowski’s ‘An Easy Girl’ (2019).

Rebecca Zlotowski

Coming soon: Les enfants des autres Watch now: An Easy Girl (‘Une fille facile’)

Writer and director Rebecca Zlotowski has steadily released a film every three years since 2010. Her stories have centered on Jewish and North-African characters, and her television series Savages, based on a series of novels from Sabri Louatah, focuses on the attempted assassination of a fictional Arab President-elect in France. Very little has been spilled about Zlotowski’s newest film, Les enfants des autres, which began shooting in March. We know that Virginie Efira and Roschdy Zem are attached, and there were casting calls looking for children, and for extras for a scene set in a synagogue.

Though each of her four previous features have their strengths—and I’m even partial to Planetarium, an overzealous magical-realist film about American sisters with a supernatural gift, set in the Parisian film industry around the rise of anti-semitism—2019 Cannes selection An Easy Girl, readily accessible on Netflix, is a choice pick. Notable for its controversial casting of Zahia Dehar, who became infamous for relations with the French national football team while an underage sex worker, this choice proved to be a clever deception in a film about how women said to be easy with men are dismissed.

Dehar plays the older cousin to newcomer Mina Farid’s Naïma, a sixteen year old who longs for her cousin’s seemingly glamorous lifestyle. Naïma soon learns this life isn’t just fashion, but about learning to please wealthy men in order to get what she wants, while never having to give too much of herself away. While most of the director’s closest contemporaries are pioneers of a coherent movement of female gaze, Zlotowski chooses here to shoot through a decidedly male gaze, challenging her audiences’ perceptions of how they treat her characters before we come to understand them.

Also noteworthy is Zlotowski’s debut feature Dear Prudence, based around a diary she’d found in the street. Starring a very young Léa Seydoux as a seventeen-year-old girl who joins a motorcycle gang after the death of her mother, the film’s unique source material makes this Zlotowski’s most intimate film.

Julia Ducournau’s ‘Raw’ (2016).

Julia Ducournau

Coming soon: Titane Watch now: Raw (‘Grave’)

Julia Ducournau’s cult-favorite, coming-of-age, cannibal gorefest Raw quickly made her a name to watch. When Garance Marillier’s Justine tastes meat for the first time at a veterinary-school hazing, it awakens a cannibalistic desire within her. Shot as one would an erotic realization, Raw is at its essence an uncontrollable thread of self discovery.

Already backed by NEON for US distribution, with a possible mid-2021 release date, Ducournau’s follow-up Titane looks to be a wild thriller, if somewhat more traditional than the teenage “monstrous feminine” body-horror of her early work. Much of the production has been kept under wraps, but we know Vincent Lindon stars alongside newcomer Agathe Rousselle. Lindon plays the father of a mysterious young man named Adrien LeGrand, who is found in an airport with a swollen face, claiming to be a boy who had disappeared ten years before. Ducournau is a filmmaker unafraid to shy away from the provocative, and Titane is all but guaranteed a major platform come premiere.

Catherine Corsini’s ‘La Fracture’ (2021).

Catherine Corsini

Coming soon: The Divide (‘La fracture’) Watch now: Summertime (‘La belle saison’), An Impossible Love (‘Un amour impossible’)

Coming a generation before many of the other filmmakers here, Catherine Corsini is best known for her complex romantic dramas. Her most recent are the 1970s feminist-tinged Summertime (2015), starring Cécile de France and Izïa Higelin as a couple torn between rural farmlands and Paris, and An Impossible Love (2018), a novelistic chronicle of a couple (Niels Schneider and Virginie Efira) as their relationship sours from 1958 to the present day.

Summertime, which is currently available to rent or buy in the US, is Corsini’s first film to consciously depict a relationship between two women (though 2001’s Replay is ambiguous as to what is happening between Pascale Bussières and Emmanuelle Béart’s characters). The young lovers learn what freedoms they gain and lose between the pastoral countryside, and the feminist organizers they run with in Paris. It’s a fairly standard romantic arc, but illuminates a fiery counter-culture feminist era, and is a staunchly progressive film from a national cinema built so firmly upon a more traditional view of seduction.

La fracture, Corsini’s latest (and the third film produced by her life partner Elisabeth Perez) centers on yet another couple (Marina Foïs and Valeria Bruni-Tedeschi) who are on the verge of breaking up when a demonstration outside causes tensions to rise at the hospital they’re confined within. A relationship under strain alongside French protest culture? Extremely French subject matter indeed.

Claire Burger’s ‘Real Love’ (2018).

Claire Burger

Coming soon: Foreign Language (‘Langue étrangère’) Watch now: Real Love (‘C’est ça l’amour’)

Most likely known for her Clouzot-tinged music video for Kompormat’s ‘De mon âme à ton âme’, starring Adèle Haenel, Claire Burger is a filmmaker heavily rooted in location. Her past films, including a graduation short and two features, have been set in the north-eastern town of Forbach, where she grew up, just fifteen minutes from the German border. This looks to be a thread that runs through her next film: Foreign Language is about a friendship between two girls who live on either side of the French-German border. BPM producer Marie-Ange Luciani is set to produce; a poster for BPM made a cameo in Burger’s last feature, Real Love.

A personal story, Real Love is one of non-traditional fatherhood and a family that does not rely on masculinity. When his wife leaves, Mario (Bouli Lanners) is left to raise his two teenage daughters in their small town, all while taking part in a community-theater production. Most of the film is told from the perspective of the younger daughter (Justine LaCroix), experiencing first love with a girl from school, who doesn’t seem to want anything serious.

Notably, after her debut and a lengthy series of short films, this was the first time Burger, who edits her own films, cast professional actors, in the case of Lanners and Antonia Buresi (as a theater director). Yet it is the performance of the actresses playing the sisters that most touched the hearts of Letterboxd fans—as Lyd writes, “Maybe it was the opera music or the fantastic performances by Justine Lacroix and Sarah Henochsberg as the daughters, but it just affirmed so many things about life choices and the tipsy-turvy nature of love as just, everything.”

Marie Amachoukeli’s ‘Party Girl’ (2014).

Marie Amachoukeli

Coming soon: Rose Hill Watch now: Party Girl

A rare non-Sciamma project backed by producer Bénédicte Couvreur, Marie Amachoukeli’s solo debut is much anticipated, after Party Girl, where she was one-third of a directing trio with Claire Burger and Samuel Theis (who is shooting a feature of his own titled Petite Nature). Outside the collaborations with Burger, which began in film school, Amachoukeli is screenwriting for a number of films including Franco Lolli’s The Defendant, and has collaborated with animator Vladimir Mavounia-Kouka on two shorts, The Cord Woman and I Want Pluto to Be a Planet Again. A synopsis has yet to be released for Rose Hill, but in an old interview with Brain magazine, Amachoukeli mentioned searching for backers for a lesbian spy comedy.

Party Girl is essentially docu-fiction, with actors cast as versions of themselves building an authentic troupe of real people. Though it’s a collaboration, Amachoukeli shines as a screenwriter, introducing the story of a bar hostess who still lives the partying, single life of a woman in her twenties, despite having reached sixty. She is thrown when a man asks her to marry him, and she must reconstruct her outlook on love. From such young filmmakers, Party Girl is a sensitive portrait of an imperfect, ageing woman, which feels so rare in a cinematic landscape that longs for a fountain of youth.

Audrey Diwan’s ‘Happening’ (2021).

Audrey Diwan

Coming soon: Happening (‘L’evenement’) Watch now: Losing It (‘Mais vous êtes fous’)

French memoirist Annie Ernaux works by reconstructing her life over and over as time passes. One of her more well-known books, L’évènement, retraces her experiences trying to get an abortion in 1963, during a time when the procedure was banned in France.

Audrey Diwan—whose 2019 debut film Losing It follows a pair of young parents (the always-charming Pio Marmaï and Céline Sallette) working through the father’s spiral into addiction and recovery—has a knack for solid performances. She’s able to write a relationship under strain with nuance, and Céline Sallette’s character shows strength as a mother choosing between protecting her children and repairing her relationship to their troubled but good-hearted father, whom she still loves dearly. This skill for writing family should pair well with Ernaux’s deeply personal prose.

