Happy Mother's Day

Because I was born of a matriarchy.....

...because I have bi-racial hair and while Nunez Mom is a non-violent mujer, Nunez Matriarch definitely gave me a swat or two with her chinelas get me to sit for its combing....

...because they are the reason for my being....

Happy Mother's Day...to Nunez Mom...and to Cuqui, Ma-ma...to Premonition who is a momi-to-be (in a matter of days)...and to all the other querida blogging and real world mommies, too many to mention.

(Picture Credit: "Hija de Yemaya y Ochun" by Yasmin Hernandez, a super bad, political, activist, rooted in raices y la tierra Boricua artista. Read about her here and support her site here.)

ETA: Took out the italics on my Puerto Rican. So I guess I'll owe a post about why soon. (Evolving Boricua Latina Caribeana mindset is the short answer...)

Video: Mara Triangle Maasai Villages Association

Mara Triangle Maasai Villages Association from Joseph Kimojino on Vimeo.

For more information and how to help.

H/T Global Voices Online

What is Social Justice to a Slave?

"For those living with some comfort in the First World, the future no longer exists as a common reference point. Yet for human beings, being sane depends on the acknowledgment of a continuity between the long since dead and those waiting to be born. The richer societies are being increasingly deprived of a temporal dimension essential to any spiritual life." --John Berger, “Foreword: To Try and Understand,” in The Algebra of Infinite Justice, by Arundhati Roy (London: Flamingo, 2002), xvii

In the U.S., we've fallen into the dangerous habit of speaking of slavery and segregation as though the words represent some Time Long Past. Slavery as that Troubling Matter of whips and cotton and bent backs and Roots which is thankfully behind us now. Segregation as those hoses, dogs and embarrassing Southern ignorance we finally got rid of (as though Jim Crow was purely a Mississippi Delta phenomenon and racism existed solely below the Mason-Dixon line).

We hardly speak of chattel slavery as the foundation of our economic system, social inequalities, and political radicalism. Of slaves as the first freedom fighters, activists, and community organizers. Of Freedom Riders as part of the legacy of that activism. Of Rosa and Coretta, Etta and Fannie. And these are the well-known names.

We've moved on to More Important Things. Our histories have become stories have become myths mumbled out of obligation to our predecessors instead of out of a recognition that the ghost of the plantation (and the workshop, and the mill, and the kitchen) sits right over our shoulder. We invoke Ann Nixon Cooper as a symbol of a life lived and then ignore those who question the very role and relevance of what that life might mean. We seat a Sojourner in our Capital and celebrate our journey from slaves to citizens, but ask the welfare queen to put her tiara back on because this stimulus is only for "those who did everything right" and you ran your credit card balance just a little too high.

As the recession deepens, words and statues should accompany public policies that consider a legacy of unequal distribution of resources and acknowledge a history of violence and of resilience. But few economists extend their analysis of the current crisis further back than the last decade. Which means the importance of houses--of land itself--to a long since distressed African-American community is dismissed in the scramble for better credit plans and harder stress tests. Which means that black farmers--yes there are still black farmers--continue to clamor for change they can believe in.

Our forgetting extends with each monument and each moment because we desperately want to believe a page has turned and the past is finally presenting us with a clean slate.

But even our blank sheets of paper are bloodstained.

In the meantime, the past roars in the silence.

....

The UN Special Focus Report on the demolition of Palestian neighborhoods in East Jersualem begins simply:

"In 1967, Israel occupied the West Bank and unilaterally
annexed to its territory 70.5 km2 of the occupied area, which
were subsequently integrated within the Jersualem municipality. This annexation contravenes international law..."

Appropriation of land for "green areas," exorbitant legal fees and fines on Palestinan men and women attempting to block the demolition of their homes or plan construction of new ones, and re-re-zonings of pre-1967 neighborhoods all amount to a systematic effort to displace Palestinan landowners.

The report reads like a lesson in 1930s urban redlining. (Or perhaps "predatory lending in reverse").

...

"In 1979, after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the CIA and Pakistan's ISI (Inter Services Intelligence) launched the largest covert operation in the history of the CIA. Their purpose was to harness the energy of Afghan resistance to the Soviets and expand it into a holy war, an Islamic jihad, which would turn Muslim countries within the Soviet Union against the communist regime and eventually destabilise it."

