#affected by chattel slavery and genocide | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

8-evil-annoying-catboys · 3 months ago

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don’t fucking spread misinformation. lincoln was elected in march of 1861, and didn’t start a draft of the emancipation proclamation until july 13, 1862. that’s over a full year later.

and, by the way, the emancipation proclamation did NOT end slavery altogether in the US. it said that slavery was not recognized as legal by the US in states that were rebelling against the US. meaning that slaves from confederate states would not be punished by the US if they ran away and made it to a state that wasn’t rebelling. chattel slavery was still legal in union states after the emancipation proclamation until the 13th amendment was passed in december of 1865, 3 and a half years after the emancipation proclamation was first drafted, and more than 6 months after the civil war ended.

furthermore, bringing up obama isn’t very relevant, seeing as gay marriage was legalized throughout the US by the supreme court decision in obergefell v hodges, NOT by the president. yeah, yeah, the president appoints the supreme court justices, so obama did influence this decision by appointing two justices earlier in his career… but it’s not accurate to imply that he clearly intended to legalize gay marriage during his presidency while campaigning in 2008, when gay marriage was not legalized until 2015, and he didn’t directly have anything to do with the decision.

in both the case of lincoln and the case of obama, i would take them at their word for what they said during their campaigns as quoted in this post.

lincoln didn’t intend to abolish slavery, he wanted to avoid civil war! when civil war happened anyway, it seems to me that the emancipation proclamation was more of a strategic economic decision and/or political theatre than an expression of lincoln’s opinions on slavery/abolition… the southern, and by extension the confederate economy before and during the civil war was only as prosperous as it was because of slavery. allowing confederate state’s slaves to run away to the union and be free and protected if and when they arrived would significantly affect the confederacy’s workforce and their economy, while also boosting morale in the war by publicly siding with abolitionists.

obama didn’t intend to legalize gay marriage, and he DIDN’T. he appointed two justices to the supreme court within the first 2 years of his first term, who would then go on to both be part of the majority of 5 justices who decided in a landmark case that gay marriage should be legal in all 50 states, like 5 years after he appointed them. he did not pick these justices in the first half of his first term with the intention of influencing the legality of gay marriage in his penultimate year as president. be serious.

all of this information is so fucking easy to find and debunk.

also.. i’m personally still on the fence about voting democrat this election—i’m feeling disillusioned both about the possibility of pressuring kamala to stop the genocide, AND the possibility of my preferred candidate (jill stein) actually winning. but it is my duty, as someone who cares about the victims of genocide, to at LEAST threaten kamala that i won’t vote for her if she and biden don’t do everything in their power to put a stop to this atrocity. holding votes hostage is THE VERY LEAST we can do. vote for whoever you think you should—as much as i wish i could vote my conscience without worrying that i’m “throwing away” my vote, the system isn’t set up to allow me to do that… yet. we’ll see how the tides look in october when the election is on the horizon, and that will decide where my vote lands. but it’s OK to threaten a candidate that you won’t vote for them if they don’t do something you want, even if you already know you’re lying. lying to politicians isn’t just ok, it’s morally correct, and it’s also only fair—they lie to you every fucking day!! in case you didn’t check those last two links, i’ll spell it out for you, HERE is where you can hold your vote hostage today, whether you’re bluffing or not—if every single person who reads this does that, maybe we won’t have to choose between voting for a genocide supporter and betting on a losing horse.

altho, again. my ideal situation is for jill stein to win, institute ranked choice voting, stop selling arms to israel and align with the rest of the world in opposition to the genocide, and start the gears turning for a better world without having to oil them with the blood of rebels and the most vulnerable citizens who will die in a revolution whether they fight or not. sorry if that sounds dumb to you, op, but you sound really stupid to me, spreading misinformation like this just because you can’t find any better way to tell people to shut up about genocide already and hand over their vote, like it’s owed to someone else and doesn’t belong to them. lol. lmao even.

This is genuinely what some of you sound like. Remember, Lincoln FAMOUSLY campaigned on the promise that he was not a threat to the institution of slavery. There were tons of people who were FURIOUS that he wasn't doing enough.

But he realized that he was trying to appeal to a voterbase of WHITE SUPREMACISTS and PEOPLE WHO EXCLUSIVELY BENIFITTED AND PROFITED FROM THE INSTITUTION OF SLAVERY.

If he was honest about his intentions to abolish slavery, he wouldn't have gotten elected to ANYTHING.

At one point, he even said something along the lines of "I have no intention to threaten the institution of slavery. My soul purpose is to save the union." Meanwhile, he already had a draft of the emancipation proclaimation largely ready to go. Obama is another example. He famously promised often and loudly that he "in no way supported gay marriage". Which ALSO made lots of liberals angry. It is extremely frustrating watching people who don't understand how politics work try to play politics.

#us politics

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bihet-dragonize · 3 years ago

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https://bihet-dragonize.tumblr.com/post/675769516863733760 - saw your tags on this post & completely agree - but i was wondering if there was a specific post where you talked about this? would love to hear your thoughts

I'm trying to go to bed so I can't elaborate more cuz I'm sleepy. I also couldn't possibly find the exact post but it was about the rise of fascism in the US and basically I think that with the imperialist founding of the US, the genocide and chattel slavery, and the literal murders of anyone that meaningfully challenges the status quo (white, cishet, Christian, upper class, sometimes male), the glorification of forced compliance and the worship of capital, the US has always been heading towards a fascist state.

With the evolution of social media, injustice is more easily shared/seen so politicians are doing their best to continue (because this is NOT new; there is a reason that poc have to fight tooth and nail to get the injustices against us even mentioned in history text books) restricting knowledge and access to that knowledge and punishing anyone who dares try to access it as a way to prevent people (especially younger generations) from simply making their own informed choices. Politicians are also using the Jan 6th insurrection as an excuse to crack down on community groups that are affecting positive change on the ground as a way to stamp out dissenters (labeling protesters). Also the bias towards white supremacist vigilantes vs police protestors.

All of this is to, again, maintain that status quo both in AND out of the US. The CIA installing fascist leaders in countries the US has political interests in is no coincidence either. The US is perfectly fine with fascism if it's beneficial to it. And with the visibility of the US's war crimes and human rights abuses, the people in the government (regardless of party lines) are deciding to be more aggressive in their push to keep control domestically and internationally.

#imma wake up tomorrow and hate this response cuz it's kinda vague but I can feel my brain melting anon so this is all I got #my answers #Kia's answers

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i-am-very-very-tired · 3 years ago

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“What they don’t want you to understand is what’s being established is a power dynamic. Before they put you on the field, teams poke, prod and examine you searching for any defect that might affect your performance. No boundary respect. No dignity left intact.” These were words spoken by football player turned activist Colin Kaepernick on his Netflix series “Colin in Black & White.” What is he speaking about when he says those words? The NFL draft combine, which leads to him comparing the NFL draft to a slave auction. Huh? You may already have your opinion well-molded about Kaepernick. Some think he’s a civil rights pioneer bringing much-needed attention to social issues. Other think he’s a disrespectful crybaby. He has every right to kneel for the national anthem. In turn, people have every right to criticize him for it. We’ve had that debate a hundred times over already. This take by Kaepernick, however, is dead wrong. For starters, people of all colors are selected in the NFL Draft. It isn’t just black people getting poked and prodded at the NFL combine. White people get it too, as does any other color of person invited there. Why? The owners of these football teams are about to invest millions of dollars in these players. Coaches and general managers are going to have their jobs and livelihoods decided by how the players they select perform. Is it so wrong for them all to want to make sure the players are up to the challenge? Secondly, every player at that combine is there voluntarily. Nobody drags them there, nobody forces them there. They are there because they want to be there. Why? Because it’s an opportunity to show off how good they are at something they have been training for all their lives. They are football players, and they want to demonstrate just how good they are at those skills they have spent countless hours mastering. Actual slaves weren’t doing the work they were doing voluntarily. Perhaps most importantly, those players at the combine will eventually be in the NFL, which means they will be rewarded quite a handsomely for their work. Slaves were not rewarded handsomely, as we know. Paying millionaires to play a game they love is not the same as chattel slavery, and to suggest it is minimizes what actual slaves went through. It’s no different than people who compare vaccine mandates to the Holocaust. It’s gross, it’s wrong and it’s a slap in the face to people who experienced actual genocide. We’re guessing that anybody who was actually a slave would gladly trade their lives for Kaepernick’s life, or any NFL players’ lives. Nobody needs to build an underground railroad for NFL players. They are doing just fine. The NFL minimum salary is almost $700,000, and it’s to play a game. Kaepernick also is the face of Nike, which actually does use slave labor overseas. Swing and a miss, Colin.

