The Republic of Dissent

The romantic Mannschaft

Alexander Osang on the Mannschaft, German football team at the South African World Cup and why its players were the ambassadors of a new Germany:

There was something soothing and liberating about watching this team play, and it was even more soothing and liberating to see the expressions of joy on the players' faces. They embraced each other when Klose, who had been out of form all season at Bayern Munich, finally scored a goal again in the first World Cup match, and the team hugged him as if he had just recovered from a long, serious illness. Klose later said that Podolski wouldn't let him go -- and that it was a nice feeling. They all seemed like boys having a fantastic time on a school outing. Löw thanked the players he substituted, and they thanked him, an act that was not a gesture but an expression of need. Everyone trusted everyone else. The most German of feelings that this team triggered was romanticism.

Having read and listened everything that was written and said about les Bleus, French football team and its South African debacle, I have realized that it is always easy to made footballers representatives/scapegoat of their country's successes or its ills because it is easy and because in both cases, the analogy and the analysis are convenient and so pleasurable for the ones making it weather their intent is to praise or to criticize violently and too often unfairly.

To come back to the Mannschaft, it is undoubtedly that its image is new and young, but I wonder whether that visible change is indicative of lasting and profound social transformations within Germany, in other words, if the Mannschaft different because Germany is different or just because it had to change and to adapt to the realities of football to remain the Mannshaft, that is a consistently good national football team.

Obama as the Philosopher King without philosophy

I agree withl the following assessment of Obama by Peter Wehner but disagree about the effect of this assessment on the US-Israel relationship:

Obama regards himself much like a teacher who oversees a classroom of sometimes unruly, sometimes dim-witted children. His magnificence is sometimes hidden from them. And so it is left for America’s philosopher-king to explain — in simply, easy-to-understand words — why things are the way they are.

I'm still waiting for Obama to show that he is what he believes that he is that is better than the ones that came before him not just as a politician. but as a leader. I'm realizing that hope is his chosen word for the simple fact that he is convinced that what matters is identity and not much else and that therefore since he is an American with a rich history and diversified experience, having a political philosophy and an unshakable belief system, which remains steady in trouble waters does not matter.

The allusory and illusory African World Cup

Interesting and informative words from Sanza Tshabalala (first quote) and Ann Berstein (second) on the South African World Cup, the obsession with race and the horrendously stupid and anti-intellectual notion that it was the African World Cup:

The more the African teams were going down, the more I started getting worried about our race relations. I thought, we [Africans] are not doing well otherwise and I thought we would do well in football and it would maybe do something with our pride.
I’m obsessed with race issues. South Africans should be behind African teams. Then I went to see the Argentina-Nigeria game, at Ellis Park. And I see young Indian professionals, white people, all dressed up in Lionel Messi jerseys, and the few of us [who] are supporting Nigeria – probably 2 per cent of the stadium. I sat there thinking, ‘What’s this society going to?’ Because we’re meant to be supporting an African team, aren’t we?

---

Why? Why should we support an African team? There isn’t a black view, nor is there a white view. What’s striking to me, going to a Soccer City game, was that you were seeing very large numbers of this emerging black lower middle class. They could afford to come to the game, they had all the right clothes and they were there. Class is more important now.

This World Cup confirmed my belief  that Africanity/Africanness  is a concept created by those who refuse to acknowledge the complexities and the diversity of the African continent either because it challenges their prejudices and received ideas or because it is more convenient for them to believe that the populations of the African continent, as Conrad's cannibals, are the same and therefore have the same views, the same needs, and the same identity. It would be too inconvenient for Sepp Blatter, the president of FIFA, the football international governing body, to accept the idea that the South African World Cup was solely the one of a country not of a continent because it would mean taking the risk to have another country on the same continent host the World Cup sooner than in a decade or two. In short, africanity/africanness is about anything but reality for it is an attempt to take short cuts to avoid acknowledging unsettling realities and to be content with bienfaisant paternalism or simply paternalistic humanism.

Colored and different realities

Worrisome:

For most of George W. Bush's two terms, a majority of Republicans thought America's economy was in good or excellent shape. Less than one-quarter of Democrats agreed. Today Hispanics and blacks are more optimistic than whites, and Democrats are more optimistic than Republicans, even though Democrats have lower income and have suffered more job-related losses.

Isn't Postracial Obama's America awesome !!

Ghana not Africa

Ghana lost yesterday. I had predicted that the Black stars would win if they were capable of ignoring the symbolic "crap" about Ghana representing the whole African continent and some type of imaginary "Africanity." Ghana lost yesterday mostly because the pressure of representing something other than itself crushed its players. Asamoah Gyan, the poor guy who missed the penalty that would have sent his country to the semi-final, thought undoubtedly about all the fluff, about the idiotic and anti-intellectual notion that he was carrying the hopes of 'Africa' on his shoulders instead of calming himself down to remember that Ghana isn't 'Africa'  and the game against Uruguay wasn't another absurd and futile identity struggle.
Next time, because there will be a next time for Ghana, its players should just think of themselves, their country, and ignore the burden of a nonexistent common identity and of a idealized history. Ghana isn't 'Africa' and remembering it can only be productive for it is a liberating reality.

Before or after whatever

Scenery: It's hot, humid, and quiet, but this calme trompeur will not last for it is less than an hour from the game between Ghana and Uruguay... It's amazing to see how all-encompassing sports can be when it becomes about something other than fun, but about identity. I'm sports fanatic, but I wouldn't die for it. In any case, I'm not watching the game for I'm going to bed. I watched too much tennis (Nadal  won!!!) and Brazil lost, which made my day. Besides I know the outcome of the game already: Ghana is going to win. The Black stars will win because they are the better team and because the only thing that can stop them is all the fluff and the burdensome symbolic noise, which may paralyze them and make them believe that they are fighting for something bigger and that football is an identity struggle which can repair injustices or rather fix a country's and  a continent's ills. Thus, Ghana will win if the Black Stars make the temperate choice to play just football and to ignore the chatter about its meaning.

Payback

The quote of the day is from John McWhorter:

The old idea was that black people should work twice as hard to prove themselves. That wasn’t fair – but today’s tacit idea is too often that black people should not have to work as hard as everyone else, as a kind of payback.

Consumerism and sameness

I agree with Helmut Holzapfel on this:

A “distance-intensive” lifestyle has emerged and is taken for granted, at least in modern industrialised societies; it has become a typical way of living shaping attitudes and behaviour for part of the population. A distance-intensive lifestyle means large distances covered in ever-smaller units of time, not only in personal travelling, but by the products consumed. Even in health food shops, Argentinean honey or apples from oases in the Brazilian jungle are freely available. The lifestyle means constant availability and spatial accessibility for people and products: Australian or Californian wine, strawberries at Christmas, most likely from South Africa. People fly from Hamburg to Milan for an evening at the opera, and back the next morning. And they live in the suburbs in a detached house with a double or triple garage outside (an SUV is a must); the house is in a beautiful location, yet a blot on the landscape.(...)The disadvantages of the lifestyle gradually become apparent: being everywhere, people are increasingly nowhere. The freedom they search for far and wide means more than dependence on transport systems. Since everyone wants to get everywhere else, everywhere looks the same; same products, same supermarkets. And since everyone wants to go somewhere else and consume products from all over, transport infrastructure is congested. If we consume yogurt made from milk and fruit sourced all over Europe, we shouldn’t be surprised about a lorry jam on the motorway near London or Milan.

