Robert Fisk explains his reasons for retirement

I feel deeply sad that Dr. Fisk has retired, and that it happened many months ago and I didn't even know. He's one of my favourite journalists in the world. His work is of enormous value. It's hard to imagine he'll really stay away from journalism. Who knows?

A fine report, by the way, from the journalists who created the piece.




Here's Fisk on Western corporate media distortion of Hezbollah:




Fisk on Turkey's holocaust against the Armenians... a genocide which Turkey still refuses to acknowledge:




Fisk reflects on the experiences of his career:

A moment of perfect beauty

Acclaimed Japanese performer Yoshikazu Fujimoto dances with a sword while a singer accompanies him hauntingly.

Kull wahad! said Muad'Dib ("I am profoundly disturbed").

Minister Faust reads FROM THE NOTEBOOKS OF DOCTOR BRAIN

Last fall, I spoke at a session arranged by Professor Janice Williamson and author/professor Thomas Wharton (Icefields) at the University of Alberta. I read from From the Notebooks of Doctor Brain (which, incidentally, received the Special Citation of the 2007 Philip K. Dick Award). I also answered questions afterward.

Here's the audio. Enjoy.

I love this White man

I wish Obama had talked like Father Mike Flager when it came to defending Rev. Jeremiah Wright. Powerful words. Great job, Father. I might've stayed Catholic if you'd been my pastor.

Some debate has ensued as to the authenticity of this interview. Read that debate here.

US, Canadian and French collusion to destroy the Haitian people

John Maxwell writes: "...the US, Canada and France, acting on behalf of the so-called 'civilized world,' decided on the basis of lies that, as in the case of Iraq, a free and independent people had no business being free and independent when their freedom and independence was seen to threaten the economic interest of the richest people in Haiti and, by extension, the wealthiest countries in the world.

"Today, and especially for the last few weeks, the starving people in Haiti have been trying to get the world to listen to their anguish and misery. Along with some other poor people in other countries the Haitians have been driven to desperation and the edge of starvation by the rapidly increasing price of food. Unlike all the others the Haitians are over the edge, they are starving, refugees in their own proud country, many forced to eat dirt to survive, however tenuously.

"Only the Cubans, the Venezuelans and the Vietnamese appear to care about what is happening in Haiti. The rest of us are too concerned with 'wealth management' and the prospects of foreign investors with bursting wallets floating down from the sky to make us all rich."

TONIGHT ON THE TERRORDOME: Medical Apartheid

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In the West, when one thinks of medical experimentation on unwilling human subjects, the country that comes to mind most readily is Germany under Nazi rule.

Few people think of the United States.

And yet since at least the 1800s, numerous doctors in the United States conducted barbaric experiments, sometimes leading to death, on patients of Afrikan descent. Indeed, grotesque gynecological experimentation on Afrikan women was the 19th century equivalent “boon” to medical science that Nazi medical atrocities were to the 20th century.

Yet while the Nazi regime rose and fell within a generation, Afrikan women and men were subjected to “scientific” Whitesupremacy for hundreds of years. As we’re about to find out, some of that experimentation continued into the modern era, with a mindset whose terrifying results continue to this day.

A few selections from Reuters news service help illustrate the racial gulf in American medical care:

“African Americans continue to receive poorer quality healthcare compared with their white peers, and racial stereotyping by American doctors, nurses and other healthcare providers is at least partly to blame.... Black patients are less likely to receive potentially life-saving treatments [and] were more likely than whites to receive less-desirable treatments, such as limb amputation... or removal of the testes in the case of prostate or testicular cancers.”

Some relevant Reuters headlines include:

“Study Finds Racial Differences in US Cancer Care” (March 8, 2003)
“Poorer Care for Blacks Found in Medicare HMOs” (March 12, 2003)
“Race May Be Factor in Young Patients' Chronic Pain” (March 18, 2003) and
“Death Risk Higher in Black Ovarian” (March 15, 2003).

See also:

Racial discrimination & health: Pathways & evidence and

Physicians’ Ethical Responsibilities in AddressingRacial and Ethnic Healthcare Disparities


Speaking to extreme racial discrimination in American medicine is Harriet A. Washington. She’s the author of the groundbreaking book Medical Apartheid:The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present.

