Globalclashes

Slavery, Race, politics, pain and apologies

Something about these assertions from Carol Swain bugs me:

I am astonished at how easy it is for some Republicans to deny their party has a serious race problem. In a few days, I anticipate releasing an advice letter I wrote to President Bush about this matter. I am very aware of the grand history of the Republican Party and would love to see the party reclaim the mantle of Lincoln and integrate its membership with Americans who share the values it once espoused.
Lastly, my desire to pursue an apology came after I became an active participant in the reparations debates associated with Harvard law professor Charles Ogletree and TransAfrica founder Randall Robinson. Although I oppose slave reparations, I believe much good could come from an apology. I have heard scores of elderly African-Americans state that they had no interest in monetary reparations. In fact, many said that there was not enough money in the world to repair the damage done to their ancestors. They expressed a desire for the government to acknowledge the injustice of slavery and the Jim Crow period that followed.
Likewise, I have had numerous Southern white women approach me with tears in their eyes to offer personal apologies for what their people did to my people. Clearly, I am not the appropriate person to receive an apology for what the U.S. government failed to prevent. My pursuit of an apology is a consequence of my hearing the pain of real people. It is clear to me that America would benefit by dealing with this issue in a forthright manner. The voice-vote Senate apology fails to meet my standards for how the matter ought to have been handled.

Stats don't lie !?

Oh boy!:

The truth is, violent white-on-black crime is a rarity in Britain, by comparison – although white-on-Asian crime is rather less so. The overwhelming bulk of violent street crime in London is committed by young black men, and in numerous cases against white people, although one would not impute a racial motive; the statistics suggest that young black male criminals are quite happy to stab or shoot anybody who hoves into view with either a bulging wallet, a mobile phone or an assumed reflection of disrespec’ in their eyes.
Apologies if this offends – but that’s how it is. At most, the African Caribbean population of London is about 12% of the whole. But black males are responsible for nearly 60% of arrests for robbery – and the overwhelming majority of gun crime, most of it black-on-black violence.
We skirt this issue, mostly for decent, if deluding reasons – that a proportion of young black males is more likely to commit violent crime than other sectors of the population. It is a form of racism, though, to assume that the problem is simply a given, and unalterable – but we have been hamstrung in our attempts to deal with it for reasons of political correctness.
The propensity of some young black males to underachieve at school and later commit crimes of violence has been seen for too long as a roguish expression of cultural diversity, exacerbated by our own inherent racism and economic oppression; in other words, it’s not their fault. Indeed the culture of violence, misogyny and epic drug abuse, exemplified in rap music, has been lapped up by a bovine liberal white culture that finds the vibrancy and “edginess” of gangsta rap something in which we should all exult and indeed emulate.

Race people

No comentario:

Democrats have long ago bought into the idea that minorities can only relate to people who look like them and must be coddled by people who do not. The Party of Lincoln, on the other hand, carries the unenviable burden of telling black, brown, and yellow people that it welcomes them, even as it insists that they have no special place, purely as a result of their race, in the party's core beliefs about the free market and individual freedom.
So the black man in the White House came to power by incessantly invoking his biography and identity. Barack Obama reminded everyone every day on the campaign trail that he is the son of a man from Kenya and a woman from Kansas. Michael Steele, the black man at the center of Republicans' political comeback efforts, prefers to talk about "personal freedom, liberty, and the desire for self-governing."
It is a stark contrast. Unfortunately, political realities skew in favor of the man of biography and the party of identity politics. Racial entitlement often creates a corrosive effect on minorities. Some brazenly demand jobs, college admissions, or business transactions based on race or gender, while others insist that identity trumps ideas or objective considerations. In that vein, Obama's Supreme Court nominee believes that "a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn't lived that life."

The glitz of minority status

This assertion from Elaine Lafferty is hilarious, but it also exposes a truth, which worries me almost as much as it makes me uncomfortable:

But here’s the good news for those doomed identity-less white guys. You actually do have an identity! You are in fact a minority in America. Embrace your status, file a brief, find your own voice. Because judges like Sonia Sotomayor, what with their identity and their empathy, who have spent a lifetime outside your members-only clubhouse, may be more willing to listen to you than you ever thought possible.

Race, identity and islands

Rex Murphy in the Globe and Mail on Sotomayor, America, and Identity politics:

Ms. Sotomayor is a nominee, on the other hand, because identity politics - like to like, even in “postracial” America - is still a prevailing dynamic. (...) And it is Ms. Sotomayor's “identity” in this sense that both she and the President regard as critical. Ms. Sotomayor has made it abundantly clear that she regards her Latino roots (and gender) as determinants of her way of seeing things. “Whether born from experience or inherent physiological or cultural differences ... our gender and national origins may and will make a difference in our judging.” The key, startling word there is “inherent.” She's claiming (among other characteristics) that an “inherent physiological” difference “may and will” shape her view. Claiming that judgment or reasoning is even partly conditioned by inherent physiological elements of one's ethnicity is very odd.
It is very close to, if not the same as, saying that there is innate, in her ethnicity, qualities that make her a better judge. Which she seems to claim. For in the same lecture from which I'm quoting, she concludes “... I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn't lived that life.”
(...) Identity politics is a closed circuit. It shuts the door to other experiences, even denying the possibility of transcending them. It is the very contradiction of empathetic power.
(...) Diversity, in the American case, seems to be turning on itself. Every group is an island of difference and there are no bridges. Unless you are of the group, you cannot “understand” it. And it has led, at least in Ms. Sotomayor's words, to a curious world where ethnic and gender characteristics are posited as the determinative basis of “superior” views, of people contained within their identities.

I'm open-minded on the "Sotomayor" issue even though  I'm uncomfortable with the roles that race and empathy  play in the nominating process, which shows that the whole post-racial thing was just an electoral gimmick. I am less interested in who Sotomayor is than in what her views are and I think that the issue here comes from the fact that there is no longer a difference between views and being and that in America, it is still assumed that one's race and ethnicity determines one's being.

Old identity politics

Interesting assertion from Krugman on the nomination Sonia Sotomayor for the Supreme Court, Conservatives, and Identity politics:

The thing that is really driving conservatives crazy, I think, is that their identity politics just isn’t working like it used to. Their whole approach has been based on the belief that Americans vote as if they live in Mayberry, and fear and hate anyone who looks a bit different; now that the country just isn’t like that, they’ve gone mad.

The politics of sexual appetite

I had a lot of fun reading Lucy Wadham's article on Sarkozy's manliness and the desire of France to be taken by a macho man in the Prospect Magazine. After my laughter stopped (it took a long time), I had to wonder what is it about the French that make Americans and Brits focus solely on their sexuality by using the excuse as one of my best friends used to put it that they are the horniest people in the world. Sugary excerpt:

My son, Jack, a French philosophy graduate, has a theory to explain the president’s success: the upstart Sarkozy is the conquering hero, the Nietzschean superman, whose will to power sets him above the constraints of conventional French morality. This, for Jack, explains his election and his massive, if short-lived popularity, as well as his ability, where others have failed, to push through difficult reforms.
I would go one step further, however, and suggest that it was also Sarkozy’s conquering libido which, more than his policies, explain the labels “courageous” and “dynamic.” Borrowing from my sisters’ rich vocabulary of male sexual stereotypes, I would describe Sarkozy as a sex dwarf. To my mind, what defines France’s president and explains his magnetism is not simply his “will to power,” but the particular circumstances that drive it: his small stature and his large sex drive.
In a culture unreconstructed by either of the great movements that have fashioned Anglo-Saxon society (Protestantism and feminism), the libido is still a force to be reckoned with in France. The last presidential election was not a battle between left and right but rather a contest between two “styles”—one gentle, the other tough; one consensual, the other coercive; one feminine, the other masculine. In the end, the French opted, not for the reassuring arms of Ségolène Royal and her “gentle revolution,” but for Nicolas Sarkozy, the libidinous sex dwarf. All the iconography of the presidential campaign pointed to the subliminal forces in the battleground. Picture Royal, dressed all in white, as if in homage to that alliance of virginity and female power embodied in such icons as Elizabeth I and Joan of Arc. Now picture Sarkozy, short and strutting in an oversized and sweat-stained suit, like France’s favourite dictator, the potent and charismatic Napoleon Bonaparte. Sarkozy, like Bonaparte, has all the characteristics of the sex dwarf: he is short, shamelessly flirtatious and tireless in his pursuit of women.
No record of his sexual conquests has seen the light of day, but I don’t need documentary evidence to know that Sarko is a sex dwarf.(...) There is something baffling about Nicolas Sarkozy’s rise to power, not only to the millions of people who didn’t vote for him, but for many of the millions who did and who now, like my own children, regret it. His success can only really be explained in psychosocial terms: that it was the collective desire of the French people to be represented by a dominant and libidinous male, rather than a dominant and matriarchal female. This particular fantasy could only have found an outlet in a society unreconstructed by feminist ideology—in short, a patriarchy. For France, despite its many powerful women, still wants to be controlled by a man.

I can't wait for somebody, an analyst, a journalist to dare to write about Obama and America in the some way. If that day ever comes, it doesn't take much to know what will happen, to guess the outrage that will follow and the accusations of racism, of using old and disgusting images of Black males as having a bestial sex drive and of some white women being curious to go black. Because if we apply Wadham's analytical frame to America and that we go along with the assertion that sexual innuendos are permitted in political analysis then what we could say about Obama and America ? Would it be permissible to say that Obama is a sexy poet and that America, after years of being taken by a cowboy who was obsessed with forceful penetration, has decided that it wants more foreplay with a sexy poet whom it imagines must have the legendary appetite of black males (since it views Obama) making it possible to assume that after the gentle foreplay, the sex will be incredible?
When I was in High School,  there was the hyped perception among my peers that going out with black guys (black girls weren't as popular, they weren't available mainly because going white for a black girl gave the impression that she was settling for milk when she should get coffee because she couldn't handled the real deal, a man of the same race who can match and more than likely surpass her own sexual insatiability) was the coolest thing, it was a way to break away with your parents's generation, appear ethnically cool and culturally radical while at the same time showing that you are in vogue and in touch with the Boys II Men era. If I wanted to be creatively mean and shallow to make a cheap point about Obama and America,I would say that we are in American politics, in the Boys II Men era and America, like a teenage girl who wants desperately to be popular and to be in sync with pop culture, has decided to go black. But I know better, I know that sex, sexual appetite in politics is important, but becomes seductively and dangerously limiting when it focuses on fun, exciting, but cheap stereotypes.

