This is a great virtual exhibit a while back from the New York Public Library. Take the essay and comments on Ethiopia with a huge grain of salt... they do not have a tradition of maritime trade and they certainly were not seafarers in the Indian Ocean world, so I don't know what shoddy scholar wrote that section up. "Habash" or "Ethiopian" historically did not have the same meaning as it does now, but it is common for people to claim much of the continent's history as Ethiopian in the contemporary sense by overlooking this. "Over the course of nearly 20 centuries, millions of East Africans crossed the Indian Ocean and its several seas and adjoining bodies of water in their journey to distant lands, from Arabia and Iraq to India and Sri Lanka. Called Kaffir, Siddi, Habshi, or Zanji, these men, women and children from Sudan in the north to Mozambique in the south Africanized the Indian Ocean world and helped shape the societies they entered and made their own. Free or enslaved, soldiers, servants, sailors, merchants, mystics, musicians, commanders, nurses, or founders of dynasties, they contributed their cultures, talents, skills and labor to their new world, as millions of their descendants continue to do. Yet, their heroic odyssey remains little known. The African Diaspora in the Indian Ocean World traces a truly unique and fascinating story of struggles and achievements across a variety of societies, cultures, religions, languages and times." A few images from South Asia from the collection, you can explore the rest here: http://exhibitions.nypl.org/africansindianocean/index2.php Indian painting depicting the Persian story of Darab fighting the Zanjis (Africans), c.1580 Pakistan has the largest number of people of African descent in South Asia. It has been estimated that at least a quarter of the total population living on the Makran coast are of African ancestry—that is, at least 250,000 men and women can claim East African descent on the southern coast of Pakistan and in the easternmost part of southern Iran. In Pakistan, African descendants are called Sheedi (Siddi.) Many are also called Makrani, whether or not they live in Makran. Much of the vocabulary used by the Afro-Sindhi is a modified Swahili. For instance, the word for shield in Swahili, ngao, is gao among the Afro-Sindhi; the word for moon (or one month) in Swahili, mwesi, is moesi in Afro-Sindhi. In Lyari, a neighborhood of Karachi, there is a Mombasa Street, the name coming from the Kenyan port city. These women are celebrating the Sufi saint Mangho Haji Syed Sakhi Sultan at Manghopir, a suburb of Karachi. Sheedis, like the Siddis of India, also revere the African saint Bava Ghor. In 1490, an African guard, Sidi Badr, seized power in Bengal and ruled for three years before being murdered. Five thousand of the 30,000 men in his army were Ethiopians. After Sidi Badr’s assassination, high-level Africans were driven out and migrated to Gujarat and the Deccan. In the Deccan sultanate of Bijapur, Africans formerly enslaved—they were called the “Abyssinian party”—took control. The African regent Dilawar Khan exercised power from 1580 and was succeeded by Ikhlas Khan. The Abyssinian party dominated the Bijapur Sultanate and conquered new territories until the Mughal invasion in 1686. This portrait is believed to be the Afro-Indian Sultan Burhan Nizam Shah III (1605-1632), who ruled in the sultanate of Ahmednagar, in northwest Deccan. This portrait, putatively of Malik Ambar, is believed to be of his son, Fateh Khan. Fateh Khan married the daughter of another Habshi (Ethiopian), one of the most powerful nobles in the kingdom. In 1631 vizier—top official—Fateh Khan deposed the sultan and installed Hussain Shah in his place. Khan held the real power until 1633, when both were exiled to Delhi and the kingdom was annexed by the Mughals. Malik Ambar's tomb - “A mile outside Raoza [now Khuldabad] proper, north-west, stands the tomb of Malik Ambar, the celebrated minister of Ahmednagar and the founder of the city of Aurangabad. It is built of plain stone, and is surmounted by a lofty dome, the interior of which is carved in various devices, and is remarkable for the echo which it possesses. The grave, which consists of a small stone-covered mound in the usual Mahomedan style, occupies a raised platform in the centre. It contains no inscription of any kind.” Siddis—also called Habshi, Kaphri or African—number about 50,000 in India. It is estimated that 18,000 live in the state of Karnataka, 10,000 in Gujarat and 12,000 in Andhra Pradesh (mostly in Hyderabad). Many Muslim Siddis left after Indian independence in 1947 and settled in Pakistan. Many Siddis do not know much about their origin, but an elder explained: “A long time ago a Hindu king brought my ancestors here from a place called Africa. The Hindu king wanted to have strong and hardworking men to work his property and women to work in his many houses. So he sent ships beyond the horizon and brought our ancestors. Then the Portuguese came and brought Siddis to Goa to work in their houses. Then the British came with more Siddis from Africa to work in their army and fight against the Indians. When they had a chance our forebears fled from Goa and Bombay and settled here and in other parts of Uttara Kannada.”

