Monthly Archive for September, 2011

Pain Song Along the US – Mexico Border: the Forced “yes” of Migration

Published on September 30, 2011 in News and Newsletter. 0 Comments

From John Washington, Upside Down World

Sergio and I were sitting in torn-out bus seats under a hot January sky in Nogales, Sonora, talking about crawling through thorn bushes. We were in an outdoor bus station with a shade-screen ceiling. About thirty other recently deported men and women were sprawled on the concrete, hunched in the gravel, or slouching in other deconstructed pairs of faded but once colorfully-patterned bus seats. Most of them were carrying heavy duty plastic Homeland Security bags. Inside the bags were their effects, their pertenencias, that they had either crossed the border with or were carrying or wearing when they were arrested stateside.

I was interviewing Sergio (names are changed for privacy) about his two recent deportations. The organization I work with, No More Deaths (a migrant aid org), had reclaimed and returned Sergio’s pertenencias to him. After some struggle and lots of “lost” wallets and stacks of cash, we’ve set up a system with Immigration and Customs Enforcement so that we can retrieve apprehended migrants’ pertenencias. It works occasionally. Before Sergio and I started talking, I watched him change out of the soiled shirt he had been wearing for days and into a pink, tight polo shirt. The buckle of the belt he looped around his waist was a skull with red eyes. Sergio was young and chubby, but with strong looking hands and dark deep-set eyes. When he started telling me his story, his ordeal of the last two months, he spoke confidently and rapidly, describing the desert crossing and his time in prison and his wife back in New York in swift, hard details, without hesitation. But then, something came into his voice. It was when he was talking about his time in court. It was a voice I recognize. It was, I don’t know what to call it, a wetness that came to his voice. Not to his eyes, though it came there next. But first to his voice. A swelling or an opening. A hollowing of his voice

The vowels started to Oh, to lengthen, to Ay, longing in the throat.

It was a sadness I could hear, his voice was cusping.

Then the wet came to his eyes.

To Read More…

The Post-Black Condition

Published on September 28, 2011 in News and Newsletter. 0 Comments

From Orlando Patterson, The New York Times

Much has been written on the benefits that accrued to the generation of African-Americans reaping the rewards of the civil rights revolution. But we have heard surprisingly little from those in the post-civil-rights age about what these benefits have meant to them, and especially how they view themselves as black people in an America now led by a black president. In his new book, Touré’s aim is to provide an account of this “post-black” condition, one that emerged only in the 1980s but by the ’90s had become the “new black.”

Post-blackness entails a different perspective from earlier generations’, one that takes for granted what they fought for: equal rights, integration, middle-class status, affirmative action and political power. While rooted in blackness, it is not restricted by it, as Michael Eric Dyson says in the book’s foreword; it is an enormously complex and malleable state, Touré says, “a completely liquid shape-shifter that can take any form.” With so many ways of performing blackness, there is now no consensus about what it is or should be. One of his goals, Touré writes in “Who’s Afraid of Post-­Blackness? What It Means to Be Black Now,” is “to attack and destroy the idea that there is a correct or legitimate way of doing blackness.” Post-blackness has no patience with “self-appointed identity cops” and their “cultural bullying.”

To Read More…

New Evidence of Anti-Islam Bias Underscores Deep Challenges for FBI’s Reform Pledge

Published on September 26, 2011 in News. 0 Comments

From Spencer Ackerman, Wired

Following months of denials, the FBI is now promising a “comprehensive review of all training and reference materials” after Danger Room revealed a series of Bureau presentations that tarred average Muslims as “radical” and “violent.”

But untangling the Islamophobic thread woven into the FBI’s counterterrorism training culture won’t be easy. In addition to inflammatory seminars which likened Islam to the Death Star and Mohammed to a “cult leader,” Danger Room has obtained more material showing just how wide the anti-Islam meme has spread throughout the Bureau.

The FBI library at Quantico currently stacks books from authors who claim that “Islam and democracy are totally incompatible.” The Bureau’s private intranet recently featured presentations that claimed to demonstrate the “inherently violent nature of Islam,” according to multiple sources. Earlier this year, the Bureau’s Washington Field Office welcomed a speaker who claimed Islamic law prevents Muslims from being truly loyal Americans. And as recently as last week, the online orientation material for the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Forces included claims that Sunni Islam seeks “domination of the world,” according to a law enforcement source.

