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Post by Admin on Jun 10, 2020 13:51:56 GMT
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Post by Admin on Jun 10, 2020 13:59:19 GMT
100 years ago African-Americans marched down 5th Avenue to declare that black lives matter theconversation.com/100-years-ago-african-americans-marched-down-5th-avenue-to-declare-that-black-lives-matter-81427The only sounds were those of muffled drums, the shuffling of feet and the gentle sobs of some of the estimated 20,000 onlookers. The women and children wore all white. The men dressed in black. On the afternoon of Saturday, July 28, 1917, nearly 10,000 African-Americans marched down Fifth Avenue, in silence, to protest racial violence and white supremacy in the United States. New York City, and the nation, had never before witnessed such a remarkable scene. The “Silent Protest Parade,” as it came to be known, was the first mass African-American demonstration of its kind and marked a watershed moment in the history of the civil rights movement. As I have written in my book “Torchbearers of Democracy,” African-Americans during the World War I era challenged racism both abroad and at home. In taking to the streets to dramatize the brutal treatment of black people, the participants of the “Silent Protest Parade” indicted the United States as an unjust nation. This charge remains true today.
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Post by Admin on Jun 10, 2020 19:00:22 GMT
Statues are just the start – the UK is peppered with slavery heritage June 10, 2020 12.47pm BST theconversation.com/statues-are-just-the-start-the-uk-is-peppered-with-slavery-heritage-140308The throwing of a statue of the slave trader Edward Colston into the river in Bristol, UK, by anti-racist protesters has sparked divergent reactions. Bristol councillor Richard Eddy is publicly “outraged” by what he sees as “frenzied thug violence” while the mayor, Marvin Rees, called the statue an “affront” and said he felt “no sense of loss”. This division in opinion is reflected across the country. Elsewhere, other controversial statues – such as that of Cecil Rhodes, who was involved in Victorian British imperialism in southern Africa – are in the spotlight, with thousands of people gathering in Oxford to demand that Oriel College, which Rhodes attended and to which he left a large financial bequest, take it down. The statue of Robert Milligan – a West India merchant and slaveholder – was removed on June 9 from outside the Museum of London Docklands and the mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, has announced a commission into London’s public landmarks. These statues are just the start – Britain’s heritage is steeped in the remnants and history of slavery, but you wouldn’t necessarily know as it is rarely highlighted. Recent events may inspire change at other British heritage sites. On the other hand, they may become more hesitant than before. I research if and how heritage sites in the UK discuss the “business of slavery”, against the long neglect of Britain’s role in transatlantic slavery and its racial legacy. For many white people this has long been invisible, untaught and unknown.
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Post by Admin on Jun 11, 2020 7:59:31 GMT
British Empire is still being whitewashed by the school curriculum – historian on why this must change November 2, 2018 1.22pm GMT theconversation.com/british-empire-is-still-being-whitewashed-by-the-school-curriculum-historian-on-why-this-must-change-105250Jeremy Corbyn recently proposed that British school children should be taught about the history of the realities of British imperialism and colonialism. This would include the history of people of colour as components of, and contributors to, the British nation-state – rather than simply as enslaved victims of it. As Corbyn rightly noted: “Black history is British history” – and hence its study should be part of the national curriculum, not segregated in a single month each year. This is a welcome proposal because, as an academic who teaches modules on South Asian, imperial, colonial and global history, I face an uphill struggle at the start of each new academic year. Many of the undergraduates who greet me know virtually nothing about any of the subjects I teach.
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Post by Admin on Jun 11, 2020 13:46:36 GMT
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Post by Admin on Jun 12, 2020 10:54:02 GMT
Marx Was Right About Slavery By Kevin B. Anderson Tory MPs are demanding that we desecrate Marx's grave – but Marx was a consistent campaigner against slavery, and supported the efforts of British workers who organised to fight it. tribunemag.co.uk/2020/06/marx-was-right-about-slavery
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Post by Admin on Jun 12, 2020 19:30:33 GMT
"Civilization is something imposed on a resisting majority by a minority who understands how to take ownership of the means of power and coercion” - great quotation from Freud to kick off this trailer for the compelling 'Black Psychoanalysts Speak' conference. Other sobering comments include this one from the magnificent Jama Adams: "My experience has been that clinical psychoanalysis in this country is essentially bankrupt - it’s been captured by the middle class. It’s therefore not appropriate - not just for black people but for anybody struggling against systemic discriminations, systemic oppositions, it doesn’t really offer much.” “Some of my friends, my more radical friends, make comments about how could you do that – how could you try to make people fit into this rotten, lousy system – especially people of colour." "In the field of psychoanalysis, it’s been minimized how profound the trauma of racism actually is" – Anton Hart "I point out to my white liberal friends that never have they ever made a white referral to me. It’s always black folks. I refer all kinds of folks to them all the time. Part of it is, I think, racism. And part of it is also economics." "Our psychoanalytic institutes have largely turned away from the big picture, the ills and inequalities of our cultures, and instead have focused on training and treating the relatively privileged. People whose problems can be narrowly conceptualized as stemming from their family relationships. People who seem, at least for a time, to be relatively immune to the traumas of history and cultural conflict. Psychoanalysis was for very long, and I think correctly seen, as patriarchal. And that’s really changed enormously. The issue of gender and sexuality is central to psychoanalytic curriculum. Whereas the issue of race, class, ethnicity is not" – Michael Moskowitz youtu.be/MHPz698AgGU
