In Barbados, there's a property called the Cleland Plantation. These days it's a place for tourists to go horseback riding, but back in 1728, it was a prosperous sugar cane farm known for being a place of cruelty and brutality, where slaves were literally worked to death. It was owned by Abraham Cumberbatch, the…
Today in unimaginably horrible news that reaffirms both the tenacity of the human spirit and human beings' unfathomable capacity for cruelty to each other: three UK women who were held as slaves for thirty years have been freed. One of the women, who is 30, had never lived a free day in her life.
Ahhh, the GOP, the party of hard work, strong values, and totally never ever ever being racist and HOW DARE YOU EVEN SUGGEST SUCH A THING. If there's one thing I know about the GOP, it's that they would certainly never abandon their extremely strong and heartfelt convictions in order to pander to uneducated bigots and…
Going insane was a luxury. It’s the going, that’s the treat. Going suggests travel, moving. There was no going. The madness was constant and still, sitting there, like a place on a map. It was where they lived, where they were from, born and bred into viscously mundane inescapable crazy. The women in the beautifully…
If you grow up attending east coast public schools and you manage to make it through the early years of elementary school, you are often rewarded with an educational overnight trip with all your classmates. On that trip, you learn about different types of plants and the exhausting reality of what it's like to be around …
Last night, just a month and change into serving his life + 1,000-year sentence for kidnapping three Cleveland women and keeping them captive under hellish conditions for a decade, Ariel Castro committed suicide in jail. After I heard the news, I felt a range of awful, base emotions, none of which made me feel good…
Actress and comedian Azie Mira Dungey used to work as a historical re-enactor at Mount Vernon. And 1- because George Washington's old stomping grounds are staffed with people acting out roles they might have had during the George Washington days and 2- Dungey is black, she played the role of a slave named Lizzy Mae.…
A Chilean nanny is accusing an aristocratic family of forcing her into slave-like conditions in their Upper East Side home.
In a surprise turn of blame-giving, CPAC panelist K. Carl Smith, a representative from the Frederick Douglass Republicans who unfortunately ceded the floor to an anthropomorphized pile of racist vacuum cleaner gatherings during the panel discussion, managed somehow to reserve most of his criticism for a female reporter …
White people who are confronted with their white privilege and the white supremacist acts they perpetuate have been known to cry, "You're being a reverse-racist!" That is completely true: people of color have the power and control to create, perpetuate, and maintain brutal systematic reverse-racism that oppresses white…
On the season finale of NBC's Who Do You Think You Are, Paula Deen discovered that her great great great great-grandfather, John Batts, was a slave owner. Deen, who was born, raised and still lives in Georgia, found that Batts, a politician and plantation owner, was very wealthy — and a hefty portion of his assets…
A bitchy white woman belittling her black maid. A Latino man being tied up and called racial slurs. A black woman being offered for sale at a slave auction. All of these are awful in reality, but for people who are into race-play — or racialized sexual situations — they can be extremely hot. I talked to two people…
Police in Luoyang, Henan province, China have discovered an underground dungeon where a man forced women to have sex for money and perform in pornographic movies. In all, six women were enslaved for periods of 2 to 21 months, and two of them were eventually murdered. The operation went on for two years without police…
Don't let the repetitive coverage of Michele Bachmann as an increasingly mainstream, or at least ubiquitous, candidate fool you. She's a telegenic opportunist, yes, but there's no evidence that she is still anything but an extremist, strongly motivated by what's benignly known as "social issues."
The language about slavery and marriage in the far-right pledge signed by Michele Bachmann wasn't just wildly offensive, it was also just plain wrong, as historian Tera W. Hunter explains in a Times op-ed today. Ignoring how slavery actually tore apart families is, she writes, "part of a broad and deliberate amnesia"…
Rick Santorum recently said he found it "almost remarkable for a black man" to be pro-choice. The anti-choice linking of abortion, slavery, and genocide has always involved a cocktail of distortion and condescension. So what to do about it?
We get that this campaign is intentionally provocative, using the loaded language of purchasing girls to break through donor fatigue. But is it too raw to be repurposed for good, especially with all the baggage of aiming this at Westerners?
Shreveport, Louisiana resident Mississippi Winn, the oldest African-American woman in America, has died at age 113. She never married, which suggests she was wise long before reaching old age (LOL).
Using new government data, the Huffington Post has ranked 13 products by the number of countries that use child labor to produce them. The goods include coffee, cocoa, tobacco, cotton and rugs.
