"BLOOD TIES"

"self-mythologizing takes place when we assimilate the stories of our ancestors into our own—it’s automatic. We tell ourselves that their triumphs have somehow entered our bloodstream. We’re not descendants, we think; we’re heirs—heirs to intangible qualities (ambition, brilliance, endurance) through the fact of a thoroughly diluted blood tie. We allow ourselves to revise and cull from a shared history we lay claim to, every dead relation a past life lived vicariously...

On one of these ships arriving at Española, I have a blood relation. That is, he’s someone the Cuban side of my family counts among its own, tracing our roots back a half-millennium to take credit for the doings of at least one star conquistador. He will become one of the first governors of the New World. He will discover new territory himself and call it Florida. He will go hunting for—and find, and lose—a natural water source with near-magical powers of rejuvenation, in modern-day St. Augustine or St. Petersburg or maybe Punta Gorda. Each of these events is made more vivid for me by our shared bloodline. Each of these events is built on a lie."
http://www.oxfordamerican.org/magazine/item/789-blood-ties?utm_source=digest-nightly&utm_campaign=digest-nightly-20160308&utm_medium=email

It's weird, reading this, because this is not at all how I engage with my ancestry, as a descendant of slaves. Anything I ever learned or read about the kinds of people who were my ancestors was about their subjugation and terror and helplessness and less and death. Occasionally, there is one specific shining-star who is held up as a symbol of the potential contributions of all people who were enslaved or faced anti-black societies and laws. But I would know if I am descended from these tokens, and I am not. And before we were brought here...? Most of that ancestry from more than a few centuries ago is gone from our knowledge (the only way for me to know which countries my ancestors were from is to use 23andMe and hope it gets more specific about not-Europe soon, telling me that I'm Irish and Southern Italian but just generally West African, South Asian).

And then, the other weird thing: There are a lot of people in my ancestry who have names and can be tracked back to an old world continent, because they are white - but, there is a way in which I don't feel like I belong to their descendants or inherit anything from them, I imagine meeting them and their confusion and disgust at my skin color.

So, the few times that I have been able to access that feeling of being an heir to something desirable have been lessons on pre-colonial African history; I was lucky to attend a middle school that dedicated part of our 7th grade history curriculum to really talking about it, and then I took a class in college. But both times, the audience in those course was mostly not black and so, unlike the lessons about the renaissance or the American revolution, we did not learn these histories as part of our own history and inheritance and pride. And, if you are black in America, it is hard to feel pride and power in the histories if your ancestors without scaring the white people around you.

FB: "Most historians seem to agree that Juan Ponce de León is one of the more humane of these European settlers, treating the locals he absorbs into his enterprise more like indentured servants than slaves. But what does that mean? How thinly do we have to slice these moral distinctions to see the difference? He does not foment a native uprising—he helps to crush several of them. By the end of his first term in San Juan Bautista, the Taíno population has been drastically reduced through the deadly trifecta of fighting, forced labor, and disease brought by the Spanish.

This is not an aspect of my inheritance I want to engage with. Do I have to? Can I skip this part? Do we inherit awesome accomplishments and awesome guilt in equal measure? What part of this is family? Can we pick and choose what’s ours in the present tense?

Do we inherit darkness, even at a few centuries’ remove?"

"Kenya’s League of Extravagant Grannies"

"This is the story of Kenya’s League of Extravagant Grannies who were once corporate and government leaders in the 1970’s but are now retired. They now live the retired high life travelling to exotic and remote areas within Africa to explore, party and enjoy in exclusivity."

http://africandigitalart.com/2016/03/kenyas-league-of-extravagant-grannies/

This is a perfect, perfect piece of art. Sort of afrofuturist-feminism-retro-glam?

Just like, "this is what it would look like".

"The Case of the Closely Watched Courtesans"

"Elite prostitution was treated differently. Certain brothels that catered to the male elite were allowed to operate. It was one duty of the vice unit’s inspectors to make sure the madams of these “authorized” brothels abided by certain rules, one of which was to supply the inspectors with a steady stream of information. But most of the unit’s energy was spent watching a particular group of elite prostitutes that worked as professional mistresses. Called kept women (the French term is dames entretenues), these women (and girls) provided sex, company, and sometimes even love for elite men in exchange for being “kept,” financially supported so that they could establish and maintain a household.

La galanterie, the practice of being or keeping a mistress, was not illegal, even while prostitution was...

