Support Docuseries "What Happened to Rap?" on Unjust Incarceration of Imam Jamil Al-Amin

 Trailer on Vimeo

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Excerpt from "The Bluest Eye" by Toni Morrison for Banned Books Week 2022

Recommendation: "The Other Black Girl" by Zakiya Dalila Harris

The novel The Other Black Girl by Zakiya Dalila Harris has deservedly garnered commercial success, and a Google search will deliver many reviews. So let's just start with a few quotes, and, after the page break, some of my comments with ****SPOILERS****.

"[Hazel had] moved from channeling her inner Baraka to her inner Barack--from confrontational to compassionate--in less than 60 seconds." @zakiya_harris, "The Other Black Girl," p 56

— Ayman Hossam Fadel (@aymanfadel) February 10, 2022

In this fictional discussion about the decision to cast Ben Kingsley as Mahatma Gandhi & the hypothetical casting of Billy Dee Williams as Mozart, @zakiya_harris in "The Other Black Girl" lands on this week's leader in institutionalized gender & racial hierarchy, #Harvard pic.twitter.com/oYmCdJo2BU

— Ayman Hossam Fadel (@aymanfadel) February 10, 2022

Since this is a horror novel, I recommend that, if you think you might read it, stop here. ******SPOILERS ***** 

Recommendation: "New Kid" by Jerry Craft

Whenever white racist fascists object to a book, I immediately move it to the top of the my to-read list.

NBC News on October 6, 2021 (archived) reported that:

A school district near Houston canceled the appearance of an award-winning children's illustrator and author, whose books tell stories about Black children struggling to fit into unfamiliar settings, amid claims of critical race theory.

The writer, Jerry Craft, had been set to appear virtually Monday before students and staff members at Roosevelt Alexander Elementary School until the Katy Independent School District pulled the plug after some parents objected.

Frantz Fanon | Philosopher of the Month Collection | May 2021

Frantz Fanon is currently Philosopher of the Month at the Oxford University Press website.

12 journal papers and book chapters are free to read online or download: https://t.co/b43ZHCtYDC#PhilosopherOTM @OUPPhilosophy pic.twitter.com/nZzJoEXJyg

— Existentialism (@rethinkexistent) May 7, 2021

Recommendation: "The Color of Money: Black Banks and the Racial Wealth Gap" by Mehrsa Baradaran

 

I remember adding Mehrsa Baradaran's book The Color of Money: Black Banks and the Racial Wealth Gap to my reading list after watching the movie The Banker on Apple TV+, which mentioned the book in the credits.*

This book flushes out in great detail arguments you should have ready when your anti-black family members, friends and acquaintances casually say things like, "This is a good neighborhood, there are no blacks here," or "We came here with nothing, now look at how well we're doing. If blacks are poor, it must be their fault."

Baradaran examines different periods of USA history after the end of its civil war and abolition of slavery.** In each period, compensation to the enslaved peoples and their descendants is rejected in favor of half-measures which cost the state nothing and produce only symbolic and psychological benefits. And "half-measures" is hardly the right word in most instances. We need phrases such as quarter, eighth, one-sixteenth measures.

Review: "There Goes the Neighborhood: How Communities Overcome Prejudice and Meet the Challenge of American Immigration" by Ali Noorani

 

Ali Noorani is the President and Director of National Immigration Forum. He began writing There Goes the Neighborhood: How Communities Overcome Prejudice and Meet the Challenge of American Immigration in 2010, after Congress failed to pass The Dream Act, despite the Democratic Party majority in the House of Representatives and the Senate. Those advocating human rights for migrants were bitterly disappointed that, despite decades of advocacy and organizing, legislation which would have provided the most meager of relief for some undocumented immigrants failed. 

Ali Noorani identifies that cultural advocacy was the missing ingredient: "When Americans were looking for an answer to their questions of cultural identity, we gave them a political answer instead." [p. 30]

Documentary: The Problem with Apu by Hari Kondabolu

I've liked Hari Kondabolu since seeing a YouTube clip (profanity warning) of why he doesn't use an accent in his comedy acts. When Roku and HBO Max finally resolved their differences, the first movie I watched was his 2017 documentary The Problem with Apu. The documentary is an excellent walk-through about the importance of representation in popular culture, a topic which I've covered in this blog's entries on TV shows, movies and documentaries. There were several points the movie made which stand out for me.

The writers on The Simpsons never considered the impact the character Apu had on actual people. When Hari was interviewing a former producer who pointed out that the show's portrayal of the evil oligarch Mr. Burns was stereotypical and Hari pointed out that one couldn't compare the positions of oligarchs and convenience store operators in society, the producer said that the only consideration in the writers' room was whether dialog was funny. Hari then points out that the only reason Apu and his accent are funny is because society is racist.

Recommendation: India in the West: South Asians in America by Ronald Takaki

 

I remember attending an Asian Students Association meeting at the University of Virginia to hear from the guest lecturer Ronald Takaki, whom I had known about because of his book condemning the United States's use of the atomic bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. The students' excitement was as if a diety had entered the room, and it was really the first time I remember considering ethnicity and identity to be important. Professor Takaki was a leading figure in the movement for multiculturalism in education. India in the West: South Asians in America was published in 1995 as part of a series of books designed for young adult readers. It is adapted and reprinted from his 1989 classic Strangers from a Different Shore: A History of Asian Americans.

