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It’s really interesting to read about Baldwin’s perspective on the situation of Algerians in France. Throughout his analysis of this society, he takes the position of an external narrator in a story but he is very critical about it and it’s eye-opening for the reader. He describes what (racist) Frenchmen say about Algerians for example, them being lazy but he adds a critical observation to it, explaining that it is not about them being lazy but rather, they are not welcomed in that society. He mentions the criticism of (racist) Frenchmen saying they do nothing but gather in Arab Cafés as if they voluntarily segregated and rejected the Frenchmen’s ‘’companionship’’. But rather, firstly, these cafés are their connection with their community, with people who see them as human beings, it’s a place of melancholia. Secondly, it is not like if they were accepted in French cafés or that they could afford it. This little extract from James Baldwin is interesting because we have the perspective of a colored man about the racial dynamics between two groups who could be defined by whiteness, but here, the root of those racial dynamics is the colonial relationship between France and Algeria.

On another note, his reflection about love is really beautiful. Through his experience with love, Baldwin was able to detach himself from the image the white man imposed on him. To make a link with Fanon’s triple gaze, finding love and feeling loved was a way for him to ignore the 2nd gaze and then be able to redefine the 3rd gaze more positively. He was able to see himself as a human being. He beautifully writes about that ‘’ It began to pry open for me the trap of color, for people do not fall in love according to their color…’’ (Baldwin, 1). He also talks about nakedness. The way I understand nakedness in this context is when someone becomes free of the stereotypes, free of racialization, free of negative gazes and becomes an individual with a personality and nakedness becomes about that rather than physicality and appearance. It’s no longer about color or ethnicity or language and differences it’s about human connections, similarities, communication, it’s about the essence, the personality more than the appearance (I think of it similarly to the distinction between batin/zahir in tasawwuf). Baldwin writes that ‘’ nakedness has no color: this can come as news only to those who have never covered, or been covered by, another naked human being.’’ (Baldwin, 2) Again, here I don’t think it’s about the physical dimension of nakedness, it’s about human connections.

What he says about love reminds me of the advice he gave to his nephew in his letter My dungeon shook. In the letter to James, the poet writes that white people need love, and that love should come from colored people. ‘’ … we with love, shall force our brothers to see themselves as they are, to cease fleeing from reality … ‘’ (Baldwin, 10) It’s the idea of the gift of making them notice their whiteness, that we have talked about in a previous class and how destructive whiteness and white supremacy are. This whiteness is responsible for colonialism, racism and all the other problems that come from those dynamics.

Baldwin, James. "My Dungeon Shook: Letter to My Nephew on the One Hundredth Anniversary of the Emancipation." In The Fire Next Time. New York: The Dial Press, 1963. 17–24

To summarize Karoline Cook’s work on Moriscos and Muslims who came to Spanish America I would say that it is mainly about the criminalization of Islam. Or rather that it is the stigmatization and criminalization of people who vaguely seemed to follow prophet Muhammad’s (pbuh) way. I was shocked (by the absurdity of some accusations) when I read about the many testimonies that Cook presents in her work. The realities of Moriscos and Muslims in Spain and Spanish America are linked to the question of islamophobia and anti-Muslim racism that we talked about last week. An interesting thing about Moriscos is that most of them, seem to have looked physically the same as other Latino/Spanish descent people, they had latin names (for example Maria Ruiz) etc. The accusation of being Morisco often came from people who noticed details about someone’s life, their neighbours for example, and then would denounce them. This denunciation seems to have been valued by the inquisitorial authorities. Further, the author mentioned that at first the denunciation of Moriscos was based on the fear that since they are ‘’Muslim’’ they might be allied to the Ottoman Empire. About that matter Cook writes that ‘’ Morisco presence in the New World was seen as a threat to the creation of a model Catholic community…’’ Also, this ‘’polemic’’ about Moriscos and crypto-Muslims is an example amongst many others that the ‘’fear of Islam’’ and Muslims was there long before our time and that 9/11 for example, is not the cause of islamophobia, it just amplified it.

