A Worldwide “Problem”
Commentary by Chitown Kev
Much of the subject matter here at Black Kos is “problematic” news.
That is, the very existence of Black people is defined and treated as “a problem” to be solved rather than as human beings who simply want to survive and, if possible, thrive in a world of other human beings.
I’m not pleading here that Blacks are, per se, a unique case in respect to being treated as “a problem”: people such as the Kurds in parts of Asia (particularly Turkey, Iraq, and Syria), the Roma in Europe, and the Rohingya in Myanmar (just to name only a few) are defined and treated in similar ways, if not worse.
Which brings me to the case of Tyler Adams, Captain of the U.S. Men’s national soccer team, at a World Cup media session in Qatar.
First of all, kudos to Tyler Adams for responding to the Iranian journalist’s question in a diplomatic fashion.
An Iranian journalist daring to asking an American about discrimination?
As if Iran doesn’t have some of the same problems with the Black populations within its own borders. Yes, including descendants of slavery.
Behdad Mahichi/AlJazeera (Sep. 2020)
The greatest density of Iranians of African descent is in the country’s south. The majority are descendants of those who arrived as a result of forced migration during the Indian Ocean slave trade, while some migrated as free peoples through occupations such as date harvesters and merchants.
For nearly 10 years, Baghoolizadeh has focused her research on the constructions of race in 19th and 20th century Iran, through the lens of slavery and abolition.
“The process of abolition was really one of erasure,” Baghoolizadeh says. “Reza Shah‘s government didn’t want to talk about it after abolition, and it created this collective amnesia.”
The topic does not appear in history textbooks, and more so, she says, since there was no humanitarian effort as part of abolition, there was no attempt made to make space for freed peoples in the economy.
(Why do I get the feeling that this Iranian reporter would not have asked a similar question of a white American?)
It was shortly after the election of Barack Obama as President of the United States that I began to get a little...perturbed at some of the accolades coming from Europe about Obama’s election. I mean, I prefer to style myself as being ”a citizen of the world” as opposed to being an American but it was not lost on me that several European countries are capable of electing a Black person to any number of leadership positions and yet (by and large) had failed to do so.
And, of course, sentiments of anti-Blacknesses are not exclusive to the United States or Europe.
World powers and even regional powers (e.g. Hitler’s Germany, the Soviet Union, Putin’s Russia) have long attempted to use American structural and institutional racism as an anti-American propaganda tool. And they have something of a point...I guess.
What I am not going to do, even as a self-proclaimed “citizen of the world,” is to pretend that most other countries are much better when it comes to discrimination against their own minority peoples within their own borders.
They aren’t.
Or even that those other countries would be less discriminatory against me because I am a Black American.
That might or might not be true. Perhaps, for the most part, because I am American.
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News round up by dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor
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The US government has discriminated against “countless” Black military veterans dating back decades, rejecting service-connected disability claims disproportionately compared with White applicants, and blocking access to housing and education benefits that helped fuel the rise of America’s middle class after World War II, a lawsuit filed Monday contends.
The suit was brought by Yale Law School’s Veterans Legal Services Clinic on behalf of a Vietnam War veteran, Conley Monk Jr., whose applications for health care, home loans, and education assistance were “repeatedly” turned away by the Department of Veterans Affairs, the court filing says. His advocates contend the case could help determine whether the federal government can be held liable for systemic prejudices that, over generations, have disadvantaged Black Americans who served in the military and their families, potentially clearing a path for others to seek recompense.
“The negligence of VA leadership, and their failure to train, supervise, monitor, and instruct agency officials to take steps to identify and correct racial disparities, led to systematic benefits obstruction for Black veterans,” the complaint says. “VA leaders knew or should have known and negligently failed to redress.”
The lawsuit relies on internal VA data showing that, from 2002 to 2020, the agency denied Black people seeking disability benefits nearly 30 percent of the time whereas White applicants experienced a 24 percent rejection rate. VA also administers home loans and education assistance for qualifying veterans, and racial disparities also exist in those categories, according to recent studies and legislation pending in Congress.
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The prominence of coaches like Cissé comes as African countries’ relationship with their diasporas is changing. There are now millions of African immigrants and their descendants in Europe. From Algerians who moved to France in the 1960s to near-daily arrivals of irregular African migrants in Italy today, Europe has been becoming Blacker for decades.
