Black Bird Press News & Review

Newark, New Jersey the Struggle of Education as a Right Not a Privilege, Principals Silenced for Challenging School Closures

By Malik Sekou Osei
28 January 2014

We have seen a number of decades go by with Blacks in offices as elected officials, and still the African American has no real power of his life. From a number of mayors to governors and now, even as the president, yet there no political traction to move beyond high unemployment, lack of health care, police Stop-and-Frisk and the question of the right to education and training.

As we look across a river, we see the injustice still blooms very large in for the African American people of Newark as they whisper the screams of a sterile flower of Black political representation that only represents the attempts of Black elected officials of getting paid. They all preform a chaotic loud musical of silence as a militant minstrel show of emptiness. For it’s all just posture of becoming the brokers of discontent of a failed populism. Newark was one the first cities to have a Black mayor Ken Gibson, Sharpe James up to Cory Booker and still Black people still have no political capital. After the symbolic dance of militants of a spirited house that brought a house Negro to the mayor’s office in 1970, who still behaved as a house Negro in protecting the corporate interests of the city under the poems of artists of identity. Where the status quo would never use them as brokers of discontent, thus in their symbolism they would never draw up history for lessons.

Now, it seems under the present Black leadership of protest, we are still stuck in 1967 and growth of empty flowers of plastic without any real scent only pretty to look at as plastic roses of Black political symbolism without the reality of power for the poor.

While, in reality there are objective laws, if you put broken ice on the side walk you’re wide up with a wet street and nothing more. It seems that the symbol of militant reform can mobilize a militant populism, never drew up the lessons of history and the racial betrayal for access to recourses, by racial militant careerist. For the history of militant culturalism through of sloganeering of some great poetry in Newark has never created an urban populism.

As similar forces continue this same empty dance of militant populism around getting elected or around elected officials, will only leave the empty tune of symbolism and failure. What has to be understood is the role of African American careerist as collaborator.

Cami Anderson

While, as the people of Newark faces this question on the right of education on January 17, Cami Anderson, the Newark public schools superintendent picked by New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, who was to suspended five school principals, including four who spoke at a local community meeting in Newark to oppose the “One Newark” program, one of the most up to date attempts to privatize public education in Newark.

What has to be understood is that under the “One Newark” plan, so-called because students will be permitted to register in any school in their age group in the city, while in fact, many public schools will be closed, and their students forced to show up in schools in other places, often at vast distance from their residences. The empty school buildings will be filled by privately run, as publicly funded charter schools.

Principals H. Grady James

Principals H. Grady James of Hawthorne Avenue School, Tony Motley of Bragaw Avenue School, Dorothy Handfield of Belmont Runyan School, and Deneen Washington of Maple Avenue School were all suspended for declaring and expressing their opposition to the plan at a meeting at the Hopewell Baptist Church on January 15. The meeting was organized by Democratic city councilman and mayoral hopeful Ras Baraka (son of Amiri Baraka the poet and writer), who hopes to exploit opposition to the reorganization plan to further his own electoral ambitions.

Ras Baraka

After public protest, four of the principals resumed their duties last Monday, and one, Deneen Washington, was told to report to the central office of the school district.

Deneen Washington

It must be noted that the city of Newark has a population of just fewer than 300,000 and is New Jersey’s largest city. According to the latest statistics, roughly a third of Newark’s residents lived at or below the federal poverty line, and Newark is still largely African American.

The Newark public school system, with about 40,000 students and 3,000 teachers, has been in state receivership since 1995. The rights of teachers in particular have been under sustained attack for several years. In 2012, the Newark Teachers Union signed an agreement—widely advertised and hyped in the media as a “landmark deal”—with the state that applied a merit pay system based on the determination of a teacher’s classroom performance.

Principal Tony Motely

Dorothy Handfield

The contract abolished the annual raises for experience, standard for decades in American public schools, and abolished automatic pay increases for those teachers who obtained advanced degrees. Since teachers who already had advanced degrees were allowed to opt out of the new system—and most did—the Newark public school system now effectively has a two-tier system of appraisal for teachers.

The Newark schools were the recipient of a $100 million gift from billionaire Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg in 2010. Some of this money was used to found new charter schools, while much of the remainder was kept in a pool for teachers’ merit pay.

