'Blood diamonds' on your hands?

Anyone growing up female in America is literally brainwashed into expecting a diamond engagement ring. Practically from the cradle, little girls are taught to recite the "Four C's of Diamond Value" – clarity, cut, color and carats. Surely if your man wants you enough to love you and marry you, he'll buy you a diamond – the bigger, the better, right?

After all, diamonds are forever. Aren't they?

TRENDING: Is this what you voted for, America?

Personally, I've always deplored diamonds. I can't stand how unnecessarily showy, ostentatious and flashy they are. I repudiate diamonds as status symbols. I haaaate what diamonds really stand for – they're harvested at the expense of exploited workers who are sickened and die for them.

Recently, I took "the family jewels" to someone who purchased "estate jewelry." Strangely enough, he was loath to let me part with my late mother's cluster diamond ring. "Wouldn't you rather keep this for yourself?" he wondered. Definitely not!

So he took two pieces of her diamond jewelry on consignment. And yet, I was uncomfortable with the transaction. I felt like it was profit at the expense of suffering. Blood money.

Little did I know!

The real truth about the diamond trade, as Ruby of the Uhuru (African Freedom) Solidarity Movement in Philadelphia reminds me, is sickening: "All diamonds are blood diamonds." While Africa has vast amounts of diamonds, she points out, most African people live in poverty and misery. The diamond cartel creates astronomical wealth for Europe and America at the expense of the African workers who toil and labor and die to extract diamonds from the earth.

If you have any doubt, consider:

• The brutal, multi-billion-dollar diamond industry, primarily controlled by DeBeers, has a bloody, oppressive history with more than 100 years of colonial plunder and genocide in Africa.

• African diamond workers on their own soil are paid less than a dollar a day, have a life span of 30 or 40 years, are forced to live in hovels away from their families, without ANY health care despite skyrocketing AIDS infection and other diseases – while profits from "legal" diamonds enrich upper-class whites in the U.S., Belgium, Israel, and South Africa.

Uhuru has this radical proposal for diamond-wearers: "Some 70 percent of American women supposedly own one rock. ... Donate your diamonds to the Uhuru Movement for African-led development programs for renewable energy and water purification in West Africa. Support reparations for African people. Africa and all its resources are really the birthright of African people everywhere!"

Think about it: "Diamond workers in West Africa make 30 cents a day for our luxury diamond bracelets! The price of our diamonds is oppression and violence. The diamond-rich Sierra Leone people live without electricity, clean water or education. Africans were forced off their land, massacred and starved by European colonizers who stole their property and resources."

Uhuru campaign organizer Alison Hoehne declares, "We have the responsibility to shut down an industry that ravages the land and labor of Africa to benefit the white world. For white society, the diamond is promoted to represent the ultimate expression of love. For Africa, the diamond trade has its origins in colonialism, with African people forced to labor on their own land under slave-like conditions for pennies a day."

In recent years, according to Uhuru, proxy wars funded by outside foreign interests competing over the mineral-rich African continent have destabilized the region, allowing for uncontrolled export of diamonds by independent speculators. The DeBeers Group, the diamond cartel founded by British colonist Cecil Rhodes, responded to this threat to their virtual monopoly of the diamond trade by devising the pejorative label "blood" or "conflict" diamonds, dismissing any other diamonds sold on the world market without their "Kimberley Process" corporate stamp of approval.

Preposterous, Alison Hoehne counters, stressing, "All diamonds are blood diamonds. The diamond wars are just another chapter in the centuries-long history of Western colonial domination in Africa that kidnapped millions of African people for enslavement in the Americas, wiped out whole segments of the African population in Africa, stole African land and resources, and enslaved African people on their own soil for the benefit of the white world."

Seeking to educate the American public about the violence and oppression intrinsic to the diamond trade, Uhuru will launch the National Action Campaign Against Diamonds, Saturday, Oct. 21, 12 noon – calling for a global boycott of the diamond trade and massive demonstrations targeting these outrages. For more information, visit www.apscuhuru.org, e-mail [email protected] or call (215) 387-0919. Join them!

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