Earth Essences.Com

 The Children of the Sun

The Children of the Sun was first published in 1918 by the Hamitic League of the World. Black Classic Press reprinted it first in 1978, and again in 1981. Our press was founded with the intention of bringing to light obscure and significant works by and about people of African descent.In the morning of the world, when the fingers of Love swept aside the curtains of Time, our dusky mother, Ethiopia, held the stage. It was she who wooed civilization and gave birth to nations. Egypt was her first-born and to UR of the Chaldees she sent her sons and daughters, who scattered empires in Asia as the wanton winds of autumn scatter the seeds of flowers.

AFRICA

The Sphinx is Africa. The bond of silence

OLD

And e is upon her.
white with tombs, and rent and shorn;
With raiment wet with tears and torn,
And trampled on, yet all untamed;
All naked now, yet not ashamed,- 

Whose obelisk's still laugh at Time,
And lift to heaven her fair name,
Sleeps satisfied upon her fame.

My mother was Semirimis?
Yea, harps strike idly out of place;
Men sing of savage Saxon Kings
New-born and known but yesterday. 

Reference: George Wells Parker

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Tribal Diets of Survival

If you were lost somewhere in the Wild, How would you survive with the Western Idiom of nutrition? We so called civilised and know all's can learn many secrets of survival from Indigenous Tribes. 

Indigenous peoples, also known as First peoples, Aboriginal peoples or Native peoples, are ethnic groups who are the original owners and caretakers of a given region, in contrast to groups that have settled, occupied or colonized the area more recently. Groups are usually described as indigenous when they maintain traditions or other aspects of an early culture that is associated with a given region. Not all indigenous peoples share this characteristic, as many have adopted substantial elements of a colonizing culture, such as dress, religion or language. Indigenous peoples may be settled in a given region or exhibit a nomadic lifestyle across a large territory, but they are generally historically associated with a specific territory on which they depend. Indigenous societies are found in every inhabited climate zone and continent of the world.

Traditional food consumed by rural communities contain nutrients that are lacking in high- and middle-income countries

Unprecedented levels of chronic non-communicable diseases are prompting calls to revert to the diets of our ancestors to regain lost nutrients.

It is believed that such a shift would help to improve society's relationship with the Earth and restore human and environmental health.

The rise of the industrial model of agriculture has contributed greatly to people being disconnected from the food on their plates," says Sarah Somian, a France-based nutritionist.

Many traditional and non-processed foods consumed by rural communities, such as millet and caribou, are nutrient-dense and offer healthy fatty acids, micronutrients and cleansing properties widely lacking in diets popular in high- and middle-income countries, say experts.

Indigenous diets worldwide – from forest foods such as roots and tubers in regions of eastern India to coldwater fish, caribou and seals in northern Canada – are varied, suited to local environments, and can counter malnutrition and disease.

"For many tribal and indigenous peoples, their food systems are complex, self-sufficient and deliver a very broad-based, nutritionally diverse diet," says Jo Woodman, a senior researcher and campaigner at Survival International, a UK-based indigenous advocacy organisation.

But the disruption of traditional lifestyles due to environmental degradation, and the introduction of processed foods, refined fats and oils, and simple carbohydrates, contributes to worsening health in indigenous populations, and a decline in the production of nutrient-rich foodstuffs that could benefit all communities.

"Traditional food systems need to be documented so that policymakers know what is at stake by ruining an ecosystem, not only for the indigenous peoples living there, but for everyone," Harriet Kuhnlein, founding director of the Centre of Indigenous Peoples' Nutrition and Environment at McGill University, Canada.

Since the early 1960s, economic growth, urbanisation and a global population increase to more than 7 billion have multiplied the consumption of animal-sourced foods – including meat, eggs and dairy products – which comprised 13% of the energy in the world's diet in 2013, according to the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI) in Nairobi, Kenya. Farm-raised livestock consumes up to a third of the world's grains, the institute notes.

Agricultural expansion, some of it to cultivate more grains, accounts for 80% of the world's deforestation, says the UN Environmental Programme.

With the global population expected to rise to some 9 billion by 2050, 50% more food must be produced to feed these people, depending on whether there is a healthy ecosystem. "When environments are destroyed or contaminated, this affects the food they can provide," Kuhnlein says.

