News — black people

A White Iowa man who intentionally plowed his car into a crowd of Black Lives Matter protesters in August last year – reportedly injuring at least one person – will not be sentenced to prison and will also have his criminal record expunged if he doesn’t get into any trouble over the next three years.

According to USA Today, 45-year-old Michael Ray Stepanek was charged with one count of assault while displaying a dangerous weapon, an aggravated misdemeanor, and one count of willful injury causing bodily harm following the incident. He spent 76 days in jail.

Stepanek had initially justified his actions and reportedly told the police he drove his Toyota Camry into the protesters because they needed an “attitude adjustment.” In December, however, a district court judge moved to dismiss the first charge and also defer the second one. A $1,025 civil fine that was imposed on him was also suspended by the judge.

Per a criminal complaint of the incident, Stepanek got stuck in a hold-up together with other vehicles as the protestors had taken over the road. He then started “honking, and eventually making a U-turn while squealing his tires to turn around,” USA Today reported.

The complaint further stated Stepanek “shut off his lights, and drove around the block, where he chose to turn southbound … where there were no vehicles between him and the protesters. The defendant intentionally struck multiple protesters with his vehicle and sped away.”

The incident left at least one person injured, with the victim complaining of “pain due to being struck intentionally by the defendant’s vehicle,” the police said.

Responding to the incident and the judge’s ruling, John W. Bruzek, Stepanek’s lawyer, said his client was “remorseful” and his actions were spurred as a result of him being “inundated” with “propaganda” that labeled the Black Lives Matter protesters as “criminal, thugs, terrorists.”

“He apologizes for his conduct and to those he harmed. Michael is being held to account with a full and clear recognition of how much worse things may have been,” Bruzek said in the statement. “The court gave Michael an opportunity to prove himself during a statutory term of probation and expects him to be a decent person and that he not conduct himself like he did. If Michael doesn’t, the court will have the opportunity to convict him and take away the deferred.”

The plea deal was struck between Stepanek and the Johnson County Attorney’s Office. The department could, however, possibly be called out for double standards as prosecutors are currently pursuing charges against some Black Lives Matter protesters who partook in the demonstrations over the summer, Time reported.

“I can’t believe there’d be someone who hates the organization so much that they’d be willing to possibly kill people just because they’re blocking the road,” a student who witnessed the incident and recorded it told USA Today. “It is all crazy now that’s he’s not getting in very much trouble or anything.”

In what was a summer of racial reckoning triggered by the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis, the largely peaceful protests during that period also saw over a hundred incidents of people – including Stepanek – driving their cars into protestors. A terrorism researcher at the University of Chicago’s Project on Security and Threats, Ari Weil, told the news outlet that out of the 104 incidents he recorded, 43 were intentional and meant to cause harm. Thirty-nine drivers were charged for those incidents.

The Boston Art Commission unanimously voted to take down a contentious emancipation statue depicting former president Abraham Lincoln with a freed Black man kneeling before him.

The statue, which was installed in 1879 and has been a subject of controversy for the way the freed Black man is portrayed, was removed from the city’s Park Square on Tuesday morning, NBC Boston reported. Named “The Emancipation Group”, the statue was a replica of the Emancipation Memorial in Washington, D.C.

City officials, however, voted in favor of taking it down following a petition calling for it to be removed, which garnered almost 13,000 signatures. The creator of the petition, Tory Bullock, told the news outlet he always had issues with the statue since childhood, adding that he usually asked himself, “If he’s free, why is he still on his knees?”

Bullock added: “It brings a feeling of… kind of validation. A feeling of… if we see something that we don’t agree with… we can stand up and say something and a lot of people may listen and may force the process that wouldn’t have happened otherwise.”

According to the Arts and Culture website, the statue was donated to the city by Moses Kimball, a politician and the founder of the Boston Museum. They also explained that the freed Black man kneeling before Lincoln is based on a photo of Archer Alexander, a formerly enslaved man who “helped the Union Army before seeking freedom for himself and his family.”