“I don’t think anyone with half a brain would paint 1.2 billion people of any ethnic or religious persuasion with a single brushstroke,” Mike Rolince, an FBI counterterrorism veteran who started Boston’s JTTF, tells Danger Room. “Who did they run that curriculum by — either an internal or outside expert — to get some balance?”

To Read More…

Migrant Women Act

Published on September 26, 2011 in Book and Newsletter. 0 Comments

Migrant Women Act by Olga Bursian is available as part of the On Diversity series.

Migrant Women Act shows the creativity and ingenuity of migrant women in shaping their own destinies during resettlement. It also shows the vital role of public services in enabling these competencies to flower. Olga Bursian documents the stories of thirty migrant women from the former USSR, Vietnam, Lebanon, the Philippines and the Horn of Africa, by exploring their socialisation into non-Western understandings of the human being, of normal society and what is worth doing in life. The women speak about how they acted through displacement and resettlement overturning popular stereotypes about their cultures. The stories reveal their generosity, resilience and audacity in the face of multiple layers of unequal social relations and negative representations. The book includes a review of the role of public services in successful resettlement, even for the most resilient women. Open entitlement to these services for new citizens was the hallmark of multiculturalism prior to the reversals begun by the Howard Government in the mid 1990s. Olga Bursian uses wide ranging sources to back a rigorous policy and program analysis, pitched at professionals and decision makers. She has lived and worked across diverse cultures and was inspired to document the unbounded resilience of migrant women.

Intercultural Relations in a Global World

Published on September 20, 2011 in Book, Headline and Newsletter. 0 Comments

Intercultural Relations in a Global World edited by Michele Lobo, Vince Marotta and Nicole Oke is available as part of the On Diversity series.

The exploration of cross-cultural contact in a global and transnational world is essential in understanding how we can learn to live with difference in ways that go beyond tolerance. This book explores such contact in Euro-American/Australian societies as well as non-western multiethnic societies such as China, Malaysia, Indonesia and countries within Eastern Europe. The contributors in this book expose the power relations underpinning such encounters as well as explore the possibilities for meaningful dialogue.

Dr Michele Lobo is an Alfred Deakin Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Centre for Citizenship and Globalisation, Deakin University. Her research focuses on intercultural relations and the social inclusion of ethnic minorities.

Dr Vince Marotta is a Senior Lecturer in Sociology and the Deputy Director of the Centre for Citizenship and Globalisation at Deakin University. He is Managing Editor of the Journal of Intercultural Studies (Routledge) and his research and publications focus on social theory, urban sociology, theories of the stranger and migration and multiculturalism.

Dr Nicole Oke is a Lecturer in Sociology & Community Development in the School of Social Sciences and Psychology, Victoria University, Australia. Her research interests are in the areas of globalisation, transnationalism and migration.

Turkish Women, West German Feminists, and the Gendered Discourse on Muslim Cultural Difference

Published on September 12, 2011 in News and Newsletter. 0 Comments

From Rita Chin, Eurozine

Since the 1950s, a massive influx of labour migrants has dramatically transformed the demographic makeup of Europe. Whether they came as guest workers or former colonial subjects, migrants from North Africa, South Asia and Turkey produced the first significant Muslim communities within Europe. During the half century that these groups have resided in Europe, the national debates about their presence have changed radically. Broadly speaking, public discussions initially focused on the economic manpower and the impact of employing migrants on the native working class. As Europeans began to acknowledge that temporary labourers had become permanent residents, political discourse shifted to migrants’ cultural differences based on their nationality. Since the 1990s, the emphasis has been on religion (especially Islam) as the primary characteristic that separates these migrants from the societies in which they reside. “Islamophobia”, in short, has emerged as “the defining condition of the new Europe”.[1]

A striking aspect of contemporary European debates about immigrants is the focus on the Muslim woman as a key figure through which objections to Islamic difference have been articulated. This gendered framing of difference is not a new phenomenon. Indeed, the distinctive gender norms of postwar migrants became a major theme once significant numbers of family reunions had taken place in the early 1970s. But recent pronouncements by figures such as the Somali-Dutch politician Ayaan Hirsi Ali and the Turkish-German sociologist Necla Kelek about the place of women in Islam have inflamed the debate.[2] Their highly sensational testimonials of female oppression under Islam have fuelled the tendency to characterize tensions between Muslim immigrants and Europeans as irresolvable. Muslim gender relations now serve as the most telling symptom of the supposedly intractable clash between European civilization and Islam.

To Read More…

Moving Beyond the “Melting Pot”

Published on September 9, 2011 in News. 0 Comments

From Parag Khanna and Aaron Maniam, 3 Quarks Daily

The tragic shooting rampage and bombing in Norway, and the spontaneous and destructive riots in London, revealed not only the elevated ethnic tensions which beset once homogenous and placid European nations, but also the fundamental new global reality of multi-cultural and multi-national states. Increasingly, governance of socio-cultural norms is in uncharted territory. As national complexions grow more variegated, one-time majorities are becoming minorities. Migration is literally the face of globalization—and as both advance around the world, we will have to re-think citizenship just as our attitudes towards sovereignty are evolving.

So far, the response to these facts has been flailing at best, despondent at worst. It was Holland’s growing right-wing movement led by politician Pim Fortuyn that partially inspired Anders Breivik. Germany’s chancellor Angela Merkel caused great consternation in Germany when she declared in October 2010 that multi-culturalism had failed. Even Canada, for many the poster child for successful multi-culturalism, is in a state of doubt about its open immigration policy and tolerant political climate.

To Read More…

Fear, Inc. :The Roots of the Islamophobia Network in America

Published on September 7, 2011 in News. 0 Comments

From Wajahat Ali, Eli Clifton, Matthew Duss, Lee Fang, Scott Keys, Faiz Shakir, Center for American Progress

Breivik’s manifesto contains numerous footnotes and in-text citations to American bloggers and pundits, quoting them as experts on Islam’s “war against the West.” This small group of anti-Muslim organizations and individuals in our nation is obscure to most Americans but wields great influence in shaping the national and international political debate. Their names are heralded within communities that are actively organizing against Islam and targeting Muslims in the United States.

According to his attorney, Breivik claimed responsibility for his self-described “gruesome but necessary” actions. On July 26, Breivik told the court that violence was “necessary” to save Europe from Marxism and “Muslimization.” In his 1,500-page manifesto, which meticulously details his attack methods and aims to inspire others to extremist violence, Breivik vows “brutal and breathtaking operations which will result in casualties” to fight the alleged “ongoing Islamic Colonization of Europe.”

By midday, pundits were speculating as to who had perpetrated the greatest massacre in Norwegian history since World War II. Numerous mainstream media outlets, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Atlantic, speculated about an Al Qaeda connection and a “jihadist” motivation behind the attacks. But by the next morning it was clear that the attacker was a 32-year-old, white, blond-haired and blue-eyed Norwegian named Anders Breivik. He was not a Muslim, but rather a self-described Christian conservative.

On July 22, a man planted a bomb in an Oslo government building that killed eight people. A few hours after the explosion, he shot and killed 68 people, mostly teenagers, at a Labor Party youth camp on Norway’s Utoya Island.

To Read More…

The Daughter also Rises: Women are Storming Emerging-World Boardrooms

Published on September 1, 2011 in News. 0 Comments

From The Economist

Zhang Yin (also known by her Cantonese name, Cheung Yan) was the eldest of eight children of a lowly Red Army officer who was imprisoned during the Cultural Revolution for “capitalist offences”. Today she is one of the world’s richest self-made women, with an estimated fortune of $1.6 billion. In the early 1980s, as a dogsbody in a paper mill, she noted that the waste paper her superiors so casually discarded was actually worth something. She has been capitalising on her insight ever since. Nine Dragons Paper, which she founded with her husband in 1995, is now one of the world’s largest paper recyclers.

The emerging world is home to many businesswomen like Ms Zhang. Seven of the 14 women identified on Forbes magazine’s list of self-made billionaires are Chinese. Many firms in emerging markets do a better job of promoting women than their Western rivals, some surveys suggest. In China, 32% of senior managers are female, compared with 23% in America and 19% in Britain. In India, 11% of chief executives of large companies are female, compared with 3% of Fortune 500 bosses in America and 3% of FTSE 100 bosses in Britain. Turkey and Brazil come third and joint fourth (behind Finland and Norway) in the World Economic Forum’s ranking of countries by the proportion of CEOs who are women. In Brazil, 11% of chief executives and 30% of senior executives are women.

To Read More….