While speaking on the phone and E-mail with teachers they believed that the standards for student performance were set so high that they have little hope of receiving any raise. In fact, only %5 percent of eligible teachers received a merit pay raise last year in 2013.

In addition to this degrading of teachers’ rights, fully accommodated by the union, Cami Anderson laid off over 100 school employees last June.

Anderson, a personal friend and political ally of former Newark mayor and current US Senator Corey Booker, a Democrat, is portrayed in the media as a “gutsy reformer” who is challenging the out-of-date Newark educational system.

Topic: Clinton Convicted (Read 4515 times)

Corey Booker

The truth is that the “One Newark” plan aims at transferring public wealth from the working Black people into private white corporate hands. This process has been going on at a national level with cities such as Detroit, New Orleans, Chicago, and New York as the vanguard.

As elsewhere in the US, the domination of charters in Newark will allow for easy firing of teachers and the slashing of their pay, along with the subordination of education to standardized test scores and the labor demands of private corporations.

What separates the situation in Newark—and sets a treacherous pattern —is the anti-democratic silencing of opposition by educators to the privatization plan.

Teachers and school workers spoke about the issue at a recent public meeting on the suspension of the principals. They highlighted that they were under a gag order from school authorities and feared retribution if they remarked publicly.

It should be said, that Chris Christie was the one to give Anderson her job. She has no training in pedagogy or care about education. Her role is to drive out higher-paid teachers. Right now in Newark they already changed the tenure system, now for a teacher to get their tenure they must teach five years instead of three. While will happen at the fourth year the administration would make moves of changing teachers or giving bad reviews and holding low test scores against the teacher as the means to denies tenure and to seek to buy out senior teachers and replace them.

The game that the flunkies for Governor Christie will argue is that the Newark schools have very low enrollment. However, this was done because Superintendent Anderson was to close down feeder schools. Now those students under One Newark can go anywhere rather than local schools, where they are slated to go.

Now, forces in Newark are using the example of New Orleans and Katrina, where the excuse in Newark is low attention to begin the growth of charter schools on the public watch. If local teachers and administrators speak out, they are under the threat to be suspended.

As of right now Newark schools are %100 percent managed and controlled, while at the same time Camden and now Jersey City has only half of its schools are state run. They local leadership of these cities is selling the city’s property to make a personal windfall profit.

Now the fight around the right of education has become the struggle of not turning local teachers and administrators into proper pantomime of silence. For looking at the history of Black elected officials this has been their political method of political survival.

They would provide limited concessions to keep the urban space governable without challenging white corporate power. For in the long range objectives of corporate capital as they bring further austerity is to makes their political representative regardless of color dance as pantomimes without real music as empty symbols of actual distractions.

Unfortunately, Newark has had a long history of this, from the July 12, 1967 beating of the Taxis driver John Smith was beaten after he was picked up by the police and taken to the police station at the Fourth Precinct. At this point the people refuse to dance the pantomime in silence. They came out of the Hays Housing Project, while John Smith was the lit match of conditions that torn down Springfield Ave.

While, there was no formal organization and it was a spontaneous eruption against racialist police violence and without actual political leadership the motion collapse into cultural militant symbolism that would become broker of discontent that has left Newark politically vulnerable because of a tradition that never prepared anyone outside of militant symbolism to be the vehicles of militant sounding Black elected officials that was help by corporate monies to keep the cities governable for private profit.

For the people of Newark, history is on their side, but not time…

Lost Radicals
- A Review Essay of Blacks In and Out of the Left

An attendee at the Black Panther's Revolutionary People's Constitutional Convention, held at the Lincolm Memorial, June 19, 1970. Photograph: U.S. News & World Report Magazine Photograph Collection (Library of Congress).

Eric Mann
January 15, 2014

Blacks In and Out of the Left
Michael C. Dawson
Harvard University Press, $24.95 (cloth)

Since the March on Washington fifty years ago, the condition of black people has deteriorated; today they are subject to injustices ranging from mass unemployment to mass incarceration. Yet gone is the rhetoric of militant hope, black liberation, and economic equality generated by the Third World revolutions five decades ago. It is difficult even to draw on the lessons and legacies of these revolutions, for the state suppression of radical organizations in the 1960s has extended into the suppression of their history. As Mumia Abu Jamal explained, young black people are suffering from “menticide,” deprived of their tradition, its strategy and tactics, and the hope it provides.