Overestimating your own importance, are we? Rejection is hard.

SomaliPhilosopher;945474 wrote: Well, thanks for the the character witness. you have tranquilized a potentially messy situation. Maybe as assurance I can call the qalbi police so they can frisk my soul for bad intentions^1 ? Safferz, on a high horse eh? have you joined Chimera on the mountain^2. Bibliography 1. innocent joke made by SP 5/2/2013 2. Second innocent joke made by SP 5/2/2013 I am just trying to maintain the peace in what is a *very* delicate SOL love rectangle (pentagon?)

SomaliPhilosopher;945469 wrote: Btw I am afraid my Safferz psychotic obsession is over. She is all yous Chi. The dhusamareb girl has really grown on me.

SomaliPhilosopher;945468 wrote: I mean no harm . I am a nice guy lol I know you mean no harm, but Chimera is offended and I feel bad dee

I think the "seeing things from afar" idealism comment was a direct response to the positions you've expressed in this thread and has nothing to do with me. I'm inclined to agree that your views on stop and frisk are problematic and not held up by the evidence, but I won't get into that again since you've said you're not interested in the topic anymore.

Chimera;945453 wrote: I get it sxb, you feel threatened by my presence, like a beta-male would to an Alpha, You like Safferz in a certain way, and I get that too, hence the futile attempt at a character assassination, but the reference to me being on a distant mountain is quite ironic, and non-applicable. I wanted to character-assassinate you in return, but I really don't know you as a member, never truly read your posts, nor felt the need. You killed the thread by getting all serious, Chimera lol. I don't think SP was trying to be malicious.

^^ I rolled my eyes so hard reading that, my contact lenses popped out.

Wadani;945444 wrote: This has always been a tactic employed by the dominant power structure. It's akin to the ethiopians use of liyuu booliis in kilinka. A soldier/cop outside the power framework will work tens times as hard and be ten times as brutal to his own people to please his masters, who smugly look on from afar. +1, as Michael Eric Dyson says, you can be black but still a ventriloquist for white supremacy. Skinship is not kinship lol

Chimera;945439 wrote: Its a current reality, how they got there, and how society failed them in education, and economy is irrelevant to fact that as of now "they do make up a disproportionate percentage". Police-officers act in real-time, they don't have the luxury of perusing historic crimes and contemplate what their style of policing might have been or predict future environments and the appropriate police measures that come with it. You brought up the fact that people of colour make up a large proportion of the prison population to justify why they should be profiled on the street by police, and I qualified that by pointing out what you're advocating here - the presupposition of criminality purely on the basis of a person's blackness - is precisely why large numbers of black men are incarcerated. I encourage you to pick up the book I linked to about the US justice system and mass incarceration for a fuller picture, but in short if you are a black person you are more likely to be a victim of police harassment and brutality, more likely to face charges for what young white men get a slap on the wrist or warning for, more likely to be convicted for the same crime as a white person, more likely to receive a harsher and longer sentence than a white person, and more likely to face the death penalty for the same crimes as a white person. I'm just not sure how you don't see the implications of stop and frisk within this wider context of race, policing and incarceration.

DoctorKenney, there are a number of fallacies structuring your argument, all of which are false statistically speaking: 1) New York City has a high crime rate (it has one of the lowest for a major city in the United States, so does Los Angeles... and economists like Steven Levitt have shown the drops in crime rates across the United States have little to do with police practices) 2) Stop and frisk is an effective police tactic (less than 0.2% of stops find weapons on the person, which actually shows it's a failure) 3) The people who are being stopped and frisked are thugs/somehow precipitated the police encounter on account of their own behaviour (do you consider Forrest Whitaker stepping out of a deli suspicious? or my brother and his friends, ironically law students working on these very issues, who were riding the subway? The main critique of stop and frisk is that it profiles anyone and everyone who is black and male and treats them as suspects) So with those assumptions removed, you have no argument.

DoctorKenney;945422 wrote: Wadani, yours is an extreme example. What makes you think that? His experience is closer to the norm.

