The Big Isms

Slavery in the Hands of Harvard, curated by Dr. Jonathan M. Square, is a small but remarkably effective look at both Gates’s arrest and, more specifically, the historical ties and intersections between the school and the varied institutions of slavery.  readSlavery in the Hands of Harvard, curated by Dr. Jonathan M. Square,continues at The Center for Government and International Studies at Harvard University (1730 Cambridge Street, Cambridge, Massachusetts) through March 16.

What we get wrong about the roots of slavery in America
Eric Herschthal, February 19, 2019, The Washington Post



Four hundred years ago, Sir George Yeardley, the governor of the fledgling colony of Virginia, bought “20. and odd Negroes” from an English pirate named John Jope. Having attacked a Portuguese slave ship on its way to Mexico, Jope — technically a privateer, or a government-sponsored pirate — found 350 enslaved Angolans chained inside the fetid, overcrowded ship.

Jope took as many Angolans as he could, then made his way to Hampton, Va., where Yeardley bought several of them. Starved for labor, Yeardley did not think twice about putting these enslaved Africans to work alongside the colony’s many white indentured servants.

The arrival of those Angolans in 1619 has long served as the starting point of African American history, even of racism itself. This year, the 400th anniversary of their arrival, the date shows no signs of losing its prominence. Across thecountry…

By the way, I AM Native & I AM Black.

Both.

How much? 100% of both. All.

Some of you witnessed some of the weird/ugly insecurity that Native & Black people sometimes face.

You have every right to be both. You don’t have to make a choice. Love 100% of you & your ancestors. — Breakdances With Wolves Podcast = Baby Makin Music (@BigIndianGyasi) February 26, 2019

The Southern Poverty Law Center just released it’s new Hate Crime report and they found an all-time high in hate groups in the US (1,020): The previous all-time high number of hate groups the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) counted was 1,018 in 2011, when rage against the first black president was roiling. Amid the era of Trump, hate groups have increased once again, rising 30 percent over the past four years.  And last year marked the fourth year in a row that hate group numbers increased after a short period of decline. In the previous four-year period, the number of groups fell by 23 percent.

Karl Lagerfeld died this week in Paris, but not everyone wants to whitewash his terrible history of misogyny, xenophobia, and hate: Publications have described his comments as “catty”, “bitchy”, “acid-tongued and superficial” and “controversial” instead of sexist, misogynistic, racist, fatphobic, and islamophobic. The blatant separation of the artist from the art perpetuates cycles of abuse in which men like Lagerfeld can occupy prominent spaces in our industries and face no consequences for their words or actions, and be fondly remembered when they are dead. The fashion industry continued to let this terrible person hold a place of high-esteem and reduced his commentary to Lagerfeld simply being a bit eccentric. It’s time the fashion industry make honest remembrances of the man and that you grapple with his true legacy and the reality of oppression in fashion if you truly hope to make more space for marginalized people and bodies in fashion—I’m not going to hold my breath fo…

The Black Power Mixtape 1967–1975From The Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975 (screenshot by the author for Hyperallergic)Black Panther is far and away this year’s highest-grossing big Oscar contender. The 2011 documentary The Black Power Mixtape examines the actual Black Panther Party. Assembled from lost and then rediscovered footage shot by Swedish news teams in the ’60s and ’70s, the wealth of unearthed material is contextualized with modern commentary and sharp editing, providing a helpful look at the black power movement.

Available on Amazon and Google Play

These are must reads:


GUILTY OF MISCEGENATION: A Look at Anti-Miscegenation Laws Across the United States (audio)
February 15, 2019, Backstory



This week’s BackStory deals with stories of love that challenged social norms in American history. We look at the ways Americans’ attitudes toward love reflect and influence broader cultural and political norms.

Ideas about love, and who can love who, often coalesced around the concept of miscegenation - marriage and or sexual relations between different races. Mainly, the idea reflects fears, spoken and unspoken, about the vulnerability of white supremacy in a changing American political and cultural environment.

Ultimately, thirty-eight states enacted laws preventing interracial marriages, from Virginia in 1691 to Wyoming in 1913. In 1967 the U.S. Supreme Court struck down all laws banning interracial marriage, in the decision known as Loving v. Virginia.

This map presents laws against interracial marriage as they varied from stat…

Equal-Opportunity Evil
Rebecca Onion, February 14, 2019, Slate



Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers opens her stunning new book, They Were Her Property: White Women as Slave Owners in the American South, with a story about Martha Gibbs, a sawmill owner in Mississippi who also owned “a significant number of slaves.” One of them, Litt Young, described her owner as a woman in total control of her financial affairs, including the management of her enslaved workers. Young remembered, for example, how Gibbs’ second husband tried and failed to convince her to stop ordering her overseer to administer “brutal whippings.” After the Confederates surrendered, Gibbs “refugeed:” She took some of her enslaved workers to Texas, at gunpoint, and forced them to labor for her until 1866—“one year after these legally free but still enslaved people ‘made her first crop.’ ” Then, writes Jones-Rogers, “Martha Gibbs finally let them go.”

