Privileged
Commentary by Chitown Kev
Almost forgot I had to write here today.
Almost!
The African American journalism series will return immediately following the X-mas/New Year’s break.
(And one wishes that POLITICO would go and stay gone…but I digress.)
I’ve been soooooooo distracted by my favorite sports team beating their arch-rivals, winning their conference championship, making the College Football Playoff, having a finalist for the Heisman Trophy (although that finalist won’t win the trophy), an assistant coach winning the Broyles Award for assistant coach of the year…
It’s all been a wonderful and quite necessary distraction.
At a personal level, I’ve gone through my own health problems and I’ve gone back into therapy There’s the deaths of two of my cousins (one of them died from COVID-19) along with some not-so-unusual family drama. It hasn’t all been bad news by any means; I became a front pager here at Daily Kos (although my performance can and must be better than the effort that I’ve put forth to this point!).
Political news has been even more maddening, at times, with one political party having gone even more bats*it crazy than they already are and a political mainstream media trying to sell the bats*it craziness as something like a return to “normalcy.”
(As if Madam Vice President’s purchase of a pot or her “Bluetooth-phobia” was earth-shattering news threatening the very foundations of the American republic.)
Still…it’s a privilege to be living in these times.
It’s a privilege to be writing here in Black Kos and a privilege to be here with you.
I’m out…for now!
CK 3:31pm
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NEWS ROUND UP BY DOPPER0189, BLACK KOS MANAGING EDITOR
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In Greenville, Miss., pop. 27,000, a modern, brightly lit juice bar stands out in the small downtown lined with mostly mom and pop businesses and a few taverns near the town’s riverbank casino.
The chorus of friendly, neighborly hellos is a customer favorite, but what’s really turning heads is the owner of Kay’s Kute Fruit, 30 year-old Kenesha Lewis.
“I’m really excited for the young people to walk in, and they say, who’s the owner, and they’re like, what? I had somebody do that to me,” Lewis says laughing.
Growing up here, she can’t recall any prominent Black-owned businesses like hers (today the town is about 81% Black). She and her husband Jason Lewis opened up this brick and mortar last Spring after a few years of making edible fruit arrangements and smoothies and selling them out of their home on the side of their regular jobs.
“Being a young woman here in the Delta, it’s not a lot of health options,” Kenesha says. “It’s not a lot of places you can go and get a healthy wrap and then you can go in the same place and have nice service.”
Indeed, the Delta is known the world over for its delicious comfort food, but fresh produce and even regular grocery stores are few and far between. At Kay’s the blenders appear to always be running, churning up pineapple or mango smoothies with the popular add-ons of chia seeds or turmeric.
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Chicago was once known for its power marriage of Black business and politics. Today, many Black-owned companies have shuttered, dramatically changing the city’s landscape. Politico: The Demise of America’s Onetime Capital of Black Wealth
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Every now and again, Alvin Boutte Jr.’s travels take him past 79th Street and Cottage Grove Avenue on Chicago’s South Side. And the memories come flooding back.
The retail corner in the city’s Chatham community, with its handsome 1920s brick-and-terracotta buildings, boasted a host of Black-owned businesses from the 1970s through the 1990s. It had stores, a pharmacy, dentists, a nightclub, a funeral home and the jewel of them all: Independence Bank of Chicago, with more than $100 million in assets, right there in a big new modern building at 7936 S. Cottage Grove Ave.
Boutte remembers that one particularly well. His father was Alvin Boutte, Sr., Independence Bank’s chair and CEO.
“Colgate Palmolive [executives] used to fly in and go sit up there in my dad’s corner office,” the younger Boutte, 50, says now. “It was always cool to see and hear him tell me about all the people that would come to Independence — to 79th street — from New York, from California or wherever their corporate headquarters were.”
But after more than 30 years in the game, Independence ended its run in 1996 when it merged with the Chicago community development bank, ShoreBank, which failed in 2010. The swanky bank building Boutte’s father built in the early 1980s — the place that employed and made loans to Black people who were ignored by white-owned banks and was an emblem of Black financial and political capital — is still there, but is now the Providence Bank and Trust.
Since the 1920s, Chicago — with one of the nation’s largest concentrations of Black residents — has been a capital city for Black millionaires and businesses. Their footprint wasn’t just local, but national: Chicago was headquarters to global brands such as Ebony and Jet magazines, and Afro Sheen hair care products.
No longer. Johnson Products, the parent company for Afro Sheen, shuttered its South Side factory. Oprah Winfrey moved Harpo Studios from the West Side to West Hollywood. Gladys’ Luncheonette, which served up smothered chicken and peach cobbler to the likes of Martin Luther King Jr., comedian Redd Foxx and a host of politicians and other luminaries, is now gone. Significant regional businesses like Independence Bank disappeared.
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A new study finds that property managers in Chicago, Los Angeles, Louisville, Houston, and Providence are least likely to answer prospective Black and Hispanic tenants. VOX: Black and Hispanic renters experience discrimination in almost every major American city
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Racial discrimination in rental markets is alive and well.
In a new working paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research, researchers found rampant racial discrimination in American rental markets — specifically, that property managers are less likely to respond to prospective Black and Hispanic tenants when they inquire about open listings.
