Wild Indigenous Cab Ride, KevinAThompson

Avatar--a step forward?

kevin thompson — Sat, 13 Mar 2010 06:09:00 GMT

The first 3-D movie I ever saw was   Avatar. Yes, the first one. And at an IMAX theater to boot. It was truly awesome. Also, I had not seen any give-the-whole-plot-away trailers or spoken to anyone who had seen it. I saw it fresh and virginal.  It was a long movie and I did not want it to end. I liked being in that universe I did not want to leave.  I as into it, really.

Okay, I was kind of flattered that director James Cameron had chosen Native, Black and Afro-Latino actors to portray the blue people, the Na'vi.
    It was accurate that the industrialized world's quest for resources is central to the displacement of the Na've people, not just in history, this kind of thing is going on right now in the Amazon and the Niger Delta. In that sense, Avatar is not about the future but about the present.
    But I have my misgivings about this supposedly sympathetic portrayal of indigenous people. Cameron could have made them more like earthlings, instead they are ten feet tall and have tails that can plug into other organisms with which they share the Pandora moon. This makes them superhuman, but also unhuman. Cameron could have made them more like Star Trek's Vulcans, basically human with a small difference, like pointy ears, to show that they were really just a different version of "us." The analogy between human/vulcan and ethnicities is easy to make, because Vulcans are still more like us than different.
    Frankly, I was slightly put off by Indigenous people being likened to non-humans. I don't see how Cameron's natives could interbreed with us. We don't breathe the same atmosphere. But we indigenous earthlings of color are human, and we can easily interbreed with well--white humans.  White and non-white humans are still part of the same family and have no biological impediments to sharing the same food, air or sexual relations. Its social, religious, and political differences, not biology, that keep earthly humans apart.

    We people of color are just that, human, and Cameron seems to say we are something other than ordinary humans. Who are the ordinary humans? Well, I guess modern white people are the true humans, in their own 21st century supposed blandness (unless the whites are cartoonish villains), but still the standard by which other humanoids are judged. We indigenous people are the exotic primitives, still, in the white man's imagination. I know Cameron did not mean it that way. I believe his intentions were good. I don't think he set out to glorify world white supremacy, but I think that is partly what resulted.


MYSTICAL PRIMITIVES

    Even today we Indigenous people are occasionally confronted by the curious about our supposed mystical insights. There are criminal rings trafficking in the skeletons of deceased Native American people. The skull of Geronimo may or may not be held by a secretive society at a prestigious university. Geneticists are trying to patent the unique DNA of tribal peoples from isolated regions. Archaeologists rack their brains figuring out how the Egyptians or the Mayans built pyramids without "modern" technology. We still fascinate many.
    Modern academia still has not answered how some rural Ugandans today can undergo brain surgery without anasthesia, how frontier-era Native Americans withstood torture without flinching, how ancient Andeans domesticated a toxic root into the edible potato, and so on.
    There just are some "abilities" Indigenous humans possess. The still great writer Marijo Moore speculated on-air (on First Voices, Indigenous Radio, WBAI-Pacifica Radio) what may have been the secret to various Native successes. She said that we just be more observant. We are often good at listening, which runs counter to the contemporary impulse to runs one's mouth all the time.
    All humans have unique abilities. Certain societies nurture and cultivate particular skills that they value. Indigenous societies often have a different set of priorities than the industrial-consumerist society which is growing so rapidly.


THE LOSS OF HUMAN VARIETY

    Global   humanity is becoming homogenized. Everyone is plugged in, hearing or listening to the same thing. Who will be left who will listen for profundity in the song of a robin?


One problem is this--seeing the increasingly globalized modern industrial "man" as the only standard for normal.   The worldviews we ascribe only to the Indigenous peoples were once the worldviews of all of humanity, including Europeans. Europe destroyed its own pagan culture and like some other monotheistic religions, went about destroying the belief systems of others.   In the process, Europeans lost touch with the same "primitve" that had once been their reality as well.
    Some of us are annoyed by the "Tribal Odyssey" shows and the naked people shown on TV. Why is the European and EuroAmerican white man so fascinated by the naked people in the forest?  In Germany I saw businesswomen sunbathing topless in city parks on their lunchbreaks, jsut afew blocks from their offices. Why are they fascinated by nudity in New Guinea?
    Perhaps they know that "primitive" life is what most of human life has been through , and a collapse of industrial economy will plunge all of humanity back into tribal life rather quickly. It is our common history and may also be our future.

  MOVIE INDIANS AND REAL INDIANS

   In his book Everything You Know About Indians in Wrong,  author Paul Chaat Smith notes that the modern concept of what an American Indian is supposed to look like was formulated mostly by Hollywood movies. Smith cites an example of how director Michael Mann did research for Last of the Mohicans (which starred Cherokee actor Wes Studi, who also appears in Avatar) , he learned of rich Mohawk farming towns. But when the movie was completed, we never see Indians as farmers, only as warriors. Hollywood narrative has now become the only template we know.
    Somehow, James Cameron, has only been able to deal with Indians as he knows them from the same place most everyone else knows them from--the movies. This is unfortunate. Avatar sequels are supposed to be planned (they better re-use some of those expensive effects gadgets) , I fear the story will be "inevitable" conquest, colonialism and drunk blue people stumbling around lamenting the loss of their world to the Earthlings.
     Or perhaps Cameron invisions a transformation of humanity into some kind of human-Na'vi hybrid, taking humanity to new heights of awareness, something the past has not yet given us.  One thing I loved about   the film was that as a futuristic film the emphasis was on a rich biological, rather than a technolgical, reality.   Can Cameron pull off something optimistic and visionary in the sequels.   I can only hope.

Big Love, Big ???

kevin thompson — Sat, 13 Mar 2010 04:51:00 GMT

I just finished watching the fourth season of the HBO series Big Love, about a polygamous family in Utah. The fourth season was pretty good, and here are some thoughts:

First the Cons:

1. I grew to like the new opening title sequence. But the original title sequence established the order of the wives and also ended with a vision of the family's life in eternity, a central part of their identity. You can't separate them from their religion.

2. Season 3 corrected a big error from the first two seasons in that we often saw the adults with their large number of collective children. But in Season 4 that changed. In season 4 we hardly saw the four or five children under age seven, and the wives and Bill were always running here and there and it left me wondering, who's watching all those little kids? Even Nicky's teenage daughter attends high school, so without any domestic help, the wives' freewheeling lifestyle does not seem plausible.

3. Likewise, Bill did not seem to spend too much time at his two home-supply mega stores, he was so busy trying to run for office.

4. Juniper Creek is supposed to be a two-hour drive from Salt Lake City, but Bill and Nicky just drive there at the drop of a hat, and no one back home notices them missing for five hours in the middle of the week. (2 hours there, 2 hours back, and some time to do something at Juniper Creek).

5. The whole political campaign storyline was implausible. Bill is a prominient businessman and onetime mainstream Latter-Day Saint. The Mormons are pretty tight-knit, and when he, Barb and their three kids dropped out of their ward I don't believe the other Mormons just forgot about them. Salt Lake City is just not that big. Their kids were still in public school. Home Plus is a major local retailer. So how does he just start running for office and the LDS community forgets he is a polygamist? Most prominent Mormons have attended Brigham Young University, went on missions together, and keep in touch through business and politics. They usually have large families, and that means lots of cousins who also grow up together. ( I'm from a small town with a fair number of Mormons and there are only so many secrets you can keep. )
     And Barb was "outed" as a polygamous the first season, and excommunicated in season 3, so how is their polygamous marriage a secret until after he wins the election?
     The LDS are not too keen on polygamists. In reality, Bill's campaign would have been killed quietly behind closed doors. He wouldn't even be allowed to openly support another candidate, because of guilt by association.
    Clearly someone from NY or LA wrote this season, without any knowledge of how small towns actually work. But then again, even in a big city like New York, there are social networks that would make it impossible to keep a secret.. There are millions of Catholics in New York, but if one priest converted to Islam, word would get around all the parishes pretty quickly.  Even a big city contains smaller social networks as tight as any in a small town.

6. The Mexico storyline was pretty good--until the end. The Greens have been established in Mexico for decades, and have the respect of the local political officials. To survive in a world of private narco-militias the Greens must be packing themselves. So how can Lois Hendrickson slice the arm off their leader and live to tell about it?

The Pros--What I liked:

1. Big Love is one of the few TV shows to portray contemporary Native Americans. It was great to see Adam Beach onscreen. If you know anything about the Jack Abramoff lobbying scandal, you know a possible direction that Season 5 might go. I hope Season 5 goes deeper into the reality of Native Americans, who are a significant social reality in the western US in general and in the Mormon religion in particular.

2. The tragic love story between Albert "Alby" Grant and the trustee was really good. It actually made me like Alby for awhile, seeing his vulnerable side. And I felt sorry for his lover, struggling over his homosexuality. After the lover's suicide, now it seems Albie will go on to be a repressed homosexual and possibly a dangerous homophobe. It happens that way sometimes.

3. I call it the "Racism Episode." There was that scene of the compound relatives watching a 1930s blackface movie scene. Nicky takes a handgun to Washington DC because its so "dangerous" (that is full of black people). Of course, Nicky turns out to be the most dangerous, carrying the gun into a government building and causing a scene. Nothing scarier than a scared white person with loaded firearm.

4. Great seeing Nicky cut off the braid and stepping into a new role, protecting her daughter and "standing by her man."

5. The scene where Bill tries to intimidate the Mexican police chief into helping him locate his son was great piece, especially if you understand Spanish, which I do.   Synopsis: Bill is speaking English to an assistant of the police chief, and this subordinate interprets into Spanish for his boss.   Bill does not get what he wants and says something negative about Mexico, etc. The chief, who has not spoken a word of English, does understand English, and says something in Spanish (that indicates his comprehension) to his assistant that ends the conversation.   Bill never realizes that the chief understood every word he said in English, but the chief as a point of pride, was not going to make life easier for this demanding American. But you have to actually understand Spanish and English to really understand what happened.

6. Sara got married in Season 4 and has left town with her husband. The actress has busy movie career, and her character can always come back. It's good for a family drama to let characters grow.

7. Marjean "extending" the family by marrying Bill's baby's mama's boyfriend to keep him in the country. A sexual threesome (or foursome, or fivesome) seems in the works. Perfectly sordid. I can't wait for Season 5.

