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Archive for 2010

Basically Good

Posted in stuff on Thu Jul 8th 2010| 158 Comments »

Basically Good is what many White Americans seem to think they are.  Sometimes they Make Mistakes or Slip Up but they Mean Well. They are not evil, not even a little bit – except of course  for a few bad apples with Emotional Problems or a Warped Development.

But they do not extend this to blacks. Blacks are Born Bad and have to fight against it their whole lives. As it turns out most manage to be good most of the time. Kind of. If you do not look too closely. But they are always in danger of Slipping Back. They always have to fight against that crack in their souls, their Flawed Moral Natures. When one of them does something bad it is not due to Emotional Problems or a Warped Development – no, instead It Just Goes To Show what their true nature is.

In this case whites are far more clear-sighted about blacks – because  they are Massively Delusional about themselves.

In the old days white people believed in original sin. That means that all men, as sons of Adam, are Born Bad and have to fight against it their whole lives. As it turns out most manage to be good most of the time. Kind of. If you do not look too closely. But they are always in danger of Slipping Back. They always have to fight against that crack in their souls, their Flawed Moral Natures. When one of them does something bad it is not due to Emotional Problems or a Warped Development – no, instead it just goes to show that man has a sinful nature.

But then sometime between 1900 and 1970 – probably like 1955 or 1968 – the angels came down from heaven and kissed each white person. Or something. And now white people are Basically Good.

They no longer have to read their Bibles: if most white people think something is all right, then it must be Okay To Do – even when it is stuff they used to think was wrong for hundreds of years, like divorce, abortion and homosexuality. Because white people are Basically Good! See how it works?

Way back in Ancient Times, like before colour television, white people used to do all kinds of terrible things, things that were not mere Slip Ups or Simple Misunderstandings – stuff like Jim Crow, slavery, genocide and colonialism. But then the Angel’s Kiss or Something wiped all that away. Wiped away not just the blame and the need make it right, but even the bad side effects, like racism and self-serving moral thinking!

It also wiped away their evil nature so now they no longer do stuff like that. So much so that “evil” now almost seems like one of those words from the old days, like “dropsy”, “tariffs” or “virtue”.

That is why when I say bad things about white people it can only be out of hatred! It could not be because it is true! Not when white people are, you know, Basically Good!

– Abagond, 2010.

See also:

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How to tell if a commenter is white, part II

Posted in stuff on Wed Jul 7th 2010| 64 Comments »

In part one I listed things that white commenters commonly say, like “My family never owned slaves” or “Blacks are racist too!” Here we look instead at the way many white commenters seem to think and react. Not all of the following are necessarily racist but they do show a white gaze or bias:

1. White self-interest: They see things from the point of view of what affects whites, what they stand to gain or lose.

For example, when talking about affirmative action they quickly point out how whites will be put out of work or not get into to a good university. It may all be perfectly true, but note the point of view.

Or take crime. If a commenter shifts the argument from, say, drugs and murder to Dangerous Black Rapists, he is probably white. Dangerous Black Rapists on the loose are rare but speak to white fears and insecurities. Meanwhile in most black neighbourhoods troubled by crime it is almost never because of Dangerous Black Rapists. Way more common are robberies, drugs, shootings, prostitution and bad policing.

2. White pride: When you say something bad about whites they get upset and, if they can get past that, defend whites.

They make it about their hurt feelings. Or belittle your feelings and observations. Or say you hate whites and blame everything on them. Or they do not like the way you put things. Etc.

When they defend whites it is mostly to clear them of moral blame – shifting blame onto ghetto mentalities, Arab traders, diseases, “the times”, “what is natural”, “what anyone would do”, etc. Strangely, they have a hard time admitting that whites are part good and part evil like everyone else, that they have screwed up big time – repeatedly – and continue to do so.

3. White experience: The experience they apply to comments never goes beyond that of most white people.

It seems they were never called racist names, stopped by the police for no good reason, followed in a shop, stereotyped and so on.

Or: When others report such experiences they belittle it. Sometimes they do that by saying they had the same experience – not to show support but to tear it down!

Or: They think the world is some huge meritocracy, that all laws are applied fairly, etc. They have never witnessed the profound injustice that lies at the heart of American society – or of any other society, for that matter.

In short, they have never had the experience of being at the wrong end of things when it comes to white people.

In most cases that is because they are white themselves! Or, worst of all, think they are honorary whites.

4. White concerns: They never take black concerns seriously because, well, they do not have to!

This is probably the most damning sign of all. They come on here and act like this is some big game where they score points, where they “win” – as if that is what matters most.

