Updated: Friday, 03 Dec 2010, 4:16 PM EST
Published : Friday, 03 Dec 2010, 4:16 PM EST
http://www.wwlp.com/dpp/news/local/hampden/Group-calls-for-police-racism-training
Jackie Brousseau
HOLYOKE, Mass. (WWLP) - Protesters showed their discontent over what they say is consistent police brutality.
Members of Arise for Social Justice stood with signs outside the courthouse in Holyoke.
They're calling for members of the police department to receive mandatory anti-racism training and for the establishment of a Community Hearing Board with disciplinary powers.
"The police dept has an environment that condones this type of behavior. This training will rid this environment and hold people accountable," said Community Activist Garry Porter.
"We need a review board that has some serious teeth and that is part of the community and not handpicked by the Mayor," said Ellen Graves of Arise for Social Justice.
Three other officers were disciplined in connection with the Melvin Jones the Third case.
Arise for Social Justice wants those officers fired and charged as well.
Friday, December 3, 2010
Black community fear racism at Russian 2018 World Cup
http://www.voice-online.co.uk/content.php?show=18560
Black community fear racism at Russian 2018 World Cup
THE BLACK community have voiced concerns about travelling to Russia to watch the 2018 World Cup fearing that racism will be rife.
Following news that England had lost out on its bid to host the 2018 games, members of the black community instantly frowned upon the chosen country.
Choice FM radio host, Martin Jay told his Twitter followers that he would instead watch the game from the comfort of his home as opposed to travelling to the Eastern European country.
Jay said: "Wow Russia hosts 2018 World Cup ! That's a TV watch for me then !!!”
While Facebook user Alexander Clarke jokingly added: “i wont be russian to go there!! lol”
Despite winning backing from Prince William, former England captain David Beckham and Prime Minister, David Cameron, England were unsuccessful in securing the much-coveted bid.
In a major embarrassment, England apparently did not even make it through to the second round of the voting in Switzerland, which was won overall by Russia.
Black community fear racism at Russian 2018 World Cup
THE BLACK community have voiced concerns about travelling to Russia to watch the 2018 World Cup fearing that racism will be rife.
Following news that England had lost out on its bid to host the 2018 games, members of the black community instantly frowned upon the chosen country.
Choice FM radio host, Martin Jay told his Twitter followers that he would instead watch the game from the comfort of his home as opposed to travelling to the Eastern European country.
Jay said: "Wow Russia hosts 2018 World Cup ! That's a TV watch for me then !!!”
While Facebook user Alexander Clarke jokingly added: “i wont be russian to go there!! lol”
Despite winning backing from Prince William, former England captain David Beckham and Prime Minister, David Cameron, England were unsuccessful in securing the much-coveted bid.
In a major embarrassment, England apparently did not even make it through to the second round of the voting in Switzerland, which was won overall by Russia.
Racism Alive and Swell in NFL
LeCharles Bentley, provided by
Thursday, December 2, 2010
The National Football League does an excellent job of publicly attacking some issues and problems. Unfortunately, the league disguises one of its most embarrassing issues within a veil of euphemistic lingo and "throwback" logic. This issue doesn't exist within the walls of NFL boardrooms, but is embedded into the league's fabric: racial prejudice and stereotyping.
Today, Peyton Hillis, the Cleveland Browns' most impressive running back since Kevin Mack, is the latest "victim" of the NFL's color cycle. Hillis isn't the run of the mill 6-foot-2, 250-pound chocolate bruiser. He's an Arkansas born-and-raised white guy. Don't you remember the white running back who starred at the University of Arkansas before Darren McFadden and Felix Jones (both African-Americans) pushed him off the depth chart? What about the guy who played for the Broncos and averaged 5 yards per carry before being traded to the Browns? None of this rings a bell?
I'm sure, too, that you are familiar with the names Knowshon Moreno and Correll Buckhalter. These two bronzed tailbacks are the guys Broncos coach Josh McDaniels felt were better than Hillis. Buckhalter missed the 2002, 2004 and 2005 seasons with knee injuries. Apparently a white running back who struggled because he was pigeon-holed as a fullback isn't as valued as a black running back with multiple knee injuries. This is eerily similar to the early years in the NFL when black players struggled with typecasting but kept their mouths shut for fear of being labeled a "troublemaker."
Many NFL coaches pounded the notion into Hillis' head that he could only be a fullback in the NFL and he should brush up on his special teams play. Evidently, that's as far as his skin tone would take him.
The only way a black running back enters the NFL with that kind of resume without being drafted in the first round is if his 40-yard dash time is slow, like Shonn Greene.
It is also widely known that former Stanford star Toby Gerhart was advised to do the same. Gerhart was the 2009 Heisman Trophy runner-up, Doak Walker Award winner, consensus All-America -- and second-round draft pick. The only way a black running back enters the NFL with that kind of resume without being drafted in the first round is if his 40-yard dash time is slow, like Shonn Greene.
The Cleveland Browns drafted Montario Hardesty in the second round, eight picks after Gerhart was selected. Hardesty endured multiple knee surgeries in college -- to the point he had to take a medical redshirt year to recover from injuries.
The Browns traded away three draft picks in order to move into the second round to draft an injury-prone running back. This is the running back the Browns envisioned establishing their run game, not Peyton Hillis.
After the 1932 season, Washington Redskins owner George Preston Marshall -- affectionately known, according to African-American studies professor Dr. Charles Ross, as the "... leading racist in the NFL" -- convinced other club owners to implement a non-formal ban of black players. This "ban" lasted 13 seasons.
Understanding there was a 13-year period when no black players were allowed to participate in the NFL is critical in understanding why the prejudices and stereotypes exist today. There was a collective and concerted effort to maintain white rosters throughout the league that impacts today's game and thinking.
Post-1933 there were zero black players for 13 years, when the league was still in its infancy and going through its most formative stages. While the foundation of the game was being laid it was being done under the formidable flag of bigotry. White privilege constructed the concept of a quarterback, center, safety and middle linebacker. White thought designed who was deemed capable to lead and coach. White power built the game brick by brick and the mortar of racial intolerance holds the house together even today.
Integration didn't turn the NFL into a utopian society; it only guided the racial rhetoric into the consciousness of the landscape. Kenny Washington (HB-DB) and Woody Strode (WR) were the first black players to be integrated in the NFL -- and as more arrived typecasting took full effect.
The black players were placed at the "skill" positions, which is another way of saying they were asked to just run fast. Their white counterparts held on to the positions that were considered the "cerebral" or "central" positions. "Centrality" is an advanced theory many sociologists point to in order to explain why positions like quarterback, center, middle linebacker and safety were off limits to the black players.
These positions were "central" because they required critical thinking skills and communication to teammates. Black athletes during that period were deemed not smart enough to communicate effectively and incapable of leading. I don't want to fail to mention there was a natural quota system in play because all of the black players were competing for the same few jobs. So the league was "integrated" but with positional stipulations and numeric accountability. Black players readily accepted their "roles" because prior to 1946 blacks weren't playing at all.
The game grew and athletes of varied ethnic backgrounds began to excel at all positions. One would assume that this would be great for the game because performance would now become the ultimate deciding factor in who was considered capable or incapable. That assumption would only be partly accurate. It's partly inaccurate because of the foundation that was laid in the early years.
The coaches and executives were the gatekeepers of the antiquated ideologies on who was physically and mentally equipped for particular jobs. As the black players settled into and accepted their "roles" the white players did the exact same because players understood they could control only one thing and that was their performance. Coaches and executives understood they could control everything. Although the control quotient wasn't intended to affect the white athletes, bigotry's omnipotent presence through time inadvertently boiled over onto the white players as well.
As a former center in the NFL, I experienced what it was like to play a position that the NFL culture didn't envision me worthy of playing. In 2005 I was the only black starting center in the NFL. I was far from a pioneer. I followed in the footsteps of two of the league's greatest centers in Dermontti Dawson and Dwight Stephenson. My peers during that time were Matt Birk, Olin Kreutz and Jeff Saturday. I was much younger than those guys, but I was in the elite conversation based on my performance.
What was interesting was the type of conversation that surrounded my play compared to theirs. I vividly remember hearing a commentator speak of Saturday's ability to study defenses, lead the line and display his overall "cerebral" approach to the game. All of this is absolutely true, but Saturday and I played against the same defenses. I studied the same film he did and made the same line calls. I was categorized as "big and physical."
Growing up I wanted to be like Stephenson and Dawson, but once I reached the pinnacle of my success I realized in order for me to be respected as a complete player I had to sprinkle in a little Mike Webster and Mark Stepnoski. During my free-agent trip to Cleveland the offensive line coach took me into his office and broke out some film.
I assumed we were going to watch my highlight reel considering I was coming off of my second Pro-Bowl berth. Instead of the highlight reel, we watched clips of their offense and I was asked to identify certain defensive looks just "to be sure I understood the concepts."
To this day I wonder if the conversation would have been the same if Matt Birk or Jeff Saturday walked into that meeting.
There are seismic shifts taking place in the NFL and they are all for the greater good of the game. It's often said that change is good but change that is preceded by open and honest dialogue is better. Labor issues will be resolved, concussions will be handled more appropriately and helmet to helmet hits minimized, but will those changes leave the NFL where it genuinely wants to be?
The culture of the NFL was forged when the league's foundation was laid. This foundation is haunted by the ghost of George Preston Marshall and universally discriminates against black and white athletes. It's an irony that can no longer be ignored.
LeCharles Bentley is a former NFL player for the New Orleans Saints and current NFL analyst on FanHouse TV.
Thursday, December 2, 2010
The National Football League does an excellent job of publicly attacking some issues and problems. Unfortunately, the league disguises one of its most embarrassing issues within a veil of euphemistic lingo and "throwback" logic. This issue doesn't exist within the walls of NFL boardrooms, but is embedded into the league's fabric: racial prejudice and stereotyping.
Today, Peyton Hillis, the Cleveland Browns' most impressive running back since Kevin Mack, is the latest "victim" of the NFL's color cycle. Hillis isn't the run of the mill 6-foot-2, 250-pound chocolate bruiser. He's an Arkansas born-and-raised white guy. Don't you remember the white running back who starred at the University of Arkansas before Darren McFadden and Felix Jones (both African-Americans) pushed him off the depth chart? What about the guy who played for the Broncos and averaged 5 yards per carry before being traded to the Browns? None of this rings a bell?
I'm sure, too, that you are familiar with the names Knowshon Moreno and Correll Buckhalter. These two bronzed tailbacks are the guys Broncos coach Josh McDaniels felt were better than Hillis. Buckhalter missed the 2002, 2004 and 2005 seasons with knee injuries. Apparently a white running back who struggled because he was pigeon-holed as a fullback isn't as valued as a black running back with multiple knee injuries. This is eerily similar to the early years in the NFL when black players struggled with typecasting but kept their mouths shut for fear of being labeled a "troublemaker."
Many NFL coaches pounded the notion into Hillis' head that he could only be a fullback in the NFL and he should brush up on his special teams play. Evidently, that's as far as his skin tone would take him.
The only way a black running back enters the NFL with that kind of resume without being drafted in the first round is if his 40-yard dash time is slow, like Shonn Greene.
It is also widely known that former Stanford star Toby Gerhart was advised to do the same. Gerhart was the 2009 Heisman Trophy runner-up, Doak Walker Award winner, consensus All-America -- and second-round draft pick. The only way a black running back enters the NFL with that kind of resume without being drafted in the first round is if his 40-yard dash time is slow, like Shonn Greene.
The Cleveland Browns drafted Montario Hardesty in the second round, eight picks after Gerhart was selected. Hardesty endured multiple knee surgeries in college -- to the point he had to take a medical redshirt year to recover from injuries.
The Browns traded away three draft picks in order to move into the second round to draft an injury-prone running back. This is the running back the Browns envisioned establishing their run game, not Peyton Hillis.
After the 1932 season, Washington Redskins owner George Preston Marshall -- affectionately known, according to African-American studies professor Dr. Charles Ross, as the "... leading racist in the NFL" -- convinced other club owners to implement a non-formal ban of black players. This "ban" lasted 13 seasons.
Understanding there was a 13-year period when no black players were allowed to participate in the NFL is critical in understanding why the prejudices and stereotypes exist today. There was a collective and concerted effort to maintain white rosters throughout the league that impacts today's game and thinking.
Post-1933 there were zero black players for 13 years, when the league was still in its infancy and going through its most formative stages. While the foundation of the game was being laid it was being done under the formidable flag of bigotry. White privilege constructed the concept of a quarterback, center, safety and middle linebacker. White thought designed who was deemed capable to lead and coach. White power built the game brick by brick and the mortar of racial intolerance holds the house together even today.
Integration didn't turn the NFL into a utopian society; it only guided the racial rhetoric into the consciousness of the landscape. Kenny Washington (HB-DB) and Woody Strode (WR) were the first black players to be integrated in the NFL -- and as more arrived typecasting took full effect.
The black players were placed at the "skill" positions, which is another way of saying they were asked to just run fast. Their white counterparts held on to the positions that were considered the "cerebral" or "central" positions. "Centrality" is an advanced theory many sociologists point to in order to explain why positions like quarterback, center, middle linebacker and safety were off limits to the black players.
These positions were "central" because they required critical thinking skills and communication to teammates. Black athletes during that period were deemed not smart enough to communicate effectively and incapable of leading. I don't want to fail to mention there was a natural quota system in play because all of the black players were competing for the same few jobs. So the league was "integrated" but with positional stipulations and numeric accountability. Black players readily accepted their "roles" because prior to 1946 blacks weren't playing at all.
The game grew and athletes of varied ethnic backgrounds began to excel at all positions. One would assume that this would be great for the game because performance would now become the ultimate deciding factor in who was considered capable or incapable. That assumption would only be partly accurate. It's partly inaccurate because of the foundation that was laid in the early years.
The coaches and executives were the gatekeepers of the antiquated ideologies on who was physically and mentally equipped for particular jobs. As the black players settled into and accepted their "roles" the white players did the exact same because players understood they could control only one thing and that was their performance. Coaches and executives understood they could control everything. Although the control quotient wasn't intended to affect the white athletes, bigotry's omnipotent presence through time inadvertently boiled over onto the white players as well.
As a former center in the NFL, I experienced what it was like to play a position that the NFL culture didn't envision me worthy of playing. In 2005 I was the only black starting center in the NFL. I was far from a pioneer. I followed in the footsteps of two of the league's greatest centers in Dermontti Dawson and Dwight Stephenson. My peers during that time were Matt Birk, Olin Kreutz and Jeff Saturday. I was much younger than those guys, but I was in the elite conversation based on my performance.
What was interesting was the type of conversation that surrounded my play compared to theirs. I vividly remember hearing a commentator speak of Saturday's ability to study defenses, lead the line and display his overall "cerebral" approach to the game. All of this is absolutely true, but Saturday and I played against the same defenses. I studied the same film he did and made the same line calls. I was categorized as "big and physical."
Growing up I wanted to be like Stephenson and Dawson, but once I reached the pinnacle of my success I realized in order for me to be respected as a complete player I had to sprinkle in a little Mike Webster and Mark Stepnoski. During my free-agent trip to Cleveland the offensive line coach took me into his office and broke out some film.
I assumed we were going to watch my highlight reel considering I was coming off of my second Pro-Bowl berth. Instead of the highlight reel, we watched clips of their offense and I was asked to identify certain defensive looks just "to be sure I understood the concepts."
To this day I wonder if the conversation would have been the same if Matt Birk or Jeff Saturday walked into that meeting.
There are seismic shifts taking place in the NFL and they are all for the greater good of the game. It's often said that change is good but change that is preceded by open and honest dialogue is better. Labor issues will be resolved, concussions will be handled more appropriately and helmet to helmet hits minimized, but will those changes leave the NFL where it genuinely wants to be?
The culture of the NFL was forged when the league's foundation was laid. This foundation is haunted by the ghost of George Preston Marshall and universally discriminates against black and white athletes. It's an irony that can no longer be ignored.
LeCharles Bentley is a former NFL player for the New Orleans Saints and current NFL analyst on FanHouse TV.
Thursday, December 2, 2010
Editor of Vogue's Italian edition celebrates black and brown women and fat ones, too
By Robin Givhan
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, November 28, 2010;
MILAN - Franca Sozzani, the editor of Vogue Italia, has taken the lead on one of the most fraught topics in her industry: diversity. She did so in reaction to runways that, in the past few years, had turned strikingly homogenous as a steady stream of pin-thin, white models - most hailing from Eastern Europe - began to dominate the catwalks of New York and Europe. The result of the whitewashed runways meant that the women being funneled into magazines, cosmetics contracts and ultimately into our popular consciousness as archetypes of the feminine ideal were overwhelmingly white and often emaciated.
Under the prestigious banner of Vogue Italia, Sozzani now celebrates black and brown women, fat girls and obese ones, too.
Sozzani works out of a modest, book-strewn, brightly lit office overlooking Piazza Cadorna, which is dominated by a two-story sculpture of a blunt-tipped needle threaded with a loop of rainbow-colored yarn. Sozzani's magazine claims a modest circulation of about 120,000 to 170,000, compared with American Vogue's 1.2 million. But do not be misled by Sozzani's small footprint.
The seasonal moda donna collections are a citywide affair centered on Piazza del Duomo. Video screens, several stories tall, flash runway images to the public; wall-size speakers throb morning to night with the rhythms of a dance party, and live catwalk productions unfold in the urban center for the entertainment of anyone who happens by. Fashion is woven into the personality of Italy's industrial capital, where mom and pop businesses have blossomed into international brands and fashion week's evening bacchanals - which have attracted everyone from soccer stars to Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi - are as crucial to dealmaking as lobbyists are to Washington.
All of which means that Sozzani is an extremely important woman.
Her magazine rides herd over designers, pushes aesthetic boundaries and often offends. The cover of the August issue featured model Kristen McMenamy dressed as an oil-soaked bird. Sozzani described the photo as a commentary on the fragility of nature; others complained that it glamorized the BP oil spill.
Vogue Italia is an insider's magazine, and where it goes, American magazines will follow - albeit with far less nudity.
In July 2008, Sozzani published an attention-grabbing all-black issue of her magazine. She followed that with a tribute to Africa in sister publication L'Uomo Vogue. She developed a whimsical special-edition ode to black Barbie. And this spring, she launched Vogue Black, a Web site devoted to black models, designers, stylists and other players in the creative field. To feed the new Internet channel, she dispatched black photographers and writers to cover the recent collections in New York and Europe.
"One day I saw her and went over to say hello and she said, 'If I never see another black person . . .!' " recalls her friend Bethann Hardison, who is black, with a laugh. "You can only feel comfortable saying something like that because you're invested. You relate."
Sozzani also started Vogue Curvy, a site that focuses on plus-size fashion.
The Black Issue that launched her on this path was a way to talk about diversity in fashion, but also about diversity and acceptance in general. "The issue made, for me, a special point," Sozzani says. "When you talk about fashion, you are also talking about many things. . . . I wanted to give a message.
"Even young people are very conventional. They are very bourgeois, generally speaking. But they buy Vogue, people who would never buy other things. They discover it's not bourgeois discourse. It's art and life." And, perhaps, through fashion their view of life will be broadened and changed.
