Submit

We invite you to join us! During August 1-November 1, send 3-5 poems, short fiction, or other prose under 6,000 words and visual art (preferably digital images) to:

Ellipsis editor
Westminster College
1840 South 1300 East
Salt Lake City, UT 84105

Include a stamped, self-addressed envelope for notification; unless you specifically ask that your submission be returned, we’ll recycle it. Please include a brief contributor’s note in your cover letter, and make sure your cover letter and submissions have your phone numbers and email as well as name and address. We pay $10 per poem and piece of visual art, and $50 per prose piece, plus two copies of the issue.

 

ANNUAL SHORT SHORT CHAPBOOK CONTEST

Our Fifth Annual Short Short Chapbook Contest submission period begins October 15 and ends December 1, 2010. Our 2010 judge will be Kim Chinquee. The winner will have his/her chapbook published in summer 2011, with an introduction by the contest judge. During the submission period, please email your 25–40 page double-spaced manuscript of short short stories under 1000 words to us here (rosemetalpress@gmail.com)  with a $10 reading fee via Paypal or check.

 

Rose Metal Press, Inc. is an independent, not-for-profit publisher of hybrid genres specializing in the publication of short short, flash, and micro-fiction; prose poetry; novels-in-verse or book-length linked narrative poems; and other literary works that move beyond the traditional genres of poetry, fiction, and essay to find new forms of expression.

In observing the literary community, we have seen that many writers are doing fruitful and exciting work in these hybrid genres, but they have limited opportunities to publish that work because few commercial publishers accept such submissions due to concerns with classification and marketability. Our mission is to focus on supporting these transgressive and unusual works, thereby helping to expand the field of publishing, as well as the range of opportunities open to authors.

Founded in January 2006 by Abigail Beckel and Kathleen Rooney, Rose Metal Press plans to put out three beautifully produced titles per year. We also sponsor readings and events to promote our books, hybrid genres, and the independent literary community. We are grateful to the Massachusetts Cultural Council and the National Endowment for the Arts for their support.

 

John Steinbeck Award

 

 

Sponsored by Reed Magazine, Center for Steinbeck Studies, San Jose State University and the National Steinbeck Center.

Reed Magazine announces The John Steinbeck Award. Writers may submit original, unpublished stories up to 6,000 words. The winner will be selected by the 2010 judge, Daniel Alarcon, and will receive a $1,000 cash prize. The winning story will appear in Reed Magazine, and an excerpt may be published in the Salinas-based newspaper, The Californian. Runner-ups will also be considered for publication.

All entrants will receive a complimentary copy of Reed Magazine.

All submissions must abide by the following competition rules and guidelines:

1. Submit through the online system.

2. All submissions must be submitted by November 1.

3. Submit in a common file format: *.doc and *.txt preferable. Please do not submit in the *.docx file format.

4. A reading fee of $15 is required for each submission. These can be paid online with Paypal (from the bottom button, the store, or the submission system) or by check at the following address:

Reed Magazine
SJSU English Department
One Washington Square
San Jose, CA 95192-0090

5. Writers may submit multiple entries, but each must be submitted separately and accompanied by a separate entry fee.

6. The finalists, as determined by Reed's fiction editors, will be sent to the judge.

7. Employees and board members of the National Steinbeck Center, REED Magazine, or the Center for Steinbeck Studies are not eligible to participate in the competition.

 

If you have any questions please contact us at: reed@email.sjsu.edu

 

 

Proudly African & Transgender: Self-Portraits in Writing

by Sokari on March 2, 2010

in Africa - Creative Arts, African LGBTI, E-Activism, Human Rights, Transgender, Uganda

As part of the Proudly African & Transgender exhibition by Gabrielle Le Roux, each person has written a short self-portrait on being transgender and on the exhibition itself. Below are their stories of their lives to go with the portraits drawn by artist and activist for social justice Gabrielle Le Roux.

The importance of this exhibition is highlighted by the fact that three Ugandan activists whose lives are on the line right now Victor Mukasa, Julius K Kaggwa and Salango Nikki Mawanda are part of the exhibition

 

 

Amanda – Zimbabwe

Dear Amnesty International

First of all i can say that I’m proudly trans-Zimbabwean, i can describe myself as a peaceful and loving soul and most people don’t realise that i’m so down to earth and i really love dogs because that is the only thing that can understand how one is feeling, apart from human beings.

