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Camille

Camille

Kitchen Wench #TeamQuaid
Staff member



In the trailer for one of Christopher Rufo’s early documentaries, a shot of a rural villager driving a donkey cart cuts to scenes of a downtown Chinese cityscape, then a baseball diamond. “Two cultures in Western China are in deep conflict. Living in complete segregation, can they put aside their differences in the name of baseball?” the narrator asks. “Diamond in the Dunes,” a PBS documentary Rufo directed in 2009, serves as a reminder of the radical transformation the young filmmaker turned far-right activist has undergone in the past several years. Long gone are the days when Rufo championed the coming together of Uyghurs and ethnic Chinese in a campy multiculturalist tribute to America’s favorite pastime.


Today, Rufo is credited as the main architect of conservatives’ weaponization of critical race theory, using his skills as a director and investigative researcher to stoke panic in the GOP base, while simultaneously using critical race theory as a catalyst to introduce curriculum-altering bills in state legislatures across the country.


Early this year, Rufo was appointed by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis to serve on the board of the New College of Florida, and he appeared at the Republican governor’s signing of the Stop Wrongs to Our Kids and Employees — or WOKE — Act, which bans discussions about certain forms of discrimination in work spaces and schools. He is a senior fellow at the conservative Manhattan Institute and regularly appears on cable and independent media to attack Disney for its queer and multiracial excesses, stoke fears about LGBTQ “groomers,” and attack gender affirming health care.


As Rufo’s efforts to fuel the culture war tearing America’s society at the seams grew, so too did the money pouring into the organization that produced “Diamond in the Dunes.” The Documentary Foundation, a tax-exempt nonprofit, received millions of dollars, including hundreds of thousands in untraceable cash, at the same time that it propped up a new right-wing media venture.


The organization brought in just under $2 million in 2021, and it paid Rufo a salary of over $300,000, according to its tax filing. At least one-third of that money came from donor-advised funds, or DAFs, according to The Intercept’s review of records filed with the IRS. DAFs are investment accounts that receive and distribute charitable donations and are common sources of funding for nonprofits, including for The Intercept. But they are not required to disclose the connection between donors who pay into the fund and the final destination of their charitable gift, which can make it almost impossible to trace.


Leonard Leo, the conservative legal activist who has played a key role in pushing the federal judiciary to the right, has similarly employed DAFs in his political project, as the New York Times reported last month.

In an email, Rufo told The Intercept that he “wound down operations for the Documentary Foundation last year,” and pointed to a recent article in which he wrote that he “founded a new nonprofit corporation in Washington State.”


The Documentary Foundation had not released a feature-length documentary since 2019, the PBS film “America Lost,” though it continued to pay him a salary.


Additionally, tax records show, the Documentary Foundation is the primary funder of National Progress Alliance, a right-wing media nonprofit with the declared mission of restoring “free speech and open inquiry as non-partisan values” and revealing “the implications of a far-left ideological takeover.” Like the videos Rufo now posts to YouTube every month, the content produced by the National Progress Alliance tends to focus on race, transgender health care, and education.


Rufo confirmed that the Documentary Foundation served as a fiscal sponsor for the National Progress Alliance, which did not respond to a request for comment.


Rufo’s salary and donations to the National Progress Alliance comprised the overwhelming majority of the Documentary Foundation’s $1.3 million in spending in 2021. The Documentary Foundation was administratively dissolved and became inactive in February of this year, according to a filing with the Washington Secretary of State’s office, and its 2022 tax filings are not yet available.


For the past few years, Rufo has elevated critical race theory: an academic discipline that studies how racism shapes public policy. In 2020, he appeared on Tucker Carlson Tonight and declared that critical race theory had “become, in essence, the default ideology of the federal bureaucracy and is now being weaponized against the American people.” Rufo’s appearance prompted President Donald Trump to issue an executive order banning racial sensitivity training for federal employees.


Rufo has said that he seeks to maximize voters’ anxieties around gender issues and is forward with his intentions to manipulate public perception for political gain. “The goal is to have the public read something crazy in the newspaper and immediately think ‘critical race theory,’” Rufo wrote on Twitter in 2021. “We have decodified the term and will recodify it to annex the entire range of cultural constructions that are unpopular with Americans.”


