Marian's Blog

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.

Genuine Progress Indicator? Measuring economies as if society mattered

As so many consumer and exchange economies teeter on the brink, here's a fascinating index that could prove more useful to more people. Many of us are in the same time familiar with, yet put off by, words and terms like "GNP", "GDP", and "economic indicator." For over a decade a group called Redefining Progress has been working on what they call the "GPI" - the genuine progress indicator.

"... The GPI starts with the same personal consumption data that the GDP is based on, but then makes some crucial distinctions. It adjusts for factors such as income distribution, adds factors such as the value of household and volunteer work, and subtracts factors such as the costs of crime and pollution. Because the GDP and the GPI are both measured in monetary terms, they can be compared on the same scale. ..." - Redefining Progress

Spitzer official misconduct could make way for David Paterson?

I'm guessing that New York politico turned radio host Chris Owens has just had his story of the week - of the year - handed to him for his new show Black Politics w/ Chris Owens. And Eliot Spitzer effectively may have just handed New York State's governorship to Lieutenant Gov. David Paterson. I saw Mr. Paterson at the DNC's Fall meeting in Virginia. Most of us who might be at all interested (in the current gov's self-inflicted wounds) are now hearing plenty of news on Mr. Spitzer's amazingly self-destructive (and maybe addictive) hiring of a... sex worker ... while on a visit to Washington, DC. And on Valentine's Eve no less. Media are reporting Spitzer was a regular customer of a prostitution ring whose scope is international. Some of our thoughts go to Silda Wall who happens to be Spitzer's wife. This stunning, sad -and illegal - fiasco has layers enough to rival Shakespeare. Sorry to say, in some ways it all feels like driving past a crash. Unlike an accident, in this case there seems little constructive that observers can do. Today New York Times is calling on Spitzer to step down. Just goes to show, when it comes to some types of 'guy behaviour', 2008 is not 1968; it's not even 1998.

Black Politics with Chris Owens, Saturdays, 11 a.m. eastern

Be sure to check today's radio show, Black Politics with Chris Owens. Starts 11AM U.S. Eastern time Saturdays. Executive Producers are Logan Nakyanzi Pollard and Stephen Davis. Chris composed the show's music. The show's produced in New York City. Listen at Air America via computer if you can't hear it by radio.

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

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.

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?

Michael Moore leaning toward John Edwards?

I got an email today with a very interesting "letter" (article) from Michael Moore in which he's definitely leaning toward John Edwards. Moore's article is entitled, "Who Do We Vote For This Time Around? A Letter from Michael Moore." He writes:

"...  And then there's John Edwards. It's hard to get past the hair, isn't it? But once you do -- and recently I have chosen to try -- you find a man who is out to take on the wealthy and powerful who have made life so miserable for so many.

A candidate who says things like this: "I absolutely believe to my soul that this corporate greed and corporate power has an ironclad hold on our democracy." Whoa. We haven't heard anyone talk like that in a while, at least not anyone who is near the top of the polls. I suspect this is why Edwards is doing so well in Iowa, even though he has nowhere near the stash of cash the other two have. ...

Then he writes:

"... For months I've been wanting to ask the question, "Where are you, Al Gore?"

And then Moore refers to the earlier Edwards quote.

"... On second thought, would you [Gore] even be willing to utter the words,
"I absolutely believe to my soul that this corporate greed and corporate power has an ironclad hold on our democracy"?" 'Cause the candidate who understands that, and who sees it as the root of all evil -- including the root of global warming -- is the President who may lead us to a place of sanity, justice and peace. ..."

Well, shut my mouth. We'll have to wait and see which way Michael goes next.

JOHN EDWARDS in Iowa and beyond: 2008 - 'crunch time' for U.S. democracy

Looking back at the tampered 2000 and 2004 U.S. elections from today, Tuesday, January 1st, 2008, it is crystal clear we now are down to the wire for democracy in America. No joke, folks. We need John Edwards for president as a veteran progressive elected leader. Edwards is also the only Democrat in the primaries with close-up, personal life experience recognizing and fighting the down-and-dirty neo-Confederate political culture that now - with the help of their allies up North and out west - has been spread to the whole USA. Bottom line, if you're anywhere in or near Iowa, or able to go there to help out, please help call and get out Iowa's local voters for John Edwards. Donations from U.S. citizens also are most welcome at his site. Happy new year, everybody!! www.johnedwards.com

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.

