#the fact that he was also a victim of slavery is so overlooked

[the-girl-with-too-many-ideas]

Unpopular opinion, If the story was told from Shen Jiu's perspective, svsss would be a horror and Shen Yuan the villain.

I mean, you're talking about someone who had little to no automony their entire childhood. Who was a slave and suffered unspeakable horrors at the hands of his master to the point of developing a fear of men. Who knows what it is like to have no control over your body or what happens to it.

So, to be not only kicked out of his body, but forced to watch as someone else occupies and uses it (arguably doing and becoming everything he was rumored to have been and done) would be viscerally horrific.

(This is why I firmly believe that YQY would take the Shen Yuan revelation badly. He was a slave too, and without a doubt, knows how much Shen Jiu valued his freedom and autonomy above everything else. He would be so horrified and devastated to learn that his Xiao Jiu was stripped of both again while he stood by and did nothing again.)

[lyledebeast]

Social Mobility

Obviously, there are a lot of problems with The Patriot's representation of slavery, but the fact that so many discussions of this center on Benjamin Martin overlooks an interesting possibility concerning this character. That Martin not only hires free men to work his land instead of using slave labor but also does heavy farm work himself is often read through a Doylian lens of making the hero more sympathetic to a modern audience. But what if we consider this choice through a Watsonian lens? What would that say about Martin?

First, he clearly does not hire free men to help him out of any moral distaste for the practice of slavery . If he felt that way, it is unlikely he would have married into a slave-owning family once, let alone twice. In the one moment where he does seem to support racial equality, his insistence that Occam sign for himself could be more about assuring the loyalty of this lone Black man who will be fighting alongside White volunteers. Perhaps, for the moment, Martin is stepping outside the White fantasyland of The Patriot where Black people simply do not escape from their enslavers when the opportunity arises. And maybe this reality is also behind Martin's choice to use free laborers for his own farm. Notice that not only he but also his sons play a role in planting, as we see when he asks Nathan and Samuel about the progress on their chores at the start of the movie. Most often, people parent in the ways they were parented, which raises an interesting possibility. Martin chose not to have slaves because he does not come from an enslaver family and has been used to doing his own labor, but now he has more land than he can manage himself even with the aid of four work-aged sons.

How on earth did this occur?

Well, it could have something to do with his being a war hero. That could also explain how a man who farmed his own land was able to marry into a family wealthy enough to afford slaves in the first place. Perhaps his marriage to Elizabeth was as much a reward for his wartime service as his marriage to Charlotte many years later. Women did not buy slaves for themselves in the colonial South, so Charlotte's are likely part of her inheritance from either her father or late husband (mentioned in some versions of the film/script, but not all). It would have been very unlikely for a woman to marry above her class, but a man could do so if he chose the right means of advancing himself. Looked at in this light, Martin's actions at Fort Wilderness, that made him a "hero" and for which he claims to feel such deep regret, gave him not only the land he owns but also the mother of his children, the gift that kept on giving (and giving and giving and . . .)

"I advance myself only through victory." "The honor is found in the ends, not the means." If my reading holds merit, these words from the villain's mouth actually describe the hero's trajectory far more accurately than Colonel Tavington's. As despicable as Tavington's actions are, he is only seeking upward mobility through tried and true methods, as Martin's experience attests. I've always found it funny that Tavington insists he can never return to England with honor but expresses no concerns that having committed war-time atrocities against Americans could impede his thriving in America. People in London for whom Tavington's victims are merely a newspaper headline will be appalled, but their flesh-and-blood Loyalist neighbors ? They'll get it!

Tavington's claim to his second James Wilkins that their burning a church filled with Patriot civilians will be forgotten is dubious at best. Most likely he knows better and is only saying that to ease Wilkins' conscience. But the reason such an action would live in infamy is not because it was particularly brutal by colonial standards. It's because the victims were White. The British Empire was a deeply White supremacist institution, and as movies like The Patriot show, that is a holdover from imperialism that we have yet to part ways with.

[meta-squash]

I recently read The Haunting of Lin-Manuel Miranda by Ishmael Reed, thinking I was going to do a writeup on it. Then totally forgot to do a review! So here are my thoughts:

It’s a really interesting piece. It’s less like a proper play and more like an essay in the form of a play. It would likely be somewhat boring to watch in a theatre, since a lot of the monologues are closer to lecture. However, I really like that Reed published it in play format. Essays about race and history and the failures of various history books are many, as are critical analyses of theatrical pieces. But meeting the medium with the same medium, writing a critical analysis of a play (or musical, as it were) in the form of a play, is a cool technique. Even if something doesn’t work perfectly in its medium, sometimes why that medium was chosen is important. Reed is famous for satire, and this is an interesting blend of genuine education and satire; the satire comes mostly in the form of the white historical figures talking about/to each other, and in the way he writes the present-day figures like Rob Chernow and Lin-Manuel Miranda himself, while the monologues of the Black and indigenous historical characters are mostly educational.

The most important overarching critique in this piece, I think, is that history books, especially those written by white people, are selective both in who they decide to portray and from what angle, and will very often omit or gloss over individuals or incidences that might paint their subject in poor light. Reed writes Miranda as a clueless victim of this type of selective omission, which I find to be an interesting choice. The Miranda portrayed in this play used only Chernow’s book as a source for the musical, which means that all the individuals Chernow omitted from his book are ignored in Hamilton, or any prejudices or angles expressed in the book exist in the musical. I don’t know if that was the case in real life, if Lin-Manuel Miranda did any further research to make sure he wasn’t overlooking important people or information, but I think it’s actually a rather kind portrayal. I would be a bit shocked if he did no other research, and no one around him during the process, whether it was producers or dramaturgs or someone else, did any other research either. So writing him as cluelessly using only the one book as a source rather than choosing to ignore other sources seems like a moment of niceness, or perhaps it’s intended to be something more like condescension.

The basic plot is that Lin-Manuel Miranda, stressed out and unable to sleep, is given an Ambien by his agent, and dreams various historical figures coming to him, A Christmas Carol-style, to inform him of all the facts Rob Chernow left out of his book about Hamilton’s relationship to slavery. This includes slaves, indigenous people, (white) indentured servants, and Harriet Tubman.

Most of the monologues are essentially Reed filling in the historical gaps while criticizing Miranda for ignoring the documented plight of enslaved people, indigenous people, and others. But I really like the way he does this; allowing the named and unnamed Black and indigenous historical figures to be portrayed by living actors also gives them a way to be embodied while their history is explained. That’s why I think the vehicle of theatre is very cool: the monologues are, essentially, mini history lessons on the people whose stories Chernow’s history book (and therefore the musical) has forgotten or omitted, but by making them into monologues it allows that person to “tell” their own story through the actor and therefore connect more to an audience, rather than a reader just consuming it on a page in a nonfiction book. There’s a big emotional connection, a pathos that comes across more easily when watching a person speak about their (or “their”) experiences than when reading it as text in a book.

The monologues themselves were actually very eye-opening and interesting; some characters were based on real, named individuals enslaved by the Hamiltons/Schuylers, their relatives, or others in their social circle, and their monologues both explained historical contexts and told their individual stories. Others are anonymous characters portraying indigenous or enslaved people, and their monologues are more general, expressing broader historical experiences. This was a good vehicle for covering bigger picture and more detailed parts of history, I think.

Much of the criticism is about the Schuyler sisters rather than Hamilton himself, and their abuse of people they enslaved. I think Reed focuses on this because the sisters are portrayed as innocent and sweet, and he wanted to emphasize how much that was not the case, and how much they treated human beings like commodities they didn’t care about. But even through the Schuyler sisters, Reed criticizes Hamilton, because he points out over and over that when the sisters wanted something done, the men had to be the ones to put it in motion, meaning Hamilton and the other men in the sisters’ lives were just as complicit in their treatment of the enslaved.

There’s a moment in the middle of the piece where the anonymous indigenous character and one of the anonymous enslaved characters start fighting over, essentially, who was more oppressed by the colonizers. Eventually they’re interrupted when another character points out that this “divide and conquer” strategy is used by imperialists to pit them against each other and that they should be working together to support liberation from oppressors. I thought this was a nice touch because, along with the educational monologues from each character, it emphasizes the importance of mutual support in the face of oppression, and shows that the colonizers wanted that kind of fighting because it was/is an effective way to prevent people from joining together to push back as one and therefore become stronger as a group.

There’s a fair amount of criticism of Miranda’s poor writing, too, and the clumsy and sometimes uncreative rhymes in his raps, which I also appreciated. Not only that, but there’s also an important criticism of how little the actors and crew in these productions get paid compared to producers, backers, and Miranda himself. There’s also criticism of the ticket prices, which I was very happy to see. I was always frustrated by the prices being so high that only people with quite a lot of disposable income (who more than likely were white, especially in major cities where the show tickets were higher) and who probably weren’t going to question any of the show’s content, were the ones who were going to see the show, rather than poorer BIPOC who might have been in the intended audience. (Although tbh I do think the intended audience was white people who wouldn’t care enough to criticize the show.)

In the play, Miranda does go through an emotional arc and redemption; in another dream, he speaks to Alexander Hamilton and realizes that Hamilton is a racist and a slave-owner and not as wholesome as he thought, and Hamilton praises him for scrubbing his image clean via the musical so people think he’s a hero. In the end of the play (which is also the most heavily satirical) he attempts to confront Chernow about his book, but Chernow dismisses him. Miranda is offered a chance to write a musical about Columbus in the same vein as Hamilton, and refuses.

I think this is a piece that would do well as a reading, or done in the style of (and this is the first theatre production that comes to my head, I’m sure there are others) Les Miserables 25th anniversary concert, in which there are no sets (or a very simple one), but the costumed characters stand to speak their lines in front of microphones at the apron of the stage.

I also think a massive criticism that was missing (but I think is a complaint specifically in the theatre fan community and maybe less obvious outside of it) is that Lin-Manuel Miranda could have and should have written a musical about a historical figure or figures who were BIPOC if he was trying to have a primarily non-white cast. The fact that there are *so many* Black historical figures whose lives would make incredible pieces of musical theatre was completely ignored by Miranda in favor writing a show with a non-white cast portraying and smoothing over the history of colonization. He could have written about so many BIPOC historical figures, or events in American history that don’t get enough attention in school. Larger productions with casts of primarily non-white actors are few and far between in mainstream theatre, and telling their historical stories even more rare, and I think Reed should have pointed that out as well.

Overall I really liked this piece, but I think I understand why others might not understand it, as it’s written in a medium that seems odd for its long-winded style. But I think it’s attempting to meet Miranda in a similar medium, and I think to some extent even the long-winded-ness (which is still full of really good history and critique) is sort of a tongue-in-cheek way of showing how difficult it is to portray history in a way that allows for a person or people’s whole story to be told, while simultaneously saying “Look, if you omit the negative aspects of a person’s history, you are failing those who lived and died in oppression by scrubbing the historical figure’s image clean.” Many people who went to see the musical didn’t go on to do more research on Alexander Hamilton and learn about the things that were left out of this portrayal of him as a go-getter, dream-chaser, heroic figure. And anyone who was on social media spaces like Tumblr during the height of the Hamilton craze remembers how many people suddenly treated these real historical figures like adorable fictional characters who were innocent of wrong-doing, who they could attach various characteristics to in the same way people do to fictional characters in fanfiction etc.

I definitely enjoyed this play, and I think while it’s closer to a multi-voiced history lecture than a proper story with a full arc, I think the medium of theatre is a very cool way to criticize Hamilton and Lin-Manuel Miranda, and I really love the combination of satire and genuine historical education. It fills important gaps, gives often overlooked details, and tells the stories of people who still remain ignored or nameless in history. It takes the white historical figures down a peg and gives narrative control to the Black and Indigenous characters. The sheer amount of words spoken by Black and indigenous characters compared to white ones is a pretty big ratio, and I think it’s a subtle but powerful way to give their stories the focus. The satirical end that portrays the racism of Hamilton himself and the selectiveness of Chernow’s book, and also has Lin-Manuel Miranda himself learning a lesson and attempting to redeem himself is also I think a good touch; it doesn’t allow anyone to bow out uncriticized, and it is an obvious attempt to encourage the real life Lin-Manuel Miranda to look at his choices compared to the historical evidence, and the things he could do or say to try and undo some of the damage the musical has done to the memory of the enslaved and oppressed.

[itsuki-minamy]

“R:B” CHAPTER 4 (Part 1)

TRANSLATION & RAWS: NARU-KUN

Chapter 1 Chapter 2 Chapter 3: Part 1 / Part 2

Hot.

The body seems to burn.

The meat is roasted in the flames. The blood boils constantly.

Everything around his emitted heat. Everyone around his has pushed the heat. Tied, hampered and contained. Tied up and condensing the heat.

The heat inside was already unbearable. His brain was boiling and he even felt like it was melting. If he doesn’t let go immediately, he will go crazy. So he put that heat in his fist and hit it. For something that pushes the heat. To tie things up. By things that incline, hinder and contain. To everything that tries to tie it.

He will do his best to repel the tangible and intangible pressure that blocks him. The pressing heat turns into scorching heat and rejects it.

Just at that moment, the heat that escaped became a pleasant sensation and burned his nerves. The wave of heat shaking his discomfort, made the freedom of the moat shine.

It was comfortable.

So…

Hit it.

Smash it.

Penetrates.

Push it in and get out.

The unexpected joy of pleasure that was not his. There were many people around him who were delighted with liberation from slavery and wanted to be destroyed. There were those who had the same goal and those who had the same irritation. He took the initiative and exercised power. The companions screamed loudly, and the sound brought a new pleasant warmth.

Power went up. Even if he is hurt or painful, he is still the power to carry on. It is a power that never gives up, even if it is confusing and terrifying.

It is the warmth of life.

And now. It's hotter than ever. It is painful. Flesh burns, blood becomes irritated, and irritation fills the brain.

It's okay.

The "power" that stabbed the fangs, shaved the desires and shook ...

He tears it all down.

Everything was burned.

Those who rejoice together were erasing everything with their hands.

It is the desert that extends. The desert he once dreamed of.

Facing the vague but emotionless sight, the blood freezes, the core freezes, it's like this, he is different...

Suoh woke up to a chewing voice that did not sing or shadow. His entire body was drenched in sweat and he was making a violent pounding as if his heart was broken.

Like a bad cold that seems to upset the stomach and a severe attack of cancer in the limbs. Inhale the warm air of the place and scratch the moment between dreams and reality.

He looks around with unmistakable fear. It makes sure there was no evidence of destruction.

What there is the usual view. Nothing changes, the room on the first floor of the bar "HOMRA".

He was tense with all his nerves and confirmed it many times.

And finally he exhales.

Immediately after the fleeting relief, a sticky and suffocating heat completely enveloped Suoh's entire body.

++++++++++

He lit the cigarette for the moment.

Suoh puts smoke in his lungs while sitting on the bed. Then exhale everything from his body.

It seems there is still heat left in cells throughout the body. The center of his head is particularly terrible. Feel a sharp dull ache in the slight mud-like heat. Damn feeling, like poison in his chest, he smokes again.

When he closed his eyes, the scene from his dream was still on. The desert of destruction. What's hard to say is that while he avoids the scene, he thinks it's okay. As he understood the tragedy, he still had the sensitivity to feel the scene in a refreshing and liberating way.

There were no ties of any kind there. There was freedom.

Freedom based on his own power.

Damn. He frowned and stood up.

Looking out the window, the scorching sunlight still lights up the world. Suoh clicked his tongue, imagining a peaceful prison.

He put the cigarette in an ashtray and left the room.

Suoh is awake on the second floor of "HOMRA". He takes a shower and walks from the hall to the stairs. Faced with that, hear a voice below.

"No doubts?"

"Yes. Fushimi also confirmed it by another route."

Izumo Kusanagi's bitter voice. It was Totsuka who answered.

"Yes. I expected it, but as soon as I faced him, he ran away."

"Whatever. It's my responsibility."

"I do not care. I will carry it out. Somehow."

"I feel sorry for the mob people."

"That is his business."

When he heard about the mafia, he knew what it was. It's the conflict from the other day. Suoh makes a sound and goes downstairs while somehow observing the content of the conversation.

At the same time as the footsteps echoed, the conversation between the two stopped. Kusanagi and Totsuka turn their faces as he goes down to the first floor.

"King. Good Morning."

"Even though it's very hot, I can't sleep until this time."

Totsuka was unconcerned and Kusanagi spoke with a dismayed smile. They were both not serious until shortly before.

It is a pleasant and habitual attitude. Suoh shrugged and took his usual seat at the counter.

"And Anna?"

"She went shopping with Kamamoto."

Take control and light the cigarette. Kusanagi kindly handed him the ashtray.

He asked for a glass of water and drank about half of it at a time. Water, a mineral that floats on ice, slides through the body. The sensation made him feel a bit rested.

He probably won't want to hear it.

These two people should be able to see that his internal pressure has recently increased. He is sincerely grateful for the consideration that they do not want to put an extra burden on him.

But,

"...So?"

Suoh asks, smoking slowly and brushing off the ashes.

"Are you sure?"

Kusanagi arched an eyebrow and Totsuka looked up, and they looked at each other. Even if he feels like it just then, he thinks they are intimidating each other.

"What did you hear?"

"I just heard it. It seems to be the case with the last mafia."

"Yes, well... Actually, that conflict seems to have started with our newcomer."

"Did he get into a fight?"

"That's what I mean... Apparently, they blackmailed the drug business."

Suoh's eyes when he heard it became sharper.

"I see, it's disgusting because they just fill their mouths."

He dares to laugh ironically.

"I'm excited about my mafia opponent."

"Idiot. Your screws just fly away."

"Eh?"

