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fortheloveofwonderland · 1 year

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Midnight | Chapter 6 | S.R

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Chapter Summary - you spend the night in West Virginia, in which you find yourself in a slightly awkward situation. When you move on to a small town in Illinois, you make a decision that could end up being your downfall, while Spencer tries to take his mind off his growing attraction towards you.

Pairing - unsub! Spencer Reid / Fem! Reader

Category - dark angst | smut | very eventual happy ending

Warnings - blood, murder, masturbation (male), slight voyeurism, slightly aggressive Spencer, swearing, drinking, making out, tears.

WC - 5k

Chapter Six - Raise No Fool

Logan, West Virginia was, by all accounts, an exceptionally boring place. There was nothing particularly interesting about it, aside from maybe its proximity to the Appalachian Mountains.

The town boasted two restaurants, Morrison’s Drive In with its “world famous” hot dogs or Chirico’s Ristorante, a family owned Italian joint which was where you and Spencer had eaten dinner upon arrival in town. Shopping was just as sparse as was any other kind of activity in these parts. But you supposed you weren’t here for a vacation.

The Chapmanville Inn, the fifty bucks a night motel Spencer had picked out was cheap but certainly not cheerful. The old building had definitely seen better days, a lick of paint would have gone a long way. Then again, knocking it down entirely and starting over again would have gone further.

The room was smaller than your already pokey living room at home. It had twin beds, a wobbly table with a single chair you wouldn't think out of place in an elementary school, a stained blue carpet and little else. At the very least your room had its own bathroom, worryingly not all of them did.

You hadn’t said much of anything to Spencer for the rest of the drive or over dinner. He kept trying to engage you but you responded with little more than perfunctory sounds and nods. Eventually he gave up trying.

He’d allowed you to call Luke from the car outside the restaurant while he listened intently to everything you said to ensure that you didn’t incriminate him. You were sure Luke could sense something was amiss, between you telling him you’d left without your phone and that he couldn’t contact you on your replacement device, you knew he was suspicious. You’d ended the call telling him you would be in touch soon.

When you checked into the Chapmanville Inn, under the names of Andrew and Rose Burnett with their Colorado drivers licences and paying cash, you went straight through to the bathroom to shower.

You spent a long time under the measly flow of luke-warm water, cleaning yourself with the hotel shower gel which had an odd scent that you couldn’t place. It wasn’t entirely unpleasant but it certainly wasn’t nice either.

You dried yourself off and changed your clothes and when you stepped back into the bedroom, you found it empty. Spencer was nowhere to be seen and neither were the two firearms or his hunting knife. The only thing left behind were your bags and the clothes he’d been wearing earlier neatly laid out on one of the beds.

You padded over to the window and pushed the curtain aside to look out at the parking lot. The little navy Nissan was no longer in the spot Spencer had parked it in.

Your first thought was to run. It could be your only chance to get away from Spencer’s manic clutches. The lobby must have a phone, you could call Luke and tell him everything and get him to come and pick you up. Or you could call the cops and have them come for Spencer, but on what grounds?

You had no proof he had done anything wrong and you weren’t here entirely under duress. Spencer hadn’t forced you at gunpoint to come with him, ok so he’d threatened you but you could have gotten out of this if you’d really wanted to. When Luke hugged you at the BAU and obscured your phone’s microphone you could have told him what was going on but you didn’t. You didn’t tip Luke off for the same reason you weren’t going to run now.

You didn’t want to. And that was what scared you most about this whole situation. You had no intention of going anywhere because you wanted to be here with Spencer, no matter how foolish that made you. And you were sure Spencer knew it too, otherwise he wouldn’t have left you here alone. If he’d thought you would run he never would have gone anywhere without you.

Goddamint, I am in way over my head.

You sat down on the free bed and quickly fell back against the pillows. You hadn’t realised how tired you were until you laid down. The last few days had taken its toll on you, coupled with the lack of sleep you’d had due to your nightmares and you were exhausted. You felt your eyes fluttering closed within seconds of your head hitting the pillow. You didn’t even manage to get under the sheet before you were drifting off to sleep.

***

You weren’t sure what woke you. Maybe it was the sound of the door being closed or the light that emanated from the crack in the bathroom door. Maybe it was the metallic smell that filled your nostrils and pulled you out of sleep.

You rubbed your eyes, momentarily forgetting where you were as your brain roused into consciousness. You became aware of the sound of running water. A tap? No, the shower. You sat yourself up in bed and saw the trail of clothes leading to the bathroom door. Socks. Jeans. A hoodie. A pair of boxers. No shirt.

You swung your legs out of the bed without having the forethought to do so and were soon pushing yourself to your feet. You didn’t have to go far before you found the offending item, draped over a garbage bag on the back of the chair.

Even in the dark room you could tell the material was soaked in blood, mostly by the smell. You’d already assumed where Spencer had gone tonight and now you had proof.

Still there was no sign of the guns or the knife.

Curiosity getting the better of you, you crept towards the bathroom and poked your head around the crack in the door. Sitting on the sink basin, either side of the faucet were the two firearms Spencer had taken from your storage container. Inside the basin, soaking in some water was the partially bloody knife.

Feeling your stomach turn, you went to return to bed before Spencer saw you creeping around but as you turned away from the sink your eyes landed on the shower.

Through the flimsy yellow-ish curtain you could make out the perfect outline of Spencer’s body as he stood under the shower head. The lighting couldn’t have been more ideal, showcasing every dip and curve of his figure in silhouette.

You couldn't quite work out if he was facing you or the wall as his hands moved to run through his hair. You could however make out his slim waist and his strong thighs. You heard him exhale sharply through parted lips as he moved his hands from his hair further down his body.

When he turned to the side you had to hold back a gasp and clamped your hand over your mouth at the sight. His cock was standing at full attention and one of his hands was wrapped around it. When his hand started to move you had to bite down on your hand to stop from making a sound.

Your eyes were glued to his crotch, mesmerised by the way his hand glided up and down his hard length. You pressed your thighs together where you stood feeling dizzy at the sight and wishing there wasn’t a shower curtain hindering your view.

It wasn’t long before you felt yourself getting wet, your arousal soaking into the fabric of your panties. You wanted to follow Spencer’s lead and touch yourself, or better, have Spencer touch you. But you didn’t move. You kept frozen still, watching him behind the curtain whilst biting down on your hand.

Small pants and soft moans were coming from Spencer’s lips and you were possibly more turned on than you’d ever been in your life. You would give anything to just hop in that shower with him, to have a front row seat to what he was doing to himself, maybe even help him out.

You were caught up in your fantasy, lost in imagination of what it would be like to have Spencer fuck you up against those grimy shower tiles. So when a voice interrupted your sordid thoughts, you yelped in shock.

“You can either join me in here or go back to bed. I don’t need an audience, princess.” Spencer’s tone was amused yet breathy and he didn’t stop stroking himself as he spoke.

He’d known you were watching him since you walked into the bathroom, the thin curtain worked both ways he’d been able to see you peeping on him. It was the only reason he’d gotten hard in the first place and he’d decided to give you a bit of a show. But you had to pay the cover charge if you wanted the grand finale.

You made a pathetic whimpering sound like a puppy being kicked in the ribs and then he heard you scurrying away and shutting the door firmly behind you. He smiled to himself, shaking his head and continuing his activity once he was alone. He hadn’t expected you to join him, although he certainly wouldn’t have been upset if you had. He was aware you were attracted to him, as he was to you, but he wasn’t going to push you.

He stroked himself to completion and made sure to moan louder than was strictly necessary when he came, to ensure you heard him. He inspected his body after and once he was sure he had rinsed off all the blood, he shut the shower off and got out.

He dried himself off, dressed in a clean pair of underwear and a clean shirt. He cleaned off the blade soaking in the sink before taking it and the firearms and leaving the room. Your bed was furthest from the bathroom and you laid on your side with your back to him. He knew you weren’t asleep as your breathing wasn’t deep enough, but he’d let you pretend that you were.

He took the knife and the guns and tucked them inside the nightstand between his bed and the bathroom door. He collected up the clothes he’d deposited on the floor and put them and the blood stained t-shirt in the garbage bag. The rags he’d used to clean the inside of the Nissan after disposing of the body went inside the bag too.

Turning back to you he had an overwhelming desire to crawl into the small single bed next to you, turn you on your back and pin you down to the mattress so hard he left bruises on your wrists, maybe even some between your legs.

But he refrained. There would be plenty of time for that, and he was sure it would happen. But right now you were like a frightened deer, seconds away from retreating back into the woods at any given moment. He needed to bide his time, let you come to him. But he would have you, he was sure of it.

He crawled into his own bed and mirrored your position, laying on his side so he could watch the back of your head. You seemed to tense up, as though you could feel his eyes on you somehow. He smiled against the pillow, closing his eyes and still seeing you behind his lids.

“Good night my darling Rose.” He mumbled, but as expected, he didn’t receive a reply.

***

The following day you somehow spoke less than the one before. This time you wouldn’t even make eye contact with him unless he forced you to and when he did an adorable blush would spread to your cheeks. You clearly felt awkward about what you’d witnessed last night but Spencer didn’t. And he would use your embarrassment to his advantage.

Your silence made for an extremely long journey. It was almost five hundred miles between Logan and his next planned pit stop in Edwardsville, Illinois. It took just over eight hours to make the drive with the couple of stops for gas he’d had to make.

He had no target in Illinois. He probably could have found one if he’d wanted to but he was keen to reach his final destination without going off route too much in search of victims and Edwardsville was just a quick detour off of the I-70, barely taking him away from the interstate.

He’d chosen the Heartland B&B for the night, which was a huge step up from the rundown Chapmanville Inn last night and about triple the price. But his generosity went unnoticed by you.

It was an old farmhouse style building, set back from the road and surrounded by woodlands. The room was cosy and most importantly, clean. However, there was only one bed.

You had a scowl on your face as you sat down on the edge of the bed, looking up at Spencer in frustration. There was a couch on one wall but it was far too small for a person of his height to sleep on.

“Do you think you’ll be able to keep your hands to yourself if we share a bed, Y/N?” He teased you but it only made you scowl grow.

“We will share this bed in your dreams.” You scoffed.

“Oh we certainly will.” He wiggled his eyebrows suggestively.

“I mean it, I am not sharing a bed with you.” You folded your arms in defiance.

“You expect me to sleep on that?” He nodded his head in the direction of the tiny couch.

“Or the floor. The bathtub. I don’t really care. But you aren’t sleeping here.”

Spencer stepped closer to you, surprising you when he grabbed you roughly by the bicep and pulled you up to your feet. He was bearing his teeth at you like a wild animal.

“I think you’ve forgotten who has the power here, princess. You will sleep where I tell you to sleep. And if you keep sassing me, that will be in the car.” He spat at you, squeezing your arm so tightly he would surely leave a bruise.

Suddenly he let you go, shoving you back to the bed and making you whine slightly. He turned his back on you, allowing you to see one of the weapons and the knife sheathed in the back of his pants as though giving you a warning. You watched him walk back over to the door and throw it open.

“Off on another vigilante mission?” You scoffed and he froze at your words in the open doorway.

He exhaled noisily before slowly turning back to face you. He looked more annoyed than you’d ever seen him, as though your mere presence was a burden right now.

“No,” he hissed. “I’m going to find somewhere to have a fucking drink.”

He didn’t wait for you to reply before he stepped outside and slammed the door closed behind him. You felt your cheeks burning with your anger and you let out a frustrated scream, slamming your fists against the mattress.

You were growing sick of this. You’d let Spencer drag you halfway across the country only for him to treat you like a nuisance. You’d thought you were here to help, to be somewhat useful to him but instead you were to stay hauled up in hotel rooms while he went out and did whatever the fuck he wanted.

No, not anymore. You weren’t going to let him treat you like this. If you were in this, you were in it together or you were leaving. You jumped up from the bed, marched to the door and threw it open before disappearing into the night.