It's striking to realize that how identical ultra-consumerists are no matter their race, religion or ethnicity. After all, if buying and stocking stuff is one's 'religion' then all other variables such as race and ethnicity are not essential. For some reasons, that reminds me of the term 'poor white trash' used in the United States, which puts the emphasis on the fact that social condition is in fact more defining than race.

Black and White cultures

Problematic assertion from Bill Benzon:

Through assimilation of black expressive culture, music especially, white American culture has changed and grown.

I have no idea what Benzon means by assimilation or by culture and that makes his statement problematic. He assumes that what he means is obvious when it isn't especially since assimilation has a negative connotation and culture is a political instrument, but a meaningless and misleading concept.

In short, I find both appalling and distressing the idea that there are such things as a black and a white cultures.

America, bisexuality, and the categorization imperative

I agree wholeheartedly with Eugene Volokh on this:

Whether Elena Kagan is straight, lesbian, bisexual, or asexual doesn’t matter to me. Moreover, to the extent a number of her close friends, who are likely to know her recent love life, say that she’s straight rather than lesbian or bisexual — and that seems to be something that one of her friends quoted in the Politico article I linked to above is saying — that should be pretty reliable evidence for those who care about the subject. Among other things, if she understandably concludes that it’s beneath her dignity to discuss her love life in public, evidence from a number of friends is the most that can be provided: “[C]ontrast the ease of proving one is straight or gay in a world in which bisexuals are not acknowledged to exist with the difficulty of proving the same thing in a world in which bisexuals are recognized.”
But the sort of bisexual erasure that takes place when we say “X can’t be lesbian, she’s dated men” (or “X can’t be gay, he’s dated women”) strikes me as pretty unsound, and not fair to a group that makes up a pretty big chunk of the non-straight population.

One has to wonder why a Supreme Court nominee's sex life ought to matter in the United States in America and realize sadly that it does because America loves categories. For it, categories especially when they are sexual and racial clarify issues of identity, which are key to its politics and to its society. People are obsessed with Elena Kagan's sexuality because they assume that it will them everything that they need to know about her views for after all, America still believes that the sex that one defines who you are and informs society about one's values. More importantly, Americans get easily confused by complexity when it comes to race and sex because they are pillars of its societal establishment. This fact explains why it is difficult to be 'bisexual' or 'biracial' and not to be marginalized in the good old USA.

Treme, New Orleans, Culture, and the authenticity fallacy

John McWhorter on the new HBO Treme and its implicit assertion of the superiority of the so-called New Orleans culture:

How, precisely, do people in Minneapolis have “less culture” than people in New Orleans? To a tribesman from New Guinea, Minnesotans would appear to have a “culture” indeed, and I’m not sure they would process New Orleans as “more cultural.” (Maybe more fun, but that’s different, isn’t it?) Why are the drinks and culinary traditions of Baltimore less “cultural” than the ones in New Orleans?

The idea here is that 'culture' is about a subtle form of primitiveness or rather to put things in more political correct fashion that it is about indigenousity untouched by modernity as if that wasn't a contradiction for the New Orleans of today isn't the one of Yesterday  and will not be the one of tomorrow and its inhabitants will change. Of course, the fact of the matter that questions of authenticity linked to 'culture' are more about politics and dogmatism than anything

Cinco de Mayo and the American Flag

Original take from Professor Bainbridge on the controversy about High School Kids who wore American flags on Cinco de Mayo:

(...)When I was growing up, it was generally regarded as a serious social faux pas to wear orange on St Patrick's Day even if you were descended from Ulster Protestants. It was something you just didn't do. Wearing US flag clothing on Cinco de Mayo is the modern equivalent of wearing range on St Patrick's Day. (...)When I was growing up, you treated the US flag with respect. You didn't make clothing out of it.  Indeed, Section 176 of 36 US Code provides rules for respect of the flag, which includes the following: "(d) The flag should never be used as wearing apparel, bedding, or drapery" and "(j) No part of the flag should ever be used as a costume or athletic uniform." So the kids were not only disrespecting their fellow Hispanic students, they were also disrespecting the flag.

I agree with Bainbridge. Nevertheless, it is my contention that although the whole Cinco de Mayo Flap was much to do about nothing, it is another indication that America just like Europe (as the Brit election showed) no longer knows what to do about Immigration because it is undergoing a identity crisis due to the fact that its politics are relying solely on the erroneous belief that identities and cultures are stable, never evolve and more importantly define a country and its citizens.

The obsessive quest for the perfect body

Susie Orbach on the "femininization" of the male body image:

Men's magazines today resemble Cosmopolitan of 20 years ago. They encourage guys to reach for the same rotten solutions to the problems of living that have been endlessly proffered to women. Transform your body, use male moisturiser, make up, get rid of those man boobs, see yourselves as a diminutive pouting strutting yet vulnerable boy/man whose ideal body is ever shrinking. Aspire to that and distinguish yourself by your ability to sculpt a body as the fashionistas imagine it. Separate yourself from the diverse physicalities so magnificently captured by Spencer Tunick in his bodies of flesh. Make a new body. Make a new self.
It's working. Boys, young men, men of all ages are being captivated by the new visual grammar which pushes men to pout and posture. The more it is there, and the more we succumb, the larger will men's girths become and the bigger the profits of those companies praying on transforming men's bodies. Don't do it, guys. Reject this new uniformity. Dare to be as physically robust and varied as you always were. Don't fall into being the latest bait in the breeding of body insecurity.

In short, skinny, when it comes to both genders, is the old and the new black. The necessary conclusion here is that the gender works because it is marketable and that societal norms when it comes to women and men subsist when they are not in conflict with the market.

Neoliberalism, unclear political identities, and the Brit hung parliament

Astute observation over at Potlatch on Britain political 'quagmire':

What Britain is witnessing right now is this paradox imploding. For the past thirty years, British political parties have gradually converged on the perfect neo-liberal model. Their policies have moved gradually closer to the prescriptions of The World Economic Forum, starting with guaranteeing adequate security and policing, then stabilising the macro-economy, then turning to market competition and regulation, and finally nurturing the right sorts of social 'externalities' and 'public goods' in the areas of education, infrastructure and culture. The problem is that this neutering of political difference ultimately leads to the very ambivalence that the markets so hate. They want someone to be in control, they just don't want that someone to have any clear political identity.

This observation would apply to the United Sates where it seems that political identity has nothing to do with politics, but everything do with constructed identities to avoid resolving political issues. Case in point: I still don't know what is Obama's political identity ( I would say the same for Sarkozy). I know that he is an excellent politician, but I just don't what it is that he wouldn't do to get himself elected and to beat down his opposition.

Free will and antisocial behavior

Fascinating:

One of the most striking findings to emerge recently in the science of free will is that when people believe—or are led to believe—that free will is just an illusion, they tend to become more antisocial.

