Marian's Blog

Gaza: Reading Robert Fisk on The Independent.co.uk

Some readers of Marian's Blog may be aware that I'm a former journalist (and press secretary, etc.) myself. And yet, being briefly outside the United States, I am experiencing culture shock. In this case the shock is good, due to once again being surrounded by so much news and so many free and readily available (televised & broadcast) news sources. Many of these are sources which, back in the States, most Americans and those living in the U.S. 1) are not offered via U.S. media & U.S. cable TV distribution systems, and 2) which, quite often, Americans will not discuss, quite often even when they may be aware of certain events going on in the world outside (or even within) the USA.

And so it was thanks to a long interview seen (more than once) on Al Jazeera's English-language TV that I learned of one experienced and rather outspoken British observer, Robert Fisk, and his columns in the British paper The Independent. 

This entry is short, and yet for today perhaps it's enough. 

Wanna play?? "Who wants to be Black American?"

What is up with this?? Is being who we are now like a game show or something: "Gee, who wants to be a Black American??"

On the eve of U.S. Black History Month 2005 ("The Niagra Movement: Black Protest Reborn") I need to ask who is trying to co-opt and confuse the identity and ethnicity of Black American people?

Black History Month was started in Washington, DC by Carter G. Woodson, a native of next-door Virginia. As a [Black American] school child in Washington, DC, my Mother remembers meeting Carter G. Woodson, much like years later when I met Mohammed Ali/Cassius Clay on more than one occasion.

Were Carter Woodson alive today I'd ask what he thinks of these lame attempts to dilute and de-stabilise Black American identity. If I told my 5 Black American grandparents what some folks today are trying to do to our ethnicity they'd all probably turn in their graves (all located in the USA).

My Black American family's been formed, enslaved, born, raised,
worked and died in North & South Carolina, Tennessee, Washington, DC, Kansas, Indiana, Missouri, Kentucky, Virginia, Florida, and elsewhere in the USA.

In spite of apparently never-ending efforts against Black Americans there are still plenty of us in most [not all] of those places all over the USA; so there's really no need for anyone to try to 'recruit' or invent any "new" Black Americans.

When I was growing up and sometimes - while traveling - my (Black American) family was busy seeking out a gas station's single 'colored'
restroom [as in 3 doors labelled "men", "women", "colored"] or the local colored motel -if there was one - outsiders (i.e., white Americans) showed no interest in subverting our ethnic identity. In the U.S. North just as much as the South most white Americans (including most of the whites who are related to Black Americans) - just wanted us to stay away; to keep our political and physical distance.

White folks wanted us Black Americans to be 'useful' ... and usable... yet pretty invisible. No such luck for them anymore.

Now together with our domestic and international friends and allies Black Americans must organise and communicate to fight the latest attempts to erase, nullify, dilute and de-value Black American
ethnicity, community, culture and history, as well as our future.

Do U.S. authorities and others wish to manipulate the traditional and
defacto definition of "African American" to further marginalise the
tens of millions of us who actually are Black Americans?

One of the weirdest things that's happened to me personally behind all this is having an Italian American man publicly call me a "racist" - simply because I told him Barack Obama is not Black American.

Well shut my impudent Black American female mouth. Obviously that guy knows better than I who I am and who is and is not related to me. And if you believe that, I've got a bridge...

The U.S. government's (calculated) political process of "naturalising" people cannot make them Black Americans any more than they can "become" American Indian/Native American.

Isn't there a provision in human rights custom or law that says all
human beings and human communities have a right to legal recognition of their ethnic identity? (As if the U.S. government, which has refused to sign other key international agreements, would care.)

The fact that a person or their family is African or "of African
ancestry" (i.e., Black) and lives in (i.e., re-located/migrated to)
the United States does not make her or him a member of the Black
American ethnic group. This is not to suggest those persons are not Black, however they are not ethnic Black Americans from the U.S.A.

For some reason up to now the American government can't seem to be bothered to point out the difference.

