PHOTO ESSAY: Picture Gallery of Fela's Queens > The Shrine

Picture gallery of

Fela Kuti’s Queens

In the West Fela Kuti, the creator of Afrobeat, is know by many as “the man who married 27 wives”. On 18 February 1978 he married the entire female entourage of his band in a ceremony conducted by a Yoruba priest. There are many sides to the group marriage, besides the sensational ones, but it would need an essay to explain them. The group marriage lasted until Fela’s release from prison in 1985. Stating that he no longer believed in marriage, he divorced the 12 wives that were still with him. Many, however, remained part of his entourage until his death.

Photographer Bernard Matussière from France took the portraits shown below of Fela’s “Queens”, as they were often called, in 1983.

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WOMEN: Are Men So Badly Off? > The Daily Beast

Are Men So Badly Off?

Sep 15, 2011 

You might think so if you listen to media tales of the 'mancession.' But Leslie Bennetts argues that women are the ones in dire straits.

Headshot of Leslie Bennetts

 

No matter whether you’re in elementary school or an assisted living home, it sure is a confusing time to be female.

All around us, pundits spend their time bemoaning the pitiable state of men. The poor darlings have apparently gotten themselves in lots of trouble.

Next week New York University is presenting a debate called “Are Men Finished?” Making the case for the demise of male dominance will be Hanna Rosin (author of last year’s Atlantic magazine cover story on “The End of Men” and an upcoming book with the same title) and Dan Abrams (author of Man Down: Proof Beyond a Reasonable Doubt that Women Are Better Cops, Drivers, Gamblers, Spies, World Leaders, Beer Tasters, Hedge Fund Managers, and Just About Everything Else).

Their analysis on the sorry state of men will be rebutted by Christina Hoff Sommers, author of The War Against Boys, and Dave Zinczenko, editor of Men’s Health magazine, whose expertise primarily revolves around what he thinks men should eat.

But whichever team wins the debate, are men really in such dire straits? It’s true that recent news has been full of dismal labor statistics about male job loss and the so-called mancession, along with regular bulletins on the rates at which women are now surpassing men in such measures as college and graduate-school degrees. According to some folks, things are going swimmingly for women, whereas men are falling ever further behind.

Troels Graugaard / Getty Images

 

So if men are the ones we should all be worrying about, why does the latest data reveal record numbers of women—far more than the numbers of men—currently living in poverty? This week the U.S. Census Bureau released new figures showing that 17 million women are living in poverty, compared with 12.6 million men. The news is even worse among those over 65, where there are twice as many women living in poverty than men.

Given such dire statistics, one might think the media and popular culture would be filled with helpful information urging women to place top priority on the urgent question of how to earn a living and avoid becoming bag ladies as they get older.

A quick survey of American culture might lead someone who’s been napping to think she’d gotten sucked into a time warp and awakened a half century ago.

Instead, a quick survey of American culture might lead someone who’s been napping to think she’d gotten sucked into a time warp and awakened a half century ago.

Pop culture seems particularly enamored of the 1960s right now, with Mad Men-inspired fashions in the clothing stores and new television series focusing on the Playboy bunnies and Pan Am stewardesses of that era, all preoccupied with coquettishly suggesting their sexual availability to interested men.

And from gossip sites on the Web to magazine cover stories on the newsstands, the feminine mystique rules. The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal didn’t even bother to mention the disproportionate impact of poverty on women in their front-page stories this week, but the news  everywhere is awash with stories fetishizing women’s marital prospects and fertility, which are celebrated as if they were the greatest accomplishments of a woman’s life.

You have to look hard to find glossy spreads or significant airtime devoted to women winning Nobel Prizes or Pulitzers, making scientific breakthroughs or starting companies or achieving historic firsts. But in recent months, the weddings of such disparate females as Kate Middleton and Kim Kardashian were treated as such earthshaking international events that they crowded out coverage of war, famine, and unemployment for considerable swaths of time.

After the lavish destination weddings that women are exhorted to indulge in, it’s on to the baby watch. Immediately, with nary a second for the bride to catch her breath; apparently a woman’s life is interesting or significant only if she’s marrying or breeding.

The real or imagined pregnancies of celebrities ranging from Hollywood stars to the French president’s wife are breathlessly tracked in an unceasing onslaught of “baby bump” stories so overwrought they border on the hysterical. They make such a fuss you’d think no one ever had a baby before.

But once the little ones arrive, it finally becomes clear that times have changed. A half century ago, in the days of Mad Men and all those bunnies and stewardesses looking to snag a prosperous husband and devote themselves to raising happy suburban families, kids were allowed to be kids, and maternal directives tended to revolve around suggestions like “go out and play.”

But today’s little girls are bombarded with ever more bizarre propaganda about their proper role in society, which is apparently to make themselves sexually desirable to males at any and every age.

Over the summer, an issue of French Vogue guest-edited by fashion god Tom Ford inflamed the fashion world with highly sexualized photos of a 10-year-old model wearing leopard-print stilettos and red nail polish, lying on a tiger-skin rug with a smoldering come-hither stare. Aspiring Playboy bunnies and reality stars seem to be starting their training in seducing men very early these days.

The photos generated a brief controversy, along with a fleeting round of commentary on “the pressure to be hot from cradle to grave,” as one pundit described the current social climate for females. But the fuss didn’t change anything, least of all the eagerness of consumer culture to expand the boundaries of exploitation ever further.

