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Showing results for 'black political party' in content posted by richardmurray.
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TO THE FIRST HAITIAN CONSTITUTION
Interesting points,
- it starts with the term supreme being which is a term not meant to be solely for christianity, and it also starts with a Black proclamation concerning the black communities relationship to whites overall.
- It defines haiti as made from the people of former santo domingo and is independent of any power in the universe , beyond earth itself, which is interesting.
- whereas the usa needed a 13th amendemtn to its constitution, slavery is abolished as the second act after the creation of haiti itself. so from a mere legal priority perspective, , the first black american- canada to argentina , legal document makes ending slavery the second most important aspect after the state itself. i find that legally interesting from a historical point of view, because outside haiti, all other governments in the american continent- canada to argentina, needed amendments of proclamations long after their formation. It proves that at least centuries ago the legal view of blacks was fundamentally varied from whites in terms of what is important.
- the third article suggest a socialism or communism, but also a complication. The only ranks that can differ people in haiti are "services to independence or liberty" which means in my mind , the concept of elected officials is deleted. A president can not exist because a president isn't a soldier to the services of independence or liberty. Soldiers or civilians are the only two classes which explains how haiti being surrounded by non black countries who have a financial gentry class + elected official clans who are not for independence or freedom but financial advantage or power accumulation to be a class above dont fit.
- The sixth clause, no retroactive nature is another note. In the usa, the usa constitution speaks of the constitution being malleable and even potentially invalid in the future but the haiti constitution speaks of it not being applicable to the past which means criminal acts during the freeing of black people by black freedom fighters are acceptable.
- PRoperty is deemed sacred. It is interesting Blacks relationship to ownership. White people view ownership as part of the market place but the haitian constitution almost treats owning property as a right to be protected once earned equivalent to the right of free speech. The placement of this and its existence is so different to other initial legal documents .
- Haiti is an anti immigration country. The seventh clause essentially states a haitian immigrting is punishable by death. That is very different from the legal norms outside haiti, which explains haiti's relationship to its neighbors but like the chinese communist constitution's particular differences based on their history of being satraped by usa/japan/western europe. By this initial constituton every single person who left haiti to become usa citizens or citizens of france are no longer haitian.
- Black members of the party of lincoln will love the eight article, it states that financial failure means one losses their quality as a citizen, an interesting article. It essentially says no one can fail. In the usa, a firm can be too big too fail but by this constitution, financial activity must lead to at least break even. It never suggest one must make a profit but one musn't fail.
- The ninth clause proves what Haiti really is. Haiti is a militaristic society. I don't mean war mongering. By the ninth clause every single person in haiti should be a member of the military by law, it isn't said outright but it is implied.
- Tenth interesting how so many articles in the haitian constitution deal with ownership or the role of the haitian military as synonymous to the haitian people, it explains how the outside influences of haiti could only hurt because in the usa/brasil/western europe the idea of the marketeer is strong but doesn't fit where the original haitian constitution was going. So many haitians didn't own anything outside of land and they coudn't disinherit children by law. I don wonder where the tenth clause can be used in terms of shifting inheritance.
- Twelve states what i have always said is a big difference. the haitian constitution admits phenotypical race and more importantly denies whites the opportunity or right to own anything of haiti. Which means any firm with a white investor or shareholder by this constitution has no right to own anything in haiti. When i think of clause twelve and i think of how black people outside of haiti are denied the ability to own anything absent white presence as a investor it is very telling.
- thirteen exposes something I didn't consider was clearly more important during jean jacques time in haiti and that is of white women who were allowed to own land essentially in haiit where they would not outside of it. It also shows how haiti's minority of mulattoes from the time of jean jacques existed as an anomaly populace.
- The haitian constitution basically goes against the casta concept and calls all children of black people regardless of shade as black from a fredi washington/devil in the blue dress to satchmo/hariet tubman skin tone.
- I have to say administratively i found the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth articles interesting. First, the haitian constitution made ceding illegal initially, whereas the usa needed the war between the states. and it makes legal sense based on the earlier article about immigrations illegality. But haiti was an empire because by said articles, haiti was split into six divisions, which had a general that was independent from the other. so jean jacques dessalines, while he was emperor ,literally allowed the six generals under him to have their own suzerainty as a general of division, with a liaison in a general in chief to him. So it explains one of the problems. where most history books suggest haiti split up with petion and henry christophe, the truth is, the emperor role was always going to be weak when you have six divisions each with their own independent governor, they needed the emperor to have one division.
- The first magistrate role is not emphasized later but I wonder their thinking with it. the first magistrate isn't defined how this person is elected or comes to power, it seems to be through military means but it is unclear and thus what happened when dessalines died.
- twenty three says the crown is elected not hereditary , which is funny cause in many history books outside haiti they suggest hereditary lineage.
- twenty eight suggest a code of conduct while the earlier provisions provide a financial salary to the emperors family, it is interesting how they make a code of conduct mandatory
- No religion is predominant which is interesting, the larger black american community has always had problems accepting what faith beliefs should dominate and tend to allow all which is complicated because some beliefs come from the enslaver. .
When I look at haiti today the reality is, it is a country that has never left the military structure first suggested by the first constitution. the problem is, the usa's meddling led to a constitution that tries to turn a community made by enslaved people who only had space for soldiers and an extended soldier society into one with marketeers and various ranks that don't fir the simpler paradigm. and the existence of the government elected class, the intelligista raised in foreign colleges has only complicated the country. All governments are the same in on eway, they are created by the conditions of the people who made them initially and usualy don't change their essence even if they make facade changes.
Haiti ConstitutionARTICLE TITLE Haiti, Constitutions
ARTICLE BODY
Haiti has had about twenty constitutions, both real and nominal, many illustrating the apt creole proverb: "A constitution is paper; a bayonet is steel." A common characteristic of most of them has been a strong president and a weak legislature.The first constitution, Autonomy and Independence (Toussaint, 1801), written ten years after independence from France, gave France suzerainty and provided for forced labor. The second (Dessalines, 1805) abolished slavery "forever," separated church and state, applied the word "black" to all Haitians, and prohibited foreign ownership of land. The third (Pétion's first, 1806) is modeled after that of the United States. The fourth (Christophe, 1811) created a nobility. The fifth (Pétion's second, 1816) granted the president his office for life. The sixth (Riché, 1846) empowered the joint chambers to elect the president. The seventh (Domingue, 1874) concentrated all power in the presidency. That of 1889 (Hyppolite) revised the previous constitution of 1879 (Salomon) and served as the basis of government until the U.S. occupation.
The Constitution of 1918, written during the U.S. occupation by Assistant Navy Secretary Franklin D. Roosevelt, cancelled the prohibition of foreign ownership of land and added individual democratic rights. The eleventh constitution (1927) increased the powers of the president, as did that of 1932 (Vincent).
The constitutions of the postoccupation and Duvalier era were the thirteenth (Magloire, 1950), a liberal one written by the scholar-diplomat Dantès Bellegarde that provided for female suffrage beginning in 1957, and the fourteenth (Duvalier, 1957), which increased the powers of the president and excluded foreigners from retail trade. Duvalier's second constitution (1961) reduced the legislature to one chamber and increased the powers of the president. Duvalier's third, which was the sixteenth constitution, made Duvalier president for life, authorized him to choose his successor, and changed the flag's colors.
"Baby Doc" Duvalier's first constitution, the seventeenth (1983), combined a set of progressive social goals with new presidential powers of appointment and new power over the legislature. Baby Doc's second (1985) provided the legislature with new powers, created the position of prime minister, and permitted political parties (a public-relations response to U.S. pressure, approved by a fraudulent referendum).
The first constitution of the post-Duvalier era, that of 1987, restored the two-chamber legislature, reduced the powers of the president by dividing the executive authority between president and prime minister, created a permanent electoral council, removed the new force publique from direct control of the president and minister of the interior, prohibited for ten years the participation in government of "any person well known for having been … one of the architects of the dictatorship and of its maintenance during the last twenty-nine years," provided many basic human rights, recognized Creole (Kreyol) as the national language, legalized vodun, and recognized no state religion. It was approved by a free and popular referendum.
President Leslie François Manigat was removed by General Henri Namphy, who became president, dissolved the legislature, and abolished all constitutions. Namphy in turn was removed by General Prosper Avril, who restored the nineteenth constitution, except for thirty-eight articles.
General Avril was forced out in 1989 and he was replaced by supreme court judge Ertha Pascal-trouillot, who became provisional president in 1990 under article 149 of the constitution. (This article provides that if the office of president is vacant, the chief justice or a member will become acting president until elections are held.) In free elections, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, a leftist priest, was elected president; he was inaugurated in February 1991. While president, Aristide took advantage of article 295 of the constitution, which authorized him for a six-month period "to proceed to carry out any reforms deemed necessary in the Government Administration … and in the Judiciary." He gave some provocative speeches threatening the elite "bourgeoisie" and the military; the latter overthrew him in late September. The Organization of American States (OAS) responded by approving economic sanctions against the military government of General Raoul Cédras to bring about Aristide's restoration. The United Nations joined the OAS in 1993 and joint efforts were made to negotiate a settlement. An accord was reached in July, providing for the selection of a prime minister (Robert Malval), lifting of sanctions, political amnesty, and Aristide's return. The accord could not be implemented once the military reneged although sanctions were strengthened. In June 1994, the military government, acting under article 149, inaugurated Supreme Court Chief Justice Émile Jonassaint as provisional president. President Aristide was restored to power in late 1994.
ARTICLE URL
https://www.encyclopedia.com/humanities/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps/haiti-constitutions#: -
The problem here is language. When did hunger become a non usable word. Food insecurity means hunger, it isn't a slur or insult to call hunger what it is. Hunger isn't beyond the USA or foreign to the USA.
white people say NYC has circa 8,200,000 people. I say 10,000,000 but if 1,200,000 humans in NYC are hungry then that is 14.6 percent to 12 percent. so one out of every ten New Yorkers are hungry . Visits to pantries are up 100% which means hunger is growing. Now, I argue this is part of eric adams plan. Many people in the USA love to forgive the government for its injurious planning, while supporting the institution of law enforcement as a tool to keep the hungry from rioting.
The report shows a nearly 100% increase in visits to pantries by families with children, compared to before the COVID-19 pandemic. (Spectrum News NY1)
Report: Child hunger rates continue to rise in New York City
By Rebecca Greenberg Brooklyn
PUBLISHED 8:40 PM ET May 28, 2024
A new report by City Harvest finds one in four children in New York City are experiencing food insecurity — a trend that continues to worsen since the COVID-19 pandemic.What You Need To Know
Last year, families made more than 1 million average monthly visits to food pantries in the city, according to a report by City HarvestThe report shows a nearly 100% increase in visits to pantries by families with children, compared to before the COVID-19 pandemic
Community Food Connection, which supplies high quality food to charities and food banks, could have its funding slashed by $30 million as part of Mayor Eric Adams’ preliminary executive budget for next year
Courtney Fields is among 1.2 million New Yorkers who don’t have enough to eat and don’t know where their next meal will come from.She said her nearest food pantry is a lifeline for herself and her five young children.
“It’s serious at the end of the month for single moms and I don’t know what I would do if the pantry wasn’t here. Honestly, I don’t,” Fields said.
Every week, the single mother walks one mile from her homeless shelter to the Bed-Stuy Campaign Against Hunger.
She said without this food pantry, her family would not survive.
“I’ll probably have to resort to things that I don’t want to resort to. Some people don’t have fathers for extra help. I don’t even have a father. I lost all the support. So it’s just me. I don’t know what I would do,” Fields said.
According to a new report by City Harvest, one in four children doesn’t have enough food to meet their nutritional needs. Last year, families made more than 1 million average monthly visits to food pantries in the city.
Data also shows a nearly 100% increase in visits to pantries by families with children compared to before the COVID-19 pandemic.
Jerome Nathaniel, who is the director of Policy and Government Relations for City Harvest, which published the child hunger report, said resources for low-income families have dwindled in the years following the pandemic.
“During COVID, there were a number of critical government programs and new food access programs that were put in place to support families and unfortunately, many of those programs have shored up or they’ve been allowed to sunset, leaving children without that support,” Nathaniel said.
Advocates for the hungry say the city should continue to invest in programs like Community Food Connection, or CFC, which supplies high-quality food to charities and food banks.
But Mayor Eric Adams’ preliminary executive budget for next year includes $30 million in cuts to that program.
“If Community Food Connection is cut, then chances are, we will have to cut from every end because they’re the ones supporting all our programs. We’re serving over 14,000 per week,” Melony Samuels, the CEO and founder of The Campaign Against Hunger, which has 250 locations across the five boroughs, said.
In a statement, a spokesperson for City Hall said, “The Adams administration continues to combat food insecurity in our city… We will continue to closely monitor ongoing needs through the budget process while simultaneously working with our city partners and key stakeholders to delivery for New Yorkers in need.”
Meanwhile, Fields hopes programs like The Campaign Against Hunger will continue to operate so she and her children can have a fighting chance.
“They’re gonna go hungry. So they need places like this so they can eat if someone like me doesn’t have support to feed the kids. We rely on places like this to feed the kids,” Fields said.
Adams still needs to negotiate a final budget with the City Council before the July 1 deadline.
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The average Electric vehicle in the USA is $52,000 , Chinese electric vehicles are being bought in Europe, dominating their market at a price of $10,000 . So Biden wants people in the usa to pay five times more for an electric vehicle made in the usa. Biden is denying the most affordable option available in the global market while trying to hope the domestic environment can provide an alternative. The simple arithmetic is clear, the global market for electric vehicles will be dominated by chinese automakers and the usa will be the one place where the chinese automakers don't dominate because of governmental tarrifs. Which the usa chagrined other countries do to protect their domestic markets.
The USA for years has benefited from cheap chinese goods. Manufacturers in the usa are too costly
and to be blunt, tend to be beneath acceptable quality when they sell something affordable to the masses. (https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/18/business/biden-china-tariffs.html)Biden Doesn’t Want You Buying an E.V. From China. Here’s Why.
The president wants to shift America’s car fleet toward electric vehicles, but not at the expense of American jobs or national security.
By Jim Tankersley
Reporting from WashingtonMay 27, 2024
President Biden wants more of America’s cars and trucks to run on electricity, not gas. His administration has pushed that goal on multiple fronts, including strict new regulations of auto emissions and lavish new subsidies to help American consumers take as much as $7,500 off the cost of a new electric vehicle.Mr. Biden’s aides agree that electric vehicles — which retail for more than $53,000 on average in the United States — would sell even faster here if they were less expensive. As it happens, there is a wave of new electric vehicles that are significantly cheaper than the ones customers can currently buy in the United States. They are proving extremely popular in Europe.
But the president and his team do not want Americans to buy these cheap cars, which retail elsewhere for as little as $10,000, because they are made in China. That’s true even though a surge of low-cost imported electric vehicles might help drive down car prices overall, potentially helping Mr. Biden in his re-election campaign at a time when inflation remains voters’ top economic concern.
Instead, the president is taking steps to make Chinese electric vehicles prohibitively expensive, in large part to protect American automakers. Mr. Biden signed an executive action earlier this month that quadruples tariffs on those cars to 100 percent.
Those tariffs will put many potential Chinese imports at a significant cost disadvantage to electric vehicles made in America. But some models, like the discount BYD Seagull, could still cost less than some American rivals even after tariffs, which is one reason Senator Sherrod Brown of Ohio and some other Democrats have called on Mr. Biden to ban Chinese E.V. imports entirely.The apparent clash between climate concerns and American manufacturing has upset some environmentalists and liberal economists, who say the country and the world would be better off if Mr. Biden welcomed the importation of low-cost, low-emission technologies to fight climate change.
Mr. Biden and his aides reject that critique. They say the president’s efforts to restrict Chinese electric cars and other clean-technology imports are an important counter to illegal and harmful trade practices being carried out by Beijing.
And they insist that Mr. Biden’s trade approach will ultimately benefit American jobs and national security — along with the planet.
Here are the policy and political considerations driving Mr. Biden’s attempt to shield American producers from Chinese competition.
Denying Beijing a new monopoly
China already dominates key clean-energy manufacturing in areas like solar cells and batteries. Mr. Biden’s aides want to prevent it from gaining monopolies in similar industries, like electric vehicles, for several reasons.They include climate concerns. Administration officials say Chinese factories, which tend to be powered by fossil fuels like coal, produce more greenhouse gas emissions than American plants.
There is also a central economic reason to deny China a monopoly: ensuring that electric cars and trucks will always be available, at competitive prices. The Covid-19 pandemic drove home the fragility of global supply chains, as critical products like semiconductors became hard to get from China and other Asian nations that the United States relied upon. Prices for consumer electronics and other products that relied on imported materials soared, fueling inflation.
Biden officials want to avoid a similar scenario for electric vehicles. Concentrating the supply of E.V.s and other advanced green tech in China would risk “the world’s collective ability to have access to the technologies we need to be successful in a clean energy economy,” said Ali Zaidi, Mr. Biden’s national climate adviser.
Shoring up national security
Biden officials say they are not trying to bring the world’s entire electric vehicle supply chain to the United States. They are cutting deals with allies to supply minerals for advanced batteries, for example, and encouraging countries in Europe and elsewhere to subsidize their own domestic clean-tech production. But they are particularly worried about the security implications of a major rival like China dominating the space.The administration has initiated investigations into the risks of software and hardware of future imported smart cars — electric or otherwise — from China that could track Americans’ locations and report back to Beijing. Liberal economists also worry about the prospect of China cutting off access to new cars or key components of them, for strategic purposes.
Allowing China to dominate E.V. production risks repeating the longstanding economic and security challenges of gasoline-powered cars, said Elizabeth Pancotti, the director of special initiatives at the liberal Roosevelt Institute in Washington, which has cheered Mr. Biden’s industrial policy efforts.
Americans have struggled for decades to cope with decisions by often hostile oil-producing nations, which act as part of the OPEC cartel, to curtail production and raise gasoline prices. China could wreak similar havoc on the electric-car market if it drives other nations out of the business, she said.
If that happens, she said, “reversing that is going to be really difficult.”
Biden needs the energy transition to create jobs
There is no denying that politics also play a huge factor in Mr. Biden’s decisions. Simply put: He is promising that his climate program will create jobs — good-paying, blue-collar manufacturing jobs, including in crucial swing states like Pennsylvania and Michigan.Mr. Biden is a staunch supporter of organized labor, and is counting on union votes to help win those states. He has pledged that the energy transition will boost union workers. He is betting their support for tariffs meant to protect American manufacturing jobs will dwarf any complaints from environmentalists who want faster progress on reducing emissions.
“One of the constituent groups in the Democratic Party that’s really highly organized, that gets people out to knock on doors, is the labor movement, more so than the environmental movement,” said Todd Vachon, a professor of labor studies at Rutgers University and the author of “Clean Air and Good Jobs: U.S. Labor and the Struggle for Climate Justice.”Those concerns have come into especially high relief given that many clean energy jobs are with young companies where workers aren’t unionized, he added.
Mr. Biden put those concerns front and center when announcing his tariff decision last week.
“Back in 2000, when cheap steel from China began to flood the market, U.S. steel towns across Pennsylvania and Ohio were hit hard,” he said at the White House. “Ironworkers and steelworkers in Pennsylvania and Ohio lost their jobs. I’m not going to let that happen again.”
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https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/27/business/biden-evs.htmlThe problem isn't the rule of the people, the problem is dysfunctional policy. One of the problems of the usa model is that dysfunctional policy works. This is based on the advertised success of the usa militaristically + financially. But the usa was and is a huge financial profiteer of centuries of mass enslavement. Remember most continental european countries enslavement was external, the cost of shipping and maintain the overseas military was a cost the european american did not have to deal with as its enslavement was local. Second the usa used immigration to strengthen its populace to maintain violent control over the enslaved+ eradicate or annihilate the indigenous or remaining indigenous. The funny thing is how a country like South Africa whose black populace have a majority in populace but are the lowest financial rung think a system by the usa or from white european heritage can work. Luckily for me south africa's change from apartheid to post apartheid is in my lifetime. I saw how south africa under mandela was guided to its current state. The USA was a jewel of white european imperialism that broke away from its motherland/Western European Countries were former global empires built up by the usa to stop them from joining Soviet russia/Russia has an untold level of natural resources and a military to protect itself/ japan was a former global empire rebuilt by the usa to stop them joining soviet russia/China is a country that found freedom from white domination, including that of the usa, during world war two and through a large populace+large natural resources+ a distrust of all foreigners including the usa became a world power. But South Africa was a country majority black whose majority population was taking a nonviolent approach to the minorities: whites/indians/coloreds who enjoyed their financial luxury while keeping the black majority under foot through violent means. Mandela gave this racial relationship, totally negative in structure, a legal fellowship that was and is totally absent. Blacks/colored/indians/whites are four different peoples, they can not fornicate into one people, nor do any of them want to. Mandela chose the wrong system, he should had did what china did, take some ideas from outside but make a system that relates to the situation of south africa specifically. China has a law that says no law from outside of china has superiority over chinese law in china. That stems from the fact that the usa/england/france/germany/russia/japan all had spheres of china as domains. The chinese learned no one can be trusted from their experiences. But the chinese also applied this after violence. Black South Africans need violence and then need to turn south africa into what they want, and if they want the coloreds/indians/whites around.
South Africa’s Young Democracy Leaves Its Young Voters Disillusioned
We spoke to South Africans who grew up in the three decades since the country overthrew apartheid and held its first free election about their lives and plans to vote — or not — in this week's pivotal election.By Lynsey ChutelPhotographs by Joao Silva
Reporting from Johannesburg, Polokwane, Carletonville, Phoenix and Gqeberha in South AfricaMay 28, 2024
At the dawn of South Africa’s democracy after the fall of the racist apartheid government, millions lined up before sunrise to cast their ballots in the country’s first free and fair election in 1994.Thirty years later, democracy has lost its luster for a new generation.