Beef and fluff

The Guardian on the fall from grace of Rachida Dati, France Sarkozy's justice minister who, no so long ago, was celebrated as a successful example of integration à la française only to be dismissed from the Sun king's court for her exuberance and luxurious taste:

Rachida Dati, the beleaguered French justice minister, may have been lampooned for her devotion to wearing ostentatious catwalk fashion at inappropriate moments, but having been forced by Nicolas Sarkozy to run in the European elections as a way of sacking her from government, she remains defiant in her choice of footwear.
Once she was Sarkozy's handpicked symbol of change, hugely popular with the public as the first Muslim woman to hold a major government post. Now, after a spectacular fall from grace, Dati is using the European election campaign to fight back.
Despite trying to prove her commitment by returning to work five days after giving birth by caesarian section, Sarkozy ordered her to run in order to sack her after the 7 June vote. She felt "humiliated", according to the former prime minister, Jean-Pierre Raffarin.(....) Dati wants to repair her own personal standing in order to be able to pursue her ambitions to become Paris mayor at a later date.
But even her symbolism as a hero of France's new ethnic minorities has taken a dent. "With her tenacity, she's a total inspiration," said Madad Zineb, 25, a student at the meeting. "But I think after Dati it now might be even harder for the young generation of ethnic minorities to break through in politics. There is now so much focus on personal history and all the tiny details of your private life. France has gained new ­hunger for that."

The problem for Dati is that she is no longer useful to Sarkozy precisely because she was solely a symbol. In politics, as anywhere else in life, it is always possible to replace symbols where they are no able to become gain some substance and gravitas by proving that they are about more than their gender, their beauty, their race or their religion . In Dati's case, she remained the glamorous and ambitious woman of Algerian and Moroccan origin, with a admirable life story, but never became fully a political woman with ideas and indispensable skills. In other words, she is just a celebrity and people don't take her seriously because she is perceived as one of Sarkozy's creatures who needs to accept her bannishment because she didn't seize the chance of a lifetime. Most people want her, especially her peers who are competing with her for the king's attention,  to fade in the background or to just die of boredom in Strasbourg. The saddest thing about Dati is that she is worth more than her caricature even though she was content with being fluffy because she thought probably that her status as a symbol would protect her from political and public attacks and would stop the French from viewing her as a cold calculating woman who did everything to succeed except studying her craft to become competent. Rachida Dati suffers from the same ill that plagues Sarah Palin, the airhead syndrome except that in her case her minority status and the fact that she does have a compelling rise from poverty to riches immigrant story makes her more sympathetic  and less contemptible because some fills that she had/has no control over her political fate and that she had/had few choices in life.

Good thinking people and race

The fact that I find myself agreeing more and more with John McWhorter on race leaves me pensive. It shows me how much my views have evolved on this issue. When McWhorter makes the assertions I shake my head in agreement, wonder whether it is possible to move beyond race and sadly come to the conclusion that it isn't going to happen in my lifetime:

When I started commenting about such things ten years ago, the going notion among good-thinking people was that racial preferences were about addressing poverty, the idea being that black people are, by definition, either poor or at least "struggling." But the simple fact is that most black Americans are not poor, by any metric. Too many black people are poor, proportionally, but most aren't - and the number of poor black people brought to selective campuses by Affirmative Action is minuscule.
Back in the nineties, if you brought this up, then next came the "diversity" idea - neglecting that the exact same insight was called tokenism until about 1975. Preferences make sense to me based on the cards you have been dealt. It's just that the idea, in 2009, that being black automatically means you have been dealt too bad a hand to be subject to serious competition in school admissions is obsolete, not to mention a grievous insult.

Z as in Zuma and Zero

A couple of articles in the press on Jacob Zuma,which don't reassure me about the future of South Africa. In the Financial Times, Alec Russell writes the following:

If South Africa is lucky, a president Zuma will be a Ronald Reagan. He will make the country feel good about itself after the awkward questions – over Aids and race and crime – raised under Mbeki. Zuma has assiduously courted minorities, in particular Afrikaners, and his frankness about the troubles plaguing South Africa – and also the problems in ­Zimbabwe – is refreshing after the chilly intellectualism of Mbeki. He also will, he suggests, step down after five years.
(...) There is, however, a less reassuring scenario than that of a latterday Reagan: the growth of a Big Man personality cult designed to mask South Africa’s growing social and economic problems, against the backdrop of a government making ever grander promises, and a steady implosion of the ANC’s sense of purpose. Mbeki’s tenure ended in ignominy but it should not be forgotten that he bravely led the ANC away from many of its outdated statist economic views. Some fear Zuma will prove the puppet of his leftwing supporters. But the greatest danger under a president Zuma may be not of a sudden ideological lurch, but of a vacuum of leadership and authority. For all his charm, Zuma has the populist’s trait of sometimes saying what his audiences want to hear – at a time when the party and country desperately need a strong hand at the tiller.

The Wall Street Journal has an article, which is less interesting because it focuses on Zuma's attempt to build a trusting relationship with South African businesses, while ignoring more important questions about the man. I have a total aversion for Jacob Zuma and it is not just because I believe that he has a women's problem to say things with more finesse that he deserves, but also because he resembles all fake populist leaders not only in Africa, but in all parts of the world who are all too ready to flatter the people, and to follow their prejudices and their fears without ever thinking about the necessity to educate the public and to make tough decisions, which can hurt their political stature and future.

Wonderland

Insightful but sad:

The quickest way to annoy white liberals in Washington is to speculate that Barack Obama was so electable because he is a stealth African-American. He is not the son of slaves, nor was he actively involved in the civil rights movement. As he explains in his first autobiography, he did not feel defined by his race during his upbringing in Hawaii and Indonesia by a white mother and grandparents. Only in adolescence did he realise that skin colour was an issue, prompting the voyage of discovery about what it would mean, which took him to be a ‘community organiser’ on the South Side of Chicago. White liberals would have you believe that a post-racial President means a post-racial America. And having been forced to deliver his impressive race speech during the campaign by the views of his ex-pastor Jeremiah Wright, Obama recently slapped down a reporter who raised the issue. But his Attorney General Eric Holder (the first African-American to hold the post) accused his country of ‘cowardice’ on the issue, pointing out that friends and colleagues at work seldom mix across ethnic lines out of hours.

The western cult of the clash

Great insights from the Guardian article on Wole Soyinka and his explanation of his inspiration for his play Death and the King's Horseman and its relevance today:

He resists the suggestion that Horseman is an essentially political play. In an introduction he wrote when it was first published, Soyinka issued a stern warning not to interpret it as a "clash of cultures" piece: "I find it necessary to caution the would-be producer of this play against a sadly familiar reductionist tendency." He still stands by this. "At the time," he says, "the tendency - in the theatre, the cinema and the novel - was to present everything that dealt with things outside western culture as being understandable only as a 'clash of cultures'. This covered everything, and it encouraged analytical laziness."
(...) It would be hard to argue that the western world in 2009 has shaken off the us-versus-them mentality which Soyinka objected to more than 30 years ago. At best, he says, it has evolved: "It has shifted from being the west versus the rest, to being the west versus the east, Christianity against Islam - as if there hadn't been periods of human history where the fusion of those cultures was absolutely fundamental." He acknowledges, though, that western society is less ignorant when it comes to Africa. There appears to be new interest in his work: the National's Horseman is one of two current revivals. The other, staged by the Oregon Shakespeare festival, has been playing since February to glowing reviews.
Intriguingly, Soyinka sees another possible reason for this renewed interest: the rise of suicide bombing in the Arab world. Like the ritual suicide of the horseman, he thinks suicide bombers confront western minds with something that is both terrifying and baffling. "The situations are totally different, but still there is that commitment to a final act," he says. "Maybe there is something about the proliferation of suicide bombers that, consciously or unconsciously, is making people ask questions of that defining moment."

As much as I respect Soyinka, I think that he is wrong and the us-versus-them mentality isn't Western, but universal and that it is amplified by the cult of difference and sacralization of blood, which is even more present in some African countries or rather African ethnic groups than in Western societies because it is seen as the only way to preserve an eroded and assailed identity. Soyinka is a way a prisoner of the colonial mindset, which I think reduces his landscape and blinds him to the fact that the West is a much a political and a cultural fiction as the Rest is.

Dark and corrupt America

Now that Americans have a cool, worldly, well read and fashionable president, I'm sure that people who as  Kishore Mahbubani is responsible for so much of the ills of the world will change their mind since it is possible to reset the past and to move forward:

(...) virtually all analysis by American intellectuals rests on the assumption that problems come from outside America and America provides only solutions. Yet the rest of the world can see clearly that American power has created many of the world’s major problems. American thinkers and policymakers cannot see this because they are engaged in an incestuous, ­self-­referential, and ­self-­congratulatory discourse. They have lost the ability to listen to other voices on the planet because they cannot conceive of the possibility that they are not already listening. But until they begin to open their ears, America’s problems with the world will ­con­tinue.
It will not be easy for America to change course, because many of its problems have deep structural causes. To an outsider, it is plain to see that structural failures have developed in America’s governance, in its social contract, and in its response to globalization. Many Americans still cannot see ­this.
When Americans are asked to identify what makes them proudest of their society, they inevitably point to its democratic character. And there can be no doubt that America has the most successful democracy in the world. Yet it may also have some of the most corrupt governance in the world. The reason more Americans are not aware of this is that most of the corruption is ­legal.

I made a bet with a friend that in four year, when Obama will be running for reelection, he won't be able to go anywhere without seeing wide protests against America and its corrupting behavior. The point is that in movies and in real life, people rarely like Goliaths because they always assume that it is keeping millions of David down to remain in power. For now, Obama is mostly considered to be as a man who is Black, half-African, partly raised in Indonesia, and who has Muslim family members, all of his differences make people assume that his policies will be different because they assume that they make see him the world as David not as Goliath and therefore he will act as they would act in they were on his position. I can't wait to see what will happen when people realize that being different is neither a political program nor a policy orientation. 

Rebranding and change

If there is one thing that is to be expected of journalists is that they are always able to get the required distance to see the forest through the trees long, long, long, long after what they cheered for or rather supported passively or silently by suspending their obligation to critique and to analyze happened. A good example from the Financial Times's Clive Crook:

Mr Obama’s campaign always exaggerated the difference he would make on foreign policy. His style could hardly be more different from the caricature of US supremacism projected by George W. Bush, but the underlying issues were unlikely to be any easier to deal with. So it has proved. In many areas of foreign and security policy, in contrast to the clear break he is attempting in domestic policy, Mr Obama is mostly rebranding Mr Bush’s approach.