“While he was recaptured several times under the Fugitive Slave Act, Alexander managed to escape and evade his abductors until the passage of the 13th Amendment,” they explained.

The statue has since been moved to a storage facility pending a decision on where to situate it next, the office of Mayor Marty Walsh said, CNN reported. “As expressed by so many during the public process this year, we fully agree that the statue should be relocated to a new publicly accessible location where its history and context can be better explained,” a spokeswoman for the mayor told the news outlet. “The decision for removal acknowledges the statue’s role in perpetuating harmful prejudices and obscuring the role of Black Americans in shaping the nation’s fight for freedom.”

In a statement, Mayor Walsh also said it was prudent they heeded the calls for its removal following the outcry from both the city’s residents as well as visitors.

“As we continue our work to make Boston a more equitable and just city, it’s important that we look at the stories being told by the public art in all of our neighborhoods,” Walsh said. “After engaging in a public process, it’s clear that residents and visitors to Boston have been uncomfortable with this statue, and its reductive representation of the Black man’s role in the abolitionist movement. I fully support the Boston Art Commission’s decision for removal and thank them for their work.”

In September of 1994, members of the Black Disciples street gang in Chicago decided 11-year-old Robert Sandifer was a little too much even for young men who were putting down rivals, as they would say, on the regular.

Sandifer, who was also called Yummy because he liked cookies, had proven exuberant and conspicuous. The Disciples feared that if they did not rein him in, the prepubescent could become an informant.

Yummy’s tendency to be showy and reckless means the police could grab him. And if they did, they would use the boy to get to the Disciples.

And so on September 1, the Disciples took out Yummy on the railroad underpass at East 108th Street and South Dauphin Avenue.

He was shot in the back of his head by Cragg and Derrick Hardaway, who were 14 and 16 respectively. The pair had ordered Yummy to go down on his knees.

Indeed, there had been a police manhunt for Yummy due to what Chicago’s head of police at the time, Sgt Ronald Palmer said was an initiation gone wrong.

On August 28 of that year, Yummy opened fire on a group of people, presumably from a rival gang, with a 9mm semiautomatic. He immediately fled the scene.

But Yummy also hit 14-year-old Shavon Dean, an innocent young girl who had been around the scene. Dean later died from the bullet wounds.

When rumors spread nationally that the perpetrator of the crime had been an 11-year-old, the shock of the crime was tripled.

Recent debates about what Chicago means to young black men have their foundations from about this time. The frequency of the terrors left so many with questions.

The Hardaway brothers had been sent by the Disciples on August 31 to deal with the problem Yummy had brought the gang. The brothers were later convicted.

Interestingly, the Black Disciples were founded in 1966 as part of efforts to advance civil rights. Along the way, that noble vision was lost.

A Chinese man who was studying chemistry at Pennsylvania’s Lehigh University on a student visa has pleaded guilty to attempted murder after poisoning his former Black roommate’s food and drinks with heavy metal in 2018.

According to WFMZ, the accused, Yukai Yang, entered the guilty plea – one count of attempted murder – on Monday in exchange for the Northampton County District Attorney’s Office to drop other charges in relation to two other cases after he is sentenced.

He was initially charged with attempted murder, reckless endangerment and assault. The 24-year-old faces 6 to 20 years in prison, and also faces deportation to his native China after serving his time as he’s a non-US citizen. His student visa has also been revoked.

Testifying before the court, First Assistant District Attorney Richard Pepper said Yang purchased the poisonous heavy metal, thallium, in March 2018, and then started lacing it in the food and drinks of his roommate, Juwan Royal. The two had reportedly been roommates for four years.

Royal, who testified in 2018, told the court about the “unfathomable pain” he felt and the string of medical conditions he suffered, including nausea, weight loss, headaches and heart palpitations, due to the thallium poisoning, WFMZ reported.

Royal said he initially started feeling a tingling sensation in his arms, hands, feet and legs. He said the tingling sensation aggravated into a “pain that I didn’t think was possible.”

“It was as if someone took a hundred tiny knives, set them on fire and was stabbing my feet,” he told the court.