Michael C. Dawson’s important new book Blacks In and Out of the Left, expands on Jamal’s diagnosis by characterizing one of its sources: the abandonment of the Black Power movement by white liberals and social democrats who claimed that a black-led movement was inconsistent with their “universalist” ambitions. Yet Dawson’s history shows the immense unifying power that black groups had. They brought together marginalized groups, created networks of support, and built a creative community. Indeed, restoring black politics means restoring a multinational, multiracial left.

• • •

In the ’60s many liberal whites believed black separatism threatened the possibility of a unified left. This belief led a generation of white leftist writers to attack the achievements of the black liberation movement, resulting in the repression, distortion, and caricature of the historical record of black leadership. In this context, Dawson’s frontal challenge to liberal and social democratic pontificates and his passionate defense of the black revolutionary tradition is a great gift to all students, especially black youth who have been robbed of their own history. Dawson brings to life the complexity of building a black and multi-racial left and highlights the profound achievements of black leaders and organizations that were purged from popular history. He emphasizes several important leaders who are too-little known today: Hubert Harrison, Cyril Briggs, Harry Haywood, Claudia Jones, W.E.B DuBois, A. Philip Randolph, Paul Robeson, and Fannie Lou Hamer. By reminding us that black revolutionary action has a long and influential tradition that extends well beyond the ’60s, Dawson challenges the white intellectuals who saw the unification of minority groups as a threat to their own interests. Here, for example, is Todd Gitlin:

In the late 1960s, the principle of separate organizations on behalf of distinct interests raged throughout ‘the movement’ with amazing speed. On the model of black demands came those of feminists, Chicanos, American Indians, gays, lesbians. One grouping after another insisted on the recognition of difference and the protection of their separate and distinct spheres. . . . from the 1970s on, left-wing universalism was profoundly demoralized.

As discouraged as white social democratic males may have felt, their domination caused a similar reaction among the revolutionary forces. Separation from the imposed universalism of the imperialist enlightenment allowed black groups to establish their own leadership, explore their own cultures, and use their own identities as the basis for self-determination. For most, separation was not separatism but an attempt to integrate self-determination into the multiracial, world struggle for socialist revolution. Indeed, the common future envisioned by blacks, Chicanos, and American Indians also attracted many whites. Rather than fracturing the left, black radicalism’s internationalist perspective provided an alternative to a universalism that was not universal.

To recover this history from its ideological misrepresentation, Blacks In and Out of the Left calls attention to the League of Revolutionary Black Workers (LRBW), who “developed their own unique version of Marxism-Leninism and black nationalism.” Dawson sees their work as both a black national struggle and a multiracial workers struggle, showing how the two can work in tandem.

Headquartered in Detroit from 1968 through the early 1970s, the LRBW built shop floor organizations in auto factories (as part of the Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement), led wildcat strikes, and organized white and Arab workers alongside blacks. By challenging Detroit’s auto industry—the symbol of American mass consumption—they “represented a real and present danger to American capitalism and the hegemony of unions that had reached an often racist accommodations with corporate America.” By extension, they challenged the aggressive support the American Federation of Labor and the United Automobile Workers had garnered for the anti-communist project internationally—including support for the war in Vietnam. Taking Lenin’s advice that workers should be tribunes of the people and respond to all forms of oppression, not just their own, they ran South End, a citywide paper; worked with “multiclass black united fronts”; opposed police brutality; initiated calls for reparations to be paid from white churches to black communities; and produced the influential film Finally Got the News (1970).

Another example of the effort to synthesize revolutionary black nationalism and Marxism was the League of Revolutionary Struggle (LRS), which operated from 1978 until 1990. It was the largest and in my view most effective of the groups that comprised the New Communist Movement. As Dawson explains, the New Communist Movement included groups that believed the United States needed a new Communist party, allied with the People’s Republic of China against the Soviet Union. The LRS was the first large multinational group created through the merger of formerly national communist groups—the Congress of African People, which had become the Revolutionary Communist League; the (Chicano) August Twenty-Ninth Movement; and the (Asian/Pacific Islander) East Wind and I Work Kuen groups. The LRS included whites who wanted to work in an organization the majority of whose members and leaders were oppressed nationalities and women of color. As the LRS demonstrated, oppressed groups conceived of themselves as promoting universalism rather than precluding it.

