hysterical blackness

The Necrosocial

2009-11-21T18:21:00.002-05:00

some good recent posts on icite in relation to ucberkeley and more. the necrosocial. anti capitalist projects

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White People Have a Racial History Too

2008-04-05T10:53:00.001-04:00

Alice Walker in AlterNet

I want a grown-up attitude toward Cuba, for instance, a country and a people I love; I want an end to the embargo that has harmed my friends and their children, children who, when I visit Cuba, trustingly turn their faces up for me to kiss. I agree with a teacher of mine, Howard Zinn, that war is as objectionable as cannibalism and slavery; it is beyond obsolete as a means of improving life. I want an end to the ongoing war immediately, and I want the soldiers to be encouraged to destroy their weapons and to drive themselves out of Iraq.

I want the Israeli government to be made accountable for its behavior towards the Palestinians, and I want the people of the United States to cease acting like they don't understand what is going on. All colonization, all occupation, all repression basically looks the same, whoever is doing it. Here our heads cannot remain stuck in the sand; our future depends of our ability to study, to learn, to understand what is in the records and what is before our eyes.

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"Banished": American apartheid, long after the death of Jim Crow

2007-09-27T08:14:00.000-04:00

Andrew O'Hehir in Salon

When the aging retiree in Harrison, Ark., welcomes filmmaker Marco Williams into his home, it seems almost like the setup for a Hollywood comedy. With his mismatched outfit of high-water trousers and flannel shirt, crusty old Bob Scott seems like the irascible geezer who might just have a heart of gold; in his T-shirt, jeans and flowing dreadlocks, Williams seems every inch the big-city African-American intellectual. They sit down at Scott's table and have a pleasant conversation about life in Harrison. Scott likes living there because people are friendly, the cost of living is low and the Ozark scenery is lovely. But one factor was even more important to him and his fellow retirees, he says: "No blacks."

It is not just historical accident that Boone County, which includes Harrison, has only 40 or so African-Americans among its 34,000 residents. Nor that Forsyth County, Ga., Washington County, Ind., Pierce City, Mo., and dozens of other counties and municipalities in the Midwest and South are nearly or totally all-white today. From the end of the Civil War through the 1920s, many rural communities systematically purged their black residents, driving them out with implicit or explicit threats of violence. Sometimes these blacks were allowed to sell their land, albeit under duress and at discount prices. Often they were simply driven off, forced to abandon homes and land and flee for their lives.

Hardly anyone now living witnessed these events, but as Williams' film forcefully demonstrates, the wounds have nowhere near healed. Descendants of displaced African-Americans have passed the stories down as formative family legend, and while whites are far more eager to bury the past, many remain uncomfortably aware that something unsavory lingers at the farthest edges of community memory.

Williams focuses on three areas with distinct and disparate histories: Forsyth County today is a bedroom community on the outer suburban fringe of Atlanta, anxious to present itself as part of the tolerant New South, unshackled from the past. Yet Forsyth was the site of one of the most extensive ethnic cleansing campaigns anywhere in the country; as recently as 1987, a multiracial Martin Luther King Day march was viciously attacked by an angry white mob. Meanwhile, the descendants of black landowners driven out in 1912 have begun to seek restitution or reparations for land that was apparently stolen from them, a movement vigorously resisted by white legal and political authorities.

In Pierce City, Williams follows the painful quest of James and Charles Brown, two St. Louis brothers who discover that their great-grandparents were driven out of town in 1901, to find and remove ancestral remains from the local graveyard. Awkwardly and uncertainly, Pierce City's coroner and former mayor begin to help the Browns, and to approach their own sense of communal responsibility. But when the Browns demand that Pierce City pay for the exhumation and relocation, the tentative sense of brotherhood falls away. Why should we offer reparations, these well-meaning white citizens demand, for something we didn't do?

Back in Bob Scott's Arkansas town, the racism is more overt than in other communities. Williams has a surprisingly polite conversation with Thom Robb, head of the local Ku Klux Klan, who amiably tells him that cross burning is an ancient Scottish rite (not, of course, an act of racial hatred) but that on the whole he thinks Harrison is better off as a white town. At the same time, Harrison's white residents have done more to confront the problem than anyone in the other two areas: Local preachers have held days of prayer and atonement; volunteers helped renovate a black church in a neighboring county; a scholarship was established for African-American student-athletes from other towns.

"Banished" offers a startling tour into an unforgotten history that remains invisible to most Americans, with the erudite Williams, who is simultaneously polite and confrontational, as our host. It would be ludicrous to suggest that he doesn't take sides: Williams clearly believes that a major historical crime has been swept under the rug, and his film is loaded with moments of understated emotional power. When the black Strickland family of Atlanta find a neglected and overgrown family burial ground on white-owned land in Forsyth County, and kneel there in prayer not far from the current residents' Confederate-flag-bedecked pickup, all the legal questions and ethical quandaries fade into the background.

All the same, Williams never shies away from his film's unanswerable questions. Much as I longed for the Brown brothers and Pierce City officials to find some agreeable middle ground, both remain prisoners of history. James Brown springs his demand for reimbursement on the coroner who has befriended him, just after the latter has shipped and reinterred his great-grandfather's remains. In response, the town fathers retreat into specious and sentimental rhetoric (and refuse to answer Brown directly). Someday, perhaps, these century-old crimes will be forgotten and black people will move into places like Pierce City and Harrison, not knowing or caring about what happened there. But not yet, and not for a long time to come.

(read entire article)

The Price of Sugar

2007-09-27T08:12:00.000-04:00

Andrew O'Hehir in Salon

As I write this, it's still difficult to find accurate information about where and when Bill Haney's profoundly disturbing documentary "The Price of Sugar" will be opening commercially in the United States. Partly this is because the Vicini family, sugar barons of the Dominican Republic, have hired Patton Boggs, a major Washington law firm, to try to halt the film's release, or at least paint it as slanted and defamatory. Narrated by Paul Newman, Haney's film follows an Anglo-Spanish missionary priest, Christopher Hartley, as he tries to bring some justice to the slavery-like conditions under which Haitian immigrants cut sugar cane in the Vicini fields.

As Hartley remarks in the film, Americans may be dismayed to learn the true cost of the sugar they put in their morning coffee: Haitian workers are routinely imprisoned by armed guards and underpaid (or go unpaid for long periods), and those who run away or try to insist on minimal legal rights frequently disappear. While Hartley and Haney have succeeded in focusing international attention on the Dominican sugar fields, both the Vicinis and the Dominican population continue to insist that nothing is wrong. Hartley has been reassigned to Ethiopia by his church superiors, and public screenings have reportedly been interrupted by counter-demonstrators. (Scheduled to open Sept. 28 in New York, Los Angeles and other major cities.)

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(The Price of Sugar)

BANISHED -- When Jim Crow Came to Town, With Eviction Notices

2007-09-27T08:00:00.000-04:00

MANOHLA DARGIS in The New York Times

There are ghosts haunting Marco Williams’s quietly sorrowful documentary “Banished,” about the forced expulsion of black Southerners from their homes in the troubled and violent decades after the Civil War. Dressed in what looks like their Sunday best, in dark suits and high-collar dresses, they stare solemnly into an unwelcoming world. A couple ride in a cart along a pretty country road, and others stand awkwardly before houses with peeling paint. There are few smiles. Photography was then a serious business, though being a black landowner, part of a fragile, nascent Southern middle class, was more serious still.

It’s stunning how loudly the dead can speak, and with such eloquence. I couldn’t help comparing these images with those in one of my own photo albums of a large family of stern-looking Midwesterners dressed in what looks like their Sunday best. The rough, ill-fitting suits and somber dresses look similar to those in the documentary, and the simple clapboard house looming behind this family recalls comparable homes in “Banished.” There are, once again, few smiles, though in one photo my grandfather, then around 12, looks as if he’s trying to keep one in check.

Unlike the young men in Mr. Williams’s documentary, my grandfather raised a family and ran a business not far from where his photographs were taken — an upstanding white citizen in a nearly all-white land. The young black men in “Banished” never had the chance to take root. Some were falsely accused of molesting white women and were lynched. We see a few of these dead in other photographs, hanging from trees and lampposts, their bodies sometimes surrounded by a visibly excited white crowd. (A crude sign under one corpse warns not to wake him.) As Mr. Williams explains, his measured voice-over calm as ever, lynching was an instrument of terror, used against blacks as a means of control and “racial cleansing.”

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On Race, Kinship, and Black Women

2007-04-18T19:46:00.000-04:00

Christina Sharpe in dissident voice

“You must not forget that we are students first and then we’re athletes. And before the student lies the daughter.”

-- Essence Carson

It took almost a week to generate "public outrage" about the remarks that Don Imus and producer Bernard McGuirk made about the Rutgers Women's basketball team.

In that same week the media consistently reported that three white lacrosse players from Duke University were found innocent of the charges against them. It's true that the charges of rape/sexual assault against the three white Duke players have been dropped, but they are not innocent of either misogynist or racist acts. After all, these young men whom, I suspect, like most young white men of their class have very little social interaction with black people or, at least, little social interaction with black people of vastly different class and circumstances, hired these young black women from the other side of the tracks to dance at their party. The two women hired to dance agree on this: the players subjected them to racial and sexist abuse. And, let’s not forget that after Ms. Roberts’ accusations became public, a number of women on the Duke Campus came forward to say that they believed her because they, and other women they knew, had been assaulted as well.

But, one (white) mother makes clear in her letter to the Boston Globe [1] the differences between what sons and daughters across a race/sex/class divide are told and who one imagines to be one’s son or daughter. She writes, “Any mother could have told those boys a party with alcohol, young men, and a stripper of unknown origins had the potential for trouble.” Many a black mother could have told that daughter (those girls) about the potential trouble to them in interactions involving alcohol and young white men with pedigrees and power attached to race, sex, and class privilege.

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"Why 'nappy' is offensive"--on hair, race, blackness and (in)humanity

2007-04-12T17:08:00.000-04:00

ZINE MAGUBANE in The Boston Globe

Why 'nappy' is offensive

By Zine Magubane | April 12, 2007
WHEN DON IMUS called the Rutgers University basketball team a bunch of "nappy-headed ho's" he brought to the fore the degree to which black women's hair has served as a visible marker of our political and social marginalization.
Nappy, a historically derogatory term used to describe hair that is short and tightly coiled, is a preeminent example of how social and cultural ideas are transmitted through bodies. Since African women first arrived on American shores, the bends and twists of our hair have became markers of our subhuman status and convenient rationales for denying us our rightful claims to citizenship.

Establishing the upper and lower limits of humanity was of particular interest to Enlightenment era thinkers, who struggled to balance the ideals of the French Revolution and the Declaration of Independence with the fact of slavery. The 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen did not discriminate on the basis of race or sex and had the potential to be applied universally. It was precisely because an appeal to natural rights could only be countered by proof of natural inequality that hair texture, one of the most obvious indicators of physical differences between the races, was seized upon. Nappy hair was demonstrable proof of the fact that neither human physiology nor human nature was uniform and, therefore, that social inequalities could be justified.

Saartjie Baartman, a South African "bushwoman," was exhibited like a circus freak in the Shows of London between 1810 and 1815. The leading French anatomist of the day, George Cuvier, speculated that Baartman might be the "missing link" between the human and animal worlds because of her "peculiar features" including her "enormous buttocks" and "short, curling hair."

In "Notes on the State of Virginia," Thomas Jefferson reflected on why it would be impossible to incorporate blacks into the body politic after emancipation. He concluded it was because of the differences "both physical and moral," chief among them the absence of long, flowing hair.

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The Article--What a mess, baby --Parents say fertility clinic botched in-vitro & girl's got the wrong dad

2007-04-06T18:56:00.000-04:00

The New York Daily News

Thomas Andrews and his wife, Nancy, got a surprise when daughter Jessica (l.) was born: Looks like Thomas wasn't the dad.

A Long Island woman and her husband are suing a Park Ave. fertility clinic for allegedly inseminating her with the wrong man's sperm.
After struggling to conceive their second child, Nancy Andrews and her husband, Thomas, turned to New York Medical Services for Reproductive Medicine for in-vitro fertilization treatments, according to a lawsuit.
Andrews soon became pregnant and the couple was overjoyed. They only discovered the clinic's "colossal blunder" after Andrews gave birth to her daughter Jessica, court papers charge.
"While we love Baby Jessica as our own, we are reminded of this terrible mistake each and every time we look at her," the Commack couple said in documents filed in Manhattan Supreme Court. "It is simply impossible to ignore."
Thomas Andrews is white and his wife is Dominican. But Jessica, who was born Oct. 19, 2004, has darker skin than either of them as well as "characteristics more typical of African or African-American descent," the lawsuit states.
The couple tested their daughter's DNA using a home kit and later with two more sophisticated methods. All three of the tests confirmed their suspicions - the tot has a different father.
"We underwent a difficult and complex medical procedure for the sole purpose of bearing a child of our own," the couple said in court papers. "We were never informed that this type of mishap could occur, and frankly, this type of mishap is almost unimaginable."
In legal documents, the couple said they were "emotionally devastated" when they found out Thomas Andrews, who had donated his sperm to be inseminated in his wife, was not the girl's biological father.
"We fear that our daughter will be the object of scorn and ridicule by other children, both in school and as she grows up," they said.
In a decision made public yesterday, State Supreme Court Justice Sheila Abdus-Salaam threw out parts of the couple's lawsuit - including a claim that they had suffered mental distress.
"The birth of an unwanted but otherwise healthy and normal child does not constitute an injury to the child's parents," Abdus-Salaam wrote.
But the judge allowed the malpractice lawsuit to proceed against New York Medical Services for Reproductive Medicine. A previous court ruling already had found the clinic's owner, Dr. Reginald Puckett, liable for inseminating Nancy Andrews with the wrong sperm, documents show.
The couple is seeking unspecified damages for the error.
Puckett's attorney did not return calls yesterday.
The Andrews, whose eldest daughter was born on Christmas Day in 2002, declined to comment through their attorney.

Patricia J. Williams -- Colorstruck

2007-04-06T18:52:00.000-04:00

The Nation

Colorstruck

The March 22 New York Post offered a fascinating study in the contradictions of our culture. The top half of the front page was consumed by "a stunning mother-child portrait" of Angelina Jolie with her newest adopted child, or as the Post put it, her "Viet man." The lower half of the page was given over to a more lurid headline ("Baby Bungle: White Folks' Black Child") trumpeting "a Park Avenue fertility clinic's blunder" that "left a family devastated--after a black baby was born to a Hispanic woman and her white husband."

The story about Jolie's magical mothering of her rainbow brood was a fairy tale of happily ever after. The bungled baby story, meanwhile, was considerably less heartwarming: Long Islanders Nancy and Thomas Andrews had trouble conceiving after the birth of their first daughter. They employed in vitro fertilization and baby Jessica was born. Jessica is darker skinned than either of the Andrewses, a condition their obstetrician initially called an "abnormality." She'll "lighten up," said that good doctor. Subsequent paternity tests showed that Nancy's egg was fertilized by sperm other than Tom's. The couple has sued.

If this were the end, the story might simply fall within the growing body of other technological mix-ups resulting in what are sometimes called "wrongful birth" suits, for lost eggs, failed vasectomies and so on. There is a legally recognized expectation that a certain standard of care will be observed in the handling of genetic material. There are ethical difficulties with any of these cases. Just to start with, it's a bit of a conundrum to call the birth of a healthy child "wrongful." Therefore, courts tend to be conservative in framing monetary damages, lest they be understood as a property interest in perfection. Hence, awarding the costs of raising an unplanned child resulting from medical malfeasance is obviously less troubling than awarding damages for "the pain and suffering" of parenting a child who was "unwanted." Indeed, in the Andrews case, a judge permitted the malpractice claim to go forward but threw out the claim for the parents' mental distress.

What's distinctive about the Andrews case is that the parents also tried to cite (also without success) Jessica's pain and suffering for having to endure life as a black person. The Andrewses expressed concern that Jessica "may be subjected to physical and emotional illness as a result of not being the same race as her parents and siblings." They are "distressed" that she is "not even the same race, nationality, color...as they are." They describe Jessica's conception as a "mishap" so "unimaginable" that they have not told many of their relatives. (Telling the tabloids all about it must have come easier.) "We fear that our daughter will be the object of scorn and ridicule by other children," the couple said, because Jessica has "characteristics more typical of African or African-American descent." So "while we love Baby Jessica as our own, we are reminded of this terrible mistake each and every time we look at her...each and every time we appear in public."

One wonders what this construction of affairs will do to Jessica, now 2, when she is old enough to understand. But here's the really interesting part. When I turned to other media accounts I found a picture of the family--from their 2006 Christmas card, no less. And Jessica looks exactly like her mother and elder sister. It is true that Jessica is slightly darker than her mother and that her hair is curlier than her sister's, but all three females are pretty clearly African-descended. As one of my students put it, if anything it is the paleness of the father's skin that marks him as the "different" one.

The picture underscores the embedded cultural oddities of this case, the invisibly shifting boundaries of how we see race, extend intimacy, name "difference." According to the Post, Mrs. Andrews is "Hispanic" and apparently, by the paper's calculations, one Hispanic woman plus one white man equals "a white pair." The mother is "a light-skinned native of the Dominican Republic," seeming to indicate that while she may not be "white," she's also not "black." Each narrative implies that if the correct sperm had been used, the Andrewses would have been guaranteed a lighter-skinned child. But as most Dominicans trace their heritage to some mixture of African slaves, indigenous islanders and European settlers, and as dark skin color is a dominant trait, it could be that the true sperm donor is as "white" as Mr. Andrews. But that possibility is exiled from the word boxes that contain this child. Not only is Jessica viewed as being of a race apart from either of her parents; she is even designated a different nationality--this latter most startling for its blood-line configuration of citizenship itself.

I might have consigned all of this to tabloid sensation had I not had conversations in recent days in which this case came up. Well-educated legal minds of all political stripes were arguing that there's nothing wrong in the parents' claim, that it's a private choice they made to have a family that looks "like" them and that they should get some money for the girl's "trauma" since, after all, it is harder to be black in this society. Some of the people arguing this have previously argued against affirmative action because our society is supposedly colorblind. Just look at Angelina! If this dreamy reasoning is any reflection of the culture at large, then its logic signals a privatization of civil rights: Discrimination is no longer a social problem that implicates all of us and our institutions as unloving or uninclusive. Discrimination becomes destiny, the normative response to biologized "abnormality."

It is ironic. There is a bill in the Georgia state legislature to make April Confederate Heritage Month. Not Southern heritage, but Confederate. Whatever romance that term may conjure in the collective imagination, it's important to remember that the Confederate Constitution was almost identical to that of the United States. The only significantly different provision was one that said: "No bill of attainder, ex post facto law, or law denying or impairing the right of property in negro slaves shall be passed." In an era when none of us are slaves but all of us are increasingly objects in the marketplace, it is sad and alarming that "Negro" features, however arbitrarily perceived or shiftily delineated, still lower the value of the human product, of human grace.

Uncle Ben's dot com

2007-03-30T20:12:00.000-04:00

Uncle Ben's dot com

He's still called Ben or Uncle Ben.

Read the Diary.

He signs his "letters" Uncle Ben.

Name: Uncle Ben
Hometown: Beaumont, Texas
Occupation: Chairman (Charman)
Year Sold First Rice: 1943
Years at the Top: A lot (b/c presumably he can't count, and doesn't need to, as long as he can cook & serve)
Packages Sold: Even more
Employees: Special, everyone
Global Offices: Absolutely

A sample Uncle Ben email:

"It may come as a surprise to you that – between my daily meetings, my Chairman functions and my everyday obligations running a worldwide rice company – I would have any time to take notice of exemplary employee behavior, but I do. In particular, I have been keeping a keen eye on the new young man working in the mail room. He is energetic, friendly and unusually prompt, all promotion-worthy attributes. Please make sure his paycheck envelope includes a complimentary coupon redeemable for a package of our delicious 90-second microwavable READY RICE®."

AS if the Chairman of the Board he is only concerned with rice, recipes, cooking, etc. How insulting.

Uncle Ben, Board Chairman--WHAT

2007-03-30T20:06:00.000-04:00

The New York Times

Uncle Ben, Board Chairman

A racially charged advertising character, who for decades has been relegated to a minor role in the marketing of the products that still carry his name, is taking center stage in a campaign that gives him a makeover — Madison Avenue style — by promoting him to chairman of the company.

Newspaper ad and image of Uncle Ben in his office,Masterfoods USA

A Web site for Uncle Ben’s, unclebens.com, offers a look at his executive office.

The longtime image of Aunt Jemima, in a photo taken between 1933 and 1951; a number of women, including Anna Robinson, shown here, portrayed the character at events like state fairs.
The character is Uncle Ben, the symbol for more than 60 years of the Uncle Ben’s line of rices and side dishes now sold by the food giant Mars. The challenges confronting Mars in reviving a character as racially fraught as Uncle Ben were evidenced in the reactions of experts to a redesigned Web site (unclebens.com), which went live this week.

“This is an interesting idea, but for me it still has a very high cringe factor,” said Luke Visconti, partner at Diversity Inc. Media in Newark, which publishes a magazine and Web site devoted to diversity in the workplace.