The birth of the Taliban as we know it today.

...

On June 12, 1967, Chief Justice Warren delivered the opinion of the Supreme Court in Loving v. Virginia:

"This case presents a constitutional question never addressed by this Court: whether a statutory scheme adopted by the State of Virginia to prevent marriages between persons solely on the basis of racial classifications violates the Equal Protection and Due Process Clauses of the Fourteenth Amendment. For reasons which seem to us to reflect the central meaning of those constitutional commands, we conclude that these statutes cannot stand consistently with the Fourteenth Amendment."

Overturning the original trial judge's contention that:

"Almight God created the races white, black, yellow, malay and red, and he placed them on separate continents. And, but for the interference with this arrangement, there would be no cause for such marriage. The fact that he separated the races shows that he did not intend for the races to mix."

An uncomfortably familiar argument. And yes...he said malay.


...

This should not even be up for debate (you're a Jack Bauer kind of girl?)

....

It is our responsibility to remember, to research, to honor and re-honor our own dead. But the forgetting? That part isn't entirely our fault. Revisionist history is as American as fried chicken and apple pie. Black people in the U.S. manifest the best and worst of what this country has to offer. Its determined hope, drive and ambition for the future. Its self-centered and viral xenophobia. Its radical love and sense of global citizenship. And its selective amnesia to any and all facts that might restate, reshape, reimagine the case--whatever the case of the moment might be.

This existence, with all of its contradictions, has galvanized us but also threaten to tear us apart by blinding us to the truth.

And what is the truth?

What is social justice to a slave?

To struggle on a daily basis--

to love who we wanted when we wanted, to claim family despite the caprice of market prices, to love the land and hate the lash, to love our children and hate their father, to worship fire-breathing gods and goddesses whose power screamed through our skin that we were the chosen ones

--to live "while we are alive" not after we are dead.

It is our responsibility to remember our dead and to shape a politics that honors the struggles
of our ancestors. Only we can teach our children how to move forward because only we best recognize the potholes our labor pains left behind.

We can't learn from our experience if we are consistently forgetting it.

We can move forward human, sane and full-bodied if instead of relying on ideology or the caprice of this theoryexpertcounselorpoliticianacademic who happens to be center stage right now (yes, even Barack; yes, even little ole me) we rely on the whole of our experience in the modern world. All fraught and fragile 400+ years and of it. And conduct ourselves accordingly.

Ayo - "Life is Real"

Beautiful.

Two by Two: A Touch of Nerdy Link Love

GPhoto: Patrick "Pato" Hebert

WOC PhD has links to a plenary with Cherríe Moraga at the National Association for Chicana and Chicano Studies Joto Caucus.

Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Wole Soyinka discuss the Future of Africa on the Vine (video) at the Root.

Shy'M "Femme de Couleur"

It's like Alicia Keys and Ciara rolled into one. In French.

I know some American boy is going to give this one a thumbs up. What say you?

Andrea Hairston's Mindscape

X-Posted @ Firewalkers

"We still yearn for a Metatheory, a God who never lies, whose simple, absolute truth will guide us from nothing to everything without once falling down. Unfortunately truths are false and lies are true. Anything we are absolutely certain of doesn't matter and everything that truly matters is uncertain."
~~Vera Xa Lalafia

Finished. Really, really liked it. And since I am still stuck in the Lull and am apparently incapable of constructing a coherent paragraph much less a review essay, here are the bullet points. (Never fear--no spoilers ahead). Mindscape:

• Confirms for me that the best hard sci-fi is the kind that openly lusts for magical realism and leaps of fantasy.
  
• Confirms that science fiction looks very different when it takes takes seriously 1) that a hero can be female and still sexy, violent, flawed, vulnerable and triumphant 2) a female hero of color can be all of these without being junglefied or mammied 3) people of color can play roles that aren't just witty, "ethnic throwback" sidekicks or helplessly tormented victims.
  
