Black Panther demands critical examination because utopian visions are unavoidably political; they are among the tools with which oppressed people attempt to draft a just future.
Another ouch by Russell Rickford
Black Panther has become a cultural phenomenon unparalleled by any other in recent memory. Rapturous audiences have all but deified the blockbuster film, a remake of a comic book tale about a superhero from the mythical African nation of Wakanda.
Viewing the movie has proven especially cathartic for those sweltering under America’s racial politics. With white nationalists on the march and government agencies seemingly conspiring to exacerbate the suffering of people of color, Black Panther’s spectacle of ebony elegance offers more than entertainment; it is a fountain of sweet tea in a searing desert.
Given the dearth of affirming black images in popular media, the impulse to lionize the film is understandable. But Black Panther is more than a celebration of black dignity and sophistication. It is also a discourse on freedom, a dreamscape that draws on black traditions of imagining and seeking to build ideal societies beyond the reach of white supremacy.
Black Panther demands critical examination because utopian visions are unavoidably political; they are among the tools with which oppressed people attempt to draft a just future. Unfortunately, anyone committed to an expansive concept of Pan-African liberation — one designed to free African and African-descended people throughout the world — must regard Black Panther as a counterrevolutionary picture.
Author Keisha N. Blain knows Donald Trump and Dylann Roof didn't come out of nowhere.
By Kim Bellware
Shock has emerged as the signature emotional response to the organized confusion of the Trump era. The president is at war with the same agents of federal law enforcement investigating his old campaign. Just months after an alt-right rally in Charlottesville ended in death, emboldened white supremacists are littering college campuses with propaganda. And an immigration system that was already broken has been thrown into even more chaos by a White House bent on vindictive, nativist policies.
All that dysfunction—much of it inspired by racially infused hate—is often greeted with incredulity, as if it were extremely unusual or even unprecedented. Keisha Blain knows better.
Amid a renaissance of athlete activism, the NFC champions rate among the league leaders of the new social awareness
The questions were good.
That’s what top Philadelphia civil rights attorney David Rudovsky thought as he listened to Philadelphia Eagles players Malcolm Jenkins, Chris Long, Torrey Smith and Rodney McLeod interrogate city leaders. This was late last September and Rudovsky had been invited to a meeting with Philadelphia’s police commissioner, local activists and NFL commissioner Roger Goodell to discuss the racial inequality issues raised when former NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick refused to stand for the national anthem in 2016.
Already that day the players had met with the city’s police commissioner and spent more than an hour watching bail hearings, some of what they saw troubled them and they wanted answers.
Why was bail set at $50,000 for a black man with no prior record while others were allowed to walk free?
When do officers decide to use stop and frisk?
Does the public defender’s office get enough resources?
“They were asking pretty substantive questions,” Rudovsky told the Guardian this week. “I was very impressed with the way (the players) were putting in the effort. The level of questioning was quite good.”
It was not something Rodovsky, who also teaches law at the University of Pennsylvania, had come to expect from professional athletes. He had heard some of the players on this Eagles team were taking an interest in social causes, but to sit with them that day, to feel their passion and see the depth of their knowledge was something else.
“They are serious,” he thought.
A word spreading through American sports is “woke”, as in athletes are finally awakening to the world around them. For years, woke has been used in the African American community to describe a new social awareness, but now professional athletes – once fearful of damaging their earning potential by talking about anything contentious – are sounding woke. LeBron James has become woke. The Seattle Seahawks have been woke. And somewhere in the last two years the Eagles became woke, too.
Perhaps there is a correlation between speaking out and winning. James is a three-time NBA champion. The outspoken Seahawks went to two consecutive Super Bowls, winning one. Now the Eagles have gone from back-to-back losing seasons to the Super Bowl. It used to be that athletes were expected to “stick to sports” biting their tongues on controversial issues lest their cries be seen as a distraction from winning. But the more Eagles players like Jenkins, Long, Smith and McLeod spoke up the better the team played.
The Eagles locker room is a fascinating place, one where players seem able to express themselves – something often lost in the NFL’s authoritarian culture. Just as Jenkins, Long, Smith and McLeod felt free to talk about racial equality, another player, receiver Marcus Johnson, was baptized in the team hotel’s swimming pool before a game. Few football coaches, no matter how faithful, would approve of any team activity that can take away from a focus on the game. And yet the Eagles Doug Pederson has ... and it has worked.
