March 27, 2003 - June 23, 2003
The End of Race?
Posted: Monday, June 23, 2003
by Salim Muwakkil, In These Times
I'm not sure if many Americans have noticed, but the concept of race has taken some devastating hits in recent years. Everywhere one looks in academia these days-from the abstract precincts of critical theory to the hard laboratories of molecular genetics-once-mighty notions of racial taxonomy have fallen hard.
The latest assault on race was a three-part PBS series, Race: The Power of an Illusion. Produced by California Newsreel, the series covers a wide range of race-related issues. But the program's title is its major point: Racial differences are illusory.
For many Americans, this is pretty radical stuff. Well before the republic was founded, the belief in racial hierarchy was deeply embedded in our national culture, and there it endures. A person's economic and social well-being remains closely correlated to racial identity.
Notwithstanding those socio-economic distinctions, the idea of racial difference seems obvious; people with a certain skin color and hair texture also tend to have common behavioral traits. However, science is revealing that those observable, "natural" differences are social constructions rather than biological facts.
"The Difference Between Us," the first episode of Race, explains that humanity emerged in Africa about 150,000 to 200,000 years ago and began migrating out about 70,000 years ago. As humans spread across the planet, populations intermingled, creating a variety of genetic interrelationships. These are not always what one might expect: Some Europeans have more genes in common with Nigerians than do Nigerians with Ethiopians, and so on. Most variation is within, not between, "races."
The first segment also notes that many of our "phenotypic" characteristics, like skin color, evolved recently, after we left Africa. But traits like intelligence, musical ability, and physical aptitude are of a more ancient genetic vintage and thus are common to all populations.
As if on cue, a recent archeological find provided corroborating fossil evidence for this genetic view of human history. The June 12 issue of Nature revealed that scientists working in northeast Ethiopia found the 160,000-year-old remains of two adults and a child that are said to be the earliest human remains ever discovered. According to Tim White, the University of California paleoanthropologist who led the team, "this discovery means our roots are African."
According to the New York Times, the theory of an African genesis of humanity had gained wide support in the last two decades thanks to the research findings of the growing science of molecular genetics. These genetic studies, based on evolutionary changes in mitochondrial DNA, which is passed from mother to daughter, have concluded that humanity had a common ancestor in Africa-the so-called "African Eve."
Before the advent of high-tech genetics, the reigning doctrines of white supremacy discouraged any consideration of an African genesis of humanity. And despite increasing archaeological evidence, many anthropologists resisted tracing humanity's origins to the so-called Dark Continent.
The more radical white supremacists postulated that there was a "multiregional evolution," in which Europeans evolved from another branch of hominids altogether-the hearty Neanderthals. However, genetic studies have revealed no Neanderthal DNA in modern humans.
A preponderance of genetic evidence reveals the ironic fact that the same Europeans who created the idea of race and white supremacy are genetic progeny of the Africans they devalued. With this view of history, it's clear that the concept of race is an insidious fiction created primarily to justify exploitation, slavery, and imperial conquest.
Race's second episode, "The Story We Tell," explores this sordid history, tracing the origins of the racial idea to the European conquest of the New World and to the American slave system. We see how the logic of racial hierarchy, which placed Africans on the lowest rung of humanity, allowed self-professed Christians to justify the institution of racial slavery.
New York University historian Robin D.G. Kelley points out that the Enlightenment idea of freedom led to the ideology of white supremacy: "The problem that they had to figure out is how can we promote liberty, freedom, democracy on the one hand, and a system of slavery and exploitation of people who are non-white on the other?" They did it by dehumanizing enslaved Africans.
The episode notes that by the mid-19th century, the idea of racial hierarchy and its corollary, white supremacy, had become conventional wisdom. "The idea found fruition in racial science, Manifest Destiny, and our imperial adventures abroad," reads the PBS Web site for the episode.
The final episode, "The House We Live In," focuses on the ways U.S. institutions and policies advantage some groups at the expense of others. It outlines the historical trajectory of racial disadvantage and shows how it remains easily discernable in the wealth gap and disparities in other social indices. The segment also examines the "unmarked" race of white people. Here the documentary slides in some of the insights developed by the nascent "Whiteness" movement, which defines the very idea of white identity as an ideology of racial domination.
Race: The Power of an Illusion concludes that racial inequality will remain a feature of this nation's social structures until we seriously address the legacy of past discrimination and confront the historical meaning of race.
The producers hope their series will blow some fresh air through a stagnant social debate and stir some new interest. I hope they're right, but I doubt it.
Salim Muwakkil is a senior editor of In These Times, where he has worked since 1983, and a weekly op-ed columnist for the Chicago Tribune. He is currently a Crime and Communities Media Fellow of the Open Society Institute, examining the impact of ex-inmates and gang leaders in leadership positions in the black community.
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The Other Columbus
Posted: Sunday, June 22, 2003
by Habeeb Salloum,
habeeb.salloum@sympatico.ca
I was content as we made our way from the Dominican Republic's Boca Chica Beach to Santo Domingo. The air-conditioned bus was comfortable and the conversation with a descendant of the Incas sitting next to me was pleasant. Just before we entered the country's capital, I asked my newly found friend, "They say a new monument is being built to house Columbus's remains. Do you know where it is located?"
I was somewhat taken aback when my Peruvian bus companion blurted out, "What do you want with his tomb? Columbus was a murderer who set the stage for enslaving the Americas!" His eyes blazed. "The world has made a hero out of a gold-seeking monster. I hope that he is burning in the hottest furnace of hell."
Yet, I should not have been too surprised by his outburst. A number of writers who, instead of painting him a saintly figure, vehemently dispute the greatness of this hero, who many consider, the most famous sailor the world has ever known.
Loved or hated, there is no denying that this discoverer of the Americas changed forever the history of mankind. His life, thoughts, works and movements, even in death - Cuba, the Dominican Republic and Spain all claim his tomb - have been studied and volumes have been written, mostly glorifying his deeds.
Only in the last few decades have a number of historians disputed the actions of this adventurer who sailed half way around an unknown world, seeking to enrich both himself and the treasury of Spain and, in the process, convert the infidels.
When Columbus arrived in the Monastery of La Rabída, edging Huelva on Spain's Atlantic coast, was he thinking of finding a new route to Asia for trade or did he have other plans in his mind? His apologists are firmly convinced that he was a visionary and man of courage who wanted to find a new route to the East for the enrichment of mankind.
However, the portrayal of this soldier of fortune as a humanist does not stand up to historic facts. It is more accurate to describe him as a mercenary-merchant and a fanatical crusader whose main aim was the gathering of wealth, the propagation of the Christian faith and setting the stage for Spain to take control of the legendary wealth of Asia.
Columbus had a burning twofold passion: the winning of gold and the winning of souls. When he set about trying to sell his idea of a western route to Asia, the long Christian Muslim wars in the Iberian Peninsula were coming to an end with the triumph of Christianity. Religious fervour in that country was at its peak and a great number of the victorious men of Christ were looking for new worlds to conquer.
Like many other Christians in that age, his intention was to begin a new crusade against Islam across the seas and to conquer infidel nations for Christ. J.P. de Oliveira Martins in his book A History of Iberian Civilization points out that to Columbus, discovery was only a means to an end. The conquest of Jerusalem was his true goal. His ambition was to obtain enough money to equip an army of ten thousand horse and a hundred thousand infantry for the conquest of that holy city.
At the same time, the lust for the possession of gold held a central place in his thinking. In spite of the fact that he could, at times, persuade himself that wealth was the means by which hearts could be won for Christ, as it turned out, the acquisition of gold triumphed over the winning of souls.
After his plans to sail west to Asia in search of silks and spices had been rejected by King John II of Portugal - the leading seafaring nation of that era - Columbus arrived penniless at La Rabída in 1485. Here his fortune began to change. The Franciscan friars recognized the feasibility of his vision and became advocates for his cause.
Fray Antonio de Marchena, an astronomer with a lively interest in navigation, and Fray Juan Pérez, who had been Queen Isabella's confessor, became the greatest source of encouragement in the difficult years to come. Believing in his theory that the world was round - an idea that had been circulating for centuries - they interceded with the Catholic Kings, Fredinand and Isabella, and their nobles on his behalf.
Columbus spent six years making trips to see Isabella and studying in La Rabída, all the time, improving on plans for his great dream. During this period he conferred with the monks and the local ship-building Pinzón brothers - two were later to command ships in the Voyage of Discovery.
At first, his ideas were rejected by the Catholic Kings and their advisors, but the friars worked on to further his quest. Eventually, after six years of badgering and bargaining, their efforts bore fruit and the Queen gave the go-ahead for the expedition.
Ferdinand and Isabella's main purpose in outfitting his ships was to extend Christian salvation to pagans and savages beyond the seas - a part of their plans for carrying on the holy war against Islam. The spirit which had driven them and their viceroys to support the expedition was the same as that which maintained the crusades against the Moors in Spain - war against the infidel.
They also believed that the project would bring riches to their treasury which had been emptied after their long wars with the Muslims in the Iberian Peninsula. Controlling the wealth of the East had, perhaps, as much appeal as conquering heathen lands.
Columbus set sail on the 3rd day of August 1492 from the small town of Palos de la Frontera, 5 km (3 MI) from La Rabída. The wealthy Pinzón brothers, Martín and Vincente, who were born there, helped him find the needed sailors. They were mostly from the town itself and the neighbouring villages. Many were jail inmates who were promised freedom if they joined the expedition.
What were that adventurer's thoughts when his three caravels, Pinta, Niña and Santa María set sail into the unknown? No one can say for sure. Perhaps, at this time, his pretext for saving souls vanished, to be replaced by the gold fever which seems to have inflicted him after his landing in the New World.
This changeover can be seen even before the Spaniards set foot in the Americas. The Catholic Kings had promised the first man to glimpse land a pension for life. The first sailor to sight shore was Rodrigo Bermanjo.
However, when the expedition returned to Spain, Columbus ignored Rodrigo's claim and had the crown pay the money to his mistress, Beatriz de Havana. Rodrigo was so bitter that he emigrated to North Africa and became a Muslim.
After landing in the New World, Columbus found that most of the people were of gentle and peaceful disposition. They welcomed the strangers with an open heart and showered them with gifts. But this did not win over the crusading Spaniards. They believed that God had destined the infidels, even if they accepted Christianity, as slaves for the Europeans. It seems that slavery went naturally with conversion.
In 1495, Columbus shipped some 500 of these unfortunate natives back to Spain as gifts to the Catholic Kings. Their pitiful state softened the monarchs' hearts and in a rare show of magnanimity they set them free.
In the ensuing years, the discovery of the New World unleashed a host of gold hungry navigators and explorers. The Indians were given to these Conquistadors by the Spanish crown as human cattle. They were forced to work the land and the mines, dying in the thousands from the heavy labour and white man diseases. In this historical tragedy, the cruelty of the so-called civilized men put that of barbarians to shame.
Columbus made four voyages of discovery to the Western Hemisphere, but he did not find the treasures and rewards he sought. In the West Indies of today, and the coasts of Nicaragua and Honduras, which he briefly touched on during his final journey between 1502-4, he searched in vain for the wealth of the East.
However, his voyages launched Spain into an era of conquest and the country was able to create an empire in the Western Hemisphere beyond that adventurer's wildest hopes. His discovery opened the path for the Conquistadors (soldiers of fortune) who within 50 years conquered most of the land from the mid U.S.A. to the southern tip of Argentina.
Spain was rapidly able to subdue, Christianize, Europeanize and administer the New World because of its past history. In the previous eight centuries the country's society had been formed for the purpose of Christianizing and Europeanizing the Muslims in the Iberian Peninsula. There is no doubt that the achievement of the Conquistadors was only the continuation of the peninsula crusades.
The people who suffered most from these conquests, which for a hundred years made Spain the leading nation in the world, were the Indians of the Americas. A brief history of what happened to the natives of Hispaniola (today's Dominican Republic and Haiti) and Cuba will give one an idea of the cruelty and savagery on which the Spanish empire in the New World was built.
When Columbus landed on the Island of Hispaniola, he found a peaceful people, who fought only when attacked, usually by the Caribs - a fierce cannibalistic tribe inhabiting the neighbouring islands. The friendly Taníos, also known as Arawaks, who had a fairly advanced culture, welcomed him and his men, offering them food and gifts.
However, their hospitality was in vain. The Conquistadors, eager to find gold and silver, slaughtered thousands of them in imposed wars and enslaved the remainder. They put the slaves to work in mines and dealt with them in a ruthless fashion. Due to this cruel treatment the whole population died off rapidly from exhaustion, disease and starvation.
By 1548 the Indians, estimated from 300 thousand to one million when Columbus arrived in 1492, had been virtually wiped out. The Spanish lust for gold and silver had erased the gentle olive-skinned Taníos of Hispaniola from the face of the earth. The race which had witnessed Columbus's first landing in the New World has not left a single descendent.
In Cuba, it was a replay of the same story. When in 1492 Columbus landed on the north eastern shore of Cuba, the amicable Taínos hosted the Spaniards with a feast of the best meat and tropical fruit found on the island. However, Columbus who is reported to have said when he stepped ashore, ‘this is the most beautiful land ever seen’ was not coming in search of scenery or hospitality. His goal was conquest and gold. The Indians who had greeted him and his crew with food, drink and something new - tobacco - were soon to learn that the Spaniards were without scruples.
In the ensuing decades, the savagery of the Conquistadors in Hispaniola was repeated again and again. Hatuey, an Indian chieftain, who, with few of his men, had escaped after fighting the Spaniards in Hispaniola, warned the Taínos of the evil Europeans who worshipped a very cruel and jealous God. He told them that these invaders would reduce them to a miserable state of slavery or else put them to death. He wanted them to join him in fighting the aggressors.
However, his call fell on deaf ears. With a handful of men he fought for several months a guerrilla war around a place called Baracoa. After being captured, he was burned at the stake and his followers rounded up and killed.
The Conquistadors then proceeded westward slaughtering the Indians who offered any opposition. The remainder were forced into slavery and made to work in the mines where most perished. A number of tribes, rather than be enslaved, committed mass suicide. Others rebelled again and again.
The last leader of these suicidal rebels was a chief named Guamá. He fought the Spaniards in the mountains of eastern Cuba from 1522 to 1533. His defeat ended the last major Indian resistance. In less than 40 years, disease, war and the mines had virtually exterminated Cuba’s indigenous population of some 300,000. This eradication of a whole people was repeated again and again on almost every Caribbean isle.
Columbus himself, by the time he died in 1506, was a disappointed man. His enemies in court had turned the Catholic Kings against him and total disillusion enveloped his closing years. It is said that his death in poverty was a measure of his failure to give Spain the promised riches of the East.
In the years to come, the Spanish soldiers of fortune would rob the Aztecs of Mexico and Incas of Peru of their massive treasures, but Columbus died without knowing of this unheard of wealth. His renowned enterprise of discovery gave these riches to others and his dreams were to be fulfilled by brutal men.
His ruthless conversion and exploitation of the natives did not bring him the gold and silver he had promised the Monarchs of Spain. Today, he is only remembered by most aboriginals of the world for the inhumane way with which he treated the Indians of the Western Hemisphere.
In Columbus's handling of the original inhabitants of the Americas, a few years ago, Russell Means of the American Indian Movement, is reputed to have said, "Columbus makes Hitler look like a juvenile delinquent." In the same vein, Manuel Gomes da Silva, one of the leaders of the Brazilian Indians when discussing the Columbus celebrations held in the 1990s is quoted as saying, "How can they celebrate 500 years of death and violence?"
Yet, even though Columbus's treatment of the Indians was barbaric and he failed to deliver the fabled wealth to his benefactors one cannot deny his imprint on mankind. He alone in the medieval world had the vision and will which changed history forever. Many believe that his initiating of the evils, perpetrated on Americas's original inhabitants during the past half-millennium, are only slight pains in the evolution of the world. Of course, no one has asked the aboriginals of the Americas their opinion.
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Oldest 'modern' human skulls found in Africa
Posted: Wednesday, June 11, 2003
Source: University Of California - Berkeley
160,000-year-old Fossilized Skulls From Ethiopia Are Oldest Modern Humans
Berkeley -- The fossilized skulls of two adults and one child discovered in the Afar region of eastern Ethiopia have been dated at 160,000 years, making them the oldest known fossils of modern humans, or Homo sapiens.
The skulls, dug up near a village called Herto, fill a major gap in the human fossil record, an era at the dawn of modern humans when the facial features and brain cases we recognize today as human first appeared.
The fossils date precisely from the time when biologists using genes to chart human evolution predicted that a genetic "Eve" lived somewhere in Africa and gave rise to all modern humans.
"We've lacked intermediate fossils between pre-humans and modern humans, between 100,000 and 300,000 years ago, and that's where the Herto fossils fit," said paleoanthropologist Tim White, professor of integrative biology at the University of California, Berkeley, and a co-leader of the team that excavated and analyzed the discovery site. "Now, the fossil record meshes with the molecular evidence."
"With these new crania," he added, "we can now see what our direct ancestors looked like."
"This set of fossils is stupendous," said team member F. Clark Howell, UC Berkeley professor emeritus of integrative biology and co-director with White of UC Berkeley's Laboratory for Human Evolutionary Studies. "This is a truly revolutionary scientific discovery."
Howell added that these anatomically modern humans pre-date most neanderthals, and therefore could not have descended from them, as some scientists have proposed.
The international team is led by White and his Ethiopian colleagues, Berhane Asfaw of the Rift Valley Research Service in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, and Giday WoldeGabriel of Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. The results of the find will be reported in two papers in the June 12 issue of the journal Nature.
The research team also unearthed skull pieces and teeth from seven other hominid individuals, hippopotamus bones bearing cut marks from stone tools, and more than 600 stone tools, including hand axes. All are from the same sediments and, thus, the same era.
"These were people using a sophisticated stone technology," White said. "Using chipped hand axes and other stone tools, they were butchering carcasses of large mammals like hippos and buffalo and undoubtedly knew how to exploit plants."
They lived long before most examples of another early hominid, the neanderthal, or Homo neanderthalensis, proving beyond a reasonable doubt, White said, that Homo sapiens did not descend from these short, stocky creatures. More like cousins, neanderthals split off from the human tree more than 300,000 years ago and died out about 30,000 years ago, perhaps driven to extinction by modern humans.
"These well-dated and anatomically diagnostic Herto fossils are unmistakably non-neanderthal," said Howell, a co-author of the Nature paper that details the hominids and an expert on early modern humans. "These fossils show that near-humans had evolved in Africa long before the European neanderthals disappeared. They thereby demonstrate conclusively that there was never a neanderthal stage in human evolution."
Because the Herto fossils represent a transition between more primitive hominids from Africa and modern humans, they provide strong support for the hypothesis that modern humans evolved in Africa and subsequently spread into Eurasia. This hypothesis goes against the theory that modern humans arose in many areas of Europe, Asia and Africa from other hominids who had migrated out of Africa at a much earlier time.
The fossil evidence, said Asfaw, "clearly shows what molecular anthropologists have been saying for a long time - that modern Homo sapiens evolved out of Africa. These fossilized skulls from Herto show that modern humans were living at around 160,000 years ago with full-fledged Homo sapiens features. The 'Out of Africa' hypothesis is now tested, ... (and) we can conclusively say that neanderthals had nothing to do with modern humans. They went extinct."
The fossil skulls
The three fossil skulls remain in Ethiopia, but replicas made from them were compared by the research team with many examples of neanderthal and earlier hominid skulls, as well as those of modern humans. Many of the modern human comparison skulls came from a worldwide sample of skeletal remains in the collection of UC Berkeley's Hearst Museum of Anthropology.
The most complete of the three new fossil skulls, probably that of a male, is slightly larger than the extremes seen in modern Homo sapiens, yet it bears other characteristics within the range of modern humans - in particular, less prominent brow ridges than pre-Homo sapiens and a higher cranial vault. Because of these similarities, the researchers placed the fossils in the same genus and species as modern humans but appended a subspecies name - Homo sapiens idaltu -to differentiate them from contemporary humans, Homo sapiens sapiens.
Idàltu, which means "elder" in the Afar language, refers to the adult male's antiquity and individual age. The man, though probably in his late 20s to mid-30s, had heavily worn upper teeth and a brain size slightly larger than average for living people.
Scientists tracking evolution through changes in mitochondrial DNA, which is passed from mother to daughter, have estimated that humans derive their mitochrondrial genes from an ancestral mother nicknamed "Eve" who lived in Africa about 150,000 years ago. Other scientists studying the male Y chromosome have reached similar conclusions. The new Herto fossils are from a population living at exactly this time.
"In a sense, these genetic findings were impossible to seriously test without a good fossil record from Africa," said White. "Back in 1982, when Becky Cann and Allan Wilson of UC Berkeley were using molecules to study evolution, they concluded that the common ancestors of all modern humans lived in Africa 100,000 to 200,000 years ago. For the last 20 years we've been looking for good, well-dated fossil evidence of that antiquity."
Previously found fossils were younger, from sites scattered around Africa, often poorly dated and incomplete. These include fossil skull fragments from Klasies River Mouth in South Africa, dating from about 100,000 years ago, and Middle Eastern fossils from Qafzeh and Skhul dating from 90,000 to 130,000 years ago. Ethiopia has yielded some modern human fossils, including those from Omo, which are approximately 100,000 years old, and the Aduma fossil finds of the Middle Awash, which date from about 80,000 years.
While these previous discoveries appear also to be Homo sapiens, the new finds from Herto are older, well-dated and more complete without sharing characteristics of more primitive human ancestors such as Homo erectus or the neanderthals.
Discovery
The fossil-rich site was discovered on Nov. 16, 1997, in a dry and dusty valley bordering the Middle Awash River near Herto, a seasonally occupied village. During a reconnaissance, White first spotted stone tools and the fossil skull of a butchered hippo emerging from the ground. When the team returned to intensively survey the area 11 days later, they discovered the most complete of the adult skulls protruding from the ancient sediment. It had been exposed by heavy rains and partially trampled by herds of cows.
A portion of the large adult's left front cranium (the braincase) had been crushed and scattered, but the team was able to excavate the rest of the skull, minus the lower jaw, and reconstruct it.
The child's skull, found nearby, was fragmented and scattered from having been exposed for many years. The team recovered most pieces of the cranium, more than 200 in all, from a 400 square-foot area, and Asfaw painstakingly pieced them together over a period of three years.
Based on the presence of unerupted teeth, the skull is that of a child of six or seven. Interestingly, this skull and a second adult's, too fragmentary to reconstruct, showed cut marks pointing to ancient mortuary practices, White said. The child's skull bore marks indicating that, after death, the muscles had been cut from the base of the skull. The rear of the cranial base was broken away and the edges polished, and the entire cranium was worn smooth as if by repeated handling. The second adult skull showed parallel scratches around the perimeter of the skull apparently made by a stone tool repeatedly drawn across the skull's surface in a pattern different from that created during defleshing, as for food. Even the nearly complete adult skull had a few cut marks.
The mortuary rituals of the Herto people differ from those of earlier hominids, some of whom cut flesh from skulls but apparently did not polish or decorate them with scratch marks. Modifications like those seen in the Herto skulls have been recorded by anthropologists from societies, including some in New Guinea, in which the skulls of ancestors are preserved and worshipped.
The Herto skulls were not found with other bones from the rest of the bodies, which is unusual, White said, leading the researchers to infer that the people "were moving the heads around on the landscape. They probably cut the muscles and broke the skull bases of some skulls to extract the brain, but why, whether as part of a cannibalistic ritual, we have no way of knowing."
The team also recovered more than 640 stone artifacts, though they estimate that the entire Herto area contains millions of such artifacts: hand axes, flake tools, cores, flakes and rare blades. Renowned African prehistorian J. Desmond Clark of UC Berkeley analyzed many of them before his death in February of last year. Clark and colleagues Dr. Yonas Beyene of Ethiopia's Authority for Research and Conservation of the Cultural Heritages and Dr. Alban Defleur of Marseilles, France, concluded that the stone tools were transitional between the Acheulean period, characterized by a predominance of hand axes, and the later flake-dominated Middle Stone Age.
"The associated fossil bones show clearly that the Herto people had a taste for hippos, but we can't tell whether they were killing them or scavenging them," said Beyene. "These artifacts are clues about the ancestors who made them."
Ancient lake shore
The early humans at Herto lived along the shores of a shallow lake created when the Awash River temporarily dammed about 260,000 years ago. The lake contained abundant hippos, crocodiles and catfish, while buffalo roamed the land.