South Africa is now heading into a pivotal election on Wednesday, in which voters will determine which party — or alliance — will pick the president. But voter turnout has been dropping consistently in recent years. It fell to below 50 percent for the first time in the 2021 municipal elections, and analysts said that voter registration has not kept up with the growth of the voting-age population.
This downward curve has mirrored the support for South Africa’s governing party, the African National Congress, or A.N.C., which was a liberation movement before becoming a political machine. Polls show the party may lose its outright majority for the first time since taking power in 1994 under the leadership of Nelson Mandela.
A new generation of voters do not have the lived experience of apartheid nor the emotional connection that their parents and grandparents had to the party. The A.N.C. as a governing party is all young people know, and they blame it for their joblessness, rampant crime and an economy blighted by electricity blackouts.
“Generational change or replacement has finally caught up with the A.N.C.,” said Collette Schulz-Herzenberg, an associate professor in political science at Stellenbosch University in South Africa.South Africa is no exception to global trends: Studies show that Gen Z and millennial voters in many countries have lost faith in the democratic process, even as they remain deeply concerned about issues like climate change and the economy.
But in South Africa, where the median age is 28, young people make up more than a quarter of registered voters in a population of 62 million, and are a crucial voting bloc. But only 4.4 million of the 11 million South Africans ages 20 to 29 have registered to vote in this election, according to statistics from South Africa’s Independent Electoral Commission.
The commission staged national campaigns to persuade more young people to register, and data show an encouraging uptick in registration of 18- and 19-year-olds who will vote for the first time in this election, to 27 percent from 19 percent since the last election.
But we spoke with many young people across the country who told us that they would sit out the election — a political rebuke to the A.N.C. and an indication that the country’s many opposition parties had failed to woo them.‘We are raising a generation of dependent young people’
Athenkosi Fani, 27His whole life, Athenkosi Fani has relied on the A.N.C. government, and he hates that feeling.
“I am made to depend on the system,” he said, sitting in his dorm room at Nelson Mandela University in the coastal city of Gqeberha, formerly known as Port Elizabeth. “We are raising a generation of dependent young people.”
Mr. Fani is a postgraduate student who has attended universities named for A.N.C. stalwarts, like Mr. Mandela and Walter Sisulu, but he said that staying in school was all that kept him from being yet another unemployed Black graduate.
He had a tragic childhood, worsened by the enduring poverty in Eastern Cape Province where he grew up. Mr. Fani’s mother received a social grant for him when he was born. Social grants, or welfare payments, are a lifeline for more than a third of households in South Africa — a state of affairs that A.N.C. politicians frequently remind voters about.
At age 11, Mr. Fani was placed in an orphanage when his mother could no longer care for him, and he became a ward of the state until 18. But he is gregarious and outspoken, and received a series of important boosts along his path.
To attend university, he relied on government financial aid. A provincial A.N.C. leader bought a laptop for him and paid for him to attend a monthlong traditional initiation for young men, an important rite of passage in the region. At his graduation in March, a member of the National Youth Development Agency attended, after it, too, funded him.
He has been an L.G.B.T.Q. activist since he was a teenager, and traveled to the United States to attend a Lion’s Club conference for young leaders to promote democracy. He was briefly an A.N.C. volunteer. All these experiences made him an ideal ambassador for youth issues, but also deeply resentful.He said that he grudgingly voted for the A.N.C. in the last election as a sign of gratitude. This time, he said, he is staying home on Election Day.
“I still do believe in democracy,” he said, but added, “I don’t want any organization that gets to have so much power.”
‘My vote isn’t going to count’
Shaylin Davids, 23Down deep, Shaylin Davids knows she’s part of the problem.
“The crime rate would actually go down if they start employing people,” said Ms. Davids, as she held court in her garage in Noordgesig, a township west of Johannesburg, with several friends. All are high school graduates, and all are unemployed.
Ms. Davids said she was good at school, but used her smarts to run drugs instead of attend university. An uncle she was close to was gunned down this past New Year’s Eve.
Aspiring now to turn a page, she started a computer course at a community center this year, hoping that it would land her a job if an employer looked past the tattoos on her face and fingers.
Ms. Davids’s grandmother told her that young people like her in her township actually had better prospects under apartheid. Ms. Davids is Coloured, the term still used for multiracial South Africans, who make up just over 8 percent of the population. Under apartheid, Coloured South Africans had better access than Black South Africans to jobs in factories and the trades.
Like many other Coloured South Africans, Ms. Davids feels left behind by a majority-Black government, and blames the A.N.C.’s affirmative action policies, which favored Black people, for reducing her job opportunities. This sentiment endures despite the reality that the unemployment rate for Black South Africans is 37 percent, compared with 23 percent for Coloured people in the country. But it has been enough to grow support for ethnically driven political parties.
Ms. Davids, though, is not interested in their slogans. She doesn’t follow politics, but she does follow the news. She watched bits of the finance minister’s budget speech in February, and concluded that he understood nothing about the cost-of-living crisis choking her neighborhood or how insufficient the social grant is.
Misinformation is rife, and she and her friends have heard rumors that if they registered, their votes would automatically go to the A.N.C. And even without that, she can’t see how her vote would change the country.
“I don’t want to vote because my vote isn’t going to count,” she said. “At the end of the day, the ruling party is still going to be A.N.C. There’s still no change.”
‘It’s not as good as it could be’
Aphelele Vavi, 22High school was great for Aphelele Vavi. His teachers were “superstars,” he said; the cafeteria had great snacks; and it is where he discovered his love of audiovisual production, which he is now turning into a career.
Mr. Vavi spent his teens ensconced in the bubble of a Johannesburg private school, and the friends and connections he made continue to shape his network and his prospects.
He lives in Sandton, a cluster of wealthy suburbs in northern Johannesburg, the son of a prominent trade unionist — making him part of the Black elite. But he was also exposed to the harsh realities of less-privileged South Africans, like his cousins, who still live in rural Eastern Cape Province.He said of post-apartheid South Africa: “It’s been really good to me.”
A first-time voter, he hopes the electricity blackouts that have plagued the country for years are the issue that will get other young people to vote. Studying audiovisual production, Mr. Vavi loses hours of work in a blackout. It also means a loss of connection to his close circle of friends, and turns his mobile phone into what he called “a very expensive brick.”
“As much as there’s been definite improvements, it’s not as good as it could be or should have been,” he said.
Hanging on the walls of the Vavi home is a portrait of the family posed with former President Nelson Mandela. Mr. Vavi’s father was once the leader of the country’s most powerful union, the Congress of South African Trade Unions, an ally of the A.N.C., and knew Mr. Mandela personally. All the younger Mr. Vavi remembers of that moment is “the hullabaloo of trying to find the bow tie” that he is wearing in the photograph.Still, Mr. Vavi said that he would not be voting for the A.N.C. He said that he had read all the parties’ manifestoes, but the politician who stood out for him did so by making a joke on X, formerly Twitter. To Mr. Vavi, the quip transformed that politician, Mmusi Maimane of the recently launched Build One South Africa party, into a relatable guy. Mr. Vavi is savvy enough to know that Mr. Maimane’s and other opposition parties won’t unseat the A.N.C., but they could shake up the party of his parents.
“The hope is that because of how unlikely it is that the A.N.C. are going to be voted out, at least scare them into picking up their socks and doing better,” he said.
‘South Africa can come back’
Dylan Stoltz, 20When Dylan Stoltz shared his dreams for South Africa with other young white South Africans, they laughed at him.
“They say you can’t do anything in this land anymore,” he said.
Mr. Stoltz’s optimism seems at odds with his surroundings in Carletonville, a dying mining town 46 miles southwest of Johannesburg. After the end of apartheid and the collapse of mining, fortunes have changed for men like Mr. Stoltz.
His grandfather had a farm of 215 acres and a senior job in a gold mine. Mr. Stoltz works as a fuel attendant in an agricultural supply store, where he serves an increasingly diverse group of farmers.
His stepfather arranged a higher-paying job for him outside of Vancouver, Canada, where he plans to go next year to work in construction for a South African émigré.
“I don’t want to leave South Africa permanently,” Mr. Stoltz said.Since 2000, the number of South Africans living abroad has nearly doubled to more than 914,000, according to census data. His plan is to work as hard as he can in Canada and make as much money as he can. Then, he’ll return to Carletonville to start a business and marry his girlfriend, Lee Ann Botes.
Fresh out of high school, Ms. Botes is considering becoming an au pair. It would give her the opportunity to travel, and perhaps finally see the ocean. Still, she, too, plans to return.
“Doesn’t matter how much the violence and crime can be, this is your home,” she said.Mr. Stoltz added, “I think South Africa can come back to where it was a few years back.”
While some white South Africans may be nostalgic for the apartheid years, for Mr. Stoltz, South Africa’s heyday was during the presidency of Mr. Mandela, when he believes there was racial unity. The closest he has come to this ideal in his own lifetime, he said, was when South Africa won the Rugby World Cup last year.
Mr. Stoltz said that he would vote for Siya Kolisi, the current captain of the national rugby team and the first Black player to lead it — if only he were running.
So he’s considering voting for the largest opposition party, the Democratic Alliance, or the Freedom Front Plus, once a minority Afrikaner party that has grown to become the fourth- largest in South Africa. His grandfather is a local councilor with the Freedom Front Plus.
‘I’m still waiting for someone to impress me’
Matema Mathiba, 30As a sales representative for a global brewery company, Matema Mathiba spends her days driving around South Africa’s northernmost Limpopo Province.
Ms. Mathiba spent much of her childhood in the provincial capital, Polokwane, once an agricultural center that has seen a mushrooming of large homes built by a new cohort of Black professionals. With the end of apartheid, the Mathiba family’s fortunes grew to provide a house with a bedroom for each of the three sisters, who all have college degrees.
In the struggling economy under President Cyril Ramaphosa, Polokwane is less expensive than living in Johannesburg, Ms. Maiba said, sipping a lemonade in a recently opened chain restaurant. The city is also an A.N.C. stronghold, with the party. taking 75 percent of the votes in the last election.
In the past, Ms. Mathiba had voted for the A.N.C. because, she said, “the devil you know is better.”
This election, though, she remains undecided. She is losing patience with the A.N.C., comparing the party to a 30-year-old, like herself, who should by now have a clear direction.
“A 30-year-old is an adult,” she said.
Ms. Mathiba’s church congregation of young Black professionals is her community, she says, and seeing television news footage of the A.N.C.’s tactic of campaigning in churches left a bitter taste.
“We can see through it, but can the older people?” she asked.With a degree in development planning, Ms. Mathiba actively participates in South Africa’s hard-won democracy, reading bills and commenting online. She understands the stakes of policy-making, but as part of the social media generation, she wants to know her leaders more personally.
That she knows nothing about Mr. Ramaphosa’s family unsettles her. She took notice when Julius Malema, the firebrand leader of the Economic Freedom Fighters, an opposition party, posted something personal about his children online. But she does not agree with his policy on open borders, she said.
Data show that a quarter of South African voters will make their decisions just days before the vote. So will Ms. Mathiba.
“I’m still waiting for someone to impress me,” she said.
‘When it’s time to do the action, they can’t’
Shanel Pillay, 24
As a girl, Shanel Pillay loved to go to the library. It’s where she studied, hung out with friends and met the boy who would become her fiancé.Today, Ms. Pillay says she would not risk the 10-minute walk to the library. Like many Indian South Africans living in Phoenix, a majority-Indian community founded by Gandhi when he lived in South Africa, Ms. Pillay feels that Phoenix has become unsafe. So has the surrounding city of Durban, on South Africa’s east coast. Crime keeps her indoors, producing TikTok videos to pass the time.
Ms. Pillay vividly remembers hiding in her home for several days in 2021, when Durban was gripped by deadly riots that pitted Black and Indian South Africans against each other. The violence highlighted how poor and working-class South Africans felt left behind by progress made since the end of apartheid.
Recently, parts of Phoenix have not had running water for weeks, she said.
Under apartheid policy, Indian South Africans received more economic benefits than other groups of color. Since the end of apartheid, Indians, who make up 2.7 percent of the population, have seized opportunities in education and skilled work.
Ms. Pillay wanted to become a teacher, but when she arrived at college, she picked what she hoped would be a more lucrative career: finance.
“I wanted to be successful,” she said. “Have my own house, have my own car, have a pool, although I can’t swim.”
After her stepfather fell ill and lost his income during the coronavirus pandemic, Ms. Pillay dropped out of college. Home for two years, she took a short course in teaching, and soon found a job at a small private school. On the side, she works as a freelance makeup artist.
“As an individual in South Africa, you need to be independent,” she said.She sees no point in voting. Neither large parties nor the independent candidates vying for Phoenix’s vote have wooed her.
“When it’s time to do the action,” she said, “they can’t.”
URL
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/28/world/africa/south-africa-election-youth-vote.htmlNice to see the indigenous people of the place now called New York, former NEw Amsterdam be given some respect absent violence demanding it
‘Old’ Amsterdam Looks Back at New Amsterdam Through Indigenous Eyes
The violent history of the Dutch colony that is now New York is not well known in the Netherlands. The curators of a new exhibition want to change that.
Chief Urie Ridgeway and other representatives of the Lenape people spiritually cleansed the galleries of the Amsterdam Museum before the opening of “Manahahtáanung or New Amsterdam? The Indigenous story behind New York.”Credit...Françoise Bolechowski/Amsterdam Museum
By Nina Siegal
Reporting from AmsterdamMay 24, 2024
In the language of the Lenape Indigenous people, the word for European explorers who crossed the Atlantic in the 17th century to settle on their lands was “shuwankook,” or “salty people.”The term first applied to the Dutch, said Brent Stonefish, a Native American spiritual leader, because they emerged from the sea to first trade with, then exploit and kill, his Lenape ancestors.
“The Dutch were basically those who ran us out of our homeland, and they were very violent toward our people,” he said in an interview. “As far as I was concerned, they were the savages.”
So, when the Dutch Consulate in New York approached Stonefish to ask if he’d help commemorate the anniversary of the 1624 establishment of the first Dutch settler colony, New Amsterdam, he was taken aback.
“They wanted us to celebrate 400 years of New Amsterdam, and we’re like, ‘No, that’s not going to happen,’” he said. “At the same time, I thought it was an educational opportunity,” he added. “We had a lot of hard discussions.”
The Dutch Consulate, which was creating an events program around the anniversary called Future 400, then connected Stonefish with the Museum of the City of New York and the Amsterdam Museum, an historical museum in the Netherlands.The result is the exhibition, “Manahahtáanung or New Amsterdam? The Indigenous Story Behind New York,” running at the Amsterdam Museum through Nov. 10 and moving to the Museum of the City of New York in 2025 as “Unceded: 400 Years of Lenape Survivance.”
Imara Limon, a curator from the Amsterdam Museum, said that the project was a true creative collaboration between the museums and the Lenape, including the organization that Stonefish co-directs, the Eenda-Lunaapeewahkiing Collective. It felt particularly important, Limon said, to present the show in the Netherlands, where few people are aware of the Dutch colony’s impact on Indigenous peoples.
“It wasn’t part of history classes in school,” she said. “And we realized that our institutional memory on this topic is also very limited, so we needed their stories.”
Each museum searched its holdings for material about the Lenape, but found only a few official records. In the Amsterdam City Archives, curators discovered a record of an enslaved Lenape man who was brought to the Netherlands in the 17th century, which is on display in the show. To supplement the documents, the Lenape contributed artworks and traditional ceremonial artifacts.Objects are just one part of the show, however: The exhibition is dominated by video interviews with Lenape people, which run from about seven minutes to 50 minutes each.
“Usually in a museum exhibit, videos are three to five minutes long,” Limon said, “but here we made them longer, because we felt we wanted to have them really present, physically present, in the space.”Cory Ridgeway, a member of a Lenape group that collaborated on the show, said she welcomed this approach.
“Traditionally museums want very object-based programming, and they will come to us and say, ‘Give us some stuff and we’ll talk about it,’” she said. “A lot of museums don’t really credit oral history as history, and that’s our main form of history.”
Stonefish said his primary goal was to show that the Lenape still exist, and that they still have a voice.“The one thing we wanted to convey was that we weren’t a relic under glass,” he said. “We still live and breathe, and strive to live good lives.”
Some 20,000 living Lenape people are descendants of an estimated population of one million that originally lived in the region of present-day New York, Connecticut, Pennsylvania and New Jersey.
In 1609, the Dutch East India Company, one of the world’s largest merchant firms, dispatched the English explorer Henry Hudson to find a trading route to China. But Hudson veered off course and arrived in the Bay of Manhattan.
He quickly claimed the whole area between the Delaware and Connecticut rivers for the Netherlands. There, Dutch merchants engaged the Lenape in trade for beaver pelts and other furs.
Later, the Dutch West India Company, founded in 1621, established its first settlement on Governors Island in 1624, and made its colony of New Amsterdam on the tip of Manahahtáanung, what is now Manhattan. Two years later, a company executive, Peter Schagen, said he had purchased Manhattan from the Lenape for 60 guilders, or approximately $24.
The Lenape dispute that claim.“We say that that’s a myth,” Stonefish said. “We didn’t have a concept of ownership; we had a concept of sharing the land, and having a relationship with all of the land, the animals and the plants. Our idea of civilization was accepting all of creation, and taking no more than what we needed.”
In the exhibition, this myth-busting is represented by a wampum belt, specially created for the show. Stonefish said a ceremonial belt would have been given to the Dutch as part of any property-sharing agreement, but there was no mention of one in the Dutch account. “Our leadership would not have entered into any type of agreement without something like this,” he said.
For about two decades, trade continued between the Dutch and the Indigenous people, but in 1643, the New Netherlands governor Willem Kieft ordered the massacre of the Lenape and other tribes living in the colony.
A two-year war ensued, during which at least 1,000 Lenape were killed. Kieft was ordered to return to the Netherlands to answer for his actions, but died in a shipwreck.
The West India Company appointed Peter Stuyvesant as Kieft’s successor, and he managed New Netherland until the English conquered the territory in 1664, and renamed it New York. The Dutch colony lasted just 50 years.Ridgeway, the member of the Lenape group, said that, for her, making connection with the “salty people” was an opportunity to initiate discussions with the Dutch government about healing the past’s wounds.
“I would love to see an apology, and I would like to see reparations,” she said. “It would be used for our language, which is nearly extinct, so that it can be spoken again, and for our elders. The majority of our people are living below the poverty level today.”
Her husband, Chief Urie Ridgeway, said the story of his people had been largely erased from American history books, but it has been transmitted through storytelling by generations of survivors. “We know our histories, but now we are starting to share them.”
He added that the current exhibition gives the Lenape a chance to tell a story that has long been ignored. “It’s about time,” he said.
URL
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/24/arts/design/amsterdam-museum-indigenous-new-york.html
A correction was made on May 24, 2024: An earlier version of this article misstated the name of the organization that Brent Stonefish co-leads. It is the Eenda-Lunaapeewahkiing Collective, not the Delaware Nation Collective. -
Response and Articles 12/19/2023
At the end of the war between the states: louisiana, south carolina, mississippi had majority black populaces, but the governments of said states had no black officials. One of the problems with some Black people in the usa is they speak very neutrally when it comes to humanity. Being verbose is a long thing, can be fatiguging, but is usually more descriptive and being more descriptive is needed when you speak of the past in humanity anywhere. The palestinean people had the majority in palestine when the zionist came but the government was completely run by members of the british empire. so...
I think a valid question exist. Beyond the law, did the 14th or 15th amendment's make the Black Enslaved or former enslaved citizens? What makes a citizen? is it the law? or is it, the communal context? I argue the history of the native american in the usa+ the black enslaved or descended of enslaved in the usa, refutes the idea that citizenry comes from the law.
The authors states tremendous progress for the black populace in what is commonly callted reconstruction in the usa, but i argue that is erroneous. First, most black people in the usa, 90% were still financially dead, no savings, no money, no land, n opportunity to gain financially. Tremendous progress I thought represented a lifting of a majority in a populace, not a financial stagnation from a majority that never had financial betterment.
The biggest problem with Black people in the usa, is the lie we tell ourselves about the commonly called Great Migration, which I call the Black fleeing. Black people flew from the south cause black people were being killed/murdered/incarcerated absent criminal activity/assaulted through the entirey of reconstruction, ask Ida B Wells and flew to the northern cities to be treated better. Most black people did not think they were going to financial betterment outside the south. I wonder where that myth comes from. Yes, some black people sought financial betterment but most wanted away from whitey.The firs thing he said that is truth, Black people always flew back to the south. But the reason was always simple. Thew white governments of the exosouth [north or west] was no better than the white governments of the south. Remember, Tulsa, which wasn't majority black like NYC, Chicago, Los ANgeles, had a government that aided in the bombing and looting of the black community in tulsa by the white community. To be blunt, NYC, Chicago, Los ANgeles were not haven cities for blacks, that is a myth. But the fact that they were not is why black people flew back.
Now what is missing. Many years ago, during Obama's first campaign I suggested Black people in the usa needed a black party of governance in the usa to focus on places where the populace of black people is largest. He speaks of Black Power in government locally in the southern states but doesn't suggest a black party of governance in said states? why? I always find it strategically silly that any community is unwilling to support organizations strictly to their benefit when they have numerical advantage.
Why do the black towns and counties of the south have representatives of andrew jackson or abraham lincoln when both have proven to be useless in being effective to making or administering legal policy to Black benefit.I emailed him my thoughts, you can do the same
chblow@nytimes.comSome post where I spoke on this
https://aalbc.com/tc/blogs/entry/194-richard-murray-creative-table/page/5/?tab=comments#comment-496
https://aalbc.com/tc/profile/6477-richardmurray/?status=1945&type=status
This photo is part of the problem. Most black people didn't own a car. This black family is financially the black one percent. This black family is looking for financial betterment but most black people owned nothing. I know for certain. Most Black people fled the south , walking, taking the train, fleeing white violence. But the narrative whites like to hear, ala magical negro is it was a simple financial move.
