“Proof of Consciousness” (P.O.C) the Host of REVIVE!!! 7/30/2017

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Today’s REVIVE show topic is entitled:

“HAS TRUMP GONE TOO FAR?!”

#Politics #LGBTQ

#TransRights

#Trump

I need you all to be apart of the conversation!

#Revive

#POC

It would be amazing to hear your perspective. So please call in we want to hear what you guys out there have to say always. Once again this show is for the people. We here at REVIVE thrive off of communication. So call us at (215)490-9832. This episode of REVIVE will be an open forum so all perspectives can be heard through great conversation.

This episode on REVIVE is entitled “HAS TRUMP GONE TOO FAR?!” Join us for this thought provoking conversation as we discuss this current administration and everything that has been done so far.

GUEST:

Susan Maasch: Susan Maasch is the Executive Director of the Trans Youth Equality Foundation. TYEF is a national nonprofit that advocates for transgender youth ages 2-18. Their mission is to share information about the unique needs of this community, partnering with families, educators and service providers to help foster a healthy, caring, and safe environment for all transgender children. The organization educates at medical and educational conferences, designs support groups around the country and trains schools. She is the proud mother of a transgender child.

Kyle Smith: Kyle Smith is a transgender youth that grew up being supported by TYEF. After being part of their programs for over 8 years, he now serves as Board Advisor. Kyle lives in New England and majors in Public Health and is an artist. While taking a year off of college he is enjoying designing and co coordinating TYEF’s first Trans Youth Arts Conference in Boston at Harvard University. This conference will use the arts to pull together transgender youth from all backgrounds and communities, with the premise that the arts build community, add beauty to our lives, reflects on our society, and encourages sharing,expression and healing.

Ray Gibson: Ray Gibson, is a 59-year-old Black transgender man, and a veteran of the United States Air Force. Ray is also certified as a public speaker. He has a Bachelor of Information Technology that he received in 2006. Ray has been in transition since 2012 and has continued to research transgender identity. Although retired, Ray continues to work as an advocate for transgender rights and racial equality. Ray is a mentor to men and women around the world and an in demand speaker.

YOU CAN CATCH REVIVE EVERY SUNDAY 11 AM-1 PM & EVERY WEDNESDAY 8 PM-10 PM!!!

It would be amazing to hear your perspective. So please call in we want to hear what you guys the listening audience out there have to say always. Once again this show is for the people. We here at REVIVE thrive off of communication. So call us at (215)490-9832 & follow on Twitter and Facebook @REVIVE_POC !

WE NEED YOU ALL TO BE APART OF THE CONVERSATION!!

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Was the white-nationalist march better understood as a departure from America’s traditional values, or viewed in the context of its history?

By Elliot Booker — 3 years ago

Making Sense of the Violence in Charlottesville

Was the white-nationalist march better understood as a departure from America’s traditional values, or viewed in the context of its history?

A crowd gathers as smoke rises from the burning body of Cleo Wright, a black man suspected of rape. Associated Press

Elizabeth Klein and James Forman Jr.

Broad swaths of the American public repudiated the white nationalists who marched in Charlottesville and President Trump’s response to them. But even in their condemnations, many officials asserted that the hate-filled demonstration and racist violence was un-American. “This bigotry is counter to all this country stands for,” tweeted Speaker of the House Paul Ryan. “The hate being spewed in Virginia is … deeply disturbing and un-American,” wrote Colorado Senator Cory Gardner. The hashtag #ThisIsNotUs trended on Twitter.

But America is a country in which racially motivated white-on-black violent crime forms a clear, unbroken pattern across every generation. Slaves arrived in America through violent crime, and whites have used violence ever since to maintain the racial hierarchy of white supremacy. And yet many Americans of good will honestly, if erroneously, believe that what happened in Charlottesville is “not us.” How can this be? Answering this question demands a look back at some of the most significant patterns of white-on-black violence in American history to identify the precise ways in which that violence was justified, forgotten, or defined as something other than the racist terror that it was.

