The Greene County Democrat

Tag: Black culture

  • Newswire: Spades, The Card Game No Executive Order Can Touch

    Newswire: Spades, The Card Game No Executive Order Can Touch

    by Melissa Rose Cooper, NewsOne

    Mel Alleyne hadn’t played spades in years. Then her sister called.

    “She was like, ‘There’s a tournament [in Brooklyn]. And you’re going to sign up for it and you can’t say no,’” she recalled.

    Alleyne, who first learned the game at a lunch table in high school, knew exactly what was at stake at that table — socially, at least.

    “It was like you were not cool if you did not know how to play spades,” she said. “It was necessary. It was like you had to know. And you had to be good.”

    Last week, Alleyne was one of a roomful of players who gathered at Aunts et Uncles, a Black-owned vegan restaurant in Brooklyn, for The Lunch Room. The spades tournament funneled competitors through a digital qualifier on the Trickster Cards app before bringing the top 16 to a live championship night filled with music, food and the kind of energy many in the Black community have known for years.

    “Everybody that you know that’s Black pretty much has played spades, they know about spades,” said Yantise Jenkins, a member of the card club, the DMV Cardtel, who traveled to support the event. “It’s at family reunions. It’s at cookouts. Thanksgiving after everyone eats dinner and cleans up, there’s somebody pulling out the cards to play spades.”

    That cultural tradition is exactly what The Lunch Room was designed to honor — especially at a moment when Black history is under attack.

    In January 2025, President Trump signed a sweeping executive order dismantling diversity, equity and inclusion programs across federal agencies and institutions. In recent years, states including Florida, have moved to restrict or eliminate African American studies from public school curricula.

    Proposed federal budget cuts have also threatened funding for the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities, two institutions that have long supported Black cultural programming nationwide. The ongoing theme is hard to ignore: the formal structures designed to protect and legitimize Black cultural life are being dismantled one policy at a time.

    What no executive order touches, however, is what gets passed down at the table.

    “It’s been done for generations. And different age groups can do it,” said Jenkins. “I was probably 8 years old when I first learned how to play.”

    Spades was never taught in a classroom. It spread through kitchen tables, rec centers and lunchrooms where the game stretched well past the bell. It has survived without institutional support because it never needed any — it moved person to person, generation to generation, in the spaces where Black people have always gathered.

    Michael Nicholas, co-owner of Aunts et Uncles, knows that story firsthand.

    “Some classes were missed and skipped because of spades games,” he laughed, “but I still graduated timely and it was cool.”

    That experience is the direct inspiration behind the tournament’s name. The restaurant, which Nicholas owns with his wife Nicole, regularly transforms into its own version of the lunchroom, hosting spades games throughout the year. To Nicholas, the game has always been about more than the cards.

    “You learn basically by sitting down and watching the family and friends getting together,” he explained. “So I feel like it’s important for us. It’s just a gathering point and a way to kind of get together, share knowledge, share space. It’s beyond a pastime.”

    That gathering point is increasingly rare. As daily life moves further online and in-person community becomes harder to sustain, events like The Lunch Room carry a different kind of weight. The tournament’s structure — starting with a digital qualifier on the Trickster Cards platform before culminating in a live event — was designed to use technology as an on-ramp, not a destination. The point was always the room.

    “Because depending on how you play and how your partner plays, you kind of like, know how to talk to each other without speaking to each other,” Nicholas said. “You can read the game, you can read the board, just by the cards.”

    For Chevy Wolf, whose agency, The Last Wolves, partnered with Trickster Cards and Aunts et Uncles to produce the event, the cultural stakes were just as clear.

    “If you grew up in Black culture, you know, spades is a part of your DNA,” Wolf said. “It’s just genetics.”

    Part of that DNA is the trash talk — the loud, sharp, loving kind that sounds like an argument to an outsider but reads as affection to anyone who grew up around it. Wolf wanted the evening to capture that, too.

    “You can still compete, but it’s all love at the end of the day. And I think that’s one of the key components we wanted to show everybody.”

    The event drew players who hadn’t touched a deck in years. It also brought people determined to make sure the game never skips a generation.

    Korey Hines, a Trickster Cards ambassador who learned to play as a kid under his Aunt Helen — a serious card player he describes as a major presence in his life — sees that work as a calling.

    “It’s actually a full circle for me,” Hines noted. “Oftentimes, generations get locked into their space and their time, and they don’t pass the torch. I feel that I was given the gift to be able to bring some people together and maybe make those transitions smoother.”

