The Shining Brief Moment Of Black Radio News

pacificanetwork |  As the keynote speaker at the Grassroots Radio Conference held in early October in Rochester, NY, Glen explained how not all preachers in the 60’s invited Dr. Martin Luther King to come to their town, for they preferred to handle relations with the dominating white system on their own.  According to Ford, The Civil Rights Movement hadn’t reached towns like Augusta except through the media.

Believing that Black clergy of Augusta were “collaborating with the white power structure,” instead of building a community of empowerment for black people, Ford threw the list of names in the trash and proceeded to search for people who would represent what he described as, “the real Augusta.”  For him, the real Augusta was made of people who were not being served by the system. So, Ford looked for leaders of the community who he thought would join him in disrupting that system.  Such as “a rather loud black woman whom all the other tenants respected” to address on housing and poverty; or “that brother who jumps up every time the police beat down another brother” to address criminal justice.

With these new allies, Ford made his own list of “experts,” and watched them grow swiftly in their roles as public commentators.  He called them his committee of 10.  Because they were already natural leaders in their community, they collectively set out to awaken everyday people to their own power.

Under Ford’s leadership, that committee of 10 called for a boycott of the downtown businesses of Augusta to protest their refusal to employ black workers.  The campaign was called “Don’t Shop Where You Can’t Work.” This was Augusta Georgia’s first mass movement. 

The project was promoted on the radio to community enthusiasm and support. On the eve of the boycott, the minister with the largest congregation held an over-flow event at his church. Cheers erupted from the crowd when it was announced that James Brown himself was coming to town to donate $600 of bail money if anyone was arrested during the boycott.  

But James Brown’s radio station relied on advertising from downtown merchants, and when Ford showed up for his broadcast featuring the boycott, he found a note taped to the microphone, saying “There will be no coverage of the downtown merchant’s boycott on this radio station.” Ford was terminated from his job after the verbal altercation that followed with James Brown that almost came to blows.  

Without the radio behind the boycott, the boycott in Augusta collapsed. However, Ford’s organizing through radio resulted in on-going local organizing in Augusta and launched Ford’s distinguished journalism and organizing career.

Ukraine And The American Negroe

"Putin's not posing apartheid for Ukrainians. There's not going to be a big land grab like we just kind of gave the Palestinians' land to Israel and now support Israel in securing that land and growing and securing that land. No, it's not like that. These are Ukrainians and they're going to be Ukrainians/Russians at the end of this, too. "There's no ethnic difference, there's no big religious difference. We don't have to worry about concentration camps and apartheid because there's no real difference (ethnically or racially), and this is a real empire, which means that Russia's not going to take anything except they're going to just redirect where they pay their taxes. And so this idea that there's a human rights violation going on in Ukraine . . . well, no, there's a political rights violation going on, but political rights are fickle things, which means that you might not be a sovereign nation if you're right next to Russia. "One of the conditions of sovereignty is not being next to a bigger power that wants to eat you. So like you don't get to be a sovereign nation (in that case). For example, when the Civil War happened and South Carolina wanted to fight against Mr. Lincoln's army, I'm glad that the rest of the nation didn't come in and save South Carolina. There was a human rights violation because one of the reasons they were fighting was to enslave black people, but the conditions in sovereignty in real life are really, actually kind of tricky. And part of it means being able to defend your borders. And I don't want to be stuck in a forever war in Ukraine if it can't defend its borders, and they are Russian. "So there's no reason to believe that there are going to be mass human rights abuses after the Ukraine's taken over. Because it'll be like what they're doing in Chernobyl. "So right now in Chernobyl there's a big worry that like, 'Oh, no. If the Russians bomb Chernobyl then it could be the case that there's a nuclear fallout and there's going to be all this delays and all that stuff.' What they did was the Russians took over Chernobyl and then put the Ukrainian engineers back to work, so like, nothing changed except who the boss is, right? " . . . you saw a little bit of this before 2008 where in the U.S. you talked to people - every now and then they'd get a letter in the mail saying that they used to pay their mortgage to this bank, but now they pay their mortgage to this bank. There's the same mortgage, just to a different bank. That's kind of what, for most of the Ukrainian people, that's going to be their life under Russia. "And that's non-ideal, but it's not something you go to war and threaten world extinction over, right? It's one of the facts of having nation states with asymmetrical power and no world government. To protect borders as is. " . . . from time to time there are going to be skirmishes, and the bigger power is going to win. And when the bigger power is Russia sometimes you've just got to negotiate a surrender. So I wish we would be all for let's negotiate a surrender. Forget the sanctions, let's negotiate surrender and let's stop pretending . . . . because what I don't want at the end of this - a war zone's an awful place - I don't want Kiev after two years of war. That's unnecessary. "And I don't think we should be giving weapons to the Ukrainians. I don't think that's necessary. I think we should be all about telling (Ukrainian president) Zelensky 'All right, well, we can't get you back, we will help you surrender and give you political asylum so you don't have to worry about getting disappeared. But pretty much that's a wrap. We're not going to support you. Which means you should surrender, because they're bigger, stronger, and have just more resources than you do, right? "But instead we're going to give weapons for a ground war, that the Russians are going to win because they're a superior force, speaking the same language, and aren't that foreign to Ukraine. I say that there's not going to be pogroms or genocide because there's not really a difference in the church, either. Like they're all Eastern Orthodox . . . . it's cousins fighting, belligerent cousins fighting, and it's a place we shouldn't get involved. "And now with these sanctions in Russia everyone's prices are going to go up, which is de facto a regressive tax. We don't have to put these sanctions on, right? Instead of just trying to negotiate full-bore surrender, we've launched economic war against Russia. There are going to be sanctions, these sanctions are going to tax everyone, everyone's going to take a hit, and so pretty much we are now paying the price and subsidizing Ukrainians, the Ukrainian war, and I don't think that we should do that, I think we should encourage him (President Zelensky) to surrender and work out favorable terms. . . . . "I don't understand why suddenly we take national borders so seriously when we were so casual about them before. We need to deal with the fact of this kind of politics. If you actually care about the war and the suffering, you want this to end. You just want it to end, right? So this is different than like the Civil War when the issue was slavery. This is just a territorial dispute between one power and another power."

