2011 Year of the French Overseas Territories

The Year of the French Overseas Territories, or in French "2011, année des Outre-mer", is almost halfway, but there are still some mayor events on the agenda.

The Year of Overseas Territories is a celebration of France and its diversity. The focus is on the "identities" of the twelve overseas departments and collectivities in all areas: culture, institutions, education, environment, economy, tourism, fine art, etc.

For more information about the French Overseas Territories and the upcoming events see http://www.france.fr

Video of the official kick-off with Marie-Luce Penchard, the minister of the Overseas Territories


And an interesting documentary about the history of the Overseas Territories.

African-American students are increasingly travelling abroad

African Americans are underrepresented in study abroad opportunities, according to the Institute of International Education. But things are changing.

According to Jada F. Smith in The Root, international living is booming among African-American students. “Many of them have expanded their marketability by increasing their number of passport stamps with global volunteerism, education, immersion language training or professional experience.”

“I was one of eight young professionals chosen to participate in a six-month media fellowship for recent college graduates,” Smith writes. “ Résumés were compared, quiet rivalries established and pedigrees picked over.

What scored highest with this crowd was an impressive answer to the question, "So, which countries have you traveled to?" Some had spent semesters studying in Spain or a year teaching in Malaysia, along with the requisite post-graduation excursions through Europe and reporting trips to sub-Saharan Africa. As for me, well, I didn't even have a passport.

The others lived in a global community -- one that I saw as gated and inaccessible.

The problem of an un-globalized population has not gone unnoticed. In 2009, President Obama began the "100,000 Strong Initiative," a $2.25 million program intended to encourage young Americans to travel to and study in China. This past February, first lady Michelle Obama spoke to students at Howard University about the initiative and the importance of having an international perspective in a world that is becoming increasingly less U.S.-centric.

Yes, our widespread lack of international participation is so chronic that it has prompted a multimillion-dollar presidential initiative. But where our white peers may need the push to go overseas, students of color often need a shove. Blacks make up about 4.2 percent of all American study-abroad students, while 81 percent are white, according to the Institute of International Education. …

In the past, experts attributed the lack of international travel among young people of color to financial constraints, fear of racism, parents unwilling to support the decision and a lack of role models.”

Read the whole story at The Root

Awesome Airbrushed Camaro

Amazing patriotic car for the Camaro5 Fest 2011 in Phoenix Arizona.












































Source

Should Black people travel to Russia?

Should people of color or black people go to Russia? The question was originally published as a blog post on the website Moscowthroughbrowneyes of a graduate student living in Moscow in 2009.

Because there is 'yes' and a 'no' answer I will post them both. And because Russia is a 'special' destination for black (and Asian) people I will also add a few links.

Should you go?

No

Says the blogger of Moscow Through Brown Eyes

A reader wrote to me:
I’m leaving this comment because since you have lived in Russia and know much more about what’s going on there than I do, I was wondering if you could answer a question for me. I was wondering, do you think it would even be smart at this point for a Black student to go to Russia to study? I was planning on going there after the summer for a year-long study abroad program but after hearing about all the racism I’m thinking that it might not be the right thing to do. Did you have a lot of close calls when you were over there?

This is a painful question for me.

On the one hand, I have had amazing experiences in Russia and I have been indelibly marked by the time I have spent with Russian history, literature and contemporary society. I can’t imagine my sense of the world outside of my interactions with Russia.

On the other hand, I simply don’t know if I can, in good conscience, advise people of Asian or African descent to travel to Russia in light of the continuing problem of racist violence.

In the past ten days, there have been attacks on Bangladeshi and Chinese students in Moscow, in addition to the earlier assaults this year on citizens of Cameroon and Vietnam. Last December, a nineteen-year-old African American was stabbed multiple times in Volgograd on his way home from the gym.

While these are certainly the most extreme types of violence, interviews with African students also reveal pervasive everyday racism in Russian society. If you travel to Russia, you are, quite frankly, playing a numbers game with your life and your well-being. Read the full story at http://moscowthroughbrowneyes.blogspot.com And read the comments and the other postings.

Note: It's very good blog, but there is a risk you will stop reading and decide you will never set one foot in Russia.


Yes

Says Jonathan Fianu in Russia Beyond the Headlines

Recently, a reader of my blog wrote me an email asking what life was like on the ground for a black person in Russia, and if there was any truth to some of the stories about rampant racism she had heard in the United States.