The internationalism of black radicals was an alternative to a universalism that wasn't universal.

The LRS envisioned a socialist revolution in the United States as part of a world revolution in which a black nation in the American South and a Chicano nation in the Southwest would ally with the multinational working class—including white workers—and the peoples and nations of the Third World. The LRS set up a national office and ran a national newspaper, Unity/Unidad. It also had hundreds of cadres working in Oakland, San Francisco, Los Angeles, St. Louis, Newark, and New York. Taking seriously the Marxist slogan “from each according to their ability, to each according to their need,” those of us who were well-paid autoworkers—I was a member from 1975 to 1985—made non–tax deductible contributions of $250–400 a month, ensuring that the organization was staffed with comrades who, working long hours, could at least pay their rent and support their families. We set up a childcare service so women could play leading roles in the organization and so children would make friends of all races, growing up in the society we wanted to build. One of our goals was to advance cultural integration as well as economic justice.

Across the country, LRS members got jobs in meatpacking plants, molten foundries, and auto factories. Like the LRBW, the LRS was instrumental in union reform movements that challenged the UAW leadership’s class collaboration. In St. Louis the LRS built a powerful UAW black caucus in a major auto factory, and in East St. Louis, Illinois, it founded the Organization for Black Struggle, which challenged police and slumlords and recruited militant and politically conscious black youth. In Los Angeles, LRS members in UAW Local 645 led an unprecedented campaign to keep GM Van Nuys open. A large and diverse group of workers built a labor/community coalition rooted in the black and Latino communities. We threatened GM with a boycott in L.A. County—the largest new car market in the country—and built a movement so strong that GM backed down and kept the plant open for ten years. I worked on the assembly line at Van Nuys for a decade and was the chair of the campaign, a story told in my book, Taking on General Motors (1987), and in a fine film by Michal Goldman, Tiger by the Tail (1986). In Oakland black LRS cadres worked with the Transit Workers Union and in New York they helped to lead the fight against police brutality.

• • •

Given the creativity, tactical brilliance, broad appeal, courage, and moral vision of the thousands of independent black cultural, women’s, and social service collectives, how can we explain the decline of black-led radical organizations? Having participated in such organizations for almost five decades and studied the history of revolutionary movements my whole life, I see three major reasons.

First, we should not take for granted how difficult it is to build and sustain any revolutionary organization. Contradictions among members and constituent groups make voluntary unity difficult to maintain. The larger an organization is, the greater the diversity in race, class, sexual orientation, and personality and the more internal contradictions.

Second, since the 1960s, the U.S. government has increasingly refused to concede even the smallest demands of working people and the poor. Social welfare programs are being shut down, unions are being broken, and civil rights, voting rights, and labor laws are being reversed. While in theory this can also generate a revolutionary response, and sometimes does, it can also discourage people as they begin to see revolution as a lost cause.

Third—and, in my view, the primary reason for the decline—is the brutal suppression of social movements by the state. The history is unequivocal: it is when black people garner mass support within their own communities and achieve a high level of unity with revolutionaries of all races that the heavy hammer of the white power structure comes down the hardest. Marcus Garvey, the brilliant leader of the Universal Negro Improvement Association, was convicted in 1925 on a spurious charge of federal mail fraud, spent two years in prison, was deported to Jamaica, and was never able to rebuild his organization from exile. Claudia Jones, a great feminist and internationalist leader in the U.S. Communist Party during the 1930s, was deported to England where she played a major role in black politics but died in poverty. Paul Robeson said that black people would not fight in a war against the Soviet Union; as a result he was under constant police surveillance, denied his passport and therefore his livelihood as a globally renowned singer, and driven to a nervous breakdown from which he never recovered. W.E.B. DuBois was also denied his passport and prosecuted as “an unregistered agent of a foreign power.” He eventually left the United States to live and die in Ghana. Martin Luther King, Jr. was under constant police wiretapping; J. Edgar Hoover’s explicit plan was to drive him, as well, to a nervous breakdown. These prominent leaders were among thousands of dedicated freedom fighters who were beaten, tortured, and imprisoned.

