Category Archives: human rights

June 8, 2011 · 7:57 pm

Juxtaposion: Hip hop/homophobia/queeriodic table of elements

Artifact 1:

T-shirt at Summer jam 2011

Artifact 2:

In Hip Hop this repressive denial often takes the shape of hypermasculine narratives with a no-homo brand of homophobia functioning as the frosting on the cake. Check out Funkmaster Flex’s seething defense of his homie Mr. Cee delivered in response to a rival station’s bit about Mr. Cee’s alleged public fellatio scenario. Flex goes on for at least five minutes straight, berating the entire station, defending Mr. Cee, and intimating that (gasp) there may be some folk at that other station who are actually gay, not (as Flex suggests re: Cee) framed by the NYC Hip Hop police.

But let’s pretend for minute that Mr. Cee is gay. Does that mean that his show, “Throwback at Noon” isn’t hot like fire? Does it diminish his pivotal role as Big Daddy Kane’s DJ? Is Ready to Die any less dope to you now than it was before you thought about the possibility that Mr. Cee was gay? I hope that you answered NO to all of these rhetorical questions and I hope that starting now the Hip Hop community can at last be persuaded to confront its irrational fear of the full range of our community’s human sexuality.

via NewBlackMan: Hip-Hop is Gay: Seeing Mr. Cee.

Artifact 3:

The queeriodic table of elements

 

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June 8, 2011 · 4:02 pm

microaggressions

If you don’t know, now you know.

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June 8, 2011 · 3:56 pm

Pharoahe Monch: Renegade

Ain’t no conscious hip hop left.  Those that were conscious, now are just working to eat.

Pharoahe Monch never pretended to be simple and clean.  His work with Organized Confusion was lyrical, dense, and complex.  I think Monch is an intellectual roughneck — capable of pushing some thin ideas to the point of breaking. Hold no rapper to the ethical standards of a priest or a politician.  Monch shares ideas — you don’t have to like them.

In fact, I didn’t like his video of “Black hand side.”  It’s a good tune, and it encourages peaceful resolution of conflict among African Americans.  But it also includes a domestic violence scene which seems to get the same treatment.  Sweep violence under the rug.  I’m not feeling that.  So I’m certainly not gonna post a video with some ideas I feel need to be challenged.

But Pharoahe’s We Are Renegades (W.A.R.) is dang good as an album.  And I don’t have any need for Pharoahe Monch to match my politics.  Just to keep making good music.   I’ll decide what fits me.

Witness “Clap.”  The first single from the album that gets a relatively lush 10 minute short movie.  Winter in America indeed.  Ice cold and not getting any warmer.  The only spark of warmth comes from gun barrel.  110%.

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June 5, 2011 · 3:28 pm

Arab spring in context: Talking blues about the news

Thanks to Reuters and the Atlantic for the photo of protesters in Yemen

My kin has laid out some good old fashioned cynicism about the Arab spring uprisings.

People everywhere hoped that the Arabs would overthrow their dictators and enjoy democracy, political freedom, and economic opportunity.

That would have been nice. But instead what has happened is slaughter. The rulers of Libya, Syria, Yemen, and Bahrain decided that the revolutions could be defeated by mass murder and indiscriminate torture, and, so far, that tactic has been 100% successful. Nothing good has come of it. The Mideast is more unstable, Israel is more paranoid and aggressive than ever, Arab demonstrators have been shot down by the thousands, and no one in the entire region is yet enjoying any increase in democracy, political freedom, or economic opportunity.

via Sad But True: The “Arab Spring” Is A Pipe Dream « Talkin’ Blues About The News.

Zing!  Can’t disagree with any of that!  It’s a good argument, and important to make in this time, where our impulse to action (read helicopter gunships in Libya) obscures reflection.

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June 5, 2011 · 4:18 am

graffiti in Libya: mocking a dictator

photo by Rory Mulholland, The Guardian

Rory Mulholland writes of the new graffiti critiques of Libyan dictator Qaddafi in The Guardian.  Smooth documentation of some cool art.  I liked this paragraph:

The revolution has lifted the lid on a repressed society and the people of Benghazi are making up for the lost years. They have quickly set up newspapers, radio stations and rap bands to say things that just a few months earlier would have got them locked up or worse. But the Gaddafi caricatures are the most striking manifestation of the new-found freedom of expression.

via The Libyan artists driving Gaddafi to the wall | World news | The Observer.