  
• POC humanity can be fundamental parts of the plot without the story collapsing into racial polemics, masochistic Afrocentricity, ambiguous mestizaje, or a melting pot of Latinidad. Translation? The history, culture, politics, and, hell, the people-dom of people of African, Latina/o and Native American descent should not only be a part of the story that is told but that people-dom should be critiqued and created with the same rigor as majority (Anglo or European) societies. That means asking what is it that poc nickname God? Was it the color of their skin only? Was the rhythm of the drums/beat/scratch? Was it the distribution of political and social power between men and women, elders and age-grades? Was it the lyric and spiritual? The curve of clay forms? Was it a kind of prayer or a way of speaking? And where do you then place histories of slavery and genocide, how do your characters feel that as spectre even as they walk in worlds three, four or five thousand years ahead of today?
  
  
• You don't have to say your characters are any color for them to be that color. (Proof again that putting the humanity of people of color into sci-fi is more than just taking a brown crayon to your cookie-cutter hero or heroine)
  
  
• Just because you don't give your characters a color doesn't make them "everyman" or "everywoman" (Proof again....)
  
  
• Gender is as much a myth as race and should be interrogated and respected just as is explained above. Sexuality is the same deal. And the absolute best sci-fi out right now is flipping both of those way on their head and them thrusting them into another dimension before bringing them back and commiting them to paper.
  
  
• Ooooooh on the way that really, really good sci-fi can take things that are absolutely normal today, magnify them, and make them absolutely otherworldly and yet frighteningly prescient. (I can't say more without spoiling...but ooooohhhhhh!)
  
  
• Ooooooh on the way that afrofuturism deplores the happy ending. After all: "Anything we are absolutely certain of doesn't matter and everything that truly matters is uncertain."
  
  

That is all, at least until I am a real writer again. If you have free time, read the book. If I had free time I would start a TechnoAfroCats Book Collective or distro (yay, I just learned what that is!) or something.

Hmm. Actually, interesting thought. I might have to consider that....

Dedicated to....

...una india Taino de Utuado....

...una mujer boriquena de Nueva York...

...dos ninas de color de Chicago....

because
our/people were never stolen/we/were never your slaves
just reluctant martyrs

because
we were made to dance like apostles
until miracles fall back to earth

because
we are the ones that birthed it
we are the ones that birthed it
we are the ones that birthed it
and we nicknamed it....



God.



[and thank you to the Firewalker who passed it my way]

Emerging Voices for Africa @ HU

The Department of African Studies at Howard University is pleased to announce the first African Studies Graduate Students Symposium to be held on October 3, 2008 at Howard University, Washington DC. The theme of this year’s symposium is “Emerging Voices for Africa: Scholarship and Activism for Social Transformation.” The purpose of this symposium is to create a space where graduate students, faculty, activists and persons interested in Africa can come together to discuss research that sheds light on and provides an in-depth analysis of possibilities for transformation, healing and revitalization in Africa along the following sub-themes:

(1) Africa in World Affairs,
(2) Development & Public Policy, and
(3) Literature and the Arts in Africa.

We also encourage students working on issues related to the Diaspora that touch on the above sub-themes to submit their proposals for inclusion at this conference.
! !
Students are encouraged to submit their proposals to the Organizing Committee on or before July 31, 2008. Each submission should include the author’s name, address, institutional affiliation, email address, and phone number.
All submissions should be sent via email to: african.palaver@hotmail.co

m
Or, to the following address:
African Studies Graduate Students Symposium
Department of African Studies, Howard University
2225 Georgia Ave, NW
Room 405
Washington DC 20059

For more information, contact Mutheu Maitha at (202) 238-2354 or african.palaver@hotmail.com

Gnarls Barkley: Going On

Love, love, LOVE this video. Every time I watch it I smile.



H/T on vid: Lex by way of kameelahwrites

Others' thoughts and those inspired to write...

Janelle Monae's Cyborg Love

Mr. said Metropolis isn't a good album. He said it was "weird." He said its all about cyber love.

Metropolis is straight up Afrofuturism.

Metropolis is woman-centered. Perhaps even womanist.

