Showing posts with label BLM. Show all posts
Showing posts with label BLM. Show all posts

29 July 2020

09:54

By Malinda Words

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True graduations



‘Public School Solidarity’ is a march scheduled for August 30, 2020 from Cynwyd Station Park to Tustin Playground. That's in Philadelphia, USA. A poster announcing the march describes what it is about as follows: ‘Lower Merion students stand with fellow students at Overbrook High School to address racial injustice in public school funding.’

The poster was designed by a 19 year old student at Leeds University on behalf of her 17 year old sister. Their mother writes about her daughters with pride. 

‘[My youngest daughter] and her friends have been tirelessly in the streets since June 1st marching, learning, advocating, agitating. Now they’ve put together their own march uniting wealthy suburban Lower Merion, where they go to school, with under-funded Overbrook in Philly across from City Line two blocks from where we live.’

What caught my attention was the following: ‘These kids aren’t the Class of 2020, and yet I feel that all young people are graduating this year from a before into an after.’

We all graduate from one thing to another. From childhood to youth to adulthood, ignorance to knowledge, darkness to light, OL to AL, school to university, student to professional. Of course we under-graduate at times and then there are situations when we regress. However, ‘graduation’ is usually associated with educational achievement or the completion of a particular course of study.

The graduation associated with young people in Philadelphia referred to above is different. It’s about the basics. They’ve said ‘no’ to what they object to. They’ve said ‘yes’ to a different world which they would prefer to inhabit.

They’ve held up signs, they’ve marched, they’ve been teargassed, they’ve refused to go away. They’ve fought on the streets and embankments, they’ve faced fully armed police officers who were ready to use force and indeed used the force at their disposal flouting all regulations and laws.

Even as they stood up to be counted among the millions standing up against racism and police brutality in the USA they were also vocal on social media. They were emotional at times, but have shown they can be stone cold sober too.

And they’ve not waited for City Hall, School Board, Congress, Senate or the White House to do what they ought to have done decades ago and are still dragging their feet to do or are resolutely obstructing. They, these young people, are going ahead regardless. They are transforming their communities by transforming their own lives. They are adding meaning to solidarity by becoming more meaningful in their engagement. They are moving from a ‘before’ that they are not comfortable with to an ‘after’ that’s at least a place on a road that leads to a somewhere they want to be. They are graduating.

There are times when you have to shout. There are situations when you cannot afford to stop shouting. However, more often than not, whether or not you shout, there are must-do things or at least can-do things that you can’t afford to shelve. You just don’t graduate if you procrastinate. And societies remain the way they were and you are forced to inhabit an unfair, ungainly and violent world in which your vulnerabilities can only get worse. 

They’ve graduated, these young people. The earth beneath their feet must have become tender with approval and the air more fragrant too with the collective breath of resoluteness. Somehow the world too must have secured some serious credit that will take it closer to true graduation.

Other articles in the series 'In Passing...':  [published in the 'Daily News']   
 
Eyes that watch the world and cannot be forgotten 
 Let's start with the credits, shall we? 
The 'We' that 'I' forgot 
'Duwapang Askey,' screamed a legend, almost 40 years ago
Dances with daughters
Reflections on shameless writing
Is the old house still standing?
 Magic doesn't make its way into the classifieds
Small is beautiful and is a consolation  
Distance is a product of the will
Akalanka Athukorala, at 13+ already a hurricane hunter
Did the mountain move, and if so why?
Ever been out of Colombo?
Anya Raux educated me about Juvenile Idiopathic Arthritis (JIA)
Wicky's Story You can always go to GOAT Mountain
Let's learn the art of embracing damage
Kandy Lake is lined with poetry
There's never a 'right moment' for love
A love note to an unknown address in Los Angeles
A dusk song for Rasika Jayakody
How about creating some history?
How far away are the faraway places?
There ARE good people!
Re-placing people in the story of schooldays  
When we stop, we can begin to learn
Routine and pattern can checkmate poetry
Janani Amanda Umandi threw a b'day party for her father 
Sriyani and her serendipity shop
Forget constellations and the names of oceans
Where's your 'One, Galle Face'?
Maps as wrapping paper, roads as ribbons
Yasaratne, the gentle giant of Divulgane  
Katharagama and Athara Maga
Victories are made by assists
Lost and found between weaver and weave
The Dhammapada and word-intricacies
S.A. Dissanayake taught children to walk in the clouds
White is a color we forget too often  
The most beautiful road is yet to meet a cartographer

malindasenevi@gmail.com  

14 July 2020

10:43

By Malinda Words

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Michael Holding always comes to the party



