Our history textbooks seemed to have missed these Native women. During Women’s History Month, brush up on what you missed—and share your new knowledge all year long.
Source: 10 Native Women You Should Have Learned About In History Class – HelloGiggles
Some of the leading trailblazers of our time graduated from Harvard Law School. Most notably, our forever first family members, Barack and Michelle Obama. 28 years since Barack Obama graduated and just two years since the Harvard Law Review elected the first Black woman to lead the student run publication, Harvard, now has one of the largest classes of Black law students in its history.
Source: This is One of the Largest Classes of Black Law Students in Harvard La – BOTWC
Elders and The Sacred
From the Dagara Perspective: Relationships of Healing the Community….
” There is an elder in making in everyone, but it is most visible in those who have the receptivity to listen to the stories of others. The ability to listen, and the willingness to support others in difficult situations are the heart and the soul of elder-hood.
If people of the West embraced the idea that the elder is at the edge, between two worlds, and is therefore a window to the Other World as well as a mirror to it, certain of the West’s social problems would be solved. One of them is the rejection of aging and the elders, which puts the culture at risk. The other is the West’s relationship to the sacred.
There is not doubt that in Western culture, the fear of aging has become quite acute. People certainly have many reasons to think that old age is not something to look forward to. But in light of what has been said about elders in an indigenous African context, one could explain Western fear of old age as linked to the sense of uselessness. If in Western society people would find ways in their old age of spending their abundant time with their grandchildren, perhaps this would raise the appreciation of old age and pave the road for a more sacred approach to being old. For if to get old is to get close to the ancestors, then old means that which is closest to the sacred.
If culture rejects the sacred, it rejects elders. If it rejects elders, it rejects the welfare of its youth. You can’t have the one without the other. It is understood in the village that youth and the elders are the ones in society who see clearly what is happening. The young are at an age where the hidden is obvious to their eyes. They want to point it out because they do not know how to pretend it is not there.
To be young and old in the modern world is to be at risk. People who wish to embrace their elderhood must first listen to the pain around them. They must notice in the young and the adult parts that are craving visibility. We must learn how to sit quietly with our youth and to listen quietly to what they have to say. This is the job of the elders. This calm, almost meditative approach to youth can also be a model for self-calming to other people who are too troubled to be quiet. Calmness is the beginning of the ability to hold space, the beginning of an elder’s contribution to the community.”
Excerpted from …THE HEALING WISDOM OF AFRICA..
by Dr. Malidoma Some…via Baba Wesley Gray
Jenny Odell’s new book makes the case for keeping your Facebook account, staying on Twitter, checking your email, but doing it all differently, and “not as asked.” (And not as self-help.)
Source: How to Do Nothing author Jenny Odell on resisting the pull of Instagram – Vox
“I didn’t want to encapsulate my existence as very traumatic and downtrodden, like ‘Great Expectations.’ So much of the national dialogue about race deals with either terrible trauma or black excellence. I was more interested in the space in between, because that’s where I exist. So the challenge was finding a space between sensationalizing and also documenting and contextualizing.”
Damon Young’s WHAT DOESN’T KILL YOU MAKES YOU BLACKER is in stores this week.
This March marked the 15th anniversary of the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq.In 2003, President George W. Bush and his advisers based their case for war on the idea that Saddam Hussein, then dictator of Iraq, possessed weapons of mass destruction — weapons that have never been found. Nevertheless, all these years later, Bush’s “Global War on Terror” continues — in Iraq and in many
Source: We Have Spent $32 Million Per Hour on War Since 2001
The United States is cutting off aid to El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras, known collectively as the “Northern Triangle,” the State Department said on Saturday, a day after President Donald Trump blasted the Central American countries for sending migrants to the United States.
Source: U.S. ending aid to El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras over migrants | Reuters
Woman Sues Harvard to Get back Slave Photos of her Family.
In 1850, a Harvard professor with a twisted theory of white superiority had research photographs taken of two slaves from South Carolina — a father and daughter, stripped to the waist, who stare hauntingly into the camera.
Tamara Lanier, 54, a retired chief probation officer from Norwich, filed suit Wednesday in Massachusetts. Papa Renty is her great-great-great-grandfather, Lanier argues in demanding that the university stop profiting from the black-and-white daguerreotype prints — and exploiting her ancestors.
Source: Harvard sued over profiting, use of slave photography
Starting in the fourteenth century, cooling temperatures disrupted our economic and social structures and may have given rise to the modern world, John Lanchester writes.
Source: How the Little Ice Age Changed History | The New Yorker
Jogo Corpo Fechado 