Marian's Blog

$200/barrel Oil? Choosing sustainability

My cab driver, transplanted from Ethiopia, told me first. That was weeks ago. But I couldn't believe it till I read the headline of today's Independent (London): "Price of oil will double." Folks, we have now reached 'put up or shut up' time. Time to re-tool our out-of-whack, hyper-industrialised U.S./western lifestyle - much of which is so wastefully over-indulgent. Let's take the news as a wake up call, not doom-and-gloom. I prefer something akin to Lucile Alder's poetic view (Dancing toward the future, published in the same journal with Meadows, Meadows and Randers' 1992 follow-up to their 1972 The Limits of Growth). Make good use of age and even perhaps of wisdom. In short, finally learning, as human society, to wise-up while we have time.

"-- To become a dancer so late
To be determined so late to become
A dancer is to become part
Of the dream of the humble heart
Determined to dance to the beat
Of this one dawn becoming day
Caught by a great blush and throb
Of laughter at such a becoming
Such a desire to become a dancer
In the sense of one moving, clumsy
With effort, yet effortlessly becoming..."

Lucile Alder, Dancing toward the Future

Hastings holds State of Black Europe hearing in Congress

In London in September or October 2004 this writer spoke on the panel, "Alliances We Need to Fight Racism" at the European Social Forum (Malmo, Sweden Sept. 2008). I participated as a member of the network Alliance of People of African Descent in Europe. Now, veteran Florida Member of Congress Alcee Hastings, who is Black American (and certainly likely, as most Black Americans are, a Euro descendant himself), has announced a hearing by the Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe, or CSCE, a commission of the U.S. Congress. Mr. Hastings is CSCE chair. "The State of (In)visible Black Europe: Race, Rights, and Politics" will be held Tuesday, 29 April, at 10AM in Rayburn House Office Building. "The hearing will focus on the challenges and opportunities faced by the more than 5 million members of Europe's Black population amidst reported increases in hate crimes and discrimination, anti-immigration and national identity debates, and growing security concerns. The impact of recently introduced anti-discrimination laws and diversity initiatives aimed at ensuring and protecting equal rights for a population many do not know exists will also be discussed. ..." Invited participants are Dr. Philomena Essed of Antioch University, author of the book, Everyday Racism: Reports from Women of Two Cultures (1990), and member of Netherlands' Equal Treatment Commission; (UK) Guardian newspaper columnist Gary Younge; Joe Frans, vice chair of the UN Working Group on People of African Descent and former member of Swedish Parliament; Dr. Allison Blakely, Afro-European author and historian at Boston University; Dr. Clarence Lusane, international race politics author and faculty member at American University; and Afro-German actor Boris Kodjoe. Logically, Marian's Blog is very interested in this hearing and its outcomes. One hard look at the disenfranchised, excluded political condition of the people of the city of majority-Black Washington, DC, with NO VOTE in the very same U.S. Senate and House of Representatives where this hearing's being held, reveals a painful irony. Europe isn't the only place where Black people are ignored, disempowered, and treated as invisible.

Zimbabwe Independence Day 2008: Where are the election results?

What is there to say about Zimbabwe? 18 April marks the 28th anniversary of Zimbabwe's freedom from colonialism and state-sponsored apartheid. Some of us, like me, marched and protested to help put an end to Rhodesia. Most people acknowledge something's gone very wrong in the last 28 years. The problem is not independence. but Zimbabwe's governance. The most recent affront is the national election of three weeks ago. Zimbabweans peacefully went to the polls and then they and the rest of Africa and the world awaited the count and announcement of the election outcome. Some reports say the opposition actually won yet today we're still waiting. This is almost as bad as the U.S. 2000 Bush v. Gore presidential election. Some hoped ex-freedom fighter Robert Mugabe might use today's Independence Day speech to gracefully and finally announce he's come to terms with the will of Zimbabwe's voters. Instead he and the ruling party have again done the unthinkable. Meanwhile, South Africa, the region, and much of Africa seem to sit on their hands. How long will this go on?