Cricket fans interested in history would know that Michael Holding was part of the fearsome West Indian pace battery which included Andy Roberts, Joel Garner, Colin Croft, Wayne Daniel, Sylvester Clarke and Malcolm Marshall. They would know that he was referred to as ‘Whispering Death’ for his quiet run-up, and that his 14 for 149 against England at the Oval in 1976 on what has been described as ‘a wasteland, parched beyond recognition, with slow flat heartbreaking wickets' is still the best match figures by a West Indian. The stats can be pulled up of course: in 60 tests between 1975 and 1987 he took 249 wickets at an average of 23.68, economy rate of 2.79 an a strike rate of 50.9.

Obviously, though, most people today would associate Michael Holding more with a microphone than with the red cherry. He doesn’t whisper. He never has. He’s probably not the first to use the phrase but I associate ‘coming to the party’ with Michael Holding. ‘Someone has to come to the party,’ to be precise.

I don’t know much about cricket, but I know enough about the game and about communication to say that his observations are highly insightful. In other words, whether with the ball or the microphone, Michael Holding is a party man.

The other day, during a rain-break in the West Indies – England test, Michael Holding surpassed himself. The interview where he held forth on institutionalized racism has since gone viral on YouTube. He drew equally from an everyday incident of a white woman, Amy Cooper, threatening to call the police when a black man in Central Park asked her to put her dog on a lead, the unconscious bias of school teachers, the representation of Jesus Christ as a white man and the deliberate and pernicious erasure of black people in the great achievements of the human race.

He bowled me over with the comment on Thomas Edison. How is it that almost every Sri Lankan has heard of Edison but no one, including myself, has heard of Lewis Howard Latimer? Why are certain versions of history treated as ‘goes without saying’ and why don’t we acknowledge that there’s ‘come without saying’ in the process?

Why indeed must it take for the killing of a black man (one of hundreds murdered by racist white policemen in the USA) and widespread protests for Sky to ask Holding the questions that made for his historic and absolutely eloquent undressing of the ideological and political façade that gives the impression things are ok and ‘every little thing’s gonna be alright’?

Why? A quick, one-word answer would be ‘complicity.’ Former England captain Nasser Hussein, commenting on the Holding interview put it well, as reported by Andy Bulla in a blog picked up by ‘The Guardian’ (Michael Holding’s eloquence leads Sky’s unflinching masterpiece on race’).

‘People will be tuning in and saying: “Not this again.” All I’ll say to those people who say “not again” is that a few weeks ago I watched a black man being killed in front of my eyes on Channel 4 news, and my natural reaction was to look away. Next time that footage came on, I forced myself to watch because I felt something inside of myself say: “You’ve been looking away too long.”’

It’s not about white-black issues alone. It’s a phenomenon that can be found in all spheres of human activity, match-fixing and spot-fixing included. It’s about pointing fingers that we are reluctant to point at ourselves. It’s about wishing away that which is uncomfortable or even disconcerting or downright appalling. It's about race, class, gender, sexuality and so many other things. 

The Sky program featuring Holding opened with a James Baldwin quote, ‘’Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.’ A batsman has to face up to a Jofra Archer, a Muttiah Muralitharan or a Michael Holding. A bowler has to contend with a Sachin Tendulkar, Ricky Ponting or Brian Lara. But there is whispering death that comes without a name. Indeed, it’s not that it arrives or could arrive, it is already here and has been here for quite a while. Present tense. Holding has seen it. Many have seen it. Some have, but have looked away while others are convinced or have allowed themselves to be convinced that it is ‘an unfounded rumor.’

Holding makes the world ask a simple question, ‘for how much longer are you going to look away?’ The answer will define the world we leave for those who are yet to arrive. We either come to the party or the party comes to us and the latter is not a prospect that is appealing, Michael Holding would surely say. 