Sozzani's activism, while modest in the great history of social upheaval, nonetheless is noteworthy because of the social climate in which this global industry is operating and because of the outsize role that fashion occupies in the culture at large. Questions about public and personal identity are at the root of a host of international antagonisms. Italy is wrestling with immigration phobia; France is busy banning the burqa; and the United States is analyzing its "post-racial," obese self. At issue in each case is how individuals define themselves in the public space and how they want the world to see them.
And within the porous confines of the fashion industry, race has, in the past months, inspired public protests, self-conscious self-analysis and debates about what constitutes racism and sizeism and what should be classified as ignorance.
In the midst of this storm of fretfulness and rebuke stands Sozzani, a diminutive, 60-year-old white editor who grew up in the northern Italian city of Mantua.
"She's creative, but she's also open," says Hardison, a former model and model agency owner. "There's a lot of creative people out there and they don't do this.
"She's a crusader," Hardison says. "She probably doesn't think so, but she is."
The Black Issue
As the editor of Vogue Italia - and the head of its Italian siblings that report on menswear and jewelry - Sozzani makes up one-third of fashion's holy trinity of Vogue czars. The others are French Vogue's Carine Roitfeld and Anna Wintour, the devil who doth wear Prada. Roitfeld enjoys the smell of cigarette smoke, lurks behind a side-swept curtain of brunette hair and favors pencil skirts, stilettos and tight-fitting jackets - a wardrobe that would best be described as painful.
The mythology surrounding the publicly inscrutable Wintour is such that few bat an eye when she arrives at fashion shows flanked by a rotating detail of beefy bodyguards. One of them favored a black-leather duster like a character out of "The Matrix." Another had a gold tooth. The most recent pair included a fire hydrant with a buzz cut and a Jean Reno doppelganger.
Sozzani travels from show to show without her own muscle. She is petite and waif-thin, with golden Rapunzel waves that reach well below her shoulders. Her features are strong and her eyes pale blue. She has an unhurried manner that calls to mind the phrase "comfortable in one's skin."
Told that she is photogenic, she observes that "sometimes I take a beautiful picture that I love. Sometimes, I see a picture of someone who looks like me but" - and she shakes her head in dismay over how a photo can go so wrong - "I think, 'Who is that?' "
Her style is unfussy, but by no means minimal. One particular afternoon in the middle of fashion week, she is dressed in an olive silk military-style shirt and a knee-length navy skirt, both by Lanvin. She prefers significant jewelry, low heels - today's reptile versions are by Manolo Blahnik - small clutch handbags and an iPhone.
Of her Conde Nast compatriots, Sozzani is closest to Wintour. The two have become friends over the years, and Wintour notes, quite simply, that "Franca is magnificent." They have worked together on the global orgy of shopping, Fashion's Night Out, as well as on finding ways to support young designers. In their tete-a-tetes, diversity on the runway is a topic that regularly comes up.
"Right now, it seems as though we are experiencing a wave of Asian models, and while there is certainly a strong African American presence with Joan Smalls, Jourdan Dunn and Chanel Iman, sadly we don't see as many African American models as we could," Wintour says.
The prestigious September issue of the American flagship featured actress Halle Berry on the cover and one of the fashion stories depicted a "We Are the World" multicultural mishmash. Still, its efforts at diversity pale compared with Vogue Italia.
"Franca's decision to take a stance on the issue of racial diversity is typical Franca - she does not tackle subjects in a low-key manner," Wintour says. "She wanted her readers to notice."
The Black Issue began to take shape during the fall of 2007 when Sozzani was struck by the homogenous aesthetic on the runways. "All the girls looked the same. The only one who stood out is Liya Kebede," who is black, Sozzani recalled. "Everything she wore I liked. I started to question myself.
"We cannot use only these girls who are the same," Sozzani says. "We go to the East Side and Russia. We go looking for tall, thin and blue eyes. But we have to scout in Africa, everywhere.
"I decided to do an issue only with black girls. People say, 'It's a ghetto.' But we do thousands of issues with Russian girls and it's not a ghetto."
There was grumbling and skepticism from cultural observers that the issue was a gimmick or that she was exploiting international interest in the American presidential election. "People accused me of doing it because of Obama and said that I was very clever," Sozzani says. "But I started the previous October, before Obama and Hillary Clinton began to fight."
Still, her timing proved prescient. When the issue arrived on newsstands July 1, 2008, Obama had wrapped up the Democratic presidential nomination.
The Black Issue was distributed with four different newsstand covers, each featuring a well-known black model. Inside, a roster of relatively unknown mannequins was spotlighted along with several veterans like Gail O'Neill and Alva Chinn. The plus-size model Toccara Jones - once a contestant on "America's Next Top Model" - posed topless.
The special issue turned into a collector's edition. After its initial print run of 120,000, it had to be reprinted for the United Kingdom, Germany and the United States, which makes up 40 percent of the magazine's readers.
"It was like Michael Jackson was coming to town in the fashion industry. People were scrambling to buy every single cover," says Michaela Angela Davis, a New York-based cultural critic.
"If you put Vogue in front of anything," Davis says, "that brand means something in the hearts of women."
For Sozzani, the Black Issue was only the beginning.
Launching Vogue Black
There have been no cultural pressures on Sozzani to broaden the embrace of her magazine or its Web site. Indeed, the Black Issue did not sell especially well in Italy. Some Americans complain that she created separate venues for women of color - and for larger women - instead of welcoming them more enthusiastically into the pages of Vogue Italia. But what is the extent of an Italian magazine's responsibility for representing such women in its pages? Should their presence reflect their visibility in Italy? The degree to which they are high-end fashion consumers? Or is there some other matrix?
While obesity rates are rising in Italy, only about 13 percent of women there are obese compared with 48 percent of women in the United States. And not so long ago, the few black faces on Italian streets belonged to the Ethiopian immigrants who arrived in the 1970s and '80s. Today, immigrants make up only about 7 percent of the Italian population and many of them, such as those from North Africa and Eastern Europe, have been met with hostility and distrust. Recent stories have detailed the backlash against the Roma, whose large Gypsy camp in northern Milan is under threat from local officials. The Northern League, with its strong anti-immigration stance, thrives in the Milan area, where the only encounter a tourist is likely to have with a minority is along the stone streets of Via Brera, where black Africans sell knockoffs of Prada and Gucci handbags. The Northern League, Sozzani jokes, has a problem with anything south of Florence.
Acceptance of outsiders is "happening step by step," she says. "We are not a big country. We are not as rich as [immigrants] think we are. Probably they think they will find more than they find . . . but we all work with foreigners at home and in the office."
Sozzani was taken aback by the success of the Black Issue. The business opportunity was evident: A market was being ignored. But Sozzani did not want to be perceived as a dabbler, a cultural tourist.
"For me, it became a commitment," Sozzani said. "I talked to these girls. I promised to take care of them."
Before launching Vogue Black, Sozzani conferred with Hardison - tall, dark-skinned with close-cropped hair, a self-declared revolutionary - for advice. Sozzani has known Hardison since the early '80s when they met through the Paris-based designer Azzedine Alaia, who, as it happens, is known for his affection for black models. In 1994 Hardison helped black male model Tyson Beckford sign a groundbreaking advertising contract with Polo Ralph Lauren. In the past three years, she's aggressively rallied the fashion industry to question its own standards. "No one wants to be a racist. The people in this industry are not," Hardison says. "But the results of what they do are racism."
Vogue Black went live in February with Hardison as editor at large. While it's headquartered in Milan, it clearly speaks to an American audience. The site opens in English in the United States, and many of the topics are culled from American popular culture. It mixes model profiles with street fashion pictures and short stories about creative types such as artist Kehinde Wiley. The reaction has been a mix of optimism, ambivalence and curiosity.
"It strikes me as strange, to be honest. Italy is such a small country and it's not particularly diverse," says writer Claire Sulmers, founder of Fashion Bomb Daily. "I wasn't sure where there was a shared common interest."
"I think she's trying to be a maverick," says Sulmers, who covered the spring 2011 Paris collections for the site. "I think they saw what a huge stir the Black Issue caused and felt this is how we can make our mark."
The idea of Sozzani, a white Italian woman, taking even partial ownership of black beauty might be a prickly one, given the negative emotions stirred when Essence hired a white fashion director this summer. The topic was so fraught that during September's fashion week in New York, some industry observers took to the streets in silent protest. And Davis - a tall, cosmopolitan black woman with a sandy-colored Afro - who was quite vocal in her criticism of Essence, hosted an hours-long panel discussion/community conversation/venting session at New York University.
During that town hall, moderators held up the October issue of Elle as an example of how white editors fail in their representation of black women and large women. Actress Gabourey Sidibe was on the cover and her image was derided as unflattering. Had she been the target of overzealous retouchers who lightened her complexion? Unskilled hairstylists who victimized her with a dime-store wig? Fatophobes who cropped her plus-size body out of the picture? (No, no and no, said Elle.)
For her part, Sozzani has mostly escaped criticism for insensitivity.
"She has a breadth of experience and knowledge," Davis says. "Franca gets it."
Can't please everybody
It's easier to turn a smaller boat than an aircraft carrier. Sozzani's third-floor office at Vogue Italia is tiny compared with the grand quarters from which American editors in chief typically reign. There is no fancy reception area, just a couple of nondescript chairs tucked against a wall in a corridor lined with rumpled gray carpeting and crowded with boxes and file cabinets.
The rows and stacks of magazines that fill the bookshelves in her office are a testament to the 22 years that she has ruled Italian fashion. And as she sits talking at one end of a large glass conference table, one can't help but notice the two unopened bouquets of flowers that lie forlorn in their brown wrapping paper at the other.
Vogue Italia doesn't have the commercial pressures of its much larger American counterpart. Its greatest strength is its nimbleness and its point of view.
"Italian Vogue magazine is an experimental magazine - that's the impression people have," Sozzani says. "I don't think it's experimental; it has a vision. It can't please everybody. I don't want to please everybody."
Still, Sozzani has decided that she will happily embrace anyone - black, brown, thin, fat - who sees the world as she does.
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, November 28, 2010;
MILAN - Franca Sozzani, the editor of Vogue Italia, has taken the lead on one of the most fraught topics in her industry: diversity. She did so in reaction to runways that, in the past few years, had turned strikingly homogenous as a steady stream of pin-thin, white models - most hailing from Eastern Europe - began to dominate the catwalks of New York and Europe. The result of the whitewashed runways meant that the women being funneled into magazines, cosmetics contracts and ultimately into our popular consciousness as archetypes of the feminine ideal were overwhelmingly white and often emaciated.
Under the prestigious banner of Vogue Italia, Sozzani now celebrates black and brown women, fat girls and obese ones, too.
Sozzani works out of a modest, book-strewn, brightly lit office overlooking Piazza Cadorna, which is dominated by a two-story sculpture of a blunt-tipped needle threaded with a loop of rainbow-colored yarn. Sozzani's magazine claims a modest circulation of about 120,000 to 170,000, compared with American Vogue's 1.2 million. But do not be misled by Sozzani's small footprint.
The seasonal moda donna collections are a citywide affair centered on Piazza del Duomo. Video screens, several stories tall, flash runway images to the public; wall-size speakers throb morning to night with the rhythms of a dance party, and live catwalk productions unfold in the urban center for the entertainment of anyone who happens by. Fashion is woven into the personality of Italy's industrial capital, where mom and pop businesses have blossomed into international brands and fashion week's evening bacchanals - which have attracted everyone from soccer stars to Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi - are as crucial to dealmaking as lobbyists are to Washington.
All of which means that Sozzani is an extremely important woman.
Her magazine rides herd over designers, pushes aesthetic boundaries and often offends. The cover of the August issue featured model Kristen McMenamy dressed as an oil-soaked bird. Sozzani described the photo as a commentary on the fragility of nature; others complained that it glamorized the BP oil spill.
Vogue Italia is an insider's magazine, and where it goes, American magazines will follow - albeit with far less nudity.
In July 2008, Sozzani published an attention-grabbing all-black issue of her magazine. She followed that with a tribute to Africa in sister publication L'Uomo Vogue. She developed a whimsical special-edition ode to black Barbie. And this spring, she launched Vogue Black, a Web site devoted to black models, designers, stylists and other players in the creative field. To feed the new Internet channel, she dispatched black photographers and writers to cover the recent collections in New York and Europe.
"One day I saw her and went over to say hello and she said, 'If I never see another black person . . .!' " recalls her friend Bethann Hardison, who is black, with a laugh. "You can only feel comfortable saying something like that because you're invested. You relate."
Sozzani also started Vogue Curvy, a site that focuses on plus-size fashion.
The Black Issue that launched her on this path was a way to talk about diversity in fashion, but also about diversity and acceptance in general. "The issue made, for me, a special point," Sozzani says. "When you talk about fashion, you are also talking about many things. . . . I wanted to give a message.
"Even young people are very conventional. They are very bourgeois, generally speaking. But they buy Vogue, people who would never buy other things. They discover it's not bourgeois discourse. It's art and life." And, perhaps, through fashion their view of life will be broadened and changed.
Sozzani's activism, while modest in the great history of social upheaval, nonetheless is noteworthy because of the social climate in which this global industry is operating and because of the outsize role that fashion occupies in the culture at large. Questions about public and personal identity are at the root of a host of international antagonisms. Italy is wrestling with immigration phobia; France is busy banning the burqa; and the United States is analyzing its "post-racial," obese self. At issue in each case is how individuals define themselves in the public space and how they want the world to see them.
And within the porous confines of the fashion industry, race has, in the past months, inspired public protests, self-conscious self-analysis and debates about what constitutes racism and sizeism and what should be classified as ignorance.
In the midst of this storm of fretfulness and rebuke stands Sozzani, a diminutive, 60-year-old white editor who grew up in the northern Italian city of Mantua.
"She's creative, but she's also open," says Hardison, a former model and model agency owner. "There's a lot of creative people out there and they don't do this.
"She's a crusader," Hardison says. "She probably doesn't think so, but she is."
The Black Issue
As the editor of Vogue Italia - and the head of its Italian siblings that report on menswear and jewelry - Sozzani makes up one-third of fashion's holy trinity of Vogue czars. The others are French Vogue's Carine Roitfeld and Anna Wintour, the devil who doth wear Prada. Roitfeld enjoys the smell of cigarette smoke, lurks behind a side-swept curtain of brunette hair and favors pencil skirts, stilettos and tight-fitting jackets - a wardrobe that would best be described as painful.
The mythology surrounding the publicly inscrutable Wintour is such that few bat an eye when she arrives at fashion shows flanked by a rotating detail of beefy bodyguards. One of them favored a black-leather duster like a character out of "The Matrix." Another had a gold tooth. The most recent pair included a fire hydrant with a buzz cut and a Jean Reno doppelganger.
Sozzani travels from show to show without her own muscle. She is petite and waif-thin, with golden Rapunzel waves that reach well below her shoulders. Her features are strong and her eyes pale blue. She has an unhurried manner that calls to mind the phrase "comfortable in one's skin."
Told that she is photogenic, she observes that "sometimes I take a beautiful picture that I love. Sometimes, I see a picture of someone who looks like me but" - and she shakes her head in dismay over how a photo can go so wrong - "I think, 'Who is that?' "
Her style is unfussy, but by no means minimal. One particular afternoon in the middle of fashion week, she is dressed in an olive silk military-style shirt and a knee-length navy skirt, both by Lanvin. She prefers significant jewelry, low heels - today's reptile versions are by Manolo Blahnik - small clutch handbags and an iPhone.
Of her Conde Nast compatriots, Sozzani is closest to Wintour. The two have become friends over the years, and Wintour notes, quite simply, that "Franca is magnificent." They have worked together on the global orgy of shopping, Fashion's Night Out, as well as on finding ways to support young designers. In their tete-a-tetes, diversity on the runway is a topic that regularly comes up.
"Right now, it seems as though we are experiencing a wave of Asian models, and while there is certainly a strong African American presence with Joan Smalls, Jourdan Dunn and Chanel Iman, sadly we don't see as many African American models as we could," Wintour says.
The prestigious September issue of the American flagship featured actress Halle Berry on the cover and one of the fashion stories depicted a "We Are the World" multicultural mishmash. Still, its efforts at diversity pale compared with Vogue Italia.
"Franca's decision to take a stance on the issue of racial diversity is typical Franca - she does not tackle subjects in a low-key manner," Wintour says. "She wanted her readers to notice."
The Black Issue began to take shape during the fall of 2007 when Sozzani was struck by the homogenous aesthetic on the runways. "All the girls looked the same. The only one who stood out is Liya Kebede," who is black, Sozzani recalled. "Everything she wore I liked. I started to question myself.
"We cannot use only these girls who are the same," Sozzani says. "We go to the East Side and Russia. We go looking for tall, thin and blue eyes. But we have to scout in Africa, everywhere.
"I decided to do an issue only with black girls. People say, 'It's a ghetto.' But we do thousands of issues with Russian girls and it's not a ghetto."
There was grumbling and skepticism from cultural observers that the issue was a gimmick or that she was exploiting international interest in the American presidential election. "People accused me of doing it because of Obama and said that I was very clever," Sozzani says. "But I started the previous October, before Obama and Hillary Clinton began to fight."
Still, her timing proved prescient. When the issue arrived on newsstands July 1, 2008, Obama had wrapped up the Democratic presidential nomination.
The Black Issue was distributed with four different newsstand covers, each featuring a well-known black model. Inside, a roster of relatively unknown mannequins was spotlighted along with several veterans like Gail O'Neill and Alva Chinn. The plus-size model Toccara Jones - once a contestant on "America's Next Top Model" - posed topless.
The special issue turned into a collector's edition. After its initial print run of 120,000, it had to be reprinted for the United Kingdom, Germany and the United States, which makes up 40 percent of the magazine's readers.
"It was like Michael Jackson was coming to town in the fashion industry. People were scrambling to buy every single cover," says Michaela Angela Davis, a New York-based cultural critic.
"If you put Vogue in front of anything," Davis says, "that brand means something in the hearts of women."
For Sozzani, the Black Issue was only the beginning.
Launching Vogue Black
There have been no cultural pressures on Sozzani to broaden the embrace of her magazine or its Web site. Indeed, the Black Issue did not sell especially well in Italy. Some Americans complain that she created separate venues for women of color - and for larger women - instead of welcoming them more enthusiastically into the pages of Vogue Italia. But what is the extent of an Italian magazine's responsibility for representing such women in its pages? Should their presence reflect their visibility in Italy? The degree to which they are high-end fashion consumers? Or is there some other matrix?
While obesity rates are rising in Italy, only about 13 percent of women there are obese compared with 48 percent of women in the United States. And not so long ago, the few black faces on Italian streets belonged to the Ethiopian immigrants who arrived in the 1970s and '80s. Today, immigrants make up only about 7 percent of the Italian population and many of them, such as those from North Africa and Eastern Europe, have been met with hostility and distrust. Recent stories have detailed the backlash against the Roma, whose large Gypsy camp in northern Milan is under threat from local officials. The Northern League, with its strong anti-immigration stance, thrives in the Milan area, where the only encounter a tourist is likely to have with a minority is along the stone streets of Via Brera, where black Africans sell knockoffs of Prada and Gucci handbags. The Northern League, Sozzani jokes, has a problem with anything south of Florence.