Her son had studied Russian and was very interested in visiting Russia, but she was concerned about these issues. I knew that the issue was important; after all, it is normally the first question that pops into people's head when they hear that I work in Russia. But usually they ask something else. This particular question is generally left unspoken, or rather unasked. I know people are thinking about it, and I know people want to ask me, but they rarely do so.

In my experience, Russians are some of the most welcoming and accepting people around. As a black person in Russia, I have not only gone about my business unaffected, I have been embraced, welcomed and treated exceptionally well—even on par with being a celebrity in the smaller towns. Many people do not know this, but African students have been coming to study in Russia for decades. In fact, there is one in Chistopol, where I live. One day I was speaking to one of the directors in the local Vostok watch factory and he affectionately told me how he sold watches to this gentleman, who was training to be a doctor, and how he has been accepted.


Prime Minster Vladimir Putin touched on stereotypes about Russia in his speech in Zurich after his country won right to host the 2018 World Cup. He said something to the effect that there are still a large number of Soviet-era stereotypes prevalent in the minds of people in the West, and once these people have the opportunity to visit Russia, they will see Russia for what it is: a welcoming country that is continually modernizing. Read the full story at Russia Beyond the Headlines


Blogs and websites

The blog of a American graduate student, who worked in Russia for a one year. A top blog with a lot of links.
http://moscowthroughbrowneyes.blogspot.com

The blog of US financial professional who worked in Russia for 10 months.
http://myrussiablog.blogspot.com

The blog of Afro-Russian blogger Sholademi (Russian)
http://sholademi.livejournal.com

Asylum in Bardak - Africans in Russia
http://african-russia.net

The Moscow Protestant Chaplaincy, and English-speaking Christian congregation in Moscow
http://www.mpcrussia.org


Some links to news articles in the Mocow times

The recent riots offered yet more proof that Russia still has not come to terms with what or who it is – a debate that has been simmering since the country’s foundation.
Link:Riots highlight need for Russia to define itself

I was sitting in the locker room at my local fitness club in Moscow on November 5, 2008, when a fellow sweat-producer remarked casually to a recent iron-pumper, "How about that American election, eh? Did they run out of white people over there or what?"
Link:Resetting race

The country's Africans know that the capital is no place to let your guard down.
"I knew folks who lost their lives," said Nigerian-born JK Samson. "Attacks, fights, even in the lecture room and with lecturers, just name it."
Link:Moscow’s mean streets

Video

Video: 'The multinational heritage of Russia and all Russians'. An interesting video to get an idea about Russia's diverse population.



Afro-Europe postings

My series of postings about Russia has come to an end, at least for now. Below the postings I wrote about Russia these two weeks.

Lily Golden, the Russian African-American social activist, has died
Video: Black in Russia - harsh life on the streets in Moscow
Black people in Russia - Yelena Khanga
The challenges of biracial children in Russia

Meet Miles Marshall Lewis - An African-American writer and music journalist in Paris

Miles Marshall Lewis is an African-American writer/editor in Paris France. He has published books a few books and has written for top magazines & newspapers like Vibe, Rolling Stone, and the Village Voice.

And he also has a great blog with stories about his live in France and with interviews with American black people in France.

Check out his blog at www.furthermucker.com, and his stories 'French like me' on his blog here.

Miles Marshall Lewis in his own words. "I was born in 1970, the year Toni Morrison wrote The Bluest Eye and Afrika Bambaataa started to deejay.



My writing life began eleven years later, when Marvel Comics published my letter to the editor of Captain America.

Growing up in the Bronx during the 70s endeared me to hiphop culture from the start, hearing Kool DJ AJ spin records in St. Mary’s Park outside my grandma’s South Bronx window.

Penning magazine cover stories about Erykah Badu, Mos Def, A Tribe Called Quest and Nas, I’ve also assumed positions at XXL (deputy editor), Vibe (music editor), BET.com (deputy music editor) and Russell Simmons’ Oneworld (literary editor) from 1998-2004. ...

As a native New Yorker, I felt the city change post-September 11 — NYPD backpack searches on the train, armed guards patrolling Grand Central Station — and pissed off over a Bush-misled America, I moved to Paris in the spring of 2004.

For over a year, I wrote about my experiences as a postmodern bohemian B-boy in a 21st-century City of Light for PopMatters.com, a column called “Paris Noir.”

My encounters with French hiphop and black culture in Paris, in addition to marrying a Martinican woman and helping raise our two sons, have led to my next book, as yet untitled.

