“Debunking the Myth of a Color-Blind France” by Sounia Johnson

Previous generations of African Americans sought greater freedom in France – and some thought they found it. But for Frances growing African and Muslim minority, “applying for a job with Arab-sounding name such as Mustafa, Mohammed, Nadia or Fatima remains a challenge.”

 

 

 

 

In the early 1930’s many African American artists fled to Paris in order to escape racial inequalities and the constant oppression and dehumanization experienced in the United States. Liberty, Fraternity and Equality, a motto celebrating freedom that traces its roots to the French revolution, was what attracted many African American expatriates such as James Baldwin and Josephine Baker who found acceptance in what they perceived as a generous France, liberal, receptive and a champion of social equality and civil rights.

Unexpectedly, many found a different reality. World-renowned African American essayist James Baldwin witnessed a deep hatred and unequal treatment of French North Africans. Baldwin pledged support for Algerians (referring to them as “Paris’s niggers”) while vehemently opposing the way white French would treat its own minorities, thereby debunking the notion of color-blind liberal France.

It is thus not surprising that French pretensions to racial equality hold little credibility for the many disenfranchised and marginalized North Africans within her borders. The 2005 riots in France’s most underprivileged cities were the result of ongoing racial and ethnic tensions. These tensions have highlighted the profound disconnect between the French Republic and Muslim youth, who are perceived and treated by the larger French society as radical thugs. 

The lives of many French-Magrehbi youth are circumscribed by limited access to education in substandard, subsidized low-rent housing in heavily Pan-African suburbs – a ghettoization not found anywhere else in Europe but mirroring housing projects in American’s most under-served urban areas. High unemployment, which in turn leads to increased juvenile delinquency, has led many young Muslims to fall prey to religious radicalism with all the negative political implications this entails for France and the war against terrorism.

Applying for a job with Arab-sounding names such as Mustafa, Mohammed, Nadia or Fatima remains a challenge for most French North Africans, who feel that they are discriminated against due to their dual heritage. Many feel pressuredto adopt French-sounding names, like Nadine instead of Nadia, Maurice instead of Mustafa. Still, their chances of finding employment are slim. For ghettoized North African youth, Liberty, Fraternity and Equality is an empty slogan.

The lack of equal employment opportunities is a reality experienced amongst many French North Africans who feel that no matter how much they try, they will never be provided with the same opportunities accorded to their French white counterparts. This reality is reflected in the organizational charts of French corporations, revealing a systematic white corporate ceiling culture. Racism is indeed well and alive in France.

With an increasingly diverse population, France must realize that it cannot keep burying its head in the sand. Race relations and inequalities have created an unprecedented crisis.

It is in France’s interest to regain its credibility as a champion of human’s rights by aggressively promulgating laws that celebrate cultural and religious differences. At the same time, France must invest in its crumbling educational system and rejuvenation of the inner cities. France must find a way to attract minorities to professional fields that have historically been denied to them rather than tracking Africans to vocational trades. And the government must enforce stiff penalties against companies that practice discriminatory hiring.

France needs a highly educated work force that includes African lawyers, judges, doctors, politicians, journalists, corporate executives and scientists, but above all, an honest national discourse that celebrates cultural differences while acknowledging France’s role in slavery and colonialism – something France has yet to do.

Commentary submitted by Sounia Johnson, a French/Algerian Los Angeles based correspondent for the North-Africa Journal.

The Only Black Family On The Titanic

Thanks to Adrianne for sharing this untold moment of Black history with the googlegroup. Click on the image to read about their saga.

“Teach ‘No more lies about Africa’, in our schools” by Nkawzi N. Mhango

If you ask me: who my prophets and books of authorities are, you’ll laugh at me (if you are foolish enough to do so). For, I’ll never mince words to tell you that they’re Mussamaali Nangoli, Chinua Achebe, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Shaaban Robert, among others without forgetting their books and what not.

Why have I reached this apogee of describing my personal belief!? What occurred recently off the coast of Libya has forced me to put this on the agora!?

We recently heard from the western media that at least 200 African immigrants died when the boat they were on sank, as they were trying to make it to Lampedusa, Italy in their attempt to seek green pastures.

