Jan

27

Racist Mobs at it in Australia (Again)

Filed Under International Racism, Race and Racism | 4 Comments

This from the Telegraph:
Each January 26, Australians gather in parks and on beaches to celebrate all that is great about their country: mateship, sunshine, barbecues and free-flowing beer.

But this year, across the country’s most populous state, the day of national pride turned violent when groups of youths rampaged through suburbs targetting non-white shopkeepers in a display of racism that echoed the ugly scenes of the 2005 Cronulla riots.

In the affluent Sydney suburb of Manly, where hundreds of families had set up their picnics for the day, more than 100 shirtless young men draped in “Aussie pride” flags smashed car windows and vandalised shops.

Carrying signs that read “—- off we’re full”, they paraded up and down the seafron threatening bypassers.

One 18-year-old Asian woman was injured when the gang smashed her car window, showering her in glass and causing several cuts to her arms.

There were also reports that the group attacked a taxi driven by an Indian Sikh and an Asian shopkeeper.

In scenes reminiscent of the Cronulla riots, when 5,000 white Australians congregated in the Sydney beachfront suburb and attacked Lebanese immigrants, groups of men jumped on cars that were stopped at traffic lights and chanted racist slogans to the terrified passengers.

Aug

30

The Olympics–a few thoughts on Global Inequality, Gender, Patriotism, and Multiculturalism

Filed Under Class Classism and Economic Inequality, Gender and Sexism, International Racism, Media Praises and Critiques, Original Essays and Analysis, Pop Culture, Race and Racism, Sociology, Uncategorized, Xenophobia and Immigration | 10 Comments

When I first started teaching I taught a class called “Prejudice and Discrimination,” in order to get my students to examine race, class, gender, and sexuality issues (later I added disability) I gave them an assignment where they had to watch a TV program, and analyze it from a sociological perspective. Basically, I wanted them to apply a theory from sociology to the program they chose. It was 2000, and one student did his analysis on the Olympics. He decided to use what I’ll call a functionalist multicultural perspective. In sociology, functionalism is a conservative theoretical view that argues that society is made up of interrelated and interdependent parts, which work together to create stability harmony, and order. Functionalists generally want to minimize change, and they tend to see everything having a functional purpose. The competing theory is conflict theory. Conflict theorists see a society that is driven over competition for scarce resources–in particular they see conflict stemming from the competition between society’s haves and have nots. Since conflict theory is inspired by some insights of Marxism, conflict theorists believe that social change is necessary.

In my student’s view, the Olympics were great because they brought all the people of the world together. Furthermore, everybody was competing on an equal playing field. He also felt that the spirit of the Olympic movement wiped out race, class, gender, and sexuality issues. In other words, the Olympics made all of these things moot, and nobody cared about any of these things when watching the Olympics.

Sarcastically, I asked myself–is this student watching the same Olympics as I am. I suppose when we take a functionalist view, the Olympics is a sample of stability and harmony, but I don’t see how we can watch the Olympics without noticing the haves and have nots of the world. While one can see some functionalist elements at the Olympics; you have to be deliberately obtuse to miss how Olympic competition is just as much about the social inequalities between groups.

Let’s start with gender. If you watched careful, there were a few occasions when I saw events for men labeled in a neutral way–i.e. the basketball finals– but events for women were labeled as women’s events–i.e. the women’s basketball finals. Isn’t it interesting that even though women participate in most sports at the Olympics, the men’s events are still central in most of those sports. I’ve also noticed that some countries have significantly fewer successful women athletes, and that is often related to the limited number of opportunities for women to compete in those countries. Think about those Kenyan and Ethiopian runners–it has only been recent that women in those countries have been recruited and trained to run like their male counterparts. I also couldn’t stand looking at yahoo during the Olympics where butt shots of women’s beach volleyball players were consistently in the top 10. Don’t get me wrong these women were talented, but it was obvious that their skimpy uniforms were part of the reason the networks had them in primetime.

