Author: tourist_yp6g7u

The weeklong convening of the Permanent Forum on People of African Descent (PFPAD) brought 900 people to the United Nations’ New York headquarters. They arrived eager to add proposals about what needs to be done to enhance the lives of Black people in various parts of the world.

The week did not start out easy though: many Black activists had traveled from across the continent—and some from locations as far away as Australia, Ireland, and countries in Latin America––yet they say they were aggravated by the fact that they had to wait for hours to enter the U.N. There was a three-hour long line for U.N. entrance passes, which could have possibly have been arranged prior to the start of the conference.

Once inside, however, activists joined non-profit and governmental representatives to talk about the concept and possibility of reparations for African enslavement; the ideals of Pan-Africanism and its suggestions for how to deal with past injustices and what to push forward for in the future; the racism and other difficulties people of African descent are facing as they migrate from war torn or failing nations; the methods of collecting and distributing high-quality and timely employment, economic, age, geographic, and economic statistics on Black populations; and the practices communities can use to promote health and well-being, while dealing with intergenerational trauma.

Epsy Campbell Barr, the former vice president of Costa Rica, chairs the PFPAD. She confessed to a press roundtable that “There’s a lot of expectation from civil society around the world, but mostly from here, from this hemisphere––from Latin America, North America, and Canada” regarding the Permanent Forum. Indices for Black human rights remain low, political participation is on the wane, and systemic racism remains an everyday reality throughout the hemisphere. 

Campbell Barr said that the calls for the extension of the International Decade for People of African Descent, which was originally declared for the years 2015 through the end of 2024, are because the U.N. was not able to get full commitments about promoting wider recognition and the social and economic development of Black communities from most countries. The COVID-19 pandemic also put a damper on programs meant to aid Black people.

One of the decade’s main achievements, though, was the establishment of the Permanent Forum. “We feel that in a second decade, because there is a larger demand from different organizations, we are going to have the political power to push our governments to do something for our communities,” said Campbell Barr. She added that the fact that the new Decade for People of African Descent would start five years before the U.N.’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) agenda in 2030 will serve as an extra push to get governments to truly work for Black communities.

“The Permanent Forum of People of African descent has the mandate to work to establish the 

Declaration of Human Rights of people of African descent,” Campbell Barr said. The final product will be a document that shows the U.N.’s commitment to African descendants in the Americas and throughout the world. “It will be the main important document and commitment of the U.N.” to Black people.

That’s why it was important to feature the input of civil society groups during the forum, Desiree Cormier Smith, the U.S. State Department’s first ever Special Representative for Racial Equity and Justice, told the AmNews: “The International Decade, we championed the creation of it. We have been commemorating it under this administration and we believe it is important,” Cormier Smith said. 

The U.S. government has been widely criticized for not heralding the importance of the Durban Declaration and Program of Action (DDPA) which was adopted 21 years ago at the World Conference against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia, and Related Intolerance. The World Conference against Racism helped push the U.N. to create a decade for recognizing the global Black diaspora. 

The problem the U.S. has with the DDPA, Cormier Smith said, is “it’s singling out of Israel and then some restrictions on free speech which are counter to our constitution.” She insisted that that doesn’t mean the U.S. doesn’t agree with the aims of the DDPA. “Let me be clear on that. The Durban Declaration and Program of Action is meant to be a blueprint on how member states can work towards the elimination of racial discrimination, intolerance, and xenophobia. We agree with those aims; we are committed to those aims. We just don’t agree with the DDPA as a policy.” 

The United States did play a major role in the formatting of the Permanent Forum, Cormier Smith asserted. “We … championed the creation of the Permanent Forum as a part of that Decade. We were a strong supporter of the creation of that forum. And we also strongly supported the participation, the robust participation, of civil society in the forum as central to the forum.
“Not all member states were a fan [sic] of that. I want to make sure that that is on record, that we were one of the loudest voices to ensure that civil society could be robustly included because we felt that was important to the credibility of the forum: you have to have the people who are closest to the pain be a part of the solution because they have the best answers, they have the best solutions.” 

