Can ‘Belle’ End Hollywood’s Obsession with the White Savior?

Posted in Articles, Book/Video Reviews, History, Media Archive, United Kingdom on 2014-05-15 04:56Z by Steven

Can ‘Belle’ End Hollywood’s Obsession with the White Savior?

The Daily Beast
2014-05-04

Keli Goff

The black characters in films like ‘The Help’ and ’12 Years A Slave’ always seem to need a white knight. But the black protagonist in ‘Belle,’ a new film about racism and slavery in England, takes matters into her own hands.

The film Belle, which opens this weekend in limited release stateside, is inspired by a true story, deals with the horrors of the African slave trade, and its director is black and British. For these reasons, comparisons to the recent recipient of the Best Picture Oscar, 12 Years a Slave, are inevitable

But there are some notable differences.

Among them, Belle is set in England, while 12 Years a Slave is set in America. 12 Years a Slave depicts—in unflinching detail—the brutalities of slavery, while Belle merely hints at its physical and psychological toll. But the most significant deviation is this: whereas 12 Years a Slave faced criticism for being yet another film to perpetuate the “white savior” cliché in cinema, in Belle, the beleaguered black protagonist does something novel: she saves herself.

Belle marks the first film I’ve seen in which a black woman with agency stands at the center of the plot as a full, eloquent human being who is neither adoring foil nor moral touchstone for her better spoken white counterparts,” the novelist and TV producer Susan Fales-Hill told The Daily Beast

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Are the Tsarnaevs White?

Posted in Articles, Law, Media Archive, Religion, Social Science, United States on 2013-04-24 22:31Z by Steven

Are the Tsarnaevs White?

The Daily Beast
2013-04-24

Peter Beinart, Senior Political Writer and Associate Professor of Journalism
City University of New York

also Editor-in-chief
Open Zion

In a word, yes. But why is this so hard for Americans to grasp? Peter Beinart on our country’s long track record of conflating religion and race.

The day after last week’s attack in Boston, David Sirota wrote a column for Salon entitled “Let’s Hope the Boston Marathon Bomber Is a White American,” arguing that this would limit the resulting crackdown on civil liberties. At first, conservatives were appalled. Then, when police fingered the Tsarnaev brothers, they were triumphant. “Sorry, David Sirota, Looks Like Boston Bombing Suspects Not White Americans,” snickered a headline in Newsbusters. “Despite the most fervent hopes of some writers over at Salon.com,” added a blogger at Commentary, “the perpetrators of the Boston Marathon bombing are not ‘white Americans’.”

But the bombers were white Americans. The Tsarnaev brothers had lived in the United States for more than a decade. Dzhokhar was a U.S. citizen. Tamerlan was a legal permanent resident in the process of applying for citizenship. And as countless commentators have noted, the Tsarnaevs hail from the Caucasus, and are therefore, literally, “Caucasian.” You can’t get whiter than that.

So why did conservatives mock Sirota for being wrong? Because in public conversation in America today, “Islam” is a racial term. Being Muslim doesn’t just mean not being Christian or Jewish. It means not being white…

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France: The Socialists’ New Head, Harlem Désir

Posted in Articles, Europe, Media Archive, Politics/Public Policy on 2013-02-11 00:07Z by Steven

France: The Socialists’ New Head, Harlem Désir

The Daily Beast (In Newsweek Magazine)
2012-10-29

Tracy McNicoll, Paris correspondent

The faded star of a French anti-racist icon.

In a country that went tipsy with Obamania four years ago, Harlem Désir’s election to lead France’s ruling Socialist Party might seem an occasion for bubbly. Désir—whose gifts include the coolest name in French politics—is the nation’s first black party leader. But his rise has elicited stunning indifference. In September, 74 percent of French poll respondents said they didn’t care. Only half of card-carrying Socialists bothered to cast their ballots. And the critics have been even less kind…

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Racial Medicine: Not So Fast

Posted in Articles, Health/Medicine/Genetics, Media Archive on 2013-02-04 02:54Z by Steven

Racial Medicine: Not So Fast

The Daily Beast
2008-08-19

Sharon Begley, Senior Health and Science Correspondent
Reuters

Next time you want to start a bar fight, proclaim to everyone within earshot that “race is not real; it is just a social and cultural construct and has no biological validity.” Then duck before you get punched in the face. . . . but as you’re avoiding injury try to hand your would-be assailants a new paper published online this afternoon by the journal Clinical Pharmacology & Therapeutics, which concludes that classifying people by the crude category of race—as in, of African, Asian or European ancestry—for medical purposes, as some people want to do, is really, really stupid…

…Which brings us to the new study. Scientists at the J. Craig Venter Institute got the cool idea of analyzing the genomes of two white guys who, according to the conventional racial categories, belong to the same race. The two are Venter himself and James Watson, co-discoverer of the double-helix structure of DNA. Venter led the private effort to sequence the human genome, winding up in a tie with the public project to do the same.