Happening sweeps up a small army of promising young actors: Being 17 star Kacey Mottet Klein, and Portrait of a Lady on Fire and School’s Out supporting breakout Luana Bajrami, appear alongside lead actress Anamaria Vartolomei. Her character, Anne, is a bright student who risks everything once her pregnancy starts showing, so that she can finish her studies. Audrey Diwan’s film isn’t the only Ernaux adaptation currently, with Danielle Arbid’s Passion Simple having premiered at Venice in 2020.

Claire Simon’s ‘I Want to Talk about Duras’ (2021).

Claire Simon

Coming soon: I Want to Talk About Duras Watch now: Mimi

One of few figures to bridge cinema and literature equally, Marguerite Duras was a social commentator on her world; she grew up poor in French-colonized Vietnam, took on a staunch leftist perspective, and developed a singular tone in her observational assertions. Duras’s 1975 film India Song, based on her novel of the same name, was a landmark in feminist film. Through a hypnotic structure (“a viewing experience like no other, one that touches all of the senses,” writes Carter on Letterboxd), India Song delivers a strong criticism of class and colonialism through its story of Anne-Marie Stretter (Delphine Seyrig), a French ambassador’s wife in 1930s Kolkata.

In I Want to Talk About Duras, writer-director Claire Simon (best known for her documentaries on the seemingly mundane) adapts a transcript of conversations between Duras (Emmanuelle Devos) and her much younger partner Yann Andréa Steiner (Swann Arlaud), in which the pair break down the codes of love and literature. These conversations were published in a book named after Steiner, who met Duras when he approached her after a screening of India Song.

The highlight of Simon’s previous work is Mimi, in which she settles down in the countryside with an old friend, and tells her life story over 105 minutes. Recently programmed as part of Metrograph’s Tell Me: Women Filmmakers series, it’s clear the film was selected for its authenticity. However, many Letterboxd members may heavily benefit from seeing The Graduation, her 2016 documentary about the famous Parisian film school La Fémis, and its difficult selection process. Most of the other filmmakers in this list passed through its gates, and Claire Simon’s Wiseman-lite documentary sheds light on the challenges these young people take upon themselves for a chance at a world-renowned filmmaking education.

Amandine Gay’s ‘Speak Up’ (2017).

Amandine Gay

Coming soon: A Story of One’s Own (‘Une histoire à soi’) Watch now: Speak Up (‘Ouvrir la voix’)

Amandine Gay has much to say about access to film school—and opportunities in the film industry—for those outside the mainstream. Initially on the radar for her Afro-feminist activism, Gay arrived on the cinema scene with Speak Up, a narrative reclamation focusing on the diaspora in France and Belgium.

Talking to Francophone Black women who may not be considered formal scholars, allowing her subjects to speak as experts on their own experiences, Gay disproves the idea that France is a race-blind society. She shoots mainly in regal close-ups and using natural light, allowing her subjects the clarity to speak for themselves, unfiltered. (And to put to bed the misconception that Black performers are harder to light, one of many important angles discussed in an excellent interview with Letterboxd member Justine Smith.)

Using family photos and home videos from subjects, Gay’s engaging documentary work is a mouthpiece to spark conversation. Her next documentary, Une histoire à soi, centers on transnational adoption and will likely take a similarly conversational approach in exploring a unique cultural divide; putting the microphone in front of those who can provide a first-person point of view. Though not officially backed yet, she’s also—for years!—teased a Black lesbian sommelier film on podcasts and in interviews. That’s a story that I hope won’t need much more maturing before we see it. A votre santé.

Related content

Feature-length French films by Women—Sarah’s list

The Official Top 100 Narrative Feature Films by Women Directors—featuring Portrait of a Lady on Fire at number one

Little White Lies: 100 Great Movies by Female Directors

Follow Sarah on Letterboxd

[jlalafics]

Hi LaLa not sure if you’ve got time tonight but I was wondering if there is any chance of an Everlark Inauguration Day Drabble?? Maybe one of them works for the President or VP, or they’re just excited about the history being made today 🇺🇸

Okay, so this is a companion piece to this story.

I hope you like this short bit. I’m apologizing ahead for it being so unedited.

_____

Katniss wakes up before dawn, restless and bladder full.

She is almost there, a month away from giving birth and the little one in her belly seems to echo her own agitation, doing somersaults as she attempts to rest after her bathroom trip.

Looking at her belly, Katniss rests her hand on it. “Come on, dude.”

Resigned to not sleeping, she reaches for the remote on her bedside table and turns on the television. Peeta shifts in his sleep, undisturbed by the sound of a Geico commercial featuring Tag Team singing a parody of their song, ‘Whoomp! (There It Is)’.

She switches channels to one of the news networks and settles on seeing a helicopter take away Mr. Orange (Willow calls him that, thanks to Peeta) from the White House.

Peace settles over her watching the helicopter fly past the Washington Monument, taking him further away from what was once a place of power. She feels hope rise as a new day dawns and a new beginning starts for the United States.

A small thump under her palm tells her that the little one heartily agrees.

Katniss falls into a snooze, barely noticing Peeta getting out of bed until she smells peppermint tea. She opens her eyes, finding Willow snuggled against her, half-asleep, and Peeta holding out a steaming mug to her.

“Good morning.” He leans down and gives her a kiss. “Are you ready for something new?”

“I’ve been ready for four years and through a pandemic,” she replies, taking the mug from his grasp and taking a sip. “That’s refreshing.”

Peeta settles back on his side and together they watch the beginning pomp and circumstance. They watch as Democrat and Republican members of Congress arrive at the Capitol, masks on and greeting one another as they await the beginning of the ceremony.

They watch as presidents and first ladies of the past make their appearances. George W. Bush and Laura Bush arrive, and the anchorman mentions that the former president has taken up painting. The Clintons arrive; Hilary wears a purple pantsuit under a maroon coat and the anchor reports that it is from Ralph Lauren.

“Why purple?” she asks her husband.

“Unity,” Peeta tells her, taking her hand and giving a squeeze. “A melding of two parties.”

“Looks like we’re off to a good start,” she remarks.

The Obamas arrive and Katniss looks in admiration at the former first lady’s fierceness in her plum coat, matching turtleneck, and wide leg pants as she walks towards her seat.

The Harris and Biden Family arrive and the anchor narrates, talking about Kamala Harris’ stepchildren calling her Momala, which Katniss finds very endearing. By then, Willow has awakened, and she watches in interest when Peeta tells her that Lady Gaga will be performing.

Finally, the Vice President Elect has arrived, resplendent in amethyst-colored dress hand-in-hand with her husband, the first ever Second Gentlemen, Douglas Emhoff.

Katniss breath catches, not quite believing that soon they will have a woman Vice President, who is of African-American and South-Asian American descent.

“You alright?” Peeta asks, blue eyes watching her carefully.

She nods, pulling their daughter closer, thinking that the Vice President is just the first of many women who will come into power. She hopes that Willow will remember this, despite her young age, and see the doors opening for her.

Finally, President Elect Joe Biden arrives along with his wife, Dr. Jill Biden to welcome applause.

“It’s like we can finally breathe, you know,” Peeta says. “Not like go outside without a mask, but we can finally feel like we’re moving forward, even if it might be slow.”

“Slow and steady,” she replies reaching for his hand.

“Mommy, her skin is like yours,” Willow says, pressing her finger to Katniss’ cheek. She points to the television at Kamala Harris. “And she’s wearing purple! I love purple—Mommy, why are you crying?”

Katniss wipes the corners of her eyes and meets Peeta’s tender gaze.

He squeezes her hand in understanding—in unity.

“Because, Willow—it’s a new day.”

FIN.

[xhxhxhx]

Barack Obama's 2000 primary run against Bobby Rush for Illinois's first congressional district was the only race he ever lost.

Although Obama won the Hyde Park precincts around the University of Chicago and the white suburbs around Evergreen Park and Mount Greenwood, Representative Rush dominated in the Black precincts in this majority-Black district on Chicago's South Side.

“Nobody sent me,” Obama had said at his campaign kickoff, on September 26, 1999. “I’m not part of some long-standing political organization. I have no fancy sponsors. I’m not even from Chicago." The primary results underlined that.