Review: How to Kill a City: Gentrification, Inequality, and the Fight for the Neighborhood by Peter Moskowitz

I attended a trade show in New Orleans or Baton Rouge a year or two after Katrina. There's plenty of down time at trade shows when I would exchange small talk with the people manning neighboring booths. One person shocked me by telling me that the flooding had the silver lining of cleaning out the city. I didn't understand at the time that what he meant was that it would facilitate capitalists' exploitation of the space previously occupied by displaced black residents of the city, whom he and policy makers at all levels viewed as expendable at best and liabilities at worst.

Peter Moskowitz's book How to Kill a City: Gentrification, Inequality, and the Fight for the Neighborhood wants people to understand the following:

• Gentrification isn't an inevitable or natural process. Students of capitalism have long ago noted why, if unchecked, it would occur, but human societies don't have to choose to follow capital's dictates.
• In the United States, racist policies have ensured that the negative impacts of housing crises fall on black and brown people.
• Policy makers at the federal, state and municipal levels have adopted gentrification & suburbanization as vehicles for economic growth and have subsidized these processes.

Documentary: "Border Bandits" by Kirby Warnock

Update: The full film is now available on YouTube for free! Video starts at 1:17.

Border Bandits is a documentary and dramatization of the murder of two Hispanic USA citizens, Antonio Longoria and Jesus Bazan, by the Texas Rangers in 1915 in an area of the border with Mexico near the confluence of the Pecos and Rio Grande Rivers. While USA popular culture has glorified the Texas Rangers, the documentary notes its participation in two waves of violence directed at the people in the path of white supremacist settler colonialism in that region. The first wave was in the mid-19th century, and it was directed against the Apache and Comanche indigenous nations. The second took place under cover of the Bandit War and the Mexican Revolution in the 1910s, and it was conterminous with the dispossession of Hispanic landowners in favor of Anglos. The documentary places the 1915 murders in the context of this second wave of violence, where up to 5,000 Hispanics were murdered as corporate Anglo agricultural interests took over the region.

Kirby Warnock's grandfather related in an oral history project that his father, Roland Warnock, had known the two murder victims and had participated in their burial. You can read the transcript.

The documentary explores the events of that day and the subsequent lives of the participants and their descendants. As such, it is a good example of social history.

When I watched the movie, I thought of the following:

1. The importance of oral history. If you have a relationship with an elderly person, ask that person about his or her childhood and record your conversation. Or get them to talk with StoryCorps.
2. The similarities in USA warfare from the original wars the Anglo colonists waged against the indigenous nations on the Atlantic coast of North America, through the Bandit War and now the Global War on Terror. The settler colonialists took advantage of divisions or acts of violence to mobilize its military and militias to seize resources from the indigenous or colonized peoples.
3. The wholescale violence employed in these wars & ethnic cleansings resulted in some blowback as murder replaced peaceful methods of conflict resolution. Roland Warnock, the great grandfather of the film's producer, was murdered in broad daylight in front of his son, who produced the testimony which forms the basis of the film.
4. The pressing need for every parent to read Lies My Teacher Told Me by James Loewen and review their children's social studies curricula.
5. Uncle Karl (Marx) & Uncle Friedrich (Engles) were on the money when they said that police's purpose is to preserve the ruling class's control over the means of production.

The collective Refusing to Forget published an excellent thread on Twitter about an atrocity the Texas Rangers commited in 1918.

#OTD on January 28, 1918, Texas Rangers massacred fifteen men and boys at the village of Porvenir, Texas, in what is perhaps the single most notorious and consequential event in the history of the Ranger Force. 1/ pic.twitter.com/HOAI1v7B20

— Refusing to Forget (@Refusing2Forget) January 28, 2023

Favorite Quotes from "Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption" by Bryan Stevenson

This entry contains some quotes from Bryan Stevenson's Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption. Stevenson is one of the founders of the Equal Justice Initiative. His work is profiled in a documentary and a soon-to-be released feature film.

Proximity to the condemned and incarcerated made the question of each person's humanity more urgent and meaningful, including my own. p. 12

I have discovered, deep in the hearts of many condemned and incarcerated people, the scattered traces of hope and humanity -- seeds of restoration that come to astonishing life when nurtured by very simple interventions. p. 17

Comments on "Dear Martin" by Nic Stone

My county's Board of Education decided to exclude Dear Martin by Nic Stone from the list of novels literature teachers can choose to assign to students to read and from its media centers. Upon checking it out from my local library and reading it, I have a lot to say about why I think my county's board of education made a mistake. For the purposes of this blog, however, I urge parents and guardians of every background to read and discuss this book with their children.

The interactions of the characters pose better, more pressing questions than any other piece of Young Adult literature I know. For non-black children growing up in majority white suburban areas, it hopefully will prevent them from asking the first black person they meet when they go to university about their standardized test scores or where they can score weed.

