#But the mass colonization of these people

[ro-is-futile]

This is so deeply ahistorical I'm trying not to be frustrated or nauseous and I'm gonna assume op had no bad intentions, they're just misinformed.

By "recent invention in history" you mean dehumanization of Black people culturally ingrained in white society as recent as the 1500s (the inception of the Atlantic slave trade). Which is recent, I suppose, in reference to the 300,000 years homo sapiens have existed, less recent if we're regarding the 10,000 years human civilization has existed, even less recent for the 5,000 years for which history has been recorded, and less recent still with regard to how long it takes for ideologies to become culturally ingrained (only several generations).

Some arithmetic to interrogate the alleged cultural recency of anti-Blackness in white society, feel free to skip:

We know that white people have consciously dehumanized Black people for at least 500 years because Europeans knew slavery was dehumanizing prior to the Atlantic slave trade—evidenced by European acts and decrees condemning slavery as early as the 8th century. Indentured servitude existed, but white people did not largely enslave other white people after the cultural understanding that slavery was wrong had developed. Laws prohibiting slavery went unenforced/ignored so that European countries could participate in the slave trade. And involvement from a relevant portion of white society was necessary for the trafficking and enslavement of some 11 million Africans. Which is to say, white people have expressly dehumanized Black people via mass enslavement as recently as 500 years ago. Which, if we're being critical, implies that Black dehumanization was present in Europe prior to the 1500s, at least in some capacity, if Europeans were willing to buy African slaves in the first place. There's evidence of European anti-Blackness as far back as the Reconquista (718-1492 CE), when the Iberian peninsula was reconquered from the Moors—some of whom were of African or of mixed-race African and Arab descent, and/or held African slaves. But I'm not well versed in that history so I won't dwell. Anglo-saxons settled Britain roughly 1,500 years ago. In other words, for about a third of the time English people have existed in Britain, there has been some concept of Black anti-Blackness there. Ask a 30 year old if 10 years ago feels recent to them lol. Ask a 60 year old if 20 years ago feels recent to them. (I'm focusing on the English here because they got a monopoly on the slave trade in the 1700s, and colonized then settled North America, but many European countries, of course, participated in the Atlantic slave trade and benefited from the fruits of its labor.) Even if we're being overly generous and saying, hey, okay, anti-blackness wasn't really culturally established among English people until England got a monopoly on the slave trade (1713 w/ Treaty of Utrecht) or until chattel slavery was well established in the 13 colonies (also early 1700s), that's still a recency of 300 years. Which is 12 generations, plenty of time for ideologies to become culturally ingrained. I'll address how this compares to the recency of heteronormativity later on.

By "specific to American culture" you mean discrimination against Black people present, at the time, in almost every country in the Americas, every African country colonized by Europe, and every European country with Black immigrants from the countries they'd colonized.

The US civil rights movement cannot be separated from civil rights & independence movements across the Black diaspora. The US civil rights movement was always Pan-Africanist. It always recognized itself as part of a broader struggle.

MLK attended Nigeria's 1960 independence celebration and cried. Look at Garveyism, or the First Pan Africanist Conference of 1900, or George Washington Williams, or Claudia Jones, or W.E.B Dubois, or SNCC for evidence of Pan-Africanist understandings. Civil rights organizers and activists understood that Black Americans would not truly have equality so long as Black dehumanization and subjugation pervaded across the diaspora.

Furthermore, the civil rights movement was not about "blacks and whites shouldn't sit at the same table" it was about a Jim Crow South and broader American culture that fundamentally believed Black people were something less than human. It was about a hatred for Black people so deeply ingrained in the white psyche, the brutal rape, lynching, and exploitation of Black Americans was institutionalized. The Jim Crow Era was an attempt to terrorize and debase Black people freed from slavery back into a state submission to the dominant culture.

Laws restricting Black mobility were present at every level of society, not just about where Black people could sit. Such as, dispossessing Black Americans from their land/preventing them from owning land, criminalizing their freedom of movement (that's where loitering laws come from), forcing them into exploitative labor contracts so that they could not amass wealth. Such laws were intended to keep Black Americans beholden to white society as a servant class—immobile.

And I haven't even touched the carceral state which remains ubiquitous.