Charles M. Blow on reversing the Great Migration
sunday-morning
BY CHARLES M. BLOWDECEMBER 17, 2023 / 10:25 AM EST / CBS NEWS
Our commentary is from New York Times columnist Charles M. Blow, whose new HBO documentary "South to Black Power" is now streaming on Max:At the end of the Civil War, three Southern states (Louisiana, South Carolina and Mississippi) were majority Black, and others were very close to being so. And during Reconstruction, the 14th and 15th Amendments to the Constitution made Black people citizens and gave Black men the right to vote.
This led to years of tremendous progress for Black people, in part because of the political power they could now access and wield on the state level.
But when Reconstruction was allowed to fail and Jim Crow was allowed to rise, that power was stymied. So began more decades of brutal oppression.In the early 1910s, Black people began to flee the South for more economic opportunity and the possibility of more social and political inclusion in cities to the North and West. This became known as the Great Migration, and lasted until 1970.
But nearly as soon as that Great Migration ended, a reverse migration of Black people back to the South began, and that reverse migration – while nowhere near as robust of the original – is still happening today.
In 2001 I published a book called "The Devil You Know," encouraging even more Black people to join this reverse migration and reclaim the state power that Black people had during Reconstruction. I joined that reverse migration myself, moving from Brooklyn to Atlanta.
Last year, I set out to make a documentary which road-tested the idea, traveling the country, both North and South, and having people wrestle with this idea of Black power.
Here are three things I learned from that experience.
First, Black people are tired of marching and appealing for the existing power structure to treat them fairly.
Second, young Black voters respond to a power message more than to a message of fear and guilt.
And third, many of the people I talked to had never truly allowed themselves to consider that there was another path to power that didn't run though other people's remorse, pity, or sense of righteousness.
I don't know if Black people will heed my call and reestablish their majorities, or near-majorities, in Southern states. But sparking the conversation about the revolutionary possibility of doing so could change the entire conversation about power in this country, in the same way that it has changed me.
URL
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/charles-m-blow-on-reversing-the-great-migration-south-to-black-power/Different Tribes of Black people slowly becoming one takes too long to retain gains or start new gains
Alabama
Black Descendent of enslaved leaders guided the majority populace of said people to do what Maher says the palestinean should do. Based on the history of said people my advice is for the palestinean to keep fighting for the river to the sea. Yes, it may lead to a termination of palestineans. But, look at the native american in the usa. Look at the black descended of enslaved in the usa.
Two peoples who in overwhelming majority, not all, chose the path Maher suggest the palestinean choose. What did it lead to?
Whites in the USA got what they wanted, they got to win a blood feud absent having to kill the rivals in the feud, and then use that as a symbol of usa greatness. The black descended of enslaved plus native american became idolters, mostly ranked by people who are completely infatuated to the culture of those who enslaved them, completely impotent populaces concerning what can only come from collective force, beggers or crawlers in the system designed by rivals in a blood feud.
Maher is correct, as someone in this community said to me the same as other black people said many times in earshot in my offline life, the past can not be changed. But, how you plan for the future does not have to suggest the past didn't happen. And that is what Maher truly wants, what the native american of the usa did, what the black descended of the usa did, for the palestinean people to eat the crow of accepting the system of their opposer and embrace said system. Then they can have a palestinean president of israel. They can have dancing jolly musicals about the fiscally poor palestineans abused by the tyrranical israelis hurting each other for relief. They can mate with israelis and have a bunch of loving palestinean-israeli mulattoes. Yeah, I know what Maher is suggesting to the palestinean. If the palestinean is wise,better for the community to die than to become the native american of the usa.Maher on palestineans
Maher on netanyahu
IN AMENDMENT
The problem with netanyahu is like so many , he is unwilling to embrace the truth of his country,this is what hitler did that many leaders are unwilling to do. Embrace the power and violence of their government as power+ violence. The Statian empire teaches all governments that power must always be wielded as benevolence, this comes from the british imperial tradition that create the usa. But I oppose that, if you are a bully be a bully. You want to push the palestineans out, then simply do it. Trying to suggest you are legal or pure or a good person or some other thing to make a false narrative in a history book or to assuade your descendents of how they got their wealth is to me a true sin. Maher says Israel is powerful , well it is time for israel to embrace that position. And to embrace that the zionist chose this location. If the zionist were wise they would had chosen somewhere in europe but they were not, they assumed they could chose a muslim place and convert it through influence of their big brother who was started the same way, the usa. But they underestimated that not all peoples are the native american + black descended of enslaved who are weak peoples. So the zionist made the bed, the israeli has to live in it, israel will always be the enemy of its neighbors, that is the zionist legacy, netanyahu needs to embrace it and kick the palestinean out and live surrounded by enemies.
What DAvid Alan Grier said is correct, and in the situation of candy cane lane holds truth but the reason it isn't industry wide must be discussed. The problem with the narrative is, who owns is irrelevant . Grier says all need to see themselves, and he isn't wrong but black people don't see themselves in media in the usa cause black people don't own the media. Many black people in the usa seem to think not owning sports team, not owning film studios, not owning music labels, not owning car companies, not owning gun manufacturers, not owning cement makers, not owning real estate , not owning mass produce producers[corporate farms], is not a factor. Black people in the usa don't own any industry. That is why Black people are not present as we will like in any industry in the usa. IT is very simple. But the reason black people don't own is because of our history under this government , historically white, that placed us in a negative financial state where whites disallowed us from owning. Yes, starting in the 1980s, it can be said that the black populace in the usa finally was free from the yoke of the whites to grow as individuals BUT it matters when whites in the usa have opportunities to take native american land, when whites have the opportunity to rip natural resources from the earth, when whites have the opportunity to have a gilded age making fortunes for bloodlines off of acts today deemed illegal. MErit isn't unimportant. I am not knocking down merit. But merit isn't more important than opportunity but opportunity in the usa comes from ownership not merit. And ownership in the USA 99% of the time comes from advantage through an ancestor using arms, guns, or inheriting wealth from an ancestor who used arms, guns.
...
This situation reflects my point, ownership is more important than merit or equality. eddie mruphy is an owner/a producer and makes the choices, if eddie murphy didn't put grier or someone black as santa that is his choice. My point is ownership is superior to merit. Black culture/storytelling has always been present to support black people feeling apart of anything. And I know cause growing up as a kid I never felt deprived of black presence in media or in any season cause of my parents.David Alan Grier on Why His Surprise Cameo as Black Santa in ‘Candy Cane Lane’ Reminded Him of ‘Black Panther’
The film reunited him with his 'Boomerang' collaborators Eddie Murphy and director Reginald Hudlin.
BY CHRIS GARDNERPlus Icon
DECEMBER 9, 2023 11:15AMAs the Candy Cane Lane premiere red carpet heated up Nov. 28, two publicist elves worked their way down the press line to remind journalists not to spoil the big reveal from the Reginald Hudlin-directed holiday adventure.
The Prime Video release, penned by Kelly Younger, stars Eddie Murphy as a recently unemployed man on a mission to win his neighborhood’s annual Christmas home decoration contest. The hush-hush surprise happens late in the film when David Alan Grier crash-lands in an ultra-slick sleigh as (the lifted embargo permits us to announce) Black Santa Claus.
“Reggie called and told me what his idea was and I was overjoyed, man. He let me flow and egged me and Eddie on,” explained Grier of reteaming with Hudlin and Murphy with whom he teamed for the 1992 romantic comedy Boomerang. “That was over 30 years ago and all we talked about were cars, clubs, big houses, like ‘Where y’all going tonight.’ This was different because Eddie is so chill. He has kids, grandkids. He seemed really, really happy.”
As far as the significance of playing an iconic character as a Black man, Grier said the opportunity reminded him of Black Panther. “When you see yourself represented in movies or stories, it’s an affirmation that you exist, that you belong, and that you’re legitimate. That’s what people forget about to see ourselves, not just us, everybody. There’s room for all of us at the table. This is the first Christmas movie I ever did so it’s got to last a long time.”
Who knows, there may also be a sequel. Prime Video announced last week that following its debut, Candy Cane Lane quickly became the No. 1 movie worldwide on Prime Video, the most-watched am*zon MGM Studios-produced movie debut ever in the U.S. and among the top 10 worldwide film debuts ever on the service.
“The sensational debut of Eddie Murphy’s first-ever Christmas movie, Candy Cane Lane, is a true demonstration of how joyful, family-oriented stories can touch the hearts of viewers around the world,” offered Courtenay Valenti, head of film, streaming, and theatrical at am*zon MGM Studios.
Grier is also counting his blessings this holiday season. “I’m going to tell you right now, I’m 67 years old. I did not think that my career would be here at my age. I have more work than I can even say yes to. My career is booming and I feel like I finally figured out what I’m doing, so I’m only getting better and better. We’ll see what happens.”
the american society of magical negroes trailer
For centuries, there has been a society hidden in plain sight, working in secret to protect Black people from harm. It’s called THE AMERICAN SOCIETY OF MAGICAL NEGROES.
A new satire from writer/director Kobii Libi and an official selection of Sundance 2024. Only in theaters March 22.guiliani as mayor of new york made policy intentionally harming the black populace in nyc, that being the selling of nyc properties that black people lived in, properties nyc owned because the real estate industry failed which many forget... is his actions toward two black female poll workers a shock to black new york city dwellers? The answer is no.
kamala harris broke the record on tiebreak votes but is the quality of her tiebreaks showing she is thoughtful or functional?
https://www.blackenterprise.com/kamala-harris-200-year-record-tiebreakers-cast/Question, should black people in the south look to reboot the majority of historical black colleges that went under?
For example the Conroe Normal and Industrial College faculty (c. 1903)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conroe_Normal_and_Industrial_College
referalMandela on a Black countries government
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i5TiUhhm7cQor
Please read MEdical Apartheid by Harriet Washington
https://www.kobo.com/us/en/ebook/medical-apartheid
the referral
https://www.msn.com/en-us/health/other/smithsonian-targeted-dc-s-vulnerable-to-build-brain-collection/ar-AA1lukXG
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My R&A - response and articles
I start with the title. One of the problems with the USA is the lie that the UA is a united place with a united peoples. In his own article he successfully proves how tribal the usa is.
But, the word isn't abandoned. The federal government of the USA in different times gambled and all the gambles failed to return what was needed to secure tomorrow.
The Federal government of the usa gambled: it could build up financial rivals [ england/germany/spain/italy/france/korea/japan/china/india/israel ] to create intergovernmental organizations centered on the usa while maintain a financial dominance as when world war two ended, it could make laws adding races into the usa while merging races to each other and the races will embrace each other positively based on a love of the state, it could grant the fiscal operators [shareholders/owners/bankers] full leeway and their fiscal desire will create untold wealth for all.
All the gambles failed to reach why they were made.
The rivals were given a black check plus resources to reboot absent the challenge of starting from the bottom while not having a need to pay for military expenditures but the usa economy wasn't able to stay on top across the board.
All races in the usa [women/blacks/muslims/lesbians] have a financially prosperous one percent, but most communities have only grown their fiscal poor who live tribally from other fiscal poor people, and with ever growing resentment.
The business sector protected itself and positioned itself to be secure regardless of its failure or quality, ala all the industries in the usa that have collapsed in the usa at an ever increasing ratio, but didn't lift up all peoples in the usa.
But the key is, all three gambles could had worked. What was the errors.
The usa funneled welfare checks and money on a simple condition to rivals in foreign countries who guaranteed to be yesmen for intergovernmental organizations totally allegiant to the usa but didn't use their unearned advantage to make the international organizations have more quality. The rivals loved the international organizations to make profit and have controls over weaker governments or former dominions but to actually improve other countries, a kind of pay it forward, europe/japan/china/india/israel didn't do, even though they were given an advantage by the usa in the way they don't give others.
Yes, blacks/native americans/lesbians/women/muslims/asians and all other groups in the usa that didn't have opportunity or potency have members in each group who financially have prospered because the federal laws forced financially wealthy white/male/christian/hetero/european people to share to those not them, but those who were granted opportunity haven't improved their communities and have simply joined financially wealthy white men creating three tiers of tribalism between the many have nots plus between the have nots side the have's plus between the many haves. While the usa keeps adding more peoples into the fiscally poor populace, growing violent sentiments.
Giving the financial community in the usa carte blanche saved it from its own mismanagement which is a betrayal of free market capitalism, but the financially community in the usa no matter how many times it is saved keeps being mismanaged and now relies on the military power of the usa side the intergovernmental organizations mandatory for the bureaucracy to work absent more violence to maintain a cycle of mismanagement from us business and bailouts from the federal government.
The article is correct, the FDR era ended with Reagan, the Reagan era is ending. Biden is trying to guide it somewhere but I see biden more as a jimmy carter, the last fdr president than ronald reagan, the president who started a new era. The problem with Biden in a general way is his centrism. Centrism at its heart is status quo, maintaining the bureaucracy, but the problem is the bureaucracy isn't fitting the populace it governs and requires radical change to do so
Why America Abandoned the Greatest Economy in History
Was the country’s turn toward free-market fundamentalism driven by race, class, or something else? Yes.
By Rogé Karma
Illustration by The Atlantic. Sources: Barry James Gilmour / Getty; Kean Collection / Getty; Library of Congress / Getty.
NOVEMBER 25, 2023, 6:30 AM ET
If there is one statistic that best captures the transformation of the American economy over the past half century, it may be this: Of Americans born in 1940, 92 percent went on to earn more than their parents; among those born in 1980, just 50 percent did. Over the course of a few decades, the chances of achieving the American dream went from a near-guarantee to a coin flip.
What happened?
One answer is that American voters abandoned the system that worked for their grandparents. From the 1940s through the ’70s, sometimes called the New Deal era, U.S. law and policy were engineered to ensure strong unions, high taxes on the rich, huge public investments, and an expanding social safety net. Inequality shrank as the economy boomed. But by the end of that period, the economy was faltering, and voters turned against the postwar consensus. Ronald Reagan took office promising to restore growth by paring back government, slashing taxes on the rich and corporations, and gutting business regulations and antitrust enforcement. The idea, famously, was that a rising tide would lift all boats. Instead, inequality soared while living standards stagnated and life expectancy fell behind that of peer countries. No other advanced economy pivoted quite as sharply to free-market economics as the United States, and none experienced as sharp a reversal in income, mobility, and public-health trends as America did. Today, a child born in Norway or the United Kingdom has a far better chance of outearning their parents than one born in the U.S.
This story has been extensively documented. But a nagging puzzle remains. Why did America abandon the New Deal so decisively? And why did so many voters and politicians embrace the free-market consensus that replaced it?
Since 2016, policy makers, scholars, and journalists have been scrambling to answer those questions as they seek to make sense of the rise of Donald Trump—who declared, in 2015, “The American dream is dead”—and the seething discontent in American life. Three main theories have emerged, each with its own account of how we got here and what it might take to change course. One theory holds that the story is fundamentally about the white backlash to civil-rights legislation. Another pins more blame on the Democratic Party’s cultural elitism. And the third focuses on the role of global crises beyond any political party’s control. Each theory is incomplete on its own. Taken together, they go a long way toward making sense of the political and economic uncertainty we’re living through.
"The american landscape was once graced with resplendent public swimming pools, some big enough to hold thousands of swimmers at a time,” writes Heather McGee, the former president of the think tank Demos, in her 2021 book, The Sum of Us. In many places, however, the pools were also whites-only. Then came desegregation. Rather than open up the pools to their Black neighbors, white communities decided to simply close them for everyone. For McGhee, that is a microcosm of the changes to America’s political economy over the past half century: White Americans were willing to make their own lives materially worse rather than share public goods with Black Americans.
From the 1930s until the late ’60s, Democrats dominated national politics. They used their power to pass sweeping progressive legislation that transformed the American economy. But their coalition, which included southern Dixiecrats as well as northern liberals, fractured after President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Richard Nixon’s “southern strategy” exploited that rift and changed the electoral map. Since then, no Democratic presidential candidate has won a majority of the white vote.
Crucially, the civil-rights revolution also changed white Americans’ economic attitudes. In 1956, 65 percent of white people said they believed the government ought to guarantee a job to anyone who wanted one and to provide a minimum standard of living. By 1964, that number had sunk to 35 percent. Ronald Reagan eventually channeled that backlash into a free-market message by casting high taxes and generous social programs as funneling money from hardworking (white) Americans to undeserving (Black) “welfare queens.” In this telling, which has become popular on the left, Democrats are the tragic heroes. The mid-century economy was built on racial suppression and torn apart by racial progress. Economic inequality was the price liberals paid to do what was right on race.
The New York Times writer David Leonhardt is less inclined to let liberals off the hook. His new book, Ours Was the Shining Future, contends that the fracturing of the New Deal coalition was about more than race. Through the ’50s, the left was rooted in a broad working-class movement focused on material interests. But at the turn of the ’60s, a New Left emerged that was dominated by well-off college students. These activists were less concerned with economic demands than issues like nuclear disarmament, women’s rights, and the war in Vietnam. Their methods were not those of institutional politics but civil disobedience and protest. The rise of the New Left, Leonhardt argues, accelerated the exodus of white working-class voters from the Democratic coalition.
Robert F. Kennedy emerges as an unlikely hero in this telling. Although Kennedy was a committed supporter of civil rights, he recognized that Democrats were alienating their working-class base. As a primary candidate in 1968, he emphasized the need to restore “law and order” and took shots at the New Left, opposing draft exemptions for college students. As a result of these and other centrist stances, Kennedy was criticized by the liberal press—even as he won key primary victories on the strength of his support from both white and Black working-class voters.
But Kennedy was assassinated in June that year, and the political path he represented died with him. That November, Nixon, a Republican, narrowly won the White House. In the process, he reached the same conclusion that Kennedy had: The Democrats had lost touch with the working class, leaving millions of voters up for grabs. In the 1972 election, Nixon portrayed his opponent, George McGovern, as the candidate of the “three A’s”—acid, abortion, and amnesty (the latter referring to draft dodgers). He went after Democrats for being soft on crime and unpatriotic. On Election Day, he won the largest landslide since Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1936. For Leonhardt, that was the moment when the New Deal coalition shattered. From then on, as the Democratic Party continued to reflect the views of college graduates and professionals, it would lose more and more working-class voters.
McGhee’s and Leonhardt’s accounts might appear to be in tension, echoing the “race versus class” debate that followed Trump’s victory in 2016. In fact, they’re complementary. As the economist Thomas Piketty has shown, since the’60s, left-leaning parties in most Western countries, not just the U.S., have become dominated by college-educated voters and lost working-class support. But nowhere in Europe was the backlash quite as immediate and intense as it was in the U.S. A major difference, of course, is the country’s unique racial history.
The 1972 election might have fractured the Democratic coalition, but that still doesn’t explain the rise of free-market conservatism. The new Republican majority did not arrive with a radical economic agenda. Nixon combined social conservatism with a version of New Deal economics. His administration increased funding for Social Security and food stamps, raised the capital-gains tax, and created the Environmental Protection Agency. Meanwhile, laissez-faire economics remained unpopular. Polls from the ’70s found that most Republicans believed that taxes and benefits should remain at present levels, and anti-tax ballot initiatives failed in several states by wide margins. Even Reagan largely avoided talking about tax cuts during his failed 1976 presidential campaign. The story of America’s economic pivot still has a missing piece.
According to the economic historian Gary Gerstle’s 2022 book, The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order, that piece is the severe economic crisis of the mid-’70s. The 1973 Arab oil embargo sent inflation spiraling out of control. Not long afterward, the economy plunged into recession. Median family income was significantly lower in 1979 than it had been at the beginning of the decade, adjusting for inflation. “These changing economic circumstances, coming on the heels of the divisions over race and Vietnam, broke apart the New Deal order,” Gerstle writes. (Leonhardt also discusses the economic shocks of the ’70s, but they play a less central role in his analysis.)
Free-market ideas had been circulating among a small cadre of academics and business leaders for decades—most notably the University of Chicago economist Milton Friedman. The ’70s crisis provided a perfect opening to translate them into public policy, and Reagan was the perfect messenger. “Government is not the solution to our problem,” he declared in his 1981 inaugural address. “Government is the problem.”
Part of Reagan’s genius was that the message meant different things to different constituencies. For southern whites, government was forcing school desegregation. For the religious right, government was licensing abortion and preventing prayer in schools. And for working-class voters who bought Reagan’s pitch, a bloated federal government was behind their plummeting economic fortunes. At the same time, Reagan’s message tapped into genuine shortcomings with the economic status quo. The Johnson administration’s heavy spending had helped ignite inflation, and Nixon’s attempt at price controls had failed to quell it. The generous contracts won by auto unions made it hard for American manufacturers to compete with nonunionized Japanese ones. After a decade of pain, most Americans now favored cutting taxes. The public was ready for something different.
They got it. The top marginal income-tax rate was 70 percent when Reagan took office and 28 percent when he left. Union membership shriveled. Deregulation led to an explosion of the financial sector, and Reagan’s Supreme Court appointments set the stage for decades of consequential pro-business rulings. None of this, Gerstle argues, was preordained. The political tumult of the ’60s helped crack the Democrats’ electoral coalition, but it took the unusual confluence of a major economic crisis and a talented political communicator to create a new consensus. By the ’90s, Democrats had accommodated themselves to the core tenets of the Reagan revolution. President Bill Clinton further deregulated the financial sector, pushed through the North American Free Trade Agreement, and signed a bill designed to “end welfare as we know it.” Echoing Reagan, in his 1996 State of the Union address, Clinton conceded: “The era of big government is over.”
