Marian's Blog

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.

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...

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

Election 2008: help a grad student, take a survey

Marian's Blog received a survey request from a PhD student at Stony Brook University in New York State. Chris Weber is conducting a survey on "people's reactions to the presidential candidates in the upcoming election." Logically this would be aimed at U.S. voters. I agreed to pass this along, and completed the survey myself. We won't be taking comments on this post.

"The purpose of this survey is to examine how people think and feel about the political issues, parties, and candidates in the upcoming election. In the survey, you will be asked a series of questions about two political candidates, John McCain and Hillary Clinton. We are very interested in how individuals [who] find information on the web think about politics, and your participation would be greatly appreciated. In total, the survey should take about 15 minutes to complete. The survey is completely anonymous and you can skip any questions you do not wish to answer. Click here to take the survey http://www.ic.sunysb.edu/stu/crweber/TAKESURVEY/election_2008.htm. Contact Chris ( crweber AT notes.cc.sunysb.edu) at Stony Brook University with any questions or concerns. Thanks for your help!"  ***

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. ...

Leon Higginbotham and South Carolina, on Martin Luther King Day

Perhaps you already know the name A. Leon Higginbotham, or maybe you don't. Until his death he served as a U.S. federal judge. Earlier he was a friend and college classmate of my father and his siblings. Not only did Judge Higginbotham go on to be an attorney and federal judge, he became the twentieth century's chief scholar of the foundations of the position of Black Americans in U.S. law. My family had previously shared with me their story about Purdue. Years later I discovered that Judge Higginbotham had recounted it elsewhere again. My father was sixteen when he began studying engineering at Purdue. While she did her studies at Purdue, my aunt lived in the town with a local Black family. My uncle and my father, native sons of Indiana, were among eleven Black male students whose Purdue ordeal Higginbotham described. I found it on the Web and want to share it here. Tuesday night is the televised Congressional Black Caucus Foundation/CNN Democratic candidates' debate from Charleston, SC. Found a link to a Black South Carolina timeline that begins with the 1525 arrival of at least one African along with a group of Spanish settlers.

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.

Hollywood Apartheid, Or appreciating the Films of Oscar Micheaux (1883-1951)

lncreasingly more frequently I think of the late, great American -and Black American - filmmaker, Oscar Micheaux. For me, Mr. Micheaux's prodigiousness and genius remain as freshly astounding as his obscurity still largely enforced by U.S. society.

Actress Hazel Diaz and three fawning male co-stars, in Micheaux's 1938 film, Swing! Britannica.com

Post-Katrina, Cont'd: Let the People Rebuild - 2006 Harvard Jnl of African American Public Policy

For some strange reason we just don't seem to be hearing as much regular, in-depth news and information as we should about post-Katrina issues facing New Orleans, the Gulf Coast and the USA. So, we suggest you check the Summer 2006 online table of contents of, and subscribe to, the Harvard Journal of African American Public Policy. From Gulf Coast women's voices and the right of return of New Orleanians internally displaced (these are the two human rights' terms) across the U.S., and restoring regional health care infrastructure. This is all about salvaging and creating grassroots democracy (what other kind is there?) in New Orleans and the Gulf Coast. And, really, in the USA. Thank you for showing that you care.

Re-connecting Africa with herself: 1619 Angola and Congo to Virginia

Re-connecting Africa with her history and her people means re-connecting Europe (and the Middle East) with its own history, too. "About 350 slaves were bound for Veracruz [Mexico], when the ship was robbed of its human cargo off the coast of Mexico in 1619 by two unidentified pirate ships..." Sandra sent me the link to Lisa Rein's Sunday, 3 September Washington Post article, Mystery of Va.'s First Slaves is Unlocked 400 Years Later. This was no "mystery". The countries who held these records for the past four centuries did not care. In fact, they've been evasive, hostile and secretive about this chapter of their own history. The Africa-Europe-Virginia story of 30 Africans cast ashore at Jamestown in 1619 from a Dutch-flagged ship is part of the larger story of 350 Angolans and Congolese among the tens of millions of Africans deported on ship after ship to the Americas over 300 years. Since then we have been kept apart from Africa. Apartheid. Forced to live apart forever. These Africans lived apart in the Americas, separated to the present day from Africa and each other. They were kept apart even inside every society into which they were shipped like goods. "They passed through a slave fortress at the port city of Luanda, still Angola's capital." ... continued

