Friday, April 30, 2010

"The Dangerous Henry Louis Gates "

by Black Agenda Report editor and senior columnist Margaret Kimberley.
"Harvard Prof. Henry “Skip” Gates has made it his life’s work to pander to whites by defaming Black people. In his latest blood-libel, Gates claims Africans share equal blame with Europeans for the centuries-long holocaust of the African slave trade. By Gates’ hideously bizarre reasoning, Black Americans should look to Black Africans for reparations."
Read the article here.

Henry Louis Gates has long pointed fingers at the collective African for their role in slavery.

I am not surprised by this his most recent nonsense.

In one of his sleep-inducing documentaries he asked a man in Tanzania if he felt responsible for slavery!

This he did right after he asked the man if he considered himself black.

The man looked puzzled and asked something like 'black as opposed to what?'.

Gates is ignorant but his ignorance is purposeful in fueling the mythology of whiteness.

African identity issues cannot be so easily collapsed into categories that Gates and his ilk theorize from afar.

His New York Times article similarly dilutes the reparations issue/movement.

In both contexts he is the unmistakable agent that provides whiteness the room to escape culpability for slavery.

In these terms Margaret Kimberley is spot on when she writes:
"Henry Louis Gates is perhaps the most dangerous man alive to black Americans. He has the cache of a professorship at Harvard University, a position which undeservedly gives his voice an added weight of authority on every issue. Gates’ area of specialty is African American literature, but he has shrewdly marketed himself as the “go to” guy on any and every issue effecting black people all over the world.

The secret of his success is not at all difficult to decipher. Gates is a masterful and consummate suck up. He sucks up to white people in the worst and most damaging way possible to other black people. He never passes up a chance to let white people off the hook for the evils they have committed and henever passes up a chance to blame black people for just about anything bad that has ever happened to them.

His latest outrageous and toxic thoughts were spewed, as usual, in the opinion pages of the New York Times. This tome, “Ending the Slavery Blame Game,” uses African participation in the slave trade as his latest cudgel with which to beat black people and to make a mockery of the question of reparations for the 200-year history of slavery in the United States. ..."
When I read Gates, or about Gates, I am always reminded of the words of Frantz Fanon who said: "I have seen the future of the black man and it is white."

Gates would not be relevant in any other terms. Obama too.

Onward!

Story and Image Credit

Thursday, April 29, 2010

Pass Laws Come To Arizona

For the last couple of years or so I have been readying myself for a long adventurous motorbike ride through the US southwest.

I got the idea a few years ago when I drove across the US from New York via Arizona and up through Nevada to Oregon.

Arizona captured my riding imagination. I wanted to escape the cage (car) and ride free through what is one of the most beautiful states in the US.

I have fond memories of long stretches of road and hot sands that bathe majestic cacti alongside the greatest Canyon this side of the Fish River Canyon in Namibia.

Sadly, I will have to scratch Arizona off my riding plans for June/July this year.

You see Arizona has just passed a law called the "Support Our Law Enforcement and Safe Neighborhood Act" (SB1070).

Ostensibly this law allows the police to stop and arrest anyone they suspect of being an illegal immigrant.

Day workers are particularly singled out making it a crime to look for work on the streets.

Bullsh*t aside, this law means brown folk who look Mexican/'Hispanic' and, of course, Muslim will be racially profiled.

Defenders on the right will be quick to point out that this law is not aimed at legal citizens of any color.

Nonsense.

Anyone even remotely familiar with race politics in the US knows that this law is not seeking to root our illegal immigrants from Canada or France for that matter.

White folk need not stress. Ride Arizona all you want.

This law is aimed at brown folk. They even built a wall between Arizona and Mexico to keep out brown folk.

If this law reminds you of the Influx Control laws of apartheid then you are on the right track.

Remember the "Pass Laws"?

Black folk were terrorized to prove their belonging at a drop of a suspicious hat.

Influx control was oppressive and not aimed at 'safety and order'. That pretense under apartheid was not even postured.

In Arizona and now Utah too, the pretense of 'safety and order' is meant to dispel the real suspicion that the law is about white safety (privilege) and white order (and all that this implies).

