Marian's Blog

Rosa Parks' American Life: 1913-2005

Rosa Parks has died at the age of 93. Mrs. Parks was well-known and yet she was one in a long line of Black American women who were willing to live by their integrity and courage. This is a photo of Ms Parks in 1955 as she was being arrested for ... basically for being Black and not accepting the proscribed and subjugated space to which Blacks are still regularly assigned. There are at least three lessons to keep in mind from Mrs Parks' life and exoerience. Obviously she was not a very darkskinned individual, and yet some people maintain the artifice that pretends that lighter-coloured skin in and of itself is an adequate shield to protect some people of African descent from social discrimination and human rights abuse. That's a lie. The second point goes to political and social gender reality as lived by Black women and often also other women of colour. In 1955 Ms Parks was expected - by law - to give up her bus seat to a white male. That reality goes against popular "one size fits all" visions of gender relations, both internationally and in the USA. International mythology tells us that women supposedly are "respected and protected" by men. No white woman would ever be required to give up her seat or anything else to a Black man, and yet Rosa Parks went to jail for not getting up and moving to give her place to a white man. The third point goes back to the first and regards Mrs. Parks' appearance. It is possible that - like many millions of Black Americans and other African descendants in the Americas - one of her two male grandparents quite likely may have been a white male. So many experiences, so many ironies in one American woman's life. Thank you, Ms. Rosa Parks.

Chapter 18, de Tocqueville: "Democracy in America" - Not for Black Americans or American Indians

"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." I needed more than a minute to digest those words straight out of Alexis de Tocqueville's famous Democracy in America. Democracy for everyone but Black Americans? Many prominent US scholars and reviewers of French 19th-century traveller, observer and author, Alexis de Tocqueville, have conveniently skipped this (and one other) section of "Democracy." Teachers and professors don't discuss it when they teach it. Yet clearly de Tocqueville's devastating predisposition toward Black Americans and American Indians, written during an 1831 tour of the USA - is still playing out in America today. De Tocqueville says "democracy" is for whites: "Europeans", "British", "Anglo-Americans" - de Tocqueville variously called them. (Nowadays select "honorary" whites also are added.) But other than mentioning the sense that civil war was approaching over enslavement of Blacks, de Tocqueville includes neither Black Americans nor American Indians in his reflections on the US future. "The lot of the Negro is placed on the extreme limit of servitude, while that of the Indian lies on the uttermost verge of liberty; and slavery does not produce more fatal effects upon the first than independence upon the second. The Negro has lost all property in his own person, and he cannot dispose of his existence without committing a sort of fraud. But the savage is his own master as soon as he is able to act; parental authority is scarcely known to him; he has never bent his will to that of any of his kind, nor learned the difference between voluntary obedience and a shameful subjection; and the very name of law is unknown to him. To be free, with him, signifies to escape from all the shackles of society. As he delights in this barbarous independence and would rather perish than sacrifice the least part of it, civilization has little hold over him." (Chap. 18, "The Present and Probable Future Condition of the Three Races that Inhabit the Territory of the United States.") For nearly two centuries huge numbers of de Tocqueville fans - schoolteachers, professors - have regularly expunged and glossed over the deeply racist anti-Black and anti-Indian bits of "Democracy in America." Now it's time we read them and, finally, respond.

Fannie Lou Hamer testimony at 1964 Democratic National Convention, Atlantic City, NJ

"... my children ... told me that the plantation owner was angry because I had gone down to try to register." Those are Ms. Fannie Lou Hamer's words speaking at the historic 1964 Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City, New Jersey. I believe that women like Fannie Lou Hamer in the USA and Benedita da Silva in Brasil have far more in common than we have differences. How I wish Ms. Hamer were still here. She died in 1977, at age 59. (How does Black mortality in the USA compare to Black mortality in the Caribbean, or in Europe for example??) At the '64 Atlantic City Democratic convention Ms. Hamer described to thousands of delegates how she was treated when she tried to register to vote. This is a fraction of abuse she endured while being held in a US jail: "... I began to scream and one white man got up and began to beat me [in] my head and told me to hush. One white man—since my dress had worked up high [her dress was raised], walked over and pulled my dress down and he pulled my dress back, back up." Is there anyone around 40 years old who is reading this?? This was 40 years ago - in the United States of America. Since then, things have not changed anywhere near enough, and not only in the US South. And language that was still used ... "plantation owner." Just recently there is news of poor Black Americans, many homeless, who are currently being held against their will in so-called "labour camps" in Florida and elsewhere. Don't believe for a minute that the "plantation owners" -- along with their children and now their grandchildren and greatgrandchildren -- aren't still there ... working with other people (in higher places?) - still doing some of the same things they were in 1864 and 1964 ... only in slightly updated, even sometimes electronic, ways.