Multifaceted identity question

It's hard for me to dismiss Tony Judt because I respect him even when I disagree with his position. So when he writes the following, it makes me pensive and a little bit uneasy, which isn't necessary a bad thing:

Some years ago I attended a gala benefit dinner in Manhattan for prominent celebrities in the arts and journalism. Halfway through the ceremonies, a middle-aged man leaned across the table and glared at me: “Are you Tony Judt? You really must stop writing these terrible things about Israel!” Primed for such interrogations, I asked him what was so terrible about what I had written. “I don’t know. You may be right—I’ve never been to Israel. But we Jews must stick together: we may need Israel one day.” The return of eliminationist anti-Semitism was just a matter of time: New York might become unlivable.
I find it odd—and told him so—that American Jews should have taken out a territorial insurance policy in the Middle East lest we find ourselves back in Poland in 1942. But even more curious was the setting for this exchange: the overwhelming majority of the awardees that evening were Jewish. Jews in America are more successful, integrated, respected, and influential than at any place or time in the history of the community. Why then is contemporary Jewish identity in the US so obsessively attached to the recollection—and anticipation—of its own disappearance?
Had Hitler never happened, Judaism might indeed have fallen into deliquescence. With the breakdown of Jewish isolation in the course of the later nineteenth century throughout much of Europe, the religious, communitarian, and ritualistic boundaries of Judaism were eroding: centuries of ignorance and mutually enforced separation were coming to a close. Assimilation—by migration, marriage, and cultural dilution—was well underway.

The duplicitous nature of Globalism

Michael Kimmelman on Globalism and the fact that it hasn't transformed the world into one big and unified society and made people the same:

(...)globalism, beyond banking, climate change and warfare, has always been a dubious concept, a misleading catchall for how the world supposedly works, to which culture, in its increasing complexity, gives the lie.
The integration of markets and the Internet have certainly brought billions of people into closer contact. Everybody has access to the same American movies and music now, and not just American, also Indian, Romanian, South African and Chinese. But far from succumbing to some devouring juggernaut, culture — and Europe, with its different communities and nations living cheek by jowl, is a Petri dish to prove the point — has only atomized lately as a consequence of the very same globalizing forces that purportedly threaten to homogenize everything.
(...)Nationalism, regionalism and tribalism are all on the rise. Societies are splitting even as they share more common goods and attributes than ever before. Culture is increasingly an instrument to divide and differentiate communities. And the leveling pressures of globalization have at the same time provided more and more people with the technological resources to decide for themselves, culturally speaking, who they are and how they choose to be known, seen, distinguished from others.

Unfortunately people tend to hang on to their differences when they fell that they have no choice about what is happening around them and that they are being forced to live and to be a certain way.

Uncivilized culture wars

Thomas C. Reeves deploring the uncivilized nature of the culture wars:

Examples of uncivilized blather abound. For example, if one has serious objections to the public display and approval of sodomy, one is called a "homophobe." Opponents of racial preferences are branded "racists." (Blacks who find special favors demeaning and patronizing are called a variety of vile names.) To believe that a pregnant mother bears a person rather than a thing is to be labeled a "religious extremist." The same label is applied to people who believe that organized religion should participate in the public square.
If you object to even one feminist dogma, you're a "sexist." Support efforts to purge the public airwaves of obscenity and violence and you're a "bigot," just like the "dummies" who believe in objective right and wrong. (Comedian George Carlin, a pioneer in public obscenity, said that all censorship is a function of "religious superstition.") Those wishing to restrain propagandizing in the classroom are called "right wingers," and are often shunned by colleagues. Those who oppose the nanny state are labeled "uncaring," "inhumane," and the like. Using the "n" word is one or another brand of racism---unless, of course, the word is used by African-Americans themselves, which it often is. Spending huge sums of tax dollars to save the economy is labeled Socialism. And on and on.

Reeves's observations are more accurate than not, but he forgets that the point of culture wars is to excommunicate, to use a term that the Vatican would love, the ones of the other side by arguing that they are bad people who should be ashamed for what they feel and of who they are,.

Race as the only important political issue

Sugary excerpt of Adam Serwer's post on some 'conservatives's' questionable beliefs about Obama and his family history:

John Podheretz and Peter Wehner argue that whether or not Obama's mother slept with men who weren't white is incidental to the fact that Obama hates America, but Michael Ledeen thinks it's a valid subject for discussion:

The character of our president is an important matter. I think both John and David have tried to illuminate it, but I wish John had taken more time with his latest tirade, gotten the facts right, and focused his considerable talent on the serious matters that rightly concern us.

Apparently being attracted to people outside of your own race reflects not just on the character of the parents, but on their children who have no choice in the matter. This kind of racial determinism seems like a lateral movement from the days when conservatives were debating whether or not interracial sex made you love communism. Again, there's a sort of mystical power accorded the phalluses of nonwhite men here that begs some serious psychological analysis from a qualified professional.

Why don't black people vote Republican again?

I'm amazed by Serwer's last question. He implies that it is an abomination for any people with dark skin to vote for republicans because they ought to be single issue voters  and solely focus on race to the detriment of economics and any other thing  that they believe because race is the only important political issue, the one who defines them and ought to determine their politics. If that isn't racial determinism, I don't know what is. I'm not addressing the views Sewer are excoriating because it isn't just some conservatives who feel that Obama is different because of his background, many liberals and Americans share that perception except that for them it is a positive difference. In my view, it isn't a meaningless different for Obama is as American as George W. Bush. It is thus hypocritical for Serwer to argue that 'conservatives' are the only people who believe that race is all defining and that one is her/his color of skin. In short, Serwer is in fact legitimizing the vision of race that appalls him, racial determinism by making the point implicitly that people shouldn't vote for people who don't share their views of race. As the Church Lady in Dana Carvey's sketch would say, isn't that special !!!!

Inauthentic 'blackness'

Maxine Williams on the 'blackness' of people with dark skins who come from an Island:

In March 2007, I attended an Obama fundraiser in New York. Michelle Obama, in delivering her cute, I-didn't-expect-to-fall-in-love-with-him speech said, with a purposeful sneer: "They told me his name was Barack Obama and he was from Hawaii and I thought, what kind of a black man comes from an island?" The crowd erupted in laughter, warmed to Michelle, and by extension her doesn't-quite-fit-in-our-black-box husband. I presumed that at least some of the people in this crowd had either read, studied or at least heard of people such as Derek Walcott, George Padmore, Bob Marley, Marcus Garvey, Frantz Fanon and Aimé Césaire. In principle, then, they knew about the "kind of black men" who come from islands. And yet, they all seemed to share in the joke.
Michelle's joke was a light-hearted nod to the competition for authenticity among minority groups, but it gnawed at me. I am black, and I am from an island. I'm a lot of other things, too, but faced with that minor slight, an instinctive defensiveness arose in me. My "islandness" and my "blackness" rose swiftly up the hierarchy of characteristics by which I define myself. The reaction stunned me and has made me consider that central issue of self-identification: why and how do we choose to be defined, and why does it matter?