The question then becomes whether the so-called post-racial society, which had to be created with the election of a multiracial president was the only change Journalists believed in because as Americans they believe that race is everything because minorities are so different in themselves that Obama, no matter what his policies were and no matter the fact his "yes, we can" simple meant "if you don't , you are not in," was going to be a different President than Bush II. If the only change we could believe in was simply racial, then Obama's election (not his years in power for we have to see where he will go from here)  reaffirms what Kipling and all of those happy and superior fools  believe, which is that race makes us who we are.

Capitulation

Excellent article in Prospect  on Hanif Kureishi, the Salman Rushdie affair, and writing about race and religion:

What particularly upset Kureishi’s critics was his refusal to play along with the idea that Asian writers had to treat Asian characters with respect. “I am a professional businessman, not a professional Pakistani,” the landlord Nasser tells his white sidekick Johnny in Kureishi’s screenplay for My Beautiful Laundrette when he evicts a black tenant. “It was a new idea of being Asian,” Kureishi says, “not the traditional notion of victims cowering in the corner. I wanted to show that Asians were not all progressive or nice—so I had an Asian as a vicious Thatcherite.”
(...)The Rushdie affair, Kureishi believes, transformed not just his own work, but also “the very notion of writing.” The fatwa “created a climate of terror and fear. Writers had to think about what they were writing in a way they never had to before. Free speech became an issue as it had not been before. Liberals had to take a stand, to defend an ideology they had not really had to think about before.” How have they borne up to the task? “The attacks on Rushdie showed that words can be dangerous. They also showed why critical thought is more important than ever, why blasphemy and immorality and insult need protection.
But most people, most writers, want to keep their heads down, live a quiet life. They don’t want a bomb in the letterbox. They have succumbed to the fear.”

Kureishi is correct in his assessment that writers have capitulated to fear. I think that this capitulation is less about fear and cowardice, than about the fact that too many writers don't view writing as Sartre and Camus did and don't believe that they have responsibilities beyond the one to sell and to be cool. Littérature engagée is dead and that is a tragedy for a century  that needs it more than anything else.

It's everywhere...

I haven't heard much about this, and I wonder why:

The president of Brasil, Lula da Silva, at a joint press conference on the 27th of March 2009 with Gordon Brown, the UK prime minister, made the following statement: “This crisis was caused by the irrational behaviour of white people with blue eyes, who before the crisis appeared to know everything and now demonstrate that they know nothing.”
That statement is not merely ignorant and stupid.  That statement is racist.  As a white person with blue eyes, I am offended by it.  I am waiting for Mr. Lula da Silva’s apology to the entire population of white people with blue eyes.

What amazes me is that Brown didn't stop him and I hope that it was just a case of something being lost in translation. Willem Buiter wonders if Lula's assertion is an example of acceptable racism  ( I think that the political correct expression for that is acceptable/tolerable bias) and that the fact that his question is a legitimate shows that all the post-racial stick is garbage especially in societies where it is tolerated to assume that race determines identity and behavior.

To count, to categorize and to discriminate

I agree with the sentiments expressed by Kenan Malik, but disagree with the substance of his arguments and his conclusion:

The foundation stone of the secular French republic is that all citizens should be equal and free from distinctions of race or religion. But senior politicians have begun to recognise that France remains deeply disfigured by racism. To combat this, Sarkozy argues, it is necessary to collect ethnically based data. The British experience suggests that such policies often do more harm than good.
Two assumptions underlie the argument for ethnic monitoring: first, that ethnicity and culture are the most important labels we can place on people; and second, that there is a causal relationship between membership of such a group and disproportional outcomes between groups.
(...) A system obsessed by ethnic categories, however, is rarely able to make those kinds of connections.
Ethnic monitoring does not just produce misleading data. The process of classification often creates the very problems it is supposed to solve. Local authorities have used ethnic categories not just as a means of collecting data but also as a way of distributing political power — by promoting certain “community leaders” – and of disbursing public funds through ethnically based projects. Once the allocation of power, resources and opportunities become linked to membership of particular groups, then people inevitably begin to identify themselves in terms of those ethnicities, and only those ethnicities.

If collecting ethnic/racial stats is to categorize and to force people to identity with an ethnic group, then why keep any kind of statistics at all, why count the numbers of men and women, of adults and children, of single and married people if the presumption is that they identify people according to certain traits, which shouldn't define them and thus fragment a society by encouraging discrimination and ghettoisation. I may be naive, but I don't think that stats lie and create different realities rather they just reflect what is happening because they are a tool. As all instruments, they become dangerous when people are allowed.able to use them to discriminate, which means that it is narrow-minded to argue that they are intrinsically bad and should be used. The point is that modern societies have never, for long, forbidden themselves from using informative tools as ethnic/racial stats based on what may happen, based on the possibility of mischief and of terrible wrongs happening. The sad fact is that we use tools  in our societies, which we wished we didn't have to use and which we know can have disastrous effects such as judging the accused and putting them to jail when they are found guilt. We do so even though we know that there are risks that innocent people can end up in jail or that punishment may never lead to rehabilitation, but an aggravation and a multiplication of dangerous behaviors. We do these things because they are necessary for the health of society, its stability and its evolution. We do them while taking all the necessary precautions to avoid wrongs. It is true that ethnic/racial stats are not a panacea and can lead to problems, but it isn't true that societies, which use them don't have choices and can't avoid the wrongs, which may ensue by utilizing them. There is no determinism here and more importantly, no fatality. I'm not going to say that there is no alternative to ethnic/racial stats, but rather that they are a tool not an end. What matters is the how, the hard work of creating policies, which make them use. Everything else, all the bad tings, which may happen depend on our ethics and our willingness to accept that policy still matters.

Mbeki and South Africa

Joseph Lelyveld reviews Mark Gessiser's book, A Legacy of Liberation: Thabo Mbeki and the Future of the South African Dream:

Gevisser's biography doesn't begin to resolve the issues of character it repeatedly raises. The chapters on Mbeki's handling of the AIDS crisis and his failure to intervene effectively before starvation and disease became rampant in Robert Mugabe's Zimbabwe leave the reader with a conundrum familiar to anyone who has tried from afar to keep up with these issues. Was it that Thabo Mbeki could not resist defying the conventional wisdom of those who were not black Africans—intrusive white busybodies of all description—or was he responding to political pressures the busybodies did not perceive or appreciate?
In the case of AIDS, Mbeki faced no significant resistance from within the African National Congress until Nelson Mandela finally made an issue of his denialism. In view of the scale and duration of the calamity, the question of why the government's unresponsiveness never became a burning political issue for the movement and its basic constituency can't be seen simply as a function of one man's overrationalized hang-ups. Obviously, there was a drastic failure of leadership. But if there were no cultural inhibitions in the way of common-sense public health policies, why wasn't this the issue on which he fell? Helen Epstein's 2007 book, The Invisible Cure, based on articles that first appeared in these pages, offers a more sensitive consideration of such questions than this study of the doleful story's central figure.

Unfortunately, the views of Mbeki on Aids just reflect a conspiracy theory view of reality and of history, which alas too many South Africans and Africans share. This is one of the reasons why most of the outrage of the Pope's views of condoms and aids was expressed in the West not in the countries, which he visited. Mbeki's time in power showed mediocre leadership in South Africa could have disastrous effects on its society. The good news is that he is gone, the bad news is Jacob Zuma is the next great white hope for a country, which can't afford atrocious and autistic political leaders unashamed to play identity politics.

Key issues

From Andrew Brown, a good summary of Gilles Kepel, criticism of the British and in my view Anglo-saxon version of Multiculturalism and identity politics:

The fundamental criticism of multiculturalism and identity politics, raised by the French sociologist Gilles Kepel amongst others, is that it creates a class of politicians with a vested interested in separatism and extremism, because without it no one would care about them.

In my view, there is a difference between identity politics and multiculturalism even though in the mind of most it is no longer to differentiate the two. In any case, Kepel with whom I don't agree often, puts his finger on the key issue, which is the one of power in a system where race and other categories, which reinforce identity politics are valued and recognized as legitimate basis for social and political identities. Kepel's criticism reminds of Professor Anderson's pronouncement during the presidential campaign that Obama was part of the new class, which has a vested interest in creating conflicts in order to solve them:

Obama is a classic New Class elitist, by education, outlook, everything. So is his wife. Their professional lives have consisted in - community organizing? please - the elite management of the poor and, of even greater importance today, management of, but also production of, communalist tensions through multiculturalism and identity politics. That’s what the New Class does; that’s what it exists to do. Along with, to be sure, extracting rents for managing social conflicts that it also has much interest in creating.

In America, the fact the NAACP still exists and will never disappear proves in a way Kepel's point that separation and extremism are political sources of power in a system where social and political dialogues aren't possible without shaming and without recriminations. Unfortunately, the French approach to these issues is not better as proves the fact that France is still debating whether to use ethnic statistics to count its minorities. It is,  in my opinion,  as bad even though it is based on the noble idea that color, race, religion or whatever else shouldn't matter to the State.

Finding beautiful symbols

This is precisely  the reason why I hate the increasing popular idea that diversity is all about image and that putting people who look different, but are beautiful and attractive (beauty is stereotypically a sign of intelligence) in position of power absolves States from elaborating coherent policies to fight discrimination and to decrease inequalities whether they are about race, gender or simply class. The fact that Sarkozy is thinking about replacing Rachida Dati with a beautiful black journalist proves my point. Symbols when they are only symbols and valued simply for what make them difference are just figure-heads and are almost condemned to fail because they are expected to be perfect or at the very least not to be their authentic self if that self isn't what people expect or desire to see.

The impossibility of a dialogue

As John Jackson shows in his account of a discussion about race and racism, which occurred on HBO on the Bill Maher's show, it is still impossible to talk about race in Obama's America. My suspicion is that it is because the goal of the participants isn't to have a dialogue, but to score points and win the argument to be able to dictate to the others what they should believe and do. Having a dialogue about race in America remains impossible because the main goals aren't to reconcile and to move forward, but to divide, to shame, to castigate, to vex, and to gain privileges and power that would be unchallengeable. Sugary excerpt:

Breitbart was debating Georgetown’s Michael Eric Dyson during the telecast and arguing (it seems) that any and all invocations of racism are bogus. They simply end debates with a broad-brushed attempt at categorical demonization. Label someone a racist, he says, and you can silence them.
For instance, Maher called Rush Limbaugh’s antics racist, including the radio host’s giddy promotion of that “Obama, the Magic Negro” song. Breitbart took offense, calling the accusation utterly ridiculous. A liberal journalist coined the phrase, he responded. So, isn’t that journalist also a racist then?
Breitbart reminded Maher that “there was no greater defender of Clarence Thomas than Rush Limbaugh.” The crowd laughed.
Dyson and Maher pushed back, at which point Breitbart chalked all of this “hypersensitive” race talk (and seemingly all racist accusations) to strong-armed indoctrination and intimidation by the powerful “black studies intelligentsia crowd” that forces other African Americans to give lip service to the belief that racism is everywhere.

