Demonstrators gather at Washington Square Park to protest against President Trump in New York. Reuters/Shannon Stapleton

These include a range of restrictions on citizens from seven war-torn countries in the Middle East and Africa. These are expected to include a temporary ban on most refugees and a suspension of visas. Sudan, Libya and Somalia are said to be on the list.

Questioned about when the additional measures would be announced, White House spokesman Sean Spicer said
 

You’ll see more action this week about keeping America safe.
 

Trump pledged during his election campaign to do just this by using what he termed “extreme vetting”. This comes after complaints from the president’s favourite website –Breitbart – that refugees from conflict zones were still being resettled in the US.

The developments will be a real blow to America’s large and thriving Somali and Libyan communities, for whom family reunions and visits from loved ones will be increasingly difficult. There were more than 150,000 Somali immigrants resident in the US as of 2015. Most entered after the 9/11 attacks.

It comes as the communities have been putting down roots, with the Somalis having elected their first legislator, Ilhan Omar. Omar, herself a refugee, is now an elected representative in Minnesota. It was a huge achievement, which she was keen to celebrate:
 

For me, this is my country, this is for my future, for my children’s future and for my grandchildren’s future to make our democracy more vibrant, more inclusive, more accessible and transparent which is going to be useful for all of us.
 

But it is not just Trump and the US throwing up barriers to Africans. The European Union is moving fast to halt the arrival of refugees and migrants on its southern shores, and is close to achieving the virtual “wall” that Trump is set on erecting.
 

Europe moves to seal migrant routes

Europe is close to sealing the routes refugees and migrants take across the Mediterranean. Consider the facts. These are the routes into southern Europe. (Map: Frontex Risk Analysis, Q2 2016)

The graphic produced by the EU’s Frontier Agency is clear: the major route that Africans are taking is via Libya.
 

The map below, from the same source, underlines the point.
 

Two routes that Africans have used in the past have almost been sealed. There is next to no transit by sea from West Africa through the Canary Islands and only a limited number arriving in Spain.

The Egyptian route through the Sinai and Israel has also been closed. The brutal treatment of Eritreans and Sudanese in the Sinai by mafia-style Bedouin families, who extracted ransoms with torture and rape, was certainly a deterrent. But this route was sealed in December 2013 when the Israeli authorities built an almost impregnable fence, blocking entry via the Sinai.

This has left Libya – and to a lesser extent Egypt – as the only viable route for Africans to use. Both are becoming more difficult. There has been the increasing propensity of Egypt to deport Eritreans to their home country, despite the risks that they will be jailed and abused when they are returned.
 

Libya, the final brick in the wall

Libya is critical to the success of the EU’s strategy, as a recent European assessment explained:
 

Libya is of pivotal importance as the primary point of departure for the Central Mediterranean route.
 

The EU has adopted new tactics to try to seal the central Mediterranean route. The countries keenest to push for this are Germany and Italy, which have taken the bulk of the refugees in recent years.

Earlier this month Italy’s Interior Minister Marco Minniti was dispatched to Tripoli to broker an agreement on fighting irregular migration through the country with Fayez al-Sarraj, head of the UN-backed Government of National Accord. Minniti and al-Sarraj agreed to reinforce cooperation on security, the fight against terrorism and human trafficking.

Mario Giro, Italy’s deputy foreign minister, told the Financial Times:
 

There is a new impulse here – we are moving as pioneers. But there is a lot of work to do, because Libya still doesn’t yet have the capacity to manage the flows, and the country is still divided.
 

The Italian proposals are very much in line with agreements the EU reached with African leaders during their summit in Malta in late 2015. The two sides signed a deal to halt the flight of refugees and migrants.

Europe offered training to “law enforcement and judicial authorities” in new methods of investigation and “assisting in setting up specialised anti-trafficking and smuggling police units”. The European police forces of Europol and the EU’s border force (Frontex) will assist African security police in countering the “production of forged and fraudulent documents”.