I also haven't even touched other gross violations of Black people's humanity and bodily autonomy. Look into Mississippi Appendectomies. Which were hysterectomies forcibly performed on Black women to sterilize them (not just in the US but in Puerto Rico too). The only reason birth control even developed was so Black women could be pressured into taking it, lol. Look into Margaret Sanger's eugenicist ass. Look into the Tulsa Race Massacre aka the burning of Black Wall Street.

I could go on forever about these gross violations, and I will never run out of specific examples, unique unspeakable horrors, that's how egregious and deeply ingrained dehumanization of Black people was. Instead I'll pull an event from my family's oral history.

My great grandmother worked as a domestic at a hospital in the segregated south. One day, two white boys saw her son playing in a field and ran him down with a tractor, badly mutilating him. With no other form of recourse, she took her child son's mutilated body to the hospital where she worked. They told her they do not treat niggers there. They did not allow her the decency, even, of washing the dirt out of his wounds. He succumbed to his injuries in the back seat of her car.

Your analysis of heteronormativity is also ahistorical.

I'm assuming op is referencing Western heteronormativity because there is abundant evidence that many societies over the course of human history have been accepting of what we would call today, queer identities. The West, shockingly, is not the world. Look into queerness and gender diversity in Indigenous and non-Western cultures.

Regarding the recency of Western heteronormativity, while Indo-European cultures have indeed been patriarchal for several thousand years, they have not been heteronormative for all that time, (e.g., Ancient Rome, Ancient Greece, The Epic of Gilgamesh, the Illiad, priests and priestesses, sapphism on Lesbos, etc.). The rise and spread of Abrahamic religions contributed to the development of heteronormativity.

This next bit of history I'm pulling from a queer historian I read years ago and will try to add to the tags later:

Early US American understandings of heteronormativity pale in comparison to 20th century heteronormativity. For example, in the 1800s it was common for boys and young men at prep schools to have boyfriends, as long as they understood that eventually they would need to marry a woman. And, arguably, this was out of necessity for propertied men to have legal biological inheritors. Hence, in certain parts of early American society, men were free to experiment with their sexuality in their youth. Consider it a don't ask don't tell policy. Probably the most notable example of this was with Abraham Lincoln. The historian asserted that heteronormativity as we know it today emerged in the late 19th century due to activism of moralist Christian women who centered family values and virtue—this vein of activism would later lead to prohibition in the early 20th century.

With this in mind, one could argue that heteronormativity as we currently know it is even less recent for white people than anti-blackness.

The spread of Christianity, specifically, largely contributed to the development of Western heteronormativity. Christianity spread through the West (via the Roman empire) from around 100-500 CE. So even if we're being very strict on our definition of Western heteronormativity, it would predate anti-Blackness in Europe by 500-1000 years accounting for cultural fluctuations and regional differences.

I understand that op is trying to say something along the lines of, "it doesn't matter if transphobia is culturally ingrained, we can do away with it as quickly as we did away with homophobia." Which is a good message, in the words of Simone de Beauvoir, there is no justification for present existence other than its expansion into an indefinitely open future.

But there's no need to minimize the cultural prevalence of anti-Blackness in white society over the course of history, the extent to which hatred for Black people was ingrained into the white American psyche, and the breadth of the work required for US civil rights activists to mitigate that hatred. And I mean, it's not like the US civil rights movement accomplished all its goals, but that's a whole other can of worms.

I also think rather than posit heteronormativity or the gender binary as this thing that has bogged humans down for several thousand years, it would be better, actually, to highlight all of the examples of queerness and gender diversity present over the course of history.

In this current moment, as fascists wage a war of misinformation, it is extremely important that we try to be as realistic about history as possible.

Hey so part of the argument around gay rights in the late 90s through the teens was.

"Hey, this is totally different from the civil rights movement. The idea that blacks and whites shouldn't sit at the same restaurant together was a recent invention in history, contingent on really specific American culture, so that was easy to change.

"But gay marriage deals with some of the most foundational feelings in human psychology and some of the most universal and ancient cultural practices! It's absurd to think that some glib answer about "consent" could overturn thousands of years of culture and psychology! Unless gay people come up with a knockout argument, there's never going to be a change, and frankly there probably is no argument strong enough to make homosexuality truly acceptable, when you weigh it against the whole history of human psychology."