What about Patriotism and ethnocentrism? As a very public sociologist noted in the thread last week, the US media listed the medal count as opposed to the gold medal count. China ran away with the gold medal count, but I guess it makes us look better to note that we won more over all medals. You could also see the bias in coverage. For the most part if the US wasn’t doing good in an event, then the coverage of that event was either non-existent or relegated to a sound bite. I’ve always felt that the Olympics is largely about Patriotism; it’s a way for countries to feel good about themselves and their people, a way to show strength (quite literally). In the 1936 Olympics, Hitler wanted to prove how great the “Aryan” race was, but he was upstaged by the great African American athlete Jesse Owens. This was the classic example of the political clashes that often occur at the Olympics. Don’t get me wrong, there are events that symbolize coming together in spite of our differences–this year the Georgian and Russian competitors in the Women’s air pistol certainly would be an example. But overall, the examples of countries trying to upstage each other or athletes coming to be representatives for the social and political causes of their nations are probably more numerous. The Olympics are a competition after all.

The other issue that I’m reminded of is global inequality and it’s connection to immigration. I was struck by how the US and China dominated the competition, but one thing I noticed in particular is how many top athletes representing the US were born in other countries and, in many cases, competed for those countries in the past. I noticed a former Chinese ping pong player, a former Kenyan distance runner, and a Trinidadian sprinter. Under the 1965 immigration Act, these immigrants are given the fast track to citizenship because of their special skills.1 The US obviously benefits, as do many other Western countries. These athletes are able to leave poor countries and head to wealthier ones. When we are talking about science and occupations, this is called the brain drain. Perhaps in sports it should be called the “muscle hustle.” Wealthy countries siphon off the top athletes from poor countries; moreover, many of the athletes from poor countries train, compete, and live in wealthy nations. I don’t know how many people noticed how many of the West Indian (such as Trinidadian, Jamaican, Bahamian) sprinters attend college and train in the US. I’d be curious to know how many of these athletes are able to stay in the US because of their skills.

Now I haven’t even touched on racism in this already long post, so I’ll keep it brief. Sport is often used as a way to reinforce racial stereotypes. Rather than connecting the racial make-up of an Olympic sports team to social opportunities, many try to assert biological distinctions between races, ignoring those who defy racial stereotypes and ignoring economic and social factors that result in racial differences. (Feel free to share your own examples for this one.)

What do you think? How does conflict theory play out at the Olympics? What ways do you think the Olympics represents a functionalist world view?

  1. This is also applied to scientists, artists, and people in some high demand occupational fields. [back]

Aug

15

Those Chinese Gymnasts

Filed Under International Racism, Media Praises and Critiques, Pop Culture, Sociology | 22 Comments

Anybody who follows the coverage of China in the American media should be ready to hear about some grand Chinese conspiracy. I discussed this in my top trends of 2007, and of course, the trend continues in 2008. This year’s conspiracy involves the ages of the Chinese gymnasts. It is widely rumored that many of the gymnasts are under the 16 age limit. Judging from their looks alone there is a good chance they are underage, but is being underage really that much of an advantage? I know people age out of that sport when they are young, but mental maturity is also an asset.

Furthermore, I remember it was not that long ago that the age of a prominent US gymnast was under scrutiny. Apparently, the age limit was raised after this US gymnast participated in Olympic competition. Nevertheless, all of the sniping about age limits for Chinese gymnasts seems a little ironic when the US has sent very young girls into competition as well. I suspect if we could get away with it we would bend the rules too. I really don’t think those folks complaining are terribly worried about the welfare of Chinese gymnastics teams; they are more upset that the Chinese are so good. I think there are some sour grapes in all of that whining.

Apr

30

Dealing with Racism in a Foreign Country

Filed Under Black/African American Issues, International Racism, Race and Racism | 26 Comments

At one point in my life, I needed to take my Spanish to fluency level in order to accomplish an important goal. I spent a year working to save money in order to go to a private immersion school in a Latin American country. I picked the capital of Costa Rica, San Jos. I wanted to stay in a relatively big city, and I was worried the smaller towns famous for language schools in Mexico and Guatemala would have so many other Americans that the immersion wouldn’t be as effective.

The school lasted 9 weeks, 8 hours a day. I was placed with a Costa Rican family. My seora was an older woman living with her adult son. They had a beautiful house in the suburbs. My boarding price included a breakfast and dinner. Breakfast was often a fried pork chop accompanied by rice and beans and a vegetable, with a side of fresh tropical fruit, a glass of fresh-squeezed orange juice and a steaming thermos of world-famous Costa Rican coffee. The first time she presented me with this spread, it was pretty intimidating. But I ate every delicious bite, thanked the seora and staggered off to school.

