Link to NPR talk: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=7495602
| Color is more than skin deep for young African-American women struggling to define themselves. This film is licenced under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.0/legalcode). | |
I'm not saying I don't know people who bleach their skin in Ghana though!! Funny world, sad world, odd world...
Labels: politics
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Israeli forces have discovered equipment they believe to be British in Hezbollah command bunkers in southern Lebanon. The Foreign Office is trying to establish who manufactured the night-vision equipment and how it ended up in the hands of the guerrillas. A spokesman said: "The Israeli Defence Forces have confirmed to us that they have found some night vision equipment, which they believe to be British, in southern Lebanon.
I won't ask the obvious question of how quickly the IDF managed to identify the equipment as British :) but I will state as I always have that conflict is big business and the Bush-Blair boys always have a finger in the cake, regardless which side they take!
On the side, I did find a comment in a Thom Shanker article in the NYT quite interesting: "one American official said normal procedures usually do not include rushing deliveries [of arms] within days of a request. That was done because
I better end here. My pad and my pen await me; my tribe wants to quest.
Interesting/Related Links:
On US Arms to
Link 2
additional article from 2002!
Other Links:
Recent Article by Lebanese-Canadian novelist
Labels: economics, politics, united nations
what are we supposed to be protesting here? if malcolm was gay of what consequence is it to the great work he did? a protest would be as shallow as the publication of the article itself - are we suggesting that gay people can not contribute to the black struggle? alvin ailey made great contributions to the profile of black people in america; e. lynn harris, one of america's bestselling authors, with an astiounding work rate, is a great role model for writers; james baldwin, lorraine hansberry (who wrote "raisin in the sun"), june jordan and audre lorde were gay, angela davis - the activist - is gay... the list goes on; which only goes to show that the guardian don't do proper research because it's absolute CRAP to say there are/were no openly gay black role models. besides that the most silly thing they've done is to trivialise people's achievements by making their sexuality an issue. a protest denying malcolm was gay will achieve nothing; it will just fall into the same shallow pit the guardian have dug...
In the UK newspapers there is always news of immigration: how tired the English are of immigrants; immigrants committing crimes; immigrants refusing to "fit" in; a picture of a black man from a totally unrelated story surreptitiously placed beside a headline on child abuse... The levels of immigration are blamed on corrupt political regimes, failing economies and persecution elsewhere. But is that enough?
It is true that several of the countries that yield immigrants to the UK have corrupt political regimes. Their leaders mortgage off their land, resources and public services to the Shells and Lonrhos of this world for personal gain while their people starve. But really that's just good capitalism isn't it? Wealth at any cost. Aren't successive UK governments just as corrupt? What do you think happened to UK's railways?
It is also perhaps true that the economies of countries like Nigeria, Jamaica, Ghana and Pakistan are ailing. After all why wouldn't they be? None of them are paid fair prices for their exports and services. Again, victims of capitalism. When the West conspires to pay 20% less for an import we don't realise the impact. Imagine that three export products contribute 57% to a country's GDP: the 20% saving that the West makes equates to a potential (lost) 11.4% rise in GDP for the afflicted country. If we go further to suppose that income from those three export products keeps 60% of the people above the so-called poverty line, this potential gain would (mathematically) life an extra 6.84% of the population out of the poverty bracket. That is the value of Fair Trade. You could try to translate that into immigration figures if you want to , but I won't bother. It still doesn't explain why the UK is a primary destination for immigrants. Neither does persecution. Aren't Brits losing their jobs? Aren't Brits persecuted in the press, in the workplace and in the playground daily? Aren't there higher crime rates in the West than in most developing countries?
So maybe we're asking the wrong questions. The pivotal question is, what makes England so attractive to immigrants? I believe the answer lies between the pages of Peter & Jane, Jack & Jill, and Humpty Dumpty. My father read a poem on the BBC in the 60s about how he had lost his ability to communicate with an elder in his village because he was learning about snow and shoes - things which had no relation to life in the village where Egya (the elder) lived. Years later when I grew up in Ghana almost all the books I read (except the ones on my father's bookshelves) had heroes from England. England was always the land of the right, the land of opportunity, the land of success. By the time most students had studied their way through that cultural propaganda and got their recognised qualifications, they had lost touch with their culture and identified more with Western values. Essentially they didn't feel at home at home. Their dreams were all aligned in the direction of the realities of the fiction they read. Rich or poor, they wanted to go to England. The same mentality is duplicated in India, Pakistan, the Caribbean, Nigeria, Kenya, as well as in the new European republics. England was brilliant at making sure that their culture was marketed as the best thing going and ex-colonies bought into it unreservedly. But it went further than that; through translation the dream was sold to poor Europe. America joined in with her movies and her own literature and the great fuel of immigration was pooled; simply waiting for the right time to be used. As Ngugi said in the introduction to his essays Decolonising the Mind: "...the biggest weapon wielded and actually daily unleashed by imperialism... is the cultural bomb. The effect of a cultural bomb is to annihilate a people's belief in their names, in their languages, in their environment... It makes them want to identify with that which is furthest removed from themselves..." Note how Nigerians and Turks alter their names to Anglicise themselves. Note how Ghanaian and Indian kids cringe in shame when their grandparents visit. But more importantly, note how readily immigrants sell everything they have just to have a chance to live the reality of the books they read and the films they saw. They have Great Expectations, they want to be Pretty Woman... It's the gold rush reborn.
England isn't a soft touch on immigration; it's just a hard imperial. Immigration is just one of the fruits of many years of hard exploitation and, really, there is no justification for complaint. Whenever labour is needed they are quick to open the gates and let the wind rush in. For immigration patterns to change a lot more than rules and treaties need changing.
