Marian's Blog

Britain's high-risk drama of mixed-gender hospital wards, op-ed in the Independent

Perhaps I am a "minority" as an American who believes it important to seek out news from and about the enormous world beyond one's own country. So today, Jan 31st, I stumbled upon an op-ed in The Independent where I learned that about twenty per cent of Britain's hospital patients are compelled to stay in gender-mixed hospital wards. Yes, women and men accomodated in adjoining beds on the same wards. Hmmm... Apparently this brilliant 'gender blind' - or just blind is more like it - policy was birthed back in 1997 by none other than now-ex PM Tony Blair. Reads The Independent: "Eleven years after Mr Blair's burst of incomprehension, one in five patients is still placed in mixed accommodation. The indignity and misery this causes is eloquently chronicled in these pages by Janet Street-Porter, whose sister was treated for terminal cancer on such a ward. Yesterday, a report for the Mental Health Act Commission found that women and young people were accommodated in mixed-sex wards, with the attendant risk of sexual abuse. Many described their stay on such wards as frightening. Whether a patient is physically or mentally ill, such an atmosphere can hardly speed recovery. ... In a rare moment of clarity amid the gobbledegook and spin, Lord Darzi said there could be no single-sex wards [emphasis added] without building "the whole of the NHS into single rooms". Clear this might be, but it is nonsense. Mixed wards will be abolished when the Government gives hospitals no choice but to do so. There can hardly be a prospective patient who does not regard this as an absolute priority. ..." I wonder what Sherry (Blair) thinks about this policy, off the record. Now that Tony's joined her by becoming a Catholic, and were he still prime minister, would he make the same decision today? God save Elizabeth the Queen, who, luckily, need never fret over her own accomodation.

Joining Maxine Waters in backing Hillary Clinton

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

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

Thank you to John and Elizabeth Edwards, 2008 Campaign

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

'Put in my place' by Ali Mazrui as recent Black migration dominates slave trade abolition symposium

The first day of this year marked the 200th anniversary of the 1808 U.S. abolition of the slave trade. Not abolition of Black enslavement in the U.S., but abolition - and only on paper - of any further trafficking of "fresh" Africans from Africa to the then-recently formed USA. It was one of the speakers, not me, who brought up Barack Obama's name and we were off to the proverbial races. It happened to be my turn at the audience mike as Michael Gomez proclaimed something "super-positive", and completely un-self-critical about Mr. Obama in reference to the status of Black Americans. Here I was in my own hometown, attending an event which - obviously quite mistakenly - I thought would focus on us whose ancestors and families were forcibly transported to and enslaved in the U.S. I was here in my hometown, Washington, DC, according to historian Melton McLaurin, capital of the U.S. interstate slave trade until 1850 - which no one knows and none mentions - yet so many of the symposium comments were geared toward declaring the proclaimed 'right' of recent Black immigrants to the U.S. to call themselves Black Americans. What is up with this??

The funny thing (as in strange, not ha ha) is that the same person who invoked Obama later admitted privately to me that he knew exactly what I was talking about. He did get part of it anyway. As he put it, it was the lack of reciprocity - any reciprocity - with we who are Black Americans by other groups of Blacks now insisting they are Black Americans and claiming, and being alloted, our cultural, historical, economic, political and demographic space. For this I hold the U.S. Census Bureau responsible, but only partially. 

The icing on this cake for me was being roundly lectured and firmly insulted by the Kenyan and ethnic Swahili professor Ali Mazrui. I'd never laid eyes on Mr. Mazrui before in my life. Earlier in the day I'd introduced myself and we'd exchanged a few kind words as I told him that we'd recently lived in Kenya, and the shock of visiting the slave-trading fort, Fort Jesus, in his hometown of Mombasa. I described to Dr. Mazrui how, as recently as 2002, the recorded audio tour at Fort Jesus described what was traded there as "spices and other things." Spice and other things, indeed. The day ended with the same man telling me and the 300 or so attendees, "What about my five sons?" referring to his 'question' about their ethnic identity in the absence of them being able to claim, like we American Negroes, being descended from the people brought to the U.S. in chains and subjected to chattel slavery and every other thing since. "What about my five sons?" he proclaimed. He then added more insult to injury as he proclaimed, almost as with pride: neither of their mothers was a Black American woman. Why did this sound so much like a rejection of Black American women? And once again, what ethnic group exists in which neither of your parents is from that group yet you can claim you are from it? Who's trying to create this existential mess, and why? More on this later.

Martin Luther King's birthday today, and 'the silence of our friends'

Today is the actual anniversary of Martin Luther King's birth. He would have been 79. It's interesting that for some reason he chose to change his name from Michael to Martin.

Over the course of 2008 I'm paying attention to this observation of his. "In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends."

Christopher (Chris) Wickstrom, on what would have been his 57th birthday

It's a funny thing, getting older. All of us become part of history, but does this happen only when we die? Or is it bit by bit as we age? My friend and classmate Christopher would be 57 years old today, but he left at a time most would call far too soon, and much too young. His name was Christopher Glenn Wickstrom. He had his mother, and father, and a brother and sister. Everyone called him Chris but for some reason I was the one person who always called him by his full given name. I think was just because I really did like his name; I suppose I also enjoyed saying it. I have missed my friend in the years and decades since he left. The brain tumour took him. This was a particular irony for one as brilliant as he. In our high school in Pennsylvania, Chris and our classmate Tim Roach seemed locked in a perpetual yet friendly competition for who'd get the best grade or the highest score. The rest of us are long grown, and Christopher long gone.

Edwards backers excluded from CNN interview on South Carolina Black voters

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

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

John Edwards knows it's the economy, not just Iraq

As the candidate said last night in New Hampshire, I too am on the John Edwards grassroots campaign bandwagon right through my ancestral South Carolina, called "the Black Primary", and the other 47, right up to the Democratic Party convention next August in Denver. John Edwards all along has been addressing what's touching, and crushing, the majority of Americans, middle- and working-class/working-poor and poor. I scoffed when I read a Washington Post headline quoting George Bush saying how 'good' the economy looked. I was wondering what planet he was visiting or what he'd been ingesting. That was only about ten days ago. Now Bush has backtracked, acknowledging there are issues with the economy, and today CNN (MSM - mainstream media) reports we're in a recession since the final quarter of 2007. I hear all the candidates. I'm supporting John Edwards.