Not content with marketing thongs for 7-year-olds bearing slogans like “Eye Candy” and “Wink Wink,” Abercrombie & Fitch introduced a line of “Push-Up” bikinis for girls the same age.

And yet even age 7 apparently isn’t soon enough to turn a girl into a sex object. On a recent episode of Toddlers & Tiaras, a 4-year-old contestant bumped and ground her way around the stage wearing prosthetic breasts and a padded butt, imitating Dolly Parton. She won the prize.

Should a few particularly obtuse girls be slow to get the message about where their power lies, even academics are happy to spell it out for them. A research fellow at the London School of Economics named Catherine Hakim just published a book called Erotic Capital, which argues that women should exploit their sex appeal to get ahead at work. “Everybody should use all the assets they’ve got,” says Hakim.

But if that’s such a great idea, how come women aren’t doing better in the real world, where their circumstances are very different from the candy-colored images confected by the media and pop culture, glorifying their sexuality instead of their brains, character, talent, or skills?

“If women could sleep their way to the top, there would be a lot more women at the top,” observes Gloria Steinem. “The truth is that it just doesn’t work because who gets screwed remains the same.”

Indeed, for all the hoopla about the rise of women, they certainly aren’t in charge of much besides child-rearing and domestic drudgework. Corporate management remains a sea of male faces. “American corporate boards moved further from gender equality last year as the number of women on corporate boards of companies on the S&P 500 dropped to 16% from 16.6%,” according to Bloomberg Businessweek.

The same ratio—and the same downward direction—applies in politics.  Across the country, “the proportion of women officeholders has been flat-lining or slipping,” the Los Angeles Times reported recently. “The number of women in Congress this year fell for the first time in 30 years, leaving women with just 16% of congressional seats. And the number of female lawmakers in state capitals decreased by 81 this year, the largest percentage drop in decades.”

Many women quit the workforce to stay at home, and women are notoriously averse to running for office, a process in which they receive more than their share of harsh public scrutiny and far less than their share of financial and other support.

But when women absent themselves from the corridors of power, who represents their needs when important decisions get made? The answer, all too often, is no one.

With women’s political power declining, those opposed to women’s rights have felt increasingly emboldened to chip away at them. Writing on alternet.org about what she called “the anti-Planned Parenthood, anti-Title X vendetta from extreme right-wing groups like ALL and its pals in Congress,” Sarah Seltzer noted recently that “gutting Title X funding would decimate family planning programs in the U.S. and most likely increase the abortion rate.”

But even as conservatives ratchet up the pressure on women to reproduce while hacking away at any measures that enable them to control their fertility, the right has little to offer when it comes to pocketbook issues for women with children. Here, too, women’s needs are routinely ignored, starting with the elected representatives who fail to address their concerns.

According to the Shriver Report [http://shriverreport.com/awn/government.php], a study on the state of American women headed by Maria Shriver, women’s financial independence is in jeopardy from the moment they get pregnant: “Most Americans believe it is illegal today for employers to fire a pregnant worker, but that is not the case.” There oughtta be a law—but there isn’t.

Things only get harder when women have kids. “The United States is the only industrialized country without any requirement that employers provide paid family leave,” observed the report, which added that employment discrimination against mothers remains egregious.

“Job candidates identified as mothers were perceived to be less competent, less promotable, less likely to be recommended for management, less likely to be hired, and had lower recommended starting salaries,” the study said.

Women still make only 77 cents to every dollar made by men, but at least those women are working. In recent months, all that hand-wringing about a “mancession” has given way to ominous talk of a “womancession” accompanying the much-vaunted “hecovery.”

When the recession began, the majority of jobs lost were held by men. But in recent months, the growth of jobs for men has far outpaced the growth of jobs for women.

Last year men gained more than a million jobs, while women gained only 149,000. Although women represent more than half the public workforce, they have lost nearly 84 percent of the jobs that disappeared during the so-called recovery.

But why should women worry about minor problems like economic survival when they can spend their time and money on really important things like injecting potentially fatal neurotoxins into their faces? After all, a woman’s looks are so important—and what could possibly go wrong with shooting botulinum toxin into your head, a millimeter or two from your brain?

And it’s never too early—or too late—to start. Plastic surgery has boomed among children as young as 6, leading to headlines like “How Young Is Too Young to Have a Nose Job and Breast Implants?”

Last month The New York Times reported that cosmetic surgery has also become a growth industry among senior citizens. Exhibit A was an 83-year-old California great-grandmother who just spent $8,000 on a three-hour breast lift with implants. Way to go, Granny—talk about “staying hot” from the cradle to the grave!

If dieting, injections, and breast augmentation don’t give them enough to obsess about, women can now spend their money trying to alter the state of their labias. Let all those peevish human-rights activists campaign against female genital mutilation in Africa. In Western industrialized nations, skyrocketing numbers of women are now turning to medical science to provide them with “designer vaginas.”

Yes, sure, if you want to quibble, it’s true that medical experts are concerned that the so-called pornification of modern culture is driving up surgery rates to unprecedented levels as a result of the increased pressure on adult women to look like prepubescent girls. As with all such procedures, there is also growing concern about the unpleasant medical complications that can result when you slice off pieces of your genitalia.