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Post by Admin on Jun 12, 2020 20:17:59 GMT
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Post by Admin on Jun 12, 2020 21:16:45 GMT
June 9, 2020 FIVE BOOKS ON SYSTEMIC RACISM EVERY WHITE LEADER CAN LEARN FROM www.centerforcompassionateleadership.org/blog/five-books-on-systemic-racism-every-white-leader-can-learn-fromWhite people have controlled race relations in the United States for the last four hundred years. It is still a mess. It is time for white people to become honestly aware of the state of race in the United States today, acknowledge it with humility, and work to repair the broken systems underlying the inhumanity that still exists. These five books can be a start for that process. We begin with Rhonda Magee’s The Work of Racial Justice, which offers us optimism through its clear path forward. Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates and The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness by Michelle Alexander tell the story of our broken world through a very personal and a broad institutional lens, respectively. The Princeton Fugitive Slave by Lolita Buckner Inniss demonstrates the critical importance of perspective taking, something required for anyone seeking to lead compassionately. Finally, White Fragility, by Robin DiAngelo helps us understand why it is so hard for white people to talk about racism. Compassionate leadership starts with work on ourself and ends with a sense of connection to everyone through our shared common humanity. What we do to any one of us we are doing to all of us. Explore the wisdom in these books as a starting point to expand your understanding of systemic racism and lead with compassion and humanity.
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Post by Admin on Jun 13, 2020 17:08:16 GMT
As Shelley noted, the "chaos" that the establishment so often denounce and define themselves against is actually an expression and reflection of the perverse and violent "order" they themselves impose and stand for: it's Newton's third law applied to political systems themselves. 'Change' states are always non-linear and technically 'chaotic' states by their very nature, as contemporary complexity theory and contemporary chaos theory have shown. Shelley called his famous poem (containing the lines "Ye are many—they are few"), the 'Mask' of Anarchy for precisely this reason: he saw that it's a loaded and weaponised lexicon that seeks to conceal the true anarchy and violence of the system itself, projected onto its effects and dissociated from its true source. "Look at history. Every time Black people challenge the power structure they are characterized as criminals or radicals. Last week, President Donald Trump described the recent protests as 'rioting' by an 'angry mob'. His linguistic framing of the widespread unrest was supplemented by the very title of the 1807 measure he threatened to invoke: the rarely used 'Insurrection Act', which allows states to request federal troops to help squelch internal disturbances. Much of the resulting press coverage settled on the more neutral descriptor 'chaos', a theme amplified by Trump’s allies. A Fox News op-ed on Monday proclaimed: 'The rioting, looting and wave of arson hitting cities around the nation following the death of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police is much like the disturbances that convulsed American cities in the 1960s.' The word 'riot', as well as the terms 'mob', 'chaos' and 'insurrection', is alarming language that creates a deliberate mode of understanding in the listener. These words are often used to delegitimize and dismiss Black movements – to make them appear too far removed from civil society to be taken seriously. Yet these terms are often in conflict with reality. They also obscure the perspective of those most qualified to judge: the participants themselves. While many politicians and pundits have attempted to dismiss the current uprisings as 'riots' – intimating that they are mere free-for-alls that lack purpose – that could not be further from the truth. Many of the uprisings that white Americans and Europeans have historically termed 'riots' were, in fact, concentrated efforts to overturn systems of oppression in the United States and across the globe. This was certainly true for the leaders and participants of the Haitian revolution, which erupted in 1791 and brought an end to slavery in Haiti. The Black men and women who gained their freedom from the French were regarded as troublemakers and agitators. Not surprisingly, the events that unfolded during the Haitian revolution were regarded by white observers as chaotic – Thomas Jefferson wrote to his daughter in March 1791 that the rebels were 'a terrible engine, absolutely ungovernable'. But this organized force, aligned for a simple cause, led to the founding of the first republic governed by former slaves who had emancipated themselves. “We are ready to die for liberty,” the Haitian rebels cried at the battle of Crête-à-Pierrot. These and other resistance efforts to the unjust system of slavery were seen by many as chaotic – and as riots that caused great disturbance in local communities. Yet they had structure and logic behind them, even when others could not see them. This is also true for today’s uprisings against police violence. While many have described these events as 'riots' lacking any basis and purpose, the activists who led these protests aim to disrupt a system of American policing that targets Black people and other people of color. Their motives are as plainly unriotous as those of any of the historic revolts in the Americas. The current protests have already become the most widespread set of civil disobedience actions the nation has ever seen. One of their most remarkable aspects is the lack of central coordination, combined with a unity of purpose as clear as what Cunningham said from his jail cell: abusive and unequal policing must stop. Whatever property damage occurs on the margins, by uninvolved actors, is a sideshow to this urgent purpose." (The Guardian) 'Riots', 'mobs', 'chaos': the establishment always frames change as dangerous Look at history. Every time Black people challenge the power structure they are characterized as criminals or radicals www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/jun/10/protest-black-lives-matter-police-activism