Acceptance of outsiders is "happening step by step," she says. "We are not a big country. We are not as rich as [immigrants] think we are. Probably they think they will find more than they find . . . but we all work with foreigners at home and in the office."
Sozzani was taken aback by the success of the Black Issue. The business opportunity was evident: A market was being ignored. But Sozzani did not want to be perceived as a dabbler, a cultural tourist.
"For me, it became a commitment," Sozzani said. "I talked to these girls. I promised to take care of them."
Before launching Vogue Black, Sozzani conferred with Hardison - tall, dark-skinned with close-cropped hair, a self-declared revolutionary - for advice. Sozzani has known Hardison since the early '80s when they met through the Paris-based designer Azzedine Alaia, who, as it happens, is known for his affection for black models. In 1994 Hardison helped black male model Tyson Beckford sign a groundbreaking advertising contract with Polo Ralph Lauren. In the past three years, she's aggressively rallied the fashion industry to question its own standards. "No one wants to be a racist. The people in this industry are not," Hardison says. "But the results of what they do are racism."
Vogue Black went live in February with Hardison as editor at large. While it's headquartered in Milan, it clearly speaks to an American audience. The site opens in English in the United States, and many of the topics are culled from American popular culture. It mixes model profiles with street fashion pictures and short stories about creative types such as artist Kehinde Wiley. The reaction has been a mix of optimism, ambivalence and curiosity.
"It strikes me as strange, to be honest. Italy is such a small country and it's not particularly diverse," says writer Claire Sulmers, founder of Fashion Bomb Daily. "I wasn't sure where there was a shared common interest."
"I think she's trying to be a maverick," says Sulmers, who covered the spring 2011 Paris collections for the site. "I think they saw what a huge stir the Black Issue caused and felt this is how we can make our mark."
The idea of Sozzani, a white Italian woman, taking even partial ownership of black beauty might be a prickly one, given the negative emotions stirred when Essence hired a white fashion director this summer. The topic was so fraught that during September's fashion week in New York, some industry observers took to the streets in silent protest. And Davis - a tall, cosmopolitan black woman with a sandy-colored Afro - who was quite vocal in her criticism of Essence, hosted an hours-long panel discussion/community conversation/venting session at New York University.
During that town hall, moderators held up the October issue of Elle as an example of how white editors fail in their representation of black women and large women. Actress Gabourey Sidibe was on the cover and her image was derided as unflattering. Had she been the target of overzealous retouchers who lightened her complexion? Unskilled hairstylists who victimized her with a dime-store wig? Fatophobes who cropped her plus-size body out of the picture? (No, no and no, said Elle.)
For her part, Sozzani has mostly escaped criticism for insensitivity.
"She has a breadth of experience and knowledge," Davis says. "Franca gets it."
Can't please everybody
It's easier to turn a smaller boat than an aircraft carrier. Sozzani's third-floor office at Vogue Italia is tiny compared with the grand quarters from which American editors in chief typically reign. There is no fancy reception area, just a couple of nondescript chairs tucked against a wall in a corridor lined with rumpled gray carpeting and crowded with boxes and file cabinets.
The rows and stacks of magazines that fill the bookshelves in her office are a testament to the 22 years that she has ruled Italian fashion. And as she sits talking at one end of a large glass conference table, one can't help but notice the two unopened bouquets of flowers that lie forlorn in their brown wrapping paper at the other.
Vogue Italia doesn't have the commercial pressures of its much larger American counterpart. Its greatest strength is its nimbleness and its point of view.
"Italian Vogue magazine is an experimental magazine - that's the impression people have," Sozzani says. "I don't think it's experimental; it has a vision. It can't please everybody. I don't want to please everybody."
Still, Sozzani has decided that she will happily embrace anyone - black, brown, thin, fat - who sees the world as she does.
Race, Criminal Records, and Getting a Job
Sociological Images
In this video sociologist Devah Pager describes her experimental research on race, criminal records, and employment with Dalton Conley. Using matched pairs of black and white students posing as job applicants, she finds, stunningly, that black men without a criminal record are as likely to get a call back for a job as white men with one (see the tables here). Black men with criminal records receive call backs for only about one in 20 completed job applications.
http://thesocietypages.org/socimages/2010/10/15/race-criminal-records-and-getting-a-job/
In this video sociologist Devah Pager describes her experimental research on race, criminal records, and employment with Dalton Conley. Using matched pairs of black and white students posing as job applicants, she finds, stunningly, that black men without a criminal record are as likely to get a call back for a job as white men with one (see the tables here). Black men with criminal records receive call backs for only about one in 20 completed job applications.
http://thesocietypages.org/socimages/2010/10/15/race-criminal-records-and-getting-a-job/
Former Professor Claims Nursing Textbook Contains Racial Stereotypes
sserts Refusal to Use Textbook Caused Firing
by AFRO Staff
Afro: http://www.afro.com/sections/news/afro_briefs/story.htm?storyid=3314
A former professor at the University of Central Florida recently filed a lawsuit against the school, claiming she was fired for refusing to use a textbook that contained offensive racial stereotypes.
According to The Orlando Sentinel, the suit, filed in federal court on Nov. 10, states that Dr. Nancy Rudner Lugo was a tenured professor at the university’s College of Nursing, but the school chose not to renew her contract in 2008.
Rudner Lugo, who is racially mixed with Jewish and Hispanic backgrounds, alleges that she was let go after speaking out against and refusing to use the textbook “Guide to Culturally Competent Health Care.” The suit claims the university ignored her concerns over the book after it received numerous student complaints.
The alleged stereotypical material first appears in the third chapter titled, “People of African American Heritage.” In the material, authors Larry D. Purnell and Betty J. Paulanka say that, “Because significant numbers of African Americans are poor and live in inner-cities, they tend to concentrate their efforts on day-to-day survival.”
The chapter also asserts that African-Americans are usually “high-keyed, animated, confrontational and interpersonal” and said that in the Black community, “being overweight is seen as positive” because “its important to have meat on one’s bones to be able to afford weight loss during times of sickness.”
Material on other ethnic groups appear later in the text when it explains that Japanese wives “care for husbands to a great extent [because] Japanese men are presumed not to be capable of managing day-to-day matters.”
“The book is one of the best-selling publications about nursing cultural trends in the country, and it won the American Journal of Nursing book award in 2005,” Grant Heston, spokesman for UCF told Reuters. “The American Association of Colleges of Nursing includes teaching the book’s ‘Purnell Model for Cultural Competence’ in its tool kit of resources colleges are encouraged to use.”
Paulanka said she believes the statements mostly hold true to new immigrants and their native culture, and said she can see how others who have lived in the U.S. for a long time would take offense to the material.
“I can see it because if I was totally Americanized and I grew up in a very American neighborhood and people were saying this is what I thought, I would find that offensive,” Paulanka told Reuters. “But it’s true if you go back to the native culture.” She added that the material was written by either an expert of the culture or a native of the group.
Purnell, the book’s co-author and a faculty member of the University of Delaware’s nursing department echoed Paulanka’s defense of the material, telling Reuters, “Culture is very sensitive. The statement may be true but that doesn’t mean they like it. It’s true for the group, not for the individual.”
The suit alleges that the university fired Rudner Lugo in retribution, violating state and federal statutes. The former professor, who once earned $70,000 a year while at the institution, seeks lost wages and damages.
by AFRO Staff
Afro: http://www.afro.com/sections/news/afro_briefs/story.htm?storyid=3314
A former professor at the University of Central Florida recently filed a lawsuit against the school, claiming she was fired for refusing to use a textbook that contained offensive racial stereotypes.
According to The Orlando Sentinel, the suit, filed in federal court on Nov. 10, states that Dr. Nancy Rudner Lugo was a tenured professor at the university’s College of Nursing, but the school chose not to renew her contract in 2008.
Rudner Lugo, who is racially mixed with Jewish and Hispanic backgrounds, alleges that she was let go after speaking out against and refusing to use the textbook “Guide to Culturally Competent Health Care.” The suit claims the university ignored her concerns over the book after it received numerous student complaints.
The alleged stereotypical material first appears in the third chapter titled, “People of African American Heritage.” In the material, authors Larry D. Purnell and Betty J. Paulanka say that, “Because significant numbers of African Americans are poor and live in inner-cities, they tend to concentrate their efforts on day-to-day survival.”
The chapter also asserts that African-Americans are usually “high-keyed, animated, confrontational and interpersonal” and said that in the Black community, “being overweight is seen as positive” because “its important to have meat on one’s bones to be able to afford weight loss during times of sickness.”
Material on other ethnic groups appear later in the text when it explains that Japanese wives “care for husbands to a great extent [because] Japanese men are presumed not to be capable of managing day-to-day matters.”
“The book is one of the best-selling publications about nursing cultural trends in the country, and it won the American Journal of Nursing book award in 2005,” Grant Heston, spokesman for UCF told Reuters. “The American Association of Colleges of Nursing includes teaching the book’s ‘Purnell Model for Cultural Competence’ in its tool kit of resources colleges are encouraged to use.”
Paulanka said she believes the statements mostly hold true to new immigrants and their native culture, and said she can see how others who have lived in the U.S. for a long time would take offense to the material.
“I can see it because if I was totally Americanized and I grew up in a very American neighborhood and people were saying this is what I thought, I would find that offensive,” Paulanka told Reuters. “But it’s true if you go back to the native culture.” She added that the material was written by either an expert of the culture or a native of the group.
Purnell, the book’s co-author and a faculty member of the University of Delaware’s nursing department echoed Paulanka’s defense of the material, telling Reuters, “Culture is very sensitive. The statement may be true but that doesn’t mean they like it. It’s true for the group, not for the individual.”
The suit alleges that the university fired Rudner Lugo in retribution, violating state and federal statutes. The former professor, who once earned $70,000 a year while at the institution, seeks lost wages and damages.
If You're Black in Philly, Every Day is a TSA Day
Change.org
Why all the furor and consternation about the government sanctioned group grope playing out in our nation's airports this Thanksgiving season?
Okay, I'll admit the prospect of having a blue uniformed minion of the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) feeling me up - the so-called "enhanced pat-down" - isn't something I find appealing. Still, it isn't an indignity that any of us has to put up with day in and day out.
If you are an African-American like me, however, and you happen to live in Philadelphia or in an ever growing list of US cities, having to possibly endure the humiliation of being singled-out, pulled aside and frisked is a daily concern.
Of course the uniformed authority behind these invasive and dehumanizing body pat-down security screens isn't the TSA but local police. Worse yet, this type of civil rights violating affront is not confined to just the airport, where at least the reasoning behind the searches (to guard against terrorists) is clear and where everyone is subjected to basically the same treatment. No, the security screening measures I'm speaking of are being conducted on the streets of cities like Philadelphia.
Further, unlike the understandably disgruntled folks who believe the airport invasion of privacy is an outrage, black folks in Philly don't have the option of opting out. If you're black or Latino and walking down a Philadelphia street, you're fair game.
Philly police, at the direction of that city's mayor and its Police Commissioner Charles Ramsey, have "stopped and frisked" thousands of its black and brown citizens, subjecting them to illegal searches and questioning for no other reason than they "looked suspicious." The declared goal of the policy is to fight crime and get guns off the streets.
However, according to a recent article on Philly.com, Philadelphia police department statistics indicate a dramatic jump in pedestrians being stopped and frisked, from 102,319 in 2005 to 253,333 in 2009 - an increase of 148 percent. Of those individuals stopped in 2009, some 72 percent were African-American. Only 8 percent of the searches led to arrests, and most of those arrests were for disorderly conduct because the folks stopped and frisked complained about their treatment.
When it comes to Philly, a brother shouldn't expect any love, at least not from the authorities.
Both the mayor and Commissioner Ramsey defend the policy and argue such measures need to be taken in order to combat crime.
But earlier this month, a class-action lawsuit was filed in federal court on behalf of eight black and Latino men, including a state lawmaker and a former police officer, who claim Philly's "stop and frisk" policy is unconstitutional. The lawsuit asks the federal court to bar police from searching and questioning Philadelphia residents simply on the basis of race, nationality or without reasonable suspicion - basically, asking for a ban against racial profiling.
Instead of waiting for the lawsuit to play out in the courts, contact Philly's leaders directly and tell them to rescind Philly's stop-and-frisk policy now.
Why all the furor and consternation about the government sanctioned group grope playing out in our nation's airports this Thanksgiving season?
Okay, I'll admit the prospect of having a blue uniformed minion of the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) feeling me up - the so-called "enhanced pat-down" - isn't something I find appealing. Still, it isn't an indignity that any of us has to put up with day in and day out.
If you are an African-American like me, however, and you happen to live in Philadelphia or in an ever growing list of US cities, having to possibly endure the humiliation of being singled-out, pulled aside and frisked is a daily concern.
Of course the uniformed authority behind these invasive and dehumanizing body pat-down security screens isn't the TSA but local police. Worse yet, this type of civil rights violating affront is not confined to just the airport, where at least the reasoning behind the searches (to guard against terrorists) is clear and where everyone is subjected to basically the same treatment. No, the security screening measures I'm speaking of are being conducted on the streets of cities like Philadelphia.
Further, unlike the understandably disgruntled folks who believe the airport invasion of privacy is an outrage, black folks in Philly don't have the option of opting out. If you're black or Latino and walking down a Philadelphia street, you're fair game.
Philly police, at the direction of that city's mayor and its Police Commissioner Charles Ramsey, have "stopped and frisked" thousands of its black and brown citizens, subjecting them to illegal searches and questioning for no other reason than they "looked suspicious." The declared goal of the policy is to fight crime and get guns off the streets.
However, according to a recent article on Philly.com, Philadelphia police department statistics indicate a dramatic jump in pedestrians being stopped and frisked, from 102,319 in 2005 to 253,333 in 2009 - an increase of 148 percent. Of those individuals stopped in 2009, some 72 percent were African-American. Only 8 percent of the searches led to arrests, and most of those arrests were for disorderly conduct because the folks stopped and frisked complained about their treatment.
When it comes to Philly, a brother shouldn't expect any love, at least not from the authorities.
Both the mayor and Commissioner Ramsey defend the policy and argue such measures need to be taken in order to combat crime.
But earlier this month, a class-action lawsuit was filed in federal court on behalf of eight black and Latino men, including a state lawmaker and a former police officer, who claim Philly's "stop and frisk" policy is unconstitutional. The lawsuit asks the federal court to bar police from searching and questioning Philadelphia residents simply on the basis of race, nationality or without reasonable suspicion - basically, asking for a ban against racial profiling.
Instead of waiting for the lawsuit to play out in the courts, contact Philly's leaders directly and tell them to rescind Philly's stop-and-frisk policy now.
Celebrating Secession Without the Slaves
By KATHARINE Q. SEELYE
NYT
ATLANTA — The Civil War, the most wrenching and bloody episode in American history, may not seem like much of a cause for celebration, especially in the South.
And yet, as the 150th anniversary of the four-year conflict gets under way, some groups in the old Confederacy are planning at least a certain amount of hoopla, chiefly around the glory days of secession, when 11 states declared their sovereignty under a banner of states’ rights and broke from the union.
The events include a “secession ball” in the former slave port of Charleston (“a joyous night of music, dancing, food and drink,” says the invitation), which will be replicated on a smaller scale in other cities. A parade is being planned in Montgomery, Ala., along with a mock swearing-in of Jefferson Davis as president of the Confederacy.
In addition, the Sons of Confederate Veterans and some of its local chapters are preparing various television commercials that they hope to show next year. “All we wanted was to be left alone to govern ourselves,” says one ad from the group’s Georgia Division.
That some — even now — are honoring secession, with barely a nod to the role of slavery, underscores how divisive a topic the war remains, with Americans continuing to debate its causes, its meaning and its legacy.
“We in the South, who have been kicked around for an awfully long time and are accused of being racist, we would just like the truth to be known,” said Michael Givens, commander-in-chief of the Sons, explaining the reason for the television ads. While there were many causes of the war, he said, “our people were only fighting to protect themselves from an invasion and for their independence.”
Not everyone is on board with this program, of course. The N.A.A.C.P., for one, plans to protest some of these events, saying that celebrating secession is tantamount to celebrating slavery.
“I can only imagine what kind of celebration they would have if they had won,” said Lonnie Randolph, president of the South Carolina N.A.A.C.P.
He said he was dumbfounded by “all of this glamorization and sanitization of what really happened.” When Southerners refer to states’ rights, he said, “they are really talking about their idea of one right — to buy and sell human beings.”
The secession events are among hundreds if not thousands that will unfold over the next four years in honor of the Civil War’s sesquicentennial. From Fort Sumter to Appomattox, historic sites across the South, and some in the North, plan to highlight various aspects of America’s deadliest conflict — and perhaps its least resolved.
Many of the activities are purely historical, and some, like a gathering this month in Gettysburg for the 147th anniversary of Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, will be solemn. At Antietam, on Saturday, the annual memorial will feature 23,000 candles, representing that battle’s casualties.
Some cities and states are promoting their Civil War history with an eye toward attracting tourists. In Atlanta, the Cyclorama, a giant painting-in-the-round that depicts the first day of the Battle of Atlanta, is being “refreshed and rebranded” as part of an overall marketing plan, said Camille Love, the city’s director of cultural affairs.
Commemorating the Civil War has never been easy. The centennial 50 years ago coincided with the civil rights movement, and most of the South was still effectively segregated, making a mockery of any notion that the slaves had truly become free and equal.
Congress had designated an official centennial commission, which lost credibility when it planned to meet in a segregated hotel; this year, Congress has not bothered with an official commission and any master narrative of the war seems elusive.
“We don’t know what to commemorate because we’ve never faced up to the implications of what the thing was really about,” said Andrew Young, a veteran of the civil rights movement and former mayor of Atlanta.
“The easy answer for black folk is that it set us free, but it really didn’t,” Mr. Young added. “We had another 100 years of segregation. We’ve never had our complete reconciliation of the forces that divide us.”
The passion that the Civil War still evokes was evident earlier this year when Gov. Bob McDonnell of Virginia designated April as Confederate History Month — without mentioning slavery. After a national outcry, he apologized and changed his proclamation to condemn slavery and spell out that slavery had led to war.
The proclamation was urged on him by the Sons of Confederate Veterans, which asserts that the Confederacy was a crusade for small government and states’ rights. The sesquicentennial, which coincides now with the rise of the Tea Party movement, is providing a new chance for adherents to promote that view.
Jeff Antley, a member of the Sons of Confederate Veterans and the Confederate Heritage Trust, is organizing the secession ball in Charleston and a 10-day re-enactment of the Confederate encampment at Fort Sumter, where the first shots of the war were fired on April 12, 1861. He said these events were not about modern politics but were meant to honor those South Carolinians who signed the state’s ordinance of secession on Dec. 20, 1860, when it became the first state to dissolve its union with the United States.
“We’re celebrating that those 170 people risked their lives and fortunes to stand for what they believed in, which is self-government,” Mr. Antley said. “Many people in the South still believe that is a just and honorable cause. Do I believe they were right in what they did? Absolutely,” he said, noting that he spoke for himself and not any organization. “There’s no shame or regret over the action those men took.”
Mr. Antley said he was not defending slavery, which he called an abomination. “But defending the South’s right to secede, the soldiers’ right to defend their homes and the right to self-government doesn’t mean your arguments are without weight because of slavery,” he said.