American Lives--PBS and DNA Trickery

kevin thompson — Sat, 06 Mar 2010 04:38:00 GMT

PBS is one of the few media outlets that even bothers to mention Native Americans, and again the only time this network disappoints me is when Henry Louis Gates gets in the game. Let me start by saying that I enjoy Dr. Gates' programs, his enthusiasm for his subject, and his willingness to take a fresh look at American life.    And I was mostly pleased with his recent PBS production, Faces of America,   which detailed the documented history of several diverse celebritiies, as he had done before with African American individuals (also mostly celebrities.) I like family stories, and I like the way he presented them.  I like the background music and graphics.
    Some highlights for me: Stephen Colbert (of the Colbert Report) learned that his great-something grandmother came from Ireland, landing in New York two days before the 1863 Draft and Race Riots in protest of the Civil War. Welcome to America! Colbert remarked, the first thing his ancestors learned was to not fight for the rights of black people. Great insight.

    I was mostly happy until the end, when Dr. Gates presented his guests with racial admixture pie-graph charts of their DNA. Mexican-American actress Eva Longoria turned out to be 66% European (presumably Spanish), 31% Asian, and 3% African.   Gates says on-camera that the "Asian" DNA includes Native American DNA. To her credit, Longoria herself knew about the African presence in Mexico, and she was not suprprised or bothered by the evidence in her own ancestry.(having a child with her Afro-German-French husband probably helped her to have some openess on the subject) She actually lamented having less indigenous Mexican ancestry than she had believed.


      Why is the Native American DNA now being listed as "Asian DNA?" The Gates show lists European and Asian as separate DNA strains, and those two populations actually share the Eurasian landmass, so why is the DNA of the Americas, both North and South, reduced to a subset of the Asian?      If Amerindians have been the most separate of continental populations, why is Amerindian DNA now being considered a subcategory of a population from which it has been supposedly separated for fifteen millenia?
    Is this the same agenda that promoted the ice-age fossil Kennewick man as a Caucasian and of course the true "discoverer of America?"
    I mean, seriously, Dr. Gates, when one travels north across the Sahara, there is no sharp break when the population changes from black African to Arab north African to Mediterranean white. And there is no sharp line between the so-called white races and Asian races when one travels east from Russia to Central Asia. These changes are gradual, but still science separates these DNA strains as separate "African," "European" and "Asian." But somehow the Ameriindian DNA must be subsumed under "Asian."
    Is this a conspiracy to deprive the Amerindian of any standing whatsoever?

    Which leads me to another celebrity profiled, author Louise Erdrich, who refused to have her DNA tested. Her father is German and she has even written books about it, but she was not subjecting her mother's Ojibway DNA to any TV show racial admixture test. An elder told her that her DNA was essentially private community property and it was not Erdrich's to give away.   In one move she protected her privacy and her own people's Sovereignty over their identity.    Kudos to her. She was Ojibway and that was that, and no genetic lab was going to get the chance to redefine her.   Now that's Sovereignty.

Troubled Empire--New York Mismanaged

kevin thompson — Sat, 06 Mar 2010 03:20:00 GMT

So much money used to pour into New York via Wall Street that a whole slew of problems could be drowned in dollars. No more. the lopsided economy of the Emprie State may tip over if changes don't come soon.    Some in New York City say that NYC "subsidizes" the rest of the state (and by extension, the rest of the U.S.) because only the financial industry showed any growth in the past fifteen years.   But that's looking at it backwards.

    When I grew up in upstate NY, there were several thriving local economies based on manufacturing. Rochester had Kodak and Xerox, Binghamton had IBM, Schnectady had General Electric, Buffalo had auto and steel plants. Farming also thrived.  Upstate New Yorkers, including my grandmother, parents, and myself, actually made things that could be sold.  These places were not suburbs, but cities in their own right. They were too far from NYC for commuting, and that kept real estate prices affordable.
    But things changed in the 1970s. The South offered low taxes and a warmer climate to lure business. IBM was the first high-tech firm to establish manufacturing computers in the Research Triangle Park of Raleigh-Durham, seeded by IBM staff from the Binghamton area.
    Businesses continued to leave New York State, which refused to lower taxes. Even though the state's higher-tech industries survived the 1980s better than the rust-belt industries of Ohio and Illinois, they too fled south or succumbed to the changing economy.
    But the tax structure of NY State continued on as if nothing had changed. So much money poured in from Wall Street that the state legislature and the governor could pretend the gravy train could last forever.

Who's to Blame:
    Partly, its the culture of New York City, where people grow accostomed to high rents, high taxes and lots of regulations. NYC has all types of entitlements, like rent-controlled apartments and various kinds of welfare, to make life bearable. Upstate life required less welfare-type payments because an honest-day's work could still pay the rent. Until the factories left. The NYC mentality tackled the problem the way it was accostomed to handling it--providing more welfare, building more prisons to house prisoners (mostly from NYC), and shipping Section 8 (federal rent subsidies) tenants from NYC to the cheaper rents Upstate. So now arrogant NYC'ers blame Upstate for being a welfare case when it was NYC-style taxes that impoverished it in the first place.
    I blame the "NYC mentality" because the bulk of the political power in the State comes from the City and the immediate suburbs. Both the Assembly and the State Senate are based on population, so the eight million City people and two or three million more in the immediate suburbs now dominate the remaining eight million in the rest of the state. All of New York's recent governors have been from the City or immediate downstate region.   The City and downstaters, both Democrat and Republican, must share the blame because they have been in charge for the past thirty years.

Some Hopeful Signs:

    When Senator Hillary Clinton left her seat to become Secretary or State in President Obama's administration, NY governor, David Paterson had to pick a replacement. He chose a female centrist upstate politician for the job and many downstate democrats were furious. How dare he pick this hick from upstate to "appease" the conservative white folks in the sticks!   But this was a brilliant political move. The governor knew that several electoral districts of upstate had voted Democratic or Working Families Party in the 2004 election. He was right on the money when he sought to gain some political points with the vast uplands of the state.

About to Lose Again:

    Gas drilling and possibly uranium mining is about to come to Upstate New York.    Unlike many other states, New York does not even have a tax structure in place to take advantage of the gas profits that may be rolling in soon. It was beneath contempt of the downstate politicians to even consider it. Of course, cash-strapped upstate counties and landowners are working to lure gas drillers to their property. The Marsellus shale gas reserves are the biggest thing to hit the State since the industrial revolution.
    And this time the Downstaters should really take notice because the drilling process risks polluting the water supply for the City, which depends on the mountain reservoirs to maintain itself.
    You'd thing the governor and legislature in Albany, the alleged capital, would be working overtime to address the drilling issue, but no, they aren't accomplishing anything, as usual. There has not been a state budget passed on time in many years.

Solutions?

      The downstate politicians have to wise up and realize they can't bankrupt the state with policies based only on Wall Street revenue.   They have to encourage a future economy that is more balanced, with lots of manufacturing , the way it was forty years ago. Just being in New York City does not make you smart.   Half of the City's high school students never graduate, and NYC is low on the list of college graduates as a proportion of its adult population. (Seattle and Raleigh, NC are #1 and #2 on that list).
     A lot of work needs to be done both in Upstate and Downstate, and NYC has not sought to understand its own problems, and should stop blaming upstate for not understanding them.

Claim Your Rights as Native Americans

kevin thompson — Tue, 16 Feb 2010 01:57:00 GMT

    I can't say this loud enough----identify yourself as Native American on the 2010 Census. Be sure to list your tribal origin. There is nothing illegal about identifying yourself as Indian just because you don't carry a tribal membership card. In fact, the right to identify yourself as Indian is encouraged by federal law.

    The Native American Languages Act of 1990    : Congress found that cultures and languages of Native Americans is unique to the United States and that the federal government must act together with Native Americans to ensure the survival of these unique cultures and languages.

    There you have it.    Since 1990, the feds believe that we are an asset to the strength of the United States, (which historically, wouldn't have come into existence without our help.)

    Reverse three centuries of paper genocide and send in those census forms!

    For more details click on http://www.manataka.org/page1014.html

Ted Duplessis and Creole Resilience

kevin thompson — Mon, 15 Feb 2010 01:25:00 GMT

I have long been fascinated by Louisiana and equally unable to understand it, because it seems to be the most culturally liberated place and also the most socially oppressive at the same time. It's had the most race mixing but remains the most racist state. I have had long talks with fellow soldiers from Louisiana and they were unable to reconcile this contradiction. So I gave up trying.
    The Internet has opened more doors, because now real Creole people blog and broadcast themselves on Youtube. They speak to you in their own words, you can see their faces and draw your own conclusions.

    Until recently, Native ancestry of African-descended people in Louisiana was simply ignored in mainstream discussions of history and culture in that state. Creoles were written out altogether, or simply labeled as "free blacks" when they couldn't be ignored. This practice was common among both white nationalist and black nationalist historians. Creoles don't fit into any category useful to either white or black nationalist definitions, and there has been a concerted effort to erase Creoles from the public memory. In Indian Country we call this "paper and pencil" genocide.

Some Tough Folks, Creoles of Color

    Recently on Youtube, I checked out videos about "Creoles of Color, Plaquemines Parish", and lo and behold, there was a 1981 documentary about the community and the first free election held there that year. Yes, the first free election in the parish, which had been run as a white supremacist dictatorship by Judge Leander Perez, and his two sons, Chalin and Leander Jr.   There were clips of Judge Perez articulating his race hatred on William F. Buckley's TV show in the 1960s. (Perez, having a Spanish surname, must have been a white Creole. His family was heavily intermarried with Italians.)   (click on   http.//www.youtube.com/watch?v=wHrFv4AErm4   )
    But the best clip by far is the one featuring some Plaquemine Parish Creoles at a barbecue, with good food and gun-shooting for entertainment.   Most of those in attendance are clearly of part-African descent, and most look to have as much Native American ancestry. There was a range of skin colors and hair textures and folks were mixing freely. Like the Cajuns and Houma Indians in the region, the Creoles of color make their living from the wildlife of the bayous. The staunchly Catholic Creoles of Color had been on the bayous long before Leander Perez. Denied access to restaurants and even some grocery stores, the Creoles of Color survived by living off the bounty of the land and the sea.
    One older Creole woman is quoted on camera saying about the oppressive Leander Perez, "He would have crushed us if he could." But he couldn't.
    This was a revelation to me, because everything else I had read about Leander Perez and Plaquemines was his relationship to "Blacks," when clearly the "black" resilience to Perez was based on their sticking close to their Indian roots, culture and economy. Clearly, something was different in Plaquemines, both good and bad, in the way white oppressed black, as opposed to the rest of the South. Perez had a geographic advantage in his favor: the parish hugs the Mississippi River delta out into the Gulf of Mexico, and this made it easy for Perez to block access from outside civil rights activists. He simply restricted access to the only ferry.
    The Creoles of Color, or course, had been there long before Leander Perez.   Petroleum is partly what made Plaquemines so valuable to the outside world, and I believe that outside petrodollar interests helped keep Perez in power. It's fitting that Perez would defend segregation as a way to keep little white girls from being raped by "Congolese," when he ran a jurisdiction much like the Belgian Congo, and its successor states, Zaire and the current Democratic Republic of Congo--all oppressive,underdeveloped regimes geared toward the extraction of mineral wealth.
    In this way Plaquemines is a microcosm of Louisiana. LIke Africa, Louisiana is mineral-rich but its people are mostly poor. Perez's Plaquemines was more like apartheid South Africa than a typical Dixiecrat region.

