Beyond White Guilt

Has anyone see The New World?
http://www.thenewworldmovie.com/

I was wondering if it was worth the time to watch, or if it was just a lot of garbage. I don't know much about the story of john smith and pochohantas, but i'm inclined to think its not very accruate, well the common story? Is it a good presentation of the story behind Jamestown with a typical hollywood romance thrown in or is it highly offensive/ignorant/etc.?

Stolen from and written by illlaw.

It has come to my attention that there are many who blame African-Americans for their current plight in America and are unaware of the role that official policies and unofficial practices have created the hole that they have found themselves in for the better part of the life of this country.

From time to time I will post information regarding matters that I come across which addresses this issue.

The first piece of information I'm going to post is about why the suburbs are lily-white for the most part and why African-Americans seem stranded in the urban areas where there are many people competing for a relatively few jobs.

Around WWII and for decades after the FHA granted home loans to working class people so that they could begin to build wealth through home ownership. These loans allowed the working class people who received them to move out of urban areas to budding suburban areas following the jobs available to working class people.

The problem was that the FHA loans were intentionally given to whites and not to African-Americans. It was official policy of the FHA (this is where the term red-lining started) that African-Americans were bad for property values and should not be given home loans if at all possible. This had the effect of creating generally all white suburbs where the property values where higher and keeping the African-Americans in areas where the property values were deemed to be lower partly because African-Americans owned or resided in them. The whites in the suburbs built equity that they then passed on to their children. The African-Americans were unable to do so because of official US Government policy.

Though the FHA has abandoned this policy the damage it has done would of course last for generations. However, private loan companies have picked up where the FHA has left off and are now granting loans in a discriminatory manner. Perpetuating the racially discriminatory and terribly damaging policy of the US government.

So when people say "slavery ended long ago or 'they' aren't discriminated against anymore" feel free to share this information with them.

More information here (including information about how local discriminatory policies, the effect of it all, and solutions):

http://www.law.fsu.edu/Journals/landuse/Vol141/seit.htm

Indian communities are flooded with people who want to know more about them—New Agers looking for quick spiritual enlightenment, anthropologists eager to capture "an authentic culture thought to be rapidly and inevitably disappearing,"2 and Christians eager to engage in interreligious dialogue. How one evaluates these attempts to understand and "know" Indians involves in large part how one analyzes the primary causes of the oppression of Native peoples. Many people—Native and non-Native alike—believe that the primary problem Native peoples face from the dominant society is ignorance. That is, non-Indians oppress Indians because they are ignorant about Native cultures. By this reasoning, if only non-Indians knew more about Indians, they would be nicer to them. Thus, even if attempts to "know" more about Indians are problematic, we can assume that at least these attempts are a step in the right direction.

Without wanting to fashion too simplistic a dualism, I suggest that the primary reason for the continuing genocide of Native peoples has less to do with ignorance and more to do with material conditions.. . If we frame Native genocide from a materialist perspective, then we have to rethink our analysis of non-Native ignorance about Native cultures. This ignorance becomes a willful ignorance in which non-Natives tend to selectively and opportunistically draw knowledge about what they think is Indian, largely because it is in their economic interest to do so. To authentically understand and represent Native peoples would demand, first of all, a reappraisal of non-Native, colonialistic attitudes of entitlement to indigenous lands. Without such a reappraisal, most efforts to "know" Indians will be necessarily less than benevolent in their intent and in their effects.

Spiritual Appropriation As Sexual Violence -Andrea Smith
http://radicalwocarmory.blogspot.com/2006/05/spiritual-appropriation-as-sexual.html

Some friends of mine ar putting up this conference in the UK in the fall. It should be really good.





Bristol Radical History Week is a series of events aimed at opening to public scrutiny up some of the hidden and misrepresented history of Bristol. Rather then concentrating on royals, famous engineers or wealthy merchants, Bristol Radical History Week is going to concern itself with the proper people of Bristol. The mass of sometime rebellious and mutinous people who had their own agendas to fulfil.

The week will also be looking at the links to people who were drawn into the network of Atlantic trading that centered on Bristol as a port. These are the impressed sailors, West African slaves, transported vagrants, indentured labourers and pirates amongst others, who made up what has recently been called the 'Atlantic Proletariat'.