But the largest victim of state suppression during the 1970s, and historical suppression now, is the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense. With thousands of members in thirty major cities, it mobilized black, Latino, and white allies to carry out the only mass, armed self-defense movement for black people since black slaves joined the Union Army during the Civil War. The Panthers monitored police behavior, ran the Breakfast for Children program, produced the weekly paper The Black Panther, took a strong stand against the war in Vietnam, and traveled all over the world in solidarity with Third World movements. COINTELPRO, a counter-insurgency program run by the FBI, sent trained informers and agents provocateurs to infiltrate the Panthers and destroy the organization from the inside by instigating disputes among its members and even killing its leaders. Dawson documents the murder of Fred Hampton and Mark Clark, dynamic Panther leaders in Chicago, who were drugged by a police informer in their midst and assassinated by the police as they lay sleeping in their beds. Many of the negative actions attributed to the Panthers were actually initiated and carried out by the police informers in an attempt to bring the organization down.

That attempt succeeded. If you want to understand the decline of radical movements, don’t look first to the challenges of being revolutionary—look first to the state.

• • •

Dawson’s historical analysis provides a model for reinvigorating the revolutionary organizations of today. Emphasizing what he calls the “Third Path” leading from black self-determination to multiracial structures of resistance, Dawson rejects the white chauvinism of social democracy and the impressive but ultimately unsuccessful work of the predominantly white Communist Party in advancing black liberation and socialism. He courageously argues that the black revolutionary tradition—and, I would add, the black-Latino alliance—can lead “a radical domestic agenda that is tied to a worldview that demands justice for all of humanity, not just those who live in rich and privileged countries.”

There are many important experiments today trying to carry out that mission, among them the Black Workers for Justice and the Malcolm X grassroots movements. My own organization, the Labor/Community Strategy Center in Los Angeles, is based on the lessons of my many black and Latino teachers. The Labor/Community Strategy Center is a leftist initiative, which was launched in 1989, around the time of the fall of the Berlin Wall, to figure out what revolutionary organizing in the age of reaction would look like. Our work focuses on training a new generation of black and Latino activists in the traditions of black revolutionary, Third World, and communist organizing.

To understand the decline of radical movements, look first to the state.

We have won major structural changes over the past twenty-five years, a testament to the value of the black revolutionary traditions. By 1990 we formed the Labor/Community Watchdog to fight environmental racism by mobilizing Latino immigrants to demand reductions in toxic emissions from Texaco and other oil refineries. In 1991 we collaborated with Accion Ecologica in Ecuador to organize an international boycott of Texaco in light of its environmentally devastating “drill and run” policies.

We also formed the Bus Riders Union in 1992 to protest Los Angeles’s “third-class bus system for Third World people” and, with the help of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, sued the Metropolitan Transportation Authority for establishing a separate and unequal transit system. Through sit-ins, a “no seat, no fare campaign,” and federal court orders, we forced the MTA to buy 2,500 compressed natural gas buses, reduce overcrowding, and lower bus fares for a decade. When the “Fight Transit Racism—Billions for Buses campaign” began, the MTA ridiculed us. But so far we have won $2.7 billion for buses for low-income black and Latino riders. Our strategy was to demand change in funding using rhetoric that unified many marginalized groups against a transit system that favored the rich. Our campaign captured the imagination of black and Latino bus riders and many middle-class white allies.

Today, in an effort to combat menticide, we are mobilizing young black and Latino organizers in Los Angeles high schools to fight the school-to-prison pipeline and the mass incarceration of blacks and Latinos. As our recently released study, Black, Brown and Over-Policed in L.A. Schools illustrates:

It is common experience in many low-income black and Latino neighborhoods for a student to walk out their door in the morning and run a gauntlet of Los Angeles Police Department in their neighborhood, then Sheriffs (LASD) patrols on public transit (stopped and frisked for ‘fare evasion’) then Los Angeles School Police Department and Probation Department at their school all day, at the front gate, in the halls, the cafeteria at lunch, in random disruptions of their classes. At the end of the day, they must pass through the same gauntlet in reverse to get home.