Between March and May of that year, Royal testified he lost around 20 pounds and could hardly ingest any food, adding that the poisoning even made him afraid to eat. Royal also said the pain in his feet was so “excruciating” he could neither sleep nor climb the stairs and had to even wear a heart monitor for some time as a result of the palpitations.

“It felt as though my body was failing me,” he testified. He was reportedly diagnosed with heavy metal poisoning in April 2018. Though the pain in his feet eventually disappeared, Royal told the court he still feels numbness in his toes, and he is less energetic as compared to his condition prior to the poisoning, WFMZ reported.

Royal said he couldn’t identify what may have caused Yang to poison him. Though he admitted they weren’t the best of friends, he described their relationship as amicable and friendly. Prior to the attempted murder charges being filed against Yang, he was being investigated for ethnic intimation after he allegedly destroyed Royal’s television and also wrote racial slurs on his stuff.

Yang’s sentencing is scheduled for January 21, although subject to change.

“When I heard my name called out on promotion day, it honestly felt like the skies opened up. Whether I was being featured or not over the years, I pushed myself and strived to be the best version of myself on stage and off. So, to finally make it to principal with ABT, it was a dream come true!”

Those were the words of Calvin Royal III in an interview in September. That month, he became the first Black male principal dancer with the American Ballet Theater (ABT) in more than two decades. Desmond Richardson was the ABT’s first Black male principal dancer, who went on to dance with Complexions Contemporary Ballet.

Royal, following his promotion in September, joins Misty Copeland in the roster of ABT’s principal dancers. This comes a year after Royal and Copeland became the first Black duo in ABT to dance the lead roles in ballet, by performing Ratmansky’s restaging of Harlequinade.

Studying ballet for the first time at 14 years old, Royal was first introduced to the dance performance during a community project in his hometown but it was in middle school that he paid more attention to it. There, he auditioned with friends for the High School of Performing Arts and won a scholarship to the summer program at Philadelphia’s famous Rock School where he studied ballet.

Royal then performed in scores of dance competitions before earning a scholarship to ABT’s Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis School in September 2006, a pre-professional ballet training program for students aged 12-17. It was tough from the start, he said.

“It was challenging on so many levels, not just being the only Black kid in my class but being away from home for the first time…I felt this sense of, ‘Ok, I’m an adult now at 17.’ That’s a lot to kind of settle in with,” Royals said. “Then, despite the longing for a sense of community, knowing that I came here because I have something that got me this scholarship to be here. I always knew that because I didn’t see people who looked like me at the top, I wanted to get there so I could help to bridge the gap and open that door.”

President Donald Trump continues to refuse to concede defeat in the US presidential election even though major independent media outlets have called the race for Democratic presidential nominee and former vice-president Joe Biden.

Instead, Trump has ranted and raved, in a somewhat predictable fashion, and at one time thrown aspersions on the culture of the American public trusting the media’s tabulations after elections. Mind you, the Associated Press (AP) has been calling elections before the Civil War.

Since it became clear his victory speech a day after November 3 was both severely premature and prophetically-challenged, the president has been raging on about electoral fraud, a charge that is constantly challenged on Jack Dorsey’s Twitter and trashed in America’s courts. So far, Republican attorneys have failed to persuade state justices to treat with seriousness any of the innumerable Hail Mary suits filed to injure the integrity of the election.

At the moment, American institutional democracy is being challenged. But whether or not the system is fortified against a coup d’état is a pronouncement we can make with more confidence after December 14 when all states have ratified their results. For now, we need to caution against alarmism and on the other hand, fight against the good poisoning Trump and his Republican enablers are undertaking.

However, what has become an unfortunate casualty in this political drama is the lack of headlines on how once again, America’s Black people have forced the nation to retake the path to a more perfect union. In the news right now, the dark clouds of a president’s tantrums have overshadowed the meaning of his defeat and the valor of his defeaters.

More than any other racial group, Black people voted overwhelmingly for Biden, a rate that currently stands at more than 87%. From Atlanta to Detroit, historic victories were sealed thanks to mass Black support for the Democratic candidate.