Using a software bot, the economists sent inquiries from fake renters to 8,476 property managers in the 50 largest US metropolitan housing markets. The bot assigned names to fictitious renters that would indicate whether the race of the inquirer was white, Black, or Hispanic.
The bot found that names perceived to be white got a response 5.6 percentage points more than Black-sounding names, and 2.8 percentage points more than Hispanic-sounding names.
Though the economists were using fabricated identities to test for discrimination, they also followed up to see what happened in the properties in real life. In what could become a major contribution to the field, the researchers find that a non-response to an inquiry from a Black or Hispanic renter “lowers the probability that a renter of color will ultimately inhabit a given property by 17.3 percent.” This is “the first available evidence on the relationship between disparate treatment and subsequent rental housing outcomes.”
The researchers, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign’s Peter Christensen, UCLA’s Ignacio Sarmiento-Barbieri, and Duke University’s Christopher Timmins, found that discrimination isn’t the same everywhere. The researchers find that for Black would-be renters, the most discriminatory region is the Midwest and the most discriminatory individual cities are Chicago, Los Angeles, and Louisville. For Hispanic would-be renters, the most discriminatory region is the Northeast and the most discriminatory individual cities are Louisville, Houston, and Providence.
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Despite the many obstacles that Black adults face, understanding how your body changes over time can help you to maintain a healthy weight as you get older. The Grio: Obesity among Black Americans is complex but far too common — advocates want to do something about it
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Obesity has reached crisis levels, and the reasons for its alarming rise are as complex as the disease itself.
The causes range from genes and diet to lack of education and access to healthy foods, but targeted junk food marketing and systemic inequalities that widen the racial-wealth gap — all of which disproportionately impact low-income communities, many of which are made up of Black people — means that Black communities are at a disadvantage from the outset.
To make matters worse, the obesity epidemic goes hand in hand with another major killer, type 2 diabetes, with each intensifying the other. The propagation of both diseases is reinforced by a system that often leaves people overworked, underpaid, and simply too tired to make the healthy choices they need to live their best life. When you add in COVID-19, and its propensity to impact those who struggle with their weight more severely than those who do not, we have a full blown trifecta of disease that has reached epic proportions.
There is no doubt that obesity poses one of the greatest threats to society’s health. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), four in 10 Americans, totaling about 100 million, are living with obesity; and among African-American adults, nearly 48% are clinically living with obesity compared to 32.6% of Whites. Recent estimates from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Surveys have found that over one third of adults over age 60 are living with obesity with older Black women coming in at the highest rates.
Statistics such as these are even more alarming given the many health risks associated with this deadly condition. Higher rates of diabetes and heart disease, which are highest in Black communities, are intimately tied to obesity; but simply carrying 20 to 30 pounds of extra weight has been linked to more than 200 serious health conditions including cancer, high blood pressure, and most recently, COVID-19.
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‘Harlem’ character Tye shows us that Black queerness comes in all shapes and on screen presentations. The Root: ‘Harlem’ Star Jerrie Johnson Redesigns What It Looks Like to Be Black and Queer on Camera
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In a world where Black lesbian characters are both limited and limiting, Jerrie Johnson and her portrayal of tech–star Tye in Amazon Prime’s ‘Harlem’, is a welcome reset in how we categorize queerness through our television screens.
The ten episode series follows four Black women in the Black Mecca known as Harlem as they wade the waters of whitewashed professional settings, codependent friendships, and seemingly never ending bouts of singlehood. Tye, a tailored suit wearing tech savvy entrepreneur, strives to make dating a bit more tolerable, at least for New York’s queer communities. “Q”, the fictional dating app developed by the character aims to connect the market’s singles, which in the real world, is much more complex than “boy meets girl”, or in this case, “butch meets femme.”
In the pilot episode, we see Tye traverse territory she had yet to explore, sex with another masculine of center woman. In the scene prior where initial interest was sparked, both characters confess to never having dealt with another “masc woman”. And although Tye was left less than satisfied (for other reasons), the casual encounter shows how expansive love between Black women can be, regardless of outer representation.
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Incumbent president Adama Barrow leading with twice votes of nearest rival in test of democratic stability after decades of Yahya Jammeh’s rule. The Guardian: Gambian opposition parties reject preliminary election results
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Gambian opposition candidates have rejected the preliminary results of Saturday’s historic vote in the West African nation that suggest the incumbent president, Adama Barrow, had easily won re-election.
According to official results announced by the electoral commission, Barrow was leading with a significant margin of more than 200,000 votes. In 2016 Barrow unseated the former president Yahya Jammeh, who is accused of human rights abuses and corruption.
Saturday’s vote is being seen as a key test of stability as it was the first since Jammeh was forced into exile after refusing to concede defeat, and was the first vote in 27 years without him on the ballot.
Later on Sunday the commission reported the final results: Barrow’s main opponent, the United Democratic party leader, Ousainou Darboe, won 238,253 votes, compared with the incumbent’s 457,519. The total number of votes cast came in at 859,567 – fewer than the more than 962,000 who had registered to vote.
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WELCOME TO THE TUESDAY PORCH.
IF YOU ARE NEW TO THE BLACK KOS COMMUNITY, GRAB A SEAT, SOME CYBER EATS, RELAX, AND INTRODUCE YOURSELF.
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