ADOS Advocacy Foundation Rebuts Harvard's Replacement Negroe Disinformation Attack

adosfoundation  |  At a time when our wealthiest colleges and universities ought to be reckoning with the distinct role that slavery played in creating and sustaining them, and working with Black communities outside of academia to secure racial justice, it is regrettable to see Harvard University using its institutional might to try and discredit and libel activists most committed to that cause.

The Harvard Kennedy School's Misinformation Review's recent publication, "Disinformation creep: ADOS and the strategic weaponization of breaking news", is a clear attempt to use the Ivy League institution's esteemed name to legitimize an ongoing smear campaign directed at the American Descendants of Slavery (ADOS) movement. The report ascribes a familiar set of demonstrably false motivations to our political advocacy, with the authors frequently substituting subjective claims, innuendo, and outright lies for the sort of empirically-backed assertions one would expect to find in a publication from such a prestigious university.

Indeed, Disinformation creep's own language highlights the authors' corrupt and biased approach: "The tweets in Figures 2-5," they write, "are examples of breaking news stories which led to a spike of activity within the ADOS network (which do not necessarily correspond to the overall spikes shown in Figure 1). We then chose the ones that best illustrated the point we wanted to make" (emphasis ours).

In other words, the authors acknowledge combing through the data and seeking to make their findings conform to a predetermined opinion of what the ADOS movement represents. Leaving aside the matter of how this method is the very antithesis of the kind of spirit that should animate and guide honest inquiry and investigation into a particular subject, the examples used by the report's authors do not actually bear out the "point [they] wanted to make". Instead, the authors' careless relationship to methodology and analysis frequently propels the material squarely into the terrain of libel.

We intend to enumerate the report's chief claims and supply evidence to the contrary that will lay bare the defamatory nature of the report. In so doing we will prove how, in an attempt to police the acceptable bounds of black political agency in America, it maliciously conveys false information to its audience.

We demand a formal apology from Harvard and that the publisher issue a full and timely retraction of this document. The retraction must appear in Misinformation Review's next issue so its readers can gain a full understanding of the report's unsound scholarship and how the authors have baselessly vilified our movement and directly violated the journal's own stated mission of combating misinformation.