 Williams's story simply shows that even Michelle Obama as cultured and intelligent as she is can be insensitive about 'race' questions for the simple reason that she doesn't feel that she need to be as careful as others do on this issue. I suspect that she believes that she knows more than anybody what 'blackness' is and isn't and what is means to be 'black.' The simple point of this story is that 'blackness' is simply about perceptions, history, and transmitted biases. It is a manufactured identity as all racial and ethnic identities are.  'Blackness' is for this reason becomes key when identity politics are predominant and enables the ambitious to use to convince the electorate to vote for people like "them." I'm not offended b Michelle Obama for she is the product of her environment: a good American who believes in the essentiality of race and that 'blackness' is the only identity that people with dark skins can or ought to have when they are true to themselves, 'normal,' and raised with the right values and within the right circumstances. In short, there isn't such a thing as authentic 'blackness' for every 'blackness' is inauthentic for it is chosen and totally subjective meaning that it is also possible to assert if one wants to cling on to racial identities (it isn't my case) that every blackness is authentic.

Isn't Obama's America the coolest place to be when you don't believe that race is self-defining?

Books, memory, and identity

Quote of the day from Fernando Báez cited by Scott McLemee in his post on book destruction:

The book is an institution of memory for consecration and permanence,and for that reason should be studied as a key element in society’s cultural patrimony.... There is no identity without memory. If we do not remember what we are, we don’t know what we are. Over the centuries, we’ve seen that when a group or nation attempts to subjugate another group or nation, the first thing they do is erase the traces of its memory in order to reconfigure its identity.... Only through the destruction of books can the murder of memory be accomplished.

Calling students 'black bitches'

Appalling:

The students -- both African-American women in Cornell’s Africana Studies and Research Center who have asked that their identities not be made public -- got to the event, at the University of Rochester, late. But they still didn’t expect that after their professor, Grant Farred, thanked them for making the unfamiliar two-hour drive, he’d briefly pause and then add, “When you came in, I thought, ‘Who are these black bitches?’ ”
Yet, that was the response they say they got from Farred, a professor of Africana studies and English. And, in the more than two months since the alleged incident on Friday, Feb. 5, the students and others contend, the Africana center and the university more broadly have failed to foster a public dialogue on the incident and to address deeper tensions involving the center and its role on campus.

I thought that universities such as Cornell and the University of Rochester were supposed to be liberal places and that liberals couldn't be racists. To make more than a cheap point, it think the incident show s again that race and racism in American is not longer essentially about color, but about something else, which makes the issue ideological, political and unsavory much like the one of autochtony in African and European countries. Of course, it is important to point out that I'm assuming that the story is true. I'm betting in case that the Professor of Africana studies thought that he was being funny and hip which is more telling.

Choosing blackness

Adam Serwer on Obama's and other people's who are 'mixed' choice to identify as black:

To the extent that biracial black people identify as black, they are choosing to embrace a once-painful element of their history. It is not being forced on us. I happened to check both white and black on my census form, but that was my choice. Every mixed person has a right to tell their own story on their terms. You might as well tell Jews to stop celebrating Passover because it is part of the enduring legacy of Jewish slavery in Egypt. That's exactly what it is, but that doesn't tell you anything about its value to the culture or why it continues to endure.

Serwer doesn't really address the issue by ignoring the context and by feigning to believe that America is a place that is comfortable with people choosing their 'racial' identity or rather refusing to belong to the category people and history tell them they ought to belong to. There is no question that Obama is entitled to define or rather to see himself as 'black.' The question then becomes if race is a choice, then why not accept that race is America is no longer about race and that some whites in America are as 'black' as Obama and I are supposedly are. This would mean letling go of the idea o racial identity and not accepting that there is such a thing as blackness and whiteness and clinging, to use a word Obama like, to the past. Serwer pretends not the see the greater point, which is that Obama didn't have much a choice when he decided that he wanted to go into politics and to be 'the one' that meant belonging and in America to belong you can't have an identity that is too controversial or rather too complicated for the masses.

Mandela wasn't enough

Thought provoking quote from an observer in David Smith's article in the Guardian comparing Julius Malema to Robert Mugabe and trying to understand his appeal to millions of young South Africans:

I went into a toilet and saw some graffiti on a wall. I've never forgotten it. It said: 'Blacks have Nelson Mandela so they think they're free. Pathetic race.

In other words, identity politics rarely solve real problems because they use the symbolic to ignore social and economic questions or rather make social and economic issues into ones about identity by focusing on race or whatever else.

Obama, 'blackness,' and America

Hum, John B. Judis is almost getting my enduring point about Obama, his chosen blackness and what it says about America and him:

When asked about his race on the census form, Barack Obama, the child of a white Kansan and black African, did not take the option of checking both “white” and “black” or “some other race.” Instead, he checked “black, African American or Negro.” By doing that, Obama probably did what was expected of him, but he also confirmed an enduring legacy of American racism.

I wouldn't have used the word racism, I would have use the word racialism to emphasize the fact that America has believed and till believes in its majority that race defines you and that therefore not choosing is cop-out, an act of cowardice, which brands someone as ashamed of who s/he is and therefore unelectable and nonintegrable within American society. Barack Obama wouldn't be president, he has branded himself as an other than people believe that he was. Americans don't like to complicate their identity politics and like everything/everyone to be either black or white, pun intended. My point has always been that blackness is as real or rather as artificial as négrititude, which explains why Obamamism feels empty to me.

Obama and the perils of belonging

Reading this about Obama and African-Americans is irritating because it shows the delusions of Americans and others on the question of race and he dangers of forcing something, a identity, a mission or whatever else because of their skin color:

African-Americans also account for more than 90 per cent of southeast Washington's residents and Barack Obama's visit was another example of how, when it comes to the still volatile issue of race, the first black President has tread cautiously – too much so for many black Americans.
By attending the service, where he sang and swayed with the rest of the congregation, Mr. Obama pointedly reminded Americans of his own complicated trajectory: raised by a white mother and grandparents, appropriating his black identity only after a wrenching voyage of self-examination.
Yet, in office, he has drawn attention to the race issue only carefully and occasionally and, as New Yorker editor David Remnick states in his newly published biography of the President, he has above all done so on his own terms. What he has emphatically not done is use the power of the presidency to usher in a New Deal for African-Americans.
This has been a source of consternation for many members of the black community, who expected more activist policies that would single out African-Americans for special treatment. With an unemployment rate among black Americans of 16.5 per cent (compared with 8.8 per cent for whites), the 42-member Black Congressional Caucus has chastised Mr. Obama for failing to adopt measures aimed specifically at creating jobs for African-Americans.

Obama's job as Potus isn't to take care, to do more for African-Americans, but for all Americans. On the issue of race, my only reproach to Obama isn't that he doesn't talk about it enough, but rather that he talks about it when it is useful politically for him and that he has chosen the easy way out, but choosing/accepting to be branded as 'black' when he isn't and especially when he is too smart to know that doesn't mean anything. Somebody told me that Obama is of African American culture and my answer to that shallow point was "please!" In short, Obama in a way is a living proof that being branded the first black president is symbolic and that there isn't such a thing as blackness, there may be such a thing as African Americanness, but it has nothing to do with blackness.

