Al Jazeera America announced a few weeks ago that it was shutting down after less than three years in operation. Despite what many critics might think of the beleaguered cable network, I think it delivers fine journalism. The following video is an example of their good reporting. Since I am an avid cyclist and a development worker, this immediately caught my attention. It’s a great story about an organization in Ghana that is making bicycles even more eco-friendly by building them with bamboo! And it is always great to hear a positive story out of Africa.
I read this delightful story recently about a young girl in New Jersey who is collecting 1,000 books featuring a black female protagonist. Marley Dias, an 11-year-old black student, said she was “sick of reading books about white boys and dogs.”
“I was frustrated … in fifth grade where I wasn’t reading [books with] a character that I could connect with,” she said.
The sixth grader started her own social media campaign #1000BlackGirlBooks, with the hope that she can donate the books to a school in Jamaica and help other young black girls relate better to the books they read and the characters in them.
What a great idea! I only wish I was half as thoughtful as she was when I was 11.
This made me think about the books I read when I was younger. Unfortunately, I really couldn’t think of that many books by black female authors, let alone books with black female protagonists, at least not in elementary or middle schools. When I finally started reading books by or about black females in high school and college, the subject was a bit intense for my liking at first. I remember reading:
These ground-breaking books were written by dynamic writers, but the subject matter in all of them can be hard to deal with. All of these books have either been banned or censored by some school districts around the country at one point.The themes ranged from rape, incest, teen pregnancy, colorism, harsh depictions of racism and domestic violence.
When I first read these books as a teenager, I was especially horrified and saddened, but then amazed and excited, mainly because they were talking about issues I could relate to as a black female in America. It makes a world of a difference when you can empathize with the protagonist in a book, and this is especially true when the protagonist looks like you.
I met up with a black female friend who is the mother of a tenth grader the other day, and we were talking about this very subject. She said she didn’t want her daughter reading any of the above books because she felt they were too vulgar. “These books make us [black people] look dysfunctional,” she said. “This is unfortunate because any of these books may be the first book a student of any color will read about women of color during their school years that can set the wrong kinds of assumptions and tones about black women.”
Okay, I can see where she is coming from. I know there are a lot of other black people who feel the same way. Maybe this issue of diversity in the protagonist skin tone should also include diversity in subject matter as well. Statistically, it is still hard to find books in schools with black female or male protagonists on any subject. According to the Cooperative Children’s Book Center, out of 3,500 children’s books in schools surveyed in 2014, only 180 were about black people. The numbers are even worse for books about Hispanics, Asians and Native Americans. This is especially troubling as America will soon become a minority-majority country.
Now, I am not suggesting that we get rid of the white guy authors altogether! William Shakespeare, Mark Twain, Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald are all wonderful authors, who made significant contributions to literature, and kids should still read their books. But it is time to add more books to school reading lists that better reflect our world today.
The first step in doing this is to start identifying and putting together book lists that can be used as recommendations to schools and public libraries. Getting involved with your local school or public library also makes a difference. Below I put together a list of my recommendations for books by and/or about black females. I think in the following weeks and months I will also pull together more book lists showcasing many different types of underrepresented groups. I think if more people did this, there would be more discussion and, thus, more change in the type of literature our kids read. There is strength in numbers!
However, this is not meant to be a complete list because there are so many books. While most of them are adult books, many of them can be read by young adults, depending on their maturity level and reading comprehension. I draw this list from my personal experience working in a multicultural book store once and doing advocacy for my local library. The top ten books on this list are definitely for young adult readers. These are just ones that I thought of off the top of my head. Please email me if you have any other suggestions for this list or future lists, especially titles for elementary and middle school kids.
A few weeks ago it was announced that Zimbabwe will use the Chinese yuan as an official currency. In exchange, China will cancel the southern African country’s $40 billion debt. Mind you, the US dollar and the South African rand are also de facto currencies in Zimbabwe. Many economists may argue that using the yuan is a good idea to getting around American sanctions.
This is just the latest maneuver by China to further penetrate the African continent through trade and development. According to the International Monetary Fund, of the 20 countries worldwide projected to grow the fastest by next year, 10 of them are in Africa. Africa’s population is also expected to double to 3.5 billion by the 2050.
So it would make sense for China and other countries to make a move on potentially big economic opportunities related to the continent’s rich resources and minerals. Approximately over a million Chinese people have moved to Africa in the last 10 years alone as part of a new scramble for Africa. However, many feel that China is doing more harm than good.
