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Racism Watch: Always remember
Sunday, October 09 @ 03:04:53 UTC |  By Dr. Selwyn R. Cudjoe
October 09, 2016
In academic and political lectures, when I refer to the negative psychological and economic impact slavery has had on black people, my questioners usually retort: "You have to bring up slavery again?"
The same people who object to my bringing up slavery's impact upon black people have no objections when Jews urge their people: "Never forget!"
This raises the question: Why should black people forget about slavery when Haiti, well into the 20th century, paid reparations to France for having fought for and won their freedom? In 1825, threatening an invasion, France sent a flotilla to Haiti to compel Haitians to pay a ransom of 150 million gold francs for their freedom. It was reduced subsequently to 90 million gold francs or US$40 billion in today's currency. In 2010, 90 leading academics, authors, and human rights activists, in an open letter to president Nicolas Sarkozy, "urged the French government to pay Haiti for the 90 million gold francs Haitians were forced to pay France for their independence" (London, Guardian, 16 August 2010).
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Racism Watch: The Ultimate Logic of a Society Built on Mass Murder
Monday, January 07 @ 18:11:15 UTC | A Black Agenda Radio commentary by Glen Ford
January 07, 2012 - blackagendareport.com
“Mass murder is at the core of the American national religion.”
As a native-born American, I grew up watching cowboy and Indian shoot-em-ups in which the highlight of the movie was when the white guys in the circled wagon train shot the Indians off their horses until all the red men were dead, and very silent. Indians didn’t do a lot of screaming in pain when they were shot; they just expired. Same thing with buck-toothed Japanese, line after line of them, charging into U.S. machine guns, falling instantly silent and dead. It was somehow quite clean, almost antiseptic, these cinematic rituals of death, all staged for the broadest popular consumption to demonstrate the inevitability – and cosmic justice – of ultimate white victory over the darker races.
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Racism Watch: The Origins of Racism
Friday, July 08 @ 14:36:12 UTC | socialistworker.co.uk
July 08, 2011
Racism is so embedded in our society that many people assume it has always existed. But, says Yuri Prasad, it is really a modern phenomenon that developed with capitalism.
The plague of racism continues to scar the world that we live in, even though there is no scientific basis whatsoever for the division of society into races. Race is a social construct that benefits our rulers.
The idea that people with different skin colours have different ideas and interests is a common sense one. The implication of this for many people is that prejudice is natural, and that any attempt to get rid of it is doomed.
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Racism Watch: International slavery museum: a refreshing approach to history
Monday, September 03 @ 22:13:47 UTC | Dan Swain is impressed by a museum that unravels the links between Liverpool and the slave trade
August 28, 2007
socialistworker.co.uk
Dan Swain is impressed by a museum that unravels the links between Liverpool and the slave trade
The new International Slavery Museum in Liverpool quotes prominently the former slave William Prescott asking us to “remember not that we were freed, but that we fought”.
This is a refreshing change from much of the coverage of the 200th anniversary of the abolition of the transatlantic slave trade, which has tended to focus on the actions of a few white abolitionists, relegating the slaves themselves to passive victims.
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Africa Focus: Arab Slavery of Africans
Wednesday, September 28 @ 01:00:34 UTC | New Era (Windhoek)
September 26, 2005
ARAB-led slavery of Africans is important because it affects directly contemporary Afro-Arab relations and is complicated by the fact that both Africans and Arabs frequently treat it as an issue to be hushed-up because of the embarrassing reaction it generates. It is a historical reality which differentiates the fate and the aspirations of Africans on the one hand, and Arabs on the other, in their different attempts to achieve Arab unity and African unity respectively. Both these objectives, if pursued democratically, would assist in the emancipation and development of the two peoples.
While the truth is uncomfortable, it is impossible to move forward towards historical reconciliation through "holocaust denial" or by "collective amnesia". Denying the truth of what Helmi Sharawy of the Arab Research Centre for Arab-African Studies and Documentation (ARAASD) Cairo, Egypt calls the "ambiguous relations' of the Afro-Arab cultural interchange in the Borderlands, will not assist reconciliation. For more than a thousand years the Sahara has been the melting point of the two cultures. Slavery was generalized in the Borderlands, stretching from Mauritania on the Atlantic, westwards through the Sahel to Sudan on the Red Sea, with slaves being captured from black Africa and taken, often on foot, northwards through the Sahel into Arabia and out of Africa. Whereas the trans-Atlantic slave trade has been the focus of the on-going struggle for reparations, Adwok Nyaba states that Arab enslavement of Africans "has either been ignored, minimized or completely rejected on false account that the Arabs either were 'brothers in Islam' equally colonized and oppressed by the west or participated in the decolonisation struggles of the African people".
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Inside U.S.A.: A Whole Lott Missing
Thursday, January 02 @ 13:46:51 UTC | Rituals Of Purification And Racism Denial
by Paul Street, www.cul-chicago.org
The most disturbing aspect of the recent national melodrama over Senate Majority Leaders Trent Lott's offensive declaration of retrospective support for the race-segregationist 1948 Presidential campaign of Strom Thurmond is not the content of Lott's remarks. The really depressing thing is what the entire episode says about the superficial level at which racism is discussed in the United States. A related downer is how it is working to stick America's head yet further in the sand on the question of race.
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Racism Watch: Lottsa Republicans
Tuesday, December 24 @ 13:13:48 UTC | By A.F. Nariman, www.yellowtimes.org
Trent Lott has gone from being knee deep to being buried up to his arching eyebrows in his own doo-doo with each of his five attempts to apologize for his ill-considered remarks at Senator Strom Thurmond's 100th birthday celebration on December 5, 2002. His words, "I want to say this about my state: When Strom Thurmond ran fro President we voted for him. We're proud of it. And, if the rest of the country had followed our lead, we wouldn't have had all these problems over all these years," have stirred up a maelstrom in Washington and across the country where reporters with little news to report in the post mid-term election and holiday lull have caught onto the story with the tenacity of a pit bull terrier's vicious hold on its victim.
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