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race discrimination vs caste discrimination

  02/19/2022       Pat Barrett      Add Comment

My wife watches a lot of English soap opera and mysteries. Most of them have a character, principal or marginal, who is Black. Over time, (Continue Reading)

African Diaspora
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Racism without malice

  08/01/2021       Pat Barrett      1 Comment

Last night we went to the ASU football game. I am not a sports fan but my wife had to be peeled off the ceiling (Continue Reading)

African Diaspora

Why voter suppression now?

  06/26/2021       Pat Barrett      Add Comment

Anti-Black laws and ordinances depriving Blacks of their civil rights were passed in the ante-bellum North once slavery was outlawed in many states of the (Continue Reading)

African Diaspora, Politics 2016/2022 running blog Corona Delta/Omicron & whatever's next edition

Why do they have to keep talking about it?

  06/01/2021       Pat Barrett      5 Comments

Listening to and watching the coverage of the commemoration of the Tulsa 1921 massacre, I recalled the number of times I’ve heard people express impatience (Continue Reading)

African Diaspora

Pink

  01/16/2021       Pat Barrett      Add Comment

“What I’ve been going toward is this idea that pink is the inverse of black, or kind of the flip side—it’s part of it. Black (Continue Reading)

African Diaspora, Personal

Let Me Tell You How Brilliant Isabel Wilkerson Is…..

  12/07/2020       Pat Barrett      Add Comment

For years I have been bugged by the way people cast blame for a systemic problem on one individualized person or institution. On the listservs, (Continue Reading)

African Diaspora, Culture

BLM

  10/12/2020       Pat Barrett      Add Comment

Guy B. Johnson, quoted in Isabel Wilkerson’s Caste, wrote: “This fact [total control over slaves] is of great significance for the understanding of racial conflict (Continue Reading)

African Diaspora

Truth and Reconciliation

  08/12/2020       Pat Barrett      Add Comment

Hearing Stuart Stevens confess his mistake in believing the Republican Party was about governance and prosperity rather than about its true north, racism, reminded me (Continue Reading)

African Diaspora, Pat's World View

BBQ

  06/29/2020       Pat Barrett      Add Comment

This quote from the Zocalo Public Square:The final key factor that tied barbecue to Independence Day celebrations in the South was the key role of (Continue Reading)

African Diaspora, Culture

cowbell as cultural memory

  03/28/2020       Pat Barrett      Add Comment

Reading Sam Floyd, my suspicions rise over terms like “cultural memory.” I recall a disturbing conversation with a Prof. Woods, chairperson of the art department (Continue Reading)

African Diaspora, Culture, Music of the African Diaspora

Panda Bear

  08/15/2019       Pat Barrett      1 Comment

We wonder at times how our grandchildren navigate their biraciality. They live in the East Valley of Maricopa County, Arizona, one of the reddest parts (Continue Reading)

African Diaspora, Personal

Compare Calabar recitation to Havana homenaje

  07/28/2019       Pat Barrett      Add Comment

 

African Diaspora, Music of the African Diaspora

A historian describes my city in the 1950s

  07/20/2019       Pat Barrett      Add Comment

Like many emerging American cities at the time, Phoenix’s spectacular growth did not occur evenly. It largely took place on the city’s north side, a (Continue Reading)

African Diaspora, Basics

Tension between immigrants and African-Americans

  07/11/2019       Pat Barrett      Add Comment

The American immigrant story has a foil, African-Americans. Our first encounters with this go something like Uncle Harry telling of his grandfather who came to (Continue Reading)

African Diaspora, Politics

Dramatic evidence of who made the changes in America

  12/23/2018       Pat Barrett      Add Comment

In Michelle Obama’s new book she has two class pictures, one of her kindergarten class and one of her first grade class in a school (Continue Reading)

African Diaspora

The centrality of music to the Black religious experience

  12/10/2018       Pat Barrett      Add Comment

I’m sure I’ve written up this incident here before but cannot find it. It points to the centrality of music and esp of rhythmic music (Continue Reading)

African Diaspora, Music of the African Diaspora

School perspective on Black culture

  08/03/2018       Pat Barrett      Add Comment

The general opinion among Whites is that Black culture is something Blacks can study as a separate issue while the general study of the U.S. (Continue Reading)

African Diaspora

Untangling Police-on-Black violence

  07/26/2018       Pat Barrett      Add Comment

The reasoning that goes on behind the shootings protested by Black Lives Matter seems shallow. Why does the story run so often along these lines: (Continue Reading)

African Diaspora, Magnum Opus redux, View from under the Bus

A provocative thought about the African diaspora in the U.S.

  05/28/2018       Pat Barrett      Add Comment

Nicholas Lemann’s The Promised Land posits a connection between the so-called underclass of the Northern ghettos and the impoverished share-croppers of the deep South who (Continue Reading)

African Diaspora

The Diaspora Comes Full Circle

  05/21/2018       Pat Barrett      Add Comment

The wedding of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle this weekend in Great Britain marks a point on the circle of the African slave trade if (Continue Reading)

African Diaspora

Letter to a friend re the Magnum Opus and unbroken transmission

  03/22/2018       Pat Barrett      Add Comment

Anyway, I wanted to force on you some more stuff I’ve come across recently which supports the thesis of my Magnum Opus, which is that (Continue Reading)

African Diaspora, Magnum Opus

Lucy and the football – Af-Am version

  01/11/2018       Pat Barrett      Add Comment

In Generations of Captivity, Berlin describes the jubilation of free people of color in the Lower Mississippi Valley when that region became part of the (Continue Reading)

African Diaspora

Another memorial service with a twist

  12/18/2017       Pat Barrett      Add Comment

The man was 97 years old, had been in CCC and the military in WW II. He started a business and was the first Black (Continue Reading)

African Diaspora, Culture
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