Most historians say it is impossible to carve out slavery from the context of the war. As James W. Loewen, a liberal sociologist and author of “Lies My Teacher Told Me,” put it: “The North did not go to war to end slavery, it went to war to hold the country together and only gradually did it become anti-slavery — but slavery is why the South seceded.”
In its secession papers, Mississippi, for example, called slavery “the greatest material interest of the world” and said that attempts to stop it would undermine “commerce and civilization.”
The conflict has been playing out in recent decades in disputes over the stories told or not told in museum exhibits and on battlefield plaques.
“These battles of memory are not only academic,” said Mark Potok, the director of intelligence at the Southern Poverty Law Center. “They are really about present-day attitudes. I don’t think the neo-Confederate movement is growing, but it’s gotten a new shot of life because of the sesquicentennial.”
NYT
ATLANTA — The Civil War, the most wrenching and bloody episode in American history, may not seem like much of a cause for celebration, especially in the South.
And yet, as the 150th anniversary of the four-year conflict gets under way, some groups in the old Confederacy are planning at least a certain amount of hoopla, chiefly around the glory days of secession, when 11 states declared their sovereignty under a banner of states’ rights and broke from the union.
The events include a “secession ball” in the former slave port of Charleston (“a joyous night of music, dancing, food and drink,” says the invitation), which will be replicated on a smaller scale in other cities. A parade is being planned in Montgomery, Ala., along with a mock swearing-in of Jefferson Davis as president of the Confederacy.
In addition, the Sons of Confederate Veterans and some of its local chapters are preparing various television commercials that they hope to show next year. “All we wanted was to be left alone to govern ourselves,” says one ad from the group’s Georgia Division.
That some — even now — are honoring secession, with barely a nod to the role of slavery, underscores how divisive a topic the war remains, with Americans continuing to debate its causes, its meaning and its legacy.
“We in the South, who have been kicked around for an awfully long time and are accused of being racist, we would just like the truth to be known,” said Michael Givens, commander-in-chief of the Sons, explaining the reason for the television ads. While there were many causes of the war, he said, “our people were only fighting to protect themselves from an invasion and for their independence.”
Not everyone is on board with this program, of course. The N.A.A.C.P., for one, plans to protest some of these events, saying that celebrating secession is tantamount to celebrating slavery.
“I can only imagine what kind of celebration they would have if they had won,” said Lonnie Randolph, president of the South Carolina N.A.A.C.P.
He said he was dumbfounded by “all of this glamorization and sanitization of what really happened.” When Southerners refer to states’ rights, he said, “they are really talking about their idea of one right — to buy and sell human beings.”
The secession events are among hundreds if not thousands that will unfold over the next four years in honor of the Civil War’s sesquicentennial. From Fort Sumter to Appomattox, historic sites across the South, and some in the North, plan to highlight various aspects of America’s deadliest conflict — and perhaps its least resolved.
Many of the activities are purely historical, and some, like a gathering this month in Gettysburg for the 147th anniversary of Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, will be solemn. At Antietam, on Saturday, the annual memorial will feature 23,000 candles, representing that battle’s casualties.
Some cities and states are promoting their Civil War history with an eye toward attracting tourists. In Atlanta, the Cyclorama, a giant painting-in-the-round that depicts the first day of the Battle of Atlanta, is being “refreshed and rebranded” as part of an overall marketing plan, said Camille Love, the city’s director of cultural affairs.
Commemorating the Civil War has never been easy. The centennial 50 years ago coincided with the civil rights movement, and most of the South was still effectively segregated, making a mockery of any notion that the slaves had truly become free and equal.
Congress had designated an official centennial commission, which lost credibility when it planned to meet in a segregated hotel; this year, Congress has not bothered with an official commission and any master narrative of the war seems elusive.
“We don’t know what to commemorate because we’ve never faced up to the implications of what the thing was really about,” said Andrew Young, a veteran of the civil rights movement and former mayor of Atlanta.
“The easy answer for black folk is that it set us free, but it really didn’t,” Mr. Young added. “We had another 100 years of segregation. We’ve never had our complete reconciliation of the forces that divide us.”
The passion that the Civil War still evokes was evident earlier this year when Gov. Bob McDonnell of Virginia designated April as Confederate History Month — without mentioning slavery. After a national outcry, he apologized and changed his proclamation to condemn slavery and spell out that slavery had led to war.
The proclamation was urged on him by the Sons of Confederate Veterans, which asserts that the Confederacy was a crusade for small government and states’ rights. The sesquicentennial, which coincides now with the rise of the Tea Party movement, is providing a new chance for adherents to promote that view.
Jeff Antley, a member of the Sons of Confederate Veterans and the Confederate Heritage Trust, is organizing the secession ball in Charleston and a 10-day re-enactment of the Confederate encampment at Fort Sumter, where the first shots of the war were fired on April 12, 1861. He said these events were not about modern politics but were meant to honor those South Carolinians who signed the state’s ordinance of secession on Dec. 20, 1860, when it became the first state to dissolve its union with the United States.
“We’re celebrating that those 170 people risked their lives and fortunes to stand for what they believed in, which is self-government,” Mr. Antley said. “Many people in the South still believe that is a just and honorable cause. Do I believe they were right in what they did? Absolutely,” he said, noting that he spoke for himself and not any organization. “There’s no shame or regret over the action those men took.”
Mr. Antley said he was not defending slavery, which he called an abomination. “But defending the South’s right to secede, the soldiers’ right to defend their homes and the right to self-government doesn’t mean your arguments are without weight because of slavery,” he said.
Most historians say it is impossible to carve out slavery from the context of the war. As James W. Loewen, a liberal sociologist and author of “Lies My Teacher Told Me,” put it: “The North did not go to war to end slavery, it went to war to hold the country together and only gradually did it become anti-slavery — but slavery is why the South seceded.”
In its secession papers, Mississippi, for example, called slavery “the greatest material interest of the world” and said that attempts to stop it would undermine “commerce and civilization.”
The conflict has been playing out in recent decades in disputes over the stories told or not told in museum exhibits and on battlefield plaques.
“These battles of memory are not only academic,” said Mark Potok, the director of intelligence at the Southern Poverty Law Center. “They are really about present-day attitudes. I don’t think the neo-Confederate movement is growing, but it’s gotten a new shot of life because of the sesquicentennial.”
Tuesday, November 30, 2010
The future belongs to Islam
The Muslim world has youth, numbers and global ambitions. The West is growing old and enfeebled, and lacks the will to rebuff those who would supplant it. It's the end of the world as we've known it. An excerpt from 'America Alone'.
MARK STEYN | Oct 20, 2006
Sept. 11, 2001, was not "the day everything changed," but the day that revealed how much had already changed. On Sept. 10, how many journalists had the Council of American-Islamic Relations or the Canadian Islamic Congress or the Muslim Council of Britain in their Rolodexes? If you'd said that whether something does or does not cause offence to Muslims would be the early 21st century's principal political dynamic in Denmark, Sweden, the Netherlands, Belgium, France and the United Kingdom, most folks would have thought you were crazy. Yet on that Tuesday morning the top of the iceberg bobbed up and toppled the Twin Towers.
This is about the seven-eighths below the surface -- the larger forces at play in the developed world that have left Europe too enfeebled to resist its remorseless transformation into Eurabia and that call into question the future of much of the rest of the world. The key factors are: demographic decline; the unsustainability of the social democratic state; and civilizational exhaustion.
Let's start with demography, because everything does:
If your school has 200 guys and you're playing a school with 2,000 pupils, it doesn't mean your baseball team is definitely going to lose but it certainly gives the other fellows a big starting advantage. Likewise, if you want to launch a revolution, it's not very likely if you've only got seven revolutionaries. And they're all over 80. But, if you've got two million and seven revolutionaries and they're all under 30 you're in business.
For example, I wonder how many pontificators on the "Middle East peace process" ever run this number:
The median age in the Gaza Strip is 15.8 years.
Once you know that, all the rest is details. If you were a "moderate Palestinian" leader, would you want to try to persuade a nation -- or pseudo-nation -- of unemployed poorly educated teenage boys raised in a UN-supervised European-funded death cult to see sense? Any analysis of the "Palestinian problem" that doesn't take into account the most important determinant on the ground is a waste of time.
Likewise, the salient feature of Europe, Canada, Japan and Russia is that they're running out of babies. What's happening in the developed world is one of the fastest demographic evolutions in history: most of us have seen a gazillion heartwarming ethnic comedies -- My Big Fat Greek Wedding and its ilk -- in which some uptight WASPy type starts dating a gal from a vast loving fecund Mediterranean family, so abundantly endowed with sisters and cousins and uncles that you can barely get in the room. It is, in fact, the inversion of the truth. Greece has a fertility rate hovering just below 1.3 births per couple, which is what demographers call the point of "lowest-low" fertility from which no human society has ever recovered. And Greece's fertility is the healthiest in Mediterranean Europe: Italy has a fertility rate of 1.2, Spain 1.1. Insofar as any citizens of the developed world have "big" families these days, it's the anglo democracies: America's fertility rate is 2.1, New Zealand a little below. Hollywood should be making My Big Fat Uptight Protestant Wedding in which some sad Greek only child marries into a big heartwarming New Zealand family where the spouse actually has a sibling.
As I say, this isn't a projection: it's happening now. There's no need to extrapolate, and if you do it gets a little freaky, but, just for fun, here goes: by 2050, 60 per cent of Italians will have no brothers, no sisters, no cousins, no aunts, no uncles. The big Italian family, with papa pouring the vino and mama spooning out the pasta down an endless table of grandparents and nieces and nephews, will be gone, no more, dead as the dinosaurs. As Noel Coward once remarked in another context, "Funiculi, funicula, funic yourself." By mid-century, Italians will have no choice in the matter.
Experts talk about root causes. But demography is the most basic root of all. A people that won't multiply can't go forth or go anywhere. Those who do will shape the age we live in.
Demographic decline and the unsustainability of the social democratic state are closely related. In America, politicians upset about the federal deficit like to complain that we're piling up debts our children and grandchildren will have to pay off. But in Europe the unaffordable entitlements are in even worse shape: there are no kids or grandkids to stick it to.
You might formulate it like this:
Age + Welfare = Disaster for you;
Youth + Will = Disaster for whoever gets in your way.
By "will," I mean the metaphorical spine of a culture. Africa, to take another example, also has plenty of young people, but it's riddled with AIDS and, for the most part, Africans don't think of themselves as Africans: as we saw in Rwanda, their primary identity is tribal, and most tribes have no global ambitions. Islam, however, has serious global ambitions, and it forms the primal, core identity of most of its adherents -- in the Middle East, South Asia and elsewhere.
Islam has youth and will, Europe has age and welfare.
We are witnessing the end of the late 20th- century progressive welfare democracy. Its fiscal bankruptcy is merely a symptom of a more fundamental bankruptcy: its insufficiency as an animating principle for society. The children and grandchildren of those fascists and republicans who waged a bitter civil war for the future of Spain now shrug when a bunch of foreigners blow up their capital. Too sedated even to sue for terms, they capitulate instantly. Over on the other side of the equation, the modern multicultural state is too watery a concept to bind huge numbers of immigrants to the land of their nominal citizenship. So they look elsewhere and find the jihad. The Western Muslim's pan-Islamic identity is merely the first great cause in a world where globalized pathologies are taking the place of old-school nationalism.
For states in demographic decline with ever more lavish social programs, the question is a simple one: can they get real? Can they grow up before they grow old? If not, then they'll end their days in societies dominated by people with a very different world view.
Which brings us to the third factor -- the enervated state of the Western world, the sense of civilizational ennui, of nations too mired in cultural relativism to understand what's at stake. As it happens, that third point is closely related to the first two. To Americans, it doesn't always seem obvious that there's any connection between the "war on terror" and the so-called "pocketbook issues" of domestic politics. But there is a correlation between the structural weaknesses of the social democratic state and the rise of a globalized Islam. The state has gradually annexed all the responsibilities of adulthood -- health care, child care, care of the elderly -- to the point where it's effectively severed its citizens from humanity's primal instincts, not least the survival instinct. In the American context, the federal "deficit" isn't the problem; it's the government programs that cause the deficit. These programs would still be wrong even if Bill Gates wrote a cheque to cover them each month. They corrode the citizen's sense of self-reliance to a potentially fatal degree. Big government is a national security threat: it increases your vulnerability to threats like Islamism, and makes it less likely you'll be able to summon the will to rebuff it. We should have learned that lesson on Sept. 11, 2001, when big government flopped big-time and the only good news of the day came from the ad hoc citizen militia of Flight 93.
There were two forces at play in the late 20th century: in the Eastern bloc, the collapse of Communism; in the West, the collapse of confidence. One of the most obvious refutations of Francis Fukuyama's famous thesis The End Of History -- written at the victory of liberal pluralist democracy over Soviet Communism -- is that the victors didn't see it as such. Americans -- or at least non-Democrat-voting Americans -- may talk about "winning" the Cold War but the French and the Belgians and Germans and Canadians don't. Very few British do. These are all formal NATO allies -- they were, technically, on the winning side against a horrible tyranny few would wish to live under themselves. In Europe, there was an initial moment of euphoria: it was hard not be moved by the crowds sweeping through the Berlin Wall, especially as so many of them were hot-looking Red babes eager to enjoy a Carlsberg or Stella Artois with even the nerdiest running dog of imperialism. But, when the moment faded, pace Fukuyama, there was no sense on the Continent that our Big Idea had beaten their Big Idea. With the best will in the world, it's hard to credit the citizens of France or Italy as having made any serious contribution to the defeat of Communism. Au contraire, millions of them voted for it, year in, year out. And, with the end of the Soviet existential threat, the enervation of the West only accelerated.
In Thomas P. M. Barnett's book Blueprint For Action, Robert D. Kaplan, a very shrewd observer of global affairs, is quoted referring to the lawless fringes of the map as "Indian territory." It's a droll joke but a misleading one. The difference between the old Indian territory and the new is this: no one had to worry about the Sioux riding down Fifth Avenue. Today, with a few hundred bucks on his ATM card, the fellow from the badlands can be in the heart of the metropolis within hours.
Here's another difference: in the old days, the white man settled the Indian territory. Now the followers of the badland's radical imams settle the metropolis.
And another difference: technology. In the old days, the Injuns had bows and arrows and the cavalry had rifles. In today's Indian territory, countries that can't feed their own people have nuclear weapons.
But beyond that the very phrase "Indian territory" presumes that inevitably these badlands will be brought within the bounds of the ordered world. In fact, a lot of today's "Indian territory" was relatively ordered a generation or two back -- West Africa, Pakistan, Bosnia. Though Eastern Europe and Latin America and parts of Asia are freer now than they were in the seventies, other swaths of the map have spiralled backwards. Which is more likely? That the parts of the world under pressure will turn into post-Communist Poland or post-Communist Yugoslavia? In Europe, the demographic pressures favour the latter.
The enemies we face in the future will look a lot like al-Qaeda: transnational, globalized, locally franchised, extensively outsourced -- but tied together through a powerful identity that leaps frontiers and continents. They won't be nation-states and they'll have no interest in becoming nation-states, though they might use the husks thereof, as they did in Afghanistan and then Somalia. The jihad may be the first, but other transnational deformities will embrace similar techniques. Sept. 10 institutions like the UN and the EU will be unlikely to provide effective responses.
We can argue about what consequences these demographic trends will have, but to say blithely they have none is ridiculous. The basic demography explains, for example, the critical difference between the "war on terror" for Americans and Europeans: in the U.S., the war is something to be fought in the treacherous sands of the Sunni Triangle and the caves of the Hindu Kush; you go to faraway places and kill foreigners. But, in Europe, it's a civil war. Neville Chamberlain dismissed Czechoslovakia as "a faraway country of which we know little." This time round, for much of western Europe it turned out the faraway country of which they knew little was their own.
Four years into the "war on terror," the Bush administration began promoting a new formulation: "the long war." Not a good sign. In a short war, put your money on tanks and bombs. In a long war, the better bet is will and manpower. The longer the long war gets, the harder it will be, because it's a race against time, against lengthening demographic, economic and geopolitical odds. By "demographic," I mean the Muslim world's high birth rate, which by mid-century will give tiny Yemen a higher population than vast empty Russia. By "economic," I mean the perfect storm the Europeans will face within this decade, because their lavish welfare states are unsustainable on their post-Christian birth rates. By "geopolitical," I mean that, if you think the United Nations and other international organizations are antipathetic to America now, wait a few years and see what kind of support you get from a semi-Islamified Europe.
Almost every geopolitical challenge in the years ahead has its roots in demography, but not every demographic crisis will play out the same way. That's what makes doing anything about it even more problematic -- because different countries' reactions to their own particular domestic circumstances are likely to play out in destabilizing ways on the international scene. In Japan, the demographic crisis exists virtually in laboratory conditions -- no complicating factors; in Russia, it will be determined by the country's relationship with a cramped neighbour -- China; and in Europe, the new owners are already in place -- like a tenant with a right-to-buy agreement.
Let's start in the most geriatric jurisdiction on the planet. In Japan, the rising sun has already passed into the next phase of its long sunset: net population loss. 2005 was the first year since records began in which the country had more deaths than births. Japan offers the chance to observe the demographic death spiral in its purest form. It's a country with no immigration, no significant minorities and no desire for any: just the Japanese, aging and dwindling.
At first it doesn't sound too bad: compared with the United States, most advanced societies are very crowded. If you're in a cramped apartment in a noisy congested city, losing a couple hundred thousand seems a fine trade-off. The difficulty, in a modern social democratic state, is managing which people to lose: already, according to the Japan Times, depopulation is "presenting the government with pressing challenges on the social and economic front, including ensuring provision of social security services and securing the labour force." For one thing, the shortage of children has led to a shortage of obstetricians. Why would any talented ambitious med school student want to go into a field in such precipitous decline? As a result, if you live in certain parts of Japan, childbirth is all in the timing. On Oki Island, try to time the contractions for Monday morning. That's when the maternity ward is open -- first day of the week, 10 a.m., when an obstetrician flies in to attend to any pregnant mothers who happen to be around. And at 5.30 p.m. she flies out. So, if you've been careless enough to time your childbirth for Tuesday through Sunday, you'll have to climb into a helicopter and zip off to give birth alone in a strange hospital unsurrounded by tiresome loved ones. Do Lamaze classes on Oki now teach you to time your breathing to the whirring of the chopper blades?
The last local obstetrician left the island in 2006 and the health service isn't expecting any more. Doubtless most of us can recall reading similar stories over the years from remote rural districts in America, Canada, Australia. After all, why would a village of a few hundred people have a great medical system? But Oki has a population of 17,000, and there are still no obstetricians: birthing is a dying business.
So what will happen? There are a couple of scenarios: whatever Japanese feelings on immigration, a country with great infrastructure won't empty out for long, any more than a state-of-the-art factory that goes belly up stays empty for long. At some point, someone else will move in to Japan's plant.
