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

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[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.]

DESSALINES

Full article (Truth Out)

Bears Ears: Leave it as it is

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It was the first national monument to grow out of the thinking, study, support, and political power of Native American nations.

[On May 6, 1903, not a hundred feet from where I was standing at the canyon’s edge, Theodore Roosevelt gave a speech that environmentalists—a word yet to be invented—would come to deem as important as Churchill’s “Blood, Toil, Tears, and Sweat” or Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address. It was a perfect match of subject and stage. In the open air on the canyon’s ledge, the president declaimed on the miracle of nature he was trying to save. The five words the speech is most remembered for would become synonymous with the Grand Canyon, and become a touchstone for protecting other wild landscapes.

“Leave it as it is,” Roosevelt told the crowd. “You cannot improve on it. The ages have been at work on it, and man can only mar it. What you can do is to keep it for your children, your children’s children, and for all who come after you, as one of the great sights which every American, if he can travel at all, should see….”]

REGINA LOPEZ-WHITESKUNK WAS A COUNCILWOMAN OF THE UTE MOUNTAIN UTE DURING THE CAMPAIGN TO ESTABLISH BEARS EARS NATIONAL MONUMENT. “WE KNEW WE WERE SPEAKING FOR NATIVE AMERICANS, BUT WHAT WE DIDN’T ANTICIPATE WAS BECOMING LEADERS FOR THE PEOPLE OF UTAH BEYOND THE TRIBES.” | PHOTO BY JUSTIN CLIFTON

Land Grab: Trump’s Campaign Against Bears Ears National Monument | Sierra

Philosopher King

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“One way of re-engaging King is to read him in the way we would thinkers like Immanuel Kant, John Stuart Mill, John Dewey—as interested in fundamental moral principles, what aspects of society deserve our allegiance and which do not. Scholars have rightly focused on Christian theology, but we thought it was important to situate him within broader philosophical and black intellectual traditions.”

New on the site, Julian Lucas interviews Tommie Shelby about Martin Luther King as activist, strategist, and philosopher:

Tommy Shelby on MLK | The Point

5 takeaways from the Russian election hacking indictment

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5 takeaways from the Russian election hacking indictment: https://apnews.com/be3a014d4f4d4d7798c5ce786a745d86

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Tribes Celebrated When This Region Became a National Monument. Now They’re Suing to Get It Back

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Ryan Zinke, yet again, employs lying as a tactical move

Department of Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke claimed [during his interview with Breitbart News Daily on 5/28/18] the Navajo people who “live close” to Bears Ears National Monument “were all in support” of President Donald Trump’s decision to shrink the protected land. But tribe representatives told us that’s false.

In fact, the Navajo Nation and other indigenous tribes have sued the federal government over the president’s decision.

Truth be told…

In the Bears Ears region of Southeastern Utah, there is an area of winding canyons known by Navajo people as Nahoniti’ino – or the hiding place. American Indians used the landscape to elude U.S. military troops in 1864, as thousands were being marched by gunpoint down to Fort Sumner in New Mexico. Hundreds died from hunger and exhaustion in what became known as the Long Walk, a brutal chapter that five tribes highlight in a lawsuit they recently filed against President Donald Trump. [Five Tribes Fought for Bears Ears National Monument. Now they are Suing the Trump Administration | TIME]

Fernando Cly, 40, is a tour guide in Monument Valley, a tribal park that stretches across the Utah-Arizona border inside the Navajo Nation. Tour guides there are Navajo and make their living from tourism in the area. In arguments over monuments, opponents often highlight economic activity that might be lost from restrictions on logging, mining and other industries. Proponents, in turn, highlight the revenue that will come from new visitors. Ryan Shorosky for TIME

 

Stephen Frye and Jordan Peterson on Political Correctness

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Our Slaves

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The Brilliant, Transcendent Clarity of Chauncey DeVega Applying Cone, Baudrillard, Adorno, Gordon and Postman in his Nuanced Argument about the “Kanye West.”

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[The eclipse of serious journalism by punchy soundbites and outraged tweets, and the polarized, standardized reflection of opinion into forms of humor and theatricalized outrage within narrow niche-markets makes the category of individual thought increasingly unreal. This is true on the left as well as the right, and it is especially noteworthy once we countenance what passes for political discourses today. … The new media forms have devolved into entertainment, and instead of critical discourse we see the spectacle of a commentariat, across the ideological spectrum, that prefers outrage over complexity and dismisses dialectical uncertainty for the narcissistic affirmation of self-consistent ideologies each of which is parceled out to its own private cable network.

I am reminded of a lecture I attended some years ago where the late James Cone, an intellectual titan and the father of black liberation theology, observed that some of the most difficult students to teach on questions of the color line were those who happened not to be white. Why? Because black and brown students often believe that because they were born into a certain body at a certain point in time, they have special knowledge and wisdom that makes it unnecessary for them to engage in serious study of the color line….

We see this in an America which in many ways has lost the ability to determine what is “true” and what is “fake,” and where lies are now labeled as mere “untruths” or “disagreements.” As with Trump, Kanye West is the human distillation of America’s social pathologies of greed, narcissism and a celebrity-driven culture of distraction and emptiness. Hyperreality is the state of being where these social pathologies exist, and through which they are mediated.

Ultimately, Kanye West is just one more character caught up in the orbit of the human black hole Donald Trump, in a malignant reality where the absurd is now the quotidian….]

Full article here: I love Kanye West | Chancey DeVega for SALON

 

Foster Care System and Child Sex Trafficking

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[Human trafficking is thought to generate over $30 billion worldwide. In the U.S., the FBI estimates that over 100,000 children are victims of sex trafficking. Foster children are particularly vulnerable to falling victim to sex trafficking and other forms of human trafficking.

60% of all child sex trafficking victims have histories in the child welfare system.

Homelessness is a key contributor to trafficking of youth. Foster children who have runaway, aged out of the system, or otherwise find themselves on the streets are a greater risk of being trafficked, particularly in the commercial sex trade. Entry into human trafficking often begins with trading sex for essential items such as food and/or shelter, but can quickly evolve to victimization by organized trafficking operations. In a study conducted in the U.S. and Canada one-fifth of homeless youth were victims of sex trafficking. The issue is compounded by the fact that states do not always report when a foster child is missing, despite provisions in federal law that mandate it. LGBTQ+ youth in the foster system are particularly prone to homelessness due to added stigma and discrimination.]

The Foster Care – Human Trafficking Nexus | HUMAN TRAFFICKING SEARCH

Also, Sex and human trafficking in the U.S. disproportionately affects foster youth | NFYI

Click to access Foster-Care-Report.pdf

AMERICA’S FOSTER CARE SYSTEM IS THE PIPELINE FOR CHILD SEX TRAFFICKING | Waking Times

 

How Morality Changes in a Foreign Language

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[Why does it matter whether we judge morality in our native language or a foreign one? According to one explanation, such judgments involve two separate and competing modes of thinking—one of these, a quick, gut-level “feeling,” and the other, careful deliberation about the greatest good for the greatest number. When we use a foreign language, we unconsciously sink into the more deliberate mode simply because the effort of operating in our non-native language cues our cognitive system to prepare for strenuous activity. This may seem paradoxical, but is in line with findings that reading math problems in a hard-to-read font makes people less likely to make careless mistakes.]

Read the full story | Scientific American