See also:

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William Wilberforce

Posted in stuff on Tue Jul 6th 2010| 144 Comments »

William Wilberforce (1759-1833), British MP and abolitionist, led the fight in parliament against the slave trade, getting it outlawed in 1807. After that he took part in the movement to free the slaves but his health did not allow him to lead it except as a sort of figurehead. He died in 1833 knowing that most of the slaves in the British Empire would soon be free.

His grandfather made a fortune trading in the Baltic Sea. Wilberforce became rich for life at 18 when that fortune fell to him after the deaths of his father (1768), grandfather (1776) and uncle (1777).

He went to St John’s College at Cambridge University. Instead of studying he stayed up all night drinking and playing cards. It worked out well in the end: he still managed to pass while making friends with people  like William Pitt the Younger, a future prime minister.

In 1780, just before he left Cambridge, he won a seat in parliament – in part by spreading money around, in part because he was a good speaker. John Boswell put it this way:

I saw what seemed a mere shrimp mount upon the table; but as I listened, he grew, and grew, until the shrimp became a whale.

He was so rich that he did not have to listen to the Tories or the Whigs (liberals). He could vote his conscience and did.

In 1785 God called. After two years of soul searching he concluded:

God Almighty has set before me two great objects, the suppression of the Slave Trade and the Reformation of Manners.

He did not think he was the man who could get the slave trade outlawed. But when no one else would step forward, he did. When his bill first came to a vote, two-thirds voted against it. So he tried again. And again. And again. And again. And again. For 20 years. Each time he would get a few more votes and get a little closer.

Meanwhile many churches were staging a grassroots movement across the country, telling of the middle passage and asking people not to put sugar in their tea.

Powerful interests defended the slave trade in parliament and the press: 80% of British overseas trade depended on it directly or indirectly. Among other things they argued:

  • Too many in Britain would be thrown out of work.
  • Blacks are not fully human.
  • Blacks are not capable of civilization.
  • Blacks are cruel and violent and given to misrule.

Therefore selling blacks as slaves to whites was an act of mercy.

Wilberforce argued that black misrule was created by whites giving guns to said rulers. To help disprove this and other stereotypes in 1792 he helped to create Sierra Leone, a British colony of black settlers.

By 1806 the slave trade had become a campaign issue. Many MPs won their seats by opposing it.

In 1807 he wrote “A Letter on the Abolition of the Slave Trade”, 394 pages long. Later that year when his bill came to a vote, only 5% voted against it! It became law throughout the empire.

See also:

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Chinua Achebe: Africa’s Tarnished Name

Posted in stuff on Mon Jul 5th 2010| 15 Comments »

Chinua Achebe, in his essay “Africa’s Tarnished Name” (1998), talks about why Europeans put Africans in a bad light: it is because they fail to see Africans as fully human, a side effect of the slave trade and colonialism. You see it in many (but not all) Europeans who work in news, film and anthropology – even in those who are in Africa helping people.

Despite how close they are to Africa, Europeans tend to see Africans as being “not like us”, as being so different that maybe they are not completely human. It has nothing to do with skin colour or looks. We know that because before the 1700s European descriptions of Africans were almost indifferent and matter-of-fact.

Africa as a strange land of cannibals and savages is an invention of the 1700s. It was pushed hard by defenders of the slave trade. It made the slave trade – and the colonialism that followed – seem like an act of mercy: Europeans were merely saving Africans from themselves.

This view reached its fullest flower in Joseph Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness” (1902). He tells of a journey down the Congo river in the 1890s:

We were wanderers on a prehistoric earth, on the earth that wore the aspect of an unknown planet. We could have fancied ourselves the first men taking possession of an accursed inheritance.

Only it was not like that. Men had been living there for thousands of years and even Europeans had been there for hundreds. In the early 1500s it already had a black Christian king, Nzinga Mbemba, who could speak Portuguese and whose son spoke to the pope in Latin. It was hardly the stone age land of near-humans that Conrad imagined.

Here is Conrad’s description of an African who looked after the boiler on the riverboat:

And between whiles I had to look after the savage who was fireman. He was an improved specimen; he could fire up a vertical boiler. He was there below me, and, upon my word, to look at him was as edifying as seeing a dog in a parody of breeches and a feather hat, walking on his hindlegs.

Achebe calls this “poisonous”.

Some say Conrad was merely “of the times”. Yet here is David Livingstone, one of Conrad’s very own heroes, talking about the character of Africans:

After long observation, I came to the conclusion that they are just a strange mixture of good and evil as men are everywhere else.