“There’s a lot of baggage associated with the image,” Mr. Visconti said, which the makeover “is glossing over.”

Uncle Ben, who first appeared in ads in 1946, is being reborn as Ben, an accomplished businessman with an opulent office, a busy schedule, an extensive travel itinerary and a penchant for sharing what the company calls his “grains of wisdom” about rice and life. A crucial aspect of his biography remains the same, though: He has no last name.
(read entire article)

On Ignorance --William Safire "On Language"

2007-03-21T10:03:00.000-04:00

The New York Times

On Language
Woman vs. Female

By WILLIAM SAFIRE
Published: March 18, 2007
Battle of the apposites.

Send comments and suggestions to: safireonlanguage@nytimes.com.
“I do not understand why,” e-mails an irate Beathan Regan of New Hampshire, “Nancy Pelosi is referred to as the first woman speaker of the House or Hillary Clinton is potentially the first woman president. Is there some inherent power or stigma to female that spawns timidity in the writers of the media?”

This column does not fear to rush in where angels fear to tread. Only 27 years ago in this space, when fainthearted sociological euphemists were pushing the gentle grammatical category gender, I stood up for the plain old Anglo-Saxon word sex.

I lost that battle. Today, the smooth-sounding gender — as in gender gap, the political disparity between male and female voters — has to do with modern social and cultural differences and tensions, while sex is a low-life word disdained as rooted in biological rutting about.

Is female doomed to a similar lexical fate at the hands of woman? Put another way, are traditionalists going to lose this one too? Let us first examine the state of play:

“Four out of the eight Ivy League schools now have female presidents,” USA Today reports. “Clinton is to date the most successful female presidential contender,” The Boston Globe wrote. Contrariwise, “Harvard Chooses Woman President,” The Christian Science Monitor headlined, and The Washington Times reported Clinton as saying, “To all those who say we’ll never elect a woman president, we’ll never know unless we try.” CNN’s Larry King, scrupulously fair, had it both ways: “Having the first woman speaker of the House made us wonder if American is ready for its first female president.”

Both words can function as nouns, but female, unlike woman, can also be an adjective. In an Oscar Hammerstein II lyric from “Flower Drum Song,” written 50 years ago, a young woman glad to be a girl sings, “I’m strictly a female female” — the first use an adjective; the second, a noun. Adjectives are by their nature stretchable, happily taking “more” or “less”: you can say “more female,” but you cannot say “more woman”; you would have to say “more womanly.” In modifying another noun, woman is what the O.E.D. labels an apposite noun — explaining, even identifying, the noun it “stands next to” — but syntactically stronger than an adjective. Both words can be used as modifiers of nouns, but the noun woman has more weight.

There’s nothing new about this: The use of woman as a modifier dates to 1300, with the poet John Dryden, translating Juvenal in 1697, noticing “a woman grammarian who corrects her husband for speaking false Latin.” Today, usage is neck and neck, with woman as a modifier appearing to my ear as pulling ahead of female by a nose.

Deborah Tannen, professor of linguistics at Georgetown University and author of “You’re Wearing THAT? Understanding Mothers and Daughters in Conversation,” gets that sense, too: “We’re hearing woman as an adjective more often now. Female connotes a biological category. I think many feminists avoid it for the same reason they prefer gender to sex. . . . I avoid female in my own writing because it feels disrespectful, as if I’m treating the people I’m referring to as mammals but not humans.”

Now we’re getting somewhere: as a modifier, female can be applied to all animals. (My beloved bitch, Geneva, for example, is a female Bernese mountain dog. She would probably take offense if I called her a woman canine, which as a native speaker I would never do.) To develop this female-woman distinction further, turn to Robin Lakoff, professor of linguistics at the University of California at Berkeley and author of a linguistic classic, “The Language War.”

First, Lakoff notes that a “woman doctor is closer to a ‘doctor who is a woman,’ while a female doctor is closer to a ‘doctor who is female’ — the last an adjective with no indefinite article. A very small distinction in meaning, but I think it works to focus more attention on woman than is focused on female in analogous cases.” That’s because an adjective adds color to a noun, while apposite nouns are part of the basis of meaning of a noun phrase.

“The use of either woman or female with terms such as ‘president, speaker, doctor, professor,’ ” the linguist says, “suggests that a woman holding that position is marked — in some way unnatural, and that it is natural for men to hold it (so we never say ‘male doctor,’ still less ‘man doctor’). When I first began in my job, people like me were often referred to as ‘woman’ or ‘female’ professors, but thankfully no more, as we have become a more normal (unmarked) part of the academic landscape. In time I trust that women presidents and female speakers will vanish in the same way.”

That leads her to make an unexpected point that goes beyond the female-woman divide: “Since we feel so strongly (still) that a president is necessarily male, every time we say ‘woman president,’ we reinforce that view: that only a man can be commander in chief, symbolize the U.S. (which is metonymically Uncle Sam and not Aunt Samantha, after all) and make it harder to conceive of, and hence vote for, a woman in that role.”

There’s a stopper for politicians seeking to curry favor with the distaff decider and female activist long known as the woman voter. But here’s a development above politics that is breathtaking in its cultural contradiction: feminists everywhere have begun to turn on the word female. What’s next?

Womanism.

Womanism as a black womens social/economic/political justice movement(s) exists both in the US and in Africa. Alice Walker defines womanism in In Search of Our Mother's Gardens and Chikwenye Okonjo Ogunyemi defines African womanism (developed simultaneously with Walker's and distinct from it) in Signs in 1985.

On language. From the OED womanism, n.

Add: b. spec. that of a kind advocated by some writers, esp. Black woman writers, and characterized by an emphasis on celebrating the contribution of women to society as a whole; Black feminism. Cf. *WOMANIST n. (and a.) 2.

Harriet Washington responds to Ezekiel Emanuel’s (egregious) review

2007-03-17T09:55:00.000-04:00

The New York Times

‘Medical Apartheid’

Published: March 18, 2007
To the Editor:

In 15 chapters and 501 well-annotated pages, my book “Medical Apartheid” offers a careful, nuanced discussion of trends, cases, problems, ethics and persistent patterns in the disparate treatment of black research subjects. However, Ezekiel Emanuel’s review (Feb. 18) ignores its rich content in order to claim that “Medical Apartheid” fails to place the experience of African-Americans in context. He dramatically misrepresents the work within an untrustworthy review that is rife with distortions, contradictions, errors, exaggerations and confusions.

Emanuel’s own troubling research agenda, elements of which I criticize in “Medical Apartheid,” may be pertinent. He champions such dubious policies as offering undue inducement to poor people and offering research subjects in developing countries inferior medications and standards of protection.

I have been allotted 650 words, insufficient for a point-by-point refutation, so I’ll address a smattering of his many mischaracterizations and errors.

Emanuel ignores how consistently “Medical Apartheid” quantifies my statements about the disproportionate use of blacks in abusive medical research. For example, researchers’ own statements reveal that the experimental development of gynecologic surgeries like Caesarian section, vesicovaginal fistula repair and ovariotomy were perfected almost exclusively using enslaved black women. The disproportionate theft of black cadavers was validated by records and events like the 1989 discovery of 9,800 bones, 75 percent from blacks, in the basement of the Medical College of Georgia’s former anatomical laboratory. Dr. Eugene Saenger’s fatal radiation experiments in 1950s Cincinnati were performed on a subject pool that was 75 percent black. The subjects of many other radiation experiments were all black, like the patients at Dooley and St. Phillip hospitals in Virginia who were intentionally given third-degree radiation burns by scientists “for investigational purposes.” By 1983, 43 percent of women sterilized by federally funded eugenic programs were black. Approximately 80 percent of the boys in the 1970s Baltimore XYY studies were black, as were nearly all of the children in that city’s KKI lead study. Every boy in a 1990s New York City fenfluramine experiment was black.

Medical treatment and public-health initiatives can also constitute medical research. Emanuel disingenuously writes as if an initiative must be either one or the other in order to accuse me of conflation. Despite Emanuel’s bewildering claim to the contrary, the “Black Stork” chapter does focus heavily upon medical research, including racialized studies that fueled involuntary sterilizations, Norplant and Depo-Provera investigations, research distortions that created the myth of the “crack baby,” and nonconsensual research with pregnant black South Carolina women.

Far from castigating directly observed therapy for tuberculosis, I lament that it is too often eschewed in favor of imprisonment. Thalidomide is indeed being given to black women subjects in Africa, and researchers fear that its presence in semen may make its use in men hazardous. Despite Emanuel’s assertion, the book is supported by a plethora of notes filling 50 pages.

Emanuel’s tenuous grasp of history is typified by his non-exculpatory focus on tangential, oft-told events and by the errors crammed into the single sentence with which he attempts to reconstruct the U.S.P.H.S. Study of Syphilis in the Untreated Negro Male. The men first were denied Salvarsan, not only penicillin; a significant minority obtained treatment; the study’s goals included not only observation but also a validation of a racially dimorphic progression of syphilis and diagnostic refinements. Researchers’ goals could not be accomplished without autopsy, and so were not achieved before death.

He falsely claims that “for Washington, the answer comes down to one thing: skin color.” Actually, I describe a terrible confluence of factors that changed over time, including a precise variant, scientific racism. My discussion of factors that tempered or trumped racism includes economics, politics, utilitarianism, communitarianism, black complicity, white beneficence, forbidden knowledge, deontological frameworks and social-justice issues. Emanuel’s failure to acknowledge these sophisticated arguments is a startling omission. Perhaps he is interested only in silencing them.

Harriet A. Washington

Chicago

Ga. Senate Panel OKs Confederate Month

2007-03-15T21:47:00.000-04:00

The New York Times

Ga. Senate Panel OKs Confederate Month

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Published: March 15, 2007
Filed at 9:16 p.m. ET

ATLANTA (AP) -- A panel of Georgia lawmakers signed off Thursday on a plan to create a Confederate heritage month, even as legislative leaders reacted coolly to a push to apologize for the state's role in slavery.

Sen. Jeff Mullis' bill would dub April as Confederate History and Heritage Month to honor the memory of the Confederacy and ''all those millions of its citizens of various races and ethnic groups and religions who contributed in sundry and myriad ways to the cause of Southern Independence.''

The unanimous vote by the Senate Rules committee -- which sent the plan on to the full Senate for consideration -- comes days after black lawmakers announced plans to ask the state to officially apologize for its role in slavery and segregation-era laws.

Virginia's legislature last month passed a resolution expressing ''profound regret'' for the state's role in slavery, and lawmakers in Missouri and Congress have proposed similar measures.

Democratic Rep. Tyrone Brooks, chairman of the Georgia Association of Black Elected Officials, said it's discouraging to see the Confederate month proposal moving ahead after leaders of the Republican-controlled House and Senate said they're not in favor of apologizing for slavery.

''Georgia needs to recognize and apologize and atone for its part in the slave trade, as Virginia has done,'' Brooks said. ''Until we do, I think there will continue to be resistance from African-Americans and others who are serving in the General Assembly'' to efforts like Confederate month.

Mullis, a Republican, said his bill was not a response to the slavery-apology movement.

''I'm from Chickamauga, so it seemed pretty appropriate for me to do something to commemorate the War Between the States,'' Mullis said. His family owned land at the site of the Battle of Chickamauga, the Civil War's second-bloodiest battle and the South's last major victory.

Mullis has supported efforts to create a Civil Rights History Month in Georgia but opposes a slavery apology. ''If I had done something personally, yes, I would apologize,'' he said.

The state's branch of the NAACP called the push for a Confederate month hypocritical.

''Although the supporters of the Confederate history bill feel responsible to honor the past deeds of their ancestors through official governmental action, they resist all notions that they have any responsibility to apologize to their ancestors' victims through official governmental action,'' said Edward Dubose, president of the group's Georgia chapter. ''That reeks of hypocrisy.''

Brooks, who said black lawmakers plan to officially introduce their slavery legislation next week, said he hopes Mullis' bill at least will encourage discussion. He said he's not necessarily against the idea of a Confederate month -- as long as similar recognition is given to the state's black history.

''All of Georgia's history should be promoted and respected and highlighted,'' he said. ''Hopefully this will lead us into some meaningful dialogue.''

Cherokees Vote Out Slaves' Descendants

2007-03-04T14:30:00.000-05:00

The New York Times

OKLAHOMA CITY (AP) -- Cherokee Nation members voted Saturday to revoke the tribal citizenship of an estimated 2,800 descendants of the people the Cherokee once owned as slaves.

With all 32 precincts reporting, 76.6 percent had voted in favor of an amendment to the tribal constitution that would limit citizenship to descendants of ''by blood'' tribe members as listed on the federal Dawes Commission's rolls from more than 100 years ago.

The commission, set up by a Congress bent on breaking up Indians' collective lands and parceling them out to tribal citizens, drew up two rolls, one listing Cherokees by blood and the other listing freedmen, a roll of blacks regardless of whether they had Indian blood.

Some opponents of the ballot question argued that attempts to remove freedmen from the tribe were motivated by racism.

''I'm very disappointed that people bought into a lot of rhetoric and falsehoods by tribal leaders,'' said Marilyn Vann, president of the Oklahoma City-based Descendants of Freedmen of Five Civilized Tribes.

Tribal officials said the vote was a matter of self-determination.

''The Cherokee people exercised the most basic democratic right, the right to vote,'' tribal Principal Chief Chad Smith said. ''Their voice is clear as to who should be citizens of the Cherokee Nation. No one else has the right to make that determination.'

Smith said turnout -- more than 8,700 -- was higher than turnout for the tribal vote on the Cherokee Nation constitution four years ago.

''On lots of issues, when they go to identity, they become things that people pay attention to,'' Smith said.

The petition drive for the ballot measure followed a March 2006 ruling by the Cherokee Nation Supreme Court that said an 1866 treaty assured freedmen descendants of tribal citizenship. Since then, more than 2,000 freedmen descendants have enrolled as citizens of the tribe.

Court challenges by freedmen descendants seeking to stop the election were denied, but a federal judge left open the possibility that the case could be refiled if Cherokees voted to lift their membership rights.

Tribal spokesman Mike Miller said the period to protest the election lasts until March 12 and Cherokee courts are the proper venue for a challenge.

Vann promised a protest within the next week. ''We don't accept this fraudulent election,'' Vann said. (read entire article)

"Slavery Is Not Dead. It’s Not Even Past." - Bob Herbert

2007-03-04T13:49:00.000-05:00

Reading BOB HERBERT in The New York Times

Slavery Is Not Dead. It’s Not Even Past.

The Rev. Al Sharpton seemed subdued, quiet, reflective — which was unusual.

Just when we thought the news couldn’t get any weirder, we learned this week, via The Daily News, that Mr. Sharpton’s great-grandfather was a slave who was owned by relatives of Senator Strom Thurmond, the longtime archsegregationist who ran for president as a Dixiecrat in 1948.

“There’s not enough troops in the Army,” Mr. Thurmond told a screaming crowd during that campaign, “to force the Southern people to break down segregation and admit the nigra race into our theaters, into our swimming pools, into our schools and into our homes.”

Mr. Sharpton seemed a little shaken by the revelation. “You’re always kind of thinking that your ancestors were slaves,” he said. “But this was my grandfather’s father. I knew my grandfather. It’s eerie when it becomes so personal.”

The days of slavery are closer than we tend to think, and they were crueler than we tend to realize. Mr. Sharpton’s great-grandfather, Coleman Sharpton, was sent with his wife and two children from South Carolina to Florida so a woman named Julia Thurmond Sharpton could send them out as laborers to pay off debts left by her late husband.

Julia Sharpton was a first cousin, twice removed, of Strom Thurmond.

“They were sent there solely for that reason,” Mr. Sharpton said. “To make money to pay her debt. It was just so clear that they were nothing but property. The complete dehumanization — I don’t think I fully understood it until this hit home.”

There’s a great deal that Americans don’t fully understand about slavery. It’s such an uncomfortable subject that the temptation is to relegate it to the distant past and move on. But the long tentacles of that evil institution are still with us. Slavery was the foundation of the thriving consumer society that we have today and the wellspring of the racism that still poisons so many white attitudes and black lives.

The sheer size of the phenomenon of slavery, which was woven into the very being of the early Americas, is not well known today. The historian David Brion Davis, in his book “Inhuman Bondage,” tells us:

“By 1820 nearly 8.7 million slaves had departed from Africa for the New World, as opposed to only 2.6 million whites, many of them convicts or indentured servants, who had left Europe. Thus by 1820 African slaves constituted almost 77 percent of the enormous population that had sailed toward the Americas, and from 1760 to 1820 this emigrating flow included 5.6 African slaves for every European.”

For most of the time between the Revolutionary War and the Civil War, the United States was governed by presidents who owned slaves.

One of the points Mr. Davis stressed was that the commodities produced in such tremendous volume by slaves — sugar, tobacco, coffee, chocolate, cotton — were crucial to the formation of the world’s first global mass market.

“From the very beginnings,” wrote Mr. Davis, “America was part black, and indebted to the appalling sacrifices of millions of individual blacks who cleared the forests and tilled the soil. Yet even the ardent opponents of slaveholding could seldom if ever acknowledge this basic fact.”

Instead of reaping rewards for this seminal role in the creation of a rich and powerful nation, blacks have been relentlessly vilified by a profoundly racist society and frozen out of most of the nation’s bounty. Consigned to the bottom of the caste heap after emancipation, and denied some of the most basic human rights, blacks became the convenient depository of whatever blame and negative stereotypes whites chose to cast their way.

The abject state ruthlessly imposed upon blacks for so long became, perversely, proof of their inferiority. Blacks gave whites of all classes someone to look down upon.

Slavery, like the past, as Faulkner reminded us, is not dead. It’s not even past. It’s not something that you can wish away.

The other night Reverend Sharpton flew into Miami to attend a conference. At the airport someone asked for his autograph.

“It was the first time in my life that I thought about why my name is Sharpton,” he said. “I mean this whole thing is as personal as why your name is what it is. You’re named after someone who owned your great-grandparents.”

WHAT -- on "nigger" and David Sedaris' The Way We Are

2007-03-03T09:28:00.000-05:00

Reading David Sedaris in The New Yorker

The dealer was named Little Mike, and he addressed Paul as "Bromine." He looked like a high-school student, or, closer still, one of those kids who dropped out and then spent all day hanging around the parking lot: tracksuit, rattail, a wisp of thread looped through his freshly pierced ear. After a few words regarding my brother's car, Little Mike ushered us inside and introduced us to his wife, who was sitting on the sofa watching a Christmas special. The girl's stockinged feet were resting on the coffee table, and settled between her legs, just south of her lap, sat a flat-faced Persian. Both she and the cat had wide-set eyes, and ginger-colored hair, though hers was partially hidden beneath a woollen cap. The wife remained seated as my brother and I entered the room. I guess you couldn't blame her for being inhospitable. Here you are, trying to watch a little TV with your cat, and these two guys show up-people you don't even know.

"Don't mind Beth," Little Mike said, and he smacked the underside of the girl's foot.

"Owww, asshole."

He advanced upon the other foot, and I pretended to admire the Christmas tree, which was miniature and artificial, and stood on a barstool beside the front door. "This is nice," I announced, and Beth shot me a withering look. Liar, it said. You're just saying that because my stupid husband sells reefer.

She really wanted us out of there, but Little Mike seemed to welcome our company. "Sit down," he told me. "Have a libation." He and Paul went to the refrigerator to get us some beers, and the girl called after them to bring her a rum-and-Coke. Then she turned back to the TV and glared at the screen, saying, "This show's boring. Hand me the nigger."

I smiled at the cat, as if this would somehow fix things, and when Beth pointed to the far end of the coffee table I saw that she was referring to the remote control. Under different circumstances, I might have listed the various differences between black people, who had been forced to work for no money, and black, battery-operated channel changers, which had neither thoughts nor feelings and didn't mind doing stuff for free. But the deal hadn't started yet, and, more than anything, I wanted my drugs. Thus the remote was handed over, and I watched as the pot dealer's wife flicked from one station to the next, looking for something that might satisfy her.

The failure of the would-be explanation. So he wanted to tell her that nigger equals black people (which we understand it does) and that properly used it refers to enslaved people and their descedant, not insensate objects, not remote controls?

Check the OED on definitions of "nigger" and its multiple everyday uses from "nigger-rigged" to "nigger yellow" to nigger head" tobacco.

An Interview with Jean-Bertrand Aristide

2007-02-27T14:16:00.000-05:00

Peter Hallward in London Review of Books

"In the mid-1980s, Jean-Bertrand Aristide was a parish priest working in an impoverished and embattled district of Port-au-Prince. He became the spokesman of a growing popular movement against the series of military regimes that ruled Haiti after the collapse in 1986 of the Duvalier dictatorship. In 1990 he won the country’s first democratic presidential election, with 67 per cent of the vote. He was overthrown by a military coup in September 1991 and returned to power in 1994, after the US intervened to restore democratic government. In 1996 he was succeeded by his ally René Préval. Aristide won another landslide election victory in 2000, but the resistance of Haiti’s small ruling elite eventually culminated in a second coup against him, on the night of 28 February 2004. Since then, he has been living in exile in South Africa.