Washington has been a fellow in ethics at the Harvard School of Medicine, a fellow at the Harvard School of Public Health, a Knight Fellow at Stanford University, and a senior research scholar at the National Centre for Bio-Ethics at Tuskegee University. She has worked for USA Today among other media outlets. Her work has appeared in the Harvard Public Health Review and the New England Journal of Medicine, and has received numerous awards.

Washington’s book Medical Apartheid explores how historians have ignored the vicious reality of race and medicine in the United States, obscuring how the ugliness of racial hatred contaminated the supposedly saintly role of scientists and doctors.

Last week, in part one, we heard about the origins of the regime of medical terror, and the horrific results for its Afrikan subjects. Tonight on the April 16th edition of The Terrordome, we present the conclusion, in which Washington explores the ways in which the terrors of the past have continued in the 21st Century.

Washington spoke as part of a lecture series at the Science Museum of Minnesota, in conjunction with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum exhibit "Deadly Medicine: Creating the Master Race."

Her lecture is part a series at the Science Museum entitled "From Eugenics to Deadly Medicine and Back," a series which began Feb. 27 and which concludes May 4, 2008.

Part 2 of Harriet Washington on Medical Apartheid begins with Washington describing how in the 19th Century, the expectation of the role of doctors was anything but the provision of compassionate medical care for Afrikans in the United States.

Watch Harriet Washington on Democracy Now! below. The transcript is here.

Review by Alondra Nelson, an assistant professor of African American studies and sociology at Yale University, who is writing a book, Body and Soul: The Black Panther Party and the Politics of Health and Race.

Harriet Washington responds to a critic here.

Earthship Biotecture

Fascinating stuff. The discussion in comments is interesting as well.

Part 2 and 3 are below:

My predictions about Battlestar Galactica’s final season

I’ve been considering for a week whether to post these predictions, since there’s a great likelihood I’ll be wrong about most or even all of them. But what they hey, hey?

1. The “Final One” is either literally or metaphorically everyone.

Why? Even before I watched Season 4, Episode 2 (“Six of One”), I’d come to the conclusion that both humans and Cylons would reach Earth and be forced to accommodate each other—live together in peace, and eventually intermarry to produce children. After the outbreak of the coup/Cylon civil war in “Six of One,” it seems that the Cylons in revolt will need new allies.

Given that this revolt is led by the Sixes, in collaboration with the Sharons and the Leobins (I can’t keep track of all the numbers), who are the most human-loving (in both senses) of the Cylons, inter-creation (a preferably term to “cross-breeding”) seems inevitable as an outcome—if not an actual goal.

Both species are depopulated... we don’t know yet how many Cylons will be boxed or prevented from attaining resurrection. After all, the surviving Cylons might simply pull the plugs on all resurrection-ready Cavils and others. The humans are down to around 40 thousand. Perhaps the only way to ensure survival of both is inter-creation.

Kara—if that’s who she is—and Leobin will create hybrid children. The Chief (if he is a Cylon; remember, the Cylons are masters of deceit--only Anders has been confirmed as of this writing) and Callie have already done so. Ditto Helo and Athena. Perhaps Baltar and Tori? Or Baltar and Caprica Six?

If so, then BSG is following in the footsteps of the Matrix trilogy. Although episodes 2 and 3 in that series were disappointing as drama, their thematic triumph over much of SF and fantasy is that they exhort accommodation with our foes towards eventual understanding, rather than the destruction of enemy forces that Star Wars prescribes or the outright genocide that Lord of the Rings recommends.

BSG goes further, saying that our survival will not only depend on accommodation but in love, union and children. A powerful and hopeful message indeed.

If the Chief, Tigh, Tori and Anders truly are Cylons, it’s possible that they actually had the families they remembered having, rather than their memories being implanted. They may be the inheritors of enough ancient/future (see below) Cylon DNA that they are the Cylon equivalent of Dune’s Kwisatz haderach.

2. Earth is the original Kobol, due to some sort of time-travel or space-folding or whatever the hell mcguffin.

Why? I don’t remember if the series explained why Kobol was abandoned. Was it due to a natural disaster? Even Kobol’s location was lost. Why? Perhaps when Kara visited “Earth,” she’d gone back in time to visit ancient Kobol.

So this would mean that in the future of the recolonisation (?) of Earth, or the creation of New/Old Kobol, the species which arises is a human/Cylon hybrid, which one day, due to war or natural disaster, goes out to seed the stars, creating twelve colonies.

