If you want to know more about coffee specifically and exploitation generally, definitely check out Black Gold airing on PBS on April 10th. The independent film by Nick Francis and Marc Francis reveals the plight of Ethiopian coffee farmers and why they receive a tiny fraction of the profit on their goods.
The film, which showed last night at the Fine Arts Theatre in Los Angeles, traces the coffee from the farmers to the exporters to the importers to the retailers and finally to the consumers. It makes the argument that because coffee goes through a chain of six links, the farmers themselves make practically no money on their product.
The film shows beautiful scenes from the Ethiopian countryside. It juxtaposes African poverty and malnutrition centers with frivolous Starbucks employees. The audience jeered at the employees and practically hissed every time a Westerner was shown drinking a Starbucks.
Though the movie neglects to fully explain the impact of the Ethiopian government’s disastrous economic policies, it does shed some light on what exactly free trade is and why the WTO talks lead to the exploitation of Africa.
Ever heard of the Westboro Baptist Church? It’s a small church in Topeka, Kan. whose mission is to spread the word throughout the world that “God Hates America.” This church was spearheaded by Pastor Fred Phelps (who actually looks like the devil himself). His basic, homophobic doctrine blames our country’s failed success in Iraq because of the immorality of the military. They believe homosexuality has infiltrated our nation’s armed services, and therefore God has it in for America’s destruction.
Phelps’ followers have been protesting at military funerals of fallen soldiers in Iraq all over the country. Last week, two men from the WBC showed up at one funeral for a dead soldier from Maine carrying signs actually saying “pray for more dead soldiers.” These crazy fundamentalists have encouraged 27 states to introduce legislation that would restrict funeral picketing. But the picketers continue to claim their right to free speech under the first amendment, and have filed lawsuits under the ACLU to fights these bans.
The WBC is in charge of the godhatesamerica.com and the godhatesfags.com websites. Also on the site is a bizarre list of people who are damned to hell. According to them, among those already in hell include Ronald Reagan, Pope John Paul II, and Martin Luther King, Jr. Oh yeah, and God also hates Canada and Sweden for their “fag-tolerance.”
Watch this riveting video about this church by a British journalist. These people need to get out more. Thank God for English class. I swear you learn about the weirdest stuff in there.
My apologies for the aggressively unoriginal post title, but I am running dangerously low on creative fuel. Thanks to endless bounty of the internet though, I am rarely tasked to come up with anything original – instead I can just string together a couple of barely coherent sentences, provide a link or three and let the world wide web take over. The theme for this post, you ask? A whole lot of race relations and a sprinkle of Charles Bronson, Mr. Death Wish himself.
1. As many of you know, New York bore witness to yet another police shooting of an unarmed African American man in November 2006, when 23-year-old Sean Bell died in a hail of 50 police bullets. On Monday, three of the five police officers involved were indicted, two of them for first and second-degree manslaughter. Many supporters of Sean Bell’s family were understandably disappointed by the relatively paltry indictments handed down, and with racial tensions already reignited by the shooting (Amadou Diallo, the unarmed African immigrant who was cut down by 19 of 41 bullets fired at him in 1999, is still fresh in many New Yorker’s minds) all eyes will be on the upcoming criminal trials. Here’s the New York Times news story, and here’s a searing Newsday column documenting and attacking racial profiling in the city.
2. In another town with a long, troubled history of racism, a 14-year-old African American girl with no prior arrest record, Shaquanda Cotton, was sentenced to up to 7 years in prison for shoving a hall monitor at her high school. The Chicago Tribune did a great job of writing up this disquieting (to risk understatement) story here.
3. New York Times columnist Bob Herbert has also done an excellent job in resurrecting the case of Gary Tyler, a 17-year-old African American boy who was railroaded onto death row in 1974 (he escaped his fate only because the U.S. Supreme Court ruled Louisiana’s death penalty unconstitutional) and has languished in prison ever since. It’s clear he’s innocent, but, as could be expected unfortunately, the wheels of justice turn quite a bit slower for people of color, especially down south. Check out these articles on the Free Gary Tyler website (I don’t have Times Select, but the columns on the website will have to suffice) here, here and here.
4. And finally, Robert Lipsyte exposes the seedy underbelly of college basketball as March Madness barrels forward here. While I cop to having a Facebook bracket of my own, I agree wholeheartedly with Lipsyte, and it seems many others do as well (Najee Ali, the prominent Los Angeles civil rights activist and former assistant to the USC women’s college basketball team in the early ’80s expressed this strongly worded sentiment to me about it – “I call it slavery”), that it is patently ridiculous for these schools and TV networks to be making millions while the athletes themselves, many of them from impoverished backgrounds, struggle to support themselves at school. The whole wretched affair is steeped in race, and it would be nice, to say the least, to see some college athletes attempt to start a union or something along those lines to demand a chunk of the profits that they create.
5. Finally, on a much lighter note, please check out this terrific Charles Bronson Japanese commercial my brother brought to my attention. I promise you it will be worth your time.
It may not have been a good week in Washington or in Iraq (is it ever?), but this week has certainly been good for soul music fans. Here are four r&b artists that P+P thinks you could use to update your music library.
Amy Winehouse is a British jazz and soul singer who recently made her debut in the U.S. with her second album entitled Back to Black, out last Tuesday. I first heard her music while listening to my launchcast player on yahoo music (an excellent source for internet radio because it allows you to customize what you hear while randomly selecting music that it thinks you might like). Her style of soul with its punkish, bluesy vibe is a definite throwback, nothing I’ve ever heard before. This past February she won a Brit Award (the equivalent of the Grammy’s) for Best British Female Artist. Her first album, Frank released in 2003 went Platinum and earned a #13 spot on the UK charts.
Another Brit is making moves on the airwaves with the release of her third album, Introducing Joss Stone, hitting stores this past Tuesday. Nineteen-year-old Joss Stone, a native of Dover, Kent, England, first caught the attention of the American music scene in 2003 with the release of her debut album, The Soul Sessions. Since then, she has gone on to perform with big names like Stevie Wonder, Blondie, and Gladys Knight. Switching from innocent blonde to funky redhead, Stone has a completely new attitude with this album. Highlights on the album are the collabos with Lauryn Hill and Common, and her new 70s’ish-style single “Tell Me About It.”
As if the discussion of Barack Obama’s authenticity as a black man wasn’t enough, a March 19 LA Times op-ed written by columnist David Ehrenstein attacks his supporters, claiming whites support him in order to assauge white guilt by supporting the “Magic Negro.”
He describes the “Magic Negro” as being “a figure of postmodern folk culture, coined by snarky 20th century sociologists, to explain a cultural figure who emerged in the wake of Brown vs. Board of Education.” Quoting Wikipedia(because it’s such a credible source of information) he says: “He has no past, he simply appears one day to help the white protagonist.” (By the way, they couldn’t get the URL right…shout out to Pajamas Media!) Morgan Freeman, Will Smith, Don Cheadle are some of today’s “Magic Negroes” in Hollywood, he says. While Al Sharpton and Snoop Dogg are authentic, Barack is not.
