Diasporas and Discontents

You Cannot Make Sense Out of Something that Does not Make Sense: Peace in the Middle East?

2006-07-17T06:36:00.000-07:00

"You cannot make sense out of something that does not make sense." This is what I told my teenage daughter when she wondered why I was so frustrated by the events taking place in west Asia now. How else do you explain to an American teenager why President Bush's response to the most pressing policy matters (domestic or foreign)often can only be described as disengaged and distracted? What do you tell a child who wants to know why Israel thinks bombing the Gaza Strip and Lebannon will facilitate peace in the "Middle East?" What do you tell a daughter who demands to know why Arab and Jewish civilians are being killed by people who claim they have a right to self-determination? You tell her: You cannot make sense out of something that does not make sense.

For most teenagers like my daughter, however, such a response will always leave them more confused than fulfilled. So, perhaps I should have offered her a short lesson in what I call history haiku. The first part of the lesson goes something like this: Israel is surrounded by people who too often question Her fundamental right to exist. This fact has often led to conflicts and confrontations with its neighbors--most notably the Palestinian population. The second part of the lesson goes something like this: West Asia has historically been a contested political and religious terrain of struggle in which differences are settled by force of arm, deeds, or both. The third part of the lesson goes something like this: West Asia is a region where rationality often loses out to disproportionality.

Each of these lessons should be kept in mind when trying to grasp what is taking place in the region today. Watching from the sidelines what I see is that Israel has launched an all-out military offensive aimed at neutralizing Hezbollah and Hamas. Furthermore, Israel's military decision has inflicted indiscriminate pain on civilian populations in Gaza and Lebanon. Israel's actions have raised legitimate questions about the size and scale of its response given the circumstances that inspired it. Conversely, the Palestinian Authority which Hamas controls and, the Lebanese government in which Hezbollah is a minority partner are weaken states that each bear some blame for not halting the kidnapping of Israeli soldiers.

After almost a week of warfare what remains unclear is what is the international community prepared to do to bring a cessation to the violence? Whatever the international community does must be done so quickly. Otherwise Israel might think that its response to unacceptable acts of aggression by Hamas and Hezbollah gives it carte blance to destablize the region. Moreover, a slow international response will send the signal that Hezzbollah in particular, can exercised what amounts to a unilateral foreign policy in which they can essentially have it both ways. On the one hand accepting the legitimacy of being a minority partner in a democratically elected government, while acting as an extra-legal terrorist state-within-a-state. They cannot have it both ways.

I would suggest that the response of the International community should come from the United Nations. In the UN a coalition of the United States, Jordan, France, and South Africa should urge the Security Council to take the following steps: (a) Call on Israel, Hamas, and Hezbollah to end all military actions and provide troops to enforce the cease-fire agreement; (b) Support the enforcement of UN Resolution 1559; and (c) Pass a new resolution with economic sanctions that names and isolates the true patrons and protectors of Hamas and Hezbollah--Iran and Syria. Whatever the UN does it must ensure that violence is not perpetrated on civilians. This is the real meaning of the saying, "peace if possible and justice at any cost". Now maybe that is how we can make sense out of circumstances that do not make sense.

Who Profits from Rage?:Race, Sports and Society in France

2006-07-08T08:33:00.000-07:00

After quietly cheering over the last few weeks for the national soccer teams of Angola, Ghana, and the Ivory Coast to succeed in the World Cup, I settled my mind last Sunday on the possibility that France would win the tournment. After all for some, France with its mix of African and Arab players was called the "last African" team left in the World Cup.

Yet, I arrived at my belated support for the French because, a multiethnic national soccer team symbolzed France at its best. With 17 of its 23 members either African/Arab, I believed a victory at the World Cup during the week of Bastlle Day would have been a welcomed triumph for a country that has been seriously wounded in recent months by race riots. These race riots had been led by African and Arab youths protesting pervasive discrimination and limited access to education, employment and housing resources. It distrubed and fascinated me that the face of France at its best and its worst looked so similar.