Some of my American fellow students drove me crazy. There was a teenager who kept complaining about the breakfasts. She made her seora fix her a special breakfast: Captain Crunch cereal. Then she complained because her seora wasn’t fixing it right. The cereal was too soggy. So she made the seora wait to put the cereal into the milk until the exact proper moment.

I didn’t want to be an ugly American. I tried to understand the customs of daily life, and did some research before I went. I also knew from living in Miami that people would call me “chinita” or “Chinese girl” without regard for my real ethnicity, but that “chinita” didn’t carry the same negative baggage as it would in the U.S. In my own country there’s a thin but persistent layer of enmity towards Asians, based on a long history of immigration scares, economic competition, and wars. That history wasn’t the same in Costa Rica, obviously. Asians were simply stereotyped as “exotic” and “foreign”. It was actually a breath of fresh air. I had to deal with being “foreign”, and I had to deal with explaining that yes, I really was an American even though I didn’t look like one. Nothing especially difficult or painful.

I didn’t think about other racial stereotypes, but I had a rude awakening.

In class, we were doing a unit based on cartoons and jokes. We were shown cartoons and asked to comment on them. It was going well. Then I turned the page of the photocopied course packet for the next cartoon. There was a black boy with exaggerated black features, crying, sitting by the side of the road next to huge watermelon slice. An older man (white/criollo) asks him, “why are you crying, negrito”? The boy says something like, “there’s too much watermelon and not enough negrito”.

It was horribly offensive. I went to the teacher right away. It was hard for me to articulate myself in Spanish, so I switched to English, which the teacher spoke very well. I told her, “this is a terrible cartoon, it’s very offensive to black people. It really needs to be taken out of the course packet.”

The teacher smiled and chuckled. She explained several things. In the U.S., we had lots of problems with race relations. Even riots! But things just weren’t the same in Costa Rica. In her country, black and white people got along. In fact, she had an in-law who was part black. No black Costa Rican would see anything wrong with that cartoon. How would I know it was offensive, when I myself wasn’t black? What’s wrong with enjoying watermelon?

She was implying, very politely, that I shouldn’t be an ugly American. I was imposing my own ideas about race relations in a realm where I was ignorant.

I’d lost some clarity, but I stayed on track. If I couldn’t win the argument on moral grounds, I’d switch to practical.

“I’m sorry I cant explain why it’s so offensive. But if you have a black student from the United States, and they see the cartoon, I promise you they’ll be very offended. In fact, they’d probably ask for their money back and say bad things about the school when they got back home.”

That did the trick. The teacher promised to remove the cartoon from the next course packet.

I felt bad about going this route and, in essence, threatening their livelihood. The teachers were women with multiple degrees in the humanities, who worked harder, for much less pay, than their U.S. equivalents. Costa Rica has a high standard of living for the region, but America is a much more powerful country and casts a large shadow.

My guilt didn’t last long. I found out that everything the teacher told me about black Costa Ricans was wrong. When I went to the black Caribbean coast (which every criollo Costa Rican warned me against doing) and actually met black Costa Ricans, I realized that Costa Rican society was extremely segregated. There was strong institutionalized racism against black people. The tourist dollars were diverted from their beaches; their language (English patois) was disparaged and dying out.

The most graphic illustration I had of this flavor of racism was in another part of Costa Rica, when I was watching television next to a friend of my seora.

They were showing a Richard Pryor movie on TV. She quickly changed the channel and said, in a normal conversational tone, “I don’t like black people. I don’t know why, I just don’t. My mother was the same way!”

I maintained a stunned silence. I didn’t say anything, because the woman was much older than me, and I felt physically incapable of confronting her. I just sat there, confused, frustrated, depressed, inadequate and culpable.

So my attempts at dealing with anti-black racism in Costa Rica were definitely a mixed bag: one partial success, one abject failure.

It’s very difficult determining where to intervene or how to stand when it comes to unfamiliar forms of racism. People defending American racism (or denying that it exists) often point to other countries and say, triumphantly, “well, they’re just as racist!” When done from an unquestioning perspective, condemning the practices of other countries has little effect other than asserting American moral superiority.