Achebe:

Without doubt, the times in which we live influence our behavior, but the best or merely the better among us, like Livingstone, are never held hostage by their times.

It is one thing to talk about the troubles of Africa – genocide, poverty, disease and misrule – which in fact must be talked about and quite another not to see Africans as fully human:

Perhaps this difference can best be put into one phrase: the presence or absence of respect for the human person.

See also:

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Maxwell: Fistful of Tears

Posted in stuff on Sun Jul 4th 2010| 3 Comments »

Remarks:

This is my favourite Maxwell song, at least of his new stuff. It has been on the American R&B charts since November, peaking at #11.

Lyrics:

Feel just like a weight has lifted it
How can I repay you help me understand
Currency a fistful of tears I can afford
Fight of your life is not the cost
Time will reveal
All along you’re the one who’s losing

Cause I go insane
Crazy sometimes
Tryin you to keep you from losing your mind
Open your eyes
See what’s in front of your face
Save me my fistful of tears

You can make it disappear girl
All you got to do is just raise up, face up, stay up
All things will heal we’ll feel it with a kiss from the skies
Don’t’ you let it go
Don’t’ you let it go

Cause I go insane
Crazy sometimes
Tryin you to keep you from losing your mind
Open your eyes
See what’s in front of your face
And save me my fistful of tears

We gon fight the war
We gon fight our fears
The only thing I wanna throw is a fistful of tears
We gon fight the war
We gon fight our fears
The only thing I gotta throw is a fistful of tears
We gon fight the war
We gon fight our fears
The only thing I wanna throw is a fistful of tears

Cause I go insane
Crazy sometimes
Tryin you to keep you from losing your mind
Open your eyes
See what’s in front of your face
And save me my fistful of tears

Cause I go insane
Crazy sometimes
Tryin you to keep you from losing your mind
Open your eyes
See what’s in front of your face
And save me my fistful of tears

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Is Black America backward?

Posted in stuff on Sat Jul 3rd 2010| 176 Comments »

Note: What follows is my post “Is Africa backwards?” written for Black America to get a sense of how bad it was. My own observations follow:

Disclaimer: I have never set foot in a black neighbourhood, much less lived in one. Those who have please be gentle and patient! This is merely me trying to make sense of what is knowable from white, middle-class suburbia:

Most of Black America is backward compared to the rest of the country, but it is nowhere near as bad as most White Americans seem to think.

For example, if you take a wrong turn in the city you might see this:

On television you see stuff like this:

That is from Nelly’s “Tip Drill” (2003), a hip hop video produced by blacks.

But then there is also this:

That is from the “The Cosby Show” (1984-1992), also produced by blacks.

So what can you do? Is there any quick and dirty way to tell how well off or bad off Black America is?

One common measure is income, how much money people make. But it does not take the cost of living into account. Many blacks live in the South where the cost of living is lower. Also drug dealers, prostitutes and prisoners do not have reportable incomes. Meanwhile deadbeat fathers and welfare queens have reason to lie about theirs.

Much better is life expectancy:

  • It is universal – everyone dies.
  • Life is far more precious than money.
  • Most of the things that make life bad tend to shorten it too, like drugs, violence, poverty and disease.
  • It is easy to compare to times past.

As it turns out, the life expectancy at birth for blacks is 71 while for whites it is 78.

So by that measure Black America is backward.

But just how bad off is it? Look at white life expectancy through the years:

  • 1900: 49.7
  • 1910: 51.9
  • 1920: 57.4
  • 1930: 60.9
  • 1940: 65.1
  • 1950: 69.2
  • 1960: 70.9
  • 1970: 71.7
  • 1980: 74.5
  • 1990: 76.1
  • 2000: 77.4
  • 2004: 78.3

So Black America is where White America was in the 1960s. Not great, yes, but we are not talking the 1800s or even the 1930s.

Observations: Now I see how the first sentence after the disclaimer falls on you like a ton of bricks.

If I wrote a post like this I would not have used the word “backward” nor would I have made it seem like blacks were somehow back in time compared to whites, back “in the 1960s”. Both are strange and misleading. Further, I would have said something about the causes and not just leave it hanging like that. I would have made a bigger deal about how 40 million blacks cannot be reduced to a single number.

If I saw this on a white blog I would not have liked “backward”, “in the 1960s”, “welfare queens” and so on. But I would have been surprised by the disclaimer and the decision to avoid television and income as a guide to “what blacks are like”.

In any case, the difference in life expectancy does point to a serious issue, regardless of how the message was delivered.

See also:

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Is Africa backward?

