By Bill Bigelow, Zinn Ed Project — Once again this year many schools will pause to commemorate Christopher Columbus. Given everything we know about who Columbus was and what he launched in the Americas, this needs to stop. Columbus initiated the trans-Atlantic slave trade, in early February 1494, first sending several dozen enslaved Taínos to Spain. Columbus described those he enslaved as “well made and of very good intelligence,” and recommended…
Exclusive: As the world ignores the ignominious 500th anniversary of the buying and selling of slaves between Africa and the Americas, historians uncover its first horrific voyages By David Keys, The…
Modern scholarship is reexamining Haiti’s founding father. Julia Gaffield, The Conversation — Crowds cheered as local lawmakers on August 18 unveiled a street sign showing that Rogers Avenue in the…
By Mark Karlin, Truthout — By detailing the growth of the slave trade in the 17th century, Gerald Horne reveals how white supremacy, capitalism and the original sin of slavery in the Western Hemisphere became intertwined. Current politics are so chaotic, staggering and fast-paced that we rarely hear of how we arrived at this moment of the resurgence of white supremacy in historical context. However, Professor Gerald Horne, author of The…
What is euphemistically referred to as “modernity” is marked with the indelible stain of what might be termed the Three Horsemen of the Apocalypse: Slavery, White Supremacy, and Capitalism, with the bloody process of human bondage as the driving and animating force of this abject horror. By Gerald Horne — The years between 1603 and 1714 were perhaps the most decisive in English history. At the onset of the seventeenth…
Because this film is not just about poverty and it’s not just about race: it’s about colonialism. By Aviva Chomsky — Of course a Marvel Comics, Hollywood, high-budget capitalist product…
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:…
Joana Gorjão Henriques has been a journalist at the leading national daily in Portugal, Público, since 2000; a Nieman Fellow at Harvard in 2010; and a contributor to The Guardian….