Eventually someone creates Cylon servants; those servants rebel; the free Cylons evolve and create twelve models; and in the cyclic time of the BSG universe, “everything has happened before, and everything will happen again.”

Perhaps some Cylons and some humans remained apart from the general intermarriage--separatist humans and Cylons who changed their minds. These groups might be among those who left to found colonies; or perhaps separatist (fundamentalists? "Humanists"?) wiped out the others in war... without realising that even among their numbers, there was some Cylon blood?

(If so, it's not hard to imagine that Roslin would represent the extreme end of separatism / anti-cohabitation.)

Someone creates Season Three’s “Temple of the Five” (as eventually discovered by the Chief)—a temple in honour of the Final Five. Did Cylons create it? Did the Final Five? Was it a Cylon/human temple, or a hybrid temple?

Some remaining questions:

A. Who left the diseased buoy, and why? Was it human? Cylon? Hybrids?

B. Who created and programmed the Cylons in the first place? Were these evolved Centurions, or someone or something else?

C. Which of the remaining characters will die by the final episode?

TONIGHT ON THE TERRORDOME: Lester K Spence on the Obama-Wright Moment

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The recent controversy surrounding Barack Obama and Reverend Jeremiah Wright has opened up innumerable discussions outside and inside the American Afrikan community regarding who has a right to say what, and who has a right to consort with whom.

So far, US corporate press has done nothing but scale their already lofty positions on the mountain of hypocrisy. While Democratic contender Obama is held up to scrutiny and shaming for his Reverend’s comments—which when taken in context sound entirely logical—the comments of some supporters of Republican nominee John McCain are outrageous.

According to Mother Jones magazine: “Senator John McCain hailed as a spiritual adviser … Ohio megachurch pastor [Televangelist Rod Parsley] who has called upon Christians to wage a ‘war’ against the ‘false religion’ of Islam with the aim of destroying it.”

(Thanks to Swamp Politics for the link on media hypocrisy.)

Of course, in a society that once claimed legal ownership over an entire segment of the human population, it shouldn’t be surprising that some descendents of the owning class still believe they have affinity rights over the descendents of the group that was once in the owned class.

Prominent Afrikan politicians and candidates in America are regularly asked to denounce fellow Afrikans; the corresponding law isn’t enforced against Euro-Americans. Whether such a law is appropriate for anyone is a separate debate—after all, the company we keep does speak to our values and may speak to our intentions—but unless such a rule is required of all, it is, by definition, discriminatory.

The man just off-centre of the controversy is Rev. Dr. Jeremiah A. Wright, Jr., who since 1972 has preached at Chicago’s Trinity United Church of Christ. He’s been a Marine, a cardiopulmonary technician, and an academic, having received his doctorate in Theology from the United Theological Seminary. He has also been the recipient of eight honorary doctorates.

The phrase ‘Unashamedly Black and Unapologetically Christian’ was coined by Rev. Wright’s predecessor, and shortly after Wright’s ministry began, the phrase became the church’s motto. Under Wright’s stewardship, the church has grown from 87 members to over 6,000, and has included Oprah Winfrey among its parishioners. Wright has lectured at universities and seminaries across the United States and internationally, and is the author of four books.

Much of the furor around Reverend Wright’s comments is focused on two phrases: “the chickens are coming home to roost,” and “God damn America.” Hear and watch those comments in their original context:

Reverend Jeremiah Wright – video clip posted on AlterNet by Erikka

Commenting on this crisis—or opportunity—for Obama is Lester Kenyatta Spence, a 39-year old Detroit native who’s now an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Johns Hopkins University. His focus is American Politics, Afrikan-American Politics, Urban Politics, Public Opinion, Political Behavior, and American Political Thought.

Spence's work has appeared widely, including in The Washington Post, The Saint Louis Post-Dispatch, Black Voices, The American Journal of Political Science, Political Analysis, The WEB Dubois Review, The National Political Science Review, and Political Research Quarterly. He’s been a guest on C-Span, PBS, and talk-radio across the United States, and is a regular commentator on the US network National Public Radio.

An increasingly prominent public intellectual, Professor Spence brings far-ranging consciousness and academic vigour to wide-ranging topics such as Black Nationalism, pop culture and Black bourgeois attempts to co-opt hip hop culture and activism. Check out his blog Bloodied but Unbowed (which is now in the Top Links section at the left).

Obama’s response to his pastor’s commentary—and the various reactions to it across the US racial and political spectrum—reveal and obscure the complex associations of race and power in America.