The problem in Zimbabwe is that Trans-people are not recognised legally, to make it even worse the LGBTI community as whole is not legalized. We cannot just be confined to a place that is only covered by walls, we need to walk free in the streets in order to express who we are as Zimbabwean citizens. The better we do that the more Zimbabwean citizens can also learn to understand the community as a whole, otherwise it’s a war that’s happening in modern day 2ist century.

My feeling about the exhibition is that the more that it gets out, the more that other people get to know what is happening in Zimbabwe. I hope that it will send a message to the powers that be so that the LGBTI community in Zimbabwe will have a voice and the people all over can understand that it’s not a choice but it’s an actual fact that one is born with.

My portrait was to portray my inner Trans-Zimbabwean beauty, so that Trans people from Zimbabwe will be heard, I feel so proud because it gave me the gusto as a Zimbabwean, that life brings choices but some of those choices cannot be chosen, the only way you can choose is how to change it and make it right. My portrait is a resemblance of a troubled Zimbabwean soul, that just want to make a right alignment of the inner and the outer part.

These are the cries for Trans-Zimbabwean people, who just want to express what they feel deep inside, no one seems to be appreciating the mere fact that they are indeed normal Zimbabwean citizens, therefore who they are and not what they present themselves as and what they don’t look like, life is so miserable for Trans-people in Zimbabwe when no one takes note and the powers that be in Zimbabwe, pretend like as if it’s abnormal, because it’s not our fault that we were born like this. I hope that this will empower the powers that be to take note of what is really going on and that they can at least try their utmost best to assist the community in Zimbabwe, especially those that are disadvantaged. I feel that this exhibition should also have taken place in Zimbabwe, because people are so uninformed about these issues, infact to point out the fact that when a being comes out of the closet they just fit in with the community, not knowing that the difference they do have is that it’s not only how they are feeling but the fact that they do have to make physical changes to right fit what they feel inside.

Hopefully in Zimbabwean schools, in Africa and other countries the world over as a whole, because people still need to be educated, so that they are not ignorant on these issues and know that this can happen to anyone, nobody chooses to be what or who they are inside. Amanda Goto

 

 

Julius – Uganda

Hi

I am in Washington where I spoke at the Human Rights Summit and have been doing some sexual rights advocacy as well.

My decision to actively be involved in activism has brought me face to face with some extremely painful experiences – right within the LGBT community.

After the assignment I am working on now, which ends today actually, I will take some time off the public scene and get myself together. Writing intimately about anything right now might just push me over the edge.

Sure I have no objections to exhibiting my portrait but I really am not in the right frame of mind emotionally and mentally to answer the questions you asked. I am fine with Amnesty.

Our website is www.sipd.webs.com. Support Intitiative for People with atypical sex Development

Yes so much has been happening lately but it is now becoming rather too much for me to deal with and I find I cannot hold up my diplomatic and calm take on stuff. I am going through a very difficult time right now.

 

 

 

Flavia – Burundi

I gather from Victor that Flavia, who, after the workshop decided to stay on in South Africa, can’t be contacted and we have reason to worry about her.

She is such a strong and lively soul and her disappearance for the time being sadly highlights the vulnerability and isolation of too many transgender people. Gabrielle Le Roux

 

 

Victor Mukasa – Uganda

Dear Amnesty International,

My name is Victor J. Mukasa, 34 years old, from Uganda. I am currently living in Cape Town, South Africa and working with the International Gay and lesbian Human Rights Commission (IGLHRC).

I am a transgender person. Yes, PERSON! I transgress traditional gender norms. Not to be stubborn, but that is me. It is not of my own making. I was born that way. My childhood, as my parents told it to me, and as far as I remember, was as such. People everywhere I went said that I look like a boy. In fact many addressed me as a boy. Even to date, I am still the same. I dress just as boys and or men traditionally dress. It is in my expression too. That is me. I am a proud transgender person.

My experience as a transgender person in Uganda is not a sweet story. In short, a transgender person in Uganda is constantly surrounded with ridicule, mockery and abuse. For most Ugandans, any person that expresses “him/herself” as the opposite sex is a homosexual and so this exposes transgender people to all the mistreatment that they would love to give to a homosexual. All transgender people are seen as the obvious homosexuals. Therefore, on top of all the transphobia, there is homophobia even if you are not gay. For the case of Uganda, you can imagine the level.

