Bandipora, Jul 10 (GNS): In a worrying development, water from the Naz Nallah Channel of Walur lake has started entering residential areas in village Chinpazpora of Ajas in Bandipora district.
A local Parvaiz Ahmad told GNS that the main cause of concern for them is the dysfunctional state of the Zadwa gauge – a crucial gate controlling the water levels from Wular Lake.
“Due to this malfunction, the water has started to seep into the residential areas of Chinpazpora village,” he said.
Worried villagers expressed apprehensions that if the gauge is not restored and closed promptly, the water may eventually submerge their homes in the coming days even as the link road is already partially submerged.
The residents expressed their disappointment over WUCMA’s failure to live up to its assurances’ of increasing the water holding capacity of Wular Lake. They claimed that a substantial amount of funds has been spent on this endeavor, but the situation on the ground tells a different story.
The villagers have appealed to the WUCMA authorities and the Deputy Commissioner (DC) of Bandipora to urgently intervene and address the imminent issue to mitigate the threat posed by the surging water levels.
When contacted, Coordinator WUCMA Irfan Rasool said that he will look into the matter.
It remains to be seen how the authorities will tackle this situation and provide relief to the residents of Chinpazpora. (GNS)
Jammu, July 10: (GNS)The Jammu and Kashmir Power Corporation Limited (JKPCL) has appealed the people to cooperate with department and use power judiciously in view of low power generation due to incessant rainfall in the region.
“It is for the information of general public of Jammu and Kashmir that due to the incessant rainfall experienced in Northern region over the past few days, the water level in Chenab River has risen above the reservoir level.
This has caused heavy silt deposition in Hydro Power Plants both under state and central sectors. These power plants supply electricity to the Union Territory of Jammu and Kashmir and Ladakh. To prevent damage to machines, mega hydro projects like BHEP-I & II, Salal & Dulhasti have been forced shutdown.
Consequently, the power availability in UT has gone down by about 1,300 MW, which have impacted electricity supply to the general public,” a communiqué’ issued by Chief Engineering (Trading) reads.
“In light of the prevailing circumstances, the general public is appealed to cooperate with the Department and use power judiciously until the situation returns to normal” it stated further, reads the statement.(GNS)
Jammu, July 10 (GNS): Bodies of Ranbir Singh Bali, Director of Finance, Forest, Ecology and Environment Department, and son were recovered from a gorge near Pannar bridge along Mughal road on Monday.
Official sources told GNS that the accident took place at 1940 hours yesterday when a swift car (JK02BD -4635) on way to Surankote from Kashmir Valley via Mughal road. Three among those travelling in the car died on the spot and another was injured and evacuated to nearby hospital by rescuers including locals and police.
The deceased included Ranbir Singh Bali (Director of Finance, Forest, Ecology and Environment Department), his wife Parvinder Kour and son Irvan Singh. Condition of his daughter Mahreen Kour is stated to be out of danger. Later, they said, body of Parvinder Kour was retrieved but that of Bali and Irvan Singh could not be recovered immediately, they said. This morning, they said, both bodies were recovered by locals, police, SDRF, DGPC Poonch and army’s 16RR after hectic efforts.
Poonch, July 10 (GNS): Body of 21-year-old youth was recovered from a field, around 3-kilometers from his residence in Banola in Mendhar area of Poonch district on Monday, officials said.
They said the body of the youth, Wasid Ahmed (21) son of Mohammad Aslam was found under mysterious conditions by a police party which reached the spot immediately after being informed about it.
When contacted SHO Mendhar told GNS that proceedings have been initiated and the body has been shifted to hospital for postmortem. (GNS)
Srinagar, July 10 (GNS): Lieutenant Governor Shri Manoj Sinha interacted with Indian Wushu team athletes & their coaches bound for 19th Asian Games, at Raj Bhavan, today.
The Lt Governor conveyed his best wishes and blessings of entire J&K UT to the players, attending training camp at Srinagar.
“I am confident that our contingent will win laurels and make the country proud,” the Lt Governor said.