Martin L. King III's sober, inspiring "Poverty in America", from 14-15 Nov on American Life TV

Whatever else Martin King III may need for his new venture, you have to give him credit him for excellent timing. King has announced he is ready to take up his father's fight against poverty. No one else with a stature that approaches his and that of his family is doing anything as ambitious or potentially far-reaching. The elder son of Martin and Coretta Scott King has produced a powerful documentary, in which he travels the USA to carry on his parents' legacy. On Wednesday, 24 October, King's foundation, Realizing the Dream, and Baby Boomer-oriented American Life TV put on an impeccable premiere for King's new documentary, Poverty in America. Also taking part in the film's Wednesday evening premiere was American Life TV journalist (and Kentucky native), Nick Clooney. Clooney is better known to some as the brother of the inimitable vocalist Rosemary, and father to actor George. King reminded premiere guests that 2008 marks the 40th anniversary of the historic yet nearly still-born Poor People's Campaign. Martin L. King, Jr. begun that Campaign, giving his life virtually on its maiden voyage. In the first week of April 1968 King, Jr. and scores of others committed to the Civil Rights Movement went to Memphis, in west Tennessee, to support that city's striking sanitation (aka "garbage") workers. With Dr. King's world-changing assassination the Poor People's Campaign not only began in Memphis, it was pretty much cut down there. Poverty in America is narrated by longtime King family friend and Movement veteran Andrew Young. Almost a third of Americans are poor or barely surviving on low-incomes and pretty minimal government benefits.

In person, and in the documentary Wednesday night, King III sounded almost eerily like his dad. His final assertion in the documentary: "We can build a society where everyone gets a fair chance to succeed, despite the circumstances of thir birth. That's what my father fought for, and that's what I'll fight for." Well, God bless him. Seeing the (opposite) direction the U.S. has steadfastly travelled the past four decades, MLK III has the anti-poverty territory pretty well to himself. I've posted my photos of the premiere to my Flickr website.

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.

People of color voted majority Dem, most Whites Republican

Here are statistics political pundits and others need to chew on. A Latino colleague sent me this NYTimes link to a fascinating exit survey on the November 2006 U.S. midterm House of Reps election. According to Edison Media Research & Mitofsky International, overall White women and men voted 52% Republican. Every counted group of people of colour voted majority Democrat.

I say every counted group because for some reason Edison/Mitofsky chose to exclude American Indian voters. Edison/Mitofsky also condescendingly refers to people of colour as "non-whites". To put it bluntly, both of these things stink and in future posts I'll be following these issues: the constant, daily exclusion of American Indian people from virtually every U.S. poll and everything else, and the use of this idiotic, pejorative negation "non-white".

Regarding votes for Democrats, whites voted just 48% compared to Black voters who cast 89% - eighty-nine - for Democrats, Latinos ("Hispanics") 70% Dem and Asians 62%. Although Edison/Mitofsky refers to people collectively as "non-whites", they seem to have "forgotten" to publish the average of these votes for Blacks plus Latinos plus Asians. So I took the liberty of doing it. The totals are about 73% for Democrats to about 27% for Republicans among all voters of colour. NYTimes says the polling firm interviewed more than 13-thousand voters as they exited 249 polling places.

WAR as "tax", only worse, & the U.S. 2006 elections

We're into the countdown to the 2006 U.S. mid-term elections. Tuesday, Nov 7, is election day, and if you're registered, I urge you to vote. On t.v. one of the usual political talking heads tries to "remind" us that "if Democrats win, they'll institute taxes."

What the heck?! Is that supposed to be an argument?

Isn't war a huge, bloody, tax???

No amount of taxes or other money that any of us pays will bring back one life lost in this war. Don't forget to add in billions going to some rather shadowy private corporations to "rebuild" the country where the war is. Then we hear not much really is being built. So we don't even know where the money has gone. "Your tax dollars at work." But in the Washington, DC metro area - mainly suburban Maryland and northern Virginia - you hear from reliable sources that so many of the people with money to buy big homes work (or do contracting) for Defense Department and "Homeland Security". So please don't talk to me about Democrats and "taxes". Let's vote.

