This essay is an adaptation of the fourth annual Philip Roth Lecture, delivered at the Newark Public Library on November 4, 2019. The lecture began with an appreciation of Roth’s merging of fiction and history. An admirer of great historical writing, Roth understood that, to be truly great, it had to grapple with what he called, in The Plot Against America, “the relentless unfolding of the unforeseen.” Flipped on its…
White history is still normalized. Non-white history is seen as provocative. By Nick Martin, The New Republic – Imagine, for a moment, you’re about eight years old, standing in a valley strewn with tiny hills. Your mother is nearby, trying to rope in your wandering little brother. Towering over you and milling about are dozens of older white men, silver in the beard and haggard in the face, antique rifles…
By Dr. Maulana Karenga — Pushing back the thick fog and fumes of the putrid propaganda of White supremacist triumphalism, what can we really see and sing by the dawn’s early light except Trump’s deformed and deficient conception of America unmasked? For all the hype, hustle and hypocrisy around “making America great again,” it presupposes an imaginary past void of its victims and of the violence, genocide, enslavement, segregation and…
By Heather Gray, Justice Initiative — Preface This will be the beginning of a series about where we came from and/or who was there already. Trump repeatedly says “Go back to where you came from.” So, I have questioned what on earth does he mean by that. All of us homo sapiens in the world came from Africa. But, also, as I started thinking about where I was born and where I…
By Nick Mirzoeff, Hyperallergic — Almost two years after the 2017 fascist rally at Charlottesville around a mediocre statue of Robert E. Lee, the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) opened its exhibition Addressing the Statue for an unspecified run. The statue in question is James Earle Fraser’s massive “Theodore Roosevelt Equestrian Memorial,” situated outside the Museum’s main entrance, depicting Roosevelt flanked by his gun carriers, a stereotyped Plains Indian and a generic African. It…
By Roy E. Finkenbine — In an interview conducted in 2002, the late Helen Hornbeck Tanner, an influential historian of the Native American experience in the Midwest best known for her magisterial Atlas of Great Lakes Indian History (1987), reflected on the considerable record of “coexistence and cooperation” between African Americans and Indians in the region. According to Tanner, “[an] important example of African and Indian cooperation was the Indian-operated Underground Railroad….
Vantage Point Radio September 23, 2019 with host Dr. Ron Daniels aka The Professor. Topics: Cherokee Nation Demands Seat in Congress Crisis of Black Land Loss in Gullah Country. Guests: Marilyn Vann, President Descendant of Freedmen’s Association, Oklahoma City, OK and Heather L. Hodges, Executive Director, Gullah Geechee Cultural Heritage Corridor Commission, Johns Island, SC Commentary. And commentary on Reparatory Justice by Dr. Ron Daniels aka The Professor
By The People’s Organization for Progress (POP) — This is a brief summary and overview that presents many of the voices in the lengthy history of African-American support and solidarity for the Palestinian People’s legitimate claim for justice and selfdetermination. This support has grown and developed from a perspective advocated by some of the most radical and progressive activists such as Malcolm X and the Black Panther Party to a…
We can embrace the underlying spirit of the Declaration of Independence but also learn from its shortcomings. By Matthew Rozsa, Salon — It is painful to write about the shortcomings of the Declaration of Independence. The historic document was officially approved by the Second Continental Congress in Philadelphia on July 4, 1776 — a mere two days after the Lee Resolution formally declared the American colonies to be independent of the…
Perhaps the main reason so many people objected to Virginia Governor Ralph Northam calling the first 20 Africans to land in Virginia in 1619 indentured servants, and not slaves, is that they believe the conditions of slavery were so much harsher than those of indentured servitude, that calling these Africans indentured servants amounts to a cover-up of their reality. That is because the popular image that we have been sold…
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