It seems almost too obvious to state that due to our distinct history
(still largely unknown or misunderstood outside the USA), Black
American ethnicity & identity are not constructed the way white
Americans and the U.S. government have deliberately (and
hyper-racially) constructed "whiteness" and "white American" identity.

For the past 100 or more years White American identity has perpetuated itself by changing imported individuals and their families and/or communities from various European backgrounds into "white American".

Such persons are also (erroneously) called "Caucasian" - as the U.S. government calls whites (and anyone else they wish to racially/ethnically co-opt).

I received an opinion survey from the opinion polling firm Zogby asking people to choose the "African American" they consider most influential. The "candidate list" included Colin Powell and Barack Obama, neither of whom is Black American.

I'm not saying perhaps one or the other or both of these persons might not be an exemplary human being. I am saying that neither had any family member who was a Black American enslaved or free in the USA.

As an ethnic group our history is not identical to the history of white people in America, since we are Black Americans and are neither white nor white American. Black Americans are related to many white people (most of whom we do not know by their name) - most who refuse to talk about it ... but that's another story. [Read Ed Ball's Slaves in the Family.]

Colin Powell is Caribbean American. Both his parents came to New York from the island nation of Jamaica. Which is absolutely fine, but none of his 4 grandparents came from any Black American community in the United States.

Barack Obama, who is Kenyan and white, is now a U.S. senator - almost solely thanks to the political support of Black Americans from the Southside of Chicago, Illinois. His father is Kenyan who moved to the U.S. and his mother is white American.

That ancestry does not make a person a Black American. In fact Barack Obama, through his mother, is descended from white slaveholder Jefferson Davis who was president of the Confederacy - the armed rebellion organised against the United States to keep Black Americans in enslavement.

If Barack Obama has any blood connection to Black Americans it would
be through his mother's white American family & the Black Americans to whom his Mother and her family are almost certainly related. Sadly, white Americans have almost never acknowledged such things ... but that's another book.

On behalf of my family, ancestors and community I deeply resent continuing attempts to manipulate our existence, to alter who we are. The world needs to understand this, not fall for it, and actively oppose what's going on.

'Earthquakes' & 'Tsunamis' Corrected

A few days back here at Marian's Blog I should have qualified my remark that a tsunami can follow any earthquake. Not exactly true.

I should've said a tsunami can follow any underwater earthquake.

Not wishing to mislead I wanted to get this right. Perhaps we should all just speak a Latin language. Most of them - except French - use the same words to differentiate the 2 types of quakes. Les francais on the other hand went their own way with 'tremblement de terre' and 'tsunami'.

Italian, Spanish and Portuguese all use maremoto for a quake in the sea, ocean or water - and terremoto for "earthquake". To me these nuances are a sign of intelligence, of culture. Or at the very least of getting and sharing there's a difference worth noting.

Web Dev: Where's The Colored folks?

I wanted to re-read and share Molly Holtzschlag's short piece on the gender or race issue. Interesting she notes that women of color were 3 of the only 4 people of color she's met so far in her web dev career; though it's not always so.

I'm sure we'll be coming this way again, and thanks for the thought, Molly.

Gender roles? let’s talk race - published 7/10/04. Molly Holtzschlag:

"The “where are the women” adventure continues as Doug Bowman revisits the thread he originated last year. No matter what your persepective is on this issue, the mere fact that its got legs of its own proves that it’s something that people want to address.

So if we’re outing gender as a specific issue in our field, we have to also out a fact that bothers me personally far more than the gender issue, and that’s the issue of race integration in the web design and development field.

Stepping aside from the broader multinational aspects for a moment let’s ask this question: Where are the blacks? the Hispanics? The Native American Indians? I’m thinking over my entire career in IT and I can confidently say I’ve worked with or known exactly four black people in a 16 year career (three of them women, interestingly enough). Fewer Hispanics than that, even though where I live has a significant Hispanic population. One Native American, ditto on the significant population here in the desert.