Seventeen-to-twenty-five-year-old organizers are leading Taking Action clubs where the students share experiences and connect their lives to the study of political consciousness and strategy. With training, they see themselves as organizers building a black and Latino united front against racism and subjugation in the high schools of Los Angeles. The movement convinced the Los Angeles Unified School Board and the Los Angeles School Police Department to stop issuing truancy citations. In just four years, more than 35,000 tardy students were ticketed on their way to school, arrested, handcuffed, and forced to pay $250–$1,000 fines. Our current project is to end school police involvement where teachers, administrators, students, and parents should handle discipline. We are also proposing an Equal Protection Plan that decriminalizes fifteen so-called violations, including “disturbing the peace,” “disorderly conduct,” and “possession of marijuana, alcohol, and markers [used for graffiti].”

Last year we initiated Fight for the Soul of the Cities, which asks organizers and community members to rally around a political platform that, as Dawson advises, offers a vision of a new society in which minority groups unite. Can we motivate black people to support open borders and amnesty? Or Latinos to support justice for Trayvon Martin?

I have spent my whole life working for what Dawson describes as a radical, anti-imperialist movement independent of both capitalist parties, with strong black leadership rooted in the 20th century’s great black-led experiments in resistance. Dawson brings the work of many important black leaders and organizations to our attention while the ruling class works to suppress its memory.

--Aquarius Bookstore, Los Angeles in 1982--

Alfred and Bernice Ligon owned the Aquarian Book Shop, probably the oldest black-owned bookstore in Los Angeles. They specialized in a wide range of works mostly by and about black people.

As a critical part of this effort, I urge a new generation of “young, gifted, and black” revolutionaries, together with Latinos, indigenous people, Asian/Pacific Islanders, and whites to use history to inform your organizing work. Read Marx and Engels’s Communist Manifesto, W.E.B. DuBois’s Black Reconstruction in America, V.I. Lenin’s What is to be Done?, Harry Haywood’s Black Bolshevik, Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, Richard Wright’s Native Son, Carol Boyce Davies’s Left of Karl Marx: The Political Life of Black Communist Claudia Jones, Mao Tse-tung’s On Practice, Paul Robeson’s Here I Stand, Martin Luther King Jr.’s speech, “Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence,” Brooks and Houck’s, The Speeches of Fannie Lou Hamer, Malcolm X’s Message to the Grassroots, the LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka Reader, Alexis De Veaux’s Warrior Poet: A Biography of Audre Lorde, Alan Wieder’s Ruth First and Joe Slovo in the War Against Apartheid, Walter Rodney’s How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, Edward Galeanos’s The Open Veins of Latin America and—of course—Dawson’s Blacks In and Out of the Left.

Read as if your life depended on it; engage in the debate; join an organization; get out into the fields, the factories, the buses, the community, the high schools, and the prisons.

Another important book for Study & Struggle for the sake of Revitalizing the Black Liberation Movement in the US.

Zimbabwe adopts Chinese yuan as currency

Sapa-dpa | 30 January, 2014 08:26

Tea leaf farmers gather to collect their share of the year-end bonus from a total amount of one million yuan ($165,272) handed out by a tea leaf company in a village of Jinan, Shandong province January 20, 2014. Picture taken January 20, 2014.
Image by: CHINA DAILY / REUTERS

Zimbabwe's central bank has announced it would accept the Chinese yuan and three other Asian currencies as legal tender as economic relations have improved in recent years.

"Trade and investment ties between Zimbabwe, China, India, Japan and Australia have grown appreciably," said Charity Dhliwayo, acting governor of the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe.

Exporters and the public can now open accounts in yuans, Australian dollars, Indian rupees and Japanese yens, Dhliwayo said. Zimbabwe abandoned its worthless currency in 2009.

It accepts the US dollar and the South African rand as the main legal tender. Their use has helped to stabilise the economy after world-record inflation threw it into a tailspin.

Independent economist Chris Mugaga said the introduction of the Asian currencies would not make a huge difference to Zimbabwe's struggling economy.

"It is Zimbabwe's Look East Policy, which has forced this, and nothing else," he said.

President Robert Mugabe has sought to boost economic relations with Asia after his relations with the West came under strain over his policy of seizing white-owned farms.