"Negroland: A Memoir" by Margo Jefferson

I'm sharing a few thoughts on Margo Jefferson's Negroland: A Memoir.

An idea which struck me was her insistence that contemplation of suicide is a civil right or privilege which blacks in America should seek to earn:

But one white female privilege had always been withheld from the girls of Negroland. Aside from the privilege of actually being white, they had been denied the privilege of freely yielding to depression, of flaunting neurosis as a mark of social and psychic complexity. A privilege that was glorified in the literature of white female suffering and resistance. A privilege Good Negro Girls had been denied by our history of duty, obligation, and discipline. Because our people had endured horrors and prevailed, even triumphed, their descendants should be too strong and too proud for such behavior. We were to be ladies, responsible Negro women, and indomitable Black Women. We were not to be depressed or unduly high-strung; we were not to have nervous collapses. We had a legacy. We were too strong for that. I craved the right to turn my face to the wall, to create a death commensurate with bourgeois achievement, political awareness, and aesthetically compelling feminine despair. (pp. 171-2)

I've never been very good dealing with people with depression, and I criticized Jay Asher's Th1rteen R3asons Why.

Here's a passage on housing segregation in Hyde Park, the home of University of Chicago, in the 1960s (p. 147):

Here's a passage about the mental price Margo Jefferson paid as a child trying to navigate the rules of race, gender and class which had been imposed on her and how her adult life has been an attempt to become "a person of inner consequence." (p. 156)

Quotes from Ralph Ellison's "The Invisible Man"

Ralph Ellison's The Invisible Man is the best English language novel I've read, IMO. How I've considered myself well-read this long without having read it is to my shame. I consider it a decolonization novel for black people of the United States (and hence for all other marginalized groups here). The unnamed narrator goes through a Ulysses-like odyssey in search of personal power and individual and collective liberation, growing and learning through each betrayal and cul-de-sac.

Film "Wilmington on Fire" by Christopher Everett Reveals Important Chapter in U.S. History

Next time you hear somebody say, "Lincoln freed the slaves in 1865. If black people have problems today, it's their own fault," please get them a copy of Wilmington on Fire by Christopher Everett. This 89 minute documentary describes events in 1898 in Wilmington, North Carolina. There, whites, through the vehicle of the Democratic Party, militias and a sympathetic judiciary, removed from office blacks and whites uncommitted to white supremacy. Black business owners and professionals were ordered to leave with the property they could carry, and the rest of Wilmington's blacks fled into nearby swamps to avoid murderous crowds. Subsequent to these events, the North Carolina legislature passed Jim Crow legislation,which continued to restrict opportunities for its black residents. White supremacist leaders, whose statues adorn Wilmington's public spaces and for whom its main streets are named, acquired the properties of the blacks who fled and even used them to defraud shareholders of the banks they managed through fraudulent mortgages. See the movie.

The DVD and digital download of "Wilmington on Fire" are scheduled to be available for purchase on November 10, 2016 the 118th anniversary of the massacre.

Find more information on the film's website, Facebook page, Twitter account, Soundcloud and Instagram. Dennis Leroy Kangalee has a more extensive review.

Listen to music and poetry inspired by the movie.

Director and producer Christopher Everett gave an interview on North Carolina Public TV's Black Issues Forum.
 
Wilmington on Fire (trailer) from Wilmington on Fire on Vimeo.

The In the Past Lane podcast of September 29, 2018 features an interview the Margaret Mulrooney, who wrote a book on the history of Wilmington, NC in which these events play a significant role.
 

Multimedia Journalist Fahmo Mohammed: Muslims in Trump's America

On Instagram & Facebook, you can follow the series Muslims in Trump's America by multimedia journalist Fahmo Mohammed.

A photo posted by فهمو محمد 🇰🇪 (@donye94) on Jul 17, 2016 at 5:28pm PDT

She also produces video on Vimeo.

Somali refugees flee war, only to endure racism in Italy from Fahmo Mohammed on Vimeo.

For more information, visit her website.

Review: "14: Dred Scott, Wong Kim Ark & Vanessa Lopez" Directed by Anne Galisky

Updated February 26, 2017: The film is now available for streaming.

Section 1 of the 14th Amendment to the United States Constitution reads as follows:

My layman's summary of this Section is that it established birthright citizenship and forbade states from depriving persons in the United States of their Federally established rights without due process.

Dawud Walid's Thoughts on PBS's Documentary on the Black Panthers

My thoughts on #BlackPanthersPBS https://t.co/q0PSHinXd3

— Dawud Walid (@DawudWalid) February 18, 2016

PBS's website for the documentary allows you to watch it for free until March 18, 2016.

Check out my review of Body and Soul: The Black Panther Party and the Fight Against Medical Discrimination by Alondra Nelson.

Support! Training the Next Generation of Anti-Racism Program Facilitators

Takbir! 100 donors! Just 7 days left to donate. Give $5 or more now to the #AMELIntensive at https://t.co/UDJIXjrbYn pic.twitter.com/oy0hQv5oTK

— Muslim Anti-Racism (@MuslimARC) November 1, 2015

Visit the Muslim Anti-Racism Collaborative website.