Posted in stuff on Fri Jun 25th 2010| 377 Comments »

Disclaimer: I have never set foot in Africa, much less lived there. Those who have please be gentle and patient! This is merely me trying to make sense of what is knowable from America:

Most of Africa is backward compared to the rest of the world, but it is nowhere near as bad as most Americans seem to think.

For example, if you search the CNN website for pictures of Luanda, the capital of Angola, here is the first picture of the city you get:

A slum.

Now try the New York Times:

Slum children picking through trash.

Now try the Internet as a whole. The first picture comes from a blogger:

Yes, that is Luanda. In Africa. Here is another picture:

Since you cannot trust American news to give you a balanced picture – or, for that matter, African bloggers rich enough to have Internet access – what can you do? Is there any quick and dirty way to tell how well off or bad off Africa is?

One common measure is GDP per capita – how much money people make. But it does not take the cost of living into account.  Many in Africa are small-time farmers who grow their own food and build their own houses, meaning that much of the African economy is off the books.

Much better is life expectancy:

  • It is universal – everyone dies.
  • Life is far more precious than money.
  • Most of the things that make life bad tend to shorten it too, like war, hunger, poverty and disease.
  • It is easy to compare to times past.

Life expectancy for those born in 2010 goes generally like this:

  • 80s: Japan, Singapore, Canada, Oceania, Western Europe
  • 70s: America, Eastern Europe, the Caribbean, Latin America, the Middle East, East Asia
  • 60s: Central Asia, Ukraine, Russia, South Asia
  • under 60: black Africa

The world average is 67. In America it is 78 for whites, 71 for blacks.

So by that measure Africa is at the bottom.

Here is the breakdown for black Africa by country (the years in boldface I will tell you about below):

  • 67  1960, 1970 (world average)
  • 66  1950
  • 65
  • 64
  • 63  Madagascar
  • 62  1940, Sao Tome and Principe, Eritrea
  • 61  Equatorial Guinea
  • 60  Botswana, Mauritania, Western Sahara, Djibouti, Ghana
  • 59  1930, Togo, Benin, Senegal
  • 58  Kenya, Burundi
  • 57  Guinea, Rwanda
  • 56  1920, Liberia, Ivory Coast
  • 55  Ethiopia, Sierra Leone
  • 54  Congo (both), the Gambia, Cameroon
  • 53  Burkina Faso
  • 52  Niger, Uganda, Gabon, Sudan, Tanzania, Mali
  • 51  Namibia
  • 50  1910, Malawi, Lesotho, Somalia
  • 49  Central African Republic, South Africa
  • 48  1900, Guinea Bissau
  • 47  Chad, Swaziland, Zimbabwe, Nigeria
  • 46
  • 45
  • 44
  • 43
  • 42  1890
  • 41  Mozambique
  • 40
  • 39
  • 38  1850, Zambia, Angola

Angola is much worse than nearly all of Africa, making the slum children of Luanda the worst of the worst – not what most of Africa is like at all.

So just how bad off is most of Africa? That is where those years in boldface come in: they are the years when the life expectancy of White American men reached those ages.

So Angola is as bad as it was for White American men in 1850. Not great, yes, but we are not talking 2000 BC or 1400 either. Meanwhile most of Africa is where White America was in the early 1900s.

See also:

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golliwog

Posted in stuff on Thu Jun 24th 2010| 96 Comments »

Golliwogs (1895) were black rag dolls common in Europe, Australia and New Zealand in the early 1900s – it was second only to  the teddy bear. It comes from Britain,  modelled on the blackface minstrels of America:  jet black skin, big, wide eyes, big red (or white) lips, wild, woolly hair and wearing a short coat with tails.

It is a stereotype of a stereotype of a black man. They started falling out of favour in the 1960s, though they are still beloved by many older whites who grew up on them and see them as harmless.

Harmless they were not. Deep down even whites understood how the dolls dehumanized people of colour: gollywog, golly and wog have all become ethnic slurs. It started in the Second World War with British troops in North Africa calling Arabs “wogs”. One regiment in the 1960s even wore golliwog pins on their uniform, one for each Arab killed. “Wog” is now applied more generally to foreigners, particularly dark-skinned ones.

Golliwogs were created by Florence Upton in London in 1895 as a character in a book she did to get some money together for art school. She based it on a minstrel doll she had as a girl in New York. “Golliwog” is just a name that popped into her head. The book was a hit and doll makers began selling them.