This meant co-operating with dictatorial regimes, like Sudan, which is ruled by Omar al-Bashir. He is wanted for war crimes and crimes against humanity by the International Criminal Court.

What is clear is that Europe is determined to do all it can to reduce and finally halt the flow of Africans through Libya – the only viable route left for most African migrants and refugees to reach Europe.

Now Trump is joining these efforts with his own restrictions. For Africans fleeing conflicts the prospects look increasingly grim.

Author is Senior Research Fellow, Horn of Africa and Southern Africa, Institute of Commonwealth Studies, School of Advanced Study

Courtesy: The Conversation

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Elections in the US are just around the corner, and it looks as if, once again, the results will ultimately hinge on outcomes in a few swing states. Perhaps foremost among these is Florida, where almost 25% of its African American citizens are disenfranchised because they are either felons or ex-felons. Florida, however, is not an outlier. In Kentucky and Virginia, over 20% of all potentially eligible African Americans voters will not be able to cast their ballot in November, while in six additional states the percentage is in the teens.

Although it is becoming difficult to ignore the brutal state violence that has all too frequently been unleashed against African Americans—and that usually goes unpunished—many people are still ignorant of the fact that 12% of all black men are denied the right to elect the people who govern them due to previous or present incarceration. By contrast, only 2.5% of the general population are not allowed to vote—surely another manifestation of black lives not mattering.

But what do human rights scholars have to say about this in their academic writings?

12% of all black men are denied the right to elect the people who govern them due to previous or present incarceration. To our dismay, not much. One reason for this is that in sociology and political science most human rights scholars use cross-national datasets for their research, and when measuring the protection of human rights, these datasets routinely rank the US extremely high.

For three decades (1981-2011), for instance, the Ciri Human Rights Data Project has given the US a ranking of two for Electoral Self-Determination, a variable that measures the “extent citizens enjoy freedom of political choice and the legal right and ability in practice to change the laws and officials that govern them through free and fair elections.” A score of two signifies “that political participation was very free and open during the year in question and citizens had the right to self-determination through free and fair elections in both law and practice.” The lived experiences of many African Americans are clearly not captured by this dataset.

Freedom House, which aims to provide “an annual evaluation of the state of global freedom as experienced by individuals,” also ignores the daily lives of African Americans. It defines political rights as those rights that “enable people to participate freely in the political process, including the right to vote freely for distinct alternatives in legitimate elections….” The organization claims that it places the greatest “emphasis on whether these rights are implemented in practice.” In the 2015 survey, as in preceding years, the US received the highest ratings for this right, revealing, as it were, that this dataset too is biased. 

Human rights scholars who use these datasets tend to receive large grants, train PhD students and shape the human rights field in the social sciences. Yet, they also know full well that the datasets they employ are skewed, and that their findings about our current political reality are consequently blinkered. Insofar as research has an impact on reality—something most scholars aspire towards—then by choosing to use datasets that obscure the lived experience of blacks as well as other forms of egregious discrimination, scholars become complicit in helping to maintain social wrongs.

Take a concrete example in which this skewing occurs: human rights scholars who have been examining when, why and how international human rights norms shape state behavior. Intrigued by the immense variation in implementation of human rights norms among states, these scholars have embarked on comparative cross-national and longitudinal research projects that aim to identify the factors that can account for these differences.

Some of these scholars have used the concept of “decoupling” to conceptualize the widespread phenomenon of states that sign conventions but do not comply by these conventions’ norms. Decoupling denotes the phenomenon in which organizations adopt policies ritualistically without actually changing their practices. Human rights researchers have found this concept useful for pointing out the gap between states’ expressed commitment to human rights principles—e.g., in the form of the ratification of human rights treaties—and their actual implementation of human rights norms.

Setting aside their actual findings, these studies stumble into the pitfall of "methodological nationalism" since they relate to a state's whole population as if it were a homogenous unit, while ignoring the differences among the groups within the state. They do not take into account that decoupling is always differentially applied, and therefore their studies actually help conceal the uneven distribution of human rights across a country’s population.
 