The exhibition, Proudly African and Transgender, is a very powerful asset for transgender Africa and thanks to; the artist, Gabrielle Le Roux, for drawing our portraits, the International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission (IGLHRC) for supporting the drawing of the portraits, to you, Amnesty International, for providing resources and space to exhibit the portraits and most importantly, to the bold and daring Trans Africans that have contributed to this project. We have all collectively made it happen. Finally, Trans Africans speak, are visible and are unstoppable.

Transgender Africans have been silenced for quite a long time. We have been invisible as though we did not exist. Today, many of us speak, we show our faces, we write and we express ourselves openly. This exhibition is an extension of all that, whenever we are unable to be present in the physical. The portraits are our images and they speak our words, they tell our stories, they express our feelings, they exhibit our pride, even our fears, they are our history, they are us today and the history of the African transgender struggle in future. They are strength, hope and pride to generations after us. I felt lost for a long time. I thought that there was no other like me. I thought I was abnormal, strange and this made me powerless. My transgender niece or nephew, grandchild or friends child will not feel lost. They will look at my portrait and they will gain power, hope, peace of mind and pride. They will know that another transgender existed before and that it is okay to be gender non-conforming. When the world sees our portraits, they will know that Africa has transgender people and that there is a struggle against injustices on our continent. I am glad that I had my portrait drawn.

Thank you so much Amnesty International for enabling this exhibition to show at your offices. It is significant!! You have constantly defended the marginalized and protected and promoted the human rights of everyone. The showing of Transgender Africans’ portraits at your offices is signifying the need to protect, respect and promote the human rights of transgender people, not only in Africa, but in every corner of the world. Thank you very much, Victor J. Mukasa

 

 

Madam Jholerina Brina Timbo – Namibia

Hi

I am Madam Jholerina Brina Timbo.

I am 24 years of age, a transwoman from Namibia, Africa.

I would like us to be united as one in the fight against human rights violations taking place in this world.

Discrimination, stigma and abuse are not only in Africa but the developed world that has given my family the LGBTI people the rights as well, Let’s not say “the Africans…” or “The Europeans…” but let us all be one family that Stands for Justice, Equality and Peace.

In my country (Namibia) being LGBTI is a crime if you are caught in the act. .As much as I want to say much, it’s not so easy for one to say much as it all turns emotional. I believe that as Human beings we have to and must speak out for the greater good of the world. But for me as a transwoman in Namibia, and not having all the rights like everyone else it’s not easy.

I hate the way people look at me and laugh, It’s because there are no laws to protect me to be who and what I am….

Long live the movements, Madam Jholerina – Namibia Southern Africa

 

 

Nicole – Kenya

My name is Nicole, a 23 year old Transgendered young woman from Kenya.

I am very easy, outgoing and loving – I would describe myself as that!

In Kenya a lot of hate crimes and fear happens, and all this from the consequence of stigma, discrimination.

For many years, trans and non-gender conforming people either face mob-justice, sexual abuse, and also die at the hands of phobic killers.

I have witnessed the denial of free access to health care without public embarrassment when done to other members of the LGBTI.

I have also passed through sexual abuse, and a lot more to be defined – but it is also through this that I am the person I am, and that I have become stronger by the day!

I am glad that this exhibition not only shows the power and strength behind LGBTI persons but also with a world of justice then it will be easier for everybody! to live peacefully!

The exhibition is one beautiful thing to explore -

I believe the Art of this exhibition brings people together, and having unity is very vital in the larger community just as it is in LGBTI.

The exhibition is a part of me, and remembering Gabrielle as the power behind this Art only shows the strength to it, I believed in her work since the first time I got a glimpse of it!

Thank you for the Amnesty’s recognition on sexual and gender minorities!

For this I applaud you.

Thank You -

 

 

Salango Nikki Mawanda – Uganda

Hello

I am a Human Rights Defender, Transman, Warrior, Parent/ Family man, Ugandan prince aged 27 born to struggle for the success and liberation of my Trans world. I believe in God, proud to be a prince from Buganda kingdom. Above all, I love humanity and co-existence.

