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News round up by dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor
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Recently, for The Guardian, Naomi Campbell shared an excerpt from a limited edition, two-volume book that chronicles her life as a groundbreaking and highly successful supermodel and all of the opportunities stemming from that. Yet, for all that is shared in the excerpt—her as a supermodel, her speaking with world leaders as a contributing editor to various publications—the article’s title hones in on what I’ve come to see as a well-meaning but no less flawed line of thinking. The title in question is, “Naomi Campbell: ‘At an early age, I understood what it meant to be black. You had to be twice as good.’”
Campbell writes: “When I started out, I wasn’t being booked for certain shows because of the color of my skin. I didn’t let it rattle me. From attending auditions and performing at an early age, I understood what it meant to be black. You had to put in the extra effort. You had to be twice as good.”
Picture it: Me, yawning at both the headline and the sentiment that inspired it. Of course, Campbell is not the only person who echoes this statement. However, I’ve only heard the “twice as good to get half as much” mantra by the mediums of pop culture or the bougie Black folks I encountered later in life after attending Howard University. As a child, not a single person ever told me this. I thank my Lord and Gyrator Beyoncé every single day for this.
Growing up, I was told to be great, but not from the perspective of doing so in order to attain an imbalanced portion of what some white person was getting for half the effort. When I think a lot about my childhood—well, besides the chaotic portions that often consumed it—I now have a greater respect for many of the values my mom instilled in me.
I did not grow up with a lot of money at all, but I was never raised to believe that there wasn’t anything I could not do. My first doctor was Black. My first dentist was Black. I had a Black priest when I was still a practicing Catholic. I went to Black schools, and when my mother aspired for me to go to a better school, it was not some white-populated institution; it was a private Black school. She couldn’t afford it, but the school of her choosing denotes that something simply being white did not constitute as better.
Was racism explained to and experienced by me? Certainly. However, I never thought that to be Black, I had to be twice as good as a white person. Likewise, I never operated under the impression that in order to see myself, I had to see it through the lens of whiteness or the prejudices forced upon me by white supremacy.
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n the spring of 2014, when our daughter, Najya, was turning 4, my husband and I found ourselves facing our toughest decision since becoming parents. We live in Bedford-Stuyvesant, a low-income, heavily black, rapidly gentrifying neighborhood of brownstones in central Brooklyn. The nearby public schools are named after people intended to evoke black uplift, like Marcus Garvey, a prominent black nationalist in the 1920s, and Carter G. Woodson, the father of Black History Month, but the schools are a disturbing reflection of New York City’s stark racial and socioeconomic divisions. In one of the most diverse cities in the world, the children who attend these schools learn in classrooms where all of their classmates — and I mean, in most cases, every single one — are black and Latino, and nearly every student is poor. Not surprisingly, the test scores of most of Bed-Stuy’s schools reflect the marginalization of their students.
I didn’t know any of our middle-class neighbors, black or white, who sent their children to one of these schools. They had managed to secure seats in the more diverse and economically advantaged magnet schools or gifted-and-talented programs outside our area, or opted to pay hefty tuition to progressive but largely white private institutions. I knew this because from the moment we arrived in New York with our 1-year-old, we had many conversations about where we would, should and definitely should not send our daughter to school when the time came.
My husband, Faraji, and I wanted to send our daughter to public school. Faraji, the oldest child in a military family, went to public schools that served Army bases both in America and abroad. As a result, he had a highly unusual experience for a black American child: He never attended a segregated public school a day of his life. He can now walk into any room and instantly start a conversation with the people there, whether they are young mothers gathered at a housing-project tenants’ meeting or executives eating from small plates at a ritzy cocktail reception.
I grew up in Waterloo, Iowa, on the wrong side of the river that divided white from black, opportunity from struggle, and started my education in a low-income school that my mother says was distressingly chaotic. I don’t recall it being bad, but I do remember just one white child in my first-grade class, though there may have been more. That summer, my mom and dad enrolled my older sister and me in the school district’s voluntary desegregation program, which allowed some black kids to leave their neighborhood schools for whiter, more well off ones on the west side of town. This was 1982, nearly three decades after the Supreme Court ruled in Brown v. Board of Education that separate schools for black and white children were unconstitutional, and near the height of desegregation in this country. My parents chose one of the whitest, richest schools, thinking it would provide the best opportunities for us. Starting in second grade, I rode the bus an hour each morning across town to the “best” public school my town had to offer, Kingsley Elementary, where I was among the tiny number of working-class children and the even tinier number of black children. We did not walk to school or get dropped off by our parents on their way to work. We showed up in a yellow bus, visitors in someone else’s neighborhood, and were whisked back across the bridge each day as soon as the bell rang.
