Category Archives: Uncategorized

Trump vs. the Southside of Chicago

Politics, Uncategorized, , , ,

Trump’s rage on Chicago is the latest manifestation of conservative rage against Chicago’s gang violence.

The gang violence is largely concentrated in the predominantly-black Southside.

The Southside of Chicago has always been a destination for the working class.

The Irish working class settled there for low skill jobs, committed violence against each other in gang warfare and killed Black working class emigres in race riots because they competed for jobs. The Black working class of the Deep South migrated to the Southside for low skill jobs and committed violence against each other in gang warfare.

Guess which group had more ability to get out of that hood?

Guess who is still stuck in the Southside after the low skill jobs have left?

This desire for hamfisted martial law against the Southside will score him points among his White conservative supporters.

None of those supporters give a shit about what produces young Black men killing each other in the Southside. They want explosions.

Get out of the Southside while you still can.

White paternalism, unfettered by tact, is about to get more innocent Chicagoans killed.

Progressive federal constitutional amendments:

  • Right to Vote Amendment
  • Equal Rights Amendment
  • Anti-Gerrymandering Amendment
  • Abolition of anti-commandeering rule
  • Campaign Finance Amendment
  • Abolition of Sovereign Immunity
  • Abolition of the Death Penalty
  • Restriction of the right to bear arms to the militia
  • Abolition of the Electoral College
  • Legalization of foreign-born presidents who have 20 years citizenship
  • Congressional Apportionment Amendment
  • Marriage Equality Amendment for race, sexual orientation and national origin
  • Reform of the 13th Amendment to absolutely abolish slavery and involuntary servitude
  • Legalization of federal referendums

Progressive state constitutional amendments:

  • the right to decent, safe, sanitary and affordable housing
  • the right to a clean, safe and sustainable environment
  • the right to full employment and balanced economic growth
  • an amendment regarding taxing the people of the United States progressively
  • the right to public education of equal high quality
  • the right to health care of equal high quality
  • The right to earn enough to provide adequate food and clothing and recreation of equal high quality
  • The right to earn enough to provide adequate water of equal high quality
  • The right to a useful and remunerative job in the industries or shops or farms or mines of the nation
  • The right of every farmer to raise and sell his products at a return that will give him and his family a decent living
  • The right of every businessman, large and small, to trade in an atmosphere of freedom from unfair competition and domination by monopolies at home or abroad
  • The right to adequate protection from the economic fears of old age, sickness, accident and unemployment
  • Abolition of the Death Penalty
  • Right to Vote Amendment
  • Equal Rights Amendment
  • Campaign Finance Amendment
  • Marriage Equality Amendment for race, sexual orientation and national origin
  • Reform of the 13th Amendment to absolutely abolish slavery and involuntary servitude
  • Legalization of ballot initiatives
  • Equality of the law on the basis of pregnancy, marital status, ethnic or social origin, colour, sexual orientation, age, disability, religion, conscience, belief, culture, language and birth

Minority-access seats

Politics, Uncategorized, ,

What is more important to keep in legislatures: minority-access seats or party-competitive seats?

Example: creating one seat populated mostly by African-American Democrats in order to ensure a safe seat for a Democratic member of Congress. But in turn, creating 4 or 5 districts next door to be populated mostly by White American Republicans to make safe seats for Republicans. This is done mostly in the South and Midwest.

I’m asking this question because many Black Democratic legislators would rather have a seat at the negotiating table for Black legislators rather than have a seat at the table for Democrats.

Case in point: how former Rep. Corrine Brown sued to keep her own 5th district in north Florida as racially-gerrymandered as possible in order to secure a safe seat for Black congressmembers like herself while surrounded by White Republican safe seats. Today, while she has been replaced by another Black Democrat, her district still looks like a snake.

Maybe minority-access seats are terrible. Maybe, in the post-Obama era, we’ll have to discard these seats to help Democrats become more competitive.