We will discover how the end of slavery, the rise of democracy, and the independence of colonial lands were the results of collective actions by extraordinary 'ordinary' people and NOT just middle class reformers, rich benefactors and generous governments as we are constantly told.

from snacktastic
The term “illegal immigrants” has been wrongly used to refer to undocumented immigrants- those who entered the United States LEGALLY, as tourists, students, etc., but stayed beyond their visa date. Of the immigrant (foreign-born) population in the United States, only 13% is undocumented.
Why do “they” come here “illegally”?

There is little recognition of how hard it has become to enter the U.S in the modern era. Many criticize today’s immigrants by saying that our grandparents came here legally, why can’t they? In truth, the Great Wave of Immigration occurred before the 1924 Johnson-Reed Act that established the National Quota System. Yes, our grandparents did come here legally- everyone did! All they had to do was board a ship. They did not have to compete for a limited number of visas, languishing in their native countries, hoping for a chance to come emigrate. We should explore the causes of our grandparents’ emigration. Past waves of immigrants from Ireland,England, Germany, Italy, Poland and Greece came to the US as the Industrial Revolution reached their countries, turning farmers into factory workers. However, these fledgling industrial societies could not absorb them all. The United States was an incidental beneficiary of these changes to the European economy. Those who could not find factory jobs in Europe came to the US and helped us rebuild our post-Civil War economy.

Scientists Find A DNA Change That Accounts For White Skin

By Rick Weiss
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, December 16, 2005; Page A01

Scientists said yesterday that they have discovered a tiny genetic mutation that largely explains the first appearance of white skin in humans tens of thousands of years ago, a finding that helps solve one of biology's most enduring mysteries and illuminates one of humanity's greatest sources of strife.

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"Thanksgiving was never a big day on the Reservation."


What Really Happened in Plymouth in 1621?

Much of America's understanding of the early relationship between the Indian and the European is conveyed through the story of Thanksgiving. Proclaimed a holiday in 1863 by Abraham Lincoln, this fairy tale of a feast was allowed to exist in the American imagination pretty much untouched until 1970, the 350th anniversary of the landing of the Pilgrims. That is when Frank B. James, president of the Federated Eastern Indian League, prepared a speech for a Plymouth banquet that exposed the Pilgrims for having committed, among other crimes, the robbery of the graves of the Wampanoags. He wrote:

"We welcomed you, the white man, with open arms, little knowing that it was the beginning of the end; that before 50 years were to pass, the Wampanoag would no longer be a free people."

But white Massachusetts officials told him he could not deliver such a speech and offered to write him another. Instead, James declined to speak, and on Thanksgiving Day hundreds of Indians from around the country came to protest. It was the first National Day of Mourning, a day to mark the losses Native Americans suffered as the early settlers prospered. This true story of "Thanksgiving" is what whites did not want Mr. James to tell.

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Questions To Ponder about Columbus Day

1. Columbus sailed into the Caribbean and never even set foot in what is now known as the United States. So, why do we, in the United States, give him one of our 8 Federal holidays?

2. Why should Columbus be given credit for "discovering" the Americas anyway, when we all know those lands were already inhabited and had been for thousands of years? Didn't the inhabitants of those lands discover them? Look at any map of the US and see the many, many, many states, cities and towns that all bear the Native American names of people and peoples who once populated those regions: Illinois, Oklahoma, Cheyenne, Nantuckett, Milwaukee, Yuma, Omaha, Witchita, Tallahassee, Mississippi, Muskogee, Tennessee, Allegheny, Missouri, Kentucky, Huron, Tuscalloosa and on and on and on......

3. Knowing that Native Americans were already here, and Columbus never was here, why does anyone go along with the myth that "Columbus Discovered America", when we all know it is not true?

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[EDIT: This link was provided to me by the OP in reference to the House Bill mentioned in #7. It's apparently a couple years old, but with enough pushing we might be able to get it back on the floor.]

THE COLOR OF DISASTER: RACE, CLASS AND HURRICANE KATRINA

A Symposium and Fundraiser
October 14th and 15th at NYU

www.triciarose.com/katrina

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