Edgar Lungu Wins Zambia Election Ruling Party Patriotic Front Stalwart Elected President

By Patrick McGroarty in Johannesburg and Nicholas Bariyo in Kampala

The Wall Street Journal - Jan. 25, 2015

Zambians elected ruling party stalwart Edgar Lungu their next president, setting the stage for more haggling between a mercurial government and the powerful mining firms that drive its economy.
Mr. Lungu, a former defense and justice minister, won 48.3% of the votes cast this week, the southern African country’s electoral commission said on Sunday. He was chosen to lead the Patriotic Front party after former President Michael Sata died in office in October, following a long and secretive illness. Mr. Lungu will govern Zambia over the next 20 months to complete Mr. Sata’s term until the next general election, scheduled for September 2016.
Mr. Sata was elected in 2011 on a populist pledge to recover more mining revenue and counter tax evasion. He also attacked the practices of Chinese miners in Zambia. But in office Mr. Sata warmed to Chinese investors and endorsed a flurry of contradictory mining policies.

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8 Disturbingly Racist Children’s Books Designed to Devalue Black People

By G. Thorpe

The Atlanta Black Star - February 21, 2014

Let’s Hurry or We’ll  Miss the Public Lynching
In the late 19th and early 20th century, many books were developed in the United States and the United Kingdom to propagate the devaluation of Black people in their relative societies.   Some of the books were so outrageous, comedian Bob Staake’s  made ‘Let’s Hurry or We’ll  Miss the Public Lynching‘ parody cover to bring light to the era. Below are the real books. These few are just a fraction on the hundreds that were made during that time.

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Akon: 'America was never built for black people'

The Senegalese-American recording artist talks frankly about US race relations, "rebranding" Africa, and his music.

Al-Jazeera - 23 Jan 2015

Senegalese-American artist Akon is a five-time Grammy nominee who has sold over 35 million records worldwide, and has collaborated with some of the biggest names in popular music, such as Michael Jackson, Snoop Dogg, Lady Gaga and David Guetta.  The musician, songwriter and producer, who was born in the US but spent much of his childhood in Senegal, is also an activist and a philanthropist - and he has turned his sights on helping Africa.  How many African-Americans do you know actually consider Africa as a vacation spot? Not one... Even just for knowledge, just to know where they came from, just to get an idea of what that is; there is so much fear instilled in them that they wouldn't even want to go there to visit. You mention Africa, they start shaking.  Akon  His current ambitious project, "Akon Lighting Africa," is working to bring solar-powered electricity to Africans in 49 countries by the end of 2020.Akon is also an ambassador for the non-profit organisation Peace One Day. Last year, he and actor Jude Law brought their celebrity power to Goma to a concert to promote peace in the Democratic Republic of Congo.  But Akon has also caused controversy through his performance style and his lyrics.  Akon talks to Al Jazeera about running his musical career as a business; his projects - both philanthropic and artistic; singing songs for peace and whether he thinks it can really make an impact; and being an African in the US.

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Africa Debt Rising New publication

By Paul Adams

AFRICA RESEARCH INSTITUTE - JAN 22, 2015

Average gross domestic product (GDP) growth in Africa is second only to that of South Asia. The improvement of macroeconomic and public sector management since the 1990s is widely praised. Substantial investment in infrastructure is now among the most pressing priorities. Public debt levels are mostly well below 50% of GDP, a rule of thumb being that 40% is sustainable in emerging economies. Global investors’ hunt for yield has enabled many African countries to tap international bond markets for the first time. While Eurobond issues are often depicted as evidence of the continent’s economic resurgence, they should also encourage close scrutiny of public financial management and debt sustainability. Against a backdrop of falling commodity prices, the US dollar’s strength and forecasts for higher global interest rates, this Counterpoint highlights the pitfalls of rising debt levels in Africa and underscores measures for mitigating risk.

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Life Never Ran These Striking Images of What It Was Like to Be Black in 1950s America

By Jordan G. Teicher

Salon - Jan. 18, 2015

Gordon Parks hadn’t been to his hometown, Fort Scott, Kansas, in more than 20 years when he returned there in 1950 as a photojournalist on assignment for Life magazine. Growing up as the youngest of 15 children, Parks attended the Plaza School, an all-black grade school in the heavily segregated town. Now, as the first black man hired full-time by the magazine, Parks wanted to find and photograph all 11 of his classmates from grade school as a way of measuring the impact of school segregation. The photo essay he created, which was never published, is on display at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston in the exhibition, “Gordon Parks: Back to Fort Scott,” beginning Jan. 17.

In the years since Parks lived in Fort Scott, segregation had remained. But the black population, which had been at a high of 20 percent when he was child, had dwindled to around 6 percent, as a deficit of agricultural work caused blacks to move to nearby cities in search of jobs.

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Gentrification: white people following white people

By Kevin Hartnett
Globe Correspondent 

Boston Globe - August 06, 2014

When we think of gentrification, we imagine swarms of young upper middle class white people moving into previously minority neighborhoods, bringing pour-over coffee and higher property tax bills in their wakes. It’s a controversial migration, not least because of the existing residents who are displaced, but it’s also seen as a welcome step away from the segregation that set in after the “white flight” of the 60s and 70s.
Now an inventive new study using Google Street View and an archive of 1990s videotapes has found that gentrification may involve less racial mixing than we assume—and in fact, may reinforce residential segregation.
In an article this month in the American Sociological Review, doctoral student Jackelyn Hwang and Harvard sociologist Robert Sampson used Google Street View to take a virtual walking tour of Chicago. As they went, they looked for details like home renovations or new construction that indicate gentrification is underway, or litter and graffiti, which indicate it’s not. Based on those observations they gave each census tract in Chicago a gentrification score. Then they compared those scores against a similar but far more labor-intensive study Sampson had carried out twenty years earlier. 

