“Black Vote, Black Power,” a collaboration between Keith Boykin and Word In Black, 
examines the issues, the candidates, and what’s at stake for Black America in the 2024 presidential election.

In a new interview with Rolling Stone magazine, Cardi B explained why she won’t be voting in the November presidential election. “I don’t f*** with both of y’all n*****,” she said. 

I love Cardi, but I hope she reconsiders her decision.

The New York-born rapper and former Bernie Sanders supporter told the magazine that she’s concerned about high costs of living, low wages, and “endless wars.”

I am, too. Anyone with a conscience wants lower prices, higher wages, and fewer wars. But not voting is not the answer. It’s the problem.

The reason why we face so many problems in America is because too many of us aren’t voting, and we’re letting other people who disagree with our values set the agenda.

Although inflation is down from its peak a few years ago and wages are up, Cardi is right that the federal minimum wage is stuck at $7.25 an hour because all 50 Republican senators and eight conservative Democrats voted to block an increase in 2021. 

The issue isn’t Cardi’s description of the problem; it’s her prescription. If you don’t vote, then what’s your strategy to create the change you want to see in America? Is it going to happen magically? Is the government going to see millions of Black people not voting and think, “Hey, let’s listen to the people who didn’t bother to vote”? 

That’s not how it works. That’s not how any of this works. The squeaky wheel gets the grease, and if we don’t speak up, we get less attention, not more.

This is why we can’t just show up once every four years for a presidential election and then complain when things go wrong. We have to vote in every election — for Senate, Congress, governors, state representatives, mayors, city councilors, prosecutors, judges, and school board members. Those are the people who make the majority of the decisions that affect our lives, not the president.

But voting, by itself, is not enough. We have to hold our leaders accountable even after we vote for them. The way to do that is to negotiate for your vote. That’s what people with power do. They don’t walk away and refuse to vote when they’re upset. They demand some specific deliverable in exchange for their vote. That’s what we should do, too — prioritize an issue and demand attention to it.

Voting is not just aspirational; it’s transactional. You’re not selecting a spouse for life. You’re hiring an employee for a specific amount of time. You don’t have to fall in love with them. They just have to do the work. 

When anyone tells you it doesn’t matter who you vote for, you’re being played. If voting didn’t matter, Republicans wouldn’t be trying so hard to stop you from doing it. And, trust me, they’re not telling white people not to vote.

Voting is not about choosing the lesser of two evils. It’s about choosing among the available applicants for the job. Sure, I would love to vote for a young, charismatic, powerful, progressive Black woman who reflects all my values, but she didn’t apply for the job this year. So, I gotta choose between these two old white guys. And I don’t agree with Biden on several issues, but I don’t agree with Trump on any issues.

The most enduring impact the next president will have on the future is the appointment of judges. Donald Trump and George Bush already appointed the conservative Supreme Court justices and federal judges who eliminated affirmative action in college admissions, overturned Roe v. Wade, struck down a rescue plan for Black farmers, ordered the Minority Business Development Agency to serve white men, and declared a Black woman’s venture capital fund to be illegal.

Not voting in 2024 gives Donald Trump the chance to stack the Supreme Court and the federal bench with right-wing judges with lifetime tenure who will be able to block any progressive legislation that you support for the next 30 years. Not voting doesn’t help advance a pro-Black agenda. It stops it dead in its tracks.

I’ve worked on six political campaigns in my life, and I’ve learned that no candidate will agree with everything I believe in, unless I run myself. That means we need realistic expectations about what candidates can and cannot do. 

Let’s say you’re in Atlanta and you have to choose between two cars to get to New York City to see your ailing grandmother. One car will take you all the way to Philadelphia, while the other car will take you back to Biloxi, Mississippi. Neither one is going to take you exactly where you want to go, but at least one car is headed in the right direction. Sure, you could wait a few years until the perfect car is built that will speed you along to the Big Apple, but granny doesn’t have forever.

So, don’t believe the people who tell you that your vote doesn’t matter. Donald Trump beat Hillary Clinton by just 79,000 votes spread out over three states — Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania — in 2016. You could fit them into the USC football stadium in Los Angeles.

George Bush won re-election by just 118,000 votes in Ohio in 2004. And Bush won his first presidential election by only 537 votes in the state of Florida. That’s the size of my high school senior class.

The lesson here is that every vote counts. Whether you’re a well-known rapper or a little-known restaurant worker, don’t throw yours away.

The post Why I Want Cardi B to Vote appeared first on Word In Black.