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citrineghost · 4 years ago

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Humans Are Historically Known for Being Terrible

Hi I’m here with an opinion today. Let’s see how many words it will take for me to adequately get it across on this very fine 15th of January

I personally believe canceling things from the past* is fruitless, pointless, and accomplishes about as much as censorship does

*We aren’t talking about shit like nazi Germany, let me elaborate further

So, as I occasionally do, I have seen a post on my dash today criticizing something historical that people are ‘problematically partaking in.’ That thing today was the wellerman sea shanty due to its ties with colonialism, slavery, and so forth.

I’m not going to dive into this specific example, because I don’t know enough of the details and am not interested in going to find them out because I’m not planning to defend it or its history, so there’s no point. I learned what I needed to know from said callout post and it’s enough to work with.

To me, it is important that we remember that people, in general, have been historically pretty terrible.

There’s colonialism, there’s slavery (of all kinds, including chattel), there’s thievery, murder, genocide, sexism, the murdering of queers. There’s lying, manipulation, propaganda, and so many more things that I couldn’t possibly list them all. I’m not saying that everyone was equally shitty. I am aware that, especially in the most recent couple hundred years, white people, especially Western Europeans and Americans, have been pretty Shite.

Am I excusing them for their actions? Absolutely not. I think it is always important to bear in mind the way they played a part in cultures’ growth, death, and, ultimately, development from one year to the next.

The reason I’m pointing this out is because the result of people being historically shitty is that most, if not all, of our historical content, our history, is steeped in horse manure.

There is not one thing you can enjoy from centuries - even decades - passed that is not here because of something inhumane, unjust, or otherwise terrible.

The only thing keeping us from canceling every other historical thing that we enjoy is our lack of awareness of how each thing ties into the whole mess.

So, we’ve learned that wellerman was sung by slavers and thieves and colonialists. What about that nice little folk song from uh, idk, Ireland or something? Let’s take this metaphorical song and ask the question, “who wrote it?” The truth is, for many folk songs, we just don’t know. There is a very very good chance that 90+ percent of nice, soft folk songs about lying in the grass or feeding chickens or baking bread for your spouse were written by racists, sexists, abusers, homophobes, and so forth.

Does that make it wrong to enjoy that song about lying in the grass and looking at the stars? I don’t think so. No one is profiting off of you listening to it, regardless of who wrote it. It’s hundreds of years old. Do you even know the name of who wrote it?

Remembering that times were different may not absolve something of its wrongdoing, but it does provide us context.

We have to allow ourselves to admit that most, if not all, historical things, came from or benefitted from atrocities or injustices that we would not stand for today. That’s just how human progression works. Frankly, if people 200 years from now don’t look at US, CURRENTLY, and think we’re terrible assholes, I am actually very concerned by that.

The nature of humanity is to get better and better over time and to build a world and a society where we don’t feel the need to be controlled by greed or to consume unethically. The problem is, it takes time. It takes lots and lots of time. Would it take less time if certain people weren’t terrible, terrible people? Yes it would. But they are, and so it doesn’t.

The fact is, human progression and improvement will never reach its end because, as things improve, our perception of our past actions will change as well and we will begin to realize that what we were doing wasn’t acceptable and is no longer necessary nor excusable.

Hate Jeff Bezos? Look around and see that 90% of people still buy from Amazon, because it provides the only affordable source of many products for people who don’t make enough money under capitalism to buy from a small business.

Hate Bill Gates? How many of us are willing to switch to Linux to quit using Microsoft? Speaking of Microsoft, they own Minecraft. Do we stop playing Minecraft?

Think Steve Jobs is a terrible person? Why are people still buying iphones, ipads, and macs? Why don’t we stop buying those so that he and current CEO, Tim Cook, quit making billions of dollars?

These are just a tiny amount of examples, using big names. We also must consider, if you have 100 books on your bookshelf, how many of the writers of those books are racists, homophobes, sexists, or abusers? I guarantee you it’s a non-zero answer. The thing is, an author who’s relatively nobody is not someone who gets canceled. No one knows anything about them but that they wrote a neat work of fiction and it’s a good book.

The question is, should we be expected to quit buying, consuming, and enjoying things made by problematic people?

In some cases, the answer should be yes. If someone is currently profiting massively from people consuming their media or products and people are ignoring their atrocities, that person could end u making millions or billions of dollars despite being terrible, which is something that undoubtedly affects all of us, economically.

In the other cases, the answer should be, do you want to? If you’re not comfortable with something, you should, of course, stop consuming it. If you can ignore the thing, you might not need to bother. And, that doesn’t necessarily mean you’re excusing it.

If we look at all of humanity, even in the present day, mathematically speaking, 50% of people are more bigoted and terrible than the rest. There’s no other way for it to be. Less than 50% would be a mathematical fallacy. Does that mean we only consume content from the better 50%? Does that mean we rigorously research producers and creators and their personal lives only to decide it’s not worth the risk of ‘contributing’ because they have no trace online except for a private Facebook account? Is them having a Facebook account enough of a ‘sin’ that it’s not worth it to buy their book?

This brings us to the censorship point

If you know your history, you know that censorship is a nasty thing. When one person decides who or what is unethical to consume from, they sometimes seek to get rid of that thing so that no one has a choice - so that no one is Allowed to consume that thing.

This has led to book burning, the destroying of decades and centuries of research about sexuality and gender. It’s destroyed religious texts. It’s destroyed content created by women that painted any single man in a bad light. It’s destroyed progression.

“But I only want to get rid of the bad thing that everyone agrees is bad!”

It doesn’t matter. If you open the door to censorship for yourself, those who wish to use it for worse reasons will become just as justified, in their own eyes, to do the same. You’ll have Christians saying it’s okay to get rid of gay content because it’s objectively wrong according to the bible. You’ll have conservative parents burning books with complicated topics like abuse and assault because they don’t want their children to have access to anything controversial or complex like that.

You cannot open the door to censorship for one group without opening that door for everyone. And that is why we do not censor things.

The question then becomes, but what of the people consuming that media? Even if it’s not censored, consuming it still makes someone bad, right?

Not necessarily. People consume problematic stuff all the time - things considered objectively bad. However, people don’t always consume said media because they support it being normalized in the real world. For example, fanfiction or books with rape in them may be something a victim reads to cope with their own past or present. A book with abuse depicted may actually make a young teen aware that what they’re going through is abuse. Content largely seen as ‘problematic’ can often play a part in solving the problem it portrays.

Then there’s historical, problematic media. Now, this is an area where I feel things have actually been OVER complicated.

Because everything historical has some tie to injustice, there is no ethical way to consume it.

There is no ethical consumption under passed time.

So, how do we judge whether something should or shouldn’t be consumed? It is my opinion that something historical should stop being consumed and become shunned when its meaning is well-known enough and its message is still pervasive enough that it is actively causing problems.