Metropolis is also genius. And so is Janelle Monáe is--or, in Lex's words, a "post-human black girl genius."*

At UMCP Digital Diasporas 2008, Kara Keeling discussed how the meeting of digital media with the humanities could trouble the humanistic ideal. Digital diasporas can help us get to what she called the/a post-human. The multi-layered, anonymous, and constructive potential of digital African diaspora, or Afrofuturism, might possibly overturn the "human," the male, heterosexual, economically elite, classically educated subject of Enlightened modernity.

I mean, can you imagine it? A human that you didn't automatically assume was white and male and heterosexual? A human that you didn't have to spend time and energy converting into a black/Latino/indigenous/Asian female in love with women? What would she look like? Would she be black-skinned with kinky hair? Or would she be pale grey with dark grey tentacles and make love to you by massaging the nerve centers of your brain? Would "she" even be an appropriate moniker?

Would she--it--be a cyborg?

What else would disrupt the human so nicely but its extreme Enlightenment opposite? Mechanical. Emotionless. Clinical. Asexual. Literally "a product of the Man." ("Violet Stars Happy Hunting!")

And what would happen when that "product" decides its going to do its own thing? When it, *gasp,* falls in love with a human????

Cyborg love. Weird, huh?

Yeah, it is. Except that the idea that we (poc) are mechanical beings in "the Man"'s world isn't new for us. It's as old as genocide, as old as slavery. It isn't even a new idea in hip hop. Gnarls Barkley and Lupe Fiasco have both hyped their Go Go Gadget Flow.

Cindi Mayweather, the cygirl of Metropolis, is a similar take on the cyborg/mechanica theme. Cindi Mayweather is what would happen when that theme just happens to start coming out of a woman of color's mouth....

"Good morning cyboys and cyber girls! I’m happy to announce that we have a star-crossed winner in today’s heartbreak sweepstakes! Android # 57821, otherwise known as Cindi Mayweather, has fallen desperately in love with a human named Anthony Greendow. And you know the rules! She is now scheduled for immediate disassembly. Bounty hunters, you can find her in the Neon Valley Street District, on the 4th floor in the Leopard Plaza Apartment Complex. The droid control marshals are full of fun rules today! No phasers; only chainsaws and electrodaggers. Remember: Only card carrying hunters can join our chase today. And as usual, there will be no reward until her cybersoul is turned into the Star Commission. Happy hunting!"

Gnarls Barkley commits suicide on his human with every track. Lupe Fiasco randomly kills his human and then brings him back to life...to get killed again. Their subjects are men of color (although GB's may be questionable and questioning his race and sexuality and I refuse to count Fiasco's "The Streets"--her stereotyping is foolishness).

Their subjects are generally preoccupied with the Game and issues of Coolness--of conforming to stereotype and surviving an inherently destructive system. A system that makes you kill yourself, or gets you killed, over and over again.

They don't know their language/They don't know their God/They take what they're given/Even when it feels odd....

Monáe's unhuman is about conformity and Coolness too. But this cygirl is caught in the Game from a different angle.

It/She falls in love--but how when it/she's not allowed to? And then the questions roll in: Who are you to fall in love? Who are you to feel, to cry, to believe, to fight, to be bold, to be crazed, to grieve and to laugh? You're a cygirl, you're type-cast, your entire existence is regulated. Your soul isn't even yours--it belongs to the Star Commission. You were built to clock in, to work, to reproduce, to satisfy the Man sexually, and then to go home. Beyond that you don't exist.

(Are we speaking of mules and men?)

So Cindi dips. Why? Not just because she doesn't agree. If only. She dips because her particular brand of insurgency has been discovered. This cygirl is defective. She can experience emotion. And it's the most exalted of all human emotions--love. She must be taken care of: "They've come to destroy me...You know the rules." ("Violet Stars Happy Hunting!")

Cindi the cygirl isn't just resisting to resist. Cindi is outta there to save her own life:

"I can only speak for myself. But what I write and how I write is done in order to save my own life." (Barbara Christian, 1987)

She is outta there to reclaim/take back/create her own soul:

"The act of writing is the act of making soul, alchemy. It is the quest for the self, for the center of self, which we women of color have come to think as "other"—the dark, the feminine." (Gloria Anzaldúa, 1981)

And on the run, what does she discover? An entire community, a network of firewalkers, a purple wondaland....

