Not-So-Secret Origins
Review by Chitown Kev
The Origin of Others
by Toni Morrison
Forward by Ta-Nehisi Coates
(Hardcover) 136pp. Harvard University Press $22.95
Ta-Nehisi Coates’ forward to The Origin of Others, six lectures given by Nobel Laureate Toni Morrison at Harvard University for the Charles Eliot Norton Lecture Series for the academic year 2015-16, serves as a useful reminder that the social and political contexts in which Ms. Morrison’s talks on ’’the literature of belonging’’ were delivered are not quite the same as the contexts with which these lectures are now in print. The lectures were originally given at a time when ‘’Obama’s two black attorneys general...had launched investigations into police departments around the country’’ and ‘’reports emerged from Ferguson, Chicago, and Baltimore substantiating the kind of systemic racism that had long been confined to ancedote’’ (true only if one has paid little or no attention the black press for over a century now). Hillary Clinton was the heavy favorite to become this nation’s first woman president.
Instead, Donald Trump became the President of the United States and what Mr. Trump’s victory said about American racism was minimized, ‘’a cottage industry sprang up asserting that the 2016 election was a populist uprising...’’ while Hillary Clinton campaigned too much on ‘‘identity politics’’ while such critics ignored ‘’the identity politics of racism,’’ an identity politics excrutiatingly detailed in scholarly work over the last 100 years and here in Ms. Morrison’s own unique mélange of literary criticism, history, memoir, and even self-literary criticism.
Ms. Morrison’s opening lecture, ‘’Romancing Slavery,’’ begins by detailing the extent to which the ‘’science’’ of past times codified the inferiority of the ‘’black race,’ mainly through the work of Dr. Samuel Cartwright (Morrison could have also recalled her mention of Joseph Arthur de Gobineau in her first novel, The Bluest Eye); it’s an important reminder that racism and the construction of ‘’Others’’ has as large a place in the history of the sciences as it does in religion and that, in fact, one of the explicit purposes of scientific racism is ‘’to identify an outsider in order to define oneself,’’ Morrison reminds us. Morrison then trains her eye on two very different documents of this process of ‘’othering’’: the diary of Englishman Thomas Thistlewood and Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin.
Thistlewood’s diary is notable for its routine and casual notations of his routine rape of enslaved women ‘’sliced in between...his notes on farming, chores, visitors, illnesses etc.’’
He noted the time of the encounter, its level of satisfaction, the frequency of the act, and, especially, where it took place.
Thistlewood’s ‘’encounters’’ with slave women took place ‘’on the bed,’’ ‘’on the ground,’’ ‘’in the woods,’’ all dutifully notated in Latin in his diary; he even notated when he wasn’t sexually satisfied.
While all of this is perfectly...horrifying, Morrison finds Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin to be, if anything, even more insidious in its documention of the romanticing and normilzation of slavery; possibly because Uncle Tom’s Cabin was, ostensibly, an anti-slavery diatribe that became an American best-seller. With Stowe, Morrison (as James Baldwin did before her in ‘’Everybody’s Protest Novel’’) criticizes the sentimenatlity of Stowe’s novel but, unlike Baldwin, supports her thesis by citing the neo-pastoral setting of the novel prior to ‘’an extraordinary scene’’ where a slave mother (Aunt Chloe) feeds her chidren under the table as if they were animals. You can literally feel the fiery anger of a black mother leaping off of the page at the very idea that any similarily situated woman such as herself would ‘’throw food on a dirt floor for your two other children to scramble to.’’ This scene serves as a reminder that a novel like Uncle Tom’s Cabin was not written for black people but in order to ‘’quiet the fearful white reader’’ while presenting a view of slavery that was ‘’sexually and romantically sanitized and perfumed.’’
Morrison rightly notes that the process of Othering happens, to some extent, in all societies; here, she concentrates on its American manifestations chiefly through the study of American literature and history ranging from Carson McCullers through slave narratives and winds up the sixth lecture with a very interesting talk about ‘’globalization’’ in its current and past contexts.
Where The Origin of Others is most conspicuous... and delightful is that Ms. Morrison remains a born storyteller and the stories that she tells the best are her own, whether it’s the story of meeting her great-grandmother (‘’the majestic head of our family’’) or a random encounter with a woman that she assumed she would see again (but never did) or the stories of how she incoporates what she has learned into the books that she writes (which includes the ‘’novel-in-progress’’ where she plans to explore ‘’the education of a racist’’). One might expect to see just a little creative deterioration in a writer who won her Nobel Prize (which is, after all, a recognized pinnacle of literary achievement) almost a quarter of a century ago but Ms. Morrison’s storytelling and critical skills remain as sharp and timely and focused as they ever were.
