Me, my children, Chicago and Obama

A Black man’s thoughts on Barack Obama’s election, which I did not predict. A sign of my age. Exclusive extracts from C Gerald Fraser’s private notebook

My children, scattered across the United States, called me election night. One was overjoyed. One sought my reaction, what did old, cynical, no-faith-in-America’s-white-voters-Dad think. Dad was stunned. One asked the question directed, I learned, to many older people, “Did you ever think you would see this in your lifetime?”

 

Of course, my answer was no. I had envisioned a ballot-box lynching. After the votes were tallied, I thought, thank God for the ghastly economy, Americans have been forced to cope with reality. There was also, from my perspective, something that most people didn’t talk about, or realize, that I thought had at least a bit of significance.

As a resident of New York for many decades, I have often thought of my adopted hometown as a city of unrivaled eminence. If you thrive on knowing that your needs and wants are, figuratively, never far from your doorstep, New York is the place to be.

Politically, however, New York City is hopeless. Harlem had the reputation of being the “Black capital of the world.” But it has proven over the years to be a castrated community whose impotence has crippled its Black residents who once stood proud.

 

 

Obama’s victory underscores Chicago’s premier position as a city of vigorous, earnest, smart Black people. And, alas, that is nothing new. The Black Chicagoan–past and present–is who I thought played a critical role in the making of this new President.
In politics, Chicago always seems to be in front. The first Black member of Congress in the twentieth century came from Chicago, Oscar De Priest, who served from 1929 to 1935. As corrupt and unyielding as the legendary Chicago political machine was, in it Black Chicagoans had a place.

Chicago, in the twentieth century, has sent two Black individuals to the U.S. Senate to represent the state of Illinois: Carol Moseley Braun (1993 – 1999, the first Black woman U.S. Senator,), and Barack Obama (2004). No other state has done that.

Chicago elected its first, and only, Black mayor, in 1983, the tough-minded, hard-hitting Harold Washington. Seven years later, New York City, playing catch-up, put David N. Dinkins, “a nice man,” in the mayor’s chair.

Furthermore, the company that created the world-renowned Ebony (in 1945) and Jet (in 1951), Johnson Publishing Company, got off the ground with local Black Chicagoans’ support and in 1949 built its showcase headquarters on one of Chicago’s downtown main streets, Michigan Avenue.

 

The former spiritual home of Malcolm X, the organization now led by Louis Farrakhan, the Nation of Islam, or the Black Muslims, has its national center in Chicago.
                                             
Oprah established Chicago as the base for her billion-dollar empire.

When Jesse Jackson, the astute yet often-maligned survivor of the 1960’s civil rights movement, the “shadow senator” from Washington, D.C., the presidential candidate in 1984 and 1988, put down roots for his political base, Rainbow/PUSH, he chose Chicago.

When it comes to business and politics, New York can’t hold a candle to Chicago. Why?

People I’ve talked to focus on the nature of Black Chicagoans. They have deep-South roots in Mississippi and Arkansas; their forbears came up the Mississippi River to work in steel mills and meat packing houses and equally inelegant but paycheck-producing employment.

 

Chicago forged tough people. The white people (many immigrants from Ireland and Eastern Europe) were tough and the Black people were tough also and had to unite to survive…

This is part of what I believe it took to create the community organizer heading for the White House. New Yorkers are too couth, too individualistic–New York City’s fabled “melting pot” sapped our spirit, produced entertainers, a few athletes, and thousands of wannabees–Chicago produces doers. Hats off, Chicago.

Now what? What’s the next move for America’s Black population–the young and the old, the urban, suburban, and rural, the middle class (whomever), and the working poor?

Among the myriad activities we confront, I think invigorating, energizing, and waking up the Congressional Black Caucus should be high on our agenda. Forget that most of its 41 members (with the exception of the President-elect) were running after Hillary Clinton as the Democratic presidential primary dawned.

Forget that Black Caucus elders espoused, for example, the impeachment of President George Bush and the defunding the Iraqi war when they were out of power in the Congressional hierarchy. But when voters anointed them in 2006 with the might to do, or even try to do these things, they backed off. 

Now it behooves those of us who send Black men and women to Congress to individually and collectively light a fire under them to push the new President in the proper direction and to use the bully pulpit to let their constituents and the country at large know what is happening in the nation’s capitol.

(Let’s hear from them beyond their self-serving newsletters and taxpayer-paid-for communiques to the faithful constituents. Let’s see them force their way, if they must, into the media–print and broadcast. Let’s hear from them.)

We want transparency, we want to be able to hold elected and unelected movers and shakers responsible. We kept hope alive, now we want change.

C Gerald Fraser, Chronicleworld Occasional Correspondent, is a senior journalist and cultural critic.