These same impulses were directed at Japanese/Asian-Americans after Pearl Harbor. Japanese Americans, many of them US citizens, were rounded up, stripped of their assets, and put into what amounted to nothing more than concentration camps.

These law abiding folk were dehumanized!

Where will it all end?

Will President Obama step in and have his party propose federal legislation that would declare the Arizona law null and void?

Dunno.

Will other right-minded Americans recall the manner that the Nazis forced Jews to wear the Star of David as part of their 'safety and order campaigns?

I am still gonna ride the US this summer. But I will give Arizona, and most of the states south of the Mason Dixon line, a big miss.

It will be safer for my brown Muslim ass.

Onward!

See my good friend Dade Cariaga's excellent post on the subject entitled "No enemies on the Right".

See also Terrorizing Immigrants by Stephen Lendman; Arizona the Hate State by Mary Shaw and; Rise in Unity to Resist Arizona’s Racist Law! by Dennis Rahkonen.

Route 66 Image Credit
Whites Only Image Credit

Wednesday, April 28, 2010

Malcolm X Killer Freed On Parole


Thomas Hagan, the man who confessed to being involved in the assassination of Malcolm in Harlem's Audubon Ballroom on February 21, 1965, has been granted parole.

Thomas Hagan confessed to being one of three men who carried out the assassination. He is the only one to do so.

Hagan said he was angry at Malcolm for causing a split in the Nation of Islam but is remorseful now.

He said in a 1977 sworn statement that "I thought I was fighting for truth and right ..."

He added that "I understand a lot better the dynamics of movements and what can happen inside movements, and conflicts that can come up, but I have deep regrets about my participation in that ... "

Hagan remains a Muslim but is not part of the Nation of Islam.

He has not made any comment about his release. For the last 22 years he has been on work release which allows him to work outside prison on selected days.

His release will no doubt raise concerns.

As of this writing the organization founded by Malcolm X's late widow, The Malcolm X & Dr. Betty Shabazz Memorial and Educational Center, has not issued a position on Hagan's release.

The Malcolm X Commemoration Committee, on the other hand, has condemned the release.

Previous to the granting of parole, Hagan petitioned for parole and was turned down 17 times.

This is a very difficult case. What purpose would it serve to keep Hagan locked up indefinitely?

Still, it does not make it any easier to accept that he was part of those who actually pulled the trigger.

But then there is the bigger story of the US government and other agents who knew about the conspiracy to assassinate Malcolm and did nothing.

And in 1999 the US turned Malcolm X's legacy of protest against them into a 33 cent stamp.

Onward!




Story and picture credit

Stamp Credit

Monday, April 26, 2010

Al Jazeera: Slovakia's Radical Roma 'solution'



Al Jazeera English reports:
Some 10 per cent of Slovakia's population are of Roma ethnicity, most of whom are illiterate and live in poverty in the country's far east.

In an attempt to integrate them into Slovak society, the government has suggested a radical proposal: that Roma children be sent to boarding schools.

The plan has already been condemned as illegal by human-rights groups and the European Union. Yet many in Slovakia see it as an essential measure to improve Roma standards of life.

Al Jazeera's Laurence Lee (above) reports from the city of Rankovce.
Mmmmm .... now where have they tried this kind of racist crap before? Australia, Canada, the US ... ring a bell?

Should the Slovak government not just say they seek integration as an annihilation policy, one in which the Roma 'problem' will be erased (in the fullest sense)?

It amazes me, actually it doesn't, that the 'solution' essentially blames the victim.

If they can just teach the Roma to be less Roma then the problem would disappear. Right?

They are after all inferior and problematized as such, not only in Slovakia but throughout Europe. (See my "Roma Death and Life in Italy" (July 21, 2008).

Even Al Jazeera could not resist saying the "problem" will not just go away. The "problem" being the conditions that befall them as a result of their inferiority.

Slovakia's government should speak their bigoted truth plainly.

Onward!