American chattel slavery—in which blacks were bought, sold, worked, and bred for profit—was created and maintained through violence that was at once brutal and routine. Presenting himself as a benevolent master, James H. Hammond, a U.S. senator and operator of two plantations, laid out a schedule of offenses for his overseers, recommending that punishments “not exceed a hundred lashes in one day.” Slave-owners concocted racist myths to justify their brutality. Blacks have higher tolerance for pain than whites (so beatings that might seem harsh really weren’t); blacks don’t care about their children (so it wasn’t really all that cruel to steal babies from their mothers and fathers and sell them); blacks are lazy and indolent (so they must be beaten).

As one overseer explained to Frederick Law Olmstead when he travelled through the South as a correspondent for The New York Times, it was not at all excessive to give an enslaved teenage girl dozens of lashes on her bare skin for allegedly skipping out on her work. “If I hadn’t punished her so hard,” the overseer rationalized, “she would have done the same thing again to-morrow, and half the people on the plantation would have followed her example. Oh, you’ve no idea how lazy these niggers are … They’d never do any work at all if they were not afraid of being whipped.” Such justifications had the force of law; the Mississippi Supreme Court reversed a slave-owner’s manslaughter conviction for beating his slave to death, holding that “the master may use just such force as may be requisite to reduce his slave to obedience, even to the death of the slave, if that become [sic] necessary … to maintain his lawful authority.” In justifying this violence, supporters of slavery recast it as a kind of self-defense, and violence committed in self-defense—unlike violence committed out of anger or hatred—says nothing about the character of the perpetrators.

The demise of slavery did not lead to a decline in white-on-black violence—it merely changed forms. Most notoriously, whites lynched blacks; looking just at white-on-black lynchings for the purpose of racial control, the Alabama-based Equal Justice Initiative documented 4,075 lynchings between 1877, when Reconstruction ended, and 1950. Lynchings were even more savage and sadistic than most people imagine. In 1899, a white mob lynched Sam Hose, torturing him for half an hour before finally killing him. Members of the lynch mob cut off Hose’s ears and fingers one by one before castrating him. Then three men doused him in kerosene and burned him alive. In a 1934 lynching in Birmingham, Alabama, the victim, Claude Neal, was forced to castrate himself and eat his own penis and testicles. The white mob repeatedly stabbed him and burned him with red-hot irons. They hanged him by the neck over a tree limb until he almost choked to death, then let him down at the last minute; this was repeated several times before Neal died.

Such depravity required justification. This time, accusations of black criminality would do the trick. In most lynchings, the victim was accused of rape, murder, or both. Hose was accused of killing his employer, Alfred Cranford, and raping Cranford’s wife, Mattie. Neal was alleged to have raped and murdered nineteen-year-old Lola Cannady. (Whether these accusations are true is beside the point—these men were entitled to due process—but there is good reason to believe, in both cases, that the rape charge was fabricated, perhaps in an attempt to incite the community’s anger.) Here, again, because defenders of lynching portrayed their violence as justified, even as we recognize today that lynching is a thing white people did, we can believe that it implies nothing about what it meant to be white.

Accusations of black-on-white rape were particularly effective in justifying lynching outside the South; Frederick Douglass described such accusations as “an appeal that not only stops the ears and darkens the minds of Southern men, but it palliates the crime of lawless violence in the eyes of Northern men.” The motifs of black men’s savage, uncontrollable lust and of white women’s chastity and virtue combined in a perfect storm of white fear to justify the practice of lynching generally, even when a particular lynching was not alleged to be in response to rape. Even opponents of lynching seemed to agree that the supposed epidemic of black-on-white rape demanded a violent solution. In the wake of the Hose lynching, Georgia governor William J. Northern, a supporter of anti-lynching legislation, argued in favor of arming white women, declaring that “an occasional negro lying dead in the back yard, shot by a brave woman in defense of her honor,” was a small price to pay for the safety and purity of Southern wives and daughters.