The sediments and volcanic rock in which the fossils were found were dated at between 160,000 and 154,000 years by a combination of two methods. The argon/argon method was used by colleagues in the Berkeley Geochronology Center, led by Paul R. Renne, a UC Berkeley adjunct associate professor of geology. WoldeGabriel of Los Alamos National Laboratory and Bill Hart of Miami University in Ohio used the chemistry of the volcanic layers to correlate the dated layers.
The Middle Awash team consists of more than 45 scientists from 14 different countries who specialize in geology, archaeology and paleontology. In this single study area, the team has found fossils dating from the present to more than 6 million years ago, painting a clear picture of human evolution from ape-like ancestors to present-day humans.
"The human fossils from Herto are near the top of a well-calibrated succession of African fossils," White said. "This is clear fossil evidence that our species arose through evolution."
The work was funded by the National Science Foundation and the Institute of Geophysics and Planetary Physics at Los Alamos National Laboratory, in combination with the Hampton Fund for International Initiatives of Miami University and the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science.
The original news release can be found here.
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Cleaning Up The Funk
Posted: Saturday, June 7, 2003
Commencement Speech At Grinnell College
by Tim Wise, May 20, 2003, Znet
Thank you very much, to the administration, faculty, assembled guests and parents but mostly to the graduating seniors, who for some totally inexplicable reason have chosen me to give today's commencement address.
I am still convinced that there must have been some terrible, terrible mistake, perhaps some kind of vote fraud, as it is not everyday that radical activists are asked to speak at these kinds of things. Indeed, I barely made it to my own graduation, so you can imagine my surprise when I was asked to attend yours.
My first thought was, honestly, what kind of example can I possibly set for these students? I mean, I graduated thirteen years ago and have just finished paying off my student loans, like, last Wednesday or something, so I can't imagine that makes me much of a role model.
But anyway, having said all that, I will dispense with the self-deprecation, for the clock is ticking, and although you did not come here today to listen to me, I was apparently chosen to give this speech for a reason, and so I figure I'd best say something worthy of the occasion.
I mostly want to avoid saying something trite, something terribly cliché, something ordinary and pedestrian--like the kind of thing most folks say when asked to give a commencement speech. I want desperately not to say something like, "you are the future of this country," although indeed you are. And I want even more desperately not to say something about how you should, after leaving this place, "continue to learn and to search for truth," though indeed you should do both.
Because you see, trite and cliché are already far too prevalent in this culture. Meaningless platitudes are the order of the day it seems, from politicians, corporate leaders, media talking heads, you name it; and I want desperately not to be like that.
And even though meaningless platitudes often come wrapped in the best of intentions, they are rendered no less meaningless by the heartfelt decency of their authors: a truism that has become painfully obvious to me, especially in the past two years.
Ever since 9/11 in fact, trite and cliché have almost become virtues it seems, as millions of good and decent people have rushed to slap bumper stickers on their cars, which say things like "United We Stand."
United, really? Well excuse me if I'm not convinced.
You see, unity is not a state of being that can be secured by a simple act of proclamation; it does not flow like water just because one wishes it to be so. Unity is something to be created; the culmination of dedicated effort, and a condition that requires as a prerequisite something else, and that something else is justice. And not just for some, or most, but for all.
And justice in turn requires equity: true equity of opportunity and access, neither of which condition existed on 9/10 or 9/9, or 9/8 or at any time before 9/11, and neither of which condition miraculously emerged phoenix-like from the ashes on that day.
Let me suggest to you that so long as the poverty rates for people of color in this country are two to three times the rates for whites, that we are anything but united.
So long as 42 million people go without health care, and millions live just a layoff or major illness away from destitution, and even homelessness, we are anything but united.
So long as there are a million black children living in families with less than $7000 in annual income--a 50% increase in the number of such kids in extreme poverty in just the past three years--we are anything but united.
So long as there are, according to federal data, roughly 3 million cases of housing discrimination against people of color each year in this country, we are anything but united.
So long as my Arab and Muslim brothers and sisters are being profiled as likely terrorists, in ways that no white men were in the wake of Oklahoma City, we are anything but united.
So long as hundreds of thousands of women continue to face glass ceilings, and worse--sexual assault--in their homes, and even at the Air Force Academy, we are anything but united.
So long as my gay and lesbian brothers and sisters can be fired just because they are gay or lesbian, or arrested in their homes for consensual sexual activity, we are anything but united, and I should add, anything but free.
As we search in vain for those weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, and fail to find them (even the $1.5 billion dollars worth of chemical and biological weapons that American corporations sold Saddam for all those years), let us remember that we have our own weapons of mass destruction, and I'm not talking about our bulging stockpiles of war material. Rather I refer to other kinds of weapons, weapons which kill and maim more Americans than Osama bin Laden ever has: they are weapons known as indifference, apathy, fatalism, and a sense of resignation to the way things are.
Because the fact is, none of the progress about which we as a nation like to boast came about as a result of folks being passive, or conforming, or because people accepted the system into which they were born.
And change certainly never comes about if people are too afraid to issue harsh critiques of their nation's flaws for fear that small-minded, scared little men with radio or TV talk shows or cabinet-level positions might call them unpatriotic.
Patriotism, if it is to have any value whatsoever, must mean the desire to set right the wrongs present within one's own nation; to demand justice and equity and to oppose anything and anyone that stands in the way of either.
Patriotism does not mean waving a flag, saying a pledge, chanting "USA, USA," at some jingoistic pep rally, and then ignoring everything the Constitution says your nation was supposed to be about. It does not mean nation-worship, and if it does, then God help us, patriotism has become little more than modern idolatry, and is a concept with which we can do without.
For those people of color, seeking to navigate the waters of a society still not fully committed to treating you as the equals you are, please know that you are the generation your ancestors prayed for, and you are capable of transforming this land. What's more, you are entitled to do so, seeing as how your parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents have no doubt paid for it many times over.
And for whites, wondering where we fit in this struggle for racial equity and justice, I say to you that we must learn to listen, to follow, to be allies in the truest sense of the word; to challenge this society even when, and especially when, it provides to us unearned privileges because of our skin color, our history, and the inertia propelled into the present-day by that history.
And not because of some misplaced liberal guilt, but because racism diminishes us as well, and steals a part of our humanity by separating us from our brothers and sisters of color.
Now I know this can be hard to hear. It is easier, I suspect, to content oneself with the clichéd notion of personal innocence--as in, "I didn't do it, I never owned slaves, I never killed an Indian, I never discriminated against anyone"--but truly, it is a little late in the proverbial day for that.
Because you see, we inherit the legacy of what has come before. History does not start, and stop, and then start again. There is no reset button that allows us to go back to a state of innocence long after that innocence has been delivered stillborn.
So although we may not be responsible for the creation of a system of racism, among other forms of injustice, we are responsible nonetheless for doing something about that system from this point forward. To do less is to collaborate with the original sin, to make us no better than those who set things up this way.
Perhaps a story can make the point here by way of analogy.
Shortly after I graduated from college, I made the decision to move into a large house with nine other roommates. Please note, and let me spare you the experience, this is never a good idea. But we thought at the time that it would be great. It would be really cheap and we would even share grocery expenses, and take turns cooking so as to share responsibility for the group.
And one night, about two weeks into our little experiment in collective living, one of my roommates made a big pot of Gumbo, because that's what you do in New Orleans.
And when I returned from work that night, he asked if I wanted some. I said no, having already eaten; but I asked him to please save some for me and to put it in the fridge for the next day, as I might take it to work with me; and then I went upstairs to my room, watched TV and went to bed.
The next morning, I come down for my coffee before heading out the door, and what do I see but that pot of Gumbo, half-full, still sitting on the front left burner of the stove. No portion of it had been saved for me, but more to the point, a great quantity of food had gone to waste. And I was upset. Having a little time on my hands, I thought to myself, perhaps I should clean up this mess.
But then I caught myself, and I thought, "Wait a minute; I didn't make this mess; this isn't my fault, and so I'm not cleaning it up." And I took my self-righteousness out the door and went to work.
About 6 o' clock, I returned home and noticed another roommate cooking the evening's dinner on the front right burner of the stove, but on the front left burner, there was still that pot of Gumbo, getting nastier, and crustier and funkier by the minute.
And I asked roommate number two what he was doing; why was he cooking around last night's dinner; why hadn't he cleaned up first?
To which he responded that he hadn't made that mess; that it wasn't his fault; and so he shouldn't have to clean it up--logic with which I could hardly argue, as indeed I had said the same thing just a few hours earlier. So I grabbed a plate of the night's meal, went to my room, did some work and went to bed.
7 a.m. came, and I had forgotten to set my alarm, but I really didn't need one; for I assure you that when Gumbo has been sitting on a stove for thirty-six hours, the smell will extend beyond the kitchen, will travel up the stairs, down the hall, under your door and through your keyhole, and assault--in a way I cannot describe--your nostrils; and indeed that is what happened.
And now I was mad. I bolted down the stairs, glared at the pot of Gumbo, as if somehow I expected it to return the stare. I saw it sitting there, now even nastier, and funkier, and there was not a roommate in sight.
And it was at that point that I said to myself, "I might not have made this mess, this may not be my fault, but I'm going to clean it up, simply because I'm tired of living in the funk."
And you see, it is the same with human societies. When we finally become tired of living in the funk, in the residue of injustice passed down to us from previous generations we will seek to clean it up, issues of blame and guilt aside.
Not to say that it will be easy of course. Cleaning up a pot of two-day Gumbo after all is a lot easier than transforming a culture.
People will tell you that you can't change the way things are; others will ridicule you for even trying, and often times your efforts will fail. They will, in fact, likely fail more often than they succeed. But that doesn't matter, because--and please never forget it--there is redemption in struggle.
Win or lose--and don't get me wrong, we indeed fight in the hopes of winning true justice--there is something to be said for confronting the inevitable choice one must make in this life, between collaborating with or resisting injustice, and choosing the latter.
There is something to be said for knowing you did all you could to stop a war, eliminate racism, or improve your community for the good of all. There is something to be said for a good night's sleep, and the ability to wake in the morning, look in the mirror, and never doubt that if today were your last, that you would have lived a life of integrity.
For although we never know when our efforts will succeed, or even if they will at all, we do know one thing as surely as we know that the sun will rise and set each day; we know what will happen if we DON'T do the work: nothing.
And given that choice, between the certainty of defeat and the promise of justice, in which territory lies the measure of our resolve and humanity, I will gladly and without reservation opt for hope. And I'm hoping you will too.
So as James Baldwin put it: "The world is before you, and you need not take it or leave it as it was when you came in."
Thank you.
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Affirmative Action for Whites
Posted: Wednesday, May 28, 2003
by Ravi Grover
ravilution@hotmail.com
"Far more whites have entered the gates of the 10 most elite institutions through 'alumni preference' than the combined numbers of all the Blacks and Chicanos entering through affirmative action." - S.F. Examiner, April 1995
"We must understand the cynicism that exists in the Black community. The kind of cynicism that is created when, for example, some in our party miss no opportunity to roundly and loudly condemn affirmative action that helped few thousand Black kids get an education, but you hardly heard a whimper from them over affirmative action for lobbyists who load our federal tax codes with preferences for special interests." - Colin Powell at the 2000 Republican National Convention
One of many stops during Bush's 2000 campaign for the Presidency was Bob Jones University, an ill-famed school which refused to allow the entry of Black students up until 1971. Soon after admitting Blacks measures were taken in 1975 to make sure that such people didn't intermingle with whites. The school set a ban on interracial dating, citing a Biblical story which talks of God creating barriers between different peoples. During his campaign Bush didn't blink an eye or lodge any sort of moral protest against Bob Jones University. But he sure did speak passionately a few weeks after Senator Trent Lott's resignation over Affirmative Action at the University of Michigan.
To me, George Bush is symbolic of America and business as usual. Here we have a completely unintelligent and unqualified white guy who made bad grades both in high school and in college yet is somehow in a high leadership position with the support of a significant number people white and non-white. For whatever reason these people deliberately overlook his stupidity and lack of competency. His career title 'leader of the free world' requires knowledge of the international community and global affairs; yet he makes blatantly ignorant statements like "Africa is a nation that suffers from great disease" and "unrest in the Middle East causes unrest through out the region." He got into Yale not because of his intelligence (because he's obviously lacking that), but because 30% of admissions in Ivy League schools are reserved specifically for children of alumni, regardless of academic achievement. Why is it opponents of Affirmative Action never seem to criticize the discriminatory policy of legacy admissions? And no surprise that historically alumni at these schools have been majority white males, so it would then make sense that the incoming 30% will also be majority white. Bush also experimented with cocaine in his past yet avoided going to jail (and moral judgment from white America). Yet another fine example of Affirmative Action for whites: even though the majority of drug users in America are white and Blacks make up a mere 13% of drug users, somehow Blacks are 74% of the people imprisoned for possession of drugs.