For example, we generally try not to consume content when it is made by someone who is a known nazi. This is because nazis are still a problem in our society, presently. We have antisemitism all over the place. Therefore, we cannot let the message become that it is okay to be a nazi by way of us treating nazis like normal people and allowing them to succeed in society without consequence.

However, there are certain problems that are no longer particularly prevalent or which are agreed to be terrible on a large enough scale that consuming the content does not necessarily imply you believe it is okay. For example, if you look at literally any media from the 1800s or which is placed in the 1800s, you will see a lot of casual sexism and gender roles. Should we despise that time period because sexism was readily available at every turn? Should we refuse to enjoy 19th century fashion or culture because it had problems? I think not. I think it would be pointless to refuse to consume, read about, or otherwise engage with the 19th century. It wouldn’t change the past and it isn’t going to somehow undo the progress we’ve made on women’s rights.

As a matter of fact, if someone merely suggested that perhaps the people of the 19th century were right for forcing women to wear long dresses and darn socks all day, they would be laughed into oblivion and called a shitty, sexist incel (which would be correct).

Does enjoying media from or placed in the 19th century mean you support sexism? I certainly hope not, since I enjoy it very much and know a lot of progressive people, women especially, who do enjoy that kind of thing. It is common sense enough, at this point in time, that people don’t generally believe that the sexism of the 1800s was acceptable. I am not going to see someone watching a period drama and assume they desire for our present-day social laws to be like what’s portrayed. That would be a ridiculous assumption. However, I could not assume the same about someone I saw watching openly antisemitic content. I would quickly wonder if they’re an antisemite/nazi/white supremacist.

So, what about that one thing I heard had a sordid past?

Listen, if we’re being honest here, most things from history have a sordid past. Sea shanties? You bet. But then when we talk of sea shanties being steeped in colonialism, we have to look at the bigger picture. What about pirates? Pirates were, by and large, a huge contributor to slavery, theft, colonialism, and murder. Does that mean enjoying media with pirates is glorifying or contributing to slavery, theft, colonialism, and murder?

(I’m about to talk a lot about pirates but this can be applied to anything that was historically bad but is no longer prevalent)

Pirates of the Caribbean is only a movie, but pirates did once exist and they did kill people. They did raid ships of merchants and tradesmen and they killed them and stole their goods. They took many good men from their families and even killed working children aboard the ships. Does that make enjoying pirates in media a contributor to these things? No. It doesn’t. We are looking at a dramatised, cleaned up version of the original piracy. I think most people are aware that pirates, in the real world, are bad and harmful and should not be supported. That doesn’t make pirate media any less fun in theory, and under our own terms.

Then we arrive at our perception - because most of this does come down to perception. When you watch pirate media, should you enjoy that, are you able to divorce yourself from their actual history enough to enjoy the media? If you can, you might enjoy it a lot. If you can’t watch a movie about pirates without thinking the entire time about how terrible they were and how much damage they did, then pirate media just isn’t right for you. But, it doesn’t mean you should attempt to take it away from others. Your opinion and perception of pirate media is not the global perception.

I have to ask, do you think others view it the same way you do?

When you read that question, you may be wondering what exactly I mean. What I’m asking is, do you believe others view that media with the same “clarity” that you do? Do you believe they understand the atrocity of real pirates and Feel that the entire time they watch the media and still enjoy it anyway?

Perhaps that’s why your response to someone enjoying something you feel guilty partaking in is, “these people all must not care about the real-world damage pirates did. The fact that they can watch this (despite sitting here and feeling the same things I do) makes me sick.”

However, if that is the case, you must remember that for a lot of people, the awareness of real world consequence is suspended during dramatised depictions of it. It doesn’t mean they have forgotten about the real-world consequences of piracy or that they don’t know it at all. It just means they are choosing not to think about it in that light while consuming media.

There is also the assumption that people must not know about something when partaking in it. You may think, “How can they enjoy this media? They wouldn’t be able to stomach it if they realized what really happened with pirates.”

In many instances, you would be correct. A lot of people are ignorant to what pirates have done in the real world. If you told every ignorant person the truth, maybe 5% of them would then become turned off by pirate media, and the other 95% would keep the truth in mind and then divorce themselves from it to continue enjoying said media.

There are realities that it is safe to divorce yourself from, and there are those that are not.

Is allowing yourself to enjoy dramatizations of pirates making you ignorant to present day conditions? Not largely. There are still pirates today, but not nearly enough for the average Joe to need to take them seriously. Those who need to know about them and do something to stop them are aware.

However, it is not safe to divorce yourself from, for instance, the holocaust. Divorcing yourself from the holocaust and seeing it as merely a dramatic setting with dramatic events and not a present-day real-world problem is exactly the kind of thing that leads to young teens being sucked in by white supremacy and naziism as well as what leads to many average conservatives believing the rise in white supremacy isn’t actually real or is not a big deal. They have distanced themselves so far from the real-world atrocity of the holocaust that they have forgotten it was real and that real people, like them, were contributors. They don’t want to believe that everyday people had any power in it and that it was tiny acts of willful ignorance that made concentration camps so successful.

All in all, there is a different answer for everything we consume.

Want to know if something you’re consuming is okay to consume? Ask yourself: is this produced by someone who is contributing to present-day conditions? If the answer is yes, quit consuming it. If the answer is no, ask yourself, does this media make me uncomfortable because I’m aware of its roots? If the answer is yes, stop consuming it. If the answer is no, it’s probably fine. You are most likely not doing any damage, so long as you are aware of what is wrong with the content and are not using it as grounds to perpetuate harm.

If, when thinking about something problematic in an old piece of media, you cringe? You’re on the right track. If you feel inclined to make excuses for it or justify the wrong in it, it’s time to step away and reevaluate why you feel the need to do so. If you’re doing so because you feel guilty for consuming it, you need to realize that it is actually more harmful to make excuses for the wrong in order to justify your consumption than it is to admit, “Yeah, this media is problematic and contains a lot of sexism, but I still enjoy it for its other qualities.” It is better to admit that you enjoy something problematic than to spread the message that what is happening in it is okay.

Some of you may be thinking, “Or, just stop consuming problematic media.”

I think in many cases, especially recent media, where your consumption has an effect on production, this is true. However, for media that is no longer being produced, I will remind you that most things have something wrong with them - yes, even pretty recent stuff.

Supernatural kills off women constantly, queerbaited the fuck out of its viewers, and sent a huge character to fucking mega hell for confessing his love.

Scrubs has no end to its sexism, transphobic and homophobic slur usage, and other problematic content.

V for Vendetta glorifies and shines a heroic light on a character who kidnaps and tortures a woman for what appeared to have been weeks or months so that she would be forced to understand his trauma and “no longer be afraid.”

Star Wars has incest, the producers/directors abused Carrie Fisher and sexualized her as a young teen, and probably a lot more that I’m not aware of because I haven’t seen the movies nor read the books.

I don’t even need to start on shows like Breaking Bad, Game of Thrones, Community, That 70s Show, and so many more. Almost every popular piece of media has something worth canceling in it. There is no point trying to curate your media consumption to only unproblematic content, because it simply can’t be done.

Curate where it makes a difference. Sigh heavily the rest of the time. Make yourself aware what and how things are problematic. Put critical thought into how your consumption is capable of supporting or perpetuating a problem and how it is not. Make informed decisions.

Do not feel guilty if you are unable to flawlessly live up to the standards of purity culture. None of us can - not really.

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randomrainman · 4 years ago

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american conservatism and the minds of people: a black man’s perspective.

Hi, it is I.

I often think long and hard about the mind states of the people around me, and my inevitable conclusion is that the vast majority of people are monumentally and irrevocably fucking stupid. As it turns out, people have a really hard time letting go of things with which they have grown familiar or fond, and therein lies the basic principle of conservative thought.

“But aren’t some things okay to keep?”