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* This article was originally published here

“Black Vote, Black Power,” a collaboration between Keith Boykin and Word In Black, 
examines the issues, the candidates, and what’s at stake for Black America in the 2024 presidential election.

“Republicans are the party of Abraham Lincoln, but Black people are stuck on the Democratic plantation.” Please stop saying this. Every time someone makes this argument, an angel in heaven loses a few brain cells. 

It’s 2024, and Virginia school board members have voted to put the names of Confederate leaders on two public schools. At the same time, the state’s Republican governor, Glenn Youngkin, has still not signed a Democratic bill passed in February to eliminate tax breaks for the United Daughters of the Confederacy.

Meanwhile, in Mississippi, Republican Governor Tate Reeves declared April to be Confederate Heritage Month. In Florida, Republicans are trying to punish local officials who remove Confederate monuments. And in Texas, Republican Governor Greg Abbott has invoked a Confederate theory of secession to justify violating federal law.

After lecturing Black people to “move on” and stop talking about the legacy of slavery, white Republicans just can’t stop celebrating the racist traitors who lost the Civil War nearly 160 years ago.

That’s one of the many reasons why Republicans are no longer the “party of Lincoln.” That party died long ago.

Republican Abraham Lincoln served as president from 1861 until he was assassinated in 1865. For the next 12 years, Republicans led the fight for Reconstruction, creating the Freedman’s Bureau, passing landmark civil rights legislation, and ratifying the 13th Amendment abolishing slavery, the 14th Amendment guaranteeing citizenship to Black people, and the 15th Amendment granting Black men the right to vote.

Then it all ended. 

Nearly the entire history of Republican legislative and policy accomplishments for Black people rests on the four long years of the Civil War and the 12 short years of Reconstruction that followed it. 

While many noble Black and white Republicans carried on the cause of racial justice for the next century, the Republican Party itself effectively abandoned Black people with the Compromise of 1877 that allowed Republican President Rutherford B. Hayes to take office in exchange for the removal of federal troops that protected African Americans in the South.

In the decades that followed, Republican politicians and judges would enable racist Democrats and Ku Klux Klansmen to terrorize Black communities in the South, drive out Black elected officials, and impose an oppressive new racial caste system called Jim Crow segregation. In fact, for most of the twentieth century, both parties were openly racist.

It took 100 years after the Civil War for the parties to switch roles when a famous Southern Democrat signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and an Arizona Republican condemned it.

So, when Republicans today claim to be the “party of Lincoln,” they want you to focus on what their party did way back in the 1860s and 1870s but ignore what the same party has done since the 1960s and 1970s. 

Some even quote Malcolm X, who rightly condemned both political parties for their racism in a famous speech called “The Ballot or the Bullet.”

But history didn’t end in April 1964, when Malcolm X gave that speech. In the years that followed, Democratic President Lyndon Johnson went on to sign the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and the Fair Housing Act of 1968, and he appointed the first Black Supreme Court Justice. 

But what have Democrats done for Black people lately?

In the past few decades, the Democratic Party delivered the first Black president, the first Black vice president, the first Black woman on the Supreme Court, and the first Black party chairman in American history. Democrat Barack Obama signed a federal hate crimes law in 2009 after a Black man named James Byrd was murdered by three white supremacists in Texas. And the last major civil rights bill, the Emmett Till Antilynching Act, was passed by a Democratic Congress and signed by Democratic President Joe Biden in 2022. That’s how far the party has moved from its racist history.

And that’s why no Democratic candidate for president has won the white vote since 1964. Not Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, or Joe Biden.

At the same time, the Republican Party has moved in the other direction, adopting a notorious “Southern strategy” that evolved from loudly using the N-word to quietly deploying “tax cuts” to appeal to white racial resentment. Today’s Republicans love to brag that the Voting Rights Act of 1965 was passed by a bipartisan margin, but it was a Republican Supreme Court that gutted the Voting Rights Act in 2013, and since that time, Republicans have been blocking every effort to renew the very law that they love to take credit for.

How else do we know the parties switched roles? Because Republicans love the racist Southern Democrats of yesterday. 

Fifty years after Strom Thurmond bolted from the Democratic Party to run for president as a segregationist, Senate Republican Leader Trent Lott openly embraced him.

And when Obama tried to remove racist Southern Democrat Andrew Jackson from the $20 bill, it was Trump who reversed him. In fact, two of Donald Trump’s first official acts as president were to hang a portrait of Jackson in the Oval Office and to visit Jackson’s Tennessee slave plantation. 