None of these three people wanted to listen to the other. Their goal was to express an ideological point of view and to get the other to shut up or to contest it so heatedly that the reaction or rather the over-reaction would be interpreted as an admission that the ideological viewpoint can't be illegitimate if it can't be challenged rationally. My point is that in America, people talk about race the way they talk about God, Jesus, and religion. To them, facts don't matter since they already have the truth on the side and are fervent believers in their dogmas.

Counting the Blacks, the Arabs, and the Others

France has had a remarkable tradition (remarkable in every sense of the word) of not counting its minorities. This reluctance to use statistics to identify its minorities has made it harder for the State to fight discrimination or to even fight the increasing accepted idea that there are too many people from the wrong kind of minority groups in France. The problem is that there is no other to even start to deal with minorities and the problem, which they face without using statistics, which actually inform the country about its ethnic, racial make up or whatever else you want to use to acknowledge the fact that France in 2009 is very different from France in 1909. A sugary excerpt from Charles Bremner on this issue:

The idea has split the country -- and not always along the usual lines. Some anti-racism groups are heavily against it while others support it. Fadela Amara, the feminist activist of Algerian background who is Sarkozy's Minister for the Inner City, said: "Our country must not become a mosaic of communities. No-one must ever wear the Star of David again" -- a reference to the war.(...)Louis Schweitzer, head of the High Authority for the Struggle against Discriminations and Equality (Halde) is strongly opposed to ethnic statistics. "There is only one human race," he says in today's Libération. "In creating ethno-racial statistics you create a reality. You risk turning these categories into reality." 

It is very romantic and idealistic to believe that France is one republic, which shouldn't be divided by numbers even though those numbers reflect only a reality that is irrefutable. The trouble is that even in France, romance doesn't erase human prejudices, doesn't fight discrimination or facilitate integration. France has been increasingly divided by the fact that visible differences are still equated to foreignness and  have become the fantasies not only of the extreme right, but of those who believe that it is hard, not to say impossible, to be /to become a normal (read acceptable) French citizen when one looks a certain way, has a certain religion or comes from particular places in the world. It isn't pleasant to count the Blacks, the Arabs, and the others, but until Earth becomes a magical land where ethnicity, race, and all the other categories, which too many love to taut or to decry, don't matter, it is an act, which countries are going to have to do. 

The consequences of racial politics

In the Globe and Mail, an eye-opening article on the consequences of racial politics in Zimbabwe. One of them is the disappearance of White Farmers, who have had their farms taken away/invaded in the name of racial and social justice even though these type short-sighted actions have led to the famine in the country:

Nine years ago, Zimbabwe had about 4,300 white-owned commercial farms. Today only about 300 remain, and many are reduced to small plots of land. Many of the invaded farms are sitting idle or neglected despite a desperate need for food in Zimbabwe, where three-quarters of the population is dependent on food aid from foreign donors.
Largely because of the invasions, Zimbabwe's farm output has dropped by 50 to 70 per cent in the past seven years, and most people subsist on one meal a day.
After reaching a peak of brutal violence during the national election last June, the invasions stopped for a while. But in recent weeks they have accelerated again.

I'm wondering what factors would explain the fact that Zimbabwe is in ruins and that South Africa has been able so far to survive the same problems of race, social justice, and economic inequality. Zimbabwe got its independence in 1980. Apartheid ended in South Africa at the beginning of the nineties. Can the differences in their fates since then be solely justified by political factors?

Talking about IT

When Glenn Loury talks about race, I listen because he doesn't preach and is willing to go there intellectually without holding on to a complex of superiority or inferiority that would make discussion, challenges to his viewpoint impossible. Sugary excerpt:

No big city police officer is “colorblind” nor, arguably, can any afford to be. Crime and punishment in America have a color — just turn on a television, or open a magazine, or listen carefully to the rhetoric of a political campaign — and you will see what I mean. The fact is that, in this society as in any other, order is maintained by the threat and the use of force. We enjoy our good lives because we are shielded by the forces of law and order upon which we rely to keep the unruly at bay. Yet, in this society to an extent unlike virtually any other, those bearing the heavy burden of order-enforcement belong, in numbers far exceeding their presence in the population at large, to racially defined and historically marginalized groups. Why should this be so? And how can those charged with the supervision of our penal apparatus sleep well at night knowing that it is so?

America's unhealthy obsession with racial identities

Shelby Steele on why Republicans can't win over African Americans and other minorities:

American minorities of color -- especially blacks -- are often born into grievance-focused identities. The idea of grievance will seem to define them in some eternal way, and it will link them atavistically to a community of loved ones. To separate from grievance -- to say simply that one is no longer racially aggrieved -- will surely feel like an act of betrayal that threatens to cut one off from community, family and history. So, paradoxically, a certain chauvinism develops around one's sense of grievance. Today the feeling of being aggrieved by American bigotry is far more a matter of identity than of actual aggrievement.
And this identity calls minorities to an anticonservative orientation to American politics. It makes for an almost ancestral resistance to conservatism. One's identity of grievance is flattered by the moral activism of the left and offended by the invisible hand of the right. Minorities feel they were saved from oppression by the left's activism, not by the right's discipline. The truth doesn't matter much here (in fact it took both activism and principle, civil war and social movement, to end this oppression). But activism indicates moral anguish in whites, and so it constitutes the witness minorities crave. They feel seen, understood. With the invisible hand the special case of their suffering doesn't count for much, and they go without witness.

Americans don't know how to talk about ra.  Shelby Steele is no exception even though he is on to something, but misses the point by making race the "it" in that sickening way Americans always do. One of my contentions is that America voted for Obama in part because of this fact. It doesn't know how to get over its blemished past without deconstructing its heritage and undermining the foundations of its society and its future. What Americans love is to have lectures, sermons on Race where somebody stands as up Shelby Steele or as Barack Obama and says here is the truth, you must accept it and deal with it. They want somebody to either make feel responsible without making them feel ignorant, evil, and most of all, 100% guilty or to make them feel clean, good, and untouched by it all.
Steele wrote a book last year asserting that Obama couldn't make it to the White House because he wasn't specific enough and because his brand of politics had a glass ceiling short of the highest office in the land. He was wrong because he was too caught up in the moment (to be fair, I was too) to realize that Americans's relationship with race would lead to want change for the sake of change to turn the page and start the future of America on a blank slate like an addict starts over her/his life forgetting that s/he will always be tempted by crack or whatever drug brought her/ him down.

Useless advice

I’m getting increasingly annoyed with the people who convinced themselves and told the American electorate that Barack Obama was the best politician since JFK and who are now giving him advice about how to be his best self, that is of course the self that they thought that he was when they chose him. This advice, from E.J. Dionne in the Washington Post just takes the cake, can somebody pass me the hopium:

Obama and his speechwriters need to seek inspiration, again, from FDR's fireside chats -- and explain what's happening to a petrified nation and world. His aides promise more of this, and they need to get moving. (...) Obama's calm and deliberative style is one of his greatest strengths. He doesn't want precipitous action in the midst of an economic collapse to come back to haunt us all. But sometimes excessive caution can be as dangerous as impetuousness. The president has no choice but to be bold. If there is one thing he should fear, it is fear itself.

Does Obama has the choice not be FDR to be just himself (we don't who that is, but I'm sure time will force him to reveal himself)? Is Obama allowed to fail without his failure being a racial and social catastrophe of epic proportion rather than just one, which demonstrates again that sometimes experience and real stuff matter more than hope and dreams especially in times of crisis? I guess that some are realizing too late, that America needed a good and potentially great president more than it needed a black, multiracial one. Let's hope for America's sake that fate is kind and he will be both although few seriously tried to find out because they were in love with the idea that voting for Obama proved that they were the better people and were cleansing America from its “sins.”

The first Biracial president

Finally, Marie Arana, in the Washington Post, daresto say what I’ve been arguing all along: Obama is biracial. He shouldn’t be reluctant or scared to say it because America still has a problem with “race” which makes Americans unable to accept that being biracial or multiracial and identifying one as such doesn’t mean to deny one’s identity, but rather accepting all of its components by refusing to choose and by embracing the totality and the diversity of one’s heritage. To me the reluctance of Obama to say proudly that he is biracial tells me something about him that makes it very difficult to believe in him as an agent of change and to be convinced that his deeds will up to his rhetoric: his brilliance as a writer and the exceptional nature of his personal story don’t make him different from any other politician, at least not yet. Sugary excerpt:

Unless the one-drop rule still applies, our president-elect is not black.

 We call him that -- he calls himself that -- because we use dated language and logic. After more than 300 years and much difficult history, we hew to the old racist rule: Part-black is all black. Fifty percent equals a hundred. There's no in-between.

That was my reaction when I read these words on the front page of this newspaper the day after the election: "Obama Makes History: U.S. Decisively Elects First Black President."

The phrase was repeated in much the same form by one media organization after another. It's as if we have one foot in the future and another still mired in the Old South. We are racially sophisticated enough to elect a non-white president, and we are so racially backward that we insist on calling him black. Progress has outpaced vocabulary.

To me, as to increasing numbers of mixed-race people, Barack Obama is not our first black president. He is our first biracial, bicultural president. He is more than the personification of African American achievement. He is a bridge between races, a living symbol of tolerance, a signal that strict racial categories must go.

 

 

Desperately seeking a French Obama

The Guardian has a worth reading article on Rachida Dati,Sarkozy’s Minister of Justice, whom had become last year the symbol of a new France because of her Moroccan and Algerian origins. The article is titled “the rise and the fall of Dati” which I think is misleading because Dati’s popularity was always in limbo; it was based on the French hopes and dreams that she could prove to them that integration doesn’t have to painful and doesn't require more efforts on their part. The fact that Dati was a newcomer meant that it was always going to be difficult for her to live up to the hype. She had never dealt with people from her new milieu. It is always harder for symbols to last when they make mistakes, which reinforce the fact that their particularities make them neither particular nor extraordinary. That is at the crux of the matter because it seems that France’s Obama obsession is like its obsession with Zidane because it shows that it wants its immigrants and minorities to be special, to be extraordinary before it accepts them. What is interesting is that Angelique Chrisafis, the author of the article, deals with this new, obsessive, and desperate quest of French to find their Obama. She shows that Dati that it has both helped and handicapped by the French obsession to find or to grow little Obamas in their banlieues. Sugary excerpt:

Dati has been hailed as the nearest thing France's fractured society has to Barack Obama. The French justice minister was raised in poverty on a housing estate in deepest Burgundy. Sarkozy said appointing her sent a message "to all the children of France that with merit and effort everything becomes possible". He also hoped it would neutralise the bad feeling after the riots on the run-down housing estates and his comment likening the wayward youths to scum.