Well, obviously, not everything needs to be thrown out in order for improvement to occur. In the Army, we have things labelled “sustains” and “improves”. The two terms are pretty self-explanatory (as are most things in the military): sustains are the things that work, and the improves are the things you either completely nix or need to, erm, improve. Of course, this begs a question: as it relates to a society of living, (mostly) breathing human beings, how does this apply?

"Don’t throw out the baby with the bath water,” it is commonly said. I am not entirely sure who was throwing away bathing children, but that’s a discussion for a different time. The baby in this idiomatic expression is whatever it is we are supposed to be maintaining. Let’s start with an example: police.

Obviously, it is entirely infeasible to literally abolish police. We absolutely need the police force as an institution, and good and effective policing is a pillar to a modern, functional society. However, we can abolish unprofessional, unnecessarily violent, racist, or otherwise unbecoming behaviour from police departments, and also demonstrate that such things are intolerable and met with appropriate punishments every time these rules are broken. NWA didn’t make “Fuck The Police” because they wanted to express interest in having thoroughly arresting cop sex; it exists because they don’t trust the police.

youtube

Above: An Autistic Swedish dude spitting shockingly accurate commentary-by-proxy about American society. Flames!

Due possibly in part to dubiously worded slogans such as “defund the police”, modern conservatives balk at the thought of changing anything of significance about how policing in many communities in the United States is conducted, even going as far as to label the reform for which we call as an attack on the very idea of police.

That said, historically, the very pillars of police forces in the United States have their foundations in slavery and post-slavery racist institutions, which means that, while much has changed on the surface, the way police implement policy reflects structural and societal racism. As a result, simply attacking individual instances of misconduct will almost always fail to elicit any meaningful progress, which is why some do seek to dismantle police departments (an option I cannot fathom as being realistic, especially not in the short term).

The lack of a centralised police organisation from which to implement policy certainly does not help, and while some police departments, to include the Department of Justice itself, have introduced implicit bias training, it would appear that change was difficult to measure. Additionally, many police departments have not addressed the more overt problem of explicit racism in law enforcement, which is a nigh-impossible thing to tackle expeditiously without a top-down structure to deal with it. It has improved steadily overall, however, but not without significant disapproval...

Pictured: “disapproval”. A civil rights demonstrator is attacked by a police dog in Birmingham, Ala., in 1963. (Photo credit: AP)

The Origins

As I noted earlier, there is plenty of shit people want to keep, and most for relatively understandable reasons -- after all, those things provide a sense of familiarity. “It’s always been this way -- why change it?” they ask. One needs only to look at our, um, flowery history to see countless examples of things that required change...

The transatlantic slave trade transported up to 12 million forcibly enslaved Africans to the Americas, many of whom arrived in what is now the United States. As unspeakably horrifying as the actual journey was, this was only the beginning of the tribulations that would befall the slaves and their descendants in the future.

While Europeans played a large part in introducing the idea of race-based caste systems into colonised lands, the American brand of discrimination is different in the fact that the idea that Blacks and Native Americans were genetically inferior to whites was endemic to our inception, and thus, formed the basis of the things enshrined into American democracy.

Photo credit: Alexander Gardner / Wikimedia Commons

Abraham Lincoln entered the chat.

Naturally, having someone even so much as threaten the idea of racial dominance after literal fucking centuries of treating Black people as property did not sit well with the slave-owning populace (even if Lincoln’s motives were not exactly altruistic). While the Southern states did in fact operate an agrarian economy heavily dependent on chattel slavery, it was that notion of superiority combined with societal comfort they felt that ultimately catalysed the secession of the Southern states from the Union...

Pictured: Civil War reenactors (from the Confederate side) simulate the Battle of Antietam, the bloodiest battle in US history. Also, why the fuck is Civil War reenactment a popular thing to do? It’s deeply weird. (Photo credit: MPRNews.org)

...and then they decided to have the deadliest fucking war in American history over that comfort. Spoiler alert: the Confederates lost both the war and their precious bullshit institution of slavery -- but even after the Emancipation Proclamation was issued, many Southern slave owners did not even pass the news of freedom to their slaves for months.

In keeping with the preservationist and racist mindset which occupied most Southerners’ brains, any attempt to integrate Black people into society during the Reconstruction period was stymied at every turn. To them, despite Black people being de jure full citizens in accordance with the Civil Rights Act of 1866, we were still subhuman. Due to Jim Crow laws, Ku Klux Klan terrorism, and other assorted nonsense, we made virtually no progress toward equality until the Civil Rights Movement and resulting laws such as the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and the Fair Housing Act of 1968.

“Well, you got what you wanted! YOU’RE EQUAL! Quit yer bitchin’!”

Ah, if only things worked that way in real life. As previously noted, even if things are codified into law as changes, there are still people who try really hard to keep everything exactly the fucking same, so it does not end up happening in practice. Things such as residual effects of redlining and continuing disproportionate and excessive imprisonment of minorities, amongst other issues, still affect people in the present day. In other areas, people exploit loopholes in order to lawfully discriminate against others they might deem “undeserving”.

Lots of things, especially when it comes to role of minorities in society, have historical precedents. When arguing said precedents with conservative types, the conversation almost always leads to one of several (predictable) conclusions: the person believes that 1) negative historical events (e.g., slavery, Native American genocide, etc.) were not that bad; 2) those things did not happen at all; or 3) those things were bad, but somehow do not affect modern society.

Obviously, all three are emphatically wrong. This is why typical conservative behaviour, even in this modern era in which information sharing is instantaneous, does not surprise me: often, the rhetoric is not rooted in reality, and often resorts to appeals to emotions to elicit a knee-jerk response. This is not to say that this does not occur on liberal ends of the spectrum, but modern conservative rhetoric is rooted primarily in unjustified fear of change and anti-intellectualism.

Pictured: A screenshot I took of someone on a pro-President Biden post desperately trying to be oppressed.

This kind of shit is utterly exhausting. Neoconservatism, in a nutshell, is people literally inventing problems and subsequently getting angry at their own creations. It is the equivalent of setting up a bear trap, immediately stepping in it, and wondering why the fuck you’re stuck in said bear trap and your foot doesn’t work anymore. During the Obama administration, the only thing I would witness is people insisting (without any evidence, of course) that President Obama was the Antichrist and that he would usher in the New World Order and take everyone’s guns. All zero of those things happened, of course, but when Donald Trump assumed the presidency, the rhetoric completely reversed, and he was named “God’s chosen" by evangelical figures, despite him having broken perhaps all of the Old Testament’s Ten Commandments. Of course, as you can see with the above screenshot, clearly, they have returned to the Obama bitching method, but diminished, partially because President Biden is also an old, white male, and they don’t need to ask where he was born.

Pictured: what happens when you fuel millions of self-victimising people with QAnon conspiracy theories and possibly loads of Bang energy drinks. Photo credit: ABC News

The hypocrisy is absolutely palpable amongst these types of people, and if I tried to sit here and continued to provide examples of conservative figures contradicting themselves, I would die either of old age or myocardial infarction, whichever happened first. The difference in the reaction to Black Lives Matter protests versus the storming of the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021 makes the double standard quite transparent: justice and equality, while technically codified into law, are clearly are not administered equally in modern-day America. We’re still not like the others.

Our brand of conservatism, by and large, is the enemy of those two very important American ideals.

|the kid|

#conservatism #conservative #liberal #Donald Trump #Joe Biden #President of the United States #creative writing #article #political ideology #critical thinking

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uncontainedkc · 4 years ago

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Necessary Disruption: Housing Reimagined

“There’s no place like home!”, is more than a popular line from the classic movie - The Wizard of Oz. Home is a safe place, a place to grow and create a lifetime of memories with your loved ones. Home is an ideal. It is the American Dream. Sadly, home has been an unfathomable circumstance for millions of humans that lived and died through various tragedies on American soil throughout our troubling history with racism, slavery and discrimination. Home continues to be a mere illusion of a reality that is completely unknowable and out of reach for some. Specifically, more than 500,000 Americans are unsheltered today. Millions more are housing insecure, including 2.5 million children. Despite the fact that housing is a basic physiological need for human survival- “home” evades millions of people in the wealthiest nation on earth, America.