In the 1940s and 1950s golliwogs appeared in several Noddy books by Enid Blyton:

Once the three bold golliwogs, Golly, Woggie, and Nigger, decided to go for a walk to Bumble-Bee Common. Golly wasn’t quite ready so Woggie and Nigger said they would start off without him, and Golly would catch them up as soon as he could. So off went Woggie and Nigger, arm-in-arm, singing merrily their favourite song – which, as you may guess, was “Ten Little Nigger Boys”.

Golliwogs were bad characters: once they robbed Noddy, leaving him naked in a dark wood while they drove off in his car:

The golliwogs in Noddy were removed in Britain in the 1980s.

A hanged golliwog appeared on the cover of Agatha Christie’s “Ten Little Niggers” (1939):

Robertson’s, a British maker of jam and marmalade, started putting  golliwogs on its jars in 1910. Something they continued to do right up till 2001 – even though they were banned from London in 1983! Towards the end they were selling 45 million jars a year.

In 2009 Carol Thatcher, the daughter of the former prime minister, compared French tennis player Jo-Wilfried Tsonga to a golliwog. Tsonga, pictured right, is half black. Thatcher said it was merely a silly joke and refused to apologize.

Soon after it was discovered that one of the Queen’s shops were still selling golliwogs. They were pulled from shelves.

You can still buy golliwogs online.

The White American rock band Creedence Clearwater Revival called itself The Golliwogs from 1964 to 1968. But golliwogs were never big in America. It is not for want of racial insensitivity: in New Orleans you can buy a doll that looks very much like a golliwog, Nola Mae:

See also:

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Zora Neale Hurston: What White Publishers Won’t Print

Posted in stuff on Wed Jun 23rd 2010| 143 Comments »

Zora Neale Hurston wrote “What White Publishers Won’t Print” for the April 1950 issue of Negro Digest. It is an article on what sort of stories about people of colour (and Jews) are aimed at White Americans by white publishers and Hollywood producers.

Hurston says whites think people of colour have no inner life:

It is assumed that all non-Anglo-Saxons are uncomplicated stereotypes. Everybody knows all about them. They are lay figures mounted in the museum where all may take them in at a glance. They are made of bent wires without insides at all. So how could anybody write a book about the non-existent?

In short, whites think the stereotypes are true to life!!! That seems mad to me but, come to think of it, even Mark Twain thought minstrel shows were true to life. And how often do whites use hip hop videos to prove some point about the True Nature of Black People?

That means the reason middle-class blacks on television are noble but boring and have little in the way of a love life is because that is just how they seem to white screenwriters! It is not some bad habit Hollywood has fallen into or some kind of racist plot: they are trying to be as true to life as possible!

Or take “Shaft” (1971): the hero, “a sex machine to all the chicks” as we are informed in the opening song, has sex with three women but loves none of them – he even pointedly avoids the L-word. I thought it was because he is just a dog. No, Hurston would say, it is because he is black:

[It is] impossible for the majority to conceive of a Negro experiencing a deep and abiding love and not just the passion of sex.

Unfortunately she is right, because it is not just Shaft: think of how few good, serious black-on-black love stories there are in the mainstream. Paramount Pictures, for example, has not made a single one in the past ten years (if ever).

Since the stereotypes are seen as true, blacks and other people of colour might be good enough for comedies and action films but for the most part they are not deep enough to carry a drama as the main character. Even Larry Fishburne’s black Othello was sidelined by Kenneth Branagh’s white Iago in “Othello” (1995).

Hurston says whites like only two kinds of Negroes in their stories:

  • Quaint Negroes – those who fit the stereotypes.
  • Exceptional Negroes – those who seem to break the stereotypes, the key word being “seem”: deep down they are still black, so they are always in danger of “reverting to type”.

Most living, breathing black people are nothing like either one. Which causes whites to misunderstand blacks and all that that means for the country.

Hurston thinks that serious stories about people of colour will help whites to see them as fully human. I disagree: stereotypes are driven as much by white self-interest as they are by plain old ignorance.

See also:

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Phillis Wheatley

Posted in stuff on Tue Jun 22nd 2010| 16 Comments »

Phillis Wheatley (c. 1753-1784), a poet, was America’s first well-known black writer. She lived in Boston during the American Revolution, just down the street from where Crispus Attucks was killed.

In 1761 at age seven or eight she was taken from Senegal by a slave ship. Ten terrible weeks later she found herself in Boston, covering herself with a piece of carpet, being sold as a house slave to a white man and his wife, the Wheatleys. They named her Phillis after the slave ship.

In 16 months she learned English and could read all but the hardest passages of the Bible. Mrs Wheatley went on to teach her Latin and Greek and all the things rich white people learned in those days. Phillis loved poetry, particularly John Milton and Alexander Pope.