As I prepared to watch the World Cup final of Sunday, I even allowed myself to pray that a team led by the magnificient play of French/Algerian/Arab team captain, Zinedine Zidane, might help set the stage for some truth and reconciliation about what I call the "Day of the Jackal". The recent moment in French history when a group of African and Arab youths devised a plan to target, kidnap and kill a young French Jewish man. This act of anti-semetic hate had left me along with most of the French public, stunned last winter by the depth of the inhumanity it laid bare.

The Day of Jackal and the racial violence that was its precursor pointed to the painful ways that diasporas and discontents increasingly intersect in the modern, intergrating socities across Europe. As I mounted the bandwagon of the French national soccer team last Sunday, I recalled something that Langston Hughes had once said about African Americans, "we are good and uglg too." Yet, I hated the ugliness that had reared its head in those disparate and disaffected segments of the African and Arab communities in France. I yearned for the French national soccer team to take the field agaist Italy an illustrated the good. Not unlike Hughes 80 years ago, I did not want to deny that the collective national 'tom-tom' however imperfect, sometimes needed to cry out in pain. Still on this afternoon the tom-tom needed to help France have a shared laugh. A successful World Cup final would make the French body politic experience a gluttony of glee.

However, last Sunday in the 110th minute of the match, I winched as Zinedine Zidane proved with one head-butt that patriotic potential can fall prey to personal pride.
What else can explain why one of France's few modern-day heroes as well as one of the greatest soccer players of his generation, would do something so inexplicable as a red card penalty. No matter what was said to him by his Italian rival, defender Marco Materazzi, Zinedine Zidane had to avoid getting a penalty that disqualified him from the match. The verbal insult hurled at ZZ could not have eclised what Jackie Robinson heard. Thus, at the moment that his team and country needed him most, Zidane should have did everything possible to ensure that the French body politic would experience a victory. Instead Zidane's act of violence not only guranteed that France would lose the World Cup final, it also ensured that rage and forgetfullness would once again rule the day at the expense of France.

Perhaps I expected too much from the World Cup, the French team, and its captain ZZ. Was it really too much though to expect that an international sporting invite might inspire a nation, region, and people in a moment of crisis? No. Jackie Robinson proved this on the baseball field, Joe Louis in the boxing ring, and most importantly, Jessie Owens did so in the very Berlin stadium that they played the World Cup final last Sunday. The same should have been true of Zinedine Zidane and France.

Ideology, Identity, and Whiteness: A Pre-Bastille Day Commentary

2006-07-07T07:22:00.000-07:00

On American Independence Day 2006, I had the audacity to annouce the social destruction of 'Whiteness.' My small but dedicated readership responded to my riff on 'Whiteness' with a deadpan disappointment that conveyed a palpable sense of betrayal. I was told by those that I trust how my pronoucement performed a premature autopsy on 'Whiteness.' Furthermore, my allies warned me that in my patriotic zeal, I had conflated the definitions of ideology and identity. So, with no apologies but with an eye toward the necessity of nuanced analysis, let me offer a pre-Bastille Day commentary on the linkage between identity, ideology, and 'Whiteness.'

First, anyone who takes the notion of 'diaspora' and discontent seriously even for one minute must recognize that there is a direct and powerful link between identity and ideology. 'Whiteness' is one of the more thorny issues that force us to consider and confront this linkage forthrightly. The brilliant British scholar, Stuart Hall, has powerfully highlighted this point in his essay, "Cultural Identity and Diaspora" where he writes:

Cultural identity....is a matter of "becoming" as well as being." It belongs to
the future as must as to the past. It is not something which already exist,
transcending place, time, history, and culture. Cultural identities come from
somewhere, have histories. But, like everything which is historical, they
undergo constant transformation. Far from being eternally fixed in some
essentialized past, they are subjsected to the continuous "play" of history
culture, and power. Far from being grounded in a mere "recovery" of the past,
which is waiting to be found, and which, when found will secure our sense of
ourselves into eternity, identities are the names we give to the different ways
we are positioned by, and position ourselves within, the narrative of the past.

