Slavery Archives - Page 2 of 3

Psyche

The Reign of One’s Own Desire

An interview with Sheldon George on his book Trauma and Race: A Lacanian Study of African American Racial Identity

January 15, 2020 • by Sheldon George and Daniel Gaztambide

Daniel Gaztambide (DG): Would you mind unpacking some of the Lacanian concepts you draw on to understand racism and Black identity, such as jouissance and object a, for a general audience? Sheldon George (SG): Jouissance is often translated from the French as pleasure or enjoyment, but it is most properly an excessive pleasure, a destructive ...

History

Reparations, Atonement, or Both

Why Atonement is a Necessary Step for National Healing

January 3, 2020 • by Troy Mosley

When the first Africans arrived at Point Comfort, VA, they did not suffer the unmitigated brutality of chattel slavery that their progeny would endure; that hadn’t been invented. Some of these first Africans who arrived in 1619 were freed, some intermarried with white indentured servants, and some escaped. For the ...

Race

It’s Personal: Changing How White People Think About Racism

October 11, 2019 • by Marcia Ely

I’ve watched the movement to take history textbooks to task for their alarming kid gloves treatment of slavery. I shook my head following last year’s story about Texas finally updating its public school curriculum to teach the truth that slavery was the main cause of the Civil War. And I ...

Feature

“Well Known as Miss Betty Cooper”

Gender Expression in 18th-Century Boston

December 20, 2018 • by Caitlin G.D. Hopkins

In the years before the American Revolution, Boston newspapers routinely advertised the sale and recapture of enslaved people alongside news of Massachusetts’ resistance to British rule. In these ads, enslavers provided descriptions of fugitives in order to assist slave catchers in returning them to bondage. One 1771 advertisement sought the recapture ...

Feature

Monuments to Men

An Interview and Epilogue to Birthright Citizens: A History of Race and Rights in Antebellum America

August 29, 2018 • by Martha S. Jones

Martha S. Jones (MSJ): My first inspiration was the years I spent as a public interest lawyer. I represented poor people of color in lower Manhattan’s trial courts and rarely did those cases reach high courts or turn on constitutional questions. Still, I knew that my clients were fighting for fundamental ...

Feature

This is Your America

Why Frederick Douglass Still Matters

June 15, 2018 • by Neil Roberts

I’m worried. Very worried. But don’t mistake my worrying for pessimism or, worse, nihilism. Rather, I worry because I see a nation, with its connection to a wider world, unraveling right in front of us. Daily attempts to shatter what constitutes citizenship contribute to this entropy. There’s no immediate solution ...

Feature

Memory, Justice, History, and the “Right” to be Forgotten

Reflections on Georgetown’s Slave Legacy

May 4, 2018 • by Tim Lacy

For the past two years, since the publication of a front-page New York Times story on Georgetown University’s sale of 272 slaves, I’ve been following the saga how the university has dealt with this information. By way of context, Georgetown is one of 28 Jesuit colleges and universities in the United States. When the Society of Jesus ...

Memory, Justice, History, and the “Right” to be Forgotten

Feature

Who Is Allowed to Speak For North Koreans?

Narratives of Captivity and Freedom

March 21, 2018 • by Reid Mitchell

The Southern Slavocracy’s obsession with people escaping slavery helped create anti-slavery feeling in the rest of the United States. The Slavocracy viewed these escapes as threats to the viability of the South’s Peculiar Institution. But until the Civil War, very few of the black people held in slavery did escape. ...

Who Is Allowed to Speak For North Koreans?

Feature

Presidential Visits to Yad Vashem

Misrepresentation and Misrecognition, yet again (Part One)

June 8, 2017 • by Michael Weinman

You will by now have seen one report or another contrasting the responses of Presidents Obama (who visited as a senator and presidential candidate) and Trump to Yad Vashem, the Israeli national museum and memorial dedicated to the victims of the Nazi Genocide, the survivors of that crime, and the ...

Feature

Against Exceptionalism, Beyond Triumphalism

A Review of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture

September 24, 2016 • by Jay Driskell

On 13 April 1943, on the 200^th anniversary of Thomas Jefferson’s birth, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt dedicated the Jefferson Memorial to the nation’s third president. Facing a sharp wind blowing in from the Potomac, the president admired the heroic statue and read the famous words that grace the interior walls of ...

Against Exceptionalism, Beyond Triumphalism

Race

Slaves: The Capital that Made Capitalism

A re-post

August 20, 2015 • by Julia Ott

This post, adapted from a lecture in the team-taught course "Rethinking Capitalism" at The New School for Social Research and first published last year, is being reposted today to provide critical insight into today's headlines. Slavery was central to the development of the American political economy. Ott reviews the recent ...

Race

Actually Essential Reading About the Confederacy

Understanding the historical context of the massacre in Charleston and the debate about the Confederate battle flag

June 29, 2015 • by Joshua D. Rothman

The massacre at the Emanuel AME Church in Charleston and the subsequent debate about the Confederate battle flag have sent Americans scrambling for historical context. The shortlist of introductory readings on the Confederacy recommended by John Williams in the New York Times ArtsBeat, however, is an embarrassing ...