It happens that the genomes of both men are in the public domain. Watson agreed to have his sequenced and published last year, with Venter right behind. So what do the genomes reveal?

The two men metabolize drugs, including antidepressants, codeine, antipsychotics and the cancer drug tamoxifen, differently. Venter has two functional copies of the CYP2D6 form of the cytochrome P-450 gene, which metabolizes more than 75 percent of drugs, while Watson has two copies of the more-sluggish variant of the gene. That’s rare for Caucasians (only 3 percent of whites have the sluggish version), but common in East Asians (49 percent of whom have it). Funny, Watson doesn’t look Chinese. But if Watson’s doctor decided to use race-based medicine to predict how he would metabolize drugs, she’d say, well, we have a white guy here, and whites rarely have the sluggish version, so I’ll assume Watson doesn’t have it either. As a result, the drug would stay in Watson’s system longer, with stronger effects compared to someone in whom the drug was quickly metabolized and cleared from the body. “It is unlikely that a doctor would guess that optimal drug dosages might differ for Drs. Watson and Venter,” the scientists write.

That’s why Venter and colleagues conclude that race is too crude a proxy for what genetic group—ethnicity or, as biologists say, population—someone belongs to. It is imperative to “go beyond simplistic ethnic categorization,” they write, since that can be seriously—and perhaps fatally—misleading. (In the U.S., some 100,000 people a year die of adverse drug reactions, many caused by an inability to properly metabolize the medication because of a particular CYP2D6 variation.) “Race/ethnicity should be considered only a makeshift solution for personalized genomics because it is too approximate,” they write…

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Three Is Not Enough

Posted in Anthropology, Articles, Media Archive on 2013-02-03 22:43Z by Steven

Three Is Not Enough

The Daily Beast
Newsweek Magazine
1995-02-12

Sharon Begley, Senior Health and Science Correspondent
Reuters

In 1990, Americans claimed membership in nearly 300 races or ethnic groups and 600 American Indian tribes. Hispanics had 70 categories of their own.

To most Americans race is as plain as the color of the nose on your face. Sure, some light-skinned blacks, in some neighborhoods, are taken for Italians, and some Turks are confused with Argentines. But even in the children of biracial couples, racial ancestry is writ large—in the hue of the skin and the shape of the lips, the size of the brow and the bridge of the nose. It is no harder to trace than it is to judge which basic colors in a box of Crayolas were combined to make tangerine or burnt umber. Even with racial mixing, the existence of primary races is as obvious as the existence of primary colors.

Or is it? C. Loring Brace has his own ideas about where race resides, and it isn’t in skin color. If our eyes could perceive more than the superficial, we might find race in chromosome 11: there lies the gene for hemoglobin. If you divide humankind by which of two forms of the gene each person has, then equatorial Africans, Italians and Greeks fall into the “sickle-cell race”; Swedes and South Africa’s Xhosas (Nelson Mandela’s ethnic group) are in the healthy-hemoglobin race. Or do you prefer to group people by whether they have epicanthic eye folds, which produce the “Asian” eye? Then the !Kung San (Bushmen) belong with the Japanese and Chinese. Depending on which trait you choose to demarcate races, “you won’t get anything that remotely tracks conventional [race] categories,” says anthropologist Alan Goodman, dean of natural science at Hampshire College.