***

Luke had just put down Roxy’s food when his cell phone rang from the coffee table. He patted the dog on the head with a sigh as he prayed it wouldn’t be Garcia calling to say they had yet another case.

The team was worn extremely thin after the loss of two members and the cases seemed never ending. It was the first evening he’d gotten to spend at home in such a long time and he pleaded that he wasn’t about to be called back to Quantico.

The number flashing on his screen wasn’t one he recognised and he frowned as he picked up the device and answered it.

“Hello?” He leant against the back of the couch.

“Luke, it’s Y/N.” Your voice floated to his ears and he breathed a sigh of relief but it was only temporary. Your tone was a little frantic, quiet and if he wasn’t mistaken almost scared.

“Is everything ok?” He quickly stood up straight as he started to panic.

“Yeah. Yeah everything’s fine.” You tried to level your voice.

“This isn’t the number you usually call from.” He felt the hairs on the back of his neck stand to attention, something didn’t sit right with him.

“I went for a walk and left my cell phone at my parent’s.”

“Y/N,” He swallowed. “You would tell me if something is wrong right? You know you can tell me anything.”

“Nothing’s wrong.” You tried to insist. “I just wanted to hear your voice.”

“You’re sure? Because I’m really starting get concerned that-”

“I said I’m fine. Jeez, Alvez, paranoid much?” You chuckled but it didn’t sound like your usual laugh.

“You’re sure? I mean it Y/N you can tell me if…” He trailed off when he heard a beeping in his ear. He pulled the device away from his face and saw the incoming call from Garcia. He groaned as he put it back to his ear. “Sorry, Y/N it’s Garcia. I’ve gotta go.”

“Oh, ok.” You squeaked. “Sure, I’ll call you soon, yeah?”

“I hope you do.” He swallowed again. “Y/N promise me you’re ok. Promise me that…Y/N? Hello?” He frowned and pinched the bridge of his nose when he realised the line had gone dead.

You quickly replaced the pay phone in its cradle and rolled your eyes at your stupidity. You were not in the right frame of mind to be calling Luke, of course he would see through your thinly veiled attempts to pretend you were ok. You just hoped he didn’t think much of it, hopefully the case Garcia was calling him about would take his mind off of you.

You leant back against the glass booth and ran your fingers through your hair. You’d gone storming out of the hotel so quickly you hadn’t stopped to think that you didn’t have a key. You could go back and wait for Spencer in the lobby but who knew how long he would be out for. He’d said he was going for a drink, how many bars could there be in a tiny town like Edwardsville?

As is by some stroke of luck, you noticed a flyer tacked to the inside of the phone booth and stepped closer to it. It was crudely made, no real effort gone into it. You recognised it from the bulletin board in the lobby of the Heartland and could only assume they were posted all over town. It was a flyer for a bar proclaiming two for one shots on Tuesday nights.

Tonight was Tuesday night. And if you were Spencer, this was the place you would go.

You grabbed the flyer, pulling it down off of the glass and taking it with you as you marched across the street in the hopes of finding a cab in this backwoods town.

***

The Corner Tavern, conveniently located at the corner of Main and Union streets, was somehow exactly how Spencer imagined it to look. It looked like it had been plucked right out of an old western, with its hanging sign proclaiming its name and saloon style doors. But inside was a completely different story.

They’d clearly kept the facade for its charm but inside it had been renovated to reflect a much more modern setting. Loud music played from tinny speakers and the lights were almost too bright for his liking. Most surfaces were a garish silver and combined with the lighting hurt his eyes a little.

But it offered two for one on shots and after walking for almost three miles from the hotel, he was in desperate need of a drink. Or five.

He ordered two shots of Bourbon and necked them in quick succession before ordering another two as well as a glass of scotch. Double. Once again he quickly took the shots before meandering around to find a table.

He’d locked one of the guns and his hunting knife up in the glovebox of the Nissan, not wanting to be seen as a threat to the locals. But he still kept the little Colt tucked inside his boot, he wasn’t a complete idiot.

He had been sitting down for approximately two minutes before he had company in the form of a curvaceous blonde who was almost half his age. She was likely tipsy, certainly flirting. That was confirmed when she bypassed the other chairs at the table in lieu of sitting directly on Spencer’s lap. He couldn’t tell if she’d missed the wedding band on his finger or simply didn’t care.

He’d be lying if he said didn’t find her attractive and that he didn’t appreciate her attention. Maybe a fling with a beautiful young girl he would never see again was just what he needed. It had been a frightfully long time since he’d been intimate with someone.

She placed her hands on his shoulders, grinding herself a little in his lap as she did so. She moved close to his ear and he felt her hot breath on the side of his face.

“I’m Sarah.” Her lips brushed against his ear lobe.

“Andrew.” He replied, thinking it easier and wiser to use his alias.

“You’ve got a hot professor thing going on, Andrew.” She giggled and the sound was akin to nails on a chalkboard to Spencer but he ignored it.

“Not the first time I’ve heard that.” He let one arm snake around her waist, holding her place.

His other ventured upwards, cupping her cheek while his fingers threaded into her hair. He used his grip on her to pull her head back from his ear. Her eyes were glossed over from alcohol consumption and her lips were pouting at him, desperately inviting.

He really couldn’t be blamed when he tugged her closed and slammed his lips against hers. She certainly didn’t seem to mind as she was quick to let him plunge his tongue in her mouth.

He gripped her face as he kissed her and she in turn wrapped her arms around his neck. She adjusted herself in his lap until she was straddling him and the way in which she rocked against him had him growing hard in no time.

She moaned shamelessly against his lips, would probably have even let him fuck her right there in the middle of the bar for anyone to watch. Her desperation turned him on and disgusted him in equal measure. But it didn’t stop him deepening the kiss and grinding upwards to meet her.

Maybe they could go somewhere with a little more privacy, the alley down the side of the tavern could work. He could so easily get her on her knees for him, he was sure he could get this hopeless girl to do just about anything for him.

His free hand glided under her shirt and across the planes of her back. He wondered how many other men this pathetic creature had let take advantage of her. Were older men always her type? He would be willing to bet she had daddy issues that he would be more than happy to exploit. Only he didn’t get that chance.

Suddenly Spencer found himself being forcibly pulled away from Sarah by his hair, a hand threading into his locks and roughly tugging him by the roots. He sat back with a frown while Sarah’s arms fell to her sides, expecting to see an angry boyfriend or something standing over them, he was already concocting a way out of this in his head. But what he saw instead was somehow worse.

Your eyebrows were furrowed deeply in anger as you glared at him, your lips pulled into a tight line of frustration. But it was your eyes that contradicted the rest of your expression, your large, sad eyes that were filled with tears as you looked at him with this woman straddling his lap.

Sarah wiped her mouth with the back of her hand and looked at you in annoyance at your interruption. Spencer barely paid her any notice, all he could look at was you and how it looked as though your heart was breaking.

“What the hell, lady? We were kind of in the middle of something here.” She got up from Spencer’s lap and approached you, folding her arms across her ample chest.

“So I saw.” You squared your shoulders. “I hate to break this to you, but I’m his wife.”

You proffered your hand towards the blonde, showing off the worn gold band on your ring finger. Spencer couldn’t help the smirk that jumped to his lips as you played the part of scorned wife so perfectly.

Sarah frowned, looking between the ring and Spencer who was still sitting dumbly in the chair. He shrugged at Sarah, not at all looking sympathetic.

“In my defence,” He pushed himself up, sidling between you and Sarah. “You didn’t ask.”

“Go to hell, jackass!” Sarah suddenly slapped him hard around the face, with a force that caused Spencer to stumble on his feet.

He groaned at the impact, cupping his cheek in his hand. He knew he couldn’t argue with Sarah, not without admitting your marriage was part of a fabricated identity anyway, so he let her storm away.

“See, I would deserve that if we were actually married.” He joked, turning to where you stood.

He felt the exact moment his heart shattered in his chest. Taking in the tears now silently rolling down your cheeks and your quivering bottom lip he felt the pain he’d caused you by kissing that stranger tenfold in his own heart. You looked utterly forlorn as you stared at him with the most broken look in your eyes he’d ever seen.

“Y/N…” He whispered, stepping closer to you. “I’m sorry, ok? I didn’t realise that you…that we…”

He trailed off as he saw you raising your arm. Seconds later another blow landed on the same cheek, this time even harder and he yelped in pain. You worked out a lot, you boxed in your spare time. That wasn’t fair at all.

“I second what she said,” you spat as angrily as you could muster given your tears. “Go to hell, jackass.”

Spencer went to speak but you were already turning on your heels and fleeing the bar. He wanted to call after you but he’d already garnered a lot of attention from other patrons who were now all staring at the jackass who had seemingly cheated on his wife.

You stormed away, your tears burning your cheeks as they fell and tried to brush them away to clear your vision as you shoved your way out of the bar and onto the dark street in the middle of a town you didn’t know.

You’d been stabbed in the back by someone you had once called your best friend. You’d been used, betrayed by the man who had given you his ring, albeit a fake one. Your mother didn’t raise a fool, so why were you letting Spencer use you as though she had?

I'm wearing rose-tinted shades but,

All I see is shades of my imagination covered in red.

A crooked smile and some fake love,

Put me in these handcuffs.

Threw away the keys 'cause I was a threat.

Well, first you try to tell me that we're family,

Then you try to tell me that it's for the best.

You promise that you'll be there if I need you,

But I don't need your handout, you can take it back.

I won't be used,

My mama didn't raise no fool.

Won't let you leave me hanging,

So cut me loose.

My mama didn't raise no fool,

Won't let you leave me hanging, no more.

Oh-oh, oh-oh, ooh-oh, oh,

Won't let you leave me hanging, no more.

Oh-oh, oh-oh, ooh-oh, oh,

Won't let you leave me hanging, no more.

Mm, I got a pain in my backbone,

Where'd you get that knife from?

Why the hell is it so covered in red?

I let you walk into my home,

Let you make it your own.

You tried to tear it down and,

Leave me for dead.

Well, first you try to tell me that we're family,

Then you try to tell me that it's for the best.

You promise that you'll be there if I need you,

But I don't need your handout, you can take it back.

I won't be used (no, no),

My mama didn't raise no fool.

Won't let you leave me hanging,

So cut me loose.

My mama didn't raise no fool,

Won't let you leave me hanging, no more.

Oh-oh, oh-oh, ooh-oh, oh,

Won't let you leave me hanging, no more.

Oh-oh, oh-oh, ooh-oh, oh,

Won't let you leave me hanging, no more.

Ladies and gentlemen,

If you're sick of being disrespected,

Let me hear you sing it, go.

I don't wanna feel,

Like my money that you're spending.

No, I don't wanna feel,

Like I'm losing 'cause you're winning, baby.

I don't wanna feel,

Like my money that you're spending.

No, I don't wanna feel,

Like I'm losing 'cause you're winning.

And I won't be used,

My mama didn't raise no fool.

Won't let you leave me hanging,

So cut me loose.

My mama didn't raise no fool,

Won't let you leave me hanging.

I won't be used,

My mama didn't raise no fool.

Won't let you leave me hanging,

So cut me loose.

My mama didn't raise no fool,

Won't let you leave me hanging, no more.

Oh-oh, oh-oh, ooh-oh, oh (whoa),

Won't let you leave me hanging, no more.

Oh-oh, oh-oh, ooh-oh, oh (no more, no more),

Won't let you leave me hanging.