But hey, that’s a small price to pay for the privilege of looking like an underage porn star, isn’t it? And women today are free to choose whatever they want, no matter what the financial or medical cost, in that ever-vital quest to remain desirable to men—a top priority even at the expense of all other considerations.

Now, there’s progress for you. Right?

 

HEALTH: Race and health in post Civil Rights America - Interview with Alondra Nelson > Books & ideas

Race and health in

post Civil Rights America

Interview with Alondra Nelson

by Pauline Peretz [01-09-2011]


Do special health programs for Black people and practices such as genealogical ancestry testing represent a risk of regression to a medical Apartheid in today’s America? For Alondra Nelson, health and science applied to Black bodies do not necessarily lead to the re-racialization of Black identity, they are also means of collective empowerment and can help to negotiate one’s ethnic identity.

Challenging racial formation on the terrain of health

 

Books & Ideas: According to what you call a “narrative of victimization”, Blacks have historically been the casualties of science and technology, and have accordingly shown a deep mistrust of all scientific authorities. Your research on both the Black Panthers’ health policies and on the use of genetic genealogy testing shows, on the contrary, that Blacks have resorted to science and technology as a way of self assertion, of personal and collective empowerment. According to you, what made this reversal possible?

Alondra Nelson: As a graduate student, I was trained with a whole generation of works explaining how science and medicine had created race, such as Sander Gilman’s work and many other historical works. I was struck that these kinds of works, and even more recent works like Harriet Washington’s Medical Apartheid, give you an overwhelming sense of the ways in which science and medicine subjugate racialized populations, but they always give you a top-down view. I explicitly started looking for spaces where black communities were challenging the process of racial formation in medicine and science. I looked at what the Black Panthers had done such as sickle-cell screening, the nutrition and education programs... One of the ways plantation and Jim Crow worked in the US, until contemporary racial discriminations, is on the terrain of health. So health care has always been by necessity a place where civil rights activism has had to take place. In Body and Soul, I place the Black Panthers in a genealogy of health activism. Starting with Marcus Garvey, even though one does not think much about Garveyism’s health policy – however, one of the photos we have of Garvey depicts these Black Cross iconic nurses walking in nursing uniforms down on Broad Avenue in Harlem. On the one hand, they were seen as necessary to the nation-state in waiting, that Garvey was interested in creating; on the other hand, we can understand the existence of this group as a critique of the inability of black nurses to be integrated into mainstream nursing. During World War I, hospital wards were still segregated – black nurses and doctors attended black people. I also place the Black Panther in a genealogy with SNCC and the Freedom Summer – members of the Medical Committee for Human Rights, which was made of doctors and nurses that came from the North, were the health care core of the Summer Movement. Several of those people would go on to help the Black Panthers set up their own clinics.

I show in my book that, since health and medicine were places where often racist ideas about black bodies were made, black activists always had something to say about the racialization of black people in health and science. The Black Panther Party is one of many voices across African-American history that has been saying something back to the top-down process of medical racialization.

The Panthers’ fight against health discriminations

Books & Ideas: To what extent did the Black Panthers resort to health as a way to remodel the group? Was theirs a project of social engineering?

Alondra Nelson: On the one hand, their health activism is part of their critique of the civil rights movement. By 1966, when they created the Party, the Movement had not appreciably changed the life of Black people, particularly in urban cities and ghettos. Their health policy was an instanciation of their critique of the moderation of the civil rights movement. The fact that the state did not care about the very body of their citizens showed the limits of what some people wanted to see as the revolutionary gains of the Movement.

On the other hand, the Panthers developed the vision of a rich and meaningful social welfare state. They were pointing out ways in which the state was inconsistent, deviated out funds for research. In their sickle-cell anaemia research campaign, they highlighted the fact that various genetic diseases had various racial and ethnic “constituencies”. They compared the fact that the Nixon administration had given very little money towards research on sickle-cell anaemia that affected blacks disproportionately, with the amount of money that had been given to diseases like cystic fibrosis that affected white people disproportionately. Their critique was also a critique of what they called and people like Barbara Ehrenreich would later call the “medical-industrial complex”. They had the sense that American health care was getting increasingly commodified and capitalized, and that this process was at its core a violation of human rights. The Black Panthers would say about the Vietnam War “the spirit of the people is stronger than the technology”, which could apply to health as well. They had an interesting complicated relationship to the system: they wanted anti-capitalist health care, anti-racist health care, and the benefits of health and medicine. Their complex view on health issues is shown by their campaign on sickle-cell anaemia. To promote the campaign, they created an origin myth of the disease. In order to do so, they looked at research by population geneticists showing which genetic diseases were adaptive or maladaptive to various medical conditions. And they made a migration, evolutionary argument consistent with their political aims, in which the genocide frame was very present. “Part of the reasons we have this disease is that we were taken from our home in Africa in the Middle Passage. We had this marker that help people combat malaria, where it had a sort of biological ecological purpose. And we were strangers in a strange land, and in a strange land this is killing us”. So they actually took up medical explanations of the disease, but they rendered them through their political agenda.

Books & Ideas: So you would say that their health care project was more a response to health disparities, than a rupture with white medicine.