Why would a 21st-century Republican president show so much love for a 19th-century racist Democrat?

It’s the same reason why Trump vetoed a national defense bill so he could preserve a Confederate general’s name on a military base in North Carolina. And why Republicans in 2023 fought to protect a Confederate Memorial at Arlington National Cemetery.
The party of Abraham Lincoln, who once appealed to “the better angels of our nature” and fought the Civil War to preserve the American union, is dead. The party of Donald Trump, who appeals to the worst demons of our disposition, and seeks to destroy the union, is alive and kicking.

Keith Boykin is a New York Times–bestselling author, TV and film producer, and former CNN political commentator. A graduate of Dartmouth College and Harvard Law School, Keith served in the White House, cofounded the National Black Justice Coalition, cohosted the BET talk show My Two Cents, and taught at the Institute for Research in African-American Studies at Columbia University in New York. He’s a Lambda Literary Award-winning author and editor of seven books. He lives in Los Angeles.

The post The Party of Lincoln Is Dead appeared first on Word In Black.

The post The Party of Lincoln Is Dead appeared first on New York Amsterdam News.

* This article was originally published here

In true New York fashion, the weather just unexpectedly turned… very weird? 

Despite local forecasts predicting highs in the 70s and eternal sunshine today through the upcoming holiday weekend, the sky in the New York area just turned a light shade of black while rain and, yes, hail, started pouring down on confused New Yorkers. It’s also very windy out there.

Before you start despairing: forecasters are warning that the very worst part of the storm will take place between right now and 1pm. It’s pretty bad at the moment, so try to stay indoors if you can—perhaps dreaming of better weather days that are actually not that far away. 

Although a severe thunderstorm warning has been issued for Manhattan and parts of Long Island earlier this hour, things should be looking better by the early afternoon. Don’t rule out the chance of a few storms this evening as well. 

This Memorial Day weekend, though, will likely be a (mostly) beautiful one: according to the National Weather Service, today’s rain will give way to a dry Friday with temperatures reaching the low 80s. Saturday will be a bit colder, perhaps in the high 70s, with a low chance of rain—same with Sunday.

On Monday, the actual holiday, expect to frolic in shorts—temperatures will reach about 75 degrees—but perhaps carry an umbrella with you as meteorologists are warning about a slight chance of rain.

While you’re hiding from today’s surprisingly wet weather, you might want to start planning the upcoming weekend. To that intent, check out our list of best Memorial Day weekend events in NYC. Enjoy the time off!

* This article was originally published here

A decade after he shuttered his three West Village dining rooms—Perilla, Kin Shop and The Marrow—and took a temporary leave from the New York food scene, Harold Dieterle is back with a brand-new restaurant concept: a Southern Italian stunner called Il Totano, with a focus on aged seafood and “a stylish Sicilian sensibility.”

RECOMMENDED: The 26 best Italian restaurants in NYC, including red-sauce joints, fine-dining spots and more

Best known as the first-ever winner of Bravo’s long-running cooking competition Top Chef, Dieterle debuted the new eatery in—where else?—the West Village earlier this week, at 154 West 13th Street by 7th Avenue.

Despite its downtown NYC surroundings, you’d be forgiven for thinking you stumbled upon the Italian coast, given the menu featuring dishes like dry-aged bluefin tuna with fried capers and fig leaf oil; a grilled branzino with blistered Sicilian green beans; a crispy pork-chop cotoletta with white anchovies and Calabrian chili dressing; and a “fake” affogato, made with fior di latte ice cream and Manhattan Special espresso soda. There will also be a new version of the chef’s famed spicy duck meatballs, here served with mint cavatelli, water spinach, and quail eggs.

Overseen by interior designer Sasha Bikoff, the digs also give off la dolce vita vibes: taking a page from the Italian fashion brand Marni, the walls are dressed up in bold, blue-and-white hand-painted wallpaper, made even more nautical when paired with a dark walnut bar (to “evoke a sleek Riva boat zipping through the Amalfi Coast,” naturally). Speaking of the bar, there are also several Southern Italian-inspired tipples to enjoy, including the Bitter Giuseppe (Chaparral liqueur, orange, and grapefruit) and the Capri (Probitas rum, Blackpool Spiced Rum, J.M. Creole Shrubb, Orchard Amaro, lemon and mint).

Il Totano will be open for dinner Sundays to Thursdays from 5pm to 10pm and Fridays and Saturdays from 5pm until 11pm. Check out the space and some of the food-and-drink offerings below: 

* This article was originally published here