Oh, Jamaican media, do you really want to shake that "Everyone in Jamaica is a dull pothead" myth? If so, what the hell possessed you to publish black writer Michael Dingwall's recent essay, "Slavery was good for the black man," in a real newspaper? Not only is it horribly written and its punctuation a mess, it's factually inaccurate and deeply, vastly offensive.

Were it not so goddamn sad and wrong, it might be laughable to read sentences like this: "While it is true that black Africa has, for the most part, squandered the opportunities that slavery offered in the past, the positive influence of European civilisation cannot be denied."

Tighten up, Jamaica Observer. And pass this doofus Dingwall 'pon de unemployment line.

When we talk about black people and AIDS, our minds often shift to Africa, where the AIDS epidemic has completely destroyed communities and left generations of orphans. A new report from the Black AIDS Institute says that we should also be paying close attention to AIDS in the black American community. According "Left Behind - Black America: A Neglected Priority in the Global AIDS," the number of African Americans with AIDS is comparable to the numbers in some African countries.

CONTINUED »

South Africa – along with China and Russia – recently vetoed the US-introduced resolution to place an arms embargo on Zimbabwe and enact travel and financial restrictions on the nation's president, Robert Mugabe, who recently reclaimed his office by killing his opponents. New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman is very, very angry about this:

But when it comes to pure, rancid moral corruption, no one can top South Africa’s president, Thabo Mbeki, and his stooge at the U.N., Dumisani Kumalo. They have done everything they can to prevent any meaningful U.N. pressure on the Mugabe dictatorship.

As The Times reported, America’s U.N. ambassador, Zalmay Khalilzad, “accused South Africa of protecting the ‘horrible regime in Zimbabwe,’ ” calling this particularly disturbing given that it was precisely international economic sanctions that brought down South Africa’s apartheid government, which had long oppressed that country’s blacks.

So let us now coin the Mbeki Rule: When whites persecute blacks, no amount of U.N. sanctions is too much. And when blacks persecute blacks, any amount of U.N. sanctions is too much.

(emphasis ours)

Real talk!

Much like the servant Grusha in the famous allegory The Caucasian Chalk Circle, Morgan Tsvangirai, Robert Mugabe's main opponent in Zimbabwe's presidential race, has dropped out of the runoff election rather than tear his beloved nation apart.

CONTINUED »

Alicia Keys submitted an opinion piece for CNN in advance of the July 4th premiere of her documentary, Alicia in Africa, about her travels to the continent and her work there to fight the spread of AIDS.

My first visit to Africa completely changed my world view. I came to understand that AIDS was not simply a deadly disease but a force capable of orphaning children, uprooting communities and stifling economic progress.

What AIDS could not do was suffocate the hope of the remarkable people I met throughout Africa. If people who had suffered such unthinkable devastation could maintain hope, then I could certainly hope for an end to this pandemic in my lifetime.

With this goal in mind, [AIDS activist Leigh Blake] and I started Keep A Child Alive in 2003 and our clinic and orphan sites operate in six countries, supporting approximately 45,000 children and their families who have been victimized by AIDS.

APARTHEID ENDURES "Whites in South Africa earn five times more than their black counterparts on average, according to a new study, illustrating the enduring legacy of apartheid 14 years after its abolition. A study done for the UASA union made waves in the Rainbow Nation last week when it showed that whites bring home 450 percent more than blacks on average and 400 percent more than their mixed race peers. In line with the global trend, education is the single biggest determinant of earning power, it concluded, but in a country with South Africa's history the issue has a powerful racial dimension. 'That blacks weren't allowed on to certain beaches (during the apartheid era of whites-only rule) can be changed overnight but education has a long-lasting legacy,' said the author of the research …"

In her new article in The Times of London, epidemiologist Elizabeth Pisani, an AIDS researcher for more than 10 years, says she believes political correctness has impeded the eradication of HIV and AIDS in Africa. Specifically, that the many nations and medical groups working to prevent the spread of the disease are unwilling to express this truth: "HIV is largely a sexually transmitted infection, so there must be something different about sex in Africa."

To help make her point, Pisani notes that though the popular assumption holds that poverty and a lack of education are the main reasons AIDS has spread like wildfire throughout sub-Saharan Africa, other impoverished nations are not nearly as plagued by the illness:

The truth is that a society in which many people have two or three partners on the go at any one time will produce a bigger epidemic than a society where people may have 10 partners in five years, but only one at a time. And it’s a fact that in parts of Africa, it’s more common for both men and women to have two or three simultaneous relationships than to have serial partners. Do people behave in this way because they are poor and ignorant? Not in Bangladesh, or Bolivia, or dozens of other countries where incomes and literacy are low. Indeed, in Africa, the incidence of HIV infection is highest in the richest households and the richest countries.

Pisani says these issues go unspoken because many people consider them racist. But without acknowledging them, she stresses, finding a way to combat the spread of HIV becomes even more nebulous than it already is.

Her grim solution? "Pray for better leaders."

MUGABE'S WHITE REFUGEES BRING PROSPERITY TO NIGERIA "Musa Mogadi says he is better off since 'the whites' came. He's got a new job, learned new farming skills, and he can chat on a mobile phone while zipping around the countryside on a motorbike. Three years ago, Mr. Mogadi got by as a subsistence farmer. But he now earns a regular wage as a supervisor on one of this town's new commercial farms. He's applied skills he learned from some of the two dozen white Zimbabwean farmers who moved to Nigeria in 2005, after being kicked off their land by President Robert Mugabe and later attracted by large parcels of land on offer under 25-year leases and commitments of support from the Nigerian government."