Credits

Wednesday, April 21, 2010

Dumbing Down For The World Cup

I asked my students in political theory 211 what constitutes a nation. Being that they are in their second year (roughly sophomores) it may have been the first opportunity to weigh-in on what a nation means.

There was not much coming back at me so I posed the question differently.

"What makes you South African," I asked.

"We live here," someone from the back shouted. "There has to be more to being South African than living here," I replied.

Silence.

This scenario is not unique. When I taught students in the US and India I asked the same question and it played out similarly.

Just this morning I watched a live broadcast from my hometown of Kimberley as I readied for work here in the village from hell.

The broadcasters were interviewing folks attached to producing the spirit for the FIFA World Cup which is 50 or so days away.

"What does the World Cup mean to you," a reporter asked an official. "We get to show the world that we are truly South African, they come here and enjoy our wonderful nation and participate in our warmth and generosity to all," he replied.

Huh?

Try as hard as he may, he did not sound convincing. The World Cup as a nation-building exercise raises more questions about what it means to be South African than anything else.

After a few more minutes of determined pressing some general consensus about the make-up of South African-ness appeared in class.

Our culture (all of them I guess); our languages (the 11 official and the many others I guess); religion (all of them I guess); our geography.

"None of these make us unique, except for geography (and Lesotho is completely surrounded by South Africa)," I said.

The one determined voice raised the inevitable.

"Our history. We are South African because of apartheid," she said.

"Is that a good enough reason to call ourselves a nation?" I asked her.

"Not really since our history divides us and that is why we don't speak as one," someone else said.

The point of the exercise was not to frustrate students or call into question our nation-state, for no good reason.

The point was to press just how artificial our reality is when we dig past fanciful comments like that of the official above.

What we are is a construction of reality and, therefore, open to manipulation.

The Fifa World Cup is the most prominent example of how power elites manipulate belonging into profit and power.

Marx may be of very little use at this historical moment but his critique of the falsity (false consciousness) that underscores nationalism is worth reconsidering.

I hope the students in 211 will spend more time thinking about what makes them a nation but I expect that they will stay stuck just like most of us.

There is a very naive impulse needed to depress the reality that nations are anything more than manipulated concepts.

Whether we will be any more South African after the World Cup is hardly a matter of hopeful speculation.

Those who will profit from the fiasco will be happy and the left-out majority will be left weighing in on the manipulation.

Huge stadia will stand empty and elected officials will bend words to explain the developmental advances that are yet to follow.

And we will be looking elsewhere to explain what it means to be South African.

So hollow is the nationalist posture of pretending to exist in conflicting terms.

Onward!

Image Credit

UPDATE(April 22): See John Pilger's "Give sport back to the fans" for more on the FIFA fleecing of South Africa.

Monday, April 19, 2010

Back To Winning

Rafa Nadal has cut his title drought and returned to winning.

Last weekend he won the Monte Carlo Masters tournament for the sixth time in a row.

Reading about his win got me to thinking about the quest to win.

Is winning everything?

In professional sport I guess the matter of winning is clear.

But in life?

What is the matter/substance of winning in life? There are no tournaments in life, are there?

Many posts ago I wrote here, after my India sojourn, that I was OK with not achieving/winning everything I set out to do so many many moons ago.

But it is not that clear cut. Is it?

Every now and then I want to believe that there is time even as the goal line grows more distant.

Perhaps I have forgotten how to win, or worse, what to win.

Onward!

Image Credit

Wednesday, April 14, 2010

Tiger Woods' Infidelity Explained By Uncle Ruckus



Gotta luv Uncle Ruckus hey ... ?

Did you know that the black revolutionary Frantz Fanon was married to a white woman, Marie-Josephe ("Josie") Duble (her maiden name)?

Some of the 'truer' black revolutionaries who only cheated with white women think he sold out!

;)

Onward!

Hat Tip 2 Abagond

Tuesday, April 13, 2010

Tutu To Berkley Students: Divesting in Israel Is Right

Dear Student Leaders at the University of California – Berkeley

It was with great joy that I learned of your recent 16-4 vote in support of divesting your university’s money from companies that enable and profit from the injustice of the Israeli occupation of Palestinian land and violation of Palestinian human rights. Principled stands like this, supported by a fast growing number of US civil society organizations and people of conscience, including prominent Jewish groups, are essential for a better world in the making, and it is always an inspiration when young people lead the way and speak truth to power.

