Ending Beauty and Truth with Strategic Acts of Terror

by Black Kos Editor, Justice Putnam

I was thinking about Kurt Vonnegut the other day. I was thinking about the firebombing of Dresden and the burning of Beatles albums in the South. I was thinking about the destruction of the Library of Alexandria and the dynamiting of the Buddhas of Bamiyan. I was thinking of laws instituted by hooded white citizen’s councils that amounted to a death sentence if a Black person was caught with a book outside the Piggly Wiggly, or even while sipping some tart lemonade on the porch at home.

Vonnegut was not the only one to call the bombing of Dresden an act of terror. Even British Air Commodore Colin McKay Grierson, a confidant of Churchill, admitted to AP war correspondent Howard Cowan, that the raid also helped destroy what was left of German morale.

Cowan then filed a dispatch that the allies had resorted to terror bombing. The woke news once did that all the time.

The firebombing of Dresden, a center for Art and Literature, was a strategic act of terror. The burning of Beatles albums was a conscious act by white supremacists, and one meant to intimidate. Laws to prevent the education of marginalized peoples, especially those of the wrong hue, are making a virulent resurgence with the slave patrol rooting out Diversity, Equity and Inclusion as they pogrom America into submission.

We are ruled by the most vile, ignorant and juvenile ghouls who are the choir boys in Lord of the Flies, but without the classical education. An entitled mob of illiterate dapper brownshirts rampaging across America and now the world. Four schoolgirls blown up in an Alabama church was never enough, shooting a Latina Montessori teacher 5 times while driving across a Chicago boulevard only tickles the palate, so why not blast 165 schoolgirls to tiny bits on the other side of the world and then smirk while dancing around the pig’s head on the Heart of Darkness sound stage. The horror. The horror.

In the historic center of Baghdad, on a street named after the tenth century classical poet, Al-Mutannabi, a street filled with bookstores and outdoor book stalls, an area often referred to as the heart and soul of the Baghdad literary and intellectual community, a car bomb exploded and killed 26 people on 5 March 2007.

-JP

did you notice
how quickly the open sky
folded in upon itself

the flaking burnt pages
like torn moth wings
flying up the fetid smoke
then drifting
down

the broken teacups
and coffee stained saucers
the splintered chairs
empty shoe
splattered blood

and
just before
that moment

did you hear the
euphony of the street
as men wrangled
and summoned
swore and cajoled
addressed
if not solved
defined
if not created
the problems
and the promise
of their country’s
tomorrow

did you even know
of the dreams imploded
inside the molten iron
across the narrow
book lined street
as debate turned
to barbed screeches
philosophy
into choked smoke
and a thousand
years of history
was buried in the rubble

or was there

nothing
except an inexorable
deadly silence

– devorah major
“on the day Al-Mutanabbi street was bombed”

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News round up by dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor

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In 2021, Evanston became the first U.S. city to pass a reparations bill, pledging $10 million to address the wreckage caused by its own racist housing laws. Newsone: The Evanston, IL Test Case: Why Repairing State-Sponsored Theft Isn’t ‘Discrimination’

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The legal challenge against Evanston, Illinois’ Restorative Housing Program is more than a local policy dispute; it’s a clinical attempt to stop a city from taking responsibility for its own history. My DNA doesn’t allow me to see this as just another legislative debate. I’m the granddaughter of sharecroppers from Palmetto, Louisiana—a small town in the southwest part of the state that still relies heavily on farming to survive.

My family’s history is rooted in a system that worked like a predatory machine, extracting Black labor while ensuring families like mine remained poor. While my family eventually managed to buy their own land and farm, that victory came only after decades of severe financial hardship. Generations later, we’re still trying to recover from those hits to our stability, and even in that admittance, I recognize our privilege. Sharecropping was just one way the system trapped Black families after slavery ended. Redlining was another—a quieter, more calculated kind of theft.