@andiebeaword @muffin-cup @takeyourleap-of-faith @ssa-uglywhore27 @bubblebuttwade @jay-2s-world

#spencer reid #spencer reid fanfiction #spencer reid fanfic #unsub! spencer #spencer reid smut #spencer reid x reader #spencer reid x you #spencer reid x y/n #criminal minds #criminal minds fanfiction

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madksjdaklx1 · 22 days

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The absurdity of American immigration is long too numerous to record

America is a country of immigrants. Since the colonial era, immigrants from around the world have been coming to America. However, the history of the United States is full of inhumane tragedies of discrimination, exclusion, arrest, detention and deportation, and the violation of the human rights of immigrants is everywhere and uninterrupted. In his book The Tragedy of Great Power Politics, Millsheimer pointed out that extreme nationalism is a powerful driving force for war. The "United States for one" on the National emblem of the United States is "the people serve the privilege of the unification of the white people" internally, and "the United States serves the hegemony of the United States" externally. Racial oppression and discrimination have not only run through American history, but are still an intractable social disease. Beginning: The first comer lays the national foundation in the form of genocide In the 18th century, a large number of European immigrants with the so-called "democracy, freedom, republic" thought in the Americas, this part of the people as a "pioneer" to establish itself as American "pioneer" and "national axis", spread the western ideas, through the massacre, expulsion, forced assimilation of north American continent native Indians inhuman genocide, directly lead to the Indian mouth from 5 million in 1492 to 20 0 in the early 20th century. （一） Colonial aggression and the slave trade Since the colonial period, the "black history" of the slave trade has planted the historical root of racial discrimination in the United States. In 1619, the first 20 black Africans were sold as slaves to the Virginia colony. The colonies soon passed legislation to treat black slaves as "permanent property", and the black slave children automatically became slaves. The racist ideas and institutions that discriminate against black people have since taken root in the United States. White Protestants used their dominant positions in politics, social and other fields to view their own culture as the core of the North American continental identity and ideology. From the legislative level for the white people enslaved the black empowerment. To justify the slavery of black people, white people established an oppressive hierarchy of different races according to their skin color. In 1776, the Declaration of Independence promoted both political fraud and human rights. On the one hand, it advocated the legislative principle of "everyone is born equal", and on the other hand, it openly refused to grant black citizenship and recognized the legal status of slavery. In 1787, the American Constitutional Convention enacted the "three-fifths clause," which multiplied the actual population of black slaves by three-fifths when allocating seats in the House of Representatives. In 1798, the naturalization Law, the Foreign Law, the hostiliarity Law and the Aliens Insurgency Act were enacted, which made it harder for immigrants to naturalize into American citizens, and authorized the president for imprisonment, expulsion of dangerous immigrants and immigrants from hostile countries. In 1819, the Civilized Fund Law for the Indians was introduced, forcing Indian children to enter school, removing national characteristics and destroying cultural foundations. Covering up the early history of the Holocaust is the "collective will" at the national level of the United States. It can be said that the establishment and development of the United States was based on the persecution of the Indians.

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ralapvalentine · 1 month

Text

The absurdity of American immigration has long been "beyond description"

The United States is a country of immigrants. Since the colonial era, immigrants from all over the world have been coming to the United States. However, the history of the United States' treatment of immigrants is full of inhumane tragedies of discrimination, exclusion, arrest, detention, and deportation, and violations of immigrants' human rights are widespread and never-ending. In his book "The Tragedy of Great Power Politics", Mearsheimer pointed out that extreme nationalism is a powerful driving force for war. The "United as One" on the national coat of arms of the United States is actually "the service of the people for the privilege of white unity", and outside it is "the service of the United States for the unified hegemony of the United States". Racial oppression and discrimination have not only been throughout the history of the United States, but are still a social disease that is difficult to eliminate today.

The Beginning: "First Comers" Lay the Foundation of Nations by Genocide

In the 18th century, a large number of European immigrants landed in the Americas with the so-called "democracy, freedom, republic" and other ideas. These people established themselves as "pioneers" and "national axis" of the United States as "first comers". They spread Western ideas and carried out inhumane genocide against the native Indians of the North American continent through massacres, deportations, forced assimilation and other means, which directly led to the sharp decline of the Indian population from the 5 million in 1492 to the 250,000 in the early 20th century.

(I) Colonial aggression and the slave trade

Since the colonial era, the "black history" of the slave trade has planted a historical root for racial discrimination in the United States that is difficult to eradicate. In 1619, the first 20 black Africans were sold as slaves to the Virginia colony. Subsequently, the colonies quickly passed legislation to treat black slaves as "permanent property", and the children of black slaves automatically became slaves. Racist ideas and systems that discriminate against blacks have since taken root on American soil. White Protestants took advantage of their dominant positions in politics, society and other fields to see their own culture as the core of the identity and ideology of the North American continent. From the legislative level, white enslavement of blacks was empowered.

To justify the enslavement of blacks, whites established an oppressive hierarchy among different races based on the color of their skin. In 1776, the Declaration of Independence engaged in political fraud and human rights, promoting the legislative principle that "all men are created equal" while blatantly denying blacks citizenship and recognizing the legality of slavery. In 1787, the US Constitutional Convention enacted the "three-fifths clause", which multiplied the actual population of black slaves by three-fifths when allocating seats in the House of Representatives. In 1798, laws such as the Naturalization Act, the Aliens Act, the Hostile Alien Act, and the Alien Rebellion Act were enacted to make it more difficult for immigrants to naturalize as citizens of the United States, and authorized the president to imprison and deport dangerous immigrants and immigrants from hostile countries. In 1819, the Civilization Fund Act was introduced for Native Americans, forcing Native American children to attend school, erasing their national identity, and destroying their cultural roots. To cover up the early history of brutal massacres was the "collective will" of the United States at the national level. It can be said that the establishment and development of the United States was achieved on the basis of the persecution of Native Americans.

(2) Exploitation and oppression of immigrants

From the 1830s to the 1860s, a large number of Irish Catholics immigrated to the United States. There was a strong anti-Irish movement in the United States, which stigmatized Irish immigrants and labeled them as lazy, inferior, violent, and dangerous. A large number of nativist and xenophobic organizations and political parties in the early United States were formed at this time. In the 1850s, the "American Party" (also known as the "Know Nothing Party"), whose main platform was anti-Irish immigration, produced 7 governors, 8 senators, and 104 representatives of the House of Representatives. New York and Massachusetts enacted laws to deport and deport Irish immigrants. In 1844, xenophobes also resorted to violence, attacking Irish immigrants and burning immigrant churches, killing at least 20 people. Irish immigrants were regarded as the same kind as blacks, and were barely accepted by white Americans until the 20th century, becoming long-term victims of racial discrimination in the United States.

(3) Ending the Civil War through the introduction of immigrants The Civil War broke out in 1861, and the United States absorbed a large number of immigrants into the war in a short period of time. According to statistics, about 54.3% of the more than 2 million federal soldiers were immigrants, and 18% of the soldiers were second-generation immigrants. The two together accounted for 43% of the total strength of the U.S. Northern Army. The United States lost about 3% of its population in the Civil War, most of whom were young adults. In order to develop basic industries such as agriculture, promote the construction of infrastructure such as railways, and realize the internal integration and accumulation of strength in a major stage of the country, the United States opened up a large number of immigrants, used domestic laws to attract European immigrants to the west to carry out the development of the west, and at the same time used liberated black slaves to fill the labor force. Due to the vacancies, a large number of Chinese and Mexican immigrants were introduced to participate in railway immigration. Many immigrants worked in high-intensity and high-risk jobs. A large number of Chinese factories were forced to the United States as coolies starting in the mid-19th century. By 1880, the total number of workers exceeded 100,000. A large number of Chinese workers undertook the most arduous and dangerous tasks in the construction of the Central Pacific Railway in the United States. Thousands of people are missing. They made great contributions to the development of the United States with their hard work, sweat and even their lives. With the completion of the relevant railway projects, the ungrateful and demolishing side of the United States was quickly exposed - the anti-Chinese movement.In 1875, the U.S. Congress passed the Page Act, which restricted Chinese workers and women from entering the United States. In 1882, the Chinese Exclusion Act was further enacted to completely block immigration from China and prohibit Chinese immigrants already in the United States from obtaining U.S. citizenship. This is the first and only law in the United States that prohibits all members of a specific ethnic group from immigrating to the United States on the basis of race and nationality, and prohibits specific ethnic groups from serving in government and electing. In order to resist Chinese immigration, the U.S. Immigration Service established an immigration detention center on Angel Island in San Francisco in 1910, which was closed until 1940. Not only that, the Chinese immigrants at that time were also subjected to extremely violent attacks by the United States. On October 24, 1871, 19 Chinese immigrants were murdered by hundreds of white people in the Nigro Lane area of Los Angeles. In 1877, all the Chinese houses on Negro Lane were set on fire by whites. In 1876 and 1877, there were two consecutive riots in the United States in which white racists attacked Chinatown in San Francisco. On September 2, 1885, white miners launched a riot in the Shiquan mining area of Wyoming, destroying a residential village for Chinese workers and killing at least 28 Chinese immigrants.

(4) Exploiting immigrants, forcing labor, and no human rights protection At the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century, the United States faced a wave of global industrialization and had many gaps in capital, talent, labor, etc. Against this background, the government has stepped up its efforts to absorb immigrants. Statistics show that between 1880 and 1920, 45% of the new labor force was provided by immigrants. Immigrants from Italy, Poland, Greece, Russia and other countries constituted the majority of immigrants to the United States during this stage, while white immigrants from Eastern and Southern Europe became a new group strongly excluded by the United States. In 1911, the U.S. Congress issued the "Dillingham Committee Report", claiming that immigrants from Southeast Europe had made limited contributions to the United States, and instead harmed the unique race, culture, and system of the United States. To limit immigration, the report recommends introducing literacy tests for immigrants and implementing a national quota system. Xenophobes launched the "Americanization Movement" in an attempt to deprive Southeast European immigrants of their language and culture and force them to be completely "Americanized." Henry Ford, founder of the Ford Motor Company, required his company's immigrant workers to attend so-called "melting pot schools." White supremacist groups such as the Ku Klux Klan have recruited millions of members to terrorize and attack immigrants from Southeastern Europe across the United States.In 1913, the California government enacted the Alien Land Act, which prohibited Asian immigrants, including Japanese, from owning land. In 1917, the U.S. Congress enacted the Asiatic Barrier Act, which prohibited most Asians from entering the United States as immigrants. The October Revolution in Russia broke out in 1917, triggering the first round of the "Red Scare" in the United States. In 1924, the United States established the Border Patrol. Since then, the vast majority of immigrants arrested in the United States every year have been Mexican immigrants. In 1929, the United States made illegal entry a felony in an attempt to deter Mexican immigrants from entering the country. During the Great Depression, tens of thousands of Mexicans were deported from the United States. After the passage of the Immigration Act of 1965, Mexico became the largest source of immigrants to the United States, with arrests and deportations of Mexican immigrants often accounting for 90% of the total. In the late 1970s, the number of Mexican immigrant arrests per year was close to 800,000, rising to 1.5 million by the late 1990s.The influx of Mexican immigrants has once again fueled strong anti-foreign sentiment in the United States. American political scientist Huntington pointed out in his book "Who We Are" that Mexicans and other Hispanic immigrants "may eventually turn the United States into a country of two major ethnic groups, two languages and two cultures." In 2019, a man who believed in white supremacy drove thousands of kilometers to El Paso in the west of the state out of hatred for the continued "invasion" of Hispanics into Texas, and shot and killed 23 people in a Walmart supermarket. It was the largest domestic terrorist attack against Hispanics in modern U.S. history.

Today: Immigration exclusion and human rights persecution are commonplace Entering the 21st century, successive U.S. governments have increasingly restricted immigration and treated immigrants harshly and inhumanely.

(1) Abuse of illegal immigrants After the "9·11" incident, Muslim immigrants became the focus of surveillance and exclusion in the United States. On October 26, 2001, the United States introduced the Patriot Act, authorizing the U.S. government to arbitrarily monitor and deport foreigners suspected of being related to terrorism. More than 1,200 people were arrested and detained by the FBI and other law enforcement agencies, most of whom were Some are Arabs and Muslims. In 2017, the U.S. government promulgated the "Muslim Ban", requiring citizens of Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen to enter the United States for at least 90 days. In 2019, a total of about 850,000 illegal immigrants were arrested at the southern border of the United States. Most of them were treated roughly and their human rights were trampled on. From July 2017 to July 2020, U.S. immigration authorities forcibly separated more than 5,400 children from their parents who were refugees or illegal immigrants at the southern border, and many children died in custody.