Alondra Nelson: The Panthers had some appreciation for the War on Poverty and some of its programs, but these programs were supposed to have a part of community control which they often did not have. When Huey B. Newton and Bobby Seal started the Panthers, they were working at one of these programs; it is partly out of dissatisfaction that they started the Black Party, and out of a more general dissatisfaction with mainstream projects to ensure black welfare. The Panthers also defined themselves against what they saw as bourgeois African-American activists – with regard to sickle-cell anaemia, they were very critical of black organizations that were trying to raise awareness about the disease and money, but did not have a politicized frame to think about their action. They rejected both sides.

In the late 1960s, while the explicit science of racial discrimination had disappeared, tremendous health disparities still existed: for the Panthers, it was the proof that Blacks had not had the great revolution in terms of race relations. The discourse about health inequalities was a relatively new discourse in American history, though the phenomenon of health disparities is an ongoing one. Sociologists and epidemiologists show that the statistics on mortality rate among African-Americans have hardly changed over the course of the 20th century. By highlighting health disparities, the Black Panther Party really brought to the fore the persistence of health inequality. I would argue that they were one of the groups to identify the problem.

Books & Ideas: How was this concern for health articulated with their wider political and social program of racial equality and empowerment?

Alondra Nelson: Within Black Power, the Panthers distinguished themselves: they had a strong program for black communities but they were not separatists. Bobby Seale very early on ran with the Peace and Freedom Party on the presidential ticket. The BPP always favoured interracial collaborations, they were against homophobia, against antisemitism... they were fairly cosmopolitan for Black power activists. Most of the people who supported their health programs were white. In the 1960s and 1970s, the percentage of doctors who were African-American was around 3%, so the Panthers could not tap into a large pool of African-American nurses and doctors. They could not have created black-only clinics.

The Panthers had what I call a social health frame which worked on scalar level. For them, the health of the individual was always related to the health of the community and the health of the nation state. Since the black community could never be fully healthy, the US as a nation could never be fully healthy. They always understood health and politics to be articulated. This is why sickle-cell anaemia was a story about geopolitics, and not only a story about genes. This is why their health clinic network was about more than just opening a place where people could get immunization and have their blood pressure measured; they wanted to create places where people could get organized, and get political education classes. Like the headquarter offices, clinics were important organizational spaces where they dealt with a lot of other kinds of social work, such as advocacy for employment... Their clinics were open part-time, they had a part-time staff, Panther volunteers and doctor volunteers. But they had allied doctors working in various places to whom they could refer Black people. They had a car driver which people called patients’ advocate, whose job was to take people to doctors who were in their referral network or who would help people get food, housing... They understood health to be more than about these minute workings of the body.

There were between a dozen and eighteen clinics. People, inspired by the creation of the Party, started chapters which the headquarters were trying to convince to adopt guidelines. These chapters were supposed to open a health clinic, start a breakfast program, and sell newspapers, among other things. In 1966, the Panthers’ Ten point-platform mentions health in passim. By 1969, all the chapters were supposed to have opened a clinic, and by 1972, the revised Ten point-platform includes a new point Six, which is a statement about health care. Health acquires a greater importance in the political work that they are doing.

The Party mandated clinics, but many of them were independent projects. They did not have the resources or staff to fund all the clinics. So it really came up to various chapters to get clinics running. It often depended on what the local networks, local situation and local needs were. For example, in Portland, Oregon, a PhD in chemistry worked with the Black Panthers to set up a clinic. He was working at the time at a diagnostic laboratory and had affiliations with local hospitals. That clinic was run with a lot of help from local medical students and local medical colleges. On the one hand, black communities were unduly subject to really poor health care at teaching colleges – the Black Panthers were critical of ill-trained medical students and black people having to be the guinea pigs of people who were barely out of medical schools. On the other hand, they understood that they needed to work with medical students. What I call “trusted experts” played a mediating role between black communities, and medical schools and doctors who vetted them. In Portland, the mainstream medicine was notoriously racist with a discriminatory ambulance service, so the Portland chapter started its own ambulance service. There are also cases like Kansas City, Missouri, where a radical doctor was asked by the Panthers to help set up a clinic off the ground. Malik Rahim who started the Common Ground Clinic in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina was also a member of the Panthers in New Orleans. He said he was able to start this bare bone clinic because he had done it before with the Panthers. It is difficult to evaluate whether the Black Panthers’ clinic was a successful story or not.

Negotiating one’s racial identity

Books & Ideas: One could think that the use of genetic ancestry testing by Blacks in search of their family history would lead to validate the scientific theory of race, and invalidate all social science that has shown that race is a social construct. According to you, the understanding of race is not radically transformed by genetic testing. What prevents this return to the racist conception of race and the “geneticization” of identities in the use of genetic testing?

Alondra Nelson: This is a central question. When I started this research in 2003 I was curious to understand why black people who had been historically suspicious of medicine and health care policies resort to genetic genealogy testing. Why would they put their DNA in an envelope and mail it to a stranger? The question of geneticization and racialization is different in a criminal justice context – there is no negotiation, there is no flux. The negotiation that I saw with African-American consumers of genetic genealogy testing really suggested that people were doing something different. None of this people would tell me “I believe race is biological and I am doing this because I know I embody the biological essence of my race”.

