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Useful news for all to advance knowledge of the world and how it works

Ambiente é o Meio #38: Povos indígenas vivem momento crucial, afirma indigenista — Ecoamazônia

Com direitos constitucionais, indígenas brasileiros ainda possuem cerca de 60% de seus territórios sem demarcação O podcast Ambiente é o Meio desta …

Ambiente é o Meio #38: Povos indígenas vivem momento crucial, afirma indigenista — Ecoamazônia

May 15, 2022 – by Heather Cox Richardson

Yesterday, an 18-year-old white man murdered 10 people and wounded three others with an AR-15. The shooter traveled more than 200 miles to get to a predominantly Black neighborhood, where he put on heavy body armor and live streamed his attack as he gunned down people grocery shopping. Eleven of those he shot were Black.

Source: May 15, 2022 – by Heather Cox Richardson

Hair Police Teaching Self-hatred

Jamaica Woman Tongue

It’s so predictable. Hard-headed administrators religiously insist that students who do not obey hair-grooming rules must be kept out of school. There’s the usual outcry against exclusion. Things quiet down. And before you know it, there’s another incident. The triggers vary. At times, it’s the irrational fear of lice lurking in dreadlocks. Or, it’s hair that’s too high. Students are expected to conform to regulations that do not always take into account the way their hair grows naturally.

Take, for instance, black people’s hair. In its natural state, as it grows from the root, it stretches up, not down. And it can rise to great heights. In the 1960s, when the Black Power movement flourished in the US and spread to the Caribbean, towering afros were the order of the day. They are making a comeback. Then, if black hair is allowed to lock, the weight of the hair eventually…

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Replacement Theory, a Fringe Belief Fueled Online, Is Refashioned by G.O.P. – The New York Times

Inside a Pittsburgh synagogue in 2018, a white man with a history of antisemitic internet posts gunned down 11 worshipers, blaming Jews for allowing immigrant “invaders” into the United States.

The next year, another white man, angry over what he called “the Hispanic invasion of Texas,” opened fire on shoppers at an El Paso Walmart, leaving 23 people dead, and later telling the police he had sought to kill Mexicans.

And in yet another deadly mass shooting, unfolding in Buffalo on Saturday, a heavily armed white man is accused of killing 10 people after targeting a supermarket on the city’s predominantly Black east side, writing in a lengthy screed posted online that the shoppers there came from a culture that sought to “ethnically replace my own people.”

Three shootings, three different targets — but all linked by one sprawling, ever-mutating belief now commonly known as replacement theory. At the extremes of American life, replacement theory — the notion that Western elites, sometimes manipulated by Jews, want to “replace” and disempower white Americans — has become an engine of racist terror, helping inspire a wave of mass shootings in recent years and fueling the 2017 right-wing rally in Charlottesville, Va., that erupted in violence.

But replacement theory, once confined to the digital fever swamps of Reddit message boards and semi-obscure white nationalist sites, has gone mainstream. In sometimes more muted forms, the fear it crystallizes — of a future America in which white people are no longer the numerical majority — has become a potent force in conservative media and politics, where the theory has been borrowed and remixed to attract audiences, retweets and small-dollar donations.

Why Urdu language draws ire of India’s right-wing – BBC News

While ‘Urdu’ borrowed words mostly from Persian – the elite lingua franca of medieval India – ‘Hindi’ took them from Sanskrit, the language of ancient Hindu texts.

“So both the languages rest on a shared grammatical base,” Dr Rai explains, “but both Hindi and Urdu have also for political reasons developed myths of origin” .

What Dr Rai says is that speakers of both communities laid claim to what was a common language but ended up dividing it out of their anxiety of maintaining a separate identity.

“The whole situation would be slightly farcical if it didn’t have such tragic consequences,” he says.

Source: Why Urdu language draws ire of India’s right-wing – BBC News