I still believe it has to be tried.

I learned a lot about racism in my own country from traveling and living in Latin America. In parallel, the most insightful accounts of racism in Korea and Japan have been the ones I’ve read from African-Americans. Different forms of racism are often not as separate and distinct as they first seem, and comparing them shows the weak spots where they can be challenged.

Feb

21

A First Black Presidency in the Light of Mexican History

Filed Under Black/African American Issues, International Racism, Politics | 1 Comment

There is an interesting discussion going on right now over at The Field Negro about what the first black President would actually mean for America.

Here are some points I’ll summarize from the post and then from the ensuing discussion.

  • Many white people may be voting for Obama in the assumption that if he’s elected, racism will magically cease to exist. This false perception might actually make things worse for black people.
  • But the people in charge right now (Republican conservatives) don’t believe racism exists anyway.
  • Obama’s potential victory would represent a great advance for black people, especially in their sense of self-worth.
  • Obama is running for President of America, not President of Black America. As such, it’s wiser to vote not from a black perspective, but from an American citizen perspective.
  • Black people should not expect that black elected leaders will accomplish everything; change also needs to come from the individual and community level.

I want to take a detour and talk about a fascinating precedent from our neighbor, Mexico. This precedent helps gives a global perspective to the question “what could the first black President mean for America.”

Benito Juarez Benito Jurez (1806-1872) was the president of Mexico for four terms in the 19th century. The story of his personal background and rise to power is awe-inspiring. He was the son of Zapotec villagers in the mountains in the south of Mexico. One day, he walked down from the mountains into town and took shelter at a church. He was 12 years old, illiterate, and could not speak Spanish, only Zapotec.

Educated by priests, he learned Spanish, studied law, became a lawyer, then a judge, then began a political career. The barriers to all of this cannot be overstated. 19th-century Mexico was a caste-ridden society with full-blooded indigenous people at the bottom, mestizos in the middle and the white criollos at the very top. At every single step of the way, his facial features would have marked him out for exclusion and prejudice.

His Liberal party stood for reform against the more traditionalist Conservatives. He believed in secular, humanist and egalitarian ideals. He considered himself an ally of Lincoln, and when the Confederacy asked his government for help, he threw their emissary in jail, then deported him, “saying he would never give support to a country that held nearly one-third of its people in permanent bondage.” He believed in the separation of church and state and wanted to end the rule of the Catholic Church, which controlled vast amounts of land, the educational system and great political power.

The Conservatives hated him so much that when Jurez was elected, they invited in the French army to take over Mexico. They would rather destroy Mexico’s independence than live under a Jurez presidency.

Jurez’s government fled to the north of Mexico and regrouped. He spent much of his time in office fighting off the French, and finally won. The French-installed usurper, Emperor Maximilian I, was sentenced to death. Four years later, Jurez died of a heart attack while working in his office.

Jurez is one of Mexico’s best-loved Presidents. His face is on peso notes; he is everywhere memorialized in municipal names and public statues. Jurez is praised for preserving Mexico’s independence against invading Europeans and advancing Mexico from semi-feudalism into the early stages of capitalism. His successor, the long-reigning Porfirio Daz, is as hated as Jurez is loved. Daz basically sold out Mexico to the United States and let it slide back into stagnation; his reign was so incredibly regressive it led to the Mexican Revolution of 1911.

What did this mean for indigenous Mexicans? After all, Jurez was the first truly native ruler in 300 years, since the time of Moctezuma and Cuauhtmoc. In this respect, his legacy was mixed. His rule was undoubtedly good for all Mexican citizens, especially when he’s compared with his most miserable predecessors and successors. He did much to release the death grip of feudalism and theocracy. On the other hand, to drive forward his vision of modernity, he was ruthless and held no ethnic loyalty. His land reforms destroyed a particular form of communal land ownership and left indigenous people much more vulnerable to having their remaining land expropriated. He attacked not only traditions that hurt them, but traditions that helped them.

Today, the status of Mexico’s indigenous people is better than in the 19th century. But it’s still not very good. The modern-day veneration of Jurez coexists with severe structural oppression and an informal caste system. To give you some idea of how strong this system is I once browsed some Mexican job ads and noticed a requirement for many jobs: “buena presentacin”. I asked a Mexican friend what this meant. “Is it like ‘professional demeanor’?” He said, cynically, “it means you shouldn’t look too Indian or they won’t hire you.”