I’ll also note that this graffiti proves the inability of the dictatorship to control the image and the word.  The people can now circumvent state controls, and graffiti is one of the modes of communication which is most likely to allow for anonymity.  Vital for earnest criticism, especially when the subject of critique is likely to shoot you.  I suspect that a fair number of westerners who have been inculcated into the moral panic associated with graffiti read the heavily painted walls of various Arab spring uprisings with anxiety.

It strikes me as a deeply authentic medium of expression which emerges in the context of necessity.  Egypt, Tunisia, Syria, and China have all used internet blockades to prevent people from communicating with each other during community mobilizations.  Painting in the street became part of internal communication and collective articulation.

Look again at the painting above.  This image communicates something about the area in which it is painted.  It might mean relative safety from repression, it might be a meeting point, it might even allow non-involved citizens to avoid areas where there might be fighting.   Speaking nothing of the ability of such an image to crack through the conditioning of decades of unquestioning obedience to a terrifying force.

Remember Timisoara?  It’s a small Romanian town, where in 1989, a few citizens rallied around a pastor being bullied by the dictatorship.  After troops were used to put down the protests, a few more people started to make some noise and the town was put under martial law.  To rally the citizens the wretched dictator Nicholau Ceausescu gave a live TV broadcast.  When the crowd started to chant Timisoara and push against security forces, Ceausecu’s face went blank, and seventy six percent of the citizens who were watching got an image they had never seen before — evil on it’s heels.

And a few hours later, Ceausescu was dead.

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June 3, 2011 · 4:33 pm

Rest in power Geronimo Ji Jaga

Thanks to CNN for the photo

I had the pleasure of talking with Geronimo Ji Jaga.  He provided some crucial insights and helped me to realize some stuff about racism, alliances, and capitalism.

For those whose RSS feeds don’t include radical websites, Geronimo Ji Jaga was the Los Angeles Black Panther Party field marshal, and he died yesterday.  He had fought in Vietnam and shared his insight on urban guerrilla struggles with other L.A. panthers.  His role in terms of clarity of cause for the Panthers comes through in quite a few memoirs.

David Hilliard gives Ji Jaga the space to tell his own story in a lengthy first-person quote in his book This side of glory.  Here is an excerpt of Ji Jaga describing his changing awareness.

I stay until ’67.  I’m a sergeant now.  After a few months at home base in Carolina, the riots jump off in Detroit and we’re sent there.  The next thing I know I’m standing next to Lyndon Baines Johnson at Fort Bragg — I want to say something to him but he doesn’t shake my hand.  Then I’m on my way back to Vietnam going to Hue to retake the city.  We get there and the dead are everywhere.  They give us a parade down the streets.  It was like something out of a movie.  Thousands of people.  A weird feeling, just coming from the situation in Detroit.  But I survive all that and now I’m a sergeant, making money, sending it home to Mama, got a girlfriend, got another woman, got a trailer I won shooting dice, got it made in the service, and it’s April fourth, 1968, and I’m about thirty miles south of Hue and I’m on the bunker and on the radio I hear Martin Luther King is assassinated.  Everything got quiet.  I will never forget that feeling — standing on top of that bunker, looking over the country and feeling as though I missed my calling, and within a month I’m out of the service (Hilliard and Cole, 217)

Here is Geronimo describing the moment of his arrest, four days after the police murder of Fred Hampton and Mark Clark in Chicago.

The police had made a dry run at the end of November,” Remembers G., ” during a regular community night, at which you had parents and people in the community coming to the library and stuff.  They went through terrorist tactics for fifteen minutes and then it was over.  Then we got the word that they were hitting hus on December 7.  So I stayed there.  Had everything prepared, sandbags at the location, weapons and stuff laid out.  And they didn’t come.

Instead they came the next night.

At that time I had been up like two and a half nights: Fred Hampton had been very close to me.

I figured they would hit the central office on Central Avenue.  Around three-thirty that morning the other Panthers said to me, “Brother you got to get some rest.” It was looking like they might not do it.  We were hoping our information was wrong.

So I say, “Okay.”

We have a bunch of different houses.  I got to Fifty-fifth — a community center — and I just fell out, sleeping on the floor like I always do becuase of Vietnam.

I’m in a deep sleep.  I might have been drugged.  Or it could have been from me staying up so many days and nights.  I don’t even hear the first boom from the front door.  Then they’re shooting everywhere.  But they miss.  because it’s completely dark and because I’m sleeping low.

They bust in.  I see the shots.  My wife, Sandra, goes “Ahh!” She throws herself half on top of me.  She’s screaming and hollering at them — screaming at them the whole time.  She was a very audacious woman.