Aime Cesaire, 1913-2008 - Negritude, gender, diaspora

Aime Cesaire est mort aujourd'hui. Aime Cesaire has died today. We awoke to this news, 17 April 2008. He made it to age 94. The Martiniquan poet, novelist, playwright and former mayor of Fort de France and member of French parliament was the last living member of the Cesaire-Damas-Senghor trio credited for inspiring the international Negritude movement. I certainly respect it though up to now in key ways, Negritude, rather than being truly universal, seems to me shaped by clearly masculinist claims. This reminds me of 2003 in Paris and a very curious and ultimately aborted attempt at an intellectual public encounter with a very self-absorbed young chap named Harlem Desir. Where, in the francophone (and other) Caribbean-African-European picture, is Black North America (women and men) permitted to fit? Negritude may have spread long before Hurricane Katrina but it came long after la Louisiane and New Orleans and Congo Square. Then last week my friend Marilyn Sephocle, la martiniquaise, and I saw each other for the first time in years. Me, francophone American; a francophone Black American and Black American woman. She, Caribbean and antillaise, citoyenne of France - a citizen of Europe through Europe's hold on its final outposts in the Americas. More than three decades ago, living in France, they called me guadeloupienne though my first time in Guadeloupe did not come till 1994. Our working group, "exiled" from Haiti, arrived by night at Pointe-a-Pitre airport where "outsiders" like me stood, waiting, in the "Non-EU" immigration line. I regret that I never met Monsieur Cesaire. Now for me along with others the task becomes to re-examine what came before and what we have inherited, while finding our way home from here.

Africa "Outside" History? President Sarkozy's infamous speech in Dakar, July 2007

Since his accession to the French presidency, I seem to have lost track of the times when to hear Nicolas Sarkozy speak is to re-affirm that truth indeed is stranger than fiction. It's likely that for most of his listeners who were present on 26 July 2007, in an auditorium of Senegal's Cheikh Anta Diop University in Dakar, this was another one of those days.

Nicolas Sarkozy's original discours in Dakar was in French, but as this event is so important, it was also important to share it as well in English. I'm sure there must be other language translations out there. We will look for them in order to post them. Now, a group of mostly African intellectuals has recently published a French-language response to Mr. Sarkozy. The edited volume is L'Afrique Repond a Sarkozy: Contre le discours de Dakar (Editions Philippe Rey, Paris, 2008) - "Africa Responds to [Nicolas] Sarkozy: Against the Dakar Discourse." Luckily for we Afrodescendants of the Americas (or "Negroes of the diaspora," as book editor Makhily Gassama quite oddly refers to us), the book includes a contribution by our Haitian writer-sister Kettly Mars. The following is an unofficial translation of Sarkozy's speech which is posted at the blog Dionysius Stoned. A thank you to DS, and certainly to the party or parties who made this original translation.

ADDRESS BY MR NICOLAS SARKOZY, PRESIDENT OF THE FRENCH REPUBLIC, AT THE UNIVERSITY OF CHEIKH ANTA DIOP, DAKAR, SENEGAL, ON 26 JULY 2007

Ladies and gentlemen

Allow me first of all, to thank the Senegalese Government and people for their warm welcome. Allow me to thank the University of Dakar that allows me for the first time to address myself to the elite of the youth of Africa in the capacity of President of the French Republic.

I have come to talk to you with the frankness and sincerity that one owes to friends that one appreciates and respects. I appreciate and respect Africa and the Africans.

Between Senegal and France history has woven ties of a friendship that no one can undo. This friendship is strong and sincere. It is for this reason that I wanted to address, from Dakar, the fraternal greeting of France to all of Africa...

Africa: Kenyan truce, and Chinese and Indian colonialism

Kenyan opposition leader Raila Odinga and putatively re-elected second-term president Mwai Kibaki finally reached an accomodation for the country's political divide and the death and violence it wrought. I was excited to see BBC live coverage of the opening of Kenya's parliament for the first time since the December election and its aftermath. Everyone who loves Kenya, Africa - and the diasporic African world - wants this political accomodation to hold.

