The Big Isms

Exclusive: De Niro, @robreiner, @SophiaBush, @StephenKing, @jvn, and more are cutting through the Trump administration’s lies about the Mueller report pic.twitter.com/VpJhIGBbv0 — NowThis (@nowthisnews) June 20, 2019

SUGGESTION TO THE MEDIA:

In 2016, you gave trump $2B in free advertising. You guys are as much to blame for him as Russian hackers and dumb voters.

How about THIS time around you DON'T help Fullofshitticus, and report on DEMs who can run the country properly?#ThursdayThoughts — BrooklynDad_Defiant! (@mmpadellan) June 20, 2019

The Big Isms will be back at the end of summer. (We have some projects to wrap and complete.)

An Artist’s Critique of Colonialism in Brazil
Commissioned by the MCA for the exhibition, de Andrade’s “Jogos dirigidos” (Directed games) (2019) plays with the conventions of educational films. The film documents a community with an unusually high prevalence of deafness in the isolated town of Várzea Queimada, in which people communicate through an unofficial form of sign language. De Andrade leaves many of these gestures untranslated, providing glosses of some afterwards, like so many video flashcards. Since only certain phrases are defined, it is difficult to follow the thread of the story, allowing the film’s subjects to hover between intelligibility and incomprehensibility in a way that underscores our shared humanity while acknowledging the very real barriers that divide us. Through “Jogos dirigidos” and its other works, One to One dramatizes exchanges between colonizer and colonized, between the global north and the global south, between the haves and the have-nots — exchanges …

When They See Us is now streaming on Netflix. The Central Park Five is available to stream on various platforms.

MUST SEE: Ava DuVernay's When They See Us Is a Brutal Look at a 30-Year-Old Injustice

How activists used photography to help end slavery
Matthew Fox-Amato, April 24, 2018, The Washington Post



It seems it’s not a protest in the age of social media without a photograph. From the women’s marches to Black Lives Matter protests to sit-ins for a Green New Deal on Capitol Hill, participants have flooded the digital landscape with photos of their activism: demonstrators brandishing signs and packing America’s streets, plazas and corridors of power.

But while social media makes this act of sharing protest imagery seem like a new innovation, it's actually an organizing tool with roots almost two centuries old. Antebellum abolitionists pioneered the use of photography as a tool for social movements, and in the process, they heightened their sense of solidarity and urgency, exacerbating the political crisis over slavery.

Abolitionists understood that building a movement meant making themselves visible. Early photography offered a bracing new tool for them to do so…

In his dissenting opinion, Keith included the photographs of 36 civil rights martyrs, and he wrote:"The utter brutality of white supremacy in its efforts to disenfranchise persons of color is the foundation for the tragedy that is the Majority's effort to roll back the progress of history. I will not forget. I cannot forget  — indeed America cannot forget — the pain, suffering, and sorrow of those who died for equal protection and for this precious right to vote." Source: Judge Damon Keith, Civil Rights Champion, Dies At 96 : NPR

I suggest everyone learn more about the prison abolitionist movement, and this profile of Ruth Wilson Gilmore is a good place to start: Prison abolition, as a movement, sounds provocative and absolute, but what it is as a practice requires subtler understanding. For Gilmore, who has been active in the movement for more than 30 years, it’s both a long-term goal and a practical policy program, calling for government investment in jobs, education, housing, health care — all the elements that are required for a productive and violence-free life. Abolition means not just the closing of prisons but the presence, instead, of vital systems of support that many communities lack. Instead of asking how, in a future without prisons, we will deal with so-called violent people, abolitionists ask how we resolve inequalities and get people the resources they need long before the hypothetical moment when, as Gilmore puts it, they “mess up.” “Every age has had its hopes,” William Morris wr…

Many German cultural institutions have long begun to address collections from colonial contexts and can build on the experience gained with completed or ongoing projects. We welcome the fact that the German museums have adopted guidelines and recommendations on the sensitive handling both of cultural objects and of human remains.
... Identifying cultural objects from colonial contexts which were appropriated in a way which is no longer legally and/or ethically justifiable and enabling their return is a moral and ethical obligation and an important political task for our age. Human remains from colonial contexts are to be returned.
8.) Requests for the return of artefacts from colonial contexts are to be processed promptly. At the same time, cultural heritage institutions are called upon to take an independent and proactive approach to identify artefacts in their collections which might be returned, even if there has been no request for return.
9.) In principle, returns shoul…