shock and awe or... you can't please everybody

Surprise, surprise: One of the contributors of the conservative Alabama-based blog Pros and Cons said in the entry Holy Smokes! that they didn't like or get Planet Grenada. I left a comment suggesting that they should read Hisham Aidi's piece Let Us Be Moors - Islam, Race And "Connected Histories" which fleshes out the mini-manifesto at the top of my blog. But the information was quickly deleted.

more on black jews

Over at ChickenBones: A Journal, I recently saw two articles by Adeyinka Makinde which discuss the possible Jewish descent in the Igbo of Nigeria: on the Igbos: A Lost Tribe of Israel? and The Igbo and Jewry. But really, these sorts of articles shouldn't be surprising. As I point out in another post:

...according to the Bible, Jacob (Israel) and his sons went into Africa as a group of 12 households and hundreds of years later they came out of Africa as a nation of millions. Either the children of Israel are really really really inbred or they intermarried with the people around them and became basically an African group. The Bible even explicitly says that Abraham, Joseph and Moses married African (Egyptian and Cushite) women [Genesis 16:3, Genesis 41:45, Numbers 12:1].

I think I need to read How Jews Became White Folks and What That Says About Race in America by Karen Brodkin which has been recommended to me on more than one occasion. There is so much history and politics behind racial classifications and I would like to have a better understanding of how the process unfolds. 

 See also: 

the lemba 

"i've seen ethiopians knocking out rome" (part 2) 

reclaiming jewish traditions in mexico 

are desis white?

catching up

I've had the seeds of a lot of different posts rattling around in my head but I'm short on time so I think I'm "forced" to just do a link dump instead of a more thoughtful consideration

Over at Umar Lee's blog, “Ugly Black Women”, Perfect Arab Wives, and Matters of Race starts to discuss some of the less idealized aspects of race relations in the Arab world. This piece was originally inspired by Not Sure What To Make of this “Discussion” over at Soliloquies of a Stranger (The life of an African American, Muslim, Muhaajirah (Expat), from the hood, in an Inter-Racial Marriage. It Doesn’t get any stranger than that!).

Abdur Rahman Muhammad finally concluded his series with Why Blackamerican Muslims Don’t Stand For Justice Pt. 5

Ever since my post i and i and thou I've been meaning to find and share information about Baye Fall, an African-based, dreadlock-wearing Sufi order who are sometimes called "Muslim Rastas". Recently I saw a pretty 'Grenada-esque' entry over at Pa' Africa Muchacho tu ta loco?, written by Dominican blogger Francisco Perez who is currently travelling in Senegal. He has a brief entry on Cheikh Lo an African musician who is a member of the Baye Fall. I wish I had a more detailed understanding of the group, but I suspect that they could be a very strong example in my favor with respect to the ongoing discussions with Sondjata (see islam and afrocentrism, afrocentricity and islam ii) on whether Islam is consistent with being African.

Francisco also has another entry on the upcoming Eid al-Adha entitled What Would Jesus Buy? I'm not sure what else to say about the holiday. This year I feel like the holiday has surprised me. I'm not totally certain which city I'll be in for Eid. I have a couple of old posts about Eid al-Adha but I don't have any genuinely new comments for now.

shades of mexican

Also thanks to George Kelly for the heads-up about: Shades of Mexican by Gregory Rodriguez of the LA Times. It is a slightly cynical opinion piece about the ways in which racial classification can change according to the interests of a given community.

box-checking blues

Odd moment: I had to go get fingerprinted recently (background check for a new job) and as part of the process I had to fill out a form with all sorts of identifying information. The most bizzare aspect of the form was how the racial categories were set up. On the plus side, the racial question was prefaced with the rather enlightening comment that "Hispanic is not a race". But then the authors of the form contradicted themselves by listing "Caucasian/Latino" as a race! There were also spots for white, black, indian/native american and Asian/ Pacific Islander. I'm not sure where to begin in terms of spelling out how illogical that is. I ended up checking "black" but if I had put more thought into it I would have also crossed out "Caucasian"and then also checked the Latino category.

nigger-reecan blues by willie perdomo
racial jujitsu or the more things change...
Latino
how race is lived
are desis white?