Jadaliyya - 0 views
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Albert Memmi, author, essayist, philosopher, and public intellectual, born in Tunis on 15 December 1920 and self-exiled to France upon Tunisia’s independence, died in Paris on 22 May 2020
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Though he ceased living in North Africa after 1956, Memmi remained a Maghrebi at heart, maintaining an intimate connection to his place of birth, its people, politics, and literary culture
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The second of twelve children, Memmi was surrounded by a large extended family surviving on the fringes of poverty. Memmi’s mother tongue was the language of the medina, the Tunisian dialect of Arabic.
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The Great Patriotic War on Education - Systematic Organization - 0 views
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For anyone who keeps abreast of politics in places like Japan, South Korea, or Turkey, the spectacle of a nationalist movement attacking textbooks and curricula for being insufficiently patriotic is a familiar one. The current strife gives experts in, say, Japanese history curricula a chance for their own “what would you say if you saw this in another country” moment.
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unlike those countries the United States doesn’t have a national educational curriculum, since we’ve decided in our infinite wisdom to allow states and localities to decide what our children in public schools will learn. This is an oddity, given that educational curricula in most countries have been founded specifically to help nationalize disparate communities—to turn peasants into Frenchmen, or serfs into the new Soviet man, for instance
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even before the dreaded Texas school textbook adoption committee used its market power to enforce a degree of uniformity in historiography that we basically had a form of national consensus about what should be taught: a blandly consensual, Whiggish, sunnily white-apologist curriculum in which all good things (like democracy, capitalism, and the interests of big business) went together and all bad things (like labor unions, radical activists, and political divisions) could be ignored
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Racist Commemoration of Greco-Roman History as White History :: Pharos - 0 views
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while “Today in White History” implies that the Venus de Milo is the work of a “white” person, this is not a category that Alexander of Antioch, born in what we now call Syria and what the Greeks called Asia, would have been placed in by any of his contemporaries. This even more true of the emperor Elagabalus, who (besides becoming an icon for transgender people) was a priest of a Semitic god before becoming Emperor.
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Anyone can mix up Euripides’ birthday, but it takes a white supremacist to insist that white identity is something that is stable and unchanging throughout time
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An account like “Today in White History” is obviously racist. Its use of Greco-Roman antiquity is obviously racist. And yet the assumptions behind its racialized narrative of history — however much this narrative is patently the product of colonial powers’ need to justify conquest, however much this narrative erases the indebtedness of so-called “Western Civilization” to other civilizations — are commonly accepted and have been for a long time. The feed has tweeted something almost every day since 2012. It has 8,000 followers and counting. Eurocentrism is alive and well and accounts like this are its fruits.
South Philly, explained - Philadelphia Weekly - 0 views
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South Philadelphia neighborhoods remain extremely segregated. Girard Estates, a largely Italian American pocket of South Philly, is 91.8 percent white, and Packer Park isn’t far behind at 80 percent white, per US Census Data. On the other hand, poorer neighborhoods like Point Breeze, Grays Ferry, and Southwest Philadelphia, are about 70 percent Black.
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To some South Philly Italians, removing the Rizzo statue was a personal attack to their identity. Many Philadelphians remember Rizzo as a racist who told voters to “vote white” and encouraged Philly police to use excessive force, but South Philly Italians see him as a no-nonsense tough guy who stood up – for them.
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Much like Frank Rizzo, white residents of South Philadelphia gave up on the Democratic Party as it began to signal race in politics and failed to address their needs. In 2016, there was a dramatic shift in mostly white neighborhoods (South and Northeast Philly) to vote for Donald Trump.
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Native Americans being left out of US coronavirus data and labelled as 'other' | US new... - 0 views
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Native Americans are being left out of demographic data on the impact of the coronavirus across the US, raising fears of hidden health emergencies in one of the country’s most vulnerable populations.
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about 80% of state health departments have released some racial demographic data, which has already revealed stark disparities in the impact of Covid-19 in black and Latinx communities. But of those states, almost half did not explicitly include Native Americans in their breakdowns and instead categorized them under the label “other”.
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In states that do categorize Native Americans in the demographic results, early data indicates dramatically disproportionate rates of infection and death
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America the incompetent nation - Digby's Hullabaloo - 0 views
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empires inevitably collapse, but America’s almost childlike inability to admit it even is an empire, even as it crumbles, may be unique in human history
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the one thing America clearly did right — and was justifiably proud of — was to create a technologically advanced society that was the envy of the world. For all our faults, Americans knew how to do things. We could get the job done.
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a fumbling mess, unable to manage the simple logistics of getting supplies from one place to another or coordinating a national set of guidelines in a public health crisis. The vaunted CDC, long thought of as the greatest scientific disease research facility in the world, fumbled in making a test that had already been produced in other countries
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Pentagon UFO disclosure: The case for taking these videos seriously - Vox - 0 views
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There are things going on in the sky that are strange and do not have an obvious explanation. These are UFOs, and like any other unidentified phenomenon, human beings are curious creatures and normally scientists will rush out to study whatever we find fascinating or puzzling. But in this case, scientists won’t touch it with a 10-foot pole. And that’s the taboo. So even though the Navy is now saying, “Hey, we’ve got UFOs on film, here they are,” the scientists are still not going to study them. So there seems to be something blocking the scientific community from engaging this phenomenon
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We argued in our 2008 academic paper that the modern state is what we call anthropocentric. Basically, that means human beings are sovereigns. In ancient times, it was the gods or nature that was thought to rule over everything. Now it’s human beings. And this principle is embodied in the state. And if you call that into question, if you call into question that the state is not the only potential sovereign here, the whole legitimacy of the state is called into question. So the whole worldview of the modern state is very vulnerable to the UFO question. You can’t even ask the question because it raises the possibility that there could be ETs here. And that would just blow everything wide open.
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What’s interesting lately is that states seem more willing to engage with this than scientists. I think there’s a hubris in the scientific community, a belief that human beings are the most intelligent species on this planet, and it’s very hard to come to grips with the idea that if there are aliens here, they’re obviously much smarter than we are.
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Africa Is Not Waiting to Be Saved From the Coronavirus | The Nation - 0 views
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when it comes to Africa, the first draft is an incomplete and inaccurate story of a continent waiting to be saved. If only the first story enters the archive, the creativity and agency of swaths of humanity will be lost, which will have consequences beyond the pandemic.
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Museums outside Africa are filled with masks and pots from Africa, not necessarily because Africans themselves thought these masks and pots were interesting, but because colonizing armies and governments thought they were. A colonial archive would likely contain exhaustive records about a white district commissioner, down to the color of his socks, but not the black woman who worked in his home. It’s not because the latter is uninteresting or even unavailable for documentation: It is because those in power set the tone and the context for what goes into the archive, and subsequently, the stories that history will tell.
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Africa is spoken for and spoken about, but so rarely allowed to speak, and this allows only a handful of narratives to survive
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The Pulitzer Problem | Rafia Zakaria - 0 views
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Taub’s article was published in 2019, slightly more than four years after Salahi himself published his best-selling Guantánamo Diary, which notably did not win a Pulitzer Prize. Large parts of “Guantánamo’s Darkest Secret”—awarded a Pulitzer this week in the Feature Writing category—particularly those that deal with Salahi, rehash with the customary “he wrote” what had already been written. Yet while the content may be mostly the same, the purpose is different. Taub, unlike Salahi, is out to deliver absolution to his American reader: casting Steve Wood as an integral player is one part of this; leaving the still-constrained reality of Salahi’s present (he cannot leave tiny Mauritania) to the very end of the piece is another.
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Credibility and journalistic heroism, as each year’s prizes show, reside in the pages of prestige publications; the New York Times and the Washington Post are mainstays, and since the prizes were first opened up to include magazines in 2015, The New Yorker is as well. No truth is really a truth, particularly a courageous truth, until it appears in their pages. The brown man, the accused terrorist, the actual torture survivor Mohamedou Ould Salahi may have written a great book. But the definitive story about “Guantánamo’s Darkest Secret” is the one penned by Taub.