As Ryan Lizza later reported, the results made Obama rethink some things:

Obama learned the exact nature of his appeal, as well as his handicaps. Unlike Obama’s State Senate district, where the University of Chicago and the multicultural Hyde Park produced most of the votes, Rush’s congressional district extended deep into black neighborhoods where Obama was unknown. His academic background was a burden, too. Will Burns explained, “Even though the University of Chicago is one of the largest employers on the South Side of Chicago, it is seen by some, particularly black nationalists, as a bastion of white political power, as a huge entity that doesn’t take into account the interests of the community, that doesn’t have a full democratic partnership with the community, and does what it wants to the community in maintaining clear boundaries about where black people are. It’s seen as an expansive force, trying to expand into Bronzeville and into Woodlawn”—historically black neighborhoods adjacent to Hyde Park—“and put poor blacks out of the area. The University of Chicago is not a brand that helps you if you’re trying to get votes on the South Side of Chicago.”

Obama’s fund-raising success and his professional networks were also viewed with suspicion. Chicago is still a city of villages, and Obama was adept at gliding back and forth between the South Side, where he campaigned for votes, and the wealthy Gold Coast, the lakefront neighborhood of high-rise condominiums and deluxe shopping, where he raised money. One day in Hyde Park, I mentioned the name Bettylu Saltzman (the Project Vote supporter and daughter of a Bulls owner) to Lois Friedberg-Dobry (the South Side operator). “I don’t run in those circles,” she said. Later, over lunch with Saltzman at a café in a gourmet supermarket on the Gold Coast, I mentioned the Dobrys and Obama’s Independent Voters of Illinois friends, and she said, “You know, the North Side and the South Side of Chicago—it’s like two different worlds.”

A South Side operator named Al Kindle, a large man with a booming voice, was a field operator for Obama’s race against Rush. He had helped elect Harold Washington, and he saw Obama’s congressional campaign from the street level. We met one evening at Calypso Café, a Caribbean restaurant that Obama has said is his favorite place to eat in Hyde Park, and Kindle described some of the worst moments in the campaign. “The accusations were that Obama was sent here and owned by the Jews,” Kindle said. “That he was here to steal the black vote and steal black land and that he was represented by the—as they were called—‘the white man.’ And that Obama wasn’t black enough and didn’t know the black experience, the black community. It was quite deafening in terms of how they went after Alderman Preckwinkle and myself. People would say, ‘Oh, Kindle, man, we trust you, you being fooled. Obama’s got you fooled.’ And some people called me a traitor.”.

The loss taught Obama a great deal about the components of his natural coalition. According to Dan Shomon, the first poll that Obama conducted revealed that the demographic he could win over most easily was white voters. Obama, who hadn’t shown any particular gift for oratory in the race, now learned to shed his stiff approach to campaigning—described by Preckwinkle as that of an “arrogant academic.” Mikva told me, “The first time I heard him talk to a black church, he was very professorial, more so even than he was in the white community. There was no joking, no self-deprecation, no style. It didn’t go over well at all.”

But, as he had in his 1996 campaign, Obama had attracted a young and zealous corps of campaign workers. “I remember one of the candidates in the race used to talk about how crazed our volunteers were, because they were passionate, energized,” Will Burns said. “You’d come by the office on Eighty-seventh Street and there’d be a bunch of guys with no teeth waiting to get their next Old Grand-dad and then these Shiraz-drinking, Nation-reading, T.N.R.-quoting young black folk. It was a random-ass mix. It was beautiful, though. When I see the crowds now, they’re very reminiscent of what was happening then.”

Emil Jones told me that, after 2000, Obama moved decisively away from being pigeonholed as an inner-city pol. During one debate with Rush, he noted that he and the other candidates were all “progressive, urban Democrats.” Even though he lost, that primary taught him that he might be something more than that. “He learned that for Barack Obama it was not the type of district that he was well suited for,” Jones said. “The type of campaign that he had to run to win that district is not Barack Obama. It was a predominantly African-American district. It was a district where you had to campaign solely on those issues. And Barack did not campaign that way, and so as a result he lost. Which was good.” Meaning, it was good for Barack Obama.

After the State Senate was redistricted in 2001, Obama's district looked very different:

One day in the spring of 2001, about a year after the loss to Rush, Obama walked into the Stratton Office Building, in Springfield, a shabby nineteen-fifties government workspace for state officials next to the regal state capitol. He went upstairs to a room that Democrats in Springfield called “the inner sanctum.” Only about ten Democratic staffers had access; entry required an elaborate ritual—fingerprint scanners and codes punched into a keypad. The room was large, and unremarkable except for an enormous printer and an array of computers with big double monitors. On the screens that spring day were detailed maps of Chicago, and Obama and a Democratic consultant named John Corrigan sat in front of a terminal to draw Obama a new district. Corrigan was the Democrat in charge of drawing all Chicago districts, and he also happened to have volunteered for Obama in the campaign against Rush.

Obama’s former district had been drawn by Republicans after the 1990 census. But, after 2000, Illinois Democrats won the right to redistrict the state. Partisan redistricting remains common in American politics, and, while it outrages a losing party, it has so far survived every legal challenge. In the new century, mapping technology has become so precise and the available demographic data so rich that politicians are able to choose the kinds of voter they want to represent, right down to individual homes. A close look at the post-2000 congressional map of Bobby Rush’s district reveals that it tears through Hyde Park in a curious series of irregular turns. One of those lines bypasses Obama’s address by two blocks. Rush, or someone looking out for his interests, had carved the upstart Obama out of Rush’s congressional district.

In truth, Rush had little to worry about; Obama was already on a different political path. Like every other Democratic legislator who entered the inner sanctum, Obama began working on his “ideal map.” Corrigan remembers two things about the district that he and Obama drew. First, it retained Obama’s Hyde Park base—he had managed to beat Rush in Hyde Park—then swooped upward along the lakefront and toward downtown. By the end of the final redistricting process, his new district bore little resemblance to his old one. Rather than jutting far to the west, like a long thin dagger, into a swath of poor black neighborhoods of bungalow homes, Obama’s map now shot north, encompassing about half of the Loop, whose southern portion was beginning to be transformed by developers like Tony Rezko, and stretched far up Michigan Avenue and into the Gold Coast, covering much of the city’s economic heart, its main retail thoroughfares, and its finest museums, parks, skyscrapers, and lakefront apartment buildings. African-Americans still were a majority, and the map contained some of the poorest sections of Chicago, but Obama’s new district was wealthier, whiter, more Jewish, less blue-collar, and better educated. It also included one of the highest concentrations of Republicans in Chicago.

“It was a radical change,” Corrigan said. The new district was a natural fit for the candidate that Obama was in the process of becoming. “He saw that when we were doing fund-raisers in the Rush campaign his appeal to, quite frankly, young white professionals was dramatic.”

Obama’s personal political concerns were not the only factor driving the process. During the previous round of remapping, in 1991, Republicans had created Chicago districts where African-Americans were the overwhelming majority, packing the greatest number of loyal Democrats into the fewest districts. A decade later, Democrats tried to spread the African-American vote among more districts. The idea was to create enough Democratic-leaning districts so that the Party could take control of the state legislature. That goal was fine with Obama; his new district offered promising, untapped constituencies for him as he considered his next political move. “The exposure he would get to some of the folks that were on boards of the museums and C.E.O.s of some of the companies that he would represent would certainly help him in the long run,” Corrigan said.

“In the end,” Lizza wrote, “Obama’s North Side fund-raising base and his South Side political base were united in one district.” And that made all the difference.

[angelictaehyun]

I love you, but didn't Biden say, "Poor kids are just as bright and just as talented as white kids.", and "You cannot go to a 7-11 or a Dunkin' Donuts unless you have a slight Indian accent." also, saying if you don't vote for him you ain't black? Pretty positive he called Mexico corrupt too. I'll let it pass anyways since he's old and probably forgot 💕

Hi. *cue awkward finger guns*

Biden (as well as Harris) has a racist history as most congressmen/congresswomen—democrat and republican—do and it is not excusable. It is important that people educate themselves and acknowledge their history so they can make an informed decision. Their past is not forgivable nor should it be forgotten, but they are currently trying to correct their mistake(s) as they both seem aware of their past and are actively trying to do better. The same cannot be said of the current president. Biden and Harris consistently educate themselves and attempt to repent for their past by creating a better society for the United States and the world. They have openly discussed their plans for the future, and I agree with most, if not all, of their ideas. As I stated, no one is forgiving or forgetting their history, but they are actively trying to correct their past which is all one can do when they have done something wrong. 