The Wushu players are attending the National Coaching camp in Srinagar organised by Sports Authority of India, Ministry of Youth Affairs and Sports after which they will leave for China on August 5, 2023. (GNS)
For the most part, this irony-laden variety of homophobia remains a relatively fringe position on the online right. But its prominence in DeSantis’ latest campaign video suggests that it could be seeping into the conservative mainstream, and that might pay dividends among a group of Republican voters. “After all, [DeSantis’s backers] are seeking out the Trump voter,” said Daniel Adleman, an assistant professor of writing and rhetoric at the University of Toronto who was written about the overlap between pop-culture and far-right ideologies. “They are trying to demonstrate that DeSantis doesn’t just talk the talk, but he walks the walk — that Trump is all full of lip service, but that DeSantis is the one who makes good on quasi-Trumpian promises.”
To help piece it all together, here’s your definitive guide to the memes and images from DeSantis’ recent video. This might be the first time you’re encountering them, but it likely won’t be the last if you pay close attention on Twitter, Threads, or whatever social new social media platform launches next week.
GigaChad
This meme, depicting a chiseled bodybuilder with a massive chin and a manicured beard, is a staple of discourse in the manosphere. Often referred to as “GigaChad,” the name borrows from the popular internal slang word “chad,” which is used refer to a stereotypical alpha male. The origin of the meme is shrouded in mystery — it’s rumored to have been taken from a series of photoshopped images of bodybuilders taken by a Russian photographer — but it first made its way online in 2017, when a version of the image was posted to the popular message board 4chan. The post introducing the meme defined GigaChad as, “The perfect human specimen destined to lead us against the reptilians” — a nod to a fringe conspiracy theory that posits that the world is run by humanoid reptiles.
Since its introduction, though, the meme has come to symbolize an ideal male form that, according to certain strains of thinking on the right, is being wiped out by the alleged feminization of American culture and media. Consider it the manosphere’s statue of David.
Patrick Bateman
You may recognize him from the 2000 film American Psycho — based on the 1991 novel by Bret Easton Ellis — but Christian Bale’s character has taken on a whole new life in the manosphere. In the movie, Bateman is a chauvinistic and status-obsessed Wall Street banker who — spoiler alert — may (or may not) lead a secret life as a serial killer and cannibal. (The movie leaves open the possibility that Bateman’s murderous activities are part of an elaborate, delusional fantasy.) Ironically, Bateman idolizes Donald Trump, a symbol of New York’s well-heeled nouveau riche during the 1980s.
Online, Bateman and other erstwhile Wall Street icons such as The Wolf of Wall Street’s Jordan Belfort (who also makes a brief appearance in the DeSantis video) have come to symbolize the set of hypermasculine virtues the manosphere is propagating. “If you’re a superficial reader of Patrick Bateman, he represents an avatar of the Reagan era, self-asserting, shameless, impudent man who’s able to make the best possible use of neoliberalism as it existed in the 1980s and, by extension, as it exists now,” Adleman said. “I could see that might be appealing to the alt-right, 4chan crowd in this post-Trumpian era.”
Yes Chad
Giga is not the only Chad popular among this crowd. In mid-2019, an image of a cartoon figure with blonde hair, blue eyes and a thick blonde beard started making its way around Twitter and other online message boards. The illustration was captioned was a single word: “Yes.” Since then, the image has become the template for a universe of memes known as “Yes Chad,” featuring illustration of men — yes, always men — who project an air of masculine authority and steely male confidence. (Sometimes, the meme is paired with an illustration of a blonde woman in a blue dress, symbolizing the so-called “trad wife.”) The meme also carries some not-so-subtle racist undertones, as it depicts the ideal man as an Aryan archetype.
In the video, meanwhile, a cartoon of DeSantis in the style of the “Yes Chad” flashes in between a clip of the governor giving a speech and a scene of him walking with his coterie. What, exactly, DeSantis is saying “Yes” to is left up to the viewer to decode.
Thomas Shelby
The fictional protagonist of the British television drama Peaky Blinders, Tommy Shelby —portrayed by Cillian Murphy — is the leader of a crime gang who evades the law and rival gangs in post-World War I England to expand his criminal empire. But online, Murphy’s character has become associated with the trope of the “sigma male,” a type of man who — in contrast to the stereotypical “alpha male,” who sits atop a social hierarchy — has transcended societal norms to play by his own set of rules. A quick Google search turns up pages of YouTube videos with titles like “12 Reasons why THOMAS SHELBY Is The Ultimate SIGMA MALE.” (In a statement released Wednesday, the team behind Peaky Blinders disowned any association with the DeSantis ad.)
Presumably, the comparison between Shelby and DeSantis is intended to highlight the latter’s willingness to play dirty and buck conservative convention — like, for instance, fighting with Disney or sending planes of migrants to Martha’s Vineyard and California.
Bodybuilders
“I’m going to leave aside the strangeness of trying to prove your manhood by putting up a video that splices images of you in between oiled-up, shirtless bodybuilders,” Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg said last weekend when asked about DeSantis’ video — apparently referring to several shots of slick-looking male bodybuilders flexing their bulging muscles. But in certain corners of the online right where the popularity of bodybuilding is on the rise, it’s not strange at all. For one possible explanation of this trend, look no further than Tucker Carlson’s much-discussed documentary The End of Men, which advanced the argument that the destruction of men’s bodies through poor nutrition and poor exercise habits is part of a broader globalist plot to take over the world. Understood in this context, rebuilding a man’s physique isn’t just good for his health — it’s also a critical first step toward overthrowing the power of the corrupt global elite.
DeSantis has not revealed whether weightlifting is a major part of his recent weight-loss efforts, but on the campaign trail he has certainly has leaned into the anti-elite rhetoric that’s tied up with the bodybuilding fad.
Achilles
Is that Brad Pitt staring out from behind that bronze helmet? Yes, yes, it is. As film buffs and mythology nerds will know, Pitt portrayed the ancient Greek hero Achilles in the 2004 movie Troy, based on Homer’s epic poem the Iliad. As in the Iliad, Pitt’s Achilles emerges as the hero of the film, bursting onto the battlefield toward the end of the conflict to revenge the death of his comrade Patroclus at the hands of the Trojan hero Hector.
As many commentators online have pointed out, there a poignant irony to the fact that a video targeting LGBTQ people included an image of Achilles, given that many scholars have interpreted Achilles’ friendship with Patroclus as a type of homosexual relationship. But the valorization of Achilles fits neatly within a broader far-right obsession with ancient Rome and Greece, which some conservatives hold up as the cradle of “Western civilization.” Ever heard of “Bronze Age Mindset”? We bet the creators of this video have.
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( With inputs from : www.politico.com )
This time, the riots followed the point-blank police shooting of 17-year-old Nahel Merzouk after a car chase. The cost of the riots in a mere week — over $1 billion in damages to businesses — towers above that of 2005, but perhaps more notable is that the discussion of the banlieues has receded, or is mediated through, the lens of the police. (In fact, this echoes a different French film, Ladj Ly’s 2019 crime thriller Les Miserables; the last prophetic image is of a young boy beside himself with trauma and anger brandishing a Molotov cocktail in the face of a cop with a gun.) Today the majority of rioters don’t have an immigrant background, and most of them are minors, some as young as 12 — in other words only a few years younger than the victim. It is their extreme youth combined with what has been characterized as their hyper violence that makes headlines.
The images we see are shocking, yes. There’s almost a one-upmanship on social media that pits three burnt busses against one gutted city hall (and I’ll raise you two looted McDonald’s). The scale of the destruction is breathtaking; it’s frequently symbolic, but often merely opportunistic — and sometimes downright incomprehensible in its perversity, like the assaults on the medical personnel trying to put some of these kids back together.
But today, despite all that is dystopian in these scenes of enraged children driven to trash their very own environment, almost everyone gets it. Few are actually surprised.
This is why 2023 is different from 2005. Regardless of the mindlessness of some of the destruction, the young people rampaging across French cities and towns are also expressing a deep anger rooted in humiliation that is felt across the country, not just in the banlieues. You could argue that for many French people, regardless of where they live, the nature of governance and decision-making in the past few years means that they all feel like “riff-raff” now.
What’s important to remember is that Macron’s governance is not incompetent — far from it. In comparison to the manner in which other major advanced democracies handled Covid, the energy crisis or inflation, France has done quite well. The trouble is that the people — the French rather than France — feel like they keep drawing the short straw when it comes to their voices and preferences being taken into account, their political and civic rights respected, their humanity protected.
From the often violent repression of the gilets jaunes (yellow vest movement) and Macron’s broken promises of a changed governing style, to the ramming through of pension reform (without a vote) in the face of massive, violent protests, the current government, despite its technocratic prowess, has given nearly every segment of French society, across all demographics and regions, cause to feel that they are governed sometimes competently but almost always with humiliating impunity. And too many have been injured or killed by police in the process; statistics show that French police kill four times more today than they did in 2010, fueling cycles of protest and repression.
That’s not to diminish the hardship and injustice faced far too often by some in French society rather than others. But the reality is, the oxygen behind these waves of increasingly frequent and increasingly violent displays is in part the fact that everyone in France has had at least a small taste of the humiliation that many have endured for decades — aside from those whose thirst for an order based exclusively on exaction and punishment drives them to the harder edges of the right.
In these early days of summer 2023, what floats above the smoldering remains of the riots, is the shared sense across French society that their problems are being systematically exacerbated by the actions of the police — and by those of a judiciary that tends to criminalize the victims and treat their families with disdain. It is an irony that this is what may finally provide a shared point of reference across French towns, communities, classes and creeds: That enough is enough and that root-and-branch police reform is not only necessary but urgent after decades of combined neglect and empowerment. But instead, as already pointed out by some, France has systematically passed legislation to further arm the police year after year over the last two decades.
The cycle of violence, from police and rioters, is taking place in a fragmented political landscape that is only going to get tougher to navigate. The riots are driving the right and far-right closer together — a tendency that is present across many European democracies and that will have profound consequences for next year’s European Parliament elections. But they also create pressures on a deeply-divided left — torn between their desires for social justice and the demands of a base that is increasingly receptive to the far-right’s promises of order.
Macron must confront this dilemma or risk making injustice and humiliation the exclusive drivers of French politics — an outcome that will only lead to further destruction and potentially catastrophic results in the presidential election of 2027.
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( With inputs from : www.politico.com )
The edicts prompted a furious backlash by an architecture world that was already primed for a fight. The preferred-style rule was the handiwork of a traditionalist Washington nonprofit called the National Civic Art Society, which fights for “the classical tradition” and has condemned modern architecture as “dehumanizing.” The organization had long criticized the American Institute of Architects, the professional association that voiced outrage against Trump’s new rule.
Trump had earlier named the Civic Art Society’s president, a conservative architecture critic named Justin Shubow, to the U.S. Commission on Fine Arts, which oversees new buildings in the capital. In January of 2021, as Trump left office, Shubow — who, professionals sniffed, was not even an architect — was elevated to the commission’s chairship.
Soon after taking office, President Joe Biden rescinded the executive orders and removed all but one of Trump’s appointees from the Fine Arts Commission, replacing Shubow with the celebrated contemporary architect Billie Tsien.
But as with so many other disruptions of the Trump years, things didn’t simply go back to normal — in part because Shubow is a determined advocate, and in part because the traditionalists have a point, or at least half a point.
And that half a point is: There are a lot of hideous federal buildings out there!
The growth of government in the decades after World War II happened to take place during one of the most maligned periods in public architecture. Like college campuses, government properties have been among the modernist era’s most conspicuous offenders, perhaps because the people commissioning the buildings were not the ones who would have to live or work in them. When it’s their own private home or business, people tend to be much less deferential to the artistes drawing up the blueprints.
In Shubow’s telling, that deference is the problem — baked right into the 1962 Moynihan document his rivals want to enshrine in law. “Design must flow from the architectural profession to the Government,” it declares, “and not vice versa.” Rather than a gesture of support for creativity, he says, the language essentially orders public servants to abandon their duty of keeping an eye on the contractors. (He notes that the AIA, which has blasted the GOP bill in the name of free expression, isn’t quite a dispassionate academic group: It’s a trade association for architects, ie those very same contractors.)
Shubow’s organization has commissioned a poll demonstrating that, by a significant percentage, Americans favor more traditionalist forms of architecture. Shouldn’t a democratically elected government make sure that its buildings don’t alienate the citizens who pay for them?
Well, sure. But the new bills do more than that. In elevating the stature of the Greek- and Roman-inflected buildings favored by Thomas Jefferson and his cohort, it adopts a grimly backward-looking posture in a country that has always been about dynamism and change.
So while it’s true that the capital was launched by people who obsessed about (small-r) “republican” style as they set about creating a fledgling republic in an age of monarchies, it’s also true that said obsession extended well beyond architecture to things like clothing — which, thankfully, no one is trying to legislate in the year 2023.
The idea of writing one particular style into law also ignores the tendency of tastes to change and perspectives to vary. Plenty of people — including me — adore the look of D.C.’s Federal Triangle, the massive 1930s constellation of Neoclassical government buildings including the Justice Department, the National Archives and the Department of Commerce. Others think its sweep of columned edifices looks kind of fascist, an association that no one could have imagined when the project was first envisioned in the 1920s.
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( With inputs from : www.politico.com )
The resulting report confirmed much of what tribes had complained about for decades: unfinished infrastructure projects that had been promised long ago as part of federal settlements, onerous restrictions on where and how tribes could put their water to use, and some 500,000 acre-feet a year that flowed down the river without compensation. Historically, tribes pursued settlements independently. “If you know one tribe, you know one tribe,” goes an axiom Vigil and others often repeat in relation to tribal water rights. But the tribal water study also underscored the consequences of their common history: There’s a difference between having a legal right to water and having a foothold in the federal apparatus that actually manages the river.
In 2019, nearly two decades into the megadrought affecting the Southwest, the seven Colorado River states adopted a drought contingency plan overseen by the Bureau of Reclamation to manage the changing hydrology on the river. In the years since, users in the lower basin and Mexico have had their water allotments cut by close to 1 million acre-feet, a more than 10 percent reduction.
Earlier this year, as the seven basin states scrambled to come up with a compromise to cut their 2023 allocations by a further 2 million acre-feet, Amelia Flores was working with partners in the state and federal government toward another milestone. Flores is chair of the Colorado River Indian Tribes, whose lands straddle the river on the California-Arizona border. For more than 20 years, CRIT’s leaders had been pushing for legislation that would allow the tribes to lease some of their water to users outside the reservation. With senior rights to more than 700,000 acre-feet a year, CRIT is one of the largest rights holders in the basin, providing water both to commercial farmers who lease tribal land — this part of the Southwest grows the bulk of the country’s winter vegetables — and to blunt the impact of shortages across in the system. Since 2016, through agreements with the federal Bureau of Reclamation, CRIT has fallowed enough farmland to leave 200,000 acre-feet of water in Lake Mead, preventing the reservoir’s levels from dropping even faster toward the critical “dead pool” level where power cannot be generated.
On Jan. 5, President Joe Biden signed legislation freeing the tribe to lease its water to users outside the reservation for the first time. But even as the tribe pushed that bill over the line, it wasn’t party to negotiations among the states about the shape of future cuts. As the tribe’s longtime attorney, Margaret Vick, explained recently in a joint phone interview with Flores, allowing tribal participation in those talks wouldn’t require an act of Congress. “What that would require is a phone call,” Vick said.
When the Bureau of Reclamation’s Feb. 1 deadline arrived without a deal, news outlets around the country reported on the proposal that came closest to consensus: Every state but California signed onto an arrangement that would leave the Golden State, which receives some 4.4 million acre-feet, by far the largest share of Colorado River water, to absorb the bulk of the cuts. To Flores’ surprise, the deal also called for CRIT to give up 45,000 acre-feet without compensation. Asked whether she’d had any prior notice from Arizona or its counterparts, Flores was blunt: “None, zero.” For the Colorado River Indian Tribes, the river is both the center of a sacred homeland and the backbone of government services: Agriculture represents about 80 percent of the tribal government’s revenue. Uncompensated water cuts could affect everything from health care to college scholarships for tribal members.
“Still to this day we don’t believe states really understand the dynamics of tribal water rights,” Flores said. “We need to be at the table.”
This dynamic is felt most acutely in Arizona, home to 22 tribes with claims to Colorado River water. When I asked Tom Buschatzke, director of the state’s water resources department, about negotiations with tribes, he touted a state program established in 2004 to buy farmland and leave it fallow in order to create a pool of Colorado River water rights the government could assign to future tribal settlements. Unfortunately, he explained, two decades on, most of that theoretical pool of water has literally evaporated with the changing hydrology of the river.
“That makes it difficult to push forward with settlements,” Buschatzke said. “I’m not going to offer a tribe something that would only be there 5 percent of the time.” There is, of course, a more reliable pool to draw from — the water that already flushes the toilets and irrigates the golf courses of Arizona’s cities and towns — but what Arizona politician is going to propose giving tribes that water?
“Wow,” Vigil says. “There’s an opportunity to start thinking about how we feed ourselves, where we feed ourselves and all those kind of things, and that’s one of the things that’s missing.”
About 70 percent of the basin’s water is allocated to agriculture, mostly to feed cattle. “And there is no structured place that I know of where those conversations are being had. Seventy percent of the water is [for] agriculture!” he repeated. “How are we not talking about that?”