"Yes. It started to cost me because they rejected me there, it seems that it was the result of an increasing escalation."

Totsuka half faintly replied.

Suoh and his friends attacked the last time because the members of "Homura" were attacked by the mafia. Retribution for the attack. And, in order not to cause more victims to the members, the battle was opened.

However, it seems that the cause was on "Homura's" side in the first place.

Of course, when it comes to the drug business in the Shizume-cho area, it cannot be overlooked. Eventually, a collision would have been inevitable.

"Rather, I'm glad you refused. It's hard to imagine 'Homura' would be one of the traffickers."

"Homura" is a group of so-called street gangs, but they have not dealt with illegal businesses.

Exceptionally, when troubleshooting Strains, the customer may be someone who is "the source", but the requests received are carefully screened. They have a line that should not be crossed as a team.

They have the meaning of self-discipline because they are a group with enormous power, but more than that, it will not be "a hobby" of Suoh and other executives.

However, there are some who are unhappy with him in the current "Homura".

"Even if Totsuka says 'harassment', while listening to something that never happened, it seems like other newcomers also exploded and got involved. They did various things, from funny pranks to stealing products. He must have been quick to sharpen there."

Kusanagi knew that there was a skirmish between a part of "Homura" and the mafia. However, shortly after hearing from the members and embarking on arbitration, the mess turned into a conflict.

There are also conditions like the fact that the opponent was a martial arts group, and that many of the members were foreigners and didn't know much about "Homura's" real situation. But still, if the lower limb hadn't anointed the fire, it would have been a bit smarter.

Suoh waved the cigarette with a distant look as he listened to the story.

The more he listened to it, the less it seemed to go down. A ridiculous and troublesome story. However, he wondered if he could say something about those people without laughing.

For example, how far would he have gone that night if Totsuka hadn't stopped him? For his own pleasure. Or to escape the pain of burning.

Bitter things come from the back of the body.

"What guys?"

"Do you remember Yamata, who received the installation three months ago?"

"Yes."

"It's a group focused on him, and now it's a group of seven or eight people."

Kusanagi said that and scratched his head in an annoyed manner.

With an old man's expression that is a mixture of deprivation and ideology.

“Well, it is a small article. It was a journey where a little smart kid was smart and mean. However, when the other party is the mafia and the kid is a walking flame radiator, it's not easy to drink."

He said bitterly with a serious voice.

"The most troublesome thing is that those smart guys don't do it. At the bottom, it's okay if it's so unreasonable. There's a lot of air, on the contrary, next time they'll go through more and more, and even if they move on with the current situation It usually will. As expected, it's too early."

While saying that, Kusanagi prepared a glass for him and poured water.

After putting it in his mouth and taking a breath...

"I really want you to be patient."

When, he laments exaggeratedly...

"Although "Scepter 4" is getting more active, our members are increasing the extra work."

"After all, if I'm keeping an eye out for newcomers..."

“That's why I said it before. I am only responsible for you."

By convention, Totsuka was supposed to take care of the newcomers in "Homura." But it's been months since that practice stopped working. As Fushimi has said many times, there are too many newcomers rather than Totsuka's negligence.

In progress…

[comrade-meow]

Prostitution or sex work? Language matters

This article is by Laura Biggs, from the Marxist-Feminist blog On the Woman Question.

The term ‘sex work’ has come to replace the word ‘prostitution’ in contemporary discussions on the subject. This is not accidental. The phrase ‘sex work’ has been adopted by liberal feminists and powerful lobbyists in a deliberate attempt to steer the narrative on prostitution.

Smoke and Mirrors

Superficially, the term ‘sex work’ is intended to make prostitution sound more palatable. It is used to remove the negative connotations of the sex industry and those who work within it. However, sanitising the horror of prostitution with such benign terms is a monumental disservice to the tens of millions of prostituted women around the world. Their experiences cannot be celebrated as ‘work’. The vast majority of their experiences are dirty and degrading. What a handful of relatively privileged Western women working in the sex trade may deem to be ‘work’ is perceived as humiliation and degradation by millions of others. Some argue that the term ‘sex work’ removes the stigma and vitriol directed at prostituted women, but this fails to address the problem. Prostituted women are hurt and violated by buyers because the sex trade enables abusive men — not because of the language used to discuss it. Suggesting that the word ‘prostitution’ is to blame for the suffering of prostituted women shifts blame away from the perpetrators of male violence and overlooks the institutional systems which allow it to flourish. It is absolutely vital that we do talk about the ugly reality of prostitution, and to do so we must begin by naming the issue in no uncertain terms: prostitution.

Reinventing prostitution as ‘sex work’ also masks the deeply misogynistic nature of the sex trade. The word ‘prostitute’ is one which is heavily gendered; it connotes women. The Oxford English Dictionary acknowledges this in their definition of the word: A person, in particular a woman, who engages in sexual activity for payment. So gendered is the word, in fact, that when referring to men in the sex industry, the descriptor ‘male’ is added in order to make the distinction (male prostitute). This is not an outdated, sexist misconception but an accurate reflection of the gender balance within sex trade. The vast majority of those who are prostituted are women and girls while the vast majority of buyers and pimps are men. Obfuscating the gendered nature of prostitution by rebranding it as ‘sex work’ erases the millennia of misogynistic oppression inherent in the sex trade. It is likely that commercial prostitution (separate and distinct from temple prostitution) is derived from ancient slavery. The physicality of male slaves meant that they were often utilised for manual labour whilst female slaves were more likely to be reserved for domestic or entertainment purposes. In many Ancient societies, women could not own property and therefore slave masters were predominantly male. As a result, female slaves were often used for the sexual entertainment of their male owner. Slave owners frequently rented out their female slaves as prostitutes and even set up commercial brothels. Prostitution, born out of sexual slavery, has always disproportionately affected women belonging to lower socioeconomic classes. It is crucial to acknowledge the origin and history of prostitution in order to understand that it is not ‘work like any other’ but an industry built upon the oppression of poor women.

A Wide Umbrella

‘Sex work’ is a vague term which refers to people selling their own sexual labour or performance. This can therefore include any number of professions such as webcamming, stripping, hostessing, escorting etc. Whilst any profession which exists solely to sexualise women is objectively antifeminist, it is important that we acknowledge that prostitution is distinct from these other milder forms of objectification. Clearly, the experiences of a student flirting with strangers via webcam to top up their student loan differs greatly from those of a vulnerable sixteen year old girl, trafficked from Romania, walking the streets. The job description of a prostitute lists acts and risks which are not common to other jobs: risk of STIs; unwanted pregnancy; unprotected handling of bodily fluids; degrading, painful and even tortuous sex; vaginal and anal tears; high risk of PTSD — not to mention the significantly increased risk of rape, assault and murder. Even within the sex industry, the experiences of prostituted women are uniquely harrowing and so it is essential that we prioritise these women in legislation on prostitution reform. By grouping all sex-related professions under the wide umbrella of ‘sex work’, those in less dangerous and degrading jobs have now been given the authority to speak on behalf of prostituted women, thus silencing the most oppressed voices within the sex industry. Individuals whose experiences have little in common with those of prostitutes are spearheading movements whose aims will have a direct and adverse effect upon the safety and wellbeing of these vulnerable women. The wide scope of the term ‘sex work’ allows wealthy lobbyists to use compliant liberal women as the mouthpiece for their damaging narrative whilst simultaneously pushing the experiences of those who are worst affected by the sex trade into the background.

In some cases, the term ‘sex workers’ is so broad that it includes pimps. Borrowing the language of the labour movement, pro-decriminalisation lobbies brand themselves as ‘collectives’ or ‘unions’ and demand decriminalisation under the pretence of ‘worker’s rights’. Douglas Fox, of the International Union of Sex Workers, describes himself as a sex worker yet is the co-owner of the one of the largest escort agencies in the country. The agency’s website argues that pimps are ‘sex workers’ and Fox also shockingly states that ‘the fact that paedophiles produce and distribute and earn money from selling sex may make them sex workers’. Similarly, the Sex Workers’ Outreach Project USA was founded by Robyn Few, a self-proclaimed sex worker who has a conviction for conspiracy to promote interstate prostitution (pimping). Unionising prostitution legitimises an industry which causes untold suffering to millions of women around the world. It is absurd to allow pimps to join these unions alongside those who they abuse and exploit. No amount of ‘worker’s rights’ will ever make prostitution a safe or humane profession. An inherently unethical system cannot be fixed through reform. A radical solution is needed: abolition.

An Appeal to Socialists

Describing prostitution as ‘work’ and its victims as ‘workers’ is a cheap and transparent appeal to socialists. Using Marxist jargon to describe prostitution as ‘work like any other’ is an insult to history’s great communists who condemned prostitution as counter-revolutionary. Under Mao, whose policy of criminalising pimps was implemented as soon as he took power, prostitution was virtually nonexistent. Engels himself asserted that communism would ‘transform the relations between sexes into entirely personal relations’. Therefore, any economic relationship between man and woman, particularly the grossly exploitative one between prostituted women and buyers, is inherently anti-communist. Lenin, too, commented that ‘so long as wage-slavery exists, inevitably prostitution too will exist’, demonstrating that he also believed prostitution to be inextricably bound to capitalist exploitation.

However, a significant portion of the woke left insist upon misinterpreting and misapplying Marxist theory to legitimise the continuance of the sex trade. They claim that by declaring prostitution to be ‘a specific expression of the general prostitution of the labourer’, Marx understood the position of prostituted women to be identical to that of all exploited workers. However, this wilfully overlooks Marx’s use of the word ‘specific’. In reality, Marx is suggesting that, whilst prostitution falls under the general banner of exploitation, its reliance on the oppression of women differentiates it from the ‘general prostitution of the labourer’ and makes it ‘specific’ to the female condition. If capitalist exploitation were removed, labour would continue to be necessary for the subsistence of any given society. In contrast, prostitution without capitalist exploitation ceases to exist; sex, devoid of economic coercion, would become a purely interpersonal relationship. In Private Property and Communism, Marx goes on to say that communism aims ‘to do away with the status of women as mere instruments of production’. Pro-prostitution arguments which characterise prostitution as ‘work’ inherently reinforce the perception of female bodies as machines which produce a commodity (sex) for male consumption. The objectification of female bodies, whether exploitative or not, is plainly incorrect and so cannot be supported by any Marxist movement.

There’s More to it Than Money

Framing prostitution as ‘work’ deliberately reduces it to a purely economic analysis. Any analysis devoid of historical materialism is wholly inadequate and will invariably fail to offer a comprehensive examination of the issue. It is vital to acknowledge the social factors which lead women into prostitution: low self esteem, childhood sexual trauma, incest etc. It is unsurprising that some of these vulnerable women embrace the ‘sex work is empowering’ narrative. Language which clouds the abject reality of their situation is undoubtedly appealing and so it is all the more immoral and manipulative for pimps, traffickers and lobbyists to push this sinister doublespeak. The insistent claim from liberal feminists that prostitution is merely ‘sex work’ does not recognise the existence of the social factors which predispose women to sell sex and so naturally prevents positive change to combat them. Prostitution, therefore, is much more than capitalist wage slavery and so we must reject any attempts to render it mere ‘work’.

[ivy-miranda-2390]

In Defense of Anakin Skywalker (and Hayden Christensen)

I grew up with Star Wars, my whole family loves Star Wars. I was 8 when I saw Episode I and afterwards, I was completely immersed in the Star Wars universe. Ewan McGregor's Obi-Wan Kenobi was probably my first fictional boyfriend and I'm unashamedly still in love with him too.

Episode II: The Attack of the Clones came out when I was 11 and so naturally I was excited to see the continuation of the Star Wars prequel universe. However, nothing could have prepared me for the absolute utter gorgeousness of Canadian actor, Hayden Christensen who was cast to play the adolescent Anakin Skywalker.

My memories of first seeing Episode II are fond because I got to see the movies with my older siblings while on vacation in Myrtle Beach. It was probably my first experience of being accepted among my older adult brothers and sisters or the feeling of 'grownupness' as I like to call it.

So Attack of the Clones has always been an special film to me because I saw it at a time when I was no longer being viewed as a child, but as a growing teenager.

It's also why I've always been rather defensive of the film too. While the film was titled Attack of the Clones, it may as well have been re-titled, "Attack of Anakin Skywalker (and subsequently, Hayden Christensen)". For over 20 years, there has been an absolute and indescribable hatred of Anakin Skywalker and many people blamed both Jake Lloyd and Hayden Christensen's supposed poor acting as the result of a badly done Anakin.

And to be honest even though I had a massive crush on Hayden Christensen and was hardly a movie critic at the time, I felt that at times that Anakin could have been better acted. However, I was young and didn't care about the script or the acting. Yet, for years I constantly defended, Attack of the Clones, Anakin Skywalker and Hayden Christensen. Partly due to nostalgia, partly to being a teenage girl and most of all partly to do with understanding the character of Anakin as being misunderstood, misinterpreted and not being treated as an adult by the elders in his life.

Did Anakin have problems? Yes.

Were most of these problems his fault? No.

Did Anakin ever try to fix these problems and better himself? Everyday of his life.

He had nothing, but he gave everything

 The prequels were written as a timeline of a boy's journey from goodness into darkness. Anakin's life is a story arch of sacrifice and redemption. Life has not always been good to Anakin. He was born a slave with no father. He was raised in the strong love of wonderful mother Shmi Skywalker. While Shmi may have been scared and confused as to how she conceived a child without a man, she raised her son in love and simple contentment.

Chances are Anakin and his mother probably faced terrible abuse in their time as slaves and more than once, Anakin may have been separated from Shmi as leverage for greedy slave owners. Although a slave, Anakin was never a victim. He may have been physically owned, but his heart and mind were free. He was his own person, always thinking outside of the box, building, creating, questioning everything and everyone. Not to mention a little wild and rather reckless.

Even as a child Anakin was a little strange to people. For a slave to have such a hopeful and positive attitude may have seemed bizarre to outsiders, but that was just the norm for him. Shmi once remarked that her son knew nothing of greed. For a boy raised with nothing, all he had were his talents as an inventor and growing pilot. And he used his talents for other people. He built C-3PO to help his mom, he entered the podrace to help Qui-Gon Jinn, he always gave without any expectation of being thanked.

A spirit that refused to surrender

After Anakin is freed and sent to train as a Jedi, that wild spirit was still intact. Much to his by-the-book master's dismay. Anakin didn't have the opportunity to grow up in the strict Jedi Temple that was built on order, rules and tradition. As a child, Anakin was use to being himself and not fitting into anyone's mold. His original dream was to be a pilot, not a Jedi. No one asked him if he wanted to be a Jedi, no one asked him if he wanted to be trained by Obi-Wan Kenobi.

While Anakin may have been grateful for both opportunities presented to him, overtime he may have seen this new life as not to different from the one he left. A life run by others. Telling him what to do, where to go, how to dress, how to behave. He survived as a slave because he dared to dream and imagine and refused to be defined by others.

Now he's thrown into a culture where individuality is looked down upon. He lived through the stifling Jedi order because he still held onto those qualities. He was going to be himself on his terms. He would nod his head and say yes when he needed to, but off the clock he would live by his own rules. Something that Obi-Wan and the Jedi order could not understand. And Anakin is getting frustrated by this.

So now we get to Attack of the Clones (and the Attack of Hayden Christensen). Critics came down hard on both Anakin and Hayden. Constantly complaining about Anakin's constant complaining, his tantrums, broodiness and being a crybaby about everything. Critics blamed the disaster of Anakin Skywalker on the terrible miscasting of Hayden Christensen. The only redeeming quality Hayden Christensen had that saved him was the fact he was so easy to look at.

For years, fans were desperate to know who Anakin Skywalker was. And so the pressure to deliver a good character that could measure up to the icon of Darth Vader may have seemed insurmountable. And so when people got this confused, overemotional 19 year old, who has no experience in love or sex, but is madly in love with a beautiful young women; and who wants to be respected in a highly established culture, without losing himself or conforming, well people were just disappointed. The disappointment can be explained in one of Anakin's most famous lines.

"HE'S HOLDING ME BACK!"

He, being George Lucas who was holding back Hayden's actual talent to create a good three dimensional character. Plus his bad script writing. Poor Hayden was just made to read lines on a page and somehow make this sad character somebody that people can root for. Unfortunately fans and critics ate him alive. It's only in recent years that people have begun to realize that they were blaming the wrong person. And by blaming Hayden, they were completely misunderstanding Anakin as a character.

His most beautiful gift, his most fatal flaw

Of all of Anakin's gifts, his ability to love deeply was probably his most profound and his most dangerous. The Jedi Temple forbade romantic attachments to others and for good reason. When you become attached to or love someone beyond the boundaries of platonic friendship you become afraid of losing them. The end of my review for the Star Wars prequels sums it up the best:

In The Phantom Menace, Yoda warns Anakin about the dangers of being afraid. Fear leads to anger, anger leads to hate, hate leads to suffering. Anakin's most beautiful attribute is also his most fatal flaw. His ability to love deeply. Yet, if you love someone you will always live in fear of losing them. Anakin was created by darkness, but raised in the light of his mother's love. His own love was made manifest by Padme and then by their unborn child/children. However, Love no matter how strong can be weakened and even be destroyed by the evil of fear. If the prequels taught anything about life, it taught how fear (even in its smallest form) can be be our most detrimental enemy. Living alone in fear and not seeking help is a signing of our own death warrants. What might have happened if Anakin had gone to Obi-Wan and seek his help? Would things have been different? The prequels were not meant to tell a happy story. They were written as a timeline of a boy's journey from goodness into darkness. No, they don't have the silliness or humor of the Originals, because there is nothing humorous about someone's self-destruction. Yet, the story of Anakin Skywalker's transformation had to be told in a way that was real and heartbreaking. To take Darth Vader and make him a human who could feel and understand and love could be an insurmountable task. Yet, you only need to watch his death scene at the end of Return of The Jedi to see that the humane part of Anakin Skywalker had always been there. The prequels were made to be built on that final scene of redemption and human love. A husband's love to save his wife became a father's love that could overcome darkness and hate. An extreme love that defied fear and held on to hope. That was the love of Anakin Skywalker.

