Monthly Archives: February 2021

By Ada Fisher

The recent action taken by the Quaker Oats family of products to change the name of Aunt Jemima to the Pearl Milling Company, which in 1888 developed self-rising flour, was a supposed bid to redress complaints of racism from the perceived belittling name for their pancake mix taking away from its legacy of good home cooking.

The face of Aunt Jemima was originally depicted by Nancy Green, a member of my grandfathers Olivet Baptist Church in Chicago. Green, a woman of class, was not a mammy, per se, but one born into slavery and found to be a servant of Gods word. In a bid for cultural whatever, nihilism is a description for removing all vestige of truth in search of political correctness and by which Black History has been distorted with facts thought to be a disgrace haphazardly removed rather than allow such to exist on its own truth.

Another example of something thats not quite the truth is an interpretation of the 1898 Wilmington Riots in North Carolina as simply race riots. They were a much more damning look at political retribution against the Republican Party. In the elections of that time in the city of Wilmington, though Blacks had claimed the public offices of that powerful port city, lost in the accounting of truth telling was that all of these elected people were registered Republicans.Some were killed. Others were run out of town via trains where Democrats were behind the violence. Too many, whether white or Black, stood quiet to this travesty of justice.

Prior to 1935, the majority of Blacks in elected office and all in national office were Republicans. In order to seize their power, the Democratic Party used tactics of violence. Jim Crow laws, poll taxes and gerrymandering were designed to keep blacks from voting and assuming power. The Ku Klux Klan was at their behest and did their biding. How quickly we forget and are too fast in failing to correctly direct blame from its inception. The attribution of such racism solely to the Republican Party reflects, in part, that many of these Democrats were to later infiltrate the Republican Party trying to nullify its quest for equal rights in their championing of the 13th, 14thand 15thUS Constitutional Amendments.

People are claiming the mantle of Black achievement that really didnt have the intestinal fortitude to start or truly get in the fight. Even today, Colin Kaepernick, a sidelined San Francisco 49ers football player who put it all on the line in taking a knee against racism and injustice during the National Anthem, is a pivotal anchor whose action strengthened the Black Lives Matter movement. For such, he is still out of a job in football.He, as well as others whove stood up for the right against discrimination, is persistently black balled and EEOC (Equal Employment Opportunity Commission) hasnt done a thing to help.

The Republican imprint on Black history is enormous. Though it is often erroneously denigrated and excluded from appreciation. We are the ones who fought long and hard for the recognition and promotion of Black achievement. Let us not forget that James Weldon Johnson and his brother Rosemond wrote Lift Every Voice and Sing in 1906 in honor of Abraham Lincoln. Carter G. Woodson in 1915 founded the organization for the study of Negro life and history followed with Negro History Week in 1926. President Richard M. Nixons 1968 appointee, Arthur A. Fletcher, pioneered the notation of affirmative action during his stint as assistant secretary of the Department of Labor. In 1976, President Gerald R. Ford recognized Black History Month as part of the U.S. Bicentennial. President Ronald Reagan signed into law the Martin Luther King, Jr. national holiday in 1983. Most recently of note, it was President George W. Bush who on Sept. 24, 2016 authorized the establishment of the National Museum of African American History and Culture, which is now a part of the Smithsonian Institute.

Many of the historically Black colleges and universities also benefited from the generosity of Republican leadership in their founding and continued support.

Though the Black church is publicly being acknowledged as central to our history, missed to date in its telling is some understanding of what the nature of the slave songs hidden codes truly were about historically as well as the bonds of brotherhood used to bring on social change and Black revolutions. The prevalence of Black ministers as perceived leaders in the fight for equal rights misses the cloaked interconnectedness in this fight from the Black Masonic and fraternal orders, artisans, educational frameworks, merchants, artists as well as farmers and lay people of color.

On a metaphysical level, Black history is the tying of our souls in existence to the great architect of the universe; it is as if we are the embodiment of quantum entanglement (a cosmic phenomenon occurring when entities generate, interact or share spatial proximity in a manner that the quantum state of each cannot be described independently of the others, including when separated at a distance in time or space).

In dismantling certain historical statues of our nations early founders, trying to erase history to ignore what blinds us in our pain or rewrite it to suit our purposes, we often fail to understand or acknowledge significant contributions to who we were and are.Let us give credit where credit is due. Our history should be a constant reminder and incentive for us to do the right thing.

Salisburys Ada Fisher is a licensed teacher, retired physician, former school board member and former N.C. Republican national committeewoman.