Furthermore, if you would like to talk simply about the past, President Trump has raped, assaulted, and sexualized multiple women, and has participated in the molestation of multiple children with his close friend, Jeffrey Epstein. He had called for the death penalty for the Central Park Five and has committed housing discrimination against African-Americans attempting to secure a home under his business. He has committed tax fraud and evasion, and when questioned about it, has refused to comment. There is quite a bit more, but this is just a couple of examples since you bring up the past (understandable as the past is very important, but he has made no effort to change his behavior and hasn’t apologized nor will he). 

As for his term, he’s done quite a bit—and I don’t mean that to commend him. Firstly, we have the creation of the border in the South as well as the isolation and separation of children from their families. There’s also the climate change sector, in which he has completely disregarded basic science and has refused to join the Paris Accords because he’s hellbent on the idea that global warming and climate change is a hoax. Speaking of lack of scientific understanding, he’s also responsible for the abhorrent mismanagement of the Coronavirus, causing the deaths of nearly 235,000 people, on top of his refusal to join Covax, the global cooperation initiative that would invest financial, scientific, and technological resources from each participating country to create a vaccine for the virus. He has implemented not one, not two, but three Supreme Court judges, one of which is a rapist, and the other is not only unqualified to be a judge but is also actively seeking to overthrow Roe v. Wade and Griswold v. Connecticut, but I digress. His management and disregard of the Black Lives Matter movement is disgusting, and he has supported police brutality against the African-American community by refusing to incriminate those responsible and showing support of white supremacists. He has allowed a multitude of anti-LGBTQ+ legislation to pass, and he has shown discrimination against the community.

The list goes on but if I listed them all out, I’d be here all night. 

Lastly, I am very aware of who I voted for in this election. I am educated and informed, and I continuously strive to learn more. I participated in our democratic society, and I made my vote, and I don’t feel any regret. This message, although possibly unintentional (but that’s not what I’m thinking), is extremely condescending and rude; I don’t appreciate it in the slightest. 

Have a great rest of your night/day.

[jennymanrique]

Three California Republicans share views on future of GOP

Members of the Republican Party in California share their views on why they believe they offer the best representation for ethnic Americans.

In an overwhelmingly blue state where according to the California Public Policy Institute, the majority of African American, Latino, and AAPI voters are Democrats, Republicans flipped four districts in the last congressional election with minority candidates.

According to the new faces, their agendas seek to “raise the conservative voices” of minorities, and find “bipartisan consensus” to legislate.

“The Republican Party for me, is not the great old party, but the great opportunity party,” said Young Kim, US representative to the CA 39th District, which includes Los Angeles, San Bernardino and Orange County, one of the most diverse districts in the country where Joe Biden won by 10 points.

“Asian Americans should not automatically be considered as members of the Democratic Party. We have our voices, we have our shared values, we have our conservative views.”

Kim is an immigrant from South Korea, mother of four children, and one of four Korean-Americans who were sworn into the 117th Congress. She is also one of 11 Republican women who flipped a Democratic seat in the last election, and who was recently ranked as the most bipartisan freshmen in Congress.

One of her bills approved with Democratic support was the Paycheck Protection Program Extension Act that gives small business owners two more months to access unspent funds from that program in order to keep their doors open and their employees on payroll. “That small extension allows 2.7 million small businesses to receive $54 billion,” she said.

She also supports legislation that provides a permanent solution to DACA recipients and to foreign students who get their education at US universities, but cannot adjust their status to stay in the country. “As we talk about immigration reform, I would like to see separate legislation to fix DACA,” she said.

While she supports Biden’s $ 1.2 billion bipartisan infrastructure bill, she disagrees that the $1.9 trillion budget to deal with COVID-19 is redirected to other purposes, “such as caring for migrants who are in the community”.

“As we recover from the COVID-19 pandemic, the work of Congress will play a large role in dictating our future,” Kim said. “And by getting the government out of the way and making life more affordable for workers and families, we can get our economy and our lives back on track.”

Daughter of farmworkers

Suzette Martínez Valladares, who represents District 38 in the California State Assembly, which encompasses the northwestern suburbs of Los Angeles, Ventura County, the Santa Clarita Valley and Simi Valley, is also faithful to her party’s fiscal conservatism.

Martinez is the only Latina Republican in the assembly. She says that Governor Gavin Newsom’s policies “are crushing the middle class” and that the handling “of the lockdown and closures had little to no guidance” so that “our businesses are going at an alarmingly negligent pace”.

The Assemblywoman is co-sponsoring bill 420 which seeks to adjust state guidelines to allow amusement parks, regardless of size, to be opened safely. Her interest comes from her first work experience at Six Flags Magic Mountain where she started as a summer intern, to end up working 8 years later as an asset protection and loss prevention investigator.

“There has been clear mismanagement for so many industries that have been shuttered and closed for over a year… 1.2 million Californians have not accessed EDD (unemployment benefits), and the distribution of vaccines has been a debacle,” Martinez said, although official data showed that California has the highest percentage of vaccinations in the country.

Born in the San Fernando Valley, her grandparents came from Mexico to work in the fields of Kern County. Every summer her father, who was born in Puerto Rico, would pick crops with them.

“Throughout my life, my parents taught me the value of hard work. My dad said that I didn’t have to be the smartest person in the room, but the hardest working person in the room.”

Martínez said that she experienced extreme poverty while in high school and that she witnessed a lot of crime and drugs in her neighborhood. “I looked around me and all of my representatives were Democrats who were supposed to be the party that supported minorities and the poor. Why was I not seeing change in my own community? That forced me to look at the Republican Party,” she said.

Public safety

Walter Allen III, a Covina city council member for more than 20 years, said that although he did not consider himself a political person and was basically a “non-partisan person,” having worked with different law enforcement agencies inclined him to join the GOP “for its platform on public safety.”

“One of the major concerns I have as a local elected official is exactly public safety … and it doesn’t make any difference whether you are Republican or Democrat, I am concerned about the notion of defunding the police,” said the African-American councilmember who is also the director of the Rio Hondo Police Academy.

Born in East Oakland, where he witnessed “high crime rates,” Allen believes that perceptions about the police stem from many people not paying attention to data. “It is victims, crime reports and issues that deal with crime that disproportionately send police into communities of color,” he said. “And for some reason, people think that police officers run around, making their point to target Blacks or Latinos, and that’s simply not the case.”

Allen condemned the murder of African American George Floyd at the hands of Officer Derek Chauvin as a “horrible thing”.

“I don’t know of any police officer that wasn’t sickened by that,” he said. But he quoted various figures according to which out of 1,000 people who were shot last year, about 235 were black, and “most of those people were armed and dangerous.”

The council member said that in his academy, 80% of the officers he trains belong to minorities and that the training is focused on de-escalation techniques, how to deal with the mental health of the homeless population, and cultural diversity.

“As a mandatory requirement they have to go to the Museum of Tolerance for a day of cultural diversity training,” he assured. “We train officers how to be guardians, not warriors,” he added.

Allen believes that his party must constantly reach out to communities of color and not just during election season. “Unfortunately, a lot of Republicans are leaving the state. But I’m optimistic if we continue with the grassroots effort, we can gain some folks of color into the party,” he concluded.

Originally published here

Want to read this piece in Spanish? Click here

[newstfionline]

Sunday, June 13, 2021

Rash of mass shootings stirs US fears heading into summer (AP) Two people were killed and at least 30 others wounded in mass shootings overnight in three states, authorities said Saturday, stoking concerns that a spike in U.S. gun violence could continue into summer as coronavirus restrictions ease and more people are free to socialize. The attacks took place late Friday or early Saturday in the Texas capital of Austin, Chicago and Savannah, Georgia. In Austin, authorities said they arrested one of two male suspects and were searching for the other after a shooting early Saturday on a crowded pedestrian-only street packed with bars and restaurants. Fourteen people were wounded, including two critically, in the gunfire, which the city’s interim police chief said is believed to have started as a dispute between two parties. In Chicago, a woman was killed and nine other people were wounded when two men opened fire on a group standing on a sidewalk in the Chatham neighborhood on the city’s South Side. In the south Georgia city of Savannah, police said one man was killed and seven other people were wounded in a mass shooting Friday evening.

Summer camps return but with fewer campers and counselors (AP) Overnight summer camps will be allowed in all 50 states this season, but COVID-19 rules and a pandemic labor crunch mean that many fewer young campers will attend, and those who do will have to observe coronavirus precautions for the second consecutive year. “Camp might look a little different, but camp is going to look a lot better in 2021 than it did in 2020, when it didn’t happen,” said Matt Norman of Atlanta, who is getting ready to send his 12-year-old daughter to camp. Even though most camps will be open, reduced capacity necessitated by COVID-19 restrictions and the labor shortage will keep numbers well below a normal threshold of about 26 million summer campers, said Tom Rosenberg of the American Camp Association.