New York's Chris Owens for Congress on 12 September 2006

Let me draw your attention to blogdiva Liza Sabater's recently posted pro-Chris Owens' take on Sept 12th's key race for the successor to my former boss, U.S. Congressman Major Owens. Major, "the first professional librarian elected to Congress", is retiring after about 12 productive terms in Congress over 24 years. He was elected in 1982 in the district where in 1968 the late Hon. Shirley Chisolm became the first Black and Caribbean American woman elected to Congress. Today there are 4 candidates in this majority Black/Brown district. "Majority colored" as Liza calls Central Brooklyn's 11th Congressional District. The people are mostly English-speaking U.S. Black American, mostly English and Kreyol/Haitian-speaking Caribbean, and Spanish-speaking Puerto Rican who, by the way, are Caribbean. The candidates: Chris Owens, Carl Andrews, Yvette Clarke, and David Yassky. Why did I believe I'd heard ages ago that Yassky had pulled out of the race? Folks say he hopes to split the colored majority vote. If it's true that's a highly cynical strategy in a district like this for a candidate who happens to be a white, Jewish male. I really hope vote-splitting does not occur. Sabater elaborates on each candidate in her Daily Gotham blog. My view is that Chris Owens happens to be the most qualified, transparent and the most effective progressive in the race. Frankly, he knows more about how Congress works than do his three opponents, combined. He also happens to be a son of Major Owens, but don't make the mistake of thinking he's trying to take a "free ride". No. Chris Owens has his own merits that make him the candidate of choice to succeed his dad - and to provide important political continuity in Washington at a time when Democrats are coming back from behind. This year's election is a referendum on the future of Brooklyn and her colored majority population. Hopefully this future will be decided in favour of the people of Brooklyn, by the clear-thinking will of eligible 11th District Brooklyn voters who take the time and cast their respective ballots, Tuesday, 12 September 2006.

For Zamzam: Arab slave trade and my Unpublished Letter to the Gulf News

Thanks to Zamzam and everyone reading Marian's Blog and sharing such thought-provoking feedback. Often I'm frustrated at finding relatively little first-person news and ideas, or even "first-person composite" news and ideas from African and African descendant women and women's groups - whether we are from Somalia, Colombia, Haiti, Sudan, or the diaspora of the displaced from New Orleans. We need more exchange between and from women's voices in our communities.

A comment from Zamzam asks me about addressing the Arab enslavement of Africans. So here's the text of an email I sent back in February to Ms. Sheeba Hasan (a woman) editor of Gulf News in Dubai (United Arab Emirates). As far as I know my letter has not been published. Thanks for asking.

February 2006

Dear Ms. Hasan:

I made my first trip through Dubai in 2004. I am writing to thank Gulf News for publishing news of France's recent decision to establish a national day recognising its role in the global trade in African people. I know firsthand that this decision results from French Parliament member Mme Christiane Taubira's work which resulted in the 10 May 2001 French law (the Taubira Law) declaring the slave trade a crime against humanity. In sincerity, I write to say that Africa, especially we Africa's scattered descendants, awaits the first actions of our Arab brothers and sisters to do the same.

New Orleans, race, White voters: Or why ex-mayor Marc Morial is NOT Louisiana Governor