He is credited with catalyzing bills banning the discussion of sexual orientation in Florida and Texas, and his attacks on public school curriculum are laying the groundwork for widespread educational privatization.


Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, wrote in Time magazine last year that Rufo’s endgame “is to destabilize public education and replace it with a universal, unregulated voucher system which would increase segregation and exacerbate already wide gaps between the rich and the rest of us.”


The National Progress Alliance is overseen by Executive Director Peter Boghossian, a former Portland State University professor who resigned in 2021 over what he described as a prolonged harassment campaign against him and his research projects, and the transformation of the school into a “Social Justice factory.” Boghossian’s recent work is a far cry from his position on the Republican Party just a few years ago: In 2016, Boghossian penned an article decrying Donald Trump as an existential threat over his climate denialism and disregard for environmental issues. “Trump and [the] Republican Party literally threaten the existence of our species. While this statement may sound alarming, it’s not in the least alarmist.”


Since its founding, the National Progress Alliance has produced videos by “Author and 5th-degree jiu-jitsu black belt Matt Thornton” on “Violence, Antifa, and BLM” in addition to man-on-the-street interviews in socially conservative Romania and Hungary. The organization has also featured “powerful testimony from a molecular geneticist” attacking the rights of transgender people to exist.

Rufo’s rise in conservative media and politics has coincided with increased donations to his nonprofit: In 2020, the Documentary Foundation’s total revenue was $155,353, according to tax filings. In 2021, the year after he broke into the mainstream, that number increased by more than a factor of 10 to $1,991,274. Before that, the organization’s peak revenue was $425,121 in 2013, with a low of $36,735 in 2018, according to tax records.

Asked about the organization’s 2021 revenue, Rufo said, “Much of this was for a fiscal sponsorship, not fundraising by or for the Documentary Foundation. In addition, I was working for Discovery Institute for much of 2020, which accounts for the lower amount of fundraising relative to the following year, when I was actively working on Documentary Foundation initiatives.” He described that work as “a range of research, publication, production, and distribution work across 2020 and 2021, including the PBS documentary America Lost and work on homelessness, mental illness, drug addiction, and critical race theory.”

The funding has poured in from a variety of conservative foundations. The aforementioned Discovery Institute, a Seattle-based nonprofit advocating for the anti-evolution concept of “intelligent design,” donated $225,000 in 2021. In 2020 and 2021, the Conru Foundation, backed by Adult FriendFinder founder Andrew Conru, donated a total of $50,000, while other individual linked charities including the McCarthy Family Charitable Foundation, the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, and the Thomas W. Smith Foundation donated a combined sum of over $100,000.

The Documentary Foundation’s largest donors, however, are donor-advised funds. In 2021, the single largest donor identifiable in public IRS records was the Fidelity Charitable Gift Fund, which contributed $496,995. In total, DAFs funneled at least $670,000 to Rufo’s nonprofit that year. The Documentary Foundation went on to donate almost that same exact amount — $690,000 — to the National Progress Alliance in 2021, the year it was founded, according to a tax filing. That’s almost all of the organization’s total revenue of $704,150 that year.

Asked about who advised on its half-million-dollar donation, Fidelity spokesperson Yakub Mohamed said that the fund does not comment on individual donors for privacy reasons.

The other DAFs that contributed to the Documentary Foundation are Schwab Charitable, Vanguard Charitable, the American Endowment Foundation, the Greater Houston Community Foundation, and the American Online Giving Foundation.

Schwab, one of the DAFs that received and distributed money to and from organizations tied to Leonard Leo, has lobbied the IRS to maintain the practice of shielding investors from scrutiny. “Schwab Charitable is cause neutral and does not interfere with a donor’s recommendation to a charity that is deemed eligible by the IRS and state regulators,” Grace Connoly, a spokesperson for Schwab told The Intercept. “Grants recommended by donors do not reflect the values or beliefs of Schwab Charitable or its management. We encourage anyone with concerns about a charitable organization to contact the IRS.”

Spokespeople from Vanguard and the Greater Houston Community Foundation also cited cause neutrality in their responses to The Intercept. The other DAFs that donated to Rufo did not respond to requests for comment.