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Such hefty institutional backing has a relationship to truth-telling and to truth creation. It doesn’t matter that Taub, per his own admission, did not speak Arabic, that he seems to have rehashed a large chunk of his Pulitzer-winning article from an already published book, or even that he spent only a week in Mauritania where Salahi now lives. His article legitimizes a process through which the Western liberal frame is conflated with the lack of any frame at all and applied to foreign places or people through the roving foreign correspondent. Ben Taub is not the problem, of course. It’s just that the edifices of elite journalism consistently elevate the voices of those like him. In a story about how a system of silencing allowed the most shameful cruelties to happen, considering the architecture of truth and silence seems important.
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What Black America Means to Europe | by Gary Younge | The New York Review of Books - 0 views
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Europe’s identification with Black America, particularly during times of crisis, resistance, and trauma, has a long and complex history. It is fuelled in no small part by traditions of internationalism and anti-racism on the European Left, where the likes of Paul Robeson, Richard Wright, and Audre Lorde would find an ideological—and, at times, literal—home.
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But this tradition of political identification with Black America also leaves significant space for the European continent’s inferiority complex, as it seeks to shroud its relative military and economic weakness in relation to America with a moral confidence that conveniently ignores both its colonial past and its own racist present.
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the number of Europeans of color—particularly in the cities of Britain, Holland, France, Belgium, Portugal, and Italy—has grown considerably. They are either the descendants of former colonies (“We are here because you were there”) or the more recent immigrants who may be asylum-seekers, refugees, or economic migrants. These communities, too, seek to pollinate their own, local struggles for racial justice with the more visible interventions taking place in America. “The American Negro has no conception of the hundreds of millions of other non-whites’ concern for him,” Malcolm X observed in his autobiography. “He has no conception of their feeling of brotherhood for and with him.”
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The Racism behind Japanese Canadian Internment Can't Be Forgotten | The Tyee - 0 views
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British Columbian governments and officials played a major role in the incarceration and dispossession of Japanese Canadians, and in other racist actions over the years. The B.C. legislature passed 170 anti-Asian laws from 1895-1950 that seriously impacted the Japanese Canadian community.
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Many in the federal government didn’t buy the B.C. government’s claims that Japanese Canadian were spies, but the B.C. delegation persisted and ultimately succeeded.
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the army and RCMP declared that they did not believe that Japanese Canadians were a security risk. (Contrast this with the treatment of German and Italian Canadian communities who were not interned on masse nor dispossessed.)
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Law, history, slavery - The Law and Policy Blog - 0 views
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Slavery was managed from afar: few slave merchants and very few domestic owners of slaves ever saw the enslaved face-to-face. Slavery was thereby dealt with by correspondence: with crews, agents and estate managers. And so, because it was about property and transactions and done from afar, there are lots of records. Lots and lots of records. And so like that modern horror, the Holocaust, you can see the dealings with slavery in record after record. For those involved, it was mundane. Slaves bought and sold, and managed, by ink and paper, by everyday people on an everyday basis. Great Britain’s very own banality of evil.
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Slave ownership was like owning a time-share in Spain or a special savings account. The import of all this should be to correct the skewed cod-history of British nostalgic exceptionalism and to remind us of the extent to which Britain was involved in (and benefitted from) slavery and the slave trade.
Marcus Garvey's descendants ask Biden for posthumous pardon - The Washington Post - 0 views
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Descendants of the Black revolutionary leader Marcus Mosiah Garvey are pressing President Biden’s administration to grant a posthumous presidential pardon to Garvey, who they say was targeted by the U.S. government and persecuted for his work to uphold racial justice for Black people in the African diaspora.
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Biden administration confronts increasing pressure to grant presidential pardons to correct historic racial injustices and counter former presidents’ issuances of presidential pardons and sentence commutations to wealthy allies and political supporters
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In 1919, Garvey founded the Negro World newspaper, whose contributors included Zora Neale Hurston, Arthur Schomburg, William H. Ferris and Norton G.G. Thomas. The paper was translated into Spanish and French and distributed worldwide, with front-page editorials by Garvey advocating for Black liberation from racial injustice.The Negro World was banned by colonial powers in some of the African territories they occupied. According to the documentary “The Story of Marcus Garvey,” the Negro World was smuggled into British-occupied Kenya by Black seamen. The paper was read aloud, and children were instructed to memorize Garvey’s editorial. They then went into villages to recite Garvey’s message.
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