Flickr/Michael Fleshman (Some rights reserved)
A demonstrate for the protection of voting rights in New York City, 2011. Disproportionate incarceration rates among African Americans lead to widespread disenfranchisement of this demographic of American society.

This can be clearly seen when examining the right to vote in the US, a right that serves as the cornerstone of any democracy. Sociologists have shown that a stratified race, class and gender system leading to a very high proportion of incarceration among African American men, combined with legislation (whose roots can to be traced back to the mid-19th century) denying felons and ex-felons the right to vote, are the main factors leading to this unparalleled level of disenfranchisement among one particular group.

In order to understand the high rate of African American incarceration, which is the primary cause for their disenfranchisement, a variety of factors need to be considered. These include differential patterns of sentencing according to race and ethnicity, the intersection of race and low educational achievement and its impact on incarceration, as well as class inequality, which includes both education and the intersection of race, low wages and unemployment. Also pertinent to African American incarceration is the effect of neighborhood characteristics and spatial contagion on recidivism as well as the relation between family structures (single parenthood) and incarceration.

Human rights scholars using cross-national datasets ignore all of this and consequently play a role in concealing the uneven implementation of this right. Crucially, when the varying outcomes are concealed then the processes that produce them—including institutionalized racism—are also covered up and over.

Once we begin to think of the different groups within a given country, then it becomes clear that improving human rights practices requires a much greater effort than is usually assumed in the implementation literature, since it must include the dismantlement or the dramatic transformation of power structures and institutions that create hierarchies by privileging certain groups and discriminating against others.

But this is only part of the problem of much of the implementation literature. Another shortcoming involves the mistaken assumption that “more implementation" necessarily translates into the improvement in human rights practices. “More human rights” sometimes means more human rights for one group and no human rights for another, which suggests that the implementation of human rights can actually deepen stratification. By concealing the uneven distribution of human rights across a country’s population, these studies elide their lack of adherence to the most basic principle underlying human rights: namely, universality.

About the authors

Neve Gordon is a visiting Leverhulme professor in the department of politics and international studies at SOAS and is the co-author of The Human Right to Dominate (Oxford 2015). The ideas in this article were first developed here.

Nitza Berkovitch is a senior lecturer at the Department Sociology & Anthropology at Ben Gurion University in Israel. She writes and teaches about globalization, human rights, gender, citizenship, state and civil society and transnational women's movements.

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Mothers across all cultures may worry about being judged for their child’s appearance. But for African-American mothers, a child’s hairstyle can be especially anxiety-inducing. If they don’t properly care for it, many fear they are violating community norms. So they fashion it to appear less curled and unruly, sometimes even using chemical straightening products on kids as young as 36 months old.
Failure to do so can lead to intense backlash.

In 2014, a Huffington Post headline announced, “Beyoncé responds to Blue Ivy hair drama with a perm.”

The article described the uproar over the decision of singer Beyoncé Knowles and her husband, Jay-Z, to leave their daughter Blue Ivy’s hair in a natural, curly state. Some called the couple negligent for not grooming their daughter’s hair. Others accused them of “cruelty” for leaving her hair “nappy.” A petition even circulated calling Blue Ivy’s hair “disturbing.”

More recently, African-American Olympic gold medalist Gabby Douglas faced a barrage of insults about her hair on social media during the 2016 Olympic Games in Rio. Many complaints focused on her hair looking “unkempt.”

Why is hair such a hot-button issue in the African-American community? And what if hair weren’t a source of tension and shame, but instead served as an opportunity for African-American parents to bond with their kids?

For two decades, these questions have formed the basis of my research. They’re complicated ones – deeply ingrained in negative stereotypes – but I’ve been able to show how a simple daily task can help heal wounds caused by centuries of oppression.

Four hundred years of trauma

As a direct descendant of enslaved Africans who grew up in an African-American community, I have fond memories of sitting between my mother’s legs as a young child and getting my hair combed. For me, the daily ritual of hair combing was a special mother-daughter bonding time.