Over the next eight years, Meusnier and his successor, Inspector Louis Marais, charted Varenne’s career. Marais’ final report, dated Feb. 26, 1762 found Varenne, after a decade of sex work, now in possession of significant wealth for someone of her background and on the verge of marrying her boyfriend, who was an army officer and a noble. She was stealing from her patron to pay for the nuptials. Did the marriage go through? The inspectors hoped it would not, fearing the social destruction of the officer. If it had, it would have represented a significant jump in social status for Varenne. But the real question is why did the police even care about the marriage, Varenne’s furniture, her love life, and her virginity?...

A clearer motive lies both in the larger police mission in this period and in understanding the importance of the demimonde, this particular sex market, to elite male society in the 18th century. The Paris police was rapidly changing in the middle of the 18th century, driven both by the needs of the police themselves in their effort to control and administer a city that was increasing in size and sophistication and by royal demands that the Paris police serve as sort of a domestic intelligence agency...

Everyone in early modern France was supposed to belong to a social unit such as a family, a household, or a guild, for example. Each unit theoretically occupied a niche in a larger social hierarchy. This system ensured each person was under what 18th-century political thinkers considered to be the “natural oversight” of their superiors, a hierarchy at the top of which sat the king. Being outside this system was highly problematic to the state because such a person was beyond social and political systems of control. For the police, controlling these populations meant keeping track of them, which in turn required developing the capacity to spy and manage information."

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/history/2014/04/elite_prostitutes_in_18th_century_paris_and_the_detectives_who_watched_their.single.html

Interesting; it's easy to see how many of our perspectives and social institutions follow from these kinds of philosophies about society and order.

"We Need A Decolonized, Not A "Diverse", Education"

"In his book Education, Power, and Personal Biography, Argentinian sociologist and educator Carlos Alberto Torres challenged mythologies of liberal education and its “notion that education is a neutral activity, and that education is an apolitical activity.” It is impossible for American education to be neutral and/or apolitical when lesson plans of all educational levels are sites of historical revisionism. One of my favorite quotes is an Ewe-Mina (peoples from Benin, Ghana and Togo) proverb: “Until the story of the hunt is told by the lion, the tale of the hunt will always glorify the hunter.” Until indigenous communities can tell the story of America’s “discovery” by European explorers, until the African diaspora can write the history of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, until marginalized communities are the storytellers of their experiences, history will be rendered partially complete but wholly privilege the knowledges and perspectives of colonizers...

The real problem with diversity in Terri’s eyes is that “because it is based on difference, [it] almost always includes whiteness,” which isn’t useful for anybody."
http://harlot.media/articles/1058/we-need-a-decolonized-not-a-diverse-education

FB: "The inclusion of marginalized identities and experiences without decentering dominant narratives is an understanding of diversity that leaves oppressive structures intact, and in fact, insulates them from criticism. Diversity is very frequently the linchpin of liberal racism in education, and inclusivity becomes functionally useless if we do not also exclude via decentering violent normativities positioned as normal"

"The cult of memory: when history does more harm than good"

"while alert to the possibility that history can be abused, as it unquestionably was in the Balkans in the 1990s, most decent people still endorse George Santayana’s celebrated dictum: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” The consequence of this is that remembrance as a species of morality has become one of the more unassailable pieties of the age. Today, most societies all but venerate the imperative to remember. We have been taught to believe that the remembering of the past and its corollary, the memorialising of collective historical memory, has become one of humanity’s highest moral obligations...

Remembrance, however important a role it may play in the life of groups, and whatever moral and ethical demands it responds to, carries risks that at times also have an existential character....

These are the cases in which it is possible that whereas forgetting does an injustice to the past, remembering does an injustice to the present. On such occasions, when collective memory condemns communities to feel the pain of their historical wounds and the bitterness of their historical grievances it is not the duty to remember but a duty to forget that should be honoured...

An example of this is the so-called pacto del olvido (pact of forgetting) between the right and the left that, while never formalised, was essential to the political settlement that restored democracy in Spain in the 1970s after the death of the dictator General Franco. The democratic transition came on the wings both of rewriting and of forgetting. The myriad avenues and boulevards that had been named after Franco himself or his prominent subordinates following the fascists’ victory in 1939 were renamed. But instead of replacing them with the names of Republican heroes and martyrs, the Spanish leaders chose to use names from the royal past...