And the alternative? In The Children Of Men, P. D. James' dystopian fantasy about a barren world, there are special dolls for women whose maternal instinct has gone unfulfilled: pretend mothers take their artificial children for walks on the street or to the swings in the park. In Japan, that's no longer the stuff of dystopian fantasy. At the beginning of the century, the country's toy makers noticed they had a problem: toys are for children and Japan doesn't have many. What to do? In 2005, Tomy began marketing a new doll called Yumel -- a baby boy with a range of 1,200 phrases designed to serve as companions for the elderly. He says not just the usual things -- "I wuv you" -- but also asks the questions your grandchildren would ask if you had any: "Why do elephants have long noses?" Yumel joins his friend, the Snuggling Ifbot, a toy designed to have the conversation of a five-year old child which its makers, with the usual Japanese efficiency, have determined is just enough chit-chat to prevent the old folks going senile. It seems an appropriate final comment on the social democratic state: in a childish infantilized self-absorbed society where adults have been stripped of all responsibility, you need never stop playing with toys. We are the children we never had.
And why leave it at that? Is it likely an ever smaller number of young people will want to spend their active years looking after an ever greater number of old people? Or will it be simpler to put all that cutting-edge Japanese technology to good use and take a flier on Mister Roboto and the post-human future? After all, what's easier for the governing class? Weaning a pampered population off the good life and re-teaching them the lost biological impulse or giving the Sony Corporation a licence to become the Cloney Corporation? If you need to justify it to yourself, you'd grab the graphs and say, well, demographic decline is universal. It's like industrialization a couple of centuries back; everyone will get to it eventually, but the first to do so will have huge advantages: the relevant comparison is not with England's early 19th century population surge but with England's Industrial Revolution. In the industrial age, manpower was critical. In the new technological age, manpower will be optional -- and indeed, if most of the available manpower's Muslim, it's actually a disadvantage. As the most advanced society with the most advanced demographic crisis, Japan seems likely to be the first jurisdiction to embrace robots and cloning and embark on the slippery slope to transhumanism.
Demographic origin need not be the final word. In 1775, Benjamin Franklin wrote a letter to Joseph Priestly suggesting a mutual English friend might like to apply his mind to the conundrum the Crown faced:
Britain, at the expense of three millions, has killed 150 Yankees this campaign, which is £20000 a head... During the same time, 60000 children have been born in America. From these data his mathematical head will easily calculate the time and the expense necessary to kill us all.
Obviously, Franklin was oversimplifying. Not every American colonist identified himself as a rebel. After the revolution, there were massive population displacements: as United Empire Loyalists well know, large numbers of New Yorkers left the colony to resettle in what's now Ontario. Some American Negroes were so anxious to remain subjects of King George III they resettled as far as Sierra Leone. For these people, their primary identity was not as American colonists but as British subjects. For others, their new identity as Americans had supplanted their formal allegiance to the Crown. The question for today's Europe is whether the primary identity of their fastest-growing demographic is Muslim or Belgian, Muslim or Dutch, Muslim or French.
That's where civilizational confidence comes in: if "Dutchness" or "Frenchness" seems a weak attenuated thing, then the stronger identity will prevail. One notes other similarities between revolutionary America and contemporary Europe: the United Empire Loyalists were older and wealthier; the rebels were younger and poorer. In the end, the former simply lacked the latter's strength of will.
Europe, like Japan, has catastrophic birth rates and a swollen pampered elderly class determined to live in defiance of economic reality. But the difference is that on the Continent the successor population is already in place and the only question is how bloody the transfer of real estate will be.
If America's "allies" failed to grasp the significance of 9/11, it's because Europe's home-grown terrorism problems had all taken place among notably static populations, such as Ulster and the Basque country. One could make generally safe extrapolations about the likelihood of holding Northern Ireland to what cynical strategists in Her Majesty's Government used to call an "acceptable level of violence." But in the same three decades as Ulster's "Troubles," the hitherto moderate Muslim populations of south Asia were radicalized by a politicized form of Islam; previously formally un-Islamic societies such as Nigeria became semi-Islamist; and large Muslim populations settled in parts of Europe that had little or no experience of mass immigration.
On the Continent and elsewhere in the West, native populations are aging and fading and being supplanted remorselessly by a young Muslim demographic. Time for the obligatory "of courses": of course, not all Muslims are terrorists -- though enough are hot for jihad to provide an impressive support network of mosques from Vienna to Stockholm to Toronto to Seattle. Of course, not all Muslims support terrorists -- though enough of them share their basic objectives(the wish to live under Islamic law in Europe and North America)to function wittingly or otherwise as the "good cop" end of an Islamic good cop/bad cop routine. But, at the very minimum, this fast-moving demographic transformation provides a huge comfort zone for the jihad to move around in. And in a more profound way it rationalizes what would otherwise be the nuttiness of the terrorists' demands. An IRA man blows up a pub in defiance of democratic reality -- because he knows that at the ballot box the Ulster Loyalists win the elections and the Irish Republicans lose. When a European jihadist blows something up, that's not in defiance of democratic reality but merely a portent of democratic reality to come. He's jumping the gun, but in every respect things are moving his way.
You may vaguely remember seeing some flaming cars on the evening news toward the end of 2005. Something going on in France, apparently. Something to do with -- what's the word? -- "youths." When I pointed out the media's strange reluctance to use the M-word vis-à-vis the rioting "youths," I received a ton of emails arguing there's no Islamist component, they're not the madrasa crowd, they may be Muslim but they're secular and Westernized and into drugs and rap and meaningless sex with no emotional commitment, and rioting and looting and torching and trashing, just like any normal healthy Western teenagers. These guys have economic concerns, it's the lack of jobs, it's conditions peculiar to France, etc. As one correspondent wrote, "You right-wing shit-for-brains think everything's about jihad."
Actually, I don't think everything's about jihad. But I do think, as I said, that a good 90 per cent of everything's about demography. Take that media characterization of those French rioters: "youths." What's the salient point about youths? They're youthful. Very few octogenarians want to go torching Renaults every night. It's not easy lobbing a Molotov cocktail into a police station and then hobbling back with your walker across the street before the searing heat of the explosion melts your hip replacement. Civil disobedience is a young man's game.
In June 2006, a 54-year-old Flemish train conductor called Guido Demoor got on the Number 23 bus in Antwerp to go to work. Six -- what's that word again? -- "youths" boarded the bus and commenced intimidating the other riders. There were some 40 passengers aboard. But the "youths" were youthful and the other passengers less so. Nonetheless, Mr. Demoor asked the lads to cut it out and so they turned on him, thumping and kicking him. Of those 40 other passengers, none intervened to help the man under attack. Instead, at the next stop, 30 of the 40 scrammed, leaving Mr. Demoor to be beaten to death. Three "youths" were arrested, and proved to be -- quelle surprise! -- of Moroccan origin. The ringleader escaped and, despite police assurances of complete confidentiality, of those 40 passengers only four came forward to speak to investigators. "You see what happens if you intervene," a fellow rail worker told the Belgian newspaper De Morgen. "If Guido had not opened his mouth he would still be alive."
No, he wouldn't. He would be as dead as those 40 passengers are, as the Belgian state is, keeping his head down, trying not to make eye contact, cowering behind his newspaper in the corner seat and hoping just to be left alone. What future in "their" country do Mr. Demoor's two children have? My mother and grandparents came from Sint-Niklaas, a town I remember well from many childhood visits. When we stayed with great-aunts and other relatives, the upstairs floors of the row houses had no bathrooms, just chamber pots. My sister and I were left to mooch around cobbled streets with our little cousin for hours on end, wandering aimlessly past smoke-wreathed bars and cafes, occasionally buying frites with mayonnaise. With hindsight it seemed as parochially Flemish as could be imagined. Not anymore. The week before Mr. Demoor was murdered in plain sight, bus drivers in Sint-Niklaas walked off the job to protest the thuggery of the -- here it comes again -- "youths." In little more than a generation, a town has been transformed.
Of the ethnic Belgian population, some 17 per cent are under 18 years old. Of the country's Turkish and Moroccan population, 35 per cent are under 18 years old. The "youths" get ever more numerous, the non-youths get older. To avoid the ruthless arithmetic posited by Benjamin Franklin, it is necessary for those "youths" to feel more Belgian. Is that likely? Colonel Gadhafi doesn't think so:
There are signs that Allah will grant Islam victory in Europe -- without swords, without guns, without conquests. The fifty million Muslims of Europe will turn it into a Muslim continent within a few decades.
On Sept. 11, 2001, the American mainland was attacked for the first time since the War of 1812. The perpetrators were foreign -- Saudis and Egyptians. Since 9/11, Europe has seen the London Tube bombings, the French riots, Dutch murders of nationalist politicians. The perpetrators are their own citizens -- British subjects, citoyens de la République française. In Linz, Austria, Muslims are demanding that all female teachers, believers or infidels, wear head scarves in class. The Muslim Council of Britain wants Holocaust Day abolished because it focuses "only" on the Nazis'(alleged)Holocaust of the Jews and not the Israelis' ongoing Holocaust of the Palestinians.
How does the state react? In Seville, King Ferdinand III is no longer patron saint of the annual fiesta because his splendid record in fighting for Spanish independence from the Moors was felt to be insensitive to Muslims. In London, a judge agreed to the removal of Jews and Hindus from a trial jury because the Muslim defendant's counsel argued he couldn't get a fair verdict from them. The Church of England is considering removing St. George as the country's patron saint on the grounds that, according to various Anglican clergy, he's too "militaristic" and "offensive to Muslims." They wish to replace him with St. Alban, and replace St. George's cross on the revamped Union Flag, which would instead show St. Alban's cross as a thin yellow streak.
In a few years, as millions of Muslim teenagers are entering their voting booths, some European countries will not be living formally under sharia, but -- as much as parts of Nigeria, they will have reached an accommodation with their radicalized Islamic compatriots, who like many intolerant types are expert at exploiting the "tolerance" of pluralist societies. In other Continental countries, things are likely to play out in more traditional fashion, though without a significantly different ending. Wherever one's sympathies lie on Islam's multiple battle fronts the fact is the jihad has held out a long time against very tough enemies. If you're not shy about taking on the Israelis and Russians, why wouldn't you fancy your chances against the Belgians and Spaniards?
"We're the ones who will change you," the Norwegian imam Mullah Krekar told the Oslo newspaper Dagbladet in 2006. "Just look at the development within Europe, where the number of Muslims is expanding like mosquitoes. Every Western woman in the EU is producing an average of 1.4 children. Every Muslim woman in the same countries is producing 3.5 children." As he summed it up: "Our way of thinking will prove more powerful than yours."
Reprinted by permission of Regnery Publishing from America Alone © 2006 by Mark Steyn
To comment, email letters@macleans.ca
MARK STEYN | Oct 20, 2006
Sept. 11, 2001, was not "the day everything changed," but the day that revealed how much had already changed. On Sept. 10, how many journalists had the Council of American-Islamic Relations or the Canadian Islamic Congress or the Muslim Council of Britain in their Rolodexes? If you'd said that whether something does or does not cause offence to Muslims would be the early 21st century's principal political dynamic in Denmark, Sweden, the Netherlands, Belgium, France and the United Kingdom, most folks would have thought you were crazy. Yet on that Tuesday morning the top of the iceberg bobbed up and toppled the Twin Towers.
This is about the seven-eighths below the surface -- the larger forces at play in the developed world that have left Europe too enfeebled to resist its remorseless transformation into Eurabia and that call into question the future of much of the rest of the world. The key factors are: demographic decline; the unsustainability of the social democratic state; and civilizational exhaustion.
Let's start with demography, because everything does:
If your school has 200 guys and you're playing a school with 2,000 pupils, it doesn't mean your baseball team is definitely going to lose but it certainly gives the other fellows a big starting advantage. Likewise, if you want to launch a revolution, it's not very likely if you've only got seven revolutionaries. And they're all over 80. But, if you've got two million and seven revolutionaries and they're all under 30 you're in business.
For example, I wonder how many pontificators on the "Middle East peace process" ever run this number:
The median age in the Gaza Strip is 15.8 years.
Once you know that, all the rest is details. If you were a "moderate Palestinian" leader, would you want to try to persuade a nation -- or pseudo-nation -- of unemployed poorly educated teenage boys raised in a UN-supervised European-funded death cult to see sense? Any analysis of the "Palestinian problem" that doesn't take into account the most important determinant on the ground is a waste of time.
Likewise, the salient feature of Europe, Canada, Japan and Russia is that they're running out of babies. What's happening in the developed world is one of the fastest demographic evolutions in history: most of us have seen a gazillion heartwarming ethnic comedies -- My Big Fat Greek Wedding and its ilk -- in which some uptight WASPy type starts dating a gal from a vast loving fecund Mediterranean family, so abundantly endowed with sisters and cousins and uncles that you can barely get in the room. It is, in fact, the inversion of the truth. Greece has a fertility rate hovering just below 1.3 births per couple, which is what demographers call the point of "lowest-low" fertility from which no human society has ever recovered. And Greece's fertility is the healthiest in Mediterranean Europe: Italy has a fertility rate of 1.2, Spain 1.1. Insofar as any citizens of the developed world have "big" families these days, it's the anglo democracies: America's fertility rate is 2.1, New Zealand a little below. Hollywood should be making My Big Fat Uptight Protestant Wedding in which some sad Greek only child marries into a big heartwarming New Zealand family where the spouse actually has a sibling.
As I say, this isn't a projection: it's happening now. There's no need to extrapolate, and if you do it gets a little freaky, but, just for fun, here goes: by 2050, 60 per cent of Italians will have no brothers, no sisters, no cousins, no aunts, no uncles. The big Italian family, with papa pouring the vino and mama spooning out the pasta down an endless table of grandparents and nieces and nephews, will be gone, no more, dead as the dinosaurs. As Noel Coward once remarked in another context, "Funiculi, funicula, funic yourself." By mid-century, Italians will have no choice in the matter.
Experts talk about root causes. But demography is the most basic root of all. A people that won't multiply can't go forth or go anywhere. Those who do will shape the age we live in.
Demographic decline and the unsustainability of the social democratic state are closely related. In America, politicians upset about the federal deficit like to complain that we're piling up debts our children and grandchildren will have to pay off. But in Europe the unaffordable entitlements are in even worse shape: there are no kids or grandkids to stick it to.
You might formulate it like this:
Age + Welfare = Disaster for you;
Youth + Will = Disaster for whoever gets in your way.
By "will," I mean the metaphorical spine of a culture. Africa, to take another example, also has plenty of young people, but it's riddled with AIDS and, for the most part, Africans don't think of themselves as Africans: as we saw in Rwanda, their primary identity is tribal, and most tribes have no global ambitions. Islam, however, has serious global ambitions, and it forms the primal, core identity of most of its adherents -- in the Middle East, South Asia and elsewhere.
Islam has youth and will, Europe has age and welfare.
We are witnessing the end of the late 20th- century progressive welfare democracy. Its fiscal bankruptcy is merely a symptom of a more fundamental bankruptcy: its insufficiency as an animating principle for society. The children and grandchildren of those fascists and republicans who waged a bitter civil war for the future of Spain now shrug when a bunch of foreigners blow up their capital. Too sedated even to sue for terms, they capitulate instantly. Over on the other side of the equation, the modern multicultural state is too watery a concept to bind huge numbers of immigrants to the land of their nominal citizenship. So they look elsewhere and find the jihad. The Western Muslim's pan-Islamic identity is merely the first great cause in a world where globalized pathologies are taking the place of old-school nationalism.
For states in demographic decline with ever more lavish social programs, the question is a simple one: can they get real? Can they grow up before they grow old? If not, then they'll end their days in societies dominated by people with a very different world view.
Which brings us to the third factor -- the enervated state of the Western world, the sense of civilizational ennui, of nations too mired in cultural relativism to understand what's at stake. As it happens, that third point is closely related to the first two. To Americans, it doesn't always seem obvious that there's any connection between the "war on terror" and the so-called "pocketbook issues" of domestic politics. But there is a correlation between the structural weaknesses of the social democratic state and the rise of a globalized Islam. The state has gradually annexed all the responsibilities of adulthood -- health care, child care, care of the elderly -- to the point where it's effectively severed its citizens from humanity's primal instincts, not least the survival instinct. In the American context, the federal "deficit" isn't the problem; it's the government programs that cause the deficit. These programs would still be wrong even if Bill Gates wrote a cheque to cover them each month. They corrode the citizen's sense of self-reliance to a potentially fatal degree. Big government is a national security threat: it increases your vulnerability to threats like Islamism, and makes it less likely you'll be able to summon the will to rebuff it. We should have learned that lesson on Sept. 11, 2001, when big government flopped big-time and the only good news of the day came from the ad hoc citizen militia of Flight 93.
There were two forces at play in the late 20th century: in the Eastern bloc, the collapse of Communism; in the West, the collapse of confidence. One of the most obvious refutations of Francis Fukuyama's famous thesis The End Of History -- written at the victory of liberal pluralist democracy over Soviet Communism -- is that the victors didn't see it as such. Americans -- or at least non-Democrat-voting Americans -- may talk about "winning" the Cold War but the French and the Belgians and Germans and Canadians don't. Very few British do. These are all formal NATO allies -- they were, technically, on the winning side against a horrible tyranny few would wish to live under themselves. In Europe, there was an initial moment of euphoria: it was hard not be moved by the crowds sweeping through the Berlin Wall, especially as so many of them were hot-looking Red babes eager to enjoy a Carlsberg or Stella Artois with even the nerdiest running dog of imperialism. But, when the moment faded, pace Fukuyama, there was no sense on the Continent that our Big Idea had beaten their Big Idea. With the best will in the world, it's hard to credit the citizens of France or Italy as having made any serious contribution to the defeat of Communism. Au contraire, millions of them voted for it, year in, year out. And, with the end of the Soviet existential threat, the enervation of the West only accelerated.
In Thomas P. M. Barnett's book Blueprint For Action, Robert D. Kaplan, a very shrewd observer of global affairs, is quoted referring to the lawless fringes of the map as "Indian territory." It's a droll joke but a misleading one. The difference between the old Indian territory and the new is this: no one had to worry about the Sioux riding down Fifth Avenue. Today, with a few hundred bucks on his ATM card, the fellow from the badlands can be in the heart of the metropolis within hours.
Here's another difference: in the old days, the white man settled the Indian territory. Now the followers of the badland's radical imams settle the metropolis.
And another difference: technology. In the old days, the Injuns had bows and arrows and the cavalry had rifles. In today's Indian territory, countries that can't feed their own people have nuclear weapons.
But beyond that the very phrase "Indian territory" presumes that inevitably these badlands will be brought within the bounds of the ordered world. In fact, a lot of today's "Indian territory" was relatively ordered a generation or two back -- West Africa, Pakistan, Bosnia. Though Eastern Europe and Latin America and parts of Asia are freer now than they were in the seventies, other swaths of the map have spiralled backwards. Which is more likely? That the parts of the world under pressure will turn into post-Communist Poland or post-Communist Yugoslavia? In Europe, the demographic pressures favour the latter.
The enemies we face in the future will look a lot like al-Qaeda: transnational, globalized, locally franchised, extensively outsourced -- but tied together through a powerful identity that leaps frontiers and continents. They won't be nation-states and they'll have no interest in becoming nation-states, though they might use the husks thereof, as they did in Afghanistan and then Somalia. The jihad may be the first, but other transnational deformities will embrace similar techniques. Sept. 10 institutions like the UN and the EU will be unlikely to provide effective responses.