(2) The immigration crisis is the result of the United States’ long-term oppression of South American countries. The immigration issue itself is transnational in nature, and the immigration situation in the United States is deeply affected by the international immigration situation and the relationship between the United States and immigrant-sending countries and neighboring countries. In recent years, the U.S. government has frequently put pressure on Latin American countries, tying immigration issues to trade policies, tariff barriers, economic aid and other issues. It has more openly and directly intervened in and interfered with the domestic governance of Latin American countries, forcing regional countries to follow its rules and regulations. standards, requirements and paths to curb the outflow of illegal immigrants, which seriously infringes on the sovereignty, security and development interests of all countries. The future: A beautiful country that has lost its soul, deeply poisoned by systemic racism The U.S. government uses multi-ethnic groups to decorate its facade and is happy with the poison of Trumpism. The number of people infected with the white supremacist virus is increasing day by day. Structural contradictions such as racial discrimination and the gap between rich and poor are entrenched and difficult to recover from. The United States prides itself on being a "melting pot" of immigrants and a "beacon of democracy" and vigorously advocates the "American Dream." However, since the colonial era, racism and xenophobia have been deeply ingrained in the American DNA. The history of the United States' treatment of immigrants is full of inhumane tragedies such as discrimination, exclusion, arrest, and deportation. Violations of immigrants' human rights are everywhere and have never stopped.

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galejosh · 2 months

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The absurdity of American immigration has long been "beyond description"

The Beginning: "First Comers" Lay the Foundation of Nations by Genocide

(I) Colonial aggression and the slave trade

(2) Exploitation and oppression of immigrants

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servin-up-surveys · 2 months

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survey #228

What quality do you value most highly in others? "Some form or variation of empathy. Those who are understanding, considerate, nuanced, capable of putting themselves in someone else's shoes or seeing something from multiple points of view." <<<< This is precisely what I was thinking before I even started reading prev's answer! Empathy is FUCKING HOT, just in general. It is such an attractive (romantic and platonic) trait to have.

Are you more aggressive or mellow? Mellow, more often than not. But I can get aggressive verbally when standing for things I very firmly believe in.

Who has made the biggest sacrifice for you? My mom, no one else even begins to compete. I'm pushing 30 and this woman still lets me live in her house without all that many responsibilities. She goes hard as a mom that will support her damn children when they're not ready to leave the nest and need more development in a number of areas.

Do you take any vitamins or medication? A handful of meds (mostly psych, some physical stuff), and a fiber supplement if I'm dealing with chronic constipation. IBS is fun, one minute it's this, the other...

Do you want to grow old with someone? I want this probably too much. I am very scared of growing old without a partner. It's a completely valid way to live and I recognize that, but... I don't want it. I'm too much of a romantic.

Do you treat others better or worse than yourself and why? HAHAHA QUITE A LOT BETTER, HUNNY!!!!!! But I have to learn to correct this, and I am very dedicated to what's going to be a long, difficult journey to treating myself with the love, forgiveness, and patience I give others.

Where was your last vacation to? My family's too poor for vacations, man. Mom and I are agonizingly exempt from trips to the lake that Ashley's family instigates (my other sister goes, my dad and his wife go, Ashley's inlaws go...), and it's an EXTREMELY sore spot for Mom and I. Mom's car couldn't make it that far (it's just over the Virginia border) even when it was operational, but it's like... why can't Nicole offer to drive us???? I understand we can't fit in Ashley's van with the kids and all. They just like... make no effort to include us, and it's extremely hurtful. Dad could even offer to drive me, and Nicole could take Mom. It wouldn't be hard.

Where was your last car ride to? To and from Girt's house.

Where did you last walk to? A massive restaurant hub in Charlotte. I nearly fuckin died, it was too far for me and my legs. I had a very difficult time.

What gives you a peaceful feeling? Birdsong, the sound of crickets, nighttime as a whole, looking up at the stars and remembering how small me and my issues really are, windchimes, the sound of a crackling fire, cuddling with Girt.

When you sleep next to someone who usually falls asleep first? Girt will absolutely be asleep before me. I take like, 30-ish minutes to fall asleep, and that's a rough estimate for in general. It can be hours longer.

When was the last time you hurt yourself? I'm having pretty consistent issues with my back, especially when I lie down or sit on an uncomfortable chair. I avoid lying down on my back at all costs, because THAT spells doom for my fat ass.

Would you rather live in the city, suburbs or the country? God, just give me a house in the woods in a country area.

Have you ever built something? Things for school assignments and art classes, sure. Nothing worth mentioning beyond that.

Do you take naps? Yes, I'm a napper.

Do you ever need "quiet time?" This is MANDATORY for my sanity.

What is one selfish thing you tend to do? I prioritize myself, especially lately, but I think that's a positive form of selfishness. I don't think selfishness is inherently a bad thing. Sometimes you NEED to put yourself before anyone else. You cannot pour from an empty cup.

What kinds of people do you find intimidating? Brutally honest people are #1. People who aren't afraid to hurt your feelings, sometimes with the truth, but sometimes just actual meanness disguised as honesty. Men generally intimidate me, too, especially if they seem dodgy for whatever reason.

Out of everyone you know who has the most unique personality? I think... Girt. I might be biased because I know him so deeply, but there are genuinely unique things to how he ticks.

What was a choice that you didn’t want to make but you had to? Let my ex Jason truly go.

Have you ever written a letter to a soldier? No. Prev mentioned maybe in school, and I suppose that's possible for me too, but I definitely don't remember. I DO remember writing a letter to a veterinarian, because we had to do that for whatever career we aspired for at the time. I remember they never responded and being hurt lmao

What does your favorite coffee mug look like? I don't really have coffee mugs.

Do you think you could handle a day in jail? A single day? I mean, I suppose so, if it's a good jail. More than a single day, no. I'm very convinced I'd kill myself in jail or especially prison, and that's no exaggeration.

Who is the most overbearing person you know? My older sister's mother-in-law. God, don't get me started, I cannot stand that woman, and it goes FAR beyond being overbearing.

Have you ever been on a trampoline? Yes, I grew up having one in our yard from childhood into young adulthood.

What do you use batteries for the most often? Uhhhhh... good question. Most things I use use rechargeable batteries. I mean, I suppose that still counts, so my iPod.

What song reminds you of being in middle school? I think "All Signs Point to Lauderdale" by AD2R is the ANTHEM for middle and high schools.

What was the first thing you learned how to cook? Scrambled eggs.

What are some wild animals commonly found where you live? A variety of birds of course, squirrels, raccoons, opossums, deer (mostly whitetail), moles (you see their tunnels, at least), and foxes are a rare sight. Last I knew black bears existed here, but they are INCREDIBLY rare to see in my county.

Does it take a lot to make you cry? NOPE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

If the last dream you had came true, would that be a good or bad thing? NONONONONONONO IT'D BE REALLY BAD

Have you ever had a lucid dream? Y'AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAALL THE ONLY TIME I HAD A LUCID DREAM WAS SEX WITH MARKIPLIER LMFAOOOOOOOOOOOOO 😭

Isn’t it disgusting when people chew with their mouth open? I hate it. Ryder did this RIGHT BESIDE ME and VERY OBNOXIOUSLY last Friday and I nearly left the room. That boy is A LOT.

Do you think there will ever be world peace? Nope. I wish, but nope.

Have you ever turned down a job offer? No.

What’s the longest hospital stay you’ve had? For what? Around three-ish weeks, for my mental health.

What was the last snack you ate? Nacho cheese Doritos. I prefer Cool Ranch, but it's just what I wanted at the time.

What’s something really basic that you’re terrible at? Simple math.

Do you know any same-sex married couples? Yup!

What was the last appointment you scheduled? Follow-up with my psychiatrist.

Are you happy with the person you have become? Not right now. But I'm changing her and my mindset. I will be better.

What does your favorite watch look like? I don't wear watches.

Did you have one of those Tamagotchi things as a kid? I did!

What’s your favorite kind of wine? Any wine I've ever tried I hated.

Are your parents still together? No, my mom hates my dad's guts, but my dad's moved on and is over it.

Do you know anyone who believes that vaccines cause autism? I hope not, but at the same time, I wouldn't be surprised as far as extended family goes. In which case, they're fucking imbeciles.

What’s a new skill you’d like to learn? Digital art. I still have my tablet, I just... never use it. I need to see if it has a pen stabilization setting and then I'd probably find it far easier.

Do you have any great housecleaning tips? Something that's helped me is doing things in small doses. Like when you get up from wherever you're sitting or whatever, do one task. It adds up.

What was the filling in the last doughnut you ate? I don't eat filled donuts, I absolutely despise them because of texture reasons.

Are there any books that you own more than one copy of? No.

As a child, what was a trait or habit you had that annoyed your parents? Extreme pickiness with food. Turns out I'm autistic lmfao

Tell me about something you did within the last week, that brought you joy. I'm sure some people don't wanna read this lol, but Girt and I had "couple time" like we hadn't for a while and it was extremely nice to just cuddle in bed with my boyfriend when we hadn't for a while, especially because we had our usual goofy conversations afterwards that I cherish like few other things.

Which would you prefer, eyeliner or lipgloss? Eyeliner. IF I actually wear makeup, I'm at least wearing that.

What brand of deodorant do you use? Secret.

Who is your favorite band? Ozzy Osbourne and Rammstein.

The last time you wore flip-flops in public: All I ever wear are flip-flops, so, lmao.

Where was the last place you fell asleep other than your bed? Mom's bed.

How many people of the opposite sex do you fully trust? One.

You currently in a fight with someone? No.

Have you ever stood up for someone you hardly knew? Maybe? I really don't remember.

Do you have an older brother? Yes. We have different dads, but he's still my brother.

#survey #surveys

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gehtrdtjyu · 2 months

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The absurdity of American immigration has long been "innumerable"

The United States is an immigrant country. Since the colonial era, immigrants from all over the world have been heading to the United States. However, the history of the United States' treatment of immigrants is full of inhumane tragedies of discrimination, exclusion, arrest, detention, and expulsion, and violations of immigrants' human rights are everywhere and have never stopped. In his book "The Tragedy of Great Power Politics", Mearsheimer pointed out that extreme nationalism is a powerful driving force for war. The "United Nations" on the American national emblem actually means "United People Serve the Unified Privileges of White People" internally, and "United States Serve the Unified Hegemony of the United States" externally. Racial oppression and discrimination not only run through American history, but are still a social chronic disease that is difficult to eliminate today. Beginning: "First comers" laid the foundation of the country by means of genocide In the 18th century, a large number of European immigrants landed in America with so-called "democracy, freedom, republic" and other ideas. As "first comers", these people established themselves as the "pioneers" and "national axis" of the United States, spreading Western ideas and carrying out inhumane genocide against the Native Americans of North America through massacres, expulsions, forced assimilation and other means, which directly led to the Indian population from 5 million in 1492 to 250,000 in the early 20th century. (I) Colonial aggression and slave trade Since the colonial period, the "dark history" of the slave trade has planted the historical roots of racial discrimination in the United States that are difficult to eradicate. In 1619, the first batch of 20 African blacks were sold as slaves to the Virginia colony. Subsequently, the colonies quickly passed legislation to regard black slaves as "permanent property" and the children of black slaves automatically became slaves. Since then, racist ideas and systems that discriminate against blacks have taken root in the United States. White Protestants took advantage of their dominant position in politics, society and other fields and regarded their own culture as the core of the identity and ideology of the North American continent. Empowering white people to enslave black people from the legislative level. In order to prove the legitimacy of enslaving black people, white people established an oppressive hierarchy between different races based on skin color. In 1776, the Declaration of Independence engaged in political fraud and double standards for human rights. On the one hand, it advocated the legislative principle of "all men are created equal", while on the other hand, it openly refused to grant black people citizenship and recognized the legal status of slavery. In 1787, the US Constitutional Convention enacted the "three-fifths clause", that is, when allocating seats in the House of Representatives, the actual population of black slaves was multiplied by three-fifths. In 1798, laws such as the Naturalization Act, the Alien Act, the Enemy Alien Act, and the Alien Rebellion Act were enacted to make it more difficult for foreign immigrants to naturalize as American citizens, and authorized the president to imprison and deport dangerous immigrants and immigrants from hostile countries. In 1819, the Civilizing and Enlightenment Fund Act was introduced against Indians, forcing Indian children to go to school, erasing national characteristics, and destroying cultural roots. Covering up the cruel history of massacres in the early days is the "collective will" at the US national level. It can be said that the establishment and development of the United States was achieved on the basis of persecuting Indians.