Anakin could be a bratty and immature young adult. However, to only base a character by his few annoying flaws is overlooking the bigger and better picture. Anakin was an outsider his whole life and yet that never seemed to bother him. He never cared about fitting in. He was content being himself and he refused to let Obi-Wan or the Jedi Order or even Padme change him. He held onto who he was for as long as he was able to. Then the tragedy of losing his wife changed that. The indomitable spirit wasn't broken, it was destroyed. Anakin re-entered a life of slavery for over 20 years.

And he was ultimately freed by one person. An orphan who once had nothing but a talent as an inventor and dreams of being a pilot. A young Jedi with an unbreakable spirit that refused to surrender to evil or fear or pain or loss. A son who loved his father so deeply that he would fight to the death to free Anakin Skywalker forever.

[ayittey1]

African Participation in the Slave Trade -- The Myths

History can be written from three perspectives: from that of the victor, a neutral observer and that of the vanquished. Much of Africa’s history was written by the colonialists (the victors) and obviously the victims of colonialism see things differently. For example, seeing no boxes with “ballots” written on them or a building with “Parliament” written on it, many European colonialists jumped to the conclusion that Africans were laboring under horrible and despot chiefs. Therefore, colonialism was good for the Africans because it liberated them from their terrible rulers. This was one monumental nonsense.

True, there were no boxes with ballots written on them and no building with Parliament written on it but that did not mean the essence of democratic governance was unknown. That mythology was as nonsensical as the claim that since there were no hamburgers in the village, Africans did not eat.

 That mythology originated from their failure to make a distinction between the existence of an institution and different forms of the same institution. There are different types of food. The absence of one type – hamburgers – does not mean a complete absence of other types of food. Similarly, there are different types of democracy. Democratic decisions can be taken by majority vote or by consensus. In traditional Africa, decision-making is by consensus. The absence of voting did not mean Africans were living under terrible despotic Chiefs.

 There are many other myths about Africa – in particular, African participation in the slave trade. Written from the African perspective, we seek to demolish the following myths.

 MYTH No. 1: Africans were selling themselves off into slavery before the Europeans arrived on the continent. African chiefs were selling off their own kind into slavery.

 It is true there was slavery in Africa but not the inhumane chattel variety. Slaves in Africa enjoyed certain rights and privileges. Generally, there were no slave markets in black Africa because of the value black Africans place on humanity. More importantly, Africans generally did not have demands for large amounts of labor. Even if they did, they could turn to their clans or extended families.The slave markets that were in Africa, according to historians, were in North Africa (or Arab North Africa) - in such places as Fez and Tripoli.

 Slaves generally were principally war captives from inter-tribal warfare. Say there was a war between two neighboring tribes – the Ashanti and the Fante – and 5,000 Fantes were taken prisoner. The Ashanti King had the following options:

 1.     Keep the 5,000 Fantes in prison, which meant he would have to feed, clothe and shelter them - an expensive economic proposition;

2.     Execute them, a very inhumane prospect; or

3.     Sell them off as slaves and use the proceeds to purchase weapons to defend his Ashanti people;

4.     Absorb and integrate the war captives into Ashanti society, a long, arduous and dangerous process since safeguards must be put in place to ensure that former combatants would pledge allegiance to a new society and authority.

 Which option do you think the Ashanti King would take? If you said the third option, you are right because it was the most humane and economically expedient. The Ashanti also chose option 4, absorbed former war captives (slaves) into their society. To make their integration into Ashanti society as smooth as possible, even the Ashanti King was forbidden to disclose the slave origins of any of his subjects. He would be DETHRONED or removed from office if he did so.

 Now, the more important issue is this. YES, the Ashanti King did sell Fante prisoners of war as SLAVES and therefore participated in the slave trade. BUT the Ashanti King did NOT sell his own kind/people - an important distinction. It was the Europeans who failed to make this distinction, which has been the source of much mythology about the slave trade.

 The Europeans made no distinction between the Ashanti King and the Fante slaves. To the Europeans, it was a BLACK African King selling BLACK Africans. Therefore, Black kings and chiefs were selling their own kind or people. Nonsense. To the Ashanti King, the Fantes were NOT his people but rather the Ashanti.

 Recall that about that time in history, medieval Europe was also fighting tribal wars - between the Flemish, French and the Germans. They were also enslaving one another. But you don’t hear the expression, “The Europeans were enslaving their own kind?” do you? Rather, you read of Germans taking French slaves and vice versa.  So make the same distinctions in Africa - The Ashanti King taking Fante slaves, etc.

The real purpose of that mythology was to whitewash European participation in the slave trade. After all, African chiefs and kings were enslaving their own kind, so it wasn’t that bad for Europeans to do so.

 MYTH NO.2. “African chiefs just went to the market and just grabbed their people to sell off as slaves.”

 You often hear this from African Americans but it is not true for four reasons. First, no African chief can do this and expect to remain chief. He would be removed. As chief, his prerogative is the survival of his tribe. Second, he would be committing an ethnic suicide if he were to sell off his own Ashanti people into slavery. Third, it did not make military sense. He would be depopulating and weakening his own tribe to the benefit of a stronger neighboring tribe. Fourth, their clans would rise up to protect the victims. More importantly, there were traditional injunctions against that. To test this, go to Onitsha market, grab and beat up .Hausa market trader. The entire Hausa ethnic group would go to his/her defense. In fact, many tribal wars started precisely this way – from a dispute or conflict between two individuals. Furthermore, the Ashanti King’s or chief’s role is to minimize any external threat to his people. And if this means depopulating or selling off the entire Fante tribe into slavery he would do so and the better off his Ashanti people would be as that would mean less competition for resources. Yes, he would sell Fantes into slavery but not his own Ashanti people – an important distinction.

 MYTH No. 3. “Africans are brothers and sisters and it is treacherous for them to participate in the slave trade.”

 Again, tribal or ethnic distinctions are important in Africa. To think that Africans consider members of another tribe as “brothers and sisters” is totally ridiculous – an exercise in grand delusion. Why would a Hutus in Rwanda slaughter more than 800,000 Tutsis in Rwanda in 1994? Or tell the Igbo that the Hausa are their brothers and sisters in 1967.

 Before the twentieth century, many societies in the world practiced some form of slavery. Prisoners of war, political opponents and religious dissidents were often enslaved in Old England. For example, in 1530, in England, under the reign of Henry VIII, a vagrant picked up for the second time was whipped and had half an ear cut off; taken for a third time, he was “to be executed as a hardened criminal and enemy of the common weal” (Marx, 1915; p.806). Seventy-two thousand vagrants were thus executed during that reign. In the time of Edward VI (1547), “if anyone refused to work, he shall be condemned as a slave to the person who denounced him as an idler” (Marx, 1915; p.806). The owner of such a slave might whip him, chain him, and brand him on the cheek and forehead with a letter “S” (for Slave), if he disappeared for two weeks. If he ran away a third time he was executed. An idler vagabond caught on the highway was branded on the chest with a “V” (for vagrant). The same laws were in effect during the reigns of Elizabeth (1572) and of Louis XVI in France. The supporters of Monmouth’s rebellion in England were sold by the Queen.   Cromwell’s Irish and Scottish prisoners were sold to the West Indies and non Muslims who opposed the Sokoto jihad were sold to North Africa.

 Criminals in Europe and Africa could be executed, transported or sold. Europeans favored execution; Africans favored sale.

“In the eighteenth century there were 300 different offences in Britain for which one could be executed. In Dahomey, there were only two, for the king preferred to sell rather than execute his troublemakers. Those who could not pay their debts were sold for life or until the debt was paid. Among the Yoruba, debt slaves (pawns) were called Iwofa, among the Asante Awowa, and among the Europeans indentured servants. About a quarter of a million white debt slaves entered America before the nineteenth century” (Boahen and Webster, 1970; p.69).

 In pre colonial Africa, social conditions were such that,

 “All the white minorities living in Africa might own Black slaves, but slaves and white masters alike were all subjects of a Black Emperor: they were all under the same African political power. No historian worth his salt can permit the obscuring of this politico social context, so that only the one fact of Black slavery emerges from it” (Diop, 1987; p.92).

 There was, however, an important distinction between the slave/master relationship in Africa and that in Europe between serf/lord, which is often overlooked. In Africa, slavery was more of a social distinction without economic consequence than fact. The African slave, “instead of being deprived of the fruits of his labor, as was the case with the artisan or the serf of the Middle Ages, could, on the contrary, add to it wealth given him by the `lord’” (Diop, 1987: p.2). Slaves of the kings of Mali and the Askias of Gao “enjoyed complete liberty of movement. Thus an ordinary slave of Askia Daud, a native of Kanta, was able to carry out a pilgrimage to Mecca without his master’s knowledge” (Diop, 1987; p.153).

 To avoid the ugly connotations associated with commercial slaving, Vaughan (1986) suggested the use of limbry: “Existing data, albeit tenuous, suggest that about 80 percent of African societies had limbry” (p.174). In contrast to commercial slavery, African “limbries” “were not on the whole mistreated, dehumanized or exploited” (Vaughan, 1986; p.174).

 The privileges accorded them, however, varied from tribe to tribe. In Nigeria, the treatment of slaves was by no means harsh; nor was their lot deplorable. The majority were integrated into the society and the respective families of their owners in order to retain their loyalty, prevent rebellion and get the best out of them (Falola, 1985; p.99). The slaves were free to some extent; they could intermarry among themselves, own property and redeem themselves if they had the means.

 Among the Lobi of Gabon, slaves were considered as “new children.” The Massangou of the Chaillou Hills in Gabon, incorporated slaves (war captives) into the entire community to replace those lost in war. In Dahomey, the children of slaves were free people incorporated into the master’s family with all the rights except the right to inherit political leadership (Simiyu, 1988; p.59). But in Senegal, slaves (djem) were closely associated to power. They were represented in royal courts and many became de facto ministers (Diop, 1987:2).

 More importantly, Boahen and Webster (1970) pointed out that:

 “Slaves had many privileges in African kingdoms. In Asante, Oyo and Bornu, they held important offices in the bureaucracy, serving as the Alafin’s Ilari in the subject towns of Oyo, as controller of the treasury in Asante, and as Waziri and army commanders in Bornu. Al Hajj Umar made a slave emir of Nioro, one of the most important of the emirates of the Tokolor empire, and in the Niger Delta states slaves rose to become heads of Houses, positions next in rank to the king. Jaja, who had once been the lowest kind of slave, became the most respected king in the delta, and was no exception; one of the Alaketus of Ketu, and Rabeh of Bornu, rose from slave to king (p.69).

 Since slaves faced few barriers to occupational mobility or economic advancement, there was hardly any need for a tumultuous social revolution, such as the French Revolution in which the exploited overthrew their lords. Slavery, of course, was never under any circumstances an ideal institution and there were cases of slave revolts. One example was the revolt under Afonja in the Oyo empire. Another was the Koranko revolt in 1838 against the Susu of Sierra Leone. Led by Bilale, the Koranko ex slaves built a fortified town to offer freedom to runaway slaves. In Calabar, the slaves united in an organization called the Blood Men, and forced the freeborn to respect their human rights (Boahen and Webster, 1970; p.70).

 MYTH NO. 4: The Europeans were the ones who introduced chattel slavery into Africa.

 In pre-colonial Africa, the Europeans and Arabs were battling each other to subjugate Africa. By the 17th century, North Africa, inhabited by the Berbers, was already under Islamic conquest. For centuries, the Berbers have fought – and are still today – fighting Arab imperialism in Morocco and Algeria, where Arab names, religion and culture are being forced upon them. The Berbers had their own language, music and culture until the region was effectively Arabized as Islam spread hundreds of years ago. According to the Amazigh (Berber) Cultural Association in America, a Moroccan law, enacted in Nov 1996 and referred to as Dahir No. 1.96.97, “imposes Arabic names on an entire citizenry more than half of which is not Arabic”. The Berbers in Algeria, too, are up in arms. Fed up with years of discrimination and persecution at the hands of the Arab majority, Berbers, who make up 20 percent of Algeria’s 32 million people, seek more autonomy in the eastern region of Kabylie. They were the original inhabitants of North Africa when invading Arabs introduced Islam. Old tensions erupted into violence after a Berber schoolboy died in police custody in April 2001. Street clashes in Kabylia between the police and Berber militants left more than 100 protesters dead. "The Berbers also want the government’s police force, which they accuse of being partisan, to withdraw from Kabylie, and they want their language, Tamazight, to be recognized as an official language” (The New York Times, June 30, 2003; p.A4).

 West Africa was saved from Islamic conquest by the Sahara, which served as an effective bulwark against Islamic expansionism. In East Africa, Islam made inroads in the 17th century – peacefully at first but with diabolical intentions at a later state. While the Europeans organized the West African slave trade, the Arabs managed the East African and trans-Saharan counterparts.  For the trans-Saharan slave trade, an estimated 9 million captives were shipped to slave markets in Fez, Marrakesh (Morocco); Constantine (Algeria); Tunis (Tunisia), Fezzan, Tripoli (Libya); and Cairo (Egypt). No black African will ever forget that in the 19th century, over 2 million black slaves were shipped from East Africa to Arabia, a slave trade operated by Arabs.

The Zanzibar slave trade, with an annual sale that increased according to some estimates from 10,000 slaves in the early 19th century to between 40,000 and 45,000 in the mid‑19th century, was at its height during the rule of Sayyid Said (1804‑1856 ‑ born 1794), sultan of Muscat and Oman…  

Enslaving and slave trading in East Africa were peculiarly savage in a traffic notable for its barbarity. Villages were burnt, the unfit villagers massacred. The enslaved were yoked together, several hundreds in a caravan, and on their journey to the coast, which could be as long as 1280 kilometres…It is estimated that only one in five of those captured in the interior reached Zanzibar. The slave trade seems to have been more catastrophic in East Africa than in West Africa (Wickins, 1981; p.184).

 Diseases such as smallpox and cholera, introduced by marauding Arab caravans penetrating the interior in search of slaves, decimated entire local populations and were far more devastating than the actual export of slaves to Indian Ocean markets.  According to Gordon (1989),

“One particularly brutal practice was the mutilation of young African boys, sometimes no more than 9 or ten years old, to create eunuchs, who brought a higher price in the slave markets of the Middle East. Slave traders often created “eunuch stations” along the major African slave routes where the necessary surgery was performed in unsanitary conditions. Only one out of every 10 boys subjected to the mutilation actually survived the surgery.

The taking of slaves – in razzias, or raids, on peaceful African villages – also had a high casualty rate. The typical practice was to conduct a pre-dawn raid on an unsuspecting village and kill off as many of the men and older women as possible. Young women and children were then abducted as the preferred “booty” for the raiders. 

Young women were targeted because of their value as concubines or sex slaves in markets. “The most common and enduring purpose for acquiring slaves in the Arab world was to exploit them for sexual purposes. These women were nothing less than sexual objects who, with some limitations, were expected to make themselves available to their owners…Islamic law catered to the sexual interests of a man by allowing him to take as many as four wives at one time and to have as many concubines as his purse allowed. Young women and girls were often inspected before purchase in private areas of the slave market by the prospective buyer (p.35).

 Some of the African slaves were shipped to Iraq, where they were inhumanely treated. In the latter part of the 19th century, they revolted and were subsequently placed in the Iraqi army. According to Walusako Mwalilino, a Malawian historian, “From 1859 to 1872, between 20,000 and 25,000 slaves were shipped to southwest Asian ports” (The Washington Times, Sept 21, 1995; p.A14). But the Arab slave trade continued well into the 20th century. According to Thomas Cantwell, an American reporter, “the last interdicted slave ship was in 1947, a dhow from Mombasa” (The Washington Post, June 4, 1994; p.A18).  American reporter, Timothy Williams, claimed that,

 “Officially, Iraq is a colorblind society that in the tradition of Prophet Muhammad treats black people with equality and respect. But on the packed dirt streets of Zubayr, Iraq’s scaled-down version of Harlem, African-Iraqis talk of discrimination so steeped in Iraqi culture that they are commonly referred to as “abd” — slave in Arabic — prohibited from interracial marriage and denied even menial jobs.

Historians say that most African-Iraqis arrived as slaves from East Africa as part of the Arab slave trade starting about 1,400 years ago. They worked in southern Iraq’s salt marshes and sugar cane fields.

Though slavery — which in Iraq included Arabs as well as Africans — was banned in the 1920s, it continued until the 1950s, African-Iraqis say.

 Recently, they have begun to campaign for recognition as a minority population, which would grant them the same benefits as Christians, including reserved seats in Parliament.

“Black people here are living in fear,” said Jalal Dhiyab Thijeel, an advocate for the country’s estimated 1.2 million African-Iraqis. “We want to end that” (The New York Times, Dec 2, 2009; p.A22).

 The official Libyan and Arab line on slavery is that: “The Arab countries are a natural extension to the African continent. The African Arabs, or those who carried the indulgent message of Islam, were the first to effectively oppose slavery as inhumane and unnatural. The claim that Arabs were involved in the trade at all is a mischievous invention of the West, made in order to divide the Arabs from their brothers and sisters who live in the African continent” (New Africa, Nov 1984; p.12). Nonsense.

