When Will it Be Safe for Black LGBT Folk to Travel to Africa or the Caribbean?

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Sometime back I remember a Twitter post asking “why is it that only countries with White people are passing same-sex marriage into law?” That question was from a gay racist.

That question has bothered me ever since.

If one were to think of homo sapiens along skin color lines, most of the progress we’ve seen on LGBT rights have taken place in countries which are predominately White and Christian, with the two exceptions of South Africa (predominately Black and Christian) and Israel (predominately White and Jewish).

It is rather difficult to live as an openly-LGBT person in most of Africa or in the Caribbean. Sodomy laws abound in these parts, as do highly-patriarchal Abrahamic religions and superstitious beliefs about sex and STDs.

Someday, I’d like to go to a Barbados which doesn’t have sodomy laws and welcomes LGBT African-American tourists to their annual Season of Emancipation. Someday I’d like to go as an openly-gay man to Trinidad and Tobago for Carnival. Someday I’d like to go to the Bahamas without fear for Junkanoo.

Someday, if I am married, I’d like to visit Elmina Castle with my husband and look out of the “door of no return” without fear of violence from folks nearby, but with tears in our eyes. I’d like for us to experience the sights and sounds of Lagos together without homophobic mob violence lurking around us. I’d like for us to go to Kuchu Pride in Kampala in a time when none of the attendees need to wear rainbow masks.

Id like to visit a Mr. Gay Africa contest in Windhoek or a drag show in Harare. I’d go to Soweto Pride in a time when Black lesbians feel much more safe and are not being targeted for corrective rape and murder by cishet men.

This vision of a more queer-welcoming African civilization is something I hope will become a reality in my lifetime.

 

Racism Against African Immigrants in Australia

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Good morning.

I’m reading about another African diaspora community in Australia which is being jolted by news of a store sign in Melbourne saying “no 14-18yo blacks or dogs allowed”. Most of the comments under articles about this sign either excuse the sign or shift the blame on Black teens.

The African-descended communities in Australia are entirely voluntary immigrants, mostly from Africa and some from the Americas. Generational slavery’s traumas (as manifested in the Americas) play far less of a role here in the lower economic strata of Afro-Australians, since chattel slavery in Australia did not involve Africans.

But these “black teens” who are turning to gangs like Apex in Melbourne are mostly of Somali and South Sudanese descent – two nationalities deeply impacted by decades of war, poverty and illiteracy in their homelands. Those factors are often a major predictor for the lack of financial or educational empowerment among many immigrant communities.

A leader of the Apex gang – interviewed here by the Daily Mail Australia – mentions some of the additional misfortunes which drive these teens to seek the comfort of drugs and gang relationships. Chief among them are family breakups, school bullying and chronic joblessness.

A similar cyclical recipe for a rise in gang affiliation can be found in any other immigrant community under similar circumstances anywhere in the world, whether it’s Chicago, Paris, Toronto or Miami.

Unfortunately, its a lot more difficult for Black mediocrity to get a pass in a predominately White European-descended, high-income developed society like Australia, even if chattel slavery is not a factor in how any living Australian citizen gained that nationality. Nothing less than “model minority behavior” is expected of non-White, non-Christian immigrants: skilled, educated, white-collar professional.

And it’s hard to exemplify that behavior when you’re a young person from a war-torn, impoverished, malnourished country like South Sudan.

TV and Twitter Have a Hold on Trump’s Mind

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#MediaStudies

Which medium matters more for this admin: TV or Internet?

The camera-addicted chattering class is addicted to every bit of drama from this admin like crack cocaine. But the Republican president is more native and addicted to ad-driven TV than he is to his Twitter account. TV cameras helped him thrive from a “wealthy” troubled reality TV host to a Twitter-abusing fiend to a joke presidential candidate to our 45th presidency, all within a span of 13 years.

This admin feeds upon the live broadcasting cameras in the press pool. This admin subsists on the cameras at his “campaign” rallies. This admin feeds on subservient one-way peepholes projecting his aura to the receiving, angered “audience”.

Cameras are designed to receive an image at one end and expel a simulation of that image out the other end to an audience who can’t talk back to the image they see.

And cameras, like the most “objective” reporter who merely quotes power verbatim like an automaton to the masses, are projective things. They don’t talk back to power as it is happening.

Social media microblogging is a backchannel for replying back to a simulation of power. It is reactive to power, and has exponentially “democratized” the chattering class through a few key gatekeepers. A reactive backchannel masticates and mangles the simulation, but is not able to project itself back to the front end of the camera.

Imagine a two-way camera apparatus which would project the backchannel’s reaction in real-time to the eyes of power while the power is being broadcast.

Imagine this admin watching social media’s reaction in real time while giving press conferences.

Or imagine if there were no cameras present at these events. No gatekeeping ad-driven cameras projecting power in one direction, no gatekeeping ad-driven reporters.

Some how, we can give less passive acceptance to the one-way, helpless acceptance of the image of power – and its inherent authoritarian tendency – upon which this admin thrives.

The backchannel, as troubled and violent as it is, must become the frontchannel.