 


This article was published in 'The Morning' [July 14, 2020]

Other articles in the series titled 'The Interception' [published in 'The Morning']

Do you have a plan? Strengths and weaknesses
Wait, it's a strategy
The virtues of risk-free generosity
Thinking and out-thinking in sports
Read, locked-down people, read!
The team, the team!
Who should take the last shot?
It's all about partnerships
'The done thing' is rarely done
'Practice, lots of practice'
Special, always and forever
The shortcut to greatness
It's healthy to retire the braggadocio 
Money talks, gold rules: are we ok with that?
Sometimes if you don't stand up, you fall
Selections and the political economy of disappointment
So who is the GOAT?
Predecessors are great teachers
When things go wrong check the fundamentals
There's always only one more game left
Mind games are part of the sporting story
Those nervous ninetiesOut-think the opposition
School sports and parents
The importing mania in school cricket
Sportsmen and sportswomen beware: your accounts will be hacked soon!
Not all victories are recorded


malindasenevi@gmail.com

25 June 2020

09:34

By Malinda Words

In: , , ,

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Racism and police brutality: the USA and Sri Lanka


T. Greg Doucette, a US lawyer, and a mathematician named Jason Miller have compiled a list of 780 videos (as of June 16) showing police brutality. The investigative journalism website  Bellingcat has documented over 140 incidents of police violence against journalists during the protests.
 
A website called www.copcrisis.com claims ‘only a small fraction of the 17,000 law enforcement agencies in the USA track misconduct reports,’ and that the report of the Department of Justice on police conduct (in 2001) ‘was based on statistics given voluntary by just 5% of police departments in the USA.’

The following is a short list of violent incidents that took place a 72 hour period ending May 31, 2020 and were caught on camera.

A New York City police officer tore a protective mask off of a young black man and assaulted him with pepper spray which the victim stoop peacefully with his hands up. New York City police officers, in two separate vehicles rammed into crowds. Security forces in Minneapolis marched down a quiet residential street and shot paint canisters at residents who were watching from their private porch. Atlanta police stopped two black people, inexplicably shooting them with tasers and pulling them out of their car. Rubber bullets, tear gas and batons, pepper sprays and spraying other chemical agents, attacking people already on the ground or were even handcuffed have been reported all over the USA. Fourteen people have been killed and at least eight of them were involved in protests while some were bystanders while the involvement/presence of the rest haven’t been confirmed as yet (as of June 18). Please note that Black Americans account for less than 13% of the U.S population but are killed by police at more than double the rate of white Americans. In 2019, 250 Black people were fatally shot by the police. 

There’s a civil war in the United States of America and it’s happening now. No exaggeration. It’s about race and it is about racism. Police and police brutality. It’s not random, undisciplined officers but systemic racism that pervades that country and finds expression in the form of police brutality.
The USA doesn’t want to acknowledge any of this. Even after calling the UN’s human rights outfit ‘a cesspool of bias’ and walking out, the USA is using all means deemed necessary to prevails on the body to desist from passing resolutions on the country’s human rights situation. 

Washington is in a way the headquarters of racism and brutality insofar as decisions, domestic and international, are driven by the former and manifest as the latter. Of course the overarching policy imperative is serving capital interests, especially the arms and pharmaceutical industries but not necessarily limited to these.

However, capitalism (and all the violence that goes with it and generates), racism and police brutality do not make up some jealously guarded private property of the USA. Poverty and powerlessness go hand in hand with the sustained development of capital interests in other countries as well, big and small, rich and poor. There is racism outside the USA and Europe. Countries with numerically strong majorities privilege those communities. 

As such the question can be asked, for example, ‘Isn’t what is happening in the USA also happening in Sri Lanka?’ There are other questions that can be asked: 1) Doesn’t Buddhism have a special place in the constitution? 2) Wasn’t violence unleashed on minorities (Tamil and Muslim)?  3) Aren’t minorities systematically excluded from political and administrative office? There can be more of course, but these are key.

Buddhism has a special place in the constitution, yes (Article 9). This ‘special place’ is effectively nullified by Articles 10 and 14. This redundancy should be eliminated. However, those who wail about the ‘unfairness’ and demand secularism are loathe to eliminate exceptions based on religion and race or ‘customary law’ (for example the Thesavalamai law for Tamils in Jaffna, the Kandyan marriage laws and the Muslim Marriage and Divorce Act). 

Violence. Yes. Various regimes have turned a blind eye on violence against Tamils and Muslims. In 1983, the Jathika Sevaka Sangamaya (JSS) the trade union arm of the then ruling party, the UNP, led the race riots. Minorities haven’t been innocent either. The Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) was the world’s most brutal terrorist outfit for decades. It was also a racist organization, targeting Sinhalese (the vast majority of whom are Buddhsits) and Buddhist places of worship. The LTTE also turned its guns on the Muslims, ethnically cleansing the Jaffna Peninsula of that community and turning one in ten Muslims in the Eastern Province into refugees. As for the Muslims, the Easter Sunday attacks were orchestrated by the ‘National Thowheeth Jama’ath,’ an outfit that has been spreading Islamic Fundamentalism for well over a decade. 