Today, we seem to be living through another inflection point in American politics—one that in some ways resembles the ’60s and ’70s. Then and now, previously durable coalitions collapsed, new issues surged to the fore, and policies once considered radical became mainstream. Political leaders in both parties no longer feel the same need to bow at the altar of free markets and small government. But, also like the ’70s, the current moment is defined by a sense of unresolved contestation. Although many old ideas have lost their hold, they have yet to be replaced by a new economic consensus. The old order is crumbling, but a new one has yet to be born.
The Biden administration and its allies are trying to change that. Since taking office, President Joe Biden has pursued an ambitious policy agenda designed to transform the U.S. economy and taken overt shots at Reagan’s legacy. “Milton Friedman isn’t running the show anymore,” Biden quipped in 2020. Yet an economic paradigm is only as strong as the political coalition that backs it. Unlike Nixon, Biden has not figured out how to cleave apart his opponents’ coalition. And unlike Reagan, he hasn’t hit upon the kind of grand political narrative needed to forge a new one. Current polling suggests that he may struggle to win reelection.
Meanwhile, the Republican Party struggles to muster any coherent economic agenda. A handful of Republican senators, including J. D. Vance, Marco Rubio, and Josh Hawley, have embraced economic populism to some degree, but they remain a minority within their party.
The path out of our chaotic present to a new political-economic consensus is hard to imagine. But that has always been true of moments of transition. In the early ’70s, no one could have predicted that a combination of social upheaval, economic crisis, and political talent was about to usher in a brand-new economic era. Perhaps the same is true today. The Reagan revolution is never coming back. Neither is the New Deal order that came before it. Whatever comes next will be something new.
URL
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/11/new-deal-us-economy-american-dream/676051/THE HARD TRUTH ABOUT IMMIGRATION
If the United States wants to reduce inequality, it’s going to need to take an honest look at a contentious issue.
By David Leonhardt
OCTOBER 23, 2023
his bill that we will sign today is not a revolutionary bill,” President Lyndon B. Johnson said as he put his signature on the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, at the base of the Statue of Liberty. “It does not affect the lives of millions.” All that the bill would do, he explained, was repair the flawed criteria for deciding who could enter the country. “This bill says simply that from this day forth those wishing to immigrate to America shall be admitted on the basis of their skills and their close relationship to those already here.”
Edward Kennedy, the 33-year-old senator who had shepherded the bill through the Senate, went even further in promising that its effects would be modest. Some opponents argued that the bill would lead to a large increase in immigration, but those claims were false, Kennedy said. They were “highly emotional, irrational, and with little foundation in fact,” he announced in a Senate hearing, and “out of line with the obligations of responsible citizenship.” Emanuel Celler, the bill’s champion in the House, made the same promises. “Do we appreciably increase our population, as it were, by the passage of this bill?” Celler said. “The answer is emphatically no.”
Johnson, Kennedy, Celler and the new law’s other advocates turned out to be entirely wrong about this. The 1965 bill sparked a decades-long immigration wave. As a percentage of the United States population, this modern wave has been similar in size to the immigration wave of the late 1800s and early 1900s. In terms of the sheer number of people moving to a single country, the modern American immigration wave may be the largest in history. The year Johnson signed the immigration bill, 297,000 immigrants legally entered the United States. Two years later, the number reached 362,000. It continued rising in subsequent decades, and by 1989 exceeded 1 million.
....
URL
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/10/us-immigration-policy-1965-act/675724/Milton Friedman Was Wrong
The famed economist’s “shareholder theory” provides corporations with too much room to violate consumers’ rights and trust.
By Eric Posner
On Monday, the Business Roundtable, a group that represents CEOs of big corporations, declared that it had changed its mind about the “purpose of a corporation.” That purpose is no longer to maximize profits for shareholders, but to benefit other “stakeholders” as well, including employees, customers, and citizens.
While the statement is a welcome repudiation of a highly influential but spurious theory of corporate responsibility, this new philosophy will not likely change the way corporations behave. The only way to force corporations to act in the public interest is to subject them to legal regulation.
The shareholder theory is usually credited to Milton Friedman, the University of Chicago economist and Nobel laureate. In a famous 1970 New York Times article, Friedman argued that because the CEO is an “employee” of the shareholders, he or she must act in their interest, which is to give them the highest return possible. Friedman pointed out that if a CEO acts otherwise—let’s say, donates corporate funds to an environmental cause or to an anti-poverty program—the CEO must get those funds from customers (through higher prices), workers (through lower wages), or shareholders (through lower returns). But then the CEO is just imposing a “tax” on other people, and using the funds for a social cause that he or she has no particular expertise in. It would be better to let customers, workers, or investors use that money to make their own charitable contributions if they wish to.
...
URL
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/08/milton-friedman-shareholder-wrong/596545/ -
Illustration by Sam Whitney/The New York Times
Pedro Pascal and Jenna Ortega Shouldn’t Be Exceptions in Hollywood
July 23, 2023
By Arlene Dávila
Ms. Dávila is the founding director of the Latinx Project at New York University.
Corporate America’s treatment of Latinx people as a homogeneous monolithic group, instead of the diverse demographic it is, has for decades perpetuated stereotypes of Latino authenticity. These stereotypes have disproportionately depicted Latinos on TV and in movies as Spanish speakers that hailed from Latin America and shared a particular Latin “look.”
In Hollywood, this narrative has reinforced the notion that we are a niche market that is separate from the mainstream, which could be served through the importation of programming that is cheaper to produce in Latin America over programming that is produced in the United States.
That’s why it was exciting to see Jenna Ortega and Pedro Pascal make Emmy history this month. For the first time two Latino actors were nominated in the lead acting category in the same year, for the hit shows “Wednesday” and “The Last of Us.”
Though Latinx people make up 19 percent of the U.S. population, they account for less than 5 percent of actors cast in speaking roles in the nation’s top-grossing films. Additionally, representation in the media industry as a whole stands at a mere 12 percent, with the majority of positions being service oriented, like cleaning services and security. These numbers have remained stagnant for decades, which is outrageous when you consider that they make up nearly half the population of Los Angeles County.
Why has the media industry been so unwilling to acknowledge and address this growing demographic of potential viewers and consumers?
Latinx creatives have told me that many executives in Hollywood don’t understand why they are outraged by how few Latinx people appear in films and television shows. After all, there is already a variety of streaming offerings from Latin America and Spain. But there is a profound difference between these markets.
We wouldn’t mistake the experience of Indigenous Mexicans living in Mexico for the experience of a fifth-generation Chicana. This is why many in the industry are identifying as Latinx — a term that signals gender inclusivity and recognition of our racial and ethnic diversity — to call attention to a pattern of exclusion of Latinx writers and creators that are representing the U.S. experience.
The globalization of Spanish language media has only widened the existing gaps between the robust development of movies and shows produced in Latin America and the limited opportunities for Latinx writers, directors and showrunners in the United States. In recent decades, Latin American media companies have benefited from investments from American streaming conglomerates like Netflix, the lower costs of producing and importing programming in Latin America and investments by governments in the region that support their film industries.
While streaming platforms offer a wealth of series and films from Spain and Latin America, there is a lack of representation of stories written by Latinx people that reflect their experiences. While actors and writers from Latin America have had the opportunity to expand their résumés with credits from global serials produced by platforms like Netflix, am*zon and Max, Latinx actors and audiences have fewer roles to choose from. The leads cast in series like “Wednesday” and the “Last of Us” are rare exceptions.
Research shows that in the United States, Latinx actors are often cast in the roles of lower-class characters, criminals or immigrants. The gap is wider still for Afro-Latinos. In shows produced in Latin America, the majority of actors cast as leads and heroines are blond and white, while darker-skinned actors are often relegated to secondary roles, housekeepers or criminals, if they are represented at all. Additionally, Latinx writers face extra barriers when entering a shrinking industry, as highlighted by the writers’ strike.
The few productions that have been written or created by Latinx people and have represented our communities in real and personal ways have been canceled after a few seasons. When shows like “Gentefied,” “Vida” and the “Gordita Chronicles” were shut down despite positive reviews, writers and fans alike were left wondering why. In the age of streaming, algorithm-driven decisions make it difficult to determine what counts as success with transparency, especially when algorithms are biased against new content.
Latinx audiences remain avid consumers of films, TV and other media, even if they don’t see themselves reflected. Some may question why media conglomerates should change and invest in original content and programming or cast Latinx actors and writers when the cheaper importation-based model is so profitable and seemingly successful. Yet they should evolve because those formulas have historically left Latinx audiences mostly untapped. There are generations of talented scriptwriters, producers and filmmakers who have been underutilized and countless rich stories and ideas that have yet to be told. Film and TV that represent the experience of Latinx communities in the United States enrich the media ecosystem by offering a more accurate representation of American demographics.
Additionally, we must address the negative impacts of the media’s import-heavy formula for Latinx audiences, which limits opportunities and perpetuates the perception of Latinx people as foreigners rather than fellow Americans deserving equal visibility on television and movie screens.
It’s worth noting that Latinx people are not the only group excluded by the globalization of streaming. That Ms. Ortega and Mr. Pascal received recognition raises the question of whether we have reached a crucial turning point. It’s worth considering how we can leverage the current SAG-AFTRA and W.G.A. strikes to also address issues of representation and investment in productions that will provide working opportunities for Latinx actors, writers and showrunners alongside matters of pay equity for media workers.
Finally, it is time to consider the global appeal of entertainment featuring Latinx actors. I want to see more roles for actors like Ariana DeBose, the first Afro-Latina to win an Oscar, for a supporting role in “West Side Story,” and productions by filmmakers and MacArthur “genius grant” awardees Alex Rivera and Cristina Ibarra, among many other outstanding Latinx creatives.
I often wonder what it would look like if Hollywood dared to recognize that Latinx talent is not an exception.
Arlene Dávila, the founding director of the Latinx Project at New York University, is the author of “Latinx Art: Artists, Markets and Politics.”
URL
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/23/opinion/latinos-hollywood-representation.html
The recently released Barbie movie has provided an opportunity for a bipartisan coalition of commentators and elected officials to see value in its dissection.Credit...Kenny Holston/The New York Times, Gonzalo Fuentes/Reuters, Jim Wilson/The New York Times, Alex Brandon/Associated Press, Warner Bros. Pictures via Associated Press
‘Barbie’ Movie Gives Left and Right Another Battlefront, in Pink
Political figures of all types grabbed for the legs of a doll-turned-movie-turned-cultural moment, with predictable results.
By Matt Flegenheimer and Marc Tracy
Last week, Representative Matt Gaetz and his wife, Ginger, arrived at a Washington reception for “Barbie” in matching pink, grinning in photos along the “pink carpet,” mingling among guests sipping pink cocktails, admiring a life-size pink toy box.
They left with political ammunition.
“The Barbie I grew up with was a representation of limitless possibilities, embracing diverse careers and feminine empowerment,” Mrs. Gaetz wrote on Twitter. “The 2023 Barbie movie, unfortunately, neglects to address any notion of faith or family, and tries to normalize the idea that men and women can’t collaborate positively (yuck).”
When another account scolded Mr. Gaetz, the hard-right and perpetually stunt-seeking Florida congressman, for attending the event at all — citing the casting of a trans actor as a doctor Barbie — Mr. Gaetz replied with a culture-warring double feature.
“If you let the trans stop you from seeing Margo Robbie,” he said, leaving the “T” off the first name of the film’s star, “the terrorists win.”
The non-terroristic winners were many after the film’s estimated $155 million debut: Ms. Robbie and Greta Gerwig, the film’s director, finding an eager audience for their pink-hued feminist opus; the Warner Bros. marketing team, whose ubiquitous campaigns plainly paid off; the film industry itself, riding “Barbie” and “Oppenheimer” to its most culturally dominant weekend in years.
But few outcomes were as nominally inexplicable (and probably inevitable) as the film’s instant utility to political actors and opportunists of all kinds. For a modern take on what was long a politically fraught emblem of toxic body image and reductive social norms, no choice was too small, no turn too ideology-affirming or apparently nefarious, for a bipartisan coalition of commentators and elected officials to see value in its dissection.
“I have, like, pages and pages of notes,” Ben Shapiro, the popular conservative commentator, said in a lengthy video review, which began with him setting a doll aflame and did not grow more charitable. (He said his producers “dragged” him to the theater.)
“I took a tequila shot every time Barbie said patriarchy … only just woke up,” wrote Elon Musk. (Mr. Shapiro, diligently but less colorfully, said he had counted the word “more than 10 times.”)
“Here are 4 ways Barbie embraces California values,” the office of Gavin Newsom, the state’s Democratic governor, wrote in a thread hailing Barbie as a champion of climate activism, “hitting the roads in her electric vehicle,” and of destigmatizing mental health care.
If there was a time in the culture when a giant summer film event was something of an American unifier — a moment to share over-buttered popcorn through big-budget shoot-’em-ups and sagas of insatiable sharks — that time is not 2023.
And, as ever, the political class’s performative investment in “Barbie” — the outrage and the embrace — can seem mostly like a winking bit.
What to make of Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, Democrat of Michigan, posting a Barbie meant to resemble herself beside the Instagram caption, “Come on Barbie, let’s go govern”?
What does it mean, exactly, when Senator Raphael Warnock, Democrat of Georgia, says of himself, “This Ken is pushing to end maternal mortality”?
Certainly, Senator Ted Cruz, Republican of Texas, has summoned practiced gravity in accusing “Barbie” of working to appease the Chinese. (Some Republicans have fixated on a scene that features a crudely drawn map that supposedly depicts the so-called nine-dash line, which indicates Chinese ownership of oceanic territory that is disputed under international law. Vietnam has banned showings of the movie in the country over that image.)
“Obviously, the little girls that are going to see Barbie, none of them are going to have any idea what those dashes mean,” Mr. Cruz told Fox News. “This is really designed for the eyes of the Chinese censors, and they’re trying to kiss up to the Chinese Communist Party because they want to make money selling the movie.”
The response on the right is not a one-off. For a generation of conservative personalities, weaned on Andrew Breitbart’s much-cited observation that “politics is downstream of culture,” Hollywood and other ostensibly liberal bastions are to be confronted head-on, lest their leanings ensnare young voters without a fight.
Recent years have provided ample evidence, some on the right say, for a “go woke, go broke” view that progressivism is bad business. Last year’s apolitically patriotic “Top Gun: Maverick” was a smashing success, as was this year’s kid-friendly “The Super Mario Bros. Movie.” By contrast, critics on the right contended that Disney’s remake of “The Little Mermaid,” with its title character portrayed by the Black actress Halle Bailey, failed to match its producers’ hopes. (Of course, there is no way to trace exactly what determines any movie’s success or failure, and many observers adhere to the screenwriter William Goldman’s axiom: “Nobody knows anything.”)
“Barbie” cannot be said to have gone broke. But its purported politics, conservatives have argued, did damage it by making it less entertaining — “a lecture,” in the words of The Federalist’s Rich Cromwell, “that self-identifies as a movie.”
Kyle Smith, a reviewer at The Wall Street Journal, complained that the film “contains more swipes at ‘the patriarchy’ than a year’s worth of Ms. magazine.”
The film seems at times (gentle spoiler alert) to be engaging with “the patriarchy” ironically, infusing it with knowing Southern California vapidity, décor that seems inspired by hair metal and a heavy emphasis on weight lifting and “brewskis.”
When it comes time (less gentle spoiler alert) to reclaim Barbie Land, the Barbies distract the Kens by indulging their tendency for exaggerated gestures of malehood like playing acoustic guitar and insisting on showing a date “The Godfather” while talking over it.
Mr. Shapiro has sounded unconvinced that the movie is broadly in on its own jokes.
“The actual argument the movie is making is that if women enjoy men, it’s because they have been brainwashed by the patriarchy,” he said in his review.
He called the film, with a straight face, two hours he will rue wasting as he sits on his deathbed.
“The things I do,” he said, “for my audience.”
Anjali Huynh contributed reporting.
Matt Flegenheimer is a reporter covering national politics. He started at The Times in 2011 on the Metro desk covering transit, City Hall and campaigns. More about Matt Flegenheimer
Marc Tracy is a reporter on the Culture desk. More about Marc Tracy
ARTICLE URL
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/24/us/politics/barbie-movie-newsom-gaetz.html
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Sammy Davis Interview
TRANSCRIPT
0:00
4 scene 22 take 33 psalm 22.
