Guyanese OnlineRichard Cohen’s new book, which has reportedly been dropped by his US publisher despite extensive additions, is still set for British release next month
By MOHAMED HAMALUDIN
Have you ever wondered why there are African-Americans, Latino-Americans, Native-Americans and Caribbean-Americans but no Anglo-Americans? In f act, there are and they are known as “whites,” signifying power, and there is no reason for a hyphenated label.
“White” is meant also to reflect the conceit that the country is homogenous and all others are add-ons. That is the erroneous belief handed down from even before the founding of the republic. A homogenous society is one like China or India or Japan, where cultural sameness binds citizens together and very strict immigration policies severely limit the influx of foreigners. Continue reading
272 Slaves Were Sold to Save Georgetown University. What Does It Owe Their Descendants? – NYTimes.com
In 1838, the Jesuit priests who ran the country’s top Catholic university needed money to keep it alive. Now comes the task of making amends.
Georgetown University
By RACHEL L. SWARNS – APRIL 16, 2016 – NY Times
WASHINGTON — The human cargo was loaded on ships at a bustling wharf in the nation’s capital, destined for the plantations of the Deep South. Some slaves pleaded for rosaries as they were rounded up, praying for deliverance.
But on this day, in the fall of 1838, no one was spared: not the 2-month-old baby and her mother, not the field hands, not the shoemaker and not Cornelius Hawkins, who was about 13 years old when he was forced onboard.
Their panic and desperation would be mostly forgotten for more than a century. But this was no ordinary slave sale. The enslaved African-Americans had belonged to the nation’s most prominent Jesuit priests. And they were sold, along with scores of others, to help secure the future of the premier Catholic institution of higher learning at the time, known today as Georgetown University. Continue reading
Book Cover: Blue Sky for Black America:
100 Years of Colored People in Western Utopian Literature
by Jesse Rhines Ph.D
The book, Blue Sky for Black America: 100 Years of Colored People in Western Utopian Literature, captured my interest as a lover of science fiction. Based on his early experience as an IBM Systems Engineer Trainee, the author Jesse Rhines applies IBM’s “blue sky” utopian approach to formulating its hundred-year projection in addressing urban hopelessness among underclass Black youth. He argues that hopelessness, a future oriented condition, requires a future oriented solution.
To facilitate this process, Rhines analyzes one hundred years of Western Utopian literature featuring Black Americans. Beginning with the pre-World War II period, he examines two classic futuristic novels by Edward Bellamy and Aldous Huxley. Blacks remain servants and are depicted as backwards, uncivilized, and rapists.
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The Homeless in New York – By Dr. Dhanpaul Narine
It was the middle of winter. We wondered why they wanted us to walk the streets on the coldest night of the year. Who would want to be out in such frigid weather?
As we checked in at York College we soon found out the reason. The coordinator said that if anyone was found sleeping in the streets on such a night then that person desperately needed a place to stay. This was empirical data and was perhaps one of the best indicators of homelessness. Such cases, we were told, should be reported and steps would be taken to move the person to a shelter.
New York is a tale of two cities. Continue reading
New report documents 3,959 lynchings from 1877 to 1950 – more than earlier estimates
A new report from the Alabama-based Equal Justice Initiative (EJI) said its researchers have documented nearly 4,000 lynchings of African-Americans in 12 states during the Jim Crow era — about 700 more than previous comprehensive studies have found.
Titled “Lynching in America: Confronting the Legacy of Racial Terror,” the EJI report said 3,959 lynchings of African-Americans took place from 1877 to 1950 in states across the South: Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas and Virginia. Continue reading
The most egregious example of “Americide” is our country’s treatment of African-Americans. It’s exhibited in the many profitable corporations—manufacturers, banks, insurance, railroad—that had their roots in slavery. Published: January 18, 2015 | Authors: Paul Buchheit | NationofChange | Op-Ed
America is gradually, but unrelentingly, destroying part of itself. The facts to support this are well-documented, told in many ways from past to present.
The most egregious example of Americide is our country’s treatment of African-Americans. Almost everyone agrees about the evils of slavery, once dismissed simply as a Peculiar Institution. But a debate goes on about reparations, with passionate arguments on both sides, ranging from a demand for a Reparations Superfund for jobs and education, to a claim that blacks actually benefited from slavery because of the years of ‘reparations’ received through poverty programs. Continue reading
Black History Month may fall on the shortest month of the year, but network and cable television stations have jumped on board to celebrate our rich history. PBS, for example, will highlight the achievements and triumphs of African-Americans with five new documentaries.
“Our Black History Month lineup delves deep into the stories of notable people and historical topics in a way that’s uniquely PBS,” says Donald Thoms, Vice President, Programming and Talent Management. “We feature the work of diverse and independent producers, which remains a staple of our content offerings year round, and I think our viewers will enjoy and even find a little inspiration from our content this year.” Continue reading
Stabroek editor On October 13, 2012 – LOS ANGELES, (Reuters) –
Brad Pitt has thrown his weight behind a documentary that blasts America’s 40-year war on drugs as a failure, calling policies that imprison huge numbers of drug-users a “charade” in urgent need of a rethink.
The Hollywood actor came aboard recently as an executive producer of filmmaker Eugene Jarecki’s “The House I Live In,” which won the Grand Jury Prize in January at the Sundance Film Festival. The film opened in wide release in the United States on Friday.
Ahead of a Los Angeles screening, Pitt and Jarecki spoke passionately about the “War on Drugs” which, according to the documentary, has cost more than $1 trillion and accounted for over 45 million arrests since 1971, and which preys largely on poor and minority communities. Continue reading
REFUGEES: No room for today’s ‘tired, poor, huddled masses yearning to breathe free’ — By Mohamed Hamaludin
The number of free African Americans increased from around 60,000 in 1790 following the Revolutionary War to about 300,000 in 1830 and European Americans feared they would help the still enslaved to escape or revolt and believed anyhow that they were an inferior race who would be better off elsewhere. The American Colonization Society and others came up with this solution: send them to Africa.
African Americans, in general, objected strongly, with some pointing out that they had lived in the United States for generations and were “no more African than white Americans were European,” as Wikipedia puts it. “Shame upon the guilty wretches that dare propose and all that countenance such a proposition,” abolitionist and scholar Frederick Douglass declared. “We live here—have lived here—have a right to live here and mean to live here,”
Still, 4,571 African Americans were relocated between 1820 and 1843 to West Africa, in a collection of settlements with names such as Mississippi in Africa, Kentucky in Africa and Republic of Maryland that formed the nation of Liberia by 1857. Because of diseases, only 1,819 survived. Continue reading →
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