In 1991, a controversy followed the discovery of the African Burial Ground next to Ground Zero. African-American activists saw a distinction between archaeological work that would do what they called “biological racing”, and archaeological work and interpretation that could restore their ethnicity to them. It is what is at stake for people. One of the scientists from Howard University who worked on that project, named Rick Kittles, went on to start the African Ancestry Company –which is the company that I write most about. Initially, the remains that they excavated were to be analyzed at a forensic lab of Lehman College which is part of the City University of New York. People who train and work there are interested in crime scenes, and have a conjectural approach to corpses they analyze. What was at stake in the move of the remains from the Lehman forensic lab to the Howard Lab was a more holistic analysis of the remains. They were using techniques that would allow them to get from race to ethnicity. Historian Michael Gomez has shown that in the Middle Passage, over time, different African ethnicities have become race in the United States, and blackness in a particular way. Part of what was at stake for the individual and for the African groups around the Burial Ground was the reversal of that, the move of race to ethnicity. You see it very clearly in the contest about where the remains would be analyzed, and how they would be analyzed. It was this return to ethnicity that was at stake. This example shows that people are after something else than biologizing race when they think about black genetics and black bodies. The difficulty with genetic genealogy testing is that it is a threshold for people who had never thought about a relationship between genetics and identity. In my interviews, people often talk about different forms of genetic testing to authorize or validate other forms. They would say things like “because I have done this genetic genealogy testing and have these results which are powerful to me, I now better understand what a genetic counsellor was saying to me about this cancer gene that runs in my family”. Or this woman would say to me “Because I work as a forensic lab technician, and I have seen black people exonerated using DNA evidence in a criminal justice setting, I am very trustful of genetic ancestry testing.” It plays a role in a larger process of geneticization. Although I argue that in the specific site of genetic genealogy testing, there is a discursive negotiation happening.

People have genealogical aspirations – family stories that they want to confirm, family mysteries that they want to solve. The power of genealogical aspirations is really born out in the way that people select particular tests to give them particular information. If people are interested in finding out if they have European or Native American ancestry, they would do the “Admixture test” which can yield that information. If they are interested in their African ethnicity, they would go to companies that can yield those types of results, using either Y chromosome DNA testing or mitochondrial DNA testing.

Books & Ideas: Do you think this resort to genetic testing is necessary for the assertion of a sense of diaspora-belonging? How does it play together with other diasporic resources (such as name changing, or the celebration of Kwanza)? How do you connect this use to the ideology of pan-africanism?

Alondra Nelson: Most of the people I have interviewed are not pan-africanist in an explicit political way. They are not afrocentrist activists, even if they are interested in African politics and culture. But many people who do genetic testing try to forge relationships with African expatriates living in the US, based on their genetic results. People also travel to Africa after getting their test results. There is an economy linked to ancestry research. Part of the niche market of the ancestry companies is that they have the biggest data basis of contemporary African DNA, which authenticates Black DNA in the US.

In another research project, I have looked at young African Americans who have used genetic genealogy testing and made videos on youtube where they do the DNA testing and/or they show the process by which they receive the results. There is an interesting genealogical shift – in the US, genealogists tended to be older people, who had time and financial resources to do so. It used to take a lot of time before internet data bases existed. These videos that I call “Roots revelation videos” help us think about diaspora because they provoke responses from the audience, people who claim to be African-Americans who live in the diaspora, in the US or Europe, or Africans who live in Africa. They speak back to the video-maker about what it means to be American. It is a place where the genetic test stimulates a conversation about the limits and the possibilities of a pan-african identity. If the result is an African ethnicity, the general response tends to be “congratulations, welcome home, brothers and sisters, fantastic!” In few other cases, commentators said things like “You are not African, you don’t have African cultural practices, you don’t have a commitment to the betterment of African communities in Africa…” I initially thought the effect of the genetic genealogy testing would be more pronounced.

Books & Ideas: You have forged the expression “Reconciliation Projects” to designate the use of genetic testing. Do you have in mind the reconciliation with the African past or the reconciliation with American society? Are not these projects antagonistic?

Alondra Nelson: I don’t think they are contradictory, particularly if we think of W.E.B. DuBois’ “double consciousness”. Genetic testing does not resolve any controversy about Black people’s history. What is at stake is a sense of reconciliation that perhaps can not be provided by science. People are using these genetic tests because they want to process acknowledgment and public airing. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa and the 2005 Truth and Reconciliation Commission in Greensboro (South Carolina) have not been great success stories but they have done the work of publicly airing and allowing a public conversation around these things. In the use of genetic genealogy testing, there is also reconciliation with Africa, in the sense of reunion.

Back to the racialization of health?

Books & Ideas: Your interest in the issue of race and science has also led you to discuss the use of racial categories in medical practice and research. You show that racial profiling in medical practice – used to define populations at risk, to make a proper diagnosis as well as propose an appropriate treatment – tends to conduct to neglecting social conditions and family histories. Is the debate here still along the lines of heredity vs. environment (as it was before, about the so-called dysfunctional black family, the controversy on IQ testing, etc.)? Or has the debate been renewed?