“The hope is that we never reduce someone to just a doer,” Michael Gervais, a renowned performance psychologist who has worked with the Seahawks told the Guardian in 2016. “We want them to feel as if they are full humans and they have a meaningful purpose in their life. We want to amplify that in the most human way possible. It’s not easy because that is what the media does not want to hear or the public might not want to hear.”
Seahawks coach Pete Carroll asked Gervais to advise his players, believing that if they developed their values and personalities they would be better on the field. There is no great evidence the Eagles are pushing their players in the same direction, but when several of them started speaking about controversial issues, the team did not resist as many would.
Monday, Long said he would not attend the traditional championship reception with president Donald Trump at the White House should Philadelphia win the Super Bowl on Sunday. He skipped last year’s as well when he was a member of the Eagles’ Super Bowl opponent, the New England Patriots. But Long’s biggest statement this year might have come in August when he became one of the first white players to support the anthem protests by placing a hand on Jenkins’s shoulder as Jenkins held a raised fist during the anthem.
“I’m here for you,” Long said he told Jenkins.
Football coaches are constantly using words like “family” and “unity” with their players. Pulling together teams of more than 50 men, including practice squads, with all those players coming from diverse backgrounds is a challenge. Usually testy subjects like race are avoided in hopes of creating a détente in the locker room. Somehow talking about them has worked in Philadelphia.
Some of the credit for the Eagles openness goes to former linebacker Connor Barwin, who immersed himself in local causes with his Make The World Better Foundation. Though Barwin is now with the Los Angeles Rams, his willingness to support causes like marriage equality while riding a bicycle around town, helped redefine the image of a football player.
Jenkins, a safety who is probably the Eagles defensive leader, continues to redraw those boundaries. He was one of the most vocal supporters of Kaepernick during the 2016 season and became a key member of the Players Coalition, a group of NFL stars who met with league executives to work on problems in the African American community. It was because of Jenkins, more than anyone else, that Rudovsky found himself in that room with the Eagles players, city leaders and Goodell last fall.
“These (players) are very sincere,” Rudovsky said. “They are very concerned about social justice issues in their community.”
Rudovsky never believed athletes had much interest in addressing social inequities, a perspective formed in the early 1990s when basketball star and Nike endorser Michael Jordan reportedly refused to endorse the opponent of openly racist Senator Jesse Helms in Jordan’s native North Carolina by saying: “Republicans buy sneakers, too.” Whether Jordan actually uttered these words is unclear but the way he protected his image, and his millions, became a blueprint for athletes to follow. Occasionally Rudovsky would hear of a Philadelphia athlete who would speak about an uncomfortable subject, yet such moments were rare.
But sports are changing. So too is Philadelphia. The current mayor James Kenney is a progressive who has pushed for policing reforms. The new district attorney was elected despite having sued the police department 75 times. Philadelphia also is a sanctuary city where people won’t be asked their immigration status and federal requests to detain undocumented immigrants won’t be met. It seems the perfect time and place for a football team to be woke.
Over the phone from his office, Rudovsky took a deep breath. The Eagles’ Super Bowl run has brought so much joy to his city. It’s hard to not be excited. Just as he, a civil rights attorney, is thrilled to see athletes care about causes for which he has dedicated his adult life. But in his glee there is a pause, because there is always a pause when athletes step from their assigned lanes.
“Now the question is: is this going to be sustained?” he said. “I think these guys will keep pushing for it and try to keep this going for more than six months.”
NFL locker rooms are transient places. Rosters shift dramatically from year to year. There are no guarantees the next group of Eagles will be as woke as this one. What Philadelphia has in its football team might be gone by next summer. The Super Bowl run could become a memory of the season a group of football players said they stood for something more than simply collecting checks and selling shoes.
Trump's plans for the federal workforce sound reasonable, but they would actually undo a century of reforms.
Over the past 30 years, conservative valorization of “market solutions” has been accompanied by deeply racialized notions of government inefficiency that aims to undermine these civil rights achievements by invoking the image of a wasteful, corrupt public workforce — one viewed by many Americans as dominated by African Americans. Commentator Pat Buchanan, for example, claimed that federal offices under the Obama administration operated according to a “racial spoils system.” For Buchanan and many others, the drive for a leaner government merges with a racist suspicion of black workers — what they see as the most rotten part of the bureaucracy.
Moreover, the president’s attack on the stability of government jobs comes at a rough time for public servants, who have been battered by austerity measures that have made jobs scarcer.
