(In contemplating Barkhad Abdi's Hollywood travails, for instance, one would need to consider the young performer's roots). For many " arid milennia, the traders and warriors and clans of what we now call Somalia played a key role in the manifestation of social relations there. They mediated markets from across the Indian ocean that shipped spices in return for hides and specie and, often enough,slaves. They provided waystations for those who hoped to trade otherwise with subsaharan Africa, including those who wanted to purchase human flesh. They were capable enough sailors that they made excellent merchant mariners and, more recently, pirates, such as those that Barkhad and his friends played in 'Captain Philips,' especially now, when sociopolitical and ecological factors have combined to impel them. "
(Layering further swatches of history and depredation and colonial and ethnic conflict onto each other is part of Abdi's life). (In this vein) (o)ne can read of the intertwining of English imperial efforts in India and Somalia throughout Isak Dinesen's Out of Africa, which tells of her 'adventures' in Kenya under the tutelage and protection of Farah, her Somali 'chief-of-staff,' in relation to all manner of other characters from Arabia, India, and elsewhere in the Horn of Africa itself. On her departure from the country, she describes the 'entire' Somali population of Nairobi's turning out to see her off."
Anything like race, if the notion has meaning other than fetish or bugaboo, has little to do with Abdi's plight as an underpaid actor in a hyper-privileged environment. To look at this issue and most others in the world today necessitates that a thinker 'intersectionalize,' so to speak, multiple ways of contextualizing things, a process in which not only is color only one of many factors to take into account, but also its meaningis one that comes from its relations to everything else, and not at all from itself. All such racialist tunnel vision is at best flawed and largely false.
Another--a fourth--Spindoctor blog, this also from the Solidarity Forever website examined an instance of Southern History that also revealed the complex and interconnected subtleties that make up what most people today simply ascribe to race and racism. The case at hand in "Tearing Down the Walls" involved one of the ugliest and most effective divide-and-conquer schemes in history--the convict lease system--which continues in new forms to proffer both exploitation of and hostility among workers to those who already own everything on Earth.
The "Coal Creek Wars" concerned the mineral and metals district that centered on Chattanooga, stretching from Birmingham to Knoxville. In it, White supremacist attitudes toward Black workers did not keep mine owners from using often enough illegally incarcerated African Americans whenever profit or class war called them to do so, with "the stern hand" that such 'dusky workers' needed.' An intense battle of classes soon became unavoidable in this context.
"One interesting aspect of this upheaval was that the miners were plus-or-minus ninety per cent White and the prisoners were almost one hundred per cent Black. Another fascinating piece of this story was that the union and unorganized colliers, with allies from community businesses and local agriculture, repeatedly confronted the militias assigned to oversee the prison-mines, and forced the release of the Black men incarcerated their. The victorious coal miners in such cases packed the jailed workers off to the State capitol or to Knoxville in the company of their keepers."
Media and cultural 'leaders' like preachers--either universally or generally, respectively--renounced miners' acts on their own behalf. "No matter that media and social leaders condemned them, however, beginning October 31, 1891, the up-in-arms miners took things a step further. They had become irretrievably disenchanted with established norms and approaches when Governor John Buchanan, a Farmer-Labor-Alliance Democrat, whom they played a big role in electing, not only failed to find a way to end convict leasing but also led some of the militia units to East Tennessee to 'restore order.' "
For over a year after July, 1891, when large scale direct action began in earnest, the mining district of Tennessee became even more an armed camp than it had already been, off and on, since the end of Reconstruction. A state of something like warfare prevailed. Not until a year or so prior to Tennessee's ending the convict lease in 1896--the first deep-South State to do so--did outbursts taper off and end altogether in the deep hollows of the Cumberlands, the Smokies, and the Blue Ridge."
Again, relying on race and racism wholly fails to account for what occurred. A different rubric, richer and more multihued, must replace an explanatory nexus based primarily, let alone exclusively, on color.
"We're All Cousins After All" provides an overview of the material that people, at least plausibly, need to ponder in connection with this ideation, a fifth instance of Spindoctor narration. As with the material on environmental justice, this reportage occurred on JustMeans, arguing in terms of corporate social responsibility and sustainability that issues ofcolor, and the supremacist ideology that different coloration elicits, required more than conceptions of race in response.
"My title today alludes to a long-ago essay, one of the first that I ever published, the original of which lies at the bottom of some mile of files, or at the back of a stuffed file cabinet drawer. It's the answer to the 'Jeopardy' (prompt) that is arguably the most important inquiry that we can (make) in these days of troubled times. '(T)he scientific relation between each person on earth and every other person who is not some stripe of parent, sibling, or offspring?'"
Of course, the answer is, the question, "What is a cousin?" This past Spindoctor essay continued,
"As any who have taken the time and energy necessary to plow through what I've been writing can testify, much of what I convey revolves around more or less complicated skeins of relationship. "(proceeding to examine sources both scientific and Marxist in their orientation to knowledge)" This theoretical and scientific undergirding that informed my notions of color and class actually, since I was neither a philosopher nor a scientist, but a student of history, grew out of my focus, beginning as an undergraduate and continuing through forays in grad school and from then until now, on the meaning and development and possibilities of life in the Southern United States. Richard Wright's Black Boy andNative Son still provide clearer conceptual foundations for discerning Southern History, which revolves around the vortex of slavery and White Supremacy; and U.S. history, which revolves around the vortex of Dixie; and world history, which revolves around the vortex of the USA than do any number of 'standard' annals of the past. "
And through everything runs the thread that defines the fabric of Southern existence: the enslavement of tens of millions of cousins over a period of centuries, whose offspring are friends and neighbors and fellow citizens today, whose lives and prospects form a distinct, and often central, component of contemporary life--of my life. Without doubt, the primary analytical and conceptual methods for dealing with this complex of historical fact and current conflict swirl around the idea of race, the explanatory upshot of which almost always devolves to racism. "
As today's article unfolds itself in a reader's mind, I ask that they repeat the accurate notation that the title advances:"We're all cousins after all." (Joseph) Graves gives us a sturdy simple tool with The Race Myth, which he follows up with the expanded and updated The Emperor's New Clothes: Biological Theories of Race at the Millennium. Matthew Hughey proffers an informative orientation to the path down which Graves wants to take us, and, quite plausibly, down which we had better move our fannies directly.
'Graves' work was written (first) to dismantle the so-called scientific basis " of the actual existence of race as a typology devoid of racist content and conjecture, and second, to expose the politically motivated ideological underpinnings of biological descents into the abyss of racism. Thus, Graves examines the history of biological diversity from a modern scientific perspective. He writes, '"what we call 'race' is the invention not of nature but of our social institutions and practices. The social nature of racial categories is significant because social practice can be altered far more readily than can genetic constitution.' "
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