Despite scepticism that this "window-dressing" at the top did little to change the discrimination poisoning French society, Dati immediately became one of the most popular figures in France. The speed of her rise has been staggering. But that of her fall could be too. The Dati fairytale has started to go spectacularly wrong.

[…] Mainland France currently has only one non-white MP and, in a recent poll, 80% of French people said they might vote for a black person at president, but only 58% could bring themselves to vote for one of millions of the French citizens of Algerian, Moroccan or Tunisian descent. As a role model, Dati is perhaps not the easiest person to warm to. But her appointment under the patronage of Sarkozy, and more importantly her survival, which now rests entirely on his whim, shows the real depths of the problem for minorities in France, who feel they are not being allowed to rise of their own accord. Fadela Amara, another woman of Algerian parentage whom Sarkozy appointed as a junior minister, says an Obama would have got nowhere in France. "It couldn't happen in France unless Sarkozy turned emperor and appointed a black president himself," she says.

There is something morbid and self-derogating about the French obsession with Obama because it is a way to look for quick answers to complex issues, which cannot be resolved by finding perfect people who make perfect speeches about hope and its audacity. Rachida Dati shows that Sarkozy may love America, but that he doesn’t get it and more gravely doesn’t have an intimate connection to France to understand that fundamental and existential reasons explain why the United States is the country of Walt Disney and France the one of Charles de Gaulle. In other words, America not only has a different history and views of race, but it also is more willing to believe in Fairy tales. America is still an adolescent country, which believes that both childhood and adolescence are the best periods in one’s life. France doesn’t have the same history and views of race and cannot therefore look to America for solutions even though it may look to it for inspiration. France is an old country. The French are less willing to accept political experimentation even though they may long for it. They always convince themselves that they want political experimentation, American-like hopeful politics because it is new and hip when it is happening in America and because it is always hard and melancholic for grownups to realize that they have lost their innocence and have become cynical. It is as dreaming of marrying Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman, but in real life, knowing that a former prostitute cannot become the housewife of a billionaire. It is hard to be an adult in front of an adolescent who still believes s/he can fly.

In any case, there is already a French Obama, but the only trouble is that she is a white woman, which means that she has no excuse for being naively hopeful, she was born in Dakar, she has four kids, and her hopeful speeches sound menacing and Forrest Gump-like to the French ear. She isn’t as popular as Obama in France because she is more French that he is (which makes her better and more political in my opinion) and thus more provencal and more difficult to be idolized by those who have given to Obama God-like Status in a country that he doesn’t know.

 

 

The perpetual quest for identity

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I agree almost totally with Kenan Malik except on his views of Multiculturalism, which suffers, in my opinion, from a lack of nuance and willingness to contest received ideas on that subject.

The power of specificity

Malcolm Gladwell on race and specificity:

What I think can rescue us from our discomfiture about talking about race is specificity. It is not better or worse to be a particular race. It just depends on what you are doing. If you want to be an airline pilot, say, you might have an advantage if you are Western. If you want to do advanced maths, it might help if you are Asian.

Color and common sense

Finally, somebody, David Aaronovitch, who expresses very well part of my beef with Obama and his so-called post racial America, which is in fact one where being biracial or multiracial means having to choose a side in order not to be invisible and to be successful. Unfortunately, Aaronovitch is a Brit, which may explain why he gets what Americans in their euphoria, ecstasy, and hopefulness that a symbol can get them past the dark spots of their history, have trouble understanding. I have to say that I respect Tiger Woods a lot more than Obama because he has always refused to be called Black or African American not because he felt that it would have been prejudicial to him but because he understood that saying that he was Black might have helped society to categorize him, but would have meant erasing part of his identity since his mother is Thai:

If I have heard one phrase in continual use about Barack Obama, it is about how he “represents”, in himself, whatever virtue or trend the user wishes to associate him with. In particular, of course, he is continually referred to as the first African-American” or “black” president of the United States.

It seems pedantic, and something worse, to argue that Obama is, in fact, mixed race. In some mouths this sounds like - and probably is - an attempt to deprive black people of a victory. It's a bit like when the inevitable stupid soul, unaware of the origin of the term, objects that, since Arabs are Semites, one cannot appropriate “anti-Semitism” to mean Jew-hatred. I always suspect the motives behind such plausibility.

And in the case of the President-elect there do seem to be two Obamas. The Hawaii Obama, brought up on that mixed-race island group by a white mother and two white grandparents, and a later Chicago Obama, living in the black community, marrying a black woman, attending a black Church and seeking his lost black father.

“He had to leave the island to find himself as a black man,” David Maraniss wrote in The Washington Post.

“He's black,” a friend said to me yesterday. “Most people would look at him and see him as being black.” Certainly 1924 Virginians would. And if the man see himself as being black, then where's the argument? Except, he isn't. To say that Mr Obama is black is to say, in effect, that his mother had no race or that her race was somehow obliterated by her choice of husband. Is to say that no one much had realised, had quite noticed, that her son was, in fact, mixed race. Is to say that being mixed race is not also to be something.

Sometimes, facts are just too stubborn

The best joke I've heard all year about the American presidential elections: How do you call a métis, a multiracial man who has successfully run as black man, has had the media eating in the palm of his hand, has raised the most money than any presidential candidate in the history,  is able to make Americans believe that he is the One and that racism would be the only reason for his improbable loss? A shoo-in to become president of the United States and to replace Jesus as the Messiah.

The futility of racial identity

As almost always, I agree with Glenn Loury when he argues pertinently and in my opinion convincingly that a life defined by racial identity is one poorly lived. I think that a society where racial identity is more important than any other factor to define one's politics and one's life choices is an unhealthy one. I'm trying to convince myself that the United States is so much better off than South Africa when it comes to the issue of race and I have to admit that there are times that I have to question my need to believe that that affirmation is true.

Defending the use of the "N" word

I don't agree with Goldberg's reasoning, but it's interesting to hear a different point of view.

Globalized beauty

Yasmin Alibhai-Brown on racism, dark skin and globalized beauty:

For those who make and break images, decide who is gorgeous and who is not, light skin and hair and eyes easily please the eye, affirm superior human status. Racism is a given, an understanding infused through the business. Top model agencies will tell you that eager Asian, Arab and black models may look exquisite and flawless, but find it almost impossible to enter, survive or let alone thrive in that hostile habitat. I have written about this abhorrent exclusivity for more than 20 years and to do so again feels like failure.

The beauty and fashion industries still maintain a closed shop when it comes to the selection and promotion of models. In women's magazines, on catwalks, even shop dummies, dark skin is rarely seen. They say it is because customers are put off by such unexpected, outlandish images of loveliness even though a recent special issue of Italian Vogue featured only black models and was sold out worldwide.

[…] And now, with 21st-century globalisation, the ugly rejection of darkness is getting even worse. European definitions of attractiveness – from thin body shape to light colouring – are sweeping the non-western world, making most populations feel envious and sometimes desperate. Ten years ago beauty lightening creams had all but vanished from these places as native pride grew and health risks were better understood. Today these products are shifting like never before. A trader in Acton has just been convicted for selling banned, toxic, whitening creams which can cause burns and rashes.

The issue is a lot more complicated than Alibhai-Brown is willing to acknowledge for after all self-derogation has as many internal factors as it has external factors. It is impossible to watch this commercial of a popular lightening cream featuring a famous actor (Shahrukh Khan) and not to realize that the issue is about much more than the dark color of one’s skin.

It's always about race even when it isn't

Nicholas Kirstoff makes the following point about Mugabe, Africa, dictactors and race which I believe shows that he knows nothing about African history:

Africa's rulers often complain, with justice, that the West's perceptions of the continent are disproportionately shaped by buffoons and tyrants rather than by the increasing number of democratically elected presidents presiding over 6 percent growth rates. But as long as African presidents mollycoddle Mugabe, they are branding Africa with his image.

[...] In a 1987 essay in Foreign Affairs, Mugabe called on the U.S. to impose sanctions on white-ruled South Africa for engaging in a "vicious and ugly civil war" against its own people. Mugabe demanded that the world "accept the value of sanctions as a means of raising the cost" of brutal misrule.

If only Mugabe were a white racist! Then the regional powers might stand up to him. For the sake of Zimbabweans, we should be just as resolute in confronting African tyrants who are black as in confronting those who are white.

Mugabe is still in power not because he is black but for the simple reasons that he is part of a small group, which African leaders have always tolerated anti-colonial fighters who become despots. The fact is that never in African postcolonial history have its political leaders pressured a dictator who fought for the independence of his country to give up power and that seldom have they even inserted themselves in the domestic affairs of other countries by asserting human rights and democratic principles. In other words, asserting that everything would be different if Mugabe were white is both misleading, dumb and ignorant because it is like asserting that Saddam Hussein would not have been in power for so long if he had been a woman which is pointless and thus, a disgraceful redherring. Mugabe hasn't become an ancient dictator because he is black, he is still in power because of whom he once was and because Zimbabwe is a country which, just like Myammar, the world, not just Africa, can afford to sacrifice and to be governed savagely.

The French and Obama

Dominique Moïsi had a syrupy op-ed in the Financial Times earlier in the week in which he argued that Barack Obama holds a mirror for the French in the sense that he shows them what they want to their own immigrants and blacks to become. Sugary excerpt:

In France, the only other country in the world that sees itself imbued with a universal message, the US has, at least since the second world war, acted as a mirror reflecting the country's deepest fears and hopes. The huge audience that gathered last week at the invitation of a "pro-Obama French committee" in the main amphitheatre of the Institute of Political Studies in Paris expressed, of course, a rejection of the Bush years. But it translated above all a longing for the return of an America capable of constituting once again a source of hope and no longer a cause of fear for the world - an America that would be admired for its recovered essence and not loathed for its abysmal performances.

This America is of course incarnated by Mr Obama. In symbolic terms, the fact that, in the US, black could have become the "colour of hope" is a source of both French admiration for America and self-examination for France, a country that has yet to come to terms with its colonial heritage. It is therefore logical that two questions dominated the pro-Obama debate in Paris, a debate from which foreign policy considerations were largely absent - as if, in the minds of the French gathered there, America the model was already prevailing over America the actor.