Alondra Nelson: There is now a post civil rights generation, like myself, who are the beneficiaries of affirmative action in the US, of doctors who are now involved in the discussion about race. It has significantly changed the discourse. The resolution of wealth disparities has been taken up in a kind of civil rights discourse. Let’s take the example of BiDil, this heart failure medication that the Food and Drug Administration has approved only for black people. African American people are supposed to have the most diverse genetic diversity, so how would you have this drug work for all black people. What is interesting is that BiDil has been taken up by professional societies (like the Association of Black Cardiologists), but also civil rights organizations, the Congressional Black Caucus, the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People (NAACP) arguing that the issue of health disparity is the terrain of the next civil rights struggle in the US, and that they want the federal government to get behind this drug that presumes to be about the peculiarity of the black body. We get to a point that Steve Epstein calls the “inclusion and difference paradigm” – on the one hand, you include people more in the mainstream health care state, on the other hand, you understand that different communities have different needs, be they social needs or biological needs. I am glad that there is now an office at NIH (National Institute of Health) that is dedicated to minorities, but what concessions do we have to make as a black community to demand from the state adequate health care resources? One could argue that creating an office of minority health is a type of segregated medicine. The potential is there but this is obviously not the intent. The projects that are meant to combat health disparity might be unwittingly creating forms of segregation, of racialization. We have to understand the ambiguous genealogy between scientific racism and research on health disparity. It is the vexed claim around biological citizenship that gets created in the context of deprivation.

 

by Pauline Peretz [01-09-2011]

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Alondra Nelson is associate professor in the Department of Sociology of Columbia University. 


She is the author of Body and Soul: The Black Panther Party and the Fight Against Medical Discrimination (University of Minnesota Press, 2011).

 

 

 

 

ECONOMICS: Rep. Maxine Waters Will Fight Whoever Stands in Way of Job Creation > Loop21

Rep. Maxine Waters Will Fight

Whoever Stands in Way

of Job Creation

By Brentin Mock

Sept. 14, 2011

Getty Images
California Congresswoman wants to repeal Obama's deficit reduction supercommittee

With black unemployment at a record high rate, the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC) has been waging a full court press to address the problem while making calculated criticisms of President Obama on where he’s fallen short on this subject. Of the CBC members, Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.) has been one of the most vocal, telling the President to call black unemployment by it’s name publicly, while challenging voters to sic the CBC on Obama if they think it’s warranted. Next week is the Caucus’ Annual Legislative Conference where they will continue to pound the pavement about jobs.

Loop 21 talked with Rep. Waters about the President’s challenges with the economy, his American Jobs Act, the foreclosure crisis, and the federal deficit reduction “supercommittee." The Congresswoman is not backing down from her pressure to bring jobs to African Americans. She says she will fight for the American Jobs Act, but she’s not for any piecemeal compromise that will only add up to a bunch of tax cuts. Finally, Rep. Waters wants to get rid of that “illegitimate” supercommittee.

Loop 21: There seems to be plenty of endorsement from the Congressional Black Caucus of Obama’s American Jobs Act. Any caveats though?

Rep. Maxine Waters: Yes, I’m pleased the President did present what appears to be a substantial jobs act to create jobs by repairing the nation’s infrastructure, and schools across nation, and also investing in small communities. But the devil is in the details. I support the direction of this legislation and I will fight for it. We will all have to fight for it. There are a number of tax cuts for employers whether payroll or tax breaks to hire new workers. We have to make sure it’s not just a tax cut bill that’s only in anticipation of employers hiring, but that they are actually hiring. Now the real work begins.

Loop 21: Part of the American Jobs Act calls for an infrastructure bank, which you called for before the President’s jobs speech. But does it go far enough, targeting women- and minority-owned business like you described?

No, I don’t remember the infrastructure bank in Obama’s jobs proposal being described. The idea has been tossed around a lot and I could support the idea, but not one that would put government money in the hands of big banks. It would have to be directed toward community banks and CDCs (community development corporations) and CDFIs (community development financial institutions) in order to implement some kind of program. But not the big banks.

Loop 21: The Obama Administration recently sued 17 banks deemed responsible for the subprime mortgage meltdown. If successful, is this going to be an adequate remedy to bring justice to those who were preyed upon with those loans? [Read about five of the banks in that lawsuit here.]

No, as a matter of fact the harm that was done with the subprime meltdown and the way our financial institutions committed fraud and misrepresented their products, so much harm has been done that we need a massive way of helping to make [homeowners] whole again and keep them in their homes. The president came up with the HAMP program and it hasn’t worked to keep people in their homes and reduce the principal on homes. Most of them are underwater. They don’t have the value they had when they were taking out the loan mortgages. So we need substantial reduction of principals and all interest rates written down to at least 4%. But that was not mentioned in the job act proposal. Banks are holding on to the money and not lending, not for mortgages nor for small businesses. They have backlogs of properties they have started foreclosures on. So we have to unscramble this mortgage crisis.

Loop 21: The Administration refuses to mention black unemployment even though it’s clearly the highest, and now we see with the Census figures that they suffered the worst increases in poverty. Will Obama ever name this problem for what it is?

I don’t know, it seems as if these are not the kinds of strategies [his campaign] have developed for him to be re-elected. Avoiding using the word “black” or “African American” seems to be what they think they need to do to appease or to get support from others in society. I don’t agree with that strategy. I don’t know what it would take to change their mind. I am working now on the fact sheet on the American Jobs Act where I see they are using targeting in ways that I have insisted -- by targeting the communities with the hardest unemployment and the most harmed in this economic meltdown. Those communities should be targeted for support. In the follow-up fact sheet, they are talking about targeting and they have recognized that it should be done, but it’s not been part of his speeches. As the legislation advances, that targeting should be at the center of how we’re dealing with harm that is done [from the recession]. But in terms of how the White House says that in their language, I wish I could say I have influence over that, but I can’t say that I have that type of influence.