And yet at the height of the violence in Kenya in January I remembered how Asian Indians and Europeans continue to dominate Kenya's economy. I recalled a conversation I had with an African leader a few years back. This elected leader reminded me of the landmine issue of land distribution vs. need for land reform in six countries that were colonised by Great Britain in east and southern Africa. I do remember on the list were South Africa, Namibia, Zimbabwe - and Kenya. I'm wondering if Tanzania and Uganda were the other two on the list...    

Meanwhile, The Economist has a cover story on "The New Colonialism" in Africa, referring to China and India. Reuters has a Feb 2008 interview about this with Hungarian-born billionaire financier George Soros:

   "...European nations' scramble for resources, from slaves to diamonds and gold, led them to subjugate Africa's peoples under colonialism. After independence swept the continent in the 1950s and 1960s, they often supported corrupt and dictatorial regimes.

Over the last decade, amid concern over minerals funding wars from Angola to Democratic Republic of Congo, Western governments and multinationals have largely accepted the need for accountability and transparency in extractive industries.

But India and China, which are pumping billions of dollars of loans and investment into Africa, have not, Soros said. ..."

Black History Month even in Paris! Family history and finding our Caribbean enslaved ancestors

I am sooo excited about this! Thanks and appreciation to France-based Comite Marche du 23 Mai 1998 (and S. Flainville) on their workshop on Sunday, 24 February. It's in French, of course: "Comment j’ai retrouve mes parents qui ont vecu au temps de l’esclavage." "How I found my relatives who lived during slavery." The geo-historical focus is on Martinique (and perhaps also Guadeloupe?) I will post more details on Marian's Blog en francais but here are a few: It all takes place 2:30-5:30pm in the Salle Saint-Denys at 8, rue de la Boulangerie, 93200 Saint-Denis, near Paris. Workshop leader is Dr. Emmanuel GORDIEN, director of CM98's own genealogy center. There's a nominal €2 (that's euro) charge, and the closest Metro is Saint-Denis Basilique. Dr. Gordien recommends a couple of French-language resources: Claire Sibille's "Guide des sources de la traite négrière de l’esclavage et de leurs abolitions" and "Les noms de famille d’origine africaine de la population martiniquaise d’ascendance servile," by Guillaume Durand and Kinvi Logossah from Editions Harmattan. I look forward to hearing how it went. Big props to Suzy and CM98!

The international conversations Black America's not having: Reading Yvonne Bynoe

Came across an interesting article from nearly a year ago: author Yvonne Bynoe's Black America After Jim Crow: Still Feels Like Segregation, published on AlterNet. (They have good stuff and deserve your consideration of $upport.)

For decades I've been having "frank and candid" conversations, personal and public, with Black folks from around the world outside the USA, as well as with my folks here at home. I agree with much but not all of what Bynoe writes. I remember a surreal moment in the Kenyan government representative's speech at the U.S. 4th of July diplomatic event in Nairobi a few years ago. Johnnie Carson, a Black American, was ambassador. But I'll save this for another time.

"What has not occurred are frank and candid conversations between native Black Americans and immigrants from Africa and the Caribbean that aim to update the public face of "Black America." These dialogues would first need to acknowledge the unique cultures and histories of the various groups, while forging relationships based on our shared interests and challenges in this country as people of African descent." - writer Yvonne Bynoe

Black History Month on the Eve of the 2008 U.S. Presidential Election

It's Black History Month, folks. Today, renegade though it may be to some, my focus is on the peculiarities I'm observing in this 2008 U.S. presidential election season. I'll begin with a fact that may not be obvious to some observers, and the farther one is from the U.S. and our history the less obvious this fact will be. Let's call it Fact 1:

Come November, U.S. voters, after well over two centuries, still will not elect to the presidency a Black person who is the descendant of "we the people" who were enslaved not long ago in the U.S.A. These descendants are the Black American people, the group of Blacks whom Kenyan historian Ali Mazrui somehow has come to deem "undefinable" or "unmentionable", or who somehow should not be singled out n view of our long historical existence, lest in some way we might be seen as an "elite." That is his term, not mine. The other side of this issue is the current possibilitiy of electing someone to become the first Black president of a country - in this case the United States - but a person who in fact does not come from the indigenous Black population of said country. We'll call this Fact 2. Or as Mr. Mazrui informed all of us during the January symposium which was supposed to be about Blacks and abolition of the U.S. slave trade, the United States may beat Kenya by electing the first "Luo" president. Apparently Luo is the name of the Kenyan ethnic group Barack Obama's late father belonged to. Kenyan opposition leader Raila Odinga is a Luo also, hence the inside joke, though not to Americans in general or to Black Americans in particular. ...

Joining Maxine Waters in backing Hillary Clinton

I'm gonna try to keep this short. Once again it's about the current infernal election cycle. As far back as fall 2004 at a local Democratic Party event in Rome, Italy, a white American - an Italian American called Peter Alegi - made it perfectly clear to me, and in the rudest possible way, that my honest, considered opinion about the candidates in this race would be neither valued or respected. So what else is new for Black women in the USA?

The same nasty attitude has been driven home to me again and again over the past months and days. The sole exception has been two truly refreshing conversations in just the past couple of days. On two separate occasions persons who asked my opinion about the U.S. presidential race happened to be three Italian Italians: two were together in Rome airport, and one was aboard my flight. Signori, Vi ringrazio per vostri domande. Meanwhile, speaking of Black American women, I've noticed how neither the MSM - "mainstream" media - nor the Democratic Party has said much about former congresswoman Cynthia McKinney leaving the Party and moving to the U.S. Greens. She now has her own campaign for the U.S. presidency, and I wish the sister well. It was just under two years ago, the last time I saw Cynthia - still in office - on Capitol Hill. I remember vividly the early '90s when she arrived in Washington to take her new office. And I recall our chats while on a congressional trip to Haiti. This was when New York Rep. Charles Rangel tried to reach a deal with then-dictator General Raoul Cedras. It was to no avail. But that, too, is for a future blog post. McKinney was a feisty senior Democratic congresswoman from Georgia. Would the current silence and apparent indifference be the same were she a white woman or a Black man? Interestingly this brings us back to the demographics of the current Democratic presidential race. We may never know for sure whether race+gender (rather than one or the other separately) has made the difference. Or perhaps we do know. Legendary Los Angeles, California congresswoman Maxine Waters is another U.S. policymaker I admire who also "happens" to be a Black American woman. Yet again I notice little coverage of recent news that she, too, has decided to back Senator Clinton. So I feel in being dissed I'm in pretty good company! A couple of other senior Black American politicos whom I've met and who also are backing HILLARY include New York's first Black mayor, David Dinkins and Harlem congressman Charles Rangel. I met Mrs.Clinton herself at the 1997 international conference on Women and Democracy in Central and Eastern Europe. That was in Vienna, Austria. I'd just completed four intense months work in Srebrenica and elsewhere in eastern Bosnia. I helped with the conference as a volunteer, assisting a woman called Susan Hovanec with press. In her presidency I hope that Hillary will act on some of the lessons she has taught on the need for greater women's participation in politics and society. For myself as a Black American woman there is something else I am not ashamed to state and about which I will not remain silent. It's a fact which should neither be denied or in any way obscured. The ancestors of the Black Americans of North America were enslaved by the British, some by the French and others by the Spanish; and later we were enslaved under the newly declared United States. Here we are today, pretty much 400 years later. One of the bottom lines for me about this election is that no matter who wins on Tuesday, 4 Nov. 2008, on the day after, the United States still will never have elected a president who comes from the U.S. Black population who are the descendants of our enslaved ancestors. For the record, I am not the person to whom to say that this is insignificant. For me as a descendant of my enslaved ancestors - my grandfather's uncle was born into slavery in Missouri before, as soon as slavery ended, that part of our family fled Missouri to Leavenworth, Kansas. And so it is vitally important that alongside other political issues which will be critical in Hillary Clinton's presidency, at the very least, with her as president there will be no illusions, delusions or confusion about this fact.