Indigenous food systems – gathering and preparing food to maximise the nutrients an environment can provide – range from nomadic hunter-gatherers such as the Aché in eastern Paraguay, the Massai pastoralists in northern Kenya, and herding and fishing groups including the Inuit in northern Canada, to the Saami of Scandinavia and the millet-farming Kondh agriculturalists in eastern India.

But the trait these groups share is a keen knowledge of how to eat nutritiously without damaging the ecosystem. "Indigenous peoples' food systems contain treasures of knowledge from long-evolved cultures and patterns of living in local ecosystems," says an FAO-supported study on indigenous food systems, nutrition, and health co-authored by Kuhnlein in 2009.

In recent years, grains such as quinoa, fonio and millet – long harvested by indigenous and rural communities in developing countries but increasingly overlooked by a younger, richer generation that prefers imported foods – have instead grown in popularity in developed countries.

Research, marketing and donor-funded financing have helped raise awareness of the ability of these high-protein grains to reduce cholesterol, provide micronutrients and lower the risk of diabetes. "Because of the many health benefits of these forgotten, or until [recently] unknown foods, valuing the wisdom of indigenous cultures [and] earlier generations is vital for reducing disease and inflammation," Somian says.

The Kondh community in Odisha state traditionally grows up to 16 varieties of millet, according to Debjeet Sarangi, head of Living Farms, a local NGO that has worked with marginalised indigenous farmers since 2005.

But millet-growing among the roughly 100,000 Kondh, who are spread over about 15,000 villages, has dropped by nearly 63% from an estimated 500,000 hectares in 1975 to more than 200,000 hectares in 2008. This is because land is being converted to paddy in exchange for government-subsidised rice programmes offering refined white rice, even though it carries health risks.

"When there is so much malnutrition existing in the area, why do you replace land which has been growing nutritious food [with rice paddies]?" says Sarangi, whose NGO reported in 2011 that 75% of under-fives in Kondh weighed too little for their age, and 55% were too short for their height group, a sign of chronic malnutrition.

Another so-called superfood declining in popularity is spirulina, a type of cyanobacteria that grows in ponds and is a staple in many traditional food systems, such as among the Kanembu in Chad.

Spirulina has the potential to boost immunity, reduce inflammation, decrease allergic reactions, and provide a healthy source of protein, according to the Langone Medical Centre of New York University in the US.

"There is a deep irony in the fact that many dieticians are advocating [traditional and indigenous foods and diets] and yet [the] modern [western] diet is what is being pushed on tribal peoples around the world, with devastating results," Woodman says.

"We have lost our primary relationship with our world around us," says Dr Martin Reinhardt, assistant professor of Native American studies at Northern Michigan University.

Native American elders historically planned seven generations ahead when creating food systems, teaching each generation that it was their responsibility to ensure the survival of the seventh, says Reinhardt, an Anishinaabe Ojibway citizen of the Sault Ste. Marie Chippewa Native American people in Michigan state. They did this by hunting and gathering only what they needed, conserving resources such as wood and water, and protecting food biodiversity.

But when Native Americans were forced to assimilate, historical access to this nutritional knowledge was lost, Reinhardt points out. According to the special diabetes programme for Indians, run by the US federal government's Indian health service , the 566 registered indigenous peoples in the US have a diabetes rate nine times higher than the national average.

Similarly, rates of the disease among First Nations and Inuit groups in Canada are up to five times higher than the countrywide average, according to the government's federal health department.

In Laos, northern highland minorities such as the Yawa, Htin and Khmu traditionally eat forest-based diets, including wild pigs, birds, bamboo shoots, banana flowers and yams rich in vitamin C. But in recent decades the Laos government has moved thousands of people from the highlands to towns for economic reasons, documented in a 2012 report by the International Fund for Agricultural Development.

"Communities [have less access] to natural resources than before," says Jim Chamberlain, an anthropologist and former World Bank consultant based in the capital, Vientiane. He says their traditional diet relies on forests and the move has led to a decline in nutritional status. Malnutrition rates in Laotian under-fives are among the highest in south-east Asia.

While reinstating traditional food systems is key for everyone's health, as well as for the environment, the lack of a market to support superfoods poses serious challenges, advocates say.

In northern Canada, many of the fishes rich in omega-3 fatty acids – a staple in the traditional diets of Arctic tribes – spawn and live in waters increasingly tainted with mercury, according to the government.