The general tendency among human rights activists, including members of the judiciary such as Garzón, has been to present law and morality as inseparable, at least in cases when the matter under consideration is clearly within the jurisdiction of a court. And because most of them assume that justice is the essential prerequisite for lasting peace, they tend to downplay the risk of any negative political and social consequences flowing from their actions."

http://www.theguardian.com/education/2016/mar/02/cult-of-memory-when-history-does-more-harm-than-good

This is a really interesting thesis. I wonder if another way to look at it would be a sort of society-level PTSD or trauma-induced anxiety disorder, where thoughts of past experiences come unbidden and you end up living in your fears, hiding from your triggers.

So, the question isn't so much "can we forget" (the answer there is no, not without healing) and more "can we engage in therapy, and can we learn to recognize and react healthily to these moments when they happen in the future?"

And then also - how can we recognize that some reactions are toxic and unproductive, but also recognize that these traumas are continuing to happen?

Related: Decolonize, not diversify, education

"Meet Is Murder"

"Meetings must be scratching some kind of itch, if only for fellowship and a reprieve from deskbound loneliness. And what an itch: Meetings are not just considered indispensable to many professions; they are almost coextensive with them. You can make a whole career of planning, holding and attending meetings and never dare contemplate the possibility of your being exempt. They can’t be avoided, but maybe they can be made bearable. I set out to see if anyone had a bright idea...

Robertson’s book, ‘‘Holacracy: The New Management System for a Rapidly Changing World,’’ presents an engaging theory: minority voices need a forum to register problems others don’t see, and a company should function like an ‘‘evolutionary organism,’’ which sounds both gentle and scientific...

With the firm support of Slack, Under Armour, the athletic apparel company, has opted to turn to the software for meetings, abolishing virtu­ally all in-person gatherings...

Robert, the original meeting hacker, was prompted to renovate meetings in the 1860s, when a discussion of abolitionist politics at a Baptist church in New Bedford, Mass., devolved into chaos... A meeting run by Robert’s Rules can be a joy to behold — though it’s clotted by as much jargon as a Holacratic meeting."

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/28/magazine/meet-is-murder.html

I think part of the problem is that we're just bad at communicating with each other. At least in my experience, offices are planning especially that don't accept our full humanity and don't make room for nuanced or human/emotive communication - or for the reflection that would give us the insights that might be communicated those ways. If a project isn't progressing, or a task is confusing and poorly organized, or a team member is having trouble completing something for personal reasons, it's important to be able to communicate this so that everyone understands what is happening and can think about how to address it. But those kinda of conversations just don't happen in offices. So we have these disjoint and frustrating and stressful work tasks and we can't even out a finger on exactly what the problem is, much less tell someone, much less address it. And out of this unspoken, unrecognized anxiety it will seem like the appropriate thing to do is to meet, so that the problems that aren't being recognized could theoretically be caught early, so that there are all opportunities for the heart-of-the-matter communication that probably won't happen, so that for a little while you can sit in a room with other people who are having the same feelings you are and for a little while you won't feel solely responsible for bearing them.

So, I think we need to learn how to be better at identifying our needs and problems, and figuring out how to communicate them to each other and hear them from others.

"Watching And Reading About White People Having Sex Is My Escape"

"I love that I never experience that shock of recognition, and thus I never have to think about how someone who looks like me, with my body, is represented on the page and lives in the world. In these fictional fantasy worlds, not only does racism not exist — race doesn’t exist, at least in the ways that we live and experience it on a daily basis. There are no men who feel the need to fetishize unsuspecting young girls, no bad first dates with guys who ask you why Chinese people eat dogs, no middle school mean girls, no white women who get in your face and scream “Go back to China” when all you’re trying to do is get on the train and go home. In the world of the romance novel, your body is just a body that gets to fall in love and experience several volcanic orgasms in a row, and in this world, when you Google “Asian women,” you probably would get a 404 error page instead of dozens of links on how to find a sexy Asian girlfriend of your very own...

It’s the fatigue that comes from being hypercognizant of race and gender, of the way that your body is seen, in a way that white men (and often white women as well) don’t have to be... There's a freedom in identifying with the white woman who, more often than I do, just gets to be a person."
http://www.buzzfeed.com/estherwang/why-i-love-watching-and-reading-about-white-people-having-30?utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Longform%2036&utm_content=Longform%2036+CID_1f6cbfdaead99b8325fe82ef937cbe64&utm_source=BuzzFeed%20Newsletters&utm_term=.cvEJLlj4p#.cnlke0y76

I kind of totally get this.