When the dust settles, 2020 will be the biggest utilitarian exercise in American democracy by the number of votes that were cast and by volume of the electorate that participated in the process. We have the president to thank for causing the biggest referendum on an American politician in 120 years. Even though he lost, Trump will have more votes than have ever been cast for an American politician except for Biden.

Across the racial spectrum, there were upticks among all groups as we have never seen before. Soon, we will make a better sense of how things turned out among the racial demographics but we already know that there was a surge in the number from 2016 among Hispanics, who make up 32 million of the US electorate.

The story was no different among Asian-Americans as well as among other minorities including African-Americans. Among white people, the numbers in the south were prominent and as Vox notes, there was an increment from 2016 of white voters in the Rust Belt.

We assume Trump – and we are according to many indications, right – was the reason for the boost in all these demographics. Nevertheless, in analyzing trends, it is better to err on the side of scientific caution. For instance, we are not expected to conflate the value-laden concept of identity and the science of demography.

Identity carries the burdens of values, aspirations, and fears while demographics is the statistical distribution of a given population. A change there does not necessarily cause a change here, nor the other way round. Therefore Trump or better still, the facts of his person and presidency, may have driven people to the polls but these voters were voting in their own self-interest.

Hence, the question is necessary: what was on the ballot for these demographics? In the lead up to the election, various surveys proved quite resourceful in this vein but for me, Pew Research’s partisan breakdown of what and how much matters to Americans stands incomparable as a definer of the times Americans live in.

More than the economy, gender politics, climate change, and the macabre headache of the coronavirus, opinions on race divided Red and Blue voters than anything else in 2020. To reiterate, while one-in-ten among Trump supporters said Black people have it a “lot more difficult” than whites, about 74% of Biden voters believed that was the case.

We were more likely than in 2016, to predict correctly who an American was voting for if we knew how that American felt on race. All the noise about polarization happens to be true, sadly.

The tendency to pretend that race does not animate political sensibilities has paid off majorly for Republicans and in part for a Democratic establishment that is not interested in muddying the waters. This is not even entirely about tipping hats to overt racism among the white electorate. Democratic Majority Whip and the South Carolina congressman, Jim Clyburn, the man credited with winning the southern Black vote for Biden during the primaries, blamed Democratic losses in Congress on calls to defund the police even though those calls come from a Black Lives Matter movement Clyburn would on any day support.

Clyburn even told CBS News that the late John Lewis had reservations about calls to defund the police because of what it’d cost the fortunes of the Democratic Party.

Far be it from anyone to challenge the commitments of Lewis and Clyburn to social justice but the two men’s position represents a strategy with the feelings of white conservative voters in mind. Somehow, calling for the demilitarization and the de-escalation of overbearing police authority and reinvesting funds into other social goods necessary to racial minorities is a line too far.

The entire plot of American politics is an unfolding Hegelian history of white people’s sentiments on how much economic and political control they are willing to cede to racial minorities. Embedded in every issue and their deliberations are the facts of racial identity. If there is an end to this Hegelian unfolding, people of goodwill can only believe it is the destination of the constitutional ideal of a more perfect union.

The fullness of the American promise is the perfect union. It is a collective must, a goal meaningful for its own sake. Certainly, one’s race should not stand in the way of their participation.

But race matters in the sacred democratic practice of elections. Between the election of 1932 and that of 1980, three elections stood out for their exceptionally high rates of turnout – 1960, 1964, and 1968. It is certainly not coincidental that the 60s was a watershed decade for African-American civil rights amidst wider counterculture politics.

The only other time Americans trooped to the polls in mammoth volumes were the decades following the Civil War fought over the south’s determination to keep slaves. There too, we can theorize a reaction to whatever racial progress had perceivably been made.

The democratic ambition of a more perfect union has always been on the ballot since Black men could vote. Detractors of this ambition have equally been around, planting impediments anywhere they can.