Ted Duplessis, Son of Plaquemines:

    After reading Ted Duplessis' writings on his blog, Creole Folks, I truly came to understand where he was coming from when I learned that he comes from Plaquemines Parish. Its a tough place to come from. Mr. Duplessis is controversial, to say the least. He does not let either Democrats or Republicans off the hook. He exposes perversion, hypocrisy, racism and corruption from all manner of institutions. He lambasts the Protestants, but he also criticizes the current leadership from the Vatican. He is still a devout Catholic. He is partly African American, but still criticizes the Afro-Protestant leadership when it tries to erase Creole culture. He indentifies as Creole and is part Choctaw. He is a military veteran and staunch defender of the U.S. border and attacks attemtps to use Mexican illegals to oppress black Americans.
    He defends Creole culture, Louisiana, Voodoo and Haiti, all grossly misrepresented in the mass media.
    Duplessis just won't fit any political category that have been defined for us. Unlike many "educated" elites today, Duplessis has wide experience in college, the military, and public relations. He has lived in different regions of the United States, and has interacted with people of all races and classes. He speaks fluent French.

    If you want to read some extraordinary commentary, check out Ted Duplessis on Creole Folks,

http:creoleneworleans.typepad.com/creole_folks/2010/02

Colored Aristocracy

kevin thompson — Sun, 07 Feb 2010 02:25:38 GMT

Colored Aristocracy: the Song

Recently I learned of a traditional song called "The Colored Aristocracy." Most likely it was composed for a popular dance craze called the Cakewalk, a genre whose music is an ancestor of ragtime and jazz. The cakewalk is long gone, but "Colored Aristocracy" lives on as an old tyme and bluegrass song.     Just type in "Colored Aristocracy" on Youtube and you will have several examples of contemporary musicians playing the song on guitar, banjo, fiddle and various combinations of instruments. The Carolina Chocolate Drops, a black old tyme music group, even named one of their CD's "Colored Aristocracy." You can also check out the Carolina Chocolate Drops on Youtube, a real sweet treat for the ears.

    The name intrigued me. I looked up "Colored Aristocracy" on-line to uncover its history. Of course, no one remembers who first composed the song, or even to which racial/ethnic group(s) that composer(s) belonged.   No one is even sure if "Colored Aristocracy" is the original title. At one time, in the version of political correctness of the mid 1900s, it was called "Southern Aristocracy." In the distant past it was also known as "Uppity N***er Aristocracy," which fit the practice of black American cakewalk dances that parodied the pretentions of upper class whites and upper class blacks.
    But the title "Colored Aristocracy" persists, not "Negro Aristocracy," or "Black Aristocracy," or "African American Aristocracy." Check out all the white (to all appearance) musicians performing the song on Youtube, who all call it "Colored Aristocracy." No other title really fits, which leads me to believe that the "Colored" title is the real title of the song, based on the social context in which it arose in pre-Civil War America.


Colored Aristocracy: the People

    There really were aristocrats of color in colonial America. They were often the descendants of Spanish, French, Portuguese, British or other European conquistadors, adventurers, pirates and their wives of color, white women being in short supply. Many owned plantations and provided the finest European educations for their children. They only married each other or pure Europeans of equal or higher status. These aristocrats of color often looked more white than black or Indian, after several generations of choosing the lightest-skinned spouses.
    In Jamaica, these Creole aristocrats represented up to twenty percent of slaveholders. In Haiti, the proportions were similar. When slavery ended in these places, the Creole slaveholding families often fled to Charleston, South Carolina or New Orleans, where they were able to still live as free people, at least for a time.
    In uppper Mexico, which later became the U.S. Southwest, Spanish conquerors had also helped create a class of mixed-blood landowners who had European, Native America, and sometimes African ancestry.   When white Anglo adventurers from the U.S. South ventured into Mexican Texas or California they elevated   themselves by marrying into these Spanish-speaking, landowning families. (At the same time U.S. politicians were justifying takeover of upper Mexico because even the elites of Mexico were "useless half-breeds.") This process continued even after the Civil War, when landless Confederate veterans established themselves through skillful marriages to lanowning Native American women in Indian Territory.
    The fur-producing regions of the Great Lakes also created succesful dynasties of color.  Rochester and Buffalo, New York, started as fur-trading posts owned by African-descended men and their Native American wives. The Bonga family of Minnesota was started by a French-speaking African, Pierre Bonga, his posssibly black wife and their sons, who married Ojibwe (Native American) wives. DuSable, a Haitian Creole and his Native American wife operated the trading post that became Chicago. (Their daughter married a Frenchman.)There was even a black man from Puerto Rico trading with the Indians on Manhattan before the Dutch arrived.
    Often times the first people to speak a European language in a region were people of color. As the earliest of the part-European entrepeneurs, they were the first to get rich and become an aristocracy.

Colored Aristocracy: the legacy

   Considering the various aristocracies of color that have existed you would think they would hold a place in the popular imagination, but the exact opposite is true. Only a remnant exists, even among the black-identified population. They seem to have disappeared, even when once being the leading families of several regions at the peak of their influence.
    Part of the problem are the narratives  with which we look at the past. One narrative portrays the conquest of the Americas as a great white drama with non-whites as mere pawns in the game. Another similar narrative has whites as all-evil and people of color as all-virtuous victims. Another narrative attempts to portray colored slaveowners as all-black but secret soldiers of a pan-African movement, as some kind of "black pride."
    Another reason for the disappearance of the aristocracies of color is this: the flood of Anglo settlement and the obsession with racial "purity" meant that elites wisely chose the path of white or Indian identity as a matter of survival. It made no sense to lose one's family's wealth and land over distant non-white ancestry when it was much easier to emphasize the Spanish, French, British, or Indian portion of the family's origins.
    But the memory of the Colored Aristocracy (ies) lives on in many families of many color, in the culture of our nation, and in a really cool song. Check it out on Youtube. And check out the Carolina Chocolate Drops, too, also on Youtube.

Star Wars--the Real Deal

kevin thompson — Sat, 19 Dec 2009 04:55:00 GMT

At the risk of offending George Lucas, I never bought his argument that the second trilogy was what he intended as the back story for the original trilogy. What is my evidence? The first three movies, which I practically memorized in dialogue and camera angles, and the novelizations which I also read.

1. In The Phantom Menace, R2D2 is already in existence, while Anakin Skywalker is a child and Obiwan Kenobi is a young man. But all hints in Star Wars: A New Hope (1977), was that the R2 units were the latest design in robotic technology, and hadn't been around all that long. When Luke says to Obi Wan Kenobi that Artoo claims to be owned by Obi Wan, Kenobi's response is "I don't recall owning a droid, certainly nothing as modern as an R2 unit." In the novelization C3PO says "I just don't understand" this new generation of 'droids. This would directly contradict what we saw in the Phantom Menace, where R2D2 is old and 3PO is new!

2.  In   A New Hope, Obi wan states that when he met Luke's father, Luke's dad was already an experienced fighter pilot, before becoming a Jedi knight. This contradicts the later presentation of the Jedi knights recruiting children and stating that ten-year-old Anakin was already "too old" to begin the training.

3. Lucas also originally conceived of Anakin Skywalker as much older than he was later portrayed. In the final scene of   Return of the Jedi (1983) , the spirit of the recently-deceased Darth Vader appears beside the spirits of Obi Wan and Yoda, and he is clearly an old man.(the actor shown was in his 80s)  I saw this in the theater (at least three times) and have seen later VHS versions with the original actor. After the second trilogy, Lucas saw fit to replace the old Anakin with a ghost of the young actor who played Anakin in the second trilogy. According to this re-done version, Anakin/Darth was only about forty-three years old at the time of his death.

4. Lucas also envisioned Obi Wan Kenobi as much older than he was portrayed in the second trilogy. In   A New Hope , when Darth Vader tells Grand Moff Tarkin that "Obi Wan is here" on the Death Star, Tarkin's response is "surely he must be dead by now." Tarkin meant that just like old Nazi war criminals who were never caught, that eventually old age would get them. That's how old Kenobi was supposed to have been, and Tarkin is pretty old himself when he says that. So Kenobi must have been pretty old even when the emperor started wiping out the Jedi knights, much older than Ewan McGregor portrays him.

5. In The Empire Strikes Back (1980),   Yoda is a retired Jedi living on a remote planet, Dagobah, that is not even on the charts. Yoda has been retired so long that Kenobi is able to conceal his existence from young Anakin Skywalker, who has never even heard of Yoda. But in the second trilogy, Yoda is hanging out in the galactic capital, as public a figure as the Speaker of the House.

6. If the Jedi were a force to be reckoned with during the Old Republic, how did Palpatine and Vader wipe them out in one day? If the Jedi were so smart, why were they all just hanging around the capital city, ready to be picked off?   Also, that burlap hermit's outfit made sense for Obi Wan to wear in the desert, and for Yoda to wear in a jungle, but it made no sense to wear a hermit's outfit in a mega-city like Corruscant.   And if that burlap hermit's outfit was the official Jedi uniform, why would Ben Kenobi wear it while living under an assumed identity?

7.   In Return of the Jedi (1983), Princess Leia told Luke that she had some memory of their mother. In the second trilogy, their mother dies in childbirth, clearly omitting any possibility that Leia actually remembered her.

8. All the Jedi were not master manipulators of the force, according to Kenobi in    a New Hope. Most Jedi, he says, could not manipulate the force at all. But in later movies, all the Jedi were able to perform superhuman and magical feats on a daily basis.

9.   Lucas did not intend the Empire to be as all-powerful as was implied later. In the opening titles for   A New Hope (1977), it states that "the rebels have won an increasing number of battles." The senate still had some power and its cooperation was still necessary for the emperor to remain in control. The problem was that some worlds, and their senators, were secretly supporting the rebellion. The Death Star was a last ditch effort by the Empire to maintain control.

10. Despite all the talk of the Jedi and the force and all that, its clear that in   A New Hope,    the rebels were doing pretty well without the help of Kenobi, but still motivated by "reactionary religious fanaticsm". They even stole the Death Star's plans without the help of retired Jedi. Han Solo saves the day and he openly disbelieves in the force, motivated more by his admiration of Luke than any high ideals.

