Marian's Blog

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

Someone STOP this carnage in Kenya

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

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

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

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

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

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. 

What George asked the Queen (in 1991)...

Mara sent me a piece in NYTimes this week, The Queen Visits the White House, in which the  author reflects upon Bush the younger's curious behaviour sixteen years ago in the very same White House. On that occasion George found himself in the presence of both QE and his mom Barbara - "... when the first President and Mrs. Bush played host to their own state dinner for the queen. By several different accounts, including Mr. Bush's own, Barbara Bush told the queen that she had seated her son far away from Her Majesty, for fear he might make a wisecrack. Then, to his mother's horror, he did, telling the queen that he was his family's black sheep and asking, "Who's yours?"  The queen, apparently not amused, replied tartly, "None of your business." Ahhh... a refreshingly direct answer to a startlingly stupid question!

"Embedded" in Iraq

Recently GOP "maverick"(?) Colin Powell labelled the reality in Iraq a civil war. Knowledgeable journalists and others say what we see in the press does not begin to convey how bad it is. It's almost two years since my Jan 19, 2005 entry when I wrote about what to some of us already looked like a tragic, inexorable descent into hell. I contrasted it with George Bush's grand, lavish and self-congratulatory 2005 re-entry into the White House on the same day. Two years on I'm still trying to comprehend the U.S. media's "approach" to reporting Iraq and the kind of place it has become since Bush & Co.'s 2003 unilateral invasion.

This led me to search for the meaning of the term 'embedded' via Merriam Webster's dictionary online. As in "to have embedded virtually all journalistic coverage of Iraq inside the military". Here's what I found: "... to enclose closely in or as if in a matrix"; "to make something an integral part of"; "to prepare [a specimen] for sectioning by infiltrating with and enclosing in a supporting substance"; "to surround closely"; and the use of the intransitive verb: "to become embedded". How will journalists and historians chronicle this still-unfolding story of the way so many are covering Iraq?

The American assassinations, part 2 - 1964, 68: Malcolm, Martin and John's brother Bobby

On the Web I found a photo taken in Washington, at Richard Nixon's January 1969 inauguration. A notation says ten thousand people came out in the cold for this event. Two thousand were protesters. In the foreground, above the crowd, a young woman holds her handpainted sign. "PEACE IS NOT SUBVERSIVE". I read those words and forty years later they make me ask myself what exactly is different today? Is America a sleepwalking society? Quite often that's how it feels. I started blogging this thread, "the American assassinations", before reading that this week BBC News has alleged U.S. CIA involvement in the 1968 murder of Robert Kennedy. The report by Shane O'Sullivan appeared November 21, 2006 on BBC Newsnight. It is possible some in the US still really do not want to think of such things. The evening he was murdered Bobby Kennedy had just won California's Democratic Party primary and was on the verge of becoming the party nominee for president of the United States. How many of us ever stop to consider the implication of these multiple assassinations in the US? All the victims were male political figures and not one of them right wing. All this violence and death. The violent reversal of the politically possible. All in less than five years, from 1963 to '68. The Boomer generation. My generation. Multiple political murders shaped my generation of American youth. In the face of serial murders and assassinations, wouldn't coming-of-age somehow change? One devastating death followed by another and another. All in barely half a decade. All with deep social and political effects that remain today. Who talks about how these killings in the U.S. marked the baby boomer generation? Many of us weren't even 18 by the time we'd lived through all this. How many people, Americans and everyone, ever think about that? Had Robert Kennedy not been shot in the recesses of an L.A. hotel it is possible, even likely, he'd have become the 37th U.S. president. Is this the real reason he died? Indeed this 'alternate reality': had Bobby Kennedy been allowed to live, at the very least would have spared us who we got instead: Richard "I am not a crook" Nixon. Some of us remember -only too well- his other "name", "Tricky Dick". Tricky Dick Nixon. Before Robert it was his brother, our president, on a routine political visit to Dallas where he, too, was assassinated in November 1963. Fewer than nineteen months later it was Black American leader Malcolm X (Malcolm Little), shot so many times, by multiple gunmen, in the Audubon Ballroom in Harlem. It was Sunday, 21 February 1965. In Pennsylvania my family heard the news on our car radio. This moment in my parents' car stays frozen in my mind. A sunny, early Sunday afternoon, right after church. I am in the back seat as we ride. The news comes on the radio as we're stopped at the light at East Market Street, heading north on South Queen. So much violence. And then barely three years later Martin Luther King is shot and killed, Thursday, April 4th, in Memphis, Tennessee. Then Robert Kennedy in Los Angeles on June 8th. Two more American assassinations less than eight weeks apart.