Professor Spence spoke with me via telephone from his home in Baltimore on Sunday, March 23. Along the way, we discuss Martin Luther King, former King lieutenant Andrew Young, and corporate press’s demand that Obama denounce the unsolicited endorsement of Nation of Islam leader Minister Louis Farrakhan.

THE PAN-AFRIKANIST’S LIBRARY

And now it’s time for another installment of our semi-regular feature on The Terrordome called The Pan-Afrikanist’s Library, in which I ask people from here and people from afar, jus’ folks and famous folks, about their favourite books by writers from any nation of the Afrikan Planet.

Today’s entry in the library is courtesy of Nene Khalema of South Africa. Khalema is completing his doctorate in Education, and he’s worked in Edmonton’s Afrikan communities for years, particularly as an advocate for educational reform. Currently he works with students of diverse immigrant backgrounds who face difficulties from lack of acculturation to post-traumatic stress disorder. Today, Nene Khalema speaks on Fools and Other Stories, a short fiction collection by South African writer Njabulo Ndebele.

TONIGHT ON THE TERRORDOME: Afrikan-Canadian Youth Activists; Rev. Jeremiah Wright in his own words

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All youth face difficulties in the transition from childhood to adulthood, but those difficulties are typically greater for youth who immigrate. In Edmonton, the increasingly large population of new Canadians from the Afrikan continent, especially from the Horn of Afrika, is finding that Canada contains within it much opportunity—for success, as well as for suffering.

On Monday, I spoke with two youth activists who are attempting to steer their peers towards productive, happy lives. Yannick Dako from Ivory Coast is 21 years old and is currently in an internship program with the YMCA. He’s also worked for Canadian Heritage and has been volunteering with Youth and Family Alliance of Alberta and Family First.

Amal Issa is a 19 year old Political Science student at the University of Alberta. Of Somali heritage, she currently volunteers at Edmonton’s new Africa Centre located ine former Wellington school, where she helps tutor young people in the African-Canadian community. She’s considering international development for her future.

Under the guidance of community worker Chantal Hitayezu of Rwanda, both youth are helping to organise a concert in June to raise money for scholarships and academic assistance for Afrikan students in Edmonton. We began by discussing obstacles facing Afrikan immigrant youth.

Reverend Jeremiah Wright

The striving of US Senator Barack Obama for his party’s presidential nomination seemed nearly unstoppable, until the recent controversy surrounding the remarks of Obama’s pastor, the Rev. Dr. Jeremiah Wright.

Obama’s handling of the matter, as seen through the lens of corporate press, has seemed to be a calculated distancing from his pastor. Obama’s own words about his pastor and his church, published March 18^th in the New York Times, tell a somewhat different story, and read in part as follows:

“Like other predominantly black churches across the country, Trinity embodies the black community in its entirety – the doctor and the welfare mom, the model student and the former gang-banger. Like other black churches, Trinity’s services are full of raucous laughter and sometimes bawdy humor. They are full of dancing, clapping, screaming and shouting that may seem jarring to the untrained ear. The church contains in full the kindness and cruelty, the fierce intelligence and the shocking ignorance, the struggles and successes, the love and yes, the bitterness and bias that make up the black experience in America.

“And this helps explain, perhaps, my relationship with Reverend Wright. As imperfect as he may be, he has been like family to me. He strengthened my faith, officiated my wedding, and baptized my children. Not once in my conversations with him have I heard him talk about any ethnic group in derogatory terms, or treat whites with whom he interacted with anything but courtesy and respect. He contains within him the contradictions – the good and the bad – of the community that he has served diligently for so many years.

“I can no more disown him than I can disown the black community. I can no more disown him than I can my white grandmother – a woman who helped raise me, a woman who sacrificed again and again for me, a woman who loves me as much as she loves anything in this world, but a woman who once confessed her fear of black men who passed by her on the street, and who on more than one occasion has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe.”

Listen to the speech here.

Who is the man who has been employed as the latest weapon against the Obama candidacy?

Since 1972, Rev. Dr. Jeremiah A. Wright, Jr. has preached at Chicago’s Trinity United Church of Christ. He’s been a Marine, a cardiopulmonary technician, and an academic, having received his doctorate in Theology from the United Theological Seminary. He has also been the recipient of eight honorary doctorates.

