We go missing too. What’s also missing is mainstream media coverage of it.
Commentary by Black Kos Editor Denise Oliver-Velez
Black women and Native American women disappear, are murdered, and are never the topic of massive amounts of national media coverage. The late PBS journalist and anchor Gwen Ifill, coined the phrase “missing white woman syndrome” to address this.
Ifill famously coined the term “missing white woman syndrome” to describe the phenomenon of the media’s extensive (and obsessive) coverage of white, upper-middle-class women and girls who have gone missing. Social scientists have noted that white women’s disappearances are given disproportionate attention and media coverage, compared to when lower-SES women disappear, or when women, men or children of color go missing. Examples include the media’s coverage of Polly Klass, JonBenét Ramsey, Chandra Levy, Elizabeth Smart, Laci Peterson, Natalee Holloway, and Caylee Anthony, among others.
This was the topic of discussion between Charles Blow and criminal defense attorney and legal analyst Yodit Tewolde on his show on the Black News Channel (BNC) in response to the amount of coverage currently allocated to the case of missing Gabrielle Petito.
It is a scary situation when people are missing, and it is torture for the family. However, not all missing people are treated the same. No one gets more coverage than missing white women, especially if they are well off, particularly if they are considered attractive. “Making the Case” host Yodit Tewolde joins Charles Blow on “Prime” to discuss the fundamental differences between how Black missing person cases and white missing person cases are handled.
Joy Reid covered the issue on the Reid Out. Her guests were Derrica Wilson, co-founder and CEO of the Black and Missing Foundation, and Lynnette Grey Bull, founder of Not Our Native Daughters.
The transcript
Reid is being called out by a host of right-wingers for having brought the subject up, as is CNN’s Don Lemon.
I admit I was glad to see some not-Black folks like Don Winslow opining.
Soledad O’Brien also weighed in:
This was a response from an administrator of the Transdoe Task Force
This is not the first time we have discussed this issue here at Black Kos — for example Black Kos Editor JoanMar wrote Finding Our Missing, back in 2014 — and sadly it will not be the last.
Black lives don’t matter as much as white lives. An unpleasant truth and one we still have to live with.
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NEWS ROUND UP BY DOPPER0189, BLACK KOS MANAGING EDITOR
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Many states have legalized pot but few embraced a serious commitment to tackling the racial disparities that disproportionately hurt Black people during the war on drugs. Politico: Lawyers, race and money: Illinois' messy weed experiment
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Illinois stood to become a model for diversifying the marijuana industry in other states when it legalized the drug last year. So far, its success is half-baked.
As the first state Legislature to legalize recreational cannabis sales after others approved it by ballot measure, Illinois crafted what it hopes will be a national template for how to atone for the war on drugs while also generating new revenue.
It’s on pace to pull in $1.3 billion in weed sales this year, roughly double what it got in 2020, and thousands of marijuana-related criminal convictions have been wiped clean. But Illinois’ effort to diversify the lucrative industry away from established white-owned businesses has stumbled several times over the past two years. It’s created a sore spot for the state that’s attracted a steady barrage of lawsuits over the lottery system built to seed scores of new small businesses owned by minorities, women and veterans.
“Yes, there have been challenges because we just put the jackhammer in the ground for the first time. And that’s loud and noisy and hard,” Toi Hutchinson, Democratic Gov. J.B. Pritzker’s senior cannabis adviser, said in an interview. “You have to go through it until you get to what building a new economy and a new industry is going to eventually look like. I never thought this was going to be a walk in the park.”
Illinois is taking a methodical approach to handing out licenses to avoid the fate of most other state markets that have few minority-owned businesses. But there’s another twist: Some marijuana dispensary winners in Illinois are already looking to sell their licenses — or a stake in them — to larger companies.
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Amid an influx of Haitian migrants, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott is trying to stir up fear about a crisis at the border yet again.
On Thursday, he said that he had ordered state troopers and the Texas National Guard to “shut down six points of entry along the southern border” at the direction of federal immigration authorities as thousands of Haitian migrants await their turn to enter the US under an international bridge in the city of Del Rio in southwest Texas.
But Abbott backtracked just hours later, claiming that the Biden administration had “flip-flopped” on its request for state assistance. The Department of Homeland Security has said that it isn’t asking Texas for help in shutting down ports of entry and that it would be a “violation of federal law for the Texas National Guard to unilaterally do so.”
The situation in Del Rio — where more than 12,000 migrants are camping in increasingly squalid conditions without adequate access to water, food, and sanitation — is growing dire from a humanitarian perspective. Most of these migrants are from Haiti and plan to seek asylum in the US, as is their right under federal and international law.
