BEAUTIFUL, ALSO, ARE THE SOULS OF MY BLACK SISTERS

FROM THE ARCHIVES: THE HEARTS OF DARKNESS: HOW EUROPEAN WRITERS CREATED THE RACIST IMAGE OF AFRICA, PART 5

Ann — Thu, 15 May 2008 05:49:47 +0000

Wednesday, 21 February 2007

The defeat of British troops by an African, Muslim army at Khartoum, Sudan in 1885 sent shockwaves throughout the European world. The Mahdi’s triumph over colonial forces challenged both white and Christian notions of supremacy over “black savages” and “Mohammedans,” sparking fears that all North Africa might rise in revolt. European and American “journalists” dubbed the Mahdi a “madman” - as if one must be mad to challenge white rule in Africa. Newspapers reworked old articles on African cannibalism and Muslim treachery, extolling white Christian rule as a civilizing necessity.

The Hearts of Darkness: How European Writers Created the Racist Image of Africa

Part Five

by Milton Allimadi

Mr. Allimadi is CEO and Publisher of The Black Star News, based in New York City. He has graciously given BAR permission to serialize his work.

The Mahdi Defeats Gen. Charles Gordon

The death of the Victorian hero, General Charles Gordon at the hands of the Mahdists in the Sudan was one of the most traumatic defeats for the British in Africa, or anywhere else in the world. It has haunted the Western psyche for generations, and accounts for much of the negative and biased coverage of Islam in Western media.

This was because in addition to being an African “savage” the Mahdi embodied the “Islamic peril” to the West; he represented the antithesis of Christian civilization.

For centuries the West had a real and abiding fear of Islam, as Edward Said showed in his book Orientalism (1978). Islam, according to the West, was a “false religion” and many of the writers referred to the faithful derogatively as “Mohammedans;” in other words, they were followers of Mohammed, a mere mortal, and since Mohammed was regarded as a disseminator of a false revelation, Said wrote, he became “the epitome of lechery, debauchery, sodomy, and a whole battery of asserted treacheries, all of which derived ‘logically’ from his doctrinal impostures.”

“For Europe, Islam was a lasting trauma.”

The Europeans had good reason to fear Islam, having been conquered by Muslims at an earlier period. “Not for nothing did Islam come to symbolize terror, devastation, the demonic hordes of hated barbarians,” Said wrote.

“For Europe, Islam was a lasting trauma. Until the end of the 17^th Century the ‘Ottoman Peril’ lurked alongside Europe to represent for the whole of the Christian civilization a constant danger, and in time European civilization incorporated that peril and its lore, its great events, figures, virtues, and vices, as something woven into the fabric of life.”

So one can imagine the national trauma that gripped England when Gordon was cut down by the Mahdi after his army was overrun in the great battle of Khartoum. One of the better and more realistic accounts of the episode is found in Lytton Strachey’s Eminent Victorians (1918). Strachey was a freethinking Britisher who did not echo the national adulation for Gordon. He wrote in a sober manner and his accounts are more credible compared to most of the contemporaneous as well as subsequent accounts of the battle.

Gordon had gained wide fame for exploits in China, where he reputedly trained and commanded a force of British and Chinese soldiers who crushed a rebellion led by a charismatic visionary. In return, he gained the nickname “Chinese” Gordon.

He was first invited to Africa in 1874 by Egypt’s Khedive Ismail to replace Samuel Baker - the same “Baker of the Nile” who was outwitted by chief Commoro (see Part Three, Feb. 7) - as governor of Equatoria province in what is now modern Sudan. After two mediocre stints in the region Gordon was sent for a third tour by the British government to help rescue trapped garrisons of Egyptian troops and English commanders in the Sudan.

In the early 1880s, a Sudanese preacher, Muhammad Ahmed ibn Abdallah, had emerged as a powerful leader and built a vast following throughout Sudan. When the Egyptian governor-general in Khartoum sent an army of 200 to arrest him, they were quickly annihilated. After that victory, Ahmed ibn Abdallah marched to El Obeid, the capital of Kordofan, where he defeated an Egyptian garrison in January 1883.

After a string of victories Ahmed was declared the Mahdi - the last prophet in a succession of 12 holy Imams beginning with the prophet Muhammad.

“The tall, broad-shouldered, majestic man with the dark face and black beard and great eyes,” Strachey wrote, “who could doubt that he was the embodiment of a superhuman power?” In contrast with Strachey’s sober evaluation, Alan Moorehead, the famous apologist for colonialism and racism, in the White Nile (1960) claimed the Mahdi was a “mad man.”

The British were wary about developments in the Sudan because of events in Egypt. In 1881 under the leadership of a nationalist, Col. Ahmed Arabi, Egyptian nationalists who hated the British and French control of the country’s finances and the fact that the army was commanded by Turkish officers staged a successful uprising. The British army intervened brutally and defeated Arabi’s followers at the battle of Tel el-kebir.

In the Sudan, the British were stunned when the Mahdists ambushed a 10,000-strong expeditionary force led by a retired English officer, Col. William Hicks. The expeditionary army was no match for the Mahdists and nearly all of them were wiped out, except 300 survivors who managed to escape.

“Gordon began his regime by proclaiming the resumption of the Slave Trade.”

There was no question after the destruction of Hicks’ army that the British would go after the Mahdi’s head. So England’s most celebrated general was selected for the mission after weeks of campaigning by British newspapers, including The Pall Mall Gazette. Upon landing in Cairo, on his way to the assignment, Gordon was declared governor-general of the Sudan. He began his regime by proclaiming the resumption of the Slave Trade, hoping that this maneuver would win him the support of wealthy slave dealers and build opposition against the Mahdi. He was denounced by the Anti-Slavery Society.

But instead of defeating the rebels, Gordon and his military secretary colonel Stewart soon found themselves surrounded by the Mahdists forces in Khartoum. The nature of the mission changed very quickly. “The question now,” Evelyn Baring, the British Consul General in Cairo, wrote to Lord Granville, the foreign minister, “is how to get General Gordon and Colonel Stewart away from Khartoum.”

