#UNIONIZEGOOGLE

Google may cut pay of staff who work from home

Publish

IMAGE SOURCE

Google employees in the US who opt to work from home permanently may get a pay cut.

The technology giant has developed a pay calculator that lets employees see the effects of working remotely or moving offices.

Some remote employees, especially those with a long commute, could have their pay cut without changing address.

Google has no plans at this time to implement the policy in the UK.

Employees in many businesses have proved that working from home permanently is viable during the Covid pandemic.

Many companies are looking ahead to how employees will work as the pandemic recedes, even as the US continues to battle the Delta variant of the disease.

• Covid: Should I be working from home or going back to the office?
• Working from home job adverts rise

Silicon Valley firms, some of which are keen to get employees back to their desks, are experimenting with employee pay structures.

Big tech companies including Microsoft, Facebook, and Twitter have offered less pay for employees based in locations where it is more inexpensive to live.

But smaller firms such as Reddit and Zillow have said they will pay the same no matter where employees are based, saying that this improves diversity.

IMAGE SOURCE

A Google spokesperson said: "Our compensation packages have always been determined by location, and we always pay at the top of the local market based on where an employee works from.

"Our new Work Location Tool was developed to help employees make informed decisions about which city or state they work from and any impact on compensation if they choose to relocate or work remotely."

Alarm

One Google employee, who works in Seattle but has a two-hour commute, complained to Reuters of being faced with a 10% pay cut for choosing to work from home full-time.

"It's as high a pay cut as I got for my most recent promotion," the employee said. "I didn't do all that hard work to get promoted to then take a pay cut."

Jake Rosenfeld, a sociology professor at Washington University in St. Louis, said Google's move raises alarms about who will feel the impact most acutely, including families.

"What's clear is that Google doesn't have to do this," Prof Rosenfeld said. "Google has paid these workers at 100% of their prior wage, by definition. So it's not like they can't afford to pay their workers who choose to work remotely the same that they are used to receiving."

A Google employee in Stamford, Connecticut, which is an hour away from New York by train, would be paid 15% less working remotely, while there were 5% and 10% differences in the Seattle, Boston and San Francisco areas.

Google will not change employees' pay if they work fully remotely from the same city.

Contract questions

In the UK, it's a fundamental part of employment law that employers cannot alter aspects of contracts such as rates of pay without the consent of employees, or without terminating those contracts and renegotiating them, said Emma Bartlett, a partner at employment lawyers CM Murray.

From an employee perspective, it would be demoralising to be paid less for doing the same job, she said, and from a business perspective, it would have the potential to create two tiers of employment, with some employees expected to be in the office, and some not.

If people stayed home working for childcare reasons, and women continue to take the main responsibility for childcare, then this could have the effect of widening the gender pay gap, she said.

Workers may be treated differently in other respects, she added, and organisations would have to work hard to make sure employees were not treated differently in terms of training, promotion, and access to clients.

Hybrid experiments

Some businesses, such as US technology giant Cisco, have put in place a hybrid working plan that has no mandates about how often employees go into the office.

Cisco expects that less than a quarter of its workforce will want to be in an office for three or more days a week.

But other firms, such as Goldman Sachs, want workers to return to offices.

The investment bank's boss, David Solomon, said in February that working from home was "an aberration" rather than "the new normal".

The Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD), which represents human resource professionals in the UK, said it was always "the safest option" for firms to seek express written agreement from employees before changing the level of their pay.

In its guidance to employers, it says that imposing a pay cut is a "high-risk" approach, since workers can bring claims for breach of contract or even constructive unfair dismissal.

Rachel Suff, senior employment relations adviser at the CIPD, said: "Rather than making sweeping decisions on issues like pay and how, where and when people work, businesses should aim to balance individual needs with the needs of the organisation.

"It would be quite near-sighted for employers to think about adjusting pay at this early point in hybrid working, given there are so many things to still be ironed out and many people are still yet to return to a physical workspace.

"Given the tight labour market, businesses also need to stay attractive and cutting pay could prove to be a false economy if it turns talent away."

'We want trillions to heal our wounds'

Historians call the 1904-08 period in what is now Namibia, the first genocide of the 20th Century


By Samantha Granville
in Windhoek, Namibia
Published5 days ago

In between the blue water of the Atlantic Ocean and the luscious golden dunes of the Namibian coast are the grounds of a former German concentration camp.

It was here at the start of the 20th Century where the Ovaherero and Nama people were subjected to sexual violence, forced labour and gruesome medical experiences. Many died of disease and exhaustion.

Uahimisa Kaapehi says his heart is heavy standing on the remains of his ancestors.

He is an ethnic Ovaherero descendent who is also a town councillor in the city of Swakopmund, where many of the atrocities took place.

Mr Kaapehi explains what happened generations ago still has a profound impact on his livelihood.

"Our wealth was taken, the farms, the cattle, everything, I was not supposed to suffer this as I'm talking," he says.

"And we - as the Ovaherero and Nama - are not supposed to be suffering."

Uahimisa Kaapehi calls the German settlement "the joke of the century"

Historians have called what happened between 1904 and 1908, in what is now Namibia, the first genocide of the 20th Century.

It is when German colonial forces displaced and killed thousands of Ovaherero and Nama people after an uprising against the colonial rulers.

It is estimated that 60,000 Ovaherero, more than 80% of the ethnic group's total population in the region, and 10,000 Nama, 50% of its population, were killed in this period.

In May, the German government for the first time formally recognised the colonial-era atrocities.

It acknowledged the massacres as a genocide, pledging to pay a "gesture to recognise the immense suffering inflicted". But Germany did not label the gesture as reparations.


'We want land'

It came out to €1.1bn ($1.3bn; £930m). It is understood the sum will be paid out over 30 years and must primarily benefit the descendants of the Ovaherero and Nama.

HULTON ARCHIVE Colonial forces brutally suppressed uprisings by the Ovaherero and Nama

But the descendants, including Mr Kaapei, do not believe the agreement is a sincere apology for what happened.

"That was the joke of the century," he says.

"We want our land. Money is nothing.

"We want them [the German government] to come and say an apology. The money is just to say what they did wrong to us.

"And we don't want a peanut. We want trillions. We want trillions that can heal our wounds."

Mr Kaapehi says his ethnic group lost a century of traditions, culture, and livelihoods - and it is impossible to put a price on that.

The land and natural resources that were taken, cemented his family into generational poverty.

