CNN.com op-ed on the Civil War
Posted April 12th, 2011 by James DeWolf PerryKatrina Browne and James DeWolf Perry have an opinion article at CNN.com on the North’s myths about the Civil War, slavery, and race.
Katrina is executive director of the Tracing Center, and James blogs at The Living Consequences.
Traces of the Trade wins Berlin festival award
Posted August 27th, 2010 by James DeWolf Perry
Traces of the Trade: A Story from the Deep North has won an award, for “Best film/video documentary production,” at the 2010 Black International Cinema film festival in Berlin.
Traces of the Trade was directed by Katrina Browne, with co-directors Alla Kovgan and Jude Ray.
Reparations and African complicity in the slave trade
Posted April 30th, 2010 by James DeWolf PerryJames DeWolf Perry is a regular contributor. He appears in Traces of the Trade and is director of research for the Tracing Center on Histories and Legacies of Slavery. This entry is cross-posted from James’ own blog, The Living Consequences, and the opinions expressed are his own.
Professor Henry Louis (“Skip”) Gates, Jr. has an op-ed in this morning’s New York Times in which he takes on the issue of reparations for slavery.
Gates will, no doubt, attract enough controversy for his general approach to the issue. He is convinced that our society must address the issue of reparations, and that we must reach a “just and lasting agreement,” which he believes will have to be “a judicious (if symbolic) gesture to match such a sustained, heinous crime.”
Remarks like these will land any public intellectual in the U.S. in hot water these days. Just consider the case of Goodwin Liu, whose mild remarks related to reparations at one of our events in 2008 became a central issue in his nomination by President Obama for a seat on the Ninth Circuit.
However, this essay is most notable for telling difficult truths about the central role of Africans in the transatlantic slave trade, and thus about the shared culpability of people of different races in the resulting history of slavery.