The long-standing traditions of limiting generational wealth and status by prohibiting land ownership coupled with rampant housing discrimination are ever-present even today. Housing in this country is treated as a luxury and not as a human right. That is a problem.

A disruption is necessary.

LIMITING WEALTH BY RESTRICTING ACCESS TO OWNERSHIP OF LAND AND REAL PROPERTY IN THE UNITED STATES.

Understanding the shift we must make requires we understand the roots of our current land ownership and housing system. Historically, housing in the United States has long been an area of explicit, strategic discrimination and oppressive practices. These practices were implemented and maintained as a way to control mobility, status, and life opportunities of populations that were deemed inferior or less desirable. It was also the most effective way to concentrate power and wealth in a select group of people- white men and by extension white women.

From the time Europeans landed in the Americas, there has been a race for land acquisition. Once the Native Americans and the Mexican states were forcibly removed from their lands and homes via murder, enslavement, or cultural genocide, that made way for what has become The United States of America. The stolen parcels, stained with fresh blood of the rightful inhabitants that gave their lives defending their homes, were divided up for the new owners. When it came time to distribute the stolen land parcels the privilege of ownership was available almost exclusively to a select class- white male immigrants.

In this country, at least fifteen generations of land ownership was the currency by which one built and maintained their family wealth and passed down such wealth to future generations. The institution of slavery ensured that ownership was a privilege specifically denied to most Black, Native and Mexican people, and their children for fifteen plus generations. For centuries, they built wealth for landowners while themselves owning nothing and having nothing to pass down to future generations.

There are some significant legislative landmarks that had lasting impacts on current day US housing:

40 Acres and a Mule

When blacks legally gained citizenship via the Civil Rights Act of 1866 which was ratified by the 14th Amendment in 1868 and after the Civil War, Congress passed the Southern Homestead Act. The stated purpose of the act was to allow for land in southern states to be acquired by formerly enslaved people. Hence, the expectation of 40 acres and a mule as recompense for generations of depravity and abject poverty imposed. This was also seen as a way to stabilize black families and allow for a basic opportunity to build a life after the horrors they endured. However, specifically excluded from being beneficiaries of the act were people holding two specific occupations: domestic servants and agricultural workers. As coincidence would have it (insert sarcasm and a major eye roll), formerly enslaved people, Native Americans, and Mexicans just so happened to occupy those roles in society. So white males were again, legally allowed to say “Sorry, no land for ‘you people’- still ”. The inability to own anything in addition to meager wages did not allow for wealth transfer in the form of land or money to be passed down to the children of Black, Native and Mexican families for another 5-8 generations.

Creating the Ghettos- Redlining

The National Housing Act of 1934 was passed by Congress which introduced the concept of redlining. Security maps for residential neighborhoods were created across the country. The security maps designated areas of high risk- which were majority black and minority communities. These maps were created by the Home Owners’ Loan Cooperation as a way to outline the neighborhoods in red (hence the term redlining) so that banks would know exactly the areas to deny mortgages or improvement loans. The lack of loans prevented home ownership, community improvement or updating which lead to crumbling infrastructure and devaluing of those neighborhoods. The domino effect of crumbling infrastructure, no maintenance or upkeep by landlords and more crowded environments led to devaluing of the property. Since the properties were in disrepair the property taxes collected based on their value were insufficient to fund schools at a reasonable level. Resulting in a collapse of the school system. By design, the infrastructure of these redlined areas imploded- making it easy to shove minorities in but nearly impossible to get out.

Public Housing- Redlining 2.0 the new Ghettos

Low-income housing and further segregation was the end effect of The Housing Act of 1937. The intent was to provide relief from the Great Depression for standard low and middle-income families. Over time the housing units were only provided to low income, mostly minority families. The units were built intentionally in segregated parts of town. This further resulted in segregated housing for Blacks, Hispanic and Asian populations.

Black WWII soldiers denied GI Bill benefits

The GI Bill was signed by FDR in 1944 to provide soldiers returning from WWII with education, training, loans for farms, businesses, employment assistance and houses. The low-cost mortgages lead to the rise of the suburbs. The problem, blacks couldn’t live in the suburbs although blacks were technically included in the benefits of the bill. The discrimination was upheld because whites did not want minorities moving to their neighborhoods. They believed that minorities drive down property values. It was also considered unethical to sell a home to a black person in a predominantly white neighborhood. There were covenants and clauses to ensure homes in most suburbs could only be sold to white families.

Civil Rights Act of 1964

Enduring 250 years of chattel slavery then 99 years of slavery in a different form brings us to 1964 when the Civil Rights Act was passed. (Of course, we are not detailing many of the tragic and important details during this time frame. It is worth noting that these years were hell for non-white people in nearly every way shape and form!) The Civil Rights Act was passed in 1964 and it prohibited discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, or national origin. So, finally, after dozens of generations of racist and discriminatory practices, we will get some housing justice and equity, right? Nope.

Even since civil rights were passed, discriminatory practices have continually affected who owns property as well as land.

Racial home ownership gaps were at the highest levels in 50 years in 2017. Statistics of home ownership:

79.1% of white Americans

41.8% of black Americans

This gap is even larger today than it was when deliberately racist and discriminatory redlining practices were rampant. Redlining was an effective systemic method to maintain social hierarchy and we still feel the effects today. This has kept blacks in certain neighborhoods and prevented them from owning land or real property. This practice resulted in another three to five generations of limiting opportunities, quality of life, and generational wealth for non-white Americans. This isn’t ancient history. A person that is 56-57 years old has lived this reality.

First Generation of Legally Free and Fully Equal Human Beings

In 2020, we are now living with the first generation of African Americans deemed to be legally, fully free, equal human beings in this country. I am one such African American born to parents that lived through segregation with no basis of wealth and systemically limited opportunities. The lack of generational ownership or wealth is critical to understanding wealth disparity in the black middle class today. The lack of generational wealth also contributes to the lack of mobility of lower-class black Americans. This reality makes it harder- if not impossible- to accrue and pass along wealth to any future generations.

Land ownership has been held as the mechanism by which wealth and status are transferred. The deliberately exclusionary nature of land and real property ownership over the past 400 years has led us to our modern-day housing crisis. Our current housing circumstance in the US is precarious but we are here by design.

A disruption is necessary.

https://www.uncontainedlivingkc.com/post/necessary-disruption-housing-reimagined

#containerhomes Uncontainedliving UncontainedlivingKC affordablehousing containersolutions housingcrisis housingjustice housingdevelopment

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snowscreekstories · 6 years ago

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Week 1

1. Excerpted quotes

“The intent of this practice is not to give voice to the slave, but rather to imagine what cannot be verified, [...] It is a history of an unrecoverable past; it is a narrative of what might have been or could have been; it is a history written with and against the archive.“ (12)

Saidiya Hartman. “Venus in Two Acts.” Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism 26 (June 2008): 1-14.

