· June, 2008

Stories about Ethnicity & Race from June, 2008

Palestine: She Shoots, She Scores

Muna Nawajaa has scored a victory for social justice. Using a camera given to her by B'Tselem's Shooting Back project, Palestinian Nawajaa recorded the masked beating of members of her family, resulting in an investigation and arrest of suspects by Israeli police. In a post entitled “Cameras as Weapons,” Uriel...

Israel: Broken Truce Angers Israelis

Six days after Israeli and Palestinian forces brokered a ceasefire agreement, four kassam rockets fired from Gaza blasted the Western Negev. Islamic Jihad claimed credit for the attack, while Hamas, Palestine's ruling party, encouraged “all Palestinian factions to abide by the calm agreement,” asserting, “Hamas is keen to maintain the...

Guyana: Death of a President

  24 June 2008

Ruel Johnson's Fictions notes the passing yesterday of Arthur Chung, the first President of Guyana, at the age of 90. He held the post from 1970 to 1980, and was “the first ethnic Chinese President of a non-Asian country.”

Caucasus: Religious Practices

Social Science in the Caucasus examines data on religious practices in the region. The blog of the Caucasus Resource Research Centers (CRRC) uses its own data to assess the importance of religion in Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia. According to the survey from last year, respondents in Georgia were more numerous...

Bangladesh: On Gorkhaland

  23 June 2008

Unheard Voices from Bangladesh takes a closer look at the Gorkhaland issue in India, and focuses on the apparent Bengali racism.

Armenia: Racist Rhetoric?

  22 June 2008

Blogian raises concern over what it considers to be racist rhetoric used by Armenia's first president, Levon Ter-Petrossian, at a radical opposition demonstration staged Friday in downtown Yerevan. Meanwhile, The Armenian Observer and my The Caucasus Knot carries more coverage of the unsanctioned rally.

Jamaica, U.S.A.: Juneteenth

  19 June 2008

Jamaican Geoffrey Philp remembers Juneteenth, “the oldest nationally celebrated commemoration of the ending of slavery in the United States.”

Poland: “Observations of the Polish Character”

At Polandian, “observations of the Polish character” by Scatts: “Some of them relatively new or recently reinforced, others very old but all have been openly discussed with a variety of Poles who, for the most part, agree with me. Those who don’t agree with me, tend to disagree with anything...

The Balkans: Ingeborg Beugel

Say: Macedonia quotes from an interview with Ingeborg Beugel, “a Dutch reporter and author of several documentaries about the crimes committed in Bosnia”: “In an interview for the online site Sarajevo-x.com, she talks about the rise of the Greek nationalism and the participation of Greek mercenaries in the war in...

Brazil: The Black President Before Obama

  17 June 2008

The sweeping Obama phenomenon has caught Brazil, and it comes as no surprise in the country with the world's largest population of African descendants. An especially notable thread is the one reporting on the resurgence of a weirdly interesting 1928 Brazilian sci-fi novel — ‘The Black President' — that predicted a US election matching a black, a feminist, and a conservative candidate in the then remote year of 2228.

Jamaica: Red Man

  16 June 2008

Jamaican litblogger Geoffrey Philp posts a poem on “the curse of being apart, neither black nor white, but red…”