"We want to breathe, but we're stuck here underground/And everybody tryin to figure their way out. Hey, hey, hey!" ("Many Moons")

...debating, critiquing, and arguing together. Fighting to breathe, to create soul, to live. Contradictions abound--"You're free but in your mind. Your freedom's in a bind...."

...and life is a struggle....but still, the rejects, the Goonies, are building together. And their combined challenge is clear--"Tell me are you bold enough to reach for love?!?"

Cindi is bombarded, or bombards it/herself, with a parade of American grammar that are the enemy: "Silhouette, silver wall, hood rat, crack whore, carefree nightclub, closet drunk, bathtub..."

And finds that it's no longer just about experiencing human love with a human being. It's about being in love with herself. Tell me are you bold enough to reach for love.

In the chorus is the chorus, the community of non-humans, rule-breakers, nonconformists, insurgents, artists, activists, fools. The support network.

When the world just treats you wrong/Just come with me and I'll take you home/Change, change, change, change your life....

What a predicament. The paradigm shift is painful. After all, at first, it was only about a carefree romantic ideal--I want you and I won't take no for an answer!--But now, it's about so much more. You're entire history and identity is on the line. You go into cybertronic overload, you're caught in a "Cybertronic Purgatory." Not really in and not really out. You're waking up. But you've got decisions to make. Every day.....

Do you stay? Do you go? Do you fight? Do you stop for awhile in order to survive the maelstrom?

Q: What do you do, Cindi?

A: You sing a black girl's song.

("Sincerely Jane.")

Metropolis is next generation, my generation. The hybrids. The artivist underground, banging against the glass door and screaming. It's what happens when we shed the skin we're in and use it slap the Man in the face. Its the possibility of reaching across boundaries, creating coalitions, building a movement. Weird? Definitely. But if weird is code for not-normal (just like normal is code for knowing & following the Rules), then weird works just fine.

Weird is an afrofuturist harvest.

Tell me--Are you bold enough to reach for love?

And what does radical love look like?

Diaspora Music: Alicia Keys and Oumou Sangaré

I got delicious chills watching this video.




Thanks to No Snow Here for posting the video.

Music: Soulfege

What say you?



More on the group here and here.

(H/T: C. Woods via Email. Thanks pops!)

3 Day Countdown...

And I'm so tired. And the blogosphere is trippin.

Pick me up please.



~*~abap~*~

Aimé Césaire: 1913-2008

First we must study how colonization works to decivilize the colonizer, to brutalize him in the true sense of the word, to degrade him, to awaken him to buried instincts, to covetousness, violence, race hatred, and moral relativism; and we must show that each time a head is cut off or an eye put out in Vietnam and in France they accept the fact, each time a little girl is raped and in France they accept the fact, each time a Madagascan is tortured and in France they accept the fact, civilization acquires another dead weight, a universal regression takes place, a gangrene sets in, a centre of infection begins to spread; and that at the end of all these treaties that have been violated, all these lies that have been propagated, all these punitive expeditions that have been tolerated, all these prisoners who have been tied up and 'interrogated', all these patriots who have been tortured, at the end of all the racial pride that has been encouraged, all the boastfulness that has been displayed, a poison has been distilled into the veins of Europe and, slowly but surely, the continent proceeds toward savagery.

And then one fine day the bourgeoisie is awakened by a terrific boomerang effect: the gestapos are busy, the prisons fill up, the torturers standing around the racks invent, refine, discuss.

People are surprised, they become indignant. They say: 'How strange! But never mind - it's Nazism, it will pass!' And they wait, and they hope; and they hide the truth from themselves, that it is barbarism, the supreme barbarism, the crowning barbarism that sums up the daily barbarisms; that it is Nazism, yes, but that before they were its victims, they were its accomplices; that they tolerated that Nazism before it was inflicted on them, that they absolved it, shut their eyes to it, legitimized it, because, until then, it had been applied only to non-European peoples; that they have cultivated that Nazism, that they are responsible for it, and that before engulfing the whole edifice of Western, Christian civilization in its reddened waters, it oozes, seeps and trickles from every crack.

From 'Discourse on Colonialism'

Sent to me in mourning and tribute by my Africana mentor, H.B.

More
Aimé Césaire est mort
Professor Black Woman
Black Looks and here.

