[When Dessalines declared Haiti’s independence from France in 1804 after a 13-year slave uprising and civil war, he became the Americas’ first Black head of state.
For more than two centuries, Dessalines was memorialized as a ruthless brute.
Now, say residents of Brooklyn’s “Little Haiti” – the blocks around Rogers Avenue, home to some 50,000 Haitian-Americans – it’s time to correct the record. They hope the newly renamed Dessalines Boulevard will burnish the reputation of this Haitian hero.]
[Between 1776 and the present, the United States seized some 1.5 billion acres from North America’s native peoples, an area 25 times the size of the United Kingdom. Many Americans are only vaguely familiar with the story of how this happened. They perhaps recognise Wounded Knee and the Trail of Tears, but few can recall the details and even fewer think that those events are central to US history.
Their tenuous grasp of the subject is regrettable if unsurprising, given that the conquest of the continent is both essential to understanding the rise of the United States and deplorable. Acre by acre, the dispossession of native peoples made the United States a transcontinental power. To visualize this story, I created ‘The Invasion of America’, an interactive time-lapse map of the nearly 500 cessions that the United States carved out of native lands on its westward march to the shores of the Pacific.]
“My only FOMO is that you can’t see my boobs,” a blue-haired artist said. “And that I can’t see yours.”
We were sitting under a heat lamp on the deck of the Country Club, an ironically named New Orleans restaurant, bar and pool a few days after Halloween—me in jeans and a sweater, her in a sports bra and undies, soaking wet from the pool. I could see her tattoos, her BDSM bruises, and her nipples, kind of, but by Country Club standards, it was an oppressive ensemble.
Two weeks earlier, in October, a consent judgment handed down by the New Orleans Alcohol Beverage Control Board abruptly ended the club’s clothing-optional policy, forbidding patrons from swimming, tanning and drinking in the nude for the first time in its 37-year history. The policy had been New Orleans’s worst-kept secret, often touted as proof that nonconformity lived on in the Bywater neighborhood, even as the rest of the city Disneyfied.
But the appeal of the club, tucked inside a 19th-century Italianate mansion on a quiet residential block, was not purely symbolic. Its parties were wild, its bartenders were affable, and it reliably provided the Authentic New Orleans Experience, for just $10 at the door. The Club was a testament to the reasons transplants had moved to New Orleans. It was on savvy tourists’ list of must-dos. And when a woman reported being drugged and raped there in July, it became a flashpoint for a debate about whether the newcomers’ arrival threatens the same Bywater culture that drew them there.
When a wrongfully convicted person gets released from prison, it is a major news event: Local television crews capture the first steps of freedom and the speeches on the steps of the state capital, audiences empathize as they grapple with gratitude and rage, and the exonerees take their first steps into an uncertain future.
But when the limelight fades, the wrongfully convicted face the reality of navigating the world they were yanked from, often with limited financial and social support.
According to the Innocence Project, it takes exonerees three years on average to receive any compensation after their release. More than a quarter get nothing. Among those who are paid, 81 percent get less than $50,000 for each year of wrongful imprisonment. Read the full article | PBS NewsHour
Sunday evening, some of the most prominent organizations that work against LGBT equality joined together in Houston, Texas to rally in defense of “religious freedom.” The event, called “I Stand Sunday,” was hosted by Grace Community Church, whose pastor, Steve Riggle, was one of the five pastors originally subpoenaed for his role in challenging the LGBT-inclusive Houston Equal Rights Ordinance (HERO).
The subpoenas, which Mayor Annise Parker (D) withdrew last week, were the catalyst for the rally, which largely functioned as a star-studded Christian worship service. Guests like Mike Huckabee, Todd Starnes from FOX News, and Phil Robertson from Duck Dynasty preached that religious liberty is under attack from LGBT equality.
It is hard to overstate the importance of Afghan employees, particularly translators, to the US war effort. Translators accompany military and special forces in everything they do, from night raids and helicopter insertions to route clearance, and they are often unarmed. They’re also critical to the work done by the State Department, the US Agency for International Development and US government-supported NGOs.
All that mean they are also targets. Taliban checkpoints are often set up expressly for the purpose of catching such men. Translators casually swap stories of Afghan employees of the US military who have had limbs or heads cut off by insurgents.
Now, with the US scheduled to largely withdraw from Afghanistan later this year, Afghans still waiting on visa applications fear their time is running out. Critics describe the process of applying for a visa as opaque, prohibitively complicated and painfully slow, putting the applicant’s lives at risk with each passing month that their visas aren’t approved.
“It has been a disastrous program,” said one former USAID official.” It’s embarrassing.”
But the State Department says they’ve implemented a set of changes to revitalize the process.
Jacques Derrida writes in Of Grammatology:
Spacing as writing is the becoming-absent and the becoming-unconscious of the subject. By the movement of its drift/derivation [dérive] the emancipation of the sign constitutes in return the desire of presence. That becoming-or that drift/derivation-does not befall the subject which would choose it or would passively let itself be drawn along by it. As the subject’s relationship with its own death, this becoming is the constitution of subjectivity. On all levels of life’s organisation, that is to say, of theeconomy of death. All graphemes are of a testamentary essence. And the original absence of the subject of writing is also the absence of the thing or the referent. [The Outside is the Inside]
Thus, the years of waiting to receive a US visa while the Taliban threaten the local linguists, kidnap their relatives, while, occasionally, they cut a head or two. “Absence”, translator as the referent, as the subject’s relationship with its/his own death. An excellent intellectual exercise on diffe’rance, for the rest of us.
Wim Wenders’ upcoming documentary “The Salt of the Earth” screened well at Cannes this year: the audience sprang to its feet and burst into applause after its premiere. Check out the first batch of clips: they’re beautiful, evocative and very Wenders-esque.
“The Salt of the Earth” focuses on Brazilian photographer and photojournalist Sebastião Salgado, whose work over the last 40 years has focused on social issues, exploring the challenges facing the Earth’s diverse–and dispersed–communities. Salgado has traveled to more than 100 countries, and in the last 10 years has shifted his attention to a project he calls “Genesis,” a series that focuses on documenting unspoiled nature and the human societies that live in such environments in accordance with ancestral and not modern conventions. Watch parts of the film here | Indiewire
The Doctrine of Discovery is a series of papal bulls, or decrees, that gave Christian explorers the right to lay claim to any land that was not inhabited by Christians and was available to be “discovered.” The doctrine’s modern influence re-emerged recently in the debate about the racism and exploitation of Native American sports mascots, Fiedler said. It has justified efforts to eliminate indigenous languages, practices and worldviews, and it affects Native American sovereignty and treaty obligations.
Since 1823, it has also been enshrined in U.S. law. In 2005, Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg cited the Doctrine of Discovery in a land-claim ruling against the Oneidas, one of the six nations of the Haudenosaunee.
According to UNESCO, progress in connecting children to schools has slowed down over the past five years. Areas that lack suitable school routes can often flood, making it even harder for kids to commute. Dangerous paths are one of the main reasons why many children decide to quit school.
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