Attempts to justify racial terror have been accompanied by a national commitment to erasing it from our memory. Consider the little-known history of racial cleansing in America. Across the South and Midwest, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Elliot Jaspin has identified hundreds of counties that experienced sharp and abrupt drop-offs of their black populations. Though the historical record, as with lynching, is intentionally spotty, in many cases there is clear evidence that whites systematically and violently drove out entire black populations, dispossessing black families of their property and rendering them refugees. Patrick Phillips recounts one such expulsion in his 2016 book Blood at the Root. In 1912, the white residents of Forsyth County, Georgia, drove out all black residents of the county, who abandoned their land and their belongings as they fled bands of “night riders” carrying torches and shooting into black families’ homes. Some black residents had enough warning that they were able to sell their land, if at a fraction of its value. But many were forced to flee in the middle of the night.

The same whites who had driven them out of the county moved quickly to take over their abandoned homes and farms, paying property taxes on land they did not own to a county clerk who was happy to ignore that there was no record of the land being sold. Whites in Forsyth enforced the racial ban violently for decades; since black refugees could not safely return to retrieve their personal property or to sell their land, the new white “owners” could assert adverse possession after the statutory period of seven years, registering deeds at the county courthouse even though the Georgia statute technically required adverse possession to be “peaceable.” The “expulsion of Forsyth’s black population had made news all over the country,” Phillips points out, “but the thefts that followed were given a legal stamp of approval by the state, and they went unnoticed by anyone but the expelled black property owners themselves.”

Justifying and erasing hundreds of years of white-on-black violence has left many Americans ill-equipped to make sense of racist violence today.

Here was a highly publicized pattern of white terrorism for the express purpose of cleansing an entire county of its black population, yet less than a decade later, Phillips writes, the white leaders of Forsyth County were boasting—with a straight face—that “while other north Georgia communities [with mixed populations] continued to suffer episodes of ‘race trouble,’ there were no such embarrassments in Forsyth.” This was possible in part because they had erased evidence of just how Forsyth came to be an all-white county; officially, the transfer of property from the expelled blacks to their white neighbors was on the up and up, formalized through an accepted legal process. They had erased the racialized crime of violence-backed theft from the record books and replaced it with legal ownership.

This literal erasure enabled the ensuing rhetorical erasure of Forsyth’s history. In 1987, civil rights activists staged a protest in Forsyth County, which remained all-white 75 years after its racial cleansing. The white residents of the county seemed genuinely puzzled as to why activists were harassing them. One such resident, Bill Bolton, complained in a letter to the governor of Georgia, “we have not bothered the rest of the world, so why does the rest of the world want to bother us now?” Bolton’s implied narrative of Forsyth County’s history begins after the expulsion of its black residents. Starting with Forsyth’s whiteness as a given, he asserts a right to be left alone, a right against forcible integration by outsiders wanting to stir up trouble. Whether deliberate or not, this neatly covers up the fact that Forsyth’s all-whiteness is not, of course, its natural state—its all-whiteness is artificial, created and maintained through terrorism, and the outside agitators insisting on integration have the more historically accurate claim in that Forsyth was, previously, mixed.

White terrorists cleansed their communities of blacks in Forsyth County in 1912, and in Marshall County, Kentucky in 1908, and in Vermillion County, Indiana in 1923, and in Sharp County, Arkansas on Christmas Eve, 1906, to name just a few. If we recognized these crimes for what they were, it would be difficult to ignore that a pattern of racial terrorism had occurred across decades, and that later incidents of racial violence were part of that pattern. But a crime no one remembers cannot lead us to associate its perpetrators with criminality, so our concept of whiteness remains untouched by any association with violence.

We have erased the history of lynching in much the same way. The overwhelming majority of lynching sites remain unmarked and un-memorialized. The failure to mark these sites allows Americans (especially whites) to forget the atrocities. When law professor Sherrilyn Ifill (now president of the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund) interviewed white residents of Maryland’s Eastern Shore for her book On the Courthouse Lawn, she found that they knew very little about the lynchings that had taken place there as late as 1933. On the other hand, black residents had a vivid collective memory of such events, passed down orally, and could often point to a particular family member who had been present. This erasure of history from public spaces contributes to a kind of gaslighting dynamic in discussions of race in America: whites are able to minimize blacks’ claims of historical and ongoing oppression because they have successfully forgotten much of the history that blacks still remember.