U.S. Midterms: "Appetizer for 2008" - Gergen

What was unimaginable less than 48 hours ago has occurred. Democrats have won both the House and the Senate while Mr. Rumsfeld has been shown the District line. Sayonara, Don. I couldn't have said it better than David Gergen on CNN declaring Tuesday's election results "the appetizer" for Election Day 2008. Gergen also aptly declared what's happening in America as "political high drama". A-men. In today's early hours, Thursday, 9 November, Associated Press has now declared Jim Webb winner while Mr. Webb has publicly thanked the people of Virginia (1607-2007) for electing him that state's new U.S. senator. Unlike perhaps a few folks I don't really intend to brag. At least not much. Globally and inside the U.S. all of us are dealing with many sobering things. Yet now at least there's the opportunity to begin again and to do some things which are both practical and right. Tuesday's really was a seismic vote.

Britain reports plot to blow up transatlantic flights from London

BBC and other media are reporting an alleged terror plot to blow up planes on transatlantic flights out of London. In the UK more than 20 persons have been arrested with searches continuing. Three U.S. airlines are said to have been targeted: United, Continental and American. London's Heathrow Airport appears virtually closed for the time being, with an international 'knock-on' or domino effect. UK authorities advise travelers to stay away from Heathrow as much as possible today. At present no hand luggage or liquids may be carried onto UK flights. Exceedingly long queues are reported along with flight cancellations and/or serious delays. A steady stream of news conferences is occurring in London, Washington and elsewhere.

From a wedding to killing at Qana: Lebanese prime minister brought to tears at Arab summit

Today, Monday, BBC carried live coverage of the Arab foreign ministers' summit in Beirut.

I grew up learning about Jesus attending a wedding in "Cana" where he transformed water to wine. This is described in John, chapter 2, verses 1-11 of the Bible. As news filtered out last week of the killing of children and adults in a place called Qana, in Lebanon, I asked myself if this could possibly be the same place where Jesus was a wedding guest. It is.

A Bible lesson online describes the wedding feast at Qana as "the first of seven miracles described in the portion of John’s Gospel known ... as "the Book of Signs." It says in changing to wine water meant for Jewish purification, Jesus began "a pattern of transforming the institutions of Judaism into those of Christianity." Today, a couple thousand years later, Qana stands for war, carnage, terror and fear.

At the Arab foreign ministers' summit in Beirut, at a certain point there was silence in the room full of Arab male diplomats and politicians as Lebanese prime minister Fouad Siniora stopped speaking. He was in the middle of affirming Lebanon's character as an Arab country - saying it is not negotiable - when his voice cracked and he worked to catch his breath. He repeated his statement while wiping tears from his eyes. Pulled himself together and concluded. A BBC summary of his earlier remarks says he proclaimed there can be no ceasefire as long as Israel occupies Lebanon and that the permanent solution must include Israel's withdrawal beyond the so-called green line as well as creation of that long-awaited Palestinian state - with its capital in Jerusalem.

Among the men dominating all sides of this carnage, which man will take on accountability for the killings (by aerial bombing) in Qana and elsewhere? After nearly 30 years of inconsisent Middle East peace talks (that started under U.S. president Jimmy Carter) - what is going on here? Why are we still collectively allowing such constant, blatant and horrific breakdowns of our humanity? All of it is beyond being unspeakable. It is thoroughly repulsive.