19th-century Mexico isn’t 21st-century America, of course. The parallel is inexact but illuminating. The first black President of America won’t signify an end to racism perhaps even not in 100 years. It’s just one of many steps in many intersecting paths along the way. On the other hand, a lot can happen in 100 years. I dont think I’ll see the end of racism and casteism in my lifetime, but I still hold out hope it will happen in the lifetime of my grandchildren.

Feb

13

A Quick Response to the Black Model Minority Immigrant Meme

Filed Under Black/African American Issues, Education and Academia, International Racism, Race and Racism, Xenophobia and Immigration | 9 Comments

Since I’m on federal jury duty this week, I won’t have too many fancy posts, but I wanted to take the time to repost a comment I put up over at Blackprof. I figured rather than derailing this thread at Racialicious, which somehow deteriorated into a model minority discussion, I would just repost the Blackprof comment. The comment is in response to a statistic suggesting that foreign born blacks are overrepresented at elite, American universities (I have edited out the typos, and shortened the comment slightly.):

What often is lost in these debates is how immigration policy and other social processes related to migration affect the type of person who immigrates to the US.

Since 1965, US immigration policy routinely favors highly educated migrants. This is particularly true for (non-refugee) African migrants and (non-refugee) Asian migrants. We generally give immigration preferences to people who are highly educated. I recently saw a presentation at a sociology conference–the typical African immigrant family in the US has a higher median income than the average white American born family. Its not like these families and individuals are coming from a remote village in Cameroon. They are already the middle and upper class, or they have some remarkable talent. My husband and his first sibling who immigrated to the US are prime examples of thishis sister has a PhD in languages or translation from a school in Nigeria. She speaks 5 languages and works for the UN. She wouldnt be here if she didnt have that skill, and she would not have gotten that skill had her father not had enough money to send her to boarding school in Nigeria (where the public school system is a complete joke). My husband, on the other hand, was a talented runner, and he wrote 250 different US Universities, showing them his times and inquiring about the potential for a track scholarship. He got 3 offers, and ran for a division I school.

Caribbeans are in different position, but I think there is a sense in which the migration process requires great stamina. In order to make it, you have to have a lot of determination…..

And personally I do believe that affirmative action should apply to Caribbean immigrants, whose ancestors were also enslaved. But I also believe that affirmative action should be used as more than just a way to compensate for past discrimination. My sense is that present discrimination should also be accounted for, and I believe in affirmative action for diversity purposes, but thats a slightly different debate.

So the key point is that there isn’t anything “special” about these cultures that leads this groups to succeed. Immigration policies, and the immigration process insure that significant numbers of (documented) West Indian and African immigrants are well educated and financial successful prior to entering the US.

Jan

5

Father Disapproves of Marriage and Kills Daughter, Son-in-Law, and Grandchild

Filed Under Crime/Hate Crimes, Family Issues, Gender and Sexism, International Racism, Interracial Relationships, Sociology | 11 Comments

This is a really depressing story, and since it clear intersects with many of the topics we deal with on this site, I wanted to post it.

A 57-year-old Indian man has been charged with killing his pregnant daughter, son-in-law and grandson by setting afire their apartment in the US state of Illinois because he was upset over her marrying a man from a “lower caste”.

Subhash Chander faces three counts of first-degree murder, one count of homicide of an unborn child and one count of aggravated arson, and was denied bail by Judge Martin E McDonough.

Monika Rani, 22, Rajesh Kumar, 36, and their son, Vansh, 3 were killed in the weekend blaze. Rani was about five months pregnant, authorities said.

Chander told police that he was upset with his daughter and son-in-law because they married without his consent and he considered Kumar to be from a “lower caste”, First Assistant State’s Attorney Robert Milan was quoted as saying by media here.

But Chander’s sister Kamla Devi said it was not true. She said the family accepted the marriage and that the caste system was not a factor to the family at all.

She claimed it was something that “people have brought up in the US since the family has immigrated from India”.

On the night of the fire, Chander went to a gas station to buy gas for his son, but decided to give it to his daughter instead. After arriving at her door, he said, Kumar told him that it was late and asked him to leave.