In urging the social destruction of 'Whiteness," I was aiming to reinforce Hall's point that identities are fundamentally about when and where we enter the national narrative about the past and the present. Consequently, they are linked in tht they existence of one reinforces the need for the other. Independence Day in the most powerful nation on earth is a perfect moment to (re)position and proposition those interested as I am, in standing firmly in opposition to a collective national identity that too often privileges 'whiteness" as an ideology and a presumed identity. Frankly, what could be more un-American an identity or ideology that celebrates 'Whiteness?

Like the incomparable Frederick Douglass who once asked: "What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?," I find it necessary to consistently call for a critical interrogation of 'Whiteness' while simutaneously problematizing constructions of white identity within the context of a White supremacist nation. Black theologian, James Cone, in his early work, A Black Theology of Liberation calls for a a similar approach to mines when challenged all folks in our multi-racial nation to view Blackness as an "ontolgical symbol" that serves as the quintessential signifer of what oppression means in the United States. Cone bolding stated in his incisive work:

Most whites, some despite involvement in protests, do believe in "freedom in
democracy," and they fight to make the ideals of the Constitution an empiricial
reality to all. It seems they believe that, if we just work hard enough at it,
this country can be what it ought to be. But it never dawns on these do-gooders
that what is wrong with America is not its failure to make the Constitution a
reality for all, but rather its belief that persons can affirm whiteness and
humanity at the same time. This country was founded by whites and everything
that has happened in it emerged from the white perspective....What we need is
the destruction of Whiteness, which is the source of human misery in the world.

I do not believe as some others do, in the inherent goodness of 'Whiteness'. I have witnessed too many people profit from prejudice and then turn around an call the remedies for the inequalities they create and support 'reverse discrimination'. I do, however, believe in the power and possibility of humanity to break through denial and acknowledge the evils of white supremacy. This grave injustice that hopes to see liberty, faternity, and equality fail in the name of racial domination must be rigorously engaged in struggle at every moment of memory, but especially on days of national and public celbration.

Consequently, I used my Independence Day annoucement to denouce 'Whiteness' by way of rejecting white supremacy. What could be more powerful than a call to a nation that confesses a committment to freedom to distance itself from an articulation of oppression already 500 years bold. Even though Jim Crowism is no longer the norm in the United States 230 years after its founding, the habits, history, and heritage that uphold and maintain institutionalized white supremacy linger. In my view, ignoring 'Whiteness' as an a salient identity and ideology is no way to celebrate a birthday in our 'imagined community'.

The Social Destruction of 'Whiteness--R.I.P. Indenpendence Day 2006!

2006-07-03T20:07:00.000-07:00

In honor of our nation's birthday I am announcing the social destruction of 'Whiteness'. As a notion 'Whiteness' is a concept that has plagued our nation for some two centuries and now on this Independence Day I say it time for it to Rest in Peace!

Frankly, any way you count it the ways of 'Whiteness' already gone on too long and is ripe and ready destruction. It has survived exploration, colonization, the trans-Atlantic slave trade, revolutions in France, Haiti, and of course the U.S.A. It has witnessed the Constitutional Convention, the Civil War, Reconstruction, the Mexican-American War and the Spanish-American War. It has inspired movements for human rights in Senneca Falls, Niagara Falls and if I am not mistaken Sioux Falls. In short it has left us with the remnants of a legacy only its proponents could love. Again, I say as nation it time that we put this big baby to rest for good.

Now if you are wondering what inspired this sudden pronoucement let me explain. First, like any good post-modernist historian I am a firm believer in the idea that all identities are social constructions. Thus, 'Whiteness' like all identities was forged in a particular moment and carefully shaped and reshaped by the social, political, economic, and cultural contexts in which it came to life. Yet, 'Whiteness' remains today what has been since its inception 500 years ago, a myth that divides nation.