Deforestation worldwide, often to make way for large-scale agricultural production, curtails the nutrients that can be gathered from forests.

Much environmental destruction is a consequence of modern society's detachment from its food systems, says Reinhardt, who co-ordinated a UNM project called decolonise your diet, which ran from 2010-12 and aimed to teach people the link between food, culture, health and the environment.

"Humans can, and need to, reconnect with nature in such an intimate way as to depend on it for survival," he says. "I hope we have not yet passed the thresholds [of what the earth can tolerate]." 

 Africa - A Brief History

The ancient usage of medicinal herbs was established long before Meneses combined the upper and lower Kingdoms of Egypt in 3200 B.C. The predynastic cultures of Amratain, Badarian (culture ruins found beneath those of Amratians), Gerzean (extension of Amaratain --3600 B.C) and the NOK cultures had medicinal herbs and drugs. In the Berlin Medical Papyrus it is stated that medicinal schools were established long before Egypt. The Nile valley Africans of Egypt came from the southern directionof the Abyssinia between 6000 to 3000 B.C This migration of peoples, knowledge, plants, and medicinal herbs, caused a concentration of information. The first Dynasty (3000.C.) was ruled by King Mina, then Kings narmer and Aha. Their relics and coprolite studies  (fossil food remains and remains of food in the intestinial tract of mummies) indicate both a primarily raw food diet and medicinal herbs.

Various African peoples such as the Nubians and Hamites of the second of the second cataract (curves of the river) and the Egyptians of the first cataract initiated a cluster of herbal knowledge. Imhotep established medicinal herb and drug schools during the regime of Pharaoh Zozer in the 4th Dynastic era. The medical books produced by Imhotep (20 volumes) spread the allopathic homeopathic and naturopathic usage of herbs over the continent.His books are currently at the Carl Marx University, Liepsig, Germany, where they were given the name of the European who stole them, Ebers and are called the Ebers Papyrus. Historically he is a science bandit - technology thief.

In any case the rulers of the fourth dynasty (3360 B.C.) were Seneferu 11and King Asa.It was this dynasty that invaded the Sudan for gold and slaves, and Sinai for copper. With the invasions  the cultural knowledge and the herb knowledge were exchanged.Also, medicinal flower essences coupled with medicinal herbs were found in the tomb of Khufu, a ruler during this dynasty. Today's African flower essence treatments are called Bach Flowers Remedies; they are credited to the European who discovered an already established African science. The fertile crescent of northeast Africa possessed medical schools and indigenous herbal medicine that was and is considered exotic. The Nubians had developed the medicinal herb and drug treatment system of homeopathy. Today, the Europeans credit Haneman, a German with this treatment modality.

The First through the Thirteenth Dynasties are considered the old age empires. These dynasties had good holistic health. Mummified remains and coprolite studies indicate that their teeth were cavity-free, and that they were free of bone disease, digestive tract illness, had a natural foods diet and used herbal medicine. The mummies from the dynastic era after the thirteenth Dynasty, have indications of appendicitis, ulcers, mastoid disease and battle wounds. This indicates the health began to deteriorateas the diet became more concentrated in cooked foods and grains coupled with disease  spurred by increased trading with Europeans. In addition, the domiscation of plants caused the nutritional value of plants to decrease.

Domestication of plants requires that the plants be taken out of their natural environment  and placed on plant plantations. Plantations for plants is a synthetic societal environment. This environment causes a nutritional alteration of the plants. Consequently, it changes the health of the plant eaters. This domestication or processing of plants is unholistic as cultivated soil becomes drained of nutrients and limited in nutritional growth response. unholistic cultivation of plants causes a people that eat domesticated plants to become domesticated  and limited to a few nutrients and this limits the range of behaviour.. In other words, you are what you eat. Eating slave plants, causes a slave mentality. A distored picture of plant slaving can be found in The Origin of African Plant Domestication by Jack Horlan. In this book, the alteration process is delineated. Many valuable herbs were destroyed at the end of the Thirteenth Dynasty. European Aryans and Semitites (white/non-Europeans) invaded and destroyed Egyptian cities, raped women, stole gold and precious healing crystals. Timaus was a ruler during this invasion period.

