Monthly Archives: August 2009

Afro-American Studies major doing research in Kenya

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Sonia Gloss, a senior majoring in Afro-American Studies at UMass Amherst, is conducting research in Kenya for her senior thesis. At the end of May she traveled to Mombasa, then to Mariakani, and on from there all over the country. Here is an excerpt from her wonderful travel/research blog at http://soniamombasa.blogspot.com/ ::

“I have done some research this week. Although I am focusing on the lives and sexual lives of truck drivers, I am not limiting my focus and am open to interviewing and talking with all Kenyan men. I spoke with about 5 different non-truck driving men this week. Actually I was speaking with one regarding the stereotypes that certain people hold about men of different tribes, specifically Luo and how people view them as promiscuous because they are uncircumcised. As I was walking around my street a little bit later that day, two men called me over saying they had heard I was asking men about these issues and they wanted to talk to me about it, primarily about why men want to be with so many women. It was great! I was being asked to research, so I was very excited. I talked about many things with those men, it is incredibly interesting to hear oral histories and the things people talk about.”

Sonia will be writing up her findings under my direction this year. I look forward to seeing her work and practicing my Kiswahili with her. This is not her first time doing work in Africa. Here’s an excerpt on her from Maasai International Challenge Africa  http://www.micatz.org/staff.html where she previously worked:

Sonia Gloss – International Program Manager
Sonia has a big heart for the poor especially the children; Sonia was first exposed to travelling the open road while on a cross country trip around the United Republic of Tanzania at the tender age of twenty. Sonia plays a role of conducting orientation seminars for the students and individual people from USA and others near countries who want to come to serve in Tanzania…She’s very excited to be working with Maasai Challenge to provide once-in-a-lifetime travel and conduct volunteer opportunities seminars and feels like she’s finally able to make a difference in global conservation.

SAFE TRAVELS SONIA! TUTAONANA!

Tell It Bob Herbert!

Anger Has Its Place
By BOB HERBERT
Cambridge, Mass.

No more than five or six minutes elapsed from the time the police were alerted to the possibility of a break-in at a home in a quiet residential neighborhood and the awful clamping of handcuffs on the wrists of the distinguished Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr.

If Professor Gates ranted and raved at the cop who entered his home uninvited with a badge, a gun and an attitude, he didn’t rant and rave for long. The 911 call came in at about 12:45 on the afternoon of July 16 and, as The Times has reported, Mr. Gates was arrested, cuffed and about to be led off to jail by 12:51.

The charge: angry while black.

The president of the United States has suggested that we use this flare-up as a “teachable moment,” but so far exactly the wrong lessons are being drawn from it — especially for black people. The message that has gone out to the public is that powerful African-American leaders like Mr. Gates and President Obama will be very publicly slapped down for speaking up and speaking out about police misbehavior, and that the proper response if you think you are being unfairly targeted by the police because of your race is to chill.

I have nothing but contempt for that message.

Mr. Gates is a friend, and I was selected some months ago to receive an award from an institute that he runs at Harvard. I made no attempt to speak to him while researching this column.

The very first lesson that should be drawn from the encounter between Mr. Gates and the arresting officer, Sgt. James Crowley, is that Professor Gates did absolutely nothing wrong. He did not swear at the officer or threaten him. He was never a danger to anyone. At worst, if you believe the police report, he yelled at Sergeant Crowley. He demanded to know if he was being treated the way he was being treated because he was black.

You can yell at a cop in America. This is not Iran. And if some people don’t like what you’re saying, too bad. You can even be wrong in what you are saying. There is no law against that. It is not an offense for which you are supposed to be arrested.

That’s a lesson that should have emerged clearly from this contretemps.

It was the police officer, Sergeant Crowley, who did something wrong in this instance. He arrested a man who had already demonstrated to the officer’s satisfaction that he was in his own home and had been minding his own business, bothering no one. Sergeant Crowley arrested Professor Gates and had him paraded off to jail for no good reason, and that brings us to the most important lesson to be drawn from this case. Black people are constantly being stopped, searched, harassed, publicly humiliated, assaulted, arrested and sometimes killed by police officers in this country for no good reason.

New York City cops make upwards of a half-million stops of private citizens each year, questioning and frequently frisking these men, women and children. The overwhelming majority of those stopped are black or Latino, and the overwhelming majority are innocent of any wrongdoing. A true “teachable moment” would focus a spotlight on such outrages and the urgent need to stop them.

But this country is not interested in that.

I wrote a number of columns about the arrests of more than 30 black and Hispanic youngsters — male and female — who were doing nothing more than walking peacefully down a quiet street in Brooklyn in broad daylight in the spring of 2007. The kids had to hire lawyers and fight the case for nearly two frustrating years before the charges were dropped and a settlement for their outlandish arrests worked out.

Black people need to roar out their anger at such treatment, lift up their voices and demand change. Anyone counseling a less militant approach is counseling self-defeat. As of mid-2008, there were 4,777 black men imprisoned in America for every 100,000 black men in the population. By comparison, there were only 727 white male inmates per 100,000 white men.

While whites use illegal drugs at substantially higher percentages than blacks, black men are sent to prison on drug charges at 13 times the rate of white men.

Most whites do not want to hear about racial problems, and President Obama would rather walk through fire than spend his time dealing with them. We’re never going to have a serious national conversation about race. So that leaves it up to ordinary black Americans to rant and to rave, to demonstrate and to lobby, to march and confront and to sue and generally do whatever is necessary to stop a continuing and deeply racist criminal justice outrage.