The second inspiration for today's annoucement is a recognition that 'Whiteness' creates chaos which has no place in a national community that desires to be a model of multi-racial democracy. Our current public discourse about immigration, urban education, hurricane recovery, and the human cost of the War in Iraq are all colored by the meaning of 'Whiteness.' Why are we only worried about migration from Mexico and Central America and not elsewhere? Why are the same children still being left behind in Washington, Chicago, Los Angeles, and Houston despite the new rhetoric of reform, responsibility and accountability? Why do the casaulties of war have faces that look disproportionately, Black, Brown and working class? Why was Mayor Ray Nagin almost ran out of office for daring to imagine aloud that the population of Post-Katrina New Orleans should mirror the pre-Katrina Big Easy? My point here is simple--although 'Whiteness has never been a ghost in our national closet, the price paid by others for its continued existence is too high in 2006. 'Whiteness is a myth with an accompanying narrative that never has had any usefulness because, it has not ever been a tie that could collectively bind Americans in hard times or difficult moments. It is only useful to those it cost nothing but as the saying goes 'Freedom ain't for Free'.

The final inspiration for today's annoucement was something I have written elsewhere about people of African descent. Namely, that we are not connected by our 'Blackness' but rather, by our shared and varied histories. All citizens of the United States can safely lay claim to experiences of diaspora, discontent, and dissent. Yet, few can rightly lay claim to 'Whiteness' with its requirements of privilege, power, and supremacy. 'Whiteness and the collective national identity are incompatible. Today, being an American must mean rejecting not embracing 'Whiteness.' On this Independence Day we should ask ourselves again how were we forged as a nation? What common ground can we stand on that unites our nation? Are we many nations made into one or one nations constructed out of many? Our history and heritage as a nation have always been built on the hope that 'Whiteness' would not triumph over the American ideal.

So, whatever our answer to these questions is we should look for them on a road marked with a sign that reads in bold: The Social Construction of Whiteness: R.I.P.

Happy 230th Birthday U.S.A.!

The King on the Auction Block: Martin, Memory, and Money

2006-07-02T15:50:00.000-07:00

Last week a consortium of civic, political, and business leaders moved to perserve vital documents highlighting the legacy and work of Dr. Martin Luther King, jr. Led by the mayor of Atlanta, Shirley Franklin, the group negotiated the purchase of some 10,000 historically valuable handwritten documents and books from the King estate. For this act of philnathropy, the nation owes the Atlanta coalition a great debt.

Had Mayor Franklin and her allies not acted, it is likely that this portion of the King legacy could have fallen in the hands of someone who would have been tempted to managed Martin's memory motivated by money. Instead, the collection which had been housed at Sotheby's acution house in New York and was poised to be sold to the highest bidder for a sum between $15 million to $30 million will now reside at Dr. King's alma mater, Morehouse College. As Andrew Young, one of Dr. King's closes aides during the civil rights movement noted, "People have seen this as an opporutunity to step up and lay claim to Martin Luther King's non-violent heritage as a part of Atlanta's tradition. It really didn't belong anywhere else."

However, it will take more than a burst of Black pride to protect and perserve these King papers. In fact, buying the documents was perhaps the easiest part of the task. The more difficult task remains mediating the influence of Dr. King's heirs who still aim to exert control over the documents even after being paid $32 million to relinquish control. However, The most important task remains yet undone---the responsibility of perserving, housing, displaying, and providing access to researchers and ordinary citizens. This formidiable responsibility has rightly been given to Morehouse College.

Yet, giving Morehouse College this responsibility is also a troubling reminder of the need for building greater institutional capacity at Historically Black Colleges and Universities. Right now for instance, Morehouse does not have the human or financial resources to organize and display their newly acquired collection. Who is going to pay for the Herculean task of hiring and training curatorial staff? Will there be scholarships that support and encourage Morehouse men (and their sisters from Spellman) to study more closely the legacy of their school's most famous alum? I for one would love to see these documents used to mount a public history exhibit to commerorate Dr. King's 80th birthday entitled: "The Man, the Method and the Movement." The exhibit I envision would examined Dr. King's daily life as a citizen, his method of deploying non-violence as a method for social change, and how his vision shaped the worldwide movement for human rights. What are the plans for giving the public accedss to this most public of American citizens?

