AfricaIs aCountry

Apartheid in Arizona

Africa Is a Country Podcast
African Five-a-Side Podcast

Apartheid in Arizona

By
Sean Jacobs

What’s up with John McCain’s home state? The state legislature has just passed an immigration law that basically targets the state’s Latino population for random stops and demands of their ID’s. As my man, Siddhartha Mitter, remarked yesterday: Apartheid nostalgics will be pleased to learn that the Pass Laws have been dusted off and reinstated, in Arizona. Separately, they have also given official sanction to the fantasies of “birthers” who claim President Barack Obama was not born on US soil.

Made Siddhartha think of Public Enemy’s 1990 tune “By the time I get to Arizona.”

Remember Arizona, and New Hampshire, were the only states that opposed a holiday honoring Martin Luther King.  BTW, John McCain has a shameful history in the anti-King initiatives and now the xenophobic immigration initiatives.

Via Siddhartha Mitter

Further Reading

No one should be surprised we exist

The documentary film, ‘Rolé—Histórias dos Rolezinhos’ by Afro-Brazilian filmmaker Vladimir Seixas uses sharp commentary to expose social, political, and cultural inequalities within Brazilian society.

Reading List: Barbara Boswell

While editing a collection of the writings of South African feminist Lauretta Ngcobo, Barbara Boswell found inspiration in texts that reflected Ngcobo’s sense that writing is an exercise of freedom.

Kenya’s stalemate

A fundamental contest between two orders is taking place in Kenya. Will its progressives seize the moment to catalyze a vision for social, economic, and political change?

An annual awakening

In the 1980s, the South African arts collective Vakalisa Art Associates reclaimed time as a tool of social control through their subversive calendars.

More than a building

The film ‘No Place But Here’ uses VR or 360 media to immerse a viewer inside a housing occupation in Cape Town. In the process, it wants to challenge gentrification and the capitalist logic of home ownership.