White culture

I'm currently reading Kelefa Sanneh's article in the New Yorker about 'White Culture." It's a great read even though it reminds me why I'm appalled by the racial essentiality of America when it is so obvious that race is no longer about race, but about something else. Sugary excerpt:

In 2008, a canny young white Canadian named Christian Lander started a blog called “Stuff White People Like,” which soon became a best-selling book bearing the same title; it listed a hundred and fifty of white people’s favorite things, from recycling to the Red Sox. (...)
Which means that Lander isn’t really talking about white people, or, at any rate, not most of them. In fact, he sometimes defines “white people” in opposition to “the wrong kind of white people,” because his true target is a small subset of white people, a white cultural élite. Most white people don’t “hate” Republicans—they have voted Republican in every Presidential election since 1968. A few months ago, a different and more demographically precise portrait of white culture arrived, bearing a fulsome blurb (“Revelatory!”) from Lander himself. The author is a black journalist named Rich Benjamin, and his book, “Searching for Whitopia” (Hyperion; $24.99), chronicles the years he spent in overwhelmingly white enclaves across America, from Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, to Forsyth County, Georgia. The people he meets tend to be politically conservative, and although they talk readily about the urban blight they left behind, they talk much less readily about race. Many in Idaho seem to agree with Helen Chenoweth-Hage, the late congresswoman, who responded to a question about the region’s lack of diversity by means of an ingenious euphemism. “The warm-climate community just hasn’t found the colder climate that attractive,” she said. Benjamin hears many disavowals of racism, and he has to drive an hour north of Coeur d’Alene, to a tiny Christian Identity church, in a town called Sandpoint, just to find someone willing to say, “I’m glad I’m white.” Even that statement, delivered from the pulpit, is swiftly followed by a disclaimer: “The Indian, the Mexican, and the black can be proud of what they are, too.”

My only observation is that I wonder why it is assumed that race isn't something that we learn, accept, integrate and choose to cling on to when it is to identify, categorize, and to dictate to people who they should be, how they should live, and who they should interact, bond with, and marry. To put it differently, I'm making almost the exact point that Beauvoir made about gender, by accepting that race is all in the becoming. Applying this principle to the use of 'white culture,'  I think that it is an foreseeable (not appropriate) reaction to the supremacy of racial and identity politics. It is impossible to define minorities by their race, and to then deny that same rights to the majority or to people who, supposedly, look like people are expected to look like not to be victims of prejudice or hurt fr things they have no control over. In short, I find the terms white, black or yellow when applied to culture as vacuous as Chick lit. I am reminded of the reaction of an "African-American" classmate in High-school , when he saw me watching Seinfeld, "boy, you are really white." I never took offense because I understood that he meant that I wasn't behaving like his type of black persons. But then again, on the race issue, I'm un-American. I'm black, but I don't feel it because it's an accident and something, which means less to who I am than the fact that the big toe of my right foot points to the south.

A good European

Angela Merkel, German's Chancellor who is so unSarkozy that it makes her likable, on what it means to be a good European:

A good European is not necessarily one who offers help quickly. A good European is one that respects the European treaties and national rights so that the stability of the euro zone is not damaged.

My only issue with Merkel's pronouncement is that I don't think that Europeans care being good Europeans for most of them believe still that Brussels is far away from them and has taken away from their government the ability to affect their lives for the better.

Curry as the positive aspect of immigration

Here is Nick Griffin's answer, the Chief of Britain far right party, the BNP the British National Party)  to put things mildly, to the question put to me by Iain Dale about the positive side of immigration:

Well, a wide range of curries is a plus. But there again, I've got the recipes.

I'm not appalled, just reassured that I'm right not to take Griffin seriously for he reminds me of Ann Coulter. He has a backbone or a little bit of political culture, he would have put things differently, Neither Geert Wilders nor Jean-Marie Le Pen, who are as far right as Nick Griffin, would have given that answer. In short, Nick Griffin is a clown.

Justice and identification

Vivian Gornik on the rights of others and the theory of Justice:

(...)I am remembering that in the early 1970s, when the second wave of the woman’s movement began to gather steam in America, the crucial word at the center of my feeling intelligence was neither “equality” nor “justice”; it was always “real.” “Real” meant that I wanted only to be born into the same existential unhappiness that afflicts all who take their social and political reality for granted. Suddenly, I was stunned—insulted!—by the realization that political history, from antiquity on, had withheld the recognition of that “reality” from whole classes of people, including women, and—as though I’d become the doctor in Chekhov’s Ward Six, the man who comprehended the horrors of imprisonment only when he himself was imprisoned—could only now grasp what that insult signified. It was the existential need of our souls to not put ourselves in the place of another; to make hierarchies that would include and exclude; declare this group fully human and that one not; as though a sense of one’s own reality depended on the lesser reality of another. And indeed. As Virginia Woolf asked, how could men dress up, speechify, go out and civilize the natives if they couldn’t come home and see themselves writ twice as large as life in the eyes of their adoring wives?

I've always wondered if it isn't difficult for people, especially for other women, to identify with women precisely because of the accepted inherent imperfection of womanhood, which makes  it easier to paraphrase Nietzsche for women to hate the idea of the "woman' and therefore to believe that they must turn their eyes to something else or to abstracts concepts or ideologies such as feminism.

Burka, right wing ideology and feminism

Mona Eltahawy on the ban of the Burqa/burka,right-wing Muslim Ideology and women's right(hat tip: Norm Geras):

I abhor the rightwing Muslim ideology behind the veils but I equally abhor the political rightwing xenophobes of Europe. The European political right – be it President Nicolas Sarkozy, his ultra-right rival Jean-Marie Le Pen (who did alarmingly well in the first round of those regional elections) or Dutch provocateur Geert Wilders – do not give a rat's ass about Muslim women or their rights: they are merely using the issue in an attempt to win votes.
The racism and discrimination that Muslim minorities face in many countries — such as France, which has the largest Muslim community in Europe, and Britain, where two members of the xenophobic British National party were shamefully elected to the European parliament — are very real. But the silence of the left wing and liberals isn't the way to fight it. The best way to support Muslim women would be to say we oppose both the racist right wing and the niqabs and burkas which are products of what I call the Muslim right wing. Women should not be sacrificed to either.

My disagreement with Eltahawy comes from the fact that I don't view women as victims or particular creatures that have to remain clean, pure, and always make good choices. I consider that they have the right to be whoever they want to be even if it means becoming an object and making disturbing choices. My point on the burka/burqa/niqab debate is simple, women are instruments to fight Islamic ideology or to promote secularism, they are normal individuals whose rights to individuality should be judge by the usual criteria used in a society to decide when individuality becomes criminal and dangerous to a society. I'm not against a burqa ban in France and elsewhere in the name of feminism, because I don't think that women's rights (whatever that expression means) is the issue, but that the right of women as human beings to define their womanhood and their femininity is in question. I'm still waiting for somebody to tell what is the male's equivalent of the burqa to reconsider my position.

Niqab and normality

Telling anecdote from Lysiane Gagnon:

A reporter from La Presse spent two days walking around Montreal dressed like a fundamentalist Muslim, with a long black robe and a niqab that covered everything but her eyes, but in most places – in the Metro, fast-food restaurants or on the streets – she went rather unnoticed and was not subjected to any aggressive reaction, except a few hard glances.