Without any shame and conducting any research, the said media fed us with mere lies all aimed at demonizing Africa. When another boat was towed to safety, it was full of Palestinians, Indians and other non-African nationals! Yes, Africa has economic problems. But she’s not alone as western media puts it. This does not mean the western media were not aware of this truth. Nay!  To them, miseries and desperation to escape from “west-made-poverty-vicious circle”, are only on Africa! Shame on you!

Western media have no gist of humanity. They don’t feel any guilt of using even dead people!  How should they, if at all, when the west introduced slavery and colonialism… and thought it’s doing the right thing? How should they, if at all, when today the world is groping with recession resulting from their greed… and does not include Africa in whatever measures they’re taking? To them Africa and her rulers are either tabula rasa or babies that should not torture their brain.

Instead of clinging unto demonizing Africa, the world needs to face this reality resulting from history… that is, colonialism and slavery that sanctified exploitation and degradation of one continent by others, needs to be corrected by treating Africa fairly in all international affairs… especially trade and Human Rights! Doing so will solve the current problems.

White Supremacy, Imperialism and Fascism in America

Breaking down the concentrated class struggle

Right now US society needs a clear understanding of the difference between socialism and fascism because a war is being waged against working class people. Americans fail to understand the class basis of the State. They also have a difficulty in making comparative analyses between the US brand of bourgeois democracy and other types. Imperialism and fascism are not such very different systems. US society presently faces a neo-fascist “dictatorship”.

First of all, socialism is a revolutionary social system. It is born out of revolt, uprisings and insurrection. It is a bottom up society and a system created to wither away; that is, socialism is not a society which has a long-term future. It will be transformed into a society where revolutions, uprisings and insurrections are unnecessary.

Socialism, like the society which must succeed it, will transform the means of distribution so that all the resources of society will be available to its members. The State must operate as the primary instrument for socialized distribution of resources — to contrast with capitalist privatization of collectively produced wealth — but not as the sole force for this activity.

Socialist democracy means working class democracy. This is the logic of democratic struggle. Once the laboring masses eradicate the degenerate notion of racist supremacy, the democratic political process must take on a more principled character. America thrives on the practice of racist supremacy, pure and simple.

Never has this been more apparent than the racist resurgence rising to challenge President Obama’s tenure in office. From Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio voicing his admiration for the Ku Klux Klan to the police summarily executing Oscar Grant on a BART station platform, these examples of racist reaction raising its hydra head have to meet forceful, unbreaking resistance from our community.

Racism shapes the culture of the colonizer society, and deforms the culture of the oppressed. It is, in reality, an expression of class warfare. As such, racism designates one nationality as a master race and the others as servants or slave races, a so-called underclass. These ideas, inculcated thru out colonialism, set the standards for interactions between workers of different nationalities. Workers from the white society think of themselves as superior to blacks, Latinos, American Indians, and Asians. Even government census forms convey a false sense of race purity.

The government bail out of the bloodsucking banks, tho, will deepen the merger of international finance capitalism with the State, which is the very definition of fascism. Capitalism is comprised of concentration of wealth into as few hands as possible. Imperialism constitutes capitalism’s merger of finance with the corporations to create an international finance system. So because of what is taking place today, with the State giving massive amounts of money to the Wall Street bankers, this is the end-game in the Milton Friedman economic model first advocated by Ronald Reagan, also known as voodoo economics.

Barack Obama seems to deepen this trend of reducing US white workers to colonized status, while the neo-cons continue to inflame racist sentiments. This struggle reflects the historical lag between bourgeois ideology and working class self-realization or, on the opposite hand, white workers reaction. Until that gap gets closed, the colonized masses must remain in a defensive posture against their white working class comrades on the other side of the skirmish line.

The State and Imperialism

What is going on with President Barack Obama’s economic stimulus plan? If we can take the word of economists like Paul Krugman and others, the government needs to wait out this period of “financial crisis” because it will stabilize over the next nine months or so. However, Obama continues to push for the so-called bank bail outs, which are nothing more than massive giveaways to the already filthy rich financial sector.

The US government want absolute authority. It seeks absolute authority under the cover of democracy to carry out the most inhuman agenda in history. It wants the ability to implement its agenda under the cover of law, based upon the assumption that elected lawmakers can pass legislation that supports the most extreme goals of international finance.