I posted to Doug’s conversation a synopsis of my recent thinking on the gender issues, citing history, cultural expectations, and education as major factors. I believe the same concerns apply when we think about race integration, at least here in the U.S.

By the way, I don’t mean to leave out any specific race. If you feel your race is under-represented in our field, by all means say so."

Donate Online World Food Programme

It's easy to donate online to World Food Programme. Please send something now. You may designate which WFP appeal you want to fund - including Somalia's tsunami victims &/or others. The options are posted on the WFP website. Donors in the USA may click a link to donate tax-free. Contributions are accepted in 6 currencies: yen, pounds sterling, Canadian dollars, euro, Australian dollars and U.S. dollars. The breadth & scale of needs seem rather overwhelming but just a bit of assistance from each of us will help thousands of lives. Haitian proverb: "Men anpil chay pa lou" - Many hands make a heavy load light

Sudan: Africa's largest Country A Sad place to be Black

Sudan: "African homeland"? A Meditation on the ludicrous in Africa

Consider what is happening this very moment in Darfur (possibly also somewhere in Southern Sudan if you don't believe the hype of Khartoum's reformed domestic politics). Combine that with Sudan's primary status in Africa which Sudan itself has dishonoured. To this add centuries of mass enslavement and deportation/exportation; in other words, ethnic cleansing of Africans from many parts of Africa.

Fact is, the removal of Africans from their regions, their Continent, &/or consequently even from their own consciousness of indigenous identity, has never ended. In Sudan today this continues. In Darfur in the West of Sudan it has accelerated. 

What I am saying is not against anyone yet the situation we are in cries out for honesty. What these African stories of extreme exploitation say is that Africans must re-negotiate their relations with Arabs and with everyone else, & that we also must do so with each other.

A corollary is that Arabs with a conscience which seeks to affirm both Africans & Arabs and all of us as human beings must do a similar re-negotiation of their presence in & ties with Africa, as well as with other identity-relation issues of their own.

The destructive and genocidal processes in Sudan, Mauritania and elsewhere do not speak well for a decent future for Black people - even in Africa. These processes also say something eloquently chilling about anyone & every entity responsible for allowing the pillage to go on, along with all who somehow 'benefit' by the physical, sociocultural, economic & political removal & exclusion of Blacks. This includes such things as the opening of "new territories" for "settlement" by others or by Africans who've been "arabized". What does 'arabization' (/arabisation) mean anyway, and especially in Sudan??

From "Confronting Genocide" @ the Aegis Trust website:

" The black people of Sudan are 52% of the population; the Arabs, who dominate the government, 39%.  For centuries it has been an uneasy co-existence of discrimination, often slavery.  In Darfur, Arabs from the north need more land, partly due to drought. That has led to clashes for decades with the black population. 

“This time it is different,” I am told by a Sudanese Arab in neighbouring Chad. “The Government trained and armed militia. I cannot be part of that.  It is dreadful.”    The conflict was convenient for the Government of Sudan’s policy of Arabisation.  Sudan is for the Arabs; black people have to go. It is not about religion.  This time the victims and perpetrators are both Muslim; the underlying problem is about racism and power."

In modern Sudan and elsewhere in the broader northern sections of AFRICA, Blacks have never been allowed to keep or to have anything, not even their own human and social freedom - referring to the practices of slavery and the slave trade which continue today in MAURITANIA and elsewhere. The only "choice" given to AFRICANS in these regions is to become "arabized" - that is, to abandon every positive meaning of being Black and of their own cultures, families & beliefs: religious and otherwise.

It is now obviously that this is a process which does not "finish" in Africa, and seemingly those promoting and doing it have no intention to stop.

Historically the same removal of Blacks & of Blackness seems to have taken place right across Africa's northern regions, from Morocco, Western Sahara, &tc. in the West all the way to Egypt in the East where the Nubian people were first subjugated, then displaced and removed.