According to the best available estimates, around five thousand of Aristide’s supporters have died at the hands of the regime that replaced the constitutional government. Although the situation remains tense and UN troops still occupy the country, the worst of the violence came to an end in February 2006, when after an extraordinary electoral campaign, René Préval was himself re-elected in a landslide victory. Calls for Aristide’s immediate and unconditional return continue to polarise Haitian politics. Many commentators, including several prominent members of the current government, believe that if Aristide was free to stand for re-election he would win easily.

This interview was conducted in French, in Pretoria, on 20 July 2006.

Peter Hallward: Haiti is a profoundly divided country, and you have always been a profoundly divisive figure. For most of the 1990s many sympathetic observers found it easy to make sense of this division more or less along class lines: you were demonised by the rich, and idolised by the poor. But your second administration was dogged by accusations of violence and corruption. Although you remained the most popular politician among the electorate, you appeared to have lost much of the support you once enjoyed among aid-workers, activists, intellectuals and so on, both at home and abroad.

I’d like to ask about the process that first brought you to power. How do you account for the fact that, against the odds, and certainly against the wishes of the US, the military and the ruling establishment in Haiti, you were able to win the election of 1990?

Jean-Bertrand Aristide: Much of the work had already been done by people who came before me, people like Father Antoine Adrien and his co-workers, and Father Jean-Marie Vincent, who was assassinated in 1994. They had developed a progressive theological vision that resonated with the hopes and expectations of the Haitian people. Already in 1979 I was working in the context of liberation theology, and there is one phrase in particular that may help summarise my understanding of how things stood. The Conferencia de Puebla took place in Mexico in 1979, and several liberation theologians were threatened and barred from attending. The slogan I’m thinking of ran something like this: si el pueblo no va a Puebla, Puebla se quedará sin pueblo. ‘If the people cannot go to Puebla, Puebla will remain cut off from the people.’ In other words, it isn’t a matter of struggling for the people, on behalf of the people, at a distance from the people; it’s a matter of struggling with and in the midst of the people. (read entire article)

Va. 1st state to express 'regret' over slavery

2007-02-26T17:53:00.000-05:00

Wendy Koch in USA Today

""Sorry" may be too expensive a word.
Once the heart of the Confederacy, Virginia has become the first state to express remorse for its past support of slavery, an action other states are in line to follow. The General Assembly passed a resolution of "profound regret" for "the involuntary servitude of Africans and the exploitation of Native Americans."

Virginia, which passed its resolution without objection Saturday, went further than any state has gone. This year, though, states and cities across the country are considering resolutions, launching studies and taking other actions to recognize slavery in their history.

Most are stopping short of apologizing. The Virginia resolution's authors, both great-grandsons of slaves, sought "atonement" for slavery but say they were told the word could prompt claims for reparations — monetary compensation — to the descendants of slaves. The definition of "atonement," according to Webster's New World College Dictionary, includes "satisfaction given for wrongdoing."

"This is as close as we can get to an apology in Virginia," says the Senate author, Democrat Henry Marsh III, a civil rights lawyer. "I feel vindicated." (read entire article)

Strom Thurmond & Al Sharpton

2007-02-25T11:00:00.000-05:00

In The Huffington Post

"Geneaologists have found that civil rights activist the Rev. Al Sharpton is a descendent of a slave owned by relatives of the late Sen. Strom Thurmond, a newspaper reported Sunday.

The Daily News said professional genealogists, working at the newspaper's behest, recently uncovered the ancestral ties between one of the nation's best known black leaders and a man who was once a prominent defender of segregation. [...]

"I doubt you can find many native South Carolinians today whose family, if you traced them back far enough, didn't own slaves," said Senter, 61, of Columbia, S.C. She added: "And it is wonderful that (Sharpton) was able to become what he is in spite of what his forefather was."

One of the late senator's sons, Paul Thurmond, and a nephew, Barry Bishop, declined comment, the Daily News said.

According to the newspaper, the genealogists found documents establishing that Sharpton's great-grandfather, Coleman Sharpton, was a slave owned by Julia Thurmond, whose grandfather was Strom Thurmond's great-great-grandfather. Coleman Sharpton was later freed." (read entire article)

L'Étranger

2007-02-25T10:47:00.000-05:00

Patricia J. Williams in The Nation

"Recently the New-York Historical Society and the Studio Museum of Harlem curated "Legacies," a fascinating show at N-YHS in which contemporary artists reflected on slavery. One of the commissioned pieces that accompanied the display was a short film by artists Bradley McCallum and Jacqueline Tarry. It featured McCallum, who is white, and Tarry, who is black, configured as a "twinning doll"--a nineteenth-century toy that has two heads, one at each end of a common torso. At the doll's waist is attached a long skirt or a cloak. Held vertically, the skirt falls and obscures one head. Flipped one way, it becomes a white doll. Turned upside down, the skirt falls the other way and suddenly it's a black doll. In the film, McCallum and Tarry, joined at the waist by some feat of pixilated trickery and dressed in nineteenth-century clothing, flip head over head down a long dark marble corridor, first a white head, then a black head, first a white man, then a black woman, first a Thomas Jefferson, then a Sally Hemings. As they describe it, "the races are joined head to toe...continuously revealing and concealing one another." Such an interesting metaphor for the state of our union. [...]

On MSNBC's Chris Matthews Show, Matthews hosted a discussion of Obama's decision to run for President. "No history of Jim Crow, no history of anger, no history of slavery," Matthews opined. "All the bad stuff in our history ain't there with this guy." Not true, I thought. The "bad stuff in our history" rests heavily upon each and every one of us. It shapes us all, whether me, Matthews, Obama, Biden--or Amadou Diallo, the decent, hard-working Guinean immigrant without any American racial "history," who died in a hail of bullets fired by New York City police officers because he looked like what the officers, groaning with racial "baggage," imagined to be a criminal. Some parts of our racial experience are nothing more or less than particular to our accidental location in the geography of a culture. (read entire article)

Another version appears in alternet as "Obama's Identity: Where Do We Start?" (read article)

Medical Apartheid

2007-02-25T10:43:00.000-05:00

EZEKIEL EMANUEL, "Unequal treatment" in NY Times

In April 1721, sailors arriving from Barbados set off a smallpox epidemic that raged in Boston for a year. Cotton Mather, the powerful Puritan minister, advocated using pus from a smallpox scab to infect another person, producing a mild case and long-term immunity to the “speckled monster.” Mather first learned about inoculation from an African slave and from reports of the practice in Turkey. For years, he had repeatedly failed to persuade any physician to try it. But on June 26, 1721, Zabdiel Boylston, a physician, administered pus to his 6-year-old son and two of his slaves, an adult and child. All three experienced mild cases and quickly recovered. By the time the epidemic subsided, Boylston had inoculated 244 people, six of whom died — a death rate of 2.4 percent, compared with 14 percent for the nearly 6,000 Bostonians who acquired smallpox naturally.

As Boylston’s use of slaves highlights, African-Americans have participated in biomedical research from the outset. In “Medical Apartheid,” Harriet Washington charges that they have also too often been abused and exploited by a racist medical establishment. This history, she argues, goes far beyond the infamous Tuskegee syphilis study, in which African-American sharecroppers, under the sponsorship of the United States Public Health Service, were for 40 years subjected to various procedures and prevented from getting penicillin treatment — despite the fact that determining the course of the disease, the putative goal of the study, had already been accomplished. “Researchers who exploit African-Americans,” Washington writes, “were the norm for much of our nation’s history, when black patients were commonly regarded as fit subjects for nonconsensual, nontherapeutic research.” (read entire article)

Race special: Racism in Britain 2007

2007-02-25T10:37:00.000-05:00

The Independent

The subject of race is in the headlines again, but really it has dominated the social and political agenda for centuries. To start 20 pages of coverage, William Leith asks the question we all fear: 'Am I a racist?'

Published: 25 February 2007
I'm about to take a racism test, and it's making me uncomfortable. Why? I'm not a racist. For the record, I am an anti-racist. If you asked me, I would say that, while the races may look different, they are equal. I would say that racism, the theory that one race is superior to another, is fallacious. Also, it does nothing but harm. It harms the victim, and it also harms the perpetrator. There is no sense in it. It is, quite literally, nonsense.

Oh, I know about racism. I know that, in both senses of the word, it's wrong. Wrong morally, and wrong factually. I don't know anybody who doesn't know this. And yet, as an idea, it persists. Something, somewhere, gives it power. And this is what's making me uncomfortable. Racism gets its power from some mysterious place, and that place, somewhere in the shadows of our culture, our collective memory, scares me.

I have an idea where that place is, but I don't want to go there. (read entire article)

White History 101

2007-02-23T09:40:00.000-05:00

Gary Younge in The Nation

White History 101

[from the March 5, 2007 issue]

Whatever happened to James Blake? He is probably the most famous bus driver ever. And yet when he died at age 89 in March 2002, the few papers that bothered to note his passing in an obituary ran just a few hundred words of wire copy and moved on.

Given that February is Black History Month, it is worth taking a moment to ask how such a crucial figure could be so cruelly forgotten.

Blake was the Montgomery driver who told a row of black passengers: "Y'all better make it light on yourselves and let me have those seats." Rosa Parks was one of those passengers. She made her stand and kept her seat. The rest, as they say, is history.

Well, black history anyway. We know how African-Americans boycotted city transit for thirteen months until the segregationists caved in. We know how the boycott launched the career of a previously unheard-of preacher called Martin Luther King Jr. and made Parks an icon. In schools, bookstores and on TV there is an awful lot of talk about them in February. But nary a word about Mr. Blake. That's because so much of Black History Month takes place in the passive voice. Leaders "get assassinated," patrons "are refused" service, women "are ejected" from public transport. So the objects of racism are many but the subjects few. In removing the instigators, the historians remove the agency and, in the final reckoning, the historical responsibility.

There is no month when we get to talk about Blake; no opportunity to learn the fates of J.W. Milam and Roy Bryant, who murdered Emmett Till; no time set aside to keep track of Victoria Price and Ruby Bates, whose false accusations of rape against the Scottsboro Boys sent five innocent young black men to jail.

Wouldn't everyone--particularly white people--benefit from becoming better acquainted with these histories? What we need, in short, is a White History Month.

For some this would be one racially themed history month too many. Criticisms of Black History Month from cynics, racists and purists are about as predictable as the arrival of February itself. But for all its obvious shortcomings, Black History Month helps clear a space to relate the truth about the past so we might better understand the present and navigate the future. Setting aside twenty-eight days for African-American history is insufficient, problematic and deserves our support for the same reason that affirmative action is insufficient, problematic and deserves our support. As one means to redress an entrenched imbalance, it gives us the chance to hear narratives that have been forgotten, hidden, distorted or mislaid. Like that of Claudette Colvin, the black Montgomery teenage activist who also refused to give up her seat, nine months before Rosa Parks, but was abandoned by the local civil rights establishment because she became pregnant and came from the wrong side of town.

The very notion of black and white history is both a theoretical nonsense and a practical necessity. There is no scientific or biological basis for race. It is a construct to explain the gruesome reality that racism built. But, logic suggests, you cannot have black history without white history. Of course, the trouble is not that we do not hear enough about white history but that what masquerades as history is more akin to mythology. The contradictions of how a "free world" could be founded on genocide, or how the battle for democracy during the Second World War could coincide with Japanese internment and segregation, for example, are rarely addressed.

"I am born with a past and to try to cut myself off from that past is to deform my present relationships," writes Alasdair MacIntyre in his book After Virtue. "The possession of an historical identity and the possession of a social identity coincide."

The purpose here is not to explore individual guilt--there are therapists for that--but collective responsibility. When it comes to excelling at military conflict, everyone lays claim to their national identity; people will say, "We won World War II." By contrast, those who say "we" raped black slaves, massacred Indians or excluded Jews from higher education are hard to come by. You cannot, it appears, hold anyone responsible for what their ancestors did that was bad or the privileges they enjoy as a result. Whoever it was, it definitely wasn't "us." This is one more version of white flight--a dash from the inconveniences bequeathed by inequality.

So we do not need more white history, we need it better told.Settlement, slavery and segregation--propelled by economic expansion and justified by white supremacy--inform much of what the United States is today. The wealth they created helped bankroll its superpower status. The poverty they engendered persists. But white history does not mean racist history any more than black history means victim's history. Alongside Blake, Milam and Bryant, any decent White History Month would star insurrectionist John Brown; the Vanilla Ice of the Harlem Renaissance, Carl Van Vechten; civil rights workers Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman, murdered near Philadelphia, Mississippi, during the Freedom Summer of 1964; and Viola Liuzzo, murdered during the Selma to Montgomery march. It would explain why Ronald Reagan kicked off his presidential campaign in Philadelphia, Mississippi, why George W. Bush chose Bob Jones University to revive his presidential hopes. It would tell the story of how Ruby Bates recanted her rape accusation in a bid to save the Scottsboro boys from the noose and how the Blakes never did reconcile themselves to the event that brought them infamy. "None of that mess they said was true," said his wife, Edna. "Everybody loved him. He was a good, true man and a churchgoer."

It would offer white people options and role models and all of us inspiration while relieving the burden on African-Americans to recast the nation's entire racial history in the shortest month of the year. White people, like black people, need access to a history that is accurate, honest and inclusive. Maybe then it would be easier for them, and the rest of us, to make history that is progressive, antiracist and inclusive. (read entire article)

American Prison Camps Are on the Way

2006-10-09T17:42:00.000-04:00

Marjorie Cohn in alternet

"The Military Commissions Act of 2006 governing the treatment of detainees is the culmination of relentless fear-mongering by the Bush administration since the September 11 terrorist attacks.

Because the bill was adopted with lightning speed, barely anyone noticed that it empowers Bush to declare not just aliens, but also U.S. citizens, "unlawful enemy combatants."(read entire article)

BACK TO SCHOOL AND SLOW ON POSTS

2006-09-08T11:32:00.000-04:00

But I'll try and post some links today or tomorrow.

Race and Adoption --(National, Transracial, Transnational)

2006-08-22T12:38:00.000-04:00

Lisa Lerner in alternet "A Mother Adopts, and Discovers Her Own Racism"

"The first photo I received of Vaishali showed her with fair skin. I was surprised, because from what my adoption agency told me, the child assigned to me would be much darker. After I got over that surprise, I had another: I felt relief. Suddenly -- guiltily -- it was a comfort to know that she would not look so different from me, and even more important, that her light skin would save her from a lifetime of prejudice. [...]

Back home, after a couple weeks had passed, I stared at Vaishali's naked bottom -- her darkest part -- and tried to ignore the insistent whispers of fear. Instead of brimming with pride, I felt like a trespasser, performing ablutions on this private flesh with color so foreign from my own. It was one thing to swoon over her photographs for months, but now she was in my home; she was my family. How could this be my daughter? I looked at her and tried to find similarities between us, relieved that her hair was straight, her lips not too full. Just thinking these thoughts made me feel horribly ashamed. I tried to sort emotion from fact: was it the dark color of her skin that was making me uncomfortable, or just that she did not look like me? I ached to talk to someone about it, but I was too afraid people would disapprove, would doubt my ability to be a loving mother." (read entire article)

LYNETTE CLEMETSON and RON NIXON" in new york times "Overcoming Adoption’s Racial Barriers"

"Ms. Brockway and Mr. Timble decided to adopt after a physically and emotionally wrenching first pregnancy — their daughter was delivered at 25 weeks. They did not want to deal with the long wait for a white infant, and adopting from overseas did not appeal to them.

“Some people see Asian or other ethnicities as closer to white, more acceptable, easier,” said Ms. Brockway, a teacher. “That’s just not us. We feel like we have the open arms and minds to be a good match to an African-American child.” (read entire article)

More on - "When the Levees Broke"

2006-08-22T11:50:00.000-04:00

""To be honest, I'm not sure what I would have done if Spike hadn't come when he did," she says. "I had a nervous breakdown right after Katrina, and I was fighting every day not to have another one. But talking about it to someone who I know cared about me and the people who suffered through this—it saved my sanity in a way. And I'm sure I'm not the only one." Spike's Katrina Allison Samuels in newsweek (read entire article)

‘When the Levees Broke’: Spike Lee’s Tales From a Broken City

2006-08-21T17:07:00.000-04:00

Stephen Holden in the new york times

A powerful chorus of witnesses and talking heads that cuts across racial and class lines was assembled for the four-hour film, to be shown tonight and tomorrow on HBO in two-hour blocks. Although seeds of hope are woven into this tapestry of rage, sorrow and disbelief, the inability of government at almost every level to act quickly and decisively leaves you aghast at what amounts to a collective failure of will.

The sights, familiar from television, are as shocking as ever: people stranded on rooftops waving signs pleading for help from passing helicopters and the thousands herded into the Superdome, which over several days turned into a giant, leaky sewer. Saddest of all are the personal stories of people who lost loved ones in the flood that inundated 80 percent of the city, leaving large sections looking like a bombed-out war zone. The sheer volume of suffering and misery chronicled by the film is crushing.

We hear horror stories of the ailing and elderly whose bodies were discovered by family members returning to their devastated homes. At the end of one chapter the film shows corpses, some covered, some not, left on the street to rot. (read entire article)

Spike Lee crafts complex, monumental look at Katrina

2006-08-21T16:51:00.000-04:00

Barry Garron yahoo news

LOS ANGELES (Hollywood Reporter) - Spike Lee calls his four-hour documentary on Hurricane Katrina a requiem, which it is, but that only begins to describe it.

The film, broken into four parts, is much more than a memorial chant to those who died in a natural disaster that went largely unmitigated by manmade relief. It also is a comprehensive look at what the storm did to the lives of the people who survived it.

The docu doesn't shrink from any part of the story. It includes the vast landscape of devastation, which is indisputable, as well as the assignment of blame for the tragic and inadequate response, some of which remains debatable. Lee's work is big enough to allow for conflicting opinions, though in most cases, it isn't hard to discern where the filmmaker stands.

There are powerful images and words during both nights, but if you must choose only one to watch, pick the first. Acts I and II deal with the predictions of the hurricane, the terrible storm and the immediate aftermath. The faces of Katrina's victims, as they describe their life-or-death ordeals, are flat-out unforgettable. Individual accounts put larger stories -- everything from the horrors at the Superdome to the extent of looting -- into greater perspective

(read entire article)

When the Levees Broke

2006-08-21T15:27:00.000-04:00

When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts

As the world watched in horror, Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans on August 29, 2005. Like many who watched the unfolding drama on television news, director Spike Lee was shocked not only by the scale of the disaster, but by the slow, inept and disorganized response of the emergency and recovery effort. Lee was moved to document this modern American tragedy, a morality play witnessed by people all around the world. The result is WHEN THE LEVEES BROKE: A REQUIEM IN FOUR ACTS. The film is structured in four acts, each dealing with a different aspect of the events that preceded and followed Katrina's catastrophic passage through New Orleans. Acts I and II premiere Monday, August 21 at 9pm (ET/PT), followed by Acts III and IV on Tuesday, August 22 at 9pm. All four acts will be seen Tuesday, Aug. 29 (8:00 p.m.-midnight), the first anniversary of Hurricane Katrina. (read entire article)

'King Leopold’s Ghost' Recounts Tales of Unimaginable Terror

2006-08-21T15:01:00.000-04:00

MANOHLA DARGIS in the new york times

Europe’s genocidal adventures in Africa receive a passionate reckoning in the ambitious documentary “King Leopold’s Ghost.” Working from Adam Hochschild’s best-selling history of the same title, the producer and first-time director Pippa Scott has enlisted a legion of talking heads to help tell a story of insatiable greed and unimaginable terror. Among those tapped for their expertise are academics, historians, Congolese elders and, for some reason, the memoirist Frank McCourt. Mr. Hochschild proves particularly effective, since he gets right to it: “What made it possible for Congo state officials to deal out all this pain and terror? Race.”

The barbarism of King Leopold of Belgium, the subject of another recent documentary, “Congo: White King, Red Rubber, Black Death,” remains shocking. In the mid-1880’s, with the help of the explorer Henry Morton Stanley and the approval of the world’s leading powers, Leopold seized a swath of Africa (then the Congo Free State, now the Democratic Republic of Congo) more than 76 times the size of Belgium, turning it into a personal capitalist venture. Using a large private army whose numbers included Congolese orphans, the king and his agents squeezed the land of its resources, slaughtering elephants for ivory, tapping trees for rubber. The Congolese were uprooted, separated, enslaved, whipped and mutilated (hands were cut off, sometimes for accounting purposes), leaving as many as 10 million dead. (read entire article)

Spike Lee Films the New Orleans Disaster His Way

2006-08-21T14:09:00.000-04:00

There are two Spike Lees. One is an artist capable of directing exceptional films, the other a public personality who suffers from flare-ups of foot-in-mouth disease and a fondness for conspiracy theories. Both sides of Mr. Lee’s personality express themselves in his new HBO documentary about Hurricane Katrina and the destruction of New Orleans, “When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts.” As a result it is by turns powerful and frustrating.

There are moments of such sheer emotional force in Mr. Lee’s film that words cannot adequately describe them.

A drowned 5-year-old girl named Sarena Polk is laid to rest in a little pink casket. Her mother, Kimberly, walks away from the funeral sobbing. Her cries describe the gulf between despair and sadness. What would probably seem crass and exploitative on the television news feels intimate in this film.