 During the 15th Dynasty when King Salatis was ruler, the European  Hyksos or shepherd kings of the white race, invaded Egypt (1730-1580 B.C.)and destroyed wildlife, crops and medicinal herbs . One rebel against this invasion was a black Egyptian prince Segenerawho died fighting the Hyksos. The Prince was hated by the Hyksos which is evident by the many wounds on his mummy  in Cairo. His mummy reveals a fractured skull, a knife cut over the eye, a bitten tongue and a broken jaw. Aside from crops and curative herbs, the Egyptian empire  (which ) included colonies outside Egypt) had abundant financial wealth and academic knowledge, thus making Egypt a prize to capture for alien cultures.

Foreign powers in pursuit of Egypt had varying ideas about war. The ideas of war in the European civilizations had been the accepted idea in this culture. However, war ideas often varied within the same culture, with a variety of contrasting organizational structures and sanctions. War varies from one culture to another. The European idea of war has become the accepted norm. However, war may also have contrasting objectives in a culture, with a variety of contrasting organizational structures in relation to the state and with varied rewards and sanctions. For example, the Aztecs used war only as a means to get captives for religious sacrifices. Consequently, the Spanish invasion of the Aztec empire was a shock to the Aztecs because the Spaniards would kill without religious purpose. 

Two rulers of the Eighteenth Dynasty from 1600 to 1399 B.C. were Queen Hatsheput and Ahmes 1 who fought the white barbric invaders called the Hyksos as they persisted in their wars to gain food, wealth and herbs. These wars marked the beginning of the long decline of Egypt and the upsurpation of medicinal knowledge by the invaders.It was after this time that the Kush empire (modern day Sudan Republic) and Queen Hatshepsut united upper and lower Egypt. At the same time Pharaoh Thutmosis invaded the land of the barbarians and made the deafeated European countries his possessions. This cultural contact caused African colonized whites to become more aware of African medicine, wealth and food.

The Nineteenth Dynasty was ruled by Pharaohs Ramses and Seri (his father) and others. many invading white barbaric hordes attempted to capture Africa's wealth, food and medicine. The famines and diseases of the Europeans were known to African civilization and attempts were made to give aid.However, the constant and continuous violence of the whites may have caused reluctance to help. Nonetheless, Ramses sent vast amounts of wheta to the plagued and famine stricken Europe. Also, Pharaoh Merneptha's priest taught his captured barbaric white slaves farming, which must have included herbalism. African priests were agriculturists, physicians and chemists. In fact, the priest temples were colleges of learning in science and religion.

The Twentieth, Twenty-second and Twenty-third Dynastic periods (1085-730 B.C.) has several Dynasties ruling at the same time from different capitals in various parts of Africa. Social unrest and strife was caused by the presence of mixed Caucasoid rulers and continued until the Twenty-Fifth (715 to 600 B.C.) Dynasty. The Twenty-Sixth Dynasty (663-525 B.C.) was marked by the Egyptians' total loss of independence and was controlled by the white Persians.

Historically, the Egyptians are noted for their abundant records that reflect the greatness in African medicine civilization. Thebes (Greek word) was the greatest city in Chem (later named Egypt).This city was named WO'SE or NOWE by the Africans. Further, this city was  the central city of a vast empire which included Nubia, Cush, Egypt, etc. Howeve, the current study of Africa is mostly of a lesser domain called Egypt and the whites who invaded it.

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  The Nuns Who Bought and Sold Slaves

Georgetown Visitation Preparatory School, one of the oldest Roman Catholic girls’ schools in the nation, has long celebrated the vision and generosity of its founders: a determined band of Catholic nuns who championed free education for the poor in the early 1800s.The sisters, who established an elite academy in Washington, D.C., also ran “a Saturday school, free to any young girl who wished to learn — including slaves, at a time when public schools were almost nonexistent and teaching slaves to read was illegal,” according to an official history posted for several years on the school’s website. 

“Nothing else to do than to dispose of the family of Negroes,’’ Mother Agnes Brent, the convent’s superior, wrote in 1821 as she approved the sale of a couple and their two young children. The enslaved woman was just days away from giving birth to her third child. Nuns disposing of black families? I have been poring over 19th-century church records for several years now and such casual cruelty from leaders of the faith still takes my breath away. I am a black journalist and a black Catholic. Yet I grew up knowing nothing about the nuns who bought and sold human beings.

