​The following article is buzzing on Linkedin at the moment, titled ‘I’m Black and I Just Might Vote For Donald Trump – Here’s Why...’ it might just raise an eyebrow or two...

Growing up in the 90’s was an interesting experience for me. I grew up in a neighborhood that was mostly black and once in a while I would come across a white person; be it in school, playing basketball or other random activities. Back then my favorite teachers and basketball coaches were both white and black, my closest friends were both white and black, I thought both Christina Aguilera and Beyonce were REALLY attractive and I was interested in “white activities” like skateboarding and tech and “black activities” like basketball and rap music. I was a cultured kid. I appreciated people for their actions and not by their skin tone.

​I didn’t view the world the same way my parents, grandparents and great grandparents did. My America was totally different than their America. I knew about slavery and racism but to me those days were over. I’m not saying racism didn’t exist, I’m just saying I never thought about it. For instance, I remember my first week of college at Monmouth University, a school that is 96% white. I walked in the Computer Science department to inquire about the program. And if the school was 96% white, the CS department was 10000% white. I walked in wearing a pair of baggy pants, an oversized t shirt and a baseball cap. I looked something like this:

When I walked in, there were four people and they all looked at me and treated me as if I was lost. I told them I was thinking about choosing CS as my major and they didn’t directly tell me that it wasn’t a possibility but they did their best to persuade me not to join their program. They said things like “If you don’t have any previous CS background, this program may not be for you” and “The coursework may be too much for you, especially since you are on the basketball team”. At the time, I thought they were looking out for my best interest so I didn’t study Computer Science; I ended up getting a degree in finance. But a year later, I became friends with a student that studied CS and asked him if he had any prior CS knowledge before joining the program and he said no. His race, yup, you guessed it — white. Today I can look back on that experience and see how my race and socioeconomic status played into them not accepting me but back then I was clueless.

November 4, 2008.
The best day of my life. Barack Obama becomes president of the United States of America. If there wasn’t anything that happened in my life before this moment to convince me that racism was dead and racist people were a dying breed, this did it. Americans voted for a black man to be their leader, how can this country be racist? HOW?

BUT THEN IT HAPPENED. I started to experience racism a daily basis from afar and at home. Not only did I have to go on Twitter everyday to find out about another black person being murdered by the cops, I also experienced police harassment myself. There have been many times when white policemen pulled me over, pulled me out of my car, sexually harassed me to only tell me things like “There is a screw missing from your license plate which prevents us from reading it properly”. I remember walking into a Wal Mart in New Hampshire and having everyone stare at me my entire time in the store. I remember working at Care.com and having a white male employee say “If you aren’t white, I don’t care about you” while watching coverage of Mike Brown on CNN. I remember having a white investor tell me “If you are so passionate about the playing field being equal in tech for black people maybe you should stop wasting your time pitching Blastchat and go work on that”.

What happened to my America?

It’s as if Barack Obama became president and white people have been on a mission to “take the country back” and prove that they are still the dominate race. Hence, “Make America Great Again”. When Donald Trump says he wants to “Make America great again”, he doesn’t want my America where everyone is judged by their actions and not the color of their skin. He wants an America where the white race reigns supreme, again. He wants a pre 60’s America and if he could he would take a 19th century America.

But he is exactly what America deserves.

Over the past eight years, America has allowed racist people to freely show their true colors and now we will pay the price for it. I’m all for Donald Trump becoming president for these few reasons:

1. We will become the laughingstock of the world. Not only will we be laughed at because our inability to help our poor, our obesity levels and our undeserving arrogance; we will be laughed at because we actually voted him into office.
2. Barack Obama will be adorned. Most presidents are appreciated and glorified decades after they leave office, however if Trump becomes president Obama will become a legend in two weeks.
3. More black people will unite for the better. Other cultures have bettered their conditions by sticking together and helping each other succeed. Unfortunately for blacks, this only happens when our backs are up against the walls. And I think a Donald Trump’s presidency will do just that. The same way Jewish and Japanese people rose from the ghettos and concentration camps in America, we can do the same and this will help level the playing field for our future generations.

All in all, I think a Donald Trump presidency will be great for America. It will help us realize how screwed up we really are and how much we need a political and societal reform. There are times when you have to take a step back to go forward and unfortunately, I believe this is one of those times.

GO AMERICA!
​
GO TRUMP!
 
Written by Jhamar D Youngblood

In July 2013, the Australian Government introduced a controversial immigration policy, transferring asylum seekers arriving by boat to remote offshore detention centres on foreign Pacific islands. Seven months later, the Manus Island centre erupted in violence when police and guards put down protests with sticks, machetes and guns, and 23 year-old asylum seeker Reza Barati was killed.

The men of Manus Island are the hidden, the silenced. The 1,000 asylum seekers held in immigration detention on the Papua New Guinean island are distant and cut off. None will return to Australia.

Almost all visitors are banned from the Australian government-run centre, journalists are particularly forbidden, and when trouble occasionally ferments and snippets of video footage of protests emerge from within the centre, phones and pens and books are taken from the detainees. Staff have their emails and webpages monitored.

The men have few ways of making their voices heard. But after riots in the centre in February 2014, filmmaker Lukas Schrank read an interview with two men in detention on the island, and was stunned to find it was the only one. “This was the only interview that I could find with people in detention. It seemed like there was a voice missing from the discussion.”

The interview was the genesis of a new film – and a new way of telling a story previously unheard. Schrank has created Nowhere Line: Voices from Manus Island, an animated film that details the journeys of two asylum seekers held in Manus’s isolated immigration detention centre. The voices of the men, recorded down a grainy phone line from the island, form the narration of the 15-minute film.

(Article by Ben Doherty @bendohertycorro published in The Guardian) 

Watch Nowwhere Line  on Vimeo : https://vimeo.com/152158702