Activists believe it is only fair if the German government buys back ancestral lands now in the hands of the German-speaking community, and returns it to the Ovaherero and Nama descendants.

'Pulling out the knife'

Yet the extent of the reparations has a bearing beyond Germany and Namibia - and could set a precedent for other countries with colonial pasts.

Captives taken after the Ovaherero rebellion were either killed or subjected to appalling brutality

US academics Kirsten Mullen and Sandy Darity, who support reparations for descendants of the slave trade, argue that this tends to mean any concessions made are likely to be small - and only given as a last resort.

In their book From Here to Equality they reference US human rights activist Malcolm X, who famously said: "You don't stick a knife in a man's back nine inches and then pull it out six inches and say you're making progress."

In the case of Germany and Namibia, Ms Mullen and Mr Darity agree that "developmental aid" does not necessarily count as healing the knife wound - it's only the first step.

"Pulling the knife out is not reparations, but it's essential. But it's not reparations. The reparative act is the healing of the wound," Mr Darity says.

"And so if you view these developmental funds as a form of pulling the knife out, then it's not reparations," Mr Darity says.

There is also some irony to reparations debate in Namibia, given that Germany in fact set a precedent in the 1890s.

German historian Horst Drechsler notes that before the genocide, Germany demanded reparations from the Ovaherero and Nama communities after they staged an uprising against the colonialists.

This had to be given in cattle - about 12,000 animals - estimated by German-American historian Thomas Craemer to be the modern equivalent of between $1.2m and $8.8m, which he argues should be added to the reparations.

For Mr Craemer, who specialises in reparations, Pandora's box is now open - and he says more widespread reparations to be paid by other former colonial powers are only a matter of time.

This is partly down to the changing demographics of majority white countries in the West where a more diverse population will force governments to face the grievances of the past.

"People are not [only] determined by the group to which they belong to. There is a possibility that people feel emotional solidarity with people that have been affected by historical injustice," Mr Craemer says.

"Even if they themselves are part of the group that committed the injustice."




Skulls of victims were sent back to Germany for eugenics research



More on this story

Why Germany's Namibia genocide apology isn't enough

Published1 June


What's the right price to pay for genocide?

Published1 April


What is genocide?

Published11 March


A 40-year search for a skull in Germany

Published13 November 2018

INTER-IMPERIALIST RIVALRY
Wagner: Scale of Russian mercenary mission in Libya exposed

By Ilya Barabanov & Nader Ibrahim
BBC News Russian & BBC News Arabic
Published 23 hours ago
Libya crisis

Wagner: Scale of Russian mercenary mission in Libya exposed


A BBC investigation has revealed the scale of operations by a shadowy Russian mercenary group in Libya's civil war, which includes links to war crimes and the Russian military.

A Samsung tablet left by a fighter for the Wagner group exposes its key role - as well as traceable fighter codenames.

And the BBC has a "shopping list" for state-of-the-art military equipment which expert witnesses say could only have come from Russian army supplies.

Russia denies any links to Wagner.

The group was first identified in 2014 when it was backing pro-Russian separatists in the conflict in eastern Ukraine. Since then, it has been involved in regions including Syria, Mozambique, Sudan, and the Central African Republic.

Wagner's fighters appeared in Libya in April 2019 when they joined the forces of a rebel general, Khalifa Haftar, after he launched an attack on the UN-backed government in the capital, Tripoli. The conflict ended in a ceasefire in October 2020.

Read the full investigation into the discarded Samsung and its secrets
WATCH: Inside the Wagner group

The group is notoriously secretive, but the BBC has managed to gain rare access to two former fighters. They revealed what type of person was joining Wagner - and its lack of any code of conduct.

There is little doubt that they kill prisoners - something one ex-fighter freely admits. "No-one wants an extra mouth to feed."

This supports other parts of the TV documentary - Haftar's Russian Mercenaries: Inside the Wagner Group - by BBC News Arabic and BBC News Russian. Its other revelations include evidence of suspected war crimes, including the intentional killing of civilians.

A Libyan villager shows images of a relative who was killed. The villager says he survived himself by playing dead

One Libyan villager describes how he played dead as his relatives were killed. His testimony helped the BBC team identify a suspected killer.

Describing another possible war crime, a Libyan government soldier also recalls how a comrade, his friend, surrendered to Wagner fighters but was shot twice in the stomach. The soldier has not seen him since, nor three other friends taken away at the same time.

The Samsung computer tablet also provides evidence of the mercenaries' involvement in the mining and booby-trapping of civilian areas.

Placing landmines without marking them is a war crime.

Just hours after the release of the BBC's report into Wagner's activities in Libya, the deputy public prosecutor at the Libyan Military Prosecutor's Office, Mohamed Gharouda, announced that an arrest warrant had been issued for the son of late Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi.

According to the order, which was released internally last week, Saif al-Islam Gaddafi is wanted on charges of war crimes committed by the group during Gen Haftar's offensive against the capital Tripoli.

He was arrested during the 2011 uprising in Libya and later sentenced to death in absentia over violence against protesters. In 2017, however, he was released by the militia holding him.

Saif al-Islam has long been suspected of having connections to Russia and the Wagner group, and is believed to be Moscow's favourite candidate to rule Libya.

The revealing Samsung tablet

The tablet was left behind by an unknown Wagner fighter after the group's fighters retreated from areas south of Tripoli in spring 2020.

Its contents include maps in Russian of the frontline, giving confirmation of Wagner's significant presence and an unprecedented insight into the group's operations.

Leaked UN report points finger at Wagner in Libya

There is drone footage and codenames of Wagner fighters, at least one of whom the BBC believes it has identified. The tablet is now in a secure location.

Military maps in Russian on the Samsung tablet

The 'shopping list'

A comprehensive list of weapons and military equipment is included in a 10-page document dated 19 January 2020, given to the BBC by a Libyan intelligence source and probably recovered from a Wagner location.

The document indicates who may be funding and backing the operation. It lists materiel needed for the "completion of military objectives" - including four tanks, hundreds of Kalashnikov rifles and a state-of-the-art radar system.

A military analyst told the BBC that some of the weapons technology would only be available from the Russian military. Another expert, a specialist on the Wagner group, said the list pointed to the involvement of Dmitry Utkin.

He is the ex-Russian military intelligence man believed to have founded Wagner and given it its name (his own former call-sign). The BBC tried to contact Dmitry Utkin but has received no reply.

