NY Times article on mixed race identity

"Black? White? Asian? More Young Americans Choose All of the Above"

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/30/us/30mixed.html?_r=1&src=me&ref=general

Useful Media Clips Concerning Arizona Tragedy on January 8

I found the following media clips useful for thinking about the events on the morning of January 8, 2011, the attempted assassination attempt on Representative Gabrielle Giffords.

Across America: Latino Community Sighs with Relief

http://www.npr.org/2011/01/12/132865098/in-tucson-a-sigh-of-relief-from-latino-community

Obama Speech Evokes Emotional Moments in Tucson

http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/politics/jan-june11/tucsonreact_01-13.html#

Arizona Attack Puts Power of Political Rhetoric Back in the Spotlight

http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/politics/jan-june11/rhetoric_01-10.html#

Some Short Stories

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s The Thing Around Your Neck, an anthology of short stories, focuses on relationships, not only person-to-person, but also person to system interactions.  Many of the perspectives of the narratives unfold through the experiences of women facing exploitation, deceit, and abuse as well as, in one case, perpetuating these same actions.  Adichie’s characters interface with systems such as the American Embassy in Nigeria, a detention center, a writing retreat, and academic settings. The author brings a verisimilitude to the fictional characters in the U.S. and Nigeria.  The author divides her real life between both places.   

The stories linger in your mind and stay vibrant upon several iterations of reading.  The story, “A Private Experience” records the small piece of time in which two women, a Hausa Muslim onion trader and Igbo Christian medical student hide together, brought together by chance, in a small abandoned store as a riot between their groups rages on outside.  The narrative, “The Thing Around your Neck” records the challenges and feelings of a vulnerable, but persistent 22 year-old Nigerian woman’s experience in the United States facing people’s expectations about her.  The last piece in the book, “The Headstrong Historian” contains a powerful line of resistance to colonialism and colonial attitudes in epistemology or the creation of knowledge as the character of Grace, a budding historian, thinks about, “a clear link between education and dignity, between the hard obvious things that are printed in books and the soft, subtle things that lodge themselves into the soul" (Adichie, 2009, p. 216).

This book contains stories for personal and/or educational reading story-by-story or read cover-to-cover at one time.   I look forward to her novels: Half of a Yellow Sun and Purple Hibiscus.

                                                                               References

Adichie, C. N. (2009). The thing around your neck. NY: Anchor Books.



Documentary: Garbage Dreams

The decline of the livelihood for the established workers and the youth of the Coptic Christian Zaballeen community in Cairo, Egypt is recorded in the documentary Garbage Dreams: Raised in the Trash Trade.  The viewer enters the world of Adham (17 years old), Osama (16), and Nabil (18) and Laila, a community member and social worker.  Small recycling microbusinesses have supported the community, but transnational corporations from Italy and Spain move in to take-over the garbage collecting and recycling industry in Cairo. The life of the Zaballeen workers is not presented as easy in the least, in fact children and adults in the community must receive tetanus shots at regular intervals. Poverty and "making do" is visually presented in most every home scene. One father will go to jail for not being able to pay the permits needed to build a small addition on the tenement-like living structure for his son and future family to live.  The youth show a great respect for the possibilities of trash and are dismayed to see landfills and lack of attention to the smallest detritus that pervades the practices of the corporate recyclers.  The Zaballeen realize that while they recycle 80% of the trash in their labors, the corporations only recycle 20%.   The knowledge of trash almost works as a kind of ecological knowledge in the community.  Exposed to a wider set of skills through the community recycling school, the coming-of-age Zaballeen youth still struggle against their almost caste-like position, “the nothing class,” and the lack of earnings and employment and a dismal outlook at seeing their livelihood disapear. Laila helps community members of all ages in an assortment of ways and continues to coach everyone to be optimistic and strategically minded. Environmental justice issues of many kinds connect to this film.

http://www.garbagedreams.com/

http://www.pbs.org/independentlens/garbage-dreams/film.html (this has an interesting game as part of the website)

Iskander, M. (Director). (2009). Garbage dreams: Raised in the trash trade. NY: Cinema Guild.

Doctors Without Borders Website

The Doctors Without Borders website offers virtual tours through their medical landscapes. For example, this link brings us to a cholera treatment center and the basic decencies and infrastructure built to stop a public health epidemic in Haiti:

http://ctc.msf.org/home/en

Clicking on a part of the image provides more information, guiding one through what must be an intense space to be in actual life.

The website juxtaposes well with Paul Farmer's book Pathologies of Power: Health, Human Rights, and the New War on the Poor (2003, University of California Press) in which the idea of structural violence is explained as contributing to disease and epidemics and disregard for human rights.