The Ark of Return
Commentary by Black Kos Editor JoanMar
Something momentous happened at the United Nations headquarters in New York yesterday; something huge and I have seen nothing about it in the news.
United Nations officials today welcomed the unveiling at the world body’s New York Headquarters of a permanent memorial to the victims of slavery and the transatlantic slave trade which they acknowledged was one of the most horrific tragedies of modern history.
Built on the Visitors Plaza at the United Nations Headquarters in New York City, as its theme suggests, The Ark of Return will help us to acknowledge the tragedy, consider the legacy of slavery, and never forget the millions of people affected by these events. It is designed in three parts for visitors to walk through and initiate a psychological, emotional, and spiritual transformation. It provides a solemn space within which one may reflect upon a tragic page in the history of mankind.
In 2007, Jamaica proposed and the General Assembly of the UN agreed to establish The Permanent Memorial on the grounds of the United Nations to honour the victims of the more than forty decades of slavery and the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade, in which more than 18 million people were forcefully removed from Africa and transported as slaves to the Americas, including the Caribbean, and to Europe.
The memorial was designed by architect Rodney Leon.
Mr. Leon’s work was selected from among 310 design proposals from 83 countries in a competition launched two years ago by the UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), with support from the UN Department of Public Information’s Remember Slavery Programme, and Member States from the Caribbean Community (CARICOM) and the African Union.
Architect Rodney Leon explains his design:
And one of the most important elements of the memorial is that of a deliberately androgynous human sculpture, called ‘the trinity figure,’ representing the human spirit and the spirit of the men, women and children of African descent whose deaths resulted from the Transatlantic Slave Trade.
To serve as a reminder to future generations not to repeat this tragedy.
One additional point: Slavery in this generation - and future generations - may not look exactly as in did in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth centuries. It is possible to be enslaved without wearing legs shackles and having intricate designs decorating your back. If black men and women of whatever age are in fear for their lives every time they walk the streets or drive their cars, a fear that is not shared by the majority community, then that too is a form of slavery. If the black life can be snuffed out or brutalized at will, without consequences, and by people who have the weight of the government behind them, then that too is a form of slavery.
Before you accuse me of hyperbole, remember that slavery also has to do with the restriction of freedom. Has to do with being owned. Law enforcement officers own the black body. LEO kill and brutalize black bodies at will, and there is not a damn thing we can do about it. Worst yet, there is not a damn thing that is being done about it by our government. In the meantime, we can't run, and we dare not fight back. Do not even try to pry the arm from around your throat that is choking you to death.
At the very least, we still have some work to do.
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News by dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor
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I doubt this case will much relief for AL Dems, but it could have some interesting implications nationally, especially in the South East. New York Times: Supreme Court Rules Against Alabama in Redistricting Case.
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The Supreme Court on Wednesday sided with black and Democratic lawmakers in Alabama who said the State Legislature had relied too heavily on race in its 2012 state redistricting by maintaining high concentrations of black voters in some districts.
The vote was 5 to 4, with Justice Anthony M. Kennedy joining the court’s four more liberal members to form a majority.
Justice Stephen G. Breyer, writing for the majority, said a lower court had erred in considering the case on a statewide basis rather than district by district. He added that the lower court had placed too much emphasis on making sure that districts had equal populations and had been “too mechanical” in maintaining existing percentages of black voters.
The Supreme Court vacated the lower court’s ruling and sent the two consolidated cases — Alabama Legislative Black Caucus v. Alabama, No. 13-895, and Alabama Democratic Conference v. Alabama, No. 13-1138 — back to it for reconsideration.
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Charles Taylor sought to serve 50-year sentence in Rwanda for war crimes committed during Sierra Leone’s civil war. The Guardian: Court tells former Liberian president to serve war crimes sentence in Britain.
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The special court for Sierra Leone has denied the former Liberian president Charles Taylor’s request to serve his 50-year sentence for war crimes in Rwanda, rather than Britain.
Taylor was convicted in April 2012 of 11 counts of war crimes and crimes against humanity for aiding murderous rebels in Sierra Leone’s civil war.
Taylor argued that detention in Britain violates his rights because the visa process will make it nearly impossible for his family to visit. He also complained about the conditions of his detention.
The court denied his request in a decision made public on Wednesday, saying Britain’s denial of his family’s visa application did not violate his rights.
Charles Taylor and wife
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This situation could get very ugly very quickly. Bloomberg: Dominican Nurse Fired for Haitian Parents Shows Expulsion Threat.
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Anne Dimanche Saintil was born in the Dominican Republic, earned her nursing degree there and worked at a hospital in the capital, Santo Domingo. Then she was fired, because her parents were from Haiti.