    There is something quietly radical about that mission in this particular moment. When the institutions that were supposed to hold Black history and culture are being hollowed out, the people who carry that culture in their hands — literally, in a deck of cards — become the institution.

    For the players who walked through the door that night, the significance landed personally.

    “It’s kind of nice to be able to come together and see each other and have that community,” Alleyne says.

    In a moment when the formal structures built to support and preserve Black cultural life are being systematically dismantled, that community — gathered around a card game, in a Brooklyn restaurant — is holding the line.

  • Black culture isn’t the problem – systemic inequality is

    Boots Riley via Creative Time Reports

    Clinton Crime Bill protestor

    Clinton Crime Bill
    protestor

    The idea that it is Black folks and our supposedly immoral and savage culture that creates our disproportionate rates of poverty and imprisonment is everywhere: cop shows, news media, movies set in Black neighborhoods and high-school social studies classes have all perpetuated this misconception. And some are now using this old, false idea to disparage Black Lives Matter, saying that the real problem facing Black communities isn’t police violence, racist oppression or economic exploitation but “Black-on-Black crime”.  We hear this all over the place, from news columnists to Ray Lewis to Rudy Giuliani – and, most recently, reiterated by Bill Clinton.
    It’s asinine, this argument that modern civil rights movements like Black Lives Matter should stop talking about actual problems in favor of apocryphal ones. During the civil rights movement there was much more homicide in the black community than there is now — black-on-black crime is shrinking. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention statistics show that from 1950 to 2013 the percentage of black men who became homicide victims dropped by a third, and for black women the percentage was cut in half.
    Though murder rates were higher in the 1960s, no one in their right mind today would argue that those organizers should have put the march on Selma or the Montgomery bus boycott on the back burner to focus on black-on-black violence back then. We shouldn’t pressure today’s activists to do this either.
    Yet the myth of black-on-black crime has enormous staying power. It’s no surprise that this kind of argument is so common among the likes of conservative media, Donald Trump and the police, but false hysteria about black-on-black crime has also been absorbed by liberals and black community leaders. Even Spike Lee took this stance in his recent film Chi-Raq, showing a Chicago minister telling a huge crowd that the fight against black-on-black violence is “our Selma”.
    We’ve been duped. When black neighborhoods are compared with white neighborhoods of similar income levels, you see similar rates of crime. The fallacy of comparing white neighborhoods with black neighborhoods is in lumping together wealthy and upper-middle-class neighborhoods (categories that not many black folks are in) with middle- and low-income ones. But that’s not how the world works. Poor white people in Memphis aren’t kicking it with rich ones in Bel Air.
    Explaining crime and poverty as a result of black behavioral choice, further, disguises ways that both are caused by capitalism. Recasting systemic inequality as cultural choice suggests that black people aren’t determined enough – that it’s their own fault they remain in poverty. Out of economic deprivation comes violence – not because poor people have bad attitudes or cultural deficiencies, but because without a real economic safety net, the machinations required for survival can involve illegal business. And whereas legal business has the police to physically enforce the laws that govern it, disputes and agreements in illegal businesses are settled and enforced by the practitioners themselves.
    The argument also regurgitates the same old disproven beliefs about crime, saying that stricter gun laws would decrease violence. Calls for gun legislation are actually calls for stricter policing and more police violence in black communities: gun control laws give police more powers to arrest – and we know that these policies will be racist in their implementation. Imagine stop-and-frisk in white neighborhoods: it ain’t gonna happen. The rate of weapons arrests is multiple times higher in the black community, even though blacks are half as likely as whites to own a gun.
    The myth of black crime as cover for racist violence is nothing new. In 1906 Atlanta newspapers created a fake “Negro crime wave” which culminated in the state militia and county police going door to door in a raid of every single black home in order to confiscate guns. People were beaten and murdered along the way. In the following decades, similar media-created “Negro crime waves” in Washington, New York and other cities led to the repression of black communities that follows this kind of story.
    The only thing that will stop murders in black neighborhoods, or in any neighborhoods, is a higher standard of living, not laws that will be enforced through a racist lens. Economic improvement will happen only through a mass radical movement to create a system in which the people democratically control the wealth that we create with our labor.
    The next time you hear someone try to shame black community activists and reinforce the myth of the black criminal, remember that it’s an old story and a fake story. And it’s time for us to move on.