And then, oops, turned out "Yeah just let consenting adults do whatever" totally worked! We didn't need to answer any of those thorny questions of human psychology and it has been years since I have seen anybody bother to even ask them.

I leave any analogy to modern day trans politics as an exercise for the reader.

[mostlikelytobeobsessed]

Helping how I can :D

Hii hi!

I received two asks from two wonderful people and horrible situations, both requiring funding for the aid they need! So, here are resources where you can donate to help people in similar situations!

Mercy USA- supplies hot meals for the indefinitely displaced people of Gaza

Access Women’s Shelter - Empowers, aids, and provides better opportunities for women as their families facing homelessness

https://www.pcrf.net

We love the PCRF in this house! Palestine children’s relief fund provides necessary aid to children and their families in Palestine

Goabroad has provided and article full of resources from how to (PLAUSIBLY) go to Palestinian territories to volunteer help, to places you can donate! (Please keep in mind that this article was written in 2023 prior to the Oct 7 attacks and that some sources may not be able to provide what you are looking for any longer, especially when it comes to travel. They recommend contacting these programs to check)

If you have any resources to add or any information on these resources, please lemme know! From the river to the sea, Palestine WILL be free 🇵🇸 🇵🇸‼️

[olowan-waphiya]

if usamericans are excited about the concept of anti-colonialism in other countries oooh boy do i have some exciting news for you...you can practice decolonization right here at home!

[houses-snowglobes]

this might be a cold take I don't really know, but being on the Strip in FNV always has me torn between "gambling is so cool" and "every single person who lives directly on the strip went through forced assimilation by Mr. house"

Benny is a victim of colonization, I feel bad for the guy

[1-jar-of-stars]

yall will jump through hoops to justify wanting to fuck the colonizer i fear

[hoarder-of-rats]

I got curious and so was doing some research on the etimology of the names of states and biomes in Brazil, and apparently most of it is named after words in the languages of the native peoples! Examples:

Caatinga comes from Tupi-Guarani: Ka'a (vegetation) + Tinga (white, clear)

Roraima comes from Ianomâmi: roro or rora (green) + ímã (mountain).

Acre comes from Apurinãs word aquiri, which means River of Alligators.

Pará comes from Tupi-Guarani pa'ra, which means Sea River, because the river was so wide it looked like the sea.

Like, most of the states whose names aren't actually words in Portuguese (for example, Rio De Janeiro (January River (?)) come from Tupi-Guarani, and I think that's neat

[hussyknee]

Keep seeing the videos from Gaza. Blood-curdling, unimaginable horror. Death toll currently at 830. Displaced 187,500, 4000 injured, some of them maimed for life. Hospitals at capacity with no medical aid able to come through. They're now washing injuries with soap because there's no antiseptic.

They're murdering them in cold blood while the world watches.

Westerners, watch the news footage. Remember that half of Gaza is children under 15. That they've not only blockaded them from all sides but they're bombing the Egypt border crossing too. Understand this is what they did in Afghanistan and Iraq, and that your people watched and cheered. Know that this is happening with the full support and aid of your governments and leaders. This is a massacre. This is genocide. And you're watching it happen live.

If any of you murderous freaks still think any of this is justified I hope from the bottom of my heart that your own house falls on top of you.

[adina--astra]

This quest was really fun...until it wasn't. I have a lot of feelings and thoughts about it, but I'll just say that my WoL would never be that cruel and shitty! So! The ending and the shit dialogue choice they gave us is not canon for me! No thank you! I don't find homelessness funny actually! And neither would my WoL who is also from a trading based society! Actually I'm taking the character! She's mine now! Her and my WoL are bffs now! Nova's going to teach her how society works! Fuck it!

[jomnki]

time is a flat circle where we watch a country go to another country and randomly will civilians because "what if they're the enemies haha we totally aren't clearing people out to steal their land" etc and we all go "wow thats fucking messed up, good thing it won't happen again!" and then the exact same thing happens right now and the same people somehow are just incapable of accepting that fact that we are living through history and letting the thing we said wont happen again fucking happen again.