 During the black struggle for civil rights in the United States and independence in Africa in the 1950s and 1960s, Afro-Arab differences and ill-feelings were buried. Black leaders, seduced by the fallacious premise that “the enemy of my enemy must be my friend”, made common cause with the Arabs. In the United States, many blacks dropped their "European” or “slave” names and adopted Islamic ones. In Africa, black leaders entered into alliances and sought support from Arab states for the liberation struggle against Western colonialism. Grand Afro-Arab solidarity accords were pompously announced. Drooling, grandiloquent speeches announced meretricious Afro-Arab summits. Little came out of them, and since independence, black Africans have gradually realized that the Arabs regard them “expendable”. The Arabs are just as ready as the French to use them as pawns to achieve their chimerical geopolitical schemes and global religious imperialism/domination.

Today Africa has found new suitors – Chinese.

 REFERENCES

Ayittey, George B.N. (2006). Indigenous African Institutions. Dobbs Ferry, NY: Transnational Publishers.

 Boahen, A.A. and J.B. Webster. History of West Africa. New York: Praeger, 1970.

Diop Cheikh Anta. Pre‑colonial Black Africa. Westport: Lawrence Hill & Company, 1987.

Falola, Toyin. "Nigeria’s Indigenous Economy.” in Nigerian History and Culture. ed. Olaniyan, 1985.

 Gordon, Murray (1989).  Slavery in the Arab World. New York, NY: New Amsterdam Books.

Martin, Phyllis M and Partrick O'Meara eds. Africa. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986.

 Marx, Karl. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy. Chicago: Kerr, 1915.

 Simiyu, V.G. “The Democratic Myth in The African Traditional Societies,” in Democratic Theory and Practice in Africa. eds. Walter O. Oyugi et. al. Portsmouth, NH: 1988.

 Vaughan, James H. “Population and Social Organization,” in Martin and O'Meara, 1986.

 Wickins, Peter (1981). An Economic History of Africa. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

  George B.N. Ayittey, PhD

Retired Distinguished Economist at American University and President of the Free Africa Foundation, both in Washington DC, USA.

Free Africa Foundation website www.freeafrica.org

[forsetti]

On Guns In America: Full Mental Jacket

America loves its guns.  It loves them so much, it is willing to overlook the damage they inflict on individuals, families, and society.  It loves guns so much, it denies evidence from around the world that supports the conclusion that fewer guns = fewer gun-related injuries and deaths.  It loves guns so much, it eagerly looks for ways to make them more dangerous, more lethal, more accessible.  It loves guns because, in spite of being the world's superpower, its past and present have been steeped in insecurity, fear, and a false sense of superiority.  Schools shootings are a microcosm of the problem of guns in America-A dangerous weapon in the hands of insecure, angry, testosterone-riddled, white males whose brains and moral compasses are at best not yet fully developed and at worst, seriously and permanently fucked up.

The problem with guns in America isn't that there aren't enough of them. The problem isn't “God has been taken out of schools and society.” The problem isn't immigrants, minorities, or Muslims.  The problem is mental health-the mental health of white, male America.  To be more specific, the problem is, and always has been white supremacy. If you don't understand the role white supremacy has and does play in how America views and loves it guns, you are part of the problem. This includes a lot of “good guy” gun owners who provide cover for their not-so-good guy gun-owning brethren.

The common thread from the first European white settlers to a large number of current gun owners in America is white supremacy.  The first white men on this continent used guns to steal land, resources, and life from the Native Americans.  The 2nd Amendment was written, in part, to ratify slavery.  It was important for guns to be readily available for whites to keep slaves in line, to be able to fend off any slave rebellion, to protect their women from “violent, sex-crazed” black men.  When slavery was abolished, the heavily armed Klan came to power to ensure white rule and supremacy was maintained.  The Mulford Act in California was passed in 1967 and signed by then-governor, Ronald Regan, repealing open carry in response to members of the Black Panthers carrying guns while they patrolled the streets of Oakland to make sure the police did their jobs properly.  Gun sales went through the roof when the first black president was elected.  Right-wing media pushes gun ownership with threats of marauding bands of Mexican gangs, Muslim terrorists, race wars, and imaginary government operations that will imprison God-fearing, gun-owning, PBR-drinking, tobacco chewing, white Americans.  

The fact that America has 5% of the world's population and almost 50% of the world's guns isn't by mistake, isn't to protect it from foreign powers, isn't to defend itself from its own government.  America has the most guns because it was built on white supremacy.  Guns were the tools used to take the land from its native inhabitants.  Guns were the tools used to keep the economic resource of slavery in line. Guns were used against fellow countrymen in order to maintain the right to own other people.  Guns were used to inflict fear, harm, and death in order to preserve and enforce Jim Crow Laws.  White supremacy doesn't carry as much power without means and threat to commit violence.  Guns and racism in America go together like Dylann Roof and a Glock .45, like Mom and apple pie.

The main reasons mass shootings are more prevalent in America now than in the “Good Old Days,” are two-fold: First, white America is losing its demographic and cultural power; Second, there are exponentially more guns now than in its mythologized past.  This explosion in the number of guns in circulation is not distributed equally among the population.  While the number of guns being manufactured and sold has skyrocketed, the percentage of households that own guns has been steadily declining.  This means those who do own guns are owning more and more of them.  I'm pretty sure the Venn Diagram of homes with guns and racists is damn near one, complete circle.  

I'm not saying all gun owners are racists but a lot of the ones who own multiple guns, who purchase semi-automatics, bump stocks, high capacity magazines, push for open carry, are pro-Stand Your Ground laws, reject even the most sensible background checks, are racist as fuck.   The NRA, right wing radio, FOX News, and Republican politicians have fed these people a steady diet of fear since the passage of the Civil Rights Act.  They've latched onto anything and everything non-white that can be peddled as a threat.  They've done this with to great success.  If you don't think so, just look at the spike in gun manufactured and sold starting the second Barack Obama was elected in 2008.  At no point did he discuss taking anyone's guns during the campaign but the mere fact a black man became president scared the living fuck out of white supremacists to where they went on a weapons-buying spree that would make Adnan Khashoggi blush. There was a small spike in guns sold after Bill Clinton was elected but it went back down to normal levels during his second term.  New guns in circulation hit a record high in 2008 and the number more than doubled by the end of Obama's second term.  If you don't think race and white supremacists' fears were not the cause of this, you aren't too bright.

This relationship between guns and white supremacy in America is why you can't have a rational discussion about gun control.  Racist fears will always override common sense, logic, evidence, social well-being, decency.  To make matters worse, their irrational fears have filtered down to a lot of other gun owners.  Every day I hear someone say, “I'm a responsible gun owner and I don't do....” or “I know a lot of gun owners who are responsible and they don't do...,” as a rationalization and justification to not only defend the status quo but to argue for access to more guns.  A lot of the “good gun owners” are sure carrying a lot of water for the “bad gun owners,” right now to the point it is impossible for me to discern which is which.  Practically speaking, there isn't much difference, politically, between an overweight, shirtless red neck posting pictures of himself holding his AR-15 in front of a Confederate Flag and the gun-owning Republican next door who is a CPA who drives a KIA Soul because both are obstacles to any gun reform. The CPA might not think he is giving cover for and be providing support to Cletus's white supremacy when he parrots NRA talking points but he sure as fuck is.  If this wasn't true, you'd see these “good gun owners” come out against their fellow gun-owning brethren whenever there was a school shooting or some other horrible run-related incident.  The silence of “good gun owners” tells you where they stand and to me, it seriously calls into question just how “good” they really are.

A good person doesn't stand quietly by as children are gunned down in schools, as families are worshiping in church, as people are watching a movie in a theater.  A good person doesn't parrot conspiracy theories about gun confiscation, Jade Helm, FEMA camps, race wars... A good person doesn't look at the overwhelming evidence from the American Medical Association, the CDC, and every other industrialized country in the world and come away with the ideas that more guns are needed and teachers should be armed.  You can say and think what you will about the people you know and love who own guns about how “good” a person they are but my definition of what constitutes a good person doesn't cover this kind of moral failing.

I never see any of these “good gun owners” coming to the defense of black victims of gun violence at the hands of the police.  When 12-year-old Tamir Rice was shot within microseconds by the police for having an air rifle in an open carry state, none of these “good gun owners” came out in his defense.  Instead, they parroted the same talking points as white supremacist websites and talking heads.  The same for Michael Brown in Ferguson, Laquan McDonald in Chicago, Walter Scott in South Carolina...  Unarmed black men and boys who are killed by the police are always labeled with negative terms. Meanwhile, white mass shooters are “mentally unstable,” “misunderstood,” “a good neighbor”...  Not only are white shooters talked about in better terms, they are treated with more respect when apprehended.  Tamir Rice laid dying in the park, he received no assistance from the police who shot him.  In fact, they prohibited Tamir's sister from getting help.  When the black church shooter, Dylann Roof, in S. Carolina was caught, the police stopped by Burger King to get him food before taking him in.  When the school shooter in Florida was finally nabbed, he was taken unharmed, wrapped in a blanket, and courteously placed into a car.  Not a single “good gun owner” said a peep about any of these situations.  Instead of seeing the built-in, systemic racism of how we view and treat black victims compared to white killers, they automatically rolled out their NRA-approved talking points.  When it is time to speak up about injustice, racism, inequality, if guns are involved even remotely, these “good gun owners” always seem to stand up on the wrong side of the moral fence, if they stand up at all.  My definition of “good person” doesn't encompass this kind of shitty behavior.  At no point does an inanimate object take precedence, priority over a human being.  That many of those defending guns as THE ANSWER are also 'pro-life,” is as ridiculous as it is hypocritical.

The other main factor in America's obsession with guns is toxic masculinity.  I know the term “toxic masculinity,” has gotten pushback from a lot of people for being “too demeaning,” “too mean,” “detrimental to the discussion.”  My response to this criticism is, I don't fucking care.  If you are male and your ego is so fragile you can't handle a negative label and need to rage about it, you've pretty much proved the need for the description.  Don't #NotAllMen at me either.  This is a lazy, dishonest response.  When people use “toxic masculinity,” they are referring to very specific characteristic traits.  If you don't fit the description, then shut the fuck up about it so you don't risk joining their ranks.

Men are more violent than women.  Some men more so than others.  Insecure men of this type, even more so.  Add in a heavy dose of white and gender supremacy and you get a toxic mixture.  Throw deadly weapons designed to kill and maim at high rates and you often get very dangerous outcomes.  The more of these traits a man has, the more likely they are to be violent.  Take just about any mass shooter in America the past fifty years and you will find someone who has a history of violence against women and/or racial animus.  Men who exhibit toxic masculinity traits are mentally unstable.  They do not know how to properly process and deal with a world where they are not the king of every hill by the mere fact they are white men.  This is a cognitive problem.  To be okay with people like this having access to high powered weapons designed to kill is an epic public safety failure.  People in hospitals, jails, halfway homes...who are deemed dangerous are not allowed belts, shoestrings, anything that can be used to harm themselves or others.  Yet, we as a society have decided it is okay for mentally screwed up white men to not only own guns but make it easy for them to get as many as they want and almost whatever kind they want.  This is fucking insane.

Imagine being in charge of policy for a mental health hospital, coming up with the position that the residents who exhibit violent tendencies, believe they are naturally superior to others, and who are prone to conspiracy theories should have almost unlimited access to things that will inflict the most pain, injury, and death on others.  What Board of Directors would vote or this policy?  What rational person on the outside looking in would say, “This seems like a great idea”?  The easy answer is, “No one,” because it is so fucking stupid.

This brings us to the “the left shouldn't be so critical of the right” stage of the discussion.  Every day, I read some article or comment that claims if the left would only stop the name calling, the harsh criticism, the sense of superiority, then the right would “do the right thing.”  This argument is so fucking stupid it really doesn't deserve a response but since I'm feeling generous, here goes...  

Either your arguments and positions are supported by evidence and tethered to reality and morality or they are not.  If they are not, then it doesn't matter what the left says or thinks about you, they are still fucked up.  If you don't want to be on the wrong side of an issue, of history, of morality, then the ONLY choices you have is to either continue to be on the wrong side or mea culpa the fuck out of yourself and get on the right side.  There IS NO OPTION where you get to believe the wrong things and also get to be on the right side. These are the fucking rules of logic, of morality, of history.  Don't blame liberals because you are wrong.  Don't blame anyone but yourself for being on the wrong side.  Suck it up. Take the personal hit.  Learn a fucking lesson.  Just don't blame others for your intellectual, moral failings.

If you really believe guns are the answer and the more the merrier, you are a deeply damaged, cognitively delusion person and a big part of the reason why America is so entrenched in a culture of guns.  You are mentally unhinged and a danger to everyone around you and to society, in general.  And, I'll bet, if I scratched the surface of your personality even the slightest, I'd uncover a whole lot of racism and bigotry just beneath the surface. You can say that guns aren’t the problem, which may be true. The real problem is racism mixed with toxic masculinity.  I am all for doing everything possible to address these problems. However, until we do, I think keeping weapons out of their hands that can and do inflict massive damage to others is the very fucking least we can do. To do...to think otherwise is the very definition of “crazy.”

[wisconsinprelawland-blog]

Legalizing Sex Work

By Mersadie Murray, University of Wisconsin-Platteville Class of 2020

September 10, 2020

Democratic Vice President candidate, Kamala Harris, made history in March when she declared her support for decriminalizing sex work in the United States. She became the first United States presidential candidate to announce she is in favor of decriminalizing sex work publicly. Despite many voters suspicion of this stance due to her opposition to ending prostitution arrests in San Francisco in 2008, her public support throughout the 2020 presidential campaign could spark a long-needed debate on the issue.

With the exception of certain areas in Nevada, the United States views prostitution and other types of sex work as a crime. However, many sex workers and advocates for decriminalization, including the World Health Organization and Amnesty International, hope that the campaign and election of 2020 could help elevate their voices (Garsd, 2019). 

In the past few months, bills to decriminalize prostitution have been introduced or reintroduced in Washington D.C., New York, and Vermont and are awaiting a vote (Elletson, 2020). in December of 2019, the federal government introduced the SAFE SEX Worker’s Study Act (SSWSA) (Congressional Research Service, 2020). This study act came as a response to SESTA-FOSTA-- a bill introduced last year that limited online resources sex workers utilized for “screening” their clients, among other things (Holston-Zannell, 2020). The goal of the SSWSA is to research how SESTA-FOSTA may have negatively impacted sex workers both physically and financially (CRS, 2020). 

Two strategies are talked about often when discussing models of decriminalization: The “Nordic Model” and complete decriminalization. Countries that use the Nordic Model, like Norway and Sweden, legalize selling sex, and criminalize buying sex (Demand Abolition, 2020). Proponents of this model believe that the demand for prostitutes will decrease if there is a fear of legal action coupled with the immunity of the prostitute. Prostitutes would no longer feel the need to keep quiet since they are not committing a crime. One study found that utilizing the Nordic Model in Sweden reduced street prostitution by 50% (Demand Abolition, 2020).  In addition, the Nordic Model views prostitutes as victims of their circumstance, believing that they are a vulnerable population who had no other choice but to sell their bodies for sex. 

Critics of the Nordic Model, including many sex workers, acknowledge that sex work is work and needed as income to survive. A study conducted in New Zealand found that 73% of sex workers relied on the income to pay for household expenses (Demand Abolition, 2020). As writer and filmmaker Bishakha Datta states, “When adult women say sex work is a form of livelihood or commerce rather than coercion, we need to put aside our discomforts and listen to them. When these women say that the harm in sex work comes not from the act of selling sex, but from the stigma and violence surrounding it because of its illegal and hidden nature, we must hear them (Datta & Post, 2013).” 

Those against the Nordic Model also claim that the majority of sex workers are not victims. While some sex workers may have been forced into prostitution when they were young, one survey of 3,000 sex workers found that 71 percent entered the industry willingly (Datta & Post, 2013). RJ Thompson, a former escort, does not view himself as a victim. In fact, he described the work as liberating. Thompson graduated law school during the 2008 recession and turned to sex work to pay his bills and student loans after being laid off from his job at a nonprofit. He can admit that many sex workers are in vulnerable situations but attributes that to the criminalization. “Many street-based workers are migrants or transgender people who have limited options in the formal economies,” he states. “And so they do sex work for survival. And it puts them in a very vulnerable position-- the fact that it’s criminalized (Garsd, 2019).” Therefore, many sex workers and activists are pushing for complete decriminalization.

New Zealand completely decriminalized prostitution in 2003 with the passage of The New Zealand Prostitution and Reform Act (PRA). Five years later, they conducted a study that found the sex industry did not increase in size as some feared, and “the vast majority of people involved in the sex industry are better off under the PRA than they were previously.” Another study found that over 90 percent of New Zealand sex workers believed the PRA gave them employment, legal, health, and safety rights (Crichton, 2015). To add, 64 percent stated that it was now easier to refuse clients. Another essential shift attributed to the passage of PRA is the dynamic between sex workers and the police. Fifty-seven percent of sex workers believed that police attitudes changed positively. Catherine Healy, the national coordinator of the New Zealand Prostitutes Collective, stated about police officers, “the focus on the sex worker wasn’t the sex worker as a criminal. It was on the rights, safety, health, and well being of the sex worker (Crichton, 2015).” To many street workers, the decriminalization of their work allowed them to maintain standards and regulations, just like would be seen in any other job. They now have workers’ rights. 

Many opponents of decriminalization fear that prostitution is inherently violent, whether it is legal or not. One study that interviewed sex workers in New Zealand found that most did not feel that decriminalization deterred the violence they face through their work. In addition to a continued presence of violence, prostitutes in New Zealand did not observe that legalizing sex work reduced the stigma they face, and most still did not disclose their occupation to healthcare professionals (Demand Abolition, 2020). 

