links for 2006-09-29
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“‘Homophobia is one of the major obstacles to black Americans coming to grips with this disease in the ways that we should,’ he said… He also said the situation would be “immeasurably eased” if more black gay people came out of the closet…”
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“The case, which names Wall Street behemoths JP Morgan Chase & Co., Aetna Inc., Bank of America, Lehman Brothers and others, says the companies’ predecessors issued loans to slave owners and, in some cases, owned, insured and transported slaves…”
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Welcome to the second installment of Jenn-subjects-herself-to-a-travesty-of-television, wherein I will be live-blogging the second episode of Survivor: Race Wars.
Carmen Van Kerckhove is co-founder and president of 
dcase wrote:
I’ve always felt that the reparations movement is a waste of resources and political capital. I understand that the underlying goal of this movement is to force the major economic players and government who fostered the economic infrstructure to acknowledge its role in the exploitation of people. This is a noble goal but given the problems associated with determining liability, estimating damages, determing how those damages should be distributed, level of apathy, and pure political will against reparations it seems tremendously inefficient to waste time on such a non-starter. Instead,the leaders of this movement should direct their resources to the exigent and more readily identifiable problems facing descendants of ex-slaves and other similar historically exploited groups today.
Posted 29 Sep 2006 at 7:42 am ¶
S wrote:
Yeah! A waste of time. TODAY and TOMORROW are the times we need to deal with most. I never agreed with many of the reparation cases I’ve heard about. Yes, many Indians are given free education and other “free” things because of what happened to their ancestors, but the way representatives are approaching reparations for decendants of slaves does not appear effective to me. Where would you even start? Are ALL african americans decendants of slaves? No. Some “african” americans have traced their ancestors back to discover that their families were primarily Indian, later mixed with Africans who never were slaves. This is too deep of an issue to approach it the way it’s been approached. Furthermore, the “black” community needs faaaaar more than moeny to fix it’s problems.
I also don’t see the point of making the decendants of slave-owners pay for the sins of their fathers. Not all of “our” fathers were saints, either, and I sure as hell don’t want to pay for their mistakes!
Posted 29 Sep 2006 at 9:14 am ¶