0:13
damn
0:16
[Music]
0:28
went into the army
0:31
you know that that horrible
0:34
that was my first taste really of racism
0:37
you know ever because I never been
0:40
exposed to it being in Show Business you
0:41
know
0:42
you know you'd run into the average bit
0:44
of it but not them not enough to to
0:45
upset you or anything you know or not
0:48
even to be aware because I'm in show
0:49
business so I wasn't aware of it and as
0:51
a kid being in Show Business you I
0:53
didn't learn until later the about why
0:55
we slept in bus stations and why we had
0:57
to go to the police and say where's
0:58
there
0:59
a colored family that you can stay with
1:01
because you couldn't get in the hotels
1:02
and things like that you couldn't eat in
1:04
this restaurant
1:05
but there was a very close fraternity
1:08
between most of the black and white
1:11
performers at that time
1:13
uh that doesn't exist today what were
1:17
some specific examples when you started
1:20
first getting the message
1:21
well I think the the first real thing
1:23
that I got was in the Army when I you
1:25
know and I was in basic training and I
1:28
hadn't even gone to basic training I
1:29
went in San Francisco we went to the
1:31
Presidio Monterey and the third day I
1:33
was standing in line and this is before
1:36
um desegregation came in the Army you
1:38
know uh and I'm standing in line and at
1:42
the at this place where there was black
1:43
and white soldiers and the cat said you
1:46
know
1:47
where I come from [ __ ] you know
1:48
staring in the back or they they ain't
1:50
here I forget the exact line now and I
1:53
had my my duffel bag and I'm a duffel
1:56
bag but you know the thing like use the
1:57
carry of Shaving equipment in and I just
1:59
sundied him you know
2:01
and knocked him down and had cut his lip
2:04
and he's bleeding from the lid and he
2:06
said
2:08
okay you knock me down but you still a
2:09
[ __ ]
2:12
and that laid with me you know because
2:14
that that's that's so
2:17
so venomous it really is you know that
2:20
that's the kind of cat that you ain't
2:22
gonna never reach
2:23
were there some points at which you
2:26
during that time when you had a lot of
2:29
pressures on you almost lost confidence
2:31
in yourself
2:33
oh well I that happened to me but not
2:35
until I made it really because you know
2:37
when you when you're hungry and you're
2:39
trying to get there that's one thing
2:41
because you've got that ambition that
2:43
feeds on and you keep crawling on your
2:46
ambition to get there I got there until
2:48
I lost control of everything
2:51
sense of values uh
2:53
now I've got the doll so wound up
2:56
there was no relaxing there was there
2:58
was no being aware of anything first of
3:00
all there was not much to be aware of
3:01
anyway in those days
3:04
but I mean the nominal awareness that
3:06
wasn't there I was just wrapped up in me
3:09
then then I got scared because I started
3:12
to lose what I thought was the basic
3:14
human instinct that I had had
3:17
and I got too phony I did oh I did it
3:19
all man I invented some
3:21
the ones that in the book I invented
3:23
some other problems you know but
3:26
I you know again to relate to what you
3:29
are I said today and I look back 25
3:32
years ago and I say wow I don't think I
3:35
my head would be where it is now if I
3:38
had not gone through that
3:40
25 years ago all the mistakes being on
3:43
all the time
3:45
emulating in truth emulating the white
3:48
stars not trying to get my own identity
3:52
but because that that was the kick then
3:54
you know that's what you had to do so I
3:58
decided if you got to do it then I'd do
3:59
it better than anybody else had ever
4:00
done it
4:01
you know in other words when I started
4:03
to do Impressions and all of that kind
4:04
of stuff relating to a theatrical thing
4:06
being on Broadway and Mr Wonderful you
4:09
know I wanted to do all that because I
4:11
figured if Donald O'Connor can do it man
4:13
I'm gonna do it
4:14
so in other words I was becoming a black
4:17
Donald O'Connor a black Mickey Rooney
4:19
instead of becoming a black Sammy Davis
4:21
what about the Rat Pack era you and
4:25
Sinatra and let me light a cigarette and
4:27
I'll tell you okay
4:32
I keep thinking uh just a few days
4:36
[Music]
4:38
no longer will it be anything happening
4:40
like it should be the one traffic ticket
4:42
that's the first step to maybe in 20
4:44
years is not to legalize it right now
4:46
when they legalized marijuana
4:50
but I'm just comedically I'm thinking
4:52
when they legalize it they will be back
4:55
to commercials again
4:59
[Music]
5:13
[Music]
5:18
[Music]
5:30
and plus but the most important thing is
5:32
you'd never be able to run through the
5:34
forest
5:41
thank you
5:43
what about the Rat Pack era
5:49
was that a part of your mistakes
5:51
well let me tell you about let me tell
5:53
you about the Sinatra thing
5:56
uh
5:57
if it hadn't been for Frank Sinatra
6:00
I don't I would have never been in films
6:02
really
6:03
because he gave me uh
6:07
he gave me a an opportunity
6:09
in three pictures
6:13
based upon the fact that there was
6:14
nothing to do really except the fact
6:16
that it we got the job because we were
6:17
all friends and buddies and it was based
6:19
upon a camaraderie that we had as a
6:22
bunch of guys as performers that Frank
6:24
said why don't we do all do a picture
6:26
together
6:27
but he so he helped my career
6:29
tremendously again my own personal
6:32
involvement being such that I became so
6:35
involved with that lifestyle
6:38
that again I found myself submerging
6:41
into a lifestyle that I could not equate
6:43
with after you'd leave the party you
6:45
come home and you're going to
6:47
and you say wow man it sure was nice to
6:49
be in the company of all them big names
6:50
and the movie star
6:52
but there was no
6:54
on one hand I I loved being with my
6:57
friends
6:58
but it was submerging me as a human
7:00
being I think as I analyze it now
7:03
and there were Beautiful Moments during
7:05
that period of the 60s the early 60s and
7:08
there was some frightening moments I
7:09
remember walking on the stage at the
7:11
Democratic Convention and being booed by
7:13
the southern contingent you know
7:16
because they had no business the only
7:17
reason they booed me was because I was
7:19
married to a white woman you know to put
7:21
it right where it's at that's why they
7:22
boom boom hits how dare you be married
7:25
to a white woman you know
7:27
but it was
7:28
a part of conversation privately and
7:31
publicly is that uh you were married to
7:33
a white woman how do you feel about that
7:36
how would you advise a young black
7:38
person your son about marrying a white
7:41
woman
7:42
I think a person should marry who they
7:43
want to marry man
7:45
I think that you can be committed to
7:47
your people to the cause whatever you
7:49
whatever the terminology you want to use
7:51
doesn't matter matter who you're married
7:53
to if you fall in love you fall in love
7:55
if you're if you're getting I don't
7:57
think anyone gets married has children
7:59
and the rest
8:00
to do a three cheating job you know
8:03
and uh
8:05
to me
8:07
I feel no thing about it I really don't
8:11
I really don't feel anything about that
8:13
because I think that's so damn private
8:16
man
8:16
that has to do with what I want a cat to
8:19
do if it's a brother on the corner
8:20
whatever it is look at me and say what
8:23
did you do today to help
8:24
don't talk about my private life
8:27
that's mine that if you know if I want
8:30
to marry a dog that's my life
8:33
this is the point whatever I had I paid
8:35
my dues to get it
8:38
and I mean pay them
8:40
in every way you want to talk about but
8:43
what I'm but that's professionally
8:45
that's as a human being on a
8:47
professional level but as a human being
8:48
period I tell my kids Harry who you want
8:52
to marry
8:53
now I know this sure as I'm sitting on
8:55
this floor man whole bunch of brothers
8:58
and sisters don't like me there's a
9:00
whole bunch of white people that don't
9:01
like me why do you feel there's a group
9:03
of brothers and sisters who don't like
9:05
you because there was a whole bunch of
9:07
brothers and sisters that didn't like
9:08
Jesus Christ that's why
9:11
and ain't nobody ever been put on this
9:12
Earth that everybody liked
9:14
they don't kill Martin Luther King the
9:16
only thing he kept singing was we shall
9:17
overcome and love and peace killed him
9:19
wiped him out killed Malcolm
9:23
wiped out everybody man don't you
9:25
understand and some cat hired three
9:29
black cats to wipe out the man who was
9:31
the mother of our time and when they
9:33
killed him he had a half a church full
9:35
of people it wasn't like it was packed
9:37
and jammed because already he was losing
9:42
and he says it himself if you read his
9:44
works that there's a whole bunch of
9:46
[ __ ] that don't like me black folks
9:48
like me but not the [ __ ]
9:51
which is true and three black cat three
9:55
[ __ ] knocked him off
9:57
paid by white establishment that's my
9:59
feeling and I will feel this as long as
10:01
I live
10:02
and it was afterwards at the the
10:04
Resurgence of this man and suddenly we
10:07
became aware of all the things that he
10:08
was saying because as long as doesn't it
10:12
strike you funny that as long as
10:16
Malcolm was preaching separatism
10:20
as long as he was preaching such
10:23
vehemence he never got hurt at all it
10:26
was when he came back from Mecca and he
10:28
said we must all live together we must
10:29
we must ask black people do our thing
10:31
but we must all live on this Earth as
10:34
one blah blah that's when he started
10:36
getting his house bombed
10:38
he got wiped out months later
10:40
same thing with King as long as King was
10:42
hitting the March as they put him in
10:44
jail that was it as soon as he started
10:45
talking about Vietnam
10:47
and the workers and this that and the
10:49
other getting out of his field of
10:52
reference
10:53
really
10:55
heavy too heavy for somebody wipe him
10:57
out
10:59
you know and it's frightening to me so
11:01
that's why I say a lot of people will
11:03
not like any performer and you try to
11:06
relate
11:07
as far I'm not talking about relating in
11:09
terms of oh hi bra and do the Fist and
11:12
whatever it is and hey man right on I'm
11:14
not talking about the words I'm talking
11:15
about in your heart relating to what the
11:17
problems are
11:18
but the society in which we live in
11:19
today it has gotten to a point where you
11:21
cannot do that anymore based upon the
11:24
fact that I must do what I feel
11:26
if I feel that I I want to help in this
11:29
area I try to do it and I try to do it
11:31
Sans publicity not based upon the fear
11:34
that I have for my job
11:36
but I think that sometimes if I want to
11:38
help some brothers who are in trouble my
11:40
lending my name to it defeats the very
11:44
purpose that they're trying to achieve
11:48
but money is money
11:50
heart is heart you should lend your
11:52
heart and your money you ain't got the
11:54
money
11:56
then lend this lend your body man to it
11:59
you know but I'm talking about I think
12:01
that if the performer can be used
12:05
than he should be used
12:08
to put my obligation into black positive
12:11
things I'm not talking about National
12:12
organizations it can be something that's
12:14
happening on the corner a project that
12:16
because I found out and Walter Mason can
12:19
tell you we found out that you go into a
12:22
town
12:23
and sometimes it's as little as a
12:25
hundred dollars because you go to an
12:28
area where this where where some
12:30
projects are and they got a recreation
12:31
center ain't got no pool table ain't got
12:33
no records to play so the kids don't go
12:35
there they hang on the car right
12:37
Jesus you walk in and you look around
12:40
and you say hey well I know I get a pool
12:42
table and I know I can get the record
12:44
player and I'll get reprise at that time
12:47
or my own company to send records you're
12:50
in a privileged situation first of all
12:52
uh I can't help but make an analogy
12:54
between yourself and lean a horn
12:55
I mean the two of you are for lack of a
12:58
better phrase are superstars are using
13:00
to some extent your sense of commitment
13:04
you uh you're evolving a new sense of
13:06
self and most importantly like you're
13:09
going in front of the nation and you're
13:11
saying I'm Black and I'm Proud and I'm
13:13
relating to my people
13:15
I'm not going to use anybody's name but
13:17
I'm sure you won't but where are the
13:19
heads of a lot of the black Superstars
13:21
we don't see them like we see you in
13:23
Philadelphia with the street gangs we
13:25
don't see them saying what Lena said in
13:28
terms of what's happened to her well I I
13:30
think
13:32
I think the phonies
13:34
that's what I think and the bitter irony
13:37
of it all is
13:39
that
13:40
again I have to sit by man and watch
13:44
these people be lauded by our brothers
13:46
and sisters in the streets
13:49
and they and the brothers and sisters
13:50
must be aware
13:52
that they ain't doing nothing
13:54
but it took me a long time to get there
13:55
maybe they maybe my brother brothers and
13:57
sisters who are superstars need that
13:58
kind of time and there are many who say
14:00
I don't want to get involved in it
14:02
but I don't know how you cannot get
14:04
involved in it because they are first of
14:06
all black and they are committed
14:08
whether they want to be committed or not
14:10
the very nature of the skin commits you
14:12
I don't read a script that I don't weigh
14:15
and say I wonder what the brother and
14:17
the con is going to think about this
14:20
how can I change it if it's wrong
14:23
because the black performer again has
14:25
that obligation
14:27
that we are black performers
14:30
and so therefore I'm not talking about
14:32
you gonna come out every time man and do
14:35
a number because like on Laugh-In
14:38
you know I do jokes but somewhere along
14:41
the line I've got to relate to what's
14:43
really happening
14:44
somewhere so that the brother who's
14:47
watching me who may not necessarily buy
14:49
my records
14:50
may not go to my movies may not come to
14:53
the Copa the Sands Hotel lassimi will
14:56
say yeah
14:58
in a bar or in his house yeah
15:01
that's all that's my thanks but the
15:04
black audience
15:06
owes that black performer an obligation
15:08
of watching and supporting him unless he
15:10
turns out to be really the rat of all
15:13
time
15:15
but I mean when I say rap I mean he's
15:17
not doing anything he's doing things
15:19
that embarrass the the black population
15:23
now I know a lot of people don't like
15:24
flips doing the the Deacon I've heard a
15:27
lot of talk about it Geraldine Geraldine
15:29
they don't like uh I now my personal
15:32
things I think geraldine's funny I feel
15:34
a little funny about the deacon
15:36
because I think that's going back to
15:37
something that's so deeply rooted in
15:39
black people
15:40
religiously you know that I think that
15:43
that does this to me but I think it's
15:45
still funny because I'm looking at it
15:46
again through one eye that looks
15:49
in two directions first as a performer
15:52
is it funny is it clever secondly as a
15:55
man we're trying to relate to the cat on
15:57
the corner again you understand what I
15:58
mean because first and foremost I'm a
16:01
performer that's all I've ever done all
16:02
my life
16:03
so I know he's got to weigh it but what
16:06
do you do
16:07
you've got to have the support of your
16:09
people
16:10
but geez I just love saying that number
16:13
one variety show in the country now and
16:16
start in by a black man who is very very
16:20
funny but Amos and Andy was funny don't
16:24
do that to me don't do that
16:27
and Geraldine is funny and uh the Deacon
16:31
is funny but can you move forward you
16:33
know at at the level of the struggle we
16:36
are for Liberation yeah you know came
16:38
before to continually uh entertain white
16:41
people with shows produced by white men
16:44
with a frame of reference of what we are
16:46
I mean that's not defining ourselves and
16:49
the role of the Entertainer
16:51
to some extent has to accommodate that
16:54
relevant I think that the Amos Amanda
16:56
was funny I was embarrassed by it I
16:58
signed the letters too you know but I I
17:00
say that I think at this point now we've
17:02
got more stars than we've ever had
17:04
before that I can afford the luxury
17:07
because in place of Geraldine and then
17:10
place a Flip Wilson I have Don Knotts
17:14
since you both guess no baby I was out
17:17
of town you know I haven't had a chance
17:19
to live a boat here okay so what you
17:21
think of the terrible cat dead man
17:27
we are like
17:29
in one sense limited because we will
17:33
never have the audience of a commercial
17:36
Channel but do you want that audience
17:38
I'd like to have that audience on the
17:40
other hand if getting that audience
17:43
necessitated compromising our principles
17:46
I know they have ten Brothers
17:48
out of the 200 million people in this
17:51
country watch this show yeah then they
17:53
have the 200 million people in this
17:55
country watch the show even because I
17:57
think being irrelevant is
17:58
counterproductive you know and and that
18:00
brings me to the next point
18:02
uh you have a show
18:05
that
18:06
folded
18:09
and that's when I think like what you
18:13
said you were in another era
18:15
you're being very kind yeah
18:18
I was a stone rock and you could be for
18:21
free yeah what would you do I mean I
18:24
don't know but I would I tell you what I
18:26
wouldn't do or maybe by that you can get
18:28
a clue I certainly wouldn't do nothing
18:29
more than I'm doing as an entertainer
18:31
today in other words I ain't gonna let
18:33
them change me last time out I let him
18:35
put me in suits I couldn't smoke I
18:37
couldn't say what I wanted to say and
18:39
though I put a lot of people to work and
18:40
I did a lot of things and all of that
18:42
and I changed a lot of policies at NBC
18:44
you know when they catch and went yeah
18:47
because you know I walked into the
18:48
publicity office one day I didn't see no
18:49
black people I said I don't understand
18:50
this it looks like the Lilies of the
18:52
white Fields you know and that was it
18:54
and the guy went oh he's very bitter and
18:56
I went well the hell with it I am very
18:58
bitter if I got it I gotta surround
18:59
myself with people that I know of and
19:01
we've got capable brothers and sisters
19:02
to do it now you go up there and be
19:04
seeing it's packed and jammed and the
19:05
executives are there you know but the
19:07
only thing that they are
19:11
you know
19:15
the most relevant thing I think I was
19:18
able to do was near the end of the
19:20
series I did a sketch
19:21
with nipsy Russell
19:24
about how brothers treat Brothers
19:27
and I did a very Bourgeois cat going in
19:29
to apply for a job right
19:31
and very Bourgeois with the three button
19:33
code as soon as he found out it was a
19:35
brother
19:36
he took his head on each other
19:39
right and the cat's baggies to send him
19:41
in and the cat walked in he said damn
19:43
hey babe that ain't the way he walked in
19:46
the White Secretary was there seeing he
19:47
said I'm I'm here for the job and I like
19:50
to apply I've been okayed and I went
19:51
through the IBM machines blah blah blah
19:54
talked very problem as soon as he went
19:55
in there instead of identifying and
19:57
saying Hey I want a groove it is to see
19:59
you in this position he didn't do that
20:00
he just put his feet up on the desert
20:02
dead go ahead and sign that
20:05
you know I'm straight
20:08
you know and suddenly here's the brother
20:10
sitting there trying to do something and
20:12
he is not protected and it was a funny
20:13
sketch and we loved doing it I got such
20:16
complaints from NBC you would not
20:18
believe and we never were to do another
20:19
one because I think we went through a
20:21
period where we were just pleased to see
20:23
a black guy there
20:25
yeah
20:26
there we are
20:28
there we are we in there because we
20:30
needed that at that period now we've got
20:32
to go on
20:33
further
20:35
you know what I mean and it's not just
20:37
seeing the black cat there anymore
20:39
you know it's like the guys I will
20:42
believe till I die that when the
20:44
pressure came on the Madison Avenue and
20:46
they said you got to put black people
20:47
into commercials they said we'll show
20:50
them black people in a commercial so
20:51
they put them in the commercials where
20:53
black people look ludicrous in
20:56
you know because everybody has a white
20:58
neighbor
20:59
you very rarely see two black women
21:02
talking
21:03
and if they're black women talking
21:05
they're not the sisters
21:08
it's Bourgeois middle class you know
21:11
straight hair no dues never a dude ever
21:14
never do you know can't look like Gloria
21:16
Foster no chance you know you must look
21:19
like you know the old days of of tan
21:22
confessions you know and that's it
21:24
and I look and I say it on the stage
21:26
sometimes I say it's ridiculous because
21:29
it doesn't relate to anything
21:35
you wearing a free Angela button have
21:37
you had any reaction from other people
21:39
as a result of wearing that button well
21:41
that was a fan of mine
21:43
in the restaurant and uh
21:46
was at the risk around the airport and
21:48
the guy walked up and asked my autograph
21:50
and he was white and he said Jay the
21:53
wife gets a big kick out of here when is
21:55
he on the laughing and all that sign us
21:59
for the kitties you know and I signed it
22:01
and he said I was wondering if and he
22:03
started staring at the button and I was
22:04
wearing you know this but and he was
22:06
going like this and he kept saying I was
22:08
I was and he was trying to focus on it
22:10
because I I was blowing his bubble
22:13
because they have
22:15
an image of me I guess of another kind
22:18
my involvement with Angela is again the
22:22
Injustice of it all
22:24
uh her political beliefs you know are
22:26
her own
22:28
I don't share her political beliefs I
22:30
share her blackness
22:32
and I share the Injustice to any black
22:35
person and there's no way that she's
22:36
going to get the right kind of trial we
22:38
know that
22:39
it's stacked against it
22:41
uh they made her the Most Wanted woman
22:44
since uh Bonnie of Bonnie and Clyde and
22:49
I think that if a guy like myself wears
22:51
a button
22:52
that's letting somebody in that crowd
22:54
that I go around with know where my
22:55
head's at
22:57
you're now married to a sister
22:59
is she I didn't I didn't know that
23:04
[Music]
23:09
[Applause]
23:13
[Music]
23:18
and it's so groovy and so nice I've been
23:21
in the hospital five times
23:22
[Music]
23:24
[Applause]
23:30
I think he's trying to tell me so
23:34
I'm absolutely
23:36
you know flabbergasted by the by the
23:39
fact that we as a people almost without
23:42
the underground which they keep saying
23:44
we've got and everything else around the
23:46
ground as a soul underground you know
23:48
don't take no trains or nothing this
23:51
something happens it's it's the same
23:53
thing compared to
23:54
as soon as downtown gets the dance we've
23:57
gone on to another one and nobody ever
24:00
told us that they got it and we didn't
24:03
care about it but when they get funky
24:04
chicken we're into something else
24:06
uh there's something else you know it's
24:08
the thing that we have that ain't no
24:09
other people got in the world
24:12
it's that immediate eye to eye contact
24:15
that says
24:17
jamf
24:19
horse that says
24:21
yeah
24:23
that's that same thing again that one
24:25
word yeah
24:27
and you know and it's not followed by
24:29
he's down right on but really just yeah
24:33
you feel that we can solve our problem
24:34
by having some type of army or some type
24:38
of violent confrontation with whites
24:41
no
24:43
you know ain't no way you can put poor
24:45
Cadillacs against the tank
24:48
two Rusty raises
24:50
you know against an M1
24:52
and the flame throw against a bottle of
24:55
Coca-Cola with a rag in it ain't no way
24:57
you can do that
25:01
how is it that you're free enough uh to
25:04
talk the way you're talking and be an
25:06
Entertainer
25:07
because you know
25:09
the rationale is that if I'm black and
25:11
an Entertainer I can't be too involved
25:13
with black causes and survive in an
25:16
industry controlled basically by white
25:18
people how are you free enough let's say
25:20
to come on black journal and relate to
25:22
the brothers and sisters the Way You Are
25:24
but I I think
25:27
that it's called
25:29
a respect for one's opinion
25:31
because I've had too many white people
25:33
talk to me and say I
25:35
I don't like what you said on the David
25:36
Frost show about something such a thing
25:39
well you but you shared a lot of guts to
25:41
say it
25:44
and the other point is which is very
25:46
very good man
25:48
I really don't care I don't give it
25:52
when I say this is a racist society in
25:55
which we live in everybody knows it is
25:58
that ain't no that ain't no big big
26:00
statement to make it maybe it's shocking
26:03
to hear it from someone that you just
26:04
watched the night before on laughing uh
26:07
but it is man I can't say well how can
26:10
you say that white and black say this to
26:11
me how can you say that man you got it
26:13
made I said I Got It Made because I had
26:15
to fight all of that but I then owe an
26:17
obligation to my brothers and my sisters
26:19
to let them know
26:21
that it existed then it still exists now
26:24
and I've been here for 40 years you know
26:27
I've got the house I've got a wife I've
26:29
got children I've got success
26:32
and now it is time for me to try in
26:36
every way feasible
26:38
to help
26:39
the plight of my people
26:41
and to gain our freedom because I'm see
26:45
the fallacy is man and let's let me say
26:47
this and and I really mean it from the
26:49
bottom of my heart
26:50
money don't make you free
26:52
popularity don't make you free
26:55
don't you know that
26:58
you know sure I live in Beverly Hills
27:00
but I'm Shackled by the same things that
27:01
happen to the brother and Watts
27:06
I've had my bosses say to me
27:09
cats that I work for
27:11
who you know really basically give me a
27:15
Jack Entrada will say to me Sam geez
27:17
that was a little heavy statement you
27:19
said on that I said but it's true ain't
27:20
it Jack he said yeah I know it's true
27:22
but I said Butcher and that's the end of
27:24
that
27:25
I mean that man and my cousin did I say
27:29
it like it is man I've been the last
27:31
five years
27:33
go away
27:39
thank you
27:40
because he's got to respect me it's like
27:42
when a brother comes to me and says but
27:43
man you're a Jew
27:45
you know I look at him and say what's
27:46
your religion and he says I'm a Baptist
27:49
or I don't have one or I'm a Muslim I
27:51
said well our religion is blackness
27:55
because if we ever get to the point
27:57
where we started talking about he's a
27:58
black Jew he's a black Catholic he's a
28:00
black Baptist he's a black Muslim really
28:03
saved for the titles that the papers put
28:04
on people then we're in trouble our real
28:07
religion and the thing that connects us
28:08
all is our blackness
28:10
the religion of Blackness that's it
28:13
God
28:15
[Music]
28:17
[Applause]
28:18
[Music]
28:19
[Applause]
28:22
[Music]
28:23
[Applause]
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My Thoughts Before The Articles
The first article is correct but incorrect. Biden like his predecessor Obama is poor on policy making. this is a simple truth. but, Saudi arabia nor Iran love the usa. Both of these countries are well aware that the usa rather them both be satraps. To be blunt, OPEC led by saudi arabia was not something the usa wanted and fought hard against, and the usa is why the shah was murdered. The usa has more to do with the most important recent events in either of these countries lives , as a negative agent.
To the arab -israeli concept, again, it is a miscomprehension. The other people commonly called arab from morocco to Pakistan may be willing to turn their back on the palestinean effort, but they clearly comprehend with Da'ish, known in the anglophone as the islamic state, that the common people desire a unification last seen a the times of the caliphates. The caliphates didn't have an israel, the caliphates had a palestine.
The article author misses a simple point, Biden has a domestic voting base that is self righteous. A domestic voting base that believes all firms/individuals/groups have to act according to a nonviolent/nonsectarian/individualistic/anti-strong communal mantra. But most governments in humanity are sectarian/willing to use violence beyond a legal code/proudly racial/anti minority. Pakistan/India/Saudi Arabia each have abused minorities/each are culturally inflexible to immigrants/have governments led by particular groups. So, Biden wants to do two things at the same time. He wants to do business with these countries but he also wants to chagrin them. And that is dysfunctional.