Feminist groups strongly believe that prostitution adds to the issue of gender-based violence since the majority of prostitutes are female, and most buyers are male (Demand Abolition, 2020). Diane Post, an international human rights attorney, describes prostitution as a systematic failure for women. “Prostitution is a symptom of the problem itself,” she says. “The problem is patriarchy, inequality, discrimination, inequitable distribution of resources, religious control, and fear of women (Datta & Post, 2013).” 

Another argument for keeping sex work criminalized is the prevalence of human trafficking in countries with legalized prostitution. A study of 150 countries found that there is a higher incidence of trafficking flow in places where prostitution is legalized (Cho, S. et al., 2013). The researchers of the study conclude that this is because of an increase in the prostitution market. Admittedly, the researchers also state that “such a line of argumentation overlooks potential benefits that the legalization of prostitution might have on those employed in the industry (Cho, S. et al., 2013).”

While it is clear that there is much research to be done on whether or not sex work should be decriminalized, it can be agreed upon that it is time that this topic is on presidential candidates’ agenda. And it appears that it will be. In January of 2020, Data for Progress, ACLU, and the Human Rights Campaign and other organizations published a report that claimed, “For the first time in presidential primary history, 2020 candidates have competed for a progressive position on the sex trade (Lennard, 2020).” And it isn’t just politicians who are contemplating a change in the future and legality of sex work. A national poll conducted by Data for Progress and YouGov found 52 percent of all voters (two-thirds of voters aged 18-44) somewhat or strongly support decriminalizing sex work (Lennard, 2020). Like most political issues, attitudes on sex work are continually changing with each new generation. It is the responsibility of elected officials to discuss these issues and create policies based on research and their representation of voters. 

________________________________________________________________

Cho, S, Dreher, A & Neumayer, E. (2013, January). Does legalized prostitution increase human trafficking? World Development, 41(1), 67-82. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.worlddev.2012.05.023

Congressional Research Service. (2020) SAFE SEX Workers Study Act. https://www.congress.gov/bill/103rd-congress/senate-bill/11

Crichton, F. (2015, August 21) Decriminalizing sex work in New Zealand: its history and impact. OpenDemocracy. https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/beyond-trafficking-and-slavery/decriminalising-sex-work-in-new-zealand-its-history-and-impact/

Datta, B. & Post, D. (2013). Should prostitution be legalized? New Internationalist, 461, 28–30.

Demand Abolition. (2020). Why prostitution shouldn’t be legal. Demand abolition. https://www.demandabolition.org/research/evidence-against-legalizing-prostitution/

Elletson, G. (2020, January 3). Sex work decriminalization bill introduced. VTDigger. https://vtdigger.org/2020/01/03/sex-work-decriminalization-bill-introduced/

Garsd, J. (2019, March 22). Should sex work be decriminalized? Some activists say it’s time. NPR. https://www.npr.org/2019/03/22/705354179/should-sex-work-be-decriminalized-some-activists-say-its-time

Holston-Zannell, L.B. (2020, June 10). Sex work is a real work, and it’s time to treat it that way. ACLU. https://www.aclu.org/news/lgbt-rights/sex-work-is-real-work-and-its-time-to-treat-it-that-way/

Lennard, N. (2020, January 30). The majority of voters now support decriminalizing sex work. It’s about time. The intercept. https://theintercept.com/2020/01/30/sex-workers-decriminalization-fosta-sesta/

*Newspaper Clipping Credit* S.F. rejects legalization of prostitution. (2008). Contemporary Sexuality, 42(12), 13.

[pope-francis-quotes]

10th September >> Pope Francis Homily During Mass in Colombia: ‘Peace requires healing of sins’ (photo ~ Pope Francis celebrates Mass in Colombia - AP) (Vatican Radio) Pope Francis celebrated Mass in Cartagena’s port area on Sunday at the conclusion of his Apostolic Visit to Colombia. The Holy Father reflected on the peace that Jesus brings through the community and how necessary it is for Colombian society. “For decades Colombia has yearned for peace”, he said, “but, as Jesus teaches, two sides approaching each other to dialogue is not enough; it has also been necessary to involve many more actors in this dialogue aimed at healing sins.” He said people cannot be ignored when making peace, in placing reason above revenge, and in respecting “the delicate harmony between politics and law”. “Peace is not achieved by normative frameworks and institutional arrangements between well-intentioned political or economic groups. Jesus finds the solution to the harm inflicted through a personal encounter between the parties,” he said. Please find below the official English translation of the Pope’s prepared homily: Homily: “The Dignity of the Person and Human Rights.” Cartagena de Indias Sunday, 10 September 2017 In this city, which has been called “heroic” for its tenacity in defending freedom two hundred years ago, I celebrate the concluding Mass of my Visit to Colombia. For the past thirty-two years Cartagena de Indias is also the headquarters in Colombia for Human Rights. For here the people cherish the fact that, “thanks to the missionary team formed by the Jesuit priests Peter Claver y Corberó, Alonso de Sandoval and Brother Nicolás González, accompanied by many citizens of the city of Cartagena de Indias in the seventeenth century, the desire was born to alleviate the situation of the oppressed of that time, especially of slaves, of those who implored fair treatment and freedom” (Congress of Colombia 1985, law 95, art. 1). Here, in the Sanctuary of Saint Peter Claver, where the progress and application of human rights in Colombia continue to be studied and monitored in a systematic way, the Word of God speaks to us of forgiveness, correction, community and prayer. In the fourth sermon of Matthew’s Gospel, Jesus speaks to us, who have decided to support the community, to us, who value life together and dream of a project that includes everyone. The preceding text is that of the good shepherd who leaves the ninety-nine sheep to go after the one that is lost. This fact pervades the entire text: there is no one too lost to deserve our care, our closeness and our forgiveness. From this perspective, we can see that a fault or a sin committed by one person challenges us all, but involves, primarily, the victim of someone’s sin. He or she is called to take the initiative so that whoever has caused the harm is not lost. During these past few days I have heard many testimonies from those who have reached out to people who had harmed them; terrible wounds that I could see in their own bodies; irreparable losses that still bring tears. Yet they have reached out, have taken a first step on a different path to the one already travelled. For decades Colombia has yearned for peace but, as Jesus teaches, two sides approaching each other to dialogue is not enough; it has also been necessary to involve many more actors in this dialogue aimed at healing sins. The Lord tells us in the Gospel: “If your brother does not listen to you, take one or two others along with you” (Mt 18:16). We have learned that these ways of making peace, of placing reason above revenge, of the delicate harmony between politics and law, cannot ignore the involvement of the people. Peace is not achieved by normative frameworks and institutional arrangements between well-intentioned political or economic groups. Jesus finds the solution to the harm inflicted through a personal encounter between the parties. It is always helpful, moreover, to incorporate into our peace processes the experience of those sectors that have often been overlooked, so that communities themselves can influence the development of collective memory. “The principal author, the historic subject of this process, is the people as a whole and their culture, and not a single class, minority, group or elite. We do not need plans drawn up by a few for the few, or an enlightened or outspoken minority which claims to speak for everyone. It is about agreeing to live together, a social and cultural pact” (cf. Evangelii Gaudium, 239). We can contribution greatly to this new step that Colombia wants to take. Jesus tells us that this path of reintegration into the community begins with a dialogue of two persons. Nothing can replace that healing encounter; no collective process excuses us from the challenge of meeting, clarifying, forgiving. Deep historic wounds necessarily require moments where justice is done, where victims are given the opportunity to know the truth, where damage is adequately repaired and clear commitments are made to avoid repeating those crimes. But that is only the beginning of the Christian response. We are required to generate “from below” a change in culture: so that we respond to the culture of death and violence, with the culture of life and encounter. We have already learned this from your own beloved author whom we all benefit from: “This cultural disaster is not remedied with lead or silver, but with an education for peace, built lovingly on the rubble of an angry country where we rise early to continue killing each other... a legitimate revolution of peace which channels towards life an immense creative energy that for almost two centuries we have used to destroy us and that vindicates and exalts the predominance of the imagination” (Gabriel García Márquez, Message About Peace, 1998). How much have we worked for an encounter, for peace? How much have we neglected, allowing barbarity to become enfleshed in the life of our people? Jesus commands us to confront those types of behaviour, those ways of living that damage society and destroy the community. How many times have we “normalized” the logic of violence and social exclusion, without prophetically raising our hands or voices! Alongside Saint Peter Claver were thousands of Christians, many of them consecrated… but only a handful started a counter-cultural movement of encounter. Saint Peter was able to restore the dignity and hope of hundreds of thousands of black people and slaves arriving in absolutely inhuman conditions, full of dread, with all their hopes lost. He did not have prestigious academic qualifications, and he even said of himself that he was “mediocre” in terms of intelligence, but he had the genius to live the Gospel to the full, to meet those whom others considered merely as waste material. Centuries later, the footsteps of this missionary and apostle of the Society of Jesus were followed by Saint María Bernarda Bütler, who dedicated her life to serving the poor and marginalized in this same city of Cartagena.[1] In the encounter between us we rediscover our rights, and we recreate our lives so that they re-emerge as authentically human. “The common home of all men and women must continue to rise on the foundations of a right understanding of universal fraternity and respect for the sacredness of every human life, of every man and every woman, the poor, the elderly, children, the infirm, the unborn, the unemployed, the abandoned, those considered disposable because they are only considered as part of a statistic. This common home of all men and women must also be built on the understanding of a certain sacredness of created nature” (Address to the United Nations, 25 September 2015). Jesus also shows us the possibility that the other may remain closed, refusing to change, persisting in evil. We cannot deny that there are people who persist in sins that damage the fabric of our coexistence and community: “I also think of the heart-breaking drama of drug abuse, which reaps profits in contempt of the moral and civil laws. I think of the devastation of natural resources and ongoing pollution, and the tragedy of the exploitation of labour. I think too of illicit money trafficking and financial speculation, which often prove both predatory and harmful for entire economic and social systems, exposing millions of men and women to poverty. I think of prostitution, which every day reaps innocent victims, especially the young, robbing them of their future. I think of the abomination of human trafficking, crimes and abuses against minors, the horror of slavery still present in many parts of the world; the frequently overlooked tragedy of migrants, who are often victims of disgraceful and illegal manipulation” (Message for the World Day of Peace, 2014, 8), and even with a pacifist “sterile legality” that ignores the flesh of our brothers and sisters, the flesh of Christ. We must also be prepared for this, and solidly base ourselves upon principles of justice that in no way diminish charity. It is only possible to live peacefully by avoiding actions that corrupt or harm life. In this context, we remember all those who, bravely and tirelessly, have worked and even lost their lives in defending and protecting the rights and the dignity of the human person. History asks us to embrace a definitive commitment to defending human rights, here in Cartagena de Indias, the place that you have chosen as the national seat of their defence. Finally, Jesus asks us to pray together, so that our prayer, even with its personal nuances and different emphases, becomes symphonic and arises as one single cry. I am sure that today we pray together for the rescue of those who were wrong and not for their destruction, for justice and not revenge, for healing in truth and not for oblivion. We pray to fulfil the theme of this visit: “Let us take the first step!” And may this first step be in a common direction. To “take the first step” is, above all, to go out and meet others with Christ the Lord. And he always asks us to take a determined and sure step towards our brothers and sisters, and to renounce our claim to be forgiven without showing forgiveness, to be loved without showing love. If Colombia wants a stable and lasting peace, it must urgently take a step in this direction, which is that of the common good, of equity, of justice, of respect for human nature and its demands. Only if we help to untie the knots of violence, will we unravel the complex threads of disagreements. We are asked to take the step of meeting with our brothers and sisters, and to risk a correction that does not want to expel but to integrate. And we are asked to be charitably firm in that which is not negotiable. In short, the demand is to build peace, “speaking not with the tongue but with hands and works” (Saint Peter Claver), and to lift up our eyes to heaven together. The Lord is able to untie that which seems impossible to us, and he has promised to accompany us to the end of time, and will bring to fruition all our efforts. [1] She also had the wisdom of charity and knew how to find God in her neighbour; nor was she paralyzed by injustice and challenges, because “when conflict arises, some people simply look at it and go their way as if nothing happened; they wash their hands of it and get on with their lives. Others embrace it in such a way that they become its prisoners; they lose their bearings, project onto institutions their own confusion and dissatisfaction and thus make unity impossible. But there is also a third way, and it is the best way to deal with conflict. It is the willingness to face conflict head on, to resolve it and to make it a link in the chain of a new process” (Evangelii Gaudium, 227)

[ericdeggans]

CBS’ Diversity Controversy, HBO’s Confederate Highlight Fight to Resist the White, Male Gaze in TV

To some, it was a landmark moment; when a roomful of journalists descended on CBS executives to pillory the company at length for its lack of diversity in primetime shows.

But, to me, it felt like a flashback to a time five or 10 years ago, when every network played this game.

Facing reporters at the TV Critics Association summer press tour Wednesday, CBS executives tried their best to frame the situation to their advantage. Their executives took the stage after a press conference with the cast and producers of its S.W.A.T. reboot, which is the only new show on the network featuring a non-white person in the lead role, with a white man, black man and Asian man as executive producers.

Still, they had few good explanations why, for the second year in a row, all their new fall primetime shows star males (in fact, every new show they have planned for the entire 2017-18 TV season stars men). Or why they couldn’t pay the two most prominent non-white co-stars on their Hawaii Five-O reboot the same as the two white males who star in the show. Or why the casting departments for the network – as alleged by Maureen Ryan from Variety and not contradicted by the network – are staffed entirely by white people.

“There is change happening on CBS,” insisted Kelly Kahl, a longtime executive in charge of scheduling at the network who became entertainment president earlier this year. “We have two shows with diverse leads this year that we didn’t have on the schedule last year. We have a midseason show with a lead character who’s gay. And over the last few years, if you look at the number of diverse series regulars, that’s up almost 60 percent.”

This is how TV executives at most every network talked about representation years ago, as incremental, careful advancement. Numbers of inclusion barely budged as network executives insisted they were doing the best they could. Of course, that was before shows like Fox’s Empire, ABC’s Scandal and Black-ish and NBC’s This Is Us revealed how much success could be found in featuring non-white characters without reservation or equivocations.

I think this issue boils down to something simple: Resisting the white, male gaze.

Shows with people of color in starring roles and status as creators and/or executive producers – for example, in series like FX’s Atlanta, HBO’s Insecure or Netflix’s Master of None -- have told unique stories through the perspectives of non-white people. Women have found similar success with series like Hulu’s The Handmaid’s Tale and HBO’s Big Little Lies. And once those perspectives brought success, it was surprising how quickly many TV outlets figured out how to bring more of those characters and stories to their air.

But CBS, long considered the most traditional broadcast network, has moved slowest to offer something similar. It has a profitable, long-running business model built on formulaic programming. And as much as executives like Kahl insist they are changing things, there’s also a sense they are too hesitant to challenge their audience -- with a slate of new shows which feel like slightly tweaked versions of many series which came before. 

A long line of CBS’ most popular shows, from NCIS and Hawaii Five-O to Bull and MacGuyver, start and center their narratives on the perspectives of white, male characters.

And it feels long past time for that to change.

Even the way TV executives talk about these issues can make progress difficult. “Every single drama on our air has at least one diverse regular character,” Kahl said of CBS during the press conference.

Using the word “diverse” as an adjective is an odd way to refer to non-white characters, though it is something TV executives do regularly. It both avoids mentioning the topic of race – which is the heart of the issue, most times – and positions non-white characters as a divergence from typical casting and programming decisions. And it leaves women out of the discussion entirely.

CBS has outsourced much of its diversity to other platforms in its media family. Its streaming network, CBS All Access, will feature the first Star Trek series centered on a female, non-white Federation officer, Star Trek: Discovery. And its sister network The CW has Latino-centered comedy Jane the Virgin and a midseason show which will be the first primetime network TV series to feature a black superhero since the mid-1990s, called Black Lightning.

But if diversity in casting is good enough for sister networks and streaming, why isn’t it good enough for the mothership network?

A version of this struggle also seems to fuel to controversy over HBO’s proposed series Confederate – a drama set in an alternate reality where the Confederacy didn’t lose the Civil War and slavery remains a reality in modern America.

HBO announced the series back in mid-July by emphasizing its creators – David Benioff and D.B. Weiss, the executive producers of its hit Game of Thrones. But when the Twitterverse heard that two white guys were going to produce this series – overlooking the fact that two black producers will be working on it, too – the backlash was severe and continues today.

Some critics seemed to make an awful lot of assumptions about a show that doesn’t even have a script yet. But others made arguments which hearken back to objections over the white, male gaze. Why must this alternate reality be centered on black subjugation and suffering, yet again? Why can’t producers imagine a world where non-white people actually achieve freedom?

African American producer Will Packer stepped forward with an alternative, telling the industry website Deadline about a show he is developing for Amazon, called Black America, about a world where black people formed a country from three states given to them after the Civil War as reparations.

This is a show where black people likely won’t be victims of a system they can’t control. And it may be no coincidence that it is created by a black producer.

I spoke to CBS’ Kahl after his press conference ended, and he remained steadfast. “In my heart, I believe we’re moving in the right direction…I think we are getting the job done,” he said, in response to a question on whether their pace of chance is too slow and ineffective. “We want also want to put on, not just diverse shows but successful shows that are inclusive…I would hope you see the progress going forward.”

I hope so, too. Because it seems one of the most venerated names in broadcasting is in danger of becoming a symbol of the bad old days, when the white male gaze was the only perspective available on television.

[ogiarts-blog]

READING- MIXED RACE SUPER MAN

I brought some books throughout this project which I felt would be relevant for my project. All centred around identity or race. The first book I read was “ Mixed-Race Super man written by Will Harris. 