Caribbean heritage: "I met History once but he ain't recognize me"

Recently I read somewhere a scholar's observation that if you want to understand Britain's early colonies in the Americas you cannot make a distinction between life in the British colonial Caribbean and life on the British colonial North American mainland. Charleston, South Carolina's deep connections to St. Catherine's (now St. Kitt's) and Nevis are just one example. The people and their interactions were so totally linked. Part of what our histories and heritages tell me is we have a lot of "re-discovering" to do - not only of each other but of ourselves. I found a few things I like on this site of professor A. Waller Hastings - including Derek Walcott's quote. I feel I know what he's talkin' about:

“I met History once, but he ain’t recognize me” (Derek Walcott, “The Schooner Flight”). And an 1882 quote from British politician Sir John Seeley: "We seem, as it were, to have conquered and peopled half the world in a fit of absence of mind."

A whole history of the things Britain (and France and Holland and Spain and Portugal, etc., etc.) did - not to mention the hard cash they stashed - but of which she now has so little conscious memory. I say this as one of tens of millions of people of colour from the Americas (and elsewhere) with what I'll call "our unclaimed ties to Britain" (i.e., ties Britain thusfar seems to refuse to recognise). So Seeley's quote sounds accurate to me.

Nor is all the Caribbean English-speaking or linked to colonial Britain: "... one of the early revolutionary critiques of colonialism, [was] that of Frantz Fanon, a French writer born in Martinique [part of the Caribbean] and educated to conceive himself as French.  However, his education in France and confrontation with French racism made him aware of the disorientation he experienced as a black man taught to behave “white,” and he responded in part by writing his influential tract, Black Skin, White Masks (1952). ..."

"... Among the first British colonies were those that later formed the United States, and foremost among these was Virginia (est. 1617) [actually it was 1607, with major retrospective activities in 2007] where the cultivation of tobacco, previously unknown in Europe, proved a boon to the British economy. Virginia contributed enormous amounts of revenue to the crown; .... duties on tobacco amounted to £421,000 pounds in the two-year period between 1699 and 1701 - one-fifth of all customs revenue during that period (7). ... Britain also developed economic interests in the West Indies. The first British settlement was in Barbados (est. 1627), which struggled at first until the possibilities of the sugar trade became apparent. The sugar economy led to other West Indian colonies, but the climate of the region made it unattractive to British settlers; even indentured servants and deportees lacked the physical stamina needed, so the slave trade was introduced to provide an appropriate labor force (the local population having already been devastated as a result of being the first point of contact with European civilization). ..." We come from this history that once was whole and now we and it are fragmented. And so it goes. Happy Caribbean American Heritage Month to all of us connected to this common history.

June: Caribbean American Heritage Month 2006

Props to our Caribbean cousins/sisters/brothers for Caribbean American Heritage Month 2006. Jasmyn Cannick has a good link on her site where she writes about Oakland, California Congresswoman Barbara Lee's 2005 proclamation, with a list of a few US folks of (recent) Caribbean descent/origin, like California's Mervyn Dymally, "the first foreign born member of the United States Congress, Marcus Garvey, Sidney Poitier, Colin Powell, Cicely Tyson, Sheryl Lee Ralph, and Shirley Chisolm." The folks are even going to show us how to play cricket on the National Mall in DC. Do they plan to let women join in? More events and details at CaribbeanAmericanMonth.org site.

"The Israel Lobby" in London Review of Books

I've been told by those "in the know" that this piece by John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt is a seminal article. It's about US foreign and domestic policy toward Israel, and its other effects in the Mideast. Also in Africa which seemingly often is caught somewhere in between. US Mideast policy always keeps Israel at its center. What are the effects? And for Americans when is it ever ok to question, examine and even to change the current "terms" of US-Israeli politics? The LRB article even quotes Israel's first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion. He was born David Gryn in 1886 in a place called Plonsk which then was Russia and became Poland. Gryn/Ben Gurion "told Nahum Goldmann, the president of the World Jewish Congress: If I were an Arab leader I would never make terms with Israel. That is natural: we have taken their country . . . We come from Israel, but two thousand years ago, and what is that to them? There has been anti-semitism, the Nazis, Hitler, Auschwitz, but was that their fault? They only see one thing: we have come here and stolen their country. Why should they accept that?"

