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Brit Actually: Nursery Rhymes of Reparations

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Abhijit Naskar

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“Cruel and proud America give us back our pride, our dreams, our land. Liliuokalani is long gone but we are here and you are here and the ghosts of Kepookalani, and Kamanawa. The great Paiea, our ageless king, will stalk you until the end and we will be there because Queen Liliuokalani is long gone but she is also here to haunt you and we are here witnesses to your greed, your stubborn clutching to what is ours. We are here and the ghosts of our makua watch you from the shadows of their island valleys and caves. From the mountain tops of Kaala and Maunakea Where old gods and the makua wait patiently. --from "Enaʻena”

AmericaPoetryHawaiiReparationsHawaiianQueen LiliuokalaniHawaiian Overthrow
Book:Hanai: A Poem for Queen Liliuokalani
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“Makaaina voices with fresh songs to sing Speaking of new strengths Mind and body strengths, Strengthening the hope of change -- new joys in this tiresome regimen of want and confusion. Grand queen sleep the ageless sleep in peace Your people rise now, and demand their share of this sweet and wondrous place. The populace from their sleep of compliance Awake now to the beat of new drums hewn from betrayal and delusion urging the makaaina voice to rise above the din of daily trumpetings of man and machine To be rid of confusion and fear To stand equally with the new rulers of this precious place to be ruthless in demanding what is ours. --from "Pono”

PoetryHawaiiAdvocacyReparationsHawaiianQueen LiliuokalaniHawaiian Kingdom
Book:Hanai: A Poem for Queen Liliuokalani
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“It’s not just a matter of having lost the land and the wealth that came with it. It’s a matter of the fact that we lost a way of life that we should have been able to pass on to our children and to their children, but which we can’t because of what was taken from us. (Harris Neck, Georgia native Wilson Moran as quoted by Aberjhani in The American Poet Who Went Home Again)”

Social JusticeAfrican AmericansBlack History MonthReparationsAntiracismJuneteenth1619 ProjectBlack People In GeorgiaEducation WeekWilson Moran
Book:The American Poet Who Went Home Again
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“[From 1994 introduction by Dr. Klaus Müller.] The postwar German government did not simply forget about homosexuals; on the contrary, it actively continued to persecute them, and to justify the efforts of the Nazis in this respect… The Nazi version of Paragraph 175 was, in fact, explicitly upheld in 1957 by the West German supreme court.”

GayGermanyNaziHomophobiaReparations
Book:The Men with the Pink Triangle: The True Life-and-Death Story of Homosexuals in the Nazi Death Camps
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“And so we must imagine a new country. Reparations—by which I mean the full acceptance of our collective biography and its consequences—is the price we must pay to see ourselves squarely. The recovering alcoholic may well have to live with his illness for the rest of his life. But at least he is not living a drunken lie. Reparations beckon us to reject the intoxication of hubris and see America as it is—the work of fallible humans. Won’t reparations divide us? Not any more than we are already divided. The wealth gap merely puts a number on something we feel but cannot say—that American prosperity was ill gotten and selective in its distribution. What is needed is an airing of family secrets, a settling with old ghosts. What is needed is a healing of the American psyche and the banishment of white guilt. What I’m talking about is more than recompense for past injustices—more than a handout, a payoff, hush money, or a reluctant bribe. What I’m talking about is a national reckoning that would lead to spiritual renewal. Reparations would mean the end of scarfing hot dogs on the Fourth of July while denying the facts of our heritage. Reparations would mean the end of yelling “patriotism” while waving a Confederate flag. Reparations would mean a revolution of the American consciousness, a reconciling of our self-image as the great democratizer with the facts of our history”

Reparations
Book:We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy
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