Even as these groups are integrated — and shape popular culture, politics, the economy and, of course, sports — many still maintain some allegiance to their ancestral homes and go back to visit regularly. send remittances; they follow Moroccan or Cameroonian news as closely as they would in Marrakesh or Yaoundé. (Social media cements this relationship even further.)
But there is another important change underway, reflective of the rising power and relevance of Africa to Europe. African players are increasingly on the center stage of world football. Though African players have a long history in Europe, it wasn’t until the mid-1990s that they began to star in the top leagues there.
At first, they were signed for their “speed” and “natural strength.” But coaches like José Mourinho and Roberto Mancini also appreciated their skill, leadership and smarts. Players like Michael Essien, Didier Drogba, John Obi-Mikel, Samuel Eto’o and Yaya Touré became global stars by the first decade of the 21st century. Sadio Mané of Senegal was a key part of Liverpool F.C.’s attack for years (and the team struggled after his departure for Bayern Munich). His national teammate, the defender Kalidou Koulibaly, captained Napoli before he moved to Chelsea.
Today, a majority of Africans — like most football fans across the world — follow the top European leagues. Football in this way cultivates a sort of pan-African identity, even if it is only for 90 minutes at a time. And there is a kind of continental solidarity that emerges for many African fans during the World Cup. If your home country’s team has made it, you first support it; when it gets eliminated, you support whichever African country is doing well. As the novelist Chimamanda Adichie put it during the 2010 World Cup, your “nationalism expands its boundaries as your country loses.”
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The former staffers allege they were not offered severance pay and other benefits following their layoff from Twitter, which was acquired by billionaire Elon Musk in late October. The Grio: Twitter employees in Ghana fight for their rights after sudden firing
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The sudden firing of all but one worker at Twitter’s Africa headquarters earlier this month has prompted the team of roughly a dozen ex-employees to lawyer up and pen a letter to the company accusing it of noncompliance with Ghana’s labor laws.
The former staffers allege they were not offered severance pay and other benefits following their layoff from Twitter, which was acquired by billionaire Elon Musk in late October. The firing occurred just four days after the opening of the website’s new offices in Accra, as reported by CNN.
Denying a laid-off worker their severance pay is a direct breach of Ghanaian labor laws as well as the former employees’ contracts, according to the report.
The letter additionally accuses Twitter of sending away the ex-workers without providing any information about the official procedure following their termination — a courtesy which was reportedly offered to employees in the United States and Europe — until after CNN reported on the firing, per the outlet.
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When you look at the numbers, it’s easy to gape in horror.
In Ghana, a nation of 32 million people, there are only 62 psychiatrists.
Zimbabwe, with a population of 15 million, has only 19 psychiatrists.
And in Uganda, there are 47 psychiatrists serving a country of 48 million — less than one single psychiatrist for every million people.
These are staggering ratios. To get your head around them, take the US as a comparison. There are around 45,000 psychiatrists for all 333 million Americans, which translates to about 135 psychiatrists for every million people. That’s still not enough — experts are actually warning of an escalating shortage — and yet it’s a whopping 135 times more coverage than exists in Uganda.
These numbers have very real, and sometimes very brutal, implications for people’s lives. When psychiatry and other forms of professional mental health care are not accessible, people suffer in silence or turn to whatever options they can find. In Ghana, for instance, thousands of desperate families bring their ailing loved ones to “prayer camps” in hopes of healing, only to find that the self-styled prophets there chain their loved ones to trees. Instead of receiving medical treatment for, say, schizophrenia, the patients receive prayers.
The scandal of mental health care in developing countries has been well documented, and surveying it, you could be forgiven for thinking the solution is straightforward: These countries just need to train more psychiatrists and mental health professionals of the type you’d find in the US.
But that’s too simplistic. Yes, training more mental health specialists will be part of the answer for these nations. But what’s most interesting is that developing countries have also figured out a new way to tackle the deficit in mental health care — and it could hold lessons for the developed world as well.
Specifically, these nations have been serving as a proving ground for a model called community-based care, where non-specialist providers or lightly trained laypeople — picture someone like your grandmother, not a doctor — deliver brief mental health interventions in informal settings like homes or parks.
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