“All donations made through donor-advised funds are reported in detail to the IRS,” Rufo wrote to The Intercept. “The idea that they are ‘untraceable’ is simply not true.”

Under U.S. tax code, charities must collect donations from a diverse set of donors to maintain tax-exempt status, though DAFs are a way for a single donor to provide most of an organization’s funding without causing it to forfeit its charitable status, said Roger Colinvaux, a professor of tax law at Catholic University.

“Some people use DAFs as a dark-money facilitator, but there are other ways to anonymize, so it’s not like DAFs are the only way to make large anonymous donations,” Colinvaux said. “One thing that could be happening with Leonard Leo or Chris Rufo, if they receive money through a DAF, and the DAF gives money to a charity, then that can help the charity to qualify as a public charity instead of as a private foundation.”
 
Camille

Camille

Kitchen Wench #TeamQuaid
Staff member


A New Front in Reparations: Seeking the Return of Lost Family Land

Black families lost millions in wealth when their lands were seized through eminent domain. Now some are trying to get it back.




For much of their lives, the Jones siblings had passed by a parking lot on the campus of the University of Alabama in Huntsville without giving it much thought. Then one day, a relative casually pointed to the spot and said she thought it was once owned by their ancestors, who had farmed the land since the 1870s.

The Joneses want it back.

“For our family and others, it’s not just about the taking of the land, it’s about the taking of our ability to build wealth,” said Michael Jones, 63, the youngest of five brothers and sisters.

African American families across the country — particularly in the South — are pushing for the return of land they say was taken in government seizures, an emerging attempt to provide economic restoration for the long saga of Black land loss and deprived inheritances.

Carrying passed-down family stories, descendants are searching for aging deeds and scouring public records to try to prove past ownership of properties that are now the sites of businesses, college dormitories and in the case of the Joneses, a parking lot for a campus business administration building.

They want the land or to be paid current market value. In some cases, families are asking for acknowledgment of the harm done as a way to return their history to public memory.


A national organization dedicated to helping Black families recover lost land has received about 700 claims to properties since 2021. One real estate lawyer has heard from hundreds of people looking for assistance. Black property loss and the case for reparations, long the realm of academics, has now spilled into politics as the nation debates compensation for the descendants of those enslaved in the United States.

“We are talking about the loss of heritage and history and culture,” said Thomas W. Mitchell, a law professor and director of the Initiative on Land, Housing & Property Rights at Boston College Law School. “You are talking about a fundamental hit in terms of economic mobility and generational wealth.”

Generally, the claims are separate from broader public efforts at reparations being considered by states, cities and some universities. In some individual claims, families are appealing directly to the entities that now possess the land. Only a very few such cases have gotten traction; most are in the early stages and could take years to progress, if they do at all.

For many Black families, the loss of property stripped by deceit, violence or using eminent domain — and often sold below market prices — was relegated to bittersweet memories and cautionary tales.

Scholars say the use of eminent domain was often racially motivated and invoked disproportionately in minority and poor communities. One study showed that between 1949 and 1973, 2,532 eminent domain projects in 992 cities displaced one million people — two-thirds of them African American.

For decades, families talked about the land that their ancestors owned as an infuriating, yet unsurprising personal history, rather than a winnable modern-day fight.

Over the years, a few families fought to get their land back. But as talk of racial justice has taken a more concrete form in the aftermath of the killing of George Floyd, more families are seeking the return of what was once their land.

A California panel last month recommended billions in reparations for African American families in the state. San Francisco is considering $5 million in cash payments as a way to bring back Black residents harmed by housing policies.

Separately, the return of prime beachfront real estate in Southern California to the descendants of the Bruce family, nearly a century after the land was seized from its ancestors through eminent domain, inspired more families to examine their own histories.

Michael Jones and his siblings were in their hometown, Huntsville, Ala., when they learned the return of Bruce’s Beach had been finalized. They had been following the story with the tiniest bits of cautious hope. To them, much of the Bruces’ story mirrored their own history with the land their family had used to farm cotton and corn.

Mr. Jones said his research shows that the land was seized in 1962 from his parents by local government using eminent domain — authority that allows governments to seize properties in the interest of public use, often to clear the way for freeways, parks and development. The state law calls for property owners to be paid “just compensation.”