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Ada Fisher: Revisionist Black history leaves things out - Salisbury Post - Salisbury Post

Rage 2 is a pastiche of better shooters that have been released in the past decade, but that aspect of its design hides one huge secret for people looking for hidden gems: The combat and sense of power from the games guns and abilities is almost unmatched in gaming right now. Its the perfect free video game, if youre in the mood for a first-person shooter. Which is great news, because its currently free on the Epic Games Store.

Rage 2s story is a jumbled mess that I wont even try to describe; lets just say you play as a chosen one with special powers and leave it at that. You explore a somewhat open world, finding new weapons, working your way up through the tech tree, and unlocking a series of preternatural abilities while fighting against The Authority. You just know theyre bad with a name like that. The games aesthetic suggests something like splatterpunk, evoking the violent nihilism of the Borderlands series.

The original Rage was a pretty mediocre shooter from id Software, and John Carmack himself later directly apologized for its PC performance. So there wasnt a lot that Avalanche Studios and id Software could pull from it for the sequel. You dont have to worry about knowing the story beats from the first game to enjoy this one; its easily forgotten, and nothing of value is lost.

You may never care why youre doing something in Rage 2, or who exactly youre going after, but the combat itself shines like a beacon. Or at least, it does once you collect some of the better guns and abilities and get them nice and leveled up. The interface doesnt always make this easy, but its worth the hassle.

I can use one ability to fling enemies backward, slamming them into walls or each other, I wrote in our original review. I can use another ability to force enemies to float in the air, pulling other items toward them as if by the gravitational force of a very small black hole. I can turn myself into a human grenade and slam into the ground, reducing everyone around me to a bloody smear. I can upgrade my ability to leap high into the air until I can basically climb up the face of sheer-looking cliffs by spamming the jump button.

This combination of abilities, as well as weapons that all sound and feel brutally powerful in action, makes Rage 2 into a creative playground of violence. How you kill folks is up to you, and you can spend a lot of time in the menus creating a fun loadout to get out there and just straight up wreck shit.

Rage 2 was a hard sell when it launched at $59.99, but for the cost of zero dollars, you should absolutely grab it. Its a game that exists within a generic shell of attitude and faux edginess, and that can be annoying. But it can also be fun to giggle at the common gaming tropes and silly narrative excuses for how your player character became the most powerful fighter out on the battlefield.

Regardless, hidden inside this OK game is one of the best examples of weapon design and selection Ive seen in quite some time. Im always interested in just seeing how my arsenal grows and interacts with the world as I go forth and kill everyone I see in order to do whatever it is Im trying to do. Theres never been a better time to take out all your frustrations on virtual bad guys who are happy to die by the thousands.

Read more here:

Free game alert: Rage 2 on PC is yours for the taking - Polygon

Evonne in the docuseries Trans In TrumplandPhoto: Topic

Heres whats happening in the world of television for Thursday, February 25. All times are Eastern.

Trans In Trumpland (Topic, 3:01 a.m., complete first season): Trans In Trumpland is a powerful docuseries with a total runtime of under two hours. Filmmaker Tony Zosherafatain takes a road trip across four states in the U.S. that have transphobic lawsNorth Carolina, Texas, Mississippi, and Idahoto converse with four transgender people of different ages and races as they cope with or fight against the anti-trans policies implemented by the Trumps administration. Zosherafatain, who is a trans man himself, gets to tell his own story over the course of four episodes as he meets members of the community to unpack the intersectional issues they face, whether its related to race, immigration, poverty. Trans In Trumpland doesnt just focus on these issues; it also demonstrates how these four people try to overcome them on a daily basis. While certain direction and music choices skew on the dramatic side, the docuseries works because of the compelling subject matter, especially the story of trans Latinx immigrant Rebecca, who moved to the U.S. at the age of 10 with her mother and has been detained by ICE three times. Its a step beyond negative headlines, offering a glimpse into the lived experience of those directly affected by laws such as the discriminatory HB2 bill, which prohibits trans people from using bathrooms and lockers that align with their gender identity, or the trans military ban. Created by TransWave Films with Transparents Trace Lysette as an executive producer, this docuseries is a heartfelt must-watch. [Saloni Gajjar]

Mr. Mayor (NBC, 8 p.m.): season-one finaleClarice(CBS, 10 p.m.)

The Dark And The Wicked (Shudder, 3:01 a.m., streaming premiere): [A] sense of morbid inevitability, of death laughing at humanitys feeble platitudes about the power of love and Gods plan, is at the heart ofThe Strangers writer-director Bryan Bertinos savagely efficient new film The Dark And The Wicked. This film is about vicious nihilism as much as it is about anything, and if a character expresses hope or happiness at any point during its compact 95-minute running time, you can bet that fate is going to make them look like a fool. Even the moralistic message that lurks under the surface of many horror movies is absent here; the evil in this film appears to be Biblical in nature, but faith and virtue are no more effective at stopping it than denying its existence altogether. Read the rest of Katie Rifes film review.