“For ghosts, the haunting is the resolving, it is not what needs to be resolved.“ (642)

“Haunting: a glossary” by Eve Tuck and C. Ree

2. An addition to the glossary of haunting

Negrito

This week’s readings reminded me of an old short story I read in high school titled En el fondo del caño hay un negrito (At the depths of the canal lies a little black boy) by José Luis González (1950). This story, which is set in Puerto Rico during the 1940s-1950s, a toddler named Melodía (Melody) sees another little black boy at the bottom of the canal on the third or fourth day of his family moving into a small shack that is placed right smack in the middle of the canal which was now part of a growing slum. On three separate occasions on that same day the toddler saw the little black boy at the bottom of the canal smiling and waving its tiny hand back at him, and he was so happy and felt so much love towards his newfound friend that he reached out to grab him. The story ends with the toddler who drowned by admiring his own reflection. Now Melodía became the little black boy at the bottom of the canal. Melodía, who was the only character that was named by the author, was now nothing more than just another little black boy of many whose bodies lie in those murky unsanitary waters, leaving behind his mother and father, only refered to as the woman and the man, struck by poverty as a couple of negros arrimaos (displaced black people).

The term Negrito is a condescending way to refer to black people. It is used as a way to soften the “pejorative” blow of calling someone Negro and avoid the risk of offending someone by implying that the person is darker than they actually are. You see, there are a bunch of matices (shades) of color: trigueño, quemao, canela, oliva, etc., all of which stand opposed to the polar category of Black. In Puerto Rico, we do not define race by the one drop rule, it is a spectrum within two polar categories of white and black, of which we are led to believe that we all fall within these ideas of a mixed Puerto Rican race. What fails to be acknowledged is that race plays a part in how the wealth is distributed and the type of people who are incarcerated. It is easy for people in PR to identify instances where they have been discriminated against for being of a lower social economic situation than it is to ask them about their race. I believe that what is worse than recognizing that there is a race problem is the negation of there being. When Black communities are told to “just get over slavery“ you are negating the lasting ramifications that slavery still plays in peoples’ lives.

3. Answers to this week’s readings:

I believe that this week’s readings referenced the ways in which slavery emanates through the state violence we experience day to day by the killing and mass incarceration of young black men. But most of all, how the U.S. was built on the rape of black and indigenous women and how that’s reflected through present haunted power dynamics. The U.S. is not alone in this, since other countries in the New World operated in a similar way, but as a person who has not lived in continental U.S. before attending UCSD, I have seen passive and overt instances of racism that I have not witnessed back home. There are similarities in the way certain historical events have been downplayed in order to avoid any recognition of these crimes. They are considered all in the past and therefore there is no use to bring them out into the open because “we fixed racism”. Yet, black and indigenous folks continue to be disproportionately affected by domestic violence, racial profiling and poverty.

Tuck and Ree’s reading reminds us of orphaned beginnings through the settler colonial relations triad which includes “a) the Indigenous inhabitant, present only because of her erasure; b) the chattel slave, whose body is property and murderable; and c) the inventive settler, whose memory becomes history, and whose ideology becomes reason ” (642). Here, we see the dynamics that are present and enacted by settlers who stripped black and indigenous people of their names, their autonomy, and their lands.

Yet, there is still a way, to challenge present dynamics by constructing liberatory futures by way of narratives, which Hartman refers to as critical fabulations by “straining against the limits of the archive to write a cultural history of the captive, and, at the same time, enacting the impossibility of representing the lives of the captives precisely through the process of narration“ (11). I believe that the only way to gain accountability is to let us be haunted, for we are not innocent. We are, by Tuck and Ree’s words, “permanently haunted by the slavery, genocide, and violence entwined in its first, present and future days“ (642). In my case, as a product of colonialism, I am not devoid of its lasting repercussions for others. I recognize that the color of my skin has given me privilege, and that I have enacted, either through ignorance or plain carelessness, present power dynamics.

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suadabdu · 4 years ago

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BL ST 129 - THE URBAN DILEMMA - Winter 2021 Blog Post 1

Chapter 3: The Movement to Create Roses- A Sociopolitical History of Education and Resistance in the Bay Area discusses the foundation of Roses in Concrete, a bay area school built to support, heal and transform BIPOC students and their communities (Noguera, 2020). The reading discusses how the founders of RiC aimed to produce students who are change agents by utilizing ethnic studies, dual immersion Spanish, social justice and art programming. One key term used in this reading is Warrior scholars. Warrior scholars are change agents who work to repair and revitalize Oakland back to health. Another term mentioned in the reading is the metaphor Roses in concrete. Rosas in concrete is a theory of change for the school that aims to create something great from a place that's not the best. The students' RiC through the school’s community responsive model are encouraged to think critically about themselves and their communities. Armed with critical thinking skills students were pushed to better the communities that they are a part of rather than leave. As professor Noguera mentioned in lecture and in the reading the school participates in reclaiming space for underserved students which is ultimately a liberatory effort.

Settler Colonialism as Structure: A Framework for Comparative Studies of U.S. Race and Gender Formation Nakano-Glenn, 2015 aims to highlight how settler colonialism is an ongoing structure and articulate better forms of cross group alliances among affected groups. Nakano-Glenn highlights how settler colonialism as a concept affects all groups such as Native Americans, blacks, Latinos, and Asian Americans whilst encompassing specificity such as racism and sexism. Additionally, Glenn discussed how oftentimes racial justice aims to include subordinated groups rather than liberate them all together. Liberal inclusion functions within the logics, epistemologies and narratives the subjugate therefore it may lead to the reproduction of it. Intersectionality and Women of Color feminist offer thinking that counter these narratives and epistemologies by identifying the links allowing for people of color to imagine liberation. A key term mentioned in this reading is Settler colonialism. Settler Colonialism aims to acquire and occupy land and settle permanently pursued through forms of militarized violence such as genocide. Racialization is a prominent feature of settler colonial societies. Racialization is the political process of ascribing ethnic and racial identities to groups that do not identify themselves as such. Racialization has categorized groups of people as inhuman allowing the settler colonists to justify their subjugation and oppression. An example of this is chattel slavery. Paying attention to the technologies of control used, we see that there are connections and commonality of different racialized “others”. Settler colonialism helps us understand the Black and white binary. Since settler colonialism is ongoing Black people in urban America are still navigating the implication. Roses in Concrete is a contemporary of that process. Glenn highlights the settler colonial framework offers many advantages but that the next task should be to explore the connections and various relationships among other frameworks for better understanding because each framework offers significant analytical methods.

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i-am-very-very-tired · 3 years ago

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I posted 6,306 times in 2021

762 posts created (12%)

5544 posts reblogged (88%)

For every post I created, I reblogged 7.3 posts.

I added 18 tags in 2021

#youtube - 15 posts

#she did such a beautiful job - 1 posts

#this girl is just discovering the magnitude of her talent - 1 posts

#instagram - 1 posts

Longest Tag: 57 characters

#this girl is just discovering the magnitude of her talent

My Top Posts in 2021

Bodybuilder shares drastic before-and-after bloating photos | The Independent | The Independent

3 notes • Posted 2021-01-29 19:48:40 GMT

3 notes • Posted 2021-11-13 09:27:37 GMT

"New York City’s a big thing, obviously, [I’m] a kid from Brooklyn, you know, so it’s big for us. [It’s] very exciting. It’s very important because typically in these things there’s no sort of diversity, there’s no one that represents the city, no one from the city. So, all those things make it a real exciting opportunity. A lot of the times people say things because it's the topic of now and they don't want to get themselves in a PR disaster ...our company Rocnation is 53% diverse [and] 51% female [?employee base/ ownership?]. We don't have a diversity department, it's just who we are, so you got to get people in the room that live and breathe it [diversity] and you know that's the only thing that's going to change it can't be [that one just] write[s] a cheque [for] $250 million over 10 years or whatever...you gotta get people from the culture in the room."

- Jay -Z to ET Online at 40/40 club 18th Anniversary

3 notes • Posted 2021-08-31 21:50:45 GMT

I'm feeling fragile, so some shallow TV watching would be great. But I just hate the way these women treat Eboni (& her valid factoids). It triggers me the way the basketball wives colourism & gaslighting towards OG triggered me.