    

    

 

 

AFRO-BLOGOSPHERE – NEW FRONTIER FOR BLACK ADVANCEMENT

Sometimes you just have to take a leap of faith. After a decade of reporting on the Black Experience, I’ve given our Internet news magazine a reality check.

For more than a decade, The Chronicleworld.org website has proved to be an effective commentary on social prejudices that malign people of colour.

Now, with the new Chronicleworld’s Weblog, I’ll be blogging to help information-poor communities create a strong base in cyberspace for their aims and demands.

This is no misty-eyed dream. People’s wants and needs are terrestrial, and real world solutions to social problems must be found. Political leaders and information power brokers must be challenged to supply them.

But the crucial point is that communities using the Internet and new technologies gain an advantage. They can increase the pressure for pay-offs in economic, cultural, political and democratic dividends.

Eminent Black scientists – such as mathematician-engineer Philip Emeagwali, “a father of the Internet” and Cheikh Modibo Diarra, astro-physicist and head of Bill Gates’ Microsoft Africa – have given us the info-tech tools. And, in my view, political blogging and cyberaction can help information-poor communities begin to shape equitable societies and nations.

Future occasional postings will explore key issues about the Afro-Blogosphere and political blogging for advancement. Among them: Is blogging a toy or a tool? What are the benefits and disadvantages? Who gains and who loses?

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For related issue-driven articles see the Archives of the Chronicleworld http://www.chronicleworld.org, Archive 04
12/13/03 “Wired up Black communities” add value to global city London

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The Chronicleworld’s Weblog is a publication of Chronicleworld the Internet magazine on changing Black Britain and Afro-Europe.

Congratulations to Obama in US Black History Month

– LETTER OF CONGRATULATIONS –

To The Hon Barack Obama, US Senator (Dem. Illinois)
Candidate for President of the United States of America 2008

On behalf of Well-wishers in Britain and Europe

Sir,

We, the undersigned, congratulate you on your brave and history-making candidacy for the US presidency 2008.

Your ideals have deep historical roots in the Age of Liberating Revolutions that signalled the end of the “Old Rule”. Chief among them are, as you will agree, the democratic American Revolution of 1776, France’s Declaration of the Rights of Man of 1789, and the successful Haitian Revolution of enslaved Africans in the Western Hemisphere (1791-1804).

If resistance to entrenched power is the watchword of your platform for America’s future, then please accept best wishes from the progressive forces here, including people of African Caribbean, Muslim and Asian heritages. We recognise a similar need in Britain and Europe, as well as America, for equality and justice not exclusion in spheres of life conducive to improved living and harmonious social, racial and religious relations.

If your candidacy is to initiate a new era in international affairs, then we urge you to employ your leadership and diplomatic skills in strategic areas of mutual concern, such as world migration policies that are not against migrants, trade and aid agreements that support sustainable development, and foreign policies that promote peace and humanitarian purposes, not war.

Moreover, there is a desperate need to add your sense of moral purpose, political commitment and vision to popular demands for democracy and freedom and the reconstruction of fraternal relations with Afro-Asian, Latin American and Caribbean peoples.

Furthermore, we believe that your historic bid for the American presidency embodies the need for unity and change in the scope of national policies on both sides of the Atlantic. Your call for beneficial change across America “From Sea to Shining Sea” resonates on these shores from the privileged halls of national Parliaments to the deprived, but aspiring, common people and multi-cultural districts of of Britain and Europe.

Signed on behalf of the supporters of this letter, by

Thomas L Blair, Professor of Sociology
Editor and Publisher of the Chronicleworld
http://www.chronicleworld.org

HOW YOU CAN SUPPORT THIS LETTER TO BARACK OBAMA TO BE FORWARDED TO HIM FOLLOWING  BLACK HISTORY MONTH
For Signatories to be officially counted and recorded, please give a few simple details in the Reply Box.  First say ”I agree to Obama Congratulations Letter”; then give your signed name, e-mail address, and describe your occupation, affiliation, organisation or institution (For Identification Purposes Only).

1. For information, the letter was written following lengthy discussions and published February 14th 2008, during the US Black History Month, in The Chronicleworld Weblog — For Creative renewal of Black Britain & the African Diaspora http://chronicleworld.wordpress.com.
2. Founded in November 1997, the Chronicleworld.org is the oldest independent, social issue, non-profit online journal in Britain and Afro-Europe. 

French racism challenged as youths riot

Paris Deaths Highlight Black Quest for Equality

Two Black teenagers dead on the streets. Paris suburbs on fire with Molotov cocktails. Residents accusing the President in the Élysée Palace of discrimination and neglect. The riotous events in Villiers-le-Bel, Paris, are a stark reminder of the urban conflicts of 2005 when Nicholas Sarkozy, then minister of the interior, sought to eradicate  unruly ghetto youth he called  ”scum” (racaille).

Unheard voices of discontent
But in all their reports and speculation about the “causes”, reporters for Le Monde, Agence France Presse and mainstream newspapers have totally ignored the simmering discontent and legitimate grievances expressed by Black French communities in the aftermath of the conflicts.

The challenge to French racism
In 2006, francophone and international Black scholars affirmed the right of alienated Black youth to force the pace of urban change. Remarkably, an alliance of cultural elites, community leaders and youth of the banlieues declared that “French society – la belle république — must join in a new debate on what it means to be Black and French in the Land of Liberty, Equality and Fraternity, as I report in my just published study, Pillars of Change – Racism, youth and France, a guide for social change.

Moral crisis in French society
The study, which grew out of the Contemporary Black World seminar at UNESCO Paris 2006, under the patronage of Black Writers and Artists and the African Cultural community, Paris, points to popular racism and its effects. “France is in a moral crisis” said Black advocates. Peter Lozes, head of CRAN, the Representative Council of Black Associations revealed the results of independent polls: “half the people of colour in France say they’ve suffered discrimination in every day life”. Heavy-handed police actions and unfair stop-and-searches are often cause for complaints.

Horror at the death of local teenagers in a crash with a police patrol car, reflects the insecurity, isolation and frustration of youth in the banlieues, the poor neighbourhoods with minority populations that ring French cities. In Pillars of Change, Brima Conteh, Paris’s best known human rights activist and director of the social action group, Diaspora Afrique, said “These troubles [in 2005] are nothing new. We have known how damaging life is for Black families”.

New policies must be introduced 
The proposed solutions to discrimination and isolation from the wider society and economy are long over due and equally valid today. First, get the facts right about the Black African, Arab and ethnic “rioters”. The majority of the so-called “immigrant youth” are French-born and therefore citizens by right of jus soli; others, of Caribbean extraction, are legally entitled children of time-honoured French West Indian citizens.

Second, new policies are required for a massive investment in affordable housing and first time “spring board” jobs for the young unemployed. Moreover, my Pillars of Change study, argues that political leaders must abandon policies that shelter the wealthy on the one hand and dismantle state welfare provisions aiding the poorest families, on the other.

Black empowerment tests modern French civilisation
Unless positive action is taken, more than adding token “ethnic faces” to his cabinet, President Sarkozy’s tepid pleas for calm in Villiers-le-Bel is “merde” – pardon my French. Benign neglect will not stem the anger of the youth of the banlieues who are defiantly affirming “We are French citizens who will no longer put up with being deprived of our rights, and our freedom to be free”.

Thomas L Blair’s Pillars of Change: Racism, youth and France – a Guide for Change is published by Edition Blair, £5.50 plus p & p from www.ebay.com see http://tinyurl.com/2yb9yd ; e-mail : tb@thechronicle.demon.co.uk

New start needed for race equality

In his first months in office Prime Minister Gordon Brown bristles with intent, but can he deliver a Covenant with Black Britain?

Now-a-days it’s sophisticated and trendy in politics and the media to claim we live in “a new country in the making” and “open to diversity”. Indeed, we’re told, the barriers to equality are quietly receding. The new Prime minister’s pledge to ‘change’ Britain and “tap the pools of talent”, is one example of these sentiments.

But, in this era of change in government leadership, my Afro-barometer tells me that for all the talk of “pioneering for social justice”, Mr Brown will have to demolish the colour bars that stretch into every area of life, domestic and foreign policy.

This is no random thought or personal view. Let’s face it the interests and the rights of Black Britons have been under attack for a long time. Without an effective counterforce the assault can only grow more oppressive.

A recent survey by the Voice, the 25-year-old Black newspaper, supports this view. “Almost the entirety of Black Britain (9 out of ten) agrees that racism remains an issue,” said Voice reporters.

Moreover, “seven out of 10 Black persons in the UK believe that racism has either remained the same or worsened over the past three to four years” – a period when Mr Tony Blair’s New Labour Government, of which Mr Brown was the Chancellor, promised to confront the problem.

Though it would be churlish to deny individual achievements over the years, in sports, fashion and music, the Voice reports that in all essentials of life “racism is alive and well”.

What does this mean in real terms? It means talents wasted in poor schooling, hard-knock neighbourhoods and low paid jobs. It means skills never developed and legions of Black youth in care, prisons or on the mean streets of London and big cities.

Even aspiring, law abiding, job-hungry Blacks are so marginal and insignificant they do not appear on the positive side of the social ledger.

Worse yet some of the biggest issues facing Black — such as chronic unemployment, poor housing and racial discrimination — don’t register a blip on the radar of mainstream, corporate and political elites.

Left adrift, Black youth face difficult lives and are often destined for tragic fates.

To counter this dire prospect, Britain needs concrete strategies that will lay to rest all fears of continuing Black disadvantage.