It is my hope that the President of Moorehouse, Walter Massey, will move quickly to call on historians like Clayborne Carson or Taylor Branch for advice and direction about how to manage this resource. For an example of what not to do with the newly acquired King papers President Massey and Mayor Franklin only need look at the King Center which was set up to commemorate Dr. King's legacy and to serve as a repository for the main body of his papers. What they will find today at the King Center is an example of an institution that is inexplicably run-down and in serious disrepair. A place that calls into questions Atlanta's claim of being the home of the modern-day civil rights movement. Dr. King and his hometown deserve better. In order to ensure that Morehouse does better, the civic coalition that purchase the King papers must make every effort to ensure that Dr. Martin Luther King's memory does not become merely a meditation on money. Instead they might focus less on money and more on remembering that Dr. King's dream may have started in Atlanta but it still lives in the lives and legacies of those who supported him and his wife in Montgomery, Birmingham, Albany, Chicago, and Memphis.

Diasporas and Discontents-A Poem

2006-04-16T14:07:00.000-07:00

In honor of National Poetry Month, I offer this poem as a meditation on what the wide-range of ideas this blog will dare to explore. Let me know what you really think.

Diasporas and Discontents (for Dan and Mary)

We stand as a three-headed Hydra.
A motley crew of disaporas and discontents:
One Jew
One African
and
An Irishwoman too.

Mouthing praises for prirates' paradise
singing sea shanties of subversive
sailors and slaves
It may very well all be too much;
But
Our rhyme is of the modern mariner
who no longer easily offers praise/songs
to dead White men.
We have long-since moved beyond
riding waves and began to ask about that
'other' kind of 'whiteness.'
And,
We chance to raise the ire of
Captains,
Scientists,
Historians,
and Students
Who arrive at the sea's shore
expecting confirmation of one-half
millennium of old truths.

So,
our Hercules performs its
3 labors like aspiring gods;
Wondering
often refusing to realize that their expectations
have been skewed like the giant shadow
of the seafarers' never-ending romance with
loneliness
desolation
fear
--Old Truths--.

So,
The three rings of dispersal
swirl and sway their collective heads in unison
stopping only to wonder:
Are they right to speak of Disaporas or Discontents?
Are such histories present in our past?
When we sail to Small Places will
Equiano and Cinque
Abraham and Joshua
Bono or Michael Collins
help us imagine
Encounter
Desire
the Exotic?
or will our sameness
Lead us like
a Sankofa sign
a Celtic Cross
a Star of David
rendering forth New Truths
that transverse
an Atlantic or Pacific world
where we might become people
Bearing witness to a new identity
Bearing witness to a new community
Bearing withness to a a new citizenship?

Dwayne Williams

Don't Pardon this Interruption: Rosa Parks and the Legacy of Jim Crow

2006-04-03T12:04:00.000-07:00

History is an image-making process. In this post-modern world of I-pods and icons too often what we see and hear shapes in powerful ways what we believe. We need only consider Hurricane Katrina and its images of diaspora and devastation. Seeing picutres of dead and displaced American citizens from the Florida Panhandle to New Orleans confirmed for some what we have come to know about race, class, community, and our collective memory. Why were so many of the citizens who seemed to be suffering disproportionately in the Gulf Coast region African American? Poor? Rural? Aged? and Female? Any capable historian would have instructed you to look at the history of the region to find the answers.

Thus, when I heard that the the Alabama Legislature was in the process of passing a bill to expunged the arrest records of Mrs. Rosa Parks other activists who fought against American aparthied, I thought what a redemption song. However, when I learned that one of the chief concerns of the bill's critics was that the pardons might cause history to forget such courageous acts as Parks' conscious choice to resist Jim Crow I reconsidered my initial glee.

My change of heart was driven in part by what I witnessed last year as Mrs. Parks laid in state at the Capitol Routunda and elsewhere. In Washington, Montgomery, and Detroit, thousands of people were filing past her casket who had no clear memory of the mass movement that inspired Mrs. Parks' method of resistance in Montgomery a half century ago. It hit me then that there was a generation of Americans who had known Rosa Parks only as a cultural and historical icon. She represented an easy shorthand for what many had learned (often poorly) about African American history each February in school.