Moïsi blinded by his enthusiasm is unable to see the whole picture, which shows that the French love Barack Obama because he is a empty slate that has become a symbol. Obama is like a Hollywood star not an American politician in the sense that the French don’t know anything about his politics, his policies, his ideology, or even who he is but loves his acting and the role that he is playing, the part of the black man who is going to change America and make it more open to the world. The French love Barack Obama like they love Woody Allen.  Americans are still the best at selling universal dreams and big ideas like the one that one man can redeem a country and make it less unFrench, Bushlike, more civilized, and thus, more open to the world. The crucial point is that Barack Obama is loved like so many French love (loved) Rachida Dati and Rama Yade (who have become less popular when they started to be less symbolic and to play a role in partisan politics), the minorities who are part of the Fillon the Sarkozy’s government. He is loved because he is attractive, photogenic, can give great speeches and great interviews. Obama is loved because in both France and America, it is a lot easier to love minorities when they become a symbol. People are “different” become hip and leaders of a movement when they choose to become all things to all people by reassuring about their so-called shameful past. They do so by emphasizing the fact that their success is an unbelievable dream, which their country and its citizen should be proud of and by avoiding the nits and grits of politics by cultivating the appearance to be above its “dirtiness” and accepting to become celebrities.

Dirty

This is a good read to understand why so few americans vote and why American democracy is, in my opinion, in trouble because its politics bring out the worst in people and its media.

The impossibility to say Goodbye to all that

Interesting review on the Prospect of Marek Kohn’s book, Trust: Self-interest and the Common Good and Kenan Malik, Strange Fruit: Why Both Sides are Wrong in the Race Debate :

Trust, the topic of Marek Kohn's book of the same name, is what arises from this discrimination—and Kohn rightly recognises that trust promotes both self-interest and the common good. As individuals, we toil to build reputations as a way of advertising our trustworthiness and of attracting like-valued people. Indeed, it is hard to overstate the importance of co-operative social systems to our psychology and social behaviour. If trust is the fuel of our co-operation, reputation is the currency with which we buy it. Apes, dolphins and ants don't feel shame or engage in honour killings.
This view of what makes humans tick also helps us to understand the awkwardness of the public debate about multiculturalism. Malik asserts that there is a tendency for what he calls the liberal left to "resurrect racial concepts" in framing their views on multiculturalism. Thus we grant authenticity, and equal but separate status, to the different desires and practices of some groups on the basis of their deep cultural heritage: consider the recent uproar over sharia law. Malik doesn't suggest these liberals are racist, just that the language they use—of ethnicity, authenticity and identity—is laden with racial baggage and reminiscent of that used by the old racists when justifying their exclusionary views.
So how is it that race and ethnicity find their way so easily, even if inadvertently, into discussions of multiculturalism? The answer has nothing to do with racism and a lot to do with statistics. Humans, as I have described, evolved to live in small isolated groups and are finely tuned to seek people of common values. Like it or not, common culture (common practices, expectations, and beliefs) correlates, even if imperfectly, with common biological ancestry. This means that markers of race and ethnicity come to be taken as markers of common values.
So does this mean that, deep down, we are all racists? No: we are too clever and self-interested for that. The very social feature that makes us unique—our ability to co-operate with unrelated others—makes us, uniquely among animals, capable of moving beyond the politics of race and ethnicity. Were we as mindless as apes and ants, this would be impossible. Their behaviour is based almost exclusively on common genetic ancestry. Ours is not.
We humans will get along with anyone who wishes to play the co-operative game with us—and that part of our nature will always trump guesswork based on markers of ethnicity or other features. The key is to provide or create stronger signs of trust and common values than are provided by the statistically useful but imprecise markers of ethnicity.

I’ve learned in the last few months that it is impossible to discuss race and ethnicity, in the United States anyway, without marketing the discussion, without making it seem that the end it will lead to a prepackaged political goal. The goal is to avoid stepping on any toes and to ignore the complexities of the subject by making it seem as if the world is divided between racists and the good people who should pat themselves on the back for being free of any racial prejudices. I don’t like the way people talk about race in America. I don’t like the fact that it can be used as a bargaining tool. I don’t like the fact that America has trouble engaging into a constructive discussion about race because it views itself as a moral country, which has therefore dealing with social issues any other way than making wrong sins for which it must atone for, and regret repentance and penitence. Race in America cannot be separated from the fact that America is a religious nation, which cannot accept its own frailty.

To be a beautiful French Black talented woman and to have no exit

Ramatoulaye Rama Yade is a beautiful French black and talented French politician who is sometimes referred as Sarkozy’s Condoleezza Rice because she works under the Foreign Minister (Bernard Kouchner) and is the Human rights Secretary. With all of her assets, one would have thought that Yade would be ensured to have a bright political future in France, but as Tim King asserts correctly she stuck in a mold due to her race and gender and may have nowhere to go:

[…] she is in a closed cubby-hole of a ministry, with no way out. Think about it. The ministry of human rights isn’t really a ministry – it has no mission, no agenda, no crack team to back up the otherwise empty words which is all she can offer. As Azouz Begag found in the previous government, working as a coloured face in a meaningless ministry like “Equal Opportunities” or “Human Rights” is a one-way ticket in the wrong direction.

Rama Yade has learnt the hard way that she can’t mention human rights abuses in “le pays des droits de l’homme” itself (in the overcrowded prisons, or the repatriation of sans papiers): when she tried, going to see some immigrant squatters faced with eviction in a Paris suburb, she was keenly and patronisingly reprimanded by her seniors. If she can’t mention France, she can only pass judgement on other countries. But the countries with human rights abuses are the very countries where the market for French goods is still strong, or with which France needs to remain on good terms (the USA for example with Guantanamo Bay). Twice now she has put into words what most of us think: first about Colonel Gaddafi being a dictator and more recently about the Olympic Games. But both times she has been made to look ridiculous by her senior colleagues. When the President went with a huge entourage and much pomp to China last November, he made the last minute decision to leave Rama Yade ignominiously twiddling her thumbs at home.

Now she knows she has the choice of either speaking out and having her wrists slapped, thus being made to look a fool in public, or saying nothing and being forgotten. Either way she is side-lined for the next job. For apart from the fact that she clearly has very definite thoughts about human rights, it is probable she accepted the job as a stepping stone, and so she needs to shine. Her contemporary and white male equivalent, Laurent Wauquiez, has just been promoted from spokesman (where the job-definition is to shine) to junior minister in charge of employment – a real job with targets and measurable success (or failure). She is stuck, losing out whether she acts or does nothing. The Ministry for Human Rights is an empty shop window. [Emphasis added].

The problem for Yade is that what made her succeed quickly, her smarts, her guts, her gender, and her race, is not what is limiting her options and putting a ceiling on her future even though the possibilities given whom she is, what she represents and what she can do should be limitless. In France, politicians don’t know what to do with talented members of minorities who are ambitious and won’t shut up after they are given a ministry. The fact that Rama Yade finds herself stuck so soon in her political career, that she can never escape the received ideas that when you are Black and French and a minister, you should be satisfied and not only ask, but not want more, shows us that France still hasn’t fully accepted that it is the motherland and not the borrowed country of people who do not look Gaul and yet want to be treat as French and not as symbols. The trouble with people who are viewed as symbols is that they almost never last because as the novelty of their presence and success fade, they become ordinary. People, in politics, don’t like it when minorities in politics are ordinary, they want them to be special, to make them feel great about themselves for voting for a difference that will change the world and not just do what politicians do.

Reverse Colonization and indigenous rights

From the Brussels Journals, this sugary excerpt on the supposedly increased urgency for true Europeans to create an indigenous people movement:

Genetically speaking, native Europeans have thus lived longer on the same continent than have Native Americans. […] Yet a Scottish councillor, Sandy Aitchison, was chastised for using the term "indigenous" about native Brits. Why is it considered ridiculous or evil if Europeans assert our rights? Is it because we are white? Everybody's supposed to keep their culture, except people of European origins? Is that it? Why is colonialism bad, except when my country, which has no colonial history, gets colonized by Third World peoples?

Western Europeans have in recent years accepted more immigration in a shorter period of time than any society has ever done peacefully in human history. If we want a break we have the right to do so. What we are dealing with is not "immigration" but colonization, and in the case of Muslims, internationally organized attempts to conquer of our countries. If non-Europeans have the right to resist colonization then so do Europeans. Switzerland, Sweden, Finland and Norway hardly have any colonial history at all. The Germans had a colony in Namibia. Why should they accept millions of Turkish Muslims, who have a thousand years of brutal colonial history of their own, because of this? There are hardly any Britons in Pakistan today, so why should the Brits allow huge numbers of Pakistanis to settle in Britain? And if the Algerians can demand independence from France, why can't the French demand independence from Algerians?

I like cultural diversity and would hope this could be extended to include my culture, too. Or is Multiculturalism simply a hate ideology designed to unilaterally dismantle European culture and the peoples who created it? If people in Cameroon or Cambodia can keep their culture, why can't the peoples who produced Beethoven, Newton, Copernicus, Michelangelo and Louis Pasteur do the same? As Rabbi Aryeh Spero points out, European elites insist "on the primacy of indigenous cultures and religions when speaking of other faraway regions, yet find such insistence arrogant when it concerns the indigenous culture of its own lands."

My first reaction when reading these arguments is to be astonished by the fact that it is being made seriously without the person making realizing their stupidity and irrationality. Then, of course there is the question of how would indigenous Europeans would be determined, what criteria would be used, genetics, race, or something else? I wonder if for example, if somebody who, as Alexandre Dumas, has some non-European blood in her/his ancestry would be considered indigenous or if someone who looks “un-European” but who can trace her/his roots in Europe would be considered Europeans. The idea is so ridiculous because it is a gimmick created to make cheap points about European identity and immigration. What it shows that implicit within the concept of reverse colonization is the idea that assertion that the ideals behind colonialism are righteous for after all, blood, genes are everything, one has the right blood or does not, and there can be any mixing and everyone, everything must remain at their place. I think those who believe that the true Europeans, the pure bloods should start an indigenous movement to stop the so-called colonization of their continent should instead invest their time and energy in creating a time machine. This would give them a better chance to change history, to pre-empt any attempts by their ancestors to go outside of Europe, to mix with the wrong people, to civilize “Europeanize” them and to initiate what is called, today, globalization.

Bluff and the race card

I find this video fascinating given the Democratic primary season and the fact that it has been about nothing much but race, gender, new politics, old politics and change rather than about substantive issues I find it incredible that Democrats and the American left are unable to have a political election between two attractive candidates without diabolization and unnecessary destruction, which leads me to believe that the Democratic party and American liberalism don't know what they are about, but that they only know what they are against. This Fact explains why it is necessary for the American to manufacture an enemy, a foe to beat in an attempt to avoid having to fight for something rather than against something, and to have an identity based on elements other than rejections and hatred.