What we witness with Trump is certainly not an American aberration yet he is unique in what Bernie Sanders calls “the most dangerous American president in our lifetime”. Since the turn of the 20th century, no president has given more fodder to the detractors of the perfect union.

Thankfully, he can now only unleash two months’ worth of loser’s wrath from the highest office. But it is important to remember that in the last four years, Trump has tested America’s democratic resoluteness with every rally, most tweets, and many executive decisions.

When the election came this year, the American president had come to represent a verifiable antithesis of the perfect union. A lifeline was necessary. Something positively different was non-negotiable.

For those who were watching and listening, not because they wanted to “piss off the libs” or hold a middle finger to polite America, Trump left the electorate with no doubt about who he was and no grey patches in his field of black.

It has seemed a trick question for me whenever people have asked if all Trump voters are racists. It is as if one is being dared to see others in the worst light possible. But as journalist Paola Ramos told Christiane Amanpour in the aftermath of the election, 2020 was simply a question of what America chose to be in light of changing demographics.

Biden and Trump, separated only by three years in age, are both white men of when white was unchallenged. But the former was the candidate open to the incoming multicolored American future. He bet on a better for all who do not look like the America in which he grew up.

The US Census Bureau believes in 25 years, non-Hispanic white people will be in the minority in America. This country cannot continue to rely on lifelines and cannot phone a friend.

Whenever Black people have committed to the path of the more perfect union, which is a lifeline for America. But there is no good reason to keep counting on these lifelines. To do so would be out of ingratitude.

In Detroit, Trump’s supporters, mainly white people, descended on ballot-counting centers in the city chanting “Stop the count!” for the very specific reason that the candidate of their choice was on his way out of the White House. Throughout this year, armed militias of white men have brazenly provoked hostilities in support of the man they believe is their savior.

Those are two ways to waste a lifeline but America has been at this in various ways for decades. But could someone remind this beloved country that lifelines are not eternal?

Three counties in Atlanta are going to have the first Black sheriffs in their respective history after the three men, who are all Democrats, were elected to fill the seats during Tuesday’s election.

Craig Owens, a police major, defeated long-time Cobb County Republican Sheriff Neil Warren whilst electorates in Gwinnett County chose Keybo Taylor over his opponent, Luis Solis. Reginald Scandrett also edged over Jack Redlinger in Henry County.

“It’s music to my ears,” Owens, who defeated his opponent by a margin of almost 35,000 votes (54.7% to 45.2%), told the news outlet after his victory. “I’ve been waiting for this for well over a year.”

“We have an opportunity to make history and that’s something we don’t take lightly,” he continued. “We’re gonna come in prepared being the professionals that we are and we’re gonna run this county like it should be. We’re going to treat everybody in this county with dignity and respect.”

Over in Gwinnett and Henry counties, Taylor and Scandrett also convincingly beat their opponents by 57% to 43%, and 60.3% to 39.7%.

“Yesterday, we finished the drill,” Taylor told his supporters on Wednesday, Gwinnett Daily Post reported. “You lifted your voices at the polls and stood in solidarity with an agenda that includes all of Gwinnett.”

The Cobb County Board of Elections will officially certify the election results on November 12. Their historic victories, according to Owens, go a long way to show how the metro Atlanta area is evolving when it comes to diversity.

“I think that will show a young black man, or a female, that they could also be the sheriff one day,” Owens told Channel 2 Action News.

Leading up to the election, Owens and Taylor promised sweeping reforms when given the mandate. In Cobb County, Owens’ predecessor, Warren, faced intense scrutiny over the conditions of the county jail following the deaths of several inmates during his incumbency in the last year.

“We’re gonna do things differently in Cobb. We’re gonna do things the right way,” Owens promised. “You can see how much Cobb has changed. And I think Cobb was due for a change.”

Owens’ and Taylor’s victories also mean they are most likely to scrap a federal partnership their respective counties have with the ICE following promises they made to cut ties with the agency during their campaigns. Known as 287(g), the program allows local deputies, who are trained and mandated by the ICE to act on their behalf, to identify, detain and deport undocumented immigrants in their custody, according to The Appeal. The immigrants usually end up in county jails for traffic and other non-violent offenses.