This was a far cry from my own experience when as a first year student at Macalester College I accompanied my best friend to a public program to hear Rosa Parks speak. Even then as an eighteen year old, I knew who Rosa Parks was and why she was important. I knew she was more than a simple seamtress who spontaneously refused to yield her seat on bus. I appreciated witnessing an agent of change that day and set my sights on transforming the world anchored as Mrs. Parks had been to community. I was only able to dare to dream in this way because, I had been raised in a family by folks unshame of the historical baggage they brought with them from Alabama to Chicago. Rosa Parks was not unlike many of the women in my own family and her choices reminded me that you had to always be clear about the price you were willing to pay for the life you wanted to lead. Rosa Parks had help me see that but upon her death it was not clear if she still carried the same weight with eighteen year olds who might have only know her as a clever reference in an Outcast rap song.

Hence there may be something to the concern raised by Democratic state Representative Neal Morrison who said that "I want to make sure that 20 years from now if my children want to know what this woman went through that there is a record." The decision by Representative Morrision and his legislative colleagues to amend their bill to say that the arrest records would not be expunged or sealed from public view, but would be given to the Alabama State Department of Archives and History is a right one.

Yet, if the Alabama Legislature was truly concerned about ensuring that the legacy of Mrs. Rosa Parks and the Montgomery Inprovement Association would be long remembered, they would not stop with a public pardon. They might also consider allocating more resources for schools and museums to create public history programs that connects citizens and communities to the crucible of consciousness that inspired a wide-range of Alabama residents to challenge White supremacy. They might also seriously consider creating a Truth and Reconciliation Commission along the lines of the South African model to prevent future generations from jumping over history.

Ultimately, the Alabama Legislature (and legislature across the nation) as a voice of its citizens should consider these questions: What are the public's enduring images of the modern civil movement in Alabama? Why should we want to offer the public a historical narrative in textbooks and state parks that expounds rather than expunges the past? Picture what would happen in the life and minds of many if they dared to answer these questions.

Unforgiveable Blackness?: Barry Bonds, Baseball, and BALCO

2006-04-03T11:59:00.000-07:00

Even after missing the entire 2005 season, Barry Bonds remains at the center of the baseball universe. A week into the 2006 campaign, the Bonds baiters and haters still see him as a whipping boy someone to despise. A bloated bowhead who bears all the marks of his other BALCO bretheren. For this group the prospect that he will soon surpass the likes of Babe Ruth and Hank Aaron should be celebrated with an asterisk not an exclamation point.

Yet, for Bonds' proponents, defenders, and deniers, he is simply the best baseball player of his generation. A man who has somehow outpaced both his late father, Bobby Bonds and god-father Willie Mays. It is his skills and will that rightlly invite awe-inspried interjections that he has often punctucuated by the power of home run projections.

Still, whatever Barry Bonds becomes by the end of the season what he is not is a Black man persecuted because of his pursuits. He is not Moses Fleetwood Walker or Jackie Robinson trying to intergrate America's pastime against daunting odds. He is not Muhammad Ali or Tommie Smith who at the height of their athletic accomplishments purposely chose to bear witness to their ideas of political truth. More importantly, he certain is not what William Rhoden of the New York Times attempted to make him last week: A modern day version of the first African American heavyweight champion, Jack Johnson.

Bonds' exploits on and off the baseball diamond will never challenge or transform our notions of masculinity the way "Papa Jack" did a century ago. What Jack Johnson did was to challenge White supremacy and the gods of sports who demanded and expected that the price of any Black man who dared to enter their ring/field of dreams would be the subjugation of their humanity. Barry Bonds' biggest battle-royales have been with journalists, teammates, and baseball historians rather than the prevailing racial order of his day. Whatever the powerful forces inside and outside of baseball ultimately do about Barry Bonds's alleged steroid use, it will not cost him the same thing it cost Jack Johnson to chose to be unforgiveably Black.