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NOT long ago Malawi was a donor darling. Being dirt poor and ravaged by AIDS, it was needy; with just 17m inhabitants, a dollop of aid might visibly improve it. Better still, it was more-or-less democratic and its leader, Joyce Banda, was welcome at Westminster and the White House. In 2012 Western countries showered $1.17 billion on it, and foreign aid accounted for 28% of gross national income.
The following year corrupt officials, businessmen and politicians pinched at least $30m from the Malawian treasury. A bureaucrat investigating the thefts was shot three times (he survived, somehow). Germany said it would help pay for an investigation; later, burglars raided the home of a German official and stole documents relating to the scandal. Malawi is no longer a donor darling. It now resembles a clingy lover, which would be dumped were it not so needy. It still gets a lot of foreign aid ($930m in 2014), but donors try to keep the cash out of the government’s hands.
Foreign aid can work wonders. It set South Korea and Taiwan on the path to riches, helped extinguish smallpox in the 1970s and has almost eliminated polio. Unfortunately, as Malawi shows, it is liable to be snaffled by crooks. Aid can also burden weak bureaucracies, distort markets, prop up dictators and help prolong civil wars. Taxpayers in rich countries dislike their cash being spent on Mercedes-Benzes. So donors strive to send the right sort of aid to the places where it will do the most good. How are they doing?
A decade ago governments rich and poor set out to define good aid. They declared that aid should be for improving the lot of poor people—and not, implicitly, for propping up friendly dictators or winning business for exporters. It should be co-ordinated; otherwise, says William Easterly of New York University, “the poor health minister is dealing with dozens of different donors and dozens of different forms to fill out.” It should be transparent. Where possible, it should flow through governments.
These are high-minded ideals, reflecting the time they were laid down: the cold war was over and the West had plenty of money. They are nonetheless sound. Aid-watchers, who row bitterly over whether the world needs more foreign aid or less, mostly agree with them. They tend to add that aid should go to relatively free, well-governed countries.
By almost all of these measures, foreign aid is failing. It is as co-ordinated as a demolition derby. Much goes neither to poor people nor to well-run countries, and on some measures the targeting is getting worse. Donors try to reward decent regimes and punish bad ones, but their efforts are undermined by other countries and by their own impatience. It is extraordinary that so many clever, well-intentioned people have made such a mess.
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“I AM desperate to save my child,” says Martha Phiri, looking at her nine-year-old daughter Esther. The child, who has albinism, scribbles away in a book, oblivious to her mother’s concerns. People with the genetic disorder, which is characterised by an absence of pigment in the skin, hair and eyes, have long suffered from discrimination in Malawi, where superstition about the condition runs deep.
But in the past two years taunts have turned into deadly attacks. On May 23rd, 38-year-old Fletcher Masina became at least the 18th person with albinism to be murdered in Malawi since the end of 2014 (others have disappeared and probably been killed). The killings are barbaric. Bodies are abandoned with limbs cut off and organs ripped out. More than 60 related cases have been recorded. These range from murders to the theft of bones from the graves of people with albinism. Attacks are driven by the belief that albino body parts can be used in witchcraft to bring wealth.
A relatively peaceful country, Malawi has never seen such violence against people with albinism. Rather, it is Malawi’s neighbour Tanzania that had previously been associated with attacks. But the Tanzanian government, spurred by ongoing international attention, has taken action by weeding out and arresting unlicensed traditional healers and handing out stiffer penalties against “albino hunters” and those who trade in body parts. Whether because of the government crackdown or education campaigns, attacks against people with albinism in Tanzania have fallen in number. The government has registered people with the disorder, to be able to monitor and track them, and has established safe houses for children at risk of attack.
The Malawian government believes foreign witchdoctors from Tanzania and elsewhere are behind the attacks it is suffering. One reason for this cross-border violence may be that in Malawi people with albinism are not monitored, crimes go uninvestigated and penalties are light.
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