Throughout the reading, I saw many links between what is being said of the Moriscos and the testimonies given by people around them and the genocide of the Uighurs in China. Similarly to what would happen to the Moriscos, any individual who seems to be a Uighur Muslim can be arrested for absurd motives and assumptions that have nothing to do with criminal activities and neither represent a threat. For example, in China, Uighur men who wear a beard would be suspected of being terrorists and throughout the years, many of them were taken by the police and put into concentration camps. Also communicating in their dialects in a public setting is risky and they can be arrested for it, in a similar way that in the Spanish America’s context, individuals would be denounced for speaking a language that vaguely seemed like Arabic and this accusation would lead to the involvement and questioning of the inquisitorial power. I saw in the documentary In Search of My Sister that the police would cut the dresses of women when they had a certain length – this measure being a way to force women to wear more revealing clothes despite their attempt to dress modestly. Sometimes, this aggression would happen to women who were not even visibly of Muslim confession (i.e. not wearing the hijab). Also, in that documentary that follows the quest of Rushan Abbas, a Uighur activist, we see that when Chinese officials are asked about what happened to the thousands of Uighurs who disappeared without their families having no idea where they are and if they are alive or death, they deny the existence of concentration camps and they say that there can not be a Uighur genocide since the numbers show that the Uighur population is increasing.

Shezan Muhammedi’s article on Ugandan Asian Refugees in Canada points out many contrasts with Arun Kundnani’s work about integrationism and institutional racism in 21st century Britain and Peter Ward’s chapter from White Canada forever that we read a few weeks ago. In Muhammedi’s work, we see that Prime Minister Trudeau had an attitude of openness towards the coming of Ugandan Asian refugees and it seems like he believed that they could integrate ‘’the Canadian way of life’’. However, the integration that Trudeau talks about is very different from the one integrationists in the UK describe, as Arun Kundnani has developed. Trudeau is talking about integration as immigrants being part of Canadian society bringing into society their cultural baggage, being part of the ‘’mosaic’’ rather than becoming ‘’white Canadians’’. He defends ‘’unity through diversity’’ and cultural freedom (Muhammedi,81). So, it is probably more accurate to say that Trudeau defends multiculturalism rather than integrationism (as defined by Kundnani)

In Muhammedi’s article, we learn that around the 1970s, there was a shift made in immigration policies from sometimes racist and discriminatory criteria of admission to a system of points, the score was based on ‘’ age; education; training; occupational skills in demand; knowledge of English or French; a personal assessment made by an immigration officer; relatives in Canada; arranged employment; and employment opportunities in area of destination’’ (Muhammedi, 79). I think these are valid questions to ask someone who wants to immigrate in the country, Still, another important factor is the biases the immigration officer could have about immigrants and how it could have impacted the interactions with the migrants answering those questions and their possible admission into Canada.

In Peter Ward’s chapter on the Komagata Maru incident, we see that William Lyon Mackenzie King had a totally different perspective about the arrival of foreigners (people of color) in Canada than the one Trudeau had 60 years later. In a report on Indian immigration from 1908, Mackenzie King considered that people from the subcontinent would not be fit to live in Canadian society because they were not used to this type of weather, they had different customs and manners which would make the incapable of adapting to the new environment. Also, they would bring in diseases (Ward, 83). We see that his opinion on the arrival of people of color is influenced by racist, white supremacist, eurocentrist (or rather ‘’Americacentrist’’) assumptions. That is another way we can see the contrast with the way Pierre Trudeau dealt with the situation of Ugandan Asian refugees. However, when comparing those situations, an important element to consider is that in the case of Ugandan Asians, they were expellees and not simple migrants. Presenting Ugandan Asians as expellees was part of Trudeau’s argument to the ones who did not agree that Canada should take in those migrants and to the ones that were concerned about the high unemployment rate and the effect more people in the workforce would have on that situation (Muhammedi, 83-84).

Ward, Peter. White Canada Forever: Popular Attitudes and Public Policy Toward Orientals in British Columbia. 3rd ed. Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2014. 79-93.
Kundnani, Arun. The End of Tolerance: Racism in 21st Century Britain. London: Pluto Press, 2007. 121-140.

I was surprised by the tone Fanon used in the text. He has a fatalistic and very negative, if not degrading way of talking of the black man, himself being a black man. It’s almost like he’s talking about himself the way racist people talk about people of colour. I am curious about why he does that though. For example, when he says ‘’ the miserable N’’ and when he describes having brown skin as ‘’ a malediction’’. Further, Fanon quotes Sartre “They [the Jews] have allowed themselves to be poisoned by the stereotype that others have of them. . .” I feel like in this text this is exactly what Fanon is showing.

Another saying of the author that I found interesting is when he says ‘’ As long as the black man is among his own, he will have no occasion, except in minor internal conflicts, to experience his being through others.’’ The way I understand this statement is that it’s only when being with someone who is different than us (in any way) that we can truly question our identity and what we think is ‘’normal’’ and that we can see things that would not have been noticed without this outside perspective. The perspective of others (especially if we share nothing in common) often differs from ours. Hence, we can learn about ourselves through others, and I think this is what Fanon is trying to say in that statement. In a community where people share identity traits, it is more difficult to be able to question ourselves because the people around us validate those traits since they share some of them with us.

In his essay, Ambalavaner Sivanandan writes that: ‘’ Everyone made money on the immigrant worker from the big-time capitalist to the slum landlord - from exploiting his labour, his colour, his customs, his culture. He himself had cost the country nothing He had been paid for by the country of his origin reared and raised, as capitalist under-development had willed it, for the labour markets of Europe.. ‘’ It made me see the situation of colored immigrant workers similar to slavery. We could almost describe it as a ‘’ modern version’’ of the transatlantic slave trade. Indeed, as it was pointed out, the immigrants were exploited for their work and it’s Britain who took total advantage of it. No profit returned to their country of origin, yet it has invested resources in them. The only thing that is different from slavery is that the workers are paid. Paid is actually a big word since what they earned was sometimes not enough to provide for their basics needs. There is also the racism aspect. Even if they do earn money, it’s like their money is not seen as money. It’s almost as if because the money comes from a person of colour it does not have value and we can notice that through the difficulty coloured people had in finding housing, amongst other things.
‘’ ...The shortage of workers, as Ceri Peach shows, made immigrants economically acceptable; the shortage of housing made them socially undesirable.’’ For me, this statement is a perfect example of the ingratitude and the hypocrisy of the West when it comes to immigration. I say the West because it’s not only in Britain that we hear these kinds of discourse, and it was not only in the 60s either. For example, in Quebec, recently Justin Trudeau and Francois Legault had the same kind of remarks about immigrants. However, as was mentioned in this article, in the case of Britain, a lot of money was made of the ready-made" workers, like the author calls them, but instead of investing the profit in social infrastructures and housing to be able to provide for the increasing demand, the state wanted to maximize their profit. Knowing that we can say that the problem is not that the immigrants increased the load on the housing market but rather it is that the resources were not invested optimally.

Furthermore, I would even say that immigrants are a ‘’significant asset’’ for the West. Amongst many other contributions, immigrants contribute to the working force in a way the West could not do alone partly because in these countries, the birth rate is becoming lower and lower. Without immigrants, many jobs would be left vacant.

After reading Sivanandan's essay and the intro from Vivek Bald’s book, it is clear that both Britain and the US were xenophobic and discriminatory in their laws. I was really surprised to see that those states had laws to justify the systematic discrimination toward people of colour. We often hear about the way people of colour were treated in the US even after the abolition of slavery, but personally, it was the first time that I heard about laws that were explicitly defending xenophobia. Also, before learning about it in this week’s readings, I never knew that migrants from the Asian subcontinent suffered from racism similar to the way African descent people were.
Also, in Ibrahim Choudry’s letter we see again the ingratitude of the West toward the participation of South Asian migrants in building the economy of the country. One concrete example he gives is that some young men who came to the US fought in the country’s army, one of the most patriotic things any person could do. Despite this devotion, the US saw them as outcasts and they had to beg to be considered American.

One of the verses in Maimouna Youssef’s song says ‘’ Self hatred and white supremacy are quite the pair’’. I think what she means is that white supremacy can cause more damage on a person of visible minority if that person already has a negative image of herself. This is an idea that we find throughout Lamar’s song, for example when he links his struggle and his feeling of being a hypocrite to the way white people see him. ‘’ That I'ma be just another slave in my head/ Institutionalized manipulation and lies/ Reciprocation of freedom only live in your eyes… ‘’. Here I think that ‘’ your eyes’’ refers to white people. Also, when Lamar says ‘’ You vandalize my perception’’ there is this idea that the person of color internalizes the way the other sees him and he begins to so himself in that same negative way/self-hatred way as was said by Maimouna Youssef. That self-hatred is noticeable in many parts of “The Fact of Blackness”.

In conclusion, there are many links we can make between this week’s readings and listenings. I think that one of them is that Fanon’s work and Kendrick Lamar's song give us a portrait of the person of colour and the other articles show us what this specific image of the person of colour implicates when it comes to integrating countries like Britain and the US. Youssef's song addresses more of the construction of identity and the way bad self-image can affect it. It is almost as if Fanon and Lamar were explaining or justifying why such discriminatory and xenophobic policies were implemented. In other words, it seems like the West saw (maybe still sees to this day) people of colour the way Fanon and Lamar describe them, and this is why they built policies and laws to make sure people of colour knew they were seen as second-class citizens.

Are the "Islamic" borrowings of movements like Moorish Science and the Nation of Islam a form of "cultural appropriation"?

I think that it can be seen as cultural appropriation because those 2 groups, the Nation of Islam (NOI) and the Moorish Science Temple (MST) are really far from the teaching of Islam and as Edward Curtis said in the introduction of the chapter ‘’ Though Drew incorporated Islamic symbols into this original tradition, his use of them apparently owed very little to the Islamic traditions of the Old World.’’(45) Also Drew Ali pretended that he was a prophet. This claim is considered blasphemous for Muslims because it’s part of the creed of all Muslims whether they identify as Sunni or Shi’i that Prophet Muhammad pbuh was the last prophet that God sent to mankind.

Another thing that I was shocked to read is that Drew Ali pretended that he wrote a Qur’an. Calling the book he wrote the ‘’ Holy Koran’’ and considering that it was revealed to him from God is another blasphemous thing (Britannica). I think that one of the reasons that might have influenced Drew Ali and even the NOI to choose to take a few aspects of the Islamic creed to build their sect and their beliefs is that the message of Islam speaks against racism in a way that Christianism might not. Also, I think that in America whiteness was associated with Christianity so choosing to identify with Islam is another way to create this separation between White and Black people, and clearly those black nationalist groups wanted to create a franc separation from white people.

Furthermore, the message of Islam is not a message of hate and viewing white people (as a group) as devils it’s also not an idea that comes from Islam. In Malcolm X’s autobiography, there is an extensive description of the NOI’s explanation about different races and the ‘’origin’’ of racism according to that group. That description sounded like science fiction to me, and I think we can see that this narrative was created to enforce the idea that white people are the devil and that separatism is important. Towards the end of the extract, in the chapter named ‘’Saved'’ we see that Malcolm is gaining enough knowledge to distance himself from the hatred and false narrative about race relationship and the creation of humanity and he kind of builds a more ‘’rational’’ way of condemning the atrocities people of color have been through (and are still going trough).

In my opinion, when we look deeper into the message and the beliefs of those groups, it becomes obvious that it's not just cultural appropriation, but rather it’s something completely separate and distinct from Islam.

When Edward Said writes that ‘’ the Orient has helped to define Europe (or the West) as its contrasting image, idea, personality, experience’’. It makes me think of when Munoz, in Feeling Brown writes that ‘’Once we look at whiteness from a racialized perspective, like that of Latinos, it begins to appear to be flat and impoverished. At this moment in history it seems especially important to position whiteness as lack...’’ Both ideas were presented in two different contexts, but they are similar.

What tropes and stereotypes of the "Oriental" can be seen in the practices Bald describes?

• The Hindu Fakir, we see it in children's movies sometimes
• The magician
• Oriental mysticism

What were the purposes of such stereotypes?
Stereotypes are sometimes used unwillingly/unconsciously by our minds because they   ‘’help us’’ process and understand the world and the people around us more easily. Stereotypes are generalizations of a group according to one image or representation we have. Stereotypes can be positive, negative, or neither, but they represent generalizations that are not always applicable to the person/situation in front of us. Stereotypes are like ‘’shortcuts’’ that the mind uses to avoid seeing individuals and situations in all their complexity.
In the case of the stereotypes of South Asians that are presented in Bald’s work, I think that they are used by people of colour to represent and use to their advantage the idea that white people might have of communities from eastern regions (here I use eastern in opposition with western). Vivek Bald writes that ‘’ In this daily act, they validated and accentuated the ideas that Americans associated with “India” and “the East” and in so doing gave authenticity and value to the goods they sold.’’ Those stereotypes mainly come from Orientalism and movies and white people had the credulity to believe that South Asians (and Easterners, more largely) actually lived that way. Some white people might have seen it as entertainment and also as ‘’proof’’ that as they thought, colored people were less intelligent and ‘’civilized’’.

In my opinion, in the context that is described in chapter 2 of Bengali Harlem, some people of colour specifically used stereotypes that are related to entertainment (magicians, fakir, costumes) because it was something that white people were impressed by. It was seen as weird and exotic. Also, for me, the choice of bringing those stereotypes to life is an example of disidentification. From my understanding, Munoz explains that disidentification is a strategy to not openly support the dominant discourse, but at the same time, this dominant discourse is not visibly opposed. Hence, disidentification is a strategy to survive in the social world.

In many examples of the people of colour presented in this chapter, whether they were African Americans who were impersonating South Asians or South Asians who would bring to life these ‘’oriental’’ stereotypes, it is exactly the purpose it had. Sometimes, those strategies were literally what allowed them to be able to have a job and provide for themselves.

Could Black or brown folks use Orientalism to their advantage?
In the 2nd chapter of Bengali Harlem we see many ways of how Black and Brown people took advantage of the stereotype of the Indian/south Asian/Middle Eastern caricature. One of the examples that is given is that some people of African descent would pretend to be South Asian because even though some South Asians had darker skin, they were sometimes less discriminated against than African Americans. The author describes that ‘’ … individuals who had successfully passed as white to access better jobs and accommodations, but for those who were darker skinned, posing as a “Hindu” or “East Indian” was a recurring and prominent theme. ‘’ ‘’ denigrated to an exotic otherness, from an unacceptable to a nominally acceptable blackness...’’
 South Asians were seen as exotic, some would disguise as fakirs and wear costumes, take a particular accent etc. They were purposely acting like the stereotypical image of the oriental because they knew they could take advantage of these stereotypes.

I think for white people South Asians were more acceptable than black people (despite the dark skin they sometimes both shared) because for white people this ‘’show’’ was seen as entertainment and they thought it gave them access to exotic products which they enjoyed. Furthermore, for people of colour, this ‘’ role-paying’’ facilitated/made possible moving around states and having a place to live despite the racist and segragational  Jim Crow laws.

What does it take to make a home in whitened space?
Personally, I think that we need to be able to do as coloured people did in chapter 2 of Bengali Harlem! What I mean by that is that as visible minorities (ethnic or/and religious), sometimes (when the situation does not cause us prejudice) we need to let white people (or the dominant group) with their assumptions of us. If they believe in white supremacy and think that everything that is not white is uncivilized or backward let them think that. The most important is that you as an individual stay true to your beliefs and your identity, that you know what you are capable of, that you work hard for what you want, that you help your community etc.