At the end of the day, the USA has banned or blockaded or stymied most if not all the countries from saudi arabia to china in a major way. The USA sent troops to mexico and put a gun to the mexican presidents head to gain the north of mexico and make it the western states. Iran/Saudi Arabia/Pakistan/India/China are all rivals, who have blood between them, but nothing that extreme. I argue they finally see the USA as their collective true opposer.To the second article,
the problem is the difference between Western Europe plus the USA at the end of the second phase of the World War and the rest of humanity at the same point. It is as i say to Black people whose forebears were enslaved completely in the USA. From a white communal situation, USA history is: Native american/European colonies/USA<original/louisiana/war between states/world war/usa world order or norms>, but from a black communal situation, USA history is: Native American/Slavery complete/Slavery through jails/Civil rights act 1965/Early integration of the 1980s/Integration or the Obama Presidency and after>
When human beings talk about history, we tend to say, the victor's write the books. But your essay isn't the book. The history book is designed as a guide for general use. But your words are yours. When history books speak of the internet, you can expect a generalization, that will be favorable to the USA. But when I speak of the internet, I speak of mismanagement/misguidance at the beginning. Dysfunctional systems designed to emphasize media over purpose. In my opinion the internet needs to be chutted. Not because a system of communication between humans is bad. No, the structure of the internet is dysfunctional. Too much energy/time/resources are spent on repeated prose/advertising/dysfunctional websites. In parallel, the writer of the second article, speaks of the norms or world order, but that is from a western European standpoint. The problem is, when the NAzi party fell in germany, western europe, which includes the U.S.A.+ Japan set up this idea of humanity, where they lead and the rest of humanity follows. But, the rest of humanity outside western europe had a different view. Russia wanted to be the leader but overreached itself, miscalculating how impotent it will be in the rest of humanity outside eastern europe. Western europe had centuries of connections in africa/asia/latin america/caribbean that made the victory over russia simple to see. But, the rest of humanity , outside russia, was trying to figure out what they will be after generations, 20 year multiples, of white european rule. China was once cut up into parts by western europe. The article says wolf warrior, should china trust the countries who less than one hundred years ago had cut it up into fealties for their financial empowerment while telling chinese they can't walk in certain parts of the cities in china. Shouldn't china be offensive/militaristic. This is the problem with the former colonies of the western european powers, commonly called the developing countries. These countries historically went from European Imperialism to European satrap. These countries don't have a sense of self rule. The last time the lands that were once part of european empires straightly had self rule was before european impires took them over. In that environment do you expect people in those countries to cherish the rule of law or the rule of power. The USA whose military is throughout the entire humanity, talks of the rule of law, while its power influences beyond the law everyday. but then people in the usa want countries absent power but influence by power to cherish some legal code that serves them nothing but pain.
China realizes the former colonies of white european empires<white european empires includes the U.S.A.> in the caribbean/south america/africa/asia want to be wolf warriors too. They want want China alone as a former european imperial colony achieved. Self rule. And china achieved self rule through a combination of violence to its own as well to others/determination even when the self was harmed/a line of my way or the highway with no compromise or deals/enough population or natural resources to exist free from external manipulation <sorry haiti or cuba>. Eastern Europe or Australia want to join western europe < which includes the u.s.a. > that is fine. They are like the U.S.A. , not naturally western european but through the years have become connected to western europe deeply. But, the rest of humanity, which is a much larger population wants to be wolf warriors. Yeah, maybe kill some citizens to close to betrayal. Yeah, maybe hurt a minority group viciously. Yeah, maybe public while proud of negative actions for its betterment. But, that is the way. The goal is to be free, not liked. China isn't asking the rest of its peers to like it, to be it, they are asking them to be free to become what they want to be while giving china financial favor over the usa. The USA can't offer a better future than the chinese, cause the chinese are offering countries the chance to be what they want to be. The USA can only offer to be a cheap dysfunctional clone of western europe and as Tunisia proves, people in the former western european satraps are becoming more and more tired of that.IN AMENDMENT
China's problem is how to separate the immigrant groups in the usa from the countries they come from. The USA's great advantage in influence is the minority of people who live in the usa but influence affairs in their country of origin or descendency. People who haven't been in Jamaica for ten years influence jamaica more than people who never left jamaica. People who haven't been in the Phillipines for years influence the phillipines more than filipinos who never left the phillipines. The USA has agents, like the cuban community in the usa who have no positive connection to the country of their ancestry, like cuba, but work tirelessly against it while living in the usa. The issue isn't immigration but how immigrants influence or are used to influence the countries they came from.
If you come from Iran and you are living in NYC, why can't you shut up about Iran. You don't live in IRan, you don't act in the government in Iran. Why can't you just wish iran well and shut up and focus more on the usa, the place you actually live.
THE ARTICLES
A man in Tehran, Iran holds a local newspaper reporting on its front page the China-brokered deal between Iran and Saudi Arabia to restore ties on March, 11 2023.
ATTA KENARE / AFP / Getty ImagesSaudi-Iran Deal: China Fills a Middle East Vacuum Left by the Biden AdministrationMar 24, 2023 4 min read
James Phillips
Visiting Fellow, Allison Center for Foreign Policy StudiesJames Phillips is a Visiting Fellow for Middle Eastern affairs at The Heritage Foundation.
China scored an unexpected diplomatic coup with the March 10 announcement that it had brokered an agreement between archrivals Iran and Saudi Arabia to restore diplomatic relations, which had been ruptured for seven years.
How did it happen? Beijing exploited a vacuum of power created by multiple miscues by the Biden administration. Biden’s bumbling, disastrous 2021 withdrawal from Afghanistan considerably lowered America’s stock in the region. The Administration made a bad situation worse by making vain efforts to appease Iran with another illusory nuclear agreement and a misguided push to castigate Saudi Arabia as a pariah, despite its importance as a longtime partner for the U.S. on regional security issues.
The Chinese-brokered agreement pushed Washington even further into the diplomatic sidelines of Middle East influence. It set back U.S. national interests by undermining American efforts to isolate Iran’s rogue regime, build an Arab-Israeli framework for containing Iranian threats, and expand the Abraham peace accords between Israel and Arab states by including Saudi Arabia.
Prior to the March 10 agreement, China had not played a significant role in Middle East diplomacy. At a time when the United States is perceived by many regional allies to be withdrawing from the Middle East, the accord confirmed China’s role as a new power player in the region and a rising global force.
Iran’s threats to Saudi Security
Iran and Saudi Arabia have endured a hostile relationship since the 1979 Iranian revolution, which added deep ideological tensions between Iran’s revolutionary regime and the Saudi kingdom to pre-existing tensions over nationalist and sectarian religious disputes. Iran’s Shia revolutionaries have sought to displace the Sunni fundamentalist Saudis as the most influential leaders of the Muslim world.
Diplomatic ties between the two Islamic powers were broken in 2016, after Iranians attacked and ransacked the Saudi embassy in Tehran following Saudi Arabia’s execution of a Saudi Shia cleric perceived to be pro-Iranian. In addition to the fierce sectarian rivalry, the two countries have fought bloody proxy battles, supporting clashing militias and terrorist groups in Iraq, Lebanon, Syria, and Yemen.
Iranian-backed militias in Iraq and Yemen have attacked Saudi oil facilities and civilian infrastructure with Iranian-made drones and ballistic missiles. Iran also launched a drone and cruise missile attack on Saudi oil facilities in 2019 that temporarily shut down roughly 5 percent of global oil production.
Saudi Arabia’s tentative détente with Iran, brokered by China, exposes a dangerous shift in perceptions about the Middle East balance of power. It is not surprising that Iran would look to China for diplomatic mediation, given their increasingly close alignment following their 2021 Comprehensive Strategic Partnership agreement. But it is disturbing that Saudi Arabia, with its long-term ties to the U.S., sought Chinese diplomatic backing.
Saudi-American tensions
A critical factor in the deterioration of Saudi-American relations has been the ham-handed policies of the Biden administration, which has neglected important security issues and focused on virtue signaling about Saudi human rights abuses.
President Biden came into office pledging to turn Saudi Arabia into a “pariah” for the 2018 assassination of Jamal Khashoggi, a Saudi dissident journalist. The Biden administration went out of its way to publicly chastise Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the de facto leader of the kingdom, for that killing, while turning a blind eye to Iran’s far worse human rights record.
The Saudis chafed at the criticism. Moreover, they were alarmed that the Administration failed to adequately respond to mounting threats to their security posed by Iran and its proxies. The Biden administration froze arms sales to Saudi Arabia, cut off support for the Saudi-backed war against the Iran-backed Houthis in Yemen, withdrew some of the U.S. missile defense systems deployed to Saudi Arabia, and prioritized the revival of the 2015 Iranian nuclear deal, which the Trump administration withdrew from in 2018.
The Saudis regarded Biden’s drive to resurrect the flawed Iran nuclear deal as a major threat to their own security, fearing that another weak nuclear deal would allow Tehran to pocket billions of dollars of sanctions relief that would be used to finance Iran’s escalating military and terrorist threats against its neighbors.
The Saudi government values many aspects of its ties to the United States, particularly in the economic and technological spheres, as demonstrated by its purchase earlier this month of 78 Boeing 787 Dreamliner commercial aircraft, in a deal worth almost $37 billion.
But the Biden administration’s cold shoulder and its complacent down-sizing of the U.S. military presence in the region prompted the Saudis to seek additional security insurance against aggression by Iran, which enjoyed steady support from China and Russia. Saudi Arabia has now hedged its security bets by bolstering relations with Russia, China, and even Iran.
The Bottom Line
The Biden administration, which claims to be “pivoting” to the Indo-Pacific, left a diplomatic and security vacuum in the Middle East. China is now working to fill that void, pivoting to the Middle East at America’s expense.
President Biden’s threat to make Saudi Arabia a “pariah” not only pushed Riyadh into China’s arms, but weakened regional efforts to contain Iran, and set back hopes of expanding the Abraham peace accords between Israel and Arab states to include Saudi Arabia.
The Administration’s misguided aggravation of Saudi-American tensions created an opportunity that Beijing was happy to exploit. It now enjoys better relations with Riyadh than Washington does.
In addition to China, Iran is a major beneficiary of the agreement, which helps it escape diplomatic isolation and buy more time for advancing its nuclear program. Moreover, Saudi Arabia is now less likely to join Arab-Israeli efforts to contain Iran.
The Biden administration needs to recalibrate its Middle East policy to give a higher priority to security issues and the need to deter and defend against multiple Iranian threats to regional security.
Perhaps then long-term partners in the Middle East, who now harbor increasing doubts about U.S. security guarantees, would stop looking to China to augment their security.
President Xi Jinping of China enters the APEC Economic Leaders Sustainable Trade and Investment meeting on November 19, 2022 in Bangkok, Thailand.
Lauren DeCicca / Getty ImagesThe U.S. Is Losing the Developing World to ChinaDec 8, 2022 3 min read
COMMENTARY BY
Michael Cunningham
Research Fellow, China, Asian Studies CenterMichael is a Research Fellow in The Heritage Foundation’s Asian Studies Center.
China has an image problem, and Xi Jinping’s "wolf warrior" diplomacy is largely to blame. At least that’s how most in the United States and Europe see it. But this narrative fails to recognize the headway Beijing is making in other parts of the world. What many fail to realize is that Beijing is conducting an effective diplomatic offensive in the developing world, and it poses a real challenge to U.S. global leadership.
To be sure, the abrasive tone China has presented to the international community has caused serious problems in Beijing’s relations with much of the developed world. Even many of China’s most important trading partners are increasingly aligning with the U.S., undoing decades of painstaking efforts by a smoother generation of diplomats. This is a weakness in Xi’s diplomacy, and Washington should capitalize on it.
But on a global scale, Xi’s diplomatic style isn’t failing so much as it’s playing a different game with rules unfamiliar to many Western powers. So-called wolf warrior diplomacy isn’t a flaw of Xi’s "New Era" program—it’s a feature of it. Since Xi came to power, China has recalibrated its diplomatic strategy to focus on the developing world, which it hopes to use to change the world order gradually.
This was a radical shift. Since the 1980s, the primary aim of Chinese diplomats was to placate the U.S. and its allies, easing their concerns about the Chinese Communist Party’s global intentions and convincing them that China’s rise actually benefits the existing international system. This policy was successful—the U.S. not only didn’t oppose China’s rise, but it actively enabled it, truly believing the disinformation narrative that engagement would result in democratic and free market reforms.
But the effectiveness of this U.S.-centric approach to diplomacy started to wane during the Trump administration. By 2017, Xi already pivoted from Deng Xiaoping’s injunction to "hide your strength and bide your time" in favor of assuming China’s place as a major world power in its own right. "Xi Jinping Thought on Diplomacy" aims to "reform" the international system and create a China-led world order, which is ominously referred to in Chinese as a "community of common destiny for mankind."
This is where the developing world comes in. Beijing knows it cannot currently challenge U.S. hegemony through military means. Rather, in a strategy likely informed in part by the CCP's own experience using workers and peasants to overthrow Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist government in China, Beijing hopes to entice as many members of the international community as possible to back its rise as a global leader. In a United Nations system characterized by "one country, one vote," the country with the most supporters often wins, and there are considerably more developing and nondemocratic countries than there are developed Western democracies.
China has worked to entice countries that are less invested in the U.S.-led international order to take its side and help fight its battles in the international community. This includes nations that openly resent the U.S. and oppose its leadership, such as Iran and Russia. China’s harsh anti-American rhetoric and aggressive treatment of Western countries appeal to these countries, giving Beijing credibility in their eyes.
It also includes underdeveloped countries in Africa, Latin America, and the South Pacific, which are not necessarily opposed to U.S. leadership but whose favor Beijing can buy through economic statecraft. China’s tone in dealing with these countries differs vastly from the harshness with which it approaches the West. In the case of many of these countries, state-owned Chinese firms are among the only developers willing to invest in much-needed infrastructure projects. While many developing countries don’t fully trust China and worry about becoming overly reliant on Beijing, cooperation is usually the least expensive and often the only way for political leaders in these countries to fill urgent needs for their struggling populations.
The U.S. can’t expect to win over rogue states intent on its decline, but it can and must compete with Beijing in the developing world. Already, China is having considerable success securing the votes it needs to block U.N. actions inconsistent with its interests. The greatest casualty has arguably been global human rights norms. China punches well above its weight in the U.N. Human Rights Council despite not even ranking among the top funders of that body. The fact that the world’s preeminent human rights authority is unable to pass a resolution to even discuss the genocide in China’s Xinjiang region shows how effective Beijing’s assault on democratic norms has become.
This is just one of many examples of how Beijing is using its influence over developing countries to overturn global norms and promote its interests in opposition to the U.S.-led global order. It is past time for the U.S. policy community to take China’s influence in the developing world seriously. Many developing countries desire alternatives to Beijing’s enticements, and the U.S. and its allies should develop strategies to compete with China for their loyalty.
U.R.L.
https://www.heritage.org/asia/commentary/the-us-losing-the-developing-world-china
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Black taxpayers are at least three times as likely to be audited by the Internal Revenue Service as other taxpayers.Credit...Hiroko Masuike/The New York TimesBlack Americans Are Much More Likely to Face Tax Audits, Study Finds
A new report documents systemic discrimination in how the I.R.S. selects taxpayers to be audited, with implications for a debate on the agency’s funding.By Jim Tankersley
Jan. 31, 2023
WASHINGTON — Black taxpayers are at least three times as likely to be audited by the Internal Revenue Service as other taxpayers, even after accounting for the differences in the types of returns each group is most likely to file, a team of economists has concluded in one of the most detailed studies yet on race and the nation’s tax system.The findings do not suggest bias from individual tax enforcement agents, who do not know the race of the people they are auditing. They also do not suggest any valid reason for the I.R.S. to target Black Americans at such high rates; there is no evidence that group engages in more tax evasion than others.
Instead, the findings document discrimination in the computer algorithms the agency uses to determine who is selected for an audit, according to the study by economists from Stanford University, the University of Michigan, the University of Chicago and the Treasury Department.
Some of that discrimination appears to be rooted in decisions that I.R.S. officials made over the past decade as they sought to maintain tax enforcement in the face of budget cuts, by relying on automated systems to select returns for audit.
Those decisions have produced an approach that disproportionately flags tax returns with potential errors in the claiming of certain tax credits, like the earned-income tax credit, which supplements low-income workers’ incomes in an effort to alleviate poverty. Those tax returns are more often selected for audits, regardless of how much in owed taxes the agency might recover.
The result is audit rates of Black Americans that are between three and five times the rate of other taxpayers, even when comparing that group to other taxpayers who also claim the E.I.T.C.
The I.R.S. does not detail how it selects returns for audit. But the researchers were able to isolate several apparent explanations for why Black taxpayers are targeted so much more frequently. One is complexity: It is much harder for the agency to audit returns that include business income, because that process requires expertise from individual auditors. Such returns appear to be audited less often than returns from otherwise similar taxpayers who do not report income from a business.
Black taxpayers are far less likely than others to report business income. And Black taxpayers appear to disproportionately file returns with the sort of potential errors that are easy for I.R.S. systems to identify, like underreporting certain income or claiming tax credits that the taxpayer does not qualify for, the authors find.
In effect, the researchers suggest that the I.R.S. has focused on audits that are easier to conduct and as a result, finds itself disproportionately auditing a historically disadvantaged group rather than other taxpayers, including high net-worth individuals.
“What the I.R.S. chooses to focus on when it conducts audits can either undercut or complement our progressive tax system,” said Daniel Ho, an author of the study who is the faculty director of Stanford’s Regulation, Evaluation and Governance Lab, known as RegLab, where the study originated.
The I.R.S. could instead program its algorithms to target audits toward more complicated returns with higher potential dollar value to the government if an audit found errors. In that case, the discrimination in the system would vanish, the authors concluded.
“Historically, there has been this idea that if federal agencies and other policymakers don’t have access to data on race and don’t explicitly take race into account when making policy decisions and allocating resources, the resulting outcome can’t be structurally biased,” said Evelyn Smith, an author of the paper who is a University of Michigan economics graduate student and visiting fellow at Stanford’s RegLab.
One lesson from the study, she said, “is that absolutely is not true.”
On his first day in office, President Biden signed a series of executive orders seeking to advance racial equity in the federal government and the nation. One of them included a directive to the White House budget office to “study methods for assessing whether agency policies and actions create or exacerbate barriers to full and equal participation by all eligible individuals.”
That order inspired researchers at the RegLab, which uses machine learning and other advanced techniques to help governments improve policies. It eventually yielded the study, which the authors will present publicly on Tuesday. It was conducted by Stanford researchers including Ms. Smith, Mr. Ho and Hadi Elzayn, along with Thomas Hertz and Robin Fisher of the Treasury Department’s Office of Tax Analysis; Arun Ramesh of the University of Chicago; and Jacob Goldin of Chicago and Treasury.
The group wanted to use machine learning to improve the federal auditing process, and they wanted to know if that process was infused with racial bias. But they couldn’t easily observe it, because the I.R.S. does not ask taxpayers to declare their race on tax forms, or otherwise track race in any way.
Instead, the researchers built a way to essentially fill in the blanks on taxpayer race, through a partnership with the Treasury that gave them access to 148 million tax returns and 780,000 audits, primarily from 2014, but ranging from 2010 to 2018.
They used taxpayer names — first and last — and the census demographics of their neighborhoods to effectively guess the race of any given filer. Then they examined those results in a small sample of returns from taxpayers who had reported their race elsewhere, on state election forms, in order to be confident that their estimates were correct.
The eventual findings were stark and surprising, the authors said. They saw an immediate correlation between the racial composition of neighborhoods and the audit rates in those areas — vivid signs of significantly higher audit rates for Black taxpayers.
Black Americans are disproportionately concentrated in low-wage jobs. They are more likely than whites to claim the E.I.T.C. The authors wondered if that prevalence in claiming the credit might explain why Black taxpayers face more audits, because I.R.S. data show the agency audits people who claim the E.I.T.C. at higher rates than other taxpayers.
But as the research progressed, the authors found the share of Black Americans claiming the E.I.T.C. only explained a small part of the audit differences. Instead, more than three-quarters of the disparity stems from how much more often Black taxpayers who claim the credit are audited, compared with E.I.T.C. claimants who are not Black.
Treasury officials are aware of the findings. The department started an advisory committee last fall to help it focus on disparities faced by Americans of color. This month, researchers from the department published an analysis of racial disparities in the tax code. It found a wide range of tax advantages that largely help higher-income Americans, like the mortgage interest deduction and preferential tax rates for investment income, disproportionately benefit white taxpayers.
Department officials are in the process of increasing tax enforcement on high earners and corporations that do not pay what they owe, using money from a sprawling climate, health and tax bill Mr. Biden signed into law last summer.
Asked about the study this week, a Treasury spokeswoman pointed to a letter that the deputy Treasury secretary, Wally Adeyemo, wrote last fall to the I.R.S. commissioner on those enforcement efforts, which in effect prioritized cracking down on groups of high-income taxpayers.
“Historic challenges and underfunding have led to audit rates for those at the top of the distribution decreasing more than the correspondence audits of those at the bottom in the last decade, which should change,” Mr. Adeyemo wrote.
Representative Richard E. Neal of Massachusetts, the top Democrat on the Ways and Means Committee, said in a statement on Wednesday that the audit rates documented in the study were “unacceptable, but a consequence of algorithmic tools that exacerbate racial biases in our institutions.”
Mr. Neal said he was looking forward to working with the Treasury on the new enforcement measures — and funding levels — that Mr. Biden set in motion last year. “It’s clear we must address the discrimination at the I.R.S.,” he said.
