re: "The Big Lizards Immigration Reform"

Dafydd at Big Lizards ("this fershlugginer web site") has a whole raft of suggestions for immigration reform.

Money quote(s):

"The primary goal of reform is henceforth to select immigrants solely on the basis of two criteria: assimilability (A) and benefit to the United States (B), not by any other criteria (such as race, country of origin, class within the country of origin, having relatives already living legally in the United States, or any other criteria currently used."

Some of his ideas are fairly common-sensical but he goes way off-beam with the stuff about indentured servitude. There are enough problems with modern-day slavery without adding this to the mix.

10/4

re: "Southerners Not Happy to Have Lost Civil War"

James Joyner at Outside the Beltway ("an online journal of politics and foreign affairs analysis") gets this just about exactly right.

Money quote(s):

"This isn’t actually all that complicated: A significant number of Southerners continue to feel a deep attachment to the region and its culture. This is especially true of those who have generations-long attachments to the South. It’s hardly shocking, then, that they would fail to celebrate their ancestor’s loss in a bitter war.

And Jamelle’s right: Almost none of those ambivalent about the Southern defeat have any fondness for slavery, much less a desire to re-institute it. Additionally, these people are some of the most patriotic Americans, seeing zero contradiction between loving America and her flag and also celebrating an insurrection against it several generations ago.

Then again, for today’s Southerners, the Civil War wasn’t about slavery.

Don’t misunderstand: There’s simply no debate that slavery was sine qua non for the South’s secession and the onset of war. All of the political debates and pronouncements surrounding the Election of 1860 and the run-up to secession make that crystal clear. Other justifications were calculated myth created by a Lost Cause movement shortly after the war.

But the political cause of a war seldom has much to do with why individual people fight. Only a tiny fraction of the soldiers of the Confederacy owned or had any prospect of owning slaves. Mostly, they fought because there was a war on and they chose their homeland over a mythical nation-state that wouldn’t come to exist in its modern sense for another several decades.

So, it’s quite easy for Southerners to distinguish between the Civil War and slavery. In their minds, their ancestors weren’t fighting to preserve a wicked institution but rather for some combination of independence, “state’s rights,” and clan loyalty."

JO - A Language of Our Own

Jamaica Observer

A Language of Our Own


JAMES MOSS-SOLOMON


Sunday, May 03, 2009


Many historians have identified that slaves in Jamaica invented a dialect of their own which represented many African languages but transformed into English-based dialect.


JAMES MOSS-SOLOMON


The essential trick was that the English-sounding words were not necessarily used in conformity with Standard English. It therefore paved an important path for many conversations to be held within earshot, but outside of comprehension. This linguistic skill served to enable the planning and resistance which eventually brought the despicable system of slavery to an end.

Read the whole article here.

Snippet(s):

"Today, the reverse may be true. Many of our educated people, including politicians, use English words in standard usage form in order to keep the true meaning from the vast majority of Jamaicans who have been generally deprived of a meaningful education. A now deceased politician once remarked that "the best way to keep a secret from the majority of people is to write it in plain English and put it on the front page of a newspaper"."

JG - Patois Bible in Pan-African and Pan-Caribbean context

From my archive of press clippings:

Jamaica Gleaner

Patois Bible in Pan-African and Pan-Caribbean context

published: Sunday June 29, 2008

Gosnell L. Yorke, Contributor

WHAT IS true mainly of the coastal regions of Africa and elsewhere in the world is also true of the Caribbean as a whole - including Jamaica. And that is: we have witnessed the not-yet-fully understood global linguistic phenomenon involving what scholars have called the "pidginisation" and, ultimately, the "creolisation" of the various languages of Europe and elsewhere - be it Dutch, English, French or Spanish in the case of the Caribbean. As we know, these four aforementioned languages were imperially imposed on our African ancestors who were forced, against their collective wills, to toil as slaves on several sugar plantations throughout the Caribbean; to work as hewers of wood and drawers of water. Because our ancestors, by and large, were not allowed to live and work together in their ethnic groups (or tribes), they were not able to communicate with each other through the use of their mother tongues - be it Akan, Balanta, Igbo or Yoruba from West Africa or wherever. This situation not only helped to discourage our enslaved ancestors from plotting their escape from their masters' dehumanising treatment (or worse) but it also meant that our ancestors were forced to creatively adopt and adapt the language of their European masters as well. This created a complex situation in which the various European languages, serving as lexifier languages, were blended with the various African mother tongues to produce, over time, some new bona fide languages we now call Creoles (not dialects). 'Divide and rule' That is, pidginisation and later creolisation were made inevitable by the slave masters' linguistic policy of 'divide and rule'. In sociolinguistic terms, the more powerful European 'High' or H language was brought into contact with the relatively powerless African 'Low' or L language. This accounts for the fact that the Caribbean is now one of the best places on the planet to study the creolisation of such European languages. For example, out of a total of about 80 Creoles spoken worldwide, about 30 of them are spoken right here in the Caribbean, alone.

Read the whole article here.

_____

Dr Gosnell L. York, is professor of religion in the School of Religion and Theology at Northern Caribbean University (NCU) and a former translation consultant with the Africa Area of the United Bible Societies - the parent body of the Bible Society of the West Indies.

JG - Human trafficking: modern-day slavery

From my archive of press clippings:

Jamaica Gleaner

Human trafficking: modern-day slavery

published: Sunday May 11, 2008

Glenda Simms, Contributor

The ongoing saga of trafficking in persons in Jamaica has again been highlighted in a recent report covered by one of the local media houses.

Read the whole article here.

Snippet(s):

"The issue of trafficking is usually highlighted when the American State Department is ready to issue their evaluation of the effectiveness of the anti-trafficking initiatives that Jamaica has pledged to implement. It can be argued that in this process we appear to return to our nine-day wonder slumber, especially when we are put on an acceptable 'tier watch' for trafficking."

"In 1899, the International Conference on the White Slave Trade was convened in England. At that time a decision was taken "to do everything possible to protect the vulnerable against the practice of trafficking."

In spite of these early good intentions, many developing societies, such as Jamaica, are forced to acknowledge that their world is now faced with a modern form of slavery - a form that is protected by the monied class and the global tentacles of organised crime."

&

"These are the women and girls who come in from the streets of Moscow and other Eastern European cities, Havana, and Santo Domingo as exotic dancers and uptown call girls; the 'brownings' of St Elizabeth and Westmoreland and other rural areas who have little or no educational foundation, but are enticed by the seductive advertisements for work in exotic and erotic massage parlours, go-go clubs and other disguised institutions of prostitution.

These advertisements appear on a regular basis in the classified advertisement sections of both morning and evening editions of the local media houses. These categories of women are likely to include the dozens of teenagers between the ages of 11-19, who are currently reported as missing in Jamaica."