Linda's Blogspot

  Who Gets to Document the Culture?  I have been thinking about cameras. Not cameras as expensive pieces of equipment. Not cameras as a way to produce beautiful photographs. I have been thinking about the camera as a historical tool. And that led me to a question: Who gets to document African American culture? I don't mean who is allowed to take a photograph. Anyone can take a photograph. I mean something deeper: Who has the opportunity to decide what is important enough to photograph, preserve, research and eventually place into the public record? We Know Our Communities I believe African Americans should have the opportunity to document their own cultural events. Why? Because we know our communities. We know the people who have been doing the work for years. We know the grandmother who has been organizing the annual celebration. We know the neighborhood institution that has quietly held a community together. We know the musician who hasn't become famous yet. We know the teac...

Going to the Source: African Environmental Knowledge, Climate Management and Free Knowledge A 2026 Senegal Environmental Justice Documentation Project Project Overview I am an environmental researcher, community outreach volunteer, writer, photographer, filmmaker, and longtime volunteer contributor to free public knowledge. For more than two decades, I have worked at the intersection of environmental issues, community development, agriculture, ecological knowledge, communications, and public education. My approach is simple: I go to the source. Rather than relying solely on information available online, I travel to communities and organizations, meet people doing environmental work, observe their projects, document what I learn, and then find appropriate ways to share that knowledge with a wider public. I am seeking funding to continue this work in Senegal in December 2026, with the First African Environmental Justice Conference in Dakar as the central gathering for the project. My goa...

Below a  reconstruction of the Wikipedia biography of James Baldwin. The current Wikipedia article contains many of the facts, but they are arranged in a way that can make Baldwin's development look like a sequence of jobs, relationships, publications and political events. James Baldwin was  a highly literate Harlem child → a Black church preacher → a young literary prodigy → a student of people and art → Greenwich Village → Connie Williams's Calypso  James Baldwin James Arthur Baldwin (August 2, 1924 – December 1, 1987) was an American writer, essayist, novelist, playwright, and social critic whose writing explored race, religion, sexuality, family, masculinity, and American identity. His books include Go Tell It on the Mountain, Notes of a Native Son, Giovanni's Room, Another Country, The Fire Next Time, and If Beale Street Could Talk. Baldwin became one of the most important American writers of the twentieth century. But the remarkable part of his story is not simply w...

  James Baldwin: The Making of an Extraordinary Mind Before James Baldwin became famous, he was already becoming James Baldwin James Baldwin is often introduced as a novelist, essayist, playwright and one of the great literary voices of twentieth-century America. That is true—but it doesn't quite tell us how James Baldwin became James Baldwin. Read the usual biography and the facts can seem to line up like newspaper clippings: Harlem. A strict preacher father. A teenage preacher. DeWitt Clinton High School. Greenwich Village. Paris. Go Tell It on the Mountain. Civil rights. Race. Sexuality. Exile. But there was something happening underneath all of those events. A remarkably gifted young Black boy was developing an extraordinary command of language, religion, literature, argument and human observation. And he was doing it long before the world knew his name. The preacher's son who became a preacher himself James Baldwin was born in Harlem on August 2, 1924. His mother, Emma Ber...

  Who Gets to Tell the Story? James Baldwin, Wikipedia, and the Age of AI As I Wonder Reflections I recently returned to James Baldwin's A Talk to Teachers, and something about it feels very current. Baldwin was speaking to teachers in 1963, during the Civil Rights Movement. He was asking teachers to think seriously about what they were teaching children—and, perhaps even more importantly, what kind of thinkers they were helping children become. His concern was not simply whether children could memorize facts. He wanted them to be able to look at the world they had inherited and ask: Who made it this way? Whose story am I being told? What has been left out? And perhaps the question underneath all of these questions: Who gets to create knowledge? That question takes me directly to Wikipedia. And from Wikipedia, it takes me directly into the age of artificial intelligence. Baldwin and the Problem of the Official Story Baldwin understood something that I think every generation has to ...