Is it possible that the debate about the niqab/burqa/burka/islamic veil isn't about the niqab/burqa/burka/islamic veil but about something else?

The rise of the malbouffe

Scary sign that even the French eating habits have been Americanized:

Today, France is the most profitable market for McDonald’s outside the US. In France this travesty is called malbouffe, literally junk food. French people try their best not to follow the American model in many ways, yet still Ronald McDonald and Colonel Sanders are threatening one of the characteristics of their culture that the French are most proud of.

Marshmallow multiculturalism

Sugary excerpt from Les Perraux's essential article on the different perceptions in Québec and the rest of Canada on the burka/burqa/niqab and what it says about Canada's brand of multiculturalism:

Prominent Quebeckers known for promoting equality, including Mr. Taylor, Mr. Bouchard and Ms. McAndrew, argued the gender segregation that comes with the niqab – along the practical barrier of a covered mouth – was too much to expect from a provincial Immigration Ministry class designed to teach spoken French and help integration.
In the rest of Canada, it was often the mainstream view in Quebec that was shunned.
One Toronto television commentator linked Quebec's fertility subsidies to the banishment of Ms. Ahmed – a barely disguised suggestion that Quebec wants women to be uneducated and pregnant.
Ms. McAndrew argues Canadians looking down on Quebec should consider why debate seems impossible outside the province.
“Public debate in Quebec is vigorous, and the level of the debate is complex. On diversity, the debate is very poor in Canada. It's marshmallow multiculturalism. You're okay, I'm okay,” she said.
“It's tolerance, but it's very soft and will face its own challenges at some point.”

Having addressed this issue several times, I have no doubt that it isn't going to go away because Québec is not going to give up its own views of secularism and integration to please the rest of Canada,. However, the key issue is being ignored in this debate and that is the state shouldn't have the right, any more than religious figures or anybody else, to tell women how to dress and to tell them that they defined by their body and how they present it. Anything else about gender discrimination and equality is gibberish designed  to mask a totalitarian view of gender with popular and seemingly modern principles.

American multiculturalism and homegrown terrorism

Quote of the day from Jonathan Laurence :

(...) recent cases show that the combination of extreme alienation from US foreign policy, whipped up with religious fervor, can trump even the relatively harmonious multicultural setting of American society.

Tiger Woods and Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Robert Zaretsky makes an interesting parallel between Rousseau and Tiger woods:

Reality and truth are elusive ideas in an age of reality television and fictitious memoirs. Yet, the public fascination with his confession is quite real and true. Where does this event leave him and us? At the same place where it leaves us with Rousseau – or rather, where Rousseau leaves us: caught in the modern obsession with authenticity. In his Confessions, Jean-Jacques does not offer an objective standard by which we can measure the truthfulness of his account. Only Jean-Jacques, he insists, can weigh the truth, or authenticity of his self-portrait. The scales that weigh the truth are buried deep inside him, far too deep for the world to assess or affect. Only Jean-Jacques can see these scales (or tilt them with his thumb). This is the only truth that matters, regardless of what passes for “truth” in our everyday world.
But as Rousseau and Woods remind us, there is a problem: every effort to express our authenticity through language is, by definition, a work of artifice. The world is a stage, Jean-Jacques warns, and we are nothing more than actors. Even if we write our own script – another much debated aspect of Woods’s address – words inevitably come between what we say and what we mean. In a world dominated by spectacle, Rousseau claims, even the words and gestures we choose are not our own, but borrowings from countless others who have already had their day on stage.

I find it disturbing that America is obsessed not with the idea that  he has failed it by failing to live up to the image that his talent had enabled him to create, the one of a man who is good and decent because he is so talented and the best. The trouble with America and its  absolute belief in greatness, is that it believes that it has to be authentic and that be God's reward to a good person. Tiger Woods reminds America of itself, of its contradictions, and  more notably of its unwillingness/stern refusal to accept that being  first doesn't always meant being the purest or even being good.

Multiculturalism and diversity

Kenan Malik on the differences between multiculturalism and diversity:

The irony of multiculturalism as a political process is that it undermines much of what is valuable about diversity as lived experience. When we talk about diversity, what we mean is that the world is a messy place, full of clashes and conflicts. That's all for the good, for such clashes and conflicts are the stuff of political and cultural engagement.
(...)Multiculturalism, on the other hand, by reposing political problems in terms of culture or faith, transforms political conflicts into a form that makes them neither useful nor resolvable. Rather than ask, for instance, "What are the social roots of racism and what structural changes are required to combat it?" it demands recognition for one's particular identity, public affirmation of one's cultural difference and respect and tolerance for one's cultural and faith beliefs.
Multicultural policies have come to be seen as a means of empowering minority communities and giving them a voice. In reality such policies have empowered not individuals but "community leaders" who owe their position and influence largely to their relationship with the state. Multicultural policies tend to treat minority communities as homogenous wholes, ignoring class, religious, gender and other differences, and leaving many within those communities feeling misrepresented and, indeed, disenfranchised.

Britain's brand of multiculturalism has failed because it placed at its center the cult of diversity and thus sacralized differences in the name of culture and of religion making moral judgments difficult and segregation/sectarianism unavoidable. I'm uncomfortable with drawing sharp distinctions between Britain's multiculturalism and diversity because  in the mind of too many those two concepts have merged. Nowadays, people who argues fanatically for diversity are in fact doing so  by categorizing people, by hierarchizing particularities, and thus deciding which ones ought to more important than others. The trouble with both multiculturalism and diversity as they are commonly understood is that they lead to desindividualization. People are forced to identity with a group of people in order to matter and to avoid marginalization because identity politics is the most potent form of politics.
To put things more simply, the only acceptable multicultural society is one, which sees that people as individuals, not as member of a group/community/whatever else and recognizes that culture and particularities are never legitimate justifications for the erosion of the social compact and the unjustifiable.

Linguistic subterfuge

Quote of the early morning from Tony Judt;

In America the misuse of language is usually cultural rather than political. People will accuse Obama of being a socialist. Italians would say magari – if only. However, no one takes this very seriously. What we have instead in the US is cultural communities policing what can and can’t be said, and that shapes how we define difference. The idea is that you can’t have an elite, since elitism is undemocratic and unegalitarian. Therefore, you always make the point that people are in some important way the same. If they are badly disabled like me, they are ‘differently abled’, which I find very amusing. It is not a ‘different’ ability: it is no ability. But since it’s politically uncomfortable to distinguish between people who can do things and people who can’t, the latter are described as separate but equal. There are numerous things wrong with this: first, it is lousy language; second, it creates the illusion of sameness or achievement in its absence; third, it conceals the effects of real power and capacity, real wealth and influence. You describe everyone as having the same chances when actually some people have more chances than others. And with this cheating language of equality deep inequality is allowed to happen much more easily.

'Muslim' hearts and minds

Flashy,  but problematic assertions from Roger Hardy

Much of the talk about winning Muslim "hearts and minds" is shallow and misguided. The issue is often seen, especially in the United States, as a matter of public relations – as if America has an image problem in the Muslim world, and dollars can buy it a better one. Or it is seen, in a facile way, as a matter of bolstering "good Muslims" while clobbering "bad Muslims". Without a surer grasp of Islamism and its discontents, the battle for Muslim hearts and minds will be lost.