War and Collateral Civilians: Ethiopian women trafficked and trapped in Lebanon

The Blogher 2006 conference is happening in about a week. Meanwhile over at Blogher.org I posted my concerns about the least visible of the "collateral civilians" caught in the bombing of Lebanon and Hezbollah. Look here under "Race & Ethnicity."

Gaza, Haifa, Somalia, Colombia, Srebrenica: Nurit Elhanan's "Women" at the Euro Parliament

"Why does that streak of blood rip the petal of your cheek?"

Correction: Nine years have passed since I worked in eastern Bosnia in 1997. In July 1995 the mass killings took place there, in the town of Srebrenica. I also remember the quiet and private sheroism of two women whom I met there in early '97 in the course of my work. I want to thank those ladies. The first rushed up to us just outside Srebrenica's municipal building. She had the grace and courage to walk right over and personally welcome home the Bosnian Muslim man with us on his first return. I do not recall his name but he was the first Muslim member of Srebrenica's post-war municipal elections commission. Another member of our staff, a woman, had driven him over from Tuzla - across the IEBL. The IEBL is a boundary: the Inter-Entity Boundary Line, a border separating mostly Muslim parts of Bosnia from the eastern region's self-styled Bosnian Serb Republic - Republika Srpska. The second lady I met just before Orthodox Easter. I was walking in the center of Srebrenica when she intently crossed the main street to meet me. This wasn't far from the Dom Kultura (Cultural Center) building. She handed me a beautiful, hand-painted Easter egg, a real, edible egg, and I accepted it from her with a thank-you in her language and a smile. Srebrenica's a very small town. Yet even the whole world is small in many ways, especially once people begin to know each other. I was deeply touched by and will not forget the kindness at the root of these small yet expansive acts of willingness and courage shown by two women whose names I do not know; women I've yet to meet again.

Last March 8 (International Women's Day) in her speech to the European Parliament, Israeli educator Nurit Peled-Elhanan - mother of a 5 - correction: 13 year old daughter killed by a suicide bomber - posed a question made eternal by the writing of the late Russian poet Anna Akhmatova (1889-1966; real name Anna Andreyevna Gorenko). "Why does that streak of blood rip the petal of your cheek?"

Nurit Elhanan's comments here about motherhood and the womb draw attention to this masculinist idea of 'womb as political demographic enemy', the verbal expression of which, sadly, I've witnessed in my international human rights work, often or usually expressed by men from their exclusively male positions of political and/or religious authority.

The "Muslim womb" is hardly the only perceived enemy. On a personal tip, the same attitude's been in the U.S. and the Americas since Columbus arrived in 1492, followed by his son's arrival a short time later with his first cargo to the Americas of captured Africans. In recent United States' experience the hostility toward "other wombs" and the fertility of "others" - both female and male - has included forced sterilisation and sterilisation under vastly uninformed consent. A nurse in Pennsylvania once asked whether I wished to be sterilised. At that moment I was in active labour no less, and thank goodness with no drugs by choice. My immediate, unfiltered and exact reply was "HELL NO."

I received Elhanan's remarks as forwarded by Paola Manduca from Sami Ramadani of London. Paola shared them on an email list in preparation for last spring's Women's assembly of the 2006 European Social Forum in Atena (Athens, Greece). In the same vein we ask your support and signature on this online petition for the Kampala Resolution on Women, Peace and Conflict. Thank you. Peace.

                                                 Women

                             Nurit Peled-Elhanan

"Thank you for inviting me to this today. It is always
an honour and a pleasure to be here, among you (at the
European Parliament).

However, I must admit I believe you should have
invited a Palestinian woman at my stead, because the
women who suffer most from violence in my country are
the Palestinian women. And I would like to dedicate
my speech to Miriam Raban and her husband Kamal,
from Bet Lahiya in the Gaza strip, whose five small children
were killed by Israeli soldiers while picking strawberries
at the family's strawberry field. No one will ever stand
trial for this murder. [continued below]

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.

Iraq: Civil war and Nir Rosen's Green Bird; long live Zarqawi?