Also someone needs to tell me is Bershawn an ally to Eb or is she a token. Cause tokens make things so much worse. A token nearly drove me crazy once. It emboldened the racist gaslighters around me. Their microaggressions grew worse.

5 notes • Posted 2021-07-07 17:43:42 GMT

See the full post

7 notes • Posted 2021-12-10 17:59:12 GMT

Get your Tumblr 2021 Year in Review →

#my 2021 tumblr year in review #your tumblr year in review

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vaguely-problematic · 5 years ago

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i keep hearing europeans and africans scoff at americans for claiming the heritage of one's ancestors (pretty sure the whole world scoffs at americans for this, to some extent)

and it's like, you know how the u.s.a. works though, right?

you know the whole melting pot thing?

oh sure the u.s. says it prides diversity yadda yadda yadda. but the modus operandi here is cultural genocide. and it does not matter where you(or your ancestors)'re from. it affects everyone.

it affects some people more than others, of course. i'm not saying the experience of the people of the first nations is the same as that of european immigrants etc. there are different levels of violence here. that's an obvious thing i should not have to say. if i went into the rabbit hole of describing how the u.s. matches different levels of violence and strategies of cultural genocide to different groups of people in different times, we might never come back out, because in pretty much every example except for outright chattel slavery, the u.s. is still perpetuating these violences against its own population.

the reason italian americans don't grow up speaking italian or eating traditional italian food or dancing, dressing, playing sports, having communities, or even practicing religion in ways influenced by their italian heritage is that their italian ancestors, upon arriving in the u.s., were forced to conform.

they were actively persecuted and threatened and intimidated and shunned etc any time they acted italian. and they were forced to conform. sometimes they were more simply enticed to conform and praised when they did, so that they came to think of their "former" heritage as something old, shoddy, and dirty, as if anything different from their "new" american way of doing things was shameful and best forgotten. but they were forced to conform. (could they ever be american enough? of course not. no one can.)

this dynamic is still painfully obvious in the u.s. today. just look around.

and let's say they kept doing things the "old" way, because they're proud and tough as nails and r.i.p. to the other immigrants but i'm different. okay. they are still working almost every waking hour just to stay alive, and their kids are sent to public school and taught american ways, in english, and also forced to conform.

all it takes is one generation growing up without speaking the language or participating in the customs of their heritage for that culture to die out. the system works.

so, no. americans- even white americans- don't really know who we are. at some point many of us have looked into the mirror and seen nothing but american propaganda and a bit of defiance looking back at us. what does it even mean to be american???

what is american culture but white supremacy and settler colonialism and military imperialism and toxic masculinity and the protestant work ethic and late stage capitalism and xenophobia and competitive individualism and rampant consumerism? if we throw that all away, what's left? are american football and apple pie and lemonade enough to be culture? no. no they are not.

things can be very american without offering anything to forge an identity around.

the culture of america is workplace culture and authoritarianism. that will keep us all in line and churning out profits for those in charge. any real culture would allow us to form community and band together and change our lives.

we find ways, we will always find ways, but.

bury the past, rob us blind, and leave nothing behind /Rage Against The Machine

so YEAH we clutch at the straws of our ghosts, at what we could have been maybe, at what, if we tried really hard, maybe we could still be? (we can't, but.)

would it fill the void? (also no.)

that's one of the coping mechanisms, anyway. another is to double down and be super patriotic (america fuck yeah).

and most often, what really happens is a combination of both these dynamics (and some ignorance etc thrown in)(that's how you get st patrick's day with green beer and "kiss me i'm irish-ish" shirts)

yes, it is problematic as hell. pathetic even. but still

is this post a touch dramatic? yes. is it still true? also yes. now please excuse me i have to eat an oreo pizza and launch a tesla into space.

Some Italian Americans are so funny cus they’ll be like 67877th generation, not know one word of Italian, can’t even point Italy on a map, and the only thing their parents ever cooked that was Italian was spaghetti and meatballs with ragu sauce and garlic bread that came from a freezer. But they’ll be the first ones to say “we do x y and z cus we Italians!” And they’ll rep Italy as if they’d just left.

If that’s all it takes to be Italian, I too am Italian for all the times I had Italian genetics inserted inside me while on all fours during my summers on Long Island.

#not italian #america #cultural genocide #ah hell i posted an older draft by mistake #edited

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navigatethestream · 8 years ago

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Societal fascism describes the process and political logics of state formation wherein entire populations are either excluded or ejected from the social contract. They are excluded pre-contractually because they have never been a part of a given social contract and never will be; or they are ejected from a contract they were previously a part of and are only able to enjoy a conditional inclusion at best. Black Americans are the former: they are residents in a settler colony predicated upon the genocide of indigenous people and the enslavement of the Africans from whom they are descendants. Residents in the United States, as opposed to citizens of. Despite a Constitution laden with European Enlightenment values, and a document of independence declaring egalitarianism and inalienable rights as the law of the land, Black existence was that of private property. The Black American condition is perpetual relegation to the afterlife of slavery, and as long as the United States continues to exist as an ongoing settler project, in this afterlife Black people will remain. As Hortense Spillers makes clear in her seminal work, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Story,” Blackness was indelibly marked and transformed through the Transatlantic chattel trade. European colonialism and the subsequent process of African enslavement — both as a profit-maximizing economic institution and an un-humaning institution — can be regarded as “high crimes against the flesh, as the person of African females and males registered the wounding.” Crimes against the flesh are not simply crimes against the corporeal self: the wounded flesh, rather, was the personhood and social positionality of the African. The wounding is the process of blackening and necessarily of subjugation, a wound from which Black people and “Blackness” writ large have yet to recover. Black exclusion from the social contract is existence within a heavily surveilled and heavily regulated state of subjection. We are carriers of the coveted blue passport still trapped in the zone of citizen non-being. We are simultaneously subjugated and teased with promises of liberation via individualized neoliberal self-betterment and swallowing of a long-soured American Dream whilst choking back dissonances and forcibly reconciling irreconcilable double consciousnesses. Whiteness has long sought to grapple with the existential threat posed by Black freedom. Black repatriation to Africa, or “colonization,” has long been floated as one potential solution. Founded in 1816 and driven by a variety of ultimately complementary motivations, the American Colonization Society helped to found the colony of Liberia in 1822. The abolitionist contingents within the society believed that because of the insurmountable discriminations free-born Black people and freedmen and their families experienced, Black people would fare far better organizing themselves in their African “homelands.” Slaveholders within American society were concerned that the presence of free Blacks would inspire enslaved Blacks to revolt and thus compromise the stability (both economic stability and the stability of the anti-Black racial order) of the southern slaveocracy, and other openly racist members outright refused Black people the opportunity to integrate into American society. Others still were concerned that Black families would burden state welfare systems and that interracial labor competition would ultimately compromise wages for white workers. A lesser known proponent of colonization was the “Great Emancipator” himself, Abraham Lincoln, who entertained a far lesser known and quickly abandoned plan for Black colonization in Panama — one decried by Frederick Douglass as “ridiculous” — which would also play a role in the expansion of American trade influence in the Caribbean. The “Back to Africa” project was subsequently taken up by Black thinkers like Marcus Garvey in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries following the failures of Reconstruction in the South, the first attempt to meaningfully extend citizenship to newly emancipated Blacks, to protect them from white supremacist violence and also the social and political disillusionment of Blacks who had migrated to northern states. It is no coincidence that interest in repatriation peaked during the period. The major problem with both historical and contemporary repatriation-colonization programs is the means by which they fail to both provide reparation for historic violence and answer the perennial question of Black citizenship in the United States. Many or most Black people, including many descendants of enslaved Africans trafficked from the continent centuries ago, have no desire to return to an Africa that has never been their home in any material sense. Given plans to remain, Black people have organized in myriad ways to affect change and actualize varying conceptions of liberation in the United States. But as history has demonstrated, some vehicles for change and political advancement are more fickle than others.

