January 2012
89 posts
Haiti drops 'Baby Doc' rights abuses case →
aljazeera.com
The UN and human rights groups have condemned a Haitian court’s decision not to charge Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier, the country former dictator, over allegations of torture and murder.
Duvalier will face trial for corruption during his 15-year rule, but not for human rights abuses, Carves Jean, the judge handling the case, said on Monday.
“Black people can’t talk to white people about race anymore. There’s really nothing left to say. There are libraries full of books, interviews, essays, lectures, and symposia. If people want to learn about their own country and its history, it is not incumbent on black people to talk to them about it. It is not our responsibility to educate them about it. Plus whenever white people want to talk about race, they never want to talk about themselves. There needs to be discussion among people who think of themselves as white. They need to unpack that language, that history, that social position and see what it really offers them, and what it takes away from them.”
—Steve Locke - “Why I Don’t Want to Talk About Race” (via kararikue)
“You come to the United States and the United States begins immediately, systematically, to erase you in every way, to suppress those things which it considers not digestible. You spend a lot of time being colonized. Then, if you’ve got the opportunity and the breathing space and the guidance, you immediately -when you realize it- begin to decolonize yourself. And in that process, you relearn names for yourself that you had forgotten.”
—Junot Diaz (via therabbitisme)
“We no longer drink at separate water fountains, it’s true. But African-Americans, as a rule and across the board, because they don’t have the power to do anything about it, are still paid less than White folks, own less than White folks, are more likely to be unemployed than White folks, are more likely to go to jail than White folks, etc., etc., ad nauseum. And most White folks are convinced that this is because people of color are, in fact, inferior. Let me repeat that: most White folks, yes, most White folks believe that people of color are, in fact, inferior. Even as they say, “I don’t see color. I just see everyone as a human being,” by which they mean, they don’t intend to acknowledge all the studies showing how exploited and dominated people of color still are in the United States because the White speaker has already decided that Black people’s problems are the result of Black people’s inferiority. “Some of my best friends are Black,” they will say, while discounting what African-Americans themselves say about the quality of their lives in the good old U.S. of A.”
—Why Am I Not Surprised?: Racism = Prejudice + Power (via sociolab)