Sri Lanka hasn’t had an Obama, true. However, it is not that people in the USA voted for Obama because he was black. Neither did people in Sri Lanka vote for Chandrika Kumaratunga or her mother Sirimavo Bandaranaike because they were women. Racism in the USA wasn’t ‘suspended’ during Obama’s reign and gender imbalances in Sri Lanka didn’t disappear when we had female heads of state. It would be simplistic to say that a country has to be racist if the head of state is from the majority community. 

In the case of privileges in top posts in the institutional arrangement, we need to take into account the identity (religious and ethnic) of the officials. Key institutions such as the Supreme Court and the Central Bank have had heads from minority communities. In fact Sinhala Buddhist ‘representation’ in the top ranks of certain institutions have been low and even non-existent historically. 

Such ‘anomalies’ don’t necessarily say things are all beautiful and equal. Indeed, certain minority political groups believe that only a federal arrangement would amount to ‘equality’ never mind that grievance claims are exaggerated, aspirations presented as citizenship anomalies and ‘solutions’ deliberately avoiding any comment on historical, geographical and demographic realities.  There are grievances. There are citizenship anomalies. 

We are comparing and contrasting here, however. The USA has one religious holiday, Christmas (Good Friday is a holiday in the UK and in other European countries as well as in Canada, Australian and New Zealand). Sri Lanka has holidays for all religious communities with Christians and Muslims enjoying a disproportionately high number. All the above mentioned countries have religious iconography associated with the state. Theism reigns. Christian theism, to be precise. You see it in flags, anthems and even currency notes. Nothing of the kind in Sri Lanka.

Let’s talk of prisons and police brutality. If ‘racism’ is to be extracted from percentages of the incarcerated, the so-called Sinhala Buddhist State is a masochistic edifice! Sri Lanka has known police brutality but here again if you talk numbers the victims have been disproportionately Sinhala Buddhists. The issue however was not race or religion. The police defended regimes. In the USA, obviously the police defends systems, but the issue was and is race and the violence was racist. 

Innocent Tamils were certainly targeted by the coercive apparatus of the Sri Lankan state, especially in the 1980s and 1990s, but this very apparatus moved to kill 60,000 Sinhala people in just two years. The victims saw themselves as nationalists. Identity was important to them. They were unarmed and weren’t exactly caught in a crossfire or killed by undisciplined soldiers. THAT was ‘policy’ and is very different from the realities of a war-theater where a monumental hostage rescue operation was successfully completed. There were costs, as always. 

That said, Sri Lanka is a long way from obtaining inter-ethnic and inter-religious resolve. We don’t have an ideal police force. Our justice system is flawed. Our constitution needs corrective amendment. At the same time,  we have nothing even close to the kind of systemic racism and police brutality whose existence the USA can no longer deny. 

However, if there were 780 videos showing police brutality and 140 incidents of police violence against journalists during the protests held over ten days in Sri Lanka, we would have the US State Department issuing warnings, Ambassador Alaina B Teplitz taking a knee and the UN issuing statements of censure. No, forget the numbers 780, 140 and 10. They’d still do it if it was just one video of a police officer kicking a protestors, one claim of even a journalist with dubious credentials whining about persecution over a period of 365 days. On the flip side, these entities AND their local lackeys have gone all quiet over rights violations in the USA. Telling!

Equivalency. Nice word. Misleads. Pernicious. The USA is in the middle of a civil war. Sri Lanka is not. 


malindasenevi@gmail.com







08:34

By Malinda Words

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Paul Robeson didn’t scream ‘BLM’ but he knew what mattered


The Biddle. What’s that? And what has that got to do with sport? Legitimate questions. The Biddle came about at a time when countries such as the United States of America (USA) didn’t have to be cute about racism, brutality and well, repression in general. Things haven’t changed much as the murder of George Floyd and brutality unleashed on those who protested that murder demonstrate. None of it is new.

More people get to see it now. That’s the difference. ’The ship be sinking,’ as my friend, ardent basketball fan and insightful commentator on race politics in US sport Tony Courseault puts it:

‘…ask 10 people to define the system, and you get 10 different answers. The ship be sinking. It’s been rudderless for a minute. And social media, that great capitalist invention, is quickly becoming the tool for us to widen the crevasse of that formerly indomitable structure.’ 

That, and the fact of those in the sinking ship being forced to shed cloaks and wade in naked with knee, boot, baton, bullet and teargas. Horses and police cars too of course.

Back in the day things were different. The Biddle got its name from President Franklin D Roosevelt’s Attorney General, Francis Biddle, who came up with a list of ‘subversive organizations.’ This was in 1941. There were 11 to begin with but by the end of the decade there were more than 90. McCarthyism would follow soon enough.