The Jones siblings, who began researching their family’s history in 1995, say their father turned down an offer to purchase his 10-acre plot, and in 1954, the city condemned the property in order to gain access to a water source, forcing the family to move. In the years that followed, documents appear to show their parents, Willie and Lola Jones, signed the deed over to the chief of the Huntsville Land Acquisition office. The Joneses say the transaction was fraudulent because their father could not read or write and could not have signed the documents.

The Joneses’s plot was later sold to the University of Alabama in Huntsville. A university representative declined to comment. “The University of Alabama in Huntsville does not make public comments on particular matters such as this,” said Kristina L. Hendrix, the university’s vice president for strategic communications.

A City of Huntsville representative said it learned about the Joneses’s claim through media reports but had not been approached by the family or an organization called Where Is My Land that helps African American families trying to reclaim lost land. “Our legal team is aware, and it would be inappropriate for the City of Huntsville to publicly comment on the matter at this time,” said Kelly Schrimsher, the communication director.

Last year, a group of scholars estimated the loss of agricultural land once owned by Black families. The research showed that farmers, the largest group of Black landowners, lost more than 90 percent of the 16 million acres they owned in 1910, based largely on discrimination by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. The present compounded value of the land loss came to about $326 billion from 1920 to 1997, the study said.

An Associated Press investigation published in 2001 found hundreds of Black landowners lost more than 24,000 acres — worth tens of millions in today’s dollars — through unethical legal tactics and racial violence.

George Fatheree III, a lawyer who represented the Bruce family, said since his involvement with the case became public, he has been contacted almost every day by a Black family who share a similar story. He said the calls or emails recount their personal history, something like: “We had 100 acres of farmland in Texas, and the sheriff came with dogs and guns and said, ‘If we didn’t leave town, there would be trouble.’ So we lost everything.”

Researchers and lawyers say cases face a mountain of obstacles, from the passage of time to gaps in public records.
So far, Where Is My Land has determined about 240 of the 700 claims submitted seem promising, and it will be asking families to submit more information, lead researcher Kamala Miller-Lester said. Within that number, about 45 are considered active cases — including the Jones siblings’ claim — meaning the documentation has been vetted by Where Is My Land and the group is working with the family and its lawyers.


In Georgia, Black families settled near the University of Georgia in Athens in the early 1900s in Linnentown, then a vibrant, close-knit neighborhood with about 50 homeowners. As part of an urban renewal project, the city of Athens and the state Board of Regents displaced the families to make way for three dormitories on campus. By the mid-1960s, the community was gone. Residents were paid as little as $1,450 for their properties. A University of Georgia analysis said homeowners received “only 56 percent of the amount they would have received if their properties had valued similarly to those outside of Linnentown.”

“We had masons, construction workers, electricians and carpenters, even a professional baseball player living in Linnentown. It was one big village,” said Hattie Thomas Whitehead, 74, a fourth-generation descendant of Linnentown. “We had Easter egg hunts and Bible study on Wednesday nights. We made a playground by the creek.”

Ms. Whitehead and the few remaining descendants formed a group to demand redress from the county and the university. They asked for $5 million in reparations — split between Athens-Clarke County and the college — along with memorial markers and the renaming of a building on the campus.

Greg Trevor, a spokesman for the University of Georgia, said the decision on compensation rested with the Board of Regents, which oversees of the University System of Georgia, which purchased the land. Neither the board nor the office of Gov. Brian Kemp responded to requests for comment.

Mr. Trevor said the university had met with Linnentown descendants and had offered to include the story of Linnentown in an oral history project maintained by University of Georgia Libraries.

In 2021, Kelly Girtz, the mayor of Athens, issued a general “proclamation of apology” for urban renewal projects in the city. The Athens-Clarke County Commission later approved a resolution specifically acknowledging the destruction of Linnentown and committed $2.5 million to fund affordable housing programs and a race and justice center. State law prohibits direct payments to private individuals.

The resolution stated the neighborhood was systematically destroyed through intimidation, controlled fires, “tokenized” Black representation and “paternalistic” relocation policies.

“Linnentown,” the resolution said, “was effectively erased without a trace by the City of Athens and the University System of Georgia.”
 