Bush is also a staunch supporter of the War on Drugs as are many white parents - so long as white kids who are caught are filling up rehab clinics and not jail cells. And here is the most important aspect of Bush that resembles the structure of America: the guy goes on vacation every other week and does very little work.
Who's doing his work for him? An administration full of both men and women of color who have had to prove their intelligence (Condoleeza Rice went to Stanford and Colin Powell went to West Point) by working twice as hard as their fellow whites, who have had to struggle to get to the top instead of having power handed over to them on a silver platter, and who are in that cabinet specifically because of Affirmative Action. Yet even though it's people of color who are doing all the work behind the scenes, the under-worked, unqualified, and unintelligent white guy is praised by his supporters as exhibiting great leadership. Not to mention many people deliberately overlook the fact that maybe the idiot shouldn't be in charge.
You can see this pattern reflected in American businesses. In the agriculture industry the majority of labor is done by Latino workers who are sweating 10 hours a day in 100 degree southwest weather. Yet almost all of these companies are owned and managed by white guys. In the Information Technology, medical, and science industries a large number of the employees are Asians with Ph.D?s and Master Degrees. Again, most hospitals and computer companies are run and managed by less educated and less experienced white guys. In the sports industry where the majority of the athletes are Black virtually all teams and merchandising companies are run and owned by white guys. You look at the garment business, most of the workers are immigrant women of color, and again who runs and manages these companies? White people.
Don't get me wrong. There are plenty of qualified and hard working whites deserving of their jobs and college admissions. But if America's businesses and its education system show us anything it's that time and time again, unqualified white males are being promoted and accepted over qualified, educated, hard working people of color and white women.
Which brings me to these two questions: does Bush, a man who's received hand-outs his whole life and is on vacation half the year while getting paid a high salary, have the right to talk about discrimination? Do whites like to 'play the race card' to ensure access to opportunities? Here are some facts showing that they do:
- The Glass Ceiling Commission, headed by Republican Elizabeth Dole, reported in 1995 that even though many minority (particularly Asian) workers had higher levels of education and better work credentials than their white counterparts, lesser qualified white males were still being promoted over them. 97% of the sr. managers of the Fortune 1000 Industrial and Fortune 500 companies are white, and 95%+ are male while 57% of the work force are people of color, women, or both. Of the 5% of managers that are women, 5% of that are women of color! When polled at the workplace the majority of white workers stated that they'd rather answer to a white male boss (even if he's got the vocabulary of a 4 year old like George Bush??) over a person of color.
- In the state of Washington Blacks only make up a little over 3.8% of the college student population. This means that for every 100 students (who are majority white in Washington) only 4 students are Black. White residents felt so threatened by this ridiculously tiny FOUR PERCENT that they passed a state ballot initiative to get rid of Affirmative Action from state universities and colleges. I wonder who white parents scapegoat now when their kids don't get into college?
- Even though Canadians make up the 4th largest illegal immigrant population in the US, Irish are the 1st largest illegal population in New England, and Italians are the 2nd largest illegal population in NYC, over 95% of people stopped and/or imprisoned by the INS are people of color. The majority of Border Patrol activity occurring at the US-Mexico border. According to www.ins.gov, Mexicans only make up 30% of undocumented aliens in the US, yet are targeted the most by law enforcement. The New York Times reported that of 37 work raids conducted by the INS use of Spanish by workers was criteria for investigating people believed to be illegal.
- According to a 1997 USDA report several southeastern states took 3 times as long to grant loans to Black farmers as it did to white farmers. In 1992 94% of the committees that granted loans had no minority or females employed.
- A study by the Leadership Council on Civil Rights reported that Black youth who've committed a violent crime are 9 times more likely to be sent to prison than white youth who've committed the exact same crime.
- The Department of Justice reports that white college students are the overwhelming majority of drug users and underage drinkers in the USA. Yet Black motorists in NJ are 9 times more likely to be pulled over by cops and have their cars searched for drugs. A Boston Globe investigation found that in Massachusetts Blacks are twice as likely as whites to have their cars searched when stopped by the police. In St. Louis, IL Latinos are 1% of the population yet 40% more likely to be pulled over by cops than whites.
- Even though suburban whites consume the most resources and produce the majority of waste in America (and in the world) a United Church of Christ report found that 3 out of 5 of the largest commercial landfills garbage dumps are in Black and Latino neighborhoods. 60% of Black & Latino and 50% of Asian American & Native American neighborhoods have uncontrolled toxic sites.
- The University of Chicago and MIT studies showed that resumes with Black-sounding names were 50% more likely to be passed up then resumes with white sounding names (ironically I saw this same news story reported the same day Bush came out against Affirmative Action)
- The Fair Employment Council of Greater Washington reported that Blacks are twice as likely to be denied mortgages as whites who are making the same income and have the same qualifications
- According to an Equal Pay Day study, women earn 89 cents for every $1 earned by a man, even when women are working the same job and have the same experience
- Blacks earn 80% of whites with the same education level The President of the University of Michigan (who's a white male) has come out in support of Affirmative Action. You would think that he would be against such a policy if his school is being overrun by stupid, unintelligent minorities, right? But this isn't the case. What's also not mentioned about the white woman who is suing U of M is that white students who had lower GPA's and aptitude test scores were admitted into the school over her. So where's the lawsuit for that? Sometimes it seems like some whites have no problem looking the other way when it comes to the stupidity of other whites but get easily infuriated over the presence of imaginary 'unqualified' people of color.
It's worth noting that when I (or anyone else) write about the existence of institutional bigotry we have to present as many facts as possible just to prove our damn point to all the skeptical whites. But when whites talk about being denied jobs or not getting admitted into a school because of 'reverse' discrimination we're just supposed to automatically take their word for it even thought they have no facts to back up their claims. Why is it we never see Labor studies conducted on how large numbers of whites are unemployed because immigrants have 'stolen' their jobs? Why is it rich whites aren't funding research to publish statistics on the large number of whites across America denied education because of Affirmative Action? Why is it through the media we don't ever hear of the wide spread impact that institutional 'reverse' discrimination has on white America? Why aren't American businesses and corporations coming out against Affirmative Action by showing that all these incompetent minorities and women are bringing them down and making them lose profits? Why isn't the US military, one of the largest proponents of Affirmative Action in America speaking out against such a policy? Where is the proof that universities are admitting brainless people of color into their schools who are dumbing down the quality of education at such institutions?
If there was proof of such discrimination going on we'd see studies conducted and analytical reports issued by both government and private organizations trying to expose the suffering of whites. Instead we listen to a lot of empty rhetoric on 'reverse' discrimination (which is really insulting because it implies that it's natural to discriminate against women and people of color) . There are clearly more whites in this country with most of America's wealth concentrated in this population. Surely they can finance and produce such a study to back up their claims of this supposed rampant unfairness they are encountering. But they don't and they can't.
Why? Because there simply is no proof.
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Whither Mother Africa?
Posted: Wednesday, May 21, 2003
by Kim Johnson, Trinidad Guardian
Listening to the radio only while driving means that you catch little more than snippets in-between navigating the potholes, dodging the maxis, answering the cell, and keeping an eye on what the children are bickering about now in the back seat.
Accordingly, I can only tell you something African is coming up, African Liberation Day or African History Month or some such.
Well, both prompt the same question: what is happening to Africa?
If it's African Liberation Day, then: when and how will Africa be liberated?
And from whom?
If it was African History Month, the issue is the same because Africa seems to be far along the road to a withdrawal from history, or at least from the 21st century.
Either way, the reality is the same: African nations are rapidly becoming irrelevant to the rest of the world, except perhaps as a market for guns.
Barring nuclear extinction, there can hardly be a more tragic scenario than that of a tyrannised people sliding into starvation, to the indifference of everybody else.
It means becoming the world's vagrant, like the ones who sleep on the pavement, dirty, hungry, sick, while passersby go about their business, stepping over without noticing the humanity sprawled there like so much rubbish.
People want to liberate Iraq from Saddam Hussein, they trying Slobovan Milosovec for war crimes in former Yugoslavia, they worried about what North Korea going to do with its nuclear weapons, they glad India and Pakistan back on speaking terms.
But Zimbabwe is only a problem when the white farmers are attacked.
Here we have people who could talk all day about how great Egypt was. And as if we didn't produce enough on our own, we import a few every year to give a lecture or two.
Yet I am yet to hear anyone weep for an Africa racked by war, genocide, corruption, disease, famine, child slavery, environmental destruction and repressive dictatorship.
Of Africa's 700 million people, half live on less than US$1 a day. About 40 million face famine.
In Ethiopia and Eritrea, while eight to 12 million are starving, their leaders use aid money to fight a war that has already claimed 70,000 lives. That scenario can be found all over. The Sudanese have been fighting a civil war for 20 years. There are wars in Angola, Sierra Leone, Congo, Congo-Brazzaville, Somalia. In Burundi, 300,000 were killed in theirs. The Ivory Coast, after decades of peaceful child slavery, has now joined the club.
In some places, the State has been destroyed by corruption and warfare, in that it cannot provide any amenities whatsoever – not water, infrastructure, policing, laws. Think of Mogadishu in Black Hawk Down.
In other countries, almost a quarter of their people are HIV-positive. Of the world's 36 million infected with Aids, 23 million live in Africa. Those countries will be depopulated of productive adults.
Africa's poverty, sickness, and social disruption are not like the Ethiopian famine of 1974. This is something new. It is the catastrophe of people who will never recover economically and will permanently need aid.
And no one bats an eyelid.
Apartheid has been destroyed so it's no longer news that there are on average 59 murders a day in South Africa, 145 rapes and 752 serious assaults. Babies are sometimes raped. Twelve per cent of the population is HIV-positive.
What's to be done?
Traditional explanations offer no solution. Colonialism, Western exploitation, racism, globalisation, foreign aid, debt crisis are all contributory. But they're external causes, and the solutions must be found internally.
If colonialism drew boundaries between States that exacerbated tribal antagonisms, only Africans can re-draw them.
Yet, among the first resolutions of the Organisation of African Unity was to keep the old boundaries, and in the 40 years of independence, they haven't budged an inch.
If things are to be changed, the responsibility lies with Africans to change them. Nelson Mandela, great as he is, cannot do it by himself.
If leaders are corrupt, then Africans must remove them. When King Mswati III of Swaziland buys a private jet for £28 million, while 22 per cent of the population have HIV and the Government's health budget is £12.6 million, remove him.
Excuses can no longer be made for South Africa's Thabo Mbeki, who thinks HIV does not cause AIDS; or for Robert Mugabe, who has destroyed the once-prosperous Zimbabwe; or Namibia's Sam Nujoma who, like Mswati, has a private jet while ruling over one of the poorest countries in the world; and on and on.
This isn't a case of blaming the victim, because the victims are ordinary African people, whereas the perpetrators are the tiny political and educated elites.
South Korea lagged behind Kenya 50 years ago, but is now a developed country, while you can't drive from Nairobi to Mombasa. Why? It's not race but political culture. Everywhere has corruption but, in most other places, it still allows development.
There's a cynical joke about two young men who become friends at university in Europe, an Asian and an African. Afterwards they return to their homes and careers.
Years later, the African visits his friend, who proudly shows off his ten-bedroom house, swimming pool, Lexus. The African congratulates his success and the Asian smiles and points at a highway in the distance.
"See that?" says the Asian with a wink: "Ten per cent."
Next year, the Asian visits his friend and is taken to his house. It is much grander than the Asian's: 36 bedrooms, two pools, a fleet of Mercedes.
"Gosh, you've done well!" exclaims the Asian.
The African smiles, points outside to the dense jungle, and says with a wink: "One hundred per cent."
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Inventing Jayson Blair
Posted: Sunday, May 18, 2003
Reflections On White Privilege And Hypocrisy
by Tim Wise; ZNet
If Jayson Blair did not exist, white America would have to create him. The confirmed New York Times plagiarist and all-around journalistic con man, after all, is the perfect foil for those whites who have always needed to find a dark face capable of confirming pre-existing biases towards, suspicions of, and fears about black people.
