Juneteenth

Juneteenth is a holiday celebrated on June 19 to commemorate the emancipation of enslaved people in the US. The holiday was first celebrated in Texas, where on that date in 1865, in the aftermath of the Civil War, enslaved people were declared free under the terms of the 1862 Emancipation Proclamation.

Every year we have an event at a Tamarac park to mark the day and 2025 wasn't any different.

This year the celebration took place on the 14th June at the Tamarac sports complex.

 There was a big difference this year though. 

It was in terms of the attendees.

I have never seen so few at this event and can only assume that this is as a result of how much ICE is harassing non-white people.😡

For their modus operandi is to harass, arrest and even assault anyone that is not white under the guise that they are " criminal undocumented immigrants". 

That's totally disgusting.

Despite the clear dangers, those of us who ignored the possibility of an ICE raid and the ensuing inconvenience, turned out and had a good time.

Music, poetry, dance and a nice variety of food trucks.

Feminists arise!

😒To many people, especially misogynists, feminism is a bad word.

Regardless, I am an unapologetic feminist, for without us, women would still be in the dark ages.

I think the reason why this movement may not be as aggressive and proactive as it was, is because modern day women in the West were born into the era when most women have rights to equal pay, rights to own property, equality in marriage, right to vote etc.  

Happily, too, along with the Me-Too movement, many powerful male sexual predators are either in jail or realizing that what had been open season on women’s bodies is coming to an end.

However, the conversation about who should control a woman’s body still needs to be confronted frontally and regularly, in view of the courts overturning Roe v Wade and most Republican legislators in the USA usurping the role of medical advisors and hanging on to the idea that men should decide what women can do with their bodies.

A new problem that must cause us to take note and become proactive, is how we relate to transgender women.

For as a woman, I find it concerning that some of our rights are being trampled as unfair advantages are being given to people who reject their anatomical gender and now call themselves transgender.

I have no problem if people want to adopt  any gender they feel and even take steps to reinforce this by doing operations to change it.

It is their right (as adults) to do what they want with their bodies as long as they don’t infringe on the rights of others.

My first concern arose when transgender athletes started to dominate women's sports, giving persons who had developed superior physical strength as men, a natural advantage when they became women.

The most well-known case is at the University of Pennsylvania where swimmer, Lia Thomas, who could not win a meet when competing as male, ended up dominating everything when he became a female!

His case is not at all unique for even in now in the martial arts, this is creating a problem.

Worse, the attitude of some courts is troubling. For example, just recently, a Federal appeals court in Connecticut, threw out a case brought by four high school girls who claimed that state’s trans-inclusive sports policy violated their civil rights and deprived them of a “chance to be champions.”

I don’t often agree with Republicans, but so far, 10  Republican led states (last being Texas) have passed laws banning transgender women or girls in sports based on the premise it gives them an unfair competitive advantage.

I endorse that move by the ten totally, but what are the other states doing? I suspect they will continue to drag their feet until feminists really get moving!

Then there is the troubling issue of men claiming claiming to have changed their gender but they have kept their penises.

By all means they can do what they want with their bodies but they should not be allowed to use female facilities where they can endanger/exploit women and children.

So far, it has been reported that in New Jersey, a so-called transgender woman got three inmates in a prison pregnant!

And according to a recent story in the New York Post, a 17-year-old was totally traumatized after seeing a transgender exposing his/her penis in the female bathroom at the YWCA.

I am positive there are many more cases like these which have not been reported nationally, but without action, it is only a matter of time before cases like these or worse, rape in female bathrooms, will become the norm if not cauterized.

Why the hell does someone who claims he feels female need a penis anyway?

Yes respect, people’s rights to be anything they want to be but they surely must not be allowed to make women afraid, victimized and endangered.

We must never forget that without eternal vigilance we are in constant danger of losing out in the game of life!

PS. More countries need to sit up and take notice of how this troubling  matter was handled in Scotland. 

See report in the Guardian  on 26, 2023. 

Its headlined.'

Trans woman found guilty of rape moved to men’s prison 6 Jan 2023 14.46 EST

Isla Bryson, a transgender woman found guilty of raping two w

Reparations

It is common for us to assume that all the descendants of the African slave trade have the same history.  However, I have only recently started to learn that as bad as the British were, the Americans were far more savage slavers and for a much longer period.

Slavery was abolished In the USA in 1865 but ours in Jamaica was abolished in 1834 but that’s only a tiny part of the story.

Because the descendants of slave masters have always been in the majority in the USA, they have continued to use legislative power to maintain near-slavish conditions up to, in some cases, recently.

The Gleaner should be highly commended for publishing on May 20, 2022, information re the 500-page document produced in California which outlines the tremendous harm suffered by descendants of enslaved people long after slavery was abolished. These were mainly manifested through discriminatory laws and actions in all facets of life, from housing and education to employment and the legal system.