He told police that Kumar started to push him and some of the gas from the container in his hand spilled onto the carpet just inside the door. Chander told police that he became “upset and angry” and pulled a lighter from his pocket and set the carpet on fire.

Chander said that he did not call police or the fire department to report the fire, nor did he call his daughter to make sure she and her family were safe.

A few media outlets have used this as an opportunity to discuss domestic violence in Chicago’s South Asian communities:

This was the third Chicago-area case in one year involving an Indian family, domestic violence and fire. NBC 5 asked counselors who serve the Indian community about that on Wednesday.

The Hamdard Center in Addison provides domestic violence counseling to more than 270 Indian and Pakistani families every year. Chairman Dr. Mohammad Hamid said the threat to family honor is a common thread in these cases, but said there is no evidence domestic violence is more common in the Indian community than other cultures.

The difference, counselors said, is that Indian families often refuse to get help before anger turns to rage.”They want to keep this a private matter and solve it at home,” said Hamid.

Relatives of Chander have insisted he did not set the fire.Counselors said if the allegations are true, this is an extreme and isolated case they hope will call attention to the problem of domestic violence in every community.

I have seen a few studies on domestic violence in South Asian families here in the US, and while it is very difficult to determine if the rates of domestic violence are higher in this group, the studies do indicate that there are numerous barriers that South Asian immigrants face in getting help in domestic violence situations. Some of those barriers are related to cultural norms, but many of the barriers are also related to lack of availability and culturally sensitive domestic violence counselors and shelters (which is true for many immigrants and native born people of color).

For those who are interested in supporting the Hamdard Center here is the link.

Nov

26

This Disgusts Me–Race Based Sex Tourism That Is

Filed Under Black/African American Issues, International Racism, Interracial Relationships, Race and Racism, Sexuality and Heterosexism, Sociology | 51 Comments

Apparently,? older white women are going to Kenya for? “sex tourism” at least that’s what this article on Yahoo! says.

They are on their first holiday to Kenya, a country they say is “just full of big young boys who like us older girls.”

Hard figures are difficult to come by, but local people on the coast estimate that as many as one in five single women visiting from rich countries are in search of sex.

Allie and Bethan — who both declined to give their full names — said they planned to spend a whole month touring Kenya’s palm-fringed beaches. They would do well to avoid the country’s tourism officials.

“It’s not evil,” said Jake Grieves-Cook, chairman of the Kenya Tourist Board, when asked about the practice of older rich women traveling for sex with young Kenyan men.

“But it’s certainly something we frown upon.”

Also, the health risks are stark in a country with an AIDS prevalence of 6.9 percent. Although condom use can only be guessed at, Julia Davidson, an academic at Nottingham University who writes on sex tourism, said that in the course of her research she had met women who shunned condoms — finding them too “businesslike” for their exotic fantasies.

I guess white women and white men are becoming more and more alike.

Emerging alongside this black market trade — and obvious in the bars and on the sand once the sun goes down — are thousands of elderly white women hoping for romantic, and legal, encounters with much younger Kenyan men.

They go dining at fine restaurants, then dancing, and back to expensive hotel rooms overlooking the coast.

“One type of sex tourist attracted the other,” said one manager at a shorefront bar on Mombasa’s Bamburi beach.

“Old white guys have always come for the younger girls and boys, preying on their poverty … But these old women followed … they never push the legal age limits, they seem happy just doing what is sneered at in their countries.”

Experts say some thrive on the social status and financial power that comes from taking much poorer, younger lovers.

“This is what is sold to tourists by tourism companies — a kind of return to a colonial past, where white women are served, serviced, and pampered by black minions,” said Nottinghan University’s Davidson.

I know I probably find this more offensive than some others since I am partnered with an African man.? It’s hard enough for people in interracial relationships (the real kind), but when some people treat interracial sexuality as an explotive and exotic adventure, I feel like it gets even harder for people like my partner and I.? On some level, it shouldn’t be that way, but since we live in a racist world it is that way.

Nov

2

Europeans Try to Kidnap Chadian Children From Their Families

Filed Under Black/African American Issues, Family Issues, International Racism, Race and Racism | 28 Comments

I first heard about this case when I was listening to BBC radio on Tuesday. I tuned in during the middle of of this story, and it seemed so bizarre that I couldn’t figure out what was going on. Well, no I go the chance to hear the whole story. It turns out that some foreign aid groups tried to take a group of 103 children out of the country. The aid workers are now accused of child trafficking and violating international laws.