The notion of race is under withering attack for political and cultural reasons—not to mention practical ones like what to label the child of a Ghanaian and a Norwegian. But scientists got there first. Their doubts about the conventional racial categories—black, white, Asian—have nothing to do with a sappy “we are all the same” ideology. Just the reverse. “Human variation is very, very real,” says Goodman. “But race, as a way of organizing [what we know about that variation], is incredibly simplified and bastardized.” Worse, it does not come close to explaining the astounding diversity of humankind—not its origins, not its extent, not its meaning. “There is no organizing principle by which you could put 5 billion people into so few categories in a way that would tell you anything important about humankind’s diversity,” says Michigan’s Brace, who will lay out the case against race at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. About 70 percent of cultural anthropologists, and half of physical anthropologists, reject race as a biological category, according to a 1989 survey by Central Michigan University anthropologist Leonard Lieberman and colleagues. The truths of science are not decided by majority vote, of course. Empirical evidence, woven into a theoretical whole, is what matters. The threads of the argument against the standard racial categories:…

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The Original Slave Colony: Barbados and Andrea Stuart’s ‘Sugar in the Blood’

Posted in Articles, Book/Video Reviews, Caribbean/Latin America, History, Media Archive, Slavery on 2013-01-25 03:55Z by Steven

The Original Slave Colony: Barbados and Andrea Stuart’s ‘Sugar in the Blood’

The Daily Beast
2013-01-24

Eric Herschthal
Columbia University

Barbados provided the blueprint for all future British slave settlements in the American South. Andrea Stuart talks to Eric Herschthal about how her family was entwined in the island’s tormented history.

On the face of it, what happened in the tiny island of Barbados 400 years ago seems irrelevant to Americans today. Even now, the island matters to Americans for perhaps one reason: the weather—it’s a popular tourist getaway. But in her exceptional new book, Sugar in the Blood: A Family’s Story of Slavery and Empire, Andrea Stuart insists Barbados, with its long history of slavery, matters more than we know.

“I wanted to take slavery out of its niche,” she said. “It’s not a black story, it’s not a white story. I want to remind people that this story belongs to us all.” Slavery and its legacy—race—still shape our world. But more specifically, the creation of Barbados, the British empire’s earliest, most profitable settlement in the New World, provided the blueprint for all its future slave colonies: South Carolina, North Carolina, Virginia, Georgia, you name it.

The island’s first settlers, like Stuart’s white ancestor George Ashby, arrived in the early-1600s. Spain was raking in huge profits with their New World colonies, mainly by extracting gold and silver. The British wanted to catch up, but when they arrived in the Caribbean, no precious metals were found. Within a few decades, however, they discovered they could make money by cultivating another precious commodity: sugar, or as it was called by many at the time, “white gold.”

That demanded workers, and the British quickly found a cheap labor source: African slaves. By century’s end, 80 percent of Barbados’s 85,000 inhabitants were Africans, giving rise to a rigid racial hierarchy: a small elite of whites on top; the masses of black workers on bottom; and, somewhere in between, a small caste of illegitimate mixed-race children, born to masters and their preyed-upon female slaves.

Given how small the island was, many of the whites who couldn’t establish a large plantation moved on to other British colonies. Many went to places that would become part of the United States. They replicated the Barbadian plantation model, growing mainly rice and tobacco, and had an outsized impact on early America. In colonies like South Carolina, six of the governors were Barbadians between 1670 and 1730. Other Barbadian émigrés, like George Ashby’s Quaker brother, helped settle Pennsylvania. Barbados was so important to the British colonial system that even George Washington, who only left North America once in his life, made that stop on the island, to help his sick brother recover from an illness…

…The “small people” she chose to focus on are her own descendants: George Ashby; his descendants like the wealthy plantation owner Robert Cooper; and several of Cooper’s slave concubines and their black children. Stuart’s mixed racial heritage helped her paint such a ruthlessly honest portrait of slavery, where she can both admire and revile slave-owners like Cooper—even wonder whether some of the slaves he slept with may have loved him.

“The reality is that most blacks have mixed blood,” she said. “When I was doing research on George Ashby, I felt some empathy. There’s something brave about leaving the world you know. If you can make that empathetic journey, you can show a more complicated picture.”…

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Obama Should Talk About Being Biracial

Posted in Articles, Barack Obama, Identity Development/Psychology, Media Archive, Politics/Public Policy, United States on 2013-01-20 22:52Z by Steven

Obama Should Talk About Being Biracial

The Daily Beast
2013-01-20

David Kaufman

The President identifies as black, but David Kaufman hopes that during his second term, he’ll also discuss his biracial heritage.

Four years after he first entered the White House, there’s no longer anything surprising about calling Barack Obama—America’s first black president—a “transformational” leader. Yet the full extent of Obama’s transformational potential has yet to be realized in one realm: his biracial heritage.