Mexico says COVID-19 has affected a fourth of its population (Reuters) About a quarter of Mexico’s 126 million people are estimated to have been infected with the coronavirus, the health ministry said on Friday, far more than the country’s confirmed infections. The 2020 National Health and Nutrition Survey (Ensanut) showed that about 31.1 million people have had the virus, the ministry said in a statement, citing Tonatiuh Barrientos, an official at the National Institute of Public Health. According to Barrientos, not all of the people in the survey’s estimate necessarily showed symptoms. The survey was based on interviews with people at 13,910 households between Aug. 17 and Nov. 14 last year, and confirmed preliminary results released in December.

Peru on edge as electoral board reviews result of disputed presidential election (Guardian) Peru was on a knife-edge on Friday as its electoral board reviewed ballots cast in the presidential election, after a challenge to the tally by the losing candidate Keiko Fujimori. The final tally gave the leftist teacher Pedro Castillo a razor-thin 50.17% to 49.83% advantage over his rightwing rival Fujimori, which amounts to about 60,000 votes. However, the country’s electoral authority has yet to confirm the win, and Fujimori, the scion of a controversial political dynasty, has refused to concede. She alleges fraud, even though national and international observers said the vote was clean, and has called for up to 500,000 votes to be nullified or reexamined, forcing the electoral board to conduct a review of ballots.

For Cornwall, G7 summit brings disruption (AP) Towering steel fences, masses of police, protests on the beach: The Cornish seaside’s turquoise waters and white sandy beaches are looking decidedly less idyllic this week as leaders of the Group of Seven wealthy democracies descend for a summit. U.S. President Joe Biden and leaders from Canada, France, Germany, Italy and Japan are arriving for three days of talks starting Friday at the tiny village of Carbis Bay, near St. Ives in Cornwall. The region is a popular holiday destination in the southwestern tip of England. Locals may be used to crowds and traffic jams during the peak summer tourist season, but the disruptions caused by the summit are on another level. A naval frigate dominates the coastline, armed soldiers guard the main sites and some 5,000 extra police officers have been deployed to the area. Authorities have even hired a cruise ship with a capacity of 3,000, moored offshore, to accommodate some of the extra officers. A main road is closed for the whole week, and local train lines and bus services have been shut down. A 3-meter (10-foot) tall metal fence nicknamed the “ring of steel” has been erected around Treganna Castle in Carbis Bay, where world leaders will stay. Security is also tight in the nearby town of Falmouth, the main base for international media covering the summit.

World leaders are in England, but beautiful British beaches have stolen the show (Washington Post) When President Biden shared a photo to Twitter on Thursday of him standing alongside British Prime Minister Boris Johnson and gazing out onto an unspoiled, sandy white beach from the Group of Seven summit in Cornwall, England, the post was supposed to be a tribute to the “special relationship” between the United Kingdom and the United States. But to many, it was the image of the picturesque coast that stood out. It looked somewhat suspicious. Too good to be true. Others questioned the authenticity of the scene, wondering whether it was photoshopped. Although it is true that some of Britain’s beaches have a reputation for pebbles, angry seagulls that steal food from unsuspecting tourists and diapers that float in murky waters, the county of Cornwall boasts some of the country’s best seaside destinations—complete with calm, clear waters that are perfect for swimming in and long stretches of soft sand that attract families from around the world. Carbis Bay is one of several beaches that make up St. Ives Bay, which, according to the Cornwall tourist board, is considered by the “Most Beautiful Bays in the World” organization to be one of the world’s best. The bay is described as being “surrounded by sub-tropical plants and lapped by turquoise waters.”

Ransomware’s suspected Russian roots point to a long detente between the Kremlin and hackers (Washington Post) The ransomware hackers suspected of targeting Colonial Pipeline and other businesses around the world have a strict set of rules. First and foremost: Don’t target Russia or friendly states. It’s even hard-wired into the malware, including coding to prevent hacks on Moscow’s ally Syria, according to cybersecurity experts who have analyzed the malware’s digital fingerprints. They say the reasons appear clear. “In the West you say, ‘Don’t . . . where you eat,’ ” said Dmitry Smilyanets, a former Russia-based hacker who is now an intelligence analyst at Recorded Future, a cybersecurity company with offices in Washington and other cities around the world. “It’s a red line.” Targeting Russia could mean a knock on the door from state security agents, he said. But attacking Western enterprises is unlikely to trigger a crackdown. The relationship between the Russian government and ransomware criminals allegedly operating from within the country is expected to be a point of tension between President Biden and Russia’s Vladimir Putin at their planned summit in Geneva on Wednesday. The United States has accused Russia of acting as a haven for hackers by tolerating their activities—as long as they are directed outside the country.

Pandemic relapse spells trouble for India’s middle class (AP) India’s economy was on the cusp of recovery from the first pandemic shock when a new wave of infections swept the country, infecting millions, killing hundreds of thousands and forcing many people to stay home. Cases are now tapering off, but prospects for many Indians are drastically worse as salaried jobs vanish, incomes shrink and inequality is rising. Decades of progress in alleviating poverty are imperiled, experts say, and getting growth back on track hinges on the fate of the country’s sprawling middle class. It’s a powerful and diverse group ranging from salaried employees to small business owners: many millions of people struggling to hold onto their hard-earned gains. The outbreak of the pandemic triggered the worst downturn since the Great Depression of the 1930s and as it gradually ebbs, many economies are bouncing back. India’s economy contracted 7.3% in the fiscal year that ended in March, worsening from a slump that slashed growth to 4% from 8% in the two years before the pandemic hit. Economists fear there will be no rebound similar to the ones seen in the U.S. and other major economies.

‘Xi Jinping is my spiritual leader’: China’s education drive in Tibet (Reuters) Under clear blue skies, rugged peaks and the spectacular Potala Palace, one image is ubiquitous in Tibet’s capital city Lhasa: portraits of Chinese President Xi Jinping and fellow leaders. China is broadening a political education campaign as it celebrates the 70th anniversary of its control over Tibet. Civilians and religious figures who the government arranged to be interviewed on the five-day trip pledged loyalty to the Communist Party and Xi. Asked who his spiritual leader was, a monk at Lhasa’s historic Jokhang temple named Xi. “I’m not drunk ... I speak freely to you,” said the monk named Lhakpa, speaking from a courtyard overlooked by security cameras and government observers. “The posters [of Xi] coincide with a massive political education programme which is called ‘feeling gratitude to the party’ education,” said Robert Barnett, a Tibetan studies veteran scholar at the University of London’s School of Oriental and African Studies.

Long overlooked, Israel’s Arab citizens are increasingly asserting their Palestinian identity (Washington Post) Growing up in an Arab village in northern Israel in the 1990s, Mahmoud Abo Arisheh was sure of at least two things: He was Israeli, and he was not allowed to talk politics. “Be careful, or the Shin Bet will get you,” his parents told him, referring to Israel’s domestic security service. Decades later, much has changed: Abo Arisheh is a lawyer, a poet and a theater director in Jaffa. He attends protests and talks politics freely—in Arabic, Hebrew and English. And while his citizenship may remain Israeli, the identity most dear to him is that of a Palestinian. “I didn’t know anything about being Palestinian,” said the 32-year-old, “but then I opened my eyes.” And now, it seems, so are many others. In just the past month, Palestinian citizens of Israel—also known as Israeli Arabs—have risen up in mass, nationwide demonstrations to protest Israeli evictions and police raids. They have been arrested by the hundreds following some of the worst communal violence between Arabs and Jews in Israel’s post-independence history. For a community that is often overlooked despite numbering nearly 2 million people—or about 20 percent of the Israeli population—these are momentous days indeed.

Nigerian police fire tear gas to break up protests over rising insecurity (Reuters) Police fired tear gas and detained several demonstrators in the Nigerian cities of Lagos and Abuja on Saturday during protests over the country’s worsening security situation, Reuters witnesses said. Anger over mass kidnappings-for-ransom, a decade-long Islamist insurgency and a crackdown on protesters in Lagos last October has fueled demands for the government of President Muhammadu Buhari to do more to tackle violence and insecurity. Reuters witnesses in Lagos and Abuja saw police shooting their guns into the air and firing tear gas into the crowds to disperse the demonstrators, who held placards and chanted “Buhari must go”. Officers were also seen smashing mobile phones confiscated from protesters, who also denounced the country’s 33.3% unemployment rate.