John Mearsheimer is author of The Tragedy of Great Power Politics and professor of poli sci at Univ. of Chicago. Stephen Walt is an international affairs prof at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government and author of Taming American Power: The Global Response to US Primacy, among other titles.

Hope somewhere in our humanity: Hermann Hesse to Teilhard de Chardin

We're off to an outdoor concert of jazz - "Black classical music" (my term since my 1975 Penn State radio show). In the midst of what I witness and write about in this blog, each day I'm on my own search for 'what helps us' - me especially - to become more fully human. Among the people, thinkers, writers, etc. I admire, whose actions, utterances and writings have influenced me, is the late French writer - Teilhard de Chardin. I came across an archived article at WIRED (Jennifer Cobb Kreisberg, June 1995) on de Chardin and development of a "Net-based" global consciousness and how even 51 years after his death in 1955 de Chardin's thoughts connect to and continue to develop with this consciousness that's making itself real, as we Black Americans might say.

Color of wealth: what's the racial wealth divide?

The Color of Wealth is available June 2006. Subtitled "The Story Behind the US Racial Wealth Divide", authors include my girl Rose Brewer along with Rebecca Adamson, Meizhu Lui, Barbara Robles and Betsy Leondar-Wright.

Woman of colour and M.I.T.-trained economist Julianne Malveaux reviews TCoW: "... shows how contemporary wealth differences evolve from pivotal points in our history, and explains how public policy, even when well meaning, reinforces existing inequality. This book is an important contribution to critical work on race and economics.” Julianne's most recent book is Wall Street, Main Street and the Side Street: A Mad Economist Takes a Stroll.

The Color of Wealth press release explains that for every 100 cents (dollar) owned by an "average" US white family, an "average" US family of color has just 18 cents. "Why do people of color have so little wealth? The Color of Wealth lays bare a dirty secret: for centuries, people of color have been barred by laws and by discrimination from participating in government wealth-building programs that have benefited white Americans." This includes, for example, "post–World War II GI Bill programs [that] helped whites only—The Color of Wealth is the first book to demonstrate the decisive influence of government on Americans’ net worth."

National Archives: Congressional records on slavery and the international slave trade

Interesting reading here; a link to the National Archives' holdings of US Congress records on American slavery and the international slave trade. If you want to know what the Continental Congress thought about enslaving Black people, or what congressmen said - on the record - about Haiti's fight for independence (doing just what the US already did), it's here.

Marian's Blog does Open Source Radio, tonight

If you can, please join us tonight by tuning in to "Hidden Histories of Slavery" on Open Source Radio. Join us via the Internet. TIME: 19:00 to 20:00 (7-8pm) US East Coast time. "Marian's Blog", so to speak, will be one of OSR's guests, with host Christopher Lydon and the incomparable Dr. Simon Schama of the BBC series, A History of Britain and also Columbia Univ., and Dr. Jill LePore from Harvard. We'll be talking slavery in the USA: the history, the research; the social and political cluelessness and amnesia... which has got to be either a massive collective defense mechanism or else some kind of weird secret weapon. Schama and LePore both have recent books on enslavement. I believe I'm the only guest who's actually spent the past 30 years searching for my own enslaved and free ancestors: those who were enslaved and later freed, the free, the enslavers, and my American Indian ancestors. What a mix - 100% American, I might add. What a conversation. What fun! We're sooo looking forward... Join us!

