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Sean Jacobs, Founder-Editor of Africa is a Country, is on the faculty of The New School.
Meklit Hadero (Ethiopia | US) - Singer + songwriter.
Ethopian American singer, songwriter and recording artist working on bridging the Ethiopian Diaspora living in the United States with Ethiopians in Ethiopia, through her organization The Arba Minch Collective.
2012 TED Senior Fellows.
For Ugandans the Americans are basically aiding a military infrastructure that will mostly terrorize local people and strengthen an unpopular dictator.
I'm sure someone will find a way to twist the following statement to make me look like a prick or self-hating negro but here it is anyway: I'm tired of seeing soccer movies about poor, brown people.
Documentary makers, you know we're not a monolith right? There are well-to-do brown folks that play soccer as well. Bring your cameras down to a youth game in [Prince George County, Maryland], MD or Cascade Heights, [Georgia] if you don't believe me. Also there are disadvantaged Europeans and Asians who play soccer as well, give them some shine from time to time.
I'm not saying there shouldn't be films about underprivileged brown kids and the uplifting power of soccer. Not at all. But the frequency with which these things have dropped over the last few years is just ridiculous and extremely disproportionate. Here's a list of the titles that I can think of without Googling:
The Anderson Monarchs project.
And that's just in the past year.
Seriously y'all we're dangerously close to "Magical Negro" territory with these types of films. Why do they keep getting made? At this point it is certainly not original and I've yet to see a follow up film where it shows some drastic improvement in the lives of the subjects since the original film. Come on y'all, we can do better.
"We are the 99% [the slogan of OWS protesters] sounds nice and I suspect has been a catchy chant below 14th St. The problem lies in the fact that it puts a very large cart ahead of a very small horse. Through virtually all of human history where there has been oppression, there has not been resistance, at least of the variety that has a modicum of hope of actually changing the political, economic, legal, or social imperatives of the oppression. "We are the 99%" as a message assumes otherwise. It assumes, sans historical or contemporary evidence, and without an organizational mechanism to change this fact, that the rest of the 99% will, like our sanitized image of Rosa Parks and those Columbia students mistaken for revolutionary proletarians, organically throw off their yokes in service of real and substantive historical transformation.
By claiming to represent the interests of, or worse, speak for the 99%, the protesters in lower Manhattan and across the country fully replicate the deus ex machina trope of historical change. As a result of this, protest on Wall St and virtually everywhere else in modern America has become more about bearing witness and venting anger than any effective or sustained challenge to the institutions and classes that control our politics, economy, and society. Protest becomes an end in itself, not a small, if dramatic weapon in the arsenal of radical transformation. Furthermore, when protest takes this form, unmoored from a sustained and mass-based politics and grounded in the dreamy assumption that oppression will eventually lead the oppressed to resist, it frequently serves to encourage political demobilization. Progressive politics becomes neither about convincing the 99% of their shared interests in any meaningful way, nor about establishing mass-based organizations that can begin to have a hope of contesting economic, political, and social power. Rather, it becomes politics waiting for god and his machine to descend down from the heavens, indeed, the hope that a panty raid is a revolution.
Am I glad that a group of young people are angry at the American economic system? Absolutely. Would I happily eat the stinkiest crow in a Staten Island landfill if a sustained movement arose out of Occupy Wall St. to actually challenge neoliberalism and the ever-increasing dominance of capital over politics, society, and everyday life? Absolutely. Do I have a sliver of hope that crow is going to be on my dinner menu anytime soon? Absolutely not.
Despite its apparent permanence, OWS is mostly composed of part-time participants, who stay a few nights. There is a core of permanent campers, possibly those who run the general assemblies, the key OWS institution. The problem is that if they simply stay in parks, they prove their staying power but nothing else. They must move out. But where? If they continue street demonstrations, they risk conflict with the police. (And the value of street demonstrations and protests may be more limited in the United States than in countries like Egypt.) If they try to hone a message then they become one more voice among many, and a smaller voice than the labor movement or the NAACP. In short, political theater can capture the imagination at a time when politics seem bankrupt, but it cannot solve political problems or short-circuit political organizing.
"Why always me?" read the slogan on Mario Balotelli's vest. Because, Mario, you're clearly more than a little bit eccentric. But you do know how to score goals and, as long as that is the case, City will forgive him for whatever controversies come their way bearing his fingerprints. City's own firestarter lit the fuse, put a rocket up United, set the game ablaze and every other firework pun going. You wouldn't want to be his neighbour and it will be one hell of an autobiography one day, but that's six goals in five games. The good outweighs the bad even if it is a close-run thing at times. And maybe he is learning: the old Mario would surely have lifted his shirt for his second goal, too, and collected a second card for his troubles.
Source and Photo Credit. See also here.
His Tumblr blog.