The Big Isms

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  In the News Yale publicly confronts historical involvement in slavery Kevin Dennehy and Susan Gonzalez, October 31, 2021, Yale News In a publicly accessible academic conference held Oct. 28 to Oct. 30, Yale researchers and other experts shared and grappled with initial discoveries about the university’s entanglements with slavery, part of a rigorous, ongoing effort by Yale to reckon with its role in a tragic and painful fact of United States history. Also, President Peter Salovey outlined initial actions Yale will take in response to what it has learned about its past and its responsibilities in the present. These will include the creation of permanent memorialization of the enslaved and indigenous people who played vital roles in the community but whose stories have been forgotten; a meaningful increase in the university’s direct financial support for its home city of New Haven; and collaborations with the nation’s Historically Black and Tribal Colleges and Univers

  Anti-Imperialism You Can Try at Home Reparations May Be One Cure for What Ails Us By Mattea Kramer Robin Rue Simmons had been very curious about the truth of American life as a young person. But it was only after she finished high school, left her native Evanston, Illinois, and returned as an adult -- ready to buy a house in the historically Black neighborhood in which she grew up -- that she delved deep into her city’s history and fully understood the policies that had kept Black residents poor while enriching their white neighbors. Of course, this isn’t the kind of history that’s taught in school, even if today’s students do sometimes learn unsavory truths about the American empire. Local history is different, perhaps because it can be especially uncomfortable to examine how that empire’s economic plunder shaped our present-day communities. Yet experiencing such discomfort may b

  CLICK TO READ GRAPHIC Free Renty! Reparations, Photography, and the Imperial Premise of Scholarship March 2, 2020 Stephen Sheehi: An Endorsement of an Amicus Brief for Lanier v. Harvard 17 hours ago Legal Precedents or Reparations? Lawsuit Against Harvard May Decide Who Owns Images of Enslaved People 17 hours ago

by Hrag Vartanian   Image of photographer Joseph Zealy's studio, edited by Professor Ariella Azoulay for her amicus brief in the Lanier v. Harvard case. Her alteration reflects respect for the felt presence of Alfred, the enslaved person photographed against his will, and, on the other hand, an understanding of the photographer's studio as a site of violence. Image courtesy Ariella Azoulay and used with permission. Over the last few years, Hyperallergic has reported on the continuing quest of Tamara Lanier to retrieve daguerreotypes of her ancestors Renty and Delia Taylor. In March 2019, Lanier filed a lawsuit in Massachusetts to obtain rights to photographs in the collection of Harvard University’s Peabody Museum of Archeology and Ethnology, which were commissioned by Louis Agassiz as part of a eugenics campaig

  America’s first vampire was Black and revolutionary – it’s time to remember him Sam George, October 30, 2020, The Conversation In April of 1819, a London periodical, the New Monthly Magazine , published  The Vampyre: A Tale by Lord Byron. Notice of its publication quickly appeared in papers in the United States. Byron was at the time enjoying remarkable popularity and this new tale, supposedly by the famous poet, caused a sensation as did its reprintings in Boston’s Atheneum (15 June) and Baltimore’s Robinson’s Magazine (26 June). The Vampyre did away with the East European peasant vampire of old. It took this monster out of the forests, gave him an aristocratic lineage and placed him into the drawing rooms of Romantic-era England. It was the first sustained fictional treatment of the vampire and completely recast the folklore and mythology on which it drew. By July, Byron’s denial of authorship was being reported and by August the true author was discovered, John

  To Watch  Incarceration Nation is a powerful documentary that tells the story of the systematic injustice and oppression of Aboriginal people since colonisation. The film takes its audience on a journey from the past into the present and shines a spotlight on incarceration in Australia. To find out more about the film, visit the website  here . The film is available to view via  SBS On Demand .  The School That Tried to End Racism is a documentary series that follows a school program designed to provide a class of primary school students with the tools to identify racial bias and make a positive change. The show is available via  ABC iview .   

The University of Virginia researchers wrote that the data “provides compelling evidence that these symbols are associated with hate.”     by Hakim Bishara SOURCE  Opponents of the removal of Confederate monuments in the United States have long defended them as emblems of “Southern pride,” rather than symbols of racism and hate. However, a recent study by researchers at the University of Virginia (UVA) in Charlottesville found a damning correlation between the number of documented lynchings of Black people in a county with the number of local Confederate monuments. The research group was led by Kyshia Henderson of UVA’s Social Psychology Program, who worked with data scientist Samuel Powers and professors Sophie Trawalter, Michele Claibourn, and Jazmin Brown-Iannuzzi at the university’s Batten School of Leadership and Public Policy. Analyzing county-level data from 1832 to 1950, they concluded that that the number of lynchings in a giv

  In the News Built on the bodies of slaves: how Africa was erased from the history of the modern world Howard W. French, 12 October 2021, The Guardian It would be unusual for a story that begins in the wrong place to arrive at the right conclusions. And so it is with the history of how the modern world was made. Traditional accounts have accorded a primacy to Europe’s 15th-century Age of Discovery, and to the maritime connection it established between west and east. Paired with this historic feat is the momentous, if accidental, discovery of what came to be known as the New World. Other explanations for the emergence of the modern world reside in the ethics and temperament that some associate with Judeo-Christian beliefs, or with the development and spread of the scientific method, or, more chauvinistically still, with Europeans’ often-professed belief in their unique ingenuity and inventiveness. In the popular imagination, these ideas have become associated with th

Black Lives Matter, She Wrote. Then ‘Everything Just Imploded.’ Erica L. Green, October 10, 2021, The New York Times CENTREVILLE, Md. — When Andrea Kane sat down to write a letter to parents in her school district days after George Floyd’s death in 2020, images of the Black man pleading for his life under the knee of a white Minnesota police officer were haunting her. Dr. Kane, the superintendent, saw him in the faces of Black students in her district and heard him crying out for his mother when she spoke to her own sons. So she started her letter with a warning that it would bear not just “good news,” but “a bit of a reality check.” Despite the coronavirus pandemic, the high-performing district on the Eastern Shore of Maryland had closed out the year with much to be proud of. But like the rest of the country, Dr. Kane said, the community had another crisis to confront. continue   Francis Scott Key: One of the anti-slavery movement’s great villains Bennett Par

  In the News Eric Williams and the tangled history of capitalism and slavery Gerald Horne, October 2, 2021, The Nation Before he became a celebrated author and the founding father and first prime minister of Trinidad and Tobago, Eric Eustace Williams was an adroit footballer. At his high school, Queen’s Royal College, he was a fierce competitor, which likely led to an injury that left him deaf in his right ear. Yet as Williams’s profile as a scholar and national leader rose, so did the attempts by his critics to turn his athleticism against him. An “expert dribbler” known for prancing downfield with the ball kissing one foot, then the other, Williams was now accused by his political detractors of not being a team player. Driven by his desire to play to the gallery—or so it was said—he proved to be uninterested in whether his team (or his nation, not to mention the erstwhile British Commonwealth) was victorious. What his critics described as a weakness, though, was al