Thank you to John and Elizabeth Edwards, 2008 Campaign

My thank-you to John Edwards and family, and everyone who worked so long and hard on this campaign. It will have been one for the history books.

As the Edwards campaign notified the press today, one news commentator noted that the U.S. "has never elected a populist."

As Americans that's nothing to brag about; in fact, it is our collective loss. How many Americans still would prefer that people tell us what some of us would like to hear? Things like we - the 'collective we' - can go right on self-centered and selfish, while simultaneously claiming to be king of the global hill. But our more and more frankenstein-like creation has little if any remaining sense of being one society. And that's just here in the US, let alone how we relate to the "outside world" which many of us can't find on a map let alone know.

It was late last year when a Southern scholar-friend of mine tried to school me about the USA. He said our country would not have any truck with a populist. I really didn't want to believe it.

Someone famous once said something like: There is no hell like the one we create for ourselves.

Darfur: do Arab governments care? The Doha Debates on BBC

When I think of the Arab League usually I think of Somalia. I recall the League's presence and involvement in the 2002-2004 Somali peace talks in Eldoret and Mbagathi, Kenya. If you have real access to BBC TV, and not what I can only regard as the mostly pandering, mind-numbing soap opera, real estate and auction fare still being passed off as BBC America, make sure you catch the Doha Debates' segment on Sudan's genocide in Darfur. This originally aired on BBC 26-27 January 2008. The segment focuses on the Arab world's relationship to the Government of Sudan and its genocide in Darfur. I'd never before seen this series. It was taped in Qatar with a studio audience of maybe sixty, several of whom also asked a few questions of the panel aloud. The motion debated was "This House believes Arab governments couldn't care less about Darfur."

Edwards backers excluded from CNN interview on South Carolina Black voters

At this stage in the Democratic primaries why would CNN or any media outlet exclude supporters of any major candidate? Today, Friday, CNN "domestic" service interviewed two Black South Carolina religioius leaders, Revs. Timothy Browne (Cleveland Chapel Baptist Church) and Joseph Darby (Morris Brown AME Church; AME = African Methodist Episcopal, a Black American Christian denomination). It's also worth noting that no women were interviewed.

Rev. Browne said he supports Clinton. CNN introduced Rev. Darby, claiming declaring him among Barack Obama's supporters. Darby quickly corrected CNN's interviewer, pointing out he isn't supporting anyone yet. Looks like somebody at CNN must have "mis-underestimated" their homework... With apologies and a hat tip to GW Bush (sic). So why didn't CNN include an Edwards supporter?

Someone STOP this carnage in Kenya

I am in shock. Following a typical U.S. newscast two or three days ago, I suppose I was 'lucky' simply to have learned that there had been a terrible arson attack on civilians taking refuge in a church in Kenya. The American newscaster, in her or his all-knowing obliviousness to the name of the place where this had occurred, did not bother to share that information. (Could they not pronounce Eldoret?) It was only a day later, talking with my husband, that I learned this atrocity had taken hold right there in Eldoret. Eldoret, that quaint, rather raw, frontier-like town in the Rift Valley hills. Where Phyllis and Kip Keino, the Olympic runner, had their children's home and a farm to feed them, and a running camp for world-class athletes. Dusty Eldoret. A town with its own home in my heart, my life and my memory. Where so many people from so many countries converged with hope and energy, in 2002-2003; with plans and schemes and no shortage of rumours; with a controlled confusion as Somali men and women leaders, and a few "pretenders", along with the ubiquitous envoys of "the international community", took up temporary residence in the Hotel Sirikwa as they tried to negotiate peace. It was there on my kencell, seated in the car, parked on the Sirikwa lot that I learned I would be a grandmother for the first time. Now carnage and terror are the shameful news from Eldoret and Kenya. As last Thursday's election approached, from somewhere not quite in the back of my mind I re-visited being at the final political rally on Lamu the very day before the historic December 2002 race. Mwai Kibaki won. I cannot believe Kenya's brave electorate of 2002 ever bargained for the violence unleashed upon them today. Back then we braced for election violence that never came. Until now. Five years ago, during and after the polling, Kenya fairly bloomed, as joyful and optimistic and filled with peace as it's turned ravaged and traumatised and bloodthirsty today. I have many words yet no words, except to say to Kibaki and Odinga, for the sake of all Kenya and all who love her, stop this violence.