I’m still trying to focus, trying to figure out whether I’m in Vietnam or here, and what the hell is this?  The detectives come in.  You can tell something is wrong because they look surprised to see me there still living.  They swing me over to handcuff me and I see them take a gun out and put it under the bunk.  To justify the shooting.  Because there wasn’t a single weapon in that building.  That was a community center.  (Hilliard and Cole, 269-270).

Ji Jaga is being framed.  Charged with a murder that he supposedly committed while he was speaking to 400 Bay Area panthers, a meeting that the FBI surveilled, and in fact knew Ji Jaga was innocent. The FBI Counter Intelligence Program (COINTELPRO) dictated that law enforcement lie to get revolutionaries off the street.

Clang. Twenty-seven years incarcerated.  Eighteen months on death row.   Years locked down in solitary confinement, because the FBI labeled him dangerous.

A few folks fought hard for his appeal — most notably Johnny Cochran and Stuart Hanlon.  Investigations confirmed that the prosecution had hidden evidence that pointed clearly to Ji Jaga’s innocence.  In 1997 his conviction was overturned.  In subsequent lawsuits, he was awarded 4.5 million dollars for false imprisonment and civil rights violations.

I saw him on the speaking tour shortly after he was released.  The spirit of mutual solidarity was quite strong during this time.  The messages from this talk and our visit were quite clear about mutuality and the need to build bridges between movements. This is a pretty good description of his talk at the time.

Geronimo talked about his background, how he came up in rural Louisiana and how he bought his first pair of shoes by selling catfish. He described how his family organized against the lynching of Black people in the south. And he recalled how his family told him and others to go to the army, “to get some training so we could come back and further protect the community against the Klan terror and we did that.” He talked of his great faith in the ability of people to rise above the everyday struggle for survival and all the other traps the system lays out. He spoke about how the Panthers had gone to gang members and how, “they would change their gangster mentality into a revolutionary mentality.” He said that while he was in prison, “not one time was I ever disrespected by one of the Crips or Bloods” and that the youth need leadership, not contempt or cynicism. He put the blame for problems in the community like drugs and guns and “Black-on-Black violence” on the system, not the people.

via RW ONLINE:Geronimo Speaks Out.

That message still lives.  And if you watched the 1491s video on that OTHER Geronimo, then you know that of course Geronimo Ji Jaga certainly isn’t dead.

 

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June 2, 2011 · 11:27 pm

Geronimo was not killed in Pakistan . . .

I didn’t know that the Navy SEAL codename for the operation to kill Osama Bin Laden was called Geronimo.  Thanks to Colorlines and the 1491s, we get a nice video response, with emphasis on current native north America.

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June 2, 2011 · 5:35 pm

The best of intentions: Cholera in Haiti

The earthquake which struck Haiti in 2010 resonated world wide.  Concerned humans gave money, donated time and exuded compassion.  Despite these best of intentions, the way that people helped was often symbolic.  A few charities got rich on the quick cell-phone donations.  More than a few donations went astray, and of course, some of the people helping brought carnage.

Like the Nepalese workers contracted by the United Nations who brought cholera with them.   In December, an Al Jazeera camera crew filmed UN workers dismantling latrines which dumped right into the Artibonite river.   Shortly thereafter, a respected epidemiologist announced that Cholera was most likely brought by the UN.  The Nepalese denied this.

Epidemiologist Renaud Piarroux conducted research in Haiti on behalf of the French and Haitian governments.

Sources who saw the report said it had evidence the outbreak was caused by river contamination by Nepalese troops.

The UN said it had neither accepted nor dismissed the findings. The Nepalese army condemned the study as unfounded.

The cholera epidemic has killed 2120 people, and nearly 100,000 cases have been treated, according to the Haitian government.

via BBC News – Haiti cholera: UN peacekeepers to blame, report says.

While people debated the cause, Haitians died.  How bad was it?  In the spring, citizens enraged by rising deaths began piling up coffins of dead relatives in the street to protest lack of action.  You’ve got to be pretty angry (and out of options) to put your dead family members out  as protest blockades.

photo from the SF Bay Guardian, taken by Ansel Herz

What was the response to the Haitian indignation?  Mostly the United Nations denied their responsibility, leaving Haitians dying of Cholera.  This morning, Spoonful of medicine brought the fascinating news that the UN had looked into the subject and yes, in fact, it looks like the UN brought the deadly disease, although they share the responsibility for the spread of the disease with the earthquake itself.