Locals, however, argue the program unfairly targets Latinos, Africans, Muslims and other immigrants and also scares people out of reporting crimes for fear of being deported. In Gwinnett County, for instance, the number of ICE detainees under the program shot up after Donald Trump assumed office.

“There’s all kinds of crimes being committed in these neighborhoods that are not being reported because people are afraid they’re going to be deported as well,” Taylor told The Appeal.

Owens also said the program “often turns into profiling, looking at Africans, Latinos, Muslims and other immigrants. It causes all types of problems, is expensive to maintain and I don’t see why the county should be involved in it.”

And though the ICE could retaliate with raids as they did in 2018 in Mecklenburg County, North Carolina, after a newly-elected Sheriff ended the program, Taylor, during a virtual debate with his opponent leading up to the election, said he would still take the high road.

“It’s almost like an ultimatum: either I cooperate with ICE or I’m going to be responsible for what they do in my neighborhoods. I take issue with them conducting raids simply because I refuse to participate in 287(g),” Owens said. “At the end of the day, I still won’t participate.”

Ethiopia may be on the brink of “a civil war”, according to experts who have spoken on the decision of the country’s prime minister, Abiy Ahmed, to order a military attack in response to hostile forces who attacked an army base in the north of the country on Wednesday.

The semi-autonomous northern state of Tigray, administered by the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF), is a tensed part of the country where the ruling party insists Addis Ababa has no compelling authority. The north of the country also holds the bulk of Ethiopia’s military installation, a situation that resulted from the 1998 war with northern neighbor Eritrea.

Speaking on Wednesday, Prime Minister Ahmed said TPLF had”crossed the red line” with the federal army “that has been protecting the people of Tigray for more than twenty years”. Ahmed also said Tigray now regards the Ethiopian army as “a foreign army”.

A statement from the Office of the Prime Minister also said the federal government had “maintained a policy of extreme patience and caution” in the face of “months of continued provocation and incite for violence by TPLF”. But now, the federal government is on the offensive, launching attacks on TPLF in certain areas.

These attacks are expected to continue on Thursday.

The BBC also reports electricity, telephone and internet services in Tigray have been cut. Ethiopia’s parliament has also proposed deliberating on a motion that seeks to characterize the TPLF as a terrorist organization.

But a professor of democracy at the University of Birmingham, Nic Cheeseman, warned that “Ethiopia could come apart at the seams” if the government engages the TPLF in open conflict. A few other ethnic groups in the country are currently pushing to secede from Africa’s second-most populous country.

Cheeseman added that what has emerged in the country “looks a lot like the start of civil war in Ethiopia”.

The Tigray ethnic group constitutes only about 5% of the country’s population but is probably the richest. Tigray is represented by TPLF, which used to be led by former Prime Minister Meles Zenawi.

The TPLF backed out of a governing coalition headed by the current prime minister over disagreements with Ahmed. These disagreements have since devolved into violent tensions.

Many Black people and other minority groups feel insecure under the administration of Donald Trump. Yet the U.S. president has done little to reassure them of their safety. He has in the past refused to condemn white supremacists and in situations where he offered a condemnation, he did so reluctantly.

Concerned about the safety of Blacks in the US, former rapper, producer and DJ in the 1970s, John Fitzgerald Johnson, also known as Grand Master Jay, has formed a militia group to protect the Black community.

The Not F*cking Around Coalition (NAC) intends to carry out its activities of protecting Blacks before and after the U.S. election in the face of a growing threat from white supremacists and police brutality against unarmed Black men.

In a recent podcast, Grand Master Jay vowed to protect the rights of Black voters who may be intimidated by white supremacists at the polls. “I think that everybody needs to climb down out of their emotional tree, and remember that it is against federal law to show up at a voting place with weapons and intimidate anybody,” he said on “Run and Tell This podcast.”

“If the United States government doesn’t want to enforce that law against people that doesn’t look like us, they’re not going to enforce it against us. We have no intentions of starting a confrontation or firefight over this vote.”