What bugs me about Hardy's assertions is that they are full of air and not much else because he tied together awkwardly and dangerously the issue of discontent with the so-called West and its foreign policies and the one of "identity." Talking about Muslim hearts and minds is as dumb as talking about a "western" identity for we know that an American is different than a French and has different sensibilities. The point is that too many people tend to homogenize groups of people when they want to make an ideological and grand point that fits their world-view, but does not reflect the realities. In short, I'm rebelling here against the notion that "Muslims" are so different from other people that policy makers trying to appease tensions and address apprehensions while dispelling misunderstandings should forget about the simple fact that people just hate being stripped of their individuality and being told that they matter less than anybody else because of something that they haven't chosen. It seems to me that by claiming that Islamism is different and misunderstood, Roger Hardy just reinforces the old and dangerous stereotypes that values and reality are relative and that some people are allowed to be barbarian and that the rest of the world should accept it.  What bothers is that Roger Hardy would never make the same point about Christian fundamentalism and that's the problem.

The objectification of the 'African' woman

Atrocious, but ordinary personal story of an Ethiopian wife in the Independent who never made  choices about her life because of her gender to put it gently:

Nurame was in her bed when she was woken by an angry mêlée. In her family's hut there were grown men – an incredible number, 10 or more, all in their 30s, all standing over her father, shouting. They reached for her. At night here, where there is no electricity, perfect darkness falls, and everything becomes a shadow-play of barely visible flickers. But even though she was eight years old, she suspected at once what was happening. She had heard whispers that, when a girl is considered ready for marriage, a man will seize her, and rape her, and then she must serve him for the rest of her life. "That was the culture," she says. But it wasn't her culture: like all the other little girls, she didn't want it. "I started screaming and tried to run out of the hut," she says. "I hid in the trees – hah! – but one of the men found me."
She was taken back to his home, held down in front of his family, raped, and taken to be married the next morning. Dazed, she signed the papers, and waited for a moment when she could flee.
After three days, he finally left her alone in the hut. She ran for miles barefoot back to her family, wanting to return to her life, and to her childhood. She hurried through the door, weeping with joy. "But my father told me that now I had had sex with him, nobody else would want me because I was ruined goods, and I had to go back to him and be a good wife," she says. "My mother was very sad but she said it was true. I thought then, 'I have to do this. I have no choice'. I just prayed to God, 'Please help me, please...' I went back. Soon after that I was pregnant, and what could I do? Hah! Now many years have passed and I have six children. Life is hard for a woman. Hah!"

Many will argue that the ordeal of Nurame are exceptionally harsh and that she is an atypical Ethiopian wife and uncommon 'African' 'woman. That would be a way to dismiss the issue for what Nurame's case shows is that Ethiopian women and women in virtually all African countries are commodities and that the choices that they can make about their lives are limited solely because of their gender. To put it in more provocative terms, African manliness is close to godliness while womanhood is about objectification and the sexual gratification of the African manly king who has great needs. It is for this reason for example that Fela Kuti can write a song about "African women" advising them not to westernize and then marry 27 Nigerians at the same time as if they were sheep thus making the point that the issue is about submissiveness, giving up up individuality in the name of a weaponized and artificial 'africanity' and about respecting the so-called laws of nature and sacredness of an imagined "African" culture.

Sex, pleasure, and rape

Julius Malema, one of Jacob Zuma's preeminent supports and  president African National Congress Youth League on sex, pleasure, and women:

When a woman didn't enjoy it, she leaves early in the morning. Those who had a nice time will wait until the sun comes out, request breakfast and ask for taxi money.

Well no wonder South Africa has one of the countries where rape is the most prevalent. Too many people there seem to believe not only rape rape, but in rape rape rape.

Niqab, assimilation, integration, Québec, Canada,

Interesting: explanation of the different visions that Québec and Canada have on the Niqab, and more importantly on integration:

(...) English Canada embraces a multiculturalist ideal: Come to Canada, and bring your differences with you. In French Canada, you can have your differences, “but please do become a Quebecker.”
Quebec's francophone majority identifies itself as a fragile minority that must be ever vigilant against cultural erosion. In that context, collective rights often outweigh individual ones, especially when it comes to language or schooling. Quebec, like France, is also fiercely devoted to secularism. “We've had a long and painful struggle with the place of religion in this society, and a lot of people feel strongly about the separation of church and state,” says Mr. Lagacé.
The Quebec-English differences over immigration and integration echo those between France and Britain. France is contemplating a ban on the burka and niqab. In Britain, any politician who'd dare suggest such a thing would be denounced as a fascist.
In English Canada, provincial government officials are only too eager to distance themselves from intolerant Quebec. “We are an open Ontario,” said a spokeswoman for that province's immigration minister. “In Nova Scotia, people have a right to express themselves any way they wish around their faith,” its immigration minister said.

It makes sense that Québec would want its immigrants to assimilate in order to be Quebeckers first to increase its population and strengthen its special minority status within Canada and  Canadian second. The issue is whether it is framing the issue the right way and fighting the right battles. The problem is that these differences that exist within Canada are going to be increasingly difficult to coexist within the same country because they are based on very different visions of society and hierarchy of fundamentals value. The whole niqab episode has shown that even the politicians of Québec don't fully know how immigrants can become 'good ' Québécois, but they know what their fears are, which explains why the focus has been placed on the usual and weakest subjects: visibly "different" women.

Le dupe de son fantasme

Slavoj Zizek on fantasy, reality, and Avatar:

If we subtract fantasy from reality, then reality itself loses its consistency and disintegrates. To choose between "either accepting reality or choosing fantasy" is wrong: if we really want to change or escape our social reality, the first thing to do is change our fantasies that make us fit this reality. Because the hero of Avatar doesn't do this, his subjective position is what Jacques Lacan, with regard to de Sade, called le dupe de son fantasme.

I have to say that with time,  I'm starting to believe that fantasies are fantasies for a reason and that try to have them mash with reality is always a mistake. After all, who/what we become if we tear down or realize all our fantasies. My answer to that question is bodies, living thing without being, dasein.

Black Mammies and other 'positive' stereotypes

I agree with Adam Serwer on this:

Mammy" is not a "positive" stereotype. There are no "positive" stereotypes, all stereotypes are created with a dehumanizing flip side that is inseparable from the faint "compliment" used to justify their invocation. But the legacy of the Mammy in particular is a grotesque one. Like every other carefully engineered old-school caricature of black people, it's meant to reinforce notions of what kind of behavior is appropriate--in this case, a docile, even happy acquiescence to white authority. "Mammy" was meant to depict black women as ugly and asexual, content to exist as surrogate mothers to the saintly white children of their owners or employers. Mammy's false happiness assures white people that the institutions of slavery and later Jim Crow have black people's consent and approval, her rotund body an alibi for the rampant exploitation of black women by their white slave masters. 
There's simply nothing "positive" about it. Mammy may give some people the warm fuzzies, but that has to do with whom the stereotype flatters. It sure as hell doesn't flatter black women.