With one foot ever in NYC, I founded Bronx Biannual in 2006 as an urbane urban literary journal full of essays and fiction from celebrated and unsung writers who share the hiphop aesthetic. "

Read the whole story at his Blog www.furthermucker.com

see a recent interview with Lewis here

Bonus
Video of a winter tour through Paris (BlackAtlas/Nelson George)

Timbuktu - The place where the Western "Songs and Dance Theory" of Black people ends

Because we are in the middle of the Black History Month UK a story about the mystical place Timbuktu.

"Everybody's heard of Timbuktu but few people actually know where it is and even fewer ever get there. Everyone knows that it's a long way from here to Timbuktu, wherever "here" might be," wrote a travel journalist.

Well Timbuktu lies in the country of Mali and it’s the place where the Western "songs and dance theory" of African people ends. Because in Timbuktu you will find the hidden libraries and manuscripts of the ancient black scholars of one of the oldest Universities on the planet.


Aminatta Forna tells the story of legendary Timbuktu and its long hidden legacy of hundreds of thousands of ancient manuscripts. With its university founded around the same time as Oxford, Timbuktu is proof that the reading and writing of books have long been as important to Africans as to Europeans.


The manuscripts of Timbuktu cover diverse subjects such as mathematics, chemistry, physics, optics, astronomy, medicine, Islamic sciences, history, geography, the tradition of Islam's Prophet Mohammed, government legislation and treatise, jurisprudence, and much more. The manuscripts of Timbuktu are a living testimony of the highly advanced and refined civilization in Sub-Saharan Africa.

But although this heritage is familiar to numerous Africans, many Westerners still believe that Africa had only an oral, nonliterate culture. Comments like those made by the British historian Hugh Trevor-Roper in 1963 still resonate: "Perhaps in the future, there will be some African history to teach. But at present there is none. There is only the history of Europeans in Africa. The rest is darkness."

In reality, Timbuktu was once a haven of high literacy. These manuscripts, some dating to the 14th century and written mostly in Arabic, show that medieval Timbuktu was a religious and cultural hub as well as a commercial crossroads on the trans-Saharan caravan route. Situated at the strategic point where the Sahara touches on the River Niger, it was the gateway for African goods bound for the merchants of the Mediterranean, the courts of Europe and the larger Islamic world, wrote Lila Azam Zanganeh in the New York times.

Read more about this video at hwww.fordfoundation.org


Links
http://www.timbuktufoundation.org

The post was inspired by the Afro-Brazilian site http://www.casadasafricas.com.br

Video: Black people in Spain – Judi Oshowole on life in Barcelona

Black travel expert Nelson George of BlackAtlas visited Barcelona and spoke to Black British Judi Oshowole who has lived in Barcelona for 18 years. She tells BlackAtlas about the city's growing diversity and the community of black women, from countries around the world, she has helped to build.

See more videos at www.blackatlas.com

See a video of Judy Oshowole talking in a meeting of a group of black women in Barcelona, the BIBS (Barcelona International Black Sisters). The BIBS consists of women from all over the globe - the UK, the US, the Caribbean and South America, Germany, Sweden, The Netherlands... See the post at www.fatjuicyoyster.com

Trivia on Barcelona

Frank Rijkaard was the successful head coach (2003–2008) of the Football Club Barcelona. He was appointed as head coach together with his assistent coach Henk ten Cate. Both of them are black and of Dutch/Surinamese origin.

Link

Also see the post Black people in Spain here.

The end of the Netherlands Antilles

Today October 10th 2010, the Netherlands Antilles are dissolved as a single political entity. The islands of Curaçao and Sint Maarten are now independent countries within the Kingdom of the Netherlands. The islands of Bonaire, Saba and Sint Eustatius are now ‘special councils’ of the Netherlands.

In 2005 the population of Curaçao voted for independence. This led to the Dutch government and the Netherlands Antilles discussing a new political structure for the five-island group situated in the Caribbean off the northern coast of South America.

Aruba has been a independent within the Kingdom of the Netherlands since 1986.

Expatica wrote: Curacao and St Maarten will each have their own parliament, government, prime minister and currency: the guilder.

Bonaire, Saba and St Eustatius will switch to the US dollar and have "island councils" akin to municipal councils. Their inhabitants will vote for the national Dutch government.

The three new municipalities will have to adopt many Dutch laws. The most contentious among them, allowing for abortion, gay marriage and euthanasia, will be systematically adopted over a period of two years, said Dutch interior ministry spokesman Thijs Manten