Historians say that nearly all of the orders of Catholic sisters established by the late 1820s owned slaves. Today, many Catholic sisters are outspoken champions of social justice and some are grappling with this painful history even as lawmakers in Congress and presidential candidates debate whether reparations should be paid to the descendants of enslaved people.

Their approaches vary in scope and some sisters have expressed misgivings, fearful that exposing the past may leave them open to criticism. But as they search their archives and reflect on the way forward, some religious women are developing frameworks that may serve as road maps for other institutions striving to acknowledge and atone for their participation in America’s system of human bondage. The Georgetown Visitation sisters and school officials have organized a series of discussions for students, faculty, staff and alumnae, including a prayer service in April that commemorated the enslaved people “whose involuntary sacrifices supported the growth of this school.” They have published an online report about the convent’s slaveholding — an article by the school’s archivist and historian also appeared in the U.S. Catholic Historian this spring — and have digitized their records related to slavery, making them available to the public for the first time.

The Religious of the Sacred Heart, who owned about 150 enslaved people in Louisiana and Missouri, tracked down dozens of descendants of the people they once owned and invited them to a memorial ceremony in Grand Coteau, La. At the ceremony last fall, the nuns unveiled a monument to the slaves in the local parish cemetery and a plaque on an old slave quarters. They also announced the creation of a scholarship fund for African-American students at their Catholic school, which was built, in part, by enslaved laborers. “It wasn’t just a question of looking at the past,’’ Sister Carolyn Osiek, the provincial archivist for the Society of the Sacred Heart United States/Canada, said. “It was: ‘What do we do with this now?’’’

“Catholicism goes back centuries, especially in families from the South,’’ he said.

 

In the early decades of the American republic, the Catholic Church established its primary foothold in the South, in communities where slaveholding was considered a mark of wealth and prestige for parishioners, clergy and nuns. It was not unusual for American-born priests and nuns to grow up in slaveholding families, and many orders relied on slave labor, historians say. The Jesuit priests, who founded and ran Georgetown, for instance, were among the largest slaveholders in Maryland. And as women began to enter the first Catholic convents in the late-18th- and early-19th-centuries, some brought their human property with them as part of their dowries, historians say. (I stumbled across this history during my reporting on Georgetown.) Wealthy supporters and relatives of the nuns also donated enslaved people to the convents. Meanwhile, Catholic sisters bought, sold and bartered enslaved people. Some nuns accepted slaves as payment for tuition to their schools or handed over their human property as payment for debts, records show.

 

Mary Ewens, the author of “The Role of the Nun in Nineteenth Century America,’’ found that seven of the eight first orders of Catholic nuns established in the United States owned slaves by the 1820s. In a more recent study, Joseph G. Mannard revealed that an eighth order did as well, at least for a time. “They really came to define Catholicism in the United States,’’ Dr. Thompson said of these early Catholic nuns. “Between 1810 and 1820, sisters came to outnumber priests in the United States. They set the foundational patterns for what sisters did in the U.S.”

 

Some nuns expressed distaste for slavery while others described their reluctance to sell the people they owned, and records document some efforts to keep families together. Sisters from both Georgetown Visitation and Sacred Heart united families in which the husband was owned by the nuns and the wife was owned by someone else. In each case, the sisters purchased the wives to bring the family together. (The Georgetown Visitation nuns bought the family’s children as well.) The Carmelites of Baltimore cared for some elderly slaves when they grew infirm. The Sisters of Charity of Nazareth in Kentucky remained so connected to their former slaves that scores returned, with children and grandchildren, to celebrate the convent’s centennial in 1912.

 
© The Sisters of Charity of Nazareth Archival Center People formerly enslaved by the Sisters of Charity of Nazareth returned with their families to celebrate the religious order’s centennial in 1912. But Dr. Mannard, a historian at Indiana University of Pennsylvania, and other researchers have found that the nuns’ financial needs — and the appeal of unpaid labor — often trumped any reluctance to traffic in humans.“In spite of my repugnance for having Negro slaves, we may be obliged to purchase some,’’ Rose Philippine Duchesne, who established the Society of the Sacred Heart in the United States, wrote in 1822. A year later, the Sacred Heart sisters in Grand Coteau purchased their first person, an enslaved man named Frank Hawkins, for $550.