Technology, ethnic conflicts, and Africa

Via the Globe and Mail, Tim Querengesser has an interesting article on the role that technology, particularly cellphones, plays inciting ethnic tensions in Africa, particularly in Kenya. Sugary excerpt:

The numbers are striking. Mobile phones are everywhere in Africa, despite its relative poverty. In fact, Kibera, Kenya's largest slum, is one of the country's biggest customers for mobile airtime.

And demand keeps growing. In 1999, one in 2,300 had a mobile phone. By 2004, it was one in 10. Now, it is one in four; of the nearly one billion people in Africa, nearly 100 million have a mobile.

The technology has pole-vaulted many African countries beyond their crumbling infrastructure and into the information age. But it has also exposed them to risks. No other continent struggles with ethnic conflict like Africa. With SMS the preferred method to communicate (they're cheaper than calls) and with cellphone-happy Kenya now picking up the pieces after ethnic war, the potential for SMS to incite hate is coming into focus.

[...] During Kenya's constitutional referendum in 2005, politicians preyed on tribal hatreds to sway votes. At the time, vernacular radio was the medium most infected with hate speech.

This time around, tribe was all important and SMS took the lead. "It's easier to use SMS than radio," said Mr. Mucheke. "There's more censorship on radio. There are no controls at the moment over SMS. That made it the most efficient and easiest medium to proliferate hate speech."

The moral block people have to spreading hate is easily overcome when a simple push of a button is all that's needed, adds Mr. Mucheke.

The trouble is that in most African countries, the State isn’t strong enough to stop the use of technology to encourage ethnic hatred and incite racial violence. Moreover, the most disturbing element of the story in that in Kenya and in too many other African countries, different ethnic groups are still viewing themselves not as part of one country and illegitimate holders of political or economical power when the two don’t come hand and hand.

Libertinism, the Death of authority and of the West

Sugary excerpt from Sally Thomas’s review of Diane West’s The Death of the Grown-up:

Take the parents whose idea of good, safe teenage fun is to hire a stripper to cover herself in whipped cream, so that their son and his football teammates can lick it off, or the mother who sues the school district to protest her daughter’s suspension, because official policies do not spell out explicitly that oral sex on the school bus is against the rules. Take “Cucumber Girl,” teenage star of a sex-education video intended for California tenth-graders, who “chirpily instruct[s] viewers, in modified Val-Gal-speak, on the proper way to don a condom,” using a cucumber as a demonstration model. Take the middle-age Batavia, New York, Rotarians posing nude for a fund-raising calendar. Take them all, please, back to Central Casting.

At least, that’s the tempting response. It’s tempting to argue, But most of us aren’t like that. After all, most of us aren’t. We don’t hire strippers to entertain our children. We don’t, as in another case West cites, hire out hotel suites to give our children a “safe” place to experiment with alcohol and drugs. Some of us go so far as to keep our children home—for the day, or for the next twelve years—to limit the influence of the Cucumber Girls, at least in our own families. As William Grimes of the New York Times points out, “In one case after another, the community reacts with outrage, or a judge throws the argument out of court. Common sense and local standards, it seems, do occasionally score a victory.”

It’s that occasionally, however, that’s telling, and scarily so. Why does “one case after another” come up in the first place? Why do “community standards” only “occasionally” prevail over absurdity? And what happens when the “community standards” themselves verge on the absurd?

[…]To give context to these contemporary events, West constructs a historical trajectory that arcs from the World War II–era entry of the word teenager into the popular lexicon, to a future of multicultural uncertainty. By her account, the rise of the student radical in the 1960—and the accompanying acquiescence of sycophantic college administrators and parents who laud destruction of property and the hurling of mindless obscenities as “acts of conscience”—begets, in an unbroken lineage, the Islamic terrorist threat of our own era, “The Real Culture War.”

[…] What, exactly, is everyone afraid of? Mainly, says West, they are afraid of defying the cultural narrative, also in development for the last thirty years or so, which asserts that no culture may claim to have advanced any further, or to have accrued any greater wisdom, than any other culture.

[…] On the geopolitical level, West claims, the same argument currently carries the day: Who are we to say that blowing people up is ‘gross?’ That’s their culture, whether they’re Islamists or Sinn Fein. In other words, when “community standards” go global, we’re the spring-break parents of the civilized world, and this does not bode well for civilization.

I have to admit that I am confused for I don’t get the point between Libertinism, the supposed death of the Grown-up, and of the West. Both Thomas and West are taking so many detours to avoid stating what they really mean that at the end of it, I am with my head spinning wondering what is their point and why they don’t have the guts to be politically incorrect to the end and state directly what they mean. To me, this real debate is really that too many people feel that the West is threatened by a bunch of elitists who reject the laws of nature, their past, and their culture because they want to be liked by the rest and because they refuse to give childish fantasies and to accept that not everything and everyone is equaled and more importantly that evil exists and must be combated. This debate takes me back to the second round of the French election. Sarkozy promised to bury the inheritance of May 68, which was responsible to the fact that French society was too permissive and too amoral. Tolerance for the intolerable had become the greatest virtue when the French needed to work more and to have a state, which behaved as the dad in a traditional family by not rewarding laziness, transgressions, and excesses. Sarkozy was thus promising to make France more traditional and more Western by returning it to its real natural values. All we need to understand that this type of grandiose statements about the West needing to be itself and to respect its values is about as authentic and noble a quest as Manifest Destiny is to examine what Sarkozy has to done so far to epitomize his own high moral aspirations. He has been such a libertine that the French are missing old presidents who may have been bad managers, but which were more demurred. The real issue is really one of identity not of values because what Thomas and West are really saying that the West is becoming like the Rest and that is a problem because the Rest can never be as good and as virtuous as the West no matter what how hard it tries. In others words, the world is populated with the right and the wrong kind of people and it is going to hell because the right kind of people are behaving badly by admiring the wrong kind of people and refusing to respect their rightness. That's the reason why the right kind of people should have more babies and should accept who they are.

Apocalypse and Europe

Well nothing about this video is new. People have been preaching the fact demographics are everything forever. What the fact that people believe that France and Europe will die because they are not making the right babies show is that to them once again blood and genes mean everything. Thus, one is born and cannot become French, European, and Western.  Integration or even assimilation doesn't work, which explains why immigration threatens national identities since immigrants always remain "the other" and always dilute the sanctity of French, European, and Western identities, which of course have never changed since the beginning of times. We all know that Sarkozy is as much a Gaul as de Gaulle.

Africa, Paternalism and Silliness

The silliest article I’ve read in a while is Michael Knox Beran is the City Journal on what he considers to be "Trendy Paternalism" in Africa promoted by celebrities and of course elites with simplistic views of Africa and selfish motives.  Long sugary excerpt:

If paternalism doesn’t work, why does the paternalist mentality persist? Joseph Conrad suggested an answer in his 1902 novella Heart of Darkness. Conrad’s antihero, Kurtz, is a man of benevolent intention who goes to Africa with grandiose dreams of saving people but who ends by slaughtering those natives who resist his hunt for ivory. The story’s narrator, Marlow, finds a report that Kurtz prepared for the International Society for the Suppression of Savage Customs. Kurtz, Marlow says, “began with the argument that we whites, from the point of development we had arrived at, ‘must necessarily appear to them [savages] in the nature of supernatural beings—we approach them with the might of a deity,’ and so on, and so on. ‘By the simple exercise of our will we can exert a power for good practically unbounded.’ ” The thesis of Sachs’s The End of Poverty is not essentially different. He, too, believes that Westerners “can exert a power for good practically unbounded” over people who have not reached our “point of development.”

The patina of benevolence, Conrad suggests, often conceals a messianic narcissism, an incipient megalomania: Kurtz spent his days in Africa “getting himself adored.” Egotism and the desire for adoration are useful stimulants when they spur people to produce things that other people want or need. But it is a tawdry ambition that deters, as the paternalist philosophy does, people from realizing their own potential.

Reading Conrad, one is uneasily reminded of today’s Africrats. Under the guise of helping Africans, they aggrandize themselves, burnish their fame—and, not least, get themselves adored. Their tours of Africa are exercises in hero worship, part Roman triumph, part Felliniesque spectacle. The landing of the jet on some remote shimmering tarmac; the heat of the African sun; the exotic savor of the desert or of the jungle air; the fawning masses: all contribute to the narcotic spell that these progresses cast over those who undertake them.

Then comes the encounter between the benign magician—the Prospero from the northern latitudes—and the Suffering African. Amid a glitter of flashbulbs, the august tourist, like a monarch touching for the King’s Evil, lays hands on the dying AIDS patient or the undernourished child. Bobby Kennedy and Princess Diana perfected the art with which the superstar feels another’s pain; Bono, Madonna, and Angelina Jolie have carried on the tradition. A messianic odor clings to Sachs’s account of this celebrity satrapy, in which the superstars figure both as agents of grace and as high priests of a cult: “The Live 8 concerts, Bono’s ONE campaign, Angelina Jolie’s work for the United Nations, and many other acts of leadership and grace are drawing millions of eager individuals into a new commitment to work for the end of poverty, and thereby for a world of peace and shared well-being.”

The fact that Beran uses Joseph Conrad to teach its readers about Africa and to make his point about he considers to be paternalism shows that he does neither understand his subject nor seeks to understand it for he isn’t concerned about Africa or Africans, but rather about what he views as the bigger danger, liberal and hollywood elites who believe enough in their principles to become activists. After all, Beran looks with contempt to those people and tries to bind them with Conrad and his Heart of Darkness in a cynical and fanatical attempt to continue old and futile ideological wars in the West between the left and the right. That’s why Beran’s article is insulting because he objectifies and instrumentalizes Africa and Africans the same way he accuses others to do it. He misdirects constantly the attention of the reader in order to avoid answering the essential question which doesn’t interest him and which he can’t answer because of his lack of knowledge and pompousness: is Africa such a different place, so unlike the West, so encrusted in the Heart of Darkness that it must be left alone and that any attempt to help, with good, bad or naïve motives, is paternalism? 

I can’t answer yes to this question because I believe that Africa is part of the world. Africa isn’t a sacred place where people are not people and where humanity is closer to abnormality or to savagery. What is paternalist is precisely the notion that Africa is only a place for specialists, that Africanity is so different from humanity that people should leave it alone. Beran believes that Africa is the way it is and that Africans are the way they are because nature, god, or whatever else wanted them to be that way so any attempt to mess with the order of things is tantamount to playing god and to be indeed paternalistic.