This is apparent from watching trends over the last thirty years. Over this period, leaders from Reagan on thru Obama have raped public assets to fill the pockets of international bankers and other corporate financiers. In the effort to strip down the State to its basic, fundamental character, US presidents have auctioned off, sold, or outright given the banks trillions of dollars. They have used the excuse that there is a banking crisis. Simultaneously, the banks line their pockets, the pockets of their investors, and buy up other financing assets.

If the bankers were operating honestly, the banks would never have sunk. It is because of their rapine greed and thirst for power that the banks have collapsed. It is not because credit has dried up, but because so much money has become concentrated in so few hands that this situation exists.

Anytime real wages have not kept pace with inflation, anytime the US worker labors for more hours than his counterpart in other industrial workers, anytime that worker has to go into debt to maintain a house, automobile and the simple thing in life, that is because cash has dried up on the street. It has dried up because the financiers have concentrated 80% of it in their own hands. Seven or eight percent of all people control 80% of all the money. Which means that the remaining 83% of the population must fight over the remaining dollars.

So while Obama has joked about bailing out the auto industry, he continues to push the argument that society cannot survive without the banks. But the auto industry produces a product. The banks do not. Paper money is not a product with any intrinsic value whatsoever.

Why is the State giving even more money to the banks, when the government owes the banks over $10 trillion? The State can seize the banks and liquidate the debt. That makes more sense.

That is what the State did with the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan. It wanted to control the oil and the opium, so it invaded those countries. Seventy-five percent of Iraqi oil ends up on the black market; opium production has skyrocketed since the US occupation of Afghanistan. The dope ends up here. Profits from the blackmarket oil ends up in the hands of the CIA and the international financiers. These monies are used to destabilize governments and societies, including US society.

However, the State wants to strip away all the benefits US workers have provided for this society. The State wants to strip down Social Security, pensions, health care and transform this country into a backwater of reaction. It can only achieve this by supporting the banks. In doing so, the strategy has been to give away public sector assets from cash grants to public lands.

The international financiers control the most reactionary sector of capitalism. They fuel wars all over the globe. They finance wars, they finance coups d’etat, they finance assassinations of men like Salvador Allende and Maurice Bishop. They want to transform revolutionary Cuba into a whorehouse and a den of vice. They want the world for their playground while creating misery and instability for billions of people in every single country.

The United States is rapidly moving towards fascism. It is repeating all the steps and turns that Germany and Italia made in the years preceding World War II. The marginalized right-wing has become more shrill and obstructionist, and the Obama Administration appears like the Weimar Republic, granting concessions to the enemies of the people, international finance. If this trend continues, in four more years there will be a firestorm in this country. You kno where this leaves African people. People need to take to the streets today.  We do not have time to wait.

November Carnival: “Reparations:what is the value of what we’re owed?”

I have never been a strong supporter for the call for reparations. I find that I expend enough energy just trying to get what I am currently entitled to, while I am struggling to hold on to what little I already have. Therefore I have not been really interested in fighting to get an apology and/or monetary compensation from “white” people for the past and current atrocities, injustices and other consequences that stem from slavery.

However, I recently received an interesting email which got me thinking more about this issue. It was from Brother Pruitt, who is the Reparations Leader and Chairman for the Committee for African American Reparations (CAAR) and the Reparations Union Lobbying Association. On his website he states:

“African-Americans should form a Reparations Union creating a power base in the tradition of lobbying and special interest groups that will consist of rich, middle class and poor blacks in addition to community conscious whites, jews and others who would like to see blacks win reparations and attain equality. This would enable African-Americans to announce the need for a congressional hearing to address the ills in society that exist because of slavery, segregation, institutional racism and discrimination. African-Americans owe it to themselves and their ancestors to expose politics and people responsible for maintaining corruption perpetuating unethical activity.”

From what I understood from his email and website, reparations is just one component, but a significant part of the overall healing and empowering process we need to go through as a community. 

What are your views on the issue of reparations? Is it a worthy cause or just a waste of time and energy? Will monetary compensation address the injustices and atrocities of the past in any significant way…. or will it lead to what Biggie Smalls once warned: “Mo’ money, Mo’ problems”? Is reparations only an issue for those in the Diaspora or should those on the African continent demand reparations also from Europeans and Arabs for the theft of human and natural resources and the continuing effects of colonialism?

Please have the link to your post submitted by Sunday 04 November at Afrospear@hotmail.com, and the carnival date will be Monday 05 November.