The phrase ‘Unashamedly Black and Unapologetically Christian’ was coined by Rev. Wright’s predecessor, and shortly after Wright’s ministry began, the phrase became the church’s motto. Under Wright’s stewardship, the church has grown from 87 members to over 6,000, and has included Oprah Winfrey among its parishioners. Wright has lectured at universities and seminaries across the United States and internationally, and is the author of four books.

Let’s now hear a sermon by Rev. Wright delivered in 1990. The Reverend delivers an exegesis, or explanation of scripture, as mixed with comments about the modern world. Many thanks to UNDERCOVER BLACKMAN for the following three links:

AUDIO: The Audacity to Hope
By Rev. Jeremiah Wright

Black clergy try to put Wright's comments in context
Supporters say he is part of a historical role in the black church

Obama’s Pastor Speaks Out against the NYT last year

Media Hold McCain, Obama to Different Standards

"...[McCain supporter] John Hagee, who has called Roman Catholicism a 'false cult system,' an 'apostate church' and a 'Great Whore.' Hagee has also stated (NPR Fresh Air, 9/18/06) that the Quran mandates Muslims to kill Christians and Jews, and has blamed Hurricane Katrina on a New Orleans gay pride parade. So far this year, U.S. media have found Farrakhan's Obama endorsement much more interesting than Hagee's McCain endorsement: The Nexis file had 478 stories on Obama and Farrakhan, 123 on McCain and Hagee."

THE PAN-AFRIKANIST’S LIBRARY

Let’s now open the gates to The Pan-Afrikanist’s Library, a semi-regular feature on The Terrordome in which I ask people from here and people from afar, jus’ folks and famous folks, about their favourite books by writers from any nation of the Afrikan Planet.

Tonight we’ll hear from Seith Mann, a television director who’s worked on such shows as The Wire, Shark, Friday Night Lights, Jericho, and Grey’s Anatomy. Seith Mann speaks of the fantasy-horror novel My Soul to Keep by Afrikan-American author Tananarive Due.

TONIGHT ON THE TERRORDOME: Amiri Baraka on Barack Obama

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I have never seen a movement in the United States gather as much excitement and momentum as the campaign to deliver the nomination of the US Democratic Party to Barack Obama.

It’s easy to get excited by it, and I get it. I never expected to see, in my own lifetime, any African-American achieve the presidency, and its looks as of this broadcast—recorded on Tuesday night before the results of the March 4th primaries are in—as if Obama will get the nomination and win the White House.

But my own excitement, based in part on seeing a man from my own so-called race get this far—indeed, like me, Obama is half-Kenyan—doesn’t overpower my determination to see justice advanced, not just image.

From what I can see, the primary appeal of the Obama campaign is what it wants to symbolise: that the United States has overcome racial discrimination, that the US need not be a warlike society driven by an economic and cultural imperative to dominate and destroy, that youthful, eloquent, non-insiders can rise to the highest offices by merit of their ideas and their appeal to regular folks.

However much American citizens believe in this symbolism—and I’ve been asking several, highly accomplished Americans in a recent slew of interviews on other topics—there is little evidence that there is substance.

On the level of policy, there seems to be little reason to believe that an Obama presidency would be better than that of a Clinton or a McCain.

Ralph Nader’s election website points out that Obama and his rivals promise equal inaction on preventing and punishing corporate crime, on a living wage, on the repeal of the anti-union Taft-Hartley Act, on NAFTA and the WTO, on Canadian-style health care, on sustainable ecological and economic development, on military reduction, on media monopoly, on corporate power, on electoral reform, on the $50B annual cost of the so-called War on Drugs, on “three strikes” laws, on the prison-industrial complex, on Afghanistan, on Israel-Palestine, on Cuba or on Iraq.

Indeed, Obama has already announced that he would bomb Pakistan, a US ally; Obama has abandoned his years’ long advocacy of the Palestinian plight in favour of an aggressively pro-Israel stance; he has engaged in saber-rattling on Iran; he has described Cuba’s revolution as a “dark time,” saying nothing of the American-imposed status of “bordello of the Caribbean” on that island-nation prior to 1959.

And Obama has said nothing in defense of Somalia, an Afrikan country the US has just bombed—an act of war.

Unfortunately, in the US, criticism of Obama often seems to come from only one source—the pro-Clinton camp.