And as necessary.
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News round up by dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor
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New York Police Department (NYPD) sergeant Cyress Smith spent nearly half of his two-decade career with the department’s Risk Management Bureau, which tasked him with addressing misconduct and evaluating internal practices. Now, he says the NYPD is punishing him for calling out racial disparity.
The New York Daily News reported yesterday (November 7) that Smith, who is Black, recently sued the NYPD in federal court. He is accusing the department of violating his civil rights with punitive job transfers and poor evaluations. Smith told the Daily News that he first reported what he saw as the disproportionate promotion of White officers in 2013. He said his own performance rating dropped soon after he filed the complaint; the Daily News reports that it dropped “to 4.0 out of 5, then to 3.5, a mark that makes career advancement extremely difficult.”
Smith successfully contested a 4.0 mark with the department, but says supervisors delayed his subsequent appeals. One supervisor, Inspector John Cosgrove, apparently told Smith to transfer departments; when he wouldn’t do so, Cosgrove allegedly punished Smith by taking away his officer training responsibilities and making him deliver mail from NYPD headquarters to other buildings.
Smith added that the department denied two disability pension requests for treatment related to his asthma and sleep apnea—both of which Smith said he developed while investigating toxic debris from the September 11 attacks. The department twice transferred Smith to precincts with soot-infested work conditions that he says negatively impacted those conditions. Last month, he was transferred to the Viper Unit, which the Daily News reports typically employs officers under investigation to monitor public housing surveillance cameras.
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The spread of mobile phones across Africa has been one of the continent’s success stories over the past two decades, transforming lives through better communication and simpler banking. It has also resulted in huge profits for powerful international companies – and for some of Africa’s wealthiest and best-connected individuals.
But an investigation for the Observer into the African interests of UK mobile phone giant Vodafone, by the Finance Uncovered network, has raised serious questions about transparency and the processes by which western firms entered Africa’s telecoms markets.
Often western operators that wanted market access in a particular country would have to choose between accepting a government stake in the venture, or giving significant shareholdings to “local investors”. But how those governments selected their partners appears contentious, and questions have been raised over how some deals were structured.
The Finance Uncovered investigation has discovered that, in certain cases, politically connected elites secured shares in Vodafone subsidiaries by borrowing money from Vodafone itself. Such arrangements may strike outsiders as odd, but they are legal, and for the lucky few able to do such deals the rewards have been huge. The International Finance Corporation, part of the World Bank, estimates that mobile phone revenue in sub-Saharan Africa grew from $100m in 1995 to $40bn in 2015. Last September, Vodafone raised $1.1bn by selling a mere 5% stake in its main African subsidiary, Vodacom Group. And the month before, Vodacom Tanzania raised $213m by selling a 25% stake. The flotation, the biggest on the Dar es Salaam stock market, was a coup for one of Tanzania’s wealthiest businessmen, Rostam Aziz.
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Way to go, Miami Republicans. You’re really socking it to engagement in your dreams.
The word that best describes President Donald Trump’s Cuba policy — and the newly issued Treasury Department regulations on travel and trade — is ignorant. But, as with all things Trump, there are many others. The policy and the rules for implementation, released this week as the president frolicked in Communist China, also are schizophrenic and dangerous to the interests of the United States.
Let me count some of the ways:
First, by doing away with the independent people-to-people travel by Americans, the architects of this policy are actually helping the Cuban government control what travelers do, whom they meet, and how their perceptions of the country are shaped, thus becoming enablers of the dictatorship. Yet, tours are the mode of travel endorsed by Trump’s policy — and propagandistic historical tours are one of the activities that prove to the Treasury Department that your travel to Cuba is “educational.”
They must be applauding from Havana because the policy aimed to hurt the government ensures quite a workload for them instead of the fledgling entrepreneurial class, thanks to Trump and the Cuban Americans in Congress who had a hand in pressuring Trump to abandon engagement. Miami’s Sen. Marco Rubio and Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart even used their votes on healthcare to negotiate with Trump on Cuba.
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The spread of mobile phones across Africa has been one of the continent’s success stories over the past two decades, transforming lives through better communication and simpler banking. It has also resulted in huge profits for powerful international companies – and for some of Africa’s wealthiest and best-connected individuals.
But an investigation for the Observer into the African interests of UK mobile phone giant Vodafone, by the Finance Uncovered network, has raised serious questions about transparency and the processes by which western firms entered Africa’s telecoms markets.
Often western operators that wanted market access in a particular country would have to choose between accepting a government stake in the venture, or giving significant shareholdings to “local investors”. But how those governments selected their partners appears contentious, and questions have been raised over how some deals were structured.
