#servitude

#servitude

[The U.S.] does not recognize a legal right to reparations for historical wrongs that were not illegal under international law at the time they occurred.

A chief tenet of liberation is the freedom to define oneself while being accorded the rights and privileges established and guaranteed under law and social standing.

In April 1675, John Howe, a naval officer, sought to win Pepys' support by offering a small enslaved boy, hoping he was seasoned to endure the cold weather in England.

Developers promise "community investments," downtown revitalization, and a new "AI Center." What they don't say is that this development comes tethered to a massive resource-intensive data center that will cost billions, create pollution, and concentrate profits for the corporations and CEOs at the top-not the surrounding communities. This is not innovation, it's exploitation.

The case is one of the most notorious examples of British involvement in illegal enslavement in Brazil, said historian Joseph Mulhern and a stark symbol of how, even after the UK Slavery Abolition Act of 1833, British citizens and companies profited from slavery in Latin America's biggest country for another half century.

Once upon a time, adding official to an announcement served a purpose. It distinguished fact from rumour, press release from pub chat. Sensible. Helpful. Civilised. But in recent years, the word has gone rogue. Nothing can simply happen anymore. It must be officially announced.

Work, in the words of Karl Marx, is a "means of life" in two senses. It is, first of all, an instrument for human life. It is the activity by which we reproduce ourselves from day to day, from year to year, from generation to generation. But work also forms, so to speak, much of the matter of human life, at least for most people in any society with which we are familiar.

I was taken to hospital chained to an officer with handcuffs but assumed they would be removed at the entrance to the hospital. I was so shocked when the cuffs weren't removed. When I told the prison guards who had brought me to hospital about what the Birth Companions booklet said, they replied: We don't know what that book is, we're not going to abide by it.

The moment a case is ruled a suicide, it's no longer investigated as a potential homicide. It defies logic to assume someone climbed eight or nine feet into a tree with a noose around their neck and hanged themselves. These cases deserve thorough homicide investigations from the start to ensure justice and accountability.

But beyond their sky-high resale price, the viral collectibles may come with a steep humanitarian cost as well. As The Guardian reports, New York-based labor rights group China Labor Watch (CLW) has accused the toys' maker, Chinese toy manufacturer Pop Mart, of employing 16- and 17-year-olds without offering them the necessary labor protections required by Chinese law. The group also alleges that these young workers aren't given adequate health and safety training, among other labor rights violations at the company's factory in Jiangxi province.

Following the removal of a slavery exhibit at the former presidential homes of George Washington and John Adams in Philadelphia earlier this month, the municipal government is suing the US Department of the Interior and the National Park Service (NPS), claiming that the NPS acted outside of its authority. The exhibits memorialised the nine individuals Washington enslaved during his tenure in Philadelphia as the nation was being founded.

Timothy Morton is one of the authors leading the new wave of environmentalism. The British thinker, whose latest work is provocative and extremely personal, takes it as a point of fact that the destruction of the planet is in process. Admired by the singer Bjork and Hans Ulrich Obrist, the artistic director of the modernist London gallery Serpentine, Morton comes across as a punk creative, one who has kept up the fight against preconceived thinking.

U.S. president Donald Trump shared a racist video on his Truth Social account in which former American president and first lady Barack and Michelle Obama were depicted as apes. I was unsurprised, yet nonetheless disgusted. U.S. senator Jon Ossoff also found the video unacceptable. He said during a rally in Atlanta that Donald Trump was "posting about the Obamas like a Klansman."

The librarian sat me in front of a microfilm reader and brought out roll after roll of film. I stayed there for hours, squinting to decipher the archaic handwriting in the Free Negro Book, which was published annually in South Carolina before the Civil War. The names in each year's edition were alphabetized, but only roughly-all of the surnames starting with A came before all of the surnames starting with B, but Agee might come before Anderson, or it might come after.

The next "Dying to Stay Here" podcast will feature a panel discussing what we call our criminal justice system. The panel reflected on a recent election in California, where voters were asked, in plain language, whether they wanted to remove slavery from our constitution, where it's still allowed "as punishment for a crime," and voted to keep it. As we celebrate another Black History Month, I reflect on the disproportionate number of Black people behind bars.

Rudi Batzell offers a material account of how racial hierarchies formed in the United States, framing the history of racism in the labor movement as a question not of biases and prejudice but of access to property and land. Racism is often considered a question of thoughts, feelings, and beliefs. The accused racist will sometimes deploy the tired old defense that he or she "has black friends,"

If Dr King were alive today, he'd be admonishing us across the nation to stand up and march for Renee Good. If we miss this moment, our children and our grandchildren and our great-grandchildren will be paying the price in a dying planet, in an authoritarian, tyrannical America where women don't have biological autonomy, and Black and Brown people are in chains, and white women are getting gunned down in the streets. That is not Dr. King's America.