[prettylittleparadox]

Happy Cancer Season! Before anyone moans about crabs, here’s a few CANCER LEADERS we wouldn’t be the same without!🥳🦀 May we honor and celebrate the many ways that caring, tenacious, and *strategic* Cancers heal the community♋️🔮: I’ll post more about these phenomenal crabs, like their moon signs and anecdotes on their birthdays!

1. Octavia Butler, Mother of SciFi, helped create and popularize the genre of African American Science Fiction. (And if you’ve never read any, you’ve never read real high stakes scifi ) Her work has won the Hugo and Nebula awards and still serves as powerful social commentary. Read: Kindred, Bloodchild, Parable of a Sower.

2. Walter Francis White, from Atlanta, used his light skin to infiltrate the KKK to investigate lynchings!! He discovered what we been knew’d-that the police were the KKK!! He later went on to lead the NAACP from 1929 to 1955.

3. Thurgood Marshall, was the first Black Supreme Court justice. He’s represented and won more cases before the high court than anyone else -29 out of 32, putting in WORK for civil rights. *

4. Medgar Evers was an NAACP leader who worked tirelessly for desegregation. He traveled through Mississippi registering Black folk to vote, and worked to gather evidence and eye witnesses for Emmett Till’s murder and other closed case black murders. This put a lot of national attention on Evers, who was assassinated in his own driveway :( *

5. Mary McLeod Bethune was the only one of her 17 siblings who was able to attend school. And she had to walk miles to go. This is why she strived toward education, and opened what would later become Bethune-Cookman University. She also opened her own civil rights organization called the National Council of Negro Women never stopping the fight to PROTECT BLACK WOMEN! She was a special advisor to President Roosevelt!

6. Mother Mary Ann Wright was Oakland’s very own, feeding the hungry in the community for decades. She first used her own social security checks to provide one meal a week, before opening her own foundation where she fed 450 people a day on small yearly budget. She said, Love is just another word until it is put into action. The time you spend talking in meetings about reaching out to those in need, might be the difference between life and death for someone.” PERIOD! Cancers for DIRECT action!

7. Ida B Wells was born enslaved but went on to become an investigative journalist! She wrote about the conditions of Black only schools before focusing her efforts on Anti-Lynching. She risked her life to travel the south for eye witness accounts to report until she was run off by constant death threats. Along with founding the National Association of Colored Women, she is co-founder of the NAACP. (I’m honored to share a birthday with this Queen, who was at one point dubbed the most famous Black woman in America)

8. Nelson Mandela, the first black state head and first democratically elected President of South Africa. His life’s activism and his government worked toward ending the legacy of apartheid.

Happy Cancer Season!!🖤🔮

[thebrokenblackman]

KRS-One - “Ah Yeah!”  Critical Analysis by Hakeem Ture

“If hip hop has the power to corrupt young minds, it also has the ability to uplift them.” - KRS-One 

The musician is a natural master of vibration and emotion. Many musicians have been able to make us dance. Many have been able to draw on relatability because nobody is the only person like them in the world. Perhaps some have even made us cry or provided soundtracks for intimate moments. Only few musicians have taken on the task of socially and historically educating their listeners through their music. 

Even fewer have been able to combine the mastery of teaching with mastery of rhythm. Those who do this become legends like; Nate King Cole, B.B. King, Nina Simone, Bob Marley, Chaka Khan and Fela Kuti’ and their influence lives throughout generations. In 1995 Krs-One released a self-titled album that came in the sunset of his reign. His career would mirror the sepia filter of the album cover. 

This album had dominant auras of militancy and rebellion that Krs-One fans had not heard since Boogie Down Productions - Criminal Minded. Krs-One was able to both appease his day one fans and gain the younger generation of Hip Hoppers who were listening to artists such as: Nas, Redman,Das Efx, Tupac, and A Tribe Called Quest. The message and timing of this album may have been divine. Let us look at the historical events of the year(s) Krs-One was creating this album in. In 1994, the United States congress had successfully completed the first step of becoming fascist by Voting to Censure Dr. Khalid Muhammad, National Advisor of the Nation of Islam. Bill Clinton and Joe Biden led Democrats to pass the The Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act and effectively fueled the prison industrial complex. South Africa held it first election since intergrating with the apartheid government and Invisble Man author Ralph Ellison had passed. Hip Hop was the soul vehicle of expression to protest the genocide that had been going on and KRS One was one of its leaders. The youth looked toward this leader to deliver an album reflective of their mindstate and he delivered. 

Imperative of a classic work of musical art, this album is composed of multiple great songs, but in my opinion the cornerstone song of the album is undeniably “Ah Yeah”. In this song he masterfully uses three 16 bar verses to empower and mobilize his listener much in the same way Dr. Khalid Muhammad did. This track starts with the establishment of an a capella warcry. He writes in response to western power’s having done such an incredible job destroying the rebel instinct that Afrikan people possess by publicly shaming our leaders and traditions. These lyrics are him trying to raise the psyche of a fallen warrior class and put revolt back in its holy place as opposed to the negative connotation that has been applied by the white power structure.  He essentially made a chant-like hook with an underlying message of “This is your enemy, This is how to handle him, and THIS is okay”. The aim focuses on  redirecting the accumulated anger of a traduced peoples that is often mistargeted toward self so that we may be collectively progresssive. 

He bellows:

“Ah yeah, that's whatcha say when you see a devil down

Ah yeah, that's whatcha say when you take the devil's crown

Ah yeah, stay alive all things will change around

Ah yeah, what? Ah yeah!”

Then comes the establishment of an eerie bass line. This song structure is familiar to fans of his earlier work. It was what they were longing for. For a few albums he took the perspective of being in the classroom or office as opposed to in the battlefield with his men. He had returned to fight with us like Haile Selassie. Immediately he establishes a dual level of respect. One with his men and one with his deterrent.  

“So here I go kickin' science in ninety-five

I be illin', parental discretion is advised still

Don't call me nigga, this MC goes for his

Call me God, cause that's what the black man is

Roamin' through the forest as the hardest lyrical artist

Black women you are not a bitch you're a Goddess

Let it be known, you can lean on KRS-One

Like a wall cause I'm hard, I represent God”

In the first 2 bars of the preceding excerption he lets us know he intends to drop some knowledge, but it will not be filtered for political correctness or comfortability. The following 2 bars he establishes both a tone of encounterment and identity. Then he goes on to explain from which direction he came much like Saint Maurice's appearance upon the plagued people of Europe to let them know he has navigated and he is no spook. He goes on to talk to his listener and the most important of them, the women.

In 1994, fresh off a press tour on which she gained popularity from criticizing Bill Clinton, Sister Souljah published her first book that was heralded by black scholars and youth alike entitled No Disrespect. Her Influence was cemented in the minds of black youth and played a huge role in raising generational consciousness by dealing with topics like “how the black woman is viewed by black men” and “the black woman’s role in repairing the black family structure”. She had solely been awarded leadership duties by a disregarded demographic in a scapegoated culture and was handling it with the grace of Misty Copeland.  Her and the women she raised to consciousness needed the camaraderie of Krs One. He goes on to sell to himself:

 “Wack MC's have one style: gun buck

But when you say, "Let's buck for revolution"

They shut the fuck up, can't get with it

Down to start a riot in a minute

You'll hear so many Bowe-Bowe-Bowe, you think I'm Riddick

While other MC's are talkin' bout up with hope down with dope

I'll have a devil in my infrared scope,”

In the first five bars he addresses the enemies of the oppressed people within the oppressed people. These “Wack MC’s” are the Uncle Toms’ and Judas of the rebellious, afro-centric movement that is Hip-Hop. He says they lack discipline and do not have the self awareness to rescue themselves. In comparison with himself who uses that energy toward an ultimate goal, Independence through revolution. In the succeeding excerption KRS briefly displays the cognitive processing and coping mechanism of a warrior:

“WOY

That's for calling my father a boy and, klak, klak, klak

That's for putting scars on my mother's back, BO

That's for calling my sister a ho, and for you

Buck, buck, buck  cause I don't give a motherfuck

Remember the whip, remember the chant

Remember the rope and

You black people still thinkin' about voting?

