Marian's Blog

Kosovo: Albanians, Serbs - And what about the Roma?

After five years living in the Balkans, and longer if I count Italy and France, there are a few things I know about Europe and Kosovo, and even more I remember about that area and the rest of former Yugoslavia. I recall one particular orientation in Pristina; one of those sessions most, if not all, international civilian mission staff have endured. Usually I actually liked them for the information we learned on the people we would work with and the regions into which we were sent. Yet in much the same way media are reporting Kosovo/Kosova and the Balkans today, in this seminar in Pristina in 2000 we were briefed on the Kosovar Albanians and on the Kosovo Serbs, yet not one word about Kosovo's Roma. So, of course I asked. After all, we were in Kosovo to work with the Roma, too. I've written about Europe's Romani citizens before on this blog and will do so again, but I'll repeat myself - the Roma, the Rom, Romani, etc., are Europe's largest ethnic minority population, whom many outsiders still call "Gypsies". In all the public discourse and reporting on Kosovo, and even on the Balkans and Europe overall, why are the Roma still almost always excluded? More powerful than anything I can offer is Sani Rifati's own firsthand account of his birthplace, along with this link to a powerful, if a bit dated, related report. When I think of my time in Kosovo (and elsewhere in the Balkans) in my mind's eye I see the pregnant woman IDP ("internally displaced person") with two school-age kids. I remember the long, narrow storage container which was "home" to several unrelated families. I remember the refugee day center in Macedonia, near Skopje: Kosovo Roma refugees sitting, waiting for so-called 'third-country refugee resettlement' invitations that never arrived. As human beings wherever we are, all of us can and, hopefully, will do far better, for each other and consequently for ourselves.

"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.

Color of wealth: what's the racial wealth divide?

The Color of Wealth is available June 2006. Subtitled "The Story Behind the US Racial Wealth Divide", authors include my girl Rose Brewer along with Rebecca Adamson, Meizhu Lui, Barbara Robles and Betsy Leondar-Wright.

Woman of colour and M.I.T.-trained economist Julianne Malveaux reviews TCoW: "... shows how contemporary wealth differences evolve from pivotal points in our history, and explains how public policy, even when well meaning, reinforces existing inequality. This book is an important contribution to critical work on race and economics.” Julianne's most recent book is Wall Street, Main Street and the Side Street: A Mad Economist Takes a Stroll.

The Color of Wealth press release explains that for every 100 cents (dollar) owned by an "average" US white family, an "average" US family of color has just 18 cents. "Why do people of color have so little wealth? The Color of Wealth lays bare a dirty secret: for centuries, people of color have been barred by laws and by discrimination from participating in government wealth-building programs that have benefited white Americans." This includes, for example, "post–World War II GI Bill programs [that] helped whites only—The Color of Wealth is the first book to demonstrate the decisive influence of government on Americans’ net worth."

What if FDR met Bush?

A curious thought crossed my mind recently. What might Franklin Delano Roosevelt have thought had he ever met George W. Bush and engaged him in, um, conversation? Possibly even one about public social policy. Can one imagine the elite but also seriously social justice activist (especially in her appreciation of Black Americans and especially right there locally in Washington, DC) Eleanor Roosevelt in the same setting with Laura Bush? Equally fascinating considering that FDR and G.W. Bush share the same East Coast American social class (and no matter how much others constantly spin Bush's 'nouveau working class-cattle ranch' socio-economic and geographic pretentions), President Roosevelt must've known - or at least at some distance - the reportedly rather notorious Bush grandfather, Prescott, who allegedly organised and provided material financial and industrial support to Nazis in Germany - until some branch of the U.S. government "intervened". Are those accounts true? So many questions, so few answers, so little public discussion.

