Nonjudgment

Over and over, people refer to societies that were colonized as indigenous. For example, I see nearly all Native American groups referred to as indigenous. Here's a dictionary definition of indigenous, which covers the meaning here. indigenous adjective in·​dig·​e·​nous 1 a : produced, growing, living, or occurring natively or naturally in a particular region or environment b usually Indigenous : of, relating to, or descended from the earliest known inhabitants of a place and especially of a place that was colonized Here's another: "Being a member of the original inhabitants of a particular place." Consider Manhattan, where I live. Humans have lived here for five or ten thousand years. Europeans arrived ten percent of that time ago. If someone calls the people who lived on…

I found a piece that expanded on something I wrote in Sustainability Simplified about how racism developed. Since I found that we needed to change culture to restore sustainability, I've been learning about abolitionism and related issues, since abolitionism is an example of humans changing global culture where no one thought it possible, then it happened, started by a small number of visionary people. In my book, I wrote: Oxford-educated Trinidadian historian Eric Williams wrote, “A racial twist has thereby been given to what is basically an economic phenomenon. Slavery was not born of racism: rather, racism was the consequence of slavery.” Recently, historian Ibram X. Kendi agreed. He wrote, “I had been taught that racist ideas cause racist policies. That ignorance and hate cause…

I was watching a dialog on Slavery and the Constitutional Convention hosted by the US National Archives (see the video below). Thomas Jefferson My upcoming book focuses on many relevant things, especially how culture induces people to act against their values, then to create beliefs to rationalize and justify the behavior violating their own values. Thomas Jefferson represents one of the most prominent cases of someone who promoted liberty, freedom, equality, and democracy to the point of risking his life for these values for himself and his peers. He didn't extend them to his slaves. A renowned and accomplished historian and lawyer, Paul Finkelman (bio below) said the following, which I found interesting and relevant. Most of us have been induced to violate our values…