And in our visual breakdown of the "shopping list" and another document, the expert says the words Evro Polis and General Director suggest the involvement of Yevgeny Prigozhin, a rich businessman close to President Vladimir Putin.

The US Treasury sanctioned Evro Polis in 2018, calling it a Russian company contracted to "protect" Syrian oil fields that were "owned or controlled" by Mr Prigozhin.

Powerful 'Putin's chef' Prigozhin

Investigations by Western journalists have linked Mr Prigozhin to Wagner. He has always denied any link to Evro Polis or Wagner.

A spokesperson told the BBC that Yevgeny Prigozhin has nothing to do with Evro Polis or Wagner. Mr Prigozhin commented that he had not heard anything on the violation of human rights in Libya by Russians: "I am sure that this is an absolute lie."

Russia's Ministry of Foreign Affairs told the BBC it is doing "its utmost to promote a ceasefire and a political settlement to the crisis in Libya."

The ministry added that details about Wagner in Libya are mostly based on "rigged data" and were aimed at "discrediting Russia's policy" in Libya.

What is Wagner? Its ex-fighters speak

Officially, it does not exist - but up to 10,000 people are believed to have taken at least one contract with Wagner since it emerged fighting alongside pro-Russian separatists in eastern Ukraine in 2014.

About 1,000 Wagner men are estimated to have fought with Gen Khalifa Haftar in Libya from 2019 to 2020.

The BBC in Russia asked one of the ex-fighters to describe Wagner. He replied: "It is a structure, aimed at promoting the interests of the state beyond our country's borders."

As for its fighters, he said they were either "professionals of war", people looking for a job, or romantics looking to serve their country.

The other ex-fighter told the BBC there were no clear rules of conduct. If a captured prisoner had no knowledge to pass on, or could not work as a "slave", then "the result is obvious".

Andrey Chuprygin, an expert working with the Russia International Council, said the stance of the Russian government was - "let them join this thing, and we'll see what the result is. If it works out well, we can use it to our advantage. If it turns out badly, then we had nothing to do with it".





Libya - a decade of turmoil

THANKS TO NATO FOR THE RAPE AND MURDER OF GADDAFI 

Downfall of Gaddafi in 2011: Col Muammar Gaddafi's more than four decades of rule end in an Arab Spring uprising. He tries to flee but is captured and killed

The country splinters: After 2014, major competing factions emerge in the east and west

The advance on Tripoli in April 2019: Gen Haftar, leader of the eastern forces, advances on Tripoli and the UN-backed government there. Both sides get military and diplomatic support from different regional powers, despite a UN arms embargo

Ceasefire in October 2020: Then in early 2021 a new unity government is chosen and sworn in, to take the nation to elections in December. Foreign fighters and mercenaries were supposed to have left, but thousands remain

ARYAN FASCISM; CASTISM, FEMICIDE & MISOGYNY
Dalit girl rape and murder: Indians protest over girl's forced cremation

By Salman Ravi
BBC Hindi, Delhi
Published4 August
image captionProtesters outside the crematorium are demanding the death penalty for the accused


Protests are continuing for the fourth day over the alleged gang rape, murder and forced cremation of a nine-year-old girl in the Indian capital, Delhi.


The girl's parents have accused a Hindu priest and three others of attacking her when she had gone to fetch drinking water from the crematorium's cooler.


Her mother said the gates were shut and she was threatened when she objected to her daughter's cremation.


Police have registered a case of gang rape and murder and arrested the men.


Warning: some readers may find this story distressing.


The girl's parents are Dalits - formerly untouchables - who make a living by begging outside a Sufi Muslim shrine located just across from the cremation ground in Delhi's Nangal area. The girl was their only child.

Her mother told me that on Sunday evening, she had sent her daughter to fetch water from the crematorium, just a few metres from their shanty.

"When she didn't return for over an hour, I went searching for her. At the crematorium, I found her lying on the ground. Her lips were blue, there was blood under her nose, she had bruises on her hands and arms and her clothes were wet."

She said the priest and the three men advised her not to call the police, saying "they would insist on an autopsy and steal her organs and sell them".

What do Delhi rape hangings mean for women?

The pregnant child caught in a media storm

She alleged that they shut the gates to prevent her from leaving, threatened her and even offered to bribe her.

The child's father said that by the time he, along with about 150 villagers, reached the crematorium, their daughter's body was mostly burned.

The villagers said they called the police and doused the pyre with water, but could only retrieve her legs - which means a post mortem exam to confirm rape would not be possible

A senior police official said that based on the information from the parents, a case of gang rape, murder and forced cremation had been registered against the accused.

Protesters have burnt effigies of PM Narendra Modi for not condemning the crime

The incident is drawing comparisons with last year's alleged gang rape and murder of a Dalit teen by four upper-caste men in the town of Hathras in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh. That incident had caused global outrage after police forcibly cremated her body despite her family's protests.

Dalits, who are placed at the bottom of the unforgiving Hindu caste hierarchy, remain among India's most downtrodden citizens.

A large majority of the 200 million Dalits are poor and despite laws to protect them, they continue to be subjected to daily discrimination from the upper castes and the authorities.

And Dalit women face the triple burden of poverty, gender bias and caste discrimination.

On Wednesday, hundreds of protesters gathered outside the Nangal cremation ground, demanding the death penalty for the accused.

They also called for some local police officials to be suspended, accusing them of harassing the victim's family.

Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal and senior leader of the opposition Congress Party Rahul Gandhi visited the child's family and offered to help them get justice.

Protesters from the Congress burnt an effigy of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, accusing him of not condemning the crime.

A fatal assault, a cremation and no goodbye

A woman reported rape. Why are police denying it?

Over the past few days, leaders from the Dalit community have participated in the protests and activists and citizens have taken to social media to express outrage.

Some have already dubbed it a caste crime - as the accused priest is reported to be an upper-caste Brahmin.

Since the 2012 gang rape and murder of a young woman on a bus in Delhi, rape and sexual violence have been under the spotlight in India.

That attack saw days of protests and forced changes to the country's rape laws, but there has been no sign of crimes against women and girls abating.

According to recent crime figures, every fourth rape victim in India is a child. In an overwhelming number of rape cases, the victims know the perpetrators.

SEE LA REVUE GAUCHE - Left Comment: Hinduism Is Fascism 

The struggle to secure access to abortion in Argentina goes on

The Argentinian government must continue to dismantle barriers women face in accessing safe abortion.