<the article misses the simple truth, every program, from the one people use to make speeches to the one people use to make paintings to the one people use to calculate taxes are made by humans sequentially, the biases negative or positive in the humans is in the functionality of the computer program, it is very simple >
Jim Tankersley is a White House correspondent with a focus on economic policy. He has written for more than a decade in Washington about the decline of opportunity for American workers, and is the author of "The Riches of This Land: The Untold, True Story of America's Middle Class." @jimtankersley
Article source
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/31/us/politics/black-americans-irs-tax-audits.html
Muhammad Aziz spent two decades in prison before he was cleared of killing Malcolm X.Credit...Todd Heisler/The New York Times
<What I love is no one is asking who actually killed Malcolm X?who? I bet somebody know and I bet whomever know is a real can of worms, unless everybody who know is dead and media rather not speak on this to rile up passions>
New York Pays $121 Million for Police Misconduct, the Most in 5 Years
The total was driven up by a small group of very expensive cases, including a settlement with a man wrongly accused of assassinating Malcolm X.By Hurubie Meko
Feb. 2, 2023
Police misconduct settlements in New York City last year were driven to their highest level since 2018 by six payouts over $10 million, including one for Muhammad A. Aziz, whose conviction in the assassination of Malcolm X was thrown out after he spent two decades in prison.Those cases, with a total value of about $73 million, accounted for about 60 percent of the settlements the Police Department paid last year, according to an analysis of city data released on Tuesday by the Legal Aid Society, New York’s largest provider of criminal and civil services for indigent clients.
The $121 million in payouts last year was up from about $85 million in 2021.
“In recent years, district attorneys have moved to vacate many more criminal cases going back dozens of years which have led to an increase in the number of reverse conviction suits and related payouts,” said Nick Paolucci, a spokesman for the city’s law department.
The city is “promptly reviewing” cases to keep litigation costs down and to provide a measure of justice to those who were wrongfully convicted, Mr. Paolucci added.
The increase in payouts can also partially be attributed to lawsuits filed following Black Lives Matter protests in the 2020, said Jennvine Wong, a Legal Aid staff attorney with the organization’s Cop Accountability Project.
Last year, the city’s Civilian Complaint Review Board, the oversight body that examines police misconduct, recommended that 145 city police officers should be disciplined for misconduct during the demonstrations after the killing of George Floyd, a 46-year-old Black man who died in Minneapolis after his neck was pinned to the ground by Derek Chauvin, a white police officer, in 2020.
During the weeks of protest, police officers and demonstrators clashed throughout the city, resulting in injuries and hundreds of arrests. The oversight body found evidence that supported 267 accusations of misconduct against the officers, recommending the highest level of discipline for about 60 percent of them.
Even outside the lawsuits that stemmed from the protests, the Police Department’s settlement amounts are “astronomically high,” Ms. Wong said.
“They make the payouts, they settled the lawsuits, but then they don’t pursue discipline,” she said.
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Police departments throughout the country have money set aside to settle civil lawsuits and often pay settlements to avoid lengthy litigation, said Maria Haberfeld, professor of police science at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice. Settling a lawsuit for police misconduct doesn’t mean that a department will punish officers, she said, adding that a payout “has no correlation to internal discipline.”For the New York Police Department, a settlement “does not signify immediately, automatically that the officer needs to be brought on disciplinary charges,” she said.
When there are internal charges filed over a police officer’s conduct, administrative trials can take months to years to be decided.
“The systemic lack of police accountability for officers who kill and abuse people is a decades-old problem,” said Yul-san Liem, a representative of the Justice Committee, an organization that works with families in New York City whose relatives have been killed by police officers.
“All of those families have actively been campaigning and calling for the officers who killed their loved ones to be fired and that still hasn’t happened,” she said.
A spokesman for the Police Department said the “decision to settle a lawsuit and for how much remains with the Law Department and the Comptroller.”
The president of the Police Benevolent Association, Patrick J. Lynch, said that the annual totals of settlements are “not a fair or accurate measure” of how police officers have performed in a given year.
“The city routinely settles cases in which police officers have done nothing wrong, and some of the largest payouts arise from decades-old cases that don’t involve a single cop who is still on the job today,” he said.
The data on misconduct payouts released by the city’s Law Department this week doesn’t account for all police settlements in 2022. All told, the city paid nearly $184 million, primarily for personal injuries, but also property damage, according to the Comptroller’s office.
The average settlement totals for lawsuits have also gone up since 2018, according to Legal Aid’s analysis. In both 2020 and 2021, only one settlement topped $10 million, while there were no payments over that amount in the two prior years.
In the past three decades, New York State has also had the third-most people exonerated in the country at 319, behind Illinois at 556 and Texas at 437. The average payouts for those exonerated in New York are also among the highest in the country.
Although the city’s data included the settlement for Mr. Aziz, whose 1965 conviction was thrown out in 2021, the $13 million settlement for Khalil Islam, whose conviction for the assassination was exonerated posthumously, has yet to be reflected.
A version of this article appears in print on Feb. 3, 2023, Section A, Page 19 of the New York edition with the headline: N.Y.P.D. Misconduct Costs at 5-Year High. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe
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https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/02/nyregion/new-york-police-department-misconduct-settlements.htmlAthenia Rodney at her new home in Snellville, Ga., with her husband Kendall and three children. They moved away from New York City last summer.Credit...Nicole Craine for The New York Times
Why Black Families Are Leaving New York, and What It Means for the City
Black children in particular are disappearing from the city, and many families point to one reason: Raising children here has become too expensive.By Troy Closson and Nicole Hong
Published Jan. 31, 2023
Updated Feb. 3, 2023Athenia Rodney is a product of the upward mobility New York City once promised Black Americans. She grew up in mostly Black neighborhoods in Brooklyn, graduated from public schools and attended a liberal arts college on a full scholarship. She went on to start her own event-planning business in the city.
But as Mrs. Rodney’s own family grew, she found herself living in a cramped one-bedroom rental, where her three children shared a bunk bed in the living room. It was hard to get them into programs that exposed them to green spaces or swim classes. As she scrolled through friends’ social media posts showing off trampolines in spacious backyards in Georgia, the solution became clearer: Leave.
Last summer, the family bought a five-bedroom home in Snellville, Ga.
“I felt like it became increasingly difficult to raise a family in New York,” Mrs. Rodney said.
The Rodneys are part of an exodus of Black residents from New York City. From 2010 to 2020, a decade during which the city’s population showed a surprising increase led by a surge in Asian and Hispanic residents, the number of Black residents decreased. The decline mirrored a national trend of younger Black professionals, middle-class families and retirees leaving cities in the Northeast and Midwest for the South.
<Yes, many blacks who are in or near the Black one percent have left New York City. This is true, but most black people of the millions of Black people in NYC have not left and have no reason to leave.>
The city’s Black population has declined by nearly 200,000 people in the past two decades, or about 9 percent. Now, about one in five residents are non-Hispanic Black, compared with one in four in 2000, according to the latest census data.
< Exactly, black people at the top of the Black financial scale>
The decline is starkest among the youngest New Yorkers: The number of Black children and teenagers living in the city fell more than 19 percent from 2010 to 2020. And the decline is continuing, school enrollment data suggests. Schools have lost children in all demographic groups, but the loss of Black children has been much steeper as families have left and as the birthrate among Black women has decreased.The factors propelling families like the Rodneys out of the city are myriad, including concerns about school quality, a desire to be closer to relatives and tight urban living conditions. But many of those interviewed for this article pointed to one main cause: the ever-increasing cost of raising a family in New York.
<this article failed to mention this more simply, NYC had between guiliani and bloomberg twenty years of White Elephant mayors. Guiliani started the attack on the black community by selling the buildings NYC owned, and starting the charter school movement. Both tactics served the purpose of splitting the black community and deleting the black majority in Harlem in particular. The buildings by the fact that in many buildings black people essentially did for themselves and hurt in one way or another other black people. I can personally tell you, in many buildings Black people used Guiliani's program to kic other black people out of the building and scheme for their own profiteering passions in real estate. And then Charter schools is a simple strategy. Guiliani knew that in every community you always have those that are happy to have and don't give a damn about others. Anyone who knows about education in japan or france or in NYC historically knows what the charter school movements goal really is. The advertised goal is to give parents a choice but the functional goals are: hurt the teachers union which is a historic enemy of the party of abraham lincoln, hurt black laborers as most black people's upward mobility isn't in owning businesses but in working for municipal governments, in aiding whites entering the black communities by offering them jobs through the private managements of charter schools who get public school money, and finally by creating another educational tier in NYC. At the top is the styvesant/bronx science/brooklyn tech schools where many children from NYC's officials go to/ next is private jewish schools or other private white institutions that are not only free from the educational scrutiny of public schools but even upon learning that they have near complete failure at standardized test are not ridiculed in media as the following report which has gone quiet in nyc media [ https://aalbc.com/tc/profile/6477-richardmurray/?status=2064&type=status ] / and now where there was public school is charter schools for parents of color, non white european descent, or whites themselves who are too poor for styvesant or a private school , but through vouchers which is a lottery, the most unfair of all things, get to go to a school with certain amenities that public school funding stop allowing when the 1970s hit and black children were making strides in the public schools of nyc. I truly despise charter schools because I comprehend their purpose was never the betterment of all children but adding another layer to make public schools the dumping ground and how do I know this. What media never tells you is all the children who are taken from charter schools for failing in one way or another and guess where they have to go, the public schools. The algorithm is clear, the three layers above public schools will gain the kids with most affluence and public schools will have the majority. Public schools will never go away. And charter schools are known to not provide on average better grades or in NYC's case show an uptake in charter school enrollment. Public schools are losing kids across all demographics based on all peoples, not just black leaving nyc and why, cause the rent's too damn high... and that brings me to Bloomberg. Bloomberg continued the guiliani selling of nyc owned property + charter schools focused on the Black community, but he added the real estate boom. Which aided a Black Minority in the Black populace. Bloomberg made a ton of money. But he also led minorities in every community involved or aspiring to the real estate industry to make money in their own community, often against the betterment to the whole. But Bloomberg wanted to make a white city, and he succeeded in starting on the path. It was meant to be faster but it didn't work out that way.>
Black families drawn to opportunities in places where jobs and housing are more plentiful are finding new chances to spread out and build wealth. But the exodus could transform the fabric of New York, even as Black political power surges. It has alarmed Black leaders, as well as economists who point to labor shortages in industries like nursing where Black workers have traditionally been overrepresented.
< In all earnest, this is the best for the black community in NYC. One of the great fallicies of fiscal capitalism is the myth of majority wealth. The most successful communities in the USA or the European colonies that preceded it are minorities. The WHite jewish community, the white catholic, the Black Caribbean, being small is the best way for a community to be affluent in fiscal capitalism. German americans is where most of the poor white trash come from/ Descended of Enslaved Blacks in the USA is where most of the commonly called by other black people lazy ignorant blacks come from, it is the chinese americans where most of the slave/low wage workers trapped in chinese communities come from. It is always the largest communities in fiscal capitalism who produce most of the poor, fiscal capitalism is best for the most minor minorities as the usa proves. Black New York City population becoming less will cause it to benefit more financially, not governmentally, not in exposure, but financially. It will force black wealth to interact more as the numbers are just smaller.>
The filmmaker Spike Lee, a longtime New York booster, said he worries about the city becoming more expensive and less accessible to people of color in particular, who have contributed so much to the city’s culture, from the birth of hip hop in the South Bronx to artists like Alvin Ailey and Jean-Michel Basquiat.
“It’s really sad because the reality is New York City is not affordable anymore,” Mr. Lee said. And if Black people can’t afford to live in the city, “you could seriously say New York City isn’t the greatest city in the world,” he said.
<a lie, greatness in NYC has nothing to do with the presence of Black people. Spike lee simply doesn't like the fact that the dream of stronger vibrant black communities in NYC is dead. The Black new york city community will become more a minority, and will become something it hasn't been since before the >Eric Adams, New York’s second Black mayor, has vowed to create a more affordable city to stem the “hemorrhaging of Black and brown families.” Mr. Adams’s own bid for mayor was partially built on a biography that reflects the Black community’s roots in the city: His parents traveled north from Alabama during the Great Migration, climbed their way from poverty in Brooklyn to middle-class homeownership in Queens and relied on public schools and colleges to lift their children to greater success.
<He can't do that cause he nor any mayer in my lifetime in NYC has the courage and it will take hear tto take on the real estate industry of New York City, the project of BLoomberg will get its result>Younger Black families say that trajectory has become more elusive. High inflation and a turbulent rental market as the pandemic has subsided have hurt New Yorkers across the board. But Black families lag far behind white families in homeownership and in building wealth. Black households have a median income of $53,000, compared with roughly $98,000 for white households, according to the most recent census data.
<NYC was never a pot of gold for black people, black people left the south not for jobs or betterment, they left the south because white people were burning our homes our people, the problem with the migration of DOSers in the USA is people, including black people, try to frame it as a financial affair, it was militaristic, whites burned black children alive as public entertainment and black people had to leave. This wasn't invite to work. >Ruth Horry, a Black mother who bounced through cockroach- and rodent-infested Brooklyn apartments for years, has repeatedly been priced out by rising rents. Eventually, Ms. Horry, 36, and her three daughters, landed in the shelter system. At a shelter in Queens, the sink was so small Ms. Horry washed her children’s hair in the bathroom at a nearby McDonald’s.
< The article doesn't mention who owned those buildings, NYC white community never wanted the black community, it was a situation at the federal level, either the federal government protect black people from whites in the south or they don't, they chose not to, so either black people go to war against whites in the south or black people leave, black people chose to leave. but where could they go? North /West/Northwest was all 90% white and did not want black people and worked against black people from then to now. Black people make it seem like some sort of opportunities was waiting in the northern states >“The conditions for what you could afford were mind-blowing,” she said. “I was just so tired of that.”
<Again, your relatives were in the north for militaristic reasons not financial, nyc never tried to make a welcome mat for black people>In late 2019, Ms. Horry moved to Jersey City through a New York City voucher program, known as the Special One-Time Assistance program, which relocates vulnerable families into permanent housing with a full year’s rent upfront. The drop in living costs has been life-changing, Ms. Horry said, and she is considering moving to the South to save even more.
<Again, that shows NYC's relationship. NYC is trying to help black people leave nyc and yet black people complain about nyc:)>“I have no food stamps, no welfare, no rental assistance,” said Ms. Horry, who now lives in a two-bedroom apartment and pays the $1,650 monthly rent through her earnings at a nonprofit that helps families in Brooklyn’s Brownsville neighborhood. “I don’t qualify for those programs, and that is an amazing feeling.”
<This is the problem with black people in the usa , being poor isn't a symbol of yourself. but the individualist culture in the USA which is deeply entrenched among black people based on black forebears actions creates these illogical positions. If you are poor then having voucing or welfare is necessary. Black people living in nyc being assisted shouldn't be ashamed, you want the street or a place to live. you can chose live in the street and not have to deal with welfare/food stamps/rental assistance>New York City’s loss of Black residents has been a gain for the South especially. The region’s economy has boomed as newcomers from the city and other urban areas in the North flock there.
<another lie, the south's economic growth is not related to blacks moving south , it is about the movement of industries to the south where wage cost are lower than north east or west coast. it is not about the movement of blacks.>Still, Regine Jackson, a professor at Atlanta’s Morehouse College who studies migration patterns, said that as more Black Northerners make what is often a bittersweet decision to leave, it remains unclear whether the South will ultimately provide the greater opportunities they seek.
< the one bit of truth in the article. I know black people who went south, some like the highlighted people in the article come with money, but many are working poor folk who simply have a lower financial need in terms of cost of living but are not in a land of gold>They may have become disillusioned with life in the North, said Ms. Jackson, but in the South, “there’s still problems.”
<truth>“There’s been a lot of progress since the civil rights movement, yet there’s still a lot left to do,” Ms. Jackson said.
<truth, but i will say this, frederick douglass is getting his wish. The Black community, especially the Descended of enslaved, has basically lived side whites in majority since the end of the war between the states. First Black people were being burned alive in the south, then black people were put in caves in the north, and now 2023 the black community is split between the south and the not south and is more internally multiracial than ever and has only known living side whites in either situation. Is the black community better for it? Time will tell>As New York’s housing shortage persists and rents stay high, Gov. Kathy Hochul recently pledged to build more than 800,000 new units of housing statewide over the next decade, double what went up in the past 10 years. In his own housing agenda, Mr. Adams has stressed expanding several programs to make homeownership more affordable for families of color.
While the Black homeownership rate — roughly 27 percent in New York — rose slightly during the pandemic, it has far to climb to catch up with other demographic groups. That is partly because of historical disparities, including racial biases that have held back Black homeownership. The national foreclosure crisis hit many middle-class Black families especially hard, and Black households still often face discrimination and the devaluation of their properties.
The departures have transformed neighborhoods across New York. In Southeast Queens enclaves like Jamaica and St. Albans, more Latino and South Asian residents are moving in. Harlem and Bedford-Stuyvesant, two iconic Black neighborhoods, have grown in population even as they experienced steep declines in the number of Black residents.
Harlem, for example, lost more than 5,000 Black people over a decade, while nearly 9,000 white people moved in, according to census data analyzed by The New York Times. Bedford-Stuyvesant lost more than 22,000 Black residents while gaining 30,000 white residents.
Christie Peale, the executive director of the Center for New York City Neighborhoods, a nonprofit that promotes affordable homeownership, said more aggressive efforts are needed.
< I repeat this was bloomberg's plan set on guiliania's , it took time to settle but it was inevitable. When the City government led by those two opened their properties which were gained by the 1970s when the real estate industry in nyc collapsed to the real estate industry again, it was bound to harm the black community especially >“Our fear is that the city will become whiter and wealthier, and the only opportunities for realizing the upside of a strong market will be for investors, people with high-income jobs,” Ms. Peale said. “It really will be that tale of two cities.”
<NYC was already like this not to long ago, again, people assess place absent an honest historical view. during the gilded when the great gatsby was written whites themselves in NYC felt the rich whites were, and I quote fitzgerald, the wicked rich. What she means by fear is really silly. Cities, all cities are like living beings, they change over time, they never remain the same. >Citywide, white residents now make up about 31 percent of the population, according to census data, Hispanic residents 28 percent and Asian residents nearly 16 percent. While the white population has stayed about the same, the Asian population grew by 34 percent and Hispanic population grew by 7 percent, according to the data.
<Again when people use the word white, they usually mean white european, but white people are also white latinos/white asians as black latinos or black asians exist. So NYC if you think of white as more than white european but including white muslim/white asian/white latino was always mostly white. IT was false assessment that suggested it wasn't>The loss of Black families has already had major implications for the education system. Some schools have shrunk, and teachers have had to be moved around to account for drops in enrollment. Overall, the public schools have lost more than 100,000 students in the past five years, a crisis facing other urban districts like Boston and Chicago. In 2005, Black children comprised 35 percent of K-12 students in New York City; they now make up closer to 20 percent.
Just since 2017, about 50,000 Black students have left K-12 district schools, a decline of nearly 22 percent. The drop among white children in the same period was 14 percent, while the overall Latino and Asian student populations declined at lower rates. Some Black students enrolled at charter schools, but many more left the city altogether. About one in four Black children at district schools who left last year moved to the South, Education Department data shows.
<I quote: Some Black students enrolled at charter schools, but many more left the city altogether. About one in four Black children at district schools who left last year moved to the South, Education Department data shows. So when people say public schools are being influenced by charter schools you can say yes>School enrollment has also been affected by a steady drop in birthrates, another national trend. Black women accounted for more than 30 percent of citywide births in 2000; their share was below 20 percent in 2019, state data shows.
< again, when people say public schools are being encroached by charters you can say , again, no . Charter schools isn't public schools problem, big urban cities is public schools problem and charter schools have for many successfully created a false narrative about their option having potency>Some of the Black families that left the city were seeking better educational opportunities for their children.
Michelle Okeke moved from Bedford-Stuyvesant to Mansfield, Texas, in 2021 to be closer to relatives who could help raise her two children. But she also worried about obtaining a good education for them in what she called New York City’s “insane” and complex system. Selective academic programs and top middle and high schools accept few Black children each year. Stuyvesant High School, the city’s crown jewel, made offers to just 11 Black students for its freshman class of more than 750 this academic year.
“There was always a part of me that was like, ‘How are we going to deal with schools?’” Ms. Okeke, whose children are 2 and 4, said. “It was a looming consideration: Should we move to Jersey? Do we go to another area where there’s more opportunities?”
The administration has sought to increase access to selective pathways like the city’s gifted and talented program. But parents worry that schools serving primarily Black children in a deeply segregated system could face larger losses in future rounds of school budget cuts, and that shrinking resources and cuts to programs may prompt further departures.
The continuing loss of Black New Yorkers may also disrupt the city’s job market. Melva Miller, the chief executive of the nonprofit Association for a Better New York, pointed to labor shortages in industries that have long relied on a disproportionate share of Black employees, like the building trades and civil service.
Some families who have left say there are things they miss about the city, but that the opportunities they have found elsewhere have made the move worth it.
Alisha Brooks, 36, a Bronx native, had always envisioned raising her children in the city, clinging to her identity as a New Yorker. But as a young Black mother, she sometimes felt out of place in her Brooklyn Heights neighborhood, which is predominantly white and higher income.
Her oldest son’s Brooklyn Heights school was largely white. In his final year there, fewer than 5 percent of the students and only a small number of teachers were Black. She noticed him growing increasingly insecure about his natural hair; classmates would sometimes try to touch it.
“He was starting to feel different,” Ms. Brooks said. “He needed to be around more diversity and see more kids who looked like him.”
After a trip to North Carolina in the spring of 2020 revealed how much cheaper life could be elsewhere, the Brooks family chose to move to Charlotte, where a growing Black population makes up more than a third of residents. Most of her sons’ new teachers, and more of their classmates, are Black.
Mihir Zaveri contributed reporting. Susan C. Beachy contributed research. Robert Gebeloff contributed data analysis.
< these individual examples are just that individual and I think have no place in the article really, communal issues are not revealed by individuals>Audio produced by Parin Behrooz.
Troy Closson is a reporter on the Metro desk covering education in New York City. @troy_closson
Nicole Hong is a reporter covering China. She previously worked for The Wall Street Journal, where she was part of a team that won the 2019 Pulitzer Prize in National Reporting.