In at least two other alternate realities, a lot of people are counting down the hours to better versions of #POTUS45: President Sanders and President Hillary Clinton.

In the former, in which someone more competent than Jeff Weaver was campaign manager, Sanders is planning a rousing speech harkening to the ghost of FDR, wondering whether or not this country is ready for positive mentions of “democratic socialism” in this inauguration speech.

In the latter, in which she campaigned harder in Midwestern states, Clinton is planning to celebrate the shattering of a glass ceiling, promote a theme of responsibility and extend an olive branch to those who hate her existence. And Bill would have worked out by now how he’ll use Twitter as First Gentleman of the United States.

Thirst for Purging

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Antoine de Saint-Exupery once said: “Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.”

So the GOP have the perfect, most on-message political party in 2017. They cut out most of the voters who don’t fit their ideas, cowed the ones who remained, and now carry the nation on a narrow path which will benefit a smaller, privileged portion of the population.

The Tea Party and its predecessors defined themselves by how much they drove away White moderates from the GOP through purity tests. The result of their zealotry, combined with massive gerrymandering, is the incoming dominant status quo.

Being “better/more inclusive than the Tea Party”, combined with being massively distracted from gerrymandering, left us with a terrible Democratic Party. We screwed ourselves. The Obama-Clinton coalition is dying.

Meanwhile, born-again Berniecrats like Nina Turner are preaching fire and brimstone at progressive tent revivals. Berniecrats, now drunk with schadenfreude and motivated by revenge, threaten to make it exciting, thrilling and headline-grabbing to be a progressive in opposition. What they lack in respectability, they replenish with ideological consistency and bombast. In the age of Trump, the American people crave both, and those who want stability are in the minority.

So I’m OK with the progressive sentiment of purging/cowing the centrists and neoliberals from the Democratic Party. I look forward to it.

As I Begin My 30s…

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8 years ago, I was living with Mom in Warner Robins and attending my freshman year (spring quarter) at Macon State College for IT. Obama was about to be sworn into office as the 44th president. Connie still lived off Armour Road next to the North Columbus Library. We drove back and forth to take care of her two kids when she was at work. It wasn’t a banner year for me, but I was adapting to Macon State and enjoying a lot of the classes. Computers were big in my life. Net neutrality was a major topic on forums. Bittorrent was my primary means of watching movies.

4 years later, I was in my final semester of college. Obama was about to be sworn in for the next half of his presidency. While I was driving back and forth from Macon to Fort Benning to help take care of my sister Connie, I didn’t know what I was going to do with my degree. I was serving as president of the MGSU GSA, hustling my business cards to people in order to do some paid web design work, organizing LGBT awareness on campus, connecting to other GSAs in Macon. I wasn’t prepared for Connie dying of cancer in November, or for living full-time in the Columbus area.

Fast forward to now. I’ve worked as a political activist and web designer for a variety of clients. LGBT peoples’ freedoms have increased by quite a bit and technology has come to envelope more of our homes and bodies, while African Americans have seen police brutality exposed on web video to a mind-numbing extent and trans people are murdered and harassed by lawmakers. I saw an election which sought the participation of a weary nation, and I worked for the more progressive candidates (Bernie, then Hillary and Jim). They lost, and now a man who is sought by his followers for excitement and free-market nationalism about their country will come into office.

But I don’t know how much I’ve grown. I’ve gained much more non-collegiate experience than I could have ever gained in Macon/Warner Robins, but I’m still asked if I’m a CSU student by Columbus residents. 4 years after graduation, I still feel like I’m on extended work-study in college. 4 years later, I’m still not able to capture that feeling of “tech is making us better people” that I felt when taking on the Communications degree in college. I bought deeply into the

In 4 years, I’ll be in my mid-30s. I honestly don’t know where or what I’ll be by then. I don’t know if social media will be more weaponized than it is now. I don’t know if this incoming president will resign in favor of his VP by then. I hazard to think that this Congress will do a lot of damage by then, worse than under Bush Junior when I was in high school. And our tech seems to be moving in a dystopic direction.

No one has an idea as to how to unfuck this trajectory. Everything is supposedly inevitable. Unions will continue to die, global warming will continue, martial law will be declared in Black urban neighborhoods like Chicago, mass murders by gun will get worse, more anti-LGBT and anti-minimum wage increase laws will be enacted at the state level.

And I don’t know where I’ll be by then, in this dystopia.

Maybe I should take on some more student debt and go back to school. Maybe I left college at the wrong time.

Worthless “Black Privilege”

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My eyes roll into the back of my head….

I’d trade my “athletic ability for survival and also for reward” in for trans-oceanic economic and military power and the lack of a 2nd Amendment.

I’d trade in my “overall and general privilege to put blame elsewhere and be rewarded for playing the victim” in for a time machine to go back in time and find a way to stop European businessmen from buying our ancestors in West Africa.

I’d trade in “regional and national organizations for the advancement of Black People” for reparations.

I’d trade in “Black President” for a new U.S. Constitution which creates a parliamentary republic, a social contract that is much more empathetic to the less-advantaged classes of our society, and features contributions by (and for the equities of) people of color, women, LGBT people and the working class.

Unlike better-minded Euro-Americans, this person wants these things that we “have”. Please, let’s trade.

That “#Ni**erNavy” Meme

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That hashtag based on a mistake by Yahoo Finance was saved by Black Twitter, but only Black Twitter can touch it with humorous pincers, like it’s a radioactive substance.

I think we’re damaged enough by our past exposure that it doesn’t hurt us as much when we hold it and treat it this way. In the hands of non-Black people, it’s either a nuclear fallout waiting to happen or a weapon of mass destruction to be used with extreme prejudice.

Most of the stuff under that hashtag are cultural references which relate specifically to the Black Southern-descended ex-slave working class experience. I volunteer that they are cultural references which non-Black people with more privilege would find objectionable or distasteful when done by their own people (e.g., “redneck culture” and it’s distaste among more privileged, urbane White people).

There are references to chitlins and collard greens as MREs! Why would non-Black Southern-descended ex-slave working class people celebrate that (IMHO) nasty-ass shit? That’s as real as it gets!

This is why the hashtag is heavily self-policed. For classist reasons, nobody really wants to esteem or positively support any of the contents of this hashtag in another culture.

Nnedi Okorafor’s Lagoon Buries the Queer Folk

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So, Nnedi Okorafor’s “Lagoon” was a good read. Extraterrestrials coming onto the beaches of Lagos, blending in with fantasy creatures and superpowers of West African legend, human characters carving their own pathways in a changing Nigeria.

The one sticking point I have with the novel is the tragic fate of LGBT and gender-nonconforming characters in the novel. If you’ve read it, you know who and what I’m talking about.

I don’t know if anyone has brought it up yet with Ms Okorafor. But basically, ALL of the Nigerian LGBT characters met tragic fates or disappeared for some inexplicable reason at some point in the novel. The cross-dresser Jacobs, the LGBT activists Rome and Seven of the Black Nexus, every gender-nonconforming character.

Yes, Jacobs was unfortunately tied up with trigger-happy 419-scamming types like Moziz, but his entire experience in the novel feels like he played no further role than a dream deferred, a tragic sideshow who would needlessly die at the hands of his homophobic colleague Moziz in order to justify Moziz’s brutal death by extraterrestrial intervention. And the Black Nexus LGBT organization disappears as quickly as it appears.

If there was anything more that I wished from this novel in finishing it, I wish that queer African folks could survive and play a larger role in the unfolding drama.

I think Ms Okorafor made an unfortunate choice in burying her queer folk in the rubble of homophobia rather than letting them see the new day in Nigeria.