Early books about female slaveholders, written in the 1970s and 1980s…

According to the Department of State, the top three states with the most human trafficking activity are California, New York and Texas. California Against Slavery reported that three of the 10 worst child sex trafficking areas in the United States are San Francisco, Los Angeles and San Diego. February 4, 2019 Minderoo Foundation Expert Advocates Global Scale of Modern Slavery and Protection of Indigenous Populations in the United States by Davina P. Durgana, PhD

At the American Bar Association Mid-Year Annual Meeting in Las Vegas, Nevada, USA the Minderoo Foundation emphasizes the important role of estimating prevalence in trying to better protect populations around the world and in our backyards.
Minderoo Foundation presented our work at the American Bar Association’s Mid-Year Annual Meeting in Las Vegas, Nevada on January 25, 2019 alongside Judges, Security Executives, and Legal Experts. We began this esteemed panel, entitled “Trafficking in the World of Chance: Human T…

"We need to be mindful of the fact that while it can seem like a problem that's far away, modern slavery is very much a first-world problem." Andrew and Grace Forrest of @WalkFreeFdn, share how all of us can help stop #modernslavery via @OctavianReport. https://t.co/6kUAMh4tQp — The B Team (@thebteamhq) December 21, 2018
Slavery has existed in different forms since ancient times. Despite being outlawed in most countries and the abolitionist movement in the 1800s, the crime persists in ways more pervasive and complex than ever.

The documentaries Black Sheep and A Night at the Garden both tackle racism and white supremacy. 
Black Sheep is a first-person profile of a black youth relating how he survived his family’s move from London to the countryside by changing to “fit in” with his violently racist neighbors. The interviews with the main subject are mesmerizing and harrowing, but its power is undercut by the unnecessary incorporation of reenactment sequences. They feel as though the filmmakers had no better idea as to how to make the story feel cinematic enough. 
A Night at the Garden is composed entirely of archival footage, presenting a brief glimpse of an American Nazi rally held in Madison Square Garden in 1939 (20,000 people were in attendance). While a longer look at the night in question could have been far more edifying, the brief running time is part of the point. Made by Field of Vision, it’s intended as a pointed, punchy reminder of how antisemitism and fascism are not recent developme…

Now, ironically, many of these same black Americans and their descendants are the people whose opinions regarding their tormentors’ racism are sought after by national news outlets. They are paraded in public relations campaigns — as the “black friend,” or the anecdotal black employee who once imparted a valuable lesson about what being black in America is really like — as proof that white people like Northam and Herring are better now, that of course they are not racist. Meanwhile, blackface remains a staple of white fun and white bonding. College students are routinely exposed for employing it. For elected officials, it is at the root of a remarkable number of scandals — from Florida’s former secretary of State to a former Brooklyn, New York, state assemblyman. It is no exaggeration to say that white people who wear blackface today could be tomorrow’s leaders. Several already are. HERE

[embed]https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/04/opinion/northam-blackface-racism.html[/embed]

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European colonisation of the Americas killed 10% of world population and caused global cooling
Alexander Koch, Chris Brierley, Mark Maslin, Simon Lewis, January 31, 2019, The Conversation



While Europe was in the early days of the Renaissance, there were empires in the Americas sustaining more than 60m people. But the first European contact in 1492 brought diseases to the Americas which devastated the native population and the resultant collapse of farming in the Americas was so significant that it may have even cooled the global climate.

The number of people living in North, Central and South America when Columbus arrived is a question that researchers have been trying to answer for decades. Unlike in Europe and China, no records on the size of indigenous societies in the Americas before 1492 are preserved. To reconstruct population numbers, researchers rely on the first accounts from European eyewitnesses and, in records from after colonial rule was established, tribute p…

The Supreme Court Case That Enshrined White Supremacy in Law
How Plessy v. Ferguson shaped the history of racial discrimination in America.
By Louis Menand, February 4, 2019, The New Yorker



White nationalist, white supremacist, Western civilization—how did that language become offensive?” the Iowa congressman Steve King inquired of a Times reporter last month. After the remark blew up, King explained that by “that language” he was referring to “Western civilization.” He also said that he condemned white nationalism and white supremacy as an “evil and bigoted ideology which saw in its ultimate expression the systematic murder of six million innocent Jewish lives.” (It’s unclear whether King thinks of Jews as nonwhite.)

However, to answer the congressman’s original question: only after a long struggle. Seventeen states had laws banning interracial marriage, which is pretty much the heart of the doctrine of white supremacy, until 1967, when the Supreme Court declared them unc…

‘If Beale Street Could Talk’ The film, based on the James Baldwin novel of the same name, is first and foremost a story of love in the midst of racism, but it’s also about artistic drive and creativity. Alonzo, known to loved ones as Fonny, is struggling to sculpt himself into something more than a kid from the Harlem ghetto.

READ: Meet the Real-Life Sculptor Who Made Art for the Oscar-Nominated Film 'If Beale Street Could Talk' | artnet News