Philly artist Jasiri X made a music video linking the attack on Van Jones to how black and brown men are systemically discredited, especially when they are speaking truth to power and shaking up the status quo.
Tag Archives: strategic essentialism
Green Jobs for Navajo Youth
Nikke Alex, the youth organizer for the Navajo Green Jobs and the Black Mesa Water Coalition, talked with us for a few minutes while she was at the Navajo Nation Council Chamber in Window Rock, Arizona, celebrating the historic passage of the first green jobs legislation in American Indian country.
The green jobs act establishes a Navajo Green Economy Commission and Fund, which can apply for federal and local funds to create green jobs for Navajo youth, as well as sponsor small-scale, green developments that will help to provide needed services to the community.
Nikke is a member of the Navajo Nation (Diné Bikéyah). She is Salt clan born for the Tangle People clan. Her maternal grandparents are of the Big Water clan, and her paternal grandparents are of the Red Bottom clan. She grew up in Gallup, New Mexico.
RaceWire: How do you feel now that the green jobs bill has been passed?
Nikke Alex: I feel really great, even though I’m exhausted. The real work starts now. It’s been 14 months of work to campaign to get the green jobs bill enacted. It feels really great to be at the forefront of the Indian country, to be the first nation to propose green legislation and pass it.
Continue reading
Racializing Uighurs: The Story of Internal Colonialism in China
China extends 3,400 miles from the west to the east and falls into five different time zones. Yet, the country operates on a single standard of time, eight hours ahead of Greenwich Mean Time, all year round based on the time zone for Beijing, the country’s capital.
A single Chinese time zone is as much a fiction as a single Chinese ethnicity; recently, this truism was illustrated in the blood of Uighur protesters. Noon for Beijing was still seven in the morning for the western province of Xinjiang, the site of recent racially motivated uprisings that started this past weekend, on July 5, 2009.
Though China is often rendered ethnically homogeneous in the West’s narratives, the truth isn’t so simple. 92% of the population is members of the Han race, the dominant group with a monopoly over political and economic resources. But over 120 million citizens identify as members of some other ethnic group, known in China as “minority nationalities,” each with their own cultural practices, histories, and experiences. Some, like the Uighurs and Tibetans to the northwest, practice religious beliefs distinct from the Han. Others, like the Miao in the south and Koreans in the northeast, speak a distinct language. Still others, like the Hui, are indistinguishable from the Han in appearance and dialect, but practice a variation of Islam and trace their ancestry to the Muslim traders who settled in China along the Silk Road.
Continue reading