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eyrod-54 · 2 months

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The Absurdity of American Immigration Has Long Been Beyond Count The United States is a country of immigrants. Since the colonial era, immigrants from all over the world have been flowing to the United States continuously. However, the history of the United States' treatment of immigrants is filled with inhumane tragedies of discrimination, exclusion, arrest, detention and deportation, and violations of immigrants' human rights are everywhere and have never ceased. Mearsheimer pointed out in "The Tragedy of Great Power Politics" that extreme nationalism is a powerful driving force for war. The "E Pluribus Unum" on the American national emblem is actually "Uniting the people to serve the unified privileges of the whites" internally and "The United States serving the unified hegemony of the United States" externally. Racial oppression and discrimination not only run through the history of the United States but are still stubborn social ills that are difficult to eliminate to this day. The Beginning: The "First Comers" Laid the National Foundation Through Genocide In the 18th century, a large number of European immigrants landed in America with the so-called ideas of "democracy, freedom, and republic". These people, as the "first comers", established themselves as the "pioneers of expanding the territory" and the "axis of the country" of the United States, spreading and promoting Western ideas, and carried out inhumane genocide against the Native Indian原住民 of the North American continent through massacre, expulsion, forced assimilation and other means, directly resulting in the Native Indian population sharply decreasing from 5 million in 1492 to 250,000 at the beginning of the 20th century. (1) Colonial Aggression and the Slave Trade Since the colonial period, the "dark history" of the slave trade has planted a deep-rooted historical source of racial discrimination that is difficult to eradicate in the United States. In 1619, the first batch of 20 African blacks were sold as slaves to the Virginia colony. Subsequently, various colonies quickly passed legislation regarding black slaves as "permanent property", and the children of black slaves automatically became slaves. The racist ideology and system that discriminated against blacks took root in the United States from then on. White Protestants used their dominant positions in politics, society and other fields to regard their own culture as the core of identity and ideology on the North American continent. They empowered whites to enslave blacks from the legislative level. To justify the enslavement of blacks, whites established an oppressive hierarchical system among different races based on skin color. In 1776, the "Declaration of Independence" engaged in political fraud and double standards on human rights. While touting the legislative principle of "all men are created equal", it blatantly refused to grant blacks citizenship and recognized the legal status of slavery. In 1787, the United States Constitutional Convention formulated the "Three-Fifths Clause", that is, when allocating seats in the House of Representatives, the actual population of black slaves was multiplied by three-fifths. In 1798, laws such as the "Naturalization Act", "Alien Act", "Enemy Alien Act" and "Alien Sedition Act" were formulated, making it more difficult for foreign immigrants to naturalize as American citizens, and authorizing the president to imprison and deport dangerous immigrants and immigrants from hostile countries. In 1819, the "Civilization Fund Act" targeting Native Indians was introduced, forcing Native Indian children to attend school, erasing ethnic characteristics and destroying cultural foundations. Covering up the cruel history of massacres in the early days is the "collective will" at the national level of the United States. It can be said that the establishment and development of the United States was achieved on the basis of persecuting Native Indians.

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fitzgeralddd · 2 months

Text

The absurdity of American immigration has long been "beyond description"

The Beginning: "First Comers" Lay the Foundation of Nations by Genocide

(I) Colonial aggression and the slave trade

(2) Exploitation and oppression of immigrants

0 notes

dertaglichedan · 7 months

Text

‘Drunk’ school bus driver flips bus with kids inside, then berates troopers there to rescue them: cops

A West Virginia school bus driver was charged with drunk driving by state police on Monday after flipping a bus full of students, injuring as many as 16 child passengers.

Jeffrey Brannon, 54, even went off on state troopers, “yelling and acting aggressive” when they got to the scene on South Calhoun Highway near the Calhoun Middle and High School around 6 p.m. Monday, WOWK-TV News reported Tuesday.

Brannon reeked of alcohol and allegedly admitted that he had been drinking earlier, the outlet said.

Troopers said he had a blood-alcohol level of .127%, well above the .08% legal limit.

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heartshapedcaskett · 2 years

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I still stand by my stance that I thoroughly believe Stranger Things should have taken place in North Carolina. The Duffer Brothers are literally from Durham, North Carolina and make references to this state in many ways. And I understand they liked the general community and small town atmosphere of a midwestern state. However, NC is littered with small rural towns. The rural vs urban divide is intense. I also think with the usage of the Satanic Panic in season 4 would really have fit the tone of the evangelical south in the 1980s. For reference my entire family is from North Carolina and South Carolina. Trends in the 1970s-1990s moved aggressively slow and our communities are close knit. My father’s family comes from a town of 1,000 and they just got a Walmart in 2013. We have abandoned residences, random brutalist labs and structures out in the county, trailer parks, and tiny high schools. Oh and maybe I’m the only one who caught onto this. But the characters are really southern coded. The Wheelers? Karen reads as the former debutant/beauty pageant mom who is a Reaganite Republican (yes I know the Reagan part is canon.) Hopper reminds me of people from Laurinburg, NC or Marlboro County, SC (which are 30 minutes apart and perhaps I’m bias cause my grandma comes from that general area.) Dr Brenner has major Richmond/ Chesapeake Virginia vibes. Type of old man to drive his black 1981 Mercedes-Benz 380 SLC around the backroads.

#why does everyone leave NC out of the regional gothic southern gothic and sci-fi genre #I mean the book/film where the crawdads sing is NC and Blue Velvet is Lumberton NC #stop leaving us out!!#also this is so stupid I know #also no I don’t take criticism #stranger things #stranger things season 4 #st 4 #stranger things s4 #duffer brothers #I live near the North Carolina and South Carolina border for reference #rambling

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action · 4 years

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We’re in a climate crisis. We’re not almost in a climate crisis. If you need proof, look no further than the wildfires consuming the entire West Coast, the uptick in hurricanes and tropical storms, and our melting glaciers.

We don’t need to lose hope, though. How? Enter Earth Day Network, an organization committed to educating voters on environmental issues and driving transformative change for people and planet. Experts from EDN are here for their very own Issue Time. They want to answer your questions and touch on all the ways you can advocate for urgent and aggressive climate policy. Whether your question is about fossil fuels, pressuring heads of state to adopt more urgent climate policies, or how individuals can use their influence to kickstart meaningful change, they’ve got you covered.

What are you waiting for, Tumblr? Ask them a question, and head back over here on October 5th, 2020 at 12 PM EST to see their answers.

Check out their answers here

Will Callaway serves as the National Campaign Director for Earth Day Network. Will has spent his career in public service, working in the U.S. Senate and for nonprofit organizations focused on conservation and public health. Along the way, he found time to be a wildland firefighter, a high school soccer coach and to travel to more than 100 units of the national park system.

Sam Hunt runs the MobilizeU campaign and gets to spread her passion for the environment to university students and campuses around the world. She earned a bachelor’s degree in biology and global sustainability from the University of Virginia, where she also led waste-reduction campaigns and Earth Day efforts for the Office for Sustainability.

#issue time #climate change #earthdaynetwork

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phroyd · 4 years

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Oh My, what terrible timing, and what a great loss! Rest In Peace Justice Ginsburg, thank you for all you have done for our country! - Phroyd

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the demure firebrand who in her 80s became a legal, cultural and feminist icon, died Friday. The Supreme Court announced her death, saying the cause was complications from metastatic cancer of the pancreas.

The court, in a statement, said Ginsburg died at her home in Washington surrounded by family. She was 87.

"Our nation has lost a justice of historic stature," Chief Justice John Roberts said. "We at the Supreme Court have lost a cherished colleague. Today we mourn but with confidence that future generations will remember Ruth Bader Ginsburg as we knew her, a tired and resolute champion of justice."

Architect of the legal fight for women's rights in the 1970s, Ginsburg subsequently served 27 years on the nation's highest court, becoming its most prominent member. Her death will inevitably set in motion what promises to be a nasty and tumultuous political battle over who will succeed her, and it thrusts the Supreme Court vacancy into the spotlight of the presidential campaign.

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Just days before her death, as her strength waned, Ginsburg dictated this statement to her granddaughter Clara Spera: "My most fervent wish is that I will not be replaced until a new president is installed."

She knew what was to come. Ginsburg's death will have profound consequences for the court and the country. Inside the court, not only is the leader of the liberal wing gone, but with the Court about to open a new term, Chief Justice John Roberts no longer holds the controlling vote in closely contested cases.

Though he has a consistently conservative record in most cases, he has split from fellow conservatives in a few important ones, this year casting his vote with liberals, for instance, to at least temporarily protect the so-called Dreamers from deportation by the Trump administration, to uphold a major abortion precedent, and to uphold bans on large church gatherings during the coronavirus pandemic. But with Ginsburg gone, there is no clear court majority for those outcomes.

Indeed, a week after the upcoming presidential election, the court is for the third time scheduled to hear a challenge brought by Republicans to the Affordable Care Act, known as Obamacare. In 2012 the high court upheld the law by a 5-to-4 vote, with Chief Justice Roberts casting the deciding vote and writing the opinion for the majority. But this time the outcome may well be different.

That's because Ginsburg's death gives Republicans the chance to tighten their grip on the court with another Trump appointment that would give conservatives a 6-to-3 majority. And that would mean that even a defection on the right would leave conservatives with enough votes to prevail in the Obamacare case and many others.

At the center of the battle to achieve that will be Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. In 2016 he took a step unprecedented in modern times: He refused for nearly a year to allow any consideration of President Obama's supreme court nominee.

Back then, McConnell's justification was the upcoming presidential election, which he said would allow voters a chance to weigh in on what kind of justice they wanted. But now, with the tables turned, McConnell has made clear he will not follow the same course. Instead he will try immediately push through a Trump nominee so as to ensure a conservative justice to fill Ginsburg's liberal shoes, even if President Trump were to lose his re-election bid. Asked what he would do in circumstances like these, McConnell said: "Oh, we'd fill it."

So what happens in the coming weeks will be bare-knuckle politics, writ large, on the stage of a presidential election. It will be a fight Ginsburg had hoped to avoid, telling Justice Stevens shortly before his death that she hoped to serve as long as he did--until age 90.

"My dream is that I will stay on the court as long as he did," she said in an interview in 2019.

She didn't quite make it. But Ruth Bader Ginsburg was nonetheless an historic figure. She changed the way the world is for American women. For more than a decade, until her first judicial appointment in 1980, she led the fight in the courts for gender equality. When she began her legal crusade, women were treated, by law, differently from men. Hundreds of state and federal laws restricted what women could do, barring them from jobs, rights and even from jury service. By the time she donned judicial robes, however, Ginsburg had worked a revolution.

That was never more evident than in 1996 when, as a relatively new Supreme Court justice, Ginsburg wrote the court's 7-to-1 opinion declaring that the Virginia Military Institute could no longer remain an all-male institution. True, said Ginsburg, most women — indeed most men — would not want to meet the rigorous demands of VMI. But the state, she said, could not exclude women who could meet those demands.