The situation of Trans people in Uganda is both negative and positive. Positively we have now organized ourselves through an organization called T.I.Ts UGANDA and through this group we are creating awareness about our existence in Uganda also for us to strategize on how overcome our challenges and threat. Negatively, we as trans people in Uganda are faced by day to day abuses both physical and verbal. We suffer from lack of information, blackmail by some of the people we trust and unfriendly health care policies. Inhuman and degrading treatment by health providers creates an insecure environment for trans people, who can’t trust them and that leads to self medication. As that all not enough, we are now going through a very difficult time since the anti homosexuality bill was tabled late last year.

Given the fact that we are so easily identified because of our gender expressions, this has made us the centre of attraction for all kinds of violence making us the sacrificial lambs of the LGBTI community. So far we have cases of physical violence and many security incidents reported to us by trans people as a result of this unrealistic, draconian, wish list, unconstitutional, inhuman, ridiculous and baseless Bill.

The Bill proposes a death penalty and if passed we will not have a chance for us to work as a group or us to work on the streets of Kampala because of fear of arrests and mob justice because already there are government officials and some religious leaders encouraging people to take the law in their hands claiming they are protecting the African traditional family.

I feel blessed to be a part of this exhibition and l know that it will get a lot of attention because this is the first time trans people from Africa are given such opportunity. I chose to have my portrait drawn because l wanted it to be a message to the world, to inspire, encourage and speak for the voiceless people who are like me.

Thank you Amnesty international for supporting our cause and please continue in various avenues and encourage your partners and allies to do the same here in Uganda and out there. I would love this exhibition to show in Washington DC and Latin America, CANADA, GENEVA at the UN, France and Sweden.

I feel this is a great opportunity for the trans movement in Africa, i know that African LGB movement gets a lot of support from Netherlands and if trans activists from Africa are showing their existence, i hope that Netherlands can join in our struggle as we build a strong and sustained movement.

Thank you for the opportunity.

Salongo Nikki Mawanda

Trans Activist, programme co-ordinator, Transgender, Intersex and Transsexuals Uganda. (T.I.Ts UGANDA)

 

 

Silva Skinny Dux Eiseb – Namibia

Dear Amnesty,

I am Silva Skinny Dux Eiseb as I am known these days. I love my name that I am using and I am known everywhere I go. I am an open minded Transgender person living in Namibia. I have been living here all my life since birth. I see myself as a Trans man. I live as a man everyday, the man that I am. I am slightly different because I am special, two in one. I am daddy, brother, boyfriend, lover and so much more.

I am the founding Father of the Trans gender movement in Namibia called (TAMON ) Trans Activist Movement Of Namibia.I live in one of the townships called Dolam in the Capital city of Namibia Windhoek. I have been an activist for more than 10 years in the LGBTI movement and I am a feminist.

Being a Trans person in Namibia is not an easy thing. You need to have a brave heart to go out there in the streets and just being yourself as you are. It takes a lot of guts because when you go out you are exposed to lots of attacks physically and verbally if you are not strong enough to stand up for yourself and defend yourself. Its wrong to be different in these peoples eyes than the usual that a man has to look like this and a woman like that. That is why some Trans people are the victims of corrective rape because they want to see if you are a real man or have to fight to prove that you are a man enough. Trans women are beaten up because a man is not to behave in that way. In Namibia things are not always bad for LGBTI people but it depends on where you stay. It’s as not bad as in Uganda but it is not so good too.

It is a milestone for me to have our exhibition out there at the Amnesty International it is an achievement for the African Trans people because with the first Trans conference in Africa this is what we have achieved, and I am proud to have been part of that. Letting my portrait been drawn is to let the world out there know that we are there and we exist and that I am proud of who I am. It is also a historic thing for me to go down in the African Trans history. I am happy to have been part of that.

This means a lot to me and the Trans struggle that me and my fellow activists fight for daily in our lives. This exhibition put us on the map and let the world know our struggles and this makes us stronger. the exhibition will not only benefit me as a person but the whole trans community as I see it as a way of highlighting issues that normally stand in the background when people talk about human rights. For me it is important that Amnesty Inernational as a worldwide known and strong organization includes LGBTI issues and emphasizes the importance of the trans struggle that is ongoing all over the world. If the portrait of my reality and others in my situation is spread around the world it might create a common ground for a common struggle. I would love to see the exhibition all over the world wherever it might be possible. Feel free to use my name and email if you like.

