Black residents in Kansas City, Missouri, say police ignored their warnings that a murderer was targeting Black women, until one of his captives escaped earlier this month. A 22-year-old Black woman in Excelsior Springs, just outside Kansas City, said she broke free from the basement where a white man held her captive for a month. She also claimed there were more victims, all of them Black women, who were similarly sexually abused. Timothy Haslett Jr. is now in police custody and faces rape, kidnapping and assault charges. Prior to his arrest, the Kansas City Police Department said concerns about a possible serial killer were “completely unfounded” rumors. “This speaks to the violent silencing of Black women specifically, of the Black community at large here in Kansas City,” says Ryan Sorrell, founder of the Black-led independent newspaper Kansas City Defender, which reported on the missing Black women. “This is ongoing. We have cases back in the ’90s where Black women have been murdered,” notes Justice Gatson, executive director of the Black women-led group Reale Justice Network in Kansas City, Missouri.
Construction workers repair and clean the Hurricane Harvey damaged home of Houston resident Lawrence Hester on Jan. 31, 2020. Hester said he was unable to get help from a city program created to fix homes damaged during Harvey and had to endure hazardous living conditions for more than two years. (AP Photo/Juan Lozano)
This is just sad and disgusting at the same time… these the kinda yamp who danced with Kevin Samuels died and don’t want ANY kind of scrutiny or accountability for anything they do…..
She Belongs to the Streets … 304s Compete for Attention in their Magic City Uniform in ATL#modernwomen #datingadvice #relationships
It’s Black History Month! Yay! Every morning this month, Amber wakes up and looks to see what’s waiting for her under the Tubman Tree. Will it be a white person telling her what Martin Luther King would have wanted? Or, better yet—someone saying, “Why do we need a Black History Month? How would you like it if we had a White History Month?” You might be thinking, “every month is White History Month.” But hear Amber out—maybe we *do* need a White History Month, because the American history that’s taught in schools is so whitewashed, we don’t learn the real story.
Can people be enlightened about housing inequality through a video game? That’s the purpose of Dot’s Home — a video game whose purpose is just that.
The narrative-driven game centers around Dorothea “Dot” Hawkins, a 20-year-old Black woman who goes back in time to help different generations of her family make decisions about housing. Dot time travels via a magic key to the ‘50s, ‘90s, 2010s, and then 2021, Input Magazine reported.
Dot is living in her grandma’s rundown house, located in a disinvested Black neighborhood in Detroit. Dot travels back in time to help; for example, her grandparents decide if they should invest in a fixer-upper as their first home. In another scene, Dot must help her parents decide if they should move away from their community to the suburbs after their public housing home is set for demolition, Bloomberg reported.
Dot travels through different decades, each highlighting “a defining moment in history for Black homeownership: the Great Migration of the 20th century, urban renewal efforts in the 1990s, and finally, the 2010 foreclosure crisis that helped spur gentrification,” Bloomberg reports, At each stop Dot must transverse racist housing policies and predatory lending practices. Ultimately, the game proves the odds are stacked up against Dot from creating generational wealth, no matter what decade she is in and the decisions she makes.
The American dream myth is that wealth and prosperity is out there for everyone’s taking, and that the house with the white picket fence is accessible to all. But players in Dot’s Game are shown the obstacles faced by Black homebuyers in the U.S.
“We wanted players to play the game and not necessarily empathize with Dot’s family but just to bear witness to, and accompany them through, these very intimate but consequential moments,” Christina Rosales, housing and land director at the community organizing nonprofit PowerSwitch Action and a co-producer of the game, told Bloomberg.
“As a player, you might feel like you have the choice to change the course of the future for this family, but ultimately, you don’t. It’s very much a rigged game. You get what you get,” Rosales told Kotaku.
The focus of Dot’s Home is to illustrate how Blacks, as well as other minorities, have to deal with housing issues, food insecurity and environmental risks, among other issues.
The concept for the game was developed through the Rise-Home Stories Project, an organization composed of Black and minority organizers that includes game designers, writers, activists and others. The group’s mission is to “change our [the] relationship to land, home, and race, by transforming the stories we tell about them,” according to its website.
Dot’s Home, which was released in late-October, and is free to play on Steam, Itch.io, Google Play and Apple’s App Store.
Last year, researchers at Facebook showed executives an example of the kind of hate speech circulating on the social network: an actual post featuring an image of four female Democratic lawmakers, known collectively as “The Squad.”
The poster, whose name was scrubbed out for privacy, referred to the women, two of whom are Muslim, as “swami rag heads.” A comment from another person used even more vulgar language, referring to the four women of color as “black c—s,” according to internal company documents exclusively obtained by The Washington Post.
Technology is supposed to make our lives more convenient and more equitable. Because, unlike people, computers and algorithms can’t be racist. But what if they totally are? #TheAmberRuffinShow #PeacockTV #Racism
The LR Zone 