Which brings me to another point, especially if we are to now watch all six movies in chronological sequence. Put together, the combined story reveals a Jedi knighthood that was woefully deficient, not only because of the ease with which they were destroyed, but due to flaws in their training. The Jedi claimed that the child Anakin was too old to begin the training, and perhaps they were right, seeing how he turned out. But Luke barely even knew what a Jedi knight was until he was twenty, and he is a pretty good pilot and fighter before he even attempts to use the force.
    And to top it off, Luke never succumbs to the Dark Side of the force, not even in the face of death. He willingly drops off the precipice in The Empire Strikes Back , rather than submit to Vader, and again he refuses to kill his own father at the emperor's command in   Return of the Jedi.   Luke never compromises his principles. He is the best Jedi of them all, and he has hardly spent any of his life under their direction, never read their documents (surely destroyed by the empire), and allied with non-Jedi (like Chewbacca and Han Solo, who calls Jedi-dom a "hokey religion.") who save his behind more than once. Even when he disobeys Yoda and Kenobi by flying to Cloud City, he actually does save the group because R2D2, travelling with Luke, re-activates the hyperdrive on the Millenium Falcon before Darth Vader can catch them in the tractor beam of the star destroyer. He still trusts his instincts and his principles and is still victorious.
    "I am a Jedi knight, like my father before me," Luke proclaims proudly, throwing down his light saber, fearless! Still brings tears to my eyes.

Note:   Check out the 1950s, Kurosawa's Japanese Samurai film    The Hidden Fortress,   which Lucas used as the structure for     Star Wars: A New Hope.      R2D2 and C-3PO were clearly inspired by the hapless peasants who open up Kurosawa's film, which is why they remain the heart and soul of Lucas's films as well.    Part of the magic of the original trilogy was the intersection of the fiesty politically-motivated princess with the money-motivated Han Solo, the adventure-seeking Luke, and two droids who just aim to survive the whole mess day by day. This mixture of different charcter motivations, all somehow working toward a common goal was all present in   the Hidden Fortress.

Note 2: By refusing to kill Darth Vader, his own father, Luke, avoids the unholy act of killing one who gave him life.  He also ralizes that to save his father, he must morally surpass his father. He invokes the best that Anakin was "a Jedi, like my father before me," even if his father fell short.

Empire Wilderness or Empire State?

kevin thompson — Sat, 19 Dec 2009 01:22:00 GMT

New York is an empire, but not because of the imperial-like power of the the Wall street Financial district. New York is an empire because it includes small nations within it. These nations are the Six Nations of the Iroquois, who have never surrendered their sovereignty to the entity calling itself the State of New York.
    Most of what we know as New York state was NOT part of the colony of New York that rebelled agains the British. No, most of it still belonged to the Six Nations of the Iroquois Confederacy--Mohawk, Onondaga, Oneida, Cayuga, Seneca and Tuscarora, as was recognized by the UK. The Six Nations, once an imperial power themselves, had retreated to what became the New York-Pennsylvania border, and welcoming Native peoples fleeing from the south. This emerging population centered on the confluence of the Chenango and Susquehanna Rivers , and included Delaware, Nanticoke (notably dark-skinned by local reports), Saponi, Tutelo, European and African refugees from the 13 colonies. In fact, a racially-mixed population lived relatively in peace on both sides of this border, until the Revolutionalry war ushered in a genocidal campaign by the newly-formed United States.
    After the visible Natives were pushed out, mostly into Canada (then still British territory), the whites remained and this became the "Southern Tier of New York." Some Natives remained in hiding, intermarried with white and black residents. The local dialect (which I still speak) still retains some faint influence of the Native tongues that were once spoken in the region.

The Empire Wilderness:

    When I drive from Fairfield County, Connecticut into New York State, I can't help but notice how "country" it becomes. The New York side is much less developed. Local residents resist new development with a vengeance.   Its rural and wants to stay that way. The greatest number of job-related and deaths in New York is in the lumbering industry.
    Upstate New York's sub-regions---the Finger Lakes, Buffalo, Binghamton, etc.--have a remarkable lack of interest in each other, even as they need each other desperately balancing their power against that of New York City. They are like nations in themselves, just like the smaller Indian Nations. I firmly believe that Ithaca, despite being home to Cornell University, has deliberately prevented any modern 4-lane divided highway from connecting it to the Interstate system. By the way, Ithaca has its own local currency.
    Surprisingly, when you drive westward to Ohio, the land is far more tamed and developed than New York. In fact, apart from New York City itself, Ohio has more large cities of note. A drive across New York will show you more mountains and forests than skyscrapers. Several counties of New York are part of the Appalachian Regional Commission.

Fragile Empire:

    There is long-standing tension between New York City and the Upstate regions. Much of Upstate has the same attitudes towards gun ownership as North Carolina, while NYC's mayor blames crime on illegal guns from Virginia.  NYC claims it subsidizes upstate because of all the revenue generated by Wall Street, but it was the City's tax-and-spend politicians who steered the enitre state into high-tax status that drove all the manufacturing out of the upstate towns and cities. Having City-style tax and welfare programs dominate the agenda leaves upstate only one option--get into the game by housing downstate prisoners.
    In the past decade, the Onondaga and Seneca nations have flexed their muscle by threatening to shut down the NY thruway on a holiday weekend when the governor threatened to tax cigarette sales on Indian territory-- and the governor backed down. The state has also countered by building local casinos, with no prior publicity, to compete with the Indian casinos. And it seems the far-eastern region of New York, Long Island, is about to have a newly-recognized Indian nation, the Shinnecocks, as President Obama is hinting at full recognition.
    Things are about to get more interesting.

Native American Strengths are U.S. Strengths

kevin thompson — Sat, 21 Nov 2009 23:38:00 GMT

There is a concensus that China is the emerging superpower, and in the future, may be the only superpower, eclipsing even the United States, my home country. No one seems to talk about what a future will look like for Americans when Mandarin eclipses English as the international language of commerce and politics. The American collective psyche is in for a rude awakening when our dominance is no longer a given. What would an American culture look like that was not an America that was able to dominate other parts of the world? Except for the very few surviving people born in the 1890s, when the U.S. became a world power by winning the Spanish-American war, there is no one on earth who can remember a time the the United States was not a world power.

Borders, Language and Culture:

    Pat Buchanan, Michael Savidge and a few others on the right consistently argue that the core values of Anglo-American are under seige and also decaying from within. Buchanan cites the decline in Christianity, along with the dimunition of English as a common tongue as reasons for concern. I believe they are correct about some things, but they also miss some key strengths in the soul of the U.S.

One Secret to American Success:

    Of all the formerly British settler colonies, the US is by far the most powerful. The U.S. is also the only one that broke off violently from Mother England, and the one whose speech still sounds the most distinctly un-British. I've even met Jamaicans who believe in their superiority over Americans because they still speak the "King's English."
    Compared to Australia, Canada and New Zealand, the US also has the largest non-white population, both as a percentage and in absolute numbers.    In the US, the presence of the Negro population, created a need for "white" solidarity, which galvanized the various European immigrants into an "American majority." In fact the Germans are still the largest ancestral pool for current US citizens, but you wouldn't know it because the Germans, too, have helped create the American mainstream.
    This tension between the would-be white and would-be black, though often violent, generates power like the positive and negative poles of a battery. Other tensions, between right and left, religious and secular, church and state, all provide energy and creativity to the American people. It is the American genius to keep these tensions bottled up in a single battery that never explodes, much to the amazement of outsiders, who wonder why we can fight each other so fiercely in elections that never degenerates into civil war.

The Most Materialistic Nation and the Most Spiritual Nation:

    We've been called the most materialistic nation and the most spiritual nation. This can sometimes occur in the same individual or church, as in the prosperity gospel congregations. The "spiritual" and "material" aspects of man are often contrasted as barely compatible, yet the U.S. confounds that notion. How do we do this? Partly, because we are willing to work at it. We work longer hours than the Europeans, and expect to be rewarded for it. The U.S. has higher rates of home ownership than any nation in Europe.
    We will even work harder for spiritual matters. U.S-style protestantism often demands that each beleiver read the scriptures for herself, and even evangelize the masses. The entrepeneural spirit of much Calvinist-descended protestantism has not only
encouraged thrift and business among its followers but has also spawned new entrepeneural religions such as Mormonism and the Baptists, two denominations notably lacking in heirarchical structures but demanding in the personal participation of their followers.
    The religous autonomy of the Native Americans opened the colonists's eyes to new possibilities in religous expression.

What Native Americans Taught European Colonists:

By the time Anglo colonists landed in Virginia and Massachusetts, Native Americans had already survived a series of demographic disasters that had already depopulated the cities of Cahokia, the kingdom of Coosa, and numerous other mound-builder population centers.    Tightly-packed populations helped epidemics spread quickly. Analysis of skeletons from Cahokia sacrificial mounds reveal bones much less healthy than people living in the countryside. This Native urban life had been stressful, with a less-balanced diet, and the added pressure of serving the priestly class, to the point of killing one's own children in service of their religion.
    After the Mound-Builder civilizaion collapsed, the survivors dispersed into smaller groups, each living minimally as farmers and hunters, valuing individual freedom and community autonomy. The Spanish in the 1500s were unable to conquer these dispersed "primitive" Indians on the East coasts of the Carolinas and Virginia, unlike the centralized and highly "cilivlized" empires of the Incas and the Aztecs, which the Spanish defeated in less than a year.  Only Canada has a more de-centralized government than us, owing partly to its diverse and tightly-knit Indian communties.
    Notice that the English-speakers conquered North America only by skillful adoption of Native farming, fighting, political manueverings and love of freedom that was (and still is) unknown in Europe. The English-speakers also relied on actual Indian soldiers for their most decisive victories. The British needed the Mohawks to seize Quebec and make it part of Canada. George Washington needed the Stockbridge Indians under David Nimham and the Rhode Island Colored (African and Indian) troops to rout the red coats out of New York.  Andrew Jackson employed Choctaw and Creole-Native troops to take New Orleans back from the British during the War of 1812, the military used Native-speaking code talkers to transmit wartime secrets in two world wars.
    Though the fascination, and even romanticization of Indians waxes and wanes in U.S. life, one fact remains. The United States as we know it would not have been possible without continued Native American participation.