Fannie Lou Hamer's long road to Denver, the 2008 Democratic National Convention

The 2008 Democratic National Convention in Denver marks a mere forty (40) years since Fannie Lou Hamer became the first post-Reconstruction Black American official delegate of a U.S. national political party convention. So many other things about the 1968 Democratic National Convention have been allowed to overshadow this historic fact for Black Americans. Virtually no one mentions this or the fact that Hamer was the first woman ever to be a political convention delegate from her state of Mississippi. This is all poetic justice but perhaps especially the latter, yet what good is justice when few heed and respect it, or keep the flame alive?

We live in a time when there's a tangible sense of sleepwalking in U.S. society. 2008 is the anniversary of Mrs. Hamer and the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party finally gaining official inclusion in the 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago. This was a culmination of fights and of sacrifices made by Mrs. Hamer and thousands more, fights we've been told and once believed were truly over. Yet August of 2007 came and went with no mention of it being the 45th anniversary of the same woman's courageous though initially unsuccessful struggle to register to vote in her state and in her country. That day was the 31 August 1962. Forty-five years later, no news, no mention, no national commemoration.

History hasn't given up on us, yet. 2009 is the 45th anniversary of Mrs. Hamer's historic and moving speech to an otherwise oblivious credentials committee at the 1964 Democratic convention in Atlantic City. This was the convention where the president of the United States, Mr. Johnson, as delegated to Hubert Humphrey and Walter Mondale, maneuvered into obscurity Mrs. Hamer and the human rights issues she and others had come to AC to represent. This is where she gave the speech in which she said "... I question America."

"... All of this [intimidation, beatings, sexual humiliation] is on account of we want to register, to become first-class citizens. And if the Freedom Democratic Party is not seated now, I question America. Is this America, the land of the free and the home of the brave, where we have to sleep with our telephones off the hooks because our lives be threatened daily, because we want to live as decent human beings, in America?"

Mrs. Hamer has been in my mind a lot lately, leading me to compare days not so long ago with today. Back then I was a child yet forced to negotiate an early comprehension of my people's collective resolve to march and protest, to die and risk injury against the kinds of violation I had yet to feel. In those years I eagerly learned the names and independence dates of anglophone African countries. Looking back I doubt my Nigerian and and Kenyan and Ghanaian homologues learned enough, if anything, about me. I can only wonder what Miss Fannie might think and what she'd dare say about the Democrats now aspiring to be president; a field of candidates with no one really like Mrs. Hamer. But today in the Americas, we're sleepwalking through so many issues.

Hillary vs. Obama? Do Democrats really want my vote?

It's 2007; not 1970 or '80 or even 1990. I've just watched the Democratic candidates debate each other on the campus of Drexel, one of two private universities (the other being Penn) which have been allowed to colonize my old neighborhood, West Philadelphia, (yet again conveniently pushing out Black Philadelphians). John Edwards isn't doing bad and Bill Richardson finally seems to have found his voice. Better late than never? I think of the two Dems whose names get the most play these days: the Senator-wife of a former president, and a Black guy who bears his family's very own Kenyan surname. To some, perhaps, this surname issue with the Black candidate is no big deal. To me it's one of many facts which set Barack Obama apart from the Black American ethnic community. For whites and even some others, perhaps Mr. Obama is "just Black enough", yet, with a father from Kenya and a white American mother (descended from Jefferson Davis, president of the Confederacy), in a way the chap is commended by some and recommended by others for not "dragging in all of that nasty old Black American U.S. history." Then there is Mrs. Clinton. I look at Obama and Hillary side by side and I think, "she could be his mother."

