Noah Sow and Other Media Links

“Deutschland Black and White by Noah Sow”

From blackwomenineurope: “Even the most cautious estimates say that there are far more than 1,000,000 Blacks currently living in Germany, most of whom are German citizens. This makes up more than one percent of the country’s population.”

From deutschlandschwarzweiss.de: “With my book, I want to show that Germany needs to do much more than a little scraping on the surface in order to become the advanced and democratic country it likes to present itself as. I was curious to see whether there really is a willingness within Germany’s white majority population to deal with their racist issues – even if this means saying goodbye to some racist traditions – or if it is really all just talk, which would mean that my country wouldn’t be ready for another level of insight, consciousness and an actual change, as well as a stop to the oppression of its Black minority population.”

My last name is Wilhite over here in Los Angeles by way of Arkansas. “Wilhite,” you may notice, is not an African name—and that is the horrible truth—and the Truth will cause you to be free. So to hear about Schwarze Deutsche who did not get this way through the horrors of slavery has always been interesting to me.

“Unsentimental Education”

From monbiot.com: “British private schools create a class culture of a kind unknown in the rest of Europe. The extreme case is the boarding prep schools, which separate children from their parents at the age of eight in order to shape them into members of a detached elite. In his book The Making of Them the psychotherapist Nick Duffell shows how these artificial orphans survive the loss of their families by dissociating themselves from their feelings of love(14). Survival involves “an extreme hardening of normal human softness, a severe cutting off from emotions and sensitivity.”(15) Unable to attach themselves to people… they are encouraged instead to invest their natural loyalties in the institution… This made them extremely effective colonial servants: if their commander ordered it, they could organise a massacre without a moment’s hesitation (witness the detachment of the officers who oversaw the suppression of the Mau Mau, quoted in Caroline Elkins’s book, Britain’s Gulag(16)).”

Monbiot, himself, is a product of this “elite” system of education and this should add even more fuel to the fire in my earlier posts “Flippant Remarks about ‘Brideshead Revisited’” and, for an American twist on the elite, “Sundown Towns.”

“Welcome to Gentrification City”

From laweekly.com: “If gentrification is indeed a flood, then the highest levees in the city have been erected around South Los Angeles. The barriers are thicker and stronger for many reasons — poverty, racism, high crime rates, a reputation in the media and public that, to put it mildly, discourages investment. Yet the surge in real estate values has been knocking down barrier after barrier. White and multiracial middle-class home buyers who might never have looked south of the Santa Monica Freeway have taken the leap, discovering nice neighbors, clean streets and a killer housing stock — Craftsman bungalows from the 1910s and charming Spanish homes from the 1920s.”

What this means (to me) is that self-described white people are moving into my old neighborhood now occupied (mostly) by Latinos.

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