Punky Brewster(Peacock, 3:01 a.m., complete first season): While the newest, most self-aware iteration of Saved By The Bell managed to find the sweet spot between its dated source material and todays comedic palette, the new Punky Brewster simply dons an ill-fitted costume of an aged-up favorite without sincerely growing up, remaining reliant on old catchphrases and adorable spunk without unearthing anything that is truly fresh. And while a little mindless escapism and vaguely comforting warmth cant hurt, it is ultimately a continuation of a story that firmly ended over 30 years ago. Read the rest of Shannon Millers pre-air review, and remember, if you ever feel the urge to play hide and seek, never hide inside an abandoned fridge.

Luda Cant Cook (3:01 a.m., Discovery+, one-hour special): Chris Bridges, better known to hip-hop fans and people who love the Fast & Furious movies as Ludacris, is apparently not much of a cook. Chef Meherwan Irani aims to change that in this Discovery+ special. Wed like to suggest that perhaps Luda should go on to make really excellent side-dishes that feature prominently in other peoples meals. Seems like hed be good at that.

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New docuseries explores what it means to be Trans In Trumpland - The A.V. Club

In a little-known 1947 essay Humanism and Terror, the French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty argued that a society is not the temple of value-idols that figure on the front of its monuments or in its constitutional scrolls; the value of a society is the value it places upon mans relation to man. He was critiquing what he saw as a grandstanding French liberalism, too infatuated with its ideals to see what was being carried out in its name. To understand and judge a society, he continued, one has to penetrate its basic structure to the human bond upon which it is built; this undoubtedly depends upon legal relations, but also upon forms of labour, ways of loving, living, and dying.

Merleau-Ponty was writing at a time of incendiary debate among intellectuals in post-war France. Left-wing philosophers such as Merleau-Ponty, Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, finding themselves caught between American-style capitalism and Soviet-style communism, wondered if there was an alternative to either. (Humanism and Terror was in part a response to Arthur Koestlers Darkness at Noon, a novel about the 1930s Stalin show trials.) Friendships were formed and torn apart over discussions on the use of violence in the service of revolution. Merleau-Ponty broke with Sartre and Beauvoir over their continued defence of the Soviet Union.

Then, in 1954, another historical upheaval would quickly reinvigorate the debate on violence, politics, and revolution: the fight for Algerian independence. It caused rifts of its own, notoriously between Sartre, who praised the emancipatory potential of revolutionary violencenotably in his introduction to Frantz Fanons Wretched of the Earth (1961)and Albert Camus. Camus, an Algerian pied noir of European descent, first argued that violence could quickly turn to nihilism in The Rebel (1951); later, he stood up on a podium to a large audience in Algiers during the war, proposing a civilian truce and asking the crowd to renounce the slaughter of innocents. His hesitant attitude to Algerian independence still garners disagreement in Algeria todayas are debates in France on secularism, Islam, and the nations colonial afterlives.

Fiction is one way of squaring Merleau-Pontys paradox between the gap of ideals and lived reality. It can unsettle the dictums of our time and speaks to our contemporary ways of living, loving, and dying that do not make it onto the front pages of newspapers, or into the speeches of politicians. Or, as Fernand Iveton, the protagonist of Joseph Andrass 2016 novel, Tomorrow They Wont Dare to Murder Us, translated by Simon Leser, puts it with reference to French attitudes to Algerian demands for independence: We put them behind bars and abolish their parties, dissolved, reduced to silence, and then we stand so tall with Culture, Liberty, Civilisation, those capital letters, paraded up and down.

Tomorrow blends fiction and non-fiction, picking up where Sartre and Camuss debate on violence and the French state left off. Iveton was a real-life supporter of Algerias National Liberation Front (FLN), born to Spanish and French parents in Algiers in 1926, and was the only European executed by France during the war, at the age of 29. The grand adages of the French republicequality, humanism, and human rightscrumble to dust in Andrass taunt, lyrical telling, as Iveton, a worker at a local gas company, prepares to set off a bomb in an abandoned shed at the factory where he works. He gets caught and is brutally interrogated by the police; his story attracts the attention of the press in Algeria and France. The French public calls for his blood. Meanwhile his wife Hlne, a defiant Polish Jew, becomes a local heroine within the underground Algerian resistance.