[britneyshakespeare]

This is just a map of New England (minus Connecticut the fake New England state)

[ro-is-futile]

Watching white tumblr users interact with black things is funny because they will always misapprehend things and just generally be reductivist.

So I’m seeing a lot of people going “haha Kendrick got awards for being a hater,” “Drake lost so bad lol.”

And I’m just massaging my temples at the irony of nonblack people en masse misunderstanding a song called “They not like us.”

Kendrick has a whole verse in the song breaking down the commodification of blackness and the history of colonization apropos to Black Americans. That’s what the whole Drake beef was about btw. It was about Drake’s pattern of ripping off black culture just to peddle it to the uncaring masses and make millions off of it, while the smaller artists he steals from get no recognition (money). Drake was getting called the rap goat by nonblack people, he was getting looked at as the greatest in a tradition he has no roots in. Kendrick’s distaste for Drake was years in the making. FdSignifier has some great vids from like 2020 about Drake’s rise in the rap world. There’s also Pusha T’s diss from 2018 called “The story of Adidon.” My point is, Drake is a culture vulture and the Drake v. Kdot beef was about reclaiming what Drake (and other culture vultures) stole.

Drake is also problematic for other reasons, e.g. sexually exploiting women, allegedly participating in sex trafficking, and so on.

It does a disservice to Kdot’s message to reduce this beef to an apolitical 1v1. It was never a 1v1, it was always political, it was always about the broader culture, it was always a culture war, etc.

[elbiotipo]

When South Africa dismantled apartheid, it did not end with the expulsion of all white South Africans. They became part of the new South Africa, just without the criminal discriminatory oligarchic powers the apartheid goverment had. When Bolivia recognized its indigenous heritage and became a plurinational state, it did not mean that people of European descent were expelled in masse. It meant the recognition of the previously discriminated indigenous and mestizo people of Bolivia and the beginning of a path of integration and revalidation.

What I mean is that it's ridiculous to think that decolonization inherently means mass suffering and relocation, that's what colonization does. Decolonization is recognizing the crimes of colonization, but more importantly, material, political and social steps to give power and self-determination to the exploited native people who were victims of colonialism and imperialism.

In multicultural societies, you don't go like in that Peter Griffin meme with a skin tone chart and saying 'well, you go back to Europe, you go back to Africa, you stay here'. You build a new society on the paradigm of dignity for exploited people and equality under the law. People are acting like this is some sort of fantastic utopia instead of real initiatives that were done in living memory, with successes and failures, as all such initiatives have. One must ask why are some so insistent that multicultural societies can't thrive, especially when for most of history, societies were indeed like that. Consider why you think like that.

[reasonsforhope]

"On a freezing cold Wednesday afternoon in eastern Kentucky, Taysha DeVaughan joined a small gathering at the foot of a reclaimed strip mine to celebrate a homecoming. “It’s a return of an ancestor,” DeVaughan said. “It’s a return of a relative.”

That relative was the land they stood on, part of a tract slated for a federal penitentiary that many in the crowd consider another injustice in a region riddled with them. The mine shut down years ago, but the site, near the town of Roxana, still bears the scars of extraction.

DeVaughan, an enrolled member of the Comanche Nation, joined some two dozen people on January 22 to celebrate the Appalachian Rekindling Project buying 63 acres within the prison’s footprint.

“What we’re here to do is to protect her and to give her a voice,” DeVaughan said. “She’s been through mountaintop removal. She’s been blown up, she’s been scraped up, she’s been hurt.”

The Appalachian Rekindling Project, which she helped found last year, wants to rewild the site with bison and native flora and fauna, open it to intertribal gatherings, and, it hopes, stop the prison.

The environmental justice organization worked with a coalition of local nonprofits, including Build Community Not Prisons and the Institute to End Mass Incarceration, to raise $160,000 to buy the plot from a family who owned the land generationally.

Retired truck driver Wayne Whitaker, who owns neighboring land and had considered purchasing it as a hunting ground, told Grist he was supportive. “There’s nothing positive we’ll get out of this prison,” he said.

The penitentiary has been a gleam in the eye of state and local officials and the Bureau of Prisons since 2006. It has always sparked sharp divisions in Roxana and beyond and was killed in 2019 after a series of lawsuits, only to be quietly resurrected in 2022. Last fall, the bureau took the final step in its approval process, clearing the way to begin buying land...

