Daniel Boyd’s solo exhibition Treasure Island, now at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, is a deeply political and personal interrogation of Australia’s colonial history.
A Pacific island woman with a child planting sugar cane in a field, Bingara, Queensland, c 1897.
John Oxley Library, State Library of Queensland.
In 1881, a Pacific Islander woman brought here to work on a sugar cane plantation ran away. She was violently retrieved by her employer. Her story sheds moving light on a dark history of exploitation.
If Texas Gov. Greg Abbott had his way, the state’s past of lynching Blacks would be taught as an exception rather than the rule. History tells a different story.
UN peacekeepers on patrol.
Sia Kambou/AFP via Getty Images
An anthropologist writes that despite best efforts, there is no guarantee that children may not have been exploited in the production process of chocolate.
Eighteenth-century Quakers attempted to align their religious beliefs with what they purchased. These Quakers led some of the early campaigns against sugar being produced by enslaved people.
Mansa Musa, the king of Mali, approached by a Berber on camelback, from The Catalan Atlas, 1375.
Attributed to Abraham Cresques/Bibliothèque Nationale de France/Wikimedia Commons
Sugar has deep links with slavery in the US, but Black workers weren’t the only ones affected. In post-Civil War Louisiana, Chinese workers also toiled cutting and processing cane.
Bernice A. King, daughter of civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr, at a recent press conference preview the King Holiday observance in Atlanta, Georgia.
EPA-EFE/Erik S. Lesser
The west has long defined racism as a function of colonial domination and discrimination. But in a changing world this definition must be challenged.
People carry out a “die in” to protest the acquittal of Kyle Rittenhouse in Portland last week. The Rittenhouse case highlights the fluidity of white privilege.
(AP Photo/Andrew Selsky)
The lionization of Rittenhouse by the right proves that even skin colour is not enough to protect white people who support anti-racism movements.
Hulu’s ‘Handmaid’s Tale’ Season 4 envisions escapes to Canada that draw on 19th century abolitionist narratives, yet the show doesn’t acknowledge race.
(Hulu/YouTube)