Skip to main content
Category

Commentaries/Opinions

It’s happened ever since I began teaching as a graduate student in 1991. Most semesters in which I have taught a course related to U.S. history, the complaint appears at least once on my students’ course evaluations: “too much time on race.”

Black history is U.S. history — but some of my students don’t want to hear it

By Commentaries/Opinions

History class should be the last place where we stop talking about race. By Donald Earl Collins — It’s happened ever since I began teaching as a graduate student in 1991. Most semesters in which I have taught a course related to U.S. history, the complaint appears at least once on my students’ course evaluations: “too much time on race.”Whether at the University of Pittsburgh, Carnegie Mellon, Duquesne, George Washington…

Read More
“Man in Forest Green,” 2016 Credit Derrick Adams/Tilton Gallery, New York

Who First Showed Us That Black Lives Matter?

By Commentaries/Opinions

By Chris Lebron — As a black philosopher, I am constantly navigating a path through the traditions and categories that define my profession. Most often, that navigation takes place between the canonical Western philosophy stretching back to Ancient Greece and the more recent intellectual output and contributions of previously excluded groups, including women, L.G.B.T people and African-American thinkers. This last tradition — the history of black thought — is a…

Read More
Sugar Slavery

The Bitter Truth About Big Sugar’s Caribbean Colonialism

By Commentaries/Opinions, Reparations

By Natalie Hopkinson — I awoke each morning dead tired, and often parched. I was going to the restroom constantly. My doctor did some blood work and delivered the dreaded news: My A1C levels were in the danger zone. Like 1 in 3 Americans, up to 90 percent of whom don’t know it, I was what she called “prediabetic.” My body was struggling to process sugar. I had to eat less…

Read More
Nicaraguan leader Daniel Ortega, Maurice Bishop, and Fidel Castro at a May 1 celebration in Havana in 1980.

Grenada’s March 13 Revolution: Forever Remembered, Never to be Forgotten!

By Commentaries/Opinions

The young revolutionaries of the 1979-83 era, at home and abroad, have all grown into advanced adulthood. It’s still quite uncertain why Prime Minister Dr. Keith Mitchell has again set March 13, the anniversary date of the 1979 Revolution led by Maurice Bishop, as the date for a general election in the three-island state he rules over – Grenada, Carriacou, and Petite Martinique.

Read More
"There's never been a president in history for whom words matter less."

Trump’s Speech Wasn’t The Scary Part: All The Republican Groveling Was

By Commentaries/Opinions

Trump’s SOTU was a forgettable, familiar litany. What’s new is the GOP’s brain-dead eagerness to do his bidding. By Heather Digby Parton — I waited for TV pundits to declare the “pivot” and proclaim Donald Trump to be our one true president after Tuesday night’s lengthy State of the Union address. But with the exception of Fox News State TV, most were less effusive than the last time he addressed…

Read More
A statue commemorating the struggle against slavery at Jamaica’s Emancipation Park in Kingston.

Old Plantation, New Slave Masters: Short Reflection on Independent Jamaica

By Commentaries/Opinions

By Tina Renier — “The presence of a group of African sell-outs is a part of the definition of underdevelopment.”- Walter Rodney Last year, Professor Rupert Lewis, a prominent Caribbean intellectual, was invited to provide a teach-in session on anti-establishment strategies in the 1960s and 1970s at the University of the West Indies, Mona in Jamaica. In the introduction of his presentation, he posed a crucial question to the participants:…

Read More
Slave descendants, left to right: Sandra Green Thomas, Patricia Bayonne-Johnson, Zeita Kemp, Melissa Kemp, Karran Harper Royal and Joseph Steward speak at Georgetown University at an April 2017 gathering to announce atonements for the school's 19th century slavery history in Washington.((Linda Davidson, The Washington Post))

Descendants of slaves sold by Georgetown want more than symbolic atonement

By Commentaries/Opinions, Reparations

By Jarvis DeBerry, The Times-Picayune — Imagine discovering that one of the world’s oldest and best candy companies was able to survive to become one of the world’s oldest and best because generations ago it sold as chattel almost 300 human beings, including your ancestors. You may find yourself impressed by the current management’s willingness to apologize for the sins of their predecessors, but what would you make of their idea…

Read More
A man drains water from his house flooded after the passage of Hurricane Dennis in the city of Kigston, Jamaica

Revisiting ‘Development As Freedom’ in a Time of Neo-liberal Hegemony.

By Commentaries/Opinions

By: Tina Renier — Poor economic opportunities and poverty create a ripple effect of other social problems such as crime and violence. A well-renowned Jamaican reggae singer, Bob Marley once sang, “many more will have to suffer… many more will have to die… don’t ask me why”. ‘Natural Mystic’ is not just a grand spectacle of entertainment. ‘Natural Mystic’ symbolically describes a contemporary world that is plagued by war, disease…

Read More