On Tuesday night, I was in an auditorium with 100 black men in the city of Baltimore, when the subject pivoted to Brett Kavanaugh. I expected to hear frustration that the sexual-assault allegations against him had failed to derail his Supreme Court appointment. Instead, I encountered sympathy. One man stood up and asked, passionately, “What happened to due process?” He was met with a smattering of applause, and an array of head nods.
If you think Kavanaugh receiving some measure of support from black men in inner-city Baltimore is as strange as Taylor Swift suddenly feeling the need to become a modern-day Fannie Lou Hamer, then brace yourself: The caping for Kavanaugh does make a twisted kind of sense. Countless times, black men have had to witness the careers and reputations of other black men ruthlessly destroyed because of unproved rape and sexual-assault accusations. And as that Baltimore audience member also argued, if the claims were made by a white woman, expect the damage to be triple.
Saturday, August 12th, will go down as a dark day for America. A coalition of white nationalists attempted to rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. Young and old donned swastikas. White militia in full camouflage and many openly carrying weapons set out to “protect” the demonstrators. Angry men and women screamed vile and racist slogans. Violence broke out with counter-protesters. Then James Alex Fields, Jr., a 20-year-old from Ohio, decided to plow his car into a peaceful crowd protesting the racist spectacle. Heather Heyer of Charlottesville was killed and at least 19 people were injured. Cornel West, who joined the counter protests with a group of clergy, witnessed it all and told me, “I have never seen this kind of hatred.”
If these were normal times, even if you believed a press conference to be typical American racial theater, you would expect the President of the United States to condemn unequivocally the hatred and bigotry of the white nationalists gathered in Charlottesville. But these aren’t normal times.
Instead, Donald Trump offered a mealy-mouthed response. “We condemn in the strongest possible terms this egregious display of hatred, bigotry and violence on many sides, on many sides.”
A black Mississippi citizen is taking his case against the state’s Confederate-themed flag to the U.S. Supreme Court.
In papers filed Wednesday, attorneys for Carlos Moore said lower courts were wrong to reject his argument that the flag is a symbol of white supremacy that harms him and his young daughter by violating the Constitution’s guarantee of equal protection to all citizens.
His attorneys wrote that under the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals’ ruling against Moore, “a city could adopt ‘White Supremacy Forever’ as its official motto; or a county could incorporate an image of white hooded figures and a noose hanging from a tree into its county seal; or a state could incorporate a Nazi swastika, as an endorsement of Aryan/white supremacy, in its state flag.”
Mississippi’s is the last state flag to feature the Confederate battle emblem. Critics say the symbol is racist. Supporters say it represents history.
Mississippi has used the flag since 1894, displaying its red field and tilted blue cross dotted with 13 white stars in the upper left corner. Voters kept it in a 2001 election.
History Channel‘s newest documentary series, Barbarians Rising, tackles the fall of Rome over the course of 700 years of invasions. However, the most recent episode that aired Monday depicts Hannibal of Carthage as a Black man, and many white history buffs are crying foul over the “historical inaccuracy.”
In the series, Hannibal is portrayed by Black British actor Nicholas Pinnock. The famous Carthaginian was a thorn in the empire’s side. He became a general at the age of 26 and managed to unite barbarian tribes to stop Rome’s imperial rise. The military genius was famous for climbing the Alps with war elephants whose sole purpose was to stomp the Roman army.
In case you haven’t heard the news already, the long-awaited Birth of A Nation film has officially flopped,according to every mainstream media outlet.
“Black feminists,” black gossip bloggers, journalists and white supremacists who’d rather the original Birth of A Nation (1915), have bandwagoned to sabotage possibly one of the most meaningful and pioneering projects of our generation and unfortunately, we fed into it.
After watching the film’s assassination campaign online for many months, I couldn’t help but recall once upon a time when highly revered veteran Black feminist bell hooks, who has also found herself a target of social media neo-feminism, once confidently warned that…
The names of Confederate generals still adorn street signs in Charleston’s public housing projects, and a heroic waterfront statue dedicated to the Confederate Defenders of Charleston still faces Fort Sumter, where the first shots of the Civil War were fired.
Just down from the Emanuel AME church — where nine black parishioners studying their Bibles were gunned down one year ago — a statue of Vice President John C. Calhoun, a staunch defender of slavery, towers above a park.
After the June 17, 2015, massacre, South Carolina lawmakers did what many people thought was impossible to achieve and removed the Confederate flag from the Statehouse grounds in Columbia. Across the country, as far away as Alaska, officials moved to strip streets, college dormitories and even lakes of the names of Confederates, secessionists and public figures who championed segregation.