Federal Law Still Values Indian Culture:

    U.S. federal law still places a high value on the cultures of Native Americans. The Native American Languages Act of 1990, reads "Congress finds that cultures and languages of Native Americans are unique" further requiring the U.S. and Native Americans to "act together to ensure the survival of these unique cultures and languages." Also, "special status is accorded Native Americans, including to right to continue separate identities." This is not just empty talk as both Republican and Democratic presidents have funded Native language programs though the ANA, or Administration for Native Americans (which can be seen in detail on the Internet.)
    I think something else is at work here. Because English has become a world language, and US-bred art forms like Hip Hop and Hollywood movies have become global art forms, and with US-based evangelical faiths winning converts in Africa and Asia, what is left that is unique to the United States? Perhaps one of those few unique qualities is Indian people, who fascinate the world so much that there is still an illegal traffic in Indian skeletal remains. Despite all the denial, Indian people still intrigue, horrify, and haunt the imagination of Western civilization.

What Native American Culture Can Teach the Rest of American Culture:

    In the face of increasing Chinese influence, here is a list of strategies for the continued survival of Anglo-American culture.

1. Value family and community over money alone.
2.  Value your own culture and history simply because its yours, not because you have the power to impose it on others.
3. Letting others be free frees you from the need to control others.
4. Cultural and spiritual solidarity can weather storms of cultural invasion. Notice how Indian cultures are still here 500 years after Columbus.
5. Don't trade in your local autonomy for the (false) security of a too-centralized system, despite the odds.

Whither Europe?

kevin thompson — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 02:00:00 GMT

    How has Europe given up the ghost? Birthrates have dropped below replacement levels. An Anglican clergyman proposed that Muslim immigrants be allowed to live under Islamic law, even when it opposed British custom. Scotland freed a mass-murderer in the name of mercy (mercy for the murderer, but not for his 200 plus victims). It seems any act that benefits European self-preservation is verboten among the elites.
    Immigrants of color report that, compared to the United States, they have far fewer opportunities to assimilate when living in Europe. Western Europeans, in particular, once had a superior attitude toward the United States (and apartheid South Africa) because of their poor treatment of black and indigenous citizens. Nowadays, even European-born people of color complain of being denied good jobs.
    So if Europe is not going to produce its own children, and will not assimilate the children of immigrants, what future does it expect to have?
    The Vatican points to a decline in religious faith as one of the culprits of this maliase. The Vatican has a point. If it wasn't for the Pope, there wouldn't be a Europe at all. It was a pope who paid off Atilla the Hun and prevented the sacking of Rome. It was the Church that converted Ireland, and later the Irish who the converted the Scandinavians who were beyond the reach of pagan Roman military power.   LIkewise the Byzantine empire and its missionaries spread Christianity to Russia and Eastern Europe. The Roman Catholic church and the Byzantine Orthodox Church each gave an alphabet to their respective halves of Europe. And Christopher Hitchens writes in one of those same alphabets, and still writes how religion has "ruined everything." He writes like an adolescent who doesn't want to give any credit to his elders.
    There's no denying it, the more religious United States is more of a creative force than Europe. The European Union was created to mimic the union of the fifty states. American culture still values family, God, spirituality and children, and therefore, we're not just allowing our culture to whither and die. We actually offer membership to newcomers.
    A German told me that he was surprised at how Americans resisted government intrusions into their private lives. Why, in Germany, when you moved into a new house, you were required to register yourself and household at the local police station. Just so the cops know who's there in advance. This seemed perfectly sensible to him. It seemed creepy to me, pardon my American instincts.
    The Pope is already looking to Anglican churchpeople in African to find religously-minded allies. Africans, it seems, have latched onto this thing called Christianity which unified and civilized Europe, but which the Europeans have discarded like yesterday's newspaper.

The Irene Cara Factor and Latina/o Casting

kevin thompson — Fri, 21 Aug 2009 00:36:00 GMT

<<WARNING SPOILERS BELOW>>>

My favorite actress in the 1970s was Irene Cara. She played a lot of doomed and tragic characters in various TV movies and miniseries. She played Alex Haley's doomed mother in    Roots II: the next Generation,   a doomed victim of the Jonestown massacre, and an impressionable teen conned into a nude camera scene by a pervert in    the movie   Fame.    Her character, the title role in   Sparkle, survived to the end of that movie, but lost a sister to drugs on the way. I don't ever recall seeing her in a comedy.
    Ms. Cara could sing, too. She sang all her own songs as a 1960s R&B singer in   Sparkle, plus she also sang the Top 40 theme songs for    Fame and Flashdance.

      In the black community, there was some debate as to her ethnicity. Some believed her to be half-black and half-Puerto Rican. In almost every role she portrayed black Americans. She even appeared on the cover of    Jet, where she identified herself as a "black Spanish person."    Ms. Cara did not call herself "half-black half-Spanish" because both of her parents hailed from the Spanish Caribbean (Cuba and Puerto Rico), so they were both (in today's terms) "Latina/o."   Her darker-skinned father was every bit as much a product of Latin American culture as was her light-skinned mother.   She was born in New York to a large family of salsa musicians, but she is best known for singing disco and R&B, both African-American genres . She apparently felt herself to be a black American, having been born an African-descended girl in America, though she actually did not have any ancestry among the Africans who came to the United States as enslaved laborers.
    And frequently ignored is one simple fact, that Latin American culture is itself an African-descended culture (in varying degrees, depending on location) and that to be both black and Latina is not at all contradictory.

    The real question is not why she usually portrayed the descendants of U.S.-born slaves, but why she never played a Latin American, which she was clearly qualified to do.

    In the theatrical release of   Fame , her charcter of "Coco" is of unspecified mixed heritage. (In the later TV series   Fame , "Coco" was played by actress Erica Gimpel and given the Spanish surname "Hernandez.").

    To add insult to injury, the only Puerto Rican character in   the movie   Fame , is played by white Anglo actor Barry Miller.   Miller has light-skin and dark curly hair, which I guess makes him  "Latin" in the mind of Hollywood casting agents.  His character, an aspiring comedian who idolizes the late Puerto Rican comedian Freddie Prinze, otherwise has no interest in Hispanic culture.  He even yells at his own Spanish-speaking mother to "speak English."   Befriending only white students, he comes across as frustrated by his Puerto Rican familyand heritage, light enough to be something else but unable to pull it off. Irene Cara's "Coco" does not even have a family or heritage that she will share with her classmates. Her homelife remains a mystery throughout the entire movie. (the other black character, the dancer Leroy, also has no family or community)
    It seems Hollywood has still not yet noticed that Latin America is full of non-white people.  Three decades have not changed much.  European Spaniard Javier Bardem played Mexican in    No Country for Old Men.  Likewise, Spaniard Antonio Banderas played Mexicans in   Zorro   and Desperado.   European-looking Puerto Rican Benicio Del Toro played a Mexican cop in Traffic.   Mexicans seem the the ethnic group least likely to be portrayed on-camera by actors of their own ethnicity.   Even in the Mexican telenovelas, the lead roles (always aristocratic) go to Nordic-looking performers while the servants are Indigenous-looking Mexicans. Only in the telenovela starring the singer Thalia, did I see African descended and clearly Mestiza actors playing non-servant roles.

    Just recenlty the actress/dancer Zoe Saldana played Lt. Uhuru in the latest version of Star Trek.  Ms. Saldana's online bio reports that she is of Dominican heritage, born in the U.S. and raised in the Dominican Republic. In her Hollywood roles she has played characters that might be considered "black," and yes, just yesterday, I overheard a group of young Latinas (all born after Irene Cara's heyday) wondering whether Zoe Saldana was "half-black" or "half-Dominican" or something.
    Of course, Dominican culture is a partly-African culture, so there just as with Irene Cara and millions of other people, there is no contradiction between being dark-skinned and Latina at the same time.
    It seems after thirty years it would not still be necessary to say this, but oh well. . .

Paying Respect to Farrah Fawcett

kevin thompson — Sat, 15 Aug 2009 23:37:00 GMT

    Back in the peak of her popularity, actress Farrah Fawcett was interviewed by   Jet   magazine.   It was a short article, so short that I re-read it and practically memorized it. It went something like this.   "Black men who are fantasizing about actress and   Charlie's Angels star Farrah Fawcett are wasting their time. Fawcett said recently 'I'm trying to get rid of my prejudices, but Daddy was stabbed by a Negro once and hasn't liked them ever since.' "
    It was not surprising that a woman born in 1947 (or 1987, '97, for that matter) had absorbed some racial attitudes growing up that she later found inconvenient. What was surprinsing was that she was candid enough to say so openly. After reading that article, I could not help but wonder if Ms. Fawcett had successfully "gotten rid of her prejudices" of her Texas upbringing, so over the years I watched her public work with African Americans with this in mind.
    Not long afterword,   Jet magazine ran a photo of her receiving a tennis lesson from Bill Cosby.    She seemed as relaxed as anybody else might be in that photo. Perhaps she had been successful. Ms. Fawcett later co-starred with Alfre Woodard in a theatrical release about a rape victim who fights back. She starred in Small Sacrifices ,a TV movie produced by Suzanne De Passe, former head of Motown's TV and movie productions. Still later, she portrayed the wife of Danny Glover who lives in a snooty gated community in the African American comedy,   The Cookout.    Whatever burden her father's prejudices had been for her, she seemed to have over come them for her professional career.
    By far the most interesting role she played was in 1995's    Children of the Dust, a TV miniseries set in Oklahoma/Indian Territory in the late 1800s. Ms. Fawcett's role was that of a middle-class white New Yorker transplanted reluctantly to the frontier by her new husband. Her character has a pathological fear of Indians, fueled no doubt by popular accounts of Indians scalping or "violating" white women. She is driven further into madness and physical illness, played with marvelous nuance, when her husband accepts an orphaned Plains Indian boy into her home to be raised.
    Ironically enough, Ms. Fawcett's character has no problem with the Black Cherokee protagonist, played by Sidney Poitier, and trusts him around herself and her children, but the Indian boy she just never warms up to. She dies early in the story, leaving her son to grow up into a white supremacist politician, and her daughter to fall in love with the Indian boy and produce a grandchild. It all ends unhappily in realistic racial violence, including the castration of Sidney Poitier's character by a white mob and the hanging of two pre-teen black boys on baseless allegations of "rape."
    I liked this role for Ms. Fawcett, because it showed a person struggling with strong racial feelings. She could go either way. Usually, racist charcters are portrayed as cartoonish buffoons or monsters, and not as real people who actually negotiate their own feelings with the environment in which they find themselves. Her role in    Children of the Dust,   really demonstrated her props as an actress. (Recently, I learned that Ms. Fawcett's mother, Pauline was born in Oklahoma and was partly of Choctaw descent.)
    Farrah Fawcett's skills as an actress were overshadowed by her brief time spent as a 1970s pinup icon. Likewise, her actress props were overshadowed by a personal life that seemed undeservedly harsh. When she died on June 25, 2009, all the media tributes already planned for her (no surprise, as her slow publicized death from cancer gave the networks plenty of time to prepare) were pre-empted by the sudden death of the King of Pop, Michael Jackson.
    I wonder still if Ms. Fawcett's father, James Fawcett, ever gave up his own dislike of "Negroes," or if they ever discussed the change in her attitudes (or her role as wife of Danny Glover) or how he felt about his daughter's death being upstaged by the death of an African American icon. Perhaps he was relieved just to have the private funeral under the radar while all media attention was on the Jackson family.
    James William Fawcett lived to see his wife and both of his daughters die of cancer before him. I would not wish such a thing on anybody.
    May the Good Lord have mercy on him and the whole Fawcett family.