The Finance Uncovered investigation has discovered that, in certain cases, politically connected elites secured shares in Vodafone subsidiaries by borrowing money from Vodafone itself. Such arrangements may strike outsiders as odd, but they are legal, and for the lucky few able to do such deals the rewards have been huge. The International Finance Corporation, part of the World Bank, estimates that mobile phone revenue in sub-Saharan Africa grew from $100m in 1995 to $40bn in 2015. Last September, Vodafone raised $1.1bn by selling a mere 5% stake in its main African subsidiary, Vodacom Group. And the month before, Vodacom Tanzania raised $213m by selling a 25% stake. The flotation, the biggest on the Dar es Salaam stock market, was a coup for one of Tanzania’s wealthiest businessmen, Rostam Aziz.
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Most Barbudans say it belongs to the people under a historical tenure system that has allowed anybody of Barbudan descent to use a plot for free. But in the wake of Hurricane Irma, the government has renewed efforts to institute a system of formal individual ownership it says is necessary to get loans for reconstruction.
Gaston Browne, the prime minister of Antigua and Barbuda — a single nation formed in 1981 from the two Caribbean islands, both former British colonies — has proposed allowing Barbudans to buy the plots where they live for $1 each. The deeds they would receive in return could be used as collateral for bank loans to rebuild their homes, most of which were not insured.
“It’s a gift,” Browne said in an interview. “We are not taking anything from them. We are giving [to] them. It is a form of empowerment.”
He described the current arrangement in Barbuda as "squatting.”
“Previous governments have just ignored them, continuing in their foolishness,” he said. “We have taken the decision now that we will build an ownership class in Barbuda, that we will empower the people, and there is no good or bad time to empower the people. The time is now.”
Browne estimated that on its own the government would be able to raise no more than $50 million to rebuild Barbuda — far shy of the preliminary damage estimate of $250 million. The storm rendered most of the island uninhabitable.
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Though unrecognised by the international community, the country benefits from a strong social contract between government and citizens. The Economist: Why Somaliland is east Africa’s strongest democracy
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DROP a pin on a map of eastern Africa and chances are it will not land on a healthy democracy. Somalia and South Sudan are failed states. Sudan is a dictatorship, as are the police states of Eritrea, Rwanda and Ethiopia. President Yoweri Museveni of Uganda has ruled uninterrupted since 1986, and plans to remove a constitutional age limit so he can cling on longer. Elections in Tanzania have never ousted the Party of the Revolution (and its predecessor), which has governed since independence in 1961. Even Kenya, once the region’s most vibrant and competitive democracy, is struggling. Last month Uhuru Kenyatta was re-elected president with 98% of a preposterously flawed vote. In this context tiny Somaliland stands out. On November 13th citizens of this internationally unrecognised state will elect a president in what is expected to be its sixth peaceful, competitive and relatively clean vote since 2001. This unparalleled record makes it the strongest democracy in the region. How has this happened?
A peculiar history helps. Somaliland was a British protectorate, before it merged with Italian Somalia in 1960 to form a unified Somalia. It broke away in 1991, and now has a strong sense of national identity. It was one of the few entities carved up by European colonists that actually made some sense. Somaliland is more socially homogeneous than Somalia or indeed most other African states (and greater homogeneity tends to mean higher levels of trust between citizens). A decade of war against the regime of Siad Barre in Mogadishu, Somalia’s capital, reduced Somaliland’s two largest cities to rubble, yet produced a flinty patriotic spirit. And the Somali National Movement (SNM), which led the fighting, cultivated an internal culture of democracy. Its leadership changed five times in nine years, and transferred power to a civilian administration within two years of victory.
But it is the absence of international recognition that may matter most. Muhammad Haji Ibrahim Egal, the president of Somaliland from 1993 to 2002, argued in 1999 that recognition would be dependent on the country’s pursuit of democracy. He proceeded to devise a constitution that was put to a popular referendum in 2001. For fear of encouraging other separatist movements in the region, the international community, following the African Union, has never obliged. But rather than stunting democracy in Somaliland, this response ensured that democratisation moved from the bottom up. Donors often impose democratic reforms on African countries as a condition of financial aid. Since unrecognised Somaliland is cut off from most external assistance, the social contract between government and citizens has become unusually strong. Democracy evolved out of a series of mass public consultations—clan conferences—which endowed it with an unusual degree of legitimacy. The system’s most striking feature is the upper house of clan elders, known as the “Guurti”, which ensures broadly representative government and underpins much of the country’s consensual political culture.
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