These measures have also deepened the racial disparity in the public workforce, which, along with the growing racial wealth gap that deprives nonwhite Americans of stability and mobility, transforms Trump’s assault on the Pendleton Act from merely historically ignorant and potentially corrupt into something more. It becomes a nod to the same racist worldview that produces the profound suspicion of people of color that has defined much of Trump’s political life.
Continuous conflation of blackness and wastefulness in American governance, a conflation pushed by writers and politicians like Buchanan and Trump, marks African Americans as incapable of earning “the public’s trust” through good governance, a stain that persists into today’s politics, from assumptions of black voting malfeasance to questions about President Barack Obama’s birth certificate.
And that returns us to Trump’s rise to the presidency. Calls for government accountability have long merged racism and anti-government rhetoric but have traditionally stopped short of resurrecting the spoils system. Then again, politicians have traditionally veiled their positions in generous and moderately realistic visions of humanity to maintain moral ground and the capacity to govern. In his latest call for the gutting of civil service reforms, Trump seems hellbent on surrendering both.
By blocking lanes, riding his bike slowly, and charging $5 to pass, the protester showed what could happen if companies impose fees for faster Internet access
By Matt Bevilacqua
Disrupting traffic has long been a way for protesters to call attention to a cause. But when the cause itself is speed—in this case, Internet speed—the move takes on an extra level of defiance.
That’s what one cyclist made clear when he used his bike to protest the Federal Communications Commission this week.
The FCC voted in December to end Obama-era rules for Internet service providers. By doing away with so-called net neutrality, critics say, the agency opened the door to broadband companies blocking access to certain websites or slowing down Internet speeds unless users pay a fee—a process known as “throttling.”
Rob Bliss, a video director for the website Seriously.TV, was upset with the FCC’s decision. So he grabbed a bike and headed to Washington, D.C., to do some throttling of his own.
Over the course of three days, Bliss set up cones in the street outside the FCC headquarters, blocking two travel lanes. He then mounted a GoPro to his helmet and proceeded to ride his bike—slowly—in the one remaining lane. Cars got backed up waiting for an opportunity to pass. But if they paid Bliss a $5 fee, they could pass right away.
Drivers quickly got impatient, as did police. But that was the point: The demonstration mocked what might happen if companies like Comcast and Verizon are allowed to charge for faster Internet access. Users who can afford it will be able to bypass snail-like speeds. Everyone else will have to wait.
Bliss called his protest “restoring automotive freedom,” a dig at FCC Chairman Ajit Pai’s claim that repealing net neutrality will “restore Internet freedom.” On his back, Bliss wore a cheeky sign reading, “Ask me about our 12th Street $5 a Month Priority Access Plan!” He tells Bicycling that no drivers took him up on the deal, though some passersby did offer words of support once they realized what he was doing.
Portraits of Real Life Women by Jamea Richmond Edwards
Jamea Richmond-Edward is a mixed media American artist who primarily depicts women from her life. “My artwork examines the complexities of the subjects within the paintings.
In April 2016, a 13-year-old boy was shot by officers of the Baltimore Police Department. The boy ran when faced with the police, so they gave chase. During the chase, the police spotted the boy holding a gun, and when he turned, they shot the teenager. The youngster wasn’t critically injured, and it seemed like an open-and-shut case of a justifiable use of force.
In April 2016, a 13-year-old boy was shot by officers of the Baltimore Police Department. The boy ran when faced with the police, so they gave chase. During the chase, the police spotted the boy holding a gun, and when he turned, they shot the teenager. The youngster wasn’t critically injured, and it seemed like an open-and-shut case of a justifiable use of force.
Now people are wondering.
The Baltimore Police Department is currently in court over one of the biggest scandals in the history of American law enforcement. The corruption case is replete with intrigue as police reveal secrets that sound like something out of an urban-fiction novel or a lost season of The Wire. It has revealed how one of America’s largest cities just happened to be filled with crooked cops, but no one seems to be talking about it outside of Baltimore.
...
...[T]he supervisor of the unit instructed officers to carry a toy gun just in case they found themselves “in a jam” and needed to plant one. When one of the officers, Marcus Tayor, was arrested, officials couldn’t figure out why he had a toy gun in his glove compartment.
These revelations aren’t speculation. Six of the eight indicted officers have agreed to cooperate with federal law enforcement agents and are testifying in open court. An officer who was scheduled to offer evidence against the crooked cops won’t get to do so after he was mysteriously shot in the head with his own weapon the day before he was set to testify.
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