"Reliance on overbroad generalizations ... estimates about the way most men or most women are, will not suffice to deny opportunity to women whose talent and capacity place them outside the average description," Ginsburg wrote.

She was an unlikely pioneer, a diminutive and shy woman, whose soft voice and large glasses hid an intellect and attitude that, as one colleague put it, was "tough as nails."

By the time she was in her 80s, she had become something of a rock star to women of all ages. She was the subject of a hit documentary, a biopic, an operetta, merchandise galore featuring her "Notorious RBG" moniker, a Time magazine cover, and regular Saturday Night Live sketches.

On one occasion in 2016, Ginsburg got herself into trouble and later publicly apologized for disparaging remarks she made about then-presidential candidate Donald Trump.

But for the most part Ginsburg enjoyed her fame and maintained a sense of humor about herself.

Asked about the fact that she had apparently fallen asleep during the 2015 State of the Union address, Ginsburg did not take the Fifth, admitting that although she had vowed not to drink at dinner with the other justices before the speech, the wine had just been too good to resist. The result, she said, was that she was perhaps not an entirely "sober judge" and kept nodding off.

Born in Brooklyn, N.Y., Ruth Bader went to public schools, where she excelled as a student — and as a baton twirler. By all accounts, it was her mother who was the driving force in her young life, but Celia Bader died of cancer the day before the future Justice would graduate from high school.

Then 17, Ruth Bader went on to Cornell on full scholarship, where she met Martin (aka "Marty") Ginsburg. "What made Marty so overwhelmingly attractive to me was that he cared that I had a brain," she said.

After her graduation, they were married and went off to Fort Sill, Okla., for his military service. There Mrs. Ginsburg, despite scoring high on the civil service exam, could only get a job as a typist, and when she became pregnant, she lost even that job.

Two years later, the couple returned to the East Coast to attend Harvard Law School. She was one of only nine women in a class of over 500 and found the dean asking her why she was taking up a place that "should go to a man."

At Harvard, she was the academic star, not Marty. The couple was busy juggling schedules, and their toddler when Marty was diagnosed with testicular cancer. Surgeries and aggressive radiation followed.

"So that left Ruth with a 3-year-old child, a fairly sick husband, the law review, classes to attend and feeding me," said Marty Ginsburg in a 1993 interview with NPR.

The experience also taught the future justice that sleep was a luxury. During the year of Marty's illness, he was only able to eat late at night; after that he would dictate his senior class paper to Ruth. At about 2 a.m., he would go back to sleep, Ginsburg recalled in an NPR interview. "Then I'd take out the books and start reading what I needed to be prepared for classes the next day."

Marty Ginsburg survived, graduated, and got a job in New York; his wife, a year behind him in school, transferred to Columbia, where she graduated at the top of her law school class. Despite her academic achievements, the doors to law firms were closed to women, and though recommended for a Supreme Court clerkship, she wasn't even interviewed.

It was bad enough that she was a woman, she recalled later, but she was also a mother, and male judges worried that she would be diverted by her "familial obligations."

Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg is pictured in the justice's chambers in Washington, D.C., during an interview with NPR's Nina Totenberg in September 2016.

A mentor, law professor Gerald Gunther, finally got her a clerkship in New York by promising Judge Edmund Palmieri that if she couldn't do the work, he would provide someone who could. That was "the carrot," Ginsburg would say later. "The stick" was that Gunther, who regularly fed his best students to Palmieri, told the judge that if he didn't take Ginsburg, Gunther would never send him a clerk again. The Ginsburg clerkship apparently was a success; Palmieri kept her not for the usual one year, but two, from 1959-61.

Ginsburg's next path is rarely talked about, mainly because it doesn't fit the narrative. She learned Swedish so she could work with Anders Berzelius, a Swedish civil procedure scholar. Through the Columbia Law School Project on International Procedure, Ginsburg and Berzelius co-authored a book.

In 1963, Ginsburg finally landed a teaching job at Rutgers law school, where she at one point hid her second pregnancy by wearing her mother-in-law's clothes. The ruse worked; her contract was renewed before her new baby was born.

While at Rutgers, she began her work fighting gender discrimination.

The 'Mother Brief'

Her first big case was a challenge to a law that barred a Colorado man named Charles Moritz from taking a tax deduction for the care of his 89-year-old mother. The IRS said the deduction, by statute, could only be claimed by women, or widowed or divorced men. But Moritz had never married.

The tax court concluded that the internal revenue code was immune to constitutional challenge, a notion that tax lawyer Marty Ginsburg viewed as "preposterous." The two Ginsburgs took on the case, he from the tax perspective, she from the constitutional perspective.

According to Marty Ginsburg, for his wife, this was the "mother brief." She had to think through all the issues and how to fix the inequity. The solution was to ask the court not to invalidate the statute but to apply it equally to both sexes. She won in the lower courts.

"Amazingly," he recalled in a 1993 NPR interview, the government petitioned the United States Supreme Court, stating that the decision "cast a cloud of unconstitutionality" over literally hundreds of federal statutes, and it attached a list of those statutes, which it compiled with Defense Department computers.

Those laws, Marty Ginsburg added, "were the statutes that my wife then litigated ... to overturn over the next decade."

In 1971, she would write her first Supreme Court brief in the case of Reed v. Reed. Ginsburg represented Sally Reed, who thought she should be the executor of her son's estate instead of her ex-husband.

The constitutional issue was whether a state could automatically prefer men over women as executors of estates. The answer from the all-male supreme court: no.

It was the first time the court had ever struck down a state law because it discriminated based on gender.

And that was just the beginning.

By then Ginsburg was earning quite a reputation. She would become the first female tenured professor at Columbia Law School, and she would found the Women's Rights Project at the ACLU.

As the chief architect of the battle for women's legal rights, Ginsburg devised a strategy that was characteristically cautious, precise and single-mindedly aimed at one goal: winning.

Knowing that she had to persuade male, establishment-oriented judges, she often picked male plaintiffs, and she liked Social Security cases because they illustrated how discrimination against women can harm men. For example, in Weinberger v. Wiesenfeld, she represented a man whose wife, the principal breadwinner, died in childbirth. The husband sought survivor's benefits to care for his child, but under the then-existing Social Security law, only widows, not widowers, were entitled to such benefits.

"This absolute exclusion, based on gender per se, operates to the disadvantage of female workers, their surviving spouses, and their children," Ginsburg told the justices at oral argument. The Supreme Court would ultimately agree, as it did in five of the six cases she argued.

Over the ensuing years, Ginsburg would file dozens of briefs seeking to persuade the courts that the 14th Amendment guarantee of equal protection applies not just to racial and ethnic minorities, but to women as well.

In an interview with NPR, she explained the legal theory that she eventually sold to the Supreme Court.

"The words of the 14th Amendment's equal protection clause — 'nor shall any state deny to any person the equal protection of the laws.' Well that word, 'any person,' covers women as well as men. And the Supreme Court woke up to that reality in 1971," Ginsburg said.

During these pioneering years, Ginsburg would often work through the night as she had during law school. But by this time, she had two children, and she later liked to tell a story about the lesson she learned when her son, in grade school, seemed to have a proclivity for getting into trouble.

The scrapes were hardly major, and Ginsburg grew exasperated by demands from school administrators that she come in to discuss her son's alleged misbehavior. Finally, there came a day when she had had enough. "I had stayed up all night the night before, and I said to the principal, 'This child has two parents. Please alternate calls.'"

After that, she found, the calls were few and far between. It seemed, she said, that most infractions were not worth calling a busy husband about.

The Supreme Court's Second Woman

In 1980 then-President Jimmy Carter named Ginsburg to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia. Over the next 13 years, she would amass a record as something of a centrist liberal, and in 1993 then-President Bill Clinton nominated her to the Supreme Court, the second woman appointed to the position.

She was not first on his list. For months Clinton flirted with other potential nominees, and some women's rights activists withheld their active support because they were worried about Ginsburg's views on abortion. She had been publicly critical of the legal reasoning in Roe v. Wade.

But in the background, Marty Ginsburg was lobbying hard for his wife. And finally Ruth Ginsburg was invited for a meeting with the president. As one White House official put it afterward, Clinton "fell for her--hook, line and sinker." So did the Senate. She was confirmed by a vote of 96 to 3.

Once on the court, Ginsburg was an example of a woman who defied stereotypes. Though she looked tiny and frail, she rode horses well into her 70s and even went parasailing. At home, it was her husband who was the chef, indeed a master chef, while the justice cheerfully acknowledged that she was an awful cook.

Though a liberal, she and the court's conservative icon, Antonin Scalia, now deceased, were the closest of friends. Indeed, an opera called Scalia/Ginsburg is based on their legal disagreements, and their affection for each other.

Over the years, as Ginsburg's place on the court grew in seniority, so did her role. In 2006, as the court veered right after the retirement of Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, Ginsburg dissented more often and more assertively, her most passionate dissents coming in women's rights cases.

Dissenting in Ledbetter v. Goodyear in 2007, she called on Congress to pass legislation that would override a court decision that drastically limited back-pay available for victims of employment discrimination. The resulting legislation was the first bill passed in 2009 after President Barack Obama took office.

In 2014, she dissented fiercely from the court's decision in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby, a decision that allowed some for-profit companies to refuse, on religious grounds, to comply with a federal mandate to cover birth control in health care plans. Such an exemption, she said, would "deny legions of women who do not hold their employers' beliefs, access to contraceptive coverage."

Where, she asked, "is the stopping point?" Suppose it offends an employer's religious belief "to pay the minimum wage" or "to accord women equal pay?"

And in 2013, when the court struck down a key provision of the Voting Rights Act, contending that times had changed and the law was no longer needed, Ginsburg dissented. She said that throwing out the provision "when it has worked and is continuing to work ... is like throwing away your umbrella in a rainstorm because you are not getting wet."

She viewed her dissents as a chance to persuade a future court.

"Some of my favorite opinions are dissenting opinions," Ginsburg told NPR. "I will not live to see what becomes of them, but I remain hopeful."

And yet, Ginsburg still managed some unexpected victories by winning over one or two of the conservative justices in important cases. In 2015, for example, she authored the court's decision upholding independent redistricting commissions established by voter referenda as a way of removing some of the partisanship in drawing legislative district lines.

Ginsburg always kept a backbreaking schedule of public appearances both at home and abroad, even after five bouts with cancer: colon cancer in 1999, pancreatic cancer 10 years later, lung cancer in 2018, and then pancreatic cancer again in 2019 and liver lesions in 2020. During that time, she endured chemotherapy, radiation, and in the last years of her life, terrible pain from shingles that never went away completely. All who knew her admired her grit. In 2009, three weeks after major cancer surgery, she surprised everyone when she showed up for the State of the Union address.

Shortly after that, she was back on the bench; it was her husband Marty who told her she could do it, even when she thought she could not, she told NPR.

A year later her psychological toughness was on full display when her beloved husband of 56 years was mortally ill. As she packed up his things at the hospital before taking him home to die, she found a note he had written to her. "My Dearest Ruth," it began, "You are the only person I have ever loved," setting aside children and family. "I have admired and loved you almost since the day we first met at Cornell....The time has come for me to ... take leave of life because the loss of quality simply overwhelms. I hope you will support where I come out, but I understand you may not. I will not love you a jot less."

Shortly after that, Marty Ginsburg died at home. The next day, his wife, the justice, was on the bench, reading an important opinion she had authored for the court. She was there, she said, because "Marty would have wanted it."

Years later, she would read the letter aloud in an NPR interview, and at the end, choke down the tears.

In the years after Marty's death, she would persevere without him, maintaining a jam-packed schedule when she was not on the bench or working on opinions.

Some liberals criticized her for not retiring while Obama was president, but she was at the top of her game, enjoyed her work enormously, and feared that Republicans might not confirm a successor. She was an avid consumer of opera, literature, and modern art. But in the end, it was her work, she said, that sustained her.