Thank you!

Silva Skinny Dux Eiseb

 

 

Skipper Mogapi – Botswana

Hello

I am Skipper Mogapi, an activist from Botswana, who has been in the fight of gay rights since 2004, I identify as Trans man and work as coordinator of Lesbians, Gays and Bisexuals of Botswana [LeGaBiBo] since 2006.

I hold two positions at the moment, the coordinator of LGBTI movement, and as the Prevention and Research Initiatives for sexual Minorities [PRISM] assistant program coordinator, from 2007 to date.

My interest in LGBT rights started in 2004 when Behind the Mask was doing research in LGBTI rights and movements and I had been the media victim [my sexual orientation was disclosed in the newspapers].

There are so many challenges I face as trans person in Botswana, like having to be stared at all the time and asked to identify yourself everywhere you go, for example using the public toilets or getting into a night club. At school I had problem with dress: I identified as a man and was expected to wear a dress all the time.

It’s also hard to get a job. Although my papers show that I am female, my physical appearance shows that I am a man. The hardest thing is, since I started taking testosterone last year 2009, whenever I travel the police and immigration officers have to question my passport or identity card.

Thanks

Skipper

The Lives Gained by Fleeing Jim Crow

By JANET MASLIN

Published: August 30, 2010

“We pray for the lady visitor and the book she’s trying to put together,” said the spiritual leader of the Monroe, Louisiana, Club of Los Angeles at a meeting that Isabel Wilkerson attended in 1996. Ms. Wilkerson was there as part of her monumental research job for “The Warmth of Other Suns,” work that seems to have lasted the better part of 20 years and taken a piece of Ms. Wilkerson’s heart in the process. Her hard work, keen insight and passionate personal commitment make “The Warmth of Other Suns” a landmark piece of nonfiction.

Joe Henson

Isabel Wilkerson

THE WARMTH OF OTHER SUNS

The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration

By Isabel Wilkerson

622 pages. Random House. $30.

 

In a book that, quite amazingly, is her first, Ms. Wilkerson (a Pulitzer Prize-winning former Chicago bureau chief for The New York Times who is now professor of journalism and director of narrative nonfiction at Boston University) has pulled off an all but impossible feat. She has documented the sweeping 55-year-long migration of black Americans across their own country. She has challenged the dismissive assumptions that are sometimes made about that migration, treating it as a briefer and more easily explained event.

Ms. Wilkerson makes a case that people who left the South only to create hometown-based communities in new places are more like refugees than migrants: more closely tied to their old friends and families, more apt to form tight expatriate groups, more enduringly attached to the areas they left behind. She argues that these people, among them her Georgia-born mother and Virginia-born father who raised Ms. Wilkerson in Washington, D.C., were better educated and more closely tied to their families than other scholars have assumed. She works on a grand, panoramic scale but also on a very intimate one, since this work of living history boils down to the tenderly told stories of three rural Southerners who immigrated to big cities from their hometowns.

She winds up with a mesmerizing book that warrants comparison to “The Promised Land,” Nicholas Lemann’s study of the Great Migration’s early phase, and “Common Ground,” J. Anthony Lukas’s great, close-range look at racial strife in Boston. (But it should not go unnoticed that “The Warmth of Other Suns” also tells the kinds of stories that have made such a tenacious best seller out of “The Help,” Kathryn Stockett’s wide-eyed, indignant novel of racial injustice.)

With a glimmer of the big, unwieldy story she wanted to tell but no set method of how to frame it, Ms. Wilkerson interviewed more than 1,200 people whose lives had followed the same basic pattern: early years in the South followed by relocation in either the North or the West. She winnowed this group down to three, each of whom had left home during a different decade.

The oldest, Ida Mae Brandon Gladney, was a Mississippi sharecropper’s wife who moved to Chicago in 1937. Next was George Swanson Starling, who relocated to New York in 1945 from the Florida citrus groves after his efforts to organize fellow workers earned his employer’s ire. Finally, and unforgettably, there was Robert Joseph Pershing Foster, a 1953 transplant to Los Angeles from Monroe, La. Called Pershing in his early years and then morphing into Bob the West Coast bon vivant, this doctor warrants a book of his own. Dr. Foster’s most famous patient, Ray Charles, would write a song about Dr. Foster’s way of running off with Mr. Charles’s women.