This report resulted from measures developed at the behest of the slavery Reparations movement in the USA, which lobbied Governor Newsome of California. So, in 2020, he created a two-year task force to investigate and detail California's role in perpetuating discrimination against African Americans. 

California is home to approximately 2.8 million blacks and it has the fifth-largest Black population in the US after Texas, Florida, Georgia and New York, the report said. And while African Americans make up less than six per cent of their population, 28 percent of them are in jails, youth detention centers and prisons.

The report concluded that; “Four hundred years of discrimination has resulted in an enormous and persistent wealth gap between Black and white Americans. These effects of slavery continue to be embedded in American society today and have never been sufficiently remedied. The governments of the United States and the State of California have never apologized to or compensated African Americans for these harms.”

Newsom issued a statement praising California for leading the USA in the long overdue discussion of racial justice and equity. The state's Attorney General Rob Bonta, whose office is assisting the task force, said, “California was not a passive actor in perpetuating these harms.”

While the demand for reparations is increasing in the USA and indeed in many former slave societies, California the only place to move ahead with a study and plan. Without an in-depth study however, one city and a few universities in the USA had taken up the issue of their illegal enrichment from slavery. So far, the Chicago suburb of Evanston, Illinois, became the first city to make reparations available to Black residents last year and Georgetown University in Washington is the first to have put measures in place to compensate descendants of the slaves they used.

However, the giant step taken by the state of California is a watershed.

The fledgling reparations movement in Jamaica will no doubt be inspired by this bold move in California, although I doubt that our government will be willing to fund any move to study in-depth how slavery has affected our society.

For calls for such action have been made locally and ignored over many years.

I can’t wait to get my hands on the full report out of California which will play a great role in educating the public in general.

It is interesting though that this report has come out in the USA, at a time when several states under Republican control are trying to further hide America’s history of slavery and oppression from the people, with the Governor of Florida even signing legislation to remove information on the topic from text books. If a giant step is not therefore taken by the current US administration to deal speedily and effectively with the issue of reparations, despite the best efforts of people like Governor Newsome, the movement will surely be set back for another few decades if a new Republican administration takes over in 2024.

 

 

Protecting the unborn while neglecting the already born

The reason why I keep coming back to religion so  regularly, is because it has been used for so long as a cover to oppress people.

In the olden days, it was the principal tool to keep the enslaved and oppressed in line, the well-known ruse being, if they accepted the oppression their rewards would come in the afterlife.

As slavery was outlawed and most people became less naïve, the religious scammers evolved a bit and Bishop Tutu summed up the next step beautifully; “When the missionaries came to Africa, they had the Bible and we had the land. They said 'Let us pray.' We closed our eyes. When we opened them, we had the Bible and they had the land.” Of course, you are aware that in South Africa, everything the apartheid government did was with the blessing of the Dutch Reformed church.

It was no different in other countries such as the USA and the Caribbean where slavery and later, white oppression, was the order of the day, for always, the slave masters had the full endorsement of the church.

Fast forward to my generation.

As far as I can see, the Christian religion is still mainly used as a tool to oppress the weak. Probably though, their favorite prey these days are women and children, because of their unequal physical strength!

So, while I have always been wary of Christians, the thing that drew me back to this topic today, is the most horrific story coming out of France about the sexual abuse of children by catholic priests. It stated in part; Clergy members in the Roman Catholic Church in France sexually abused more than 200,000 minors over the past seven decades, according to an estimate published on Tuesday by an independent commission that concluded the problem was far more pervasive than previously known.”

I find these reports about the catholic church especially painful, for while I don’t know much about their religious teachings and care even less, based on their operation in Jamaica, I have always been a big supporter of that denomination where through the efforts of representatives such as Father Holung, Sister Benedict and the Alpha institution,  it has only been surpassed by the Salvation Army, in assisting, uplifting and training the poor in my country.    

However, catholics internationally, are well known for their promulgation of the inferiority of woman and definitely, what we can do with our bodies, under the guise of protecting the unborn while abusing the already born.

What is happening in Texas too is a poignant example of how those who describe themselves as upright Christians, use their superior powers to oppress women, under the guise of protecting the unborn.

In this latest move, these Texan legislators too, have decided that women don’t control our own bodies, so government through them, can determine what pregnant ladies do with their’s!

I don’t know if it’s the nonsense about woman being created from Adam's rib which has driven this overreach in the Christian world, but whatever it is, it is nothing but another grab for power over us women in the name of religion.

For how is that these upright people in Texas, care so much about the recently conceived,(some are claiming that a human exists from the moment of conceptions!) when they display so little concern about the pligtht of pregnanat women and children  after they are born, especially minorities.

For according to the statistics, Black infants in Texas are twice as likely as white infants to die before their first birthday and maternal mortality is higher than the national average.

Protecting the unborn indeed while leaving those already here to suffer and die from their racist policies and neglect.

These religious zealots would be on firmer ground if they encouraged men to have vasectomies instead of  continually trying to take control of women's bodies!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UJu_qutzS3Y