Will Harris is Indonesian and english, he grew up in England and has written this very personal essay with his experience as a man of mixed heritage and other examples of celebrities who are also mixed race eg - Barack Obama and Keanu Reaves. 

Harris in his introduction describes his work “ Mixed Race Superman asks what it means to be mixed race in an increasingly divided world. In an era where a man endorsed by the Klu Klux Klan can sit in the White House, Will Harris considers two very different supermen- Barack Obama and Keanu reaves - each transformed the confusion of a mixed heritage into a heroic identity” also delving into “ exploration of race, identity and masculinity” highlighting the juxtapostion of previously having a mixed race President as opposed to the new some may say “ racist” president who seems evident to cause more divide and controvasy, mentioning his support from Neo-Nazi, and other white supremacy groups...

In conjunction with his It speaks about a time period in which tensions were high with the police, due to multiple injustices and these hate crimes and stabbings. Especially, as these issues are with in the Black community. And although tensions are not as bad here in the UK we do still have a huge problem with stabbings and gang violence still especially in London. And in the US, huge problems between the police and people in minority communities. Some of my family live in America and there is a huge divide between communities- Spanish, Black, White, Jewish in addition to this unimaginably obvious divide theres a big fear of the police as a person of colour. 

He also speaks about his experience growing up in London, when the conversations about race weren’t happening as much as now. He speaks about “ Vague statements about multi-culturalism and the need for intergration” sometimes making the news. And a sense of embarrassment that they were talking about “ people like him”.

Highlighting events of racial hostility in London, and the hate crime against Stephen Lawrence a heart breaking and known case to me. He talks about the negligence from the police and how they mishandled hate crimes at the time. “ Stephen Lawrence was stabbed to death in South London while waiting for the bus. The metropolitan police’s mishandling of the case brought back memories of the 1980′s: of stabbings being un-investigated, the violent and indiscriminate use of stop and search, the shooting of Cherry Groce which led to the 1985 Brixton Riot. A few months after being arrested Stephen Lawrence’s Killer walked free. In 1995 Wayne Douglas was killed in police custody and another riot broke out in Brixton.”

Also speaking about societies expectancy for immediate results. With the New Labour manifesto in 1997 claiming that “our attitudes towards race, sex and sexuality have changed fundamentally”. and questions this statement “ Though we were a racist society- we aren’t anymore”. Which raises questions how can we expect such an immediate result and expect change when racism is institutionalised within the police, education , laws. With stops and searches for more black people, or black people driving nice cars, black people loosing jobs for traditional hair styles and being treated disgustingly by the police. and claiming that people have to “ combine change and social stability”. The evident issue is the only discussions raised are not discussions its a statement. 

Harris goes on to say. “ there wasn’t much social stability for Indian families who had their windows smashed in” and  “ for the South London community Stephen Lawerence had lived in”. Almost as though the social stability must come from minority groups and victims when in fact the change comes from much higher up, and is much bigger than a statement. It needs to be a conversation about race, and division and HOW to create social stability and in subsequently creating change within communities. 

He continues, “ They didn’t want to appear callous, overlooking the needs of ethnic minorities; nor did they want to appear weak, giving into the demands of identity based ‘ pressure groups’. Multiculturalism gave them the perfect rallying cry and emollient, offending no one by including everyone”. I believe this mind set is still very prominent today. ‘ offending no one by  including everyone”. This is similar to the current movement, black lives matter. Where by people who are protesting and trying to create change towards police brutality and the black community. People say in response to this movement “ all lives matter”. But by generalising a specific race related issue you then restrict the rights of people ( minority groups) who need protection and who need the social change. White privilege and male privilege are two problems which are very much in bedded into our society. And there is need to distinguish difference between different ethnic groups, because the issues I may face, as opposed to a muslim woman or a black woman would all be different and are all so individual and personal you can not begin to blend all this social, cultural and political aspects for everyone as the “ same” and “ equal”. Because right not for a lot of people of colour it is not, and there for must be distinguished as different. 

“ Now there was a politician who not only looked different, but talked beautifully- and knowingly- of his mixed race up bringing. Here was a story that was long and painful but seemed to bend implacably towards justice”. And although throughout this book I found the kind of superman comparisons slightly bizarre, but this statement I did relate to. Growing up I didn’t have anyone really who looked like me in cartoons, books, or many role models only celebrities maybe singers or models who were mixed race. But to see Obama, a man who looks like us as the president of the US, was indescribable. It was something that was almost was unimaginable with the deep rooted history of slavery, segregation , racism that they would have a black president and almost highlighted this idea that anything could be possible and the world was changing and mindsets were changing. It was exciting and almost I understand this superman complex he speaks of, this invincible man- despite all of societies hurdles, and the difficulties that arose he became president and created a time of hope .

Unfortunately for me, Harris doesn’t refer to examples of women in history or currently, it is very male orientated. However, as an account of his personal experience I do understand as throughout the exploration for my identity, I have looked at goddesses, female artists and women who have inspired me as these women of colour I relate to personally and have been “ role models” to me. As Keanu Reeves is a celebrity in which Harris looks up to. He does touch on a few times, about feminism, gender-fluidity and trans people.

In conclusion I think that Harris gave a very insightful and personal account of his experience as a man of mixed heritage. I agree with many of his points throughout his essay and discusses similar socio-cultural issues which I have explored. 

HARRIS, W. (2019). MIXED-RACE SUPERMAN.]: MELVILLE House, p.1.

HARRIS, W. (2019). MIXED-RACE SUPERMAN. [: MELVILLE House, p.15.

HARRIS, W. (2019). MIXED-RACE SUPERMAN. : MELVILLE House, p.15.

HARRIS, W. (2019). MIXED-RACE SUPERMAN. [Place of publication not identified]: MELVILLE House, p.15.

HARRIS, W. (2019). MIXED-RACE SUPERMAN: MELVILLE House, p.17.

HARRIS, W. (2019). MIXED-RACE SUPERMAN. : MELVILLE House, p.22.

[ayittey1]

Myths about African Participation in the Slave Trade

 History can be written from three perspectives: from that of the victor, a neutral observer and that of the vanquished. Much of Africa’s history was written by the colonialists (the victors) and obviously the victims of colonialism see things differently. For example, seeing no boxes with “ballots” written on them or a building with “Parliament” written on it, many European colonialists jumped to the conclusion that Africans were laboring under horrible and despot chiefs. Therefore, colonialism was good for the Africans because it liberated them from their terrible rulers. This was one monumental nonsense.

 True, there were no boxes with ballots written on them and no building with Parliament written on it but that did not mean the essence of democratic governance was unknown. That mythology was as nonsensical as the claim that since there were no hamburgers in the village, so Africans did not eat.

 That mythology originated from their failure to make a distinction between the existence of an institution and different forms of the same institution. There are different types of food. The absence of one type – hamburgers – does not mean a complete absence of other types of food. Similarly, there are different types of democracy. Democratic decisions are taken by majority vote or by consensus. In traditional Africa, decision-making is by consensus. The absence of voting did not mean Africans were living under terrible despotic Chiefs.

 There are many other myths about Africa – in particular, African participation in the slave trade. Written from the African perspective, the following seeks to demolish these myths.

 MYTH No. 1: Africans were selling themselves off into slavery before the Europeans on the continent.

 It is true there was slavery in Africa but not the inhumane chattel variety. Slaves in Africa enjoyed certain rights and privileges. Generally, there were no slave markets in black Africa because of the value black Africans place on humanity. The slave markets that were in Africa, according to historians, were in North Africa (or Arab North Africa) - in such places as Fez and Tripoli.

 Slaves generally were principally war captives from inter-tribal warfare. Say there was a war between two neighboring tribes – the Ashanti and the Fante -- and 5,000 Fantes were taken prisoner. The Ashanti King had the following options:

 1.     To keep the 5,000 Fantes in prison, which means he would have to feed, clothe and shelter them - an expensive economic proposition;

2.     To kill them, a very inhumane prospect; or

3.     Sell them off as slaves and use the proceeds to purchase weapons to defend his Ashanti people;

4.     Absorb and integrate the war captives into Ashanti society, a long, arduous and dangerous process since safeguards must be put in place to ensure that former combatants would pledge allegiance to a new society and authority.

 Which option do you think the Ashanti King would take? If you said the third option, you are right because it was the most humane and economically expedient. The Ashanti also chose option 4, absorbed former war captives (slaves) into their society. To make their

integration into Ashanti society as smooth as possible, even the Ashanti King was forbidden to disclose the slave origins of any of his subjects.

 Now, the more important issue is this. YES, the Ashanti King did sell Fante prisoners of war as SLAVES and therefore participated in the slave trade. BUT the Ashanti King did NOT sell his own people - an important distinction. It was the Europeans who failed to make this distinction, which has been the source of much mythology about the slave trade.

 The Europeans made no distinction between the Ashanti King and the Fante slaves. To the Europeans, it was a BLACK African King selling BLACK Africans. Therefore, Black kings and chiefs were selling their own kind or people. Nonsense. To the Ashanti King, the Fantes were NOT his people but rather the Ashanti.

 Recall that about that time in history, medieval Europe was also fighting tribal wars -  between the Flemish, French and the Germans. They were also enslaving one another. But you don't hear the expression, "The Europeans were enslaving their own kind?" do you? Rather, you read of Germans taking French slaves and vice versa.  So make the same distinctions in Africa - The Ashanti King taking Fante slaves, etc.

 MYTH NO.2. "African chiefs just went to the market and just grabbed their people to sell off as slaves."

 You often hear this from African Americans but it is not true for four reasons. First, no African chief can do this and expect to remain chief. He would be removed. As chief, his prerogative is the survival of his tribe. Second, he would be committing an ethnic suicide if he were to sell off his own Ashanti people into slavery. Third, it did not make military sense. He would be depopulating and weakening his own tribe to the benefit of a stronger neighboring tribe. Fourth, their clans would rise up to protect the victim. More importantly, there were traditional injunctions against that. To test this, go to Onitsha market, grab and beat up .Hausa market trader. The entire Hausa ethnic group would go to his/her defense. In fact, many tribal wars started precisely this way -- from a dispute or conflict between two individuals. Furthermore, as Ashanti King or chief, one of his role is to minimize any external threat to his people. And if this means depopulating or selling off the entire Fante tribe into slavery the better off his Ashanti people would be. It would mean less competition for resources.

 MYTH No. 3. "Africans are brothers and sisters and it is treacherous for them to participate in the slave trade."

 Again, tribal or ethnic distinctions are important in Africa. To think that Africans consider members of another tribe as "brothers and sisters" is totally ridiculous -- an exercise in grand delusion. Why would a Hutu government in Rwanda slaughter more than 800,000 Tutsis in Rwanda in 1994? Or tell the Igbo that the Hausa are their brothers and sisters in 1967.

 Before the twentieth century, many societies in the world practiced some form of slavery. Prisoners of war, political opponents and religious dissidents were often enslaved in Old England. For example, in 1530, in England, under the reign of Henry VIII, a vagrant picked up for the second time was whipped and had half an ear cut off; taken for a third time, he was "to be executed as a hardened criminal and enemy of the common weal" (Marx, 1915; p.806). Seventy-two thousand vagrants were thus executed during that reign. In the time of Edward VI (1547), "if anyone refused to work, he shall be condemned as a slave to the person who denounced him as an idler" (Marx, 1915; p.806). The owner of such a slave might whip him, chain him, and brand him on the cheek and forehead with a letter "S" (for Slave), if he disappeared for two weeks. If he ran away a third time he was executed. An idler vagabond caught on the highway was branded on the chest with a "V" (for vagrant). The same laws were in effect during the reigns of Elizabeth (1572) and of Louis XVI in France. The supporters of Monmouth's rebellion in England were sold by the Queen.   Cromwell's Irish and Scottish prisoners were sold to the West Indies and non Muslims who opposed the Sokoto jihad were sold to North Africa.

 Criminals in Europe and Africa could be executed, transported or sold. Europeans favored execution; Africans favored sale.

 “In the eighteenth century there were 300 different offences in Britain for which one could be executed. In Dahomey, there were only two, for the king preferred to sell rather than execute his troublemakers. Those who could not pay their debts were sold for life or until the debt was paid. Among the Yoruba, debt slaves (pawns) were called Iwofa, among the Asante Awowa, and among the Europeans indentured servants. About a quarter of a million white debt slaves entered America before the nineteenth century” (Boahen and Webster, 1970; p.69).

 In pre colonial Africa, social conditions were such that,

 “All the white minorities living in Africa might own Black slaves, but slaves and white masters alike were all subjects of a Black Emperor: they were all under the same African political power. No historian worth his salt can permit the obscuring of this politico social context, so that only the one fact of Black slavery emerges from it” (Diop, 1987; p.92).

 There was, however, an important distinction between the slave/master relationship in Africa and that in Europe between serf/lord, which is often overlooked. In Africa, slavery was more of a social distinction without economic consequence than fact. The African slave, "instead of being deprived of the fruits of his labor, as was the case with the artisan or the serf of the Middle Ages, could, on the contrary, add to it wealth given him by the `lord'" (Diop, 1987: p.2). Slaves of the kings of Mali and the Askias of Gao "enjoyed complete liberty of movement. Thus an ordinary slave of Askia Daud, a native of Kanta, was able to carry out a pilgrimage to Mecca without his master's knowledge" (Diop, 1987; p.153).

 To avoid the ugly connotations associated with commercial slaving, Vaughan (1986) suggested the use of limbry: "Existing data, albeit tenuous, suggest that about 80 percent of African societies had limbry" (p.174). In contrast to commercial slavery, African "limbries" "were not on the whole mistreated, dehumanized or exploited" (Vaughan, 1986; p.174).

 The privileges accorded them, however, varied from tribe to tribe. In Nigeria, the treatment of slaves was by no means harsh; nor was their lot deplorable. The majority were integrated into the society and the respective families of their owners in order to retain their loyalty, prevent rebellion and get the best out of them (Falola, 1985; p.99). The slaves were free to some extent; they could intermarry among themselves, own property and redeem themselves if they had the means.

 Among the Lobi of Gabon, slaves were considered as "new children." The Massangou of the Chaillou Hills in Gabon, incorporated slaves (war captives) into the entire community to replace those lost in war. In Dahomey, the children of slaves were free people incorporated into the master's family with all the rights except the right to inherit political leadership (Simiyu, 1988; p.59). But in Senegal, slaves (djem) were closely associated to power. They were represented in royal courts and many became de facto ministers (Diop, 1987:2).

 More importantly, Boahen and Webster (1970) pointed out that:

 “Slaves had many privileges in African kingdoms. In Asante, Oyo and Bornu, they held important offices in the bureaucracy, serving as the Alafin's Ilari in the subject towns of Oyo, as controller of the treasury in Asante, and as Waziri and army commanders in Bornu. Al Hajj Umar made a slave emir of Nioro, one of the most important of the emirates of the Tokolor empire, and in the Niger Delta states slaves rose to become heads of Houses, positions next in rank to the king. Jaja, who had once been the lowest kind of slave, became the most respected king in the delta, and was no exception; one of the Alaketus of Ketu, and Rabeh of Bornu, rose from slave to king (p.69).

 Since slaves faced few barriers to occupational mobility or economic advancement, there was hardly any need for a tumultuous social revolution, such as the French Revolution in which the exploited overthrew their lords. Slavery, of course, was never under any circumstances an ideal institution and there were cases of slave revolts. One example was the revolt under Afonja in the Oyo empire. Another was the Koranko revolt in 1838 against the Susu of Sierra Leone. Led by Bilale, the Koranko ex slaves built a fortified town to offer freedom to runaway slaves. In Calabar, the slaves united in an organization called the Blood Men, and forced the freeborn to respect their human rights (Boahen and Webster, 1970; p.70).

 MYTH NO. 4: The Europeans were the ones who introduced chattel slavery into Africa.

 In pre-colonial Africa, the Europeans and Arabs were battling each other to subjugate Africa. By the 17th century, North Africa, inhabited by the Berbers, was already under Islamic conquest. For centuries, the Berbers have fought – and are still today -- fighting Arab imperialism in Morocco and Algeria, where Arab names, religion and culture are being forced upon them. The Berbers had their own language, music and culture until the region was effectively Arabized as Islam spread a thousand years ago. According to the Amazigh (Berber) Cultural Association in America, a Moroccan law, enacted in Nov 1996 and referred to as Dahir No. 1.96.97, "imposes Arabic names on an entire citizenry more than half of which is not Arabic”. The Berbers in Algeria, too, are up in arms. Fed up with years of discrimination and persecution at the hands of the Arab majority, Berbers, who make up 20 percent of Algeria's 32 million people, seek more autonomy in the eastern region of Kabylie. They were the original inhabitants of North Africa when invading Arabs introduced Islam. Old tensions erupted into violence after a Berber schoolboy died in police custody in April 2001. Street clashes in Kabylia between the police and Berber militants left more than 100 protesters dead. "The Berbers also want the government's police force, which they accuse of being partisan, to withdraw from Kabylie, and they want their language, Tamazight, to be recognized as an official language" (The New York Times, June 30, 2003; p.A4).

 West Africa was saved from Islamic conquest by the Sahara, which served as an effective bulwark against Islamic expansionism. In East Africa, Islam made inroads in the 17th century – peacefully at first but with diabolical intentions at a later state. While the Europeans organized the West African slave trade, the Arabs managed the East African and trans-Saharan counterparts.  For the trans-Saharan slave trade, an estimated 9 million captives were shipped to slave markets in Fez, Marrakesh (Morocco); Constantine (Algeria); Tunis (Tunisia), Fezzan, Tripoli (Libya); and Cairo (Egypt). No black African will ever forget that in the 19th century, over 2 million black slaves were shipped from East Africa to Arabia, a slave trade operated by Arabs.