These three left their homes for very different reasons. But what they had in common was an inability to accept the illogic of the Jim Crow world in which they were raised. The single greatest strength of “The Warmth of Other Suns” lies in its anecdotal examples of how the rules of segregation, whether spoken or unspoken, actually worked on a day-to-day basis. It’s one thing to know that Southern blacks faced bias in all aspects of their lives. It’s another to know that when an esteemed black doctor from Louisiana needed to perform surgery on a black patient, he couldn’t do it in a white hospital. Driving around with his own portable operating table was easier.

Although the book contains its share of much rougher stories, it is these seemingly workaday ones that hit hardest. One interviewee’s remark that leaving the South “was like getting unstuck from a magnet” best sets Ms. Wilkerson’s tone in a book sure to hold many surprises for readers of any race or experience. “The Warmth of Other Suns,” whose title was taken from a Richard Wright quotation, does a superb job of capturing the way whole lives can be changed by small outrages, and the way those changes are neither irrevocable nor simple. For Ida Gladney, George Starling and Robert Foster, the act of leaving home meant the end of one set of troubles. It just as surely meant the beginning of another.

Dr. Foster’s epochal journey is the most devastating, partly because of his storytelling style. Years after the fact, he would remember in vivid detail the exhaustion of driving west across Texas without knowing where segregation actually ended, where he could find a place to sleep, where he could even safely stop his car. (He kept an eye out for Confederate flag bumper stickers. He also wound up traveling desperately across three states without rest.)

It says a lot about Ms. Wilkerson that she retraced Dr. Foster’s steps by driving west herself, with her parents in the car to provide commentary. Because they are her parents and three black people can now stop wherever they want to, her mother and father cut short this experiment before their daughter’s exhaustion could even begin to match what Dr. Foster went through.

“I’m looking for a room,” he told Ms. Wilkerson he had said after being turned down wherever he stopped along the way. “Now, if it’s your policy not to rent to colored people, let me know now so I don’t keep getting insulted.” In a book that spans a century, Ms. Wilkerson describes both youthful dreams and late-life losses. There may be things about her three principals that she will not say (Dr. Foster’s obsession with appearances, particularly with his wife’s, goes well beyond anything that racial inequity can explain), but there does not appear to be anything she didn’t know.

Her closeness with, and profound affection for, her subjects reflect her deep immersion in their stories and allow the reader to share that connection. It creates a wide swath of human drama. And it shapes a new understanding of why Southerners’ new lives in strife-torn cities far from home may not have been easier than the lives they left behind.

 

UCSD Guestbook: Sherman Alexie

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27 minutes

Rated R: Mature language and themes. Author, poet, screenwriter of "Smoke Signals" and satirist Sherman Alexie has been hailed as one of the most important writers of this generation. The New Yorker named him "one of the top 20 writers for the 21st Century." Alexie's most recent book is the acclaimed "The Toughest Indian in the World." (#6190)

Sapo National Park

Sapo National Park, in southeast Liberia, is a beautiful rainforest. One of the few left in the region.

Many people live in and around the forest.

The forest is remote, a ten hour drive fron the capital on rough roads that are impassible during rainy season, and across a river into the dense thicket.

To the people who lived near the forest, it seems endless. After all, they’d never seen the other side.

They cut parts of it down to start farms.

NGOs have come in to teach about conservation. They bring generators and have slideshows.

But it’s the kind of place where things are as they’ve always been.

And this is how people farm, and this is what they eat.

The park is in danger.

But so are many things in Liberia.

 

_________________________________

About Scarlett Lion

I’m an American photographer and journalist traipsing around Africa on the lookout for the ordinary and the extraordinary, using my camera as a pretext to enter worlds not otherwise available.

This space is a scrap book of web and life trawlings – photography, music, arts, politics, and other sundry subjects. It is also a vanity press for my unpublished (and occasionally) published work.

I found the scarlett lion on the roof a friend’s house in Kampala back in 2006 when I went through a crate of discarded items he and a few other artists had gathered. On that day, I was looking for something and I found the lion: a discarded kid’s toy made in China on the cheap, that somehow found it’s way to East Africa. Something about the hollowed out, paint chipped figurine appealed to my understanding of this amazing continent: I’d never seen a real lion, after all.