Mariela Belski
Executive director of Amnesty International Argentina
9 Aug 2021

Demonstrators in favour of legalising abortion react after the Senate passed an abortion bill, in Buenos Aires, Argentina on December 30, 2020 [File: Reuters/Agustin Marcarian]


In recent months, Argentinians have had access to legal abortion for the first time. In December, Argentina became the fourth in Latin America to legalise abortion after the National Congress passed the Voluntary Termination of Pregnancy Law

Securing this right for women and pregnant persons was a milestone achievement and the culmination of decades of struggle, setbacks and progress. Now, new challenges emerge: the effective implementation of the law across a vast and unequal territory and the legal battles filed by conservative groups in the nation’s courts.

Amnesty International is currently monitoring the enforcement of the Voluntary Termination of Pregnancy Law. We have examined at least 33 lawsuits that challenged the law, 20 of which have already been dismissed – at least three of these dismissals are final.

So far, none of the suits filed against the Argentine state claiming that the law is unconstitutional has been successful. Despite some judges being willing to put their religious or personal interests before the rights of women and pregnant persons, in general terms, the judiciary has shown itself to be a guarantor of human rights and, hopefully, it will continue to resist the attacks that attempt to overturn a law approved by a vast majority of Argentina’s Congress.

An additional challenge faced by citizens who want to access this service is that Argentina is a federal state in which each of the 24 jurisdictional authorities is free to determine their own health policies. There are also wide economic and social inequality gaps between the provinces, varying levels of ecclesiastical influence and marked ideological differences between federal governments. These factors all impact the effectiveness of the implementation of the Voluntary Termination of Pregnancy law.

In many rural areas, sexual and reproductive health services and trained staff are still unavailable. The province of Catamarca, for example, is home to more than 124,000 women and people of childbearing capacity, according to the National Institute of Statistics and Censuses, but, in a response to a freedom of information request by Amnesty International Argentina, the Ministry of Health in Catamarca revealed the region only has two healthcare centres that guarantee access to services for the voluntary termination of a pregnancy.

The province of Buenos Aires, home to 40 percent of the national population, has made significant progress, yet 36 of its 135 districts still do not offer this service. As this is a national law, anyone should be able to get an abortion no later than 10 days after they request it, irrespective of their place of residence. Delays or obstructions represent a violation to their rights.

Access to information is also key to making free decisions. The government has still not organised massive information campaigns to help people know their rights and the options available to them when deciding to terminate a pregnancy.

It is also necessary to have quality nationwide statistical data to have diagnostic tools in connection with the progress and the challenges in the implementation of the law at a federal level. It is also essential to guarantee that students have access to comprehensive sex education, a policy that is experiencing some obstructions in certain jurisdictions.

Abortion access procedures have presented some issues that need to be overcome. The authorities must approve the production and sale of mifepristone, a drug recommended by the World Health Organization, which has been on the list of essential medicines since 2005. This drug, combined with misoprostol, boosts the efficacy of pregnancy terminations and speeds up the process.

Likewise, it is essential to improve the accessibility to interventions using manual vacuum aspiration (MVA), since almost all provinces continue to perform curettage, a less safe method that should be reserved only for those cases where other options are not available.

The women’s rights movement has a lot to celebrate. Argentina has brought abortions out of clandestine settings thanks to activism, research and vital public debates. This same path continues to inspire activists across the region, who also seek sexual and reproductive autonomy. The green wave keeps spreading across Latin America and will surely bring new victories in the recognition of women’s rights.


The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.

Time to challenge Argentina’s white European self-image, black history experts say


New generation of researchers say country must confront its ‘erasure of blackness’ and the structural racism that exists now

Couples dancing tango in Argentina, in this undated photo. Seven million Europeans migrated to Argentina between 1850 and 1950. Photograph: Ullstein Bild/Getty Images


Uki Goñi in Buenos Aires
Mon 31 May 2021 

Argentina has long taken pride in its European heritage. The mass migration of 7 million Europeans, mostly Spanish and Italian, between 1850 and 1950, created a racial profile many Argentinians feel distinguishes their country from the rest of Latin America even today.

“Mexicans descend from the Aztecs, Peruvians from the Incas – but Argentinians descend from the ships,” goes an old saying that encapsulates Argentina’s perception of itself as a nation of transplanted white Europeans.


Paraguay still haunted by cataclysmic war that nearly wiped it off the map

But that Eurocentric view is being vehemently disputed as not only outdated but also factually untrue by a generation of young Afro-descendant researchers and activists who wish to rewrite the accepted version of Argentinian history.

“Argentina needs to understand that it is both very racist and very Afro,” said black activist and researcher Alí Delgado.

University lecturer Patricia Gomes is another Afro-descendant researcher intent on demolishing Argentina’s mythical self-image as a white nation. “In Argentina it used to be said that here there were no blacks, therefore there was no one to be racist with – and hence there was no racism,” she said.

Delgado and Gomes point to recent studies of population surveys and genetics that paint a far different picture from Argentina’s accepted history: one recent study concluded that up to 9% of today’s Argentinians may have ancestry from Africa.

The reason is simple: between the 16th and 19th centuries – long before the wave of European migration – more than 200,000 enslaved Africans arrived at the twin ports of the River Plate, Buenos Aires and Montevideo, capital cities of what are now Argentina and Uruguay.

“The number of slaves who arrived to the region of the River Plate is almost half of those who arrived in the US, which gives an idea of the magnitude of slave traffic in the River Plate region,” according to Alex Borucki, a Uruguayan academic at the University of California Irvine, who co-manages the SlaveVoyages website that traces every ship carrying enslaved people that reached the Americas.

In a sign of the changing perceptions of Argentina’s racial identity, Gomes and Delgado are teaching Argentina’s first ever university courses on the subject.

Their two-month series of lectures for law students at the University of Buenos Aires in March and April was booked solid. Another two-month course will follow in August and September, and the pair are also considering an open seminar for the general public.

Gomes and Delgado argue that the idea of a European Argentina was a fabrication imposed by racist 19th-century leaders to erase Argentina’s rich black culture from the nation’s collective consciousness.

Gabino Ezeiza, a famed Argentinian payada musician, in this picture from 1891. Photograph: Alamy

In 1778, Africans and Afro-descendants made up 37% of the population of what is now Argentina, according to a census by its Spanish colonialist rulers. In some major provinces the proportion was more than 50%.