From France to Britain: Black ancestors in the American revolution

I love history. Following France's first national commemoration of its role in the slave trade there's also room to remember our Brits. What follows is about giving credit where credit is due and about depictions of history being planned and others not being planned for next year's 2007 British and American anniversary of 400 years of the Jamestown settlement and Virginia. Virginia is just one of the several (slaveholding) English New World colonies that transformed into (slaveholding) US states. Facts from the period before the Revolutionary War - the American Revolution - strongly suggest that many, many Black Americans, including my family, most likely are descended from Blacks who fought in or otherwise supplied the American Revolution. Likewise other African British Americans of the time fought for their freedom from enslavement alongside the British. But in large measure Black American veterans of the Revolutionary War and their descendants have not yet been widely recognised whether by the US or any other country. As I figure it, almost 300 years later - and 40-plus years after the height of the Civil Rights Movement - these descendants are still waiting to be fairly documented. Their numbers are still nowhere near being reflected in the membership (or even attitudes) of the DAR (Daughters...) and the Sons of the American Revolution. Exactly how many years have the DAR and SAR even had members of colour - whether Black or Native American or another background? This fascinating note is from the work of historian Robert Selig - The Revolution's Black Soldiers. It's posted in its entirety at American Revolution.org. I added most of the emphases myself:

"The early 1770s were a period of slave unrest in Virginia, prompting the city of Williamsburg to establish a night watch in July 1772 to apprehend "disorderly People, Slaves as well as others." Slave restiveness increased when news of the [Virginia-based] Somersett case reached the colonies in September 1772. James Somersett, a slave taken to England by his master Charles Steuart, had run away. Recaptured and in chains in the hull of a ship bound for Jamaica, he sued for his freedom. In June 1772, Lord Mansfield, Chief Justice of the King's Bench, held that slavery "is so odious, that nothing can be suffered to support it, but positive law." As "the law of England" neither "allowed" nor "approved" of slavery, Mansfield ruled that "the black must be discharged." Mansfield's decision outlawed slavery only in England; it did not apply to British colonies. But that was immaterial to American slaves. In January 1773, the General Court in Boston received the first of three petitions in which slaves pleaded their freedom with the argument that Mansfield's decision should indeed apply to the colonies, where they were "held in a state of Slavery within a free and christian Country." By September 1773, the first of Virginia's 250,000 slaves were also trying to get "out of the Colony, particularly to Britain" -..." (cont'd)

Immigration through our eyes: Black & Native Americans; Diamond's article in Intl Migration Review 1998

Came across an interesting reference. "African-American Attitudes towards United States Immigration Policy", by Jeff Diamond in International Migration Review, volume 32, number 2; Summer 1998, pp. 451-470. Diamond goes back as far as the status of Black Americans before the Revolutionary War vis a vis the immigrants - basically all white and European - introduced into the US then.

Below, one of the things I want to ask is whether large-scale immigration within the Americas wouldn't be an excellent - and logical - topic at the OAS. And if you don't know what the OAS is, please read on.

... (continued below)

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.

God, Please Send Me Back as a Black American again

This is for my buddy and brother Washingtonian George over at Negrophile ("one who loves and admires Black people"). Thank you for that inspiration, in spite of such things as Harvard University's "implicit association test" - which neither mentions nor measures the existence of those of us (not only among Blacks) who love and admire Black Americans - Black folks any and everywhere. Thank you, George, for Negrophile's truth and inspiration. I also thank the spirit of my cousin, Harry Lee Gudger, God rest his good-natured soul. In his lifetime Harry Gudger was a native of Muncie, Indiana USA who later became an elected officer of the Texas NAACP. From Zvornik to Srebrenica, from Travnik to Somalia, Haiti and beyond I've been asked: "'What' (ethnicity) are you? Where are you from?" As I walked to work one morning in eastern Bosnia an elderly man asked (translating): "Gospodja ("ma'am") - Are you from India?" I looked my elder, that's what he was, in his eyes and let him know, "no, sir", I was not from India but that I was Black American, meaning this particular US North American version of our mestizajes of the Americas - our various, similar yet diverse mixtures of African + Indigenous Native American + European - mixed race ancestry. In other words I am 100% Black American. I realise and cannot accept as some among the 'newly mixed' assert "their" issues and identity right here in the same geopolitical space by apparently ignoring and supplanting - even denigrating - any thoughtful consideration of the processes by which mixed race people in the US and Americas were created centuries ago. In other words, I thank the Creator for making my people - Black Americans - as fully human as most of them truly are; and in the face of and in spite of such indifference, cruelty, craziness, deprivation and depravity, all taking place in the midst of unprecedented wealth and power. Across the world and including some recent immigrants to the USA - so many people have told me they've been inspired by Black Americans... So if there is karma and as Black Americans say, "What goes around comes around," God, send me back another time as a Black American, a Black American woman.