We're hearing a lot these days about the angry white base of the Republican Party. Beyond analysis of this group as the core of support for presidential candidates like Donald Trump, there are people who suggest that Democrats (like President Obama) need to reach out to them either to calm the waters of our political divide or as people who might be lured back into the Democratic Party.

There are occasions when people also refer to the base of the Democratic Party. Often it is assumed that this group is made up of the most liberal activists - in this election cycle, Bernie Sanders supporters.

But take a moment to look at some of the data in a report about a group that doesn't get much attention in our political discussions these days: The Status of Black Women in American Politics.

First of all, the number of black women who turn out to vote is higher than any other demographic group - 70% in 2012. That number has been rising since 1996, so it is more than a response to the candidacy of Barack Obama. And no group votes more consistently Democratic than black women. Here are the figures since 1992:


1992 Bill Clinton - 87%
1996 Bill Clinton - 89%
2000 Al Gore - 94%
2004 John Kerry - 90%
2008 Barack Obama - 96%
2012 Barack Obama - 96%

As a comparison, in the above elections no Democratic candidate got more than 48% of the vote from white women.

We — the undersigned artists, musicians, and cultural leaders of America — are excited to endorse a new vision for our country.

It’s a vision that pushes for a progressive economic agenda.

It’s a vision that creates jobs, raises wages, protects the environment, and gets big money out of politics.

We endorse Bernie Sanders to become the 2016 Democratic Nominee for President of the United States of America.

Sincerely,

The Artists and Cultural Leaders for Bernie Sanders

https://berniesanders.com/artists/

Tonight (Oct. 13) is the first democratic debate. Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders, Martin O’Malley, Jim Webb and Lincoln Chafee will go at it while proving to the nation their legitimacy. Since the 2016 Presidential candidates for both parties put in their bids, hip-hop has been very vocal along the process. Here’s a gallery of who your favorite hip-hop stars are endorsing.

The Gambia has announced it will ban female genital mutilation (FGM) after the Guardian launched a global campaign to end the practice.

The president, Yahya Jammeh, said last night that the controversial surgical intervention would be outlawed. He said the ban would come into effect immediately, though it was not clear when the government would draft legislation to enforce it.

FGM involves cutting female genitalia – often when girls are young – to remove their labia and clitoris, which often leads to lifelong health complications, including bleeding, infections, vaginal pain and infertility. More than 130 million women worldwide are subjected to the procedure in Africa and the Middle East.

The practice is widespread in many African countries, including the Gambia, where 76% of females have been subjected to it. The age at which FGM takes place in the Gambia is not recorded, but it is reported that the trend of practicing FGM on infant girls is increasing. By the age of 14, 56% of female children in the country have had the procedure.

“It” is Hillary-hate. It is the tendency for people to decide, at regular intervals, that Hillary Clinton is not a mainstream Democrat who’s carved out a groundbreaking career in politics, but a blood-drenched, boner-killing, venom-dripping hellbeast who is out to destroy America.

“They” is more nebulous, and worse: Hillary-hate is often, but not always, the province of men. It is often, but not exclusively, Republican; conservatives launched The Hillary Project to stop her candidacy back in 2013. (“Hillary Clinton—the name alone strikes dread in the heart of freedom loving Americans.”) And it is often, and unacceptably, embraced by otherwise progressive men, who abandon their principles and their common sense in order to trash her, demonize her, and loudly proclaim to anyone who will listen that they Just Don’t Like Her.

You know Hillary-hate. You’ve seen it before: It’s Tucker Carlson proclaiming that “when she comes on television, I involuntarily cross my legs.” It’s Chris Matthews scolding Clinton, when she criticized Bush’s homeland security spending in 2005, by saying that “you look more witchy when you’re doing it like this.” It is sainted progressive icon Jon Stewart getting huge laughs, off a shot of Clinton smiling politely, with the line “that look is where boners go to die.”

And it goes on, and gets worse, until Hillary is not just portrayed as an ugly, mean old lady these dudes don’t want to fuck, but as an actual monster. Hillary-hate is the fact that, while Clinton was grieving the suicide of her friend Vince Foster, Republicans spread rumors that she had seduced and murdered him. Hillary-hate is Maureen Dowd calling Clinton “Godzilla” and “Glenn Close in Fatal Attraction.” Hillary-hate is the not-remotely-subtle implication that Clinton abuses her husband, spread by the New York Post; next to a photo of Clinton with her mouth wide open at a Benghazi hearing, they ran the headline “NO WONDER BILL’S AFRAID.” Hillary-hate is the persistent, bizarre need for major media outlets to go along with Dowd’s calling Clinton the “50-Foot Woman” and to make Clinton look scary by portraying her as superhumanly huge: On the cover of TIME as a rampaging, pantsuited giantess the size of a skyscraper (photographed in the act of stepping on a powerless man, of course) or on the cover of the New York Times Magazine as some sort of Lovecraftian elder God the size of a planet.

Besides teaching us who we are, books are where we learn who is important enough to read about – and only 5% of kid’s books had black characters last year


Literature’s job is not to protect young people from the ugly world; it is to arm them with a language to describe difficult truths they already know.

“In times of crisis or unrest,” Ferguson municipal public library director Scott Bonner wrote in an email conversation, “everyone, but especially kids, will have questions that tie to identity, empathy, sense of belonging vs exclusion, seeking a role to play, and so forth”. Bonner turned the FMPL into a safe haven during the civil unrest in 2014, earning it a Library of the Year award and international acclaim.

“Books help us know who we are,” he added, “and we must know who we are before we can understand what we must do.”

Besides teaching us who we are, books are where we learn whose lives matter enough to read about: a recent Florida State University study called children’s literature “a dominant blueprint of shared cultural values, meanings and expectations”. Exclusion from this world, the study says, constitutes a kind of “symbolic annihilation”. As suicide rates among black youth skyrocket, and police officers justify killing unarmed children, the annihilation becomes much more than symbolic.


The ongoing crisis of state-sanctioned violence and antiblackness in America is not a new problem, but sustained protests have forced the world take note of it. And while some individual writers have spoken up, the Young Adult industry has had little to say about what the New York Times called “the most formidable protest movement of the 21st century to date”.

Sha’Condria Sibley’s poem, “Black Woman Steps Up to Mic” is everything. And yes, that word gets used for, well, everything these days, but Sibley’s award-winning piece fits the bill.

In her poem, which she performed at the this year’s Texas Grand Slam, Sibley takes on the misconceptions and stereotypes about Black women that do little but make us feel under siege.

Sibley powerfully spits:

Sibley later proclaims, “Black woman is even afraid to call herself Black woman too many times in this poem because she has been taught that she is too insignificant to be acknowledged.”

Well, damn.

“As a black woman with a big name,” Sibley told Fusion she wrote the poem for “people who may have been guilty of not listening to someone based off their initial presentation.”

http://www.clutchmagonline.com/2015/10/you-need-to-watch-black-woman-steps-up-to-mic-right-now/

A group of men beat a female comedian on a D.C. street just days before she's set to take the stage – and she says the show will go on.
Paris Sashay, 23, was brutally beaten by several men late last Saturday night after they called out to her and friends and she rejected their advances, she told News4

The comic was walking from Eden, on I Street NW to a car parked on L Street NW when a group of men began harassing the group of women. Their behavior escalated and then became violent, Sashay said.
She blacked out and woke up in a hospital with a broken nose and chipped teeth, her face covered in bruises.
"Guys make it where you don't have a right to say no anymore. But as a woman, you should be able to say no," Sashay said. "Just say no. You're just not interested."