Journalist Howard French wrote a book a couple of years called China’s Second Continent: How a Million Migrants Are Building A New Empire in Africa. He traveled to half a dozen African countries to meet with these Chinese migrants about their motivations. They work in a wide variety of occupations, including factory owners, farmers and even prostitutes. Many of them come to Africa because they are either tired of the competitiveness, lack of freedoms and/or lack of economic mobility back in China.
The book left a really bad taste in my mouth and a fear for the worst. Many of the Chinese interviewees sounded the same way European colonizers did during the original Scramble for Africa over a one hundred years ago. Most of the interviewees speak of Africans in a very racist manner, commonly calling them the derogative hei ren.
The biggest gripe with the Chinese businesses is that they hire other Chinese workers – not African workers – to construct big development projects in Africa. The Chinese businesses say they do this because they feel the Africans are not smart enough, childish, and don’t eat bitter, or work as hard as the Chinese. Then when Africans are hired for jobs, they are paid low wages with very limited benefits and in dangerous environments. But many of these problems stem from African governments allowing Chinese business to come into their countries while ignoring their labor laws.
It seems like China is setting up these African countries to be totally dependent on them by just hiring only Chinese workers. It would be more valuable for the continent to practice capacity building, where they train Africans to build and maintain their own infrastructure. Sure, American aid and development projects in Africa have also been known to have shady, ulterior motives in the past as well, including most recently with PEPFAR, but at least Americans mostly hires Africans to work on African projects. Even when I work on any media development projects in Africa, we make a conscious effort to hire locals because the whole point of development is all about, in my opinion, “ teaching someone how to fish.”
There is also a Chinese presence throughout the Caribbean. In Jamaica, where my family is from, there have been similar complaints about Chinese development projects, mostly in the tourism sector with resorts. Recently I was in Kingston and I noticed that the Chinese community self-segregates themselves from other Jamaicans and don’t usually hire locals in their businesses. Jamaicans that are hired are treated poorly. Because of this there is growing hostility towards the Chinese migrant community. A Jamaican friend once told me, “We have replaced British colonization and exploitation with the Chinese. They are only here to exploit us.”
What is most interesting about the Zimbabwe situation is that introducing Chinese currency into the country’s economy takes the Chinese neo-colonialist agenda to a whole new level. China, a country that has a long rap sheet of human rights abuses, is hooking up with Zimbabwe, another country with serious human rights problems. Furthermore, despite the fact that he has been an egomaniacal despot in recent years, Mugabe was originally a freedom fighter 40 years ago who helped Zimbabwe become a free country. Now it feels it feels like the country is moving back into colonialism.
Ghanaian business executive Ed Brown said the best quote in French’s book:
“This [relationship] is going to be determine Africa’s future for the next fifty years. This big question is whether African countries are dynamic enough to take advantage, or whether they’ll end up being the appendage of somebody else all over again.”
The purpose of graphic design is to communicate ideas. Effective design can also change the world. This is why I am a big fan of the work of Hungarian designer and editor Tibor Kalman. He is best known for using the artform for communicating social justice issues. Most of his work from the 1980s and 1990s have influenced many younger designers like myself in communications design.
Kalman once said that “graphic design is a language, but graphic designers are so busy worrying about the nuances – accents, punctuation and so on – that they spend little time thinking about what the words add up to. I’m interested in using our communication skills to change the way things are.”
Kalman actually went to school to learn journalism, but dropped out to work in a bookstore that would eventually become Barnes & Noble, where he became the company’s first creative director. He went on to start his own design firm and created corporate brands, but quickly grew tired of it and refocused on innovative design.
His newly-found focus could be first found in the fourth studio album by the punk rock band Talking Heads, which featured four digitally manipulated photographs of the group members – a technique that was done long before Photoshop was ever even invented.
Kalman moved on to working for magazines like Interview and Artform, but he is best known for being the editor-in-chief of Colors, the in-house magazine for Benetton. He used the platform to explore controversial issues, such as religion, war, sex, crime, abortion, racism, greed and AIDS. My favorite piece by him is the recreation of Ronald Reagan as a AIDS patient. It is a disturbing, but effective image of a sickly Reagan to represent his “ill” manner towards HIV/AIDS policy during his presidency.
Kalman devoted one issue to the topic of racism and re-imagined famous people with different skin tones and features, like a black Queen Elizabeth and Arnold Schwarzenegger, an Asian Pope John Paul II and a white Spike Lee. He also recreated Michael Jackson as a white person, which is not too different from how he actually looked later in his life… but I digress.
Kalman also encouraged other designers to lead by example in other areas of their work, like being more responsible to the environment with their design work.