Phillis had more education than most whites, but for the most part was not allowed to sit with them at church or the dinner table.

In 1767 her first poem to be printed in a newspaper appeared. She was just 14.

In 1770 a poem about her pastor, “On the Death of the Rev. Mr. George Whitefield”, made her name in Boston.

By 1773 she had enough poems for a book, but printers did not believe she wrote them! John Hancock and other top white men in Boston questioned her and wrote a letter stating she was the author.

But even with the letter no one in Boston would print her book. Mrs Wheatley sent her to England with her son to see a countess who could help her. And so her book was printed in London in 1773. Voltaire said it proved that blacks could write poetry.

Mrs Wheatley saw the book on her death bed. Soon after Mr Wheatley died too and Phillis was freed.

She became the most famous American poet during the Revolution – even George Washington wanted to meet her! But her star slowly sank. In 1779 no one would print her second book – even though her first book continued to do well.

In 1778 she married a free black man, John Peters, a shopkeeper. They had three children, but two died right away.

In 1784 her husband was sent to debtor’s prison. When winter came she and her little girl took sick and died. At 31 she was laid in an unmarked grave, the poems for her second book lost ever since.

She wrote for a white audience, writing in the style of the times. “On Being Brought from Africa to America” has a particularly cringeworthy passage:

‘Twas mercy brought me from my Pagan land,
Taught my benighted soul to understand
That there’s a God, that there’s a Saviour too:
Once I redemption neither sought nor knew.

But then she says:

Some view our sable race with scornful eye,
“Their colour is a diabolic die.”
Remember, Christians, Negros, black as Cain,
May be refin’d and join th’angelic train.

Her poetry would later help to free the slaves: for many it proved that blacks were just as good as whites when given a chance.

See also:

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“Africa is a country”

Posted in stuff on Mon Jun 21st 2010| 99 Comments »

“Africa is a country” is a common belief among Americans. It pictures Africa, meaning black Africa, as a place like Italy or China, a place where everyone pretty much looks the same, dresses the same, eats the same and talks the same. “Say something in African,” they ask.

Even those who “know” it is a continent divided into dozens of countries still tend to think that way when, say, watching the news.

For example, every now and then on the news you will see a boy who is skin and bones sitting in the dust somewhere in Africa. He will die if food aid does not arrive in time.

The news report is perfectly true: he is skin and bones and he will die if food does not come. Millions in Africa have died that way before. It is not made up, not for a nanosecond.

The trouble comes when that boy is seen in terms of “Africa is a country”. His somewhere in Africa then becomes everywhere in Africa. Because Africa is a country where things are pretty much the same from coast to coast, like America.

Only the worst news about Africa – and not even all of that – makes it to America. Then it is applied to all of Africa, because Africa is a country:

  • The boy who is skin and bones in Sudan becomes how Africa is.
  • The bad leadership of Mugabe in Zimbabwe becomes how Africa is.
  • Aids in South Africa becomes how Africa is.
  • The senseless mass killings in Rwanda become how Africa is.
  • The 12-year-old boy with a machine gun in Sierra Leone becomes how Africa is.

Africa can never become more than its bad news because most Americans know so little about the place to add enough balance.

Even worse, this news is being laid on top of racism, a racism that already expects the worst of black people – making the bad news seem more telling than it is and the racism, in turn, more true than it is.

Africa is huge: it is three times bigger than America in both land and people.

Africa is a continent of a billion people. That is bigger than the whole world was up till 1800. Bigger than it was in the time of the Bible. Bigger than it was in the time of Shakespeare.

Africa has at least a thousand languages, which means at least a thousand cultures. Meaning each country has dozens of cultures of its own! So even the countries are not countries in the Western sense.

Africa has way more genetic diversity than the rest of the world – because it is the root of mankind. Deep down we are all Africans no matter what our colour or country.

So while there is some truth to the stereotypes about Africa – it is easy to find supporting examples in a land of a billion people – they are profoundly false. Because any stereotype about a place that big would have to be.

Peters Projection, which shows continents according to their true size

See also:

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Sergio Mendes, will.i.am, Erykah Badu: That Heat

Posted in stuff on Sun Jun 20th 2010| 1 Comment »

Remarks:

Posting this mainly because of Erykah Badu, not Sergio Mendes or will.i.am (I have seen those two together before but I cannot remember where).