So where's my white folks??? Cheney and Barack Obama related

To be honest the only real news about Dick Cheney and Barack Obama being related is that yet again we see a person from a different background is treated quite differently from we
Black Americans.

Just like the central yet undiscussed fact that he bears his own family's African name (which by definition of our experience, Black Americans do not) Barack Obama's blood tie with Dick Cheney is not through enslavement. Instead it's through white families up to and including his mother, who conceived him with a continental African, from Kenya, to be precise.

What of we millions of Black Americans? Up to the present no white American (nor European) politico has yet bragged of or publicly mentioned their family relations with us. And yet that area is such fruitful turf! Through my own arduous and emotionally tortuous family research I've connected with maybe two or three white relatives from my mother's family. Luckily, they've been good people. Mind you, a bit like Mr. Obama, these folks were not slaveholders. They are not related to my family through slavery, but through my white female ancestors in Tennessee and North Carolina. In another part of my family, my maternal grandfather confided to me forty years ago how his white cousins came to eat and play at his mother's home in Leavenworth, Kansas. But when they turned twelve, with no warning, they just stopped coming. My grandfather added that some of the white kinfolk moved from Leavenworth to New London, Connecticut where they took jobs at a federal naval base. This was 60 years ago, at least.

"A noose lesson": the only worthwhile news from Grambling State University??

"Grambling had football. Southern had football and academics." These were my words as I described to a lady my view of the legendary, continuing rivalry between two Louisiana schools, both historically Black: Southern University and Grambling University. Each fall Southern and Grambling teams face-off in the annual Bayou Classic football gameMy siblings and I grew up on Southern's campus, in Scotlandville (Baton Rouge), while Grambling is a few short miles from the now-infamous town of Jena. I've never seen anyone address this issue but it's my educated guess that Southern University and A&M College probably is the largest historically Black university in the United States. We'd drive the 70 miles east to visit Southern's New Orleans campus, back when it was new. Today, Southern has even more statewide campuses. Hurricane Katrina shifted the title "Louisiana's largest city" from New Orleans to the state capital, "Big BR" - Baton Rouge. News is out that a few rookie schoolteachers (Black Americans) called themselves giving a group of small children a rather vivid lesson about what happened over in Jena. One newscaster bothered to add that the woman in one photo, holding up a little girl with a noose around her neck, is the girl's own grandma. The implication is that the grandma and the other adults were awkwardly sharing with the kids what Black Americans have been and are subjected to. Clearly their method was idiotic, not to mention weird, especially for small kids. In some parts of the U.S. we call this 'backasswards'. To me the bigger question is, Why is this the only time mainstream media mention anything about Grambling (or any other U.S. Black college)? A chyron (subtitle) image on MSNBC even mispelled Grambling's name as "Gambling State University". I've never before seen CNN interview - or more like put on the spot - Grambling president Dr. Horace Judson. The only other times these two charismatic schools are publicly acknowledged is via the rare, obscure and marginal media mention of inter-collegiate Black college football.