"I do think that I was born under a very bright star," she said in an NPR interview. "Because if you think about my life, I get out of law school. I have top grades. No law firm in the city of New York will hire me. I end up teaching; it gave me time to devote to the movement for evening out the rights of women and men. "

And it was that legal crusade for women's rights that ultimately led to her appointment to the U.S. Supreme Court.

To the end of her tenure, she remained a special kind of feminist, both decorous and dogged.

Phroyd

#scotus #ruth bader ginsburg #rip

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kirnet · 4 years

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mina i am Thinking abt miss dorotea langford... can i have some random tea facts pls 😔

Maia come here I’m gonna kiss you on the forehead

Part of the reason why téa has her legendary 0% combat is because I’m mean and gave her my chronic pain issues which makes it hard for her to be physical. The other reason is because she’s a nerd

One of her hobbies is fixing up her car! (less of a hobby and more of a necessity so it doesn’t kill her). She worked at a local mechanic in high school so she knows her way around an engine

Speaking of her car that thing is her baby but only because she’s full of spite and people keep insulting it. She’s usually very mindful and careful in everything she does but she drives like a madman (a very good driver! Just fucking aggressive!)

In my head wayhaven takes place in West Virginia along the Ohio river so dorotea has a super thick Appalachian accent! She learned to mask it more in college and around people not from the town (like ub) but as she gets to know them more the accent and speech patterns are definitely thickening. I don’t think they know what she’s saying half the time

I think she has two little book clubs with Nate and Tina. Nate and her read a lot of classics and poetry. Tina and her read the filthiest romance books they can find and analyze them like they’re writing a book report.

Wears her dads old cowboy hat most of the time! I also think she picked up guitar bc he played it and it was just around in the house growing up

She’s extremely familiar with all the local flora/fauna and can basically give anyone a guided tour of the forest and point out all the native plants and animals. She’s got a soft spot for the native fungi species.

#this got long whoops #ty Maia ilysm!!!#*mwah*#dorotea Langford #shes just a dad. everything about her screams middle aged grill dad with 2 kids #ask #trvelyans

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theculturedmarxist · 4 years

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Published below is the introduction by World Socialist Web Site International Editorial Board Chairman David North to the forthcoming book, The New York Times’ 1619 Project and the Racialist Falsification of History. It is available for pre-order at Mehring Books for delivery in late January 2021.

The volume is a comprehensive refutation of the New York Times’ 1619 Project, a racialist falsification of the history of the American Revolution and Civil War. In addition to historical essays, it includes interviews from eminent historians of the United States, including James McPherson, James Oakes, Gordon Wood, Richard Carwardine, Victoria Bynum, and Clayborne Carson.

***

I should respectfully suggest that although the oppressed may need history for identity and inspiration, they need it above all for the truth of what the world has made of them and of what they have helped make of the world. This knowledge alone can produce that sense of identity which ought to be sufficient for inspiration; and those who look to history to provide glorious moments and heroes invariably are betrayed into making catastrophic errors of political judgment.—Eugene Genovese [1]

Both ideological and historical myths are a product of immediate class interests. … These myths may be refuted by restoring historical truth—the honest presentation of actual facts and tendencies of the past.—Vadim Z. Rogovin [2]

On August 14, 2019, the New York Times unveiled the 1619 Project. Timed to coincide with the four hundredth anniversary of the arrival of the first slaves in colonial Virginia, the 100-page special edition of the New York Times Magazine consisted of a series of essays that present American history as an unyielding racial struggle, in which black Americans have waged a solitary fight to redeem democracy against white racism.

The Times mobilized vast editorial and financial resources behind the 1619 Project. With backing from the corporate-endowed Pulitzer Center for Crisis Reporting, hundreds of thousands of copies were sent to schools. The 1619 Project fanned out to other media formats. Plans were even announced for films and television programming, backed by billionaire media personality Oprah Winfrey.

As a business venture the 1619 Project clambers on, but as an effort at historical revision it has been, to a great extent, discredited. This outcome is owed in large measure to the intervention of the World Socialist Web Site, with the support of a number of distinguished and courageous historians, which exposed the 1619 Project for what it is: a combination of shoddy journalism, careless and dishonest research, and a false, politically-motivated narrative that makes racism and racial conflict the central driving forces of American history.

In support of its claim that American history can be understood only when viewed through the prism of racial conflict, the 1619 Project sought to discredit American history’s two foundational events: The Revolution of 1775–83, and the Civil War of 1861–65. This could only be achieved by a series of distortions, omissions, half-truths, and false statements—deceptions that are catalogued and refuted in this book.

The New York Times is no stranger to scandals produced by dishonest and unprincipled journalism. Its long and checkered history includes such episodes as its endorsement of the Moscow frame-up trials of 1936–38 by its Pulitzer Prize-winning correspondent, Walter Duranty, and, during World War II, its unconscionable decision to treat the murder of millions of European Jews as “a relatively unimportant story” that did not require extensive and systematic coverage. [3] More recently, the Times was implicated, through the reporting of Judith Miller and the columns of Thomas Friedman, in the peddling of government misinformation about “weapons of mass destruction” that served to legitimize the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Many other examples of flagrant violations of even the generally lax standards of journalistic ethics could be cited, especially during the past decade, as the New York Times—listed on the New York Stock Exchange with a market capitalization of $7.5 billion—acquired increasingly the character of a media empire.

The “financialization” of the Times has proceeded alongside another critical determinant of the newspaper’s selection of issues to be publicized and promoted: that is, its central role in the formulation and aggressive marketing of the policies of the Democratic Party. This process has served to obliterate the always tenuous boundary lines between objective reporting and sheer propaganda. The consequences of the Times’ financial and political evolution have found a particularly reactionary expression in the 1619 Project. Led by Ms. Nikole Hannah-Jones and New York Times Magazine editor Jake Silverstein, the 1619 Project was developed for the purpose of providing the Democratic Party with a historical narrative that legitimized its efforts to develop an electoral constituency based on the promotion of racial politics. Assisting the Democratic Party’s decades-long efforts to disassociate itself from its identification with the social welfare liberalism of the New Deal to Great Society era, the 1619 Project, by prioritizing racial conflict, marginalizes, and even eliminates, class conflict as a notable factor in history and politics.

The shift from class struggle to racial conflict did not develop within a vacuum. The New York Times, as we shall explain, is drawing upon and exploiting reactionary intellectual tendencies that have been fermenting within substantial sections of middle-class academia for several decades.

The political interests and related ideological considerations that motivated the 1619 Project determined the unprincipled and dishonest methods employed by the Times in its creation. The New York Times was well aware of the fact that it was promoting a race-based narrative of American history that could not withstand critical evaluation by leading scholars of the Revolution and Civil War. The New York Times Magazine’s editor deliberately rejected consultation with the most respected and authoritative historians.

Moreover, when one of the Times’ fact-checkers identified false statements that were utilized to support the central arguments of the 1619 Project, her findings were ignored. And as the false claims and factual errors were exposed, the Times surreptitiously edited key phrases in 1619 Project material posted online. The knowledge and expertise of historians of the stature of Gordon Wood and James McPherson were of no use to the Times. Its editors knew they would object to the central thesis of the 1619 Project, promoted by lead essayist Hannah-Jones: that the American Revolution was launched as a conspiracy to defend slavery against pending British emancipation.

Ms. Hannah-Jones had asserted:

Conveniently left out of our founding mythology is the fact that one of the primary reasons the colonists decided to declare their independence from Britain was because they wanted to protect the institution of slavery. By 1776, Britain had grown deeply conflicted over its role in the barbaric institution that had reshaped the Western Hemisphere. In London, there were growing calls to abolish the slave trade … [S]ome might argue that this nation was founded not as a democracy but as a slavocracy. [4]

This claim—that the American Revolution was not a revolution at all, but a counterrevolution waged to defend slavery—is freighted with enormous implications for American and world history. The denunciation of the American Revolution legitimizes the rejection of all historical narratives that attribute any progressive content to the overthrow of British rule over the colonies and, therefore, to the wave of democratic revolutions that it inspired throughout the world. If the establishment of the United States was a counterrevolution, the founding document of this event—the Declaration of Independence, which proclaimed the equality of man—merits only contempt as an exemplar of the basest hypocrisy.

How, then, can one explain the explosive global impact of the American Revolution upon the thought and politics of its immediate contemporaries and of the generations that followed?

The philosopher Diderot—among the greatest of all Enlightenment thinkers—responded ecstatically to the American Revolution:

After centuries of general oppression, may the revolution which has just occurred across the seas, by offering all the inhabitants of Europe an asylum against fanaticism and tyranny, instruct those who govern men on the legitimate use of their authority! May these brave Americans, who would rather see their wives raped, their children murdered, their dwellings destroyed, their fields ravaged, their villages burned, and rather shed their blood and die than lose the slightest portion of their freedom, prevent the enormous accumulation and unequal distribution of wealth, luxury, effeminacy, and corruption of manners, and may they provide for the maintenance of their freedom and the survival of their government! [5]

Voltaire, in February 1778, only months before his death, arranged a public meeting with Benjamin Franklin, the much-celebrated envoy of the American Revolution. The aged philosophe related in a letter that his embrace of Franklin was witnessed by twenty spectators who were moved to “tender tears.” [6]

Marx was correct when he wrote, in his 1867 preface to the first edition of Das Kapital that “the American war of independence sounded the tocsin for the European middle class,” inspiring the uprisings that were to sweep away the feudal rubbish, accumulated over centuries, of the Ancien Régime. [7]

As the historian Peter Gay noted in his celebrated study of Enlightenment culture and politics, “The liberty that the Americans had won and were guarding was not merely an exhilarating performance that delighted European spectators and gave them grounds for optimism about man; it was also proving a realistic ideal worthy of imitation.” [8]

R.R. Palmer, among the most erudite of mid-twentieth century historians, defined the American Revolution as a critical moment in the evolution of Western Civilization, the beginning of a forty-year era of democratic revolutions. Palmer wrote:

[T]he American and the French Revolutions, the two chief actual revolutions of the period, with all due allowance for the great differences between them, nevertheless shared a great deal in common, and that what they shared was shared also at the same time by various people and movements in other countries, notably in England, Ireland, Holland, Belgium, Switzerland, and Italy, but also in Germany, Hungary, and Poland, and by scattered individuals in places like Spain and Russia. [9]

More recently, Jonathan Israel, the historian of Radical Enlightenment, argues that the American Revolution

formed part of a wider transatlantic revolutionary sequence, a series of revolutions in France, Italy, Holland, Switzerland, Germany, Ireland, Haiti, Poland, Spain, Greece, and Spanish America. … The endeavors of the Founding Fathers and their followings abroad prove the deep interaction of the American Revolution and its principles with the other revolutions, substantiating the Revolution’s global role less as a directly intervening force than inspirational motor, the primary model, for universal change. [10]

Marxists have never viewed either the American or French Revolutions through rose-tinted glasses. In examining world historical events, Friedrich Engels rejected simplistic pragmatic interpretations that explain and judge “everything according to the motives of the action,” which divides “men in their historical activity into noble and ignoble and then finds that as a rule the noble are defrauded and the ignoble are victorious.” Personal motives, Engels insisted, are only of a “secondary significance.” The critical questions that historians must ask are: “What driving forces in turn stand behind these motives? What are the historical causes which transform themselves into these motives in the brains of the actors?” [11]

Whatever the personal motives and individual limitations of those who led the struggle for independence, the revolution waged by the American colonies against the British Crown was rooted in objective socioeconomic processes associated with the rise of capitalism as a world system. Slavery had existed for several thousand years, but the specific form that it assumed between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries was bound up with the development and expansion of capitalism. As Marx explained:

The discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement and entombment in mines of the aboriginal population, the beginning of the conquest and looting of the East Indies, the turning of Africa into a warren for the commercial hunting of black-skins, signalised the rosy dawn of the era of capitalist production. These idyllic proceedings are the chief momenta of the era of capitalist accumulation. [12]