Critiquing Post-Colonial Thinking

Achille Mbembe gives the following definition of Post-Colonial thinking:

In postcolonial thinking, race is the wild region, the beast, of European humanism. To borrow Castoriadis's terms on racism, I'd say that the beast puts it more or less this way: "I alone possess value. But I can only be of value, as myself, if others, as themselves, are without value".
Postcolonial thinking aims to take the beast's skeleton apart, to flush out its favourite places of habitation. More radically, it seeks to know what it is to live under the beast's regime, what kind of life it offers, and what sort of death people die from. It shows that there is, in European colonial humanism, something that has to be called unconscious self-hatred. Racism in general, and colonial racism in particular, represents the transference of this self-hatred to the Other.
There is a second level in the postcolonial critique of European humanism and universalism which, if the term had not given rise to so many misunderstandings, could be called biopolitical. The face of Europe which was experienced by the colony (and before that, under slavery, by the "plantation"), and which gradually became familiar, was far from being that of liberty, equality and fraternity. The totem which colonized peoples discovered behind the mask of humanism and universalism was not only deaf and blind most of the time, it was also, above all, characterized by the desire for its own death, but insofar as this death was necessarily conveyed through that of others, it was a delegated death.
It was also a place where law had nothing to do with justice but, on the contrary, was a way of starting wars, continuing them and perpetuating them; and above all a place where wealth was but a means of exercising over others the right of life and death. As a result it could be said of postcolonial thinking that it is not a critique of power as usually understood, but of force – a force that is incapable of transformation. Once again it is Fanon who has analyzed, better than anyone else, this kind of necropolitical force which, in passing through fiction, becomes sick of life or else, in an act of permanent reversion, takes death for life and life for death. That's why the colonial relationship fluctuates constantly between the desire to exploit the other (seen as racially inferior) and the temptation to eliminate him, to exterminate him.
What – thirdly - characterises postcolonial thinking is entanglement and concatenation, unveiled chiefly through its critique of identity and subjectivity. From this viewpoint it is opposed to a particular Western illusion, that there can be no subject other than in the circular, permanent referral to oneself, to an essential and inexhaustible singularity. In countering this, postcolonial thinking stresses the fact that identity arises from multiplicity and dispersion, that self-referral is only possible in the in-between, in the gap between mark and demark, in co-constitution. In this situation colonisation no longer appears as mechanical and unilateral domination forcing the subjugated into silence and inaction. Quite the reverse – the colonized person is a living, talking, conscious, active individual whose identity arises from a three-pronged movement of violation, erasure and self-rewriting.

I don’t believe in Post-Colonial thinking. No, I shouldn’t say that because it delegitimizes the criticisms that I’m about to make to explain why I feel uncomfortable with not only the expression “Post-Colonial Thinking” but also with its premises and foundations. First, I don’t think that it is too reductive to base a way of thinking on a single negative event and thus arguing that it is the sole formative for millions to people. Colonialism was a traumatic and defining event, but it is part of whole history and cannot be separated from the vast context it belongs to.  If Arundhati Roy is right when she asserts vehemently that Colonialism is a form of rape, it cannot, it shouldn’t become the focal point of constructive way of thinking. When it does, the loudest message given becomes that not that existence determines essence, but rather that traumas are essence. In other words, the narrative starts to be that once a rape occurs, it is impossible for the rape victim to be something other than a rape victim; the past is erased; the present and the future are solely conditioned by that atrocious act.

Second, I don’t believe that colonialism was a European phenomenon, that it was a product of “western” culture or philosophy if there is such a thing. I am questioning here the presumption that what Mbembe calls “European Humanism and universalism” led to Colonialism and must therefore be criticized by Post-Colonial thinking. In short, my argument is simply that Post-Colonial Thinking is limited, restrictive, and disempowering because to say things bluntly, it divinizes, willingly or unwillingly, the status of victim and elevates it to the one of omnipotent critique who cannot be wrong and cannot be criticized. Post-Colonial thinking is freedom and judgment without responsibility and because I love Camus and Sartre too much, that bothers me. 

Hannah Arendt and America

I spent most of my time away from this blog reading and rereading books that I needed, wanted, and had to read. I reread many of the works of Hannah Arendt. I was struck by how relevant her work still is. I enjoyed particularly reading her letters to Karl Jaspers especially the ones in which she talks about America and Europe after the Shoah. In a letter written in January 1946, she makes acute observations about America, which I think are thought-provoking. Sugary excerpt:

The high degree of practical political understanding, the passion to straighten things out, not to tolerate unnecessary misery, to see that I the midst of often cutthroat competition, the individual is guaranteed a fair chance—all of this has a flip side, however, which is that nobody worries about what cannot be changed. The attitude of this country toward death will never cease to shock us Europeans, The basic response when someone dies or when something goes irrevocably wrong is: Forget about it. That is, of course, only another expression of the country’s fundamental anti-intellectualism, which, for certain special reasons, is at its worst in the universities (Chicago University and a few other universities are not exactly glowing exceptions to this rule, but they are exceptions nonetheless.) Every Intellectual here is a member of the opposition simply because he is an intellectual, The reasons for that are the all-pervasive social conformity., the necessity to rebel against the god of success, etc. Among themselves, however, these intellectuals maintain a remarkable solidarity, and in their discussions and debates they are unfanatical and open-minded to an astonishing degree. From your acquaintance with Lasky you will have a good idea of what these people are like.

The fundamental contradiction in this country is the coexistence of political freedom and social oppression, The latter is, as I’ve already indicated, not total, but it is dangerous because the society organizes and orients itself along “racial lines.” And that holds true without exception at all social levels, from the bourgeoisie on down to the working class. This racial issue has to do with a person’s country of origin, but it is greatly aggravated by the Negro question, that is, America has a real “race” problem and not just a racial ideology. (Emphasis added)

History and Integration

I agree with this:

What's interesting about sport is that it has always been ahead of the game. Integration through sport is nothing new. In the US it was black athletes who were the first to be recognized as Americans. In France too.
We're in the process of giving birth to something. But giving birth is always painful. And what will be born? Things can't go backwards, people are suffocating. Previously, those who suffered discrimination used to say nothing, because they couldn't see how it worked. They accepted what they had, and thought they were lucky. But young people born in France who feel completely French want to have a share in everything. Are we going to tell them that they are wrong to make demands, to tell them that they cannot have the same dreams or the same hopes? They are demanding the same rights.
And I think that this is a good thing for France. Discrimination means neglecting people who have a contribution to make. An intelligent approach would want everyone to be involved. But are we going to start thinking this way before it's too late?
What is happening in France is fundamental for Europe. After the riots in 2005, many people in Europe said: "The French model of integration has had it; we mustn't do what they have been doing." Even though we're more advanced. I'm lucky enough to be able to travel and I can see that France is light-years ahead of some countries. It's incredible. That's what I felt in Italy and today in Spain, for example.
[...] Yes. My friends are first and foremost French and, what's more, they don't even understand the kind of thing that people say about this. For example, why speak about "first, second, or third generation"? They're French. Why speak about minorities? Do the others see themselves in terms of a majority?
But – to get back to history – you would think from the way that some people's minds work that the population of France became fixed sometime way back in the past. In reality, even in the past it was not fixed. Nevertheless, it is only since the 1970s that people of different origins have really been living together. In mainland France it was long thought that slavery and colonization were justified by a "racial hierarchy". The whole culture, the whole of society was characterized by this way of thinking. And today we're asking all those people to live together and to believe that everyone is on the same level. But they haven't been taught to accept that, because the ideas of racial inferiority and superiority have never been challenged. The French population itself was not directly linked to the institution of slavery. But the state sanctioned, organized, and took advantage of slavery and the slave trade. Slavery is not just about colour: it is a system in which some people had interests and which the state controlled and assisted.

France and Race

Charles Bremmer on France and Race:

So France is one of the few developed nations which does not ask for ethnic origin in the national census. There are no reliable statistics that can be used to measure discrimination or gauge diversity in education and the work place.

[…] Last summer the Sarkozy parliament passed a law that reversed the statistics ban. It allowed the collection of ethnic data in projects approved by the national agency for the protection of personal data (CNIL).

The new law was furiously opposed by some groups, such as SOS Racisme, which raised 90,000 signatures on an internet petition against it, including that of François Hollande, the Socialist Party leader. It was also strongly supported by other groups. "We are about to open the way to something fabulous," said Patrick Lozès, president of the Representative Council of Black Organizations. “We are going from just talking about equality as a moral standard to doing something to help achieve it.”

Then two weeks ago, the Constitutional Council threw out the law and upheld the old ban, saying that measuring ethnicity contradicted article one of the Constitution. The decision has been welcomed as a blow against racism while others deplore it as a set-back in the fight against discrimination.

Its immediate impact has been the suspension of a planned survey by two state statistical agencies (INSEE and INED) which would track the impact of ethnic origin on French citizens of African origin. Those involved have been voicing their frustration, saying the ruling, designed to uphold the noble ideal of the constitution, will block attempts to remedy discrimination.

[…] President Sarkozy himself carries some of the blame for the confusion because he has muddied the waters over race. On one hand he is in French terms progressive. The son of a Hungarian immigrant and part Jewish, he favours affirmative action, or positive discrimination, to balance diversity in work and education (There is no chance that the Constitutional Council will let this happen). Yet he has also played to the unhealthier instincts of white France by creating a new ministry of Immigration and National Identity, headed by his old friend Brice Hortefeux. His parliament stirred the pot further by adding the possibility of DNA testing for people seeking permission to immigrate to rejoin family members. The Constitutional Council upheld this at the same time as rejecting the change on ethnic data.

Sarko's hard line on last week's riots -- saying that they had nothing to do with any social malaise -- has further fanned suspicion among minorities and on the left that he does not understand the exclusion that they suffer.  He has promised a new approach to the plight of the banlieue, to be announced next month. All we know so far is that, as he put it, "this will not just be another attempt to throw money at the problem."

What disturbs me is the fact that Bremmer’s unsavory assumption that the banlieues is related to ethnicity and immigration rather than to assimilation integration and unemployment and crime. In other words, one would logically assume, after reading Bremmer, that France has problems controlling its banlieues because it is more multiethnic and multicultural than it knows and that the French youths get in the streets because they have foreign roots and look different than Sarkozy. The problem is in my opinion more complex in the sense that French youths are rioting because they have foreign roots or look different but precisely because to the contrary of Sarkozy who had a father who came from Hungary, people assume without even knowing their name that they aren't french and that they are lazy, uneducated, and potentially dangerous. They don't enjoy the presumption of Frenchness and for these reasons, they believe that the State doesn't treat them like every other citizen. The refusal of France to acknowledge its multi-ethnicity has made French society unwilling to accept that Francité, frenchness is neither about race, ethnicity, or religion, which means in other words that even those who don't have french blood can become French. The solution  to this problem starts with the realization that Integration means in part the acceptance that foreignness doesn’t pollute the French national identity, but enriches it.