Every President we ever had lied!

You know, I'm kinda glad Nixon died.”

Throughout the preceding excerption KRS skillfully uses onomatopoeias to create a setting for his listener. There is a battle going on. Shells casings are falling to the ground and bullets are flying from high caliber weapons. He is in the thick of it and then an enemy approaches him. He musters the courage to engage with his assailant by remembering the suffrage the morals of his enemies’ elected nation-state has caused his ancestors. Then he rejoices in the death of one of their leaders, Richard Nixon.

In the second verse Krs-One addresses an age-old topic of discussion for spiritual people that was brought forth to the Afrikans of today by Noble Drew Ali, “The Prophetic Soul”. This belief dates back to ancient Buddhism in the caves of Asia taught to us by Dr. Ivan Van Sertima in his book “African Presence in Early Asia”. This belief entails that all the prophets of the world including but not limted to; Adam, Jesus, Buddha, Muhammad, and himself were the same soul being reborn until its mission is completed.” Krs-One puts himself and a couple others in this divine line of being. 

“This is not the first time I came to the planet

 concern every time I come, only a few could understand it

I came as Isis, my words they tried to ban it

I came as Moses, they couldn't follow my Commandments

I came as Solomon, to a people that was lost

I came as Jesus, but they nailed me to a cross

I came as Harriet Tubman, I put the truth to Sojourner

Other times, I had to come as Nat Turner

They tried to burn me, lynch me and starve me

So I had to come back as Marcus Garvey, Bob Marley

They tried to harm me, I used to be Malcolm X

Now I'm on the planet as the one called KRS

Kickin' the metaphysical, spiritual, tryin' to like

Get with you, showin' you, you are invincible

The Black Panther is the black answer for real

In my spiritual form, I turn into Bobby Seale

On the wheels of steel, my spirit flies away

And enters into Kwame Ture”

In the beginning of the third verse he briefly continues the theme of possessing The Prophetic Soul but now, he does not speak from a perspective of being the people who had the soul. He speaks from the perspective of the soul. This soul is traveling and looking for a host. In the first two bars he speaks of how he was able to travel without detection from the government’s surveillance. Then, he goes on to finally choose a host that is relevant to the demographic of people it intends to reach. This host is stylish and his image is relatable, so the people will be receptive of his message through familiarity. 

“In the streets there is no EQ, no di-do-di-do-di-do

So I grab the air and speak through the code

The devil cannot see through as I unload

Into another cerebellum

Then I can tell em, because my vibes go through denim

And leather whatever, however, I'm still rockin”

After the prophetic soul latches on to the host, KRS-One, it manifests purpose with grassroot organization and motivational speaking. Being KRS-One founded the Stop the Violence Movement in 1988 and was solely responsible for mobilizing many of the most influential Hip Hoppers against Gang Violence and Culture he had plenty of knowledge to give on the topic.

“We used to pick cotton, now we pick up cotton when we shoppin'

Have you forgotten why we buildin' in a cypher

Yo hear me kid, government is building in a pyramid

The son of God is brighter than the son of man

The spirit is, check your dollar bill G, here it is

We got no time for fancy mathematics

Your mental frequency frequently pickin' up static

Makin' you a naked body, addict and it's democratic

They press auto, and you kill it with an automatic”

Too often credit for the creation and establishment of a culture or society is given to one person as opposed to being evenly distributed amongst the support structure. How many times have you been taught the legacy of all the men that signed the declaration of independence? It is likely that you’ve only been taught about Thomos Jefferson. Just like there would be no Fidel Castro without the parallel influences of Che Guevara and Camilo Ceinfuegos there would be no Hip-Hop without KRS ONE. Perhaps without his tenacity, passion, and will it would have been infiltrated and exploited before it reached its full maturity. If that would have happened America would not have its current number one export. In his prime most consumers who listened to his message and gazed upon his image said “OH NO!”  from fear of what they could not understand. Today, we look at his legacy of art and effort and cant help ,but smile and yell “AH YEAH!”.

“If hip hop has the power to corrupt young minds, it also has the ability to uplift them.” - KRS-One 

The musician is a natural master of vibration and emotion. Many musicians have been able to make us dance. Many have been able to draw on relatability because nobody is the only person like them in the world. Perhaps some have even made us cry or provided soundtracks for intimate moments. Only few musicians have taken on the task of socially and historically educating their listeners through their music. 

Even fewer have been able to combine the mastery of teaching with mastery of rhythm. Those who do this become legends like; Nate King Cole, B.B. King, Nina Simone, Bob Marley, Chaka Khan and Fela Kuti’ and their influence lives throughout generations. In 1995 Krs-One released a self-titled album that came in the sunset of his reign. His career would mirror the sepia filter of the album cover. 

This album had dominant auras of militancy and rebellion that Krs-One fans had not heard since Boogie Down Productions - Criminal Minded. Krs-One was able to both appease his day one fans and gain the younger generation of Hip Hoppers who were listening to artists such as: Nas, Redman,Das Efx, Tupac, and A Tribe Called Quest. The message and timing of this album may have been divine. Let us look at the historical events of the year(s) Krs-One was creating this album in. In 1994, the United States congress had successfully completed the first step of becoming fascist by Voting to Censure Dr. Khalid Muhammad, National Advisor of the Nation of Islam. Bill Clinton and Joe Biden led Democrats to pass the The Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act and effectively fueled the prison industrial complex. South Africa held it first election since intergrating with the apartheid government and Invisble Man author Ralph Ellison had passed. Hip Hop was the soul vehicle of expression to protest the genocide that had been going on and KRS One was one of its leaders. The youth looked toward this leader to deliver an album reflective of their mindstate and he delivered. 

Imperative of a classic work of musical art, this album is composed of multiple great songs, but in my opinion the cornerstone song of the album is undeniably “Ah Yeah”. In this song he masterfully uses three 16 bar verses to empower and mobilize his listener much in the same way Dr. Khalid Muhammad did. This track starts with the establishment of an a capella warcry. He writes in response to western power’s having done such an incredible job destroying the rebel instinct that Afrikan people possess by publicly shaming our leaders and traditions. These lyrics are him trying to raise the psyche of a fallen warrior class and put revolt back in its holy place as opposed to the negative connotation that has been applied by the white power structure.  He essentially made a chant-like hook with an underlying message of “This is your enemy, This is how to handle him, and THIS is okay”. The aim focuses on  redirecting the accumulated anger of a traduced peoples that is often mistargeted toward self so that we may be collectively progresssive. 

He bellows:

“Ah yeah, that's whatcha say when you see a devil down

Ah yeah, that's whatcha say when you take the devil's crown

Ah yeah, stay alive all things will change around

Ah yeah, what? Ah yeah!”

Then comes the establishment of an eerie bass line. This song structure is familiar to fans of his earlier work. It was what they were longing for. For a few albums he took the perspective of being in the classroom or office as opposed to in the battlefield with his men. He had returned to fight with us like Haile Selassie. Immediately he establishes a dual level of respect. One with his men and one with his deterrent.  

“So here I go kickin' science in ninety-five

I be illin', parental discretion is advised still

Don't call me nigga, this MC goes for his

Call me God, cause that's what the black man is

Roamin' through the forest as the hardest lyrical artist

Black women you are not a bitch you're a Goddess

Let it be known, you can lean on KRS-One

Like a wall cause I'm hard, I represent God”

In the first 2 bars of the preceding excerption he lets us know he intends to drop some knowledge, but it will not be filtered for political correctness or comfortability. The following 2 bars he establishes both a tone of encounterment and identity. Then he goes on to explain from which direction he came much like Saint Maurice's appearance upon the plagued people of Europe to let them know he has navigated and he is no spook. He goes on to talk to his listener and the most important of them, the women.