That number did not drop significantly after independence from Spain in 1816: Afro-descendants accounted for 30% of the population of Buenos Aires for decades after independence. But after that, the number is unknown, because Argentina’s census bureau stopped collecting racial information.

“Census data was manipulated to erase us first from the statistics – and then from the history books,” says Gomes. “From the end of the 19th century the state meticulously began to make us invisible to present Argentina as homogeneous and of European descent.”

Argentina’s “whitening process” has been studied in depth by US academic Erika Edwards in her book Hiding in Plain Sight, published last year by University of Alabama Press.

“The whitening project was a successful endeavor in terms of the erasure of blackness,” said Edwards. “The idea that somebody could be the descendant of a slave is just not there.”

That belief in a strictly European Argentina continues to percolate. “We are all descendants from Europe,” said President Mauricio Macri at the 2018 World Economic Forum in Davos.

It wasn’t until the 2010 census that an option was included for Argentinians wishing to self-identify as Afro-descendants. “That inclusion was very important but unfortunately it was restricted to only a small segment of the population, with the resulting projection suggesting that only half a percent of the population self-identify that way,” said Gomes.

Delgado and Gomes prefer data from a 2005 study conducted by Afro-descendant researchers that projects 5% of the population as having at least one African forebear.

Black slaves pay homage to the 19th-century politician Juan Manuel de Rosas. Photograph: CPA Media Pte Ltd/Alamy

A genetic study conducted by the University of Brasília in 2008 reached a different conclusion, finding that 9% of current-day Argentinians are of African ancestry.

Argentina’s pro-European immigration policy was initiated under its 1853 constitution at a time when the country’s post-independence thinkers and politicians were obsessed with the dichotomy of Civilization and Barbarism – the title of a 1845 book by Domingo Sarmiento, the country’s seventh president. In this Manichean view, Afro-descendants were placed squarely on the barbarism end of the scale.

“If it was not possible to physically eliminate Argentina’s Afro-descendants, the decision was to at least eliminate them symbolically, to create a discourse that there are no blacks in Argentina, that Brazil has that problem,” says Edwards.


Their forefathers were enslaved. Now, 400 years later, their children will be landowners

The entrenched poverty of many Afro-descendants goes hand in hand with Argentina’s structural racism, says Delgado.

“There are no black journalists or politicians, but Argentina’s poor barrios are full of Afro-descendants. So are our prisons, just like in the United States.”

Most present-day Afro-descendants are of mixed race because of inter-marriage between the male European immigrants who arrived after 1850 and Argentinian women of African descent.

“In the US, a drop of black blood makes you black, but in Argentina a drop of white blood makes you white,” said Gomes. “In a society where Afro-descendants were marginalized, many Afro-descendant families emphasized their whiteness to save themselves. They ripped up old photos and denied the existence of a black relative.”

The popularity of the two academics’ courses suggest that Argentina is finally opening up a long-postponed debate about race and identity.

“It’s time for Argentinians to take their black grandmother out of the closet,” said Delgado.

In 1972, Melvin McNair helped hijack a plane to join 

Black Panthers in Algeria. ‘I am at peace with what I did.’

In exile in France, McNair has built a life around community service and baseball. He is wanted by authorities in the U.S. for his 50-year-old crime.

Kim Hjelmgaard, USA TODAY
Published  Jul. 29, 2021
ILLUSTRATIONS BY VERONICA BRAVO

SPECIAL FEATURE LONG READ

1972: Melvin McNair hijacked a plane to join Black Panthers in Algeria (usatoday.com)

‘First martyr of the voting rights movement’: How a Black man’s death in 1965 changed American history

ILLUSTRATION BY MARA CORBETT; GANNETT ARCHIVES

Like George Floyd, Jimmie Lee Jackson’s killing by police inspired a movement. His death led to equal voting rights, but his name has been forgotten.

Javonte Anderson, USA TODAY
Published May. 20, 2021

LONG READ FEATURE

Like George Floyd, Jimmie Lee Jackson’s death sparked a movement (usatoday.com)

 

USA TODAY project Never Been Told shares stories of people of color

#BDS

At Risk in Israel’s Backlash Against Ben and Jerry’s? The Right to Protest.

Israel’s push to punish the ice cream company is part of a larger offensive against Palestine activists—one that mirrors the broader right-wing assault on social justice movements.

By Amira Mattar

THE NATION
TODAY 5:00 AM

A business sign hangs over the entrance to a Ben & Jerry’s ice cream shop. (Robert Alexander / Getty Images)

Ben and Jerry’s recently announced that it will not renew its agreement with its Israeli licensee when it expires in 2022, stating that it is “inconsistent” with the brand’s values “to be sold in the Occupied Palestinian Territory (OPT).” The decision, which has created tension between the brand’s independent board and its British parent company, Unilever, was the culmination of years of pressure from Palestine advocates and, more recently, the Movement for Black Lives, which views the fight for Palestinian rights as integral to the struggle for Black freedom.

Much has been written about Israel’s relentless offensive against the ice cream company. But less has been said about the consequences for Americans’ right to protest if our constitutional right to boycott is gutted per Israel’s requests. As a Palestinian and lawyer supporting those who face a cruel backlash for supporting Palestinian rights, I can tell you that these efforts are only the tip of a larger assault on all of our rights to speak out for justice.

Almost as soon as Ben and Jerry’s announced its decision, Israel and its US lobby got to work threatening the ice cream company for heeding calls to end corporate profits made at the expense of Palestinian human rights. Israel’s prime minister warned Unilever that Israel plans to respond “aggressively” to the decision. Its president classified it as a form of “terrorism.” An ambassador sent a letter to the governors of 35 US states calling on them to enforce laws aimed at blocking boycotts against Israel for its violence against Palestinians.

The message to others in corporate America was clear: Support Palestinian human rights, and we will make you pay.

The reaction from Israel and its allies is familiar and expected. The pro-Israel lobby has vowed countless times before to punish entities that disturb the business of Israeli apartheid or criticize Israel for denying Palestinians their rights. (Only three years ago, pro-Israel advocates sounded the alarm on Airbnb for delisting properties on illegal Jewish-only settlements, hounding the company with harassing legal threats until it walked back its decision.) And, since 2014, Israel and its allies have tried to lock down a growing movement for Palestinian rights by pushing legislation in the US targeting boycotts, divestment, and sanctions that seek to hold Israel accountable for its violations of international law.