Howard University Professor Justin Hansford, who also serves as an elected member of the Permanent Forum, explained that some of the recommendations and suggestions that activists and community organizations made will form part of the Permanent Forum’s final conclusions and recommendations to the U.N.

“One of the interesting things about the forum to me is that it’s not just about civil society’s engagement with the official mechanisms and organisms. It’s about talking to each other,” Prof. Hansford added. “I know that some of the things that people have talked about in the sessions, they’ve gone off on the side and had people approach them and projects get started and relationships get formed. So, there’s a lot that can happen simply by letting people know what you’re interested in doing and this is a platform where we had, I think we’re at 1,200 people, both online and in person at the forum. These are all human rights activists fighting for Black people all over the world. What’s exciting is that they’re going to be building connections and relationships and coming up with their own projects even outside of whatever happens at the official forum. And that’s going to be where a lot of the change happens.”

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Food in New York exhibition at Museum of the City of New York, 104th Street and Fifth Avenue.
Food is a powerful social network binding New Yorkers to each other and with countless others across the globe. The city’s raucous restaurant scene; its ubiquitous street food; the current activist efforts to source food locally; the world’s largest food market in Hunts Point; and the artists, thinkers, and designers who are imagining new sustainable ways to relate to food, will all be part of Food in New York: Bigger Than the Plate. The exhibition will examine the challenging nodes and networks of the city’s food systems. Anchored around issues of sustainability, labor justice, and equitable access to food, the show will explore the ways in which artists and designers are developing solutions to these global and local challenges. Through September, 2023.   Online tickets at the MCNY site for Wednesday-Sunday: LINK

* This article was originally published here

NEW YORK (AP) — On air quality maps, purple signifies the worst of it. In reality, it’s a thick, hazardous haze that’s disrupting daily life for millions of people across the U.S. and Canada, blotting out skylines and turning skies orange.

And with weather systems expected to hardly budge, the smoky blanket billowing from wildfires in Quebec and Nova Scotia and sending plumes of fine particulate matter as far away as North Carolina should persist into Thursday and possibly the weekend.

That means at least another day, or more, of a dystopian-style detour that’s chased players from ballfields, actors from Broadway stages, delayed thousands of flights and sparked a resurgence in mask wearing and remote work — all while raising concerns about the health effects of prolonged exposure to such bad air.

The weather system that’s driving the great Canadian-American smoke out — a low-pressure system over Maine and Nova Scotia — “will probably be hanging around at least for the next few days,” U.S. National Weather Service meteorologist Bryan Ramsey said.

“Conditions are likely to remain unhealthy, at least until the wind direction changes or the fires get put out,” Ramsey said. “Since the fires are raging — they’re really large — they’re probably going to continue for weeks. But it’s really just going be all about the wind shift.”

Across the eastern U.S., officials warned residents to stay inside and limit or avoid outdoor activities again Thursday, extending “Code Red” air quality alerts in some places for a third-straight day as forecasts showed winds continuing to push smoke-filled air south.

In Washington, D.C., Mayor Muriel Bowser ordered schools to cancel outdoor recess, sports and field trips Thursday. In suburban Philadelphia, officials set up an emergency shelter so people living outside can take refuge from the haze.

New York Gov. Kathy Hochul said the state was making a million N95 masks — the kind prevalent at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic — available at state facilities, including 400,000 in New York City. She also urged residents to stay put.

“You don’t need to go out and take a walk. You don’t need to push the baby in the stroller,” Hochul said Wednesday night. “This is not a safe time to do that.”

The message may be getting through. So far, officials said Wednesday, New York City has yet to see an uptick in 911 calls related to respiratory issues and cardiac arrests.

More than 400 blazes burning across Canada have left 20,000 people displaced. The U.S. has sent more than 600 firefighters and equipment to Canada. Other countries are also helping.