Frantz Fanon and France's Wretched of the Earth

I'm remembering the brother of a friend of mine from the Maghreb - northern Africa. Yes - Tunisia, Morocco, Libya, Algeria and several other countries beyond are in and are part of Africa. My friend's older brother was killed some years ago - murdered it seems - in a small town in France; a town I visited. To my knowledge up to now no one has ever been arrested, let alone tried for this young man's tragic and unnatural death. I don't even have any idea whether French local authorities investigated the circumstances of his death. Last year in 2004, in spite of our collective efforts and dialogue at the 2003 European Social Forum (ESF/FSE) right there in France, in St. Denis and in Paris, there was precious little global recognition of France's history and responsibilities in Haiti during the 2004 bicentennaire - bicentennial - of the entire world's first modern Black republic. In spite of all this I maintain my love of France, though certainly not uncritically. I have lived and worked, struggled, learned and shared in France. Now national authorities have activated a state of emergency - un etat d'urgence - for the first time since Algeria's war of independence against France as European colonial occupier. There's a huge gap of both time and politics from 1955 to now. Yet not nearly enough has changed it seems. Coincidentally, the Bandung Conference in Indonesia also took place in 1955. Two of my blog categories are "Bandung+50" and "Wretched of the Earth?" I was very much influenced in choosing these themes by a person, a Black Frenchman and an historical cousin - another person of African descent from the Americas - named Frantz Fanon. Fanon authored two seminal works of "anti-colonial revolutionary thought, Black Skin, White Masks (1952) and The Wretched of the Earth (1961), works which have made Fanon a prominent contributor to postcolonial studies." Fanon died of cancer in Washington, DC on 6 Dec. 1961. In 1964, after his death, his third book appeared in English as Toward the African Revolution. Black Skin, White Masks originally was titled, "An Essay for the Disalienation of Blacks." The above quote is from Prof. Deepika Bahri's informative Fanon website. Bahri, from India, is associate prof of English and director of Asian Studies at Emory University in the US. Her site also notes British director Isaac Julien's 1996 film on Fanon - Frantz Fanon: Black Skin, White Mask, available from California Newsreel. Read more of this post below...

FRANTZ FANON, MD (1925-1961):

Native of MARTINIQUE, Caribbean Americas

Rape where There is No Justice: Mukhtaran Mai, Celia, and Recy Taylor

Rape is a horrible thing to experience, let alone to have to talk about after it has happened to you or to someone you care for or love. And yet the whole world needs to talk about sexual assault - of women and girls as well as boys and men. We need to talk about rape and gang rape - sexual assault by a group of people; almost always committed by men. Before the recent community attack (instructing others to rape followed by vicious ostracism) and gang assault on a woman named Mukhtaran Mai in Pakistan, Black and Native women of the United States and of the Americas already had been enduring regular and systematic harm, death, destruction, collective defamation, and community and official collusion and apathy through the past 300 to 500 years. 500 years is half a millenium. It has definitely been racially motivated rape, gang rape, 'succession rape' (year after year through the course of a woman or girl's life) along with other forms of racially gender-targeted sexual, psycho- and social-sexual exploitation. In the US, people today are far more aware of and willing to discuss racially motivated execution by lynching. When it comes to the long, continuing tradition of raping women of colour there is silence. It's no longer acceptable for US society to "dis-remember" these rapes because, allegedly, people "wouldn't know what to say," it makes them feel 'uncomfortable', or because "I didn't rape anyone." In the US almost no historical or political analysis or credence is given to the personal and collective trauma (to the Black American community) of sexual abuse that previously was widely socially endorsed in the USA and which has been regularly meted out to Black women and girls. It is shameful but true - in many parts of the United States it has not been very many years since many local police jurisdictions actually began to legally recognise and enforce the social/legal idea that a Black woman could be raped. Look for US court and police records to find empirical evidence (practical evidence) of the earliest cases in which a Black woman was allowed to file a rape complaint against any man - but especially against a white man. One case not at all long ago was the virtually unreported and uninvestigated gang rape of Mrs Recy Taylor - rural Henry County, Alabama around 1944 or 45, just after World War II. Recy Taylor, a young married lady in her 20s or 30s, was gang raped by about six white American soldiers who had just returned to the US from World War II. One account from the period says these (still unknown?) men used condoms - to protect themselves from her because she was a Black woman. Other than one rather courageous white Jewish American journalist whose nom de plume was Earl Conrad, who else (beside the 1940s Black American press) has bothered to document and investigate the rapists and what they did to Recy Taylor? Were they ever arrested? I don't believe so. Is Mrs Taylor still alive? How did - or has -she live(d) with this treatment in years after? In the US state of Missouri in the 1850s, before the World War II gang rape in Henry County, Alabama, there was the rape, enslaved concubinage, three pregnancies and single motherhood - and finally the murder trial and lynching of a Black female teenager named Celia. At age 14 Celia was purchased and raped on the way to his farm by a white farmer named Newsom. For the remaining 4 or so years of her short life, the white Newsom kept Celia for sex as the only Black female on his farm. He kept her - and eventually the two children of his whom she had - in a cabin a stone's throw from the house occupied by Newsom's white wife and their children. Celia's true story is told from Missouri court records by North Carolina historian Melton McLaurin in his book, Celia: A Slave. Now we hear that the U.S. government "supports" a very brave lady named Mukhtaran Mai in a place called Pakistan. Yet in the same moment my country does not love its own people, and every December in the days before Christmas I remember Celia, who was enslaved.

