Marian's Blog

Summer reading? Britain, the Slaves & U.S. Revolution - "Rough Crossings"

We'd like to recommend a book for those interested: Simon Schama's Rough Crossings: Britain, the Slaves, and the American Revolution. Here's a video - Schama discussing this huge, terribly obscured chapter of Black American & U.S. history, with staff of Google. This history is growing serious legs. 

BBC snubs Cynthia McKinney: U.S. third-party candidates

The election may be over yet BBC has forever altered my perception of it as a relatively balanced source of international news. I was watching BBC TV News last Monday evening, Nov 3, as the announcer chirpily announced there actually were other candidates in the U.S. election. Surprise! He proceeded to name and show photos, first Ralph Nader (independent), ex-Republican, now Libertarian Bob Barr (a U.S. Afrodescendant who seems to self-identify as "white"), and the third candidate? I was pretty well waiting for the newsreader to note Cynthia McKinney, the U.S. Green Party candidate. Was I wrong. Instead the Beeb names... Gene Amondson. Gene Amondson?? Have you heard of Gene Amondson? Has he, like Cynthia McKinney, been a six-term (or even a one-term) member of the U.S. Congress? I don't recall BBC bothering to mention Mr. Amondson's party affiliation (perhaps more obscure than his name, if that's possible). And so Tuesday, election day, I looked it up on the Net. Apparently he belongs to the "Prohibition Party." Prohibition? I thought that failed in the 1930s. Thanks to BBC News, Cynthia McKinney out, Gene Amondson in. Here's a deeper, bitter irony: Cynthia McKinney bears a British surname; like almost all Black Americans, probably linked to slavery. She carries a family name of British origin and yet, so uncharacteristically, the BBC had not even the slightest desire to acknowledge her, let alone brag about her, on the basis of UK ties to this U.S. presidential candidate and her almost certain British slave-trade family history. How sad; how racist.

Coping with public fear: "Bailouts only add to sense of panic," O'Grady, The Independent (London)

We're reading Sean O'Grady's article in today's Independent: "... no amount of taxpayer money, no vote in Congress or the Commons and no speech by a president or prime minister can now fully restore the confidence that has been drained from the system during a year of brutal capitalist "creative destruction." Confidence is the magical ingredient that makes our system work, the thing that allows Keynes' "animal spirits" to take off, and create businesses and wealth. And, as we have seen from the billions wiped from the stock markets yesterday, it is simply beyond price. Without it, there is merely fear."

I'm not convinced about needing to emulate "animal spirits" but our next post recalls the words of U.S. president Franklin D. Roosevelt.

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.