The Anarchism of Blackness by William C. Anderson and Zoé Samudzi, ROAR Magazine |

#anarchism #black anarchism #black liberation

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samashni-blog · 6 years ago

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Tumblr post, April 5th

In “Venus in Two Acts,” Saidiya Hartman states early on that “There are hundreds of thousands of girls who share [Venus’] circumstances and these circumstances have generated few stories. And the stories that exist are not about them, but rather about violence, excess, mendacity, and reason that seized hold of their lives, transformed them into commodities and corpses, and identity fired with names tossed-off and insults and crass jokes” (2). In a history with a power dynamic that allowed for the complete ownership of one person over another, society is affected on both an individual and collective levels.

When a person becomes chattel, with their history wiped away, where does that leave those who come after them? How is it fair that some people are able to trace their “trace their ancestry back to the Mayflower” and others must take a DNA test just to find out with less than 100% certainty the general region of the globe their ancestors inhabited only 200 years ago?

When a woman is stripped down to nothing but a number without a story, where does that leave the rest of the world? How is it fair that one demographic’s determined facts are able to become the ultimate truth of history, without regard to those who actually experienced the history? Those who created the idea of what is considered knowledge and science are also (not-so-)coincidentally the ones who hold the only “legitimate” evidence of their atrocities. Where do we, the living, go from here? Can we right these wrongs? Should we? I think this last point was a key idea of Hartman’s work.

It has always been so hard for me to imagine a future in which justice is truly served. Because I feel like the idea of justice is so different for each person on this planet. (Also, since it is part of the class’ theme, what would a robot say justice is? Who would program that robot?) Anyway, can justice really ever be served? We can never know what the earliest victims of chattel slavery would have wanted. Their voices were never documented for us. And although we can see the lasting effects of slavery and the continued forms of slavery in the current century, will equal housing lending, affirmative action, cash payouts, reverse racism, or an entire wiping of the mind for a “fresh start” solve our problems? We can’t really know. We could always try something, though.

One term I would add to the Tuck & Ree glossary is: Reparations. In my mind, this is some form of acknowledgement, service, or payout of/for a wrongdoing. But in matters such as the genocide of Indigenous American tribes and chattel slavery, what would this ever look like? Do we give back the land that is the United States? Do we pay out millions of dollars to each Black family descended from slavery? And who is this “we”? How does history attempt to right the wrongs of its past that haunts it to this day?

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96thdayofrage · 6 years ago

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A couple months ago, I was chillin’ at my potna house watching football. During a commercial break, we started talking about Kamala Harris — and my potna’s older cousin shouted, “Kamala Harris! She been lockin’ niggas up at Renee (referring to the Oakland courthouse) since way back in the day and was doin’ it with a smile on her face.” He wasn’t wrong. Kamala Harris has spent her career as the district attorney of Alameda County, San Francisco, and as the Attorney General aka The Top Cop of California.

As someone from the Bay Area and living in Oakland, I am constantly reminded of her history of locking up Black people in the Bay Area. Her track record consists of terrorizing Black communities through the prison industrial complex and she has consistently shown herself to be an enemy to the masses of Black people.

While I admit the symbol of having a Black woman as president sounds nice, it doesn’t exclude Kamala from being critiqued. I operate under the political belief that there are no good presidents. Presidents are just figureheads for the white supremacist settler colonial state. I aim to have a principled critique of her record that advances Black political thought, yet Twitter has been full of misogynist critiques of Kamala. It is important we critique her while avoiding misogynoir, as there is no place for misogynoir in the Black liberation movement.

Whether it was declining to advocate for legalization of marijuana in California, in which Black people are arrested at the highest rate. Or her failure to support body cameras for the police while simultaneously opposing legislation that would require her office to independently investigate police shootings. Kamala is not for the people. She even defended the 3 strikes law, in which Black people are incarcerated at a rate12 times higher than whites. Kamala Harris has demonstrated through her actions that she does not value Black lives, but rather supports our death via the carceral state.

Kamala’s support of the death penalty, which is a modern day form of lynching that has executed hundreds of innocent people, and also disproportionately affects Black people proves that she doesn’t value Black lives. Kamala even advocated that an innocent Black man named Kevin Cooper, who was a death row inmate and had a trial that was rooted in overt racism and corruption, be executed. She advocated for this even though Kevin had DNA evidence that proved his innocence yet Kamala Harris opposed it until the New York Times exposed the case.

Furthermore, America has no moral ability to be able to decide who lives and who dies. The death penalty is fundamentally racist, yet Kamala supports it — furthering her record as a tough on crime politician.

Not only has she failed to support policies that might improve the lives of Black people, she has defended the need for prison slavery. What’s dangerous about Kamala is that she weaponizes “civil rights” language however her actions prove otherwise. For instance, she said “the idea that we incarcerate people to have indentured servitude is one of the worst possible perceptions…I feel very strongly about that. It evokes images of chain gangs.” Despite making the connection between prison labor and chain gangs —she “pushed back against a federal order to expand an early parole program, arguing that it would deplete their stock of prison labor, especially inmates who fight wildfires”. These inmates make a dollar an hour, which is a form of slavery. Kamala is not only a super cop, but an adamant defender of the institution of policing that is rooted in slave patrols.

Kamala Harris evokes the language of being a civil rights leader for Black people. In her video announcement for president, she weaponized words like “truth, justice, and equality” and her campaign slogan is “for the people”. This is propaganda, and this campaign strategy isn’t something new, rather it follows what I refer to as the Obama Plan. The Obama Plan is a campaign strategy that will center a civil rights type narrative such as “hope” and will also use all the elements of Blackness we like in order to get a Black person elected. This campaign uses the popular aesthetics of Blackness despite the actions of Harris being fundamentally anti-Black.

Kamala used this plan by announcing her run for presidency on Martin Luther King Jr. Day, a day that celebrates the radical legacy of a Black man who stood for the liberation of Black lives with both an anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist politic. Kamala Harris announcing her run for presidency on MLK Day is disrespectful to King’s legacy and is a spit in the face to the Black radical tradition. Her announcing on MLK day is propaganda. It’s meant to fool Black people that she’s actually for us, despite her actions terrorizing the Black community through her role as a prosecutor. It shows us how Black liberals will weaponize the aesthetics of a freedom fighter in order to strengthen the united states colonial empire.

It is important that we understand that the “criminal justice system” is built upon the legacy of chattel slavery, and that it’s primary role is to lock up Black, Brown, and poor people to maintain a workforce (re: slaves) that supplies America an endless amount of free labor. This being said, Kamala has been the slave auctioneer and sending Black people to prison in order to maintain this endless supply of free labor. Yet some claim that she was a “progressive prosecutor”. How can there be a progressive prosecutor if the foundation of the criminal justice system is rooted in slavery and the genocide of the indigenous? If she truly was a “progressive prosecutor or a good prosecutor,” she would make sure that prosecutors do not exist. There were no good slave owners, or slave auctioneers, just as there are no good prosecutors.

Kamala Harris is what the Black radical tradition calls a neo-colonialist. Neo-colonialism is the integration of a colonized person into the colonized system in order to enact the policies of the colonizer. That being said, Kamala is a Black face doing the job of a white supremacist system. Neo-colonialism is white supremacist colonial propaganda, and it is meant to fool the masses of oppressed people that becoming the oppressor leads to freedom. Don’t be fooled by symbolism. As Obama’s presidency showed us, symbolism does not mean progress for the masses of Black people.

It is clear that Kamala Harris is not for the people. She is for the American empire. Don’t let her identity as a Black woman, or her identity as an AKA, or her status as an alumna from Howard University fool you into thinking she is actually for us: Kamala don’t give a fuck about you niggas.

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