The New York Times has a depressing story about the tense relationship between Muslim immigrants from West Africa and African-American in a poor section of the Bronx. Resentment, mistrust, post-9/11 Islamophobia and just plain ignorance, are some of the factors at the heart of the dispute, which in some cases has turned violent. (In the image above some of the immigrants meet with police to report and discuss hate crimes against them.)
The story is accompanied by a photo slideshow.
The Chicago-based literary theorist Walter Ben Michaels has been going on about why we privilege race over class. His right to a point. But that’s it:
Race … has been a more successful technology of mystification. In the US, one of the great uses of racism was (and is) to induce poor white people to feel a crucial and entirely specious fellowship with rich white people; one of the great uses of anti-racism is to make poor black people feel a crucial and equally specious fellowship with rich black people.
Hip hop meets twentieth century black Atlantic identity politics.
The full film, about a Black Panther who fled Kansas City in the American Midwest in 1970 for a new life in Tanzania (by director Aaron Matthews), is now online.
Probably the most insightful one-liner I’ve read about South Africa in a while.
From a piece by The Guardian’s South Africa correspondent, David Smith. It’s what a cynic told him about Apartheid and its legacy.
Read Smith’s take on recent events in South Africa, including the white refugee crises here.
It’s worth reading the comments on the piece, which confirms this insight.
I was anticipating that sooner or later someone would organize a conference on this theme. The Department of African and African American Studies at George Mason University in Virginia is organizing such a conference in early October. Here’s an excerpt from the call for papers:
