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 our executive director, Katrina Browne, with co-directors Alla Kovgan and Jude Ray.
James DeWolf Perry is a regular contributor. He appears in the film Traces of the Trade and is the Tracing Center’s director of research. This entry is cross-posted from James’ own blog, The Living Consequences, and the opinions expressed are his own.
The Florida Modern-Day Slavery Museum, a traveling exhibit consisting of a replica of the trucks involved in one of the most shocking cases of modern-day slavery in the U.S., is currently touring the nation.
The museum has toured Florida extensively, as well as appearing on the National Mall and at the State Department in Washington, D.C. It is now on a lightning tour of other East Coast locations: today, the museum is at City Hall in Boston; tomorrow, it will be in western Massachusetts, and by the end of the week it will be in Baltimore before ending the tour seven days from now with a stop in Charlotte, N.C.
James DeWolf Perry is a regular contributor. He appears in the film Traces of the Trade and is the Tracing Center’s director of research. This entry is cross-posted from James’ own blog, The Living Consequences, and the opinions expressed are his own.
President Obama’s nomination of controversial law professor Goodwin Liu to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit has been blocked by Senate Republicans and returned to the White House.
Professor Liu became the subject of controversy in late March, in part due to remarks he made on a panel convened to discuss our documentary, Traces of the Trade: A Story from the Deep North. That evening, in response to the topic of reparations for slavery, Liu observed that any effort to compensate for our nation’s history of slavery and racial discrimination would inevitably require trade-offs which would diminish the privileges enjoyed by people who benefit from that history today.
James DeWolf Perry is a regular contributor. He appears in the film Traces of the Trade and is the Tracing Center’s director of research. 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.
The Associated Press is running a story, “US family finds traces of slave-trade past in Cuba,” about the ten-day trip to Cuba just completed by Executive Director Katrina Browne, Director of Research James DeWolf Perry, and Project Director Tulaine Marshall of the Tracing Center on Histories and Legacies of Slavery.
The story, written by A.P. reporter Will Weissert, focuses on the visit paid by Browne, Perry, and Marshall to the site of Mount Hope, a coffee plantation near Madruga owned by Perry’s ancestor James D’Wolf. D’Wolf was the leading slave-trader in U.S. history, sending the majority of his slaving voyages to Cuba, and he would work slaves on plantations like Mount Hope while waiting for prices in Havana’s slave market to rise.
James DeWolf Perry is a regular guest contributor. He appears in the film Traces of the Trade and is the Tracing Center’s director of research. This entry is cross-posted from James’ own blog, The Living Consequences, and the opinions expressed are his own.
Today is the first anniversary of remarks by actor and activist Edward James Olmos at the United Nations about the idea of race as a social fiction.
I posted about these remarks at the time, but I want to use this occasion as an excuse to highlight once again what Olmos had to say that day, and I’m even going to take the unusual step for me of embedding the video of his remarks here.
The reason I’m doing this is that I’ve never heard this idea expressed with more power and conviction. Each time I see this, I’m reminded of just how powerful the myth of race is, and how important it is for those in the public eye to speak the plain truth that the emperor has no clothes:
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Thursday, March 18, 2010
Katrina Browne, Producer/Director, Traces of the Trade: A Story from the Deep North
Executive Director, The Tracing Center on Histories and Legacies of Slavery
kbrowne@tracesofthetrade.org o: 617-349-0019 c: 617-290-5275
Ms. Browne will be in Cuba from March 22-30, so may not be reachable then.
Marga Varea, Events and Development Director, The Tracing Center on Histories and Legacies of Slavery mvarea@tracesofthetrade.org o: 617-349-0019 c: 617-710-5436
The Tracing Center on Histories and Legacies of Slavery is pleased to announce that three representatives of the 2009 Emmy®-nominated documentary Traces of the Trade: A Story from the Deep North will be traveling to Cuba with the Freedom Schooner Amistad next week. We are honored to be able to hold the Cuba premiere of the film during the Amistad’s visit. The ship is visiting Cuba from March 22-31 as part of the United Nations commemoration of March 25 as the International Day of Remembrance of the Victims of Slavery and the Transatlantic Slave Trade. For the press release from Amistad America please see: http://www.amistadamerica.org/content/view/1994/257/.
