Happy 50th Independence Day, Jamaica!

Like me and many of my friends, 1962 is a special year for the island nation of Jamaica..  It was 50 years ago on this date that a ceremony occurred signaling that the Jamaican Independence Act was now in force, it was no longer a British colony after 307 years of British rule and from this day forward Jamaica would handle its business as an independent nation.
 
At a few moments before midnight on August 5, 1962 at the National Stadium in Kingston the Union Jack was lowered for the last time and replaced with the brand new black, gold and green flag of a newly independent nation.  .

It triggered several joyous days of celebration across the island before the day to day business of running their nation began with the August 7 opening of the first Jamaican parliament.

Like all nations in their post-independence day phase Jamaica has had their good times and bad times, but the 2.8 million people who live in the third largest Anglophone country in the Western Hemisphere and their people across the Jamaican Diaspora love their country, are proud of its accomplishments, and proud of their Jamaican heritage.

They wish to use this 50th Anniversary year to reflect on Jamaica's past half century, learn the lessons from them, dream of a better Jamaica and get to work building that nation for future generations. 

The people of Jamaica are also determined to imagine a better future for themselves and their country and work hard to achieve it.


And now, please rise for the Jamaican national anthem, a song we US track fans got way too familiar with during the Beijing Olympic Games in 2008 and are hearing again during these London Games.






Seriously, to all my TransGriot readers there, happy 50th Independence Day, Jamaica!.

Some Euro 2012 Fans Can't Say No To Racism

The UEFA Euro 2012 tournament is being co-hosted by the nations of Poland and Ukraine June 8 through July 1.   The group play stage is winding down to its conclusion this weekend to determine the teams that will enter the knockout rounds and be in contention for the European championship.

Because it is an international game, talented players of African descent have long been integral parts of European club teams and several national clubs for years.

In the UEFA Euro 2012 tournament the national sides of England, the Netherlands and France have large visible contingents of African descended players.  Italy has 21 year old striker Mario Balotelli and the Czech Republic has Theodor Gebre Selassie as lone African descended starting players on their national teams. 

While soccer is called 'the beautiful game', one of the ugly stains it struggles with is racism in the sport, especially in European football venues.  There has been a long deplorable history of players and supporters of European based club and national teams uttering racial monkey chants, anti-Semitic epithets and throwing bananas on the pitch at African descended players. 

There were concerns expressed before the Euro 2012 tournament started by groups that monitor racist events at European football matches such as Football Against Racism in Europe (FARE) about the wisdom of hosting the tournament in those two nations in light of reports that Ukrainian fans had been videotaped during matches doing Nazi salutes and aiming monkey chants at African descended players


FIFA has been engaged in a ongoing Say No To Racism campaign to clean up the bigoted behavior in the sport since 2001 which I believe also needs to be expanded to combat homophobia and transphobia as well. .  

Superstar players in the sport such as David Beckham have also been outspoken about eliminating racism in 'the beautiful game' as well.

UEFA (Union of European Football Associations, the governing body for soccer in Europe) has a zero tolerance policy and rules that make national football associations responsible for their fans' boorish behavior.   Punishments can range from warnings and a sliding scale of fines to points deductions and even expulsion from future Euro tournaments.

Reports out of the first week of Euro 2012 are justifying the concerns that FARE and other groups had when the tournament was initially awarded to Poland and Ukraine.  It seems that old bigoted habits are dying hard. 

Even before the tournament started, The Netherlands national squad was highly pissed off about their players being subjected to racist chants during an open training session in Krakow a day after they visited the nearby Auschwitz concentration camp.

Reports have surfaced that during the June 10 Spain-Italy and June 14 Croatia-Italy matches elements of the Spanish and Croatian fan bases started monkey chants aimed at Balotelli.  The Croatians took it a step further by not only doing the chants but throwing a banana onto the pitch.

Croatia has a particularly egregious history of racist abuse.  They were fined by UEFA for deploying neo-Nazi flags and shouting racist chants during a Euro 2008 quarterfinal loss to Turkey and fined by FIFA for an incident in a World Cup qualifying match in Zagreb in which England's Emile Heskey was subjected to racist taunts.