Chinese investors have over the past two decades entered diamond mining, construction and retail sectors in the south-east African country.

People in many parts of the world like to look lighter

OCTOBER 15, 2013 | BY KNEWS | FILED UNDER LETTERS

Dear Editor,
One gets the impression that Frederick Kissoon is bored, has run out of things to say, wants continuous attention, is cheating journalistically, or getting old and rusty – or all of the above! His KN 10-13-13 column, “Sex and skin colour: India confronts its white-skin obsession” is a case in point.
Mr. Kissoon browses the internet and looks for topics that put India and Indians in bad light, and brings these to the fore in the Guyana newspapers to create a furor and irk the sensitivities of Indians. The only problem about that is that poor Mr. Kissoon moves too slowly for comfort.
The hue and sex colour is not a recent phenomenon; the debate has been raging for years in India. And Mr. Kissoon should know that the biggest criticisms of the outrageous practices in India come from Indians themselves – through various forms in the media. So when Mr. Kissoon claims that the thing (Indian’s obsession with white skin) “is now wide open, thanks to Al Jazeera”, it evokes another chuckle from this journalist researcher.
I quote verbatim from my KN letter of 11-02-13, “Freddie’s sensationalist column was typically partial and unbalanced”.
In that letter, I stated, “Mr. Kissoon is angry that almost all of the ads have light skinned persons, and has repeatedly expressed his disgust that Indians in India have been partial to those with lighter complexion in the Bollywood arena. (I share this sense of disgust, as it is true not only to actors, for also those in certain employment, for those looking for a spouse, etc.). But does he know that Africans, from Jamaica to South Africa, use lightening creams to look lighter and non-black?
A University of Cape Town study showed that one in three women in South Africa try hard to whiten their skin to look white, including local musician Nomasonto ‘Mshoza’ Mnisi, who is now several shades lighter. The situation in Nigeria is worse, where approximately 77% of the women use skin lighteners. And many African women in the continent and in the Diaspora, including Guyana, have used hair straighteners, thereby departing from the traditional appearance.
In Jamaica, the most public proponent of bleaching is singing star Vybz Kartel , whose own complexion has dramatically lightened in recent years. His ‘Look Pon Me’ contains the lines: “Di girl dem love off mi brown cute face, di girl dem love off mi bleach-out face.” And residents of Denham Town, in west Kingston, say the introduction of a ‘new type’ of skin lightening cream has sparked fist fights and a rift among women in a section of their community. The women are reportedly accusing each other of spitefully purchasing too much of the commodity to get the other jealous.
On 13-01-13, the Stabroek News carried an article, “Fly Jamaica inaugural flight delayed”, and showed a photo of the attendant crew. There were eight women shown in the photo; except for one, all of them were light skinned, most with dyed hair! The bottom line is people in many parts of the world like to look lighter, and advertisers hone in on that axiom.
It is obvious that Mr. Kissoon browses the internet in search of material to insert in his daily column. There is nothing original about this cheap form of journalism. (If Mr. Kissoon wants some really juicy journalistic stuff, all he has to do is to check out the Indian media websites!).
It is baffling why Mr. Kissoon would mention the Al Jazeera news item on the obsession of white skin colour of Indians, and ignore this dark side (pardon the pun) of the Africans. In a prominent article by that media house a few months ago (http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/features/2013/04/20134514845907984.html), Al Jazeera stated that almost 8 out of 10 women are involved in “bleaching” – a term used for whitening one’s skin – to look and feel more beautiful – far more than the Indians!
Mr. Kissoon laments that the BBC has not carried the issue of India’s obsession with being “fair”. They did – on June 5, 2012, when Rajini Vaidyanathan wrote, “Has skin whitening in India gone too far?”
Try again, Fred.
Devanand Bhagwan

Editorial Reviews

Review

With respect to Marvin X, declaring Muslim American literature as a field of study is valuable because recontextualizing it will add another layer of attention to his incredibly rich body of work.He deserves to be WAY better known than he is among Muslim Americans and generally, in the world of writing and the world at large. By we who are younger Muslim American poets, in particular, Marvin should be honored as our elder, one who is still kickin, still true to the word!

READ MARVIN X for RAMADAN!....

Mohja Kahf

Associate Professor

University of Arkansas-Fayetteville