Quentin's Weeknotes 8/04/18- 8/10/18
This week
- I learned that Beyonce and Solange’s Mom’s art collection is dope as hell.
- I poured over some beautiful maps of Brooklyn that show the locations of indigenous Lenni Lenape trails. Not surprisingly, many of these trails became the basis for major thoroughfares and roads. As I’ve educated myself about the Indigenous history of North America, it’s always surprising to me (though it really shouldn’t be) just how many putatively “American” (read European or English) places are actually Indigenous places that were papered over by colonization and material efforts to actively forget it.
- I read this absolutely bonkers intellectual and social biography of Charles Murray, one of the co-authors of the Bell Curve and ongoing proponent of the thoroughly debunked belief in correlations between intelligence and race. Murray began his work as part of the US’s counterinsurgency efforts in Thailand in the 1960s, and much of his subsequent work built on this formative experience. He later grafted his anti-government beliefs onto ideologically minded (and funded) racist IQ science, and has spent the next 30 years as a putative teller of uncomfortable truths that are really just self-fulfilling justifications of existing inequality. Anthropologists did little work to publicly counter Murray in the 1980s and 1990s, though some are taking him on now.
I read with great relish Erik Loomis’s call for a Corporate Accountability act that takes aim at the limited array of progressive and leftist activism around trade issues. Loomis’s argument is basically that the neo-liberal consensus between the center-left and center-right in the 1980s and 90s has left us bereft of alternatives for what a just, fair, and healthy global trade would look like. Also, his upcoming book “A history of American in Ten Strikes” looks like the kind of saucy labor history I tend to love.- I welcomed a Cayuga faith keeper and his partner to the Museum where I work. Ostensibly I was there to give them a tour and help them figure out a more precise location for Oquaga, a large Iroquois settlement and refugee community in what is now Southern New York. But in practice, he was the one who gave me a tour, and I just opened doors! The group of us had long and interesting conversations about Iroquois history, wampum, and Indigenous representation in White culture. I’m hoping to have him back sometime in the future to talk to students and faculty!