Croatia has been formally charged for the incidents in Thursday's Croatia-Italy match in Poznan and the Croatian Football Federation is rapidly distancing themselves from the bigoted elements of their supporter base.


During the June 8 Russia-Czech Republic match in Wroclaw reports are surfacing that some of Russia's nekulturny supporters aimed racist monkey chanting at Gebre Selassie, and UEFA is investigating those charges with Russia's sports minister vehemently denying them. 

If those reports are true, then it's karmic justice that the Czech Republic qualified for the knockout round despite being beaten 4-1 by Russia thanks to Greece beating the Russians.1-0 in group play.

Now that UEFA is starting to crack down, we'll see if this chills out the racist supporters of some of the national teams still left in the Euro 2012 tournament and if the threat of severe UEFA sanctions or banishment from Euro 2016 will be enough to get those fans to say no to racism at this tournament.

Titanic Sinking 100th Anniversary

Today is the 100th anniversary of a tragic event that still captures the world's imagination and interest 100 years after it happened.  

It was the impetus for several movies about it including the blockbuster 1997 James Cameron produced film and diving expeditions to find the sunken liner that was eventually discovered in 1985.

The sinking of the British passenger liner RMS Titanic on its maiden voyage on April 15, 1912 several hours after colliding with an iceberg caused the deaths of 1,514 people and was the worst peacetime maritime disaster in world history.   The passenger list on that maiden voyage included some of the world's wealthiest people at the time and immigrants to the United States and Canada from Great Britain, Ireland, Scandinavia and other parts of the world.

One of the facts that has come out about the Titanic sinking in recent years is there was one family of African descent traveling on the ill-fated liner, the Laroches

25 year old Haitian native Joseph Laroche, his pregnant French wife Juliette, and daughters Simonne and Louise, were onboard and in the process of moving from their former home in Paris to Haiti to escape the racial discrimination he'd encountered in France while trying to find a job as an engineer.  Laroche's uncle Cincinnatus Leconte was president of Haiti at the time and arranged a job for him as a math teacher.

Laroche's mother had booked first class passage on the liner LaFrance for them but after the Laroche's heard about the Compagnie Générale Transatlantique line's policy of children not being allowed to dine with their parents, they exchanged the tickets for second class passage aboard the Titanic.  

Juliette, Simonne and Louise managed to be placed on a lifeboat by Joseph and were picked up later by the RMS Carpathia  Joseph did not survive and his body was never recovered   Juliette Laroche returned to France with her daughters and later gave birth to a son.   Louise died in 1998 as one of the last eight survivors of the disaster. 
 

The disaster involving the 'unsinkable' ship which was the largest built in the world at the time led to improvements in maritime safety.   The Titanic remains on the seabed of the North Atlantic gradually disintegrating in 12,415 feet (3794 m) of water. 

Since the discovery of the wreck site, thousands of artifacts from arguably the most famous ship in the world have been recovered, have been displayed in museums around the world and the ship still holds the world's collective attention a century later.

Titica-Trans Angolan Music Rising Star

As I like to point out on this blog, transpeople do exist on the second largest continent on the planet. 

One of the other things I'm most fond of reminding people of that peruse this blog and every time I get a chance to utter the words is  is if transpeople are given a chance, we can do anything we set our minds to do and excel at it.

Meet 25 year old Titica, who is a rising star in the Angolan music genre called kuduro, which is a fusion of rap and techno music. 

She was named the best kuduro artist of 2011, is a regular on radio and television there, has performed at a Divas concert in front of Angolan president Jose Eduardo dos Santos and will be embarking on an international tour with stops in Portugal, the UK and the United States.

But as she mentioned in a BBC interview, her newfound success hasn't been easy.  

"I've been stoned, I've been beaten, and there is a lot of prejudice against me, a lot of people show that. There is a lot of taboo," she said.  





But at the same time, in heavily Catholic Angola, she's managed to cultivate a fan base that only cares about her music, not her trans status. 

And that's the way it should be.   I'll have to check her out when she comes to Houston to perform at the Angolan consulate.