Here is a quote from the actual UN report, written in classic bureaucratic language, but clear enough for my purposes:

“Based on the epidemiological information available, the cholera epidemic began in the upstream region of the Artibonite River served by the Mirabalais Hospital on October 17th, 2010. This region has little to no consumption of fish or shellfish products, which are known to be associated with outbreaks of cholera worldwide. Therefore, the most likely cause of the outbreak was the consumption of contaminated water from the river. An explosive cholera outbreak began on October 20th, 2010 in the Artibonite River Delta, indicating that cholera had spread throughout the Artibonite River Delta within two to three days of the first cases being seen in the upstream region.” UN-cholera-report-final.pdf (application/pdf Object).

The United Nations volunteers contracted for a trucking company to remove their waste.  Here is the waste removal strategy, sometimes called out of sight/out of mind:

The contracting company dispatches a truck from Port-au-Prince to collect the waste using a pump. The waste is then transported across the street and up a residential dirt road to a location at the top of the hill, where it is deposited in an open septic pit (Figure 11). Black water waste for the two other MINUSTAH facilities – Hinche and Terre Rouge – is also trucked to and deposited in this pit. There is no fence around the site, and children were observed playing and animals roaming in the area around the pit. UN-cholera-report-final.pdf (application/pdf Object)

How do you know that this is caused by the UN workers?  Well the strain of Cholera is identical to the strain in Southeast Asia.

A careful analysis of the MLVA results and the ctxB gene indicated that the strains isolated in Haiti and Nepal during 2009 were a perfect match. The strains isolated in Haiti are also perfect matches by MLVA and ctxB gene mutations with South Asian strains isolated between or since the late 1990’s.  UN-cholera-report-final.pdf (application/pdf Object).

And of course lets discuss the cover-your-ass conclusion paragraph.  After thirty pages of exposition explaining the 99% likelihood that the UN disaster assistance brought more terrifying disaster to Haiti, the report authors punk out.

The introduction of this cholera strain as a result of environmental contamination with feces could not have been the source of such an outbreak without simultaneous water and sanitation and health care system deficiencies. These deficiencies, coupled with conducive environmental and epidemiological conditions, allowed the spread of the Vibrio cholerae organism in the environment, from which a large number of people became infected. The Independent Panel concludes that the Haiti cholera outbreak was caused by the confluence of circumstances as described above, and was not the fault of, or deliberate action of, a group or individual.

The source of cholera in Haiti is no longer relevant to controlling the outbreak. What are needed at this time are measures to prevent the disease from becoming endemic.

The claim that the “deficiencies” of the Haitian health care system are equally responsible for the introduction of the disease into Haiti is ridiculous.  These factors account for the spread of the disease, but certainly not the introduction.   No longer relevant?  How about for the next United Nations disaster relief?  How about for the kids dying of cholera in Haiti this morning?  Seems like victim blaming to me.

Responding to a natural disaster provides the kind of cover for half-assed assistance.  Because of the “disaster” the lack of reflection can be blamed on the need for speedy action.  The risk of this is that we excuse terrible decisions, because the people were ‘trying to help.”

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June 1, 2011 · 4:12 pm

Dan Savage and Terry Miller on google + it get’s better

This is a really nice reflection on the technology company’s relationship with the It get’s better campaign.  Savage is particularly eloquent about the ways homophobia limits the ability of gay teens to see happy gay adults.  He argues that the It get’s better campaign, through youtube, circumvented barriers and actually got to people.

Dan Savage gives credit to the support and sponsorship of google, who created a commercial video for the project and have helped to publicize the campaign.  Google, Obama and other higher profile participants joined without compromising the message and the sincerity of the videos.  Check it out, you’ll enjoy the discussion.

And this morning the SF Giants became the first major league team to make their own It get’s better film.   I appreciate that they speak for the whole organization.  Nice work.   Culture change in process.

And the standout best It get’s better video comes from the Cincinnati Rollergirls.

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May 31, 2011 · 7:46 pm

On the extradition of Ratko Mladic

Ratko Mladic taking command in Srebrenica. Thanks to http://www.gendercide.com for the image still

Today Ratko Mladic, the Serbian commander who ordered the execution of at least 7,000 men in Srebrenica was extradited to the Hague to face charges under the International Criminal Court.  The write up in the Guardian ends with the probably justification for this move — Serbia’s desire to enter the E.U..  As is noted in the article, the Serbian president Boris Tadic made clear that he viewed the arrest and extradition of Mladic not as an ethical move, or a truth-seeking in a climate of national amnesia, but as a political token.