And for every flaw of Obama’s, there are dozens more in the Clinton clan, a group which expanded the racialised drug-sentencing laws of the US and saw the US become one of the world’s leading jailors; a group which bombed Sudan and destroyed half its pharmaceutical production, leading to the deaths of unknown thousands; a group which oversaw years of US-led sanctions which killed one and a half million people in Iraq, a group which successfully prevented the Security Council from employing the word “genocide” and thus allowing the actual genocide of nearly a million people to unfold in Rwanda.

One man who’s concerned about uneven critiques of Barack Obama is Amiri Baraka, the acclaimed Afrikan-American playwright, poet and essayist who was a leading force in the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s and 70s, when he was known as Leroi Jones. Amiri Baraka has lectured across the world on music and culture. He is the author of over 40 books of essays, poems, drama, and music history and criticism.

His most famous works are the analysis of AA music Blues People and the play Dutchman, both from 1963. His most recent work is The Essence of Reparations, a collection of essays addressing “racism, national oppression, colonialism, neo-colonialism, self-determination and national and human liberation.” Baraka has taught at Yale, Columbia, and the State University of New York at Stony Brook.

His awards and honors include an Obie, the American Academy of Arts & Letters award, the James Weldon Johnson Medal for contributions to the arts, Rockefeller Foundation and National Endowment for the Arts grants, Professor Emeritus at the State university of New York at Stony Brook, and the Poet Laureate of New Jersey.

Amiri Baraka remains politically active, and on the Obama candidacy, he warns that unbalanced criticism directed at Obama alone is often pro-Clintonism in disguise, a Clintonism based on grossly misplaced Afrikan-American loyalty.

Baraka also warns that, while it’s useful to get Obama elected, the man will do nothing on behalf of progressive causes and the needs of America’s poor, its people of colour, its environment and its need for justice, without an aggressive, progressive movement that refuses to go away at the sight of a dazzling smile and the sound of catchy slogans.

Fear of a Black-Planned Ed

This is a longer version of an article published inVue Weekly in the week of 2008 February 28 for a series of articles commissioned for Afrikan History Month.
























One of the most obvious indicators of injustice is the use of double-standards. We learn early in life that what’s good for the goose is good for the gander. If geese are eating gravel and ganders and getting grain—and worse, the gander lobby is raising hell about geese wanting to get some—you know that someone is having the down pulled over his eyes. And that’s usually a prelude to getting roasted.

The last several months in Toronto have been a furious battle over the just-approved proposal to create an Africentric public school as one means to address the disproportionate failure and drop-out rate of African-Canadian students in that district.

But to hear Paula Todd on CTV Newsnet’s The Verdict—just one of a wailing chorus of opposition—such a school would be a return to American-style racial segregation and a betrayal of the very students it’s supposed to be helping. Todd’s producers even helpfully ran the word “segregation” as a subtitle on the screen throughout a lengthy debate they hosted, a word that immediately shaped the impressions of viewers who might be channel-surfing or even channel-squatting.

Segregation? Huh?

It might be segregation, if, for instance, when you leave work or school to return to your own home instead of someone else’s, you’d call that segregation. Or, for that matter, when you go to your own workplace instead of someone’s, that were segregation.

Why is there such terror among some elements of our society about Africentric education? What assumptions are behind the terror? When scores of other groups have their educational needs met in publicly-funded schools—officials call it “school choice,” but African-Canadians are denied such choice, it’s clearly a double-standard. If Todd and her types are so concerned that “segregated” education will “roll back the clock” and ill-prepare students for “integrated” communities and workplaces, why are they silent about Edmonton?

In Edmonton alone, we have two First Nations schools (Amiskwaciy Academy, Awasis), a Hebrew bilingual school (Talmud Torah), three Arabic bilingual schools (Glengarry, Malmo and Killarney), three Spanish bilingual (Mill Creek, Sweet Grass, McKernan), four Christian schools, four Ukrainian bilingual schools, five German bilingual schools, twelve schools with Mandarin bilingual programme, and seventeen schools offering French immersion.

We also have a girls school (Nellie McClung), a “child study centre” (Garneau), a dance school (Vimy Ridge), a science school (Elmwood), a “traditional” school (James Gibbons), two hockey schools (Donnan and Vimy Ridge), four arts schools, four “sports alternative” schools, four “academic” schools, eight “pre-advanced placement” junior highs, and eight schools offering a foreign curriculum (International Baccalaureate).