In the 20th Century the heart of the Nubians' Southern (also called "Upper") Egypt homeland was seized to be permanently submerged as the site of the well-known Aswan Dam. I remember in grade school in America at the time we were taught the Aswan Dam was a great sign of Egypt's progress. There was not one word about the permanent scattering of Nubian communities or the loss of Nubia's still undocumented ancient culture and history.

Subsequently during the rule of popular anti-colonial leader Gamal Abdel Nasser, the Egyptian government flooded much of Nubia. But even today Upper Egypt's Aswan area holds ancient sites & monuments currently underwater, and still worthy of and still awaiting the long overdue recognition as UNESCO World Heritage sites.

SUDAN has acquired enough territory to rank it as Africa's largest country. The perverse reality is that there can be no joy in this. It may be "Africa's largest country" (while Nigeria is most populous) but more pertinent & more honestly, overtly and covertly, Sudan is violently anti-Black. Despite whatever measure that almost anywhere in the world would be sent and seen as a mark of pride, the fact remains Sudan is one of the worst and saddest places in the world to be an African.

Powell Quits: 1st Caribbean Amer Sec of State Joins "CLUB CLIFTON WHARTON"

I guess Alma Powell's message finally sunk in.

Caribbean American Colin Powell says he's quitting as Bush's sec of state. TV news beat everybody to the punch (again) announcing this. Even the BBC World website's only Powell story was about him going to the Mideast next week. You go Alma (who actually IS Black American).

They say Powell wasn't always treated well, but it had to be lightyears better than the way Clifton Wharton was treated.

Dr. Wharton is Black American just like Alma. He's the man who turned TIAA-CREF into a serious $$ pension fund (for univ & college profs). He's a son of the late Clifton Wharton, Sr. - the first Black American to serve as a career foreign service officer.

Cliff Wharton, Jr. made it as far as DEPUTY Sec of State- under poor Warren Christopher who must have been incredibly jealous of Dr. Wharton's grace, intelligence and charm. (And language skills.) Due to the backbiting & undermining ("is it because I'm Black [American]?) Dr. Wharton lasted @ 8 months in that job... then said SEE YA around November 1993.

More on this later. Same time same station.

San Diego: Darfur, Iraq, Ivory Coast, UN Res 1325 - women working for peace & security or typecast victims of conflict?

Darfur, Iraq, Cote d'Ivoire. Ah... our work is cut out.

The Joan Kroc Institute for Peace & Justice, with Unifem, the Canadian Committee on Women, Peace and Security and the Boston Consortium on Gender, Security and Human Rights, convenes a working conference on advancing implementation of UN Security Council Res 1325. This week - 18-20 Nov - in San Diego, California. Be there or be square.

Appropriate place to discuss the Kampala Resolution on Women, Peace and Conflict, excerpted here, drafted 27 July 2002, by Ancil Adrian-Paul, Eva Dalak, Patrick Mbuthia, Gina Van Schalk and myself, at the 2002 Women's Worlds conference hosted by the Dept of Women and Gender Studies at Makerere University, Kampala, Uganda where Episcopal priest Rev. Grace Ndyabahika convened the women, peace and conflict track and recruited 'us' drafters.

IT'S ELECTION DAY!!! GO VOTE!

It's ELECTION DAY, folks. Early this morning on CSPAN (TV) I caught a replay of Molly Ivins' "live performance" in early October at the Philly Public Library (16th & Vine branch).

Just before the Election 2000 debacle of 4 years ago Molly and her colleague published that wonderful book, "SHRUB". Now perhaps she will be vindicated.

Are you an American? Are you in the USA? If you're an American and in the USA, get up NOW and GO VOTE!!! I'm now in Washington (DC) and it's 8AM eastern time and I have to do the same -- go vote. In the meantime you can keep posted on today's progress (or otherwise) via www.ZOGBY.com - the political pollster's website.

More of my blogisms (Marian's word) later!!! Peace. GO VOTE!!!!!!!!! And only once, thanks.