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Post by Admin on Jun 13, 2020 17:45:58 GMT
Excerpt from "Narrative Control Operations Escalate As America Burns": Wikipedia, Facebook, Twitter, and mainstream media are falling all over themselves with censorship and spin jobs to get the narrative back under control as mass protests continue to sweep across America. In 2017, representatives of Facebook, Twitter, and Google were instructed in a US Senate Judiciary Committee hearing that it is their responsibility to “quell information rebellions” and adopt a “mission statement” expressing their commitment to “prevent the fomenting of discord.” “Civil wars don’t start with gunshots, they start with words,” the representatives were told by cold warrior think tank denizen Clint Watts. “America’s war with itself has already begun. We all must act now on the social media battlefield to quell information rebellions that can quickly lead to violent confrontations and easily transform us into the Divided States of America.” “Stopping the false information artillery barrage landing on social media users comes only when those outlets distributing bogus stories are silenced — silence the guns and the barrage will end,” Watts added. Those words rattle around in the memory now as America burns with nationwide protests demanding an end to the police state, and as narrative control operations ramp up with frantic urgency. medium.com/@caityjohnstone/narrative-control-operations-escalate-as-america-burns-70cca6280961
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Post by Admin on Jun 13, 2020 19:39:55 GMT
Black Suicidality and Mental Health #BlackLivesMatter www.madinamerica.com/2020/06/black-suicidality/Samantha Lilly Samantha Lilly brings their background in philosophy, bioethics, and social justice to their work as a critical suicidologist, with the belief that suicidology, at its best, is social justice work. Before beginning a Ph.D. in Health in Social Science at the University of Edinburgh, Sam was awarded a Thomas J. Watson Fellowship. Their project, “Understanding Suicidality Across Cultures,” gave them the privilege of working alongside ethicists, scholars, and rights advocates in the Benelux countries, Lithuania, Argentina, Aotearoa, and Indonesia. Sam’s current research is dedicated to bringing feminist and decolonial methodologies to suicide prevention.
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Post by Admin on Jun 13, 2020 20:33:50 GMT
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Post by Admin on Jun 14, 2020 0:24:43 GMT
Race—a capitalist invention mronline.org/2020/05/19/race-a-capitalist-invention/Originally published: Socialist Worker (May 17, 2020) | Official figures showing that black people are four times more likely to die from the coronavirus than white people have helped reignite a debate about race. Supporters of the idea that humanity is divided into distinct groups feel vindicated by the ways the virus has impacted on different communities. This, they say, is proof that we are separated by biology, that race is a scientific reality. Even for people who reject racism, the concept of race remains seductive because it can appear to explain their experiences. Prejudice can seem so ingrained, and so resilient, that it feels like it must be an essential feature of human society, something hardwired into us. Doesn’t it follow then that the different ways in which we experience the world are connected to our biology, and from that to our culture? Is that what lies behind the endurance of the idea of race? Socialists profoundly disagree. For us, race is socially constructed. That is to say it is an invented category, and that the inventors were people who wanted to create a racial league table—with themselves at the top. The first thing to note is that the idea of race is a relatively recent one. The ancient societies of Africa, India, China, Greece and Rome did not classify people according to their skin colours although all sorts of other prejudices flourished in these times. It was the birth of capitalism, and the growth of the slave trade it depended on, that was to change everything.
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Post by Admin on Jun 14, 2020 0:33:29 GMT
The Dawning of the Apocalypse: The Roots of Slavery, White Supremacy, Settler Colonialism, and Capitalism in the Long Sixteenth Century by Gerald Horne monthlyreview.org/product/the-dawning-of-the-apocalypse/August 2019 saw numerous commemorations of the year 1619, when what was said to be the first arrival of enslaved Africans occurred in North America. Yet in the 1520s, the Spanish, from their imperial perch in Santo Domingo, had already brought enslaved Africans to what was to become South Carolina. The enslaved people here quickly defected to local Indigenous populations, and compelled their captors to flee. Deploying illuminating research, The Dawning of the Apocalypse is a riveting revision of the “creation myth” of settler colonialism and how the United States was formed. Here, Gerald Horne argues forcefully that, in order to understand the arrival of colonists from the British Isles in the early seventeenth century, one must first understand the “long sixteenth century”—from 1492 until the arrival of settlers in Virginia in 1607. During this prolonged century, Horne contends, “whiteness” morphed into “white supremacy,” and allowed England to co-opt not only religious minorities but also various nationalities throughout Europe, thus forging a muscular bloc that was needed to confront rambunctious Indigenes and Africans. In retelling the bloodthirsty story of the invasion of the Americas, Horne recounts how the fierce resistance by Africans and their Indigenous allies weakened Spain and enabled London to dispatch settlers to Virginia in 1607. These settlers laid the groundwork for the British Empire and its revolting spawn that became the United States of America.
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