I should've posted this weeks ago but here goes. If anyone believes there's a "level playing field" in competing for leadership in the US, you need to remove your head from whatever hole in which it's stuck. Just because it's the 21st century and currently 2006 and some of us have high-speed Internet is no reason to deliberately subscribe to delusion. In New Orleans the son of former mayor "Moon" Landrieu (and sister of current Louisiana US senator Mary L.) and member of one of Louisiana's traditional - read 'white' - political family dynasties challenges a Black guy whose father, no disrespect intended, definitely never was elected to any Louisiana statewide office. New Orleans' ex-mayor Marc Morial's late father, Ernest "Dutch" Morial, was the first-ever Black (or Creole) mayor of New Orleans when he succeeded Mitch's dad as New Orleans mayor in April 1978. This was almost yesterday - the late 1970s - not the 1870s. Marc Morial himself, now head of the New York-based National Urban League, was a successful multi-term mayor of his hometown. Yet when it came time for him and his backers to look around for what he could do next they realised he was not going to be elected the next governor of the Bayou State. I guess Marc couldn't even seriously consider lieutenant governor - the post currently held by dynastic N.O. mayoral contender Mitch Landrieu. Landrieu could, and did, get that job. In Louisiana with his name and colour it could be handed to him - and probably was. But not Marc Morial and not Ray Nagin. Before Katrina drove out over half its majority-Black population, New Orleans - and only since the '70s - had become an oasis within a statewide political wilderness, giving at least some (albeit local rather than statewide) chance to a relative handful of Black Louisianians aspiring to exercise political leadership in their own society. Is Black American political leadership in our own country and in our home communities still too ambitious in 21st century USA? This gaping disparity (between defacto exclusion of Blacks from leadership in most of Louisiana versus a chance for Blacks to compete locally and successfully in pre-Katrina New Orleans politics) exists because like all over the USA - including the "non-racist" (?!) American North and West - millions of white Americans still refuse to support and vote for Black candidates. Even if their lives and true democracy depend on it. Another case, another state. Illinois. Barack Obama, with a Kenyan father and white American mother, reportedly depended on Black Americans as the faithful, decisive and visionary voter base that made him Illinois' first Black US senator, though he is not an ethnic Black American. (And ethnic Black Americans aren't Kenyan or White American.) Even being 'half white' did not convince a majority of Illinois' white voters to vote for Obama. That fact is deep but it is not new. If anybody ever asked us we Black Americans always have known about and felt the stab from the "'flakiness' factor" of our white kin/fellow US citizens. (Like white abolitionist John Brown there are exceptions; they deserve the attention they almost never get from the MSM.) In some circles such irrational social-political behaviour would at best be construed as a public mental health problem. Just as importantly, it's blatantly anti-democratic. At the end of the day, whoever is elected in N.O. today, the whole world needs to be aware of Katrina's unintentional yet very real impact in undermining at least four decades of work and achievements and civil and political rights organising and social behaviour change on behalf of everyone eligible to vote - in New Orleans, in Louisiana, in the South and across the USA. When the cards are on the table this playing field remains far from being level and the ceiling is so low Black Americans still can't stand up. You just have to wonder why most US pollsters and public opinion researchers do not ask Americans about this and do not seem to care.

Protest marches: No to Katrina evictions; Bush articles of impeachment

So much going on as February winds down. Your help is needed to support and help pass H.R. 4197: the Hurricane Katrina Recovery, Reclamation, Restoration, Reconstruction and Reunion Act of 2005. Email, snail-mail or call your congressional representatives and ask them to pass HR 4197. What about impeaching George Bush? Get your copy of this book available for $9.95 from Center for Constitutional Rights -featuring four Articles of Impeachment against George Bush. I'm sure his parents will be disappointed, though probably in the American people. Articles of impeachment include: warrantless surveillance, lying to Congress about Iraq, torturing prisoners, and subverting the Separation of Powers. By law US federal separation of powers is legislative, executive and judicial, though lately they seem all jumbled with someone in or near the White House pulling rabbits from a hat. KATRINA PROTESTS: Info from democrats.com and afterdowningstreet.org, "... on March 15, FEMA plans to evict thousands of victims of Hurricane Katrina. ... Our federal government is engaged in a campaign to exclude poor and black people from the new version of the city it allowed to be destroyed. On March 14, tens of thousands of Americans will skip work and march from the U.S. Capitol to the White House, and we will not leave until Bush announces a plan for housing and orders an end to evictions. Press Conference: 1-2pm, Rayburn Office Building - Room #2237; Mardi Gras Style March for Justice: 2-3pm start from Capitol South Metro at 2pm to White House; Rally & Protest at White House 3pm- 11:59pm, Lafayette Square Park." Check websites of the protest march for those internally displaced by Katrina, and another to send an email to your voting member of Congress - if you have one (Washington, DC itself and Puerto Rico, Virgin Islands, US Samoa, Mariana Islands, etc. HAVE NO voting representation in Congress). Ask your rep to cosponsor House Resolution 635 calling for congressional investigation into grounds for impeachment. Register here for local protests in your area.