"Thank you, white folks"

Jack White of The Root says, "Thanks" to white America for voting for Obama in such large numbers and even adds, quite graciously, "we couldn't have done it without you."

The Audacity of Taupe

A couple of weeks ago, I have discovered a great blogazine, side-barred at Slate, called The Root. And this really excellent article/post, The Audacity of Taupe, discusses Obama as a man of mixed race, and the changing self-image of mixed race Americans over the generations. By David Swerdlick.

Black people can't argue a speeding ticket after sundown, and the only thing in life that white people can't do is use the N-word. To that simple rule, I am now officially adding the M-word. Good news, though—"Creole" has been approved for everybody's use.

A potpourri of stories: Guantanamo, racial injustice and -- the hyphen?

Just some of the things I have been reading these days.

The War on Terra: Omar Khadr turns 21 still in Guantanamo and Andrew Sullivan muses on a president who has lost the plot.

Technology: The UK slights Open Source, and they may regret it.

Language pedantry: The OED reveals the hyphen is an endangered character.

Racial fault lines in the US: The Jena Six and the Presidential candidate. (And in case you don't know who the Jena Six are, here is a backgrounder.)

Mourning for Yolanda King

Yolanda King, 51, the eldest daughter of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Coretta Scott King, died Tuesday. She was a social activist, motivational author and speaker and an actor, appearing in several major films and TV mini-series. She is survived only by her two brothers and one sister.

The Jade that was ours

Exit Jade Goody, spirited away to a safe house, lest the disciples of British
tolerance tear her limb from limb.

So begins Mary Riddell's comment column in the Observer this past Sunday. As a so-called "race row" developed between a plain, loud, working-class (well, that's being generous, under-class in fact) young woman from Britain and a gorgeous, talented, wealthy and well-brought-up one from India, Britain spent the last seven days like this:

• Day one - glued to the telly, hoping for a hair-pulling girl on girl catfight


• Day two - realising that there was maybe some - um - racism at work here


• Day three - frantically disassociating themselves from such racism


• Day four - discovering that it wasn't that simple, there was a class dynamic as well; meanwhile busily pouring money into Channel 4's coffers to register their disgust/approval of Jade's bullying tactics


• Day five - as Jade is evicted, some found sympathy for her, while the tabloids ceased their orgy of asylum-seeker bashing to do some self-righteous racist bashing, without a second's pause to notice the irony


• Day six - Jade apologises, breaks down, apologises some more, weeps piteously (India for one is not entirely convinced) while the C4 executives cringe under the wrath of media critics and all and sundry proclaim (whew!) the death of the CBB and BB "format"


• Day seven - we put our feet up and have a nice cup of tea from the Paki shop
  

Gore airlifts stranded patients, while elsewhere . . .

Here's a story that you may not have heard at the time. Ex-VP Al Gore paid to airlift the patients of a hospital in New Orleans to Tennessee when they were stranded in life-threatening circumstances. (Gore has apparently been a little shy about the story, no doubt due to his unfair and atrocious treatment by the press in the past.)
In an interesting if chilling parallel, I was watching the new Andrew Marr show Sunday AM this morning and in the ritual reading of the newspaper headlines, one of the national tabloids had a front page story alleging that hospital staff in New Orleans engaged in mercy killing of stranded and terminally ill patients. I could not find a link for this on the internet (I'm sure it must be out there*) but I did find a lot of other stuff, including this powerful accusation of ethnic cleansing in New Orleans. Here's a quote:

Buffalo-based columnist Michael I. Niman notes Sept. 8 how the feds effectively shut down citizen self-help rescue efforts such as [New Orleans resident Charmaine] Neville's:
The Â?too dangerous to rescueÂ? myth was also employed by FEMA as rationale for ordering rescue teams to stand down early in the crisis. Louisianans are a tough lot, and many private boat owners from areas surrounding New Orleans immediately entered the city as flooding began, creating an ad hoc rescue flotilla. Many survivors tell of strangers in small fishing boats plucking them out of second story windows or off of roofs, depositing them high and dry on highway overpasses. The Federal government put a stop to such heroism, while failing to replace the independent effort with one of their own. (Online at MediaStudy.com)
There appears to have been an overt policy of racial and class discrimination in the rescue effort. ThMilwaukeeee Journal-Sentinel Sept. 2 reports the ordeal of Kelli Nelson, an African-American Wisconsin native working as a nurse at Charity Hospital, New Orleans' largest public hospital and trauma center. She and other personnel and patients were finally airlifted out to San Antonio on the 2nd, after she stood on the roof with a big sign reading "Save the babies, please get us out of here." The city's big private hospitals like Tulane were evacuated days earlier. Trapped in the city, Kelli did manage to get out some chilling text messages to her friends and family.
"She says the situation has gotten worse," the friends relayed that Kelli had messaged them. "The evacuation was aborted... [T]hey had taken babies and mothers down to a boat to go to Tulane's helicopter pad and they were refused access to the pad... what a horror story.
"Does that mean indigent people have no rights...?

* Update: It was The Sunday Mail. I ended up buying the paper and reading it "offline". The pundits on the show pooh-poohed the possibility of accuracy of this story, but I have to say it had, for me, a ring of verisimilitude.

New Orleans left to the dead and dying

A shocking story comes to a conclusion of sorts. Only read this if you have the stomach for the unpleasant truth.

England, abolition and the current immigration debate

The air of England is too pure for a slave to breathe, and so everyone who breathes it becomes free. Everyone who comes to this island is entitled to the protection of English law, whatever oppression he may have suffered and whatever may be the colour of his skin.

In preparation for the mammoth task of reviewing the mammoth literary work known as "the Barock Cycle" (Neal Stephenson) I have been browsing the Quicksilver Metaweb, where I found the sublime quote above. Slavery and the history of abolition movements is one of about a dozen major themes that run through the three weighty tomes that make up the Barock Cycle. As you may know, abolition movements, the study of, is one of my areas of passionate interest, and the Stephenson novels seem to uncannily hit upon a lot of them (cryptanalysis, metaphysical debates, religious wars and slightly unusual sexual practices also feature prominently.)
I am struck by the vast philosophical gulf between the sentiments in the quote above, from an English judge in an historic case which may have sparked the British abolitionist movement, and the beliefs (or perhaps total lack of beliefs) of the current guardians of British liberty, ironically known as the Labour Party.
Several cases in point will illustrate this:

• The new anti-terror legislation


• The terrible decline in military ethics in recent decades


• Blatantly racist policies towards "asylum seekers" and other immigrants


• And all I can say about this one is: "All intolerant people shall be shot!"


• "Unless, of course, they are intolerant of 'travellers', because that sort of prejudice is just normal middle-class values."

Too black for America

A City Pages article, The Baddest Man on the Planet tells the story of the immortal Jack Johnson, the most in-your-face black man in American history. The renewed interest in Jack Johnson is sparked by a new 4-hour documentary by Ken Burns which is being released this month in the US. (I have to see it!)
Johnson was many things in his life--a dandy, a braggart, a womanizer, a gambler, a drinker, a fugitive, a convict, a vaudevillian, even an inventor (he held the patent on a special wrench designed for working on racing cars, another of his passions). But he was never yellow. In the language of the day, Johnson was a "bad nigger," and he swaggered through Jim Crow America as if prejudice did not exist. In the ring, he reveled in humiliating white boxers, delaying or altogether forgoing the knockout to extend their suffering. Conversely, he often took it easy on fellow blacks.
At a time when other black men were lynched for looking at a white woman the wrong way, the Galveston-born Johnson flaunted his relationships with white women, often traveling from city to city with two or three of them in tow. Ultimately, his relationship with one "sporting woman"--as prostitutes were called--became the pretext for Johnson's arrest and conviction on a trumped-up Mann Act violation, which prohibited the transport of women across state lines for "immoral purposes."