Loop 21: So, if Obama’s bill passes with the kind of targeting of black communities you call for, but he does not say this in front of the general public, would you be pleased?

I would be somewhat relieved -- the bottomline is if I can create jobs and I can get people employed, I want that very badly. If he does not say it publicly it would not please me, but I would not be as unhappy as if I don’t get some jobs. If we don’t get jobs then I would be very unhappy.

Loop 21: In a recent GOP presidential candidates debate, Michele Bachmann mentioned black unemployment. What do you think of Bachmann naming that which the President won’t?

I didn’t see the debates, but if the President allows the right wing to articulate concerns about black unemployment and he doesn’t then that does not speak well to his ability to recognize the people who are really truly his base. That does not bode well for his re-election. If they can say it, then certainly so can he.

Loop 21: One news report says that Obama has not ruled out passing this jobs bill in pieces. Does that concern you?

Yes, it does concern me. When you are in a fight you don’t start with compromise. He put out a comprehensive legislation package for $477 billion. That’s what I expect him to fight for. That’s what I am going to fight for. I don’t like starting out with compromise and picking pieces out, or a bill that just gives tax cuts to employers or businesses. We have to fight for what we think is right so that kind of talk does not please me.

Loop 21: The New York Times reported about employers, from small businesses and large, who said tax cuts would not be enough to incentivize them to hire more workers, that instead they were looking for the right people. What do you think of that?

I did not see the story but I do know this, when you are talking about the right people to do the job -- I had at one of my job fairs 10,000 people show up, and one of the people who owned a company where they are looking for engineers and people who are trained in certain technology and computer expertise said to me that they had found a number of people who met their requirements. So, if employers imply that by hiring someone who happens to be unemployed that they may be unqualified I reject that argument. My sense of what we are trying to accomplish is to hire those who have been laid off and I think there are qualified people out there. So when people say they are not incentivized by tax cuts, that’s not an argument that makes good sense to me. The fact of the matter is that we expect people to hire those who meet the qualifications and to hire those who are unemployed who meet the qualifications. 

Loop 21: For companies that advertise jobs with hiring preferences for those already employed, would you say that’s a veiled way of saying they won’t hire African Americans, since they represent the highest unemployed?

I don’t know, but those advertisements would certainly impact that sector of our society with the highest unemployment. It is kind of inhumane to advertise that you will not get hired if you are unemployed. That’s about as un-American as it gets. Certainly the African American population would get that.

Loop 21: Under the arrangement made to raise the debt ceiling, a congressional supercommittee is now responsible for coming up with more cuts, and if they don’t there will be automatic cuts including to Medicare. Was that a good deal?

[Speaker of the House John] Boehner walked away saying he got 98% of what he wanted. The debt ceiling negotiations were harmful and the supercommittee is the wrong way of going about good public policy. No 12 members of Congress can represent the entire American body. I don’t like the supercommittee and I think it is illegitimate. I’m getting signatures for a bill right now to repeal the supercommittee.

Loop 21: Next week is Congressional Black Caucus’ Annual Legislative Conference and many eyes are on this body. What is the message you’ll be sending to the country?

The conference will start with a townhall on jobs so that we are consistent on going from our job fairs to the the townhall where we will have some people from civil rights organizations and the business community, and members of the CBC talking about next steps. I do believe that we should focus on the American Jobs Act bill and take deep look at the bill, picking it apart and seeing where the pitfalls are, where we should be applying pressure ,where we should be forming alliances, and how to help get this bill realized. I don’t see this bill as a public relations effort or something for campaign purposes, I see it as a piece of legislation that we have to fight for. The people will know whether we are serious about this based on how hard we fight for it.

 

 

VIDEO: "The Unseen Ones" Documentary « AFRICA IS A COUNTRY

Nico10long

Father figure

September 16, 2011

by Sean Jacobs

Filmmaker Kurt Orderson sent me “The Unseen Ones,” his new 19-minute musical documentary about the very talented Cape Town rasta rapper Nico10long working on his new self-titled EP (produced by Martin Muller). The dialogue is mostly in Afrikaans with subtitles. Rastafari’s appeal, gangsterism, HIV-AIDS, and identity politics, all get a turn. Fellow MC’s Benji Tafari and Silver Tongue make guest appearances.  The film concludes with Nico10long’s new video for the single “Vaderfiguur” (translated: “Father Figure”).

 

PUB: Gival Press — givalpress.com

—The ArLiJo Poetry Award Guidelines


Arlington Arts Center and Gival Press are pleased to announce the ArLiJo Poetry Contest. All poets who live or work in the Mid-Atlantic region, which includes Virginia, West Virginia, Washington DC, Maryland, Delaware, or Pennsylvania, are eligible to enter.

Poets may submit one poem, previously unpublished, in English which must not be longer than 25 lines in any style or form, any subject/topic.

The poet's name must not appear on the actual poem. A cover sheet for the poem should include:

name
address
telephone number
email address
title of poem


The poem must be submitted by email to:
givalpress@yahoo.com with ArLiJo Poetry Award in the subject line, with the poem attached in a Word or Rich Text Format document.

Deadline: September 30, 2011, by midnight.

There is no entry fee.


Prize:
The winning poem will be published in the online journal ArLiJo, with a short bio.