Technical Difficulties?

Is something about the wireless connection here keeping me from uploading photos (to Flickr)? If I'm not able to I'll do it as soon as I can. In the meantime I'll try uploading to my album here. Patience is s'posed to be a virtue anyway.

UK, Iran: what to say about some things in the News?

What's to be blogged about some of the things we're hearing every day in the news? The "missing" body count of Iraqi civilians (said to be @ 20-30 thousand as of July 2005); or those two young men who were hanged in Iran last week - because they were known or believed to be gay - what vicious, cowardly hypocrisy; and the police in London discovering that deliberately and mistakenly they have taken the life of a Brazilian who apparently had nothing to do with terrorism or the bombings last week. God help all of us. Everywhere.

"Scotland's Black History" on BBC Radio Scotland

Straight up - I want to thank Scottish radio producer Billy Kay for developing his groundbreaking and popular series, Scotland's Black History. You can hear several parts of the 6-part programme here as audio on the Radio Scotland website for a few more days. Part 1 was last Monday night, followed each evening through tonight. UK broadcast time is 19:03, or 7:03pm. Each audio segment is on the Radio Scotland website for a week starting right after each broadcast. Program # 3 aired last night, Thursday July 7; it's about the USA - "The Virginia Slave's Lament." It details Scotland's relations to slaveholding and colonial plantations in the American South. The whole re-broadcast was July 4-8, plus the time the audio is available on the website. "Scotland's Black History" first aired last September-October for Britain's Black History Month (in the UK it's October). More details below.

For Claudia - Mexico, Memin, Blond eyes, blue Hair and Hermann Hesse, Part 2

A thank you to reader Claudia who wrote to offer an honest insight into part of what Mexican culture is like. In response to a fellow Mexican who can't seriously be described as 'eloquent', she wrote, "As if calling americans stupid engages you in any intelligent dialogue." And that's exactly what we'd like to shoot for in this blog: intelligent dialogue. As Claudia also noted, I did not and would not ever say that "all" Mexicans are racist or anti-Black and/or against Indian (native) people. The fact about we people of the Americas -- meaning those of us whose primary ancestry is some combination of African and/or indigenous Native Indian and/or European intertwined over the past 200-500 years - is the vast majority of us (who are not newcomers), regardless of region or country, are of mixed-race heritage. I won't go into all of mine again right here. And DNA tests are now easily available for all of us to take. But I do remember a Mexican American friend of mine, originally from Texas. She was 'typically' 'mestiza'-looking (indigena+ (Southern, dark) European), but she told me that her brother - also Mexican American, with the same parents - clearly looks more Black (African). As Claudia writes: "... do you not remember the saying in mexico when you marry a white mexican or a white US American or when your kid comes out "guerito" [meaning 'light' in skin colour] - "estas mejorando la raza" - "YOU ARE IMPROVING THE RACE." How totally idiotic... These days this phrase may be heard less often, but the thinking still is just about the same. 