Indeed we have long invented proofs to fit our prejudices.
Racist beliefs about blacks and their propensity for savagery were confirmed (for racists at least) by slave rebellions.
Racist beliefs about black intelligence are confirmed (for racists at least) by any black student who drops out of an elite college, no matter the reasons.
And now there is Blair, who confirms (for racists at least) that blacks are a little less honest, a little less truly talented, and taking jobs from more capable whites because of misguided racial preferences; preferences that allow them to get away with fraud or shoddy work in a way that whites presumably never would be allowed to do.
But really now, who are these folks trying to kid?
Whites have been doing our fair share of lying and cheating since long before this nation even became a nation. Indeed, without a healthy dose of both it would have been rather difficult to have become a nation at all.
And when whites lie we are rarely pilloried the way Blair has been as of late, or as Janet Cooke--another black journalist who fabricated stories in the early 1980's--was. Indeed, in just the last several years, over a half-dozen white journalists have been busted for plagiarism or fabricating stories, some every bit as serious in scope as Jayson Blair, and even at the Times; yet none provoked this kind of outrage.
In fact, one of the guilty parties even has a new book from a major publisher, which provides a somewhat fictionalized but overall lighthearted account of the author's deceptive exploits.
Of course, there's nothing particularly unique about light-skinned liars managing to get by without too much damage to their reputations or the shelf lives of the tales they've told.
The stock narrative of American history, created by whites to be sure, is nothing but a string of fabrications, after all.
Christopher Columbus discovered America and was the first to prove that the world was round. Wrong.
George Washington chopped down a cherry tree and then 'fessed up to his father because he could not tell a lie, though apparently historians had no such compunction.
The nation was founded by people who, despite their persecution of those with religious beliefs different from their own, were seeking religious freedom. Strike three.
One nation, with liberty and justice for all: by now you probably get the picture.
Truth be told, Jayson Blair is really quite the amateur trickster compared to the chroniclers of American propaganda and triumphalist pseudo-history. But this should come as no surprise, as the powerful by necessity must be more talented at bullshit than anyone else, if for no other reason than to maintain said power.
Ronald Reagan lied about a welfare cheat with dozens of names and Social Security numbers who collected over $100,000 fraudulently and drove around in a Cadillac. It was completely fabricated, an intentional con, but it certainly didn't hurt--indeed one might even say it helped--his career.
When he was a reporter in St. Louis, Pat Buchanan took internal FBI memos blasting Martin Luther King Jr. and passed them off as his own work: a form of plagiarism to be sure, but his career was hardly damaged by his lack of ethics.
George Will brags about procuring--one might say pilfering--Jimmy Carter's 1980 Presidential Debate handbook and passing it on to Reagan so as to prepare him for his televised tête-à-tête with the incumbent. But in Will's case, an action called theft by those who are intellectually honest hasn't prevented him from being a respected columnist and commentator whose smug mug we can see each Sunday morning on "This Week."
George W. Bush lied about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction--what with his claims of 300 gallons of this, and 500 gallons of that, and such and such tons of this other thing--and most people don't seem to care. When white folks lie, even if those lies result in a war that kills (so far) at least 4000 Iraqi civilians according to news reports available in Europe but not here, the apostles of integrity and virtue have nothing to say. But let a black man perpetrate a fraud, especially if that fraud besmirches the good reputations of white men, like the bosses at the New York Times, and all hell breaks loose.
And then that black man becomes a poster boy in the eyes of white reactionaries for why affirmative action and "diversity" efforts are misguided. That such insipid buffoonery passes for wisdom in the eyes of so many, rather than being seen as the epitome of a racist double-standard is stunning beyond belief; or rather it would be were it not so numbingly common, so cliché, so pedestrian.
After all, when white men ripped off the Savings and Loan industry, costing taxpayers a few hundred billion in bailout funds, no one suggested that we should be wary of hiring white men to run banks: even white men like Silverado's Neil Bush, brother of W., who had no prior experience in the field.
When white men commit major corporate fraud (think Enron) no one suggests that we should eradicate the workings of the old boy's networks that are so instrumental in getting white guys top executive jobs in the first place.
When a half-dozen white pilots in six months get pulled off planes because they're either drunk or hungover, or when a couple of others strip down to their underwear in the cockpit just for shits and giggles, no one recommends that white pilots might be too unstable to serve the nation's commercial fleet, or that whatever channels white men have exploited to receive the lion's share of jobs as pilots should be shut down so as to preserve the integrity of the profession.
When a white man runs a business into the ground, after having deserted his military assignment during war time, not only do whites as a group not bear the stigma of that one white man's incompetence and duplicity, but the white man in question gets another shot as a chief executive: this time as President of the United States. The same job his daddy had; a man who lied about taxes and reading his lips.
Recent revelations of widespread cheating by affluent white suburbanites on the SAT, using any number of ingenious scams to con the college entrance exam, haven't prompted calls for extra security at testing sites in Pleasantville, or greater scrutiny of white college applicant's scores.
Ultimately, if blacks screw up or do something objectionable they become exhibit A in the racist fantasies of the weak-minded, but if whites screw up, we get to remain individuals. This is the essence of white privilege: the privilege to rise or fall without implicating your group in the process or calling into question the mechanisms that brought you to your current station.
People of color, on the other hand, constantly have to answer for the whole. So when Jesse Jackson was running for President, everyone wanted to know his views on black crime, out-of-wedlock childbirths in the black community, and whether or not he would distance himself from Louis Farrakhan. Yet I can't recall a single white politician being asked his views on white serial killing, disproportionate child sexual molestation among whites, or being asked to distance himself from David Duke.
Even when blacks succeed there is no escaping the backhanded compliment that they are a "credit to their race," itself a racist comment since it implies that the group as a whole is rather lacking in the shining star department. Needless to say, such a thing is never said to a successful white person, since we already have a rather unlimited credit line, so to speak.
The most pathetic thing about the Blair incident is this: to an awful lot of whites--and certainly the zombified denizens of talk radio--this scandal proves that blacks are somehow getting opportunities they don't deserve; that racial preference has turned the notion of merit selection upside down. Yet they fail to acknowledge the reality that whites continue to get far more jobs, irrespective of actual ability, than people of color do.
According to the National Center for Career Strategies, more than 85 percent of all jobs are filled by word-of-mouth as opposed to merit-based competition through open advertising. What's more, nine in ten executives got their jobs through networking. So just who do we think are the folks in these networks, and who are those persons disproportionately left out? To ask the question is to answer it.
Studies for years have found that employers tend to prefer hiring people who remind them of themselves, and that too often they make judgments about merit and ability that are less about talent than their comfort level with the potential hire: a comfort level heavily influenced by race. Once again, just who do we think benefits from this form of subtle racism, and who is harmed? And once again, to ask the question is to answer it.
And finally, a recent study found that when resumes of equally-qualified job applicants are sent to employers, those with white sounding names are fifty percent more likely to get called in for an interview than those with black-sounding names. So who's getting preference?
At the end of the day, white America may delude itself into believing that Jayson Blair is the epitome of racial preference run amok, but until we clean out our own stables, filled as they are with liars, cheats, and a plethora of incompetents, we might want to avoid any and all mirrors for a while.
Tim Wise is an antiracist essayist, activist and father. He can be reached at timjwise@msn.com
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Fraud at the New York Times: Blaming Blacks
Posted: Wednesday, May 14, 2003
By THE BLACK COMMENTATOR
The New York Times should be ashamed of itself for abrogating "the trust between the newspaper and its readers," as chairman Arthur Ochs Sulzberger Jr. put it. But the Jayson Blair affair is the least of the newspaper's transgressions against truth. Racism, not affirmative action, is what ails the Times.
By rights, the Times' embarrassment should be of no collective concern to Black people. Whites control every important aspect of the publication's decision making. White management devised their own version of what they chose to call affirmative action, hiring those Blacks that appealed to their corporate tastes. Black people in general bear no responsibility for white people's hiring decisions. Yet, in the wake of 27-year-old Blair's alleged plagiarisms and fictions, media racists immediately sought to somehow blame the very concept of affirmative action for what is, at root, just another instance of white management incompetence. "Affirmative action" didn't hire Blair, and Blair didn't hire and assign himself--white management did.
There is a deeper current underlying this story, one that allows the Times to escape its own responsibilities by hiding behind supposed good intentions. The paper poses as a social do-gooder, when in reality it is an unreconstructed bigot. The Times needs an affirmative action program because it does a terrible job of hiring competent Black reporters, many hundreds of whom are willing and able to perform the corporate mission. The same racism that has historically prevented the Times from sufficiently staffing itself with minorities also causes it to hire the wrong candidates. White people have been screwing up affirmative action since before the term was coined, sometimes on purpose, more often through an inability to objectively assess non-whites--one of the definitions of racism.
Assault on The Gray Lady
The Blair denouement was bigger news than a thousand dead Iraqis. Basically, the story was framed as an affirmative action-induced erosion of standards at the highest levels of journalism--an assault on American media integrity as represented by The New York Times. Blacks were having their corrupt way with the Gray Lady--a symbol of white intelligence and competence as potent in some respects as Lady Liberty, a few miles south of Times Square.
The starting point of American racism is the assumption that white people and their institutions represent the proper, normative standards against which all other people and institutions are judged. Once the white normative assumption is internalized, a racist worldview flows from it as surely as water to the sea, polluting every social space in its path.
The logic of this seminal assumption dictates that people hired by the New York Times are either gifted human beings, or people who have been bestowed a gift. It is a circular kind of logic, since the Times has the power to set standards based on--itself.
The New York Times functions as a corporate arbiter of white American discourse. We gain vital clues to the workings of white corporate minds by noting the content and treatment of "All the News That's Fit to Print." We do not learn what is actually important, but only what the Times deems important enough to publish. And that's critical to know, if only to understand how the mighty think, and what they think about.
Those who are shackled by racist assumptions are led to conclude that a Black person fortunate enough to measure up to the standards of The New York Times--one who is privileged to breathe that rarified white air--carries a double obligation. He must prove that the brilliant whites who hired him picked the right Black person for the job, and he must insure by his comportment in the position that other white institutions will hire more Blacks to assist them in their corporate mission.
Should the Black candidate--a person picked by whites--fail, it is the aspirations of Black people as a whole for upward mobility that are made to seem unreasonable, ridiculous, even criminal. This is white mischief at its most automatic and insidious.
Jayson Blair failed his white folks, giving the New York Times a "huge black eye," as Sulzberger said with a straight face. The Times compiled a 7,500-word account of the Blair affair, essentially concluding that the newspaper had allowed its good intentions to be "betrayed" by a bad Black.
Lunatics control the asylum
Nowhere has the newspaper acknowledged that Blair was an affirmative action hire--this is simply assumed to be the case. In one sense, however, all Black recruitment at historically white work environments is affirmative action, in that it is reluctant hiring--white people doing what does not come naturally, and is against their distorted judgment. Persons who are reluctantly hired are often reluctantly supervised and not mentored at all. It is crystal clear that Jayson Blair was not part of any formal or informal "team" at the New York Times. Had he been connected with the life of the paper, half his stories would not have later been found to be bogus in some respect, including "frequent acts of journalistic fraud." Blair acted utterly alone.
Yes, there is something inherently wrong with affirmative action as practiced in the United States and at The New York Times: white people still make all the decisions. The perpetrators of the historical crime, the people whose delusional worldviews created the societal distortions that plague Black America in the first place--the same people that make the New York Times an unfit interpreter of reality--remain the arbiters of societal standards, values, and hiring. They decide what is "Fit to Print," and who is fit to engage in the process. Let them live with their choice of Jayson Blair--that's white folks' business.
African Americans did not craft the New York Times affirmative action program, nor are there enough Blacks in the organization to decisively influence the paper's editorial or workplace policies. Blair's alleged transgressions are proof only that the New York Times is a bad judge of Black people--as is normal among racists.
African Americans should not be drawn into a conversation based on the assumption that The New York Times sets a high standard for journalism, or that the paper's white managers are capable of recognizing any aspect of reality whatsoever, in hiring decisions or news judgments. Black people bear no onus for white incompetence in selecting Black people to carry out white corporate missions.