I am writing to tell you that, despite what detractors may allege, you are doing the right thing. You are doing the moral thing. You are doing that which is incumbent on you as humans who believe that all people have dignity and rights, and that all those being denied their dignity and rights deserve the solidarity of their fellow human beings.

I have been to the Ocupied (sic) Palestinian Territory, and I have witnessed the racially segregated roads and housing that reminded me so much of the conditions we experienced in South Africa under the racist system of Apartheid. I have witnessed the humiliation of Palestinian men, women, and children made to wait hours at Israeli military checkpoints routinely when trying to make the most basic of trips to visit relatives or attend school or college, and this humiliation is familiar to me and the many black South Africans who were corralled and regularly insulted by the security forces of the Apartheid government.

In South Africa, we could not have achieved our freedom and just peace without the help of people around the world, who through the use of non-violent means, such as boycotts and divestment, encouraged their governments and other corporate actors to reverse decades-long support for the Apartheid regime. Students played a leading role in that struggle, and I write this letter with a special indebtedness to your school, Berkeley, for its pioneering role in advocating equality in South Africa and promoting corporate ethical and social responsibility to end complicity in Apartheid. I visited your campus in the 1980’s and was touched to find students sitting out in the baking sunshine to demonstrate for the University’s disvestment in companies supporting the South African regime.

The same issue of equality is what motivates the divestment movement of today, which tries to end Israel’s 43 year long occupation and the unequal treatment of the Palestinian people by the Israeli government ruling over them. The abuses they face are real, and no person should be offended by principled, morally consistent, non-violent acts to oppose them. It is no more wrong to call out Israel in particular for its abuses than it was to call out the Apartheid regime in particular for its abuses.

To those who wrongly accuse you of unfairness or harm done to them by this call for divestment, I suggest, with humility, that the harm suffered from being confronted with opinions that challenge one’s own pales in comparison to the harm done by living a life under occupation and daily denial of basic rights and dignity. It is not with rancor that we criticize the Israeli government, but with hope, a hope that a better future can be made for both Israelis and Palestinians, a future in which both the violence of the occupier and the resulting violent resistance of the occupied come to an end, and where one people need not rule over another, engendering suffering, humiliation, and retaliation. True peace must be anchored in justice and an unwavering commitment to universal rights for all humans, regardless of ethnicity, religion, gender, national origin or any other identity attribute. You, students, are helping to pave that path to a just peace. I heartily endorse your divestment vote and encourage you to stand firm on the side of what is right.

God bless you richly,

Desmond Tutu.
Archbishop Emeritus of Cape Town.

Ps. Despite his sell-out adverts for slave financing Barclays/ABSA bank, Tutu is consistent on his position on Palestine.

Letter Credit
Picture Credit

Kulwant Roy's Unsealed Photos


CNN Caption: "Jawaharlal Nehru, Mahatma Gandhi and Sardar Patel at a special session of the AICC to consider the formation of an Interim Government, Delhi, 1946."


CNN
Caption: "A meeting where plans were drawn up for Partition. Seated round the table are Lord Mountbatten, Liaqat Ali Khan, Baldev Singh, Acharya Kripalani, Sardar Patel and Pandit Nehru, June, 1947."

See more of 'History in the making': The visual archives of Kulwant Roy.

Monday, April 12, 2010

"White Fatigue"

I found myself sitting on a bus somewhere in downtown Portland, Oregon, lost in thoughts prompted by student exchanges in one of my race/racism classes.

It was raining as usual and the end of the day had folks getting on and off the bus frequently.

The faces around me were pleasant enough and some folks even greeted before taking a seat next to or across from me.

I felt neither lost nor found among the many white faces just going on about their business.

But being neither lost nor found is an indifferent place. And indifference can lead to irritability, even contempt, at times.