Lyrics:

[Will.I.Am]
one for the treble
two for the bass
3 for the ladies
and four for the blaze
yo yo yo
It’s that heat, that heat, that heat, that heat
It’s that heat yo

the heat comin thick down from sao paulo
bankin new york shakin up the apollo
rhyme like night people bite and swallow
but the way to recite it is soundin raw hollow
hollow like empty 40 ounce bottles
holla at ya boy if you wanna date models
brazilian beauties wit booties that wobble
booby like tooties that fog up ya goggles
yea I keep it hot full throttle
beats bang out and keep yah head on bobble
instrumentally I’m rich like lotto
fundamentally I just can’t follow
or get sentimental when witnessing my bro’s
divin, duckin, dodgin from hollow
point bullets that turn bodies into john does
I stay positive and rock mics cause I go

[Hook]
One for the treble
Two for the bass
Three for the ladies
and Four for the blaze

[Erykah Badu sings]

That Heat (x4)

So take off ya clothes
relax yah soul
unwind yah spine

[Erykah Badu sings]

It’s that heat, that heat, that heat (X3)
It’s that heat yo

It’s that heat comin in slow motion
barbecue yah body keep yah body straight roastin
light skin hunny’s get the sun tan lotion
dark skin hunny’s in the summer no commotion
you can catch me chillin by the ocean
wit brazilian feminines sippin on potions
girls lookin like cinammon toast
and I got a little chocolate for yah cinnamon toast
I got the notion to get real close
that’s a little ??? motion don’t mind if I boast
baby I can be yah favorite host
break yah off wit a single or a freaky double dose
just don’t catch no emotions
I bring heat from coast to coast and
beats and rhymes is my devotion
I’m turnin mc’s into ghosts
when I talk about

[Hook]
One for the treble
Two for the bass
Three for the ladies
and Four for the blaze

[Erykah Badu sings]

It’s that heat, that heat, that heat (X3)
It’s that heat so

[Erykah Badu sings]

It’s that heat, that heat, that heat (X3)
It’s that heat yo

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stereotypes about Africa

Posted in stuff on Sat Jun 19th 2010| 123 Comments »

Some stereotypes about black Africa that I get from living in America:

Africa is a country: Africa is divided into dozens of countries, but those are just lines on a map: there is no important difference between most of them. Kenya, Nigeria, Senegal and Sierra Leone, for example, are pretty much all the same. They have no history worth learning and understanding.

People: They all look alike: dark brown skin, flat noses, big lips and woolly hair. The women are fat, but that is how their men like them.

Culture: They wear colourful clothes – or almost nothing at all – and love to play the drums and dance. They live in jungle clearings in little round huts. They eat monkeys.

Language: They speak in some mumbo-jumbo that is not even a proper language, the most important word of which is “bwana”. Some can speak in broken English.

Lack of civilization: Africa was a dark continent full of naked savages. They put bones through their noses and cooked people in big pots. Whites brought civilization, but unfortunately it has been falling to pieces ever since they left in the 1960s. Ancient Egypt does not count as an African civilization because Egypt is not truly African.

Lack of intelligence: tests show that black Africans have an average IQ of 70, which, sadly, proves they are not terribly bright – as we suspected all along. So Africa will forever be screwed up unless outsiders step in to run things properly.

Black Savage Rule: Mugabe proves they are incapable of self-rule. Rulers are cruel and on the take. Rape and murder are out of control. Gone are the good old days of:

Colonialism: the left’s name for white rule. Yes, there were some “excesses”, but whites more than made up for it by bringing civilization and good government.

Neocolonialism: imagined by the left: whites have had little power in Africa since the 1960s.

Bono, NGOs and Nice White Ladies: white people who try to help Africa in spite of itself.

War: ever-present wherever you go, fought by heartless 12-year-old boys with machine guns.

Genocide: a common practice.

The slave trade: carried on by blacks and Arabs for thousands of years, long before whites showed up. They are still at it!

Cities: vast, violent shantytowns. At the centre: a few government buildings and maybe two high-rise hotels that are falling apart. There is one dirty, ill-equipped public hospital filled to overflowing. There is not even regular bus service, much less universities and libraries.

Disease: half are dying from Aids – proof they lack any kind of morals. Millions die of malaria, also incurable.

Religion: some follow a half-understood Christianity; a few follow Islam, most follow superstition.

Children: unwashed, half-naked, skin and bones for want of food. They sit listlessly on the ground with flies landing on their faces.

Wild animals: the only noble and truly interesting thing in Africa.

See also:

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The Boondocks, Astro Boy and drawing people of colour

Posted in stuff on Fri Jun 18th 2010| 74 Comments »

I like to draw women but unlike my brothers I can only draw at a cartoon level. To me I am mainly drawing black women but unless I give them natural hair or brown skin people will ask me, “Why do you like to draw white women?”