According to him, the Black community feel disenfranchised by the whole US electoral system. He explained that the mission of the group is not to fight anyone who wants to vote for either Trump or Biden but to ward-off the Proud Boys and other white supremacy groups. 

According to ADL, a non-profit organization that works to stop hate groups, the Proud Boys is a misogynistic, Islamophobic, transphobic and anti-immigration organization. Some members espouse white supremacist and anti-Semitic ideologies and/or engage with white supremacist groups, it added.

In the first presidential debate against Biden, Trump told the group to “stand back and stand by.” He added: “But I’ll tell you what, somebody’s got to do something about Antifa and the left, because this is not a right-wing problem. This is a left-wing problem.”

Shortly after the debate, Proud Boys organizer, Joe Biggs, posted on social media: “President Trump told the proud boys to stand by because someone needs to deal with ANTIFA… well sir! we’re ready!!.” 

For Grand Master and his militia, the president essentially gave marching orders to the Proud Boys to attack Black voters, something he and his men would not allow to happen on Election Day and beyond.

“We’re not carrying those guns for show,” he said on the podcast, adding that: “You best believe I’m prepared to die so that you and your children can have a future.”

Not F*cking Around Coalition was formed in 2017 after white supremacists marched through the streets of Charlottesville, Virginia, and instigated violence, leading to the death of one person and many sustaining injuries.

“This was it. We had to get serious,” Grand Master Jay told VICE News. “No more talking. No more speculating. No more ‘What ifs.’ That was when I knew race relations had gotten to a point. What were we doing here? Things are just getting worse.”

The group has two missions. The first is to form an “inter-city security force to protect Black communities and the second mission is to form an “ethnostate”, a new country that’s “owned, operated by Blacks.”

In a move to leave its colonial past behind, the Barbados government is now all set to remove the statue of Vice Admiral Lord Horatio Nelson from the National Heroes Square in the heart of the capital, Bridgetown.

The statue, which has stood in the city for over 200 years, will be removed on November 16, 2020, on International Day of Tolerance, a year before dropping Queen Elizabeth II as Head of State. 

Announcing the decision which he described as “a step towards the healing of the Nation”, John King, Minister in the Prime Minister’s Office with responsibility for Culture, said, “This is indeed an ultimate statement of confidence in who we are as a people and what we are capable of achieving.”

“As we amend the Constitution to have a Barbadian Head of State, and as a symbol of the maturity of our democracy, it is imperative that we reexamine notable elements of our colonial past. Cabinet’s decision to remove the statue is part of this process as we seek to promote national identity as part of a modern Barbados.”

The recent wave of black consciousness that swept over the western world attracted calls for lingering symbols of slavery and colonialism to be removed across the world. An online petition calling for the removal of the statue led by former journalist Alex Downes garnered thousands of signatures in Barbados.

“In a country where approx. 95 percent of the population is also black, why do we continue to proudly force ourselves to relive the traumas our people have faced by having this statue stand in Heroes Square?” Downes questioned.

The 30-year old Barbadian further called on the Government of Barbados to replace the statue with a symbol of unity which acknowledges the true work of the country’s heroes.

The statue of Nelson – a British Navy officer — was erected over two centuries ago in honor of his victory against French forces in the Valley of Trafalgar. However, Nelson’s staunch support for the Transatlantic Slave Trade has attracted tremendous criticism in recent times.

According to a letter penned by Nelson to his friend, Simon Taylor — a British plantation owner  in Jamaica — in regard to slavery, he remarked: “I have ever been and shall die a firm friend to our present colonial system…neither in the field or in the Senate shall their interest be infringed whilst I have an arm to fight in their defense, or a tongue to launch my voice against the damnable and cursed doctrine of Wilberforce and his hypocritical allies.”

Apart from Barbados, many people across the globe support the symbolic act of reclaiming dignity and exposing long-celebrated racists. Bahamas and Trinidad and Tobago have strongly called for the removal of statues of Christopher Columbus.