It was somewhere at this point that I remembered a past girlfriend diagnosing my bouts of irritable indifference as "white fatigue".

"Listen to me," she said insistently over a cold hefeweizen on Grant Avenue, "I have to leave Portland because like you I suffer from "acute and returning bouts of white fatigue."

"Leave for where," I asked. "Home of course," she answered. "You should come too."

I smiled knowingly as she continued to make her case.

But what brings on "white fatigue" you may wonder, or not?

Well like she explained to me on another bus ride home to the hills of Sylvan it is the constant space of being out of place.

That place where you are forced to explain your being in both active and unconscious gestures.

I grew tired of explaining my identity to the point where I just added more layers of borrowed identity.

On some days questions about my whereabouts from interested and disinterested white folk led to creative explanations of genetic treks through Nepal and Tibet, also Greece and Timbuktu.

I was disassociating my reality. Perhaps. Or trying to be humorous.

But I also remember just being pissed about the too often vacant insistence that my borrowed blackness is displaced because real Africans are black.

"How can you be black? You don't look black. Africans are black."

If "white fatigue" was just a way of saying that it was hard to be visibly different in a sea of sameness then there is at least one merit to the concept.

Though one is never too far away from whiteness in a race-based republic like South Africa it has been a while since I called in sick due to "white fatigue".

This past weekend though started early on Friday for me and my diagnosis looks and feels like the "white fatigue" of Portland days except for one very important distinction.

The reason I locked myself away from the world outside had nothing to do with white people on the bus or at News Cafe. It even had less to do with that murdered fool TerreBlanche and the AWB fallout.

This time around I am afraid to say that my diagnosis of "white fatigue" is instead very much one of "black fatigue".

Yeah broer, sorry to say so but I have a case of 'acute black fatigue' and it is of the returning kind brought on by being lost and indifferent in the land of my birth.

I am tired of 'splaining stuff:
No I am not from India. I was born here and no I do not own a spice shop.

My mother is Malay by way of 200 more years of presence here in the soil that blackened my politics.

Yes I know a Malay face looks just like an Indian face to you.

No I do not know why all Indians are not Muslim and why Osama is blowing up stuff all over the world.

Osama is an Indian I do not understand. Just like you.

No my mother does not think it odd that her aging son is not married and no I did not meet a nice Muslim girl on my last trip home.

In fact, I met other real African idiots who know a lot about white people but sh*t about themselves and the folks who look like me. Just like you.

Yes I do take offense at the "you Indians cheat us blacks" victimization you want to use as a stick to beat my ass.

No I am not racist when I say that I f*cking hate soccer and everything related to the World Cup and Bafana Bafana team jerseys on fat out of shape asses included.

And yes I am looking to f*cking escape. I am going to cross over that race-conscious border to the north of my insanity and declare to all that for once I expect that those white folks in Portland were right.

Geezuz, my brown skin does contextualize my displacement. Just like Osama.

And hell no I don't cook curry and rice over my place everyday.
;)

Take me to another place ... and no not Tennessee. Been there and it is tiring too.

Onward!

Thursday, April 8, 2010

Max Du Preez on Terre Blanche

"I was astonished at the complete overreaction to ... the murder of Eugene Terre'Blanche by so many white South Africans and sections of the white media. ...

How did it happen that all these people forgot that Terre'Blanche was the national clown 16 years ago? That 99.9% of South Africans thought the AWB were disgusting fascists and racists?

Terre'Blanche was the joker with holes in his underpants lying on the doormat of an English poppie, the buffoon who fell off his horse, the crazed racist who led his thugs into Bophuthatswana to “kill some kaffirs”, the lunatic who crashed through the Codesa building’s windows with an armoured car and assaulted staff, the hooligan who served time in jail for a vicious racist assault on a defenceless man.

Nobody but a handful of dronkgat (drunk-ass) half-wits ever took Terre'Blanche seriously.

And now that two of his workers clubbed him to death, apparently because he refused to pay them, he is suddenly a paragon of virtue and a martyr for the white cause!

Most letter writers and radio callers unequivocally declare that his murderers were motivated by Malema’s song.