While indigenous people have held a variety of top posts at Interior Department agencies going back 20 years or more, Biden’s appointment of Deb Haaland, the first Native American secretary of the Interior, signaled a commitment to Native points of view in the upper echelons of power at the White House. It did not take long for tribes to be disappointed. In late 2021, Vigil coordinated an effort that saw the leaders of 20 tribal nations sign a letter to Haaland, outlining a list of shared demands of federal officials, including a framework for leasing privileges similar to those won by CRIT. Haaland held a listening session with the signatories the following spring, one of “more than a dozen meetings” an Interior Department spokesperson highlighted of the government’s commitment to “robust consultation” with tribes. But to Vigil, it was part of a familiar pattern: Federal agencies seem always willing to talk but never to respond to specific demands.
This past February, federal officials announced the states had missed a second deadline to make further cuts, totaling 2 million to 4 million acre-feet, and that the Bureau of Reclamation would have to make the decision instead. In April, the Biden administration sketched out its plan to meet that target, setting aside distinctions between “senior” and “junior” rights holders, and asking California, Arizona and Nevada to reduce Colorado River water usage across the board by an additional 25 percent.
To avoid the bruising politics of choosing California alfalfa over Arizona subdivisions, the administration’s proposal put cities and towns with water rights dating to the 1960s on the same footing as irrigation districts with claims dating back to the 19th century. Settled tribal rights, too, would have to flow from the same bucket. But the threat of federal officials unilaterally imposing reductions on the states for the first time in history was finally enough to compel broader agreement. With the help of a wet winter and $1.2 billion in federal funds, Arizona, California and Nevada have agreed to cuts of roughly 13 percent across the lower basin, enough to stave off the immediate crisis. The plan is expected to gain final federal approval, but it will not materially change the role of tribes in future negotiations.
When I asked Vigil if he felt he’d seen any significant inflection points in tribal participation in the river’s governance after 15 years of advocacy, there was a long pause. Finally, he said, “You know the reason why that’s a tough question? Because nothing has really changed. We don’t have a formal place in the policymaking process. … And until that happens, that means our sovereignty is not being fully recognized.”
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( With inputs from : www.politico.com )
In recent years, Georgetown and the Maryland Jesuits became an early example of an institution attempting to atone for its past in the slave trade. In 2019, the school announced it would provide preferential admissions to descendants of enslaved people, and its Jesuit operators announced millions in funding for racial reconciliation and education programs.
It’s uncertain whether last week’s Supreme Court decision overturning race-conscious affirmative action in college admissions will affect Georgetown’s program for descendants of enslaved people. Georgetown president John J. DeGioia wrote in a statement that the university was “deeply disappointed” in the decision, and that the university will“remain committed to our efforts to recruit, enroll, and support students from all backgrounds.”
As the college system braces for the fallout of that Supreme Court decision — and amid a simmering cultural debate about how, or even whether, to teach the kind of history Swarns has unearthed in schools — we had a wide-ranging discussion about book bans, the history of the Catholic Church (and her own connection to it) and the future of campus diversity.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Naranjo: Obviously the Catholic Church is not the only institution involved in slavery in the U.S. Do you think all institutions with a history of enslaving people have a duty to provide a full accounting of their involvement in doing so?
Swarns: You’re absolutely right. My book is about the Catholic Church and Georgetown University and their roots in slavery, but they are far from alone. Slavery drove the growth of many of our contemporary institutions — universities, religious institutions, banks, insurance companies. Many of those institutions are grappling with this history and I think it’s really important and urgent for them to do that work. I think it helps us understand more clearly how slavery shaped Americans, many American families and many of the institutions that are around us today. So to me, this is critical work.
Naranjo: I understand you are Catholic yourself. Has your personal relationship with the church been affected during your research?
Swarns: I had been writing about slavery and the legacy of slavery, and so I stumbled across the story in this book about the Catholic Church and Georgetown. But it just so happened that I also happen to be a Black, practicing Catholic, and when I first heard about this slave sale that prominent Catholic priests organized to help save Georgetown University, I was flabbergasted. I had never known that Catholic priests had participated in the American slave trade. I had never heard of Catholic priests enslaving people. I was really astounded, and I’ve been doing this research, going through archival records of the buying and selling of people by Catholic priests to sustain and help the church expand, even as I am going to Mass and doing all of that. And so it has been an interesting time for me because of that.