***

Andrass style can be frenetic. This is Iveton remembering the making of the bomb: The timer is relentless, liable to drive a person crazy in the most literal way, tick-tock tick-tock tick-tock tick-tock tick-tock tick-tock. Then, suddenly, a return to the present:Wheres the bomb you son of a bitch? Fernand is blindfolded with a thick piece of torn cloth. His shirt lies on the floor, shorn of most of its buttons. One of his nostrils is bleeding. A cop punches him as hard as he can; his jaw makes a faint cracking sound. Wheres the bomb?

Ivetons imprisonment and torture is woven alongside an earlier story of his relationship with Hlne. Here, the previously staccato prose becomes joyous, tender, full of soaring possibility that will be violently foreclosed. Iveton meets Hlne at a restaurant in Paris, where she works as a waitress. He notices her eyes, coloured the kind of wolf-dog blue which rummages around your heart, never asking for permission, which enchant the North African kid that he is. She tells him about her family, how her mother cast off her wealthy family to run off with her father, and which of her family members were massacred during the Second World War. They talk about politics: Fernand is upfront about his proletarian sympathies. Hlne laughs: Why not? Communism would be nice, sure, provided that its actually implemented, equality for all, the real thing, without bigwigs or bureaucrats, without propaganda or political commissars. But that doesnt really exist anywhere, not even in the USSR, she points out.

What distinguishes Iveton is his belief that there can be that seemingly impossible space in-between. A member of the Algerian Communist Party, he becomes frustrated with the inertia of the partyitself riven with debate on whether the FLN comprised a genuine revolution or the doing of reckless agitatorssees his friends die in the war, and becomes an independent affiliate of the FLN. He does not agree with some of their methods, choosing instead to place a bomb at an abandoned building near his workplace to mess up some equipment and make a symbolic statementone that could have hardly harmed a large fly. When he later recounts the story to his inmates, a man named Abdelaziz objects, saying that pilots who bomb villages dont care about the children cowering inside of their homesand eye for an eye, he concludes. If this were non-fiction, perhaps wed be taken down the line of the Sartre-Camus debate on the ethics of violence, judge each side and come to a definitive conclusion. Instead, Ivetons trialnow followed intensely by newspapers, politicians, and Hlneawaits.

What is clear, though, is that Iveton will not be granted the same nuance with which he approaches his own politics by a nervous and vengeful French state. He goes into the trial believing that his intentions will absolve himhe did not want to hurt anybody, he tells the court. He only wanted to draw the French governments attention to the growing number of combatants fighting for greater social happiness, he tells the court, and to prove that not all European Algerians are anti-Arab, because the gulf keeps growing. Iveton trusts that France is no dictatorship; itll be able to see whats what, and reports to the judge of his experience being beaten and torturedactions nominally prohibited.

But to the state, Iveton is not so much an individual with a fine-tuned purpose but a European Algerian who crossed an impossible threshold at an impossible time. The French state is on edge, his lawyers tell him; politicians claim in public that Iveton had intended to blow up the whole city; French newspapers deem him a killer. Meanwhile Franois Mitterrand, then senior minister in charge of leading the response for the war, is confirming death sentences, holding the firm position that Algeria is France. Some speculate that because of Ivetons race he will be spared, but things are more complicated. Iveton shows the others that there is a different way to be European. For breaking open these conditions of possibility, he is too dangerous to keep alive.

First published in France in May 2016 under the name Nos frres blesss, Andrass novel was awarded the Prix Goncourt prize for debut novels, sparking public interest in an unknown writer. Andras declined the prize, writing in a letter that competition and rivalry were in his eyes notions foreign to writing and creation. He has avoided engaging with the media, only giving short interviews to a few newspapers in which he reasserted his desire to live privately against the age of spectacle, publicity, and media.

The only things he has to say to the public, he followed, are in his booka book that brings in vivid, roaming detail the life of one man, a historical conflict, and the ignoble past of a nation state at odds with its avowed ideals. The story of Iveton soon became folded into national myth: Sartre memorialised him in an essay titled We Are all Assassins; Camus, too, is said to have tried to prevent Ivetons death, warning that unpunished crimes, according to the Greeks, infected the city-statewhich rings like a premonition to the France of today, tumbling down in the gulf between Culture, Liberty, Civilisation and the violence it exacted throughout history and continues into the present day. Andrass retelling adds to the rich canon. Though in it, Iveton not only becomes a historical symbol, but reanimated as a flesh-and-blood man who loved and was loved back.

Tomorrow They Wont Dare to Murder Us by Joseph Andras, translated by Simon Leser (Verso)

Originally posted here:

What fiction reveals about the Algerian War - Prospect Magazine