Previously based in Uganda, currently in Liberia. Always roaming.

• Glennagordon.com

   

  Visit my photography portfolio

The African-American Perspective on the Iraq War or…We Told You So (And Why It Matters)

31 Aug 2010 Author: Jill Tubman

I have to say — along with the Inauguration, the president’s first speech to the nation on Haiti and the passage of healthcare reform, this is probably going to be one of my favorite moments to date of Barack Obama’s presidency, reminding me why we all worked so very hard to get a brother elected in the first place. Congratulations on another promise kept.

80% of African-Americans thought before the war in Iraq started that it was a bad idea. That’s partly because 25% of the Armed Forces are black — at twice the percentage of our population. It means if you’re black, you’re more likely than most Americans to know someone who might be put in harm’s way in active combat — a relative, a friend or a co-worker. In my case, I know people personally in each of those categories who were sent to Iraq, their lives disrupted and endangered for an unnecessary mission. What’s left behind — friends and loved ones who pray for their safe and sane return. You don’t always get both of those, I’ve learned. You can see that yourself on the mean streets of America — too many of our cities’ homeless are military veterans, shamefully treated by the society they risked their lives to protect. If you know someone who’s going to have to go to war, it means you’re more likely to take that burden a bit more seriously. Our people are not toy soldiers, but flesh-and-blood men and women. From the Boston Globe:

Before the 2003 invasion of Iraq, major polls showed that African-American support for the invasion was as low as 19 percent, according to the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, while white support ran between 58 percent and 73 percent in major polls.

Even today African-Americans by far lead the way in calling the war a mistake. According to Gallup, 85 percent of African Americans say it was a mistake, compared to 53 percent of white Americans. According to Pew, a plurality of white Americans, 49 percent, still say it was the right decision to invade Iraq, compared to 21 percent of African-Americans.

Our opinion matters as a people because without us, the military is starving for new recruits. Culturally speaking, it’s not just younger black folks who thought the war was wack but their parents, preachers and teachers. Here’s more from this excellent, must-read Boston Globe piece offering the African-American perspective on the war and why it’s so important given our history supplying the military with recruits:

Gregory Black, a retired Navy diver who last year started the website BlackMilitaryWorld.com, said that quote sums up what he too hears from African-American veterans of Iraq.

“African-Americans detest this war,” Black said yesterday in a phone interview. “Everybody kind of knows the truth behind this war. It’s a cash cow for the military defense industry, when you look at the money these contractors are making. African-Americans saw this at the beginning of the war and now the rest of the country has figured it out. It’s not benefiting us in the least.”

Asked about the reference to an “oilman’s war,” Black said, “It’s basically about oil, basically about money. It’s an economic war.” He said veterans are saying they are tired and burned out. “Guys are saying we’re halfway around the world fighting people of color under the guise of democracy and we can’t see how it’s benefited anyone,” Black said. “It’s hard to fight halfway around the world for people’s freedom when you’re not sure you have it at home.”

Today, we must turn our attention to the war in Afghanistan. It’s gone badly and is likely to take a nasty turn given the floods in neighboring Pakistan near the region in conflict. Desperate people are often targets for demagogues such as the Taliban and Al Qaeda. Black people in my experience at least tend to be more ambivalent about Afghanistan in contrast to Iraq which was just a crazy idea on the face of it.

Al Qaeda was based in Afghanistan when they attacked the U.S. on 9/11/2001. Busting some ass over there made sense at the time, but nowadays, it’s not clear if our presence is doing more harm than good while putting Team America in danger’s way. I hope the President will address his vision for peace in that area of the world in his speech tonight…

Photo credit: American soldiers salute while the national anthem is played during a ceremony marking Veterans Day at the U.S. Camp Eggers in Kabul, Afghanistan (AP Photo/Anja Niedringhaus)

God In Me

Shackles (Praise You)

I Sings

Watch My Mic Sounds Nice: A Truth About Women & Hip Hop

• 8/31/10 at 11:10 AM
• Comment 4Comment 4Comments

This documentary, which takes a look at the past few decades in hip-hop to address the dearth of female M.C.s, aired on BET last night and is now online in full, courtesy of Miss Info and Mr. World Premiere. Featured artists include Missy Elliott, Jean Grae, Rah Digga, Eve, and Salt-N-Pepa.