Speaking some truth: WV poet on "Appalachian Blackface"

Crystal Good is an outstanding West Virginia Affrilachian (that would be African American Appalachian) poet, thinker and creative spirit. At the recent Race Matters in Appalachia Summit, she read an original poem that told the total truth about the 2014 elections. It's really worth a look. Fast forward about 20 minutes into this link to see her performance.

Sad to say, but she nailed it.

Race matters

I've been running around too much lately and this blog has been a casualty of all that. However, I had a pretty good excuse for at least part of the time. That would be the Race Matters in Appalachia that my organization, the American Friends Service Committee, was proud to sponsor, help plan, and participate in.

(Sorry about ending that last sentence with a preposition.)

Race in Appalachia is a timely topic, especially given the racial dog whistling that helped flip WV in the last election. Here is some of the coverage from the Charleston Gazette, the Charleston Daily Mail, and WV Public Broadcasting. For good measure, here's an op-ed by my friend the Rev. Ron English.

This event was meant to be a conversation starter and just the beginning of a whole lot of needed work.

Case in point

The Charleston Gazette gave nice editorial support to an upcoming conference on race in Appalachia that I've been working on with quite a few other people. One example of why such a topic might be relevant is the recent controversial  personal blog post by Charleston Daily Mail editorialist Don Surber in which he referred to Michael Brown as an animal who had to be put down. The blog post has since been taken down, but that's a bell that will be hard to unring.

A little good news

According to longtime WV statehouse reporter Tom Miller, 

The idea of housing West Virginia's state prisoners at a private, for-profit prison in neighboring Kentucky has been shelved and is no longer a priority, Commissioner Jim Rubenstein of the state Division of Corrections told state legislators last week at one of the interim committee meetings.

Rubenstein said the idea has now "been put way back on the back burner" because of the current decrease that his agency has been seeing "within the total (inmate) population." This seems to put to rest this earlier proposal that called for the state to possibly house up to 400 inmates at a prison in eastern Kentucky that would be operated by the Corrections Corporation of America.

This is welcome news for all kinds of reasons. I was proud to work with WV allies to keep this from happening. The main reason it didn't was the success of a 2013 bill addressing prison overcrowding.

RACE MATTERS IN APPALACHIA. If you get a chance, please consider attending this conference or race on Nov. 10 and 11.