Justifying and erasing hundreds of years of white-on-black violence has left many Americans ill-equipped to make sense of the racist violence that we live with today. As a result, whites often lack the vocabulary to contextualize even the most obviously racist events. After Dylann Roof murdered nine black Bible study participants at Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina in 2015, media outlets tended to use vague language like “evil” or “monster” to describe Roof. That kind of equivocal terminology implied that Roof had an inherent, inevitable propensity for violence, a propensity that sprang up organically rather than being nurtured by extremist influences, and that his motivation was inscrutable because evil is incomprehensible and mysterious. Many politicians sounded like then South Carolina governor Nikki Haley, who wrote, “We’ll never understand what motivates anyone to enter one of our places of worship and take the life of another.”

But Roof’s motive could not have been clearer. He wrote a manifesto about the threat black criminality poses to Western civilization. He confessed to police that he planned and carried out the shooting with the intention of starting a “race war.” Roof was desperate to make sure everyone understood that he had acted to promote white supremacy, but many Americans stubbornly refused to take him at his own word, insisting that it would be premature to interpret the shooting as racial terrorism. By failing to connect Roof’s racism with his obvious criminality, many allowed themselves to think of the Charleston tragedy as an isolated and senseless act, instead of seeing it as a seamless continuation of the racial terrorism that is America’s heritage.

In every generation, Americans have consistently spoken about racist violence committed by white people as justified, erased it from memory, or simply called it something else. So when self-identified white nationalists seeking to turn America into a whites-only homeland held a torchlight protest, many observers failed to make the clear connection to bands of night riders, armed and carrying torches, driving blacks out of their homes to cleanse the region of anyone not white. When gun-toting white men at a neo-Nazi rally brutally beat a black man with metal poles, Americans failed to see the connection to the violence of slavery, to whites whipping blacks into submission. When a white supremacist drove a car into a crowd of anti-racist counter-protesters, killing one person and injuring nineteen others, Americans condemned it thoroughly, but failed to recognize it as a lynching, as the kind of terrorist act whites in this country have long used to maintain racial control.

This state of affairs is not inevitable; America’s relationship with its history is a collective choice. Other countries have made other choices in the wake of systematic racist violence. After the Holocaust, Germany made financial reparations to the victims, and began a decades-long project of building monuments and museums to commemorate the horrors of Nazism and the bravery of those who resisted it. South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission sought to develop a shared national narrative of human rights abuses under apartheid by telling the stories of both victims and perpetrators.

Neither response is perfect in theory or in execution; defensiveness and denial remain. But the effort is underway to face up to the full horror of racist terror, not justify it; to name racially motivated violence as such, not hide it; to mark down in disgrace the names of the perpetrators, not celebrate them; and to memorialize the victims, not erase their suffering. America, tragically, is over a century behind on its obligation to undertake the same reckoning. The horrific events of August provide an opportunity to get started.

READ MORE https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/09/a-history-of-violence/538659/?utm_source=fbb

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“Time for an Awakening” with Bro. Elliott Sun 2/18/18 guest Dr. Jerome Fox

By Elliot Booker — 3 years ago

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“Time for an Awakening” for Sunday 02/18/2018 guest will be Author, Psychologist, Dr. Jerome Fox. The discussion centered around his book “Addicted To White:The Oppressed In League With The Oppressor” along with solutions for our community to break addiction and move forward. We had dialogue about this and related topics with our guest, Dr. Fox.

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‘Victory Is Mine’: Lumumba Landslide Win Defies Conventional Wisdom, Polls

By Elliot Booker — 4 years ago

Chokwe Antar Lumumba likely claimed the Jackson mayor’s seat, winning the Democratic primary by a landslide against other candidates, drawing more than twice the votes as the second-place candidate. Photo by Imani Khayyam.

JACKSON— “Victory is mine. Victory is mine. Victory today is mine,” attorney Chokwe Antar Lumumba, 33, sang as he grabbed the microphone last night and led a packed room at the King Edward Hotel in singing the gospel hymn, “Victory is Mine,” by Dorothy Norwood.