This history is why the Evanston case matters. In 2021, Evanston became the first U.S. city to pass a reparations bill, pledging $10 million to address the wreckage caused by its own racist housing laws. Now, the federal class-action lawsuit Flinn v. City of Evanston characterizes these $25,000 grants as “racially discriminatory.” The lawsuit claims that attempting to remedy past harm violates the 14th Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause. This is a dangerous distortion of the facts. Evanston’s program is a settlement for state-sponsored theft, not a matter of “racial preference.”

From 1919 to 1969, Evanston’s government actively forced Black residents into specific areas. Through exclusionary zoning and the denial of building permits, the city corralled Black families into the 5th Ward. This coordinated effort suppressed Black wealth on purpose. The city’s 2020 report details how officials used “city planning” to remove what they called “surplus population”—a clear code for Black residents.

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Latest outage darkens island facing dwindling oil reserves and increasing pressure from Washington. The Guardian: Blackout in Cuba leaves millions without power amid US oil chokehold

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A blackout hit the western half of Cuba on Wednesday, leaving millions of people in Havana and beyond without power in the latest outage to affect an island struggling with dwindling oil reserves and a crumbling electricity grid.

The government’s Electric Union confirmed the outage on social platform X, saying it affected people from the western city of Pinar del Rio to the central town of Camaguey.

The agency said crews were working to restore power and posted a picture of the prime minister, Manuel Marrero Cruz, meeting Vicente de la O Levy, the energy and mines minister, “to specify the details of the … disconnection and the next steps to be taken for its restoration”.

“We trust in the experience and effort of the electrical workers to overcome this situation in the shortest possible time,” Marrero wrote on X.

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can Addis Ababa’s economic boon last? Foeign Policy: What’s Behind Ethiopia’s Double-Digit Growth

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The highlights this week: Ethiopia relaxes foreign exchange controls as it is projected to experience significant growth, U.S. troops arrive in Nigeria to support counterterrorism efforts, and China announces a zero-tariff policy for imports from 53 African countries.

Last week, the Ethiopian Central Bank announced a major relaxation of foreign exchange controls in a bid to further liberalize the economy, attract foreign direct investment, and make it easier to do business in Ethiopia. The move comes shortly after Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed said that the country is projected to grow 10.2 percent this fiscal year.

Ethiopia was one of Africa’s fastest-growing economies, with average annual growth of around 11 percent, until 2020, when a two-year civil war broke out in its northern Tigray region. The war cost more than $28 billion in damages and economic losses, and more than 1 million people in northern Ethiopia still rely on humanitarian aid.

The country’s current economic rebound has been driven by reforms demanded by the International Monetary Fund, leading to stronger performances in agriculture, mining, and exports. An extensive reform program, which launched in July 2024, floated the birr, Ethiopia’s currency, and opened up key industries such as banking, telecommunications, and real estate to foreign competition.

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Betsy, Lucy, and Anarcha, the Mothers of Gynecology, were three enslaved girls who sacrificed for the advancement of maternal health. The Grio: Do you know the Mothers of Gynecology? This Black maternal health conference is keeping their names alive

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Nearly two centuries ago in Alabama, three enslaved girls, Betsy, Lucy, and Anarcha, were tortured in the name of advancing women’s health. Last week, dozens gathered on those same grounds to reclaim their legacy as the true Mothers of Gynecology and demand better care for Black women.

From Feb. 26 through March 1, physicians, doulas, midwives, historians, celebs, and reproductive justice advocates convened in Montgomery, Alabama, at the More Up Campus, for the fifth Day of Reckoning conference, part of the growing movement tied to the “Mothers of Gynecology” monument created by artist and activist Michelle Browder.

The multi-day gathering brought out many leading voices across medicine and wellness, including OB-GYN Dr. Camille Clare, wellness icon Queen Afua, scholar and activist Toni Bond, and actress and maternal health advocate Tatyana Ali, to confront the field’s painful origins and push for solutions to the ongoing Black maternal health crisis.

Browder said the gathering itself grew out of the monument she created to honor the three enslaved girls whose bodies were used in gynecological experiments during slavery. What began as an effort to spark conversation through art, she explained, soon grew into a much broader movement around Black maternal health and reproductive justice.