Harvard Uses Mercenary Replacement Negroe To Launch Disinformation Attack On ADOS

harvard |  ADOS leverages legitimate moral and legal arguments for reparations and grievances about the failure of the Democratic party to adequately support one of its most loyal and critical voting blocs but brings in immigration.  Including  immigration  as  a  distinguishing  factor  is  justified  by  legitimate  statistics  around how Black immigrants have much higher levels of wealth and educational achievement, as well as better health outcomes (Brown etal., 2017) versus native-born Black Americans, differences that can indeed be directly attributed to racial stress and intergenerational trauma that started in slavery and persists today (Doamekpor  &  Dinwiddle,  2015),  despite  evidence  that  this  divergenceis  the  fault  of  treatment  by  the dominant white culture (Iheduru, 2013), and not of the immigrants. Animating ADOS grievances are the negative attitudes that Black immigrants can hold about native-born Black Americans (Nsangou & Dundes, 2018; Telusma, 2019), as well as perceptions of dominant cultural narratives favoring those who are apart from  the  direct  legacy  of  the  trauma  of  slavery  and  the  indictment  that  legacy  presents  for  the  moral foundations of the United States.

ADOS also resents what it sees as justice claims of other groups being prioritized over those of native-born Black  Americans. However,  it  sees  the  solution as  narrowly advocating  for  the  interests  of  native-born Black  Americans  alone,  and rejecting  any  solidarity  or  larger  coalitions  (N’COBRA, 2020), including trans-national movements for reparations or coalitions that address how systematic racism also lethally affects   Black   immigrants   and   other   groups.   Significantly,   Carnell  previously   sat   on   the   board   of Progressives  for  Immigration  Reform  (PFIR),  a  subsidiary  of  the  Federation  for  American  Immigration Reform (FAIR), which has been identified as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center (Boehlert, 2019) because of its violent opposition to foreign nationals living in the United States.

The ultimate impact that ADOS may have had on the 2020 election will be hard to ascertain; however, it  did have  a notable  media moment  when  rapper  Ice  Cube  talked  with the  Trump campaign about  his “Contract WithBlack America” in October, which was heavily based on ADOS ideas (Watts, 2020). The Trump campaign used this moment to claim approval from Ice Cube, an example of disinformation creep in trying to distract from Trump’s often outright racism and deep hostility  and  opposition  to  the  far broader Movement for Black Lives coalition.

We scraped a set of 534 thousand tweets using “#ADOS” or two related terms (“#LineageMatters,” “AmericanDOS,” which we found were not widely used) and posted between November 1, 2019,and September  30,  2020,  running  analyses  on  weekly  subsets  to  first  understand  the  content  of  the  ADOS network  and  to  select  tweets  on  which  to  carry  out  descriptive  content  analysis.  The  status_ids  of  the tweets, and scripts for both collection and analysis, are available from the Harvard Dataverse (Nkondeet al.,  2021).  For  having  accurate  counts  of  daily  frequencies  to  compare  to  real-world  events,  we supplemented this scraped set with access, via a third-party service, to a set of 1.36 million tweets pulled from the Twitter firehose. This includesa total of 1.1 million tweets using the #ADOS hashtag that were publicly visible on Twitter as of the end of 2020.

Democrat Preznit Of U.S. Council Of Mayors Declared Racism A Public Health Crisis

Forbes |  An executive order signed by Mayor Greg Fischer on Tuesday declares racism a public health crisis in Louisville, Kentucky, with Fischer stating that several of the city's "systems are more than broken" and that they need to "be dismantled and replaced."

At a press conference announcing the executive order, Fischer said that the death of Breonna Taylor, an unarmed black woman who was shot and killed in her home by Louisville Metro police officers, made the city a "focal point for America's reckoning on racial justice." 

Fischer declared that for Louisville to move forward, it would first need to address the pain and root causes of racism, in addition to acknowledging its impact.

Under the order, seven specific areas will be targeted by the Louisville Metro Government: public safety, children and families, employment, Black wealth, housing, health and voting.

The order also calls for continuing to offer mail-in ballots for all elections.

Fischer pointed to several statistics Tuesday that highlighted the racial inequity in the city, such as the fact that Black residents own only 2.4% of Louisville's businesses, despite constituting 22.4% of the city's population.

Between some majority-Black and majority-white neighborhoods in Louisville, life expectancy can vary by as much as 12 years, according to the mayor. 

Crucial Quote: "For too many Louisvillians, racism is a fact of daily life, a fact that was created and documented in our country's laws and institutional policies like segregation, redlining, and urban renewal," Fischer said. "Laws and policies that restrict the freedom of all Americans to exercise their constitutional rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.