When President-elect Barack Obama, an early opponent of the Iraq war, asked Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton -- who helped to authorize the war -- to be his secretary of state, many liberals scratched their heads. When Obama asked Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates -- a Republican who has run the Iraq war for more than two years -- to stay on in his new administration, the scratching grew fierce. But no one needs to read »
In 1963, Stanley Milgram, an assistant professor of psychology at Yale, published his infamous experiment on obedience to authority. Its conclusion was that most ordinary people were willing to administer what they believed to be painful, even dangerous, electric shocks to innocent people if a man in a white lab coat told them to. For the first time in four decades, a researcher has repeated the Milgram experiment to find out whether, after all we »
COMPLETE TEXT OF ALABAMA'S SLAVERY APOLOGY May 25, 2007 The complete text of the slavery apology resolution approved by the Alabama Legislature on Thursday: WHEREAS, slavery has been documented as a worldwide practice since antiquity, dating back to 3500 B.C. in ancient Mesopotamia; and WHEREAS, during the course of the infamous Atlantic Slave Trade, millions of Africans became involuntary immigrants to the New World, and millions more died during passage; the first African slaves in »
WRITING IN ESSENCE MAGAZINE, ""AMISTAD'' midwife Debbie Allen described the Joseph Cinque saga as ""a little drop in a big bucket of blood memory we need to share with the world.'' Allen's implicit assumption is that ""Amistad'' is not enough, that we need to reach deeper into that bucket if we are to understand America. S. Allen Counter, neurophysiologist, Harvard University professor and head of the Harvard Foundation, believes that nothing less than a national »
THERE IS a simple reason American presidents will not apologize for slavery. An apology for the past means asking white Americans to take responsibility for the present. One hundred and forty years after the Emancipation Proclamation, that remains a task too heavy for presidents to perform. The truth remains too terrible for Americans to bear. Twice in five years a president has gone to Africa. Both said how terrible slavery was. In 1998, Bill Clinton »
For nations, like people, distant memory of trauma can be submerged and repressed but never extinguished. It surfaces in words, in politics and sometimes in the movies. In the middle of Steven Spielberg's new film, ""Amistad,'' which opens next week, comes ""the Middle Passage''--the journey of Africans to the New World. Like the Nazi rampage through the Jewish ghetto in ""Schindler's List,'' these spare scenes are among the most wrenching ever put on film. They »
SPRINGFIELD, Ill. — Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama opposes offering reparations to the descendants of slaves, putting him at odds with some black groups and leaders. The man with a serious chance to become the nation's first black president argues that government should instead combat the legacy of slavery by improving schools, health care and the economy for all. "I have said in the past _ and I'll repeat again _ that the best reparations »
Reparations for American blacks was a sideline issue for most African Americans until the publication of Randall Robinson's The Debt. The book helped bring the reparations debate to a larger audience, introducing the wider black community and general American population to a notion long discussed at black nationalist meetings. Others began taking action. Deadria Farmer-Paelmman, a legal activist, conducted extensive research finding that Aetna issued policies on slaves in the 1850s; she has since filed »
For those who still can't grasp the concept of white privilege, or who are constantly looking for some easy-to-understand examples of it, perhaps this list will help. * White privilege is when you can get pregnant at seventeen like Bristol Palin and everyone is quick to insist that your life and that of your family is a personal matter, and that no one has a right to judge you or your parents, because "every family »
Don't Call This Country "America" How the name was hijacked and why it matters today by Elizabeth (Betita) Martinez, courtesy of Z Magazine If ever there was a time to break the habit of calling this country “America,” as if no other nations existed in this hemisphere, it is in the current era of Permanent War and arrogant empire-building. If ever there was a time for people in this white-dominated super-power to reject its racist »