A certificate will be presented to the winner on Oct. 23, 2011 at the Arlington Arts Center (3550 Wilson Boulevard, Arlington, VA 22201-2348) or mailed, if the person is not able to attend the Gival Press Poetry Reading, featuring John Gosslee, author of 12: Sonnets for the Zodiac, and Clifford Bernier, winner of the 2010 Gival Press Poetry Award for his manuscript titled The Silent Art.

The poetry reading will be held on Oct. 23, 2011 at 5 pm. An honorarium of $100 will be granted if the winning poet is able to attend to present his/her winning poem.

In addition, the winning poet will get feedback, be it in person, phone or email, from the two poets reading on Oct. 23.

The entries will be read and judged anonymously by Robert L. Giron, publisher of Gival Press and editor of ArLiJo, an online journal.

The winner need not be present to win.


Sponsors:
Arlington Arts Center and Gival Press.

Visit:
Arlington Arts Center

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

PUB: Literary Competition

Competition

Meridian Writing is pleased to announce our autumn short story writing competition is now open. We will accept stories of up to 3,000 words, and is open to both published and unpublished writers.

Please note that all entries must be accompanied by an entry form and correct fee.

First Prize          £100

Second Prize      £50

Third Prize         £25

In addition to Prize Money, all winning authors will receive a firstwriter.com   voucher worth $15/£10/15, allowing them to take out a free subscription to firstwriter.com, providing access to details of hundreds of publishers, literary agents, writing competitions, and magazines. firstwriter.com will contact the winning authors directly.

Closing Date - 3oth September 2011

Competition Rules

  • The competition is open to both published and unpublished authors writing in any genre, including children's fiction. Stories must not have been previously published elsewhere either in print or online.
  • Authors must be sixteen years of age or older.
  • Stories should be a maximum of 3,000 words in length, but there is no lower limit.
  • The entry fee for each story is £5.00 GBP. There is no limit on the number of entries any one person may enter but no author may win more than one prize in any competition. Multiple entries may be made on one entry form with all stories listed.
  • Each entry must be accompanied by an entry form (which can be copied from our website, or obtained from our contact address: please enclose a SAE) or the Online Entry Form.
  • The Judges wish to make an unbiased decision on all entries, so please ensure that only the story title is printed on the story itself. This includes NOT having an author contact detail cover sheet. Any entries which do not comply with this rule will be disregarded from the competition. 
  • The closing date for the current competition is: 30th September.
  • The winners will be announced in October, with the winning stories being published on the Meridian Writing website.

Entry Details

  • If you would like confirmation that your postal entry has been received, or the list of winners, please enclose a suitable SAE (either marked 'Received' or 'Winners'). Online entries will receive a confirmation email once we have determined the correct fee has been received.
  • Your story should be clearly typed or printed in English (12pt, Times New Roman preferred) on one side only A4 paper, a word count included and double spaced. Include a 'header' which contains your story title and page number. Online entries will be accepted as an attachment saved as a .doc (or equivalent) file and mailed to our email Entry Address. Please ensure stories are emailed at the same time as the online form is submitted to avoid confusion.
  • If someone else is paying for you via PayPal, please enter a note to this effect to avoid any confusion.
  • Please refer to the 'Contact Us' page to see details on how to pay the entry fee.  
  • No stories will be returned, so make sure you keep a copy of your story.
  • The winning and runner-up stories will be published on the Meridian Writing website.
  • The Judges' decision is final, and no correspondence will be entered into.
  • Winning authors will be required to supply a short (50 - 100 word) bio which will be published alongside their story.
  • Copyright remains with the author, but Meridian Writing has the unrestricted right to publish winning stories online. Additional publishing of any stories will be made with the consultation and agreement of the author.

 

PUB: Writing Contest > Torrey House Press

Writing Contest

Torrey House Press (THP) seeks fiction and literary nonfiction from writers with a passion for the environment, issues, people, history, and cultures of the Colorado Plateau and the West. We consider literary works from both published and unpublished writers. Contest winners receive cash prizes in addition to having their work published in THP’s annual journal.

Competitions:

Fall 2011: Creative Literary Nonfiction (2,000 to 10,000 words)
First Prize: $1,000
Deadline: September 30, 2011 (extended)

Contest submissions must be original and not previously published. Please, no stories written for children for contest entries. Double space your submissions and use a 12-point font, with numbered pages that include the title of the piece as a header.  Do not put your name and contact information in the document containing your entry.  There will be a place to enter your name and contact information separately.

The entry fee is $25 per submission and is non-refundable. You are welcome to enter more than one piece; each will be considered a separate submission and must be accompanied by the $25 fee.

Please use our submission manager here to pay and submit:
Submit to Torrey House Press

Contact us at mail@torreyhouse.com if you have any problems with submitting.

Submissions to multiple publishers are accepted and encouraged as long as you let us know. However, please contact us at mail@torreyhouse.com so we can immediately withdraw your work upon its acceptance elsewhere.

When we accept a submission, we are purchasing first-publication rights. Once we’ve published your story, you are free to include it in your own collection. Winners will be contacted within six weeks of the deadline. First prize is $1000, second prize is $250, and third prize is $100, and all three winning works will be published in the Torrey House Press annual journal. Honorable Mentions may not be published but will be noted in the journal. In addition, if we read something that raises the hair on our arms, we may ask for more! We may solicit a short synopsis of a novel with the first three chapters or 50 pages, whichever is longer, and something about yourself so we can see if your writing fits the literary needs of Torrey House Press. See Publishing Your Work.