Major Owens unveils Black Caucus Members' opinion survey

The Congressional Black Caucus annual legislative conference ends tomorrow, Saturday. Monday, Oct 1st, I plan to attend "A New Challenge to the Congressional Black Caucus", my former boss Major Owens' Library of Congress think-tank panel on the CBC and his forthcoming book, The Peacock Elite: A Subjective Case Study of the Congressional Black Caucus. I'm interested in the results of Mr. Owens' opinion survey that he's asked his former colleagues - Black Caucus members (Members of U.S. Congress) to complete. Monday's panel includes current Congresswoman Maxine Waters (Los Angeles, California); former CBC members, Oakland (Cali) Mayor Ron Dellums and attorney Louis Stokes; author and Univ. of Maryland political science prof Ron Walters; and author Michael Eric Dyson, now on faculty at Georgetown University. I have not yet seen results of the congressional opinion survey, though I'm certain we'll hear more on Monday. Since retiring last January after 24 years representing Central Brooklyn, NY's 11th congressional district, Mr. Owens is now a distinguished visiting scholar in the Library of Congress's Kluge Center.

Black Women meet, and annual Congressional Black Caucus

It feels like everyone meets in September. The annual CBC - Congressional Black Caucus - Legislative Conference is underway through Saturday. Looking at the conference dates apparently the traditional Sunday morning prayer breakfast may no longer be fully included, though it's popular and is taking place. Black women's groups are hosting international meetings on two continents, opening the same day, with one in Europe, Vienna, Austria, and the other in America, in Washington, DC. In Washington, along with the Constituency for Africa, the National Council of Negro Women hosted a half-day panel of women from several regions of the African world. "Empowering Women of Political Power in the African Diaspora" took place Thursday at NCNW's historic brownstone building in downtown DC. Strangely, and hardly by accident, although Washington still remains a majority-Black American city, the National Council of Negro Women is the only Black American organisation which owns a building in downtown DC (a not-so-tiny fact in itself worthy of enquiry). Moderator was Cynthia Colas, director of NCNW's International Development Center while Dorothy Height, NCNW's venerable Chair, President Emerita and resident doyenne, presided. Among presenters were African Union ambassador to the USA, Her Excellency Amina Salum Ali, U.S. Congresswoman Diane Watson of California, Zakiya Wadada, exec. dir. of the Emancipation Support Committee of Trinidad and Tobago (Caribbean), and the Hon. Halima Mohamed Mamuya, Member of Parliament, Tanzania, East Africa. So many talented women and too many to list, but more are named here. In Austria (Arnold Schwarzenegger's home country) the Black women's group AFRA and its director, Beatrice Achaleke, host the three-day Congress of Black European Women, the first congress of its type. Co-sponsored by Austria's parliamentary president Barbara Prammer, the meeting was planned as part of the EU's 2007 European Year of Equal Opportunities for All. (Possibly for all save Europe's colonial populace in the Americas???) Anyway. Here's a news story on Thursday's Congress opening. Last week I e-interviewed Yvette Jarvis in Athens. In 2000 Jarvis became Greece's first Black elected official as a member of Athens City Council. Currently she is special advisor on immigration to the city's mayor. 

United States Social Forum debuts in Georgia, 27 Jun-1 Jul

Hmmm... what's making headlines in the U.S. today? Paris Hilton out of jail and possibly giving an 'interview' to Playboy. Duh. In the UK Tony Blair steps out as prime minister as his Chancellor of the Exchequeur Gordon Brown steps in. And then there's the very first national U.S. Social Forum, opening in Atlanta, Georgia. Atlanta and Georgia. Firmly part of the U.S. South; central geography in the original home region of the Cherokee Nation (no, it was not Oklahoma); home of Dr. Martin Luther King and historically Black American "Sweet" Auburn Avenue and Spelman (women's) and Morehouse (men's) colleges. The global social forum movement has been active and building for some time yet I would wager large numbers of Americans who probably consider themselves "informed" have no idea what a 'social forum' is. (In the U.S. staying "informed" seems to have become even more relative and challenging than it always has been - at least for news & info on certain kinds of democracy- and human rights-related topics, domestic as well as international.) The official USSF site reads: "The US Social Forum is more than a conference, more than a networking bonanza, more than a reaction to war and repression. ..." The global Social Forum theme is, "Another world is possible". The U.S. theme takes it a step further. "Another world is possible - Another U.S. is necessary." Amen.