Do you really think the two workers would not have killed him if Malema had never sang that song? Unless strong evidence emerges, it would be very hard to believe.

I was deeply ashamed by the overwhelming, vulgar racism unleashed by whites since Terre'Blanche’s murder.
Max is on point here. In the opening hours of the murder ETV's coverage was mostly sensationalism.

Deborah Patta and Jeremy Maggs milked the story and made repeated connections between Malema's singing of "kill the boer" and the murder.

This kind of sensationalism sells. And last night the circus continued when secretary general, André Visagie, threw a dramatic fit of confrontation at black political commentator Lebohang Pheko on live TV.

Visagie made a fool of himself. South Africa watched the substance of the AWB in all its inglorious irrelevance.

What is even sadder is the fact that thousands of black victims of crime will not be afforded the same spotlight.

Onward!

Max Du Preez Credit

ETV Image Credit

Wednesday, April 7, 2010

Was Eugene Terre Blanche Assassinated?

The leader of the AWB movement (Afrikaner Resistance Movement),Eugene Terre Blanche, was allegedly murdered last Saturday on his farm in Ventersdorp, about an hour from where I am right now.

Two black farm workers, a 15 year old minor and a 26 year old man, have been charged with "murder, housebreaking and robbery with aggravating circumstances, crimen injuria and attempted robbery with aggravating circumstances".

The two farm workers have indicated that they were involved in a wage dispute with Terre Blanche.

The National Prosecuting Authority (NPA) told the court that Terre Blanche was found with his pants pulled down around his knees to expose his genitals.

For this reason, the NPA is pursuing a charge of crimen injuria.

The political fallout has been quite significant. President Zuma appeared on television to call for calm. He licked and smacked his lips through an inarticulate 10 minute broadcast that had him say he would "love to" offer his condolences to the Terre Blanche family.

Leaders in the mostly toothless AWB movement first said they would avenge the murder and then recanted calling for law and order.

Opposition parties started in on the ruling party's man-boy Julius Malema who just recently sang a supposed struggle anthem that says 'kill the boer, kill the farmer'.

Terre Blanche was no saint. He was, instead, a brutal racist who vehemently opposed the democratization of South Africa.

In the past he has severely assaulted black workers on his farm and in the town of Ventersdorp where many of his supporters live.

One particular assault led to a jail term and left the victim permanently incapacitated.

So why all the noise about his murder?

This is not a new story and it must be contextualized in the brutal history of South Africa.

Terre Blanche was a political leader of a racist separatist fringe that have all but disappeared from the current moment.

But, his murder comes against the backdrop of a lot of political noise from the ruling party about their anthem that calls for 'killing boers'.

The African National Congress (ANC) says the anthem is a mere metaphor and cannot be stifled by the courts (as it has been).

Many white folks, particularly farmers, see the song as provocation and believe that Terre Blanche murder was in fact a systematic assassination.

These strands need to be separated.

I have consistently argued that crime does not uniquely victimize white South Africans.

Farm murders form part of a wider criminal environment that finds more black victims than any other racial group.

From what is apparent in this case, Terre Blanche was killed in a wage dispute that is not part of any systematic pogram.

Though it is unacceptable that buffoons like Malema sing outdated anthems that call for 'killing boers' there is no plausible connection to the murder of Terre Blance.

Politically the issues are much more complex.

We have to ask ourselves why South Africa is still so divided along the apartheid lines of race.

Add to that historical mess the intersections of class and gender and the current moment is not exactly that happy rainbow nation Archbishop Tutu began to describe.

The truth is that democratization has failed to reduce the national stress of racism. We remain divided and that is our main characterization.

No amount of telling the truth or posturing on the nonsense of non-racialism has made South Africa anything more than the racist republic that whiteness constructed.

The fact that President Zuma would rather gloss over our racial divides makes the situation desperate.

This is why there is so much noise about Terre Blanche.

We have not even come close to solving the racism that colonialism and apartheid fomented and, we are not likely to do so under the current leadership of race denial experts.

And we are still not free.

Onward!