Mr. Lee also sets the record straight on the false reports that spun out of the chaos, stories about men raping babies and shooting at helicopters, which portrayed the victims as savages. Those stories, magnified or invented whole cloth, drowned out the risks and sacrifices of Louisianans, which far outweighed the instances of criminality and opportunism. And those reports helped harden the views of many against rebuilding the city.

There are several reasons to make a documentary like “When the Levees Broke.” One is to create a historical record. A more important goal is to draw attention to the continued misery of the victims and, one would hope, encourage a new rush of aid and assistance for those struggling to rebuild. But Mr. Lee undermines the latter goal whenever his film reduces Katrina to a black problem.

Without quite endorsing them, Mr. Lee presents the utterly unfounded charges that the failed levees were blown up to flood poor black neighborhoods.

The resulting deluge destroyed the homes of black and white residents of New Orleans, including those in better-off neighborhoods like Lakeview. There are enough hard facts and plenty of injustice to go around in the story of the dangerous and woefully insufficient levees and the dismally bungled federal response to the disaster. Mr. Lee does not need to dwell on the most divisive rumors.

“When the Levees Broke” soars when it emphasizes what a terrible human tragedy Katrina was. In one instance, Mr. Lee presents a stark montage of bloated corpses. But he refuses to reduce these people to no more than symbols. A friend of one of the dead men, whose image is by now familiar because it has been used over and over by media outlets, says sadly yet defiantly, “The guy’s name was Eddie.” Suddenly, simply, the viewer cannot look at the storm’s dead the same way again. (read entire article)

N.O. better blues

2006-08-21T13:21:00.000-04:00

Salon

Aug. 20, 2006 | NEW ORLEANS -- People had been talking for weeks about how the New Orleans premiere of Spike Lee's much anticipated Hurricane Katrina documentary, "When the Levees Broke," was sold out, so it was a little eerie when we arrived at New Orleans Arena Wednesday night to find that fewer than half of the 14,000 who'd reportedly snatched up the free tickets actually showed up for the event. Maybe they'd heard there would be no alcohol sold in the arena. Certainly Lee's ambitious film -- sweeping in its scope, emotionally intense and a challenge to watch in one sitting -- could drive just about anyone to drink. It's also possible that all those people who didn't show up don't live here anymore. The new New Orleans can be a pretty lonely town sometimes.

Which is partly why watching a Katrina documentary with thousands of other local residents -- certain to be a gut-wrenching experience -- also carried with it the possibility of catharsis. All summer long, apprehension about the first anniversary of "The Storm" (First? Really? Why does everyone look 10 years older already?) has been steadily building. With so many people still assessing their losses, coming up with a meaningful commemoration can be difficult. I know that 11 months ago I would never have predicted that I might be sitting in the arena across the street from the Superdome -- eating nachos, no less -- eager to watch more footage of what I thought I'd witnessed too much of already.

Lee kept his introductory comments brief, thanking the audience for the opportunity to tell their story. He encouraged people to laugh at the funny parts. Given how common inexplicable weeping spells are around here (as I write this from my neighborhood coffee shop, there is a man next to me reading his e-mail and sobbing intermittently -- I don't even ask anymore) everyone seemed relieved to hear that there would be funny parts, even if they did turn out to be few and far between.

Lee has frequently stated that at four hours – apparently the longest running time ever for an HBO original movie -- "Levees" is still not long enough, nor complete, and he's right. But through hundreds of interviews, "Levees" admirably covers an entire spectrum of events and circumstances. Starting with Katrina's landfall and the flooding from levee breaks, Lee moves quickly into the rapid spread of conspiracy theories and the government's refusal to address them. We see familiar footage of the botched evacuation, as Americans became refugees in their own country, and witness, again, how it was the inaction of elected leaders, not bad weather, that led to the subsequent breakdown of their lives.(read entire article)

Into Africa

2006-08-12T13:11:00.000-04:00

Barry Sherbeck in the ny times

AS the house lights dim for the second act of each performance of Madonna’s “Confessions” tour, the singer, wearing a crown of thorns, begins her 1986 anthem, “Live to Tell,” while her body hangs in mock crucifixion on a cross glittering with the mirrored tiles of a disco ball.

Madonna has been riffing on crucifix imagery for two decades. What hauls the entire tableau vivant into the present are the images flickering behind her on screens: close-ups of African children, staring with mournful eyes, superimposed over crackling flames and a running ticker, which tallies at 12 million the number of children orphaned by AIDS in Africa.

That Madonna should suddenly be casting an ice-blue eye toward Africa should hardly be surprising. After all, she has always known how to spot a trend. [...]

Those newly interested in the continent have been motivated by different atrocities. For some it has been the genocide in Darfur; for others, AIDS orphans. But regardless of anyone’s specific interest, most people consistently describe being attracted by what they see as a clarity — both political and moral — in Africa’s problems.

“I ask myself, ‘Why Africa?’ Why am I not motivated by Iran or something,” said Genevieve Parker, a 17-year-old student at the Potomac School in McLean, Va., who just returned from a summer trip to Ethiopia where she helped install pipes for an irrigation system. “It’s just because I don’t understand what’s going on: who are the good people, who are the bad?”

In Africa, Ms. Parker said: “there are a lot of problems, but you can group them in together. I can organize Africa in my head, in terms of poverty, droughts, even governments.’’(read more)

COMMENT TO COME - Gwyneth Paltrow is part of a campaign to help African children.

2006-08-12T13:06:00.000-04:00

Massacre in Lebanon

2006-07-28T10:18:00.000-04:00

Courtesy of brownfemipower: women of color blog

Why is the “war on terror” killing children?
by Robert Fisk

IT will be called the massacre of Marwaheen. All the
civilians killed by the Israelis had first been
ordered to abandon their homes in the border village
by loudspeaker; and leave they did, 20 of them in a
convoy of civilian cars.

That’s when the Israeli jets arrived to bomb them,
killing 20 Lebanese, at least nine of them children.
The local fire brigade could not put out the fires as
they all burned alive in the inferno. Another
“terrorist” target had been eliminated.

Later, the Israelis produced more “terrorist” targets
— petrol stations in the Bekaa Valley all the way up
to the frontier city of Hermel in northern Lebanon and
another series of bridges on one of the few escape
routes to Damascus, this time between Chtaura and the
border village of Masnaa. On day two, Israeli jets
came first to the little village of Dweir near
Nabatiya in southern Lebanon, where an Israeli plane
dropped a bomb on the home of a Shia Muslim cleric. He
was killed. So was his wife. So were eight of his
children. One was decapitated. All they could find of
a baby was its head and torso which a young villager
brandished in fury in front of the cameras. Then the
planes visited another home in Dweir and disposed of a
family of seven.

Lebanon, as usual, was paying the price for the
Hizbollah-Israeli conflict — as Hizbollah no doubt
calculated they would when they crossed the Israeli
frontier on Wednesday and captured two Israeli
soldiers close to Marwaheen.

But who is really winning the war? Not Lebanon, you
may say, with its more than 130 civilian dead and its
infrastructure steadily destroyed in hundreds of
Israeli air raids. But is Israel winning? Last week’s
missile attack on an Israeli warship off the coast of
Lebanon suggests otherwise. Four Israeli sailors were
killed, two of them hurled into the sea when a
tele-guided Iranian-made missile smashed into their
Hetz-class gunboat just off Beirut at dusk. Those
Lebanese who had endured the fire of Israeli gunboats
on the coastal highway over many years were elated.
They may not have liked Hizbollah - but they hated the
Israelis.

Only now, however, is a truer picture emerging of the
battle for southern Lebanon and it is a fascinating,
frightening tale. The original border crossing, the
capture of the two soldiers and the killing of three
others was planned, according to Hassan Nasrallah, the
Hizbollah leader who escaped assassination by the
Israelis last week, more than five months ago. And the
missile attack on the Israeli gunboat was not the
last-minute inspiration of a Hizbollah member who just
happened to see the warship.

It now appears clear that the Hizbollah leadership —
Nasrallah used to be the organisation’s military
commander in southern Lebanon — thought carefully
through the effects of their border crossing, relying
on the cruelty of Israel’s response to quell any
criticism of their action within Lebanon. They were
right in their planning. The Israeli retaliation was
even crueller than some Hizbollah leaders imagined,
and the Lebanese quickly silenced all criticism of the
guerrilla movement.

Hizbollah had presumed the Israelis would cross into
Lebanon after the capture of the two soldiers and they
blew up the first Israeli Merkava tank when it was
only 35 feet inside the country. All four Israeli
crewmen were killed and the Israeli army moved no
further forward. The long-range Iranian-made missiles
which later exploded on Haifa had been preceded only a
few weeks ago by a pilotless Hizbollah drone aircraft
which surveyed northern Israel and then returned to
land in eastern Lebanon after taking photographs
during its flight. These pictures not only suggested a
flight path for Hizbollah’s rockets to Haifa; they
also identified Israel’s top-secret military air
traffic control centre in Miron.

The next attack — concealed by Israel’s censors — was
directed at this facility. Codenamed “Apollo”, Israeli
military scientists work deep inside mountain caves
and bunkers at Miron, guarded by watchtowers,
guard-dogs and barbed wire, watching all air traffic
moving in and out of Beirut, Damascus, Amman and other
Arab cities. The mountain is surmounted by clusters of
antennae which Hizbollah quickly identified as a
military tracking centre.

Before they fired rockets at Haifa, they therefore
sent a cluster of missiles towards Miron. The caves
are untouchable but the targeting of such a secret
location by Hizbollah deeply shocked Israel’s military
planners. The “centre of world terror” — or whatever
they imagine Lebanon to be — could not only breach
their frontier and capture their soldiers but attack
the nerve-centre of the Israeli northern military
command.

Then came the Haifa missiles and the attack on the
gunboat. It is now clear that this successful military
operation - so contemptuous of their enemy were the
Israelis that although their warship was equipped with
cannon and a Vulcan machine gun, they didn’t even
provide the vessel with an anti-missile capability —
was also planned months ago. Once the Hetz-class boats
appeared, Hizbollah positioned a missile crew on the
coast of west Beirut not far from Jnah, a crew trained
over many weeks for just such an attack. It took less
than 30 seconds for the Iranian-made missile to leave
Beirut and hit the vessel square amidships, setting it
on fire and killing the sailors.

Sayed Hassan Nasrallah, the Hizballah leader, told the
Israelis that “if you do not want to play by rules, we
can do the same.” It was a grim little threat that was
obviously meant to counter Ehud Olmert’s equally grim
little threat that there would be “far-reaching
consequences” for the missile attack on Haifa.

— By arrangement with The Independent

Anger in the Arab World

2006-07-28T10:04:00.000-04:00

Rashid I. Khalidi in the nation

In what passes for analysis of the war involving Israel, Lebanon and Palestine in US and Israeli government circles, in the well-oiled PR machine that shills for them, and in much of the US media, we are told about a struggle against terrorism by a state under siege. The basic argument is that Israel is "responding to terrorist violence," and that the only real question is, How soon will Israeli force, backed by American determination, prevail? But this scenario has little to do with reality in the Middle East.

There will be no "destruction" of Hezbollah, and no "uprooting" of its infrastructure or that of Hamas, whatever the results of Israel's siege of Gaza and its merciless attacks against Lebanon. The rhetoric about "terrorism" has mesmerized those who parrot it, blinding them to the fact that Hezbollah and Hamas are deeply rooted popular movements that have developed as a response to occupation--of the West Bank and Gaza for nearly forty years, and of southern Lebanon from 1978 to 2000. Whatever one might say about the two movements' callousness in targeting civilians (a subject on which Israel's defenders are hardly in a position to preach), both have won impressive victories in elections and have provided social services and protection to their people.

The Lebanese government will not do Israel's bidding in south Lebanon. The deep divisions in Lebanon over Hezbollah's military presence before Israel's blitz began are rapidly disappearing. Lebanese Prime Minister Fouad Siniora, Lebanese Speaker Nabih Berri, Saad Hariri (son of assassinated Prime Minister Rafik Hariri), Gen. Michel Aoun, President Émile Lahoud and other major leaders of the country of all sects and all political persuasions and Lebanese public opinion have been horrified at Israel's ravaging of their country's infrastructure and its defenseless civilian population, yet again. Few indeed will be the Lebanese voices to support the Israeli-US position as this savaging of Lebanon goes on--and just because it is largely absent from US television does not mean that it is invisible to the rest of the world. (read more)

Flooded and forgotten

2006-07-01T00:28:00.000-04:00

Susan Straight in Salon

"We have no electricity, no water," others told me. "They just opened a store last week in my neighborhood, and a lady was holding a bag of chips and crying. People were just walking around her and nodding, because they understood. We haven't been able to buy food."

That first night, walking the streets and listening to people who found out I was from California and wanted to tell their stories, as if we were in a war zone from which only I would eventually escape, I realized that they felt completely abandoned in a way I can't imagine.

I am from a state where fault lines run everywhere -- where earthquakes have destroyed cities that were then rebuilt, where wildfires obliterate communities nearly every year, where mudslides take out houses in upscale beach towns again and again. In California, people are reimbursed by insurance companies, and then they rebuild in the same places, over and over. La Conchita, buried by mud in a horrific slide in 2004, will see new homes on the same slope. Scripps Ranch and other San Diego neighborhoods erased by wildfires in 2004 have already risen from ash. The Oakland hills, devastated in 1991 by one of America's most costly and destructive fires, are covered with houses again." (read more)

Katrina and New Orleans

2006-06-22T19:22:00.000-04:00

"Thousands of New Orleans Public Housing Units to be Destroyed as 200,000+ Low-Income Residents Remain Displaced" on democracy now

"We take a look at the situation with public housing in New Orleans. Last week, Federal housing officials announced that more than 5,000 public housing units for the poor were to be demolished even though tens of thousands of low-income residents remain displaced. On Saturday, public housing residents and advocates protested the decision by the Department of Housing and Urban Development and vowed to use any means necessary to stop the bulldozing of their apartments. The HUD decision means that at least 3,000 families who lived in the units before the storm will have to find someplace else to go. If the federal government's plan goes forward, New Orleans will have lost 85 percent of its public housing over the past decade.

Last week, the Deputy Chief of Staff of HUD, Scott Keller, attended a meeting of the New Orleans City Council. After the meeting Free Speech Radio News correspondent Christian Roseland asked him if now was the right time to be tearing down public housing since there are still over 200,000 people displaced from the hurricane. This was Scott Keller's response. (read entire article)

AND "All New Orleans Public School Teachers Fired, Millions in Federal Aid Channeled to Private Charter Schools" on democracy now

"We go now to New Orleans to look at the ongoing efforts to rebuild the city in the wake of the Hurricane Katrina disaster. After the storm hit, the city's infrastructure was virtually wiped out. Public housing units, hospitals, schools and universities were closed down because of physical damage. But many of these public institutions have not been re-opened. And some contend that this is part of an effort to privatize New Orleans.
We first look at the New Orleans public school system. Immediately after Hurricane Katrina hit, the Louisiana state legislature voted to take over most of the city's public schools and effectively fire the 7,500 teachers and employees who work in them. The city schools are now part of the state-run recovery school district and control of many of schools is being given to private charter organizations. Just last week, Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings announced $24 million dollars in federal aid to Louisiana for development of private charter schools which doubles the amount the state has already received. This federal grant was made only to charter schools - not traditional public schools. Many parents and teachers have expressed concern the move towards private charter schools is being done with little public discussion about curriculum, the efficacy of the schools, and working conditions for teachers." (read entire article)

"Confronting Confinement”: Bi-Partisan Commission Criticizes Size, Conditions and Racial Make-Up of U.S. Prison System

2006-06-14T14:48:00.000-04:00

From democracy now

"MICHAEL JACOBSON: [The US has the] Largest prison population in the world, and we incarcerate the greatest percentage of our population of any country in the world, and as you said, it's still growing. One of the central findings of the report is that it's simply too big. Too many people in prison. Too many people with mental illness who shouldn't be there. And those that are there are not getting the treatment they need. There are correctional leaders in this country who are trying to do a great job under incredibly difficult circumstances. They don't have the resources they should have. The correction officers aren't paid as well as they should be. It's a very tough, demanding job. And their legislatures keep passing tough on crime laws that keep filling up their prisons, and there's a disconnect between the resources these administrators have to do their jobs, and the number of people that they have to supervise. [...]

AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk about specifically California and Louisiana?

MICHAEL JACOBSON: Sure, well, California is by far – well, not by far, California and Texas are the two biggest prison systems in the country. California's prison system now houses about 165,000 people, at an annual cost of $8 billion a year. It's the -- it has the budget of a small country. A federal court recently took over the California health care system in their prisons, and one of the allegations that the judge found was true was that one prisoner each week was dying as a result of medical malpractice. That's a huge issue, obviously. And going be a very big challenge for the federal courts to handle. Health care is a gigantic issue in the California prison system. It's not been handled well for years.

Louisiana is a much smaller system, and one of the issues in Louisiana is good news and bad news. Angola, which is a very well known prison and used to be probably one of the country’s most violent. It’s far less so now. There’s been very good management in the institution and it’s a lot better than it used to be. But Louisiana, like a lot of states, pays their officers incredibly low wages. So they have very high turnover. People come in and out. I believe Louisiana is one of the states where one of the drawing cards for being a correctional officer is that your salary is so low, you're still eligible to collect public benefits. And the commission tries to address issues of training, and pay, and leadership in this report, because you simply can't run these facilities, which are amazingly difficult to run -- running these places and working in them is probably one of the toughest jobs in America. And you can't do that if your staff is underpaid and under-trained. (read more)

"Lieutenant Watada's War Against the War"

2006-06-14T14:34:00.000-04:00

Jeremy Brecher & Brendan Smith in the nation "Lieutenant Watada's War Against the War"

"In a remarkable protest from inside the ranks of the military, First Lieut. Ehren Watada has become the Army's first commissioned officer to publicly refuse orders to fight in Iraq on grounds that the war is illegal. The 28-year-old announced his decision not to obey orders to deploy to Iraq in a video press conference June 7, saying, "My participation would make me party to war crimes."

An artillery officer stationed at Fort Lewis, Washington, Watada wore a business suit rather than his military uniform when making his statement. "It is my conclusion as an officer of the armed forces that the war in Iraq is not only morally wrong but a horrible breach of American law," he said. "Although I have tried to resign out of protest, I am forced to participate in a war that is manifestly illegal. As the order to take part in an illegal act is ultimately unlawful as well, I must as an officer of honor and integrity refuse that order."(read more)

"Senate Issues Apology Over Failure on Antilynching Law"

2006-06-14T13:52:00.000-04:00

SHERYL GAY STOLBERG in NY Times June 14, 2005, "Senate Issues Apology Over Failure on Antilynching Law"

"WASHINGTON, June 13 - Anthony Crawford's granddaughter went to her grave without speaking a word to her own children about his lynching, so painful was the family history. On Monday, Mr. Crawford's descendants came to the Capitol to tell it -- and to accept a formal apology from the Senate for its repeated failure, despite the requests of seven presidents, to enact a federal law to make lynching a crime.

The formal apology, adopted by voice vote, was issued decades after senators blocked antilynching bills by filibuster. The resolution is the first time that members of Congress, who have apologized to Japanese-Americans for their internment in World War II and to Hawaiians for the overthrow of their kingdom, have apologized to African-Americans for any reason, proponents of the measure said. [...]

He is James Cameron, who in 1930, as a 16-year-old shoeshine boy in Marion, Ind., was accused with two friends of murdering a white man and raping a white woman. His friends were killed. But as Mr. Cameron felt a noose being slipped around his neck, a man in the crowd stepped forward to proclaim Mr. Cameron's innocence. Mr. Cameron came here in a gray suit and a wheelchair, his voice shaky but his memories apparently fresh.

''They took the rope off my neck, those hands that had been so rough and ready to kill or had already killed, they took the rope off of my neck and they allowed me to start walking and stagger back to the jail, which was just a half-block away,'' Mr. Cameron told a news conference. ''When I got back to the jail, the sheriff said, 'I'm going to get you out of here for safekeeping.''' [...]

Although the Senate garnered praise on Monday for acting to erase that stain, some critics said lawmakers had a long way to go. Of the 100 senators, 80 were co-sponsors of the resolution, and because it passed by voice vote, senators escaped putting themselves on record.

''It's a statement in itself that there aren't 100 co-sponsors,'' Senator John Kerry, Democrat of Massachusetts, said. ''It's a statement in itself that there's not an up-or-down vote.'' (read more)

James Cameron

2006-06-14T11:06:00.000-04:00

From NPR James Cameron, Human-Rights Activist, Dies

Hear Cameron speaking James Cameron

FINALLY - James Cameron; Survived Lynching, Founded Museum

2006-06-14T10:36:00.000-04:00

CORRECTION: THE WASHINGTON POST PRINTED AN OBITUARY ON SUNDAY JUNE 11.

Yvonne Shinhoster Lamb in The Washington Post" James Cameron; Survived Lynching, Founded Museum"

James Cameron, 92, who at 16 survived being lynched from a maple tree in Marion, Ind., and decades later was present when the U.S. Senate apologized for its failure to enact federal anti-lynching laws, died June 11 of congestive heart failure at a hospital in Milwaukee.