In his book Coal, Cages, Crisis, Schept noted that mine sites are considered ideal locations for prisons or a dumping ground for waste, rather than places of ecological value, as some biologists have argued. The Roxana site has been reclaimed, meaning re-vegetated with a forest that now shelters a number of rare species, including endangered bats.

Opponents argue that a prison will bring more environmental problems than jobs. Letcher County was 1 of 13 counties ravaged by catastrophic flooding in 2022, a situation exacerbated by damage strip mining caused to local watersheds. The prison slated for Roxana will exacerbate the problem.

The Bureau of Prisons estimates it will damage 6,290 feet of streams and about 2 acres of wetlands. (The agency has promised to compensate the state.)

DeVaughan said the purchase also is a step toward rectifying the dispossession that began with the forced removal and genocide of Indigenous peoples. The Cherokee, Shawnee, and Yuchi made their homes in the area before, during, and after colonization, and their thriving nations raised crops, ran businesses, and hunted bison that once roamed Appalachia.

In all the time since, coal, timber, gas, and landholding companies have at times owned almost half of the land in 80 counties stretching from West Virginia to Alabama. Several prisons sprang from deals made with coal companies, something many locals consider the continuation of this status quo.

Changing that dynamic is a priority for the Appalachian Rekindling Project, which hoped to buy more land to protect it from extractive industries and return its stewardship to Indigenous and local communities. DeVaughn said Indigenous peoples throughout the region will be welcome to use the land as a gathering place...

DeVaughan sees its work establishing a new vision of economic transition for coalfields, one that relies less on “dollars and numbers” and more on “healing and restoration” of the land and the Indigenous and other communities that live there.

She is working with some personal connections in the Cheyenne and Arapaho nations to acquire a herd of bison and plans to work with local volunteers, scientists, and students to inventory the site’s flora and fauna."

-via GoodGoodGood, February 6, 2025

[lillybean730]

zenos is fundamentally a very pitiful antagonist imo. not that he sucks at serving that role (he's effective at making you want to kill him ill grant him that) but just that his motivations are pitiable. the guy is only happy when he's about to die in combat and also is way too strong to be killed. hobbyless behavior and very pathetic rip bozo etc

[unravelingwires]

Clump

Do you know how the name of my blog is “unraveling wires?” That isn’t completely arbitrary. When I was a kid and trying to parse my own mind, I imagined my thought process as a tangled knot, each strand representing one maladaptive idea or emotion. You didn’t have to know a strand’s source to begin untangling it, but it was often easier to do so if you had a bird’s-eye perspective. I loved untangling jewelry and power chords, even then, so it was calming to imagine a process as fraught as introspection as something finite with an end goal. 

Slowly, that idea expanded to cover a lot that happened on the inside of my head: philosophy and spirituality and project structuring. It was reductive at times—anxiety cannot be handled by introspection, in my experience—but the point of symbols is that they continually expand until you forcibly pin them down.

I was talking yesterday about the colonization of Mars, trying to explain why it felt like a degradation. “Just because no one lives there doesn’t mean it doesn’t have value,” I said. “I know that Mars is a rock so it can’t be hurt, but just because it’s alive doesn’t mean we have a right to reform it any way we want to.” One of my friends pointed out that humans change any ecosystem we touch, that we cannot just write ourselves out of existence, and I thought about the days I’ve spent poisoning honeysuckle and tallying grass stems, catching crayfish and tracking elk. I thought about how Yellowstone was inhabited when we turned it into a national park, how the inhabitants sure as hell weren’t parasites, how there were no regulations against killing predators after the park was established.

The UK doesn’t have big predators anymore. India—with its 1.4 billion people and counting—does. The modern US, despite everything, still does too, and it has people working to keep it that way.

So no, I think there’s a difference between colonizing Mars and living on Earth. Hell, there’s a difference between traveling to Mars and colonizing it. If you’re careful, you can untangle vines without killing them. 

[tenth-sentence]

The padre said that the Christian Indians did not much like coming to mass, but that otherwise they showed respect for religion.

"Journal of Researches into the Natural History and Geology of the Countries Visited During the Voyage of H.M.S. Beagle Round the World, 1832-36" - Charles Darwin