Jean-Jacques Dessalines, and the Historical Standards of Acceptance in Leadership and Revolution. According to Color

[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.

Supporting the French colonial perspective, leaders across the Americas and Europe immediately demonized Dessalines. Even in the United States, itself newly independent from Britain, newspapers recounted horrific stories of the final years of the Haitian Revolution, a war for independence that took the lives of some 50,000 French soldiers and over 100,000 Black and mixed-race Haitians.

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.]

Full article (Truth Out)

The Burden of Free Speech VS History as a Matter of Opinion and Language | Bill Ayers, Dinesh d’Souza and a Discussion about America

For Those Who Don’t Mind the Word “Redskin”; and for Those Who Do

George Caitlin’s Creed | Sacred Feminine and Masculine | Russell Means and Pearl Means

Two narratives by Russell Means shortly before his death in 2012 | Oyate Wacinyapi

The Often Overlooked US History of Native American Dispossession

[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.]

Read the full article | AEON

A Simulacrum of a New Orleans’ Landmark of the Weird

“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.

How a Woman’s Rape at a Gay Nude Bar Sparked a Battle Over New Orleans’ Libertine Soul | TPM

What Constitutes Freedom

“The most dangerous form of non-freedom is the one which is not even perceived as such.”

“The highest form of freedom is love.”

Perceptions are not Reality | Things the World Gets Wrong

Ipsos MORI | Poll | Perceptions are not reality: Things the world gets wrong.

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).

Read more: Political Ignorance Around the World | The Washington Post

 

The Roughest Celebrity Video I Have Ever Seen

Eight Female Explorers

Although climbing mountains, documenting exotic lands and traversing some of Mother Nature’s most extreme landscapes might not be considered gender-exclusive activities today, they were once very much the endeavors of men only — well, men and a select handful of tenacious women who saw beyond their prescribed societal roles and just went out and did it.

We’ve rounded up eight notable female adventurers of the 19th and early 20th centuries who blazed the trail, sometimes literally, for their modern counterparts.

Read more: 8 Female Explorers | Mother Nature Network