Colour-conscious but White-blind

Thanks, yet again. to tribe.net, i have discovered LiP Magazine and this excellent article about the racialisation of crime reporting and the hypocritical colour-blindness to crimes committed by an overwhelming majority of white perpetrators. This relates to something I have noticed since I was a little girl in the American South in the 1960s, although it sure didn't stop there: in everyday discourse, not just news reporting, white people are "people", white Americans have opinions that are called "American opinions" about black people and their problems, white girls are just girls but black girls are blacks who happen to be young and female. It goes on and on. Read this, it's really good, and whatever your colour it may open your eyes.

NHS racism exposed

This leaked government report is the front page, above-the-fold headline in the Guardian today. And a very scary story it is, too, involving everything from nurses' automatic perception of black patients as drug addicts to the wholly avoidable death of a black patient in a mental health institution.

Another article about racism towards the Roma

Britain as the deep south is the title of an article by Heaven Crawley which details the worsening situation of anti-traveller racism. Explanatory note for non-Brits: Gypsies or Romani people are commonly called Travellers in Britain; there are also non-Romani Travellers, usually called "new age travellers." Some of the discrimination that the Romani experience is also directed at new age Travellers and this fact is used to justify the excuse that anti-traveller prejudice is not racism. I think this is mere semantics; it is a cultural discrimination, it is, for want of a better word, tribalism. It doesn't matter what you call it, some of the actions arising from anti-traveller-ism are barbaric and truly on a par with anti-black vigilantism experienced in the US. This also reminds me forcefully of what was done (is still being done) to the Dine (Navaho) and Hopi people in the American Southwest; they were also forced into inappropriate housing that destroyed their chosen way of life and broke their culture.

Overrun in Atlanta, by Joel of Pax Nortona

I know! I know! I'm behind in my blogging. I knew (some) about the events in Atlanta on the 15th, but I didn't post anything then. And then I didn't even read blogs yesterday. So today I readPax Nortona's excellent post about it. It's a great image - Bush running scared from a small angry crowd, despite all his overwhelming protection, and then to cap it all - an all white Dixiecrat fundraiser in Atlanta. How does this guy get away with it?

What have the Arabs ever done for us?

So asked daytime talk show presenter "Kilroy", in a now controversial newspaper article. And Guardian columnist Derek Brown is telling him what. Of course, historically the Arabs are the inventors of zero and algebra, and are the discoverers of much astronomical knowledge and many chemical processes. At their cultural peak, they were artists, writers and architects of far greater skill and taste than Europeans of the day. But many people who know these facts, even if Kilroy doesn't, have no idea of the richness of Arab culture today, in such areas as poetry and prose, calligraphy, ceramics and architecture.

Acceptable racism

George Monbiot's opinion piece in the Guardian is about a shocking racist incident that occurred just last week in rural England, and is apparently not even considered a crime or racist by most. In fact, the MP for the area where it occurred blamed the whole thing on the victims. What group is it that can be insulted and assaulted with impunity in modern Europe? (Indeed, this group suffers less in the UK than in many other countries.) They are the gypsies, or "travellers" as they are called here, or Roma, as is their offcial designation. Monbiot then turns to the question of why the racism against the Roma is so acceptable, and I have to say his thesis is a bit of a stretch. I think he got it the first time - they are stateless, therefore without rights, and with fearful barriers to organising to better their lives.

Ryan's class act

Ryan's Class Act, with an unhappy ending worthy of GB Shaw. This just infuriates me. There is something so - I can't think of a word, but it makes me cringe, whatever it is - about the British attitude towards race and class, and yet most white Britons are convinced that they are so very, very racially tolerant compared to Americans. More like so very, very, utterly clueless about how arrogant and condescending they really are.

Hiphopophobia

Zoe WIlliams asks why we conflate "black culture" with the views and mores of only young, straight, black males in her article Hiphopophobia.

Saving of Private Lori

Everyone has now heard about the Saving of Private Lynch. Gary Younge of the Guardian asks : What About Private Lori? And here is a tribute to Private Lori Piestewa from Indian Country Today.