Africa Is a Country

Apartheid in Arizona

Africa Is a Country Podcast
African Five-a-Side Podcast

Apartheid in Arizona

By
Sean Jacobs

What’s up with John McCain’s home state? The state legislature has just passed an immigration law that basically targets the state’s Latino population for random stops and demands of their ID’s. As my man, Siddhartha Mitter, remarked yesterday: Apartheid nostalgics will be pleased to learn that the Pass Laws have been dusted off and reinstated, in Arizona. Separately, they have also given official sanction to the fantasies of “birthers” who claim President Barack Obama was not born on US soil.

Made Siddhartha think of Public Enemy’s 1990 tune “By the time I get to Arizona.”

Remember Arizona, and New Hampshire, were the only states that opposed a holiday honoring Martin Luther King.  BTW, John McCain has a shameful history in the anti-King initiatives and now the xenophobic immigration initiatives.

Via Siddhartha Mitter

Further Reading

Leapfrogging literacy?

In outsourcing the act of writing to machines trained on Western language and thought, we risk reinforcing the very hierarchies that decolonization sought to undo.

Repoliticizing a generation

Thirty-eight years after Thomas Sankara’s assassination, the struggle for justice and self-determination endures—from stalled archives and unfulfilled verdicts to new calls for pan-African renewal and a 21st-century anti-imperialist front.

Drip is temporary

The apparel brand Drip was meant to prove that South Africa’s townships could inspire global style. Instead, it revealed how easily black success stories are consumed and undone by the contradictions of neoliberal aspiration.

Energy for whom?

Behind the fanfare of the Africa Climate Summit, the East African Crude Oil Pipeline shows how neocolonial extraction still drives Africa’s energy future.