Mr. Cameron, who kept a piece of the rope that had scarred his neck moments before he was spared, was the only known survivor of a lynching attempt. An astute student of history, he lectured widely and in 1988 founded the Black Holocaust Museum in Milwaukee.

The museum, one of the first of its kind in the country, explores the story of African Americans from slavery to the present. Mr. Cameron started the museum in his basement, and it gained widespread support as a venue of reconciliation. [...]

In his autobiography, Mr. Cameron recalled the raw, inhuman sound of the mob, which included members of the local Ku Klux Klan. He once said he still could remember the faces of the 2,000 white people who gathered there, some with their children. Some eating. He prayed for his life.

Then, as the noose grew tighter around his neck, a voice called out: "Take this boy back. He had nothing to do with any raping or shooting of anybody."(read more)

Patricia J. Williams on "Borrowed Bodies"

2006-06-13T19:29:00.000-04:00

"Last June Nicholas Minucci, a young white man, spotted Glenn Moore, an African-American man, walking down a street of Minucci's neighborhood of Howard Beach, Queens, an area that is generally described as "all white." Minucci leapt out of his car, accosted Moore and, employing a baseball bat he just happened to be armed with, beat Moore while spewing racial epithets, then stole his sneakers. Moore ended up with contusions on his body and two skull fractures. [...]

Inside the courtroom, Minucci has been immersed in studies of the history of the N-word. He has armed himself with a copy of Harvard law professor Randall Kennedy's provocatively titled book Nigger and peruses it conspicuously while seated at counsel table, cracking his knuckles intermittently. In that book, Kennedy flatly claims that the word "nigger" has lost its sting, that it is just part of American idiom, that usage by hip-hop musicians and high-fiving basketball players has rendered it little more than the currency of facile badinage. Minucci likes this a-contextual take on the word; indeed, it is the cornerstone of his defense against the hate crime charge. Minucci just loves hip- hop and high-fiving and basketball to death--the bat notwithstanding. As a soulful born-again, neo-kinsman of Ludacris, he claims to have utilized the N-word's most casual and nonconfrontational connotation when inquiring if Mr. Moore might possibly have lost his way. (read more)

James Cameron (1914-2006) -James Cameron surivivor of a lynching in Marion Indiana died Sunday

2006-06-13T19:01:00.000-04:00

Thanks KGH.

From yahoo news "Founder of Black Holocaust Museum dies"

MILWAUKEE - James Cameron, who survived an attempted lynching by a white mob and went on to found America's Black Holocaust Museum, died Sunday at the age of 92.

Cameron had suffered from lymphoma for about five years, said Marissa Weaver, chairwoman of the Milwaukee-based museum's board.

In 1930, in Marion, Ind., Cameron and two friends were arrested and accused of killing a white man during a robbery and raping the man's companion.

A mob broke them out of the local jail and hanged Cameron's two friends, then placed a rope around his neck.

"They began to chant for me like a football player, 'We want Cameron, we want Cameron," he recalled in a 2003 interview with The Associated Press. "I could feel the blood in my body just freezing up."

The 16-year-old shoeshine boy was spared when a man in the crowd proclaimed his innocence. ("read the rest).

See also: ("Anatomy of a Murder" - Lynching)

More Madness

2006-06-13T18:46:00.000-04:00

Devon Carbado, "Defending "Nigger"?" on blackprof

Some of you might recall that a few years ago Professor Randall Kennedy of Harvard Law School authored a book titled: Nigger: The Strange Career of a troublesome Word." Perhaps not surprisingly, the book engendered a fair amount of controversy, and we explored some of that controversy on this blog. (See The Role of "Nigger" (or "Nigga") in Public Discourse). For the first time, Professor Kennedy testified in court about the use of the term. The case involves a white man, Nicholas Minucci, accused of beating a black man, Glenn Moore, with a baseball bat. According to law enforcement officials, the defendant swirled racial epithets --including Nigger--at the Moore as he physically abused him, and told Moore that he would be taught a lesson for attempting to rob a white person. Because the crime is being prosecuted as a hate crime, Minucci faces up to 25 years in prison. Part of the defense's strategy is to suggest that the term "Nigger" has multiple meanings, and that it is not necessarily associated with racial violence. This is precisely the point that Professor Kennedy makes in his book and made as an expert witness for the defense: "It [Nigger] is used by all sorts of people, black and white, and other groups as well." When Minucci's lawyer, Albert Gaudelli, asked Professor Kennedy to be a witness for the defense for no fee, he initially declined. Gaudelli did not give up: "Do you believe what you wrote. Are you willing to stand by it?" Indeed Professor Kennedy was: " I do not feel I was championing anybody's cause," Professor Kennedy told the New York Times. He testified "to advance the aims of justice." Reflecting on how things went, Gaudelli commented: "I think I did good. I got a Rhoddes Scholar to testify for nothing and all I had to do is drive him to the airport." (read entire piece)

MADNESS

2006-06-13T18:42:00.000-04:00

IN FULL. Corey Kilgannon NY Times "Epithet 'Has Many Meanings,' a Harvard Professor Testifies"

The witnesses in the trial of a white man accused of a racially motivated beating of a black man in Howard Beach last summer had been typical for an assault case in Queens. Until yesterday.

All of the previous witnesses — the hardened detective, the newsstand owner, the pizza maker, the career criminal and other assorted neighborhood characters — had offered plain-spoken testimony about Nicholas Minucci, 20, who is charged with using a racial epithet while attacking Glenn Moore with a baseball bat on June 29, 2005.

But the final witness for Mr. Minucci was a stranger to him, to Howard Beach and to the State Supreme Court in Kew Gardens, Queens. The defense got the Harvard Law School professor Randall Kennedy to travel from Boston to testify about the current usage of the racial epithet, sometimes referred to in court as the "n" word.

The epithet has become central to the trial, as a measure of whether Mr. Minucci attacked Mr. Moore because of his skin color. Several witnesses have testified that Mr. Minucci repeatedly spewed the epithet in anger while chasing Mr. Moore and beating him on the head. Mr. Minucci insists that Mr. Moore was about to commit a robbery and that he used the word as a form of benign address before subduing him with a few swats to the side and legs.

Mr. Minucci's lawyer, Albert Gaudelli, said he hoped Professor Kennedy's testimony would convince the jury that the mere use of the epithet did not constitute racism. On the stand yesterday, Professor Kennedy's explanation of the modern usage of the word seemed to support Mr. Gaudelli's claim.

"The word is a complex word," he testified. "It has many meanings."

Professor Kennedy had just taken the stand in a packed courtroom and rattled off his impressive credentials — which include attending Princeton, Oxford and Yale, a clerkship for Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall and his membership in the Bar of the Supreme Court.

He said the epithet was "a word that can be put to many different uses," ranging from a pejorative term to a friendly salutation.

Mr. Gaudelli asked Professor Kennedy, who is black, about his book on the subject.

"My second book is entitled, 'Nigger: The Strange Career of a Troublesome Word,' " the professor responded. Mr. Gaudelli handed him a copy of the book, and had it entered into the case as Exhibit W.

Professor Kennedy said that in modern parlance, the word could have many different meanings and was no longer restricted to use by or about black people. In fact, he said, many new immigrants use the word casually after learning it from movies, music videos and popular songs. In San Francisco, he said, the word is commonly used among young Asian immigrants.

"It is used by all sorts of people, black and white, and other groups as well," he said.

Later, outside the court, Professor Kennedy said it was the first time he had testified in a criminal trial about the use of the word. He said he had agreed to come to Queens to testify "to advance the aims of justice," but not to take Mr. Minucci's side.

"I do not feel I was championing somebody's cause," he said. "I was asked to speak as an expert witness about a particular issue. Somebody's liberties are at stake here."

Mr. Gaudelli said that when he phoned Professor Kennedy and asked him to testify, for no fee, the professor initially declined. But Mr. Gaudelli persisted.

"I said: 'Do you believe what you wrote? Are you willing to stand by it?' Do you want to deprive my client of a fair trial?' " Mr. Gaudelli recounted. "He said, 'I'll call you in the morning.' "

Asked how the testimony went, Mr. Gaudelli said: "I think I did good; I got a Rhodes scholar to testify for nothing and all I had to do is drive him to the airport."

Early on, Professor Kennedy said the epithet, which dates to the 17th century, derived its name from the Latin niger, meaning black. It "seeped into English" through Spanish and Portuguese, he said.

In the cross-examination, Mariela Herring, a Queens prosecutor, asked Mr. Kennedy, "Are you here to tell us the "n" word is no longer a derogatory term?" She then asked more directly, "Is it a derogatory term?" Professor Kennedy responded, "It can be."

She asked Professor Kennedy if he had chosen the title of his book, published in 2002, for "shock value," and she cited a newspaper interview in which he said the "catchy title" would grab attention.

Professor Kennedy said the meaning of the epithet depended on the context in which it was used. Ms. Herring asked him to assume that the context was a white man wielding a baseball bat, about to attack a black man. Justice Richard L. Buchter disallowed the question, saying Professor Kennedy could not conjecture as to what the attacker would be thinking.

Justice Buchter also denied Mr. Gaudelli's attempt to enter a chapter of Professor Kennedy's book — "The Use of the Word Today" — as evidence, for the jury to consult.

Mr. Gaudelli maintains that Mr. Minucci, growing up in Lindenwood, a racially diverse neighborhood adjacent to Howard Beach, grew up with many nonwhite friends and used the term as part of his regular vocabulary.

The lawyer insists that his client, encountering a black man carrying a bag of tools at 3 a.m. in a middle-class white neighborhood, decided that Mr. Moore was about to commit a robbery and decided to use "reasonable force" to stop him. Mr. Moore has admitted that he and his friends intended to steal a car that night.

During yesterday's proceedings, Mr. Minucci responded to a question from the judge by saying that he would not take the stand. Five of the 19 counts against Mr. Minucci were eliminated, to streamline and simplify the indictment.

Both sides are to give their closing arguments today, and the judge is expected to give the case to the jury in the afternoon.(read entire article)

"Anatomy of a Murder" - Lynching

2006-05-28T16:16:00.000-04:00

David Bradley in the Nation on Cynthia Carr's "Anatomy of a Murder"

"On the night of August 7, 1930, in the town of Marion, in Grant County, Indiana, a congregation of white Hoosiers--men, women, children--participated in a bizarre American ritual: the lynching of a black man. Or rather men, for in Marion there were two: Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith, both 19, charged with the robbery and murder by shooting of a white man, Claude Deeter, 24, the previous night in a local lovers' lane. Shipp and Smith had been interrogated using methods common in that era, and based on the confessions thereby obtained they most likely would have been convicted. The prosecutor, the Marion Chronicle-Tribune reported, would demand the death penalty, and the "youths...cringed in the shadow of the electric chair." But the Chronicle also reported another allegation: Deeter's companion, 17-year-old Mary Ball, claimed she had been raped.

So a mob assembled. Ball's father made the ritual demand that the prisoners be handed over. Following the pro forma refusal, the mob stormed the jail. First Shipp, then Smith, was dragged out, maimed, murdered, mutilated and hung in the courthouse square. The next day's headline read Marion Relaxes After Lynching--like God, on the Seventh Day. (read entire article)

See an earlier post on Carr from the NYTimes Magazine ((Miscege)NATION - The open secret at the heart of US white supremacy)

For more on Cameron see David Mariott's On Black Men

"A Black Person Doesn't Feel Safe Everywhere"

2006-05-23T20:33:00.000-04:00

DANIEL COHN-BENDIT ON THE RACISM DEBATE IN GERMANY in Der Spiegel

"...SPIEGEL ONLINE: Germany's Africa Council this week wants to name specific areas where dark-skinned people shouldn't venture during the World Cup...

Cohn-Bendit: ... we don't need to wait for the Africa Council. The Verfassungsschutz (domestic intelligence agency) has already provided the data that show where far-right violence happens especially frequently. Whether they describe these places as no-go areas is immaterial. (read entire article)

An Inconvenient Truth

2006-05-23T20:19:00.000-04:00

A link to the trailer for Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth

(an inconvenient truth)

See also: (an inconvenient truth movie site)

Shooting to Kill on the Border

2006-05-23T18:40:00.000-04:00

By Sharon Smith in counterpunch

"On the afternoon of May 18, 22 year-old Oscar Abraham Garcia-Barrios was shot and killed at close range by U.S. Border Patrol and Customs agents. Garcia-Barrios was just 50 feet north of the border crossing from San Diego to Tijuana. He and a teenage passenger were transporting four undocumented immigrants-back to Mexico.

Border Patrol agents told reporters that they began following Garcia-Barrios' black Dodge Durango after receiving a "tip" from a San Diego "citizen" that his car had picked up four undocumented Mexicans. (read entire article)

The State We're In

2006-05-23T17:47:00.000-04:00

Elizabeth White for the AP "1 in 136 U.S. Residents Behind Bars"

"Prisons and jails added more than 1,000 inmates each week for a year, putting almost 2.2 million people, or one in every 136 U.S. residents, behind bars by last summer.

The total on June 30, 2005, was 56,428 more than at the same time in 2004, the government reported Sunday. That 2.6 percent increase from mid-2004 to mid-2005 translates into a weekly rise of 1,085 inmates. (read entire article)

Immigration: Mother consigned to certain death by harsh new rules

2006-05-18T18:28:00.000-04:00

Maxine Frith in the independent

"When Ese Elizabeth Alabi fell ill while on a trip to Britain and was told she urgently needed a heart transplant, she comforted herself with the knowledge that she was in a democratic country with an excellent healthcare system.

Instead, she was consigned to a certain death by draconian new rules brought in to quell the hysteria over so-called health tourism and immigration.

Ms Alabi was denied the chance of a heart transplant simply on the grounds of her nationality and died in hospital on Monday night at the age of 29, leaving three-month-old twin boys and a two-year-old son. Desperate attempts to get a High Court judge to overturn the rules were delayed as Ms Alabi was forced to fight a deportation battle even as she lay dying in hospital. (read entire article)

Lynching Resolution Rejected in Waco

2006-05-17T14:18:00.000-04:00

On yahoo news

WACO, Texas - A resolution denouncing lynchings in the 1800s and early 1900s was rejected Tuesday by county commissioners, while the City Council agreed to try to draft a document both bodies can accept.

McLennan County commissioners decided against adopting a community group's measure apologizing for the lynchings by a 4-to-1 vote, but then said they would work on a resolution all could accept. [...]

At least two county commissioners had said they opposed an apology because the lynchings happened before current leaders and residents were born. But they also said the victims should not be forgotten. (read entire article)

Captain of Duke's Lacrosse Team Is Indicted

2006-05-15T16:51:00.000-04:00

By SHAILA DEWAN in New York Times

"A grand jury returned an indictment today against a third lacrosse player in the rape case that has raised racial and class tensions between elite Duke University and its hometown.

Dave Forker Evans, a team captain who lived in the house where a black woman says she was sexually assaulted by three white players during a party in March, was charged with rape, first-degree sexual offense and kidnapping. Mr. Evans, who is from Washington, D.C., was indicted on the same charges as two of his fellow teammates, Reade Seligmann, 20, of Essex Fells, N.J., and Collin Finnerty, 19, of Garden City, N.Y., who surrendered on April 18.read more

Beloved -Best Work of American Fiction of the Last 25 Years

2006-05-11T19:41:00.000-04:00

New York Times

Early this year, the Book Review's editor, Sam Tanenhaus, sent out a short letter to a couple of hundred prominent writers, critics, editors and other literary sages, asking them to please identify "the single best work of American fiction published in the last 25 years." [Read A. O. Scott's essay. See a list of the judges.] Following are the results.
Note
This feature will appear in the May 21 issue of the print edition of the Book Review.
Related
In Search of the Best: An Essay by A. O. Scott
The Judges
Forum: Discuss the Choices
THE WINNER:

Beloved
Toni Morrison
(1987)
Review read more

NSA has massive database of Americans' phone calls

2006-05-11T19:31:00.000-04:00

Leslie Cauley, USA TODAY

The National Security Agency has been secretly collecting the phone call records of tens of millions of Americans, using data provided by AT&T, Verizon and BellSouth, people with direct knowledge of the arrangement told USA TODAY.
The NSA program reaches into homes and businesses across the nation by amassing information about the calls of ordinary Americans — most of whom aren't suspected of any crime. This program does not involve the NSA listening to or recording conversations. But the spy agency is using the data to analyze calling patterns in an effort to detect terrorist activity, sources said in separate interviews.

QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS: The NSA record collection program

"It's the largest database ever assembled in the world," said one person, who, like the others who agreed to talk about the NSA's activities, declined to be identified by name or affiliation. The agency's goal is "to create a database of every call ever made" within the nation's borders, this person added. read more

Some Responses to Steinberg

2006-05-11T16:46:00.000-04:00

Gregory D. Squires "Reintroducing the Black/White Divide in Racial Discourse" in New Politics 40, volume X, 4 read response

Gilbert Jonas "Another American Dilemma:Race vs. Immigration" in New Politics 40, volume X, 4 read response

Alan Aja "The Intra-Immigrant Dilemma" in New Politics 40, volume X, 4 read response

Ron Hayduk "Alliances Needed" in New Politics 40, volume X, 4 read response

Peter Drucker "Mobilizing Immigrants and Blacks" in New Politics 40, volume X, 4 read response

Michael Hirsch "Finger-Pointing Toward "Freedom Now!"" in New Politics 40, volume X, 4 read response

Steinberg responds

Stephen Steinberg "Response" in New Politics 40, volume X, 4 read response

Stephen Steinberg "Immigration, African Americans, and Race Discourse"

2006-05-11T16:40:00.001-04:00

New Politics, Vol. X, No. 3

IN 1971, THE Amsterdam News, New York City's oldest African-American newspaper, published a cartoon by Melvin Tapley that gave vent to a uniquely black ambivalence toward immigration. The cartoon portrayed a downtrodden black figure crouched on the ground, labeled "US Folks," a double entendre for "us folks" and "U.S. folks." A chain of other figures, representing Spanish Americans and the foreign born, climb on the back of the crouched black figure, to pluck fruit off the tree of opportunity. Tapley had no illusions about the struggles of these immigrant minorities. Although he portrays them as getting ahead on the backs of blacks, immigrants too must climb over the wall of prejudice, and they reach only the lowest branches on the tree of opportunity.

The accompanying editorial read as follows:

News from the Census Bureau that Spanish-speaking Americans are now able to earn higher incomes than Blacks will not come as a surprise to many of us.

Since our arrival here in 1619 as slaves, Black Americans have watched millions of European immigrants arrive and within a short time hold jobs and reach levels of incomes Blacks were not allowed to attain.

In fact, during the early part of the century the hordes of Irish, Italian, Jewish, Polish, German, Scottish, Greek, Spanish, and other European immigrants frequently replaced Blacks as longshoremen, street-car motormen, construction workers, jockeys, blacksmiths, and able-bodied seamen. Outright, rank racism, and discrimination were the tools by which Blacks have been deprived of work over the decades. read more

Chicago's Abu Ghraib: UN Committee Against Torture Hears Report on How Police Tortured Over 135 African-American Men Inside Chicago Jails

2006-05-09T20:39:00.000-04:00

Amy Goodman on democracy now

AMY GOODMAN: We go now to Chicago, where we're joined by three guests: David Bates, Flint Taylor and John Conroy. David Bates is one of dozens of men to come forward with allegations of abuse at the hands of the Chicago police. Flint Taylor is an attorney with the People's Law Office in Chicago, which he helped found in the late 1960s. He has represented many of the torture victims and was directly involved in spearheading the special prosecutor's investigation. And John Conroy is a journalist and author who's covered the case for over a decade. He’s written several articles for the Chicago Reader and is the author of the book, Unspeakable Acts, Ordinary People: The Dynamics of Torture. We welcome you all to Democracy Now! I want to begin with Flint Taylor for an overview. You have been working on this case for years. You have represented people who said they were tortured. Give us the scope of this story.

FLINT TAYLOR: Well, the scope started out with one man who was tortured by electric shock and having a plastic bag put over his head and being beaten by Jon Burge and others at the Area 2 police station. He, on his own, brought a lawsuit in the mid-‘80s. That lawsuit, we got involved in, and over the years we were able to uncover, with the help of journalists such as John Conroy, others such as David Bates, who had also been tortured and had told their stories in various courts, but no one had put all this evidence together.

We were able to assimilate, over many years, over 60 cases of torture, and when I say “torture,” I mean electric shock, I mean suffocation with bags, I mean mock executions, I mean racial attacks, that kind of thing. And they were all coming out of the same station, and they were all headed up by this man, Jon Burge, who came out of Vietnam, started out as a detective and quickly rose in the ranks through sergeant, lieutenant and commander. This went on -- the actual documentation now shows that this went on for over 20 years, from 1972 to 1992, when in fact Burge was finally, after community outrage, suspended and fired from his job. read more

Two by Ishmael Reed

2006-05-09T20:15:00.000-04:00

"How the Media Uses Blacks to Chastise Blacks," The Colored Mind Doubles in counter punch

ITivo Don Imus as much as I can because his putrid racist offerings are said to represent the secret thinking of the Cognoscenti. Maybe that's why journalists like Jeff Greenfield and others admire him so much. He says what they think in private. [...]