One of the things, though, that has been fascinating is that, as I tracked some of the people who had been enslaved and sold by the church, I learned that many of them — even after the Civil War, even after they were free people — they remained in the church that had betrayed them and sold them. And they remained in the church because they felt that the priests, the white sinful men who had sold them who had done these things, did not own this church. The church — God, the Holy Spirit, the Son — they did not control that. And their faith that had sustained them through all of this difficult period of enslavement continued to sustain them. And not only that, many of these individuals became lay leaders and some even became religious leaders in the church and worked to make the church more reflective of and responsive to Black Catholics and more true to its universal ideals. And so, in a strange way, learning that history, learning about these people and their endurance and their resilience and their commitment to their faith has been really inspiring to me. So, I’m still practicing, I’m still going to Mass.
Naranjo: As you note in the book, Catholicism in the U.S. has often been perceived as a Northern religion. And you show us how that’s not necessarily the case. But what do you think its role in enslaving people means for conversations about culpability and reparations, given that many people view slavery as a Southern thing?
Swarns: I think that explains a bit of the disconnect for people. Many of us as Americans view the Catholic Church as a Northern church, as an immigrant church. Growing up in New York City, that’s certainly the church that I knew. The truth is that the Catholic Church established its foothold in the British colonies and in the early United States and in Maryland, which was a slaveholding state and relied on slavery to help build the very underpinnings of the church. So the nation’s first Catholic institution of higher learning, Georgetown, first archdiocese, the first cathedral, priests who operated a plantation and enslaved and sold people established the first seminary. So this was foundational to the emergence of the Catholic Church in the United States, but it’s history that I certainly didn’t know and most Catholics don’t know. And most Americans don’t know.
In terms of grappling with this history, the institutions have taken a number of steps. Georgetown and the Jesuit order priests, who were the priests who established the early Catholic Church in the United States, they’ve apologized for their participation in slavery and the slave trade. Georgetown has offered preference in admissions to descendants of people who were enslaved by the church, and it’s created a fund — a $400,000 fund — which they’ve committed to raising annually to fund projects that will benefit descendants. They’ve also renamed buildings and created an institute to study slavery.
The Jesuits, for their part, partnered with descendants to create a foundation and committed to raising $100 million toward racial reconciliation projects and projects that would benefit descendants. So those are the steps that have been taken so far by the institutions that I write about in my book.
Descendants, I think, have different feelings about whether or not this is adequate, whether or not more should be done. Most of the people that I speak to believe that these are good first steps, but that more needs to be done.
Naranjo: In your reporting process, did you experience any pushback into looking into a history that maybe some would like to have forgotten?
Swarns: In this instance, I was dealing with institutions that were trying to be transparent and trying to address this history. For both institutions, I would say there are more records that I wish I had that I don’t have. And that’s often what we journalists encounter. And part of the challenge, frankly, beyond institutional willingness or unwillingness, is just the marginalization of enslaved people during our history. Enslaved people were barred by law and practice from learning to read and write. So the records that would give great insight into their lives, letters and journals that historians and writers used to document the lives of other people, say, in the 1800s, are really, really, really, really scarce. And so that’s an enormous challenge for anyone trying to unearth the lives of enslaved people.
Naranjo: I was reading the book last week, after the Supreme Court struck down race-based affirmative action in college admissions. Years before that, Georgetown had embarked on this process and, as noted in the book, implemented a program for preferential admission for descendants of people enslaved by its Jesuit founders. What responsibilities do you think institutions with similar histories of enslaving people have to descendants?
Swarns: Universities all across the country are obviously grappling with the implications of the Supreme Court’s affirmative action decision. More than 90 universities have already identified historic ties to slavery and have committed to addressing that history. There’s actually a consortium of universities studying slavery. And what the Supreme Court decision means for them and for their efforts, I think, remains uncertain.
Georgetown issued a statement last week like many universities did, saying that they remain committed to ensuring diversity on campus and valuing diversity. How this will all play out — I mean, I think we’re all going to have to wait and see. In terms of the responsibilities for universities that have identified their roots in slavery? I’m a journalist, so to me, I think it’s so important to document this history. To search in the archives, to make materials available and easily available to families to identify descendants. And to reach out and to work with descendants. I’m a journalist, I’m not a policymaker, and so there will be others who can hammer out what policies institutions feel are best and what policies that the descendants, if there are any identified, feel would be best. But for me as a journalist and as a professor, I feel the urgency of documenting this history and making sure that it is known. And collaborating with descendant communities, when those communities are identified, in terms of deciding on policies and programs.
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( With inputs from : www.politico.com )