And I haven’t even mentioned a single Catholic school. Forget about Catholic specialty schools. Their entire national, tax-funded system is all “special interest,” and by Todd’s standard “segregated.” But then again, with the exception of Aboriginal Canadians (who are the “subject” of an entire federal department), few of these groups are the target of racial profiling by police, courts or employers.

Some claim that failure among African-Canadian and African-American students is a defect in “Black” culture, that the kids equate academic success with racial betrayal or “acting White.”

That notion was popularised by Nigerian-American academic John Ogbu in Black American Students in an Affluent Suburb, among others, and thoroughly debunked by African-American sociologist Algernon Austin in Getting It Wrong: How Black Public Intellectuals are Failing Black America.

The original “acting White” claims were never made by or even put to students; the phrase was a post-study quip used by the researchers and picked up by media. Austin’s study reveals that, in the US, African-American students self-report a high value on education, even while attending under-funded schools with often poorly-trained or –equipped staff. Indeed, as Austin points out, by the metaphor of fearing “acting White,” the leading fearful group is actually White prep school students. Such claims also ignore the continued popularity of the HBCUs, or Historically Black Colleges and Universities such as Howard, Tuskegee and Morehouse.

Jenny Kelly, author of Under the Gaze: Learning to Be Black in a White Society and an Education professor at the U of A, notes that some various communities in majority-White countries have advocated Africentric schools as means for student success, including in her native England where she was raised by Jamaican parents. Such aims “come from a recognition by community activists, parents and teachers that Black kids are not doing as well in the traditional educational system.”

In Canada’s case, in cities where the African-Canadian population is small, such calls are rare. But in Toronto, where the community is large, calls have been made for years, and in Edmonton where the population is growing, calls are increasing. “[Africentric schools are] seen by some as slightly abhorrent: ‘back to apartheid.’”

Kelly herself is not an advocate of such schools, having argued extensively that moving towards such institutions lowers pressure on school boards and governments to improve all public schools, including through the pan-disciplinary infusion of global African content into the curriculum. Nor is she executing a double standard, since “all kids should be educated in one school [system, even] in terms of religious groups including Catholics or whomever else. There’s a publicly funded space and kids should be educated in that space.”

“We live in a society that is not a level playing field. Issues of race, class and gender exist within that space. When we look at the research, at anecdotes, race is an issue in kids’ lives—in terms of low expectations [from authorities], and in terms of dropping out.” Kelly points to the significant research on drop-out and “push-outs” by George Dei, Chair of the U of T’s Sociology and Equity Studies department at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education. “It’s often the conditions within the school that somehow enable and encourage kids to drop out. So what do you do? These kids are dropping out, they don’t seem to be able to survive in the traditional system. The system isn’t changing fast enough to take them up—what do you do?”

And that, she says, is a major part of the rationale for Africentric schools. “It’s an alternative within a larger system. If it provides a space that some students would find effective in which to learn, then I say, go with it.” She’s clear she wouldn’t want such schools to have mandatory attendance or exclusion by race, but she acknowledges that no one is advocating such requirements.

When and if such schools go forward, Kelly’s main concern is operational: “Who is going to fund this? What’s the role of the province? Will Black parents have to fund-raise? If they’re going to be operating in the long term, and not just the short term, funding is important. The kids need to get a really good education, not just a second-hand ‘We meet every so often.’” She’s clear on the absolute must-haves: “Good teachers, good resources and a good curriculum.”

For all the people who have spoken nothing but evil since Castro's resignation...

...including Obama, you should note this:


















Of course, Amiri Baraka has some fascinating things to say about Barack Obama, too.

Aaron Douglas and Afriluminism

This is the third in a series of mini-essays commissioned by Vue Weekly for Afrikan History Month.

In 1993 I visited an artists’ workshop in Nairobi while visiting my father’s home country. I saw there why so much of what passes in the West for "African art" [not Afrikan art] is such absolute garbage.

In little more than a hallway of a chop-shop, an assembly-line of men hacked pieces of wood into animal forms such as giraffes and rhinos, eventually smoothing them before finishing them with felt markers. Similar shops made “tribal masks” and other patronising, hackwork kitsch. Sure, I could blame Western buyers and the media culture that made them think such “rustic” feebleries were the best the continent had to offer.

But I had to admit, so long as the supply existed, the demand would not dry up. If someone made money from the stereotype, the stereotype could never die.

Of course, legions of genuine artists from across the Afrikan planet have generated beauty and wonder for millennia, from the sculptor