SOURCE ARTICLE
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/31/nyregion/black-residents-nyc.html
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A Hindu ritual on the banks of the Ganges River in Varanasi, northern India. Prime Minister Narendra Modi has chosen Varanasi as a core vehicle of his assertion of India as a Hindu nation, raising tensions with Muslims.Russia’s War Could Make It India’s World
The invasion of Ukraine, compounding the effects of the pandemic, has contributed to the ascent of a giant that defies easy alignment. It could be the decisive force in a changing global system.By Roger CohenPhotographs by Mauricio Lima
Roger Cohen, the Paris bureau chief, and Mauricio Lima spent almost two weeks in India, traveling between New Delhi, Varanasi and Chennai, to write and photograph this piece.Dec. 31, 2022
Seated in the domed, red sandstone government building unveiled by the British Raj less than two decades before India threw off imperial rule, S. Jaishankar, the Indian foreign minister, needs no reminder of how the tides of history sweep away antiquated systems to usher in the new.Such, he believes, is today’s transformative moment. A “world order which is still very, very deeply Western,” as he put it in an interview, is being hurried out of existence by the impact of the war in Ukraine, to be replaced by a world of “multi-alignment” where countries will choose their own “particular policies and preferences and interests.”
Certainly, that is what India has done since the war in Ukraine began on Feb. 24. It has rejected American and European pressure at the United Nations to condemn the Russian invasion, turned Moscow into its largest oil supplier and dismissed the perceived hypocrisy of the West. Far from apologetic, its tone has been unabashed and its self-interest broadly naked.
“I would still like to see a more rules-based world,” Mr. Jaishankar said. “But when people start pressing you in the name of a rules-based order to give up, to compromise on what are very deep interests, at that stage I’m afraid it’s important to contest that and, if necessary, to call it out.”
In other words, with its almost 1.4 billion inhabitants, soon to overtake China as the world’s most populous country, India has a need for cheap Russian oil to sustain its 7 percent annual growth and lift millions out of poverty. That need is nonnegotiable. India gobbles up all the Russian oil it requires, even some extra for export. For Mr. Jaishankar, time is up on the mind-set that “Europe’s problems are the world’s problems, but the world’s problems are not Europe’s,” as he put it in June.
The Ukraine war, which has provoked moral outrage in the West over Russian atrocities, has caused a different anger elsewhere, one focused on a skewed and outdated global distribution of power. As Western sanctions against Russia have driven up energy, food and fertilizer costs, causing acute economic difficulties in poorer countries, resentment of the United States and Europe has stirred in Asia and Africa.
Grinding trench warfare on European soil seems the distant affair of others. Its economic cost feels immediate and palpable.
“Since February, Europe has imported six times the fossil fuel energy from Russia that India has done,” Mr. Jaishankar said. “So if a $60,000-per-capita society feels it needs to look after itself, and I accept that as legitimate, they should not expect a $2,000-per-capita society to take a hit.”
Here comes Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s India, pursuing its own interests with a new assertiveness, throwing off any sense of inferiority and rejecting unalloyed alignment with the West. But which India will strut the 21st-century global stage, and how will its influence be felt?
The country is at a crossroads, poised between the vibrant plurality of its democracy since independence in 1947 and a turn toward illiberalism under Mr. Modi. His “Hindu Renaissance” has threatened some of the core pillars of India’s democracy: equal treatment of all citizens, the right to dissent, the independence of courts and the media.
Democracy and debate are still vigorous — Mr. Modi’s Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party lost a municipal election in Delhi this month — and the prime minister’s popularity remains strong. For many, India is just too vast and various ever to succumb to some unitary nationalist diktat.
The postwar order had no place for India at the top table. But now, at a moment when Russia’s military aggression under President Vladimir V. Putin has provided a vivid illustration of how a world of strongmen and imperial rivalry would look, India may have the power to tilt the balance toward an order dominated by democratic pluralism or by repressive leaders.
Which way Mr. Modi’s form of nationalism will lean remains to be seen. It has given many Indians a new pride and bolstered the country’s international stature, even as it has weakened the country’s pluralist and secularist model.
India’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, himself a mixture of East and West through education and upbringing, described the country as “some ancient palimpsest on which layer upon layer of thought and reverie had been inscribed” without any of those layers being effaced.
He was convinced that a secular India had to accommodate all the diversity that repeated invasion had bequeathed. Not least, that meant conciliation with the country’s large Muslim minority, now about 200 million people.
Today, however, Mr. Nehru is generally reviled by Mr. Modi’s Hindu nationalist party. There are no Muslims in Mr. Modi’s cabinet. Hindu mob attacks on Muslims have been met with silence by the prime minister.
“Hatred has penetrated into society at a level that is absolutely terrifying,” the acclaimed Indian novelist Arundhati Roy said.
That may be, but for now, Mr. Modi’s India seems to brim with confidence.
The Ukraine war, compounding the effects of the Covid-19 pandemic, has fueled the country’s ascent. Together they have pushed corporations to make global supply chains less risky by diversifying toward an open India and away from China’s surveillance state. They have accentuated global economic turbulence from which India is relatively insulated by its huge domestic market.
Those factors have contributed to buoyant projections that India, now No. 5, will be the world’s third-largest economy by 2030, behind only the United States and China.
On a recent visit to India, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said that the United States wanted to “diversify away from countries that present geopolitical and security risks to our supply chain,” singling out India as among “trusted trading partners.”
Nonetheless, India is in no mood to cut ties with Mr. Putin’s Russia, which supported the country with weapons over decades of nonalignment, while the United States cosseted India’s archenemy, Pakistan. Even in a country starkly fractured over Mr. Modi’s policies, this approach has had near universal backing.
“For many years, the United States did not stand by us, but Moscow has,” Amitabh Kant, who is responsible for India’s presidency of the Group of 20 that began this month, said in an interview. New Delhi has enough rivals, he said: “Try, on top of China and Pakistan, putting Russia against you!”
Mr. Modi’s India will not do that in an emergent world characterized by Mr. Jaishankar as “more fragmented, more tense, more on the edge and more under stress” as the war in Ukraine festers.
“Paradoxically, the war in Ukraine has diminished trust in Western powers and concentrated people’s minds on how to hedge bets,” said Pratap Bhanu Mehta, a prominent Indian political theorist. “India feels it has the United States figured out: Yes, you will be upset but you’re in no position to do anything about it.”
That has proved a good bet up to now. “The age of India’s significant global stature has just begun,” said Preeti Dawra, the Indian-born director of global marketing at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore.
Arriving in Varanasi, Hinduism’s holiest city, in 1896, Mark Twain remarked on the “bewildering and beautiful confusion of stone platforms, temples, stair-flights, rich and stately palaces” rising on the bluff above the Ganges, the river of life.
Mr. Modi, 72, who adopted the city as his political constituency in 2014 when he embarked on his campaign to lead India, saying he had been “called by the mother Ganges,” has cut a pinkish sandstone gash through this sacred jumble of devotion.
Known as “the corridor” and opened a year ago, the project connects the Kashi Vishwanath Temple, dedicated to the Hindu god Shiva, to the riverfront a quarter-mile away.
The broad and almost eerily spotless pedestrian expanse, with its museum and other tourist facilities, links the city’s most revered temple to the river where Hindus wash away their sins. It is quintessential Modi.
Cut through a labyrinth of more than 300 homes that were destroyed to make way for it, the passage intertwines the prime minister’s political life with the deepest of Hindu traditions. At the same time, it proclaims his readiness to fast-forward India through bold initiatives that break with chaos and decay. Mr. Modi, a Hindu nationalist and tech enthusiast, is a disrupter.
A self-made man from a humble background in the western state of Gujarat, and from a low status in India’s caste system, or social hierarchy, Mr. Modi has come to embody an aspirational India.
Through what Srinath Raghavan, a historian, called “an incorruptible aura and a genius at orchestrating public narratives,” he appears to have imbued India with the confidence to forge the singular path so evident over the 10 months since Russia went to war.
“Modi’s social mobility is in some ways the promise of India today,” Mr. Raghavan said in an interview.
That Modi-inspired promise, as invigorating to the traditionally lower castes of Hindu society as it is troubling to the Brahmins who long ran India, has come at a price.
Vishwambhar Nath Mishra, a Hindu religious leader in Varanasi and an engineering professor, said that the corridor had been a “blunder” that had destroyed 142 old shrines, an example of the bulldozing style Mr. Modi favors.
“We have always been a unique family in Varanasi, Muslims and Christians and Hindus who sit down and work things out, but Mr. Modi chooses to create tensions to get elected,” Mr. Mishra said. “If he is trying to establish a Hindu nation, that is very dangerous.”
Every morning, Mr. Mishra bathes in the Ganges. He heads a foundation that monitors the river and showed me a chart illustrating that the level of fecal matter in it is still dangerously high. So why does he do it? He smiled. “The Ganges is the medium of our life.”
One recent evening, I watched the Hindu prayer ceremony on the riverfront from a small boat. Perhaps two thousand people had gathered. Candles flickered. Chants rose. Along the great crescent sweep of the river, smoke billowed from the pyres that burn night and day. For a Hindu to die and be cremated in Varanasi is to be assured of transcendence and liberation.
A distracting electronic screen flashed behind the ceremony. On it, Mr. Modi’s bearded face appeared at regular intervals, promoting the Indian presidency of the Group of 20 largest global economies, an organization that calls itself the “premier forum for international economic cooperation.”
Mr. Modi, as this elaborate choreography of the spiritual and the political suggested, wants to turn India’s presidency of the G20 in 2023 into a premier platform for his bid for re-election, to a third term, in 2024.
“Big responsibility, bigger ambitions,” proclaimed one slogan on the screen. G20-related meetings are planned in every Indian state over the next year, including one in Varanasi in August.
India wants its presidency of the group to have the world as “one family” and the need for “sustainable growth” as its core themes. It wants to push the transformation of developing countries through what Mr. Kant, the organizer, called “technological leapfrogging.” India, with its near universal connectivity, sees itself as an example.
About 1.3 billion Indians now have a digital identity. Access to all banking activities online, through digital bank accounts, has become commonplace during Mr. Modi’s eight years in power. They were once the preserve of the middle class. Poorer Indians have been empowered.
“Nobody wants the current world order,” Mr. Kant said. “There are still two billion people in the world with no bank account.” India will advocate on behalf of poorer nations. But the issue with Mr. Modi’s “one family” theme is that, just up the road from the riverside prayers, his divisiveness is evident.
It is not easy to get into the complex, at the top of Mr. Modi’s new corridor, where the 17th-century white-domed Gyanvapi Mosque abuts the Kashi Vishwanath Temple. Intense security checks take a long time to negotiate because this is an epicenter of the inflamed Hindu-Muslim tension in India.
Armed guards are everywhere. They stand beside the mosque, which is encased behind a 20-foot metal fence topped with coils of razor wire. They patrol the Hindu crowds, who line up in saffron-color robes beside the temple to make their offerings of milk, sometimes mixed with honey, to the simple stone lingam that is the symbol of Shiva.
The only mammals that cross easily from the Hindu to Muslim worlds, as if to mock the stubborn divisions of humankind, are the lithe gray monkeys that scamper over barriers from shikhara to minaret.
A flurry of legal cases now centers on the mosque. A court survey this year claimed to have uncovered an ancient lingam on the premises of the mosque, so establishing, at least for hard-line Hindus, that they should be allowed to pray there. Large Muslim prayer gatherings have been banned.
In the ascendant Hindu narrative that Mr. Modi has done nothing to discourage, India belongs in the first place to its Hindu majority. The Muslim interlopers of the Mughal Empire and other periods of conquest take second place. Mosque must yield to temple if it can be demonstrated that a temple predated it.
If Mr. Putin has chosen to portray Ukraine as a birthplace of the Russian world inseparable from the motherland and embraced the Orthodox Church as a bastion of his power, Mr. Modi has chosen Varanasi as a core vehicle of his assertion of India as essentially a Hindu nation. Of course, the Indian leader did so in the interest of power consolidation, not conquest.
Three decades ago, the razing by a Hindu mob of a 16th-century mosque in the northern Indian city of Ayodhya, which Hindus believe is the birthplace of the god Ram, led to the death of 2,000 people and propelled the rise of Mr. Modi’s party.
A temple is now being built there. Mr. Modi, who presided over the groundbreaking in 2020, has called it “the modern symbol of our traditions.”
Faced by such moves, Ms. Roy, the novelist, voiced a common concern. “You know, the Varanasi sari, worn by Hindus, woven by Muslims, was a symbol of everything that was so interwoven and is now being ripped apart,” she said. “A threat of violence hangs over the city.”
I found Syed Mohammed Yaseen, a leader of the Varanasi Muslim community, which makes up close to a third of the city’s population of roughly 1.2 million, at his timber store. “The situation is not good,” Mr. Yaseen, 75, said. “We are dealing with 18 lawsuits relating to the old mosque. The Hindus want to demolish it indirectly by starting their own worship there.” Increasingly, he said, Muslims felt like second-class citizens.
“Every day, we are feeling all kinds of attacks, and our identity is being diminished,” he said. “India’s secular character is being dented. It still exists in our Constitution, but in practice, it is dented, and the government is silent.”
This denting has taken several forms under Mr. Modi. Shashi Tharoor, a leading member of the opposition Congress Party that ruled India for most of the time since independence, suggested to me that “institutionalized bigotry” had taken hold.
A number of lynchings and demolitions of Muslim homes, the imprisonment of Muslim and other journalists critical of Mr. Modi, and the emasculation of independent courts have fanned fears of what Mr. Raghavan, the historian, called “a truly discriminatory regime, with its risk of radicalization.”
As I spoke to Mr. Yaseen, I noticed a man with an automatic rifle seated a few yards to his left. Clearly a Hindu, with a tilak in the middle of his forehead, he took some interest in the conversation.
Who, I asked, is this man with a rifle?
“He is my guard, appointed a couple of months ago by the district administration to protect me, given the tension over the mosque,” Mr. Yaseen said.
The guard was a police officer named Anurag Mishra. I asked him how he felt about his job. “I am standing here to protect a fellow human being,” he said. “My religion does not really matter. Nor does his. My superiors told me to do the job.”
Mr. Yaseen said that he was happy to have a Hindu protecting him, even if “I trust in God, not in the guard.”
That one Indian citizen protects another — a Hindu police officer with a rifle safeguarding a Muslim community leader from potential Hindu attack — was at once reassuring, in that it suggested secular, democratic, pluralistic India would not go quietly; and alarming, in that it was necessary at all.
At the G20 summit in Bali, Indonesia, in November, Indian diplomacy played an important role in finding compromise language after several Western countries had pressed for harsh criticism of Russia over Ukraine or even for Moscow’s ouster from the forum. The phrase, “Today’s era must not be of war,” in the leaders’ declaration, and the reference to “diplomacy and dialogue,” were a reprise of Mr. Modi’s words to Mr. Putin in September.
Could India, with its ties to Russia, mediate a cease-fire in Ukraine, or even a peace settlement? Mr. Jaishankar, the foreign minister, was skeptical. “The parties involved have to reach a certain situation and a certain mind-set,” he said.
And when will the war end? “I wouldn’t even hazard an opinion,” he said.
Still, India wants to be a bridge power in the world birthed by the pandemic and by the war in Ukraine.
It believes that the interconnectedness of today’s world outweighs the pull of fragmentation and makes a nonsense of talk of a renewed Cold War. If a period of disorder seems inevitable as Western power declines, it will most likely be tempered by economic interdependence, the Indian argument goes.
With inequality worsening, food security worsening, energy security worsening, and climate change accelerating, more countries are asking what answers the post-1945 Western-dominated order can provide. India, it seems, believes it can be a broker, bridging East-West and North-South divisions.
“I would argue that generally in the history of India, India has had a much more peaceful, productive relationship with the world than, for example, Europe has had,” Mr. Jaishankar said. “Europe has been very expansionist, which is why we had the period of imperialism and colonialism. But in India, despite being subjected to colonialism for two centuries, there’s no animus against the world, no anger. It is a very open society.”
It is also situated between two hostile powers, Pakistan and China.
In December, there was another skirmish at the 2,100-mile disputed Chinese-Indian border. Nobody was killed, unlike in 2020, when at least 20 Indian and four Chinese soldiers died. But tensions remain high. “The relationship is very fraught,” Mr. Jaishankar said.
Escalation at the border is possible at any moment, but it appears unlikely that India can count on Russia, given Moscow’s growing economic and military dependence on China. That makes India’s strategic relationship with the West critical.
In the light of the war in Ukraine, however, each party is adjusting to the fact that the other will pick and choose its principles.
“Ukraine is certainly not seen here as something with a clear moral tale to tell,” Ms. Roy, the novelist, said. “When brown or Black people get bombed or shocked-and-awed, it does not matter, but with white people it is supposed to be different.”
India is in a delicate position. In the face of American criticism, the country chose to take part this year in Russian military exercises that included units from China. At the same time, India is part of a four-nation coalition known as the Quad that includes the United States, Japan and Australia and works for a “free and open Indo-Pacific.”
This is Indian multi-alignment at work. The Ukraine war has only reinforced New Delhi’s commitment to this course. Washington has worked hard over many years to make India Asia’s democratic counterbalance to President Xi Jinping’s authoritarian China. But the world, as seen from India, is too complex for such binary options.
If the Biden administration has been unhappy with India’s business-as-usual approach to Mr. Putin since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, it has also been accepting of it — American realpolitik, as China rises, demands that Mr. Modi not be alienated.
At the end of my stay, I traveled down to Chennai on the southeastern coast.
The atmosphere is softer there. The economy is booming. The electronics manufacturer Foxconn is rapidly expanding production capacity for Apple devices, building a hostel for 60,000 workers on a 20-acre site near the city.
“The great mass of Indians are awakening to the fact that they don’t need the ideology of the West and that we can set our own path — and Modi deserves credit for that,” Venky Naik, a retired businessman, said.
I went to a concert where a musician played haunting songs and spoke of “renewing your auspiciousness every day.” There I ran into Mukund Padmanabhan, a former editor of The Hindu newspaper and now a professor of public practice at the newly established Krea University, north of Chennai.
“I do not believe Modi can marshal Hinduism into a monolithic nationalist force,” he said. “There are thousands of Gods, and you don’t have to believe in any of them. There is no single or unique way.”
He gestured toward the mixed crowd of Hindus and Muslims at the concert. “People don’t like to talk about the project of Gandhi and Nehru, which was to bring everyone along and go forward, but it happened, and it is part of our truth, part of the indelible Indian palimpsest.”
Hari Kumar contributed reporting from New Delhi.
Roger Cohen is the Paris bureau chief of The Times. He was a columnist from 2009 to 2020. He has worked for The Times for more than 30 years and has served as a foreign correspondent and foreign editor. Raised in South Africa and Britain, he is a naturalized American. @NYTimesCohen
MY THOUGHTSIndia is everything Japan isn't. It is historically multiracial, maintained or supports a caste system that accepts a poor life for some unlike the socialist healthcare system of Nippon, Japan has more usa debt than any other country while India does public business with a smile to USA's modern enemy in media, russia.
Like CHina with the Ugyars, India with its Muslims , seems to be on a quest to reduce the islamic footprint in the country or at least contain it, while both do large business with islamic strict saudi arabia/iran/qatar or et cetera. so, India is correct, Asia is complex and if Asia is leading the future in humanity then dichotomies are no longer valid, these are complex times coming in the future of the alignments in humanity.
I do think that india's immigrant community in england/usa or other will have a huge role in the complexity their prime minister speaks of in the future.Article Link
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/31/world/asia/india-ukraine-russia.html
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Attending to a patient at the severe burns unit.Credit...Zied Ben Romdhane for The New York Times
In a Hospital Ward, the Wounds of a Failed Democracy Don’t Heal
Tunisia’s road to democracy began with a self-immolation, and such cases have filled hospital burn wards ever since, as elected leaders failed to deliver on a promise of prosperity.
By Vivian Yee
Vivian Yee, who covers North Africa for The Times, spent a week at the Trauma and Severe Burns Hospital in Ben Arous, near the Tunisian capital, where she watched doctors carry out their work.Jan. 3, 2023
The most troublesome patient in the hospital’s severe burns unit was refusing to let the orderlies change the bandages that had encased him since he set himself on fire three months earlier, so Dr. Imen Jami burst into his room, her habitually knit brows drawn as tight as they would go, her lips pressed together in a magenta line.“Look, I have someone in a coma, and I have no time,” she told the young man. “The final word is that you’ll get on the bed and change your bandages.”
“I’m so tired,” he moaned.
“You’re really not going to have them changed?” she said, looming over him.
“No, I will,” he said, quailing.
The doctor had seen this before: Tunisians who set themselves on fire in the throes of desperation often had little interest in recovering. Unable to support their families in a country that was coming apart, they had only the same old futility waiting for them back home.
In a sense, Tunisia’s 2010 revolution — and the wave of Arab Spring uprisings it inspired — began in this hospital burn ward near the capital, Tunis, and sometimes it seems as if its dying breaths are being taken there, too.
A decade ago, the Trauma and Severe Burns Hospital treated Mohamed Bouazizi, the 26-year-old fruit seller whose self-immolation came to stand for the rage that brought down a dictator and launched a democracy. Now it houses self-immolation patients whose own acts of protest changed nothing, and a host of doctors trying to escape. The country’s collective despair was so great that Tunisians turned once again to the one-man rule they had fought so fiercely to overthrow just a decade ago.
All the while, Dr. Jami had been there on the fourth floor.
She was there in the waning days of 2010, when Mr. Bouazizi was brought into the ward in critical condition, and there when the former dictator, President Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali, came to pose for a picture at his bedside in an unconvincing attempt to show the public that he cared. Less than three weeks later, on Jan. 4, 2011, Mr. Bouazizi was dead.
She was there in the days that followed, when a surge of young men from around the country inundated the hospital after their own copycat self-immolations.
Outside the walls of the hospital in the Tunis suburb of Ben Arous, Mr. Bouazi