Aura popularis

Quote of the day from Naema Ahmed, the student who was asked to choose between wearing the niqab and going to class to learn French in Quebec:

It wasn't fair for them to ask me to leave the exam. (...) I feel like the government is following me everywhere.(...) I'll just stay in my house. This will solve the problem.

Burqa wearers

Fascinating stuff from Andrew Brown:

In France, where there is an inflamed debate on the matter right now, the first investigation carried out by the police last year found that there were 367 women in France who wore burka or Niqab – 0.015% of the population. This was so low that the secret service was told to count again, and came up with a figure of 2,000; in Holland there seem to be about 400, and in Sweden a respectable guess suggests 100. The most fascinating figure of all, though, came from the Danish researchers, who actually interviewed some of the covered women. Most were young, or at least under forty, and half of them were white converts. I think this makes it entirely clear that in modern Europe the burka is not an atavistic hangover, but a very modern gesture of disaffection from and rejection of society, which appeals to a certain kind of extreme temperament.

If those stats are right, it means in my opinion that banning the Burka/burqa is even more of an invitation for women who want to make a point to wear it as an act of defiance and of rejection of 'modern' society. The question that I have then is whether the Burqa/Burka becomes less threatening to the usual suspects if it isn't a symbol of women's submision or of a proof of Islamisation, but simply an instrument of rebellion? My answer is that it doesn't matter for what a woman wants to wear is her business and should never become a matter for the state or for a religion.

When Winnie bites Nelson

Winnie Mandela is probably one of the few persons who is not afraid to slam her former husband, even though he is a God in South Africa. After reading her comments, I have to believe that any movie made about her will be better than any movie made about Nelson Mandela because she is more flawed and thus more human; actors and directors aren't going to be afraid to go "there." A few of her reproaches to her former husband: 

Mandela did go to prison and he went in there as a burning young revolutionary. But look what came out.(.,.) I cannot forgive him for going to receive the Nobel [Peace Prize in 1993] with his jailer [FW] de Klerk. Hand in hand they went. (...) Do you think De Klerk released him from the goodness of his heart? He had to. The times dictated it, the world had changed, and our struggle was not a flash in the pan, it was bloody to say the least and we had given rivers of blood. (...) I had kept it alive with every means at my disposal.

Something tells me that Winnie Mandela wishes Mandela had remained in prison so she would never had had to fade in the background as a disposable thing when he came out because she wasn't clean. Part of the truth of course is that Winnie Mandela never learned to become a stateswoman because she believes in radicalism ,raciality, identity politics, money, and not much else. For after all, she is speaking up this loudly now because she wants somebody to pay her to shut up.

Harlem as a Babylon without future

Stephen Foley has a must read article on Harlem and its slow decline as the center of "black" politics in America. Sugary excerpt:

Harlem is where the black political elite – including Paterson's father, Boris – has resided for generations; a ferocious, ready-made block vote wielded on behalf of the civil rights movement and advancing the community's causes.
Adam Clayton Powell, the first African-American sent to Congress from New York State, shepherded the civil rights reforms of Presidents Kennedy and Johnson through his chairmanship of the Education committee; his successor, Rangel, ascended to run the powerful Ways and Means committee, which controls Congressional purse strings.
(,.. )He [Charlie Rangel] dodged censure over unpaid taxes on a villa he owns in the Dominican Republic, but was then criticised by a House watchdog for company-funded trips to the Caribbean. The accumulating accusations of ethical violations threaten to bring down this last remaining Harlem pillar, with little apparently to take its place. (...) But what of the future? Reading the newspapers on the block opposite Rangel's Harlem home, a local character known as Mister Nature, a man who has observed the area's politics for three decades, says the political elite has only itself to blame. "The Democrat political meetings are sorry affairs," he says. "There is no new blood. We have politicians who are proud of their past, and working for themselves and for the rich today, but they are not looking into the future. They have simply not trained others to replace them.

The trouble with identity politics in America and elsewhere is that those who are using it to get to power once they get there believe that it's solely about them, that they cannot be replaced because they are the ones who built the trainstation. This is what I called the Mugabe theory of politics, which explain why leaders who use identity politics to get there almost never leave at the right time, but more often than not eat their young to make sure that only death takes them away from power. It's sad to say, but Mandela is the exception not the norm and he had to spend 25 years in jail to get that wise and to learn that legacy matters more than personal gratification.

The Islamic republic of Canada ?!

Lysiane Gagnon on the recent expulsion from a French class in Quebec of an Egyptian immigrant who was wearing the Niqab:

In Quebec, most agreed with the decision to expel the niqab-wearing woman, including constitutional lawyer Julius Grey, who has defended the right of inmates to smoke in prison and the right of Sikh students to wear ceremonial daggers in class. “Accommodation should not lead to separation,” he said.
Yolande Geadah, an Egyptian-born writer, said: “There is no possible compromise with people with such inflexible attitudes.” Raheel Raza, a Pakistani-born Muslim women's rights activist, said: “When we come to Canada, we're not coming to the Islamic Republic of Canada.”
The irony is that, last fall, Egypt's top Islamic cleric said students and teachers at Cairo's Al-Azhar University would not be allowed to wear face veils in classrooms and dorms on the grounds they had “nothing to do with Islam.” The education ministry later barred the niqab during exams, to prevent students from sending others to take the tests. Although an Egyptian court subsequently ordered a stay on the Al-Azhar ban and overturned the education ministry's decision, we have to ask ourselves: Should Canadian colleges be more tolerant of Islamic fundamentalism than Cairo's universities?

Wow, in what world do we live in to make the argument that a woman becomes dangerous and infectious because of what she wears? And how convincing is it for Lysiane Gagnon to argue that Canada must be as open on the so-called woman's issues as Egyptians?  Did I miss a big part of this movie not to be able to understand why the body of a woman can never be fully their own, but an instrument to make either a political or a religious point? I'm forced to realize that Islamists and feminists agree on at least a central issue : a woman is what she wears.

Dangerous empty spaces

Sugary excerpt of the morning from DJ Taylor:

(...) the difficulty that women have in defining a space to be themselves somewhere between the contending forces of Puritanism and exploitation. If there are two factors that have consistently undermined this search they are, first, that the most successful woman of the age – Mrs Thatcher – sustained her rise through what were, effectively, masculine techniques, and, second, the invariable habit of certain feminists – at any rate the ones I met in the mid-1980s – of having their cake and eating it too.
Male bluster was frowned on, naturally, but somehow innocuous timidity wouldn't do either. You couldn't win, because the rules were always being changed on the arbitrary whim of the game-planner.
On the other hand, the existence of a hulking vacuum in society that only feminism can fill was brought home to me last weekend when, while waiting for a long-delayed flight at Belfast International, I started taking an interest in the couple on the seats opposite. They were aged about 20: a wooden-looking boy and a rather charming girl, solicitous of her beloved's welfare, who kept on feeding him crisps. Five minutes later, I looked up to find the girl reading Cosmopolitan while her slack-jawed consort rifled through the Nuts "Boobs special". A relationship built on the foundation of post-modern irony? Or one bludgeoned into insensibility by the steady drip of sexist crap? You sometimes feel that what we really need in this struggle is a few fire-bombed "gentlemen's clubs" and desecrated top shelves