Petty frauds and mega-lies
The New York Times violates truth, every day, with no assistance from African Americans. Jayson Blair is accused of writing stories about people he had not spoken to, and places he had not been. For this, he is crucified, and made a symbol of Black pretensions. The Great White Liar William Safire wonders, "How could this happen at the most rigorously edited newspaper in the world?" Yet Blair's misdeeds, so innocuous that he could commit 36 of them before being caught, pale when compared to the Stalinist crime against reality perpetrated by valued Timesman Adam Nagourney, May 5, in full view of the paper's editors.
Nagourney was entrusted to divine the larger truths that emerged from the televised Democratic primary debate, in South Carolina. Instead, as BC noted in last week's issue, he disappeared three of the candidates:
"Nagourney then proceeded to delineate the opposing Democratic camps, comprising six of the nine candidates: Lieberman, Kerry, Edwards, Gephardt, Dean and Graham. In over 1,000 words, Nagourney not only failed to once mention the names Al Sharpton, Carole Moseley-Braun or Dennis Kucinich, he did not indicate in any manner that the three candidates existed on the planet Earth! The two Blacks and one lefty white did not rate even a throwaway line about the "others" vying for primary votes. The fact that they lived and breathed was not deemed fit to print--an amazing but honest exposition of the world as it should be in the judgment of the New York Times and corporate media, in general."
The New York Times erased three important politicians from a nationally televised event in which they were full participants, leaving not a trace of their presence in the Newspaper of Record. Presumably, the editors were pleased. Stalin's scissors men would have been proud.
One of the disappeared, Sharpton, is likely to come in first or second in South Carolina, next February. Will Times readers wonder how and why that happened? "It's an abrogation of the trust between the newspaper and its readers," said Times chairman Sulzberger. But he was talking about Jayson Blair's little tricks and inventions, not Adam Nagourney's racial and political mutilation of a nationally significant event. Jason Blair invented quotes of transient interest from rather unimportant people. Adam Nagourney whited out a national debate.
The Times vastly underestimated the October 26 anti-war march in Washington, reporting that turnout was only in the "thousands," far "below expectations." Actually, between 100,000 (police estimate) and 200,000 (Pacifica's count) people gathered that Saturday on the Mall for a protest of global, historic impact. It took a monsoon of emailed complaints to prompt the Times to issue a corrective story on the following Wednesday, confirming that the huge turnout had served to "Invigorate the Antiwar Movement."
Times Executive Editor Howell Raines neglected to assemble a task force to investigate "how such fraud could have been sustained within the ranks of The New York Times" by reporter Lynette Clemetson, an assassin of history, itself. Such language is reserved for petty revisionists, like Blair.
The Times prints only the news that fits its version of reality, and discards the rest. It now pillories Jayson Blair for doing the same thing, piecemeal.
We think he is a Timesman, after all.
The Black Commentator
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America: Bastion of White Supremacy
Posted: Wednesday, April 30, 2003
by Ras Tyehimba
America, the so called epitome of democracy, freedom, and capitalism fought their battle against the colonial might of great Britain in 1775 and with the help of black slaves who fought as well, freed themselves and their country from the colonial tentacles of Great Britain. They won the right to self-determinism/ to chart the course of their own destiny. They drafted their Declaration of Independence that stated "We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness". Yet it took America until 1865 to free their slaves from the bondage of chattel slavery.
This act of sheer hypocrisy has tainted the nation that once dreamed of being a beacon of freedom, democracy, equal rights and justice for the world. This single act of momentous hypocrisy has now proliferated into a culture of corruption, individualism, world imperialism and wanton carnal gratification. Just imagine, Thomas Jefferson, former President of USA, who helped draft the Declaration of Independence, at the time, traded slaves from his plantation for kegs of molasses.
Also, the European Americans facilitated the grand massacre of the indigenous people (misnomered Red Indians), justifying the annihilation by branding them as evil savages. These indigenous people who once roamed the wide expanse of their land (know today as America) were herded into small reservations: what was left of them that is, and forced to live a life contrary to their own traditions.
Having gained Independence from the colonial might of Britain and severing all forms of British colonial control, America embarked on a series of expansionary policies that would ensure they achieve the status of a Colonial superpower. The misleaders of that time, and even now, firmly believe in freedom for Americans (white Americans that is) but not freedom for anybody else. This white supremacist/patriarchal/ 'might is right' stance that is the foundation of the American legacy has manifested itself not only in America's policy to other mostly non white nations but also most strongly in America's internal policy to the black (non-white) people that also make up the nation of USA. It has been a legacy of blatant racism, discrimination, oppression and violent suppression of any group, organization or idea that is not congruent with the popular culture that is manipulated by the upper echelons of American society.
Black people who are termed as the minority has felt the full brunt of these oppressive policies that has sought to suppress the very essence of themselves. Blacks are the minority in society but the majority in the prisons. Blacks are targeted by the police, tortured, sodomized, killed and falsely imprisoned. How much more sickening, heart- wrenching stories of brutal torture , intimidation and slaughter by the security forces of America will we hear. The immigration policy of the USA is very deliberately structured to increase proportionately the number of white people versus the number of black people. The Educational curriculum by its very nature reinforces the degradation of the Black people in America. Blacks have less access to quality education and are forced to assimilate Euro centric standards and culture to survive.
Very integral to the success of the colonial imperialistic designs of America on the world is the whirring propaganda machines that spew American popular culture, values, products and other assorted junk. Fast food outlets pop up on every busy corner with bright signs declaring MacDonalds, KFC and Burger king. These fast food outlets sell billions of steroid laced carcinogenic products to long lines of people who are seeking a taste of the American dream. Genetically modified foods usually without any labels are consumed in great quantity. Humanitarian aid being given to Afrikan countries by the US is genetically modified. Not content with poisoning themselves.
Our youths are walking advertising boards, advertising the wide range of American products. Nike the sign says: just do it. While Nike one of the greatest symbols of American capitalism still has Asians working in terrible slavery-like sweatshop condition. The cost of producing one pair of shoes costs about $1US, while the price of a pair often crosses the $100 US mark.
Very central to America's imperialistic thrust for total global domination is the success of its media that spew a conglomeration of arrogant 'God bless America' garbage. When I was little boy I enjoyed watching Westerns with the 'brave' and 'heroic' cowboys taking on and beating the 'savage' and 'evil' native Americans (misnomered Red Indians). Years later I understood how dangerous and false this image is and how important it is in upholding the well doctored American image of being fair, righteous and just. The American materialistic value system bombards the world's consciousness along with complementary images of the all conquering American hero fighting the evil forces of the world. This arrogant pattern has permeated the offering of Hollywood (who is controlled principally by Jews), which is beamed all over the world via the high tech American satellite network. One consequence of this is that people all over the world have the perception that Hitler was the worst thing that ever happened to the human race. The atrocities committed by people like Rhodes, Ian Smith, Mussolini, King Leopold and others (who makes Hitler look like a goody-to-shoes) are whitewashed and overlooked by those who should know better. King Leopold slaughtered more than 12 million Afrikans approx twice that of the Jews killed by Hitler. To add insult to injury there is a scholarship given mostly to Afrikan people that is named the Rhode Island Scholarship*. This is equivalent to giving a prize to Jews and calling it the Adolph Hitler Scholarship.
We need to look no further than the Israel/Palestine conflict, the Venezuelan/Chavez situation, the Zimbabwe land issue or more recently the Iraq invasion to see the viciousness of American Media and understand the importance of having alternative sources of media. CNN, NBS etc serves America and American interests just like BBC serves English interests, often overlooking truth and justice. History has shown this fact so often that it has become painfully predictable.
In this era, to be overtly racist has become politically incorrect, so the nature of racism and white supremacy has ascended to new heights of subtleness. Despite of the many black people who are in positions of power within the current American system, this is just an illusion that will fool the many who are sleeping. The slave elevated to the position of slavedriver is not a statement of black power but rather just a perpetuation of white supremacy. This tokenism is done to garner the support of the respective group for activities that are often detrimental to the wellbeing of the said group.
It is expected that some people will get uncomfortable when the word white supremacy is uttered. But if the reality of the world order is not clearly and openly articulated, how are we going to progress past the illusions, patronizing attitudes, empty platitudes and self contempt that is so pervasive throughout the global landscape. As it is now, black people in and outside America will get no justice, no reparations, and no real equality under the capitalist, patriarchal, white supremacist order that has produced the likes of Jefferson, Reagan and Bush(times 2). It is a system that has no regard for humanity and the sacredness and dignity of human life. It is a system that is rooted in a popular culture of death, extolling the 'virtues' of might, materialism, greed, individualism, violence, money and power to all who will listen. God bless America indeed.
* This scholarship is given by a European institution not an American one, but I included it because it is relevant within the overall framework.
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Opposition MDC was formed to revive colonial domination
Posted: Tuesday, April 15, 2003
By a Correspondent, www.herald.co.zw
Never before, at any point in the history of this country, has the subject of elections haunted people’s minds as did the 2002 presidential elections.
The final week preceeding these elections was taken up by national debate during which the electorate was concerned over who would win.
What each one of the five candidates stood for had become universal knowledge.
However, victory by Zanu-PF over the MDC was certain. The ruling party had the strong advantage that it was a revolutionary Africanist party which fought the war of liberation.
Predictions about the Zanu-PF victory were not based on moral issues only, but also on the political experiences in Mozambique and Angola as well as other countries of the Sadc region.
The imperialist countries, however, only conceived their defeat as a temporary setback. Forces of imperialism soon sought re-entry into the liberated countries through the more insidious strategy of creating and establishing constellations of power in the form of client political parties. The experiences in Mozambique and Angola were, however, that the puppet parties were rejected at elections. The people of the sub-region have an awareness of the West’s strategy of perpetuating imperialist hegemony by using blacks as fronts.
The strategy is the revival of colonial domination by replacing white actors with black actors, making it easier to enter and control the geopolitics of the region. White liberals and black victims of imperialist nostalgia were recruited into the revival project for imperialism.
Taking advantage of the national decline in radical nationalism, following the leftist ideological thaw, the MDC party was formed to revive the ideals of conquest and domination.
In its formative stages, the MDC activists hid behind labour, as members of the Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions ZCTU harassed the Government through the organisation of mass strikes. They also hid behind the constitutional reform movement. Mr Morgan Tsvangirai was the National Constitutional Assembly chairman during its inauguration. Mr Tendai Biti, Mr Munyaradzi Gwisai, and Professor Welshman Ncube were among the key figures of the NCA who subsequently became key figures in the MDC.
Apart from Mr Gwisai’s socialist rhetoric, the prevailing discourses emerging during and after the formation of the opposition party were leaning towards friendship with capitalism. The MDC was easily integrated into the imperialist system under the broad strategy of the West in which comprador parties are seeded in the local political systems.
Like the Renamo and Unita movements in Mozambique and Angola respectively, which were controlled by imperialists, the MDC set to use the electorate to implement in Zimbabwe, anti-African policies that resumed the dispossession and alienation of blacks. The party symbolised the tenacity and the relentless aspirations of the British in their quest for reviving white privileges in Zimbabwe.
The imperialist tactics used in Mozambique and Angola in the form of Renamo and Unita were being renovated for redeployment as democracy in Zimbabwe. Mr Tsvangirai completed the ill-conceived tripartite in the sub- region comprising himself, Alfonso Dhlakama and the late Jonas Savimbi. These represent the offals of our three nations.
As happened in Angola, Mozambique and later in Namibia, Zimbabweans emerged from racial oppression through a fierce blood-letting struggle. In return for the struggle, the blacks set to restore all that was lost. The return of stolen land, for instance, began in earnest. Zimbabwe, Namibia and South Africa completed the historical military struggle of their people through elections, making the institution of elections important as a political conflict resolution instrument.
The concept of elections and democracy are intrinsically associated. Holding elections, and participating in elections usually evokes notions of democracy. Democracy evokes notions about the rule of law. It is generally accepted that governments that ascend to power through popular elections are legitimate institutions that rule by the permission of the people. These governments have the mandate of the people. Mandate may include, among other things, agrarian reforms which may be popular at home and unacceptable elsewhere.
By its very character and origin, imperialism is not a local persuasion and, on the whole, inherently contradictory to local views on the accumulation of wealth. For Zimbabwe, cultural, economic and political development policies of the Government have a national character and inexorably anti-imperialist. Elections as vehicles to State power and its legitimation have become the sine qua non of reactionary interests in the geopolitical system of Zimbabwe.