While we’re getting our schadenfreude on about the Trump supporter’s husband being deported, other Trump supporters remain vocally resentful and spiteful against the husband for not going through the immigration process.

Because 10 years is, in their view, “plenty of time to become legal”, when it actually isn’t.

Their rage against illegal/undocumented immigrants, against the idea of amnesty, against the idea of open borders knows no bounds, not even among their fellow Trump supporters’ families.

Isolationism and xenophobia, of which we have plenty, is a destructive crusade. What will the end of this crusade look like after we deport all the undocumented immigrants? Who else has to go? Who else will the inner regime behind the American mask deport?

 

Georgia Democrats Are Useless Right Now

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At the rate we’re going, Democrats will always be in the minority in GA.

  • We will always be fighting the predominant party from an inferior position.
  • We will never win the majority of either house of the General Assembly.
  • We will be eternally held hostage by right-wing bigot legislators.
  • We’ll never field competent competition in “deep red districts”.
  • We’ll never reform the State Constitution.
  • We’ll never get public accommodations-related civil rights passed.
  • We’ll forever stay a red welfare state.
  • We’ll let “religious” business owners turn away all possible demographics as customers, employees, associates because of things they can’t change.
  • We’ll recriminalize abortion.
  • We’ll erase separation of religion and state.
  • We’ll further erase separation of corporation and state.

But stay in your “safe seats”, Georgia Democrats, and ignore rural seats at your peril.

Know your place, Georgia Democrats. Be useless.

Prison Abolition

I think abolishing both police and prisons is a gargantuan undertaking. It will mean having to reshape everything we know about property, what we value, and how far we will go to retaliate against violations of property. It will mean decriminalization and legalization of a number of felonies and misdemeanors. It will mean unlearning our learned, acculturated emotions about each other.

If this alternative structure for law and justice can be built, it will be about as important of a change in history as Costa Rica’s abolition of it’s standing armed forces in 1948.

On Tuesday night, James K. Knowles—the inept, whitesplaining, cop-coddling, Mike Brown-denigrating mayor of Ferguson, Mo.—was re-elected. He beat out Ella Jones, a black woman and member of the City Council, by fewer than 600 votes. This is just a few weeks after Tishaura Jones, the city treasurer, lost her bid to be St. Louis mayor by a mere 888 votes.

These results are disgraceful, inexcusable and ultimately frightening. The entire black population of metro St. Louis is in the sunken place, and I don’t think even Rod of the T.S. Mutha&^%-A could get them out.

via Ferguson, Mo., Stays in the Sunken Place: Re-Elects Failed Mayor

Ebony on Religion in Haiti

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In my travels around Haiti, I have come across many villages where there is no police presence and nor is there a clinic nearby for basic care, often leaving the Vodou priest or priestess( hougans and manbos) to serve every role from midwife to judge and jury. Yet Langlois and the Catholic Church he represents remain silent on the deeply imbedded inequality in Haiti and a Haitian government more interested in attracting foreign tourists by any means than providing basic social services to its people. He also fails to critique the international community who have little to show for $9 billion funneled through international contractors and NGOs in Haiti with little accountability since the 2010 earthquake.

Contrary to the Cardinal’s statement, Vodou is not Haiti’s problem; Christianity is. No push to spread Vodou ever wiped out entire “savage” indigenous peoples. Vodou has caused no wars due to a desire to convert as many people as possible. Vodou doesn’t tell “saved souls” that they must be complacent, accepting their lot on Earth for the potential of future salvation in heaven. Vodou never told Black people they were a curse or 3/5ths of a person.

via Haiti Doesn’t Have a Vodou Problem, It Has a Christianity Problem – EBONY

The Phoenix John Brown Gun Club. The Huey P. Newton Gun Club of Dallas. The Socialist Rifle Association. Redneck Revolt. New Black Panthers. Brown Berets. Liberal Gun Club.

I’ve only held and used a gun once. It seems like the in-thing to ditch gun control and just go stockpile some ammo.

I also think about the admonishments who blame gun control and “identity politics” for Democrats losing so much power to reactionaries in “Middle America”/”white working class America”.

Maybe this left-wing gun culture should be embraced in the same way the GOP has embraced right-wing gun culture?

How do you think this will play out?

CityLab: Pay Teens To Attend School or Keep Losing Them

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Interesting idea about #BasicIncome:

The problem: Suspending kids who don’t go to school isn’t “different.” That’s what they did when I was there. At risk of stating the obvious here, suspension is no punishment for those who are already voluntarily suspending themselves. Suspension is better than criminalizing truancy, but it won’t necessarily inspire kids to start coming to homeroom. For that kind of inspiration—and inspiration is truly what’s needed here—educators will have to come up with something more creative, and competitive.

And here it is: We need to pay high school students to go to school. I don’t mean some punk-ass weekly or monthly allowance, or a gift card for Dave & Busters. I’m talking about a deposit of somewhere in the ballpark of $50 to $100, every school day. That’s not for making honor roll; it’s just for making it to school in the morning and staying until the end of the day. Yes, compensated just for showing up. Think Universal Basic Income—but for kids.

via Pay Teens To Attend School or Keep Losing Them – CityLab