 The Zanzibar slave trade, with an annual sale that increased according to some estimates from 10,000 slaves in the early 19th century to between 40,000 and 45,000 in the mid‑19th century, was at its height during the rule of Sayyid Said (1804‑1856 ‑ born 1794), sultan of Muscat and Oman...  

 Enslaving and slave trading in East Africa were peculiarly savage in a traffic notable for its barbarity. Villages were burnt, the unfit villagers massacred. The enslaved were yoked together, several hundreds in a caravan, and on their journey to the coast, which could be as long as 1280 kilometres...It is estimated that only one in five of those captured in the interior reached Zanzibar. The slave trade seems to have been more catastrophic in East Africa than in West Africa (Wickins, 1981; p.184).

 Diseases such as smallpox and cholera, introduced by marauding Arab caravans penetrating the interior in search of slaves, decimated entire local populations and were far more devastating than the actual export of slaves to Indian Ocean markets.  According to Gordon (1989),

 “One particularly brutal practice was the mutilation of young African boys, sometimes no more than 9 or    ten years old, to create eunuchs, who brought a higher price in the slave markets of the Middle East. Slave traders often created “eunuch stations” along the major African slave routes where the necessary surgery was performed in unsanitary conditions. Only one out of every 10 boys subjected to the mutilation actually survived the surgery.

The taking of slaves – in razzias, or raids, on peaceful African villages – also had a high casualty rate. The typical practice was to conduct a pre-dawn raid on an unsuspecting village and kill off as many of the men and older women as possible. Young women and children were then abducted as the preferred “booty” for the raiders. 

Young women were targeted because of their value as concubines or sex slaves in markets. “The most common and enduring purpose for acquiring slaves in the Arab world was to exploit them for sexual purposes. These women were nothing less than sexual objects who, with some limitations, were expected to make themselves available to their owners. . .Islamic law catered to the sexual interests of a man by allowing him to take as many as four wives at one time and to have as many concubines as his purse allowed. Young women and girls were often inspected before purchase in private areas of the slave market by the prospective buyer (p.35).

 Some of the African slaves were shipped to Iraq, where they were inhumanely treated. In the latter part of the 19th century, they revolted and were subsequently placed in the Iraqi army. According to Walusako Mwalilino, a Malawian historian, "From 1859 to 1872, between 20,000 and 25,000 slaves were shipped to southwest Asian ports" (The Washington Times, Sept 21, 1995; p.A14). But the Arab slave trade continued well into the 20th century. According to Thomas Cantwell, an American reporter, "the last interdicted slave ship was in 1947, a dhow from Mombasa" (The Washington Post, June 4, 1994; p.A18).  American reporter, Timothy Williams, claimed that,

 “Officially, Iraq is a colorblind society that in the tradition of Prophet Muhammad treats black people with equality and respect. But on the packed dirt streets of Zubayr, Iraq’s scaled-down version of Harlem, African-Iraqis talk of discrimination so steeped in Iraqi culture that they are commonly referred to as “abd” — slave in Arabic — prohibited from interracial marriage and denied even menial jobs.

Historians say that most African-Iraqis arrived as slaves from East Africa as part of the Arab slave trade starting about 1,400 years ago. They worked in southern Iraq’s salt marshes and sugar cane fields.

Though slavery — which in Iraq included Arabs as well as Africans — was banned in the 1920s, it continued until the 1950s, African-Iraqis say.

 Recently, they have begun to campaign for recognition as a minority population, which would grant them the same benefits as Christians, including reserved seats in Parliament.

“Black people here are living in fear,” said Jalal Dhiyab Thijeel, an advocate for the country’s estimated 1.2 million African-Iraqis. “We want to end that” (The New York Times, Dec 2, 2009; p.A22).

 The official Libyan and Arab line on slavery is that: "The Arab countries are a natural extension to the African continent. The African Arabs, or those who carried the indulgent message of Islam, were the first to effectively oppose slavery as inhumane and unnatural. The claim that Arabs were involved in the trade at all is a mischievous invention of the West, made in order to divide the Arabs from their brothers and sisters who live in the African continent" (New Africa, Nov 1984; p.12). Nonsense.

 During the black struggle for civil rights in the United States and independence in Africa in the 1950s and 1960s, Afro-Arab differences and ill-feelings were buried. Black leaders, seduced by the fallacious premise that "the enemy of my enemy must be my friend”, made common cause with the Arabs. In the United States, many blacks dropped their "European" or "slave" names and adopted Islamic ones. In Africa, black leaders entered into alliances and sought support from Arab states for the liberation struggle against Western colonialism. Grand Afro-Arab solidarity accords were pompously announced. Drooling, grandiloquent speeches announced meretricious Afro-Arab summits. Little came out of them, and since independence, black Africans have gradually realized that the Arabs regard them "expendable”. The Arabs are just as ready as the French to use them as pawns to achieve their chimerical geopolitical schemes and global religious imperialism/domination.

 REFERENCES

Ayittey, George B.N. (2006). Indigenous African Institutions. Dobbs Ferry, NY: Transnational Publishers.

 Boahen, A.A. and J.B. Webster. History of West Africa. New York: Praeger, 1970.

Diop Cheikh Anta. Pre‑colonial Black Africa. Westport: Lawrence Hill & Company, 1987.

Falola, Toyin. "Nigeria's Indigenous Economy." in Nigerian History and Culture. ed. Olaniyan, 1985.

 Gordon, Murray (1989).  Slavery in the Arab World. New York, NY: New Amsterdam Books.

Martin, Phyllis M and Partrick O'Meara eds. Africa. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986.

 Marx, Karl. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy. Chicago: Kerr, 1915.

 Simiyu, V.G. "The Democratic Myth in The African Traditional Societies," in Democratic Theory and Practice in Africa. eds. Walter O. Oyugi et. al. Portsmouth, NH: 1988.

 Vaughan, James H. "Population and Social Organization," in Martin and O'Meara, 1986.

 Wickins, Peter (1981). An Economic History of Africa. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

 George B.N. Ayittey, PhD

Washington, DC

[bountyofbeads]

PLEASE READ 📖 AND SHARE this IMPORTANT PERSPECTIVE from Ms. Velez on the history of violence and terrorism against people.

"Donald Trump and his minions are but a symptom of the white supremacist problem we all face today, and that problem is rooted deep in the  foundations of this nation. Become a part of the solution."

Trump is a continuation and culmination of the long trail of white terrorism against black folks

By Denise Oliver Velez | Published Aug 11, 2019 9:00am EDT | Daily Kos | Posted August 11, 2019 11:14 AM ET | VIDEOS

Say her name: Elizabeth Lawrence.

During the last week of June 1933, Elizabeth Lawrence, an African-American mother and school teacher, was killed by a mob in her own home near Birmingham. Ms. Lawrence was walking along a country road about five miles from her home when a group of young white children began taunting and throwing rocks and dirt at her. Being a school teacher and mother herself, she reacted as many might. Ms. Lawrence verbally reprimanded the children without ever touching them. However, in the years post-slavery, all that was needed to justify violence against a black person was the word of a white person, even a child. Like so many other African Americans who were lynched based on these social norms, Ms. Lawrence was now at risk for violent retaliation because she committed a “social transgression.” 

On July 5, Ms. Lawrence was alone in her home when the children’s parents surrounded her house. It is unknown if she exited the house in protest or if the mob stormed inside during the attack, but Ms. Lawrence was shot and her house burned to the ground, likely with her still inside. 

Reading the story of just one of the many thousands of victims of white terrorism here in the U.S. made me stop, and think about what we are faced with today.

I took this story personally. 

I am the daughter and grand-niece of  black school teachers, all of whom would have done exactly what Ms. Laurence did. I grew up in black communities where elders chastised children, who weren’t necessarily their own, as a matter of custom. 

Lawrence’s son Alexander fled to Boston so that he would not face the same fate. No one was ever charged with her murder. The fact that so many white people who have participated in terror paid no price for the slaughter they perpetrated makes me wonder why anyone is “surprised” we have an open white supremacist sitting in the White House. Trump is, of course, aided and abetted by Republicans in Congress and supported by those white Americans who keep them all in office. 

I sit here and think about the children and grandchildren of the white people who are alive today here in my country, whose immediate ancestors attended “spectacle” lynchings.

*Trigger warning if you can’t deal with reading about violence.

Here’s how the Equal Justice Initiative describes them:

More than 4000 African Americans were killed in racial terror lynchings between 1877 and 1950. Many of these extrajudicial murders were celebratory public spectacles, where thousands of white people, including elected officials and prominent citizens, gathered to witness victims being gruesomely tortured and mutilated. White newspapers advertised these carnival-like events; vendors sold food, photographers printed postcards, and victims’ clothing and body parts were given out as souvenirs.

In Newnan, Georgia, in 1899, at least 2000 whites watched as a white mob mutilated and burned alive a black man named Sam Hose, and then sold pieces of his organs and bones. In 1916, a white mob in Waco, Texas, tortured and lynched a mentally disabled 17-year-old black boy named Jesse Washington in front of city hall, stripping, stabbing, beating, and mutilating him before burning him alive in front of 15,000 white spectators. Charred pieces of his body were dragged through town, and his fingers and fingernails were taken as keepsakes.

Public spectacle lynchings were most frequent in the South, but also occurred in Northern and Midwestern states as black Americans migrated during the 20th century. In 1920, 10,000 whites attended the lynchings of three black circus workers in Duluth, Minnesota. In Springfield, Missouri, in 1906, two black men, Horace Dunn and Fred Coker, were hanged and shot to death for a crowd of 5000 whites. White lynch mobs and spectators rarely faced consequences. Although these killings were widely attended and photographed, whites committed public spectacle lynchings with impunity.

Before I die, I hope to make a pilgrimage to Alabama to visit the memorial depicted in the photo at the top of this story.

New York Times reporter Campbell Roberts on described the opening last year in an article titled “A Lynching Memorial Is Opening. The Country Has Never Seen Anything Like It”:

The National Memorial for Peace and Justice, which opens Thursday on a six-acre site overlooking the Alabama State Capitol, is dedicated to the victims of American white supremacy. And it demands a reckoning with one of the nation’s least recognized atrocities: the lynching of thousands of black people in a decades-long campaign of racist terror.

At the center is a grim cloister, a walkway with 800 weathered steel columns, all hanging from a roof. Etched on each column is the name of an American county and the people who were lynched there, most listed by name, many simply as “unknown.” The columns meet you first at eye level, like the headstones that lynching victims were rarely given. But as you walk, the floor steadily descends; by the end, the columns are all dangling above, leaving you in the position of the callous spectators in old photographs of public lynchings.

The magnitude of the killing is harrowing, all the more so when paired with the circumstances of individual lynchings, some described in brief summaries along the walk: Parks Banks, lynched in Mississippi in 1922 for carrying a photograph of a white woman; Caleb Gadly, hanged in Kentucky in 1894 for “walking behind the wife of his white employer”; Mary Turner, who after denouncing her husband’s lynching by a rampaging white mob, was hung upside down, burned and then sliced open so that her unborn child fell to the ground.

White massacres of blacks and other people of color are part and parcel of our history, starting with Native Americans. They are rarely included in what is taught as “history” in schools across the U.S. Head over to the Zinn Education Project for a listing titled “Massacres in U.S. History”:

Here is a list of some of the countless massacres in the history of the United States.

Most of these massacres were designed to suppress voting rights, land ownership, economic advancement, education, freedom of the press, religion, LGBTQ rights, and/or labor rights of African Americans, Latinos, Native Americans, Asians, and immigrants. While often referred to as “race riots,” they were massacres to maintain white supremacy.

One of the best explanations about why it is important for students to learn this history is included in the article (and related lesson) by Linda Christensen, Burning Tulsa: The Legacy of Black Dispossession.

A tweet thread by historian Stephen West shows how politicians fueled hate crimes during the Reconstruction era, with parallels today. Ursula Wolfe-Rocca writes about Red Summer of 1919, Remembering Red Summer — Which Textbooks Seem Eager to Forget.

I was watching(See segment on website) Rachel Maddow on MSNBC on Tuesday, and she brought up the case of one of the last lynchings to take place in the U.S.: the terrorist murder of Michael Donald.

On the night of March 21, 1981, a cross crackled and burned on the lawn of the Mobile County courthouse—the Ku Klux Klan’s grim protest of the outcome of a local murder trial. It was just the beginning of the terror that would take place that night.

The cross burned out, but the Klan’s anger didn’t. Later that night, two men roamed Mobile looking for a black man to kill. They found him: 19-year-old Michael Donald. Before the night was through, Donald had been murdered and his body hung from a tree.

Maddow pursued a line of thought focusing on using legal avenues to potentially destroy the sources of funding for white supremacists.

I agree with the idea, as just one part of what needs to be done to combat white supremacist terror. However, it places the onus of taking action onto the shoulders of the victims’ families.

It does little to erase what I call the “collective amnesia” of white people here in the U.S. for the role they have played—and continue to play—in maintaining white supremacy.

The strongest case made in this respect that I’ve read since the advent of Trump came from Ta-Nehisi Coates. If you missed it when he wrote it in 2017, I strongly suggest you read the entire piece titled “The First White President: The foundation of Donald Trump’s presidency is the negation of Barack Obama’s legacy.”

There is far too much in this tour de force to cite here without violating copyright.

I was struck by his critique of “the left” and its current avoidance of really addressing white supremacy in pursuit of white working-class Trump voters.

The focus on one subsector of Trump voters—the white working class—is puzzling, given the breadth of his white coalition. Indeed, there is a kind of theater at work in which Trump’s presidency is pawned off as a product of the white working class as opposed to a product of an entire whiteness that includes the very authors doing the pawning. The motive is clear: escapism. To accept that the bloody heirloom remains potent even now, some five decades after Martin Luther King Jr. was gunned down on a Memphis balcony—even after a black president; indeed, strengthened by the fact of that black president—is to accept that racism remains, as it has since 1776, at the heart of this country’s political life. The idea of acceptance frustrates the left. The left would much rather have a discussion about class struggles, which might entice the white working masses, instead of about the racist struggles that those same masses have historically been the agents and beneficiaries of. Moreover, to accept that whiteness brought us Donald Trump is to accept whiteness as an existential danger to the country and the world. But if the broad and remarkable white support for Donald Trump can be reduced to the righteous anger of a noble class of smallville firefighters and evangelicals, mocked by Brooklyn hipsters and womanist professors into voting against their interests, then the threat of racism and whiteness, the threat of the heirloom, can be dismissed. Consciences can be eased; no deeper existential reckoning is required.

He concludes:

...the most powerful country in the world has handed over all its affairs—the prosperity of its entire economy; the security of its 300 million citizens; the purity of its water, the viability of its air, the safety of its food; the future of its vast system of education; the soundness of its national highways, airways, and railways; the apocalyptic potential of its nuclear arsenal—to a carnival barker who introduced the phrase grab ’em by the pussy into the national lexicon. It is as if the white tribe united in demonstration to say, “If a black man can be president, then any white man—no matter how fallen—can be president.” And in that perverse way, the democratic dreams of Jefferson and Jackson were fulfilled.

The American tragedy now being wrought is larger than most imagine and will not end with Trump. In recent times, whiteness as an overt political tactic has been restrained by a kind of cordiality that held that its overt invocation would scare off “moderate” whites. This has proved to be only half true at best. Trump’s legacy will be exposing the patina of decency for what it is and revealing just how much a demagogue can get away with. It does not take much to imagine another politician, wiser in the ways of Washington and better schooled in the methodology of governance—and now liberated from the pretense of antiracist civility—doing a much more effective job than Trump.

It has long been an axiom among certain black writers and thinkers that while whiteness endangers the bodies of black people in the immediate sense, the larger threat is to white people themselves, the shared country, and even the whole world. There is an impulse to blanch at this sort of grandiosity. When W. E. B. Du Bois claims that slavery was “singularly disastrous for modern civilization” or James Baldwin claims that whites “have brought humanity to the edge of oblivion: because they think they are white,” the instinct is to cry exaggeration. But there really is no other way to read the presidency of Donald Trump. The first white president in American history is also the most dangerous president—and he is made more dangerous still by the fact that those charged with analyzing him cannot name his essential nature, because they too are implicated in it.

This short video(Website) illustrates the content of the essay, noting that Trump is our first “white President” elected solely because of his whiteness, with no other redeeming values or qualifications.

I concur.

Coates cites James Baldwin, who wrote “On Being ‘White’ and Other Lies” in an essay published in Essence in 1984:

There has never been a labor movement in this country, the proof being the absence of a Black presence in the so-called father-to-son unions. There are, perhaps, some niggers in the window; but Blacks have no power in the labor unions. Just so does the white community, as a means of keeping itself white, elect, as they imagine, their political representatives. No nation in the world, including England, is represented by so stunning a pantheon of the relentlessly mediocre. I will not name names I will leave that to you. But this cowardice, this necessity of justifying a totally false identity and of justifying what must be called a genocidal history, has placed everyone now living into the hands of the most ignorant and powerful people the world has ever seen: And how did they get that way?

By deciding that they were white. By opting for safety instead of life. By persuading themselves that a Black child's life meant nothing compared with a white child's life. By abandoning their children to the things white men could buy. By informing their children that Black women, Black men and Black children had no human integrity that those who call themselves white were bound to respect. And in this debasement and definition of Black people, they debased and defamed themselves.