 

In 1830, the Carmelite sisters cited concerns about having to undertake “the disposal of our poor servants” to help explain their reluctance to move to Baltimore from their plantation in rural Maryland. But they dropped those objections after learning that the sale would help pay off their debts and allow them to keep their rural estate. They sold at least 30 people, Dr. Mannard said. Nearly a decade later, the Sisters of Charity of St. Joseph’s in Emmitsburg, Md., founded by Elizabeth Ann Seton, the first native-born American to be canonized as a saint, agreed to follow the counsel of their religious superior who told them they could sell their “yellow boys” at 10 to twelve percent profit “without doing an injustice to anyone.”

 

As for the Georgetown Visitation nuns, the profits from slave sales would become a vital lifeline during a period of expansion. In the 1820s, the sisters embarked on a building campaign, which left them saddled with debt. To ease the financial strain, they sold at least 21 people between 1819 and 1822, the records show.

 

 
.Buddhism
When some buyers dawdled in making payments, the sisters took them to court, Dr. Nalezyty foundand Followed by almost 500 million people worldwide, it was founded on the teachings of Gautama Buddha who believed in a moral life and emphasized on developing wisdom and understanding. Bauddha Dharma (Buddhism) literally translates to “Religion of the Buddha” or “Way of the Buddha.” The Sisters of Charity of Nazareth in Kentucky, who owned 30 people at Emancipation, were among the first sisters to seek to make amends. They joined with two other orders — the Dominicans of Saint Catharine and the Sisters of Loretto — to host a prayer service in 2000 where they formally apologized for their slaveholding. In 2012, the Sisters of Charity of Nazareth erected a monument at a cemetery where many of the enslaved people were buried. So far, they have identified three descendants of the people they once owned.“Their contributions had been ignored,’’ said Sister Theresa Knabel, who researched the order’s history and reached out to descendants. ‘’We needed to know who they were, know their names, know their story and make them visible.”

 

Roslyn Chenier, an African-American software consultant in Atlanta, learned that her forbears had been owned by the Religious of the Sacred Heart when she was contacted by Sister Maureen J. Chicoine, who has researched the history of the order and has identified dozens of descendants.“I was amazed, amazed,’’ said Ms. Chenier, who attended the ceremony organized by the sisters in Grand Coteau last September. “It was very emotional.” Ms. Chenier gave up practicing many years ago. But some of her relatives remain devout. Learning that their ancestors were owned by nuns astonished them. But it hasn’t shaken their faith, she said. It hasn’t shaken her strong Catholic identity, either.

 

That doesn’t surprise Father Gregory C. Chisholm, a black priest who heads the St. Charles Borromeo, Resurrection and All Saints parish in Harlem. He has had a number of conversations about Catholic slaveholding. The conversations are often painful, he said, but few black people are surprised to hear about racism among the clergy.Older people still remember the days of segregated pews and segregated churches, he said. Others have encountered racism within their own parishes and within their own religious orders, even as they cherish the blessings that Catholicism brings to their lives.

 

 
 

© Aaron Borton for The New York Times Sister Theresa Knabel, right, and Sister Adeline Fehribach at the monument for the enslaved at the cemetery of the Sisters of Charity of Nazareth in Nazareth, Ky. “This whole thing reveals the ways in which the religion has failed us in some way,’’ said Father Chisholm, who says he is encouraged by the church’s recent efforts to acknowledge its past. “It’s hard. It’s difficult. But it’s good. It’s a way for our church to be renewed and that’s what it has to be. It has to be renewed.’’

 

In November, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops addressed slavery in a pastoral letter that discussed racism within the church and asked for forgiveness. In 2017, Father Timothy P. Kesicki, president of the Jesuit Conference of Canada and the United States, apologized for the 1838 sale of enslaved people that helped keep Georgetown University afloat.The sisters say they still have work to do. At Georgetown Visitation, a committee is focusing on embedding the history more deeply into their school curriculum. The Sisters of Charity of Nazareth are creating a permanent exhibit on their campus that will highlight the contributions of African Americans to their congregation.She wants to make sure that students no longer grow up, as I did, without learning about the enslaved people who helped to build the church. She wants to make sure that we all know their names.

 

Rachel L. Swarns is a contributing writer for The Times, an associate professor of journalism at New York University and the author of a forthcoming book about Georgetown University and its ties to slavery. The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..