In 1994, fresh off a press tour on which she gained popularity from criticizing Bill Clinton, Sister Souljah published her first book that was heralded by black scholars and youth alike entitled No Disrespect. Her Influence was cemented in the minds of black youth and played a huge role in raising generational consciousness by dealing with topics like “how the black woman is viewed by black men” and “the black woman’s role in repairing the black family structure”. She had solely been awarded leadership duties by a disregarded demographic in a scapegoated culture and was handling it with the grace of Misty Copeland.  Her and the women she raised to consciousness needed the camaraderie of Krs One. He goes on to sell to himself:

 “Wack MC's have one style: gun buck

But when you say, "Let's buck for revolution"

They shut the fuck up, can't get with it

Down to start a riot in a minute

You'll hear so many Bowe-Bowe-Bowe, you think I'm Riddick

While other MC's are talkin' bout up with hope down with dope

I'll have a devil in my infrared scope,”

In the first five bars he addresses the enemies of the oppressed people within the oppressed people. These “Wack MC’s” are the Uncle Toms’ and Judas of the rebellious, afro-centric movement that is Hip-Hop. He says they lack discipline and do not have the self awareness to rescue themselves. In comparison with himself who uses that energy toward an ultimate goal, Independence through revolution. In the succeeding excerption KRS briefly displays the cognitive processing and coping mechanism of a warrior:

“WOY

That's for calling my father a boy and, klak, klak, klak

That's for putting scars on my mother's back, BO

That's for calling my sister a ho, and for you

Buck, buck, buck  cause I don't give a motherfuck

Remember the whip, remember the chant

Remember the rope and

You black people still thinkin' about voting?

Every President we ever had lied!

You know, I'm kinda glad Nixon died.”

Throughout the preceding excerption KRS skillfully uses onomatopoeias to create a setting for his listener. There is a battle going on. Shells casings are falling to the ground and bullets are flying from high caliber weapons. He is in the thick of it and then an enemy approaches him. He musters the courage to engage with his assailant by remembering the suffrage the morals of his enemies’ elected nation-state has caused his ancestors. Then he rejoices in the death of one of their leaders, Richard Nixon.

In the second verse Krs-One addresses an age-old topic of discussion for spiritual people that was brought forth to the Afrikans of today by Noble Drew Ali, “The Prophetic Soul”. This belief dates back to ancient Buddhism in the caves of Asia taught to us by Dr. Ivan Van Sertima in his book “African Presence in Early Asia”. This belief entails that all the prophets of the world including but not limted to; Adam, Jesus, Buddha, Muhammad, and himself were the same soul being reborn until its mission is completed.” Krs-One puts himself and a couple others in this divine line of being. 

“This is not the first time I came to the planet

 concern every time I come, only a few could understand it

I came as Isis, my words they tried to ban it

I came as Moses, they couldn't follow my Commandments

I came as Solomon, to a people that was lost

I came as Jesus, but they nailed me to a cross

I came as Harriet Tubman, I put the truth to Sojourner

Other times, I had to come as Nat Turner

They tried to burn me, lynch me and starve me

So I had to come back as Marcus Garvey, Bob Marley

They tried to harm me, I used to be Malcolm X

Now I'm on the planet as the one called KRS

Kickin' the metaphysical, spiritual, tryin' to like

Get with you, showin' you, you are invincible

The Black Panther is the black answer for real

In my spiritual form, I turn into Bobby Seale

On the wheels of steel, my spirit flies away

And enters into Kwame Ture”

In the beginning of the third verse he briefly continues the theme of possessing The Prophetic Soul but now, he does not speak from a perspective of being the people who had the soul. He speaks from the perspective of the soul. This soul is traveling and looking for a host. In the first two bars he speaks of how he was able to travel without detection from the government’s surveillance. Then, he goes on to finally choose a host that is relevant to the demographic of people it intends to reach. This host is stylish and his image is relatable, so the people will be receptive of his message through familiarity. 

“In the streets there is no EQ, no di-do-di-do-di-do

So I grab the air and speak through the code

The devil cannot see through as I unload

Into another cerebellum

Then I can tell em, because my vibes go through denim

And leather whatever, however, I'm still rockin”

After the prophetic soul latches on to the host, KRS-One, it manifests purpose with grassroot organization and motivational speaking. Being KRS-One founded the Stop the Violence Movement in 1988 and was solely responsible for mobilizing many of the most influential Hip Hoppers against Gang Violence and Culture he had plenty of knowledge to give on the topic.

“We used to pick cotton, now we pick up cotton when we shoppin'

Have you forgotten why we buildin' in a cypher

Yo hear me kid, government is building in a pyramid

The son of God is brighter than the son of man

The spirit is, check your dollar bill G, here it is

We got no time for fancy mathematics

Your mental frequency frequently pickin' up static

Makin' you a naked body, addict and it's democratic

They press auto, and you kill it with an automatic”

Too often credit for the creation and establishment of a culture or society is given to one person as opposed to being evenly distributed amongst the support structure. How many times have you been taught the legacy of all the men that signed the declaration of independence? It is likely that you’ve only been taught about Thomos Jefferson. Just like there would be no Fidel Castro without the parallel influences of Che Guevara and Camilo Ceinfuegos there would be no Hip-Hop without KRS ONE. Perhaps without his tenacity, passion, and will it would have been infiltrated and exploited before it reached its full maturity. If that would have happened America would not have its current number one export. In his prime most consumers who listened to his message and gazed upon his image said “OH NO!”  from fear of what they could not understand. Today, we look at his legacy of art and effort and cant help ,but smile and yell “AH YEAH!”.

[mindofharry]

i’m so lucky to have parents that educate me and my siblings on black history month and why it’s so important.

Schools need to do BETTER. educate us, tell us about black history. Martin luther king jr seems to be the only one i’m taught about? but there’s so much more.

Here are a few people in history that deserve to be talked about more: (from the oprah magazine, written by michelle darrisaw)

Shirley Chisholm

when Chisholm was attempting to shatter the glass ceiling, the same couldn't be said. During the racially contentious period in the late '60s, she became the first Black woman elected to Congress. She represented New York's 12th District from 1969 to 1983, and in 1972, she became the first woman to run for the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination. Her campaign slogan: "Unbought and Unbossed" rings even louder today.

Bayard Rustin

Dr. King is usually credited for the March on Washington in August 1963. But it was Rustin who organized and strategized in the shadows. As a gay man who had controversial ties to communism, he was considered too much of a liability to be on the front lines of the movement. Nonetheless, he was considered to be one of the most brilliant minds, and served his community tirelessly while pushing for more jobs and better wages.

Claudette Colvin

Before Parks refused to give up her seat on a bus in Montgomery, Alabama in 1955, there was a brave 15-year-old who chose not to sit at the back of the bus. That young girl was Colvin. Touting her constitutional rights to remain seated near the middle of the vehicle, Colvin challenged the driver and was subsequently arrested. She was the first woman to be detained for her resistance. However, her story isn't nearly as well-known as Parks'.

Annie Lee Cooper

The Selma, Alabama, native played a crucial part in the 1965 Selma Voting Rights Movement. But it wasn't until Oprah played her in the 2014 Oscar-nominated film, Selma, that people really took notice of Cooper's activism. She is lauded for punching Alabama Sheriff Jim Clark in the face, but she really deserves to be celebrated for fighting to restore and protect voting rights.

Dorothy Height

Hailed the “godmother of the women’s movement,” Height used her background in education and social work to advance women’s rights. She was a leader in the Young Women's Christian Association (YWCA) and the president of the National Council of Negro Women (NCNW) for more than 40 years. She was also among the few women present at the 1963 March on Washington, where Dr. King delivered his famous “I Have a Dream” speech.

Jesse Owens

Owens was a track-and-field athlete who set a world record in the long jump at the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin—and went unrivaled for 25 years. He won four gold medals at the Olympics that year in the 100- and 200-meter dashes, along with the 100-meter relay and other events off the track. In 1976, Owens received the Presidential Medal of Freedom and was posthumously awarded the Congressional Gold Medal in 1990.

Robert Sengstacke Abbott

Without Abbott's creative vision, many of the Black publications of today—such as Ebony, Essence, Black Enterprise, and Upscale—wouldn't exist. In 1905, Abbott founded the Chicago Defender weekly newspaper. The paper originally started out as a four-page pamphlet, increasing its circulation with every edition. Abbott and his newspaper played an integral part in encouraging African Americans to migrate from the South for better economic opportunities.

Alice Coachman

Growing up in Albany, Georgia, the soon-to-be track star got an early start running on dirt roads and jumping over makeshift hurdles. She became the first African American woman from any country to win an Olympic Gold Medal at the 1948 Summer Olympics in London. She set the record for the high jump at the Games, leaping to 5 feet and 6 1/8 inches. Throughout her athletic career, she won 34 national titles—10 of which were in the high jump. She was officially inducted into the National Track-and-Field Hall of Fame in 1975 and the U.S. Olympic Hall of Fame in 2004.

— these people are just as important.