Through the MDC as a comprador party, the British government of Tony Blair hoped to institute imperialist policies using the local electoral system. Another dimension of elections and also by association of democracy, is revealed in the institution’s susceptibility to political and ideological intrigues of foreign elements. The 2002 presidential elections were for imperialism the finest opportunity for retrograde voting by the Zimbabwean electorate. It was to be in the history of Zimbabwe a period of the "legitimate return" to the ideas of colonialism.
The Zimbabwean electorate as a reasoning public rejected the MDC in the same way their counterparts in Mozambique and Angola rejected Renamo and Unita. Renamo could not be rewarded for waging the most barbarous war on the African continent, destroying lives, property and infrastructure on which the Mozambicans socially and economically depended for their livelihood.
The Angolans did not vote for Savimbi to reward him for destroying the country. The sophisticated British propaganda machine at the MDC service attempted in vain both within Zimbabwe and on the international scene to poach the true meaning of the liberation struggle and reconstruct the old ideologies of the white man. Mr Tsvangirai could not be rewarded for betraying the nation.
Despite the presence of the Western narcissus in the local political arena, the MDC lost the elections.
The 2002 elections were important as a means of bringing about political communication between vested interests. The electorate has selected its leadership and more so participated in the resolution of the land problem by mandating Cde Robert Mugabe to pursue the programme as shown in the Zanu-PF election programme.
The Zanu-PF campaign theme during the elections was agrarian reform, with land reallocation as the strategy for achieving the theme. The MDC’s campaign theme was the reverse, and the reverse in all respects, as it sought to entrench in the electorate the false notion that whites in Zimbabwe and the West were indispensable for the economic empowerment of black Zimbabweans. The MDC strategy for achieving its ideas included segmentation of the electorate into ethnical entities and appeal to tribal sentiments and differences in language as the issue for an MDC vote.
The Matabeleland provinces and Chipinge constituency were believed to be MDC bantustans. The urban centres were viewed as semi- liberated zones during these divisive campaigns. This is again a critical aspect of the election process.Under the guise of democracy, elections can be one strategy to kill national unity which is pivotal in peace and development. Through ethnic divisions, the state of Somalia fell under.
Frenchman Jean Bodinas as early as 1576 described democracy as always the refuge of all disorderly spirits, rebels, traitors and outcasts who encourage and help the lower orders to ruin the great. Under the guise of democracy, imperialism is fighting to control the State of Zimbabwe by festering internal conflicts.
The peddling of false ethnical consciousness did not work in Matabeleland as the return of the seats to Zimbabwean nationalists has begun with the return of the Insiza constituency. The return of urban seats has also begun with the Chinhoyi mayoral victory. The electorate has recently debunked the MDC’s false segments.
For Zimbabwe, elections as a socio-political institution have lost their significance. It’s no longer the readily acceptable medium of communication between political parties and the electorate. It’s no longer the barometer of public views and interests. More so as it has remained a means of public participation in their own affairs, this participation is being entirely rejected as the courts are being obligated by the losers to subvert the electorate by nullifying their vote. The results of Zimbabwe’s elections are not moments of wide jubilation by the victorious majority and their candidates. They have become significant only for always being mass media stories about the loser’s resolve to take the issue to the High Court. Losers resent introspections of their parties and their relationship with the electorate and their own credibility as individuals.
Unable to win the elections fairly, the losers have constructed phantom claims about the electoral system in the country. As it is, these claims are only sets of misinformation intended to discredit the entire manner in which political power is gained. The defeated usually find solace in the false belief that elections were rigged. When will it be indisputable knowledge that elections can be won without any party rigging at all?
Voting is by adults who are conscious about the consequences of their electoral choices. Several factors influence voting choices. While campaign messages are influential, contesting candidates, their individual histories and those of their sponsors usually make the difference. The MDC has struggled to raise credible candidates in each election it participates in resulting in its adversaries winning seats ahead of the actual elections. Some candidates romp to victory easily because of their positions in the national memory with unpatriotic ideas hastening the defeat of others.
By simply ignoring the importance of context with the society in which they live, puppet parties have sought to evaluate local election processes using a clearly inappropriate medium of standard. A reactionary mindset that is Eurocentric has been instrumental in the evaluation notwithstanding that elections are physically in Zimbabwe and for mainly the black majority. Ignorance of context has led to weird claims about rigging. The levels of technological infrastructural, educational development and their limitations on public projects have been appropriated as vices for rigging.
Yet these limitations together with limitations in funding affects election processes such as the number and physical location of polling stations, the manpower logistics and the other important resources that can be made available for conducting elections. These limitations explain widely the problems faced during the actual voting such as long queues, low turn out, delays in counting and even delays in the arrival of ballot papers.
In Zimbabwe, Western imperialists have played an interventionist role to save their puppet party from electoral defeat. They directly finance the MDC. Unashamed of the copious bloody gift the recipient has squandered it the way boozers and revelers dispose of their earnings. The major expenditure was financing violence. Speaking at a campaign rally in Bikita, Morgan Tsvangirai in praise of violence boasted that he could bring in 20 000 youths to replace those arrested for violence a clear indication that imperialism is financing political violence in Zimbabwe as it did in Mozambique and Angola. Recently there has been more direct interference in Zimbabwe politics by the British when they sent High Commissioner Brian Donnely to buy MDC votes with maize in the Insiza Constituency.
Imperialist' funds have also been used against the country's electoral system through the financing of legal appeals against election results. The rural electorate have been the target for disenfranchisement. The Zimbabwean courts have been petitioned by the MDC to nullify almost every election won by Zanu PF. Although it is a legal right for individuals and groups to seek recourse from the law for wrongs done, using the courts to dispossess the rural electorate of its vote for selfish reasons is unfair. The battle lost in the rural constituency must not be revived in the metropolitan city where nothing resembles the rural constituency. If voters are adults, their choices have to be respected.
Ends
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Situation In Congo Increasingly Complex
Posted: Tuesday, April 15, 2003
TORONTO (NFTF.org) -- A peace accord involving the warring parties in Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) (Background Report) was struck earlier this month and was almost immediately threatened by tribal violence in the Ituri region between Lendu and Hema communities. These two groups have had a longstanding dispute that is independent of, but complicated by, the larger war that has engulfed DRC since 1998.
On April 13, 177 delegates in the Ituri region met and adopted a series of measures to end local hostilities. This has given a boost to the wider peace accord affecting the whole nation.
But complicating this whole situation is a dispute between Rwanda and Uganda, both of whom had troops fighting on opposing sides in the DRC war. The DRC government negotiated the withdrawal of Rwanda's troops in the fall of 2002 although it is now clear that not all have actually departed. It appears there are still about 5,000 Rwandan troops in DRC and on April 13, they were ordered to get out. As well, Uganda has indicated it will withdraw all of its troops by April 24.
On April 14, President Paul Kagame of Rwanda pledged that his country will try everything possible to avoid a war with Uganda but if that pledge does not succeed, there is the very real likelihood that DRC would be drawn into any war between Rwanda and Uganda.
As it is, there are several groups of DRC refugees living in Rwanda and there have been accusations that Uganda has been training Rwandan rebels to fight against the government of Rwanda. Uganda denies the accusations. There are also accusations of a group of Ugandan rebels known as the People's Redemption Army (PRA) who are said to be making incursions into Uganda from within DRC.
So while the omnibus peace agreement in DRC has held (for two weeks now), problems arising in neighboring countries, or within DRC but caused by neighbors, makes its success anything but certain. In the three countries mentioned in this report, there have been several million deaths over the past five years or so.
YellowTimes.org correspondent Paul Harris drafted this report.
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Colorblindness Is Racist
Posted: Sunday, April 13, 2003
Posted By: Pianke Nubiyang
The racists and their tricknology continue to amaze and gall those of us who are staunch Black nationalists and who believe in self-preservation and development of mind and self.
People who claim they are "color blind" are nothing but apathetic racists. They shut their eyes to racism and pretend it does not exist; yet, they are quick to call Blacks who respond to WHITE SPUREMACY AS "RACIST"
Listen, in Germany there were also "color blind" Germans who shut their eyes. During slavery and lynching in the U.S., many whites were also "color blind" and shut their eyes to the racist genocide, raping of Black women, lynching, burnings alive and all types of horrible, demonic racist atrocities that were committed against Blacks in their own lands.
The scum and dregs of Europe, starving for lack of potatoes and oppressed from British oppression had the edacity and nerve to come to the U.S. (New York during the Civil War...WATCH THE MOVIE "GANGS OF NEW YORK," and massacre over 10000 African-Americans because these starving Europeans did not want to fight in the Civil War.
If you think the Iraqis are rioting and looting today, during the latter part of the 1800's to the 1930's, looting, burning, lynching and destroying Black folk was a game to the racists. In fact, they used to have "Pic-nics" (pick a negro) where Black men and women were grabbed and lynched or burned alive.
As for today, the same "colorblind" racists who pretend that we are all "equal" continue to support cultural and racial genocide against Black people simply by the way they vote for racist nazi-like laws and schemes to destroy the Black family and pack Black males and females like animals in zoos.
Yes, we are Afro=centrists and we are proud. We are Black nationalists and there are Blacks in the South whose ancestors have been there for over ten thousand years (Waschitaw Nation, Jamassee, Gullah-Geechee, others) and they want and will have their independence so they don't have to see racists and deal with them.
Blacks are so fed up with these racist "colorblind" people that a poll held by a well-known publication asked "If racism continues in America, would you choose independence or living under more racism?? 98 percent of those polled out of thousands choose independence. Even when the question went to statehood and an all-Black nation free of the racist element, OVER 90 PERCENT WATED TOTAL BLACK NATIONHOOD.
Why is that? Well the reason is clear. The vast majority of Blacks see three types of whites of which two types are a threat to Black survival.
1. The hard-core racists including those who smile in your face and vote for Black destruction.
About 20 percent of settlers (people from Europe who settle the U.S.)
2. The outright in-your-face racists
About 10 percent
3. The "colorblind" racists who are about 65 percent.
4. The totally non-racists, about 5 percent
The largest group of racists is the color-blind whose racism is "blind" to Black people's oppression. They deny there is brutality, profiling, racism, economic degradation, ghettoization and all the racist, lucifite tricknology that is use to maintain racist societies.
AS BLACK PEOPLE, WE HAVE ALWAYS SEEN THE APATHETIC "COLORBLIND" RACIST AS THE BIGGEST THREAT TO OUR SURVIVAL.
IT WAS THESE APATHETIC RACISTS WHO SAT BACK WHILE TENS OF MILLIONS OF PEOPLE WERE ELIMINATED IN EUROPE, CHINA, RUSSIA, RWANDA AND EVEN THE AMERICAS. Today, while genocide occurs in Sudan and West Papua these "colorblind" and apathetic folks are also blind to the situation. Yet, let Africans create an African Union and militarize, stop selling their strategic metals to the "colorblind" or let Africans organize all their scientists in Europe and elsewhere to create a formidable power block and ALL THE "COLOR BLINDNESS" AND APATHETIC MENTALITY WILL BE OVER.
Africa would suddenly be the new threat and everyone will be in their business.
Blacks have the right to be nationalistic, Afro-centrists, pro-Black, and those who don't like it, well too bad.
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The Democratic Republic of Congo
Posted: Friday, April 11, 2003
BACKGROUND REPORT (NFTF.org) -- The Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) is the current incarnation of a state that has been known to history as Congo Free State, Belgian Congo, Congo/Leopoldville, Congo/Kinshasa, and Zaire. It is still known in some circles as Congo-Kinshasa to distinguish it from its neighbor, Republic of Congo, or Congo-Brazzaville. Much of its western border is comprised of the Congo River which it shares with Republic of Congo in an undefined way; no specific agreements have been reached on the division of the river, its islands, or its resources.
This nation of approximately 55 million is in Central Africa surrounded by Republic of Congo, Central African Republic, Sudan, Uganda, Rwanda and Burundi, Tanzania, Zambia, and Angola. There are over 200 African ethnic groups but about 45% of the population is made of three groups who are Bantu and a fourth group that is Hamitic.
DRC is a state endowed with vast potential wealth (gold, diamonds, rubber, copper, cobalt, oil, timber) but its economy has declined significantly since the mid-1980's due a variety of unsuccessful government measures, the residue of colonial rule, and the financial imperialism of new masters.
Its recent history has been one of internal conflict. Much of this arose as the state absorbed large numbers of refugees from the fighting in Rwanda and Burundi in 1994. But the conflicts in the whole region of Central Africa date back as far as the fifteenth century and are today, as they always have been, conflicts of imperialism.
