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Greg Kane is a Black American writer. He was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. Today, I was brought to tears to read this article he wrote in the Baltimore Sun inwhich he confirmed with his own eyes..and the eyes of other Black Americans...what I have been telling people for years about the "current" Slave Trade in North Africa...BLACKS sold to Palestine, Saudi Arabia and Iraq among others... Please read this article by your own Black American brotherman, Bless his African soul. I pasted the article...for those who don't have membership links. GREGORY KANE: Arabs and blacks are not kindred souls 2003/03/26 10:51 PM EDT By Gregory Kane For some African Americans, Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein is our brown, Third World brother fighting against the forces of racism and white supremacy, manifested by President Bush and crew. That view belies the truth: for years, perhaps centuries, Arabs in the Middle East and Africa have had a white supremacy agenda of their own. Sunni M. Khalid is an African American journalist and Muslim who’s lived in Egypt and traveled extensively in the Middle East. He’s commented on the situation there and pulls punches about as often as his boxing hero, Joe Frazier, did – which is to say not at all. Seven years ago he found himself on assignment in Iraq when he noticed that the principal of a Baghdad elementary school looked just like his aunt back home in Detroit. After noticing other Iraqis who might be considered black here in the states, Khalid asked from whence they hailed. Most said they came from Basra, a town in southern Iraq. Africans got to Basra in pretty much the same way they arrived in the Americas: on slave ships. “Basra was the entrepot for Africans who were enslaved by the Arabs,” Khalid said last week. He estimates that 10 to 15 percent of Iraq’s population is Afro-Arab, but you’d never know it to look at Hussein’s inner circle of advisors and leaders. Are there any? The question was put to Khalid. “Not at all,” he said. Iraqi Afro-Arabs, according to Khalid, “have been marginalized like all the other people of African descent in the Arab world. The treatment that Africans have historically received at the hands of Arabs is not very good, especially in the last 30 years.” Our “brown Third World brothers” in Arab countries haven’t got a thing on Bush and Co. in the white supremacy department. Khalid remembers living in Cairo and talking to Muslims from sub-Saharan African countries. “They told me they were stoned, harassed and mistreated on the streets of Cairo everyday,” Khalid recalled. “They told me they were Muslims in spite of the Arabs, not because of the Arabs.” Khalid’s wife is a dark-skinned Somali woman. He remembers the glares he got from Arab women when he took his wife to dinner. (Khalid is a caramel-colored African American who looks Arab in the Middle East.) One woman even asked how he could shame himself by being seen with such a woman. Similar incidents occurred when his wife went grocery shopping. Lighter-skinned women would cut ahead of her in line, a practice Mrs.. Khalid ended quickly. Khalid’s stepfather, a Nubian, was in line at a bank one day when a light-skinned Arab walked up beside him and was immediately waited on by the teller. “I’ve been going through this my whole life,” he told Khalid afterwards. White Europeans received more deference and better treatment from Arabs than darker Afro-Arabs do, Khalid said. “A lot of African American Muslims don’t want to deal with that,” Khalid said. There is racism in the Arab world directed against black people.” It is a racism that closely parallels that practiced against blacks in this country. Most, if not all, African Americans have had similar run-ins with racism, or know someone else who has. While America’s white media are often chided by African Americans for ignoring stories important to blacks, Khalid noticed the same thing in the Arab world. “You can pick up any newspaper in Egypt and there will not be one word about the Arab treatment of, and genocide against, Africans in the Sudan,” Khalid said. So bash Bush for starting what you may consider an unjust war if you must, but spare me the notion that Hussein or any other Arab is a Third World brown brother. The history just doesn’t support the notion. Gregory Kane is an award-winning columnist for the Baltimore Sun. In 1997 he was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for his reporting on slavery in the Sudan. That work won him the 1997 Overseas Press Club Award |
