Patrick Jean-Baptiste
Shibboleths and Passports: The Marks of Empire
My wife is in transit, crossing borders, navigating spaces that recognize her, and spaces that do not. She sends me a text from the...
Throw the Rock, Hide the Hand: Trump’s Great Deception
I do not know Donald Trump. But I know the city that made him, the tabloids that birthed him, the bodega endcaps where his...
Friendship in the Age of Self-Improvement
I have learned to pay attention.
I have learned that friendship—the kind that lasts, the kind that stretches over decades, the kind that takes root...
Selling Liberation: When Toussaint Louverture Became a Beer Pitchman
There is something uncanny about this image—Toussaint Louverture, stripped of the very thing that made him. He’s there, immortalized in a 1940s beer ad...
Reclaiming Haiti’s Futures: Returned Intellectuals, Placemaking, and Radical Imagination
First off, I’m spending waaay too much time in the footnotes. Lots of delectable gratins from our history, scattered in the margins—like the term...
Teaching Haiti: Strategies for Creating New Narratives
https://open.spotify.com/episode/6EAYDkcVdaW2Sy8zyund0i
Podcast Summary: Rewriting Haiti’s Narrative with Dr. Cécile Accilien
In this episode, I sat down with Dr. Cécile Accilien to discuss her book, Teaching Haiti:...
The Rules Were Never Meant for Us: Understanding the Market’s Game
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Money is a language, but most of us are not fluent. We move through the world knowing the cost of bread, the...
The Colonial System Unveiled
https://open.spotify.com/episode/4r074cksVEwDplwAN3V3mY
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Of the many topics discussed in this interview, none stuck with me more than the Baron de Vastey toast described below.
The year...
Simbi and the Coders: When Magic Becomes Automation
There was a time when coding was magic. The engineers, the ones who could summon logic from the ether, who could bend systems to...
Can We Ever Just Be? Black Identity Beyond the Shadow of...
Can we, as people of African descent, ever exist without the West as our measuring stick, our shadow, our perpetual point of departure? Can...
