[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.]
[One of the most common questions I receive from readers is how to check their lineage for Native American ancestry.
There are a few companies now that – for a pretty penny – will search your DNA for ethnic markers and give you a sort of roadmap of percentages. I’ve had friends use these companies and haven’t heard anything negative from them, so I imagine the information they provide is legit.
And there’s absolutely nothing wrong with trying to figure out your genetic heritage. I fully support that.
But I wonder: For those who find they are some percent “Native American” (and let’s not forget we’re talking thousands of unique tribal nations in that vague descriptor), what will they do with that information?
In discussing Rachel Dolezal, the national conversation centers on her claim to Black identity, what she calls “the Black experience” (as if being Black, or any race, can be packaged into a singular experience). I am in full support of these discussions.
But no one outside of Native thinkers bats an eye at her assertion that she was born in a tipi and her family hunted with bows and arrows. In fact, Dolezal’s parents, who swore up and down that Dolezal is Caucasian without a hint of Black, noted that, in fact, one or two great-grandparents were Native.
“The lack of questioning of that born-in-a-tipi story, however, points to the need for children’s books and media that accurately portray our lives in the past and the present so that people don’t put forth stories like the one Dolezar did, and so that that those who hear that kind of thing question such stories.
“Dolezal’s story about living in a tipi is plausible but not probable. The power of stereotyping is in her story, and in those who accepted it, too. That is not ok. Look at the images of Native people you are giving to children in your home, in your school, and in your library. Do some weeding. Make some better choices. Contribute to a more educated citizenry.”]Read the full article here | Righting Red
“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
The sculptures on the facade of the Parthenon, also known as the Elgin Marbles, consist of a large collection of marble sculpture, which was transported in Britain in 1806 by Thomas Bruce, ‘Z Count of Elgin, ambassador in the Ottoman Empire from 1799 till 1803. Taking advantage of the Ottoman reign of the Greek territory, Lord Elgin managed to obtain permission (the firman) by the Ottoman Sultan to remove the marbles in order to enumerate and register them in schemes, but later he moved on to their abstraction and their exportation out of the country.
The UNESCO World Heritage Center included the Parthenon as part of the wider monument complex, recorded in the catalog of world heritage monuments since 11th September 1987. However, the Parthenon is beyond the numbers of a World Monument Record. As a grand achievement in architecture, engineering and aesthetic context, the Parthenon stands as the most credible witness to an ancient Western civilization which hassignificantly influencedthe development of the modern Western world.
The Parthenon is the greatest monument of the Athenian State and the apex of the Doric order. Its construction began in 448/7 B.C., whereas the opening was held in 438 B.C. at the Panathenean Games and the sculpture decorations were finished in 433/2 B.C. According to sources of antiquity, the architects who worked for the construction of the Parthenon were Iktinos, Callicrates and possibly Pheidias, who was also responsible for the sculpture decoration. It is one of the Greek temples that is entirely built of marble as well as the only Doric temple with anastatic metopes. Many parts of the sculpture decoration, the architrave and the coffers of the ceiling were drawn with red, blue and gold colour. Pentelicon marble was used, except from the stylobate, which was built of limestone.
From a total of 97 surviving stones of the frontispiece of the Parthenon, 56 are in London and 40 in Athens. From a total of 64 surviving metopes, 48 are in Athens and 15 in London. From a total of 28 surviving figures of the frontispieces, 19 are in London and 9 in Athens.
The video is a British televised debate on the return of the Parthenon Marbles back to Greece, held in London in 2012.
A recent United Nations report estimated nearly 9,000 civilians have been killed and 17,386 wounded in Iraq in 2014, more than half since ISIL fighters seized large parts on northern Iraq in June. It is likely that the group is responsible another several thousand deaths in Syria. To be sure, these numbers are staggering. But in 2013 drug cartels murdered more than 16,000 people in Mexico alone, and another 60,000 from 2006 to 2012 — a rate of more than one killing every half hour for the last seven years. What is worse, these are estimates from the Mexican government, which is known to deflate the actual death toll by about 50 percent.
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.
ΡΟ Π ΤΡ Ο Ν 