Nicholas Kristof is at it again. Last week he announced that ‘over the next several days’ he will ‘… be responding to questions submitted via YouTube from readers.’
The first question: ‘Today’s question asks Nick why many of his columns about Africa seem to portray “black Africans as victims” and “white foreigners as their saviors.”‘
Tonight, Somali-born former model, and current entrepreneur, Iman will receive the Fashion Icon award from from the Council of Fashion Designers of America. Past winners of this special award, which is “awarded to an individual whose signature style has had a profound influence on fashion,” include model Kate Moss (2005), and actresses Sarah Jessica Parker (2004) and Nicole Kidman (2003). Whatever you may think of the fashion industry, this is huge, and signals that Iman is (finally) getting the due that she deserves. Because, as we all know, fashion (still) doesn’t much care for Black women, or women of color in general. You don’t have to see the recent short documentary, The Colour of Beauty, to know that. You need only read the New York Times article announcing Iman’s award. Some highlights:
Via @Siddhartha Mitter: ”… The Great White Savior really outdid himself with this one. A blame-the-poor classic with particularly overt Calvinist moral messaging, even less appreciation than usual for colonial legacy, public finance and global economics, and that condescending Kristof brand of Savior Feminism Lite that verges on misandry.”
What Siddhartha is talking about; Nicholas Kristof’s latest column. Here’s the intro:
There’s an ugly secret of global poverty, one rarely acknowledged by aid groups or U.N. reports. It’s a blunt truth that is politically incorrect, heartbreaking, frustrating and ubiquitous: It’s that if the poorest families spent as much money educating their children as they do on wine, cigarettes and prostitutes, their children’s prospects would be transformed. Much suffering is caused not only by low incomes, but also by shortsighted private spending decisions by heads of households.
The newest in expat chic? Bujumbura, “a freewheeling city of palm trees and colonial-era Art Deco buildings thrust against the shores of Lake Tanganyika [where] Congolese, Rwandans and aid workers from across the region are flocking to the city’s nightclubs, dancing till dawn and nursing their hangovers on the area’s fine lakeside beaches.” That’s according to the New York Times.
*Pun intended.
It’s Friday so here’s some links and stories I have managed not to give the proper treatment to this week.
* What’s Jeffrey Gettleman problem? This week he has a story in The New York Times about Somalia’s Radio Mogadishu, “the one and only relatively free radio station in south central Somalia where journalists can broadcast what they like–without worrying about being beheaded.” Then he has to praise the Italians who once colonized Somalia (they dressed well), get people to tell him they’re “really dark” and bring up “Black Hawk Down.” He piles it on about derelict and broken down things are, except the story is accompanied by images of the soundproof studios with what looks like the latest computer editing equipment.
I try not to post about either Nicholas Kristof or Jeffrey Gettleman, the Henry Morton Stanleys of their age. But even I could not resist this video. In the clip, Kristof sets out to draw attention to the fact that women do all the hard, physical work in Congo (well Eastern Congo to be exact): like carrying water or wood, or working in low level construction. So far so good. But then he turns out it into a spectacle by focusing all the attention on himself.
– Sean Jacobs
The New York Times does some real reporting for a change in a story (last week) about a new 16-mile long bus rapid transit service which offers fast, affordable, dignified travel on bus lanes cleared of other vehicles between black Soweto and Johannesburg’s still very white northern suburbs. The main users of the Brazilian made buses are domestic workers–”one in six working women in South Africa is a housekeeper or nanny”–who spend a fifth of their incomes to go and wash middle class people’s clothes and care for their employers’ children.
The article is accompanied by photos by South African photographer Joao Silva, like the one above which shows one of the people profiled in the story walking to a bus stop 30 minutes away from her house.
Instead of another story on the white refugee crisis, “The New York Times” recently did some real reporting on the state of education for the majority of the country’s black schoolchildren. And they did not just blame the ANC government.
Two stories. Serious. Here and here. (The first focuses on a school in Khayelitsha outside Cape Town and the second on a social movement that has grown out of the struggle for equal education.
I was struck how similar these conditions seemed to when I was a high school student 20 years ago.
The stories were accompanied by a video report:
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The paper’s editorial board, not a friend of Jacob Zuma, likes the change in the South African government’s AIDS policy. Most recently the new health minister, Dr. Aaron Motsoaledi, “… accepted a withering critique by South African scientists, who said the governing African National Congress party’s record on AIDS and health care was deeply flawed, and promised remedial action.”