Some members of the NGO Children Rescue/Arche de Zoe have been arrested for attempting to take the 21 girls and 82 boys – the youngest being about a year old and the oldest about 10 – out of Chad. The agency workers were French. Three journalists who were travelling with the volunteer workers and the Spanish crew who were to fly them back to France are also being held. In Chad’s capital, N’Djamena, a prosecutor on Wednesday also charged Jacques Wilmart, a Belgian pilot involved in the affair, with “complicity in abduction”, before sending him to jail.

Zoe’s Ark says it wanted to rescue children from Darfur, but French officials and UN aid workers say they believe many were from Chad and were not orphans.

The United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) called the attempt to separate the more than 100 young Chadian children from their parents and then take them to France for adoption an “illegal and totally irresponsible move.” The UN said the children had family in the country.

“They are not orphans and they were not sitting alone in the desert in Chad, they were living with their families in communities,” Annette Rehrl of U.N. refugee agency UNHCR told Reuters in Abeche.

UNICEF spokesperson Veronique Taveau told journalists in Geneva that what happened had violated international rules, such as The Hague Convention on international adoption and the Convention on the Rights of the Child.

Taveau said the case was not an isolated incident but one that was highly visible because of the size of the group of children.

L’Express reports the Europeans offered sweets and biscuits to encourage the children to leave their homes.

“My parents had gone to work in the fields. As we were playing some Chadians came and said here are some sweets, why don’t you follow us to Adre and then we’ll take you home. We were taken to the hospital in Adre,” said a young boy who gave his name as Osman. Adre is a town on the Chad-Sudan border.

“We spent seven days in Adre and I’ve been here in Abeche for more than one month. We were well fed by the whites, there was always food. I would like to go back to find my parents,” he told reporters at the Abeche orphanage where the children are being cared for by local and international aid workers.

Many European media outlets were putting a slightly more favorable spin on this, but as more information comes out, these so called aid groups are not looking good at all. The UN has said that most of these children were not orphans, which they found out from interviewing the older children. Now many of the children are separated from their families, and there are concerns that the youngest children may not be reunited because they are too young to talk. Needless to say this is not going over well with people all over Africa. As the International Herald Tribune article cited in this paragraph notes:

The scandal has sparked outrage and condemnation across Africa, where it has a deep resonance from the colonial era, when slave traders, missionaries and colonial officials blithely separated African families with little regard to their wishes. In Congo, government officials suspended all adoptions by foreigners to examine their procedures more carefully, according to The Associated Press, and protesters angry about the attempted kidnappings took to the streets in Chad.

The scandal has also raised tensions between Chad and France just as the European Union begins deploying a peacekeeping force in the region aimed at shoring up Chad, which has been increasingly drawn into the four-year-old conflict in neighboring Darfur.

This history is one reason why adoptions by Westerners are not common in African countries. Incidents like this contribute to the destruction black families, and I suspect these aid workers felt no need to respect the rights of poor black African families.1

  1. Why oh why am I having flashbacks to this old Rachel’s Tavern post/comment? I was so angry at that woman. I could barely contain myself. [back]

Oct

29

There Are No Black People in Argentina

Filed Under Black/African American Issues, International Racism, Race and Racism | 41 Comments

This is a short post I originally wrote for my blog earlier this year, at the end of Black History month. I think it’s of interest to a wider audience. Also, it ties in with two things I talked about in my introduction post. Perpetual foreigner or caste-like native minority, who has it worse, and when do they have it worse, and if there’s a point to the comparison, how can it be made in a mutually productive and illuminating way?

As we see with the Afroargentinos, the two derogatory categories are not mutually exclusive.

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On this last day of Black History Month, I really couldn’t think of a good U.S. topic I could write on that hasn’t already been covered extensively in the blogs I read. Instead, I’m going to point out a little-known international black history topic: what happened to black people in Argentina.

The title of my post is intentionally misleading, because there are definitely black people in Argentina! There just aren’t that many of them. The Argentinian national identity is very European, and much more defined and crisp around the edges than is usual for an American country.