Clarence Page and others are regularly blaming the victim. Harvard's Orlando Patterson is also brought in by the Neo Con op-ed editors at the Times to characterize the problems of African-Americans as self-inflicted, using the kind of argument that would be ripped to shreds in a freshman class room.

Even Bob Herbert, a liberal and the token black on the New York Times' Neo Con editorial page, has to take the brothers and sisters to the woodshed from time to time in order to maintain credibility with his employers. He too says that Gangsta Rap is the cause of society's woes. (David Brooks, who promotes some of the same ideas as David Duke, but has a more opaque writing style, even blamed the riots in France on Gangsta Rap). read more

Learning About Racism, Live on NPR and CNN, Ishmael Reed, "The Furor Over the "Colored Mind Doubles" in counter punch

Maybe if those who manage airport services and the presidents of the airline companies knew how it felt to sit in a place like the Phoenix airport as the sole black person, while watching CNN, surrounded by people, all of whom look like Bush supporters, they would end this service. At home
you can always change the channel. Here you're stuck.

Within an hour CNN broadcast stories about the alleged rape of a black college student by white members of the Duke University lacrosse team. The report was biased in favor of the white players. When a black man is suspected of a crime, the cable networks are pro prosecution. When whites are involved, like the kids who killed a homeless man in Florida, the kind, who are attacking the homeless all over the country, the suspects are given the benefit of the doubt by the media.

CNN ran the arrests of two black security guards who were the first suspects in the kidnapping of Valerie Holloway, even after they had been released! read more

Blood on our Hands - Jodi Dean on White privilege

2006-05-09T19:30:00.000-04:00

Here's the post in full:

How many of us have blood on our hands? Do we acknowledge it, atone for it?

I almost titled this post: what racism did for me. I benefitted concretely and materially from Jim Crow laws. I may have said this before, but I think it is important for me to bear it in mind, to remember it, to mark it. Because of Jim Crow laws, my white grandfather--who grew up 'so poor the poor folks called us poor,' as he used to say---with barely a high school education, a 16 year old share-cropper wife, and a new, sick baby, was able to flourish as a small businessman in southern Mississippi.

After the Depression and the end of prohibition--during which he ran a bar for his bootlegging brother--my grandfather opened the only furniture store in Pascagoula, Mississippi that sold to blacks. (Not the term he used.) Or maybe just the only white owned store--I don't know for sure, and all those who would know have long passed. It was called Home Furniture Store. His black customers called him Mr. Home instead of Jake, J.C., or Mr. Runnels. Was he one of the few white progressives? Not really. He was a businessman who could identify an untapped market. Had the market been tapped, he may not have done so well.

His wife bled on and off for a couple of years after giving birth to my mother in a shack near Macedonia, Mississippi. So, they only had one child. She benefitted from her father's business sense. And from segregation insofar as she could become valedictorian of her high school and get a scholarship. Maybe she would have even had the schools been integrated. Thing is, we won't know.

Even if it is exaggerated to say that there is blood on my hands with respect to these matters, and I think it important to consider the other matters perhaps more relevant to this topic, it is not exaggerated to call oneself to account for the way in which one benefits from the suffering of others. It may be that in understanding how we have benefitted from the suffering of others, in recognizing how our privilege has nothing to do with our own acts, our 'merit' as some liberals would like us to think, we can hear the call to do our best to eliminate such suffering. read more

Video

2006-05-06T12:49:00.000-04:00

(Watch this video) Thanks BFP.

"Mission Akkomplished"

2006-05-06T12:21:00.000-04:00

Ariel Dorfman reprinted on counter punch

I blinked at the words on my screen. I had been trolling the internet, looking for reasons why the US does not celebrate its workers on the same day as the rest of the world, even if the origins of that date happen to be profoundly American: 1 May 1886, when demands for an eight-hour working day by Chicago trade unions (mostly made up of European immigrants) were met by violent police repression. When my search engine turned up an unknown website, www.secrethistory-georgewbush.com, I almost decided not to explore its contents. Of all Americans, the one least likely to be linked to May Day was George W Bush, notoriously uninterested in history or, for that matter, the working class. [...]

It is hard to believe that an incompetence so drastic and so persistent is not deliberate. It's crazy, I know, but George W Bush has acted as if he had indeed received secret instructions many years ago to ruin his land and lay low the American empire, make sure that, no matter what happened to the Soviet Union, it would not be the United States that would inherit the earth. Hard to believe and yet, I must confess . . .

I made it all up. The eccentric web- site. Its mysterious disappearance. The riotous accusations. All of it invented by me as a way of using that May Day landing on the deck of the Abraham Lincoln three years ago to ask ourselves what George W Bush has done to America, where has his mission finally landed us all?

It turns out that, despite all his efforts, the mission is far from accomplished. Just look at those millions of undocumented men and women who advanced through the avenues of Lincoln's country on this 1 May 2006, marching through its hopes and through its fears. Look at them, risking everything, crossing deserts and dodging bullets, exploited by bosses and discriminated against by vigilantes, just to be part of the American dream.

It's time to recognize that hidden truth: those illegal workers marching along the avenues and into the memory of America believe more in the promise of the United States than its president does. They are doing more, day and night, to keep their adopted country running and alive than the man who is not, of course, a KGB agent but, sadly for his fellow countrymen, continues to act more and more like one with every passing day. (read the entire article)

The "controversy": Viswanathan, Harvard, and the (un)Making of an "exceptional" brown girl

2006-05-05T13:30:00.000-04:00

Mark Lawson in the guardian "Fingers in the word-till"

"This panic about language-theft is prompted by Kaavya Viswanathan, the teenage American writer whose debut book - How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life - has been withdrawn from bookstores and her publishing contract cancelled after the discovery that her first novel incorporated portions of books by four other writers, including Megan McCafferty and Salman Rushdie.

This case seems to have some similarities with those of two American journalists - Stephen Glass of the New Republic and Jayson Blair of the New York Times - whose writing was proved to be fraudulent, although the techniques slightly varied: Glass was fictionalising material, Blair stealing it from others. Viswanathan seems to have combined these approaches by passing off the fiction of others as her own." read more

Motoko Rich, 'Opal Mehta' Won't Get a Life After All read more in the new york times, Motoko Rich and Glenn Rifkin, "For a Harvard Student and Aggrieved Novelist, Plagiarism Generates Interest," read more

Stewart Klawans in the nation "Sloppy Seconds"

"So what makes the Opal Mehta case such a thirsty blotter for news ink? The word "Harvard" may have something to do with it. I suppose Ms. Viswanathan would not have gotten so much attention as a student at Tufts--or, for that matter, if she were named Carla Nathan. Wild speculation on my part, of course; but maybe newspaper readers take special interest in the affairs of celebrity universities, and in the overreachings of the dark-skinned and ambitious. Maybe--an even wilder speculation--newspaper editors don't mind encouraging such interest." read more

Finally Sandip Roy in Salon "How Opal Mehta saved our lives,"

"I know this must come as small consolation to you these days, as dreams of book deals, film projects and maybe even Ivy League futures seem to wither on the vine. But as one Indian-American to another, I say thank you. I have to confess to a sneaking sense of relief when Opal Mehta's life came crashing down around you. It's not schadenfreude. It's just this relief that finally we can fail, that we can screw up spectacularly and live to tell the tale." read more

A Few Links On Blacks and Latinos in the US

2006-05-05T11:00:00.000-04:00

How do you tell the histories of immigration and slavery together; slavery and freedom? How do you tell it any other way?

Margaret Kimberley in black commentator "Immigration and America's Bad Karma"

"New immigrants from Mexico to the American west are just going back to their old neighborhood. What goes around does quite literally come around. Of course, Mexico was Indian territory stolen originally by the Spanish. So much bad karma, so little time.

America cannot have an honest discussion about immigration without revisiting its sordid past.read more

Tanya Hernandez on black prof Is There Racism in Latin America and What Does That Mean for Race Relations in the United States?

"The existence of racism in Latin America is an under-examined topic. Yet the growing demographic presence of immigrants from Latin America in the United States means that understanding race relations in the United States will more and more mean learning to understand the racialized contexts Latino immigrants emanate from. The one consistent commonality throughout Latin America is that while racialized hierarchies are manifest, each nation-state insists that racism does not exist. Because the scholarship about race in Latin America has focused on Brazil, examining the Brazilian context provides useful details about Latin American racism."read more

Rachel L. Swarns, Growing Unease for Some Blacks on Immingration in the new york times

"But despite some sympathy for the nation's illegal immigrants, many black professionals, academics and blue-collar workers feel increasingly uneasy as they watch Hispanics flex their political muscle while assuming the mantle of a seminal black struggle for justice.

Some blacks bristle at the comparison between the civil rights movement and the immigrant demonstrations, pointing out that black protesters in the 1960's were American citizens and had endured centuries of enslavement, rapes, lynchings and discrimination before they started marching.

Others worry about the plight of low-skilled black workers, who sometimes compete with immigrants for entry-level jobs.

And some fear the unfinished business of the civil rights movement will fall to the wayside as America turns its attention to a newly energized Hispanic minority with growing political and economic clout.

"All of this has made me start thinking, 'What's going to happen to African-Americans?' " said Brendon L. Laster, 32, a black fund-raiser at Howard University here, who has been watching the marches. "What's going to happen to our unfinished agenda?" read more

"Bush challenges hundreds of laws"

2006-05-04T16:10:00.000-04:00

Charlie Savage in the boston globe

President Bush has quietly claimed the authority to disobey more than 750 laws enacted since he took office, asserting that he has the power to set aside any statute passed by Congress when it conflicts with his interpretation of the Constitution.

Among the laws Bush said he can ignore are military rules and regulations, affirmative-action provisions, requirements that Congress be told about immigration services problems, ''whistle-blower" protections for nuclear regulatory officials, and safeguards against political interference in federally funded research.

Legal scholars say the scope and aggression of Bush's assertions that he can bypass laws represent a concerted effort to expand his power at the expense of Congress, upsetting the balance between the branches of government. The Constitution is clear in assigning to Congress the power to write the laws and to the president a duty ''to take care that the laws be faithfully executed." Bush, however, has repeatedly declared that he does not need to ''execute" a law he believes is unconstitutional.

Former administration officials contend that just because Bush reserves the right to disobey a law does not mean he is not enforcing it: In many cases, he is simply asserting his belief that a certain requirement encroaches on presidential power.
But with the disclosure of Bush's domestic spying program, in which he ignored a law requiring warrants to tap the phones of Americans, many legal specialists say Bush is hardly reluctant to bypass laws he believes he has the constitutional authority to override. read more

What Kind of Card is Race? The Absurdity (and Consistency) of White Denial

2006-04-30T06:58:00.000-04:00

Tim Wise in counter punch

Recently, I was asked by someone in the audience of one of my speeches, whether or not I believed that racism--though certainly a problem--might also be something conjured up by people of color in situations where the charge was inappropriate. In other words, did I believe that occasionally folks play the so-called race card, as a ploy to gain sympathy or detract from their own shortcomings? In the process of his query, the questioner made his own opinion all too clear (an unambiguous yes), and in that, he was not alone, as indicated by the reaction of others in the crowd, as well as survey data confirming that the belief in black malingering about racism is nothing if not ubiquitous.[...]

Since the O.J. trial, it seems as though almost any allegation of racism has been met with the same dismissive reply from the bulk of whites in the U.S. According to national surveys, more than three out of four whites refuse to believe that discrimination is any real problem in America (2). That most whites remain unconvinced of racism's salience--with as few as six percent believing it to be a "very serious problem," according to one poll in the mid 90s (3)--suggests that racism-as-card makes up an awfully weak hand. While folks of color consistently articulate their belief that racism is a real and persistent presence in their own lives, these claims have had very little effect on white attitudes. As such, how could anyone believe that people of color would somehow pull the claim out of their hat, as if it were guaranteed to make white America sit up and take notice? If anything, it is likely to be ignored, or even attacked, and in a particularly vicious manner.

That bringing up racism (even with copious documentation) is far from an effective "card" to play in order to garner sympathy, is evidenced by the way in which few people even become aware of the studies confirming its existence. How many Americans do you figure have even heard, for example, that black youth arrested for drug possession for the first time are incarcerated at a rate that is forty-eight times greater than the rate for white youth, even when all other factors surrounding the crime are identical (4)? read more

Tony Snow - Black Underclass Is “Most Dangerous Thing In Our Lifetime”

2006-04-27T20:12:00.000-04:00

From democracy now Black Underclass Is “Most Dangerous Thing In Our Lifetime”

Tony Snow is already coming under scrutiny for a series of controversial comments he’s made on his radio program. Just last week, he shared these views: "People like Jesse Jackson who have committed themselves to a view that blacks are constantly victims, have succeeded in creating in the United States the most dangerous thing that we’ve encountered in our lifetime; which is, an underclass that doesn’t seem to be going anywhere." Tony Snow went on to criticize what he described as: "the idiotic culture of hip-hop”: "You have people glorifying failure. You have a bunch of gold-toothed hot dogs become millionaires by running around and telling everybody else that they oughtta be miserable failures and if they’re really lucky maybe they can get gunned down in a diner sometime, like Eminem’s old running mate."

"The Rebuking and Scorning of Cynthia McKinney"

2006-04-27T20:02:00.000-04:00

David Vest in guerilla news network

"A Washington press corps that stood idly by while Bush and Cheney plundered the country, wrecked the environment, spied on Americans without a warrant, tortured civilians and lied the country into a war that will only get worse, woke up one morning and collectively decided: “Let’s all play Get Cynthia!”
Let’s get her for being too outspoken, bringing up the wrong issue at the wrong time, failing to get with the program, becoming a distraction, leaving House Majority Leader Nancy Pelosi beside herself with rage.

Let’s get her because, hell, she practically volunteered for it, and besides, she’s an easy target, standing practically alone, fired upon at will by Republicans—who seem to think her story cancels out DeLay, Abramoff, Katrina and Iraq—and virtually undefended by Democrats, except by the rolling of eyes heavenward, as though to say, “Oh, please! We’re not responsible for HER!”read more

"Eight Months After Katrina"

2006-04-26T20:26:00.000-04:00

Bill Quigley in common dreams

On Monday, April 17, 2006, two bodies were found buried beneath what used to be a home in the Lower 9th Ward. Their discovery raised to 17 the number of Hurricane Katrina fatalities that have been discovered in New Orleans in the past month and a half. Katrina is now directly blamed for the deaths of 1,282 Louisiana residents. Eight months after Katrina, the state reports 987 people are still missing.

Chief Steve Glynn, who oversees the New Orleans Fire Department search effort that found the latest two bodies told CNN: "You want to put it to rest at some point. You want to feel like it's over and it's just not yet."

Eight months after Katrina, there are still nearly 300,000 people who have not returned to New Orleans. While we can hope that our community is nearing the end of finding bodies, the struggle for justice for the hundreds of thousands of displaced people continues.read more

"Hell on Earth"

2006-04-26T20:23:00.000-04:00

John Vidal in The Guardian

Twenty years ago today, Konstantin Tatuyan, a Ukrainian radio engineer, was horrified when Reactor No 4 at Chernobyl nuclear power complex exploded, caught fire, and for the next 10 days spewed the equivalent of 400 Hiroshima bombs' worth of radioactivity across 150,000 sq miles of Europe and beyond. He was just married, and he and his young family lived in the town of Chernobyl, just a few miles from the reactor.

Like 120,000 people, the family was evacuated, but Tatuyan volunteered to become a "liquidator", to help with the clean up, believing that his knowledge of radiation could save not just him but many of the 200,000 young soldiers and others who were rushed in from all over the Soviet Union. "We felt we had to do it," he says. "Who else, if not us, would do it?"

Tatuyan spent the next seven years in charge of 5,000 mostly young army reservists - drafted in from Azerbaijan, Lithuania, Chechnya, Kazakhstan and elsewhere in what was the Soviet Union - working 22 days on, eight days off, digging great holes, demolishing villages, dumping high-level waste, monitoring hot spots, testing the water, cleaning railway lines and roads, decontaminating ground and travelling throughout some of the most radioactive regions of Ukraine, Belarus and southern Russia.read more

"Despite Crisis, 'Duke Lacrosse' Apparel Sells Like Hotcakes"

2006-04-23T12:34:00.000-04:00

I can't find the source for this. I think it's the Chronicle of Higher Education
April 20, 2006

Despite Crisis, 'Duke Lacrosse' Apparel Sells Like Hotcakes

Duke University has gotten a load of bad publicity in the last month over allegations that members of its men’s lacrosse team raped a stripper they had hired to perform at a party, and this week two of the players were indicted (The Chronicle, April 14 and April 19). Why, then, are sales of merchandise carrying the name and logo of “Duke Lacrosse” going through the roof?

ESPN’s Web site is reporting that sales have tripled or quadrupled in the last month, and local store owners are having trouble keeping the hats, T-shirts, and jerseys in stock. One obvious reason for the boom is the success of Duke’s women’s lacrosse team, currently the No. 1 team in the country. The gear, after all, doesn’t say “Duke Men’s Lacrosse.”

But that can’t be the only reason. Is it possible that the buyers are using their purchases to show solidarity with the men’s team at a time of legal peril, moral crisis, and institutional danger? Americans have been known to make political statements with their purchases before, from “Buy American” campaigns that stretch back to the 1970s to the many people who bought copies of Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses in 1989 without any intention of reading the book after Ayatollah Khomeini called for the novelist’s death.

Whatever the reason, someone is making a lot of money on that “Duke Lacrosse” apparel.

"Call to Escort Service Began a Night of Trouble at Duke"

2006-04-23T12:22:00.000-04:00

DUFF WILSON and JULIET MACUR in NY Times

The Duke University lacrosse team's troubles began with a phone call. A team captain using an assumed name called an escort service to hire two exotic dancers for a party on March 13. Last week, two Duke players were indicted on charges of first-degree forcible rape, first-degree sexual offense and the kidnapping of one woman hired that night. Collin Finnerty, 19, of Garden City, N.Y., and Reade Seligmann, 20, of Essex Fells, N.J., both sophomores, are each free on $400,000 bail. read more

Paul Gilroy: against the grain

2006-04-21T17:05:00.000-04:00

Colin MacCabe in open democracy

"Paul Gilroy has good claim to be the most influential intellectual writing in Britain today. His first major book There Ain't No Black in the Union Jack: The Culture and Politics of Race and Nation (1987, 1991) was an inspiration to a generation of young students and artists in the 1980s who wanted to be black and British. A signature of its impact is that even the title of this pioneering study of national identity in post-empire Britain became absorbed into the culture without reference to the author.

A series of pivotal books has followed, along with a host of essays, reflections and collaborations that cohere into an unmatched and still evolving body of work. The second key text in Gilroy's career was The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double-Consciousness (1992), which transformed academic geography and history. It made clear that Gilroy really had learned Hegel's lesson that only the slave truly understands a freedom which the master simply enjoys. As important, he had listened long and hard to the music in which the slaves and their descendants had articulated this understanding. read more

Ellen Kuzwayo (1914-2006)

2006-04-21T11:51:00.000-04:00

Thanks to black looks

"RIP - One of Africa's most respected and most dedicated women, South African anti-apartheid and women's rights activist and author, Ellen Kuzwayo.

Appearing before the TRC (Truth & Reconciliation Committee) in November 1996, Khuzwayo said: "They ruined our children. They turned our children into animals. I will go to my grave with this pain in my heart."

She was one of the most qualified female black teachers in South Africa but left her profession in protest against the introduction of Bantu Education which she believed was meant to impoverish generations of black children.

"I can forgive them for what they did to us adults but I cannot forgive them for what they did to the children," she said at the TRC hearings in Soweto. read more

"Ellen Kuzwayo; South African Rights Pioneer" by Alexandra Zavis in Washington Post

"South African author, women's rights and anti-apartheid champion Ellen Kuzwayo died April 19 after a long illness. She was 91. [...]

She was the first black writer to win South Africa's premier CNA Literary Prize for her 1985 autobiography, "Call Me Woman," a book that made her a spokeswoman for the suffering and triumphs of black women under apartheid.

"My motivation for writing the book was born out of the negative image about black women in South Africa, promoted by the general community of white people of this country, in particular the women . . . who employed African workers as domestic workers," Ms. Kuzwayo said. read more

"Big Business Sees A Chance For Ethnic and Class Cleansing"

2006-04-21T11:47:00.000-04:00

Gary Younge originally in The Guardian

"There are two types of power," said Linda Jeffers, addressing an accountability session of New Orleans mayoral candidates at the city's Trinity Episcopal church. "Organized money and organized people." Since Hurricane Katrina, the battle between those two forces has shaped the struggle to rebuild New Orleans. With mayoral elections on Saturday it is set to intensify.

