Africa Is a Country

Apartheid in Arizona

Africa Is a Country Podcast
African Five-a-Side Podcast

Apartheid in Arizona

By
Sean Jacobs

What’s up with John McCain’s home state? The state legislature has just passed an immigration law that basically targets the state’s Latino population for random stops and demands of their ID’s. As my man, Siddhartha Mitter, remarked yesterday: Apartheid nostalgics will be pleased to learn that the Pass Laws have been dusted off and reinstated, in Arizona. Separately, they have also given official sanction to the fantasies of “birthers” who claim President Barack Obama was not born on US soil.

Made Siddhartha think of Public Enemy’s 1990 tune “By the time I get to Arizona.”

Remember Arizona, and New Hampshire, were the only states that opposed a holiday honoring Martin Luther King.  BTW, John McCain has a shameful history in the anti-King initiatives and now the xenophobic immigration initiatives.

Via Siddhartha Mitter

Further Reading

How to unmake the world

In this wide-ranging conversation, para-disciplinary artist Nolan Oswald Dennis reflects on space, time, Blackness, and the limits of Western knowledge—offering a strategy for imagining grounded in African and anti-colonial traditions.

A migrant’s tale

On his latest EP, Kwame Brenya turns a failed migration into musical testimony—offering a biting critique of ECOWAS, broken borders, and the everyday collapse of pan-African ideals.

What Portugal forgets

In the film ‘Tales of Oblivion,’ Dulce Fernandes excavates the buried history of slavery in Portugal, challenging a national mythology built on sea voyages, silence, and selective memory.