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau spoke to President Joe Biden by phone on Wednesday. Trudeau’s office said he thanked Biden for his support and that both leaders “acknowledged the need to work together to address the devastating impacts of climate change.”

Canadian officials say this is shaping up to be the country’s worst wildfire season ever. It started early on drier-than-usual ground and accelerated quickly. Smoke from the blazes has been lapping into the U.S. since last month but intensified with recent fires in Quebec, where about 100 were considered out of control Wednesday.

“I can taste the air,” Dr. Ken Strumpf said in a Facebook post from Syracuse, New York, where the sky took on the colorful nickname of the local university: Orange.

The smoke was so thick in Canada’s capital, Ottawa, that office towers just across the Ottawa River were barely visible. In Toronto, Yili Ma said her hiking group canceled a planned hike this week, and she was forgoing the restaurant patios that are a beloved summer tradition in a nation known for hard winters.

“I put my mask away for over a year, and now I’m putting on my mask since yesterday,” Ma lamented.

Eastern Quebec got some rain Wednesday, but Montreal-based Environment Canada meteorologist Simon Legault said no significant rain is expected for days in the remote areas of central Quebec where the wildfires are more intense.

In the U.S., federal officials paused some flights bound Wednesday for New York’s LaGuardia Airport and slowed planes to Newark and Philadelphia because smoke was limiting visibility.

Major League Baseball’s Yankees and Phillies had their games postponed. On Broadway, “Hamilton” and “Camelot” canceled Wednesday performances and “Prima Facie” star Jodie Comer left a matinee after 10 minutes because of difficulty breathing. The show restarted with an understudy, show publicists said.

It was not to be at Central Park’s outdoor stage, either. Shakespeare in the Park canceled its Thursday and Friday performances of “Hamlet,” saying ’tis not nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of wretched air.

___

Gillies reported from Toronto.

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* This article was originally published here

Heeding the call for a quickly announced rally, a group of protestors came from as far as DC and New Jersey to support the demand for reparations for people of African descent at the African Burial Ground in Downtown Manhattan on Monday, 5th June, 2023.

With the current legislative session in Albany ending on Thursday, June 8th, , speakers Attorney Roger Wareham, December 12th Movement chair Viola Plummer; and City Councilman Charles Barron, encouraged the crowd to call on every elected official they knew, especially; Governor Kathy Hochul, speaker of the Assembly Carl Heastie, and the Senate Majority Leader  Andrea Stewart-Cousins, to demand that three prominent reparation advocate groups be included in the upstate commission on reparations.

Kenniss Henry from the N’COBRA Washington D.C. chapter noted how the deluded white supremacist who shot and killed 10 Black people out shopping in Buffalo, May 14, 2022, had scrawled on his  assault rifle “here’s your reparations.” 

She contended, “The people in Buffalo are really struggling psychologically. What we can do to ease some of that pain is to send a message to our elected officials: You will not leave us the great people in the great State of New York with a reparations legacy that is not our legacy.”

“We want a commission that is represented by the community, and not by the state,” boomed Barron.

Reparations is a top-of-mind topic, with California’s news that they are considering giving reparations for descendants of enslaved Africans; and Missouri Rep. Cori Bush’s H.R. 414,  Reparations Now Resolution, calling on the nation’s “moral and legal obligation” to redress the centuries’s long-term trauma, economic, social, and political damages with $14 trillion price tag.

Reparations remains a hot-button and under-reported issue for many New York State’s citizens of African Descent, Monday’s press conference  speakers determined.

The question is whether the watered down “mechanism proposed to address the issue, The New York State Community Commission on Reparations Remedies, will be actually community controlled or another Albany controlled façade,” said Attorney Wareham.

The December 12th Movement International Secretariat continued that the State Senate version, S2416, sponsored by Sen. Jabari Brisport, replicates the bill originally introduced by then Assemblyman Charles Barron, which was passed by the Assembly in two separate sessions.”