“I say that because it is not about me. I say that because you defied conventional wisdom today,” Lumumba boomed to his crowd of supporters just after 10 p.m. after leading the field of 10 candidates throughout the evening. “… Conventional wisdom said that Jackson could not come together, but we saw today in this election, we saw northeast Jackson agree with south Jackson, (and) southwest Jackson agree with northwest Jackson,” Lumumba said.

Lumumba indeed delivered a resounding victory, taking 55.11 percent of the vote and his next closest challenger, state Sen. John Horhn, following with 21.21 percent. That win means the young attorney is likely to be the next mayor, even though he still has to defeat Republican nominee Jason Wells in the June 6 general election, which is typically perfunctory in such an overwhelmingly Democratic city.

The presumptive mayor, supported by national progressives including Bernie Sanders devotees and Democracy for America, did not mince words when it came to the need to increase prosperity throughout the city instead of in just parts of it. “We have two options,” Lumumba told his crowd to loud cheers. “We have the option of economics by the people and for the people or economics by a few people for themselves. And so we’re making the decision that we’re going to have a solidarity economy that works for all of Jackson.”

Lumumba called out members of his father’s Taliaferro family from Michigan. (His father Chokwe Lumumba, the previous mayor who died in office in 2014, was first named Edwin Finley Taliaferro before he later changed it.)

“Today would have been the 96th birthday of my grandfather, the day his grandson wins the Democratic primary,” Lumumba said. “So what we’re going to do is broaden the ticket. We’re going to make certain that we all work together, that we identify our collective interests. We’re going to love each other.”

Lumumba made the point that everyone in the city pays when one neighborhood struggles. “We’re going to show support to south Jackson. Because we know that when the people in south Jackson aren’t treated right, the tax burden will fall on the people in north Jackson,” he said.

‘One City, One Aim’

As primary night wore on, supporters waiting at Lumumba’s watch party became increasingly adrenalized with the promise of a win as spirits dropped at most competitors’ gatherings. At approximately 9:50 p.m., the crowd began cheering, blowing colorful noisemakers like it was New Year’s Eve, and raising their fists to the sky as the candidate’s sister Rukia Lumumba led the chant, “One City, One Aim.”

Rukia Lumumba, who moved back to Jackson from New York City in time to help lead her brother’s 2017 campaign, did not need a microphone as her strong and passionate voice filled the room. “It is an honor. It is a pleasure, to stand in this room with you tonight,” she told the crowd. “But most importantly as I stand here, it is an honor and a pleasure to be the sister of this great human being. He stood up after our father passed to continue that vision. A vision that was a selfless vision. A vision to unite a city.”

Mayor Tony Yarber, who only drew 5.39 percent of the vote in his re-election bid, conceded at his subdued watch party at the Next Level nightclub. “The city will gain an advocate that will have something to say without giving a damn,” Yarber told the Jackson Free Press and WLBT while sitting next to his wife, Rosalind.

The mayor later officially conceded, offering full support to presumptive Mayor Lumumba and continuing devotion to the city. “This isn’t a loss for us … you move forward,” he said.

Both Ronnie Crudup Jr., a political newcomer who took 2.34 percent of the vote in fifth place, Crudup and his wife, Andre’a Crudup, showed a positive attitude and good vibes while watching results with their family and supporters all evening at the New Horizon Center.

However, Hinds County Supervisor Robert Graham, who hosted his watch party at Eddie’s Soul Food on Bailey Avenue, left supporters standing outside waiting impatiently for him to arrive. The flustered Graham supporters did not allow the press to take any photos of them. He took 15.2 percent of the vote, coming in third.

Horhn, who came in second, posted a gracious message on his Facebook page late on primary night: “It’s been a great day, and a great competitive season. I wish to compliment each of my competitors on their respective campaigns. The dialogue has been excellent, the interaction lively and robust, and the relationships between us all respectful and productive.”

“Each of the men running in the Democratic primary are good men, each with significant skills and true passion. Going forward, let’s keep the momentum. … I look forward to the opportunity for us all to work together for the benefit of each of our supporters. Because, when we remove the part that says; “I’m for candidate X, Y or Z,” we then get to the part that says; “I’m for JACKSON.” So, let’s all be for JACKSON tomorrow morning,” Horhn added.