Like the U.S., the modern nation of Argentina established living room through ethnic cleansing and genocide of indigenous inhabitants, then combined different streams of immigrants to form a conglomerate identity. The difference is that there was a second wave of ethnic cleansing in the late 19th century that got rid of the large black population in the north of the country. Formerly, black people in Argentina had played a major economic and cultural role. The tango, for example, has roots in Africa.

From a review of the documentary “Afroargentinos”
Carlos Menem, whose ten-year tenure as Argentina’s president ended in 1999 just before his macroeconomic policies led to the collapse of the economy, was asked, during a tour of the United States, about whether Argentina had any citizens of African descent. He responded, “No, we have no blacks. Brazil has that problem.”

Something happened. No one is quite sure exactly what. The official version is that the black people just drifted off during a long war. This is wrong: there was a concerted effort to remove them, sponsored in large part by statesman Domingo Sarmiento. But exactly how they were removed is in doubt. Were they concentrated in quarantine areas without medicine and left to die during epidemics? Or simply taken from their homes, pushed over the border into Brazil and Uruguay and told never to come back?

Some of them remained. Here’s part of an interview with Fidel Nadal, former frontman of the Argentinian rock band Todos Tus Muertos. I’m sure not all Afroargentinos have taken his path: the complete rejection of national identity in favor of a transnational one. But these are the very raw words of someone who refuses to accept the official story.

From a 1998 interview (my typical clunky translation)

It happened I was born in Argentina, but I’m black and my nationality is African. My ancestors came from Africa in an illegal way, kidnapped, robbed, into slavery. If I said that I am Argentinian I would be accepting that illegal fact. And I don’t accept it. They kidnapped us, they mistreated us, and we still built their cities and gave them love in exchange for mistreatment. Also, when any person of the world sees me, they don’t believe me when I say I’m Argentinian. Once, in Peru, someone wanted to beat me up. “You’re Argentinean. I was in Argentina and there are no black people. Why are you lying to me?”. There, you realize that no matter that I’ve been born in Argentina, my nationality always is going to be Africa, because any person that sees me on the street says: “That black man, where is he from?”. In Africa, when they see a black man they don’t ask where he’s from, because that’s his house. But if you went to Africa, they would ask you, “Where are you from, white man?” Black people aren’t born from here, we come from Africa. It’s natural. And it’s natural for Europeans that a rasta speaks of rastafarianism. They’re surprised when I tell them that I was born in Argentina. They ask me: “Where are you from?” And I say: “I’m of Africa, but I was born in Argentina. How?” And I explain this same thing that I’m saying to you now. And they have to accept it. I don’t come from the family of the ambassador of the Congo in Argentina. No. My family went through five generations in slavery, making the streets, nursing children, fighting in the English invasions, forming what now is known as Argentina. If you don’t know where you come from, how do you know who you are and where you’re going? One thing is your original culture, and another one is imposed culture. You’ll say: if you’re of Africa and you think that it’s that way, why don’t you go there? I’ll tell you something: I go to Africa, but who pays me for all of that? Imagine it, I go over there and they start off: “Ahg, ug” and I say “Hey, what’s up”. “But what: you don’t know how to speak? What did you come here to do? What’s your family, what’s your last name? And me: “I don’t know. Nadal”. “But that’s not an African name.” “No, because it’s the last name of the family that enslaved me and made me take their name.” “But that makes you like a dog, not a human being,” theyll say to me… You don’t know your name, your last name, your language. You have nothing, neither home, nor family. The richest part of a man is his culture. But you’re a stranger in your own land. And neither are you from here. You’re seen as different because you are different. You’re black. Although you dye your hair blonde and put on contact lenses, they’re always going to shout at you from a truck: “Hey, black man, what are you doing.” I always knew that I was black; let’s say, since I was a little boy. When you went to school, you didn’t say: “Eh, I came there as white.” But they say to you all of a sudden: “Black!” and, above all, it’s to insult you. It’s crazy. Just like when I was a boy my father spoke to me of Malcolm X, Lumumba, leaders of Africa. And I hooked up with reggae because I looked at the album covers and said: “How I look like this type; my hair grows like that.” Sure, I lived in Almagro, but we were links on the same chain. And there was something familiar in that, as if I’d heard it before…

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