We can argue about what consequences these demographic trends will have, but to say blithely they have none is ridiculous. The basic demography explains, for example, the critical difference between the "war on terror" for Americans and Europeans: in the U.S., the war is something to be fought in the treacherous sands of the Sunni Triangle and the caves of the Hindu Kush; you go to faraway places and kill foreigners. But, in Europe, it's a civil war. Neville Chamberlain dismissed Czechoslovakia as "a faraway country of which we know little." This time round, for much of western Europe it turned out the faraway country of which they knew little was their own.
Four years into the "war on terror," the Bush administration began promoting a new formulation: "the long war." Not a good sign. In a short war, put your money on tanks and bombs. In a long war, the better bet is will and manpower. The longer the long war gets, the harder it will be, because it's a race against time, against lengthening demographic, economic and geopolitical odds. By "demographic," I mean the Muslim world's high birth rate, which by mid-century will give tiny Yemen a higher population than vast empty Russia. By "economic," I mean the perfect storm the Europeans will face within this decade, because their lavish welfare states are unsustainable on their post-Christian birth rates. By "geopolitical," I mean that, if you think the United Nations and other international organizations are antipathetic to America now, wait a few years and see what kind of support you get from a semi-Islamified Europe.
Almost every geopolitical challenge in the years ahead has its roots in demography, but not every demographic crisis will play out the same way. That's what makes doing anything about it even more problematic -- because different countries' reactions to their own particular domestic circumstances are likely to play out in destabilizing ways on the international scene. In Japan, the demographic crisis exists virtually in laboratory conditions -- no complicating factors; in Russia, it will be determined by the country's relationship with a cramped neighbour -- China; and in Europe, the new owners are already in place -- like a tenant with a right-to-buy agreement.
Let's start in the most geriatric jurisdiction on the planet. In Japan, the rising sun has already passed into the next phase of its long sunset: net population loss. 2005 was the first year since records began in which the country had more deaths than births. Japan offers the chance to observe the demographic death spiral in its purest form. It's a country with no immigration, no significant minorities and no desire for any: just the Japanese, aging and dwindling.
At first it doesn't sound too bad: compared with the United States, most advanced societies are very crowded. If you're in a cramped apartment in a noisy congested city, losing a couple hundred thousand seems a fine trade-off. The difficulty, in a modern social democratic state, is managing which people to lose: already, according to the Japan Times, depopulation is "presenting the government with pressing challenges on the social and economic front, including ensuring provision of social security services and securing the labour force." For one thing, the shortage of children has led to a shortage of obstetricians. Why would any talented ambitious med school student want to go into a field in such precipitous decline? As a result, if you live in certain parts of Japan, childbirth is all in the timing. On Oki Island, try to time the contractions for Monday morning. That's when the maternity ward is open -- first day of the week, 10 a.m., when an obstetrician flies in to attend to any pregnant mothers who happen to be around. And at 5.30 p.m. she flies out. So, if you've been careless enough to time your childbirth for Tuesday through Sunday, you'll have to climb into a helicopter and zip off to give birth alone in a strange hospital unsurrounded by tiresome loved ones. Do Lamaze classes on Oki now teach you to time your breathing to the whirring of the chopper blades?
The last local obstetrician left the island in 2006 and the health service isn't expecting any more. Doubtless most of us can recall reading similar stories over the years from remote rural districts in America, Canada, Australia. After all, why would a village of a few hundred people have a great medical system? But Oki has a population of 17,000, and there are still no obstetricians: birthing is a dying business.
So what will happen? There are a couple of scenarios: whatever Japanese feelings on immigration, a country with great infrastructure won't empty out for long, any more than a state-of-the-art factory that goes belly up stays empty for long. At some point, someone else will move in to Japan's plant.
And the alternative? In The Children Of Men, P. D. James' dystopian fantasy about a barren world, there are special dolls for women whose maternal instinct has gone unfulfilled: pretend mothers take their artificial children for walks on the street or to the swings in the park. In Japan, that's no longer the stuff of dystopian fantasy. At the beginning of the century, the country's toy makers noticed they had a problem: toys are for children and Japan doesn't have many. What to do? In 2005, Tomy began marketing a new doll called Yumel -- a baby boy with a range of 1,200 phrases designed to serve as companions for the elderly. He says not just the usual things -- "I wuv you" -- but also asks the questions your grandchildren would ask if you had any: "Why do elephants have long noses?" Yumel joins his friend, the Snuggling Ifbot, a toy designed to have the conversation of a five-year old child which its makers, with the usual Japanese efficiency, have determined is just enough chit-chat to prevent the old folks going senile. It seems an appropriate final comment on the social democratic state: in a childish infantilized self-absorbed society where adults have been stripped of all responsibility, you need never stop playing with toys. We are the children we never had.
And why leave it at that? Is it likely an ever smaller number of young people will want to spend their active years looking after an ever greater number of old people? Or will it be simpler to put all that cutting-edge Japanese technology to good use and take a flier on Mister Roboto and the post-human future? After all, what's easier for the governing class? Weaning a pampered population off the good life and re-teaching them the lost biological impulse or giving the Sony Corporation a licence to become the Cloney Corporation? If you need to justify it to yourself, you'd grab the graphs and say, well, demographic decline is universal. It's like industrialization a couple of centuries back; everyone will get to it eventually, but the first to do so will have huge advantages: the relevant comparison is not with England's early 19th century population surge but with England's Industrial Revolution. In the industrial age, manpower was critical. In the new technological age, manpower will be optional -- and indeed, if most of the available manpower's Muslim, it's actually a disadvantage. As the most advanced society with the most advanced demographic crisis, Japan seems likely to be the first jurisdiction to embrace robots and cloning and embark on the slippery slope to transhumanism.
Demographic origin need not be the final word. In 1775, Benjamin Franklin wrote a letter to Joseph Priestly suggesting a mutual English friend might like to apply his mind to the conundrum the Crown faced:
Britain, at the expense of three millions, has killed 150 Yankees this campaign, which is £20000 a head... During the same time, 60000 children have been born in America. From these data his mathematical head will easily calculate the time and the expense necessary to kill us all.
Obviously, Franklin was oversimplifying. Not every American colonist identified himself as a rebel. After the revolution, there were massive population displacements: as United Empire Loyalists well know, large numbers of New Yorkers left the colony to resettle in what's now Ontario. Some American Negroes were so anxious to remain subjects of King George III they resettled as far as Sierra Leone. For these people, their primary identity was not as American colonists but as British subjects. For others, their new identity as Americans had supplanted their formal allegiance to the Crown. The question for today's Europe is whether the primary identity of their fastest-growing demographic is Muslim or Belgian, Muslim or Dutch, Muslim or French.
That's where civilizational confidence comes in: if "Dutchness" or "Frenchness" seems a weak attenuated thing, then the stronger identity will prevail. One notes other similarities between revolutionary America and contemporary Europe: the United Empire Loyalists were older and wealthier; the rebels were younger and poorer. In the end, the former simply lacked the latter's strength of will.
Europe, like Japan, has catastrophic birth rates and a swollen pampered elderly class determined to live in defiance of economic reality. But the difference is that on the Continent the successor population is already in place and the only question is how bloody the transfer of real estate will be.
If America's "allies" failed to grasp the significance of 9/11, it's because Europe's home-grown terrorism problems had all taken place among notably static populations, such as Ulster and the Basque country. One could make generally safe extrapolations about the likelihood of holding Northern Ireland to what cynical strategists in Her Majesty's Government used to call an "acceptable level of violence." But in the same three decades as Ulster's "Troubles," the hitherto moderate Muslim populations of south Asia were radicalized by a politicized form of Islam; previously formally un-Islamic societies such as Nigeria became semi-Islamist; and large Muslim populations settled in parts of Europe that had little or no experience of mass immigration.
On the Continent and elsewhere in the West, native populations are aging and fading and being supplanted remorselessly by a young Muslim demographic. Time for the obligatory "of courses": of course, not all Muslims are terrorists -- though enough are hot for jihad to provide an impressive support network of mosques from Vienna to Stockholm to Toronto to Seattle. Of course, not all Muslims support terrorists -- though enough of them share their basic objectives(the wish to live under Islamic law in Europe and North America)to function wittingly or otherwise as the "good cop" end of an Islamic good cop/bad cop routine. But, at the very minimum, this fast-moving demographic transformation provides a huge comfort zone for the jihad to move around in. And in a more profound way it rationalizes what would otherwise be the nuttiness of the terrorists' demands. An IRA man blows up a pub in defiance of democratic reality -- because he knows that at the ballot box the Ulster Loyalists win the elections and the Irish Republicans lose. When a European jihadist blows something up, that's not in defiance of democratic reality but merely a portent of democratic reality to come. He's jumping the gun, but in every respect things are moving his way.
You may vaguely remember seeing some flaming cars on the evening news toward the end of 2005. Something going on in France, apparently. Something to do with -- what's the word? -- "youths." When I pointed out the media's strange reluctance to use the M-word vis-à-vis the rioting "youths," I received a ton of emails arguing there's no Islamist component, they're not the madrasa crowd, they may be Muslim but they're secular and Westernized and into drugs and rap and meaningless sex with no emotional commitment, and rioting and looting and torching and trashing, just like any normal healthy Western teenagers. These guys have economic concerns, it's the lack of jobs, it's conditions peculiar to France, etc. As one correspondent wrote, "You right-wing shit-for-brains think everything's about jihad."
Actually, I don't think everything's about jihad. But I do think, as I said, that a good 90 per cent of everything's about demography. Take that media characterization of those French rioters: "youths." What's the salient point about youths? They're youthful. Very few octogenarians want to go torching Renaults every night. It's not easy lobbing a Molotov cocktail into a police station and then hobbling back with your walker across the street before the searing heat of the explosion melts your hip replacement. Civil disobedience is a young man's game.
In June 2006, a 54-year-old Flemish train conductor called Guido Demoor got on the Number 23 bus in Antwerp to go to work. Six -- what's that word again? -- "youths" boarded the bus and commenced intimidating the other riders. There were some 40 passengers aboard. But the "youths" were youthful and the other passengers less so. Nonetheless, Mr. Demoor asked the lads to cut it out and so they turned on him, thumping and kicking him. Of those 40 other passengers, none intervened to help the man under attack. Instead, at the next stop, 30 of the 40 scrammed, leaving Mr. Demoor to be beaten to death. Three "youths" were arrested, and proved to be -- quelle surprise! -- of Moroccan origin. The ringleader escaped and, despite police assurances of complete confidentiality, of those 40 passengers only four came forward to speak to investigators. "You see what happens if you intervene," a fellow rail worker told the Belgian newspaper De Morgen. "If Guido had not opened his mouth he would still be alive."
No, he wouldn't. He would be as dead as those 40 passengers are, as the Belgian state is, keeping his head down, trying not to make eye contact, cowering behind his newspaper in the corner seat and hoping just to be left alone. What future in "their" country do Mr. Demoor's two children have? My mother and grandparents came from Sint-Niklaas, a town I remember well from many childhood visits. When we stayed with great-aunts and other relatives, the upstairs floors of the row houses had no bathrooms, just chamber pots. My sister and I were left to mooch around cobbled streets with our little cousin for hours on end, wandering aimlessly past smoke-wreathed bars and cafes, occasionally buying frites with mayonnaise. With hindsight it seemed as parochially Flemish as could be imagined. Not anymore. The week before Mr. Demoor was murdered in plain sight, bus drivers in Sint-Niklaas walked off the job to protest the thuggery of the -- here it comes again -- "youths." In little more than a generation, a town has been transformed.
Of the ethnic Belgian population, some 17 per cent are under 18 years old. Of the country's Turkish and Moroccan population, 35 per cent are under 18 years old. The "youths" get ever more numerous, the non-youths get older. To avoid the ruthless arithmetic posited by Benjamin Franklin, it is necessary for those "youths" to feel more Belgian. Is that likely? Colonel Gadhafi doesn't think so:
There are signs that Allah will grant Islam victory in Europe -- without swords, without guns, without conquests. The fifty million Muslims of Europe will turn it into a Muslim continent within a few decades.
On Sept. 11, 2001, the American mainland was attacked for the first time since the War of 1812. The perpetrators were foreign -- Saudis and Egyptians. Since 9/11, Europe has seen the London Tube bombings, the French riots, Dutch murders of nationalist politicians. The perpetrators are their own citizens -- British subjects, citoyens de la République française. In Linz, Austria, Muslims are demanding that all female teachers, believers or infidels, wear head scarves in class. The Muslim Council of Britain wants Holocaust Day abolished because it focuses "only" on the Nazis'(alleged)Holocaust of the Jews and not the Israelis' ongoing Holocaust of the Palestinians.
How does the state react? In Seville, King Ferdinand III is no longer patron saint of the annual fiesta because his splendid record in fighting for Spanish independence from the Moors was felt to be insensitive to Muslims. In London, a judge agreed to the removal of Jews and Hindus from a trial jury because the Muslim defendant's counsel argued he couldn't get a fair verdict from them. The Church of England is considering removing St. George as the country's patron saint on the grounds that, according to various Anglican clergy, he's too "militaristic" and "offensive to Muslims." They wish to replace him with St. Alban, and replace St. George's cross on the revamped Union Flag, which would instead show St. Alban's cross as a thin yellow streak.
In a few years, as millions of Muslim teenagers are entering their voting booths, some European countries will not be living formally under sharia, but -- as much as parts of Nigeria, they will have reached an accommodation with their radicalized Islamic compatriots, who like many intolerant types are expert at exploiting the "tolerance" of pluralist societies. In other Continental countries, things are likely to play out in more traditional fashion, though without a significantly different ending. Wherever one's sympathies lie on Islam's multiple battle fronts the fact is the jihad has held out a long time against very tough enemies. If you're not shy about taking on the Israelis and Russians, why wouldn't you fancy your chances against the Belgians and Spaniards?
"We're the ones who will change you," the Norwegian imam Mullah Krekar told the Oslo newspaper Dagbladet in 2006. "Just look at the development within Europe, where the number of Muslims is expanding like mosquitoes. Every Western woman in the EU is producing an average of 1.4 children. Every Muslim woman in the same countries is producing 3.5 children." As he summed it up: "Our way of thinking will prove more powerful than yours."
Reprinted by permission of Regnery Publishing from America Alone © 2006 by Mark Steyn
To comment, email letters@macleans.ca
Indian American Hindu group stirs a debate over yoga's soul
influential group behind it, the Hindu American Foundation, suggests only that people become more aware of yoga's debt to the faith's ancient traditions.
That suggestion, modest though it may seem, has drawn a flurry of strong reactions from figures far apart on the religious spectrum. Dr Deepak Chopra, the New Age writer, has dismissed the campaign as a jumble of faulty history and Hindu nationalism. R Albert Mohler Jr., president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, has said he agrees that yoga is Hindu — and cited that as evidence that the practice imperiled the souls of Christians who engage in it.
The question at the core of the debate — who owns yoga? — has become an enduring topic of chatter in yoga Web forums, Hindu American newspapers and journals catering to the many consumers of what is now a multibillion-dollar yoga industry.
In June, it even prompted the Indian government to begin making digital copies of ancient drawings showing the provenance of more than 4,000 yoga poses, to discourage further claims by entrepreneurs like Bikram Choudhury, an Indian-born yoga instructor to the stars who is based in Los Angeles. Mr Choudhury nettled Indian officials in 2007 when he copyrighted his personal style of 26 yoga poses as "Bikram Yoga."
Organizers of the Take Back Yoga effort point out that the philosophy of yoga was first described in Hinduism's seminal texts and remains at the core of Hindu teaching. Yet, because the religion has been stereotyped in the West as a polytheistic faith of "castes, cows and curry," they say, most Americans prefer to see yoga as the legacy of a more timeless, spiritual "Indian wisdom."
"In a way," said Dr Aseem Shukla, the foundation's co-founder, "our issue is that yoga has thrived, but Hinduism has lost control of the brand."
For many practitioners, including Debbie Desmond, 27, a yoga instructor in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, the talk of branding and ownership is bewildering.
"Nobody owns yoga," she said, sitting cross-legged in her studio, Namaste Yoga, and tilting her head as if the notion sketched an impossible yoga position she had never seen. "Yoga is not a religion. It is a way of life, a method of becoming. We were taught that the roots of yoga go back further than Hinduism itself."
Like Dr Chopra and some religious historians, Ms Desmond believes that yoga originated in the Vedic culture of Indo-Europeans who settled in India in the third millennium BC, long before the tradition now called Hinduism emerged. Other historians trace the first written description of yoga to the Bhagavad Gita, the sacred Hindu scripture believed to have been written between the fifth and second centuries BC.
The effort to "take back" yoga began quietly enough, with a scholarly essay posted in January on the Web site of the Hindu American Foundation, a Minneapolis-based group that promotes human rights for Hindu minorities worldwide. The essay lamented a perceived snub in modern yoga culture, saying that yoga magazines and studios had assiduously decoupled the practice "from the Hinduism that gave forth this immense contribution to humanity."
Dr Shukla put a sharper point on his case a few months later in a column on the On Faith blog of The Washington Post. Hinduism, he wrote, had become a victim of "overt intellectual property theft," made possible by generations of Hindu yoga teachers who had "offered up a religion's spiritual wealth at the altar of crass commercialism."
That drew the attention of Dr Chopra, an Indian-American who has done much to popularize Indian traditions like alternative medicine and yoga. He posted a reply saying that Hinduism was too "tribal" and "self-enclosed" to claim ownership of yoga.
The fight went viral — or as viral as things can get in a narrow Web corridor frequented by yoga enthusiasts, Hindu Americans and religion scholars.
Loriliai Biernacki, a professor of Indian religions at the University of Colorado, said the debate had raised important issues about a spectrum of Hindu concepts permeating American culture, including meditation, belief in karma and reincarnation, and even cremation.
"All these ideas are Hindu in origin, and they are spreading," she said. "But they are doing it in a way that leaves behind the proper name, the box that classifies them as 'Hinduism.' "
The debate has also secured the standing of the Hindu American Foundation as the pre-eminent voice for the country's two million Hindus, said Diana L Eck, a professor of comparative religion and Indian studies at Harvard. Other groups represent Indian-Americans' interests in business and politics, but the foundation has emerged as "the first major national advocacy group looking at Hindu identity," she said.
The debate has also secured the standing of the Hindu American Foundation as the pre-eminent voice for the country's two million Hindus, said Diana L Eck, a professor of comparative religion and Indian studies at Harvard. Other groups represent Indian-Americans' interests in business and politics, but the foundation has emerged as "the first major national advocacy group looking at Hindu identity," she said.
Dr Shukla said reaction to the yoga campaign had far exceeded his expectations.
"We started this, really, for our kids," said Dr. Shukla, a urologist and a second-generation Indian-American. "When our kids go to school and say they are Hindu, nobody says, 'Oh, yeah, Hindus gave the world yoga.' They say, 'What caste are you?' Or 'Do you pray to a monkey god?' Because that's all Americans know about Hinduism."
With its tiny budget, the foundation has pressed its campaign largely by generating buzz through letters and Web postings to academic journals and yoga magazines. The September issue of Yoga Journal, which has the largest circulation in the field, alluded to the campaign, if fleetingly, in an article calling yoga's "true history a mystery."
The effort has been received most favorably by Indian-American community leaders like Dr Uma V Mysorekar, the president of the Hindu Temple Society of North America, in Flushing, Queens, which helps groups across the country build temples.