It is not just me: Aaron McGruder, who draws “The Boondocks”, does the very same thing: he depends mainly on skin colour and hair to make his characters “look black”.

In America people of colour are seen as “other”, so unless you mark them as such in cartoon drawings they come out looking white.

A good example of this is McGruder’s Jazmine Dubois:

She is light-skinned, but in the newspaper her skin looks white.

Having given up skin colour as a clear marker of her race McGruder is forced to give her a natural hairstyle – thus the huge Afro puffs pictured above. If he gave her a weave she would look white to Americans unfamiliar with her, as in this picture drawn by a fan:

Yet if you put the girl in that picture in a Japanese anime and give her a Japanese name she would seem Japanese to most people in Japan!

One girl, one drawing, three races depending on her setting and audience.

Astro Boy was one of the first anime characters. Before he appeared on American television in the 1960s he was in comic books aimed at Japanese schoolboys in the 1950s.

The huge eyes of anime characters go back to Astro Boy, who in turn got them from Max Fleischer’s Betty Boop:

Osamu Tezuka, the creator of Astro Boy, grew up watching Betty Boop, Mickey Mouse and Bambi – all of whom have big eyes.

Even though eyelid surgery was catching on in Japan just then, that had little to do with it: Tezuka loved big eyes because it made it easier to show a character’s feelings. By adding colour and shading to the eyes you could go even further. So it became a cornerstone of the anime style.

In America Tezuka, like McGruder, would have been forced to mark the race of his characters as people of colour. Since many Japanese have pale skin and many white Americans have black hair, the only sure marker between the two in a cartoon drawing is slanted eyes.

But by giving them big eyes Tezuka destroyed that marker. It would be like McGruder giving Jazmine a weave. But in Japan it did not matter: characters are assumed to be Japanese unless clearly marked as foreign. Just as in America they are assumed to be white unless their race is clearly marked.

To White Americans the Japanese are “people with slanted eyes”. But the Japanese do not think of themselves that way – any more than White Americans think of themselves as “people with blonde hair, blue eyes and big noses”, which is how they are stereotyped in anime. To the Japanese it is foreigners who look strange, not themselves.

See also:

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The Liberation of Paris: whites only

Posted in stuff on Thu Jun 17th 2010| 202 Comments »

Paris was freed from Nazi rule on August 25th 1944 by the 2nd Armoured Division of the Free French army, a few months after D-Day. The strange thing is that all the soldiers seemed to be white – even though the French army at the time was two-thirds black. As it turns out the British and Americans who ran D-Day would only let all-white army divisions cross the Channel. Even the black American soldiers were left behind in Britain and joined the fighting only later.

France in those days ruled much of Africa and had black soldiers in its army. In 1940 when Paris fell to Hitler 17,000 black soldiers had lost their lives defending France. In spite of that no black soldiers were allowed to take part in the liberation of Paris four years later. And to this day there is no monument in Paris to honour them.

After the fall of Paris, De Gaulle fled to Africa to raise an army to some day return to free France. By 1944 his army was two-thirds black. But then five months before D-Day the British and Americans told him they did not want black soldiers freeing Paris – they would  allow whites only.

De Gaulle was against it – he did not separate his men by race like the Americans did – but he had little choice.

Most of De Gaulle’s divisions were about 40% white. The whitest one was 75% white – the 2nd Armoured Division in Morocco. It would be hard to move it into position for D-Day because of all its tanks, but it was the only one that could be made all-white in time. But even as it was, many of the “whites” were not French at all but Spanish, Syrian and North African.

But why did the British and Americans want an all-white division? They said it would be better for propaganda and French morale – as if they knew more about French morale than De Gaulle himself.

Propaganda: it seems the (white) American commanders were afraid of how the sight of black soldiers freeing Paris would look on newsreels back home where everyone had been brought up on whitewashed history. So to maintain that image they forced the French to whitewash their army, forcing fiction on fact.

At the time the American army was segregated on the grounds that blacks were not brave enough to fight in battle. Blacks worked in the supply chain behind front lines as truck drivers and dock workers. They were not thrown into battle until near the end when General Eisenhower had little choice. But the black African soldiers had already proved their courage in France in 1940 and had even fought alongside white Americans in Italy in 1943.

The American motives seem clear, the British ones do not. Their army was not segregated by race and they had nothing like Jim Crow to maintain on the home front. Some say it is because they were afraid of having a black fighting force on their soil – D-Day was staged from their shores.

See also:

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