Barron and Wareham stated that what makes this version of the Reparations legislation unique from those anywhere else in the United States – is the provision for a Commission which has a majority community-selected membership.

“Three community organizations, of which we are one, will select 6 of the 11 Commission members. The legislature will have the final determination and execution on the Commission’s findings and recommendations,”

The other version was the only one considered by both houses on Monday, S1163-tA places the selection of all commission members in the hands of the government – three by the Governor Hochul, three by the speaker of the Assembly Heastie, three by the Temporary President of the Senate Stewart-Cousins.

Barron wants The December 12th Movement, N‘Cobra, and Ron Daniels and the Institute of the Black World to pick at least two members of the commission each – totalling six members of the Commission.”

This way they would have the “opportunity to bring our experience to help develop a comprehensive program that will improve the quality of life for the state’s Black residents.”

“We are working in tandem with our Senate counterparts on a historic piece of legislation,” said Speaker Carl E. Heastie, in response to an Amsterdam News request for comment. “Throughout history, here in New York and across the country, African Americans have been subjected to racial, economic, and institutional injustices that have plagued communities for decades – a reality we must still acknowledge. To grow towards a better and more inclusive future, we must know our past. This bill, which is being championed by Assemblywoman Solages, would establish a New York State Community Commission on Reparations Remedies to continue to examine the institution of slavery and the impact slavery and discriminatory practices have had on living African Americans. We can be the change agents needed to create a better New York.”

In response to the AmNews, Stewart-Cousins’ Press Secretary Amanda Stout, said that the senator “will be advancing a different bill sponsored by Sen. Sanders and Assemblywoman Solages S.1163A.” instead of S2416.

The bill, The New York State Community Commission on Reparations Remedies, is being supported by State Senator James Sanders, and other state senate colleagues; Cordell Cleare, Leroy Comrie, Brad Hoylman-Sigal, and Robert Jackson, and Assemblywoman Michaelle C. Solanges.

The bill reads in part “Relates to acknowledging the fundamental injustice, cruelty, brutality and inhumanity of slavery in the city of New York and the state of New York; establishes the New York state community commission on reparations remedies to examine the institution of slavery, subsequently de jure and de facto racial and economic discrimination against African-Americans, the impact of these forces on living African-Americans and to make recommendations on appropriate remedies…make determinations regarding compensation.”

Wareham reminded the folks gathered, and those peering out of windows surrounding the historic African Burial Ground National Monument on Duane Street, “If we talk about reparations we have to talk about how Africans get to this country. We have to talk about the labor that was exploited. That we were actually capital.That different from probably from everybody else in the world we’ve never received repair for the damage that was done, and continues to be done to this very day. Even this burial ground came out of struggle.

“If it were not for Sonny (Abubadika) Carson this burial ground would be another federal building. And it was a struggle – people putting themselves in front of the bulldozers that brought us here. That’s why we’re here today to struggle around the repairs.”

”The New York State reparations bill – as you know around the country, different people, states, townships have been moving to address the issue of reparations.New York State is way, way, way behind.”

Wareham noted that when he was in the Assembly, (current) City Councimember Barron put forth a bill that is different from any one that has been put forward.

Barron took the mic, “In this state, where there are 3 million people of African ancestry: whether you come from Africa, the Caribbean, South America, Central America, North America, African people deserve reparations in this state for our labor. We built this city. We built this country.”’

“That’s right,” the crowd responded.

“Right here in New York City, in the Burial Ground are African people, 427 of our remains are buried there, and thank God for Abubadika Sonny Carson who stopped the excavation and made sure they were respected. Throughout downtown New York 20,000 of our remains right now are down here.