Monsieur Césaire, your work lives on, your work continues.

Rest in peace.

"Critical Latinidad" makes the cover of Latinidades

Cover Image: Viajero#14, David Amoroso (2007)

One of Waiting 2 Speak's most clicked makes its published debut!

"It is only recently that U.S. Latina/o studies has begun to recognize the importance of Afro-Latina/os to Latina/o history, culture and condition in the United States."

Click here for the free download.

UMCP Latina/o Studies Working Group Founder and Director Robb Hernandez is the Managing Editor. Article submissions and art work inquiries can be made to him at robbher3@[no-spam]umd.edu. (Remove the no-spam when you email!)

Oblate Sisters of Providence Invited to Mass with Pope

The group's story dates to the early 1800s.

"It was unheard of -- a woman of color putting on a habit," said Sister Annette Beecham, the superior general of the Oblate Sisters.

"When Mother Mary Lange started the orders, we were not really accepting black people, especially in this area," Sister Reginald Gerdes recalled.
But Elizabeth Lange, the founder of the Oblate Sisters, was determined to answer the call to God, the group told Robinson. She migrated to Baltimore from her native Haiti.

A well-educated woman, Lange wanted to teach children how to read. She started a school in her home and, in 1828, began to study to become an Oblate Sister. Three other women joined her.

"Here's four women who had four strikes against them in 1828. They were women, they were women of color, they were immigrant women and they were Catholic. They followed God's vision for them to teach African-American children. I believe that's why it's survived for so long," Knecht said

Read the rest here.

Visualizing the Black Church

More fantastic images over at Sojourner's Place by artist Annie Lee.

The Cleanse: Inspiration from Laurent DuBois

“What if, as we sought to understand the history of universalism in the Atlantic world, we could tell an integrated story that goes something like this: the discovery of the Americas generated a space for new ways of thinking about humanity and natural rights, and out of encounters between Native Americans, Africans and Europeans there emerged new ways of thinking about belonging, governance, subject-hood, and eventually citizenship. These new ways of thinking may have been written down overwhelmingly by the educated elites in Europe and the colonies, yet they drew on the circulation of meanings and ideas in which those who were not literate participated; through their labor but also through their resistance--both in actions and in speech--enslaved peoples in the Atlantic world both generated problems of governance and began to propose new solutions by insisting on their own dignity and denying the justifications issued for their enslavement; as thinkers in Europe argued against slavery and for the primacy of natural rights, drawing on this broader context of which they were a part, they in turn influenced colonial administrators who witnessed the actions and sufferings of the enslaved, who saw and heard them, and who in turn produced new interpretations that emphasized the need for limits on the power of masters and for abuse; these reformist tendencies, though certainly limited in scope and ultimately aimed at preserving colonial production and societies in which people of African descent were viewed primarily as sources of labor, nevertheless opened up windows and possibilities for change; in and through these decades of debate in France there was a parallel set of debates in communities of the enslaved on both sides of the Atlantic, about tactics but also about ideas; together, these debates laid the foundations for the intellectual and political explosion that would take place during the 1790s in the Caribbean.

“One could then, perhaps, go one step further and argue that this explosion then generated what we think of today as the true thinking of the Enlightenment--a concrete and radical universalism that overthrew profit for principle and defended human rights against the weapons of empire and the arguments of racial hierarchy. This advance, unsurprisingly, was met with hostility and with reaction; its victory was turned back in some ways; and it became saturated with many of the contradictions that infused the thinking of the Enlightenment itself. But precisely this process of reaction, the combination of planter nightmares and slave hopes, played out in crucial ways during the next decades to lead to other phases of liberation, followed by other phases of reaction, a cycle in which we still reside.

“What if we took up the task of writing such a story--or one like it?...”

Laurent DuBois, “An Enslaved Enlightenment: Re-Thinking the Intellectual History of the French Atlantic.”

A Girl Like Me (2005)

I know A Girl Like Me, a short documentary by Kiri Davis, has gone around the women and gender, feminist and radical women of color networks a few times. But it popped up on Power to the People a few days ago so I thought I'd just give it another push around.

It is only 7 minutes long. If you haven't seen it, give it a view.