My organization, Palestine Legal, has tracked how more than 30 states have enacted laws that prohibit state contracts and/or investments in entities that boycott or divest from Israel. Some create McCarthyite blacklists of boycotters. Others require vendors servicing the state to pledge in writing that they will not boycott Israel for the duration of the contract. Hundreds more copycat measures have been put forward across the country by Israel-supporting lawmakers.

This is why the Israeli prime minister could warn Unilever and Ben and Jerry’s that “severe consequences, including legal” were in store.

But when these laws are challenged in court, federal judges have determined that a number of them are unconstitutional—and blocked them. Courts have been clear: Politically motivated boycotts dwell at the heart of First Amendment–protected activities. The Supreme Court ruled that boycotts against white-owned businesses in the Jim Crow South were protected. And courts have recently and repeatedly declared that boycotts protesting Israel’s human rights abuses are no different. Elected officials, Republicans and Democrats alike, who have taken up Israel’s appeal to punish Ben and Jerry’s are exhibiting their pro-Israel bona fides at the expense of all of our First Amendment rights.

These legislative attacks on our right to boycott are central to a broader right-wing assault on social justice movements as a whole. States are criminalizing protests by Indigenous and environmental activists fighting against pipelines and by Black Lives Matter activists protesting police violence. They are introducing similar laws to punish companies that divest from the fossil fuel industry. If boycotts for Palestinian rights are the first to be targeted, what is next? Ultimately what is at stake here is our right to dissent.

Let’s also be clear: Israel’s pleas to activate constitutionally suspect laws do more than enlist our government in undermining our rights and in shielding it from accountability. They are part of Israel’s strategy of swallowing the West Bank and East Jerusalem.

Israel’s visceral reaction to Ben and Jerry’s announcement to withdraw from the Occupied Palestinian Territory reveals that it will go after even those who attempt to distinguish Israel inside the Green Line from its illegal settlements—a line that Israel itself has blurred physically and economically (and a blurring the United States has furthered). Israel passed a law imposing penalties on boycotters of Israel and areas it controls, including the illegal settlements. The settlements themselves are so thoroughly intertwined with Israel’s market that it is practically impossible to pull out from selling products in the Occupied Territory without ending ties with Israel altogether—an ironic, self-inflicted consequence of trying to fortify a single state based on supremacy, spanning from the river to the sea.

This racist design—to occupy, empty, and annex the whole of Palestine—requires the forced dispossession of millions of refugees and a continued brutal military suppression of Palestinians who remain in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem. It requires maintaining a deadly siege on Gaza, where Palestinians and the infrastructure they rely on become fish in a barrel with every high-tech Israeli bombardment. It requires upholding nearly 60-plus laws that deny Palestinian citizens of Israel rights equal to Jewish citizens’.

This is a critical moment. The legacy of last year’s racial justice uprisings taught us that it is possible to shake a nation awake to interrogate systems of oppression at its roots—from white supremacy in the United States to settler-colonialism in Palestine. Grassroots movements are welcoming new voices and growing as a result. Attacks on people’s right to make demands for a freer future—from Standing Rock, to Black Lives Matter, to freedom for Palestinians—underscore the risk to all of our rights to protest for justice.


Amira MattarAmira Mattar is the Michael Ratner Justice Fellow at Palestine Legal, an organization that challenges efforts to censor and repress advocates who speak out for Palestinian rights.

Multiple Lebanese officials ‘criminally negligent’ for Beirut blast: Human Rights Watch
By Staff Reuters
Posted August 3, 2021 7:33 am

WATCH: Beirut explosion: Drone footage shows port and its surroundings 1 year after deadly blast.


A report released by Human Rights Watch on Tuesday concluded there was strong evidence to suggest some Lebanese officials knew about and tacitly accepted the lethal risks posed by ammonium nitrate stored at Beirut port before the fatal blast there on Aug. 4 last year.


HRW called for a U.N. investigation into the explosion, which was caused by the chemicals stored unsafely at the port for years and killed more than 200 people, injured thousands and destroyed swathes of Lebanon’s capital.

The report by the international rights watchdog contained over 700 pages of findings and documents. Its investigation also concluded there was evidence that multiple Lebanese authorities were criminally negligent under Lebanese law.

Some Lebanese officials knew about 2020 Beirut blast risks, took no action: Human Rights WatchSome Lebanese officials knew about 2020 Beirut blast risks, took no action: Human Rights Watch – Aug 3, 2021

HRW said President Michel Aoun, caretaker Prime Minister Hassan Diab, director general of state security Tony Saliba and other former ministers wanted for questioning by judge Bitar, had failed to take action to protect the general public despite having been informed of the risks.

Reuters sought comment on the report’s findings from Aoun, Diab and Saliba.

The presidential palace offered no comment. Saliba said his agency did all it could within its legal remit, filing legal reports to warn officials, and had an office open at the port only months before the blast. There was no immediate response from Diab.

READ MORE: Lebanon’s prime minister among those charged with negligence in Beirut explosion

Aoun said on Friday he was ready to testify and that no one was above the law. HRW based its report on official documents it reviewed and on multiple interviews with top officials including the president, the caretaker prime minister and the head of the country’s state security.

The investigation trailed events from 2014 onwards after the shipment was brought to Beirut port and tracked repeated warnings of danger to various official bodies.

“Evidence strongly suggests that some government officials foresaw the death that the ammonium nitrate’s presence in the port could result in and tacitly accepted the risk of the deaths occurring,” the report said.

0:45 Beirut explosion: Signs of life detected at building destroyed by blast – Sep 3, 2020

It called on the United Nations Human Rights Council to mandate an investigation into the blast and on foreign governments to impose human rights and corruption sanctions on officials.

A Lebanese investigation into the blast, led by Judge Tarek Bitar, has stalled. Politicians and senior security officials are yet to be questioned and requests to lift their immunity have been hindered.

A document seen by Reuters that was sent just over two weeks before the blast showed the president and prime minister were warned about the security risk posed by the chemicals stored at the port and that they could destroy the capital.

(Writing By Maha El Dahan, Editing by Timothy Heritage)

Art Criticism

Huguette Caland Is One of Lebanon’s Most Famous Artists. But a Big Part of Her Story Has Remained Hidden

“Huguette Caland: Tête-à-Tête” looks at an artist who is also the daughter of one of Lebanon's most famous politicians.

Ben Davis, July 21, 2021

Installation view of “Huguette Caland: Tête-à-Tête” at the Drawing Center. Photo by Ben Davis.


