quote:

Originally posted by Fabulous:
DR Congo: Africa's worst war



Many families have lost someone in the war
The four-and-a-half year conflict in the Democratic Republic of Congo has been described as the worst since World War II.

An estimated 3.3 million people have died as a result of the war making it the "tragedy of modern times", according to a report issued by the International Rescue Committee aid agency.

The IRC said that only about 10% of the victims died violently, with the vast majority dying from starvation and disease due to the activities of the various armed groups operating in the country.

"This is a humanitarian catastrophe of horrid and shocking proportions... Yet, the crisis has received scant attention from international donors and the media," says IRC President George Rupp.

Africa's worst ever war began following the invasion of the north and east of the country by Rwanda and Uganda, to, as they said, prevent armed groups attacking them from Congo's territory.

This brought in armies, which have now left, from other countries to fight on the side of the Congolese Government.

However, ethnic clashes between the Hema and Lendu in the troubled north-eastern province of Ituri remain a potential stumbling block to peace.

Condemnation

The IRC's report was released as the United States and Britain condemned a massacre of some 1,000 villagers in Ituri province.

The reported massacre near Bunia last Thursday, came just a day after a peace agreement was signed in South Africa marking the end of 19 months of talks between the government, opposition parties, civil groups, militia and rebels.


DR CONGO'S WAR

Four years
Seven foreign armies
At least 3 million dead
Disease and abuses widespread

Hope survives DR Congo killing


The US has called on Uganda to exercise its responsibility to protect civilians in Ituri where the killings occurred and to ensure that no violations of human rights or atrocities are committed.

On Monday, a Ugandan army spokesman denied any involvement in the massacre, saying his troops had been at least 15 km away.

Both US and UK have also called on all parties in the conflict to cease hostilities immediately and support a committee set up to end the fighting and make the area safe.

The committee resumed talks on Monday, despite the massacre.

On Monday, President Kabila was sworn-in as a transitional head of state for a period of two years before elections.

A new transitional government should be formed soon, including representatives of rebel groups who control eastern DR Congo but they were not present at Monday's ceremony in the capital, Kinshasa.

On Tuesday, Reuters news agency reported that people in Ituri were fearful of reprisal attacks.

"This is really hell. We are not secure, even here . Anything could happen," Emmanuel Ralonji said in Bunia, not far from the scene of the massacres.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/africa/2928127.stm

America/Britain careless about what happens in Africa---they got what they wanted a long time ago----SLAVES!

Davida Bloom

White, But Not Quite:
The Jewish Character and Anti-Semitism - Negotiating a Location in the Gray Zone Between Other and Not

It is hard to describe the feeling -- the haunting quality -- the degree of its intensity, somewhere between a deja-vue and a possible connection with a collective consciousness; it is even difficult to pinpoint when in the discussion I became aware of the feeling.

I only know it was there and it stayed with me. A feeling of being erased, and yet not feeling entitled to halt the process of erasure. The discussion revolved around a 1994 production in Chicago of The Merchant of Venice, directed by Peter Sellars. Sellars set the production in present day Venice, California and cast Antonio and the Venetians as Latinos, Portia and her retinue as Asians, and Shylock and the Jews as African-Americans.

I did not understand why I felt usurped when the location of the Jew was replaced by the African-American. David Richards writes in his review of the production for the New York Times, "Mr. Sellars argues in a director's note that such innovations extend 'the metaphor and the reality of anti-Semitism' to include 'parallel struggles and their related issues' ".

Why should this directorial choice trouble me? As words were circulating in my mind, words that might begin to express to my colleagues my troubled feeling, the subtext implied in the intonation of the comment that the Goodman Theatre's subscription base was outraged by the production, stopped the words from forming in my mouth.

I am after all a privileged middle-class Jewish woman. I have only a few times in my life felt the effects of anti-Semitism, and then only in its mildest forms. My experiences of discrimination pale in comparison to those of these other Others.

My place in that location of the Other as a Jew, not as a woman, slipped away. I did not feel entitled to claim a location, not even share the space, with the Asian, the Latino, and the African-American from the Goodman Theatre production.

In her book, Black, Jewish, and Interracial: It's Not the Color of Your Skin, but the Race of Your Kin, and Other Myths of Identity, Katya Gibel Azoulay writes, "Identities take [page 13] shape or surface at the moment when their potentiality are denied".

I think perhaps the troubled feeling stems from the sense that this production in Chicago denied the potential of my Jewish identity.

In this paper I will attempt to analyze the roots of this feeling: the ambiguous location of the Jewish character in mid- to late twentieth century theatre, and the ambiguous location of anti-Semitism at the end of this century. I maintain that this location lies somewhere between the Other and the Not, a location that marks Jews as white, but not quite.

Jewish Identity as Not White

In a very literal sense, all Jews are not white. Ilsa M. Glazer reminds us in her article "A Cloak of Many Colors: Jewish Feminism and Feminist Jews in America," that people of different global locations see Jews as a people who are not necessarily white. "Jews who migrated to America came mostly from Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East and therefore tend to be Caucasian.

Those who migrated to the modern state of Israel from sub-Saharan Africa, India, and elsewhere have made that country a multiracial and multicultural mosaic united by religion".(3) News reports in 1996 of Ethiopian Jews living in Israel who were outraged upon learning that their donated blood had been discarded due to what was perceived as a unacceptably high risk of possible HIV transmission, brought the literal multi-colored dimension of the Jewish people to the headlines.

Historically however, the identification of Jews as not white has not been a factor of their skin color. Azoulay notes that in "Virginia's laws pertaining to miscegenation, one finds evidence that Jews were not conceptualized as merely a religious group, but were specifically marked as a nonwhite race".

The American theatre followed this trend of viewing Jews as non- [page 14] white. Ellen Schiff describes the typical (stereotypical) characters found in the popular comedies and vaudeville acts of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries when she writes that "The era's dramatized personae included a whole variety of ethnic caricatures which exploited the traits familiarly associated within the Irish, Germans, French, Swedes, and that irresponsible burlesque concoction, the stage Negro. The Jew[ish character] figured as an ethnic among ethnics". Even the Jewish entertainers during that time claimed their place next to other "non-white" immigrants. Schiff continues:

It is note worthy that so many of the entertainers whose names come immediately to mind as the early great Jewish comedians and comediennes--Tucker, Brice, Cantor, Jessel, Burns--launched their careers with a bag of borrowed tricks that bespoke their awareness of themselves and their audiences as ethnics. With other diversions, they offered 'Dutch' (German) dialects routines, Irish imitations, Yiddish parodies and, with remarkable regularity, blackface.

The Jews as non-white also permeate Christian history. Sander Gilman when discussing the Otherness that has marked Jews as racially different throughout Christian societies in his book Jewish Self-Hatred, argues:

The association of the Jews with Blackness is as old as Christian tradition. Medieval iconography always juxtaposed the black image of the synagogue, of the Old Law, with the white of the Church. The association is an artifact of the Christian perception of the Jews which has been simply incorporated into the rhetoric of race.

But it is incorporated, not merely as an intellectual abstraction, but as the model through which Jews are perceived, treated, and thus respond as if confronted with the reflection of their own reality.

This phenomenon of what I call racialized ethnicity is by no means unique to the Jewish (and other) immigrants to America. Richard Ned Lebow's book White Britain and Black Ireland: [page 15] The Influence of Stereotypes on Colonial Policy, documents the ways in which the Irish native was racialized to be Black by Imperial Britain.

And, on a more private/domestic front, Anne McClintock, in her book Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest, details the fascination aristocrat Arthur J. Munby held for working women in the late nineteenth century. "Munby refers frequently to the 'racial' otherness of working-class women".

His drawings of Caucasian working-class women with blackened skin are yet another example of the degree to which the Other's racial identity is not dependent on their literal skin color.

The Shift from Non-White to Not-Quite

[snip]

Click on the link to read more.

http://www.rtjournal.org/vol_1/no_1/bloom.html

Early Black Women at Cornell



Introduction
At the time Cornell was founded, University President Andrew Dickson White was adamant that the new university be open to women as well as men, and to all people regardless of race. The process of creating a tolerant and respectful campus community that offers opportunity to all has been a complicated one. It has been influenced by the particular views of different administrations, changing social and political ideas and expectations, and the individual students who have attended the university.

Since the arrival of Jane Eleanor Datcher, the first known black woman to matriculate at Cornell, black women have lived, studied, and cultivated friendships at Cornell while pursuing a premier education. Although they have been an important part of Cornell’s history, various factors have also set them apart. Themes of the exhibit include the experiences of black women as students at Cornell, as well as the stories of racism and anti-racism and the complex road toward inclusion.

The changing accessibility of campus housing is an example of the varied institutional attitudes toward black women students. Sarah Winifred Brown of the Class of 1897 spent her years at Cornell living in Sage College for Women. She went on to become a medical doctor, and during World War II was a member of the “flying squadron” of fifty women physicians appointed by the Women’s War Work Council. Just a few decades later, under the administration of President Livingston Farrand, R. Louise Fitch (Dean of Women) denied residency to black women in Sage College.

While the university was filled with a spirit of great opportunity and promise, it was still part of an American culture that was mired in the racism of its time. In the classroom, African-American women learned alongside their white counterparts. Socially, they often created community with each other and within Ithaca’s black community.

Despite the social challenges and because of their own single-mindedness, many of them flourished and graduated, and went on to lead full and accomplished lives. Alumnae featured here include Sarah Winifred Brown 1897, Jessie R. Fauset 1905, Evie Lee Spencer Carpenter ’18, Adelaide Cook Daly ’18, Pauline Davis ’31, Ruth Peyton ’31, Nellie Tidline ’37, and Sarah E. Thomas ’37.

Continue the tour

http://rmc.library.cornell.edu/earlyblackwomen/introduction/index.html

Conflicts in Africa

Conflicts in Africa — Introduction

There have been over 9.5 million refugees and hundreds and thousands of people have been slaughtered in Africa from a number of conflicts and civil wars. If this scale of destruction and fighting was in Europe, then people would be calling it World War III with the entire world rushing to report, provide aid, mediate and otherwise try to diffuse the situation. Find out more about why Africa has been largely ignored and to see some of the root causes of the problems.

http://www.globalissues.org/Geopolitics/Africa.asp

Assata Shakur



Assata Shakur (born Joanne Deborah Byron Chesimard July 16, 1947 in North Carolina) was an activist in the Black Panther Party, and currently remains an escaped convicted felon and fugitive living in asylum in Cuba since 1984. Shakur grew up in New York City and attended Manhattan Community College and CCNY, where she was involved in many political activities.

Granted political asylum in Cuba (where she presently lives), Shakur remains a fugitive from New Jersey and the United States for her 1979 escape from prison. She had been incarcerated for the 1973 slaying of New Jersey State Police officer Werner Foerster.

She was also convicted of a second murder, for the death of fellow activist Zayd Shakur, who was killed that night along with officer Foerster in the shooting. In the 1990s, she became perhaps most well known as the godmother and step-aunt of the late famed hip hop artist Tupac Shakur.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assata_Shakur