Mexico, Memin, Blond eyes and blue Hair and Hermann Hesse, Part 1

I'm thinking of Mexico, our beloved neighbour, and her seemingly endless capacity to debase herself in matters of race - and almost solely toward her Black and Indian citizens. Now the issue is Mexico's Memin Pinguin postage stamps and how a previously obscure piece of Mexican cultural history looks amazingly like a 'cry for [collective mental] help', while requiring a kind of Afrocentric human rights critique with which Mexico truly is unfamiliar. According to LA Times' article yesterday, "five new stamps show a cartoon figure named Memin Pinguin, a picaresque urban child who gets by on wits and moxie..." Though Memin has been a real money-maker in the Mexican comic book world - which we're supposed to take as some kind of compliment - yet I can pretty well guarantee not a peso of those profits ever went into providing hospitals, schools and homes to Afro Mexican communities. Memin was created in 1947 by one Yolanda Vargas Dulche; its "popularity peaked in the 1950s and 1960s." An Afro-Mexican singer named Johnny Laboriel (whom I'd never heard of before) declares, "The idea to put out this postage stamp is the biggest stupidity." The head of Mexico's postal service claims nostalgic "value" and has no plans to recall them. I have to contrast depictions of the black caricature 'Memin' - the product of one woman's imagination or of her demons - with the no class, over-exposed Paris hiltonian influence largely attributable to the apparent enthralling impact of blond eyes + blue hair. Oops, make that blue eyes, blond hair. My mind turns to a quintessential blond. Ok, maybe it's a stereotype though there's little stereotypical about the German blond called Hermann Hesse. Hesse's name is ever-present on this blog. I spent several minutes discussing Hesse's meaning in my plenary presentation last October at the 2004 European Social Forum. For the past 30 years I keep coming back to my deepening intellectual awareness that a pacifist German novelist is a cultural hero of mine. And why? Because at an early and tumultuous point in 20th century consciousness - anti-war, anti-racism, anti-homophobia, etc. - singlehandedly, in the fell swoop of a short and unusual essay, Hermann Hesse contributed to de-constructing the global economy of European-ness/whiteness. I wonder if Hesse scholars out there know if Hesse realised what he did when he created The European. Long past his death Hesse is helping to dismantle the strange, negative habit called white "supremacy." It is a habit, just like drugs, food, smoking, or the viral transmission of AIDS and of memes. While staring white supremacy dead in the face, and sooner rather than later, eventually someone will debunk the racist distortion deceptively known as Memin Pinguin - and for that I will say 'vielen danke' to Hermann Hesse.

Oprah nixes HERMES: Paris Shop says don't come in

Money makes some Black folks rich but it still can't make some other folks less ignorant. In a tragic case of "mistaken identity" shopkeepers at Hermes in Paris apparently mistook Oprah Winfrey for an idiot. Maybe they saw her chocolate brown face and thought "beggar." Oops. The talk show host, and publishing and producing diva - and all-around sister with mucho courage - is said to have assured the public that Hermes need not worry about seeing her -or her credit cards - ever again. I hope she keeps her word, which frankly she's likely to do. I have a strong feeling word will be getting around and some other folks will follow Oprah's lead and give Hermes and their scarves some permanent "space." This "misunderstanding" as Hermes called it, is a regularly occuring social-psychological condition known to and experienced by many, many Blacks & other people of colour (gens de couleur, gente de color). I call it the "Your-Money's-not-as-good-as-White-folks'-Money Disease." Couturier Hermes has since apologised to Oprah, but honey ... it _ is _ too _ late. Hopefully le tax system francais has a business write-off specifically for financial losses due to racist stupidity. If they don't, they and a lot of other places should. And not just in France.

American poet Langston Hughes: I Dream a World

I don't know in what year Langston Hughes wrote I Dream a World. I know he was born in 1902 in Joplin, Missouri in the US midwest, what some folks call the American heartland. His full name was James Langston Hughes and he attended Lincoln University in Pennsylvania (not Lincoln in Missouri) and lived his life until 1967. Later as a student at Lincoln (in Pa) myself, I first lived in Hughes Hall, named for him. His biographer is Arnold Rampersad, author of The Life of Langston Hughes, 1941-1967: I Dream A World, first published in 1988.

I dream a world where man No other man will scorn, Where love will bless the earth And peace its paths adorn. I dream a world where all Will know sweet freedom's way, Where greed no longer saps the soul Nor avarice blights our day. A world I dream where black or white, Whatever race you be, Will share the bounties of the earth And every man is free, Where wretchedness will hang its head And joy, like a pearl, Attends the needs of all mankind-- Of such I dream, my world! - The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes, edited by Arnold Rampersad (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1994), p. 311.