PJ O'Roarke, and How US Cities are Going to the Dogs

kevin thompson — Sat, 08 Aug 2009 22:52:00 GMT

    Sometimes I will see two different TV programs, or read two magazine articles, withing a day or two of each other, that are completely unrelated on the surface but are deeply connected at a second glance. Call it coincidence or something else.
    Today this happened while watching a History Channel program on feral dogs and once it ended, I surfed the channels and landed on author PJ O'Roarke promoting his latest book     Driving Like Crazy. Yes, there was a significant connection between the two programs. Serendipity at its best. Read on.

Dogs Returning to the Urban Wild:

    The History Channel program was Monster Quest, and this time the monsters were domestic dogs that had run away, been abandoned, taken up the wild life and killed humans. The show covered the Stephen King book and movie   Cujo, about rabid St. Bernard that goes on a killing spree. (I wish King had not used a good Akan African name for the dog). The monster quest also re-enacted the killings of three people in two separate incidents by packs of dogs. In one attack, a pack of pit bulls killed two people in rural Michigan. In another, a boy was killed in St. Louis by a pack of dogs, but there were no witnesses to confirm the breed(s) involved.
    I will praise this series    Monster Quest, for its frequent references to Indigenous peoples. (An earlier episode featured mountain Seminole people and the reports of Sasquatch in the mountains of eastern Oklahoma.)   The narrator mentioned that Native Americans were the first people to bring the domestic dog into the Americas from Asia. Also mentioned was the U.S. military's use of Cuban-bred bloodhounds to hunt down red and black Seminoles in Florida.
    But the bulk of the show depicted a reality-show-style coverage of scientists trying to capture a feral dog in East St. Louis, Illinois, attach a camera and tracking device, and take a blood sample to determine its genetic makeup. East St. Louis, across the Mississippi river from St. Louis, Missouri, was once an industrial city and the site of one of the largest massacres of African American people to take place on US soil. Ironically, it became an almost totally black city by the 1970s, and a spiral of crime, underfinancing, and inadequate services (like schools and sewers) forced people out.  Monster Quest   did not mention all of this, but did mention a recent 60% drop in East St. Lou's population.
    Huge portions of the city are abandoned.  The cameras showed rows of houses standing empty, and lots of empty factories are being taken over by prairie brushland and forest. We got to see a pack of the East Saint Louis dogs and the crew captured two of them. The dogs were mostly small and black, with standup ears, almost wolf-like in appearance. They did not bark at all. They had been born in the wild and their capture by the science team was probably their first contact with humans. A couple of them quickly became "trap savvy" and could not be captured the same way twice.
    The program spent less time on an effort in Detroit to photograph the movements of feral dogs in the vast expanses of abandoned factory land in that city.   But more on Detroit later.

DNA Testing of Feral Dogs

    The DNA testing, which was held up until the end of the program, revealed some interesting data. The canine genome (like the human genome) has been sequenced. Also, all the different pure breeds' genes have also been analyzed and sequenced. It turns out the East St. Louis pack had some paternal ancestry from pit bulls and English bull terriers, but was predominantly Alaskan malemute and Chow. Pit bull genes were not a surprise, because pit bulls are popular in poor urban areas and abandoned pit bulls could easily have joined the packs of urban feral dogs.  However, the ferals did not resemble pit bulls in the least. They had long hair (like chows) , the more standard pointy snouts and slim builds of sled dogs (like Malemutes). They had the compact look of multi-generation strays in urban India. Life in the "urban wild" had reduced any influences from the highly specialized breeds, like chihuhuas, poodles, yorkshire terriers, or pit bulls, that had little survival value outside of human protection.
    I understood this immediately, because I have seen with my own eyes how fighting pits can behave when they are abandoned in urban areas.  In the city where I live, a pack of dogs, including one pit, attacked two people, sending both of them to the hospital. Another time, I saw a pit take over a police car.  It seems these pit bulls have been bred and trained to fight, and if they escape or are abandoned, they do the one thing they know best---attack and bite.
    The problem is, going on the attack right away is not a long-term survival strategy. It draws immediate police attention and usually a quick death at the hands of Animal control. Clearly, some of the male pits had survived in the wild long enough to mate, but none of the E. St. Louis feral pack resembled pit bulls at all. They were aggressive only when cornered, and their preferred survival strategy was flight when they encountered humans. This is what wolves and coyotes do.
    In some ways, it was more surprising that the E. St. Louis ferals had the genetic predominance of Alaskan Malemutes and Chows. Neither of these breeds are the most popular breeds in urban areas, yet their genes survived overwhelmingly in the wild state, much more so than the genes of other breeds. Chows and Malemutes, bred by Indigenous people of east Asia, the Asian and Alaskan arctic, had made their combined comeback as the Eurowestern industrial civilization had retreated from portions of the landscape. That says something about the continued survival of Indigenous peoples, too.

PJ O'Roarke Promotes Driving as the American Way

    I surfed the channels and came to C-SPAN, where author/reporter PJ O'Roarke was promoting   Driving Like Crazy, his take on the importance, personally** and nationally, of the automobile.   He quotes David Davis, the iconic auto enthusiast, writer who once ran Car and Driver   magazine, who said that politicians hate automobiles because people can use them to leave their jurisdictions. O'Roarke views the car as the fulfillment of the dream of the Founding Fathers of the U.S.--to pick up and leave whenever you choose.
    And I think O'Roarks is on to something here. The America we know is impossible without the automobile. Even the most non-driving urbanite depends on cars (or trucks) to deliver to the corner store down the block. Does any car-hating urban planner really want return to deliveries in horse-drawn wagons? O'Roarke cites the car as a democratizing force, allowing unprecedented mobility to the masses for the first time in human history.
    The choice to leave is very American. After the Civil War, many Union and Confederate veterans remained on the road as itinerant workers as mobility had become an accostomed way of life. Newly-freed slaves would also take to the road, just because they could. Some just took a walk for a few days, just to feel free, and returned to the plantation for wages. But is was nice to exercise the choice to leave.
Native Americans had been exercising the right to pick and go for centuries before European or African settlement.

Leaving the Cities Nothing New

    Native Americans not only moved as individuals and families, but as entire communities. The Creeks would rename the new location of their town after the old one. That's how Tulsa, Oklahoma came to be named after Tulsa town, in what became Alabama. In fact the largest Native American city, Cahokia, was a few miles from the site that later became East Saint Louis. Tens of thousands of people walked away from Cahokia once its theocratic government (and possibly an epidemic) no longer worked for them.

    It was doubly ironic that I saw the wild dog episode   on  Monster Quest , where another team tracked the packs of feral dogs in abandoned auto-factory lots in Detroit,       right before I saw PJ O'Roarke discuss the demise of the US Auto industry.

    This all brought to mind the futile cries of American activists bemoaning the decline of many US cities.  They usually blame the automobile, or racism. But they are ignoring one crucial fact about Americans and cities: people can leave them. Yes, leave.  For a good reasons or no reason. That's what freedom is partly about. It is a very ancient American tradition. It's not even just "white flight," because in Detroit and East St. Louis, "black flight" is the most recent reason for (human) depopulation. Before either, it was "red flight."
    And when people move out, trees, weeds, and wild dogs move in.

**I must confess my love of road trips. I credit this to my parents driving from Alabama to Seattle, across the Rockies on two-lane mountain highways without guardrails, in my father's 1954 Plymouth. I was the five-month-old infant in the car-bed in the pre-seat-belt back seat, secured in by packs of diapers. I don't remember this, of course, but just having this imbedded in my subconcious must account for my instant feeling of relaxation once I am on the road. The road is a lullaby.

Multiracials and the Re-invention of U.S. Black Culture

kevin thompson — Tue, 04 Aug 2009 01:41:00 GMT

Natives Help Create Black Communities

My own Creek ancestors escaped the 1832 removal of the Creek nation and hid out in another part of the South. They still spoke their language, but otherwise had few other Creek people around them. So they cast in their lot with the newly-freed Africans, and one white, who were nearby. They were forming the "Colored" community as members of the local churches, schools and social networks. Some of them still maintained their Creek identity while still being teachers of "Negro" children and holding leadership positions in the Negro churches. This happened right after the Civil War, as the newly-free African community was re-inventing itself as a literate, Protestant politically-active society.

The East Coast Multiracial
My family was not the first Native American family to take part in this process. On the east coast free African sailors in the 1700s were forming their own Masonic lodges and churches.  Many of these seamen, such as ship owner Paul Cuffe, were half-Native. Cuffe's mother was Wamponoag Indian, and his wife was as well. He organized ships to take free blacks to Africa for settlement, decades before the establishment of Liberia by the federal government. (Recent DNA testing from Liberia has shown Native American ancestry among some Americo-Liberians.)
    Multi-racial people also formed a large part of the "Colored" population in the Chesapeake Bay region. A large number of white indentured women had married enslaved Africans who labored beside them, and produced a generation of free-born black children. A large number of Native American communities still existed in the Chesapeake and Delmarva regions, and many of them moved between the "Indian" and "Negro" realms depending on where they were working.

Church Split over Racial Self-Perception

    On the Delmarva peninsula there was a Methodist church, and the bishop assigned them a new pastor. Many members of the congregation considered this new pastor to be a "Negro," and were offended, saying they were Indian and not Negro, and demanding a white or Indian preacher. The congregation split in two, once faction accepting a Negro identity and later associating itself with the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) denomination. The other faction stood by their Indian identity. Of course, before the split, the congregation included several families who had been worshipping and marrying together for several generations. The split represented the split of several extended families into two different "racial" identities.
    The AME denomination, then headquartered in the north, was also recruiting congregatrions of former slaves in the south, congregations that had been in existence during slavery but not yet associated with a national black-identified organization.

The First Name Change

    Prior to the Civil War, many of the free black churches and lodges in the northern states had the word "African" in their title, such as the African Methodist Episcopal church. People of color were not too sure if they were welcome, or wanted to enter into the "American" identity. After emancipation, there was a change to "negro" as an added identifier to a new identity as blacks were now bonafide U.S. (or American) citizens,as stated in the 14th amendment.  Later, leaders argued for "negro" to be capitalized, as an ethnic identity as "Negro". Then the identifier became "black" and most recently "African American" (sometimes hyphenated, sometimes not).