Camille

Camille

Kitchen Wench #TeamQuaid
Staff member
:colin: :colin: :colin: :colin: :colin:


www.dailykos.com

Auctioning 700-some People

A very interesting story from ProPublica, whose stories really should be circulated here far more often. Republished under their CC license. By all means, visit their site. How a Grad Student Uncovered the Largest Known Slave Auction in the U.S. by...
www.dailykos.com
 
Camille

Camille

Kitchen Wench #TeamQuaid
Staff member


blacknews.com

20-Year-Old Black Woman Graduates College, Named HBCU Entrepreneur of the Year

Nationwide -- Aaliyah Duah, a recent graduate of Virginia State University, has been named HBCU Entrepreneur of the Year in recognition of her outstanding work in promoting financial literacy and entrepreneurship in the black community. At just 20 years old, Aaliyah has already made a...
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financialrevolutionn.com

Financial Revolutionn

Financial Revolutionn is a platform that teaches financial literacy and has a primary focus in underserved communities.
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@playahaitian
 
playahaitian

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Camille said:


blacknews.com

20-Year-Old Black Woman Graduates College, Named HBCU Entrepreneur of the Year

Nationwide -- Aaliyah Duah, a recent graduate of Virginia State University, has been named HBCU Entrepreneur of the Year in recognition of her outstanding work in promoting financial literacy and entrepreneurship in the black community. At just 20 years old, Aaliyah has already made a...
blacknews.com blacknews.com

financialrevolutionn.com

Financial Revolutionn

Financial Revolutionn is a platform that teaches financial literacy and has a primary focus in underserved communities.
financialrevolutionn.com

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:bravo::bravo::bravo::bravo:

I need to write this young superhero a letter of thanks for her inspiration
 
Camille

Camille

Kitchen Wench #TeamQuaid
Staff member
talkafricana.com

The Tragic Story of George and Willie Muse, the Black Brothers Who Were Kidnapped and Forced to Perform in Circuses - TalkAfricana

George and Willie Muse were two brothers born in rural Virginia in the late 19th century. They were members of the African American community, and their family worked as sharecroppers. However, their lives took a drastic turn when they were kidnapped and forced to become part of a circus sideshow.
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www.theguardian.com

American freakshow: the extraordinary tale of Truevine’s Muse brothers

Beth Macy’s bestselling book tells the story of two African American brothers with albinism who were kidnapped and forced to perform in a 1920s circus. What can their story teach us about racism in the US today?
www.theguardian.com www.theguardian.com

These are the Muse Brothers. Their biological names are George and Willie Muse. They were two albino brothers born in slavery!
In 1899 they were kidnapped as boys in Truevine, Virginia by bounty hunters and were forced into the circus, labeled as “freak show” performers.
Their owners showcased the brothers in circuses where they were exploited for profit in so-called freak shows. The Muse Brothers became famous across the United States as “Eko and Iko”, the “White Ecuadorian Cannibals”, the “Sheep Headed Men”, the “Sheep Headed Cannibals”, the “Ministers from Dahomey” and “Ambassadors from Mars”.

George and Willie were forced to grow their hair into massive “dreadlocks“ which together with their white skin and bluish eyes were exhibited as rarities. They were also billed as “Darwin’s Missing Links” and “Nature’s Greatest Mistakes”.

The boys were not permitted to go to school, neither were they paid for their work. They were literally kept in slavery.

One of their owners had found that George and Willie harboured the ability to play any song on almost any instrument, from the xylophone to the saxophone and mandolin, and that made them even more famous and more valuable ‘assets’ to owners of travelling circuses. However, after all this time, their illiterate mother had not ceased looking for her boys.

In the fall of 1927, the brothers were on a tour with Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus to Roanoke, little did the boys know they were coming home from which they had disappeared nearly three decades back.

It came to their mother’s attention that the The Greatest Show On Earth was in town and she was determined to find them. It was a tough decision to confront the Ringling Brothers who were powerful multimillionaires who also had the attention of the heavyweight politicians and law enforcement agencies.

Their mother tracked them down and eventually found the boys working for the Ringling Brothers circus and surprised them while they were on stage and their family reunited, 28 years later since they had gone missing in the very same town. The poor and powerless black woman stood up to police and big shot circus owners and successfully took her sons home.


Pics @ the link.


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