Mississippi: born under a bad sign

Two li'l darkies
Lyin' in bed
One was sick
An' the other most dead.
Went fo' de doctor
Doctor he said,
"Feed dem babies on shortnin' bread"
Shortnin' Bread (traditional)
______

Lord why was I born in Mississippi,
when it's so hard to get ahead
Why was I born in Mississippi,
when it's so hard to get ahead
Every black child born in Mississippi
you know the poor child is born dead

When he came into the world
the doctor spank him, the black baby cry
When he came into the world
the doctor spank him, the black baby cry
Everybody thought he had a life
and that's why the black baby died

He will never speak his language
the poor baby will never speak his mind
Lord he will never speak his language
the poor baby will never speak his mind
The poor child will never know his mind
why in the world he's so poor

Lord why was I born in Mississippi
when it's so hard to get ahead
Lord why was I born in Mississippi
when it's so hard to get ahead
Every black child born in Mississippi
you know the poor child was born dead
JB Lenoir

David Seaton's News Links
On a personal note: when I was a very small boy, at the end of the 1940s and the beginning of the 50s, my family spent a lot of time in Biloxi Mississippi, which at that time was a charming place and not the tacky nightmare it has since become. All of that was blown away by Katrina I understand, but I'm sure it will be even worse when reconstructed.

Anyway, neighboring Keesler air force base was a tiny thing in that period and there were no casinos and all that goes with them either, just warm breezes off the Gulf of Mexico, Forrest Gumpy shrimp and oyster boats and soft-voiced people, young and old, white and black, that loved small children... nothing like Chicago.

Nearly every Friday we drove over to New Orleans to spend the weekend, and in those days, before expressways, that entailed a leisurely drive though the Mississippi Delta, the area described in article below. That is where I saw the terrible after effects of slavery for the first time. And there I saw the decedents of the Slaves in their true historical context, not huddled around oil drum braziers on the freezing winter corners of Chicago's South Side... like creatures from another planet.

This was just before the mechanization of cotton which finally took place when the black people of Mississippi were allowed to vote, and thus before the black diaspora to the ghettos of the north that followed it. Those were the days before America's poor were sent to live in mobile homes and trailers and the black people of the Delta lived in amazingly rundown, unpainted, weatherbeaten shacks and dressed in rags... you could have been in Haiti, Salvador de Bahia, Jamaica, Cuba or Trinidad: anywhere where forcibly transported Africans were abandoned to their fate and stranded like rusting cars on blocks or busted washing machines rotting in the grass. Machines that no longer serve. The immense cruelty of slavery was impressed on me long before I was eight years old.

On lifelong reading and observation I came to the conclusion that African slavery and its aftermath form a pan-American nation and that Mississippi has more in common with the Dominican Republic than with Iowa and more in common with Haiti than Vermont. So I don't compare Cuba, for example, with Sweden, France, Lichtenstein or Canada. I compare it with Jamaica, Brazil and... Mississippi.

The article from the New York Times is about infant mortality among the poor blacks of the Mississippi Delta. In some counties in Mississippi it is as high as 20 deaths per thousand births, which is a little better than Albania, but not as good as Panama with 17 per 1000. The US average infant mortality rate for blacks in 2003 was 14 per 1000. The US global average is 6.50.... "Afro" Cuba, as black as Mississipi, has 6.33 per 1000! DS

In Turnabout, Infant Deaths Climb in South - New York Times
Abstract: For decades, Mississippi and neighboring states with large black populations and expanses of enduring poverty made steady progress in reducing infant death. But, in what health experts call an ominous portent, progress has stalled and in recent years the death rate has risen in Mississippi and several other states. The setbacks have raised questions about the impact of cuts in welfare and Medicaid and of poor access to doctors, and, many doctors say, the growing epidemics of obesity, diabetes and hypertension among potential mothers, some of whom tip the scales here at 300 to 400 pounds. “I don’t think the rise is a fluke, and it’s a disturbing trend, not only in Mississippi but throughout the Southeast,” said Dr. Christina Glick, a neonatologist in Jackson, Miss., and past president of the National Perinatal Association. To the shock of Mississippi officials, who in 2004 had seen the infant mortality rate — defined as deaths by the age of 1 year per thousand live births — fall to 9.7, the rate jumped sharply in 2005, to 11.4. The national average in 2003, the last year for which data have been compiled, was 6.9. Smaller rises also occurred in 2005 in Alabama, North Carolina and Tennessee. Louisiana and South Carolina saw rises in 2004 and have not yet reported on 2005. Whether the rises continue or not, federal officials say, rates have stagnated in the Deep South at levels well above the national average. Most striking, here and throughout the country, is the large racial disparity. In Mississippi, infant deaths among blacks rose to 17 per thousand births in 2005 from 14.2 per thousand in 2004, while those among whites rose to 6.6 per thousand from 6.1. (The national average in 2003 was 5.7 for whites and 14.0 for blacks.) The overall jump in Mississippi meant that 65 more babies died in 2005 than in the previous year, for a total of 481. READ IT ALL