The Loss of the Mulatto Identifier

    "Mulatto" dropped off the US census in 1920, aritificially inflating the official size of the "negro" population. Futher assaults on mixed race status by Walter Plecker and others discouraged multi-racials and Native Americans from asserting their identities as neither "black" or "white."   Not until the 2000 census, did non-white, non-black, natiive born individuals regain the legal right to identify themselves as they chose outside of the official categories.

Black American Identity Not Simply a Transplanted African Identity

    There have been recent attempts to portray contemporary U.S. African-American culture as merely a transplanted African culture, as if an ocean and centuries of separation account for nothing, as if a high degree of cultural and biological mixture with non-African elements in North America account for nothing. This fits in well with the quasi-Marxist definitions of diaspora Africans and part-Africans as "colonialized" or "oppressed" people, suffering in a monolithic situation. This ignores the large number of partly-African slave owners   in Jamaica, Haiti, and Charleston, South Carolina. This also ignores the large number of Colored troops who made George Washington's victory possible.

Native Americans are Now Defined Out of Black History.
        I once unintentionally offended a woman when I suggested that U.S. Black culture is re-invented every generation or so, just as white American identity is re-invented to fit new realities. I had challenged the idea that African identity had somehow remained unchanged for three centuries on North American soil.
    What I was trying to suggest was that as black identity was redefined, Native Americans and blacks with Native ancestry and/or culture were also erased from the reality of African American history. I knew this was true because my own family had been part of the process.
    This assault on partly-Native blacks is now coming from the highest levels of academia. Professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr., himself has participated in this. (Despite what follows, Professor Gates, I sympathize with your recent struggle with being disrespected in your home by civil servants who your taxes support.) In his PBS series   African American Lives    Professor Gates makes the most general comments about Native Americans, revealing little specific knowledge about any particular Native American culture.
    Even worse, Harvard professor Claudio Saunt, is quoted on-camera saying that most blacks with Native American ancestry inherited it from white slave-owners who were part-Indian. Professor Saunt, who has extensively researched southeastern Indian societies, should know better than to make such a generalization for the following reasons: He ignores partly African individuals who were culturally Indian and who were recognized as such on the federal Dawes Rolls, even among slave-holding, pro-Confederate nations such as the Chickasaw.
    Professor Saunt also ignored that many African Americans have Native ancestry from Northeastern nations, Plains Nations, Canadian Aboriginals, and other Native societies that had no connection to Southern plantation slavery. Perhaps he was being quoted or edited out of context, but perhaps I am being too generous.

Self-Policing of Black Identity
    Professor Jack Forbes calls this process the "self-policing" of the black community. But it is also part of the continued re-invention of Black identity.   Somehow, an acknowledgement of non-African influence in official Black History is threatening, as if that makes black identity less "black."  Does that mean Frederick Douglas's life, writing, and activism is less a part of Black history because his father was Scottish-American? Or is Malcom X's life and autobiography only a 75% Black event because he was 25% white?   Of course not. That would be absurd. Yet somehow acknowledgement of Native American influence must be avoided at all costs. What is at stake here?
    Why can't Native American and Multi-racials be recognized as co-creators of modern Black America, and by extension, non-black America (which still has constant African American infusions of music, culture and politics.)?

Nicole Richie Allowed to Have the (Non-black) Simple Life

kevin thompson — Sat, 01 Aug 2009 22:53:00 GMT

    Several years ago Nicole Richie, the daughter of famed R&B singer Lionel Richie , starred in a reality show with her childhood friend and hotel heiress Paris Hilton. In this show, The Simple Life, the two blonde-haired Beverly Hills-bred young twenty-somethings spent several months living with a white (to all appearances) farm family in rural Arkansas.   The comedy and drama revolves around the cultural differences of the materialistic urbanites and how they adapt and maladapt to their new surroundings. But the newfound celebrity of Nicole Ritchie revealed at least four surprises.
    I watched the entire season, from the sendoff party at the Hilton estate (which Lionel also attended), to the livestock auction to Nicole and Paris's attempts to succeed as convenience store clerks and other small-town tasks. Nothing surprising there.

Here were two of the surprises:
1. This Southern town did not seem to have any black people in residence. (though I know all southern towns do not have black residents).
2. Nicole Richie's ethnic background, which is partly African American (at least by upbringing), was never mentioned.

Though any number of racist comments might have been edited out, none of the avowedly conservative patriotic Republican family seemed to have any discomfort with Nicole Ritchie's presence in their home and other social settings. The father is an ex-marine and proudly so. Just being celebrities in that Arkansas town made them a subject of interest, especially to local young males, and somehow no one was particularly interested, much less hostile, to Ms. Ritchie's blond hair, green eyes and upbrining in the home of a still famous black-identified singer who even once scored a hit on the Country music charts. Okay, as they say in Latin America, "money whitens," and so perhaps "beauty whitens" also. But I think there is more to this story than that.
    On one show Nicole and Paris play a board game with their host family.   The question is "who is the Secretary of State?" Neither Nicole nor Paris have a clue, but the four-year-old boy shouts "Colin Powell!"

    Here is another possible surprise:
The white folk in that Arkansas town simply were not that racist. They knew Nicole Richie might loosely be considered "black" but it did not matter to them. Not even to the elderly white residents who had once expected black folk to know their place. They were conservative, Republican, gun-owning, church-going, but they were not cross-burning extremists. How's that for overturning stereotypes.?(Many white conservative Christian Southerners support missionary and other relief aid in Africa, though this gets little attention in secular media.)

Surprise Number Four: Instead of abandoning a child in accordance with the stereotype of black men, Lionel Ritchie actually adopted a child that was not biologically his.    The media, of course, has nothing to say about this.

And Surprise Number Five: Nicole Ritchie's "Biological" Background.
    Nicole and her father, Lionel Richie, later appeared on Oprah.    Mr. Ritchie explained how he came to adopt Nicole, who was the biological child of an un-named woman and the brother of percussionist Sheila E. (E for Escovedo). Sheila E. had a hit song in 1984 during her association with Prince. Her father from Mexico had performed for years with fellow-Mexican Carlos Santana. In an interview from that time Sheila reported her father as Mexican, and her mother as Louisiana Creole, and raised in Oakland, California, apparently in a black community, though she did not say as much. Nonetheless, the American music awards of 1984 gave Sheila an award in the "black" music category.(Yes, that's what they called it)
    So, Nicole Richie, presumably sharing this same Escovedo genetic ancestry of Mexican/Mestizo/Creole, might as easily be classified as "latina", Creole, or something else. She could easily have inherited (or not inherited) African (and/or Native American) ancestry from either her Mexican or Creole ancestors.  But despite all the ways she might be considered "black," the most obvious is this:

Nicole Ritchie's Possible Black Identification Comes From her Adoption by the Richies:

    Nicole Richie was raised in the home of a famous performer of African descent, whose connection to popular black culture is well-known. She still carries the Richie surname. She still seems close emotionally to her father, and her two children presumbaly see a lot of their famous ("black", though nor particularly dark) grandfather.   I don't even know if Nicole Ritchie considers herself to be "African American."  She does not seem to have made any effort to publickly associate with any famous black celebrities, even less so than Paris Hilton. The father of her children is white to all appearances. And everyone is cool with this. It's no big deal that she was raised "black" and lives "white."
    Her social fluidity is never mentioned on-camera by commentators. The media gives her this freedom, and also for the public, to decide how Nicole Ritchie is racially perceived. They show Nicole and her father, her friends and children, and let you decide how you will perceive the situation.

This seems a step in the right direction.

Kicking Obama Out of the Tribe

kevin thompson — Sun, 26 Jul 2009 02:35:00 GMT

The challenge to Barack Obama's US citizenship is no less than an attempt to kick him out of the Anglo-Saxon tribe into which he was born. The President inherited his citizenship from his mother, a US-born citizen whose ancestors had been living here for eight or more generations.
    Elements on the Right are claiming that President Obama is not a US citizen, despite having been born in the United States. The argument goes like this: Because only one of Obama's parents, his mother, was a US citizen, then he also fails to qualify as a "natural-born" US citizen because she had not lived in the US for five years after her 15th birthday. And why had she not lived in the US for five years after her 15th birthday to the time of Barack's birth? Because she was only 19!
    So is the Right now going to demand the revocation of citizenship to all babies born to US citizen-teenage mothers, all of whom who would fail to qualify?

    Stupidity on the Right:
I actually agree with the Right on some things, so I don't want the Right and its ideals to fail completely. But I can not help but notice the Right takes positions that ultimately will undermine their longer-term goals. Don't believe it? Read on.

1. Dred Scott Decision--this Supreme Court decision basically extended slavery from slave states to all states, because slave owners could transport slaves to free states and not free them--in open defiance of local anti-slavery laws. For all the hypocrisy of "states' rights," the Dred Scott decision actually trampled the laws of free states. This imposition on free states fueled the fire to defeat the Confederacy a few years later, and end legal slavery North and South.

2. Just this week, the Senate defeated a federal law which would have allowed citizens from states which allowed them to carry concealed weapons, to carry those weapons into states which did not allow it. All states would have to obey the most lenient concealed-weapons laws, local policy be damned.
    The Right was not smart enough to see how this precedent would have undermined their own fight against same-sex marriage. A legally-married same-sex couple could then move from one state to another, and demand their new state of residency recognize their marriage as legal, despite local law. Users of medicinal marijuana might also have used this precedent to carry their drug of choice across state lines without interference.

    So is the Right ready to revoke US citizenship from any number of US born individuals in order to unseat the current president? Precedent shows the Right may be bold enough, or stupid enough, to try it. The news from this past week is not encouraging. The daughter of former Vice President Dick Cheney, Elizabeth Cheney,  herself a lawyer, is leading the charge to question the citizenship status of her eighth-cousin-once-removed, Barack Obama. Yes, Dick and Elizabeth Cheney are cousins of President Obama. The former Second Lady herself, Lynn Cheney, announced it herself when researching her husband's ancestry. So, yes, Elizabeth Cheney is out to revoke the citizenship of her own cousin for political gain. Despite this lunacy, Cousin Barack has even extended Cousin Dick's secret service security detail. Just shows you who has the stronger sense of duty to family.
    Those of us familiar with the internal politics of American Indians should recognize something familiar with this. Occasionally a recognized Indian tribe will kick individuals and families off the tribal rolls based on some technicalities. The usual suspect is casino cash and the goal of shrinking the pool of people eligible to qualify for the money. The usual loser is poor and aged tribal members.

    Yes, President Obama belongs to the loosely-defined tribe of Anglo-Saxons due to his mother's ancestry. If his mother had been alive I doubt this attack would have been leveled** Also, if this was some other candidate and the foreign father had been white, I don't think this would be an issue.