There’s plenty to say about Huguette Caland, on the occasion of “Huguette Caland: Tête-à-Tête” at the Drawing Center, a lovely (if too small) survey of her career, curated by Claire Gilman and Isabella Kapur.

Caland is an increasingly important figure in recent art history, her rise coinciding both with a surge of interest in overlooked women artists and the mounting political instability in her country of birth, Lebanon, which has put a spotlight on its history and culture. After a lifetime of mainly minor successes (she died in 2019), her reputation sharply spiked in her final years, during which she was celebrated in the “Made in L.A.” biennial in 2016, the Venice Biennale in 2017, and at the Tate St. Ives and the Sharjah Biennial in 2019.


Elegant and free spirited, Caland was a painter, sometimes sculptor, and designer of arty kaftans. Her paintings and drawings—and, indeed, even her kaftans—have an often frank, surrealist-tinged eroticism, featuring interlocking body parts and faces emerging from tangles of lines.

Huguette Caland, Bribes de Corps (Body Bits) (1973). Photo by Ben Davis.

If I were going to write a review of the show, I would say that its best works were the “Bribes de Corps” or “Body Bits” paintings of the early to mid ‘70s. These feature curvaceous, colored shapes, given just enough definition to make you understand that they double as up-close rolls of flesh, bodies smooshed together or zoomed in on. After that, I like her late-period abstractions, intricate, richly colored grids of interlocking patterns inspired by Palestinian textiles.

But I’ve been reading everything available about Huguette Caland for a week, and I am left a bit vexed. So instead of writing an ordinary review I decided that the most interesting question raised by the show is about how her life story gets told, and what is left out, and why.


Installation view of “Huguette Caland: Tête-à-Tête” at the Drawing Center. Photo by Ben Davis.

A Complicated Inheritance

All accounts of Huguette Caland’s life story contain the same important piece of background info: That she is the daughter of Bechara el-Khoury, a towering political figure and the first president of independent Lebanon in 1943.

El-Khoury is often described in the writing about Caland as a “national hero”—which is certainly true. Lebanon’s independence day celebrates the day he and other leaders were released from prison by the French authorities in 1943; Huguette had her first one-person show, in 1970, at an art center located on “Bechara el-Khoury Avenue.”

Installation view of “Huguette Caland: Tête-à-Tête” at the Drawing Center, featuring a portrait of the artist. Photo by Ben Davis.


But his legacy, it seems, was also somewhat tarnished by the circumstances of the end of his tenure. In everything I have read about Caland, I find no mention of how he fell from power, or what it might have meant to her. (In the most authoritative English essay about Caland’s early life, from the monograph Everything Takes the Shape of a Person, critic Kaelen Wilson-Goldie deals with this moment in a single parenthetical statement: “his nine-year-term as president had ended in 1952.”)

It may be that, given the suffering of Lebanon in subsequent decades, the upheaval of ‘52 has come to seem quaint. But it was not obscure, the first national crisis of the young nation. Bechara el-Khoury and the circle around him had become increasingly associated with corruption and nepotism. As one book put it, the family had become known for having “a finger in every business deal and every senior governmental appointment and realizing money from both.” Among other things, Huguette’s mother was caught taking $100,000 in gold to Paris, an embarrassment that was denounced in parliament, opening the floodgates of scandal.

Opposition factions united against him. A general strike paralyzed the country. El-Khoury appealed to the military to crush the rebellion.

When the military refused, in what is to this day remembered as a heroic act of neutrality, Bechara el-Khoury gave up power in the peaceful Rosewater Revolution. Huguette was 20.

Installation view of “Huguette Caland: Tête-à-Tête” at the Drawing Center. Photo by Ben Davis.

A Child of Independence

This drama predates Huguette’s becoming an artist by more than a decade. The very same year her father had to give up the presidency, 1952, she married Paul Caland, a young French-Lebanese lawyer and nephew of publisher Georges Naccache, a fierce critic of her father, connected to yet another exceptionally influential Maronite Christian family. (The two families were associated with rival political newspapers; Naccache had been thrown in prison in 1949 for an article saying—prophetically—that the system of political compromises that el-Khoury had founded the nation on was too fragile to last.)


They both soon took lovers, even as they had three children, Pierre, Philippe, and Brigitte. Bechara el-Khoury would die of cancer in 1964, with Huguette helping to nurse him at the family estate outside of Beirut. It was only then that she seriously thought of being an artist, enrolling in her mid-30s to study art at American University, constructing a personal studio to work on her family estate, and changing her entire look.

Huguette Caland, works from the “Homage to Public Hair” series (1992). Photo by Ben Davis.

Huguette had always struggled with her weight, and decided now to cease wearing Western fashions and to take up the loose-fitting abaya as more suitable to her shape. Her husband hated the change, calling them “sacks of potatoes.” Acquaintances in Lebanese society were said to think that “Sheikh Bechara’s daughter became crazy.”

In 1970, at the age of 39, Huguette Caland would abruptly leave her husband, her three children, and Lebanon, moving to Paris to live as an artist. The unconventional midlife turn was a dramatic act of self-realization and self-creation. “I wanted to have my own identity,” Caland said of her decision to seek an artist’s life abroad. “In Lebanon, I was the daughter of, wife of, mother of, sister of. It was such a freedom, to wake up all by myself in Paris. I needed to stretch.”

At the same time, she would remember that the deliberate estrangement was made easier because she saw her children often, given that they traveled as official swimming champions on the French national team, representing the former colonial power—her son Pierre Caland swam for France at the 1972 Munich Olympics. (Pierre went on to become a financier. Her other son, Philippe, became a film producer, making the infamous Hollywood disaster Boxing Helena, and touching off an international protest by Buddhist monks for his movie Hollywood Buddha—a film that features Huguette in the role of “mom.” Daughter Brigitte teaches Semitic languages at American University, is a chef, and, since 2005, has managed her mother’s legacy.)

Installation view of “Huguette Caland: Tête-à-Tête” at the Drawing Center. Photo by Ben Davis.

In Paris, Caland deepened her explorations into erotic abstraction. She also, famously, met fashion designer Pierre Cardin who, liking her billowy, self-decorated clothing, had her design “Nour,” a line of kaftans (four of these unique creations are shown in the Drawing Center on custom, surrealist mannequins). “It was the only job I ever had in my life,” she boasted. I haven’t been able to find any explanation of how she lived as an artist who had only a handful of shows and proudly only did paid work a single time, but I assume that family money was somehow involved.