Latin America is preparing to settle accounts with its white settler elite - Guardian

David Seaton's News Links
A careful reader will discover in this article many parallels between Latin America and the US frontier states and former Confederacy, known nowadays as the "sun belt". The sun belt is the heart of the "red" states where the Republicans have their base. Perhaps you'll agree with me that if the CSA had won its independence, by now the Southern USA would be more like Brazil or Venezuela than like Boston or New York. And perhaps the North East and Middle West could have followed their enlightened and progressive traditions without having to share the nest with so many racists and religious nuts. DS

Abstract: The recent explosion of indigenous protest in Latin America, culminating in the election this year of Evo Morales, an Aymara indian, as president of Bolivia, has highlighted the precarious position of the white-settler elite that has dominated the continent for so many centuries. Although the term "white settler" is familiar in the history of most European colonies, and comes with a pejorative ring, the whites in Latin America (as in the US) are not usually described in this way, and never use the expression themselves. No Spanish or Portuguese word exists that can adequately translate the English term. Latin America is traditionally seen as a continent set apart from colonial projects elsewhere, the outcome of its long experience of settlement since the 16th century. Yet it truly belongs in the history of the global expansion of white-settler populations from Europe in the more recent period. Today's elites are largely the product of the immigrant European culture that has developed during the two centuries since independence.(...) Latin America shares these characteristics of "settler colonialism", an evocative term used in discussions about the British empire. Together with the Caribbean and the US, it has a further characteristic not shared by Europe's colonies elsewhere: the legacy of a non-indigenous slave class. Although slavery had been abolished in much of the world by the 1830s, the practice continued in Latin America (and the US) for several decades. The white settlers were unique in oppressing two different groups, seizing the land of the indigenous peoples and appropriating the labour of their imported slaves. A feature of all "settler colonialist" societies has been the ingrained racist fear and hatred of the settlers, who are permanently alarmed by the presence of an expropriated underclass. Yet the race hatred of Latin America's settlers has only had a minor part in our customary understanding of the continent's history and society. Even politicians and historians on the left have preferred to discuss class rather than race. In Venezuela, elections in December will produce another win for Hugo Chávez, a man of black and Indian origin. Much of the virulent dislike shown towards him by the opposition has been clearly motivated by race hatred, and similar hatred was aroused the 1970s towards Salvador Allende in Chile and Juan Perón in Argentina. Allende's unforgivable crime, in the eyes of the white-settler elite, was to mobilise the rotos, the "broken ones" - the patronising and derisory name given to the vast Chilean underclass. The indigenous origins of the rotos were obvious at Allende's political demonstrations. Dressed in Indian clothes, their affinity with their indigenous neighbours would have been apparent. The same could be said of the cabezas negras - "black heads" - who came out to support Perón. This unexplored parallel has become more apparent as indigenous organisations have come to the fore, arousing the whites' ancient fears. A settler spokesman, Mario Vargas Llosa, the Peruvian-now-Spanish novelist, has accused the indigenous movements of generating "social and political disorder", echoing the cry of 19th-century racist intellectuals such as Colonel Domingo Sarmiento of Argentina, who warned of a choice between "civilisation and barbarism". Latin America's settler elites after independence were obsessed with all things European. They travelled to Europe in search of political models, ignoring their own countries beyond the capital cities, and excluding the majority from their nation-building project. Along with their imported liberal ideology came the racialist ideas common among settlers elsewhere in Europe's colonial world. This racist outlook led to the downgrading and non-recognition of the black population, and, in many countries, to the physical extermination of indigenous peoples. In their place came millions of fresh settlers from Europe.(...) The true Latin American holocaust occurred in the 19th century. The slaughter of Indians made more land available for settlement, and between 1870 and 1914 five million Europeans migrated to Brazil and Argentina. In many countries the immigration campaigns continued well into the 20th century, sustaining the hegemonic white-settler culture that has lasted to this day. Yet change is at last on the agenda. Recent election results have been described, with some truth, as a move to the left, since several new governments have revived progressive themes from the 1960s. Yet from a longer perspective these developments look more like a repudiation of Latin America's white-settler culture, and a revival of that radical tradition of inclusion attempted two centuries ago. The outline of a fresh struggle, with a final settling of accounts, can now be discerned. READ ALL