The president also said it was time for the EU to do its part by boosting his country’s efforts to join the bloc, arguing the arrest of Mladic proves it is serious about rejoining the international fold.

“I simply ask the EU to fulfil its part,” he said. “We fulfilled our part and we will continue to do so.”

The EU had repeatedly said Serbia could begin pre-membership talks only after it arrested the wartime Bosnian Serb commander. Some EU countries have said Serbia needs to do more, including arresting its last fugitive, Goran Hadzic, who led Croatian Serb rebels during the 1991-1995 war.

Tadic said Hadzic would be arrested as soon as possible.

via Ratko Mladic bound for The Hague to face war crimes charges | World news | guardian.co.uk.

This sixteen year-delayed arrest seems like an attempt to sanitize and distance the violence by suggesting that a few toxic leaders can be prosecuted.  No better time to pretend to care about systematic violence than when your nation is up for consideration by the E.U..   And of course, note the language of the Guardian describing Hadzic as the nation’s “last fugitive.” It isn’t surprising that many believe that the Serbian government long knew the whereabouts of the brutal Serbian general who was ‘hiding’ with relatives.

It would be nice to think of this as a win for the extra-national organizations — particularly the International Criminal Court.   This seems like a romantic view — President Tadic didn’t turn Mladic over until they could see the cash just out of reach.  And of course, it wasn’t the moral judgment of the International Criminal Court which reached the Serbian’s leaders hearts, it was the threat of losing their bid to become members of the European Union.

The other part of this idea that extra-national organizations can affect cultural change within a nation should be held in the context of international involvement in the very war crimes that Mladic is accused of.

Summarizing the catastrophe in 1997, David Rohde — who as a journalist with the Christian Science Monitor won a Pulitzer Prize for uncovering the first mass graves around Srebrenica — offered a blistering critique of the moral lapse on the part of the “safe area’s” alleged guardians: “The international community partially disarmed thousands of men, promised them they would be safeguarded and then delivered them to their sworn enemies. Srebrenica was not simply a case of the international community standing by as a far-off atrocity was committed. The actions of the international community encouraged, aided, and emboldened the executioners. … The fall of Srebrenica did not have to happen. There is no need for thousands of skeletons to be strewn across eastern Bosnia. There is no need for thousands of Muslim children to be raised on stories of their fathers, grandfathers, uncles and brothers slaughtered by Serbs.” (Rohde, Endgame, pp. 351, 353.)

via Gendercide Watch: The Srebrenica Massacre.

That’s right, United Nations observers had convinced Muslims to disarm and then turned them over to the Serbians under Ratko Mladic.  How did they do that?  Well, the United Nations security council passed a resolution which declared that Srebrenica was a safe zone where “all parties and others concerned treat Srebrenica and its surroundings as a safe area which should be free from any armed attack or any other hostile act.” In the months before this, hundreds of Bosnian Muslim villages had been destroyed — when the UN declared that Srebrenica was the safe zone and sent blue helmet UN peace-keepers — refugees flooded into the town. 

Ratko Mladic seized Srebrenica and took every Muslim captive.  Mladic divided the men from the women and then had the men executed in a gymnasium in Srebrenica.   Thousands of Muslim men were rounded up from the surrounding areas and were trucked into Srebrenica where they were executed and buried in mass graves.  Where were the U.N.? Well, that depends who you ask.  The official charges against Mladic say that he kidnapped and held hostage those two hundred United Nations blue helmets.

I don’t really care.  What is valuable to note is that the best of intentions — those who were attempting to bring peace and reduce the conflict became complicit in systematic violence against unarmed civilians.   The United Nations promise to keep Srebrenica safe, and the disarmament of the Bosnian Muslims should be remembered as part of the event.

This isn’t to excuse Mladic, but to  put into context the extradition and the trial-to-come.

Mladic was a General in an army.  The political forces which operated to sustain these forces are still unaccountable.  Ratko Mladic was also the general who oversaw the siege of Sarajavo.  He was (and still is) heralded as a hero by many nationalistic Serbs.  He was beloved by his nation precisely because he did what no one else could do — he purified the Serbian nation of outsiders and acted as the uncompromising agent of nationalistic vengeance.

Now that the Serbian leaders desire to be seen as European Union members who are supposed to exhibit the symbolic pursuit toward a vague notion of human rights, Mladic is cut loose.

 

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