In the late ’80s, following the death of a lover, Romanian sculptor George Apostu, she would move to California. There, she had an architect build her a luxurious “chateau fort,” constructed with no interior walls—not even around the bedroom or bathroom. (A 2003 L.A. Times story about the house’s delightful architecture won Caland some of her first major press in English.) She held court there, made friends in the local artist community, and perfected radiant, free-flowing abstractions that captured her restless, happy temperament.


Huguette Caland, Bodrum (2008). Photo by Ben Davis.

In 2013, at 82, she returned to Beirut to attend to the sick Paul Caland, with whom she had never lost touch.
Phantom Threads

One aspect of Caland’s career that doesn’t get enough attention—perhaps her clearest act of commitment to a cause—was the founding of INAASH, a United Nations NGO, in 1969. The still-existing organization helps Palestinian women living in refugee camps within Lebanon learn traditional embroidery and sell it. This may seem like an aside here, but it’s relevant in that Palestinian embroidery patterns inspired Caland’s beautiful late work.



Huguette Caland, Appleton (2009). Photo by Ben Davis.

Many accounts give “Huguette El-Khoury Caland” sole credit for the organization, touting her influence as the daughter of the former president. Others mention two other women, Shermine Hneine and Gebran Majdalani, and say that a Palestinian, Serene Husseini Shahid, convinced these doyennes of Lebanese society to focus the organization on preserving Palestinian embroidery traditions after being enraged to see Palestinian textiles being sold as “Israeli” in New York.

By all accounts, Caland was moved by the plight of Palestinians displaced from their homeland. She reportedly had two busses of refugees brought to see her 1970 show at Dar El Fan art center.

Three and a half decades later, in 2006, a curator’s glimpse of Palestinian embroidery on pillows in Caland’s luxurious Venice home would inspire the Los Angeles Craft and Art and Folk Art Museum to do “Sovereign Threads: A History of Palestinian Embroidery,” with Caland helping to fund the show and make the curatorial connections.

Huguette Caland, City (2010). Photo by Ben Davis.

But the state of the available writing on Caland is such that I’m not quite sure, after days of reading, how one squares the narrative of her commitment to refugee women via INAASH with the narrative of her making a clean break with her responsibilities in a feminist act of self-invention for Paris—something that happened directly after the NGO’s founding. I’d like to know more!
Huguette Caland Now

On a Lebanese arts-and-culture chat show some years ago, daughter Brigitte Caland was asked what her famous mother would want an audience to take away from her work. “To like her art without thinking about a nationality or gender,” was the reply.

This is likely not a line that resonates with most of Caland’s fans just now, smacking of a dated universalism that directly contradicts the feminist and post-colonial types of criticism that have helped elevate her legacy in recent years. For me, that’s the reason to interrogate her biography a bit, because her personal story is explicitly being used to lend its aura to the art.



Huguette Caland, works from the “Homage to Public Hair” series (1992). Photo by Ben Davis.

The Drawing Center is playing the informative documentary, Huguette Caland: Outside the Lines (produced by Brigitte). In it, Kaelen Wilson-Goldie (who also reviewed the show) admits that Caland didn’t want to be called a feminist. “But it’s what you want out of feminist art which is seeing feminism in action, which is how you live your day to day,” she says.

Caland was certainly a fascinating character, living on her own terms, embracing sexual and creative freedom far in advance of what was on offer. At the same time, contemporary feminist theory has labored mightily to get out from under the class- and race-blind rhetoric that inflected the largely white, largely middle-class Second Wave in the ‘70s in the U.S. A contemporary intersectional approach, it seems to me, needn’t deny the substance of her rebellion, but might put some more focus on clarifying how Caland’s specific social position, coming from the very literal ruling class of a nation, gave her access to forms of self-actualization that most women didn’t and don’t have.

The habit of invoking her family’s political status, but in a purely mythologizing way, is more vexing—particularly right now.


Viewers watch Letters to Huguette at the Drawing Center. Photo by Ben Davis.

A second film at the Drawing Center, the meditative Letters to Huguette by great Lebanese photographer Fouad Elkoury, explicitly seeks to connect Huguette Caland’s seemingly self-focused artistic philosophy and today’s general interest in activism. It juxtaposes interviews of the elderly artist talking about her painting practice with images of the earth-shaking 2019 street protests in Beirut and then the near-collapse of the country under coronavirus in 2020.

Speaking of one young street protester, the narrator addresses himself to Caland: “just like you, he wants to affirm the rights of the individual.” The protesters on the streets, we are told, will “inevitably echo your own fight for freedom”—a heartfelt but odd tribute that seems to compare young people literally occupying the streets in collective political action to Caland leaving the country to pursue her passions on her own.


The film strikes a completely different note from the erotic fragments and sunnily abstract works we see in the actual show.

Letters to Huguette symbolically links Caland’s art to the spirit of contemporary protest by showing her talking about the fear she felt as a girl when her father was a pro-Lebanese independence activist being harassed by the French authorities. But isn’t it even slightly relevant, in the context of a film about anti-corruption protests, that her father was himself once targeted by anti-corruption protests?

The film briefly mentions, in one line, that Bechara el-Khoury himself designed the dysfunctional political system based on institutionalized religious division that the protesters are trying to tear down, while Huguette personally disapproved of this system—but the tension is not really explored. When the film shows us Huguette Caland holding forth on politics, she basically says that people from different backgrounds should get along. (Her daughter and advocate Brigitte stated on that chat show quite clearly, “She was born in a political house but I don’t think politics mattered to her.”)

To be clear: I like Huguette Caland’s art and I like this show! What I am getting at, anyway, is a much larger pattern: art history has a tendency to default to notions of artists as heroes, and to turn art into an all-purpose form of social wisdom. And so, because we like Caland’s work and want to make the case for it, the parts of her biography that resonate with contemporary narratives are emphasized, and anything that complicates the picture is deemphasized.

But isn’t it better—either to understand her art or to understand the forces shaping our own world—to emphasize that artists are not in any intrinsic way heroic, but people who are sometimes relatable and insightful, but often privileged or compromised, and sometimes inspiring, but not always in ways that you either could or would want to follow? How unfortunate an irony would it be if the very act of bringing a Lebanese artist into the center of art history becomes a way to create a subtly skewed view of Lebanese history?

“Huguette Caland: Tête-à-Tête” is on view at the Drawing Center, New York, through September 19, 2021.

Follow Artnet News on Facebook: