BlogHer exclusive interview with Sen. Barack Obama

Sen. Obama sat down with BlogHer's Erin Kotecki-Vest yesterday in Roseburg, Oregon to respond to questions posed by members of the BlogHer community. The BlogHer politics team has been working hard for months to get responses to these questions form each of the candidates. Perhaps Sen. Obama's example will persuade his rivals to respond in kind.

More Interesting Black German Links

• Black German Cultural Society, Inc.
• BLACKS DURING THE HOLOCAUST
• Who are the Grammer Children
• Sterilization for Black Children
• First memorial to black victims of Nazi genocide
• THE STATE OF (IN)VISIBLE BLACK EUROPE: RACE, RIGHTS, AND POLITICS
• Black History Month: Germany and African Americans, by Leroy Hopkins (TWIG, February 8, 2008)
• Ira Aldridge: An African American Star on the European Stage in the 19th Century (TWIG, February 22, 2008)
• From Minstrelsy to Jazz: Cross-cultural links between Germans and Afro-Americans, by Rainer Lotz

Meet Rosemarie Pena, child of the Holocaust

Among the heartfelt Mother's Day tributes published all over the web this weekend, you might have come across this touching entry from BlogHer community member Rosemarie Pena:

As a mother, I know how easy is is to love your child. I am not sure I can fully understand the love of woman who can love a child she didn’t bear as if it were her own. My mother has done this more than once. I didn’t even know I was adopted when I brought another baby girl home. A classmate had a baby she was unprepared to raise and I volunteered my mom. She didn’t refuse. My baby sister is still there living with and caring for Mom.

Rosemarie's mother, Perrie Haymon, is even more extraordinary when one knows Rosemarie's story. Here's a glimpse, an introduction to a presentation she gives at speaking engagements throughout the US:

Ilse Moellgaard, a Danish child, survived the Holocaust but never recovered from the experience. Neither have her four daughters.

Rosemarie Pena is the oldest of those four daughters, although she did not learn until the mid-1990s that Ilse Moellgaard had been the woman who brought her into the world. Learning about Moellgaard and her story completely altered Rosemarie's understanding of who she was. She had spent 38 years thinking of herself as an African American woman. Through Ilse, she came to understand that she was not only adopted, but bi-racial, an immigrant, and a child of the Holocaust.

At the same time, Pena told me, learning about her origins explained some things about her life, such as her recurrent nightmares. One is of "lying in the snow surrounded by German soldiers." Another is of "being in a playpen with my hands raised and no one would come for me."

In this month that marks both the Yom Hashoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day and the 60th anniversary of the establishment of the State of Israel, I wanted to share Rosemarie's story, not only because I find it unique and compelling, but because it speaks to the myriad, unexpected ways in which history echoes in our lives, shaping and re-shaping our notions of who we are and how we connect to the world. Helen Epstein described being a child of Holocaust survivors as "being possessed by a past which one has not lived," but one might argue that to some degree, history has all of us in its grasp.

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One means that Pena has chosen of reclaiming her history is through her involvement with the Black German Cultural Society, an international community that claims several thousand members in Europe, the United States and elsewhere. Members of the Society include people of mixed German and African ancestry, as well as people of African descent who were born in Germany. BGCS works to increase awareness of Afro-German history and cultural contributions. For example, Nubian Queen reminds readers that Afro-Germans were among the victims of the Holocaust:

Did you know that in the 1920's, there were 24,000 Blacks living in Germany? Neither did I. Here's how it happened, and how many of them were eventually caught unawares by the events of the Holocaust....

Perhaps the best known contemporary Black German is Hans Massaquoi, a veteran journalist who startled many with his 1999 memoir, Destined to Witness: Growing Up Black in Nazi Germany. At that time, Kirkus reviews said of Massaquoi's book:

As a small boy, Massaquoi was "fascinated and ... more » moved" by Hitler and seduced by Nazi busywork and organized pageantry. Thus he felt exceptionally betrayed upon realizing that there was no place for a "non-Aryan" such as himself in the Reich. Although his devoted mutti protected him fiercely (his father had returned to Liberia), he encountered virulent abuse at school and was dehumanized by the Nuremburg Laws, which essentially barred him from public life, whether from a playground or from the Hitlerjugend, which all his chums joined. Things became much worse during the war years, when, perversely, he repeatedly escaped the worst fate by a hairbreadth. This included nearly being discovered "race mixing" by the SS and surviving the protracted fire bombing that leveled his beloved Hamburg.

Even those who consider themselves knowledgeable about German culture admit to ignorance about the black German experience. KJD ad Love German Books writes:

I was unaware that there have been black people here since French colonial troops occupied the Rhineland after WWI - most Afro-Germans I've known have one "non-German" parent. It also raised an issue I was aware of, but in a different context - the country's racist determination of nationality, based on "German blood". And it pays a lot of attention to language and the media - which is miles behind even Britain when it comes to showing black people and ethnic minorities in any other context than as criminals or victims. Or, of course, athletes and entertainers.

Actually, the Afro-German presence goes back even farther -- to at least the 18th century. Former African slaves and indentured servants joined the Hessian army, as allies of the British during the US Revolutionary War, and some of them emigrated to Germany when the colonists emerged victorious.

Other well-known Afro Germans include actor Boris Kodjoe, historian and archivist Arturo Alfonso Schomburg and poet May Ayim.

cross-posted at Blogher

Are journalists giving John McCain a free ride?

Yeah, pretty much.

Go set a spell on Shauna's Front Porch!

Welcome to the blogosphere, Shauna Rhone!

Covering Race in the Presidential Race

Keith Woods, dean of the Faculty, Poynter Institute, on the Online Newshour, speaks the truth:

And I think, particularly when you look at the way that we have talked about the demographic groups, the degrees to which we have divided up particularly black and white America in this -- in the conversation, we reveal, I think, in some ways, both the media's limitations in how it talks about it and the country's.

So, you see a full vocabulary for talking about white Americans in this debate, from blue-collar, a euphemism for white blue-collar workers. We talk about lunch-bucket Democrats. We talk about the soccer mom and the NASCAR dad, all of which are euphemisms in the national discourse for white Americans.

And then we talk about black people, as though they are all the same, with pretty much all the same views. And Latinos and Asians haven't fared much better. And we don't talk at all about Native Americans.

Denise Clay, the Mad Political Scientist, has some advice for Hillary Clinton, now running as "the candidate for White America."

I Remember Mama Voting: For My Stepmother

My friend Nordette Adams, who works for ACORN, asked me to help her starting a meme in which women talk about the mother figures in their lives who taught them the value of voting. Her request triggered this remembrance:

My stepmother, Virginia Sampson Pearson, came from a North Carolina family in which dark-skinned men of the soil married long-haired mixed-race women who "had always been propertied people," as great-aunt Fanny used to say. As a result, she had a laborer's toughness and a talented-tenth racewoman's pride. After her mother succumbed to illness when she was nine, she spent much of her time in the protective care of an extended family of grandmothers and aunts who were proud graduates of Fayetteville State. This eased the sting of Jim Crow and instilled in her a reverence for education and a belief in racial uplift. But when she came north with her father and brother at the tender age of 13, her encounter with the meanness of urban poverty and police brutality had galvanized her political consciousness.

As a result, when the time came for me to be educated, she was determined that I would be firmly centered in my ethnicity, history and understanding of my responsibilities to my forbears. Political awareness and involvement was part of the package. It was at her insistence that we went to the March on Washington in August, 1963 when I was six. As I began elementary school, she was a maid for a family in which both parents were professors at a state college in New Jersey. I wore their childrens' cast-off clothing; her clothes came from Goodwill. During the presidential election of 1964, she would report that her boss would tell guests over tea that she was voting for Goldwater, "because he would keep the Negroes in line." When I started reading "Peanuts" comics, she bought me a Charles Schultz- illustrated book of children's letters to Pres. Johnson. As a result, I wrote a letter to LBJ in my seven-year-old hand protesting the fact that my uncle and cousins were being shipped to Vietnam.

But the most important political lessons were about my African legacy. She showed me South Africa, told me about apartheid, and said, "Always remember, we will never be free until South Africa is free." She introduced me to real Africans, made sure I read about the new countries emerging, and about their efforts to press their cause at the United Nations. All of this while we tracked each success and failure of the civil rights struggle, and talked about whether black women had any business getting involved in feminism.

She taught me about voting first because she voted. Second, by talking about her employer, I learned how others used their votes to hurt us. And finally, when my teenaged indignation had me tilting toward militancy, we had conversations about how voting and other ways of working within the system were the ways to make real change. "You can't change the system because it IS," she would say to me. But, by her example, she showed me that little by little, through education and agitation, we could learn to bend the system our way.

Luther Vandross and Martha Wash: I Who Have Nothing

This deserves a glass of Chianti...a little quiet storm for your Friday evening....

Bill Moyers: "Behold the double standard"

hat tip to Richard Prince

Jelani made me do it: The Original Black Man's Guide to the Press

William Jelani Cobb is a brilliant man with a wicked sense of humor. This piece for TheRoot.com came out of an online conversation that got very silly, very fast. We meant to add that we found this rare manuscript in an Afrocentric bookstore in North Philly next to remaindered copies of "The Black Man's Guide to Understanding the Black Woman." Rumors are that it can be obtained from certain street-corner vendors in Brooklyn as well.

Sometimes you've just got to laugh to keep from crying.

May-day Link love

Ann Wright asks: Is There an Army Cover Up of the Rape and Murder of Women Soldiers?

William Jelani Cobb: Perception Is Reality:
Jeremiah Wright fought a losing battle on unfamiliar turf and for a while now, I've been meaning to beg everyone to read his Prayer For a Random Black Man

Lester Kenyatta Spence: Thoughts on Sean Bell (see youtube clip below)

Akua Gyumerah: Community reaction to the verdict in the Sean Bell trial

Mark Anthony Neal: Posts from Bakari Kitana, James Peterson and Kevin Powell on Obama/Wright and Sean Bell, respectively

AfterEllen.com gives my buddy Lynne D. Johnson well-deserved props Congratulations, Lynne!




Artists I love:

• Soulfege makes Vanity Fair.com
  


• A quartet of clips about the incomparable Miche Braden.
  


• 
  TCNJ's Signal: Ja-Tun paints soul-inspired self-portrait