A naturalized immigrant, she said Take Back Yoga represented a coming-of-age for Indians in the United States. "My generation was too busy establishing itself in business and the professions," she said. "Now, the second and third generation is looking around and finding its voice, saying, 'Our civilization has made contributions to the world, and these should be acknowledged.'"
In the basement of the society's Ganesha Temple, an hourlong yoga class ended one recent Sunday morning with a long exhalation of the sacred syllable "om." Via the lung power of 60 students, it sounded as deeply as a blast from the organ at St Patrick's Cathedral.
After the session, which began and concluded with Hindu prayers, many students said they were practicing Hindus and in complete sympathy with the yoga campaign.
Not all were, though. Shweta Parmar, 35, a community organizer and project director for a health and meditation group, said she had grown up in a Hindu household. "Yoga is part of the tradition I come from," she said.
But is yoga specifically Hindu? She paused to ponder. "My parents are Hindu," she said. But in matters of yoga, "I don't use that term."
Read more: Indian-American Hindu group stirs a debate over yoga's soul - The Times of India http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/world/indians-abroad/Indian-American-Hindu-group-stirs-a-debate-over-yogas-soul/articleshow/7004072.cms#ixzz16nOG4I6D
That suggestion, modest though it may seem, has drawn a flurry of strong reactions from figures far apart on the religious spectrum. Dr Deepak Chopra, the New Age writer, has dismissed the campaign as a jumble of faulty history and Hindu nationalism. R Albert Mohler Jr., president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, has said he agrees that yoga is Hindu — and cited that as evidence that the practice imperiled the souls of Christians who engage in it.
The question at the core of the debate — who owns yoga? — has become an enduring topic of chatter in yoga Web forums, Hindu American newspapers and journals catering to the many consumers of what is now a multibillion-dollar yoga industry.
In June, it even prompted the Indian government to begin making digital copies of ancient drawings showing the provenance of more than 4,000 yoga poses, to discourage further claims by entrepreneurs like Bikram Choudhury, an Indian-born yoga instructor to the stars who is based in Los Angeles. Mr Choudhury nettled Indian officials in 2007 when he copyrighted his personal style of 26 yoga poses as "Bikram Yoga."
Organizers of the Take Back Yoga effort point out that the philosophy of yoga was first described in Hinduism's seminal texts and remains at the core of Hindu teaching. Yet, because the religion has been stereotyped in the West as a polytheistic faith of "castes, cows and curry," they say, most Americans prefer to see yoga as the legacy of a more timeless, spiritual "Indian wisdom."
"In a way," said Dr Aseem Shukla, the foundation's co-founder, "our issue is that yoga has thrived, but Hinduism has lost control of the brand."
For many practitioners, including Debbie Desmond, 27, a yoga instructor in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, the talk of branding and ownership is bewildering.
"Nobody owns yoga," she said, sitting cross-legged in her studio, Namaste Yoga, and tilting her head as if the notion sketched an impossible yoga position she had never seen. "Yoga is not a religion. It is a way of life, a method of becoming. We were taught that the roots of yoga go back further than Hinduism itself."
Like Dr Chopra and some religious historians, Ms Desmond believes that yoga originated in the Vedic culture of Indo-Europeans who settled in India in the third millennium BC, long before the tradition now called Hinduism emerged. Other historians trace the first written description of yoga to the Bhagavad Gita, the sacred Hindu scripture believed to have been written between the fifth and second centuries BC.
The effort to "take back" yoga began quietly enough, with a scholarly essay posted in January on the Web site of the Hindu American Foundation, a Minneapolis-based group that promotes human rights for Hindu minorities worldwide. The essay lamented a perceived snub in modern yoga culture, saying that yoga magazines and studios had assiduously decoupled the practice "from the Hinduism that gave forth this immense contribution to humanity."
Dr Shukla put a sharper point on his case a few months later in a column on the On Faith blog of The Washington Post. Hinduism, he wrote, had become a victim of "overt intellectual property theft," made possible by generations of Hindu yoga teachers who had "offered up a religion's spiritual wealth at the altar of crass commercialism."
That drew the attention of Dr Chopra, an Indian-American who has done much to popularize Indian traditions like alternative medicine and yoga. He posted a reply saying that Hinduism was too "tribal" and "self-enclosed" to claim ownership of yoga.
The fight went viral — or as viral as things can get in a narrow Web corridor frequented by yoga enthusiasts, Hindu Americans and religion scholars.
Loriliai Biernacki, a professor of Indian religions at the University of Colorado, said the debate had raised important issues about a spectrum of Hindu concepts permeating American culture, including meditation, belief in karma and reincarnation, and even cremation.
"All these ideas are Hindu in origin, and they are spreading," she said. "But they are doing it in a way that leaves behind the proper name, the box that classifies them as 'Hinduism.' "
The debate has also secured the standing of the Hindu American Foundation as the pre-eminent voice for the country's two million Hindus, said Diana L Eck, a professor of comparative religion and Indian studies at Harvard. Other groups represent Indian-Americans' interests in business and politics, but the foundation has emerged as "the first major national advocacy group looking at Hindu identity," she said.
The debate has also secured the standing of the Hindu American Foundation as the pre-eminent voice for the country's two million Hindus, said Diana L Eck, a professor of comparative religion and Indian studies at Harvard. Other groups represent Indian-Americans' interests in business and politics, but the foundation has emerged as "the first major national advocacy group looking at Hindu identity," she said.
Dr Shukla said reaction to the yoga campaign had far exceeded his expectations.
"We started this, really, for our kids," said Dr. Shukla, a urologist and a second-generation Indian-American. "When our kids go to school and say they are Hindu, nobody says, 'Oh, yeah, Hindus gave the world yoga.' They say, 'What caste are you?' Or 'Do you pray to a monkey god?' Because that's all Americans know about Hinduism."
With its tiny budget, the foundation has pressed its campaign largely by generating buzz through letters and Web postings to academic journals and yoga magazines. The September issue of Yoga Journal, which has the largest circulation in the field, alluded to the campaign, if fleetingly, in an article calling yoga's "true history a mystery."
The effort has been received most favorably by Indian-American community leaders like Dr Uma V Mysorekar, the president of the Hindu Temple Society of North America, in Flushing, Queens, which helps groups across the country build temples.
A naturalized immigrant, she said Take Back Yoga represented a coming-of-age for Indians in the United States. "My generation was too busy establishing itself in business and the professions," she said. "Now, the second and third generation is looking around and finding its voice, saying, 'Our civilization has made contributions to the world, and these should be acknowledged.'"
In the basement of the society's Ganesha Temple, an hourlong yoga class ended one recent Sunday morning with a long exhalation of the sacred syllable "om." Via the lung power of 60 students, it sounded as deeply as a blast from the organ at St Patrick's Cathedral.
After the session, which began and concluded with Hindu prayers, many students said they were practicing Hindus and in complete sympathy with the yoga campaign.
Not all were, though. Shweta Parmar, 35, a community organizer and project director for a health and meditation group, said she had grown up in a Hindu household. "Yoga is part of the tradition I come from," she said.
But is yoga specifically Hindu? She paused to ponder. "My parents are Hindu," she said. But in matters of yoga, "I don't use that term."
Read more: Indian-American Hindu group stirs a debate over yoga's soul - The Times of India http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/world/indians-abroad/Indian-American-Hindu-group-stirs-a-debate-over-yogas-soul/articleshow/7004072.cms#ixzz16nOG4I6D
Where's The Diversity Among Oscar Hopefuls?
ALLISON KEYES, host:
This is TELL ME MORE from NPR News. I'm Allison Keyes. Michel Martin is away.
Coming up, cheering for science. We'll talk about professional cheerleaders doing what they do best - to encourage girls to get involved in science.
But first, the holiday season is underway and movie studios have begun to flood the multiplexes with flicks they hope will score huge profits, Oscar nominations or both.
One might yearn for plotlines that are new and diverse, but can we say the same about the characters we see on the screen and the folk in the director's chair? Do they reflect the unique backgrounds and cultures of Latino, African and Asian Americans and other communities of color in the nation?
We were curious about the role of diversity in film, particularly Oscar quality films, so we've called Jeff Yang. He writes the Asian pop column for the San Francisco Chronicle and he joins us from our studio in Culver City. Also joining the conversation is Kamal Larsuel. She's editor-in-chief and writer of 3blackchicks.com, a website of film reviews. She joins us from Auburn in Washington state. Welcome to the program.
Ms. KAMAL LARSUEL (Editor-in-chief and Writer, 3blackchicks.com): Hi, thank you for having me.
Mr. JEFF YANG (Writer, San Francisco Chronicle): Thank you.
KEYES: The Hollywood Reporter just wrote that for the first time in 10 years they don't think that there will be any black nominees in any of the acting categories for the next ceremony, and they're not seeing any people of color among the early list of awards hopefuls. Jeff, if that really happens, what message does that send both to the public and to the Academy?
Mr. YANG: You know, it looks like we've kind of fallen back into the default, if you will, of having the middle market films and the art films, the films that are generally seen as having the most opportunity to contend for this sort of critical and industry acclaim, if you will, really being absent of representation of people of color.
KEYES: And when you say people of color, we're talking Asians, we're talking Latinos, not just black folk.
Mr. YANG: Yeah. And I would actually say that for Asian Americans in general, it's almost kind of a wasteland as far as the Academy Awards are concerned.
KEYES: Kamal, if the Academy Awards do turn out to be basically all white this year, do you think it sends a particular message to the film industry that that's acceptable, or do you think the message more goes to the public?
Ms. LARSUEL: I think it goes to the industry that it's more acceptable. I mean this happens over and over again, where they throw a bone one year and then just take all our toys away the next. I mean, "The Color Purple," prime example. Nominated for 11 Academy Awards, won zero.
You know, as a black woman, the first thing I think about is black actors. But when I broaden my scope, what about all actors of color? We could even say, you know, Arab-Americans and Iranian Americans, there's nothing out there to represent and celebrate the citizens of this country who are of color.
One of the most disappointing things for this year was "The Last Airbender."
KEYES: Let me jump in right quick, for people that don't know, in "The Last Airbender," there were white people that were playing Asian characters, which caused, shall we say, a bit of controversy.
Mr. YANG: The one thing that we can be grateful for was that "The Last Airbender" will be nowhere near the Academy Awards ceremony next year.
Ms. LARSUEL: That's true, you know.
KEYES: Hang on a second. We're going to play a clip from that and then we're going to come back to it in just a second. Here we go.
(Soundbite of film, "The Last Airbender")
Ms. NICOLA PELTZ (Actress): (as Katara) You are the only one who can control all the elements and bring peace to our world.
Mr. NOAH RINGER (Actor): (as Aang) I will stop them.
Unidentified Man: (as Character) You may already be too late.
(Soundbite of music)
KEYES: Dun, dun, dun. Okay, Jeff, let me ask you. And I have to note, this isn't the first this director has caught some flack for this, is it?
Mr. YANG: The director himself, M. Night Shyamalan, who is himself somebody who's been nominated for Academy Awards in the past. "The Sixth Sense," his kind of opus magnus, put him in contention for a slew of awards: Best Picture, Best Director.
Ms. LARSUEL: I see dead people.
Mr. YANG: Yes.
(Soundbite of laughter)
Mr. YANG: I see dead people, but I don't see Asian people. You know, the thing is he has always seen himself as this sort of (unintelligible) maverick in Hollywood where, you know, it's his vision that matters most. And I think the real fault has to lie with the studios because the casting decisions end up being primarily around the idea of avoiding risk as much as possible.
KEYES: If you're just joining us, this is TELL ME MORE from NPR News. We're talking about diversity or the lack of it in the movies, especially those with a chance for Oscar nominations. We're speaking with the San Francisco Chronicle's Asian pop columnist Jeff Yang, and also, with editor-in-chief and writer of 3blackchicks.com, Kamal Larsuel.
So, if there are talented actors and filmmakers of color, where are they if they're not in the Oscar movies?
Mr. YANG: You know, this is one of those things where it almost ends up being, like, ah, you don't want to blame your own community for this sort of thing, and you can't in some ways. I mean there are so many talented performers out there who are Asian and African-American, Latino and, you know, and there are filmmakers who are incredibly talented as well, you know.
And the question is, okay, well, so why aren't they, you know, kind of standing up and being counted? Well, you know, the fact is it's like with any other profession, you need to have the (unintelligible) team in place, you need to have people in positions of decision making power who are saying, you know, I'm going to look at a wider angle, a wider lens on what might be a potentially successful project to put my weight behind.
And at every level, you know, from the studio executives to, you know, every step along the way, you just don't have enough people of color inside who can help reach a hand outside to bring in those next generation talents, if you will.
KEYES: What do you think is going to be the next move or do you think there'll be a next move from major film companies on diversity? If all of this ends up to be an all-white Oscars year, do you think there will be another cycle? Because this is beginning to sound like a - there's a one big black movie or one movie that has actual Asians or Latinos in it, and there will be - and then the next two years there's nothing.
Mr. YANG: I think that's what we're looking at, certainly. But there are bigger trends that are happening and I think the biggest of these trends is that we are looking at more and more films being made for global audiences and for global consumption.
I'm actually here in Los Angeles right now on the press tour for a film that's coming out called "The Warrior's Way," which is an international production. It stars a superstar in Korea, a guy named Jang Dong-gun. Alongside him is Kate Bosworth, Danny Huston and Academy-Award nominated actor Geoffrey Rush.
So, you have this desire here, I think, for more people to say, we're not going to play the straight Hollywood game now. You know, we're going to put our money, and this is not a small budget film. It's, you know, a nicely budgeted film and we're going to see whether or not we can't get butts in seats on both sides of the Pacific.
KEYES: Kamal, from your point of view, do you see color on the horizon?
Ms. LARSUEL: It'll be a whitewash Oscar and we will stand up and protest and yell and scream and bring the spotlight back on people of color. And so the Oscars of 2012 will probably have a nice array of people of color and then we'll go back into the commonplace and get comfortable again until we have to scream. And I just wish we would get to a day where we don't have to scream.
KEYES: Kamal Larsuel is the editor-in-chief and writer of 3blackchicks.com. She joined us from Auburn, a town in Washington state. Jeff Yang writes the Asian pop column for the San Francisco Chronicle. He joined us from our studio in Culver City. Thank you both for an interesting conversation.
Ms. LARSUEL: Thank you.
Mr. YANG: Thank you, Allison.
This is TELL ME MORE from NPR News. I'm Allison Keyes. Michel Martin is away.
Coming up, cheering for science. We'll talk about professional cheerleaders doing what they do best - to encourage girls to get involved in science.
But first, the holiday season is underway and movie studios have begun to flood the multiplexes with flicks they hope will score huge profits, Oscar nominations or both.
One might yearn for plotlines that are new and diverse, but can we say the same about the characters we see on the screen and the folk in the director's chair? Do they reflect the unique backgrounds and cultures of Latino, African and Asian Americans and other communities of color in the nation?
We were curious about the role of diversity in film, particularly Oscar quality films, so we've called Jeff Yang. He writes the Asian pop column for the San Francisco Chronicle and he joins us from our studio in Culver City. Also joining the conversation is Kamal Larsuel. She's editor-in-chief and writer of 3blackchicks.com, a website of film reviews. She joins us from Auburn in Washington state. Welcome to the program.
Ms. KAMAL LARSUEL (Editor-in-chief and Writer, 3blackchicks.com): Hi, thank you for having me.
Mr. JEFF YANG (Writer, San Francisco Chronicle): Thank you.
KEYES: The Hollywood Reporter just wrote that for the first time in 10 years they don't think that there will be any black nominees in any of the acting categories for the next ceremony, and they're not seeing any people of color among the early list of awards hopefuls. Jeff, if that really happens, what message does that send both to the public and to the Academy?
Mr. YANG: You know, it looks like we've kind of fallen back into the default, if you will, of having the middle market films and the art films, the films that are generally seen as having the most opportunity to contend for this sort of critical and industry acclaim, if you will, really being absent of representation of people of color.
KEYES: And when you say people of color, we're talking Asians, we're talking Latinos, not just black folk.
Mr. YANG: Yeah. And I would actually say that for Asian Americans in general, it's almost kind of a wasteland as far as the Academy Awards are concerned.
KEYES: Kamal, if the Academy Awards do turn out to be basically all white this year, do you think it sends a particular message to the film industry that that's acceptable, or do you think the message more goes to the public?
Ms. LARSUEL: I think it goes to the industry that it's more acceptable. I mean this happens over and over again, where they throw a bone one year and then just take all our toys away the next. I mean, "The Color Purple," prime example. Nominated for 11 Academy Awards, won zero.
You know, as a black woman, the first thing I think about is black actors. But when I broaden my scope, what about all actors of color? We could even say, you know, Arab-Americans and Iranian Americans, there's nothing out there to represent and celebrate the citizens of this country who are of color.
One of the most disappointing things for this year was "The Last Airbender."
KEYES: Let me jump in right quick, for people that don't know, in "The Last Airbender," there were white people that were playing Asian characters, which caused, shall we say, a bit of controversy.
Mr. YANG: The one thing that we can be grateful for was that "The Last Airbender" will be nowhere near the Academy Awards ceremony next year.
Ms. LARSUEL: That's true, you know.
KEYES: Hang on a second. We're going to play a clip from that and then we're going to come back to it in just a second. Here we go.
(Soundbite of film, "The Last Airbender")
Ms. NICOLA PELTZ (Actress): (as Katara) You are the only one who can control all the elements and bring peace to our world.
Mr. NOAH RINGER (Actor): (as Aang) I will stop them.
Unidentified Man: (as Character) You may already be too late.
(Soundbite of music)
KEYES: Dun, dun, dun. Okay, Jeff, let me ask you. And I have to note, this isn't the first this director has caught some flack for this, is it?
Mr. YANG: The director himself, M. Night Shyamalan, who is himself somebody who's been nominated for Academy Awards in the past. "The Sixth Sense," his kind of opus magnus, put him in contention for a slew of awards: Best Picture, Best Director.
Ms. LARSUEL: I see dead people.
Mr. YANG: Yes.
(Soundbite of laughter)
Mr. YANG: I see dead people, but I don't see Asian people. You know, the thing is he has always seen himself as this sort of (unintelligible) maverick in Hollywood where, you know, it's his vision that matters most. And I think the real fault has to lie with the studios because the casting decisions end up being primarily around the idea of avoiding risk as much as possible.
KEYES: If you're just joining us, this is TELL ME MORE from NPR News. We're talking about diversity or the lack of it in the movies, especially those with a chance for Oscar nominations. We're speaking with the San Francisco Chronicle's Asian pop columnist Jeff Yang, and also, with editor-in-chief and writer of 3blackchicks.com, Kamal Larsuel.
So, if there are talented actors and filmmakers of color, where are they if they're not in the Oscar movies?
Mr. YANG: You know, this is one of those things where it almost ends up being, like, ah, you don't want to blame your own community for this sort of thing, and you can't in some ways. I mean there are so many talented performers out there who are Asian and African-American, Latino and, you know, and there are filmmakers who are incredibly talented as well, you know.
And the question is, okay, well, so why aren't they, you know, kind of standing up and being counted? Well, you know, the fact is it's like with any other profession, you need to have the (unintelligible) team in place, you need to have people in positions of decision making power who are saying, you know, I'm going to look at a wider angle, a wider lens on what might be a potentially successful project to put my weight behind.
And at every level, you know, from the studio executives to, you know, every step along the way, you just don't have enough people of color inside who can help reach a hand outside to bring in those next generation talents, if you will.
KEYES: What do you think is going to be the next move or do you think there'll be a next move from major film companies on diversity? If all of this ends up to be an all-white Oscars year, do you think there will be another cycle? Because this is beginning to sound like a - there's a one big black movie or one movie that has actual Asians or Latinos in it, and there will be - and then the next two years there's nothing.
Mr. YANG: I think that's what we're looking at, certainly. But there are bigger trends that are happening and I think the biggest of these trends is that we are looking at more and more films being made for global audiences and for global consumption.
I'm actually here in Los Angeles right now on the press tour for a film that's coming out called "The Warrior's Way," which is an international production. It stars a superstar in Korea, a guy named Jang Dong-gun. Alongside him is Kate Bosworth, Danny Huston and Academy-Award nominated actor Geoffrey Rush.
So, you have this desire here, I think, for more people to say, we're not going to play the straight Hollywood game now. You know, we're going to put our money, and this is not a small budget film. It's, you know, a nicely budgeted film and we're going to see whether or not we can't get butts in seats on both sides of the Pacific.
KEYES: Kamal, from your point of view, do you see color on the horizon?
Ms. LARSUEL: It'll be a whitewash Oscar and we will stand up and protest and yell and scream and bring the spotlight back on people of color. And so the Oscars of 2012 will probably have a nice array of people of color and then we'll go back into the commonplace and get comfortable again until we have to scream. And I just wish we would get to a day where we don't have to scream.
KEYES: Kamal Larsuel is the editor-in-chief and writer of 3blackchicks.com. She joined us from Auburn, a town in Washington state. Jeff Yang writes the Asian pop column for the San Francisco Chronicle. He joined us from our studio in Culver City. Thank you both for an interesting conversation.
Ms. LARSUEL: Thank you.
Mr. YANG: Thank you, Allison.
U.N. says migrants face worst racism, Arizona law cited
UNITED NATIONS | Mon Nov 1, 2010 5:23pm EDT
(Reuters) - Migrants bear the brunt of discrimination around the world, and Arizona's controversial immigration law is the kind of policy that could open the door to human rights abuses, a U.N. investigator said on Monday.
"If I have any specific group ... subject to the most insidious contemporary forms of racial discrimination, then those are migrants," said U.N. special rapporteur on contemporary forms of racism and xenophobia, Githu Muigai.
"In many parts of the world today, immigrants bear the brunt of xenophobic intolerance," Muigai, a Kenyan lawyer, told reporters.
"This is true of the United States, as it is of Europe, as indeed it is in many parts of the world."
He cited the example of the U.S. state of Arizona's immigration law, which would require police in the course of a lawful stop to determine the status of anyone they suspect is in the country illegally.
That law, the subject of a fierce legal battle in the U.S. court system, has been scrutinized and criticized around the world, partly due to concerns it would encourage racial profiling and promote discrimination.
Muigai said there was nothing barring countries from implementing "a fair, open and transparent migration policy." But the Arizona law is something different.
He said it "equips a policeman ... with such immense powers as to compromise in my point of view the very, very fundamental human rights that ought to be enjoyed in such an enlightened part of the world as Arizona."
"What I find difficult ... to reconcile to is the stigmatization, the negative stereotyping that goes with ethnic profiling," Muigai said, adding that "an immigration policy that does not respond to minimum international human rights standards is inherently ... suspect."
A U.S. federal district judge in July put on hold key parts of the state law known as SB 1070, arguing that immigration matters are the federal government's responsibility.
Arizona on Monday asked U.S. appellate judges to allow the law to go into effect while the legal battle continues.
(Reuters) - Migrants bear the brunt of discrimination around the world, and Arizona's controversial immigration law is the kind of policy that could open the door to human rights abuses, a U.N. investigator said on Monday.
"If I have any specific group ... subject to the most insidious contemporary forms of racial discrimination, then those are migrants," said U.N. special rapporteur on contemporary forms of racism and xenophobia, Githu Muigai.
"In many parts of the world today, immigrants bear the brunt of xenophobic intolerance," Muigai, a Kenyan lawyer, told reporters.
"This is true of the United States, as it is of Europe, as indeed it is in many parts of the world."
He cited the example of the U.S. state of Arizona's immigration law, which would require police in the course of a lawful stop to determine the status of anyone they suspect is in the country illegally.
That law, the subject of a fierce legal battle in the U.S. court system, has been scrutinized and criticized around the world, partly due to concerns it would encourage racial profiling and promote discrimination.
Muigai said there was nothing barring countries from implementing "a fair, open and transparent migration policy." But the Arizona law is something different.
He said it "equips a policeman ... with such immense powers as to compromise in my point of view the very, very fundamental human rights that ought to be enjoyed in such an enlightened part of the world as Arizona."
"What I find difficult ... to reconcile to is the stigmatization, the negative stereotyping that goes with ethnic profiling," Muigai said, adding that "an immigration policy that does not respond to minimum international human rights standards is inherently ... suspect."
A U.S. federal district judge in July put on hold key parts of the state law known as SB 1070, arguing that immigration matters are the federal government's responsibility.
Arizona on Monday asked U.S. appellate judges to allow the law to go into effect while the legal battle continues.
Is It Where You’re From or Where You’re At? Black Demographics and Creative Economies
Mai Perkins remembers attending a concert at Central Park SummerStage with Cassanda Wilson, partly because of an observation the jazz singer made about Perkins’ new city. “She made a comment that I thought was so applicable to the city’s diversity. She said, ‘California has landscape, New York has people-scape!’” It was a sentiment that the native Angeleno could relate to.
Perkins is no different from the millions who migrate across the country for school or for a new job. She moved to Washington DC over ten years ago to attend Howard University and ended up in New York City to pursue her career as a writer.
So what makes New York a more complementary fit for her than her hometown? Maybe that has something to do with the creative economy, a concept much discussed by “urban expert” Richard Florida in his book “Who’s Your City: How the Creative Economy is Making the Place Where You Live the Most Important Decision of Your Life,” which explored an interesting pattern of how one’s city environment influences productivity and creativity.
“I really think that being in New York and seeing people living and thriving outside of conventional standards has really benefitted my personal and professional trajectory in ways that would not have been realized had I remained in Los Angeles,” said Perkins. The Brooklyn resident and adjunct professor at City University New York believes that the high level of diversity in New York fosters creativity and comfort with one’s personal identity.
When applied to the Black experience, will analyzing the creative economies explain why cities like Brooklyn or Philadelphia produce so many musical artists or why Atlanta has such a high percentage of Black entrepreneurs? According to the social theory, location is critical whether you know it or not. It’s not only about infrastructure and city government but also about the atmosphere created by people themselves. For many Blacks, just having a presence within a city is a major element.
“A majority of Blacks have a strong racial identity. If a person has a strong racial identity, it matters whether they live in a city that has a sizable percentage of that racial group,” said Rashawn Ray, an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Maryland. “Cities that have a thriving Black middle class, Black political representation or politicians clearly invested in issues that affect African-Americans, stable housing prices in black neighborhoods, public spaces conducive to physical activity, and an educational system that has a track record for graduating Black youth and assisting with college attendance are positive places for Blacks to live.”
And what about the impact of living in a city where there’s not much Black representation?
Growing up in either Atlanta or Brooklyn/Harlem is a far different experience than living in a California city where Blacks only represent 6.6 percent of the state population according to the 2010 US Census Bureau Results. Although cities like Los Angeles have a Black population of nearly 12 percent (2000 Census), New York’s black population exceeds 26.6 percent (2000 Census) and Atlanta boasts a large 61.4 percent Black population (2000 Census).
Perkins, who appreciated her Los Angeles upbringing, admits that the East coast seems to be more conducive to various self-expressions. “I knew in 11th and 12th grade that I wanted to grow locks, but it wasn’t until I moved to DC and went to Howard that I figured out it was actually an option,” she said. “My mother has always had a sophisticated Afrocentric style of dress and had worn hairstyles ranging from naturals to fingerwaves. [It was] never an issue of feeling that I couldn’t express myself culturally. However, when I look at some of the African American teenagers coming up in LA right now, I don’t know how much they value styles and choices that are centered in African tradition like perhaps a lot of the youth in New York do,” she said, adding that the composition of New York cannot be ignored when discussing its impact on individuality. “The Black population in New York City is significantly more diverse than the Black population in LA. In New York, you are the minority if you are African American; when I meet people here, their first question to me is which African country or part of the Caribbean am I from.”
As Harlem, Brooklyn and Washington DC represent Black meccas of the East Coast, Atlanta is the Southern mecca, representing upward mobility, prosperity and of course, the Buppy culture.
Akiim DeShay of BlackDemographics.com, who is a native of Rochester New York, said that Atlanta made a positive impression on him after having lived there for a short time in high school. He witnessed the stable and middle class life of Atlanta that encapsulates the city’s image as a destination for many looking to start a family, take part in the burgeoning Black Hollywood, or just live in a stable African-American community. Maybe it’s unintentional but Atlanta has definitely reaped the rewards of being branded as the place to be for successful African-Americans.
“Atlanta has its problems but it also has a reputation of opportunity and prosperity,” said DeShay, who now resides outside of Dallas. “So even those who are living in poverty, high crime areas, and segregation continue to hear from others or the media about how booming the city is. They see folks from all over the country who broke their neck to move there with horror stories of places they escaped from.”
Despite the fact that Atlanta has its negatives like any other big city, much of its leverage and reputation comes from the fact that African-Americans can see themselves reflected as engines of everyday business.
“Go to any of Atlanta’s business centers and it is normal to see African Americans working in all sectors of the economy at all levels,” said DeShay. “Ask for a supervisor, manager, or even the CEO, and don’t be surprised if a Black man or woman appears. Majority Black middle class neighborhoods surround the city’s southern half. In an environment like this, how could anyone fail? Well of course it happens but don’t tell that to any of the thousands of African Americans who move there every month.” The attraction is evident; the Atlanta area gained 445,000 African Americans between 2000 and 2008 which is by far the largest Black population gain of any metropolitan area in the United States.
While the city has long been a destination for Southerners, California only began to experience Black migration in large numbers in 1940. Many Black residents of Oakland and Los Angeles will tell you that their parents or they themselves moved to California from various locations in the South for job opportunities in the aftermath of World War II. The period between 1940 and 1970 is known as the Second Great Migration, in which the state of California absorbed about 5 million blacks.
The longer history of Blacks on the East coast has dictated the dominant nature of East coast culture in music and history. Don’t we often wonder why certain cities over-represent when it comes to producing notables? “Cities such as New York and Philadelphia have historically been large markets for the culture and the arts. After all, the Harlem Renaissance and Du Bois’ classic Philadelphia Negro occurred in these cities,” said Dr. Ray. “The legacy of these triumphs still lives on. These cities have also historically had a thriving Black middle class and Black political representation. These dynamics set the tone for allowing equitable opportunities for Blacks to be productive, creative, and upwardly mobile.”
Perkins is no different from the millions who migrate across the country for school or for a new job. She moved to Washington DC over ten years ago to attend Howard University and ended up in New York City to pursue her career as a writer.
So what makes New York a more complementary fit for her than her hometown? Maybe that has something to do with the creative economy, a concept much discussed by “urban expert” Richard Florida in his book “Who’s Your City: How the Creative Economy is Making the Place Where You Live the Most Important Decision of Your Life,” which explored an interesting pattern of how one’s city environment influences productivity and creativity.
“I really think that being in New York and seeing people living and thriving outside of conventional standards has really benefitted my personal and professional trajectory in ways that would not have been realized had I remained in Los Angeles,” said Perkins. The Brooklyn resident and adjunct professor at City University New York believes that the high level of diversity in New York fosters creativity and comfort with one’s personal identity.
When applied to the Black experience, will analyzing the creative economies explain why cities like Brooklyn or Philadelphia produce so many musical artists or why Atlanta has such a high percentage of Black entrepreneurs? According to the social theory, location is critical whether you know it or not. It’s not only about infrastructure and city government but also about the atmosphere created by people themselves. For many Blacks, just having a presence within a city is a major element.
“A majority of Blacks have a strong racial identity. If a person has a strong racial identity, it matters whether they live in a city that has a sizable percentage of that racial group,” said Rashawn Ray, an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Maryland. “Cities that have a thriving Black middle class, Black political representation or politicians clearly invested in issues that affect African-Americans, stable housing prices in black neighborhoods, public spaces conducive to physical activity, and an educational system that has a track record for graduating Black youth and assisting with college attendance are positive places for Blacks to live.”
And what about the impact of living in a city where there’s not much Black representation?
Growing up in either Atlanta or Brooklyn/Harlem is a far different experience than living in a California city where Blacks only represent 6.6 percent of the state population according to the 2010 US Census Bureau Results. Although cities like Los Angeles have a Black population of nearly 12 percent (2000 Census), New York’s black population exceeds 26.6 percent (2000 Census) and Atlanta boasts a large 61.4 percent Black population (2000 Census).
Perkins, who appreciated her Los Angeles upbringing, admits that the East coast seems to be more conducive to various self-expressions. “I knew in 11th and 12th grade that I wanted to grow locks, but it wasn’t until I moved to DC and went to Howard that I figured out it was actually an option,” she said. “My mother has always had a sophisticated Afrocentric style of dress and had worn hairstyles ranging from naturals to fingerwaves. [It was] never an issue of feeling that I couldn’t express myself culturally. However, when I look at some of the African American teenagers coming up in LA right now, I don’t know how much they value styles and choices that are centered in African tradition like perhaps a lot of the youth in New York do,” she said, adding that the composition of New York cannot be ignored when discussing its impact on individuality. “The Black population in New York City is significantly more diverse than the Black population in LA. In New York, you are the minority if you are African American; when I meet people here, their first question to me is which African country or part of the Caribbean am I from.”
As Harlem, Brooklyn and Washington DC represent Black meccas of the East Coast, Atlanta is the Southern mecca, representing upward mobility, prosperity and of course, the Buppy culture.
Akiim DeShay of BlackDemographics.com, who is a native of Rochester New York, said that Atlanta made a positive impression on him after having lived there for a short time in high school. He witnessed the stable and middle class life of Atlanta that encapsulates the city’s image as a destination for many looking to start a family, take part in the burgeoning Black Hollywood, or just live in a stable African-American community. Maybe it’s unintentional but Atlanta has definitely reaped the rewards of being branded as the place to be for successful African-Americans.
“Atlanta has its problems but it also has a reputation of opportunity and prosperity,” said DeShay, who now resides outside of Dallas. “So even those who are living in poverty, high crime areas, and segregation continue to hear from others or the media about how booming the city is. They see folks from all over the country who broke their neck to move there with horror stories of places they escaped from.”
Despite the fact that Atlanta has its negatives like any other big city, much of its leverage and reputation comes from the fact that African-Americans can see themselves reflected as engines of everyday business.
“Go to any of Atlanta’s business centers and it is normal to see African Americans working in all sectors of the economy at all levels,” said DeShay. “Ask for a supervisor, manager, or even the CEO, and don’t be surprised if a Black man or woman appears. Majority Black middle class neighborhoods surround the city’s southern half. In an environment like this, how could anyone fail? Well of course it happens but don’t tell that to any of the thousands of African Americans who move there every month.” The attraction is evident; the Atlanta area gained 445,000 African Americans between 2000 and 2008 which is by far the largest Black population gain of any metropolitan area in the United States.
While the city has long been a destination for Southerners, California only began to experience Black migration in large numbers in 1940. Many Black residents of Oakland and Los Angeles will tell you that their parents or they themselves moved to California from various locations in the South for job opportunities in the aftermath of World War II. The period between 1940 and 1970 is known as the Second Great Migration, in which the state of California absorbed about 5 million blacks.
The longer history of Blacks on the East coast has dictated the dominant nature of East coast culture in music and history. Don’t we often wonder why certain cities over-represent when it comes to producing notables? “Cities such as New York and Philadelphia have historically been large markets for the culture and the arts. After all, the Harlem Renaissance and Du Bois’ classic Philadelphia Negro occurred in these cities,” said Dr. Ray. “The legacy of these triumphs still lives on. These cities have also historically had a thriving Black middle class and Black political representation. These dynamics set the tone for allowing equitable opportunities for Blacks to be productive, creative, and upwardly mobile.”
Study: Latinas Are Economic Engine of Arizona
Prensa Hispana, News Report, Maritza Lizeth Félix, Posted: Nov 26, 2010
PHOENIX -- Latinos represent more than 30 percent of Arizona’s population and bring more than $31 billion to the state’s economy, according to a recent study by Arizona’s Hispanic Chamber of Commerce, reports Maritza Lizeth Félix for Prensa Hispana. The report, “Datos: Focus on Arizona’s Hispanic Market 2010,” finds that Latina women have become an economic engine in the state. The study does not include the economic impact of undocumented immigrants.
In Numbers
$31.3 billion – the buying power of Latinos in Arizona
$47.9 billion – the amount Latinos are expected to spend in 2013
$951 billion – Latino buying power in the U.S., not including Puerto Ricans, whose buying power is estimated at $50 billion
63% of Arizona’s Latino population lives in Maricopa County
42% of the residents of Phoenix are Latino
1 in 4 children born in the U.S. in 2008 was of Hispanic descent
Fun Facts
Latinos spend $128.50 a week on food, compared to the $91 that others spend.
A Latino goes to the grocery store at least 4 times a week on average.
Young Latinas are the biggest spenders on cosmetics and personal hygiene products.
Latino families continue to prefer options in Spanish, since the majority speaks Spanish at home.
Latina mothers are more likely to buy fresh food to cook, than to eat at a restaurant.
Nearly 41 percent of the Latino population plans to buy a TV or computer in the next six months.
Every two minutes, a Latino baby is born in the U.S.
PHOENIX -- Latinos represent more than 30 percent of Arizona’s population and bring more than $31 billion to the state’s economy, according to a recent study by Arizona’s Hispanic Chamber of Commerce, reports Maritza Lizeth Félix for Prensa Hispana. The report, “Datos: Focus on Arizona’s Hispanic Market 2010,” finds that Latina women have become an economic engine in the state. The study does not include the economic impact of undocumented immigrants.
In Numbers
$31.3 billion – the buying power of Latinos in Arizona
$47.9 billion – the amount Latinos are expected to spend in 2013
$951 billion – Latino buying power in the U.S., not including Puerto Ricans, whose buying power is estimated at $50 billion
63% of Arizona’s Latino population lives in Maricopa County
42% of the residents of Phoenix are Latino
1 in 4 children born in the U.S. in 2008 was of Hispanic descent
Fun Facts
Latinos spend $128.50 a week on food, compared to the $91 that others spend.
A Latino goes to the grocery store at least 4 times a week on average.
Young Latinas are the biggest spenders on cosmetics and personal hygiene products.
Latino families continue to prefer options in Spanish, since the majority speaks Spanish at home.
Latina mothers are more likely to buy fresh food to cook, than to eat at a restaurant.
Nearly 41 percent of the Latino population plans to buy a TV or computer in the next six months.
Every two minutes, a Latino baby is born in the U.S.
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