    So how far is the Right willing to go for short-term gain? There must be thousands of young mothers giving birth to children whose fathers' citizenship status is unclear or unknown.*** Is the Right willing to, in the terms of tribal politics, "disenroll" millions of people from US citizenship rolls? Such a policy could actually reduce the power of the future white (I mean "Republican base") electorate while increasing the power of the "anchor baby" electorate, the children of undocumented aliens born here, unless other laws were changed, too.

    Considering the large number of legal and illegal immigrants living here now, this disenrolling game is sure to hurt the Right sooner or later. Like a strict DNA standard of whiteness, a great many white people would fall short of the standard. So the less said of this, the better.

** The Cheney's willingness to attack the citizenship of their own kinfolk, reveals a sense of insecurity about the status of all "native"-born Americans. President Obama's US citizenship depends on his mother's status. If her status can be challenged 47 years later after his birth, how many others' might also be challenged, retroactively?

***For several years, the number of babies born to unwed white mothers has been increasing.

Oklahoma! Oh-Boy! Cherokee in Whiteface

kevin thompson — Sun, 19 Jul 2009 00:01:00 GMT

I loved the movie   Oklahoma!   long before I knew it was based on a play by a Cherokee writer, Mr. Lynn Riggs. But even while in Junior High I knew that something was missing from the movie   Oklahoma!,    namely, black and Indian people. Riggs was part-white and like many Cherokees of the late 19th and early 20th century, shared a Southern Protestant heritage. So where are the Cherokee and Negroes in the play   Green Grow the Lilacs and the musical based on it, Oklahoma!?
      Riggs said that the lead female charater, Laurie, was based on his high-spirited sister, who, like him, was Cherokee. The character Aunt Eller, was was based on an elderly aunt who raised Riggs and his sister, and who looked exactly like the actress Charlotte Greenwood who played Aunt Eller in the movie. (My daughter commented that Aunt Eller's sassy lines reminded her of her Southern black mother.) Only the long-departed Riggs knows how many of the characters are really Cherokees in whiteface.

The Indian Problem with Oklahoma!

    Quick history lesson:   Indian territory was supposed to be reserved for Indian people, until greedy outsiders took advantage of the relative weakness of the Indian nations and invaded.    By 1907, the white majority simply voted Indian territory out of existence and declared it to be part of the state of Oklahoma, and segregated the phone booths by race. The Indian people still remained, of course, their national governments abolished, the more African-looking Indians getting an extra twist on the same raw deal.
    Green Grow the Lilacs    actually celebrates the rural culture of the white settlers, mostly of Southern origins. Riggs said so himself. Of course, Southern white and Cherokee culture had overlapped in places since before either came west. There was a lot of intermarriage. Many Cherokee converted to Christianity, spoke English, owned enslaved Africans, not always in that order. Riggs came from this milieu, so white settler culture was part of his experience.
    But   Lilacs    and     Oklahoma! go beyond the mere using of white settler culture as cultural backdrop, the very themesong actually celebrates the establishment of the state of  Oklahoma, and the accompanying disempowering of Indian and black people who were there first. But since no people of color are evident onstage or oncamera, this is not obvious.

The Cherokee Night of Lynn Riggs

Riggs wrote only one known play about his Cherokee heritage, The Cherokee Night,   which features all Cherokee characters. Until recently, it was hard to even find a hardcopy of the script, but it has been analyzed at length by some modern scholars, such as Daniel Heath Justice (Cherokee) and Craig Womack (Creek and Cherokee). Its noteworthy that the young Cherokee male characters express their superiority to the Creeks due to alleged Negro ancestry of some Creeks, and their desire to kill and dismember a Negro if they get the chance. Riggs is clearly hinting at some anxiety about possible African ancestry even among the Cherokees (perhaps even himself), and it is expressed in the violent and homo-erotic images of turn-of-the-century lynchings of African Americans.
    None of Riggs' other surviving works deal much with Negroes, but Riggs himself actually performed in blackface as part of a minstrel troupe as a young man (I saw the photo, though this was common. Bob Hope and Dean MArtin, whose careers lasted until the age of television, also performed in blackface in the 1930s). He wrote of being interested in his friend George Gershwin's plan to compose an opera,   Porgy and Bess, based in a Negro community and incorporating Negro music into the classic opera format.
    The real Oklahoma had plenty of interracial violence, and interracial marriage, to keep racial anxieties at a high level. Riggs lived most of his adult life outside of Oklahoma, moved about in white Hollywood circles, but he seems to have kept most of his racial anxieties to himself.

A World Not Ready for Riggs

    Part of Riggs' problem was that the world was not ready for a light-skinned, homosexual Cherokee from a state awash in racial ambiguity and violence. I decline to use the term "passing" for white, because Riggs, like Will Rogers, socialized with whites while still known as Cherokee. I liken Riggs to Anatole Broyard, a Creole writer who concealed his background because of the immediate association (however spurious) of Creole indentity with Negro culture. The America that both Riggs and Broyard inhabited was not open to the nuanced existence of mixed-race peoples.   But out of the surreality of that experience sometimes comes great art.
    And taken as art, Oklahoma!    is still great.

SOURCES

Craig Womack,    Red on Red: American Indian Literary Separatism

Daniel Heath Justice,   Our Fire Survives the Storm

Miracle of a War Film-Spike Lee's Miracle at St. Anna

kevin thompson — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 00:29:00 GMT

This one just blew me away. I just bought the DVD because I knew it would be a keeper, and boy was I right. Director Spike Lee always employed an epic sensibility, evidence of his true love for the Hollywood masterpiece, and in   Miracle at St. Anna, he has done the genre justice.
    This is a war epic, no doubt. Miracle at St. Anna is more of a war movie than most, because it shows the effect of war on the so-called non-combatants, who are often the most numerous casualties.

Civil Wars are the Nastiest Wars:
    Wars of invasion can be destructive, of course, but often the goal of the invader is to capture some strategic military points and neutralize the military forces of the enemy. The defender's goal is to push the enemy off his territory, and if possible, do it with such force that the invader will think twice before trying it again. That is an oversimplification, I'll admit.
    But civil wars are battles for the heart and soul of a nation.  Different factions work to purge the entire body politic of the defined enemy, who is essentially their neighbors but who differ from each other in language, religion, skin color, region, economic class, political ideology or some combination of traits. To "purify" the nation, one must exterminate the enemy entirely. Tear down his temples, outlaw his language, rape the women, desecrate their cemeteries, etc. No one is a non-combatant. Everyone from babes in strollers to old folks in wheelchairs is a worthy target of your wrath.
    As in the U.S. Civil War, the enemy may be your own brother, or your fellow graduate from West Point. Choosing sides gets messy. Civil wars usually have extremely high body counts, as the goal of battle is not to "win" battles but to shed as many gallons of blood as possible.

Occupations and Civil Wars Can Blur Together:

      This is part of the background of Miracle of St. Anna: Italy's Fascist party dictator, Mussolini, was allied with Adolf Hitler, Nazi party leader of Germany. Mussolini came to power first, and invaded Ethiopia to make up for the lost time that Britain, France, Portugal and even Belgium had in already acquiring overseas colonies. Germany, like Italy, had been only a collection of duchies and micro-states before they unified in the 1860s. Though Mussolini was militaristic, Hitler added the element of race hatred as a stated ideology to the German version of fascism, called Nazisim.
     When the Nazis invaded eastern Europe, they usually found locals willing to identify local Jews and hand them over to the Germans. Oddly enough, it was the Italians who hid more Jews from the Nazis than they turned in. It seems the Italians had a stronger sense of humanity than almost any other European Christians. The Italian people also distrusted Mussolini and eventually overthrew him.
    This created a problem for the German troops on Italian soil. The Italians were their supposed allies but Italian partisan rebels were attacking them. In reality, the Germans were fighting the Italian people while actually being allied with the Italian government.   This also happened in South Vietnam, where the U.S. was supporting the South Vietnamese government against the communist North, but huge elements of the South Vietnamese population were against their own government and therefore the U.S. slaughtered South Vietnamese civilians as suspected communists. Not surprisingly, the U.S. lost this one.
    The U.S. was essentially engaged in a civil war with at least two factions of Vietnamese society. That is also what has happened to us in Iraq (and has not yet concluded).

The Real Deal on Film:
    Spike Lee does not provide all this background in the film, but it is all evident in gory detail. Lee also tells the story through the eyes of Buffalo Soldiers, American men of African descent, who of course have been present in all phases and events of U.S. history and every major conflict the world over in the 20th century. There was something satisfying about this, seeing white-on-white brutality through black eyes (of the director and the characters), as subversive as Leslie Marmon Silko (Laguna Pueblo)writing about an"Indian with a camera" and taking the power to show, and therefore define, visual reality, a power Euro-Western media and academia institutions usually reserves for themselves. But we people of color have always possessed the power to see and even influence these white-on-white bloodbaths.
    Author James McBride, the half-Jewish, African American author of St. Anna, commented that these European events were now part of Black History because black people were part of them. And Lee doesn't soft soap the racial hypocrisy of the U.S. fighting racist dictatorships in Europe while maintaining a violence-based caste system at home.

Spike and the Italians Redux:
    I read once that Spike Lee grew up in a series of Brooklyn neighborhoods that were often mixtures of African American , Italian and Puerto Rican. Except for his first two films,   the romantic comedy/drama    She's Gotta Have It ,   and   School Daze  , a musical drama that highlighted black-on-black color conflicts, Italian-Americans have usually featured heavily in Lee's films. Several actors on The   Sopranos   appeared in small roles in Spike Lee films.    Jungle Fever   and    Do the Right Thing have black-Italian conflict as their central themes.
     Spike has now taken his appreciation for Italian people back to Italy. Miracle at St. Anna has long dialogues in Italian, German and Spanish, but mostly in English and Italian. It's also about Americans overseas, but this time the Americans are black Americans, facing Italians who have never seen a black person up close, except in racist propoganda posters that portrayed Africans as a form of monkey, yet show more respect to our heroes than do their white American officers.


The Real Power of the Miracle of St. Anna:
There was also something very Catholic about this movie, and I mean that in the best way possible. The peasants and country priests have the faith of martyrs that should make any Christian feel inspired.
    This movie combines everything that is horrifying about Schindler's List       and   Saving Private Ryan.   I purchased the DVD because I thought it was a keeper I would want to watch again.   But the emotional punch was just too much and I don't know when I'll be able to see it again. But the lessons of war and faith are so well presented here that I know I'll be drawn back.
    This is truly one of the great ones.
    God bless Spike Lee, author James McBride  and everyone else involved.