Queen Elizabeth I wanted colonies in the Americas.

“There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism. “-Walter Benjamin

We find the U.S. presented as a benevolent White empire, liberally granting those it conquered and placed under the White Man’s burden “most of the American constitutional guaranties.”

“In adopting the term ‘citizens’ we did not understand, however, that we were giving to those people any rights that the American people do not want them to have.”-Senator Joseph B. Foraker

Puerto Ricans are taxed without representation; foreign, but in a domestic sense; the spoils of racial conquest which are too racially different to be welcomed into the U.S.’s majority White family.

“The problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color-line.” -W. E. B. Du Bois

This Treaty is part of a nineteenth-century barbarous textual tradition that championed and perpetuated the establishment of White, Anglo-Saxon supremacy across much of the globe.

“Do not make peace until we get Porto Rico.” Theodore Roosevelt

Cornel West calls Lipsitz the “Eminem of Afro. American Studies.”

Jefferson’s rhetoric is chilling. But it isn’t new.

This passage is a racist, Eurocentric mess.

Du Bois experiences a racial microaggression.

Moreover, the cumulative effect of these violations takes a toll on victim and victimizer alike, leaving both bowed from the weight of evils and injustice.

Given this extreme racial violence Schurz strongly recommended that the federal government intervene to protect the newly freed Blacks.

“I start precisely where Taylor never arrives…”—Cornel West

I return to blogging recognizing the need to say something about the connection between people’s perspectives and whether or not they see the forms of oppression before them.

If Freire and Aquinas are right, teaching against oppression-sustaining myths that render people socially blind is an act of mercy.

When Europe’s colonizing arms wrapped around my Indigenous ancestors, they executed an act of racist encounter, not discovery.

Human mercy requires feeling the sufferings of others.

The Supreme Courts of the United States and Canada explicitly link Christianity to racist practices of Indigenous dispossession.