The one thing both sides seem to agree on is that neither wants the city to return to the way it was before the hurricane. The people of New Orleans, most of whom are black and many of whom are poor, want schools that will educate their children, jobs that will pay a living wage, and neighborhoods where capital investment matches the large pools of social capital created by their churches and close-knit communities. Organized money has something else in mind: the destruction of many of those communities and permanent removal of those who lived in them, a city that follows the gentrification patterns of racial removal and class cleansing that have played out elsewhere in the US. [...]read more

"Beyond 40 Acres and a Mule"

2006-04-21T10:23:00.000-04:00

Scott Jaschik in Inside higher ed

But the reason members of the Organization of American Historians held an open forum on reparations as part of the group’s annual meeting is that many scholars consider this an issue that won’t go away — and that poses particular challenges to their discipline. So many delicate issues in history and public policy — defining who is black, defining who should feel either guilt or complicity for slavery, the relative evil done to groups like slaves, Holocaust victims or Native Americans — relate in some way or another to the reparations debate. And many were in evidence Thursday.

Participants said that the while the issue isn’t exactly capturing attention from Congressional leaders, it is getting attention in scholarship and in classrooms. “Most white Americans view the idea of reparations as a new or strange idea, but in fact it isn’t new or strange,” said Ray Finkenbine, a professor of history and director of the Black Abolitionist Archives at the University of Detroit Mercy.

Finkenbine traced the history of the reparations idea back to before the United States was a country, when the topic was discussed in colonial circles. The main reason the idea has seemed so “fringe” to white people recently is that, after the Civil War, the reparations movement changed from one with interracial support to one that was taken seriously only by black people. He added that historians today have a responsibility — and one he said that they are starting to fulfill — to fight this “racial amnesia” in white America.read more

Retired Colonel Sam Gardiner on Iran War Plans

2006-04-19T18:22:00.000-04:00

"The Issue is Not Whether the Military Option Would Be Used But Who Approved the Start of Operations?" Amy Goodman Democracy Now

AMY GOODMAN: We're talking to retired Air Force colonel, Sam Gardiner. You were quoted on CNN on Friday night, saying the question isn't if we would attack Iran, that military operations are already happening. What do you mean?

COL. SAM GARDINER: Well, the evidence is beginning to accumulate that a decision has already been made to use military force in Iran. Now, let me do a historical thing, and then I'll tell you what the current evidence is. We now know that the decision and the actual actions to bomb Iraq occurred in July of 2002, before we ever had a U.N. resolution or before the Congress ever authorized it. It was an operation called Southern Focus, and the only guidance that the military -- or the guidance that the military had from Rumsfeld was keep it below the CNN line. His specific words. The evidence that we've already --

AMY GOODMAN: Keep it below what?

COL. SAM GARDINER: The CNN line. In other words, I don't want this to appear on CNN, okay? That was his guidance to the military, you can begin to bomb Iraq, but don't let it appear on CNN. You're catching your breath.

AMY GOODMAN: Yeah.

COL. SAM GARDINER: I think the same thing has happened, and the evidence -- let me give you two or three evidences. First of all, the Iranians in their press have been writing now for almost a year that the United States is involved inside Iran conducting and supporting those who conduct military operations, attacks on military convoys. They've even accused the United States of shooting down a couple airplanes inside Iran. Okay, so there's that evidence from their side.

I was in Berlin three weeks ago, sat next to the Iranian ambassador to the International Atomic Energy Agency, and I asked him a question. I read these stories about Americans being involved in there, and how do you react to that? And he said, oh, we know they are. We've captured people who are working with them, and they've confessed. So, another piece of evidence.

Let me give you a couple more. Seymour Hersh, in his New Yorker article, said that there are Americans in three locations operating inside Iran. Another point. We know that there is a group in Iraq, a Kurdish group called the Party for Free Life in Kurdistan, that crosses the border from Iraq into Iran, and they have taken credit for killing numbers of revolutionary guard military people. And the interesting part about that is, you know, we tell the Syrians, ‘Don't let that happen. Don't let people come across the border and stir things up in Iraq,’ but we don't seem to be putting any brakes on on this unit. So, you know, the evidence is pretty strong that the pattern is being followed.

Now, the question that really follows from that is “Who authorized that?” See, there is no congressional authorization to conduct combat operations against Iran. There are a couple of possibilities. One of them is that it's being justified under the terrorism authorization that occurred in 2001. The problem with that is that you would have to prove a connection to 9/11. I don't think you can do that with Iran. The second possibility is that it's being done under the War Powers Act. I don't want to get too technical, but the War Powers Act would require the President to notify the Congress 60 days after the use of military force or invasion or putting military forces in a new country under that legislation, and the President hasn't notified the Congress that American troops are operating inside Iran. So it's a very serious question about the constitutional framework under which we are now conducting military operations in Iran. read more

Wole Soyinka with Amy Goodman on Democracy Now

2006-04-19T18:16:00.000-04:00

Legendary Nigerian Writer Wole Soyinka on Oil in the Niger Delta, the Effect of Iraq on Africa and His New Memoir

I asked him about his perspective on the invasion and occupation of Iraq and how it affects Africa.

WOLE SOYINKA: Not only for the African continent, but for the entire world, this is one of the most unbelievably monumental disasters, miscalculations, acts of governmental irresponsibilities with consequences which will be with the world for a very, very long time. A lot of Africans do not fully understand the issues in Iraq or else are indifferent. They have their own problems. If you like, they have their own mini-Iraqs on their hands, and so the blunders of countries like the United States are spoken of almost in a kind of academic way, not in terms of the effect, the impact of such blunders on the world, impacts such as the distrust of the United States, distrust even of some of the very positive role it can play in a situation like Darfur, for instance. But that distrust runs so deep that the soul of Darfur can just expand and pollute the entire region, whereas if the moral authority of the United States had not been so badly damaged, it might have been able to influence what's happening in Darfur a lot more, operating through the Africa Union or through the United Nations. So Iraq, the ramifications of the events in Iraq really have been very bad for Africa, generally.

AMY GOODMAN: And the Niger Delta, we talked about it in our first part of the interview, but the level of militancy, the anger at the oil companies coming into the Niger Delta, this organization called MEND, Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta, can you tell us who they are?

WOLE SOYINKA: They're very young, mostly, very highly motivated people who, however, have links with some of the elders, the progressive elders in the region, in Bayelsa, for instance, in Ijaw region, many belong to the Ijaw ethnic group, and from all indications, they're very articulate. The ones whom I’ve spoken to asked me to intervene in a number of ways in Nigeria, very articulate, and at the same time, they're reluctant rebels. Take, for instance, an email which one of them sent to me, said, “Prof, listen. We are people who would rather be with our families raising our children, sending them to school. We’re not happy sort of carrying out operations in the creeks. We want to be home. We want all this to be over so we can return to our families, but what future do our children have? There are no schools, there are no clinics. All the wealth in this region is going to Abuja, is going to sustain the rest of the nation, so it's about time that we took a stand. We want you to understand this.” This is the kind of language which they use. It's not bravado; it’s not crude, thuggish kind of people, at least the ones whom I’ve spoken to. read more

"Why a Hairstyle Made Headlines"

2006-04-18T15:39:00.000-04:00

I know this is really, really late but...

Robin Givhan in The Washington Post on Cynthia Mckinney's hair:

"When Rep. Cynthia McKinney (D-Ga.) summoned the media to Howard University last week to tell her side of the story in an altercation with a Capitol Police officer, she assumed the traditional news conference position behind a podium and a bank of microphones.

She stood there wearing a coral-colored jacket and dangling earrings and raising the serious issue of racial injustice. But it was impossible not to stare at her hair. As your plainspoken mother might say, it appeared to be standing all over her head. [...]

Aesthetically speaking, it was not one of McKinney's better moments. Her hair, which she had for years worn in thick braids, seemed to be in a limbo between a polished Afro and a head of funky twists. Had the humidity gotten to it? [...]

Anyone who has the smarts and the tenacity to be the first black woman elected to Congress from Georgia clearly understands the visual politics of wearing milkmaid braids and gold tennis shoes into the corridors of power. Her choices drive home the point that she is exceptional. She rolls hair, clothes and race into a tight ball. And it becomes impossible to talk about one without getting tangled up in the others. read more

AND PATRICIA J WILLIAMS IN THE NATION A Short History of the Pads of Brillo

[...] On our way out of the House of Representatives, we noticed a small scuffle as the Capitol Police wrestled with a dark, angry headful of illicit hair; a "dangerous do" had been trying to smuggle its way into the halls of power. [...]

I suppose this blinding power of hair is why facial recognition is so low in the humans' arsenal of self-protection. However it may seem to us, to the humans' hair is somehow more potently identifying than width of brow or color of eyes. "Who could notice the cheekbones, the nose and the smile with the loaded distractions of that washerwoman crown of braids?" asked an editorial in their widely circulated newspaper the Washington Post. Notice the placement of the word "loaded." They use that same word when speaking of guns. In other words, it would appear they can tell whether someone is a "loose cannon" or "safe" by whether the hair is "scattershot" or "a smooth, controlled cap."

Anyway, can you get a few of the Terran anthropologists on this? The hair doesn't speak to us; we don't hear a thing. But to the humans, the hair is yelling "confrontation!" and it makes everyone's optic nerves turn to stone when it stands up or lies down and it is "impossible not to stare" at anything but that bad, bad hair. One possible clue: The only thing the humans fully agree on is that the hair is all about race.

But the guidebook says race is a "card" game...read more

"Suppressing the N.O. Vote"

2006-04-15T20:16:00.000-04:00

The Editors at The Nation write:

New Orleans has long been pivotal in the struggle for black voting rights. During the Civil War, free blacks there demanded suffrage; their efforts resulted in Lincoln's first public call for voting rights for some blacks in the final speech of his life. Once these rights were won, New Orleans blacks took an active part in politics, leading to the establishment of the South's only integrated public school system. But rights once gained aren't necessarily secure; after Reconstruction, blacks in New Orleans lost the right to vote. As Thomas Wentworth Higginson wrote at the time of the Civil War, "revolutions may go backwards."

This is what we are seeing now, as New Orleans prepares for municipal elections on April 22. These elections are set to take place even though fewer than half the city's 460,000 residents have returned and the vast majority of those displaced outside Louisiana are African-Americans--the result of what Representative Barney Frank calls the Bush Administration's policy of "ethnic cleansing by inaction."

How did this happen? How did New Orleans become the most obvious symbol of the "backwards revolution" in voting rights that's been going on for at least twenty-five years? read more

UPDATE: MOVED FORWARD

2006-04-09T12:59:00.000-04:00

THIS IS NOT AN ENDORSEMENT BUT A CRITIQUE!

WHAT!!!

GET A LOAD OF INVISIBLE CHILDREN AND THE FRAMING OF WHAT IS AN HORRIFIC PROBLEM - THE CHILDREN FLEEING THE LRA IN NORTHERN UGANDA

the movement

the trailer

the teaser

Think the Alleged Rapists at Duke Bought into the “Oversexed Black Woman” Image?

2006-04-03T17:53:00.000-04:00

Thanks AREA25 for sending me this and the preceding article.

Commentary: Think the Alleged Rapists at Duke Bought
into the “Oversexed Black Woman” Image?
By: Gregory Kane, BlackAmericaWeb.com Date: Thursday,
March 30, 2006

Were these a bunch of white guys looking for a
real-life ‘make me feel good’ moment from a black
woman?

Consider this Part Two of last week’s column, in which
I suggested that it’s high time black folks pull
Hollywood filmmakers up for their persistence in
perpetuating the oversexed black woman stereotype. I
suspected when I wrote the piece that such
stereotyping might have some extremely bad real-life
consequences.

Now, courtesy of Duke University’s lacrosse team, we
all know how bad.

At least three members of Duke’s lacrosse team have
been accused of raping, beating and attempting to
strangle a black dancer at a party on March 13. The
woman is also a student at North Carolina Central
University.

According to several news stories, the players invited
two women to dance at the party, in which underage
drinking figured prominently (Booze isn’t called
“ignorant oil” for nothing.). The alleged victim and
another black woman went to dance at what they thought
was a bachelor party for five men. The two left after
they saw “dozens” of men and the party took a rowdy
turn, but one player apologized and convinced them to
return.

It was after the women returned that the victim
alleges three players dragged her into a bathroom and
raped and sodomized her. Forty-six of the 47 members
of Duke’s lacrosse team submitted DNA samples to
police. The 47th player is the lone black member of
the team, who didn’t fit the description of the
suspects.

Joe Alleva, the athletic director at Duke, said the
players deny all the charges. Even if that’s true,
this incident presents all sorts of disturbing
questions.

Why did a bunch of white guys feel it was necessary to
hire two black exotic dancers for their booze-a-thon?
I’m sure there are white exotic dancers in Durham,
N.C. Did these guys watch “Monster’s Ball” and
overdose on Halle Berry’s “make me feel good” moment
once too often?

Let’s assume they simply hired two female exotic
dancers and didn’t know the race of either until they
arrived at the party. How, then, do we account for
the women being subjected to racial slurs, as one told
the Raleigh News and Observer last week?

This was clearly a case in which, at best, a bunch of
white guys deliberately set out to degrade and demean
two black women. And black folks should be justifiably
outraged.

Now here’s the hardest question of all: Don’t some
black men degrade and demean black women just as much
as those Duke lacrosse players allegedly did?

You know the ones I’m talking about. Some rappers and
their endless stream of videos depicting black women
doing exactly what the exotic dancers at that party
near the campus of Duke University were doing: Shaking
it fast and dropping it like it was hot. And the irony
is weÂ¹re usually seeing a bunch of rappers who look
like they got beat down with both ends of the ugly
stick surrounded by gorgeous women.

Perhaps the most notorious of those videos is Nelly’s
“Tip Drill.” When Nelly was invited to Spelman College
a while back, some sisters there felt compelled to
uninvite him. They didn’t appreciate that “Tip Drill”
video. Change the race of the guys in Nelly’s “Tip
Drill” video from black to white, and you’d probably
have a scene similar to what went on at that party,
given the best-case scenario in which no rape
occurred.

Nelly’s defense of “Tip Drill” is that the video was
entertainment. The sisters at Spelman would probably
tell him that’s not the point. What is the point is
that the nearly butt-naked, scandalous hoochies
depicted in “Tip Drill” aren’t who most black women
are.

Black women are the ones graduating from college more
frequently than black men. If those black women happen
to be enrolled at Vanderbilt University in Nashville,
Tenn., then they’re also the group on that campus with
the highest grade point average.

Black women are the ones earning, on average, more
than their white female counterparts with comparable
educations. In Baltimore, black women are the ones who
hold three of the city’s top four elective offices.

Black women are doctors, lawyers, engineers, judges,
entrepreneurs, journalists, editors, legislators and
administrators. It’s time Hollywood got that. It’s
time those horny booze hounds otherwise known as Duke
University’s lacrosse team got that.

And it’s time black men got that.

Text Of Professor Baker's Letter To Duke

2006-04-03T17:47:00.000-04:00

Text Of Professor Baker's Letter To Duke
Administrators
POSTED: 12:29 pm EDT April 3, 2006
March 29, 2006

Awaiting the Restoration of Confidence:

A Letter to the Duke University Administration

Television screens tuned in to MSNBC on the morning of
March 29, 2006, broadcast a headline in bold red: DUKE
RAPE? At the bottom right corner of the front page of
The New York Times on the same day was an article
about the rape allegations roiling Duke University.
How is a Duke community citizen to respond to such a
national embarrassment from under the cloud of a
"culture of silence" that seeks to protect white,
male, athletic violence and which apparently prevents
all university citizens from even surveying the known
facts? How can one begin to answer the cardinal
question: What have Duke and its leadership done to
address this horrific, racist incident alleged to have
occurred in a university-owned property in the
presence of members of one of its athletic teams?

The alleged crimes of rape, sodomy and strangulation
of a black woman at a party populated in some measure
by the Duke lacrosse team reportedly occurred on March
13. University administrators knew about and had begun
to respond internally within twenty-four hours
following the incident. But Duke University citizens
had no public word from our university leadership
until President Richard Brodhead called a press
conference on March 28. Two weeks of silent
protectionism left all of us vulnerably ignorant of
the facts. Receiving e-mails and telephone calls of
concern from friends nationally and internationally,
we have been deeply embarrassed by the silence that
seems to surround this white, male athletic team's
racist assaults (by words, certainly -- deeds,
possibly) in our community.

It is virtually inconceivable that representatives of
Duke University's Athletic Department would allow its
lacrosse team to engage in regular underage drinking
and out-of-control bacchanalia. It is difficult to
imagine a competently managed corporate setting in
which such behavior would be tolerated (and swept
under the rug), or where such a "team" would survive
for more than a day before being tossed out on its
ears by security. Moreover, in a forthrightly ethical
setting with an avowed commitment to life-enhancing
citizenship, such a violent and irresponsible group
would scarcely be spirited away, or sheltered under
the protection of pious sentiments such as
"deplorable" -- a judgment that reminds us of Miss
Opehlia in Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin,
saying that slavery was "perfectly horrible." Such
timorous piety and sentimental legalism, in the
opinion of the author James Baldwin, constitutes
duck-and-cover cowardice of the first order.

There is no rush to judgment here about the crime --
neither the violent racial epithets reported in a 911
call to Durham police, nor the harms to body and soul
allegedly perpetrated by white males at 610 Buchanan
Boulevard. But there is a clear urgency about the
erosion of any felt sense of confidence or safety for
the rest of us who live and work at Duke University.
The lacrosse team -- 15 of whom have faced misdemeanor
charges for drunken misbehavior in the past three
years -- may well feel they can claim innocence and
sport their disgraced jerseys on campus, safe under
the cover of silent whiteness. But where is the black
woman who their violence and raucous witness injured
for life? Will she ever sleep well again? And when
will the others assaulted by racist epithets while
passing 610 Buchanan ever forget that dark moment
brought on them by a group of drunken Duke boys?
Young, white, violent, drunken men among us --
implicitly boasted by our athletic directors and
administrators -- have injured lives. There is
scarcely any shame more egregious than one that wraps
itself in the pious sentimentalism of liberal rhetoric
as though such a wrap really constituted moral and
ethical action.

Duke University's higher administration has engaged in
precisely such a tepid and pious legalism with respect
to the disaster of recent days: the actual harm to the
body, soul, mind and spirit of black women who were in
the company of Duke University lacrosse team members
as far as any of us know. All of Duke athletics has
now been drawn into the seamy domains of Colorado
football and other college and university blind-eying
of male athletes, veritably given license to rape,
maraud, deploy hate speech and feel proud of
themselves in the bargain.

Many citizens have weighed in, and one hopes all
departments, programs and concerned members of our
university community will speak out forcefully for
swift and considered corrective action.

But of course, it is not exclusively our academic
administration that seems to have refused decisive and
meaningful action. The most deafening silence -- and,
quite possibly, duplicity (which is to say, improbable
denial) -- has marked, in fact, Duke's Department of
Athletics. Where was Joe Alleva before Tuesday's press
conference called by President Brodhead? Where now is
the commercial charisma of Coach K, who could
certainly be out front condemning Duke athletes who
call people out of their name from the precincts of
university-owned housing? Why aren't such stalwarts of
Duke athletics publicly and courageously addressing
the horrors that have occurred in their own domain? We
remember the very first day of our new President's
administration -- how he and Coach K shared the media
dais, and the basketball magnate was praised for his
bold leadership. It all seems rather like an
Indonesian shadow play at this moment of crisis. All a
show.

What is precipitously teetering in the balance at this
point, during weeks marked by inaction and
duck-and-cover from our designated leaders is, well,
confidence.

It is very difficult to feel confidence in an
administration that has not addressed in meaningful
ways the horrors that have occurred to actual bodies,
to the Durham community of which we are an integral
part, and to our sense of being members of a proactive
and caring community. Rather, gag orders and trembling
liberal rhetorical spins seem to be behaviors du jour
from our leaders.

There can be no confidence in an administration that
believes suspending a lacrosse season and removing
pictures of Duke lacrosse players from a Web page is a
dutifully moral response to abhorrent sexual assault,
verbal racial violence and drunken white, male
privilege loosed amongst us.

How many mandates concerning safe, responsible campus
citizenship must be transgressed by white athletes'
violent racism before our university's offices of
administration, athletics, security, and publicity
courageously declare: enough!

How many more people of color must fall victim to
violent, white, male, athletic privilege before
coaches who make Chevrolet and American Express
commercials, athletic directors who engage in Miss
Ophelia-styled "perfectly horrible" rhetoric, higher
administrators who are salaried at least in part to
keep us safe, and publicists who are supposed not to
praise Caesar but to damn the unconscionable -- how
many? Before they demonstrate that they don't just
write books, pay lip service, or boast of safe
citizenship -- but actually do step up morally,
intellectually and bravely to assume responsibilities
of leadership for such citizenship. How many?

How soon will confidence be restored to our university
as a place where minds, souls and bodies can feel safe
from agents, perpetrators and abettors of white
privilege, irresponsibility, debauchery and violence?

Surely the answer to the question must come in the
form of immediate dismissals of those principally
responsible for the horrors of this spring moment at
Duke. Coaches of the lacrosse team, the team itself
and its players, and any other agents who silenced or
lied about the real nature of events at 610 Buchanan
on the evening of March 13, 2006. A day that, not even
in a cliched sense, will, indeed, always live in
infamy for this university.

