Why We Are Surveying the MENA Community in the U.S. |
I was thrilled when I heard that two of my colleagues in the Graphics department, Denise Lu and Haeyoun Park, were pursuing a project on how people of Middle Eastern and North African descent in the United States think about their racial and ethnic identities. I'm of Lebanese and Irish descent and have wanted to pursue a similar story for years. |
I also wondered what had prompted their interest. This is not something that has come up a lot in New York Times coverage. |
But there was some discussion in recent years about the possibility of a new U.S. Census category, as well as new scholarship on the subject. People of Middle Eastern and North African ancestry are currently classified as white, without a box to check for MENA ethnicity, which advocacy groups and elected officials have increasingly questioned as they feel the existing option does not fit many people's lived experiences. |
During the Obama administration, the government had done extensive research into whether to create a MENA box and how to go about it. It's a complicated endeavor: We're talking about a huge and diverse region, and there's no universal agreement about which countries fit into the category. There are many ethnicities, languages, religions and skin tones. |
But the same is true for other categories that do exist on the census, and having the box can bring advantages, like increased federal funding for groups that serve MENA-heritage communities. |
But the bureaucratic back-and-forth is only a small part of the story. Denise, Haeyoun and I have teamed up on a long-term project on this subject, and what we really want to explore is how people in this category grapple with questions around race, ethnicity, identity and belonging. |
This week we published a survey on this subject, and we'll contact some of the respondents for in-depth interviews for a series of future articles. |
We'd be very grateful if you share the survey with anyone who might want to take it, and be in touch with any feedback. Thanks for reading, and we look forward to hearing from you. |
 | | Elizabeth Nsele, daughter of the late Solomon Linda, holds a photo of her father, at left with the Evening Birds musical group, at her home in Soweto in 2006.Naashon Zalk for The New York Times |
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What Does Cultural Appropriate Really Mean? |
By Ligaya Mishan T Writer at Large |
IN 1939, SOLOMON Linda, a Zulu musician who grew up herding cattle in drought-prone Msinga in South Africa, improvised a few notes at what was then Johannesburg's (and sub-Saharan Africa's and possibly the continent's) lone recording studio. As the South African journalist Rian Malan chronicled in a 2000 feature for Rolling Stone, Linda and his group, the Evening Birds, were on the third take of a song that had more sounds than words, with the five backup voices split in harmony but one in rhythm, steady and inexorable, and Linda's high, clean falsetto soaring above, until he uttered into being the musical phrase that would soon make its way to every corner of the world, albeit with lyrics he never wrote: "In the jungle, the quiet jungle, the lion sleeps tonight." |
Pressed onto a 78 r.p.m. disc and titled "Mbube" ( "Lion"), the song sold around 100,000 copies and made Linda a local star. But by the 1950s, after the all-white National Party government had codified segregation into the system of apartheid in 1948, he was working a janitorial job at the record company's warehouse and had signed over the copyright of the song for 10 shillings, roughly the equivalent of $41.80 today. (Whether he understood the terms of the contract is unclear, as he could not read or write.) In the United States, the song was rejiggered for white singers who couldn't quite manage the beat but saw their perky doo-wop arrangements climb the charts nevertheless. Eventually, Disney took notice; Linda's lilting lullaby is arguably the heart of "The Lion King." Record executives interviewed by Malan estimated that, as of 2000, Linda could've earned $15 million in revenues and royalties. Instead, when he died of kidney failure at age 53 in 1962, he was buried a pauper in an unmarked grave. (His descendants reached an out-of-court settlement with Disney in 2006.) |
A fairly straightforward story of exploitation, no? It's almost reassuring in its clarity: Someone created something beautiful and someone else took it, passed it off as their own and got rich because of it. The race and class differentials — a poor Black man living under an oppressive regime versus slick white record producers in the booming postwar West — simply underscore the imbalance of power. And yet in the '90s, when a few of these producers were squabbling among themselves over rights to the song, one of them tried to make a case that the original tune was not the product of Linda's individual imagination but a traditional Zulu melody: a cultural artifact, like the Scottish Highlands air behind "Morning Has Broken" (immortalized by the British singer Cat Stevens in a 1972 single) and the Appalachian coal miners' ballad "The House of the Rising Sun" (a hit for the British band the Animals in 1964), that belonged to no one and thus everyone. "After all, what was a folk song?" Malan writes. "Who owned it? It was just out there, like a wild horse or a tract of virgin land on an unconquered continent." |
In the case of "Mbube," there was proof that Linda wrote the notes. (English lyrics were added in 1961 by the American songwriters George David Weiss, Hugo Peretti and Luigi Creatore.) But what if it had, in fact, been a traditional Zulu song? Should that have made it fair game, even though it came not from the Western traditions that these producers shared but from a culture of which they and much of their audience likely knew very little — from a people who were suppressed and dispossessed under colonialism? Copyright law (within human history, a fairly recent development) tells us that individuals have ownership over what they create and are harmed when others copy from them without permission, attribution or compensation. But can a more amorphous collective, a culture, likewise be harmed? |
Read the rest of the story here. |
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