New York City was the second largest slave holding city in the country, and was 2nd only to Charleston, South Carolina. It was your brothers and sisters who rose up in 1712, right here in New York City and said ‘We don’t want to be enslaved anymore and burnt down the governor’s mansion. The white community said to the the white power structure then ‘You’re gonna do something because these Africans are angry?’  So they said all right we’ll have a gradual emancipation.

Africans from Africa,  from the Caribbean, and from here “fought to end slavery in New York City, and every last one of us deserves reparations.”

Always with the historical facts and stats, Barron told the people gathered at the African Burial Ground, that in 1799 they had the Gradual Emancipation Act. “They said ‘Your males, we’ll only hold them for 27 years. Your females, we’ll only hold for 25 years.’ They didn’t accept that. They said ‘We are going to keep organizing until we are free.’ 

“They said they didn’t want these folk  to keep attacking us, so in 1827 New York City abolished slavery because of the struggle of our people. So we put that all in our bill to tell the history of New York City. The Big Apple – ain’t never gave you a bite. So we put our bill together and we said that we wanted it to be different from any other bill in the country.”

Barron said in the California reparations bill, five of the appointees of their commission are picked by their governor, four by the state assembly, and so their proposals will be from the “handpicked Blacks,” not community-involved reparation advocacy organizations, which is what they are demanding for New York.

N’COBRA, The December 12th Movement, and Ron Daniels’ Institute of the Black World are “Brothers and sisters who have been in this reparations movement for over 30 years to pick at least 2 members of the commission each. So we would have six members of the commission

The Brooklyn elected reiterated that they got 100 assembly members to support that concept in 2021 when he was in the assembly. It passed  the assembly. In 2022 when he left the assembly and went to the City Council, Michaelle Solage, assemblymember and Senator Jabari Brisport,   pushed it again, and it got another 100 votes and was passed.

Now in 2023, Barron said, “It had already passed the assembly, Jabari successfully got 25 senators to say if it comes their way they will vote for it in the Senate. We were only 7 votes short in the senate and here comes the sabotage. Now all of a sudden, the leader of the assembly Carl Heastie, and the leader of the senate Andrea stuart-Cousins  and some other Blacks up there decided they wanted another type of bill. They wanted a bill that would give the governor – a white woman 3 votes [on the commission],  and our groups no votes.”

In typical “no-holds-barred” Barron fashion, he asked the lively assembled, “How do you have a Black leader of the assembly, a Black leader of the senate, Black electeds in the assembly and the senate say we want this white woman governor to have three votes, and three from the assembly, and three from the senate, and none from our community groups?”

Fired up, Barron declared, “I said ‘Hell no that’s not going down.’ We say we will determine the compensation for reparations, not the state that enslaved us in the first place. Those who oppressed us, those who enslaved us and representing that, cannot determine the compensation. That’s gonna be determined by those of us who have been working at [reparations advocacy] hard.”

Barron told those gathered to call up every elected reachable to push the bill with the community-involved reparations compensation discussions at the state level before January 8th.

Posting up behind the ‘They stole us, they sold us, they owe us – Reparations Now,’ banner, “Ready to go to war?” international activist Viola Plummer, asked the very participatory crowd. “Here in New York State –  because here was the epicenter of slavery. We must face them head on. We’ve got to let them know we’re mad as hell. The war against us is now going to be two-fold, us against them…and we are prepared after all of these centuries and promises to go to war for our ancestors.” 

N’COBRA’s Kenniss Henry said it is about making sure that the Commission is so situated, “To determine what the remedies need to be to repair 400 plus years of pernicious history and current day vestiges and we must be the ones to decide what those remedies are. No one else can do that. Not the appointees from the governor, not the appointees from anyone else.”“If their sellout bill passes we will still take our victory lap because they will still have to deal with our community. Our bill and our movement has forced this state to deal with reparations in the first place. We are going to continue our struggle,” Barron told the Amsterdam News on the eve of the vote. “Whatever commission comes through they are going to have to deal with the masses as we intensify our struggle. Our demand for just reparations will not be co-opted.”

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* This article was originally published here