Obama’s 1995 book Dreams from my Father makes clear that his identity was influenced as much—if not more—by his Caucasian mother than his absentee African father. But since he won the Democratic nomination in 2008, both Obama and the media seem to have shut the closet door on his multi-culti background. With his black wife and children by his side, Obama certainly represents an aspirational—and much-needed—African-American cultural ideal. But with one half of his family history so conspicuously overlooked, whether by circumstance or design, that ideal is not the entire story of his identity.

To a certain extent, I think it’s been an act,” San Francisco State University Professor Andrew Jolivétte—editor of Obama and the Biracial Factor, a collection of essays—says of the president’s mono-racial messaging. “The President has been afraid to speak more openly about being biracial because it could be read in so many different ways.”…

…With so few journalists actually asking the President about being mixed-race, Obama has conversely had very little to tell them. Or maybe because he’s so publicly—and repeatedly—identified as black in the past, the President simply feels he has nothing left to reveal. “Some might suggest he’s purposely not talking about it, but perhaps his mixed heritage is no longer some on-going restless question for Obama,” suggests Michele Elam, Professor in the Department of English and the Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity at Stanford. “I don’t think he’s repressing his mixed heritage or capitulating to the ‘one-drop’ rule,” Elam continues. “For Obama, the choice to identify as black has never been merely about biology or blood … He sees blackness as containing differences of experience and ancestry.”…

Read the entire aritcle here.

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In Second Inaugural Address, Can President Obama Reassure a Worried Public?

Posted in Articles, Barack Obama, Media Archive, Politics/Public Policy, United States on 2013-01-20 03:17Z by Steven

In Second Inaugural Address, Can President Obama Reassure a Worried Public?

The Daily Beast
2013-01-19

Evan Thomas

These are gloomy times for an inauguration. In Newsweek, Evan Thomas asks: On Monday, can the president rise to the occasion with a historically inspiring message?

The last Inauguration Day, Jan. 20, 2009, dawned bright and cold. More than a million people, possibly the largest live audience ever to see a president inaugurated, and certainly the biggest since Lyndon Johnson’s inauguration in 1965, streamed to the Washington Mall for Barack Obama’s oath-taking as the 44th president of the United States. Even the most jaded old Washington hands could feel a different vibe in the crowd—people seemed excited, happy, some teary-eyed to witness, for the first time in history, an African-American sworn in as chief executive.

A president who is writing (or, more likely, editing and refining) his inaugural address is confronted with a very difficult challenge: how to speak in his own true voice while at the same time speaking for every man and woman. The challenge to be at once unique and universal has defeated virtually all of Obama’s predecessors. With a few memorable ­exceptions—like JFK’s, Lincoln’s second, FDR’s first (“the only thing to fear is fear itself”)—inaugural addresses have long disappointed their expectant listeners. The words rarely live up to the occasion. Most inaugural addresses “tend not to be very good,” says presidential historian Michael Beschloss. “The best rhetoric has been used up in the campaign, and presidents don’t want to promise too much. They are planning to give their first State of the Union addresses in a few weeks and they don’t want to preempt. Plus, most presidents are not good speakers or writers.”…

Read the entire article here.

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‘Searching for Zion’: Emily Raboteau’s Hunt for the Promised Land

Posted in Africa, Articles, Biography, Interviews, Media Archive on 2013-01-15 18:36Z by Steven

‘Searching for Zion’: Emily Raboteau’s Hunt for the Promised Land

The Daily Beast
2013-01-13

Mindy Farabee

A writer set out around the world to find the mythical ‘promised land’ of the African diaspora. Emily Raboteau speaks about the Jewish search for the same, African-American tourism to Ghana, and Barack Obama’s ties to this search.

Mention the notion of Zion, author Emily Raboteau notes, and most people will think almost automatically of Israel. But for citizens of the African diaspora, Zion, with its promised land of abundance and freedom from oppression, has carried profound cultural significance since the days of slavery, when the saga of Hebrew slaves fleeing Egyptian captors served as a galvanizing narrative.

In Searching for Zion: The Quest for Home in the African Diaspora, Raboteau’s self-described “strange admixture” of travelogue, cultural anthropology, and historical study, the author uses this promised land as a point of departure, lighting out for Israel, Ethiopia, Jamaica, Ghana, and the post-Katrina American South to talk to immigrants and others who have wrestled with displacement.

Her new book likewise stumbles across complications everywhere. In this edited interview below, she talks about family ghosts, the other side of heritage tourism, and the state of Zion today…

Read the entire interview here.

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