[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
Ipsos MORI’s new global survey, building on work in the UK last year for the Royal Statistical Society, highlights how wrong the public across 14 countries are about the basic make-up of their populations and the scale of key social issues.
For example, survey respondents in the 14 nations included in the study massively overestimate the unemployment rate, and the percentage of immigrants and Muslims in their country’s population. Most also believe that the murder rate is rising, even though it has actually been falling in every country. Even in Sweden, the country that scored highest, respondents are on average badly off on politically important issues such as the unemployment rate (which they think is 3 times higher than it actually is) and immigration (which they overestimate by “only” about 45 percent).
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
This selection of ancient Greek literature includes philosophy, poetry, drama, and history. It introduces some of the great classical thinkers, whose ideas have had a profound influence on Western civilization.
* On Nature | by Embedocles
* Jason and the Golden Fleece | by Apollonius of Rhodes
* Poetics | by Aristotle
* The Trojan Women and Other Plays | by Euripides
* The Histories | by Herodotus
* The Iliad | by Homer
* Republic | by Plato
* Phaedro | by Plato
* Apology of Socrates | by Plato
* Frogs | by Aristophanes
* Myths | by Aesop
* Greek Lives | by Plutarch
* Antigone, Oedipus the King, Electra | by Sophocles
* Prometheus Bound | by Aeschylus
* Oresteia | by Aeschulys
* Funeral Oration | by Pericles
* History of the Peloponnesian War | by Thucydides
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.
The United Kingdom’s Parliament has voted overwhelmingly in favor of a non-binding motion recognizing Palestine as a state alongside Israel.
The House voted by 274 MPs to 12 to adopt the motion, which called on the government to “recognize the state of Palestine alongside the state of Israel,” with an amendment adding the words “as a contribution to securing a negotiated two-state solution.”
The decision will not change government policy but could have international implications. Government ministers, including Prime Minister David Cameron, abstained in the vote.
Europe, as both a place and a concept, has changed dramatically in its centuries of history. Once one of the world’s most war-torn places, it is now known for its remarkable peace. While a place of relatively great prosperity, it is also experiencing deep economic turmoil. Europe’s transformations are still ongoing, evident both at the continental level and as narrowly as along certain transportation lines.
It’s the third time in five years that South Africa has refused to allow Dalai Lama into the country out of deference to Beijing. Russia has also shut the Dalai Lama out repeatedly. But there are also some very surprising nations cowing to China.
Take the United Kingdom. In May 2013, when Prime Minister David Cameron met with the Dalai Lama, even after Beijing warned him not to. China cut off diplomatic relations, and Cameron’s administration spent a year working to get back in Beijing’s good graces. William Hague, Britain’s foreign secretary, promising that the British government was “fully aware of the sensitivity of Tibet-related issues” and would “properly handle such issues on the basis of respecting China’s concerns.”
An almost identical scenario played out in 2010 between China and Denmark, and, until South Africa’s visa decision, the most recent diplomatic row over the Dalai Lama took place in another Scandinavian country beloved for its openness, tolerance, and social welfare: Norway.
That’s right. When the Dalai Lama visited Norway in May 2014, government officials allowed him to enter the country but refused to meet with him.
European governments pay millions of dollars in ransoms to free their hostages. The White House needs to decide whether it’s willing to sacrifice principle for people.
One wishes, of course, for some sort of Inglourious Basterds, in which the former victims rise up to give the monsters a taste of their terrible medicine. That’s what the movies are for. In real life, Obama has done what he can do by sending American warplanes to hammer IS positions in Iraq. For the moment, at least, he has saved Kurdistan from being overrun, and driven the jihadists away from the Mosul Dam. That’s a very good start. There may be nothing Obama can do to save Steven Sotloff. But there is a great deal he can do to show the criminals of the Islamic State that the West is prepared to defend the values it professes.
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