The list did not mention individuals but people were certainly targeted. Among them a man called Paul Leroy Robeson.

He was born in 1898. His father was born into slavery, escaped and later became the minister of Princeton's Witherspoon Street Presbyterian Church. Paul became the third African-American student ever enrolled at Rutgers College and the only one at the time. He was made to suffer a broken nose and a dislocated shoulder before being selected to the school’s football team. He was a member of other teams but was once benched because a Southern team refused to compete because Rutgers ‘was fielding a Negro.’ He was a debater, a singer and an actor, skills which marked his later life and in fact added to his stature as an activist. He was elected the class valedictorian and in his speech urged classmates to work for equality of all Americans (of the USA).

That’s what he did. He worked for equality — of all peoples, not just ‘all Americans.’ He stood up for the British working class and colonized peoples of the British Empire. He supported the Republican forces during the Spanish Civil War and became active in the Council on African Affairs (CAA) which was listed by The Biddle. Yes, that. He was investigated during McCarthyism. He was denied a passport and suffered serious decline in income.

On July 25, 1946, four African Americans were lynched (according to some) or shot dead (according to others) by a mob of white males. No suspects were prosecuted for the murder of George W. and Mae Murray Dorsey, and Roger and Dorothy Malcom.

Robeson met and admonished President Harry Truman, warning that if legislation to end lynching was not enacted, ‘the Negros will defend themselves.’  Truman terminated the meeting declaring that it was not the right time to propose anti-lynching legislation! Robeson then issued a call demanding that Congress passes civil rights legislation and founded the ‘American Crusade Against Lynching' in 1946. Yes, long before anyone had heard of Rev Martin Luther King (jr). In 1951 he presented to the UN an anti-lynching petition titled ‘We Charge Genocide,’ insisting that the US Government had failed to stop the barbaric practice and therefore was guilty of violating the UN Genocide Convention. Interestingly, today, as I write, the US is using all means deemed necessary to stop the UN from investigating systemic racism.

The following extract from a wiki entry tells a lot about Robeson, the racism that’s part of US sports DNA and the systemic racism in that country.

‘A book reviewed in early 1950 as “the most complete record on college football” failed to list Robeson as ever having played for Rutgers and that he been an All-American. The NBC canceled Robeson’s appearance on Eleanor Roosevelt’s television program. The State Department denied Robeson a passport and issued a “stop notice’ at all ports.”’

An interesting reason had been offered: ‘an isolated existence inside United States borders not only afforded him less freedom of expression but also avenge his "extreme advocacy on behalf of the independence of the colonial peoples of Africa.”’ Robeson was also told that ‘his frequent criticism of the treatment of blacks in the United States should not be aired in foreign countries.’

Today, athletes such as LeBron James (Los Angeles Lakers) and Colin Kaepernick (formerly of the San Francisco 49ers) speak up against racism in the USA and of course police brutality. Hundreds of athletes have made their positions clear. They stand. They march. They speak.

Back then there was Paul Robeson. As for much of the rest of the world, it was like the river Mississippi as depicted in later renditions by Robeson of ‘Old Man River,’ originally a tune in the musical ‘Show Boat,’ the screen version of which featured Robeson: ‘What does he (meaning ‘Old Man River,’ or ‘The Mississippi’) care if the world’s got trouble, what does he care if the land ain’t free?’

The Biddle still exists, only it is not called that any more. And Robeson is alive, even though few mention his name. The Mississippi can’t keep on rolling along forever.

Other articles in the series titled 'The Interception' [published in 'The Morning']

 The plus, minus and equal of improvement
Do you have a plan?
Strengths and weaknesses
Wait, it's a strategy
The virtues of risk-free generosity
Thinking and out-thinking in sports
Read, locked-down people, read!
The team, the team!
Who should take the last shot?
It's all about partnerships
'The done thing' is rarely done
'Practice, lots of practice'
Special, always and forever
The shortcut to greatness
It's healthy to retire the braggadocio 
Money talks, gold rules: are we ok with that?
Sometimes if you don't stand up, you fall
Selections and the political economy of disappointment
So who is the GOAT?
Predecessors are great teachers
When things go wrong check the fundamentals
There's always only one more game left
Mind games are part of the sporting story
Those nervous ninetiesOut-think the opposition
School sports and parents
The importing mania in school cricket
Sportsmen and sportswomen beware: your accounts will be hacked soon!
Not all victories are recorded