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Uncle John Scruggs - Little Log Cabin in the Lane

Critical Race Theory - Racial and Ethnic Minorities in the US (Essential Reading List)

1. Racism Without Racists by Eduardo Bonilla-Silva
2. From Different Shores: Perspectives on Race and Ethnicity in America by Ronald Takaki 
3. A Different Mirror: A History of Multicultural America by Ronald Takaki
4. Beyond the Melting Pot, Second Edition: The Negroes, Puerto Ricans, Jews, Italians, and Irish of New York City by Nathan Glazer and Daniel P. Moynihan
5. American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the Underclass by Douglas S. Massey and Nancy A. Denton
6. THE PHILADELPHIA NEGRO by W.E.B. DuBois
7. The Wretched of the Earth  by Frantz Fanon
8. Black Skin, White Masks by Frantz Fanon
9. Racial Formation in the United States: From the 1960s to the 1990s (Critical Social Thought) by Michael Omi and Howard Winant 
10. The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness  by Michelle Alexander
11. The Souls of Black Folk by W. E. B. Du Bois
12. The Latino Threat: Constructing Immigrants, Citizens, and the Nation by Leo R. Chavez
13. Racist America: Roots, Current Realities, and Future Reparations by Joe R. Feagin
14. The White Racial Frame: Centuries of Racial Framing and Counter-Framing by Joe R. Feagin
15. The Myth of the Model Minority: Asian Americans Facing Racism by Rosalind S. Chou and Joe R. Feagin 
16. Systemic Racism: A Theory of Oppression by Joe R. Feagin
17. White Party, White Government: Race, Class, and U.S. Politics by Joe R. Feagin
18. Latinos Facing Racism: Discrimination, Resistance, and Endurance (New Critical Viewpoints on Society)  by Joe R. Feagin and José A. Cobas
19. Globalization and America: Race, Human Rights, and Inequality (Perspectives on a Multiracial America) by Angela J. Hattery and David G. Embrick (Editors)
20. When Affirmative Action Was White: An Untold History of Racial Inequality in Twentieth-Century America  by Ira Katznelson 
21. Critical Race Theory: An Introduction by Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic
22. Critical Race Theory: The Key Writings That Formed the Movement by Kimberle Crenshaw, Neil Gotanda, Gary Peller, Kendall Thomas (Editors)
23. Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment by Patricia Hill Collins
24. Race and the Invisible Hand: How White Networks Exclude Black Men from Blue-Collar Jobs by Deirdre A. Royster 
25. The Crucible of American Indian Identity Native Tradition versus Colonial Imposition in Postconquest North America By Ward Churchill
26. One Nation, Indivisible: Is It History?  Todd Bigelow/FTWP In Los Angeles, demographers see "white flight" beyond the suburbs and into rural areas. (By Todd Bigelow for The Washington Post) First in a series of occasional articles  By William Booth Washington Post Staff Writer Sunday, February 22, 1998; Page A1
27. Mexican Americans and the American Dream by Richard Alba
28. We the People: Asians in the United States (CENSUS BUREAU REPORT)
29. We the People: Blacks in the United States (CENSUS BUREAU REPORT)
30. We the People: Hispanics in the United States (CENSUS BUREAU REPORT)
31. We the People of Arab Ancestry in the United States (CENSUS BUREAU REPORT)
32. How many Jews are there in the United States?  By Michael Lipka - PEW RESEARCH October 2, 2013. 
33. A Portrait of Jewish Americans - PEW RESEARCH, October 1, 2013.
34. Between Arab and White: Race and Ethnicity in the Early Syrian American Diaspora by Sarah M. A. Gualtieri.
35. Brown Skin, White Masks by Hamid Dabashi. 
36. Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: America, the Cold War, and the Roots of Terror by Mahmood Mamdani. 
37. Reel Bad Arabs: How Hollywood Vilifies a People by Jack Shaheen. 
38. The Ethnic Project: Transforming Racial Fiction into Ethnic Factions by Vilna Bashi Treitler.

Judaism Added to the African Studies Agenda

New panels on Black Judaism offered at annual scholarly conference

By Len Lyons|

Tablet - December 30, 2014

For the first time in its 57-year history, the African Studies Association’s annual conference this year offered panels discussing the rising tide of Black Judaism—communities in sub-Saharan Africa and in the African Diaspora identifying themselves as descendants of Jews or practicing some form of Judaism. I attended the November conference along with 1,600 participants from 30 countries, and presented new research on Ethiopian Jews in Israel. Five other researchers and authors in the field of Black Judaism also contributed to the panels.
The panels were proposed by William F. S. Miles, a political scientist from Northeastern University. His academic interest in Nigeria took a personal turn in 2008 when he discovered, while reading Edith Bruder’s The Black Jews of Africa, that the several thousand Nigerian Igbo who practice Judaism had religious traditions quite similar to those of his own family. Miles, who returned to Nigeria several times to visit the Jews of the capital city of Abuja—where there are now four synagogues—describes Jewish life in his book, The Jews of Nigeria.

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African American Movies From 1920, 30 and 40s

The Girl from Chicago (1932)

 Murder on Lenox Avenue (1941)

The Symbol Of the Unconquered (1920) 

Body and Soul (1925)