Many of the countries in this area achieved independence from colonial masters in the 1950's and 1960's and quickly degenerated into fighting within and without their borders, much of it spurred by the "financial colonialists" who stepped into the gap left by the old monarchies. The history of these states since the fifteenth century has been one of European colonialism, resistance, independence, followed by neo-colonialism, and prolonged resistance yet again. The primary beneficiary of the new order in this region was the United States who allegedly maneuvered the assassination of Congo's first president, Patrice Lamumba, in 1960. The country's history has been troubled ever since.
President Joseph Mobutu ruled for over 30 years after coming to power in a CIA-aided coup. He is said to have turned over and again to policies and practices that would favor the United States government and business interests over the needs and interests of his people. But rebel groups arose to challenge Mobutu's rule and in 1997 power was seized by Laurent Kabila, a former Marxist who led the Alliance of Democratic Forces. During most of Mobutu's rule the country had been known as Zaire but in May 1997 Kabila formally changed its name to Democratic Republic of the Congo.
On assumption of power, Kabila inherited a country already involved in massive tribal infighting, partly arising because of the influx of refugees in 1994. His rule was quickly challenged by a Rwanda and Uganda backed rebellion in August 1998. Finally, troops from Zimbabwe, Chad, Angola, Namibia, and Sudan intervened to support Kabila's government. Even though a cease-fire was reached in July 1999 between DRC, Zimbabwe, Angola, Uganda, Namibia, Rwanda and the Congolese rebels, sporadic fighting continued unabated. Kabila was assassinated January 16, 2001 and rule of the country fell to his son, Joseph.
Joseph Kabila was successful in negotiating a withdrawal of the Rwandan forces from Congo in October 2002 and early in 2003, all combatant parties finally came to the table and agreed to cease the fighting. They agree to set up a government of national unity as a caretaker until democratic elections can be held in 2005. These will be the first democratic votes cast in this country in over forty years. Remaining Ugandan forces have promised to depart the country by the end of April 2003.
Intertribal conflicts are continuing to erupt periodically, threatening the stability of this fragile peace. As recent as last week, a group of Ituri villagers near the border with Uganda was massacred; early casualty estimates were as high as 1,000 people although this has now been downgraded to between 150-300, according to United Nations observers. Although promises are made to bring the perpetrators to justice, this may be just one more incident in a long history of inter-tribal conflict that will require some careful diplomacy to resolve.
As of April 11, 2003 the peace agreement is holding and the government is beginning its drive toward restoring the infrastructure and social systems of DRC. The nation lost as many as 3.3 million people as a result of the past five years of fighting. At this point, they are anxious to get back on their feet, without the shackles of colonialism.
YellowTimes.org correspondent Paul Harris drafted this report.
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Racist War & Pirate Plunder
Posted: Monday, April 7, 2003
The Black Commentator, 2003-04-06
"They are not really capitalists in the 'normal' sense, at all. They 'invest' in elections to seize control of state mechanisms to facilitate domestic crimes with impunity and terrorize the world militarily."
"The initial data available so far reveals the dirtiness of U.S.-British warmongers, the fakeness of their claims about a clean war, as well as their indifference to the lives of innocent, unarmed Iraqi civilians." The indictment comes, not from Baghdad or Kuala Lumpur, but from the Foreign Minister of Switzerland. Micheline Calmy Rey, of the ruling Socialist Democratic Party, explained that her country has an obligation to document war crimes as "a founder and a sponsor of the Geneva Convention."
The entire globe is recoiling from the United States, a planetary phenomenon that will characterize the historical period we have now entered - if humanity survives it. In declaring war against international order, the Pirates at the helm of the Hyper-Power have profoundly frightened every economic and social sector of every nation on the globe. In self-defense, the world will be forced to reorganize itself, to create new mechanisms of trade and security in place of the institutions that the Bush men are deliberately savaging. The Americans will be left out of these arrangements.
The realization dawns on the assaulted consciousness of humanity that the would-be rulers and their society are worse than monstrously destructive - they are delusional, a danger to civilized endeavor, untrustworthy in any agreement, contemptuous of law and reason. A nation and people to be avoided, circumvented, conspired against for safety and survival's sake.
These are the first days of the inevitable and soon to become dramatic decline of the United States. In what will be viewed as a supreme irony of history, the dream of a glorious and bloody leap to global omnipotence will collapse in incompetence and self-mutilation - not this year or the next, and not in time to save millions from death, disease, impoverishment and national humiliation. But it will happen, because the nations and peoples of the world will see no choice available to themselves but to make it happen.
It need not have been so. With the role of protector against an extinct Soviet Union long redundant, the United States' favored position in the world is based on the size of its economy and the unique role of the dollar as the sole denominator of oil prices - an artificial support. Over time, the growing strength of the European euro currency would have provided alternatives to banks and national treasuries that sought to diversify their holdings. The dollar's value would have shrunken, gradually, but without great drama. America's share of fossil fuel consumption could have been brought under control in collaboration with developed and developing nations, to guard against undue harm to the economies of all while alternative energy sources were brought on line - to the profit of innovative capital in the most developed nations such as the United States.
But this was not to be. The Pirate class personified by Bush, Dick Cheney and Richard Perle has no stake in the domestic economy of the United States or the stabilizing institutions of the world. They war against order, to transform the American military machine into a pirate armada to amass wealth through plunder. They are not really capitalists in the "normal" sense, at all. They "invest" in elections to seize control of state mechanisms to facilitate domestic crimes with impunity and terrorize the world militarily. And they award themselves contracts for that, too.
The Pirates operate within and are the products of a society made delusional through centuries of racist plunder. The most afflicted products of this society cannot recognize facts at variance with the racist imperatives of Manifest Destiny. They cannot negotiate because they are effectively blind to the humanity of others. Objectively incompetent at analysis of non-whites and only imagining the characteristics of foreign whites, they launch wars against "enemies" whom they cannot properly assess, with a cavalier cruelty that the civilized world reserves for animals. They have no sense of guilt because in their worldview they are the embodiment of good. Their wealth and power appear to confirm their self-assessment.
When frustrated by actual facts and peoples they escalate with fury and bewilderment, like an armed sleepwalker awakening in a crowd. They do great damage and feel harmed by their victims. But they cannot win in any protracted struggle, because they truly do not understand their surroundings or the people they have made antagonists - or even the Swiss, who are said to love order and prosperity most of all.
A wired world is taking note of every pathological tick in the twisted American face. Even now, a myriad of plans are evolving to sidestep the dangerous, delusional United States as mankind goes about its collective business. A kind of international redlining will increasingly make itself felt, but not seen. The Bush men believe they are willing into existence a New American Century, while in reality they are creating an America-phobic planet in which the U.S. has earned an invisible but powerfully consequential non-favored nation status. Having invented the concept of globalism, the United States will be consigned to pariah status - and shrink, until it learns to live by human norms and scales.
The Black Commentator
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Of Lies, Liberation and American Self-Delusion
Posted: Thursday, March 27, 2003
by Tim Wise
Iraqis must think the American definition of liberation a strange one.
First, we destroy all of the key government buildings that we can find in a search for Saddam Hussein.
Then we relentlessly attack the Iraqi military, which of course counts among its troops, members of tens of thousands of Iraqi families.
Then we launch a cruise missile that destroys an urban market in Baghdad, claiming that it was intended to hit a battery of rocket launchers placed in the area by the Hussein regime.
In all, coalition forces have most likely killed a few hundred civilians, and injured hundreds more.
And all of this, after twelve years of painful sanctions that have reduced the nation's life expectancy dramatically, helped boost malnutrition, and contributed to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi citizens. Although some would seek to blame those conditions on Saddam himself, the fact remains that before sanctions were imposed, Iraq was a vibrant nation economically, and the citizens of the country--though certainly subject to repression of a vicious nature--were not by and large starving, or unable to attain medical care. Saddam didn't change after 1991; what changed were the external forces affecting the well-being of the Iraqi people.
Yet Bush, Powell, Rumsfeld and the bunch expect not only Americans, but more importantly the Arab world (and Iraqis themselves) to accept the assurances of our benign intent; to believe that this has nothing to do with oil (as if we would wage war to oust a dictator in a nation whose main economic export were pomegranates); to believe that we care only for the freedom of Iraq, despite having long financed, armed and stood by the very same dictator we now hope to destroy.
They expect the Iraqi people to welcome U.S. and British troops as liberators, and cheer the war effort, despite the fact that it was the U.S. and Great Britain who sold this "monster" the very materials that we now insist he must no longer possess, and stood by while he gassed Kurds and Iranians, even lying about the latter to make it seem as if the Iranians had been the ones doing the gassing.
Only a profound disrespect for the intelligence of the Iraqi people and the Arab and Muslim worlds could possibly lead one to believe such a scenario is likely. To believe that they can forgive and forget the history of which they are acutely aware. A history that includes U.S. support for the cruel Baath party, dating back even to before the ascent of Hussein to power; a support we offered because they were so efficient at slaughtering the progressive and democratic forces in that nation--forces that were also nominally socialist and thus a danger to be crushed.
Only a belief that the rest of the world sees us the way we see ourselves--a view so out of touch with reality that it simply boggles the mind--could lead one to believe that Iraqis will welcome U.S. domination of the Gulf region, or the U.S. administering a provisional government there until truly free elections can be held. They can, after all, look at what we have done in Afghanistan, which is destroy a tyrannical regime, devastate a nation with bombs, install a leader who was not the choice of the people, and then abandon the country as usual, so that areas outside of the capitol are now being run by fanatical warlords, rapists, murderers and Taliban-throw backs. Quite the liberation that, they must be thinking.
Oh sure, most Iraqis will welcome the demise of Saddam Hussein. But there is a difference between welcoming regime change and cheering the forces that imposed that change by force. Even now, according to a report in USA Today, Iraqis in neighboring Arab states are returning home to fight Americans. Though they insist they despise Hussein, they are also clear about the desire to fight the invaders and fight for their country, which they see as being destroyed, not saved. A few days ago, news reports noted that Iraqis in Basra were smiling and cheering as American troops came marching in, but that as soon as the troops got out of sight, they would just as quickly turn to the reporters on the scene and curse the Americans, and praise Saddam.
Even worse, Middle East experts are almost uniformly expressing the opinion that this war is proving to be the best recruiting tool al-Qaeda has had in years, meaning that even if the Iraqi people viewed the bombing as a form of liberation--albeit a loud, destructive and painful one--to the extent this view is rejected by most of the Arab and Muslim world, our actions may yet provoke one, two, many 9/11's.
It's all really very simple. People generally don't like to see their homelands invaded or bombed. We certainly wouldn't, after all. As much as Americans badmouth our government and its politicians, there is a tendency to put aside that anger and criticism when faced with war. In the U.S. this is happening even though we are not the ones being attacked. Imagine then what facing bombings would tend to do for American public opinion. Surely it would tend to rally most of us behind the leaders of the country, even those not particularly popular with many folks. So too in Iraq or anywhere else on Earth.
But the arrogance of the powerful makes it impossible to see all that. It is the same arrogance that prompted whites to view the genocide of Indian peoples as progress, and a civilizing mission (for those we didn't kill), and a mission for which the savages should have been grateful.
The same arrogance that allowed the belief that we were doing Africans a favor by enslaving them, and "bringing them to Christ."
The same arrogance that inspired the notion of "destroying the village in order to save it," in Vietnam.
The same arrogance, and fundamentally the same racist and supremacist mindset that forever and always inspires the masters of the universe to believe their own hype and expect everyone else to be so gullible, unintelligent and child-like as to accept it too.
The same arrogance that allows us to believe that we and we alone have the right to dictate who will and will not have weapons of mass destruction; who will and will not have to follow United Nations resolutions; who will and will not be able to launch "preventative war."
The same arrogance that allows Donald Rumsfeld to shriek hysterically at the violations of the Geneva Conventions by the Iraqis for merely showing American POW's on film and thereby "humiliating them," but which allows him and others to think nothing of the far more serious violations of the same Geneva Conventions evidenced by intentional U.S. bombing of Iraqi water and power stations during the first Gulf War: a certifiable war crime according to Article 54 of those Conventions.
The same arrogance that ultimately explains the widespread hatred of the U.S. throughout much of the Arab and Muslim world.
The same arrogance that puts not only Iraqi lives at risk, but ultimately our own.
Liberation indeed.
Tim Wise is a writer, anti-racism activist and father.
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