Thursday, 8 June 2006. Abu Musab al-Zarqawi no longer walks the earth and CNN has interviewed a 'less well-known' (to some of us) freelance journalist called Nir Rosen. Today Rosen became the first person I've heard in the mainstream media (MSM) to speak openly, and like he were making sense, about Iraq being in a state of civil war. Digest that. Most other media folk are still using that "sectarian violence" euphemism. This includes Wolf Blitzer who thankfully, unlike many of his CNN colleagues, I am not forced to endure or imagine discussing "Brangelina" with a straight face. Besides Nir Rosen has anyone in US mainstream media officially called the current state of Iraq a civil war? Rosen specifically says it's been a civil war since 2005. He is also author of a book I'd never heard of before today - In the Belly of the Green Bird: The Triumph of the Martyrs in Iraq - briefly reviewed here. The book's subtitle seems appropriate on this day when some in "the West" are cheering and instant-replaying news of al-Zarqawi's death. May he, like all of us, have an opportunity to talk to G*d about who he was and the acts he committed in this life.

"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.

Somalia - Peaceful protesters tell Islamic fighters: "Leave Mogadishu"

The Guardian reports "hundreds of protesters" (we also hear it was thousands) marched the streets of Mogadishu today asking self-styled Islamic sharia court militias to leave town peacefully. On the U.S. diplomatic side, a (San Jose) Mercury News article today reports former State Department official Princeton Lyman is advising the Bush administration to "begin working urgently with regional governments and Somaliland, an unrecognized self-declared independent nation in northern Somalia, to contain Islamist militias." That quote is from the paper, not directly from Lyman. And I added the emphasis. We hope "official Washington" 1) will not bring any more of its "shock and awe" into traumatised Somalia; and 2) that it also will not simply turn its back. I will try adding a link for info on Somaliland - a region once colonised by Britain. This is also where I first drank camel's milk, and I must say: not bad! My prayers are with all of our colleagues and friends.

Kenya Bloggers Day, aka Madaraka Day

Today is June 1st - both Madaraka Day and Kenya Bloggers Day. Uaridi (Swahili for 'rose') has done a lively Madaraka Day post at her blog so I've linked it here. Unlike Uaridi I'd probably trade a Tuskers and nyama choma (barbecued or roast meat) for a glass of water (probably Keringet or something) or chilled vino bianco, with a nice green salad fresh from my Muthaiga garden (which I dearly miss). Madaraka Day took place June 1st, 1963, 18 months before Kenya's full independence from Britain on 12 December 1964. In the early 60s I was a little Black American girl who had never yet been outside her home country, but I vividly remember collecting the set of luncheon placemats each with a nice map and description of an African nation that recently had re-gained its independence. Even as a kid thousands of miles away - to the west across Africa and the Atlantic - I understood vicariously what African independence meant. It made me feel hopeful and proud. I also still hope that soon Africa will remember and be proud of us.

Blair and Bush: E. J. Dionne's Coalition of the Erring

It worked for "Brangelina", so why not Mr. Blair and Mr. Bush? We'll use "blush" - pronounced 'bloosh' the way Scots would say it. I love the George Orwell quote in E.J. Dionne's 30 May article. "[T]he slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts." How 'twu'. Well, bring it on anyway. As soon as we're done we'll all hunt, fish, chop wood and ride bikes at George's private lake in Texas.

'Slaves'? Or 'people'? 17 May Open Source Radio on Slavery

The slavery history discussion on Open Source Radio went really well. Thanks to OSR host Chris Lydon, my fellow guests professors Jill LePore and Simon Schama, and to producers Chelsea and Robin. Our lively discussion opened a lot more doors than we closed, so hopefully we can do this again. This remark from Allison, a listener who refers to an image posted on the OSR site:

"I’m struck by the caption for the photo above: “…where over a million slaves were traded between 1811 and 1873.” I think it would be more impactful to say: “where over a million people were kidnapped and sold into slavery…” Allison continues: “We dehumanize the people by calling them slaves. I don’t believe a person is a slave. I believe other people enslave them. I prefer to put the degrading label on the offenders not the victims." Right on, A.

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!