But while parents across all cultures comb their children’s hair, my research during graduate school revealed how, for African-American parents, the task is uniquely layered in emotionally charged, negative stereotypes about hair.

The origins of these attitudes are over 400 years old, deeply rooted in the psychological trauma of slavery. Part of the denigration of people deemed “property” meant vilifying all physical characteristics associated with their status, from dark skin color to thick, tightly curled hair – a stark contrast to the straight, thin hair of their oppressors. These debilitating stereotypes were merely one arrow in a quiver of psychological warfare used to subjugate the millions of enslaved men and women who outnumbered their owners.

Yet the negative intergenerational messages about hair still resonate today. Ironically, although these stereotypes about hair were originally perpetrated by whites, negative reactions to African features are also held by many African-Americans.

A hair-straightening kit marketed to African-Americans: Target

They’ve laid the psychological foundation for today’s “hair wars” within African-American communities: straight hair – deemed “good” hair – versus tightly curled, coily hair (“nappy” or “bad”). In many ways, it’s also related to the tendency to value light skin over dark skin.

Psychologists refer to this phenomenon as “internalized oppression,” or identification with the oppressor. A billion-dollar beauty industry that includes straight-haired wigs and skin-bleaching creams speaks to the legacy of this historical trauma.

Mothers who have internalized these historical stereotypes about what constitutes “good” and “bad” hair may express these attitudes in how they interact with their child while combing the child’s hair. For many parent-child relationships, hair remains a flashpoint for conflict and shame.

Flipping a negative into a positive

As a psychologist, I worry about parents who possess these subconscious beliefs about their child’s dark skin color or tightly curled hair – that these beliefs will be expressed in acceptance or rejection of children.
Numerous studies demonstrate that strong, supportive bonds between a parent and child – what’s called secure attachment – are required for infants to grow into healthy adults. This begins with the unconditional acceptance of infants from birth and continues with consistent encouragement and support in the child’s first months and years.

Hair combing interaction can play a key role in establishing secure attachments.

Findings from my research suggest that this simple task, which takes only around 10 minutes per day, facilitates some core parenting behaviors that lead to more secure attachments: positive verbal interaction, loving physical touch and responsive listening. (For example, research has shown just how important healthy physical touch is to both human development and survival.)

By studying videotaped interactions of mothers and daughters from a variety of income groups, I’ve been able to show how a young child can feel secure or insecure during the everyday routine of hair combing. In some instances mothers would laugh, invite the child to participate in the activity and praise the playful antics of the child’s pretend play. In these interactions, emotional skills were reinforced in the child that led to self-confidence and a strong gender identity, while laying the groundwork for healthy adult interpersonal relationships.

On the other hand, some children would be forced to sit stoically as their mother jerked the comb through their hair, their cringing faces reflecting the fear and pain they experienced. Perhaps the parents simply didn’t enjoy the task; or the hair elicited unconscious feelings of shame that begin during their childhood.

When I founded the Center for Natural Connections (CNC) at Tulane University in 2004, I hoped to promote the positive benefits of daily hair combing as an opportunity for parents to connect with their children, culture and community.

The CNC has translated findings from 15 years of research into cost-effective, community-based interventions. All the programs – which include Gentle Grooming for Hospitalized Children, Parent Café & Miranda’s Green Hair Puppet Show, and the Talk, Touch & Listen While Combing Hair parent support group – promote positive attitudes toward hair combing as an opportunity for caregivers to connect to their child.

The programs enhance parental self-efficacy, emotion recognition, conflict resolution and social support among parents. With seminars being held in community centers, it’s a psychologically safe place for parents of color to disrupt a legacy of trauma and create a new, positive narrative for future generations.

By recognizing the toxic stereotypes associated with their hair and skin color and learning from a community of fellow parents, African-American parents can begin to live out the African proverb “It takes village to raise a child.”

Courtesy: The Conversation

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