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Lucía Solís, an African-Colombian artisan distiller from Buenaventura on Colombia’s Pacific coast, has spent much of her life making and selling viche, a pungent liquor believed to cure snakebites. Now, with a new law on the horizon, she’ll be able to sell the ancestral home-brew across the country –and perhaps beyond.
The African-Colombian moonshine, traditionally distilled from raw sugar cane and mixed with local herbs and fruits, was this week recognised by Colombia’s senate as part of the country’s “cultural and ancestral heritage”, a move that now awaits President Iván Duque’s approval.
The new law will allow for the liquor, until now mostly sold on roadsides and beachfronts across the Colombian Pacific, to be produced and commercialized at a larger scale by African-Colombians, while restricting production to ancestral communities.
“This is just the beginning,” said Solís, whose family have distilled the drink for six generations. She has been calling on politicians to recognise the cultural significance of viche for four years, and in April she registered her viche’s trademark. “We’ve been here for 300 years making viche and now we can get distribution on a large scale.”
African-Colombians have populated the regions along the country’s Pacific coasts since the 16th century, when their ancestors were brought from Africa as slaves to work on sugar cane plantations, goldmines and the large estates of landowning Spanish colonizers.
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Despite record nominations for actors and creatives of color, the diversity of this year’s awards ceremony was primarily expressed through its host (shoutout to Cedric the Entertainer), his opening tribute to Biz Markie, , its announcer (additional shouts out to MC “Keep a Job” Lyte), a cultural array of presenters, and commercial break music, courtesy of DJ-comedian Reggie Watts, who bumped The Staples Singers, Stevie Wonder, Luther Vandross and Mark Morrison’s “Return of the Mack???” Hmm. (The last one is a choice, for sure. But I digress.)
As you’ve probably gathered by now, most wins of the night went to shows that didn’t boast a Black or POC lead, but that didn’t stop a handful of iconic artists from making history—in fact, all of them did. In one of the biggest moments of the night, legendary choreographer, dancer, producer, director and actress Debbie Allen was recognized with the Governor’s Award, making her the first Black woman to ever receive the prestigious honor.
“Let this moment resonate with women across the world, across this country and across the world,” Allen said in part during her acceptance speech. “From Texas to Afghanistan. Let them know—and also young people who have no vote, who can’t even get a vaccine. They’re inheriting the world that we live, that we leave them. It is time for you to claim your power, claim your voice. Say your song, tell your stories. It will make us a better place. Your turn.”
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Voices and Soul
by Black Kos Poetry Editor
Justice Putnam
My mom and I tested positive for COVID on Friday, she was doing okay until her vitals crashed yesterday and I had call 911. She was doing terribly all night, but they finally got her stabilized. She suffered a “stress” heart attack and the surgeon put in a heart catheter. We were prepared for a stent, but he didn’t find any blockage and that is good news. The next 24 hours will be critical and we are praying mightily. The team that my nurse sister trained worked 110% on her and that is a Godsend, as well. We probably caught the virus when we were at ER for almost 12 hours about 10 days or so ago. Hundreds of anti vaxxers made us walk a gauntlet and jeered us for wearing masks. In the ER examination area, these idiots accosted doctors and nurses. If I had been conscious, instead of worrying about my mom, I would have taken down license plate numbers for the lawsuits to come. My next window to do so is a super spreader rally of anti vaxxers on the 27th. I should be out of quarantine that day. They f’d around, now they will find out. I’m not playing.
I have nothing to give you, but my anger
And the filaments of my hatred reach across the border
You, you have sold many and me to exile.
Now shorn of precious minds, you rely only on
What hands can grow to build your crumbling image.
Your streets are littered with handcuffed men
And the drums are thuds of the wardens' spiked boots.
You wriggle with agony as the terrible twins, law and order,
Call out the tune through the thick tunnel of barbed wire.
Here, week after week, the walls dissolve and are slim
The mist is clearing and we see you naked like
A body that is straining to find itself, but cannot
And our hearts thumping with pulses of desire or fear
And our dreams are charred chapters of your history.
My country, remember I neither blinked nor went to sleep
My country, I never let your life slide downhill
And passively watched you, like a recklessly driven car,
Hurrying to your crash while the driver leapt out.
The days have lost their song and salt
We feel bored without our free laughter and voice
Every day thinking the same and discarding our hopes.
Your days are loud with clanking cuffs
On men's arms as they are led away to decay.
I know a day will come and wash away my pain
And I will emerge from the night breaking into song
Like the sun, blowing out these evil stars.
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