And have brought humanity to the edge of oblivion: because they think they are white. Because they think they are white, they do not dare confront the ravage and the lie of their history. Because they think they are white, they cannot allow themselves to be tormented by the suspicion that all men are brothers. Because they think they are white, they are looking for, or bombing into existence, stable populations, cheerful natives and cheap labor. Because they think they are white, they believe, as even no child believes, in the dream of safety. Because they think they are white, however vociferous they may be and however multitudinous, they are as speechless as Lot's wife— looking backward, changed into a pillar of salt.

However, White being, absolutely, a moral choice (for there are no white people), the crisis of leadership for those of us whose identity has been forged, or branded, as Black is nothing new. We—who were not Black before we got here either, who were defined as Black by the slave trade—have paid for the crisis of leadership in the white community for a very long time, and have resoundingly, even when we face the worst about ourselves, survived, and triumphed over it. If we had not survived and triumphed, there would not be a Black American alive. And the fact that we are still here—even in suffering, darkness, danger, endlessly defined by those who do not dare define, or even confront, themselves is the key to the crisis in white leadership. The past informs us of various kinds of people—criminals, adventurers and saints, to say nothing, of course, of popes—but it is the Black condition, and only that, which informs us concerning white people.

Baldwin, of course, was not the only author and black political thinker to address the issue of whiteness and white supremacy.

We have just lost Toni Morrison. Her death has revived interest in a piece she wrote after Trump was elected.

It was titled “Making America White Again,” and the subhed read “The choices made by white men, who are prepared to abandon their humanity out of fear of black men and women, suggest the true horror of lost status.”

On Election Day, how eagerly so many white voters—both the poorly educated and the well educated—embraced the shame and fear sowed by Donald Trump. The candidate whose company has been sued by the Justice Department for not renting apartments to black people. The candidate who questioned whether Barack Obama was born in the United States, and who seemed to condone the beating of a Black Lives Matter protester at a campaign rally. The candidate who kept black workers off the floors of his casinos. The candidate who is beloved by David Duke and endorsed by the Ku Klux Klan.

William Faulkner understood this better than almost any other American writer. In “Absalom, Absalom,” incest is less of a taboo for an upper-class Southern family than acknowledging the one drop of black blood that would clearly soil the family line. Rather than lose its “whiteness” (once again), the family chooses murder.

Toni Morrison, who chronicled the African American experience in fiction over five decades, has died aged 88. The novelist was the first African American woman to win the Nobel Prize for Literature and is widely regarded as a champion for repressed minorities. Speaking on racism, Morrison said in an interview: "If you can only be tall because someone else is on their knees then you have a serious problem. And my feeling is white people have a very, very serious problem"

Keith Boykin ✔@keithboykin

"If you can only be tall because somebody is on their knees, then you have a serious problem. And my feeling is white people have a very, very serious problem, and they should start thinking about what they can do about it.”

Rest In Power Toni Morrison

9:51 AM - Aug 6, 2019

As I have done in the past and will continue to do in the present and into the future, I call upon those of you who are defined or define yourselves as “white” to stand up and fight this plague inflicting our nation. Black folks, as only approximately 13% of the population, cannot fix it alone.

Donald Trump and his minions are but a symptom of the white supremacist problem we all face today, and that problem is rooted deep in the foundations of this nation.

Become a part of the solution.

[mbonafedefilmfestivals2018-blog]

My five favorite films

1) Gladiator: The magnificent Gladiator is a sprawling, enthralling Roman orgy of blood, passion, betrayal and revenge. It is monumental movie-making: visually thrilling, technically astonishing, and emotionally engaging.Rome, is outstanding (anachronistic, computer-generated "helicopter" shot of the Colosseum included). The key to Gladiator's greatness is Russell Crowe's career-best performance in the lead role.As Maximus Decimus Meridius, he is obliged to combine the courage of the world with the political sense of a devoted family; and he does so brightly, laser stare or a barely intelligible growl. He is simply mesmerizing.Maximus's troubles begin after he has conquered the rebellious tribes of Germany and learns that Caesar (Richard Harris) has chosen him as his successor. When Caesar's son, the whingeing wimp Commodus (Joaquin Phoenix), finds out, he grabs power for himself with breathtaking brutality. Maximus flees but is sold into slavery, ending up as a gladiator in Rome, where he eventually confronts the snivelling architect of his misfortunes in the arena.It's an epic tale - most of it pure fiction - eloquently told. But, though the film bagged five Oscars, which was endlessly quotable script ("At my signal, unleash hell") was mystifyingly overlooked. 

2) Gomorra: Matteo Garrone has created a gruelling species of neo-neorealist Italian cinema from Roberto Saviano's bestselling book Gomorra, about the power and reach of the Neapolitan mob: the camorra. The title's bleak play on words is almost inaudible beneath the film's thundering detonation. After the final credits, it is hard to escape the fear, even the despair, that this whole area all of Naples, all of southern Italy, is suitable.The action takes place mostly in and around the tenement buildings of Scampìa in Naples; Garrone presents it as a multi-stranded epic of various characters in various stages up the food chain. The mob has been split by a turf war, called a "secession", signalled in the film's first minute by a grisly gang hit on some camorristi in a tanning salon: plump, self-admiring, nude wiseguys bathed in an eerie blue light, who are shot dead by a blank-faced crew; the killers impassively deposit their weapons in a sports bag held open for them by a female associate waiting for them in the foyer. Then, and at all other times in the film, no police officers or other authority figures take any sort of effective or preventive action, and the Roman Catholic church is utterly absent. The resulting war divides loyalties, and creates ruptures and fissions that discharge individual stories like jetsam.Marco (Marco Macor) and Piselli (Ciro Petrone) are two brash teenagers, obsessed with Brian de Palma's Scarface and with becoming local bosses themselves: a flukey success stealing cocaine at the very beginning emboldens them to draw attention to themselves with suicidally flashy behaviour. An even younger boy, perhaps 12 or 13, is Totò (Salvatore Abruzzese); he yearns to join the mob, but in the meanwhile earns a few euros picking up shopping for a local woman whose husband appears to be "away". Don Ciro (Gianfelice Imparato) is a harassed bean-counter employed by the camorra to patrol the estate's grim walkways and dole out a grotesque sort of maundy-money to its various mendicants and pensioners: widows, the elderly, those who in general need to be kept pacified. Pasquale (Salvatore Cantalupo) is a camorra tailor presiding over vast sweatshops: engine rooms for the fashion industry. He puts himself in mortal danger by giving lucrative "lessons" to Chinese competitors, and has an epiphany of pure horror when he watches TV coverage of Scarlett Johansson at the Venice film festival wearing an outfit that seems worryingly familiar.Finally, and most nauseatingly, there is the chilling, semi-legitimate figure of Franco, played by the incomparable Toni Servillo, a businessman who offers dumping grounds for toxic waste, importing carcinogens from all over the EU by falsifying importation documents, disregarding safety procedures and working with camorra families to gain access to the land where the cancer-inducing garbage can be dumped. (He talks about a shadowy "Zio" figure who turns out to be a hatchet-faced monster who wants the troublesome Marco and Piselli dealt with.) So the cancer rate thereabouts climbs inexorably upwards, while gangsters get rich and get high and get shot in the head.It is not a mob film in the classical vein, because there is no Scarface or central boss figure with whom we are tacitly allowed to become fascinated. There are just scattered villains and victims, filmed with loose, freewheeling energy and attack. The gloomy, underlit interiors are in contrast to spectacular setpieces in broad daylight, such as an extraordinary wedding procession and most appallingly when Marco and Piselli steal some assault rifles from a camorra weapons dump and, as excited as the children they in fact are, try them out on a deserted stretch of wetland. They have first stripped to their underpants, perhaps because they thought their clothes would become stained. (With cordite? Smoke? Blood?) Their gunfire is ear-splittingly, brain-frazzlingly real, and given how commonplace guns and gunfire are in the movies, it is remarkable how rare this is. Garrone also interestingly conveys what the human face looks like when a gun is fired very close by. There are many scenes when we see the bystander's shock; the face goes into spasm, a microsecond after becoming entirely blank, like that of an animal or a corpse.And beneath all this is the corrupt business of importing waste: literally undermining the entirety of southern Italy with the reckless digging and dumping of poisonous industrial excrement, turning the nation into a gigantic public lavatory, a process facilitated by corruption, by a menacing gangster culture enforcing easy land sales, and by a cynical Italian government. The movie omits that part of Roberto Saviano's book which deals with the camorra's link with Britain. But it certainly leaves us pondering the fact that British, and all EU members, donate the money and the political respectability which serves to cover up the whole dysfunctional business. Gomorrah is a powerful example of of that thrilling current of energy which right now is lighting up Italian cinema.

3) Cinema Paradiso: If ever a movie came from the heart, it was Giuseppe Tornatore's nostalgic Cinema Paradiso (1988) now getting a rerelease to celebrate its silver jubilee. A successful but jaded film director recalls his Sicilian childhood: he was a cheeky scamp called Totò (Salvatore Cascio) helping out in the cinema booth, learning to love movie magic and becoming a friend to the old projectionist Salvatore (Philippe Noiret), in a special place whose movies were censored by the local priest, and whose interior was designed to look like a church, with an altar under the screen. Cinema Paradiso is much loved, though I have occasionally been the man in the Bateman cartoon: the reviewer who confessed to finding Cinema Paradiso a bit sugary and the kid really annoying.There's a scene in which Salvatore confesses to the appalled priest his doubts about the loaves and the fishes: journalists have looked similarly outraged when I have murmured my heretical thoughts aloud. It is perhaps down to Ennio Morricone's syrupy score with its disconcerting melodic resemblance to I've Never Been In Love Before from Guys and Dolls. There's no doubt about the brilliance of its central scene: by twisting the projector's glass screen on a fine summer's night, Salvatore reflects the movie image out into the town square, spread over a neighbouring building, for a glorious open-air performance: the sacred spirit has escaped the temple, with exciting but ultimately catastrophic results. And the final "kiss montage" scene is inspired. It's a real experience and a classic. But a sweet tooth is necessary.

4) On my skin: Director Alessio Cremonini painstakingly reconstructs the high-profile true-crime case of 31-year-old Stefano Cucchi, a former heroin addict arrested by the Italian military police for possession of drugs and beaten so sadistically he died in custody a week later, in On My Skin (Sulla mia pelle). As tensely focused as a thriller, the film is gripping from start to finish, which is surprising given the familiarity of the case in Italy. One of its main assets is rising star Alessandro Borghi, who lends searing credibility to the doomed youth with his low-class Roman accent and street wit, and he turns Cucchi’s seven-day decline into death into a heart-breaking calvary.  This case, which happened in 2009, is still in the appeals courts and more trials are upcoming. But Cremonini and his co-scripter Lisa Nur Sultan pull together the various conflicting legal threads into a single, powerful narrative leaving no doubt that the initial beating was the primary cause of death, aggravated by a criminal lack of medical treatment in a series of Roman hospitals. The Netflix release should give new wind to the prosecution, which has been actively spurred on by the victim’s sister Ilaria Cucchi, here played by Jasmine Trinca in a rather small supporting role.Though one of the most infamous cases of the decade and one that rocked public opinion, Cucchi’s is only one of 172 deaths of inmates that occurred in Italian prisons in the year 2009. The emphasis given to this figure at the end of this tense, grueling pic gives one pause.For those who don’t already know the story, the film opens with a hospital orderly on a locked ward discovering Stefano lifeless in his bed, seven days after he was arrested in his car for possession of 20 grams of hashish and a small amount of cocaine. His backstory begins a week earlier with the essentials of the boy’s life: work in his Dad’s engineering office, boxing workouts at the gym, attendance at Mass, carving up bricks of hash in the apartment his folks have bought for him.One night, while joking with a pal in his parked car, a carabiniere patrol car appears out of nowhere; the uniformed military police are soon joined by two off-duty officers in street clothes. When they find 10 packets of hash on Stefano, they run both boys in for questioning. It is the beginning of a nightmare of unrelenting tension. The key scene of the beating, however, takes place offscreen. In a remote police station in the middle of the night, Stefano is shoved into a cell with three officers. When he emerges his face is a mass of bruises, his back hurts and he can barely walk.His condition worsens with each passing day; he can't eat, drink or urinate. What is hard to comprehend is why he insists that “nothing happened” to him when questioned by other police officers; he ironically says that he fell down the stairs. The doctors don’t believe him, but they wash their hands of him and hide behind bureaucratic protocol when he refuses treatment. The scenes fly by swiftly in Chiara Vullo’s no-nonsense edit, with the ever-weaker youth being dragged from jail to hospital and back to jail and stumbling in front of a judge who barely glances at his swollen face. Only to some other inmates does he confess he was beaten by the police who arrested him.  This is clearly a career-changer for Borghi, whose roles have swung from a violent crime lord in Stefano Sollima’s Suburra to a mysterious lover in Ferzan Ozpetek’s Veiled Naples. He is barely recognizable with his shaved head that emphasizes his huge eyes and emaciated frame. Keeping Roberto De Angelis' production design simple and the sets verging on barren, Cremonini makes sure all the attention is focused on the protagonist. The only breakaways are to his upset older parents and his married sister Ilaria, honest middle-class people who live on the wrong side of town, but have struggled to see him clear of the drug trap. Unbelievably, they’re denied access to their son and brother, even after they’re told he’s been hospitalized, and the bureaucratic runaround they’re subjected to is inhuman.Matteo Cocco’s (Pericle) cinematography, clean and limited in its palette, manages to be striking without ever calling attention to itself. Not so the use of Mokadelic’s music, which subscribes to the common modern vice of raising the volume in a misguided attempt to dominate the mood and ends up sounding menacing but maudlin.

5) Life is beautiful: It may have been showered with awards (including three Oscars) and struck box-office gold around the world, but "La Vita è Bella" remains a deeply problematic contribution to the growing body of films about the Holocaust.Written and directed by Italian comedian Roberto Benigni, and photographed by master cinematographer Tonino Delli Colli, it is a film of two distinct halves, inspired by Dante's observation that, "There is no bigger tragedy than to remember the happy times during the misery."We begin in late 1930s Tuscany, where the clownish Guido (a permanently grinning Benigni) arrives in the town of Arezzo. Dreaming of opening a bookshop, he finds temporary work as a waiter and begins to woo blushing schoolteacher Dora (Braschi, the director's wife) who's engaged to the local Fascist official. Punctuating this fairy tale love story are moments of Chaplinesque slapstick, including the Jewish Guido's bravura impersonation of a school inspector.The two lovers marry and have an adorable child Giosué (Cantarini), but then several years later the family are deported to a German-run concentration camp. There the father pretends to his son that the brutal conditions and screaming guards are part of an elaborate and bizarre game where points are awarded for good behaviour and first prize is a tank.Music changes with the development of the story, at the beginning it is a colorful, happy music, then it becomes melancholic, sad, but at the same time it is a bearer of hope. Looking at the film superficially it could be criticized negatively because, in some respects, it is in contrast with the story, but the real intent of Benigni is not to stage a documentary, but to bring a smile, even if paradoxically charged of worry and fear, where cruelty and evil reigned. This is one of the characteristic aspects of the film. The Tuscan director has avoided a flat film, too tied to reality, instead creating a film where the plot is comedy-drama, utopia-disenchantment. In fact, the comic scenes are the most dramatic, the most moving, in which a man, Guido, aware of his fate, strives to convince his son that life is beautiful and that its main ingredient is “L'Allegria” (happyness). Also, even when is being brought to be killed, he does not renounce to smile for the last time to his son. Guido knows he is going to meet death, yet he does not hesitate to wink at his son, as a sign of complicity for a "game" in which he had to  contrive any possible ways to survive and to emerge victorious. It was not just a game, it was "the game of life", in which we are often defeated by the evil, but in the end the goodness, innocence and the rationality win over it. The important thing is to hope, smile, love and believe.

[seniorbrief]

Why Columbus Day Is One of the Most Controversial Holidays in America

Taylor MarkarianOct 03

For some, Christopher Columbus is a figure of pride. For others, he is a symbol of racism and discrimination. Read on to learn more.

Theera Disayarat/Shutterstock

Columbus Day has been a very divisive holiday in the United States for some time now, and that shows no signs of changing any time soon. The explorer from the 15th century was from Genoa, Italy, which is why many Italians cling to him and his accomplishments with pride. Many Italian-Americans are adamant about keeping the holiday as they feel it is a day for them to celebrate their heritage, their place in this country, and their contributions to America while recognizing their ancestors’ own struggles as immigrants.

Those who are in favor of abolishing Columbus Day or changing the name to Indigenous People’s Day say it has nothing to do with a lack of respect for Italians and everything to do with the way this particular man treated the native people of the so-called “new world.” While Columbus accomplished much for the Spanish crown on his expeditions, he is also responsible for crimes against humanity that can’t be overlooked. Slavery and physical brutality were part of daily life during Columbus’s colonization of the Caribbean Island of Hispaniola. Starvation and disease were also widespread thanks to the horrible working conditions he and his crew provided for the natives. These facts are what drove a group of anti-Columbus protesters to cover the hands of a statue of the explorer in New York City with red paint last year, to illustrate the point that he is a figure stained with blood. (All of this aside, Columbus was also actually not the first person to discover America. The Vikings beat him to it several hundred years earlier.) Find out about famous moments in history that actually didn’t happen.

Four states and many cities have abandoned Columbus Day and replaced it with Indigenous People’s Day to honor the Native Americans who fell victim to these tragedies instead. On this new holiday, people celebrate the culture of indigenous Americans (those who lived here before Europeans came to colonize). However, Columbus Day still remains a federal holiday. Whether that will change is still yet to be seen. In the meantime, catch up on these other facts you probably didn’t know about Christopher Columbus.

Original Source -> Why Columbus Day Is One of the Most Controversial Holidays in America

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