Wadani;945420 wrote: Sometimes I can't resist my pedantic urges lol. lol I wasn't being sarcastic, I really do appreciate the clarification if I was using the concept incorrectly Chimera;945419 wrote: This is not some racial profiling after a 1 in a million terrorist attack, this is stop & frisks on communities that make up a huge percentage of the prison population. Somali, Indian, Nigerian and Polish men make up a large number of detainees in London, if a cop were to stop me while dressed in a hoodie (never), I would perfectly understand. And I suppose you think people of colour making up huge percentages of the prison population is just because they commit more crimes? lol c'mon now, you're not thinking here. Defend stop and frisk all you want, but the statistics themselves show that it's an ineffective practice, and the campaigns and organizing against it (the only reason Bloomberg and the police commissioner are commenting on this right now is because of a current lawsuit and legislation on the table to curtail it) are becoming hugely successful because they are able to make the case that stop and frisk is a violation of civil liberties.

Wadani;945413 wrote: Cognitive dissonance would only describe his state of mind if he persisted in his support of racial profiling of black men even after witnessing himself or others who fit his 'nonsuspicious' mold being harassed arbitrarily. At this point his point of view is presumabley consistent with what he has actually seen play out in reality, thus precluding the anxiety, frustation and uneasiness borne of conflicting cognitions/beliefs. I was thinking more that Chimera knows better and understands the realities of racism (something that has come through in posts of his that I've read in the past), but supports stop and frisk despite this. But thanks for the clarification, psych major DoctorKenney, I'm not responding to that because you are all kinds of wrong and I'm not sure where to start.

SomaliPhilosopher;945409 wrote: Chimera down, three left to go I hope you're not including Alpha in that figure.

It's disappointing to see how little you seem to understand or care.

Sigh. Who are "they" and what makes "them" so threatening that civil liberties can be suspended for illegal and humiliating stop and frisks? How does one "look suspicious"? I don't understand how you can justify the treatment that young man in the video received, particularly as a black man yourself.

So you are serious. *headdesk*

Chimera;945392 wrote: Just tired of having to play bodyguard for my female relatives and their kids who just want to play in the park or shop in peace without these weed clowns stinking up the place. I'm extremely biased, so don't expect objectivity from me, I have no sympathy for them, be they Somali or non-Somali. Thugs are despicable creatures. These are nice neighbourhoods and areas being ruined by groups that dress like the men in that video. I think more patrols around those areas would be a great deterrent. Just to make sure -- is this a serious comment? I have a hard time believing it to be your position, when you come across as more socially conscious and thoughtful than this.

Chimera, did you miss the part about how every single young black male in NYC statistically was stopped and frisked in 2011? What makes you think they (and "they" includes people just like you) are doing anything but minding their own business before becoming subject to police harassment?

Alpha Blondy;945388 wrote: is NYC representative across the board? Stop and frisk is a program specific to the NYPD, but racial profiling is certainly policing practice across the US (and Canada). Chimera;945389 wrote: We need more of them doing stops and searches at the parks and malls. Why do you say that? Everyday people are stopped and frisked everywhere, and not just outside on the street.

... and statistically every single young black man in New York City was stopped and frisked in 2011. "In an interview on ABC's "Nightline" last night, NYPD commissioner Ray Kelly elaborated on a point Mayor Michael Bloomberg made in a speech this week, about the racial breakdown of stop-and-frisks conducted by city police officers. Bloomberg said NYPD critics are unfairly compare the number of black and Latino men stopped to the number of black and Latino men in the general population, whereas they should be comparing the numbers of stops to the descriptions of suspects. Kelly, in his interview, said that if you use that methodology, "African-Americans are being understopped." A year ago, Kelly went even further, telling reporters people in "communities of color" actually "want more" stop-and-frisks."

Alpha Blondy;945367 wrote: i didn't realise they had siestas in the Great Satan of American States. Just doing my part to help popularize the practice

Alpha Blondy;945363 wrote: horta, did i tell you about the time i was employed as a human-goat conflict expert. i was tasked to undertake the root causes of the ever-growing conflict between goats and people. the project was funded by the UN. but the UN required an expert to assess the situation, before releasing the funds to the local NGO, who would implement the project. for the duration of the short contract, i spent my days writing reports, doing needs assessments etc...... BUT i was NEVER allowed to visit the conflict prone areas, as per strict UN regulations. after haphazardly writing a ''neither here nor there spiel'' .... which was so far removed from the reality on the ground........ i passed the report on to my colleague in our regional HQ to have it approved......in one of those emerging middle-income countries, which....as i'm sure, you could appreciate has ostensibly benefited from the conflicts between goats and people issues. after several months........ just before the end of the financial year and my contract, i received a response from my colleague.. .... cautiously proposing we ought to send the report to our HQ in New York to have it ''rubber-stamped'' . unfortunately, the financial year ended and the project was scrapped due to 'timing constriants'' . 2 weeks later, i found another short-term contract.....i was handsomely paid to be a human-sheep conflict regulatory framework consultant ........