The Big Isms

December 30, 2014 Guest Post By Amari D. Pollard BLOG

I can’t tell you the exact moment I realized what it meant to be considered “different.” Maybe it was when I was three and my friend compared me to a monkey because my hands were black but my palms where tan. Maybe it was when I was eight and someone called me a Negro. Or maybe it was when I was twelve and someone told me to get to the back of the bus because that’s where I belonged.
I can’t remember, and it doesn’t matter if I could because the point is that in the world we live in, people like myself are meant to feel different. Yet, it’s funny how we’re all considered so different when we are all so similar at the base of our composition.
Are we not all human? Do we not all have organs, and breathe, and feel?

In honor of Tax Day, we asked a black cartoonist to design his own tax form.
Source: Cashing In on Your White Privilege Tax Deduction

George Yancy, Emory University philosophy professor and the author of Backlash: What Happens When We Talk Honestly about Racism in America (Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2018), talks about the response to his 2015 column for The New York Times section The Stone entitled, "Dear White America" and the racist vitriol it elicited and asks where we go from here.
LISTEN: Talking About Racism - The Brian Lehrer Show - WNYC

If Beale Street Could Talk Gets a Harlem Homecoming for Its Premierethe film adaption of If Beale Street Could Talk is “100%
Harlem-based—shot in Harlem and based on a novel by a great American
writer who was Harlem-born…so how could we possibly present it anywhere
but the Apollo?”...

RACISM: The first recorded utterance of the word was by a man named Richard Henry Pratt, whose legacy among Native Americans and others is deeply contentious. His story illustrates problems with how the word is used today.
Source: The Ugly, Fascinating History Of The Word 'Racism' : Code Switch : NPR

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African-Americans were not alone in suffering separations. Starting in 1879, tens of thousands of Native Americans were required to leave their families and attend boarding schools. Richard Pratt, an Army officer who founded the first one, the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, in Pennsylvania, summarized his philosophy this way: “A great general has said that the only good Indian is a dead one. In a sense, I agree with the sentiment, but only in this: that all the Indian there is in the race should be dead.” He declared, “Kill the Indian in him, and save the man.” This was considered sound treatment of “savages” after annihilation had failed to fully eliminate them.

Assimilation was the main goal of the schools: The children’s names were changed, their language, religions and other cultural traditions suppressed.

I found out I was adopted at 49
Over 100 children born in Ireland between 1949 and 1969 have had their births incorrectly registered, says child and family agency Tusla. Irish prime minister Leo Varadkar apologised to the 126 people whose adoptive parents were registered as their birth parents and called it "another dark chapter" in Ireland's history. Dolores Quinlan is one of the people affected.  She tells us what it was like to find out about her adoption at age 49. (Photo: Dolores Quinlan is one of over 100 Irish people who were "illegally adopted" in the sixties. Credit: Dolores Quinlan)
LISTEN: BBC World Service - Newshour, I found out I was adopted at 49

Multiple people close to Donald Trump have direct ties to white supremacists. Trump’s top economic adviser, Larry Kudlow, has admitted he recently hosted white nationalist publisher, Peter Brimelow, at a birthday celebration at his home. Brimelow founded the anti-immigrant website VDARE.com.

Meanwhile, Trump’s speechwriter Darren Beattie was fired last Friday as revelations surfaced that he had spoken at a conference alongside prominent white nationalists, including Brimelow, in 2016. Beattie was a panelist at the H.L. Mencken Club conference, an event the Southern Poverty Law Center calls a gathering of “white nationalists and pseudo-academic and academic racists.” We speak with Richard Cohen, president of the Southern Poverty Law Center.

Though Wojnarowicz, like most Americans, viewed Indians through a romanticized lens, his interest in the shared death space of those marked as expendable reveals the possibility for collaboration beyond life.
Considering his use of language like artillery in his visual art, it is unsurprising that David Wojnarowicz was first a poet. Walking through P.P.O.W.’s current exhibition, Soon All This will Be Picturesque Ruins: The Installations of David Wojnarowicz, I couldn’t stop thinking in poems. One poem in particular looped through me and around the works, the one-sentence poem that is simply the title of the collection, This Wound is a World by Billy-Ray Belcourt (2017) from the Driftpile Cree Nation.
BIG READ

A year after removing the statue, Duke University decides to leave the site of the former Confederate monument empty to “provide a powerful statement about the past, the present and our values.” With the unanimous support of the Board of Trustees, newly instated University President, Vincent E. Price, ordered the statue be removed, which it was on August 19, 2017. In his public statement about the decision, Price wrote the statue would “be preserved so that students can study Duke’s complex past and take part in a more inclusive future.” He also announced the creation of a Truth, Racial Healing, and Transformation Center, led by Charmaine Royal, associate professor of African and African American studies, biology and community and family medicine. read

The disturbing parallels between modern accounting and the business of slavery (audio)
Kimberly Adams, August 14, 2018, Marketplace


Slavery in the United States was a business. A morally reprehensible — and very profitable business. Much of the research around the business history of slavery focuses on the horrors of the trans-Atlantic slave trade and the business interests that fueled it. The common narrative is that today's modern management techniques were developed in the factories in England and the industrialized North of the United States, not the plantations of the Caribbean and the American South.

According to a new book by historian Caitlin Rosenthal, that narrative is wrong.

Rosenthal is an assistant professor of history at the University of California, Berkeley, and in her new book, Accounting for Slavery: Masters and Management, she looks at the business side of slavery once it was well-established on plantations. Rosenthal argues that slaveholders in the Amer…