A responsible, and in many instances appalled -- and
yes, frightened -- citizenry of Duke University is
waiting -- and certainly more than willing to join
considered actions by bold leaders to restore
confidence in a great institution and its mission.
Today, I polled my class whose enrollment is
predominantly women and white. All said that nothing
had happened in terms of this university's response
that had left them anything but afraid. The shame of
this is unconscionable. Still, these women will surely
sleep better this evening than the black woman injured
at 610 Buchanan Boulevard by the white lacrosse team's
out-of-control violent partying will ever again rest
in her life.

Professor Houston A. Baker, Jr.
George D. and Susan Fox Beischer Professor of English
Editor, American Literature

A thought

2006-04-03T07:55:00.000-04:00

I've been reading a lot of James Baldwin and I came upon this quotation: "The wretched of the earth do not decide to become extinct, they resolve, on the contrary, to multiply; life is their weapon against life, life is all that they have." And i was thinking about abortion and the push to make it illegal again.

Is this about white supremacy? About increasing the US white population? No incentives like other countries but a dis-incentive--a criminalization of reprodcutive choice.

"A Poverty of the Mined"

2006-03-28T18:10:00.000-05:00

Another interesting post by Daniel Moshenberg on black prof:

He responds to Orlando Patterson's op - ed piece in the NY Times called A Poverty of Mind via a reading of Kara Walker. "Since Patterson avoids defining `culture’, he can say whatever he wants, and it must be correct, or at least happily beyond correction. Patterson’s writes of a "cool pose culture." For Fanon, for example, that’s not culture; it’s consciousness, and frozen consciousness at that. Those who engage in it purchase and consume and are persuaded, intensively and profitably so, that they do not make it. It is the gift that keeps on taking. [...]

Patterson writes about the `disconnected fifth’. Of course, this hearkens to the talented tenth. Fine. But the cultural studies question would be that of the connectedness of the disconnection. (It would also interrogate the seductive neatness of twenty percent. How is the minority a majority? This is the Pan-African Black Consciousness cultural critique. When is one in five equal to nine in ten?) The political economic question is who derives profit and power from the establishment and maintenance of a disconnected, surplus?, population? The cultural question is who derives pleasure from a disconnected population? Who, personally and structurally? The cultural studies question is what becomes of profit, power, pleasure in the calculus of the disconnected fifth? A poverty of the mind is also a misery of the mind. It’s also a misery of the mined, those whose bodies and lives and more are read as always already used, depleted, and best forgotten. (read more).

Who Is Killing New Orleans?

2006-03-27T19:49:00.000-05:00

Mike Davis in The Nation

"More than 60 percent of Nagin's constituents--including an estimated 80 percent of the African-Americans--are still scattered in exile with no obvious way home.

In their absence, local business elites, advised by conservative think tanks, "New Urbanists" and neo-Democrats, have usurped almost every function of elected government. With the City Council largely shut out of their deliberations, mayor-appointed commissions and outside experts, mostly white and Republican, propose to radically shrink and reshape a majority-black and Democratic city. Without any mandate from local voters, the public-school system has already been virtually abolished, along with the jobs of unionized teachers and school employees. Thousands of other unionized jobs have been lost with the closure of Charity Hospital, formerly the flagship of public medicine in Louisiana. And a proposed oversight board, dominated by appointees of President Bush and Governor Kathleen Babineaux Blanco, would end local control over city finances. [...]

With each passing week of neglect--what Representative Barney Frank has labeled "a policy of ethnic cleansing by inaction"--the likelihood increases that most black Orleanians will never be able to return. read more

Black Men in Danger

2006-03-27T18:54:00.000-05:00

Erik Eckholm "Plight Deepens for Black Men, Studies Warn" in NY Times

"The share of young black men without jobs has climbed relentlessly, with only a slight pause during the economic peak of the late 1990's. In 2000, 65 percent of black male high school dropouts in their 20's were jobless — that is, unable to find work, not seeking it or incarcerated. By 2004, the share had grown to 72 percent, compared with 34 percent of white and 19 percent of Hispanic dropouts. Even when high school graduates were included, half of black men in their 20's were jobless in 2004, up from 46 percent in 2000" (read more).

Orlando Patterson "A Poverty of the Mind" in NY Times

"SO why were they [black men] flunking out? Their candid answer was that what sociologists call the "cool-pose culture" of young black men was simply too gratifying to give up. For these young men, it was almost like a drug, hanging out on the street after school, shopping and dressing sharply, sexual conquests, party drugs, hip-hop music and culture, the fact that almost all the superstar athletes and a great many of the nation's best entertainers were black (read more).

Trey Ellis "The University of Prison" in The Huffington Post Part I, Part II.

"Surviving to tell the tale of torture"

2006-03-25T18:49:00.000-05:00

Olga Talamant in the LA Times

"THE BURLAP BAG felt rough and scratchy against my cheek, but it also smelled earthy and deceptively comforting. Thick tape already covered my eyes, so the bag's only purpose was to frighten me. And it worked. I knew I had entered another dimension.

A day earlier I had been a not-too-unusual 24-year-old American student from UC Santa Cruz, working with the Peronist Youth organization for social change in Azul, Argentina. For the next 16 months, I would become one of thousands of political prisoners and torture victims taken into custody as Argentina first declared martial law and then later suffered a right-wing military coup. But I was one of the lucky ones — a survivor, thanks to family and friends in the United States who won my release on March 27, 1976.

When I returned home to California and testified about the torture, my stories horrified listeners. But we could feel safe here because torture was the province of brutal, unsophisticated despots. It was a time when the average American could not imagine our soldiers abroad participating in anything remotely similar. Now, three years into the Iraq war, we have seen the images of Abu Ghraib and read accounts of the atrocities at Baghdad's Camp Nama.

Americans once shocked by my experience now hear officials defend torture as a necessary evil in the war against terrorism. But it is only evil. read more

More Than 500,000 Rally in L.A. for Immigrants' Rights

2006-03-25T18:31:00.000-05:00

My brother called from the march in LA and said it was amazing, that it was LA like he'd never seen it before. That he stood in place for almost 2 1/2 hours there were so many people marching.

The LA Times is estimating 500,00- which means there are probably many, many more than that.

Joining what some are calling the nation's largest mobilization of immigrants ever, hundreds of thousands of people boisterously marched in downtown Los Angeles Saturday to protest federal legislation that would crack down on undocumented immigrants, penalize those who help them and build a security wall on the U.S. southern border. Spirited crowds representing labor, religious groups, civil-rights advocates and ordinary immigrants stretched over 26 blocks of downtown Los Angeles from Adams Blvd. along Spring Street and Broadway to City Hall, tooting kazoos, waving American flags and chanting "Si se puede!" (Yes we can!). The crowd, estimated by police at more than 500.000, represented one of the largest protest marches in Los Angeles history, surpassing Vietnam War demonstrations and the 70,000 who rallied downtown against Proposition 187, a 1994 state initiative that denied public benefits to undocumented migrants.

The marchers included both longtime residents and the newly arrived, bound by a desire for a better life and a love for this county. [...]

Saturday's rally, spurred by anger over legislation passed by the U.S. House of Representatives last December, was part of what many say is an unprecedented effort to organize immigrants and their supporters across the nation. The U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee is to take up efforts Monday to complete work on a comprehensive immigration reform proposal. Unlike the House bill, which beefed up border security and toughened immigration laws, the Senate committee's version is expected to include a guest worker program and a path to legalization for the nation's 10 to 12 million undocumented immigrants.

In recent weeks, hundreds of thousands of people have staged demonstrations in more than a dozen cities. The Roman Catholic Church and other religious communities have launched immigrant rights campaigns, with Los Angeles Cardinal Roger Mahony taking a leading role in speaking out against the House bill and calling on his priests to defy its provisions that would make felons of anyone who aided undocumented immigrants. In addition, several cities, including Los Angeles, have passed resolutions against the House legislation and some, such as Maywood, have declared itself a "sanctuary" for undocumented immigrants.

"There has never been this kind of mobilization in the immigrant community ever," said Joshua Hoyt, executive director of the Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights. "They have kicked the sleeping giant. It's the beginning of a massive immigrant civil rights struggle." read more

Kristof, "Suburban Safari"'s and "Invisible Children"

2006-03-24T17:45:00.000-05:00

KGH told me to read this Nicholas Kristof opinion in the NYTimes "On the Road, You and Me"

"Where's the best place to get an education? Some might say Harvard or Yale, Oxford or the Sorbonne. But maybe you should add Ndjamena to the list.

Universities are — oh so slowly — recognizing that they need to prepare students to survive globalization. But most overseas studies programs are both too short and too tame. They typically involve sending a herd of students for a term in France or Italy, where they study a little and drink a lot together, amid occasional sightings of locals.

That's why I bring up Ndjamena, this dusty capital of one of the poorest countries in the world. A student living independently here could learn French and Arabic, and would emerge with a much richer understanding of the world than could be taught in any classroom.

Traditionally, many young Britons, Irish, Australians and New Zealanders take a year to travel around the world on a shoestring, getting menial jobs when they run out of money. We should try to inculcate the custom of such a "gap year" in this country by offering university credit for such experiences.

So here's my proposal. Universities should grant a semester's credit to any incoming freshman who has taken a gap year to travel around the world. In the longer term, universities should move to a three-year academic program, and require all students to live abroad for a fourth year. In that year, each student would ideally live for three months in each of four continents: Latin America, Asia, Africa and Europe.

A student might, for example, start off teaching English and studying Latin American history in Ecuador, then learn Chinese intensively in Chengdu, then work at an AIDS clinic in Botswana while reading African literature on the side, and finish up by studying Islamic history in Istanbul. In each place, the students would live with local families.

Since the best way to learn about public health challenges is to endure them, I would also suggest offering extra credit for any student who gets malaria.

The cost of a year of travel would be far less than the annual cost of attending many colleges in the U.S. Third-class trains and buses are incredibly cheap; you can sometimes ride free on top of the trains. As a student backpacker myself in India two decades ago, I once lined up with the beggars and lepers of Amritsar to get free gruel from a Sikh temple — but that embarrassed even me.

In any case, all this suffering builds character. And students would get far more out of a year of travel than a year in classrooms.

Meanwhile, there's no need for universities to take the first step. Spring break season is upon us, and university students are dashing off to party in Mexico and Florida. So, you student readers, how about dashing off instead to Mongolia, where you'll find plenty of sand — the Gobi Desert — and get a truly exotic alcoholic drink: fermented mare's milk.

As for parents, if you have a child graduating from high school or college this year, forget about a conventional graduation present. Instead, send him or her off with a friend with a one-way ticket to Timbuktu.

Over a year or so, the kids would figure out how to catch rides with trucks north over the Sahara, then hitchhike through the Middle East and across Central Asia. After a temporary job in Calcutta to earn a few rupees, they could migrate through East Asia and then make enough money as tutors teaching English in China to buy cheap air tickets home.

Now, that would be an education!

You may not know that one of the most cosmopolitan states is Utah. That's because so many young Mormons spend two years abroad as missionaries. They learn languages, live as the locals do and bring back a worldliness that stays with them forever.

All this has been throat-clearing for my own announcement: In an effort to put my company's money where my mouth is, I'm sponsoring a contest in which I'll take a university student with me on a reporting trip to a remote part of Africa. We'll visit schools, clinics and villages, perhaps chatting with presidents in their villas and Pygmies in the rain forest. The winner will write a Weblog for nytimes.com and prepare a video blog that will be shown on mtvU.

So if you're a masochistic student — or if you have an ex you want to send into a malarial jungle — you can find out more information at nytimes.com/winatrip.

And even if you don't win, you can do this kind of thing on your own. So I'll hope to see you hanging out in Ndjamena by the Chari River, as the hippos bellow nearby."

WHAT!!!

NOW GET A LOAD OF INVISIBLE CHILDREN AND THE FRAMING OF WHAT IS AN HORRIFIC PROBLEM - THE CHILDREN FLEEING THE LRA IN NORTHERN UGANDA

the movement

the trailer

the teaser

The W Word

2006-03-24T13:35:00.000-05:00

There's a really good post on black prof called "The W Word." It begins:

"On Wednesday, March 22, 2006, NPR Morning Edition, a report titled “Zimbabwean Farmers Find a New Life in Nigeria” actually used the W word. White. Somehow, the report is a success story. It’s set up this way: “This next story is about white farmers in a majority black country. Zimbabwe’s white farmers were forced off their farms. It was part of an infamous land reform program instituted by President Robert Mugabe. Some of those farmers are getting a second chance in another African country.” And then the report begins with a proudly Zimbabwean voice: “What do you want to know? What can I tell you. It’s a lekker place, Nigeria. We are very happy. We are working ourselves to death.” The reporter `translates’ lekker as sweet, and omits to note the language is Afrikaans. This matters because near the end of the report, we are told that things are changing in this corner of Nigeria, but we’ll come to that in a bit.

A year ago thirteen white farmers moved, or fled, or according to the report `were wooed,’ from Zimbabwe to outside Shonga village, in Kwara State, west central Nigeria, and today they’re doing fine. With government subsidies and only “a handful of local farmers displaced”, they have set up farms of 2500 acres or so each. With direct and implied government assistance, modern technology, they now boast swimming pools and good harvests. Fortunately, they brought their Black Zimbabwean housekeepers, so, you know, it’s all good.

The Black Zimbabweans come into the picture as children, literally, singing a song in Shona, the majority language of Zimbabwe. It’s explained that the language and culture of Shonga, a Hausa speaking area, is encountering changes. For the Black Zimbabweans, in this instance Tapera Manyika, his wife Yeukai Sam, and their three daughters, life has improved. With less violence and a viable local currency, it’s all good." read more

IS THERE ...

2006-03-24T13:20:00.000-05:00

A Critical Queer Theory in Law? Like Critical Race Theory (in relation to Critical Legal Studies)-- but, to quote E. Patrick Johnson, a Critical Quare Theory. (Quare is, for Johnson, "thinking racialized sexuality"––see Black Queer Studies.)

Am I forgetting something obvious?

The Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy

2006-03-24T12:30:00.000-05:00

Over at slant truth Kevin Andre Elliott posts on Michael Franti and the Disposable Heroes:

Earlier today I was listening to the Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy, Hypocrisy is the Greatest Luxury . Remember them? Michael Franti’s second group (after the Beatnigs and before Spearhead) along with Ron Tse. Back in the early nineties, when this album came out, it was the shit, but I would have expected it to have grown stale with time. Fortunately that’s not the case. In many ways, I find the album more relevant now than ever. The lyrics from the title track:

Hypocrisy is the Greatest Luxury

Life these days can be so complex
We don’t make the time to stop and reflect
I know from first hand experience one can go delirious
seriously it can be like that
But before I put my foot in my mouth
cause that’s what I’m about to start talking about
Please let me confess before all the rest
that I’m afflicted by this addicted like most in the U.S.
It’s tough to make a living when you’re an artist
It’s even tougher when you’re socially conscious
Careerism, opportunism
can turn the politics into cartoonism
Let’s not patronize or criticize
Let’s open the door and look inside
Pull the file on this state of denial

[Chorus:]
Hypocrisy is the greatest luxury

Raise the double standard
(2x)

The bass, the treble
don’t make a rebel
Having your life together does
AMERICA
has an image of a young one
fast living not give an expletive
no respect for his
or the lives of those around him
Suicidal, homicidal or at very least
extremely unbridled
How convenient for those
who would like to destroy him
The problem has never been our political logic
but the way we enact it
We can imagine a perfect society
but can’t maintain a decent relationship
The failure found in the luxury, not in the hardship

[Chorus:]
Hipocrisy is the greatest luxury
Raise the double standard

Iraqi Exile Speaks Out Against the Targeting of Gay Iraqis by Shia Death Squads

2006-03-23T22:14:00.000-05:00

From democracy now

"Shiite death squads in Iraq have been systematically targeting gay Iraqis for persecution and execution. The attacks follow a death-to-gays fatwa issued by Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani last October. In a question and answer section of his website, Sistani says homosexuality is "forbidden" and calls for the killing of gays in the "worst, most severe way."

ALI HILI: Iraq, at the time of Saddam, was -- I mean, I'm talking about as a gay Iraqi -- it was not as bad as we can see now. In fact, it was a little bit -- we have a little bit acceptance. We have little bit of -- not too many intimidation. People are really accepting gays, especially in theater, in entertainment and media. We had several actors, singers, which was very popular before. There was no homophobic attitudes toward gay and lesbians. Most of them are welcomed in the community and the society. And people just -- we indulgence with the rest of Iraq.

JUAN GONZALEZ: And what has happened in the period since the U.S. occupation?

ALI HILI: Well, we started to receive information, in particular, the last two years, when we made contact with our friends, in particular, my old friends in Baghdad. And horrific, horrific details about, I mean killing, intimidation, harassing, arresting. It's a very dark age for gays and lesbians and transsexuals and bisexuals in Iraq right now. And the fact that Iraq has been shifted from a secular state into a religious state was completely, completely horrific. We were very modern. We were very, very Western culturalized -- Iraq -- comparing to the rest of the Middle East. Why it's been shifted to this Islamic dark ages country? read more

"Spate Speech or Honest Mistake"

2006-03-23T18:30:00.000-05:00

From acephalous "On his show this morning, Dave Lenihan attempted to list Condleezza Rice's qualifications for NFL Commissioner:

She's been chancellor of Stanford. She's got the patent resume of somebody that has serious skill. She loves football. She's African-American, which would kind of be a big coon. A big coon. Oh my God. I am totally, totally, totally, totally, totally sorry for that.

The link to the audio on The St. Louis Post-Dispatch warns potential listeners of the clip's "offensive language." People were certainly offended by it. KTRS station manager Tim Dorsey fired Lenihan a scant twenty minutes after his self-described "slip of the tongue." According to Dorsey, Lenihan's "slip"

was a most unfortunate racial slur. There can be no excuse for what was said. Dave Lenihan has been let go. There is enough hate. We certainly are not going to fan those flames. That is not what we're about.

St. Louis' NAACP chapter president, Harold Crumpton, called Dorsey seeking an explanation. Dorsey explained that Lenihan had already been fired. Crumpton sounded pleased, noting that "coon" is a word "intended to inflame passions . . . like the 'n word.'" I emphasize the word "intended" because the intention is there only in a general sense. It fails to account for the specific context of this utterance.

His unfortunate "slip" immediately follows a conversation in which Lenihan agrees with a caller who said she'd make a "fantastic President." He accidentally calls her a "coon" while trying to refer to the "coup" her ascension to NFL Commissioner would be. I grant you that the word "coup" immediately following the phrase "she's African-American" reeks of tokenism. But to claim that he "intended to inflame passions" by praising her qualifications for both the office of President of the United States and the Commissioner of the National Football League irks me.

This kind of unintentionally offensive comment differs from those which result from unacknowledged privilege. Lenihan's language isn't "unintended" in the "I'm unaware of the structural inequalities inherent in contemporary America" so much as the "I tripped over my tongue and out came what sounded like a racial epithet" way. (Unless you believe that in praising Rice he intended to denigrate all African-Americans. One could argue that Rice fits into the old "one of the good ones" mold and that Lenihan did intend to belittle the majority of African-Americans. None of the talking heads I've watched have forwarded that argument though.) read more

Scott Eric Kauffman's slip in the title is of a different but related order than the slip in the broadcast. Both speak some larger "truth." Spate is a "flood or inundation; A sudden or violent outburst or outpouring of some quality, feeling, etc." And coon "a Negro" (slang, derogatory). SEK, "Short of granting the existence of a psychoanalytic unconscious which reveals itself through such slips, I can't see how someone would ascribe ill-intention to them. However there are times when they may be the product of conscious thought interfering with articulation." I don't really think it's intention at all here for Lehihan (given his response) but both slips are a form of flooding, a form of remembering but Lenihan acknowledges his and SEK, here, seems not to want to acknowledge his own.

The Need for Struggle: Blacks at a Political Impasse

2006-03-23T18:12:00.000-05:00

Glen Ford and Peter Gamble in black commentator

"We have arrived at, and long passed, the juncture in Black politics when we can afford a false unanimity. Although there does exist an overwhelming consensus of progressive opinion among African Americans at-large, there is a deep and widening chasm between the people and those who purport to represent the masses - such as has not been seen since the mid-Sixties, when distinct strains of divergent Black political opinion gave motion to various oppositional movements. These movements were not opposed to each other, but were joined in opposition to racial oppression.

The result was a social transformation of America - accomplished by Black people - and which spawned the women's and anti-war movement: children of the Black movement, without which these social advances would not have been possible. The entire society was restructured, for the benefit of most citizens. But there was a price to pay - a great "white backlash" that has been most dramatically manifested in mass Black incarceration as a national policy since the early Seventies, the white reaction to Blacks stepping out of their place.

At the same time, during the early Seventies, we saw the ascension of a newly liberated class of Blacks who had cashed in on the chips that the Freedom Movement had provided. These African Americans saw a clear cut through the forest to the sunlight of profit - and took off like gazelles. The masses of Black folks applauded them, believing that their political and financial victories were our own. But they were not. [...]

Black Commentator is concerned most of all about Black political development, not because we are Afri-centric, but because we understand that nothing happens that is progressive in this nation that we have built occurs unless Black people are in motion.

It is therefore time for us to stop censoring ourselves, to stop biting our lips, and to speak the truth as we know it. Forget the Black business-leadership class. Replace them. They are no use, and they do us no good. read more