A ‘Miracle’ in the Primary

Conventional wisdom, and recent polls, predicted that Lumumba would take around 30 percent and then face one of two older candidates in the runoff—Horhn or Hinds County Supervisor Robert Graham. But Lumumba had predicted on social media throughout the day that he would top the margin needed to escape a run-off: 50-percent plus one vote.

Turnout in the Jackson Democratic primary election was typically low but similar to recent years, with 33,839 Jacksonians casting ballots in the Democratic primary, and 34,169 Jacksonians voting in total. The much less popular Republican primary brought in 330 total votes for mayor. Jason Wells won the Republican mayoral primary election on Tuesday night with 174 total votes.

Few people—save Lumumba and his supporters—seemed to believe that a candidate winning a majority with predicted low turnout and nine candidates was possible. Secretary of State Delbert Hosemann predicted low turnout in statewide municipal elections, telling reporters Tuesday morning that the Jackson Democratic primary would more than likely go to a run-off. He said it would be a “miracle” if someone managed to take home 50 percent of the vote plus one.

Lumumba pulled off more than a miracle and then some, in that case.

The Jackson City Clerk’s staff counted ballots in the basement of the Hinds County Courthouse with the assistance of the Hinds County Clerk’s office last night. Initial returns showed Lumumba out ahead of other candidates, first over 50 percent with Graham in second place, then dropping under when Horhn pulled ahead of Graham. Yarber, however, clearly was out of the running even with a third of precincts’ votes counted. He conceded the race around 8:30 p.m., endorsing Lumumba.

By about 9:30 p.m. more than 80 percent of the precincts’ votes were in, and Lumumba had a sizeable lead at 54 percent of the total votes. Sen. Horhn conceded the race around this time.

#Then the vote-counting halted after a technical glitch in the basement of the Hinds County Courthouse. Clerks needed access to a machine to download votes from one of the flash drives, which did not work at first, but the room where the machine they needed was—was locked. By 10 p.m. clerks and election-commission staff were able to download the rest of the votes and report the final results.

Lumumba ended the night with more than 55 percent of the total votes cast in the election, garnering 18,617 votes. Horhn, in second place, drew 21.21 percent of total votes. The results on election night included absentee ballots cast before the election but excluded affidavit ballots cast at the polls when a person went to the wrong precinct. Clerk staffers said that while there were several affidavit ballots to be counted on Wednesday, there were not enough to change the results and edge Lumumba out of winning a majority.

The presumptive mayor came close to winning the emergency mayoral run-off election back in 2014, after his father unexpectedly died. Mayor Tony Yarber and Lumumba emerged from the primary election with each candidate winning 31 percent of the vote. Yarber then took 54 percent in the 2014 runoff to defeat Lumumba then.

In the 2014 primary emergency primary election, 35,522 Jacksonians voted (about 1,000 more than last night’s election). More than 100,000 Jacksonians are registered to vote.

As far as city council races go, all incumbents running for re-election won: Ward 2 Councilman Melvin Priester Jr., Ward 3 Councilman Kenneth Stokes, Ward 4 Councilman De’Keither Stamps and Ward 5 Councilman Charles Tillman. Virgi Lindsay took home 65 percent of the vote to easily replace Margaret Barrett-Simon’s Ward 7 spot on council and beat out 25-year-old newcomer Ladarion Ammons, who still had a good showing.

The Ward 6 council race will go to a run-off in two weeks between Aaron Banks, a Yarber campaign staffer in 2014 who received 32 percent of the votes, and Ernest Slaughter, who received 23 percent of the votes. Banks or Slaughter will replace Council President Tyrone Hendrix, who retired to take a job with the Mississippi Association of Educators. Republican Ward 1 Councilman Ashby Foote faces independent William “Bill” Jordan in the general election, but no Democratic challenger.

To read more Click or Copy link below:

http://www.jacksonfreepress.com/news/2017/may/03/victory-mine-lumumba-landslide-win-defies-conventi/

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