Srebrenica Will Always be Part of My Life

Lars, Yolanta and I first arrived to work in eastern Bosnia - the Bosnian Serb Republic - Republika Srpska- in the cold of March 1997. Lars is Lars Nopp of Sweden, and Yolanta is Yolanta Deutschova Hristova from Bulgaria, and me, myself - Marian - "American from the United States"; Black American. I step back a moment to say that's who I am. Black American is the fact and foundation of my experience and of my people's experiences as human beings in the US and the Americas, and in much of the world. Yolanta, Lars and I were there with OSCE; first, to prepare the logistics for upcoming voter registration, and then to help prepare the terrain for 1997's first post-war municipal elections in Bosnia. Not long after we arrived we made our first car trip to Srebrenica. Sometimes I call it "Sreb" for short. My most recent trip back to Srebrenica [sreb bren NEET suh], Bratunac [BRA too knots], Zvornik [ZVOR nick] and Sekovici [SHAY koh vih chee] was July 2002. The weather was dangerously, godawful hot. On the day of the now-annual memorial like everyone else I stood on the roadside, unsheltered, in the hot sun, for the July 11 service that takes place on the right hand side of the main road as you enter Srebrenica. I know I wasn't the only person praying to please not pass out. One returnee woman (i.e., a Srebrenica Muslim) fainted and was taken away on a stretcher. Thousands of Muslims came back on maybe a dozen, maybe 2 dozen or more buses. I don't remember how many buses there were but there were a lot. I'm sure someone out there remembers those details. I keep asking myself, if terrible issues and events permeate a country or a place and those issues are not completely resolved, can people - can the international community - intervene for awhile, then turn and just walk away? Just as importantly, "where" are the people of Srebrenica now? Including and not only the town's Muslim exiles. I mean in their hearts and in their heads; what do they think, feel and want? The women and the youth as well as the men; what are they willing to do and what are they willing to share with each other to negotiate and build mutual peace?

Afro German man finds family in Virginia; discovers genealogist is his cousin

There are times the universe is as elegant as it can be brutal.

The title of Kristin Davis' article in the Fredericksburg (Virginia) Freelance-Star newspaper reads, "German man finds out genealogist is a relative." I know of Char McCargo Bah, the genealogist who was helping Harald Stoelting research his family, when she discovered that he's her first cousin. A cousin of mine who knows Char sent me the article.

I know at least one other person, a woman in the Balkans - she's Afro Croatian - with a similar family history she's trying to find. I looked for her family info myself and if need be I'll look again. I really hope her search succeeds if it hasn't already. Here's a photo of Harald and his family - and the article is here:

Auschwitz, Porrajmos; Other matters...

So much to write about... but over the weekend I lost two fairly decent blog entries while trying to finish them. Too painful to blog about.

One was about an interview Carlo heard last Saturday morning on the talk show "uomini e profeti" on italian radio 3 (rai), about what was done to European Roma people during WW II. They said in Rom language they call it the Porrajmos - "il divoramento" - the devouring. That's a terribly powerful image.

The Hebrew community in Italy [UCEI.it] has helped the Roma with their project on that history.

I'll deal with the 2nd lost blog later. I intend to come back to them but probably not right now.

I re-discovered the Jamerican (Jamaican-American) actor Frank Silvera when [Rupert Murdoch's] Sky international satellite broadcast the 1955 movie "Killer's Kiss"; that would be a Stanley Kubrick flick.

It's a shame the cool things one never sees or hears of again in the USA. Luckily Silvera is the inspiration for Garland Lee Thompson's respected Frank Silvera Writers' Workshop [fsww.org] based in Harlem (upper Manhattan), New York. It's a place for playwrights, actors, directors, producers, designers & others. FSWW is also involved with the annual National Black Theater Festival in Winston-Salem, North Carolina (Aug 1-6, 2005).

From the 1940s/50s till his death in a home accident in 1970 (repairing the sink electric garbage disposal!) Frank Silvera was a major actor - from New York theatre & Joseph Papp's Shakespeare Festival to Hollywood and back. Just check his bio on IMdB.

But then you look at posters from the movies he was in - like "Killer's Kiss" and "Viva Zapata" and more; but you probably won't find him since even he couldn't overcome the marketing ban against Blacks/people of colo(u)r which today has only been modified. Compared to that I wonder what the NY theatre/Broadway documentation is like.

The next few days we'll be busy - & I'll be skiing!! Not sure exactly what time I'll blog (or if I'll blog early) but we shall see.

"Very Nasty party"; Maybe Harry's swastika wasn't worst part

Mark Lawson's Guardian commentary says swastikas were not the worst part of a 'fancy dress' party attended last weekend by brit princes Harry & William Windsor. Lawson's piece, "The very nasty party", is in today's 15 Jan. Guardian.

Lawson writes about "... the kind of people whose kids have 'colonial or native' [themed] parties fitted out by shops that stock SS costumes..." (The shop in question in this case was Maud's Cotswold Costumes.)