Dimanche is among as many as 110,000 people living in the Dominican Republic without any legal status after the government, following a Supreme Court decision, began denying citizenship to Dominican-born children of undocumented immigrants, almost all of whom came from neighboring Haiti. She said she lacks official paperwork on her birth because she was born at home, and now fears she’ll be deported to Haiti, a country she doesn’t know.
“You’re living in the place that’s your home, where you grew up, but it’s like you are a foreigner,” the 27-year-old Dimanche said. “I don’t know what my future is here.”
President Danilo Medina’s government can start deporting people ineligible for citizenship after June 15, Washington Gonzalez, deputy minister of the Interior and Police, told reporters in January. With only 8,755 people enrolled in a government process to offer a path to citizenship, forced deportations could send tens of thousands of people out of what was one of the Western Hemisphere’s fastest-growing economies last year into its poorest.
“The Dominican Republic’s actions against Haitian immigrants and Dominicans of Haitian descent are shameful examples of discrimination and violations of basic human rights,” Carlos Ponce, director of Latin America programs at Freedom House, a Washington-based organization that promotes political and civil liberties, said in a Feb. 13 statement.
Dominican nationalist activists demonstrate in support of President Danilo Medina's immigration policies against Haitians and Dominicans of Haitian descent in Santo Domingo on Feb. 27, 2015. Photographer: Erika Santelices/AFP via Getty Images
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Yes because even though POC and LGBT folk are still under represented on TV, now they actually are more than a handfull, queue the white panic brigade. Slate: Deadline Says There Are Not Enough Roles on TV for White People. Poor White People.
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Now, I’ve read Nellie Andreeva’s Deadline article on the uptick in “ethnic casting” in television, and my main reaction is a sense of déjà vu. The headline—“Pilots 2015: The Year of Ethnic Castings—About Time or Too Much of Good Thing?”—is enough to make your eyes roll very far into the back of your head. (Mine did.) Too much of [a] good thing? Really? By posing such a question, one suggests that the scale is suddenly tipping in favor of non-white actors on TV; that the television landscape is suddenly overrun with minorities (it’s not), and that it’s becoming much harder to find white leads on the small screen on a daily basis. (It’s not—GLAAD reported that while stats are improving, only 13 percent of characters announced on primetime for the 2014-15 season were black, 8 percent were Latino, and 4 percent were Asian-Pacific Islander, hardly a threat to television’s overall whiteness.)
At first I thought: The headline could be misleading and inflammatory while not truly representative of the contents—this happens all the time. Andreeva, a rigorous and smart reporter, could have just been saddled with a terrible title for her investigation into the industry's hot topic du jour: diversity in Hollywood. But, unfortunately, the piece bears out all of the fears that its headline promises, and then some.
The subject at the core of the article is intriguing: Andreeva speaks to several sources about what the “explosion” of “ethnic casting” has looked like for some actors and talent agents within the industry, most notably, those who are white. It seems that more and more pilots this year are open to “all ethnicities,” but with a greater emphasis on casting non-whites: “Basically 50 percent of the roles in a pilot have to be ethnic, and the mandate goes all the way down to guest parts,” one talent representative tells Andreeva. She also breaks down the many TV roles that have been specifically designated for non-white actors in recent years, like Morris Chestnut in Rosewood and the black-cast TV series adaptation of Uncle Buck.
It’s an interesting breakdown of what Hollywood’s new diversity push looks like on the ground. But where the piece takes a wrong turn is when Andreeva spins her reporting into a queasy critique of TV’s interest in providing a larger array of perspectives and faces in lead roles. At one point, she refers to a couple of show pilots based on real-life white people (The Advocate and Broad Squad) that have cast non-white actors in some of the roles. This could be a bad sign, she says: “Replacing one set of rigid rules with another by imposing a quota of ethnic talent on each show might not be the answer.” She goes on to point to the success of all-white shows and all-black shows like Seinfeld and The Cosby Show, which were hits “based on the strength of their premise, execution and talent performances and chemistry.”
Arguments like these are dangerous because they ignore history—a Hollywood legacy of quite literally white-washing historical figures, systematically denying people of color the chance to tell their own stories, and assuming that there is only ever enough room for one or two non-white faces or entities (Sidney Poitier in the ‘60s, The Cosby Show in the ‘80s, and so on) to capture the world’s attention. Referring to the casting uptick as a “pendulum” that may have “swung too far” to the other side, even while admitting that diversifying Hollywood is “long overdue,” as Andreeva does, reinforces the idea that diversifying TV—or rather “normalizing” it, as Shonda Rhimes has astutely said—is equal to white actors getting the raw end of the deal. (This is not much different from those who suggest that leveling the playing field for all means the “downfall” of the white heterosexual male.)
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