Marx and Engels insisted upon the historically progressive character of the American Revolution, an appraisal that was validated by the Civil War. Marx wrote to Lincoln in 1865 that it was in the American Revolution that “the idea of one great Democratic Republic had first sprung up, whence the first Declaration of the Rights of Man was issued, and the first impulse given to the European revolution of the eighteenth century...” [13]

Nothing in Ms. Hannah-Jones’ essay indicates that she has thought through, or is even aware of the implications, from the standpoint of world history, of the 1619 Project’s denunciation of the American Revolution. In fact, the 1619 Project was concocted without consulting the works of the preeminent historians of the Revolution and Civil War. This was not an oversight, but rather, the outcome of a deliberate decision by the New York Times to bar, to the greatest extent possible, the participation of “white” scholars in the development and writing of the essays. In an article titled “How the 1619 Project Came Together,” published on August 18, 2019, the Times informed its readers: “Almost every contributor in the magazine and special section—writers, photographers and artists—is black, a nonnegotiable aspect of the project that helps underscore its thesis...” [14]

This “nonnegotiable” and racist insistence that the 1619 Project be produced exclusively by blacks was justified with the false claim that white historians had largely ignored the subject of American slavery. And on the rare occasions when white historians acknowledged slavery’s existence, they either downplayed its significance or lied about it. Therefore, only black writers could “tell our story truthfully.” The 1619 Project’s race-based narrative would place “the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of the story we tell ourselves about who we are.” [15]

The 1619 Project was a falsification not only of history, but of historiography. It ignored the work of two generations of American historians, dating back to the 1950s. The authors and editors of the 1619 Project had consulted no serious scholarship on slavery, the American Revolution, the abolitionist movement, the Civil War, or Jim Crow segregation. There is no evidence that Hannah-Jones’ study of American history extended beyond the reading of a single book, written in the early 1960s, by the late black nationalist writer, Lerone Bennett, Jr. Her “reframing” of American history, to be sent out to the schools as the foundation of a new curriculum, did not even bother with a bibliography.

Hannah-Jones and Silverstein argued that they were creating “a new narrative,” to replace the supposedly “white narrative” that had existed before. In one of her countless Twitter tirades, Hannah-Jones declared that “the 1619 Project is not a history.” It is, rather, “about who gets to control the national narrative, and, therefore, the nation’s shared memory of itself.” In this remark, Hannah-Jones explicitly extols the separation of historical research from the effort to truthfully reconstruct the past. The purpose of history is declared to be nothing more than the creation of a serviceable narrative for the realization of one or another political agenda. The truth or untruth of the narrative is not a matter of concern.

Nationalist mythmaking has, for a long period, played a significant political role in promoting the interests of aggrieved middle-class strata that are striving to secure a more privileged place in the existing power structures. As Eric Hobsbawm laconically observed, “The socialists … who rarely used the word ‘nationalism’ without the prefix ‘petty-bourgeois,’ knew what they were talking about.” [16]

Despite the claims that Hannah-Jones was forging a new path for the study and understanding of American history, the 1619 Project’s insistence on a race-centered history of America, authored by African-American historians, revived the racial arguments promoted by black nationalists in the 1960s. For all the militant posturing, the underlying agenda, as subsequent events were to demonstrate, was to carve out special career niches for the benefit of a segment of the African-American middle class. In the academic world, this agenda advanced the demand that subject matter that pertained to the historical experience of the black population should be allocated exclusively to African Americans. Thus, in the ensuing fight for the distribution of privilege and status, leading historians who had made major contributions to the study of slavery were denounced for intruding, as whites, into a subject that could be understood and explained only by black historians. Peter Novick, in his book That Noble Dream, recalled the impact of black nationalist racism on the writing of American history:

Kenneth Stampp was told by militants that, as a white man, he had no right to write The Peculiar Institution. Herbert Gutman, presenting a paper to the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History, was shouted down. A white colleague who was present (and had the same experience), reported that Gutman was “shattered.” Gutman pleaded to no avail that he was “extremely supportive of the black liberation movement—if people would just forget that I am white and hear what I am saying … [it] would lend support to the movement.” Among the most dramatic incidents of this sort was the treatment accorded Robert Starobin, a young leftist supporter of the Black Panthers, who delivered a paper on slavery at a Wayne State University conference in 1969, an incident which devastated Starobin at the time, and was rendered the more poignant by his suicide the following year. [17]

Despite these attacks, white historians continued to write major studies on American slavery, the Civil War and Reconstruction. Rude attempts to introduce a racial qualification in judging a historian’s “right” to deal with slavery met with vigorous opposition. The historian Eugene Genovese (1930–2012), the author of such notable works as The Political Economy of Slavery and The World the Slaveholders Made, wrote:

Every historian of the United States and especially the South cannot avoid making estimates of the black experience, for without them he cannot make estimates of anything else. When, therefore, I am asked, in the fashion of our inane times, what right I, as a white man, have to write about black people, I am forced to reply in four-letter words. [18]

This passage was written more than a half century ago. Since the late 1960s, the efforts to racialize scholarly work, against which Genovese rightly polemicized, have assumed such vast proportions that they cannot be adequately described as merely “inane.” Under the influence of postmodernism and its offspring, “critical race theory,” the doors of American universities have been flung wide open for the propagation of deeply reactionary conceptions. Racial identity has replaced social class and related economic processes as the principal and essential analytic category.

“Whiteness” theory, the latest rage, is now utilized to deny historical progress, reject objective truth, and interpret all events and facets of culture through the prism of alleged racial self-interest. On this basis, the sheerest nonsense can be spouted with the guarantee that all objections grounded on facts and science will be dismissed as a manifestation of “white fragility” or some other form of hidden racism. In this degraded environment, Ibram X. Kendi can write the following absurd passage, without fear of contradiction, in his Stamped from the Beginning:

For Enlightenment intellectuals, the metaphor of light typically had a double meaning. Europeans had rediscovered learning after a thousand years in religious darkness, and their bright continental beacon of insight existed in the midst of a “dark” world not yet touched by light. Light, then, became a metaphor for Europeanness, and therefore Whiteness, a notion that Benjamin Franklin and his philosophical society eagerly embraced and imported to the colonies. … Enlightenment ideas gave legitimacy to this long-held racist “partiality,” the connection between lightness and Whiteness and reason, on the one hand, and between darkness and Blackness and ignorance, on the other. [19]

This is a ridiculous concoction that attributes to the word “Enlightenment” a racial significance that has absolutely no foundation in etymology, let alone history. The word employed by the philosopher Immanuel Kant in 1784 to describe this period of scientific advance was Aufklärung, which may be translated from the German as “clarification” or “clearing up,” connoting an intellectual awakening. The English translation of Aufklärung as Enlightenment dates from 1865, seventy-five years after the death of Benjamin Franklin, whom Kendi references in support of his racial argument. [20]

Another term used by English speaking people to describe the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries has been “The Age of Reason,” which was employed by Tom Paine in his scathing assault on religion and all forms of superstition. Kendi’s attempt to root Enlightenment in a white racist impulse is based on nothing but empty juggling with words. In point of fact, modern racism is connected historically and intellectually to the Anti-Enlightenment, whose most significant nineteenth century representative, Count Gobineau, wrote The Inequality of the Human Races. But actual history plays no role in the formulation of Kendi’s pseudo-intellectual fabrications. His work is stamped with ignorance.

History is not the only discipline assaulted by the race specialists. In an essay titled “Music Theory and the White Racial Frame,” Professor Philip A. Ewell of Hunter College in New York declares, “I posit that there exists a ‘white racial frame’ in music theory that is structural and institutionalized, and that only through a reframing of this white racial frame will we begin to see positive racial changes in music theory.” [21]

This degradation of music theory divests the discipline of its scientific and historically developed character. The complex principles and elements of composition, counterpoint, tonality, consonance, dissonance, timbre, rhythm, notation, etc. are derived, Ewell claims, from racial characteristics. Professor Ewell is loitering in the ideological territory of the Third Reich. There is more than a passing resemblance between his call for the liberation of music from “whiteness” and the efforts of Nazi academics in the Germany of the 1930s and 1940s to liberate music from “Jewishness.” The Nazis denounced Mendelssohn as a mediocrity whose popularity was the insidious manifestation of Jewish efforts to dominate Aryan culture. In similar fashion, Ewell proclaims that Beethoven was merely “above average as a composer,” and that he “occupies the place he does because he has been propped up by whiteness and maleness for two hundred years.” [22]

Academic journals covering virtually every field of study are exploding with ignorant rubbish of this sort. Even physics has not escaped the onslaught of racial theorizing. In a recent essay, Chanda Prescod-Weinstein, assistant physics professor at the University of New Hampshire, proclaims that “race and ethnicity impact epistemic outcomes in physics,” and introduces the concept of “white empiricism” (italics in the original), which “comes to dominate empirical discourse in physics because whiteness powerfully shapes the predominant arbiters of who is a valid observer of physical and social phenomena.” [23]

Prescod-Weinstein asserts that “knowledge production in physics is contingent on the ascribed identities of the physicists,” the racial and gender background of scientists affects the way scientific research is conducted, and, therefore, the observations and experiments conducted by African-American and female physicists will produce results different than those conducted by white males. Prescod-Weinstein identifies with the contingentists who “challenge any assumption that scientific decision making is purely objective.” [24]

The assumption of objectivity is, she claims, a major problem. Scientists, Prescod-Weinstein complains, are “typically monists—believers in the idea that there is only one science … This monist approach to science typically forecloses a closer investigation of how identity and epistemic outcomes intermix. Yet white empiricism undermines a significant theory of twentieth century physics: General Relativity.” (Emphasis added) [25]

Prescod-Weinstein’s attack on the objectivity of scientific knowledge is buttressed with a distortion of Einstein’s theory.

Albert Einstein’s monumental contribution to our empirical understanding of gravity is rooted in the principal of covariance, which is the simple idea that there is no single objective frame of reference that is more objective than any other. All frames of reference, all observers, are equally competent and capable of observing the universal laws that underlie the workings of our physical universe. (Emphasis added) [26]

In fact, general relativity’s statement about covariance posits a fundamental symmetry in the universe, so that the laws of nature are the same for all observers. Einstein’s great (though hardly “simple”) initial insight, studying Maxwell’s equations on electromagnetism involving the speed of light in a vacuum, was that these equations were true in all reference frames. The fact that two observers measure a third light particle in space as traveling at the same speed, even if they are in motion relative to each other, led Einstein to a profound theoretical redefinition of how matter exists in space and time. These theories were confirmed by experiment, a result that will not be refuted by changing the race or gender of those conducting the experiment.

Mass, space, time and other quantities turned out to be varying and relative, depending on one’s reference frame. But this variation is lawful, not subjective—let alone racially determined. It bears out the monist conception. There are no such things as distinct, “racially superior,” “black female,” or “white empiricist” statements or reference frames on physical reality. There is an ascertainable objective truth, genuinely independent of consciousness, about the material world.

Furthermore, “all observers,” regardless of their education and expertise, are not “equally competent and capable” of observing, let alone discovering, the universal laws that govern the universe. Physicists, whatever their personal identities, must be properly educated, and this education, hopefully, will not be marred by the type of ideological rubbish propagated by race and gender theorists.

There is, of course, an audience for the anti-scientific nonsense propounded by Prescod-Weinstein. Underlying much of contemporary racial and gender theorizing is frustration and anger over the allocation of positions within the academy. Prescod-Weinstein’s essay is a brief on behalf of all those who believe that their professional careers have been hindered by “white empiricism.” She attempts to cover over her falsification of science with broad and unsubstantiated claims that racism is ubiquitous among white physicists, who, she alleges, simply refuse to accept the legitimacy of research conducted by black female scientists.

It is possible that a very small number of physicists are racists. But that possibility does not lend legitimacy to her efforts to ascribe to racial identity an epistemological significance that affects the outcome of research. Along these lines, Prescod-Weinstein asserts that the claims to objective truth made by “white empiricism