The Short Life and Quiet End of the CV Pride Center

Uncategorized,

I really wanted the CV Pride Center to succeed, but I knew that it was burning through money from the moment it opened. I was constantly reminded of this by its operators, every time I vocalized my idea that the center should reach out to CenterLink: The Community of LGBT Centers.

The building, formerly a storage facility for ad signs, was of poor architecture, had huge glass windows on the front, and had poor insulation. It was never built to hold people, and even renting half of the building and operating the AC/Heat was very expensive.

The center was open for barely a year. I did what I could by voluntarily building a website for it as a personal project.

So I find it a weird sort of justice to know that the former CV Pride LGBT Community Center, which closed in October 2015, is now the Trump/Pence campaign office for Columbus.

But some of the most dedicated volunteers for the center now regret ever having worked for it, or for those who owned it. I don’t regret my work for it, but it should be a warning and reminder to those who want to plan another, better LGBT center here in Columbus, GA.

In the meantime, we have Colgay PRIDE of Columbus Georgia, which is operated by people who are more observant and dedicated to LGBT-inclusive social justice and community organizing. Even without a dedicated building, Colgay Pride is doing the non-partisan activism and outreach to LGBT people and their friends and family which is needed here in #ColumbusGA.

#LGBT

It Isn’t Good That Police Shoot Twice as Many Unarmed White Civilians as Black Civilians

Politics, Uncategorized, , , ,

If police kill twice as many unarmed European-Americans as they do African-Americans, isn’t that a problem with police, too? Shouldn’t the police be fixed to stop killing so many people across the country?

Why do you think there are so many White sovereign citizens who proclaim themselves to not be subject to American law? Why do you think that anarchist/libertarian White guys run Cop Block and Photography Is Not A Crime! in direct and sustained critique of police behavior?

Don’t be so cluelessly self-absorbed as to think that only Black, or only liberal, or only “SJW” people are raging against law enforcement abuse.

It’s not just #BlackLivesMatter. It’s not just #Kaepernick.

It’s also #StopKillingUs.

The “lewd acts” include “watching porn and masturbation.” I didn’t know that NYC had this, but they were going to run into this sooner or later. Potential solutions: time-limits, content filters, and maybe a door for entry like the good ole days. Does one use one’s idNYC card with these kiosks? Question for NYC residents: have you used one of these yet? #LinkNYC #tech #InternetAsPublicUtility

René Préval

Politics, Uncategorized,

René Préval, who served as President of Haiti from 1996-2001 and 2006-2011, is perhaps the greatest democratic survivor of Haitian politics. He managed to both receive and turn over presidential powers peacefully and democratically, twice over.

He weathered food riots, a dysfunctional government, frequent turnover of prime ministers, and the Haitian earthquake of 2010 where his own presidential residence was destroyed and left his family homeless. Yet, he never led or encountered a coup, unlike his democratic predecessor Jean-Bertrand Aristide, who suffered two coups. He did not have his own death squad, did not exceed his own presidential mandate.

Since independence in 1804, Préval is only the first elected Haitian president to serve his full term and voluntarily retire (and only the second overall after Nissage Saget, who had taken power by coup in 1867 but left office voluntarily after five years), and the first to be elected in non-consecutive terms. No other head of state in Haiti’s history can claim to have had a similar experience as René Préval.

“We are twice as likely to have a firearm in our homes as black Americans and Hispanics, yet significantly less of us die by gunshot. White people represent 65 percent of the population but just 25 percent of gun homicides. Black people represent 13 percent of the population yet a disturbing 55 percent of gun homicides.

Our gun obsession is simply fueled by the fact that the odds are in our favor. Black and brown kids in Chicago, Baltimore and Miami die by bullets at a much greater rate than our children in Montana, Idaho and Wisconsin.

The color of our skin makes up most of the Republican Party, a party twice as likely to own guns at home than the Democratic Party.

People who look like me are ultimately responsible that a third of all Americans with children under 18 at home have a gun in their household, including 34 percent of families with children younger than 12.

We make up 80 percent of Congress. The majority of white lawmakers refuse to make it legally harder to buy firearms, even AR-15 assault rifles that no respectable hunter would ever use to bag a 12-point buck.”

Source: America’s nostalgic gun culture defies logic and common sense – The Undefeated

Lack of Self-Respect Among Black Republicans

Politics, Uncategorized, , , , ,

He told the New Times that he had hopes of helping the Trump campaign avoid the mistakes that Gov. Mitt Romney (R-MA) made in his failed presidential run in 2012. Romney, said Jackson, waited until too late in his campaign to start outreach to nonwhite voters.

“I have been saying repeatedly that you cannot go into black community in the 9th hour of a campaign and ask them to vote for a GOP candidate,” he said. “The party has done a piss poor job of courting the black vote over 50 years. So you have to have more vested interest in time and in your financial effort for the whole campaign, not just in the last 100 days.”

Source: Head of Trump’s black outreach in Florida says ‘piss poor’ campaign doesn’t care about blacks – Raw Story

Thinking about it, I can understand an immigrant from Haiti like Rep. Mia Love of Utah becoming a GOP politician. Because she is an immigrant, she gains from the “pull yourself up by your own bootstraps because we’re a nation of immigrants who sought a better life here” doctrine. I don’t find it strange that she follows through on that, first as mayor of Saratoga Springs, Utah and later as a House rep from Utah. She doesn’t even need the Congressional Black Caucus because she rhetorically hates its very existence, despite joining it after joining Congress in 2015 (oops).

But what do African-Americans of antebellum slave descent gain from joining the GOP at this moment of political history? The prevailing consensus in the GOP is that our history is an inconvenience to be glossed over (even glamorized) and not “focused upon”; that our contributions are to be honored but not the trauma which produced those contributions; that our current plight, only 2 adult generations out from the end of Jim Crow, is a result of our “personal lifestyle choices” and not of systemic origin; that we should ditch the Mexicans in order to make more room for (everyone else but) us in the low-skill, high-labor jobs of agriculture, mining, manufacturing and even service industries (which may or may even not be “real jobs worthy of a living minimum wage”); that we should ditch LGBT people and Planned Parenthood clinics in order to make our divorce rate drop, men return to their wives, children have more children, and women stop being so liberated as to make informed choices for their bodies; and other insults to our intelligence.

None of that is appealing to me. None of this makes sense. Maybe if I got into a car accident, got a bad case of amnesia, adopted a new name and identity as a Nigerian immigrant from Lagos, integrated myself into the Nigerian American community like Rachel Dolezal did with African-Americans in Spokane, became religious, set up a business and then decided to go into politics as a moderate Republican Congressperson from Atlanta, this message would be a bit more appealing for me to campaign on and live by. A bit.

Then I would be lauded by those who don’t know any better as another rare Black politician who “never slaved on the Democratic plantation” and joined the party of Lincoln “bcuz freedom.” And Fox News, Breitbart and the National Review would love me for every word I publicly utter.

But that ain’t happening in this timeline of reality. I’d have to shut part of my brain off to join the present GOP even if I were a descendant of antebellum slaves who was anti-immigrant, anti-choice, anti-LGBT, anti-welfare or at least just pro-free-market. I’d have to shut off part of my brain to vote for the real estate developer or anyone who endorses him. And most Black Republican descended from antebellum slaves, except for Rep. Mia Love, don’t even sound original to me in their adoption of GOP talking points, especially when those talking points emanate from some angle of gratuitous anti-Blackness and class bigotry. Maybe they’re honest, but not original or nuanced.

We’re looking for empowerment for our families’ and neighbors’ lives that we didn’t have when “things were simpler” and “Black businesses were better” under Jim Crow. The GOP’s austerity and anti-civil rights policies simply don’t provide empowerment for most African-Americans, and they seem to be harming the Euro-American community across the country, too (see Kansas under Brownback, Indiana under Pence, Wisconsin under Walker, Michigan under Snyder and North Carolina under McCrory). The latter may get tired of it soon enough, if they can jump off the nativist train first.

MLK’s description of the 1964 Republican campaign of Barry Goldwater applies just as much to this year and the subsequent landslide that is about to happen against the GOP nominee.

Again.

 

As a reminder:

Twice on video, I’ve seen White people bash another White family on WalMart premises for receiving welfare benefits. The first family was loading their food into a van in the WalMart parking lot at night when the guy rolled up to them and recorded the family on video while he yelled at them for using his “hard-earned money” to buy food. The second family was a father in the checkout lane being bashed by a woman behind him in front of his toddler daughter, for the same reason (“you’re just gaming the system, ain’t ya?”).

You know what? That HURT me to watch.

Because if that’s how White Americans treat worse-off White Americans at WalMart in front of their children for the temerity to receive SNAP and TANF, imagine what mendacious coarsities those same individuals express among their kinfolk about African-Americans who do the same.

#classism #bigotry #welfare

Black America Measured as the Next U.S. State

Politics, Uncategorized, , , ,

I remember reading this article from The Atlantic from a while back which thoroughly measured the economy and infrastructure of Black America as its own nation-state.

However, I don’t know if anyone has ever thought about if Black America were its own state within the Union – a majority-minority state demographically dominated but never self-governed at the state level by people of African descent.

But what if it were? What would be the prevailing politics of this state?

Let’s call it the 52nd state in the Union – the State of New Afrika. The 51st would be Puerto Rico.

In the State of New Afrika, how would Black Democrats govern and represent their districts? How would Black Republicans?

What would be the state of law enforcement in New Afrika? How much control would the majority-Black state government have over its majority-Black cities?

State governments have perhaps more control over the function of cities and their residents than the federal government does. The provision of funding for public schools, for law enforcement, for prisons (public or private), for water resources, for roads, for recreation, for environmental protections and so on. No city in the United States except for the District of Columbia (subject to Congress) has such a broad control over their infrastructure. The federal government is also hobbled in its ability to reach cities because of state government control.

So if Black America lopsidedly dwells in metropolitan areas, but these metropolitan areas’ statuses are ultimately determined at the state level where the majority of leaders are not of the same economic, ethnocultural or regional background, what does that say about how much control we actually have over our local communities and our welfare?

 

pre-touch for touchscreen

I was reading that Apple has secured a patent for adding Force Touch to desktop mouses (which may see it added to the Magic Mouse 3), but then I see that Microsoft’s Research department has amazingly demonstrated “pre-touch” for touchscreen.

So now we’re talking about even more layers of multitouch interaction, both for touchscreens, trackpads and multitouch mice. 3D Touch, a more advanced version of Force Touch, is already in the iPhone 6s and 6s Plus, and adds a layer of shortcuts and actions to touchscreen actions.

Force Touch is already featured in the Apple Watch, MacBook Retina 2015, MacBook Pro Retina, and Magic Trackpad 2. But now “pre-touch” for touchscreens? Maybe we’ll finally get a hover function for alt-text on touchscreen browsers? Maybe we’ll be able to pinch and zoom without touching the screen? I can even imagine that pre-touch could enable 6DOF navigation of 3D interfaces, akin to 3dconnexion’s SpaceNavigator 3D mouse.

This will be the bee’s knees. What a time to be alive.