Marian's Blog

Election 2008: the meanings of "history"

Over the past several months I've talked with about sixty journalists about the issues of ethnicity (which is neither colour or "race"), representation and the lack of it, and history - particularly the history of the USA and every other society in the Americas, Europe - including Britain - and Africa, which is a continent, not a country. In talking with journalists, historians and others there are fundamental and serious concerns about this election cycle which, despite the hype and in very basic and uncomfortable ways, is like every previous U.S. presidential election. What I find most astounding is that with so much "free" press running around - domestic and international - almost no one is willing to go on-record to ask, acknowledge or discuss, in clear language whether English, Kreyol, Spanish, Arabic or Choctaw, what it means that in 2008 the U.S. continued its erstwhile tradition of never nominating or electing an American Indian or a Black American - a descendant of those enslaved in the USA. Posed against election hoopla versus an almost overwhelming need for decency and accountability right around the world, what does, or what should, this fact mean?

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.

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.

India-Africa Summit in Delhi: Hard questions?

April 8-9 mark the first-ever India-Africa Forum Summit. Might the Summit include any component addressing human trafficking and undocumented (i.e., illegal) immigration coming from the Asian subcontinent into East and Southern Africa?? India and the African Union each has its own summit website. From India's website:

"India and Africa have a historic relationship and this has grown into a sustainable partnership. From our struggle against colonialism and apartheid, we have emerged to jointly accept the challenges of a globalising world. Whether we have to deal with threats to international peace and security, the threat from international terrorism or the scourge of poverty, we believe that India and Africa traverse the same path, share the same values and cherish the same dreams." 

The AU's description seems decidedly less sentimental: "The Africa-India Forum Summit is intended to consider the modalities to strengthen the cooperation ties between the two partners in the areas of Economic; Political; Science, Technology, Research and Development; Social Development and Capacity Building; Tourism; Infrastructure, Energy and Environment and Media and Communication. The Africa – India Forum Summit aims also at adopting harmonized and comprehensive framework to reinforce the regional cooperation in a wide rage of fields as support to the already existing bilateral cooperation between African countries and India. The Forum would also be an occasion for the sharing and exchange of good practices in harnessing resources from the Diaspora."

"Harnessing resources from the Diaspora." The African Union wants to learn from Indians how to "tap into" its diaspora. Would the diaspora targetted for harnessing be the new one of the past 20-40 years or the far older and much larger one which was expelled and sold away to foreign lands during the slave trades? Thinking of the "historic relationship" between South Asia and Africa (including India before the Partition), it would seem far more logical, not to mention just, that Africa and India (and now Pakistan) would begin by collaborating to do something for the immediate and long-term benefit of the Siddi or Sheedi people and other African-Descendant populations in Asia and South Asia, and in India and Pakistan in particular, whose presence in Asia was created by and who survived the Indian Ocean Slave Trade.

Washington's Slavery Emancipation, April 1862

Spring in Washington means more than cherry blossoms. Throughout April, Washington, DC -- or at least some of us -- will recognise the 146th anniversary of the abolition of Black enslavement in the District of Columbia which took place Wednesday, 16 April 1862. Here's the rub: annual ceremonies marking DC emancipation were held from 1866 till 1901, but then nothing all the way up to 2002. What happened after 1901? This date of the end of enslavement, though incredibly significant, wasn't even an official local holiday until 2005. So much for marking major passages in U.S. history. So to honour the beginning of real freedom for so many people right there in the U.S. capital, Marian's Blog has a new spin-off featuring the District of Columbia Emancipation Act of 1862. The office of the mayor of Washington has an online calendar listing most of this year's events remembering the mid-19th century emancipation of a people who lived then, and still do, in the shadow of the Capitol, the Congress, the White House and Supreme Court of the United States, in Washington, DC.

My greatgrandfather, Thomas Gudger, who died in Chanute, Kansas, 1913

Today I am writing to remember and honour Thomas Gudger, father of my maternal grandmother and her three brothers. I never met any of my grandmother's brothers.  Thomas Gudger died on this day in March 1913, in a place called Chanute in the U.S. state of Kansas. One day he went to his job in the local cement plant and this act of responsibility ended his life. He was 34 but already a widower with four children. He'd lost my great grandmother, his wife, in childbirth in Tennessee, yet he made an heroic effort to keep his family together and give them a better life. As Black Appalachian people, my great grandfather (called mulatto but whose family was tri-racial - Black American/African, American Indian and white/European), his maternal uncle (also "mulatto") and other family members, moved to Chanute in 1911 or 1912 from their Tennessee-North Carolina mountain home. Less than twenty four hours after my grandfather's death, crushed to death at his job, the local newspaper published the front page story: Thomas Gudger, colored, killed; four little children left without parents. The article, which eventually I will transcribe, states uncategorically no one was present at the time of the "accident." At the same time, curiously, this statement wasn't a quote attributed to any official such as, say, local police. The article contains no comments from any local authorities. Is it also coincidence the headline and article seem to read like a warning? Was it intended as a warning to other Blacks who might attempt to settle and work in this part of southeast Kansas? I think of renowned photographer Gordon Parks whose family, in the same general period of the early 1900s, fled southeast Kansas and its anti-Black racism. For the rest of my life I will wonder how many Black Americans, over decades and centuries, have lost their lives; how many of our loved ones have been murdered in our country, the USA, with total impunity and with continued anonymity for the perpetrators and the places that enabled, even rewarded, them. Much more often than our society thusfar has acknowledged our family members lost their lives for what we now call racially motivated reasons. We love you always, Grandpa Gudger.

Chocolate City, a film on Washington, DC and gentrification

In recognition of our colonised status, people around the world can help by taking a symbolic break from even uttering the words "Washington" and "Washington, DC." Leave our name out of conversation and put a blank space in print. Besides the general public, those encouraged to promote, observe and abide by the boycott should include bloggers, teachers and professors, clergymembers, tourists and tour guides, travel agents, economists, journalists, scientists, activists and politicians. To do so will send a powerful message in contrast to the real lack of power of our city's mostly Black and mostly Black women residents. Washington, the city, always has been about far more than national and international politics and tourism.

(In Washington, an image of DC native son the late Marvin Gaye shows up only in a vodka advert. U.S. Capitol with "don't walk" sign. Photos property Marian's Blog)

In fact, DC's reality remains hidden: a majority-Black American city with a buried yet deeply rooted history (and identity) as the former capital of the U.S. interstate slave trade. People live here, and for many years the majority of Washington's citizens have been Black Americans; or at least we have been the vast majority until the very recent past. Washington as a majority Black city has always been subjugated and segregated. We have been and are under attack. In spite of the presence of international organizations and the embassies of nations around the world, little news of the real DC and our status seems to get out, even and especially among journalists. Along comes a film to break the silence: CHOCOLATE CITY, a documentary by filmmakers Ellie Walton and Sam Wild. Just as they would have bought Black Americans' ancestors as slaves, property developers have bought my town and the local population is being forced out using means that are mostly foul. CC focuses on the displacement and dispersal of the community of 400 families who lived in public housing called Arthur Capper Homes. The film has two de facto "stars", Arthur Capper resident Debra Frazier and Anu Yadav, a performance artist of South Asian origin. The two form unlikely yet complementary poles in the moving narrative. A quickly built official website for Chocolate City is down now seems to be back up after having received so many hits it temporarily exceeded its bandwidth. I'm also pointing readers to Jennifer Tchinnosian's 6 Feb 2008 review in George Washington University's student paper, the Daily Colonial, a name which is wholly a propos.

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.

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."

"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.

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. 

Jena as de Tocqueville's "democracy" where Black Americans are a "threat" to Whites

The issues and actions haunting Jena, Louisiana today were well-established and defined as long ago as 1835, and even earlier. The problem is that since that time, now more than 170 years gone, U.S. society has steadfastly refused to deal fairly and honestly with those issues. This brings all of us to the town center of Jena, and elsewhere. I'm referring to the 1835 publication of Alexis de Tocqueville's thoughts and observations of the USA in "Democracy in America". The book continues to be read, lauded and digested in the US and globally, so could it be that no one is reading Chapter 18? Titled: THE PRESENT AND PROBABLE FUTURE CONDITION OF THE THREE RACES THAT INHABIT THE TERRITORY OF THE UNITED STATES. The "three races" de Tocqueville writes about are Native Americans, Black Americans, and White Americans. Also look for this section, "Situation of the Black  Population in the United States and Dangers with which its Presence threatens the Whites." For people who have read Chapter 18, where is the feedback and public critique? How about shock, disgust, outrage and serious response?? The French writer wrote published this in 1835; it's now 2007.

"The Indians will perish in the same isolated condition in which they have lived, but the destiny of the Negroes is in some measure interwoven with that of the Europeans. These two races are fastened to each other without intermingling; and they are alike unable to separate entirely or to combine. The most formidable of all the ills that threaten the future of the Union arises from the presence of a black population upon its territory; and in contemplating the cause of the present embarrassments, or the future dangers of the United States, the observer is invariably led to this as a primary fact. ..."

Our society and perhaps especially our "free press"/news-cum-gossip media, still insists on speaking of Jena, nooses hung in trees, abuse, rape and murder of women of colour, of education, poverty and affirmative action, HIV and AIDS, incarceration and the death penalty, in a vacuum, as though in 170 years none of us has read let alone dissected Alexis de Tocqueville's much-revered words. His unambiguous views and observations of Black and Native Americans remain today in bold contrast to his admiration for and affirmation of a white, and whites-only, America.

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

"Granulated slavery" - Michael Burke in the Jamaica Observer

It's August. This is a month to remember and commemorate Britain's end of its slave trade, from London to Guyana and the Caribbean and its "basin", and beyond. This also encompasses "local Washington, DC" since a sizeable number of Caribbean folk live and work in the DC-Maryland-Virginia area. More Caribbean and Caribbean Basin folk are scattered across Canada and various parts of Europe. August also marks national independence of Britain's post-slavery Caribbean colonies, more than a hundred years after chattel slavery ended. So we're checking Michael Burke's fascinating column, Granulated slavery, Saturday, 5 August, in the Jamaica Observer. Burke pulls together related issues: economic enslavement, jobs and their absence, 1970s' Roman Catholic liberation theology throughout the Americas (conveniently abandoned by some), the virus of today's artificially induced mass consumption as well as the local and global co-operative movement and its underused ability to put a dent in poverty. Thanks for the overview, Michael.

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.

"Great Society" Speech, U.S. President Lyndon Johnson, Univ Michigan May 22, 1964

Friday, 22 May 1964 "... the "Great Society" is not a safe harbor, a resting place, a final objective, a finished work. It is a challenge constantly renewed, beckoning us toward a destiny where the meaning of our lives matches the marvelous products of our labor. ..." - Ly