The Mahdi was content with maintaining a siege of Khartoum, and he confidently urged Gordon to surrender. “For after the beginning of the battle were you to surrender,” he warned in a letter to the British general, “it would be from fear, and not willingly, and that will not be accepted.” Gordon responded defiantly, firing off numerous telegraph messages to Baring demanding more British and Indian troops so that he could “smash up the Mahdi.”

Trapped in Khartoum with Gordon were also Colonel William Hicks and Frank Power, who became a correspondent for the English newspaper, The Times. Power made surprisingly frank - one could even say “seditious” by the standards of those days - observations in his journals, which were in total contrast to the adulation of British imperialism prevalent in most of the accounts of the era. “I am not ashamed to say I feel the greatest sympathy for the rebels,” Power declared, as quoted in We Thundered Out: 200 Years of The Times, 1785-1985 (1985), “and every race that fights against the rule of the Pashas, backsheesm, bribery, robbery, and corruption. It is the system, and not the Mahdi, that has brought about the rebellion. The rebels are in the right, and God and chance seem to be fighting for them. I hope they will hunt down every Egyptian neck and crop out of the Sudan.”

On September 10^th 1884 Power and Colonel Hicks left Khartoum aboard a steamer in a bid to escape. When the steamer grounded, the two men were killed. Some steamers did make it through the Mahdists’ tight gantlet along the Nile, surviving the rifle shots from the banks of the river and succeeding in smuggling the trapped general’s volumes of notes, later published as the Khartoum Journals. This is Lytton Strachey’s evaluation of the book: “A more singular set of state papers was never compiled. Sitting there, in the solitude of his palace, with ruin closing around him, with anxieties in every hand, with doom hanging above his head, he let rush, for hour after hour in an ecstasy of communication, a tireless unburdening of the spirit, where the most trivial incidents of the passing day were mingled pell-mell with philosophical disquisitions, where jests with anger, hopes and terrors, elaborate justifications and cynical confessions, jostled one another in reckless confusion.”

The Mahdists finally broke through the British defenses and overran the garrison, killing General Gordon on January 26^th 1885. By the time a rescue expedition led by Charles Stewart arrived on January 28^th, Khartoum had been razed. So powerful was Gordon’s hold on the Victorian imagination that even his death was romanticized. There is the famous painting by G.W. Joy, which shows Gordon standing defiantly on top of a flight of steps, with his left arm crossed at an angle as if he were checking a wristwatch, with a pistol pointing toward the ground in his right hand. The long-robed Mahdists, one holding a spear, are shown creeping toward him, hesitantly, as if awed by the prospect of their prize, this great white general.

This imagery is so illogical that it cannot bear resemblance to reality - it’s more convincing to imagine that Gordon either charged into combat and was killed, or that he unsuccessfully pleaded for his life before he was stabbed multiple times. What has never been disputed is the fact that Gordon’s head was lobbed off and taken to the Mahdi in Omdurman.

“The queen was in a terrible state about the fall of Khartoum,” her private secretary, Sir Henry Ponsonby wrote in his memoirs (as quoted in Lytton Strachey’s Eminent Victorians), “and indeed it had a great deal to do with making her ill.” The newspapers throughout Europe and the United States went wild. There was real fear that an Islamic uprising would sweep to Egypt, throughout north Africa and into Europe.

“El Mahdi Triumphant,” The New York Times announced in a three-lined heading on February 8^th 1885; the second sub-headline read, “The Peril of the British Forces on the Nile,” and a final sub-headline declared, “Gen Gordon Believed to Be Dead.”

London was reported to be in a panic, with officers volunteering for service in Africa. In Paris, although the French must have privately chortled at the defeat of the British, their colonial rival, they secretly worried that the French colonies of Algeria and Tunisia could be swept by an Islamic tide. The Italian prime minister and the war minister “fully resolved” that their country was ready to join England in concerted action against the Mahdi, according to the article.

“Chinese Gordon Killed,” mourned The Times of London on February 11^th when the general’s death was confirmed; a sub-headline read, “Hero of Khartoum Treacherously Stabbed,” (even though he had been killed in warfare), and another sub-headline declared: “His Fate No Longer in Doubt - The Egyptian Soldiers Massacred in the Streets by The Mahdi’s Followers.”

“There was real fear that an Islamic uprising would sweep to Egypt, throughout north Africa and into Europe.”

“The scenes of slaughter are described as surpassing the Bulgarian atrocities and rivaling the worst horrors of the Sepoy mutiny,” the Times of London reported, “The panic-stricken Egyptians were captured in their flight and put to death in the most fiendish tortures.”

Several decades later, Alan Moorehead, the famous apologist for European colonialism, was still trying to malign the Mahdi in the White Nile, claiming that once he retired to Omdurman to enjoy his victory, “there was an extreme love of sensual pleasure in the Mahdi’s character, and once the siege was over he seems to have abandoned to it altogether.” The Mahdi, Moorhead claimed, grew “enormously fat,” and in the privacy of his harem, “his concubines attended him as though he were some great, sleek queen-bee in the pulsating center of a hive.”

The Mahdists’ victory contributed to the fall of Gladstone’s government in England. The Mahdi himself died within months of Gordon’s defeat. Yet, in September 1898, more than 14 years later, the British remained so bitter about the defeat that when Colonel Herbert Kitchener defeated the Khalifa Abdullah in the Sudan, he desecrated the Mahdi’s tomb. His remains were exhumed and tossed into the Nile. Evelyn Baring declined to accept the Mahdi’s skull when Kitchener sent it to him as a trophy.

National Geographic Magazine & Africa’s Savagery

One of the most preposterous articles published about Africa appeared in the October 1922 issue of The National Geographic magazine, a publication that was very influential in shaping the perception of Africa to Americans.

Founded in 1888 as the publication of The National Geographic Society by a group of investors, geographers, lawyers, bankers and biologists, the magazine’s objective was to “further the prosecution of geographic research,” and to “diffuse the knowledge so gained, among men, so that we may all know more of the world upon which we live.” By the 1950s, the magazine had a subscription base of five million.

The October 1922 article was entitled “Transporting a Navy Through the Jungles of Africa,” and was written by a Briton, Frank J. Magee. It was Magee’s account of how he and 27 English naval volunteers journeyed from the West Coast of the continent, with African porters, into the interior, to assist Belgians in Belgian Congo who were then fighting German soldiers on Lake Tanganyika in 1915 - Germany then controlled Tanganyika.

Their objective was to reach the river Lualaba with their disassembled boats. From there, the boats would be re-assembled, and the crew would sail to Lake Tanganyika. The concocted article is worth reviewing in some detail because it offers insight into the psyches of the writer, the editors who commissioned the article, and the readers it was intended for.

“And so early in the coolness of an African morning,” Magee wrote, recalling the beginning of the journey, “we turned our backs on civilization and all that it meant, to fade away, but for a short time, we hoped, into the heart of the African bush.”

The writer portrayed the traditional rulers encountered along the way with the same type of contempt displayed by the authors of the 19^th Century explorers’ journals - not surprising since he was trying to emulate them.

“One old chief, I remember, was attired in an old British militia tunic and a pair of spats, his crowning glory being an opera hat and a pink sunshade,” Magee wrote. “I was aware that a big business in out-of-date uniforms is carried on between traders and these tribes, but the origin of the spats and the sunshade puzzled me somewhat until I remembered we were in the land of reputed cannibals.”

According to Magee, when he and his colleagues ignited the engine to start up the bulldozers for clearing a path, all the “natives” fled into the bush, thinking it was some kind of monster that had come to devour them. Along the way, the “natives” happily sang Christian hymns while carrying loads that weighed more than 50 pounds. “They had memorized the tune and words, but they had no actual comprehension of the meaning,” Magee explained. “Imagine therefore, a crowd of natives on the march, each carrying a load of some 60 pounds on his head, with a prospect of a 30-mile trek under a blazing sun, singing such a hymn as ‘Now the Laborer’s Task Is O’er.’”

“They came bounding down from the trees and the hill-tops, falling over each other in their hurry to pay homage to the new Great White Chief.”

On September 28^th, 1915, the expedition reached the Lualaba river and after transporting their vessels “The Mimi” and “The Tou-Tou” by railhead, it sailed the rest of the 350-mile distance along the river, shooting crocodile and hippos along the way, as all brave adventurers can be expected to do.

When they reached their destination, they were welcomed by Belgian troops and they all started constructing a harbor using blasted stones. By the time Christmas arrived, all their vessels were afloat - so the team waited patiently for the German enemy.

Suddenly one day, according to Magee’s account, a German vessel appeared with guns ablaze and the battle commenced. By the time the smoke cleared, the German vessel, the Kingani, was immobilized and three German marines killed. Three Africans were missing, while the British suffered no losses, Magee reported.

When the German vessel was escorted to the shore, flying the white flag of surrender, the “natives” erupted in wild celebration of the British victory, Magee claimed. “They came bounding down from the trees and the hill-tops, giving vent to loud whoops of delight and gesticulating wildly, simply falling over each other in their hurry to reach the beach in order to pay their homage to the new Great White Chief, our commander,” he wrote. Magee then followed up with a scene that he plagiarized from Joseph Conrad’s Hearts of Darkness: “There they assembled in thousands, arrayed in their brightest pigments and grandiest loin-clothes, a jigging, jogging, frenzied mass of black humanity - a sight not to be forgotten.”

Once the British commander landed ashore, Magee claimed, “The natives, with grunts of satisfaction and approval, threw themselves flat on the ground and trickled sand on their hair - a sign of respectful homage - as the commander passed among them. The native women flocked around in an effort to be seen by him, regarding this as a fetish which would protect them from evil spirits.” In contrast to the “natives” barbaric form of celebration, the Europeans, Magee wrote, “expressed their joy in the usual demonstrative Continental fashion of embracing and kissing each other and by singing of their national anthem.”

The dead Germans were then buried with “full military honors” after which, according to Magee, “specially chosen native troops were put on guard over the graves” around-the-clock. “The significance of this,” he explained, “lies in the fact that a large majority of the Belgian native troops were recruited from tribes addicted to cannibalism and some of them might have felt tempted to take the opportunity of indulging in their horrible custom if precautions had not been taken to prevent it.”

The natives, Magee claimed, were so impressed by the victory over the Germans that they molded the likeness of the British commander, Spicer Simson, in clay and started worshipping him as their new “ju ju.” Magee explained: “This was very well for Commander Spicer Simson, but it must have proved rather disconcerting to the Belgian White Fathers of the native mission - who had spent years and years in an effort to open the native mind to Christian teachings to find their black folk suddenly turning to a new ju ju in the form of a British naval commander in clay.”

This psychotic writer saved his best concoction for the last part of his fairy tale. The Belgians had decided to test a Marconi wireless equipment at the precise moment that they were also test-flying a newly assembled plane. “Picture, therefore, the amazement of the superstitious negroes,” Magee wrote, “when, shortly after the wireless had begun sending testing messages, with the rasping, crackling of electrical sparks, lo and behold came the answer to their prayer to Heaven, as the natives thought, in the form of a low droning, gradually getting louder.”

He continued, “Suddenly, the seaplane shot into view out of the sky, describing circles and going through sundry evolutions over the camp. The natives stood spellbound, gaping upward with arms extended, eyes bulging, and mouths agape. The airmen then made a sudden dive downward and that broke the spell. The savages bounded off into the bush, terror lending wings to their progress. Mothers snatched up pickaninies and dived for the shelter of their kraals, shrieking at the top of their voices, it was real pandemonium.”

The National Geographic even published an obviously staged photograph of the terrified “natives,” showing seven Africans kneeling on the ground, gazing up at the sky with arms upraised, and with the following caption:

“Spell-bound, gazing upward with their arms extended, eyes bulging, and mouth agape, the awe-stricken natives first believed the aero plane a new kind of monster swooping down from the sky to destroy them.” Who can blame any African, reading these lines today, for wishing that many Europeans like Magee had been consumed by the alleged cannibals they encountered?

Mussolini’s ‘Civilizing’ Mission in Ethiopia

Europeans did not mind killing millions of Africans, or fellow whites for that matter. However, in order to maintain the worldwide myth of white superiority - which was essential to enable them to dominate the non-white races - it was paramount that Africans not see them fighting amongst themselves.

After British and French colonial armies clashed with Germans in Africa, a New York Times article published on March 20^th, 1915 under the headline “African War A Blot,” reported that the Duke of Mecklenburg, who was the president of the German Colonial Society, had complained bitterly in a letter. According to the good Duke, “The actions of the British and French are destroying the civilizing work of Europeans in Africa and that this procedure constitutes a ‘mockery of the law of nations and definite international agreements.’”

“Before the eyes of natives, white men, with the aid of blacks, now engage in the slaughter of white men,” the Duke protested, in his letter, “The effect of that unhappy racial encounter can be only fatal to the future colonizing work of every European nation in Africa.”

The Duke also complained in his letter that the French had transported German captives from Togo and Cameroon to French Dahomey, making them walk 300 miles in the process. The Germans were forced to suffer further indignity during the journey. According to the Duke, the white captives were “compelled to do manual work under the supervision of black men.”

After Germany’s defeat in the War there was a scramble to divide up her colonial possessions in Africa, and as always the Europeans knew what was in the best interest of the Africans. A New York Times article published on December 7^th, 1918 under the headline, “Says Colonies Favor Britain,” revealed that Walter Hume Long, the British Secretary of State for Colonies had told Parliament that the “Natives of Germany’s colonies want to come under British rule.” The honorable Secretary never explained how he arrived at this conclusion without the benefit of a survey or referendum that might have solicited the opinion of those natives.

“It will be a great injustice to our great dominions,” Hume is quoted as telling Parliament, “to tell them that the colonies, which, in a large measure, they conquered by their blood and valor, are to pass under the control of anybody but the empire to which they belong.” Perhaps it had never occurred to Hume; was it not plausible that the “natives” might have preferred to govern themselves?

During the 1930s, Italy was once again contemplating the conquest of Ethiopia. An article published in The New York Times on December 23^rd, 1934, under the headline “Abyssinia Encircled by Covetous Powers,” reported that Italy wanted to control Ethiopia before Germany and Japan. All these countries, the Times explained, coveted the “vast potential sales to Abyssinia’s millions” the “quantities of the cheap gimcracks which so fascinate semi-civilized populations.”

“The Times attempted to re-write history, to make it appear as if the Italians had not been fairly defeated.”

The Italians remembered their annihilation at the hands of Menelik’s army in 1896, as the Times article recalled. Here’s how the newspaper characterized that Italian defeat: “There was a fast and fierce clash, the battle of Adowa, in which a quarter of a million savage black warriors, equipped mainly with spear and shield, slaughtered nearly 40,000 Italians practically in their tracks and in spite of the Italian rifles and artillery.” Here, almost 40 years later, there is an attempt to re-write history, to make it appear as if the Italians had not been fairly defeated, and had been merely overwhelmed by superior numbers. The writer never bothered to consult the Times’ own archives to learn how his predecessors had documented Ethiopia’s great victory. In fact, Menelik’s army had numbered about 70,000, not the 250,000 the Times now claimed.

“The insult of defeat has rankled in the breasts of Italian militarists these many decades,” the Times article explained, “Fully as strongly as burned the Ethiopian conviction that, having once beaten Europe at her game of war, Abyssinia could do so again.” The article cautioned Europeans and Americans not to underestimate the psychology of the Ethiopian, particularly the “true Abyssinian” who was Amharic and “considers himself vastly superior to a white man.”

But Il Duce wanted to avenge Italy’s humiliating loss and nothing would stop him from invading Ethiopia, not even a desperate appeal to the League of Nations by Emperor Haile Selassie, and an Op-Ed article he published in The New York Times on July 14^th, 1935 to rally international diplomatic support. The emperor vowed that he would resist any Italian aggression and criticized Mussolini for not submitting the disputes between the two countries to a neutral arbiter. Selassie was to discover, bitterly, that the “collective world security” espoused by the League of Nations did not apply to natives.

On May 5^th, 1936, Selassie was forced to flee as 30,000 Italian troops, backed by 1,000 trucks, abundant supplies of mustard gas, which the Italians used liberally, and with 50 planes flying overhead, swept into Addis Ababa. The emperor set up a government in exile in London while Ethiopians continued guerrilla warfare against the Italians.

The New York Times account of the conquest was written by Herbert L. Matthews, who had traveled with the Italian convoys. The headline of a May 6^th, 1936 Times article read like a press release from the Italian military: “Ethiopia is Italian, Says Mussolini as His Troops Occupy Addis Ababa.” A second sub-heading read, “Raises Italian Tricolor,” and a third stated, “Finds Miserable Scene.”

“Ethiopia’s era of independence, which had lasted since biblical times, ended at 4 o’clock this afternoon when the Italians occupied Addis Ababa,” Matthews wrote. “This account is being written in the automobile in which this correspondent came to Addis Ababa from Dessye with Marshall Pietro Badoglio.”

Marshall Badoglio, the Italian commander, fired barbs at the departing emperor, and Matthews was evidently happy to take dictation for him. “The Negus, following his great victories, has been obliged to flee from his capital,” Badoglio told Matthews, sarcastically referring to Selassie by his title, which meant “king of kings” in Amharic, “We, following the defeats we received, have arrived here.

“You have seen the welcome the populations have given us along the road,” Marshall Badoglio continued, and the obliging Matthews wrote, without bothering to get a quote from a single native, “They feel themselves freed of the heaviest yoke. Now begins the labor for us, as arduous as that of the war we won, to give civilization and progress through peace and tranquility to these people for all.”

The brutal occupation was punctuated by a New York Times article published on May 10^th, 1936 under the headline “Conquest of Africa Completed” and under the byline of P.W. Wilson. The Italian victory, the article reported, completed “four centuries of a territorial transition that now embraces the whole of the once-Dark continent of Africa with its 12,000,000 square miles and about 150,000,000 inhabitants.” With the “comparatively unimportant exception of Liberia, a Negro republic on the Atlantic seaboard,” the article added. “The evaluation of Africa as a white man’s empire is subject to emotional factors and especially pride of possession…”

Next week, Part Six: Viewing Africa Through Western Writings

Part One in BAR’s January 24 issue

Part Two in the January 31 issue.

Part Three in the February 7 issue.

Part Four in the February 14 issue.

The Hearts of Darkness: How European Writers Created the Racist image of Africa

Published by The Black Star Publishing Co.

P.O. Box 64, New York, N.Y., 10025

www.BlackStarnews.com

To order copies call (212) 481-7745

Or visit the author’s site: www.theheartsofdarkness.com

MISSOURI LAWMAKERS ADVANCE 2ND VOTER ID PHOTO BILL

Ann — Thu, 15 May 2008 05:11:17 +0000

ASSOCIATED PRESS - 5/12/08

JEFFERSON CITY, Mo. -Missouri Republicans on Monday advanced a constitutional amendment allowing a photo identification requirement for voting and recrafted an ID law similar to one the state Supreme Court struck down two years ago.

The Republican-led Senate elections committee voted along party lines to send the legislation to the full chamber, setting up a potential showdown with opposing Democrats before Missouri’s legislative session ends Friday.

After a photo ID mandate was enacted in 2006, a voter sued on grounds that it would effectively disenfranchise her. The Missouri Supreme Court cited the state constitution in ruling the law was too heavy a burden on voting rights.

Missouri Republicans revived their photo ID efforts after the U.S. Supreme Court last month upheld a similar Indiana identification requirement, based on the federal Constitution.

The state court ruling said the costs of obtaining the documents to prove identification and get those IDs amounted to an illegal poll tax. Sponsoring Sen. Delbert Scott said this year’s proposal would allow the state to cover such costs for those who don’t have the IDs.

The proposed constitutional amendment targeted for the November ballot merely would authorize a law requiring a government-issued photo ID for voters. The Senate committee advanced that amendment to the full Senate. It also advanced a separate elections bill Monday that supporters hope to amend on the Senate floor to automatically enact a photo ID requirement upon voter approval of the constitutional amendment.

The state Supreme Court noted in 2006 that there have been no known instances of Missouri voters impersonating other people. But a sponsor of the amendment, Republican Rep. Stanley Cox, said fraud is by definition secretive, hard to uncover and to prove.

Democratic Secretary of State Robin Carnahan claimed Republicans were chasing “mythical problems” with a solution that would make it more difficult for people to vote.

No one besides Republican lawmakers spoke in favor of the photo ID measure. By contrast, a long line of people were still standing to oppose it when the Senate panel cut off testimony after less than an hour and voted. The committee had to quit, because the Senate was going into session.

Republican Sen. John Loudon ridiculed concerns that the photo ID requirement amounted to a tax on voters.

“The only thing taxing is you have to get off your duff and get an ID that’s given away for free,” Loudon said.

___

On the Net:

Legislature: http://www.moga.mo.gov

JACKSON STATE - MAY 14, 1970

Ann — Thu, 15 May 2008 03:03:23 +0000

IN REMEMBRANCE OF PHILLIP LAFAYETTE GIBBS AND JAMES EARL GREEN

MARTYRS OF JACKSON STATE UNIVERSITY

Phillip Lafayette Gibbs, age 21, lay dead from four gunshot wounds: two in his head, one under his left eye, and one in his left armpit. Gibbs left behind a wife, one child, and another on the way.

Behind the police line across the street, James Earl Green, age 17, was lying dead in front of B. F. Roberts Dining Hall. Green was a senior at Jim Hill High School and on his way home from work at a grocery store when he paused to watch the riot. Police later claimed they had been fired on from the dining hall. Green was killed by one gunshot.

-Phillip Lafayette Gibbs, 21, pre-med.
-James Earl Green, 17, high school student walking home from the grocery store.

You both were never able to live to see your dreams come true. All your hopes. All your ambitions. All your desires.

May those of us in America be a living testament to your noble sacrifice in the name of justice, freedom, and the revolution of the mind.

Rest in Peace, Phillip and James.

SALUTARE.

RIBBON IN THE SKY

Oh so long for this night I prayed
That a star would guide you my way
To share with me this special day
Where a ribbon’s in the sky for our love

If allowed may I touch your hand
And if pleased may I once again
So that you too will understand
There’s a ribbon in the sky for our love

This is not a coincidence
And far more than a lucky chance
But what is that was always meant
Is our ribbon in the sky for our love, love

We can’t lose with God on our side
We’ll find strength in each tear we cry
From now on it will be you and I
And our ribbon in the sky
Ribbon in the sky
A ribbon in the sky for our love

There’s a ribbon in the sky for our love

Lyrics by Stevie Wonder, from the album “Natural Wonder”.

http://www.metrolyrics.com/ribbon-in-the-sky-lyrics-stevie-wonder.html

Ribbon in the Sky Video: http://youtube.com/watch?v=Q1YpULTAzrI

WHO’S PAYING FOR PROSTITUTES?

Ann — Wed, 14 May 2008 16:53:06 +0000

WHO’S PAYING FOR PROSTITUTES?

by Leila Noelliste

According to a new report, college- educated men with wives and girlfriends are the johns who frequent West and South Side prostitutes. Researchers at the Chicago Alliance Against Sexual Exploitation interviewed 113 men who buy sex and reported that 79 percent had attended or completed college, 62 percent made more than $40,000 a year, and 62 percent had a wife or girlfriend.

Roughly 40 percent of the interviewees were Black, 36 percent were white, 14 percent were Latino, and the remaining were Asian or multicultural. The average age was 39. Most of the men, 83 percent, said that buying sex was an addiction, and about half said that they did it to obtain sex acts their partners would not perform.

Anal sex and oral sex were the most commonly cited. “I want to pay someone to do something a normal person wouldn’t do. To piss on someone or pay someone to do something degrading who is not my girlfriend,” one participant said. The average age for the first purchase of sex was 21 years old, with some men starting as young as 10. Only 22 percent reported feeling guilty or shameful when they purchased sex, and 43 percent said that a prostitute should do whatever a man asks, if he pays her.

“She gave up her rights when she accepted my money,” one participant said. Although they felt relatively guiltless about participating in prostitution, many men acknowledged that it was detrimental. Eighty percent said that prostitution had a negative impact on communities, and 42 percent said that it psychologically and physically damaged the women involved.

Ninetyfour percent said that they would not want their daughters to become prostitutes. “Getting beat up, robbed. Vaginal, stomach, back problems. Being stretched. It wears them out,” one participant said. “From prostitution comes drug involvement, pimps, and violent crime like battery and assault,” said another. The West Side, followed by the South Side, were the most popular locations to buy sex.

Thirty-four percent said they used the Internet to find women, 57 percent walked the streets, and 84 percent used indoor venues like bars, strip clubs and private parties. Close to 90 percent of interviewees said that some form of public exposure, like jail time, would deter them from buying sex. Sixty percent said that men under 18 should not follow in their footsteps. “Learn to trust and love a woman first.

“If you start out thinking of a woman as a sexual tool, you always will think of her as a sexual tool,” one participant said.

(Article courtesy of the Chicago Defender: http://www.chicagodefender.com )

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

“I want to pay someone to do something a normal person wouldn’t do. To piss on someone or pay someone to do something degrading who is not my girlfriend,” one participant said.

Yeah, prostitutes are not normal people. They are what. . .sub-human? Therefore, pissing on them, and degrading them is okay because they are the lowest of the low, right, Mr. Prostitutor? They obviously are not human in your eyes, so why not go the Full Monty on them? Why not piss, shit, vomit and wipe your ass on them, because everyone knows that those horrible prostitutes force all men to have sex with them.

The nerve of those uppity prostitutes.

“She gave up her rights when she accepted my money,” one participant said.”

Oh, and she gave up her right to be more than just a sperm-receptacle for some prostitutor’s sick and perverted neuroses, eh? The women whom prostitutors engage in sexual activities with were (and still are) HUMAN BEINGS, before they became prostitutes. But, I guess it is oh so convenient for prostitutors to forget that? To cut right out of their hearts the fact that these women they seek to lie up with are human beings with feelings, minds and hearts. So easy to forget and throw out of their minds that the woman they are debasing is someone’s daughter, someone’s sister, someone’s cousin, someone’s niece.

Yeah, real easy to throw those thoughts out of their minds, eh?

“Ninetyfour percent said that they would not want their daughters to become prostitutes. “Getting beat up, robbed. Vaginal, stomach, back problems. Being stretched. It wears them out,” one participant said. “From prostitution comes drug involvement, pimps, and violent crime like battery and assault,” said another.”

Yeah, but, prostitutors just keep right on going back to these women, women who face violent crimes, like battery and assault, and physical debilitation, mayhem, rape, and murder, mainly from prostitutors.

“Sixty percent said that men under 18 should not follow in their footsteps. “Learn to trust and love a woman first.”

Right.

Make sure those young men who look up to you do not follow in your footsteps.

Make sure you are the most hypocrite of hypocrites by talking out the side of your neck by admonishing young men not to do as you do, while you continue to use prostitutes, like the sex gluttons that you are.

“Learn to trust and love a woman first.”

What a joke!

After you have defiled and denigrated a woman whom you want to do any sex act you can conjure up, now you want to earn a woman’s trust and love? After you have used women as sexual toilet receptacles, now you want to start treating all women as humans when you could not get up the balls to treat prostitutes as human beings? Not when you can have a two-faced, double-standard attitude towards prostitutes, in comparison to the women of your own family, towards the women of your own community?

I noticed this article did not state the races of the prostitutes. Not being from the Chicago area, I did a little research on the two neighborhoods mentioned in this article and here is what I found:

-Near South Side: http://www.cagis.uic.edu/commarea/carepts/carept_33.txt

-Near West Side: http://www.cagis.uic.edu/commarea/carepts/carept_28.txt

are predominantly black neighborhoods.

Near South Side: approximately 6,424, black

Near West Side: approximately 31,052 black; approximately 10,352, white

Then again, vice and other illegal activities (gambling, alcohol, illegal guns, prostitution, drugs) have always been steered towards poor and black neighborhoods.

These areas are called interzones.

The racialization of sex created a demilitarized urban landscape zone of racialized sex. Interzones were the black/white districts. . . .located in districts that had black and white, heterosexual and homosexual, prostitute and customer. (Just like New Orleans’s Storyville). Interzones were in essence, urban racial landscapes that were an area where outsiders could go to release their pent-up psychological depravities and where their sub-conscious throughts were given free rein.

Interzones were buffers to keep all the vices that were too contaminating for the precious non-white neighborhoods, from spilling over into and corrupting the non-black parts of society. Therefore, the creation of interzones made sure that sexual vices remained contained, in majority black neighborhoods. As long as prostitution remains contained in black neighborhoods, its presence is considered normal. But, let prostitution dip its little toe into white neighborhoods, then out comes the Vice Squad in full force, to clean up the white neighborhood. Never mind that there have been police busts of white housewives operating prostitution rings out of their all-white suburban homes. Their acts of vice would be considered an aberration, as outside the norm. Prostitution in black neighborhoods is considered normal for those people. Prostitution is allowed to remain and fester and run rampant in black neighborhoods. Even when the denizens of black neighborhoods seek more law enforcement to drive out pimps and prostitutes, much fanfare is made of police muscle to crack down on prostitutes and prostitutors who frequent them, but this only lasts for a little while, and then it is back to business as usual for the prostitutes, and the prostitutors who frequent them.

Many times the police harrass the denizens of the neighborhood in these so-called crackdowns. Many black women who live in neighborhoods that have prostitutes in them, suffer from police abuse and torment when these black women leave their homes to go to work, go to school, go to the grocery store, and go to church. Many black women sitting at bus-stops have been illegally detained by police on only the mere suspicion that that woman was a prostitute. Many black women have been propositioned by men from all races while going about their daily lives because of the sterotyping of ALL black women as prostitutes.

Because of the racist/sexist belief that all black communities are only good for being a hazardous waste site for America’s sick sexual fantasies, prostitution is allowed to remain and is publically sanctioned and condoned———-as long as it stays in black neighborhoods.

Nothing new there.

America has always treated black neighborhoods as her dumpimg grounds for all of America’s filthy, neurotic, and racist psychosis. Just as black people have been used as sexual latrines by America, so too have prostitutes been used by many men, the same way.

As the author Carol Chehade so aptly stated, America has always used black neighborhoods, black towns, black bodies, as the country’s waste receptacles for America’s most vulgar and basest depravities:

“Sex has always been a very powerful weapon in oppressing Blacks. Our long record of trying to control the bodies of Black people is in itself perversely sexual. Our country has owned and exploited physical parts of the Black body to benefit White people’s wishes, whims, and desires. The black body has been used as a repository for our sickness. We’ve used the black body laboriously, exploitatively and sexually. We’ve taken pleasure in watching Black pain. The very act of bondage is a form of sadistic control over another person, let alone an entire race.

“We did things to the Black body that we would never do to ourselves. We captured, bound, whipped, chained, stripped, branded, displayed, sold, degraded, objectified, crudely fondled, and enslaved.”

From Big Little Whites Lies: Our Attempt To White-Out America”, by Carol Chehade, Nehmarche Publishers, Inc., 2001.

And the lack of decent-paying, rewarding jobs, educational school systems, and racist segregation of blacks from whites (urban=black, rural/suburban=white; yes, the city of “broad shoulders” is notorious for its viciously racist segregation that rivals the American South’s Jane Crow), has allowed this hemmed-up, penned-in, environment to continue.

Here are 10 Things We Can Do To Stop Commercial Sexual Exploitation:

Chicago Alliance Against Sexual Exploitation
http://www.caase.org/

1. Work to help women gain supportive housing and jobs that pay a living wage

2. Advocate for shelters and clinics equipped and staffed to offer medical and psychological treatment for women

3. Educate young girls and boys on the harms of prostitution and how to avoid becoming a victim of sexual exploitation

4. Challenge society’s sexist views of women. Fight against pornography and other forms of media that continue to objectify women

5. Change language- stop using words such as “pimp”, “ho” and “whore” and challenge your friends when they use similar language

6. Support legislation aimed at stopping sexual exploitation and expanding options for prostituted individuals

7. Make sure the needs of sexually exploited individuals are being addressed in the domestic violence community, the sexual assault community, among homeless rights advocates and among individuals working to fight substance addiction

8. Pressure local CAPS and police enforcement to go after those purchasing sex instead of those selling it

9. Hold media and financial institutions accountable in regards to the ads they run that promote prostitution

10. Raise public awareness! Host book clubs, film screenings and art projects to raise awareness about the issue. Also join in local awareness raising initiatives such as the upcoming Rescue and Restore campaign.

Read CAASE’s research study on Chicago men who purchase sex by clicking here:

http://www.caase.org/uploads/File/Deconstructing%20the%20Demand%20For%20Prostitution.pdf?PHPSESSID=4ebce9e9432b353000b4f93d6a8b4dc1

Just as America has defiled the bodies of black Americans, so too do these prostitutors defile and seek the degradation of women who work as prostitutes. Just as America has sought to control the bodies of black people, so too do prostitutors seek to control and obliterate the bodies of prostitutes. Just as America has used black people’s bodies for their perverse whims, wishes and hellish sexual desires—–so too have men used prostitutes for their hellish sexual desires.

Just as America has used black people’s bodies as racist, sexist repositories, so too do prostitutors use the bodies of prostitutes as repositories for their most horrendous sex acts.

A man cannot seek the services of a prostitute to bind, gag, beat, and torment them, without that behaviour finding its way into his relationships with all other women. A man cannot pay a woman to do all manner of wretched forms of sex acts, then expect that detrimental mode of behaviour not to carry over as a way of thinking into a future relationship. A man cannot truss up, piss on, shit on, masturbate on and debauch a woman just because she is a prostitute, and expect to come away from degrading her humanity without destroying and degrading his own humanity.

By seeking the destruction of her humanity, he has sealed the coffin on his own humanity.

By tearing her down, and tearing her apart, he has done the same to himself.

And all women who encounter him or enter into his life intimately, will suffer the consequences of his previous mistreatment of prostitutes.

Men who use the services of prostitutes seek to destroy the morality of all women. The desire to seek out prostitutes to have a woman do sex acts for you that border on the vile and inhumane, is a perverse desire to annihilate the humanity in any and all women.

But, because prostitutes are the least adored, the least loved, the least respected, the least protected in this country, they are fair game for the most monstrous of male hatred and misogyny.

“If you start out thinking of a woman as a sexual tool, you always will think of her as a sexual tool,” one participant said.”

Yeah.

It’s real easy for these prostitutors to use these women for their immoral anti-woman sex. As long as it it is someone else’s daughter, someone else’s sister, someone else’s female relative.

Until it hits close to home.

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OUTSIDE R. KELLY TRIAL, DEBATE RAGES

Ann — Mon, 12 May 2008 06:06:16 +0000

OUTSIDE R. KELLY TRIAL, DEBATE RAGES

FANS AND ACTIVISTS AT ODDS, MIRRORING LARGER DIVISIONS

By Kayce T. Ataiyero | Tribune reporter

10:04 PM CDT, May 11, 2008

The debate simmered outside R. Kelly’s child pornography trial last week. Fans fiercely defended the popular R&B singer, while a handful of detractors railed at him.

Their opposing views of Kelly—as either a star wrongly accused or a sex criminal—mirrored a debate that has resurfaced in the black community, where Kelly’s fame, the nature of the charges against him, and larger questions about celebrity, sex and race have put some onlookers at odds before the evidence is even heard.

“R. Kelly is a pedophile. Lock him up,” Dwight Taylor of Gary chanted into a bullhorn, riling the crowd of about 30 or so people who had gathered to watch Kelly make his entrance into the Cook County Criminal Courts Building.

“Free R. Kelly!” some of his supporters shot back.

Kelly, 41, is accused of taping himself having sex with a girl who prosecutors say may have been as young as 13 at the time. Kelly has denied any wrongdoing, and the girl, now in her 20s, has consistently denied that it is her on the tape.

Jury selection began Friday and continues on Monday.

The snail’s pace of the case—it has gone through six years of legal wrangling—the black community’s skepticism about the justice system and the prolific career Kelly has had in the interim may have led some to overlook the allegations against him, observers say.

Black activist Najee Ali is among those disturbed by the lack of outrage surrounding the case. Since 2002, Ali, executive director of Project Islamic HOPE, a civil rights organization based in Los Angeles, has tried to rally the black community to condemn Kelly.

On Friday, Ali and Taylor were the two lone voices speaking out against the singer. They carried signs that read: “R. Kelly. World’s Greatest Pedophile,” a play on one of the singer’s songs.

Ali is used to being outnumbered.

“This has been the loneliest fight I have ever been in,” Ali said last September as he was gearing up to protest, before the trial was once again delayed. “You would have thought we would have had an outpouring of support. We are outnumbered by his supporters, probably by 10-1.”

Some of the support Kelly has enjoyed throughout the case is rooted in the black community’s reluctance to publicly chastise one of its own, observers said. Kelly isn’t the first high-profile black man to continue to win community support despite being accused of a sex offense. When boxer Mike Tyson faced charges of raping a black beauty contestant, his popularity in the black community remained strong.

Katheryn Russell-Brown, author of “Protecting Our Own: Race, Crime and African Americans,” said that when a black male celebrity is accused of a serious crime, the community’s instinct to protect him kicks in. Mistrust of the legal system and the notion that black men often face discrimination cause the community to close ranks around them, she said. “We have mad love for our superstars, people who have made it out, and we rally to support them,” Russell-Brown said.

“People see the allegations and say they are out to get him, to bring another black man down,” she said. “We are also concerned about what this means for the community. O.J. [Simpson], Michael Jackson, R. Kelly, Michael Vick—if they can be hung out to dry, so can we.”

Instead of scrutinizing the men, observers say, the actions and motivations of the women involved have been dissected, often placing the responsibility for the scandal on the alleged victim. Though the girl in question may have been underage, analysts said, some in the larger society have the perception that sex with a teenager is not so offensive as sex with a much younger child.

Mark Anthony Neal, an African-American studies professor at Duke University, said he was disappointed over the community’s continued support of Kelly.

“Our ability to continue to go see his concerts and buy his music gives him the impression that he doesn’t have to face consequences, at least in the black community,” Neal said. “The fear of airing our dirty laundry didn’t allow folks to really rally around this thing. If this had been Justin Timberlake, the reaction would have been very, very different.”

But Bakari Kitwana, a hip-hop scholar and artist-in-residence at the University of Chicago, said it would be premature to judge Kelly before he has been tried, a mistake he said was made with Michael Jackson with disastrous consequences for his career. “At what point is the art separated from the reality? Does it make his art now irrelevant because he’s got this other problem going on?” Kitwana asked. “If we find out some crazy stuff about Michelangelo, what do we do about his ‘David’? Should we tear it down?”

Keyonia Jones, a 23-year-old Kelly supporter, said the singer’s reputation should not be tarnished by a case in which the girl says she was not victimized. “I don’t see that there’s a victim. She is denying that that’s her on the tape,” she said.

Cynthia Neal Spence, associate professor of sociology at Spelman College in Atlanta, said there is a perception long held by the larger society that, in cases of sexual impropriety, it is the responsibility of the woman to prevent the behavior. Also, pervasive images of hypersexual women in entertainment have caused many to be desensitized, she said.

“There’s not a lot of difference between [what is on the tape] and what is on BET [Black Entertainment Television]” in people’s minds, Spence said, adding that the sexual nature of images in music videos makes it more difficult for people to discern what is actual pornography.

“The standards have been lowered in terms of what is appropriate. I think pop culture has created fertile ground for the degradation of women,” Spence said.

Back at the courthouse, Ali made a similar argument to three young women who came out to support Kelly.

After a few minutes, one of the women, Jerhonda Johnson, 18, of Streamwood, said both sides would just have to agree to disagree.

“You got your opinions about this and we got ours. We can go on forever about this,” she said. “The jury will let us know what’s up.”

kataiyero@tribune.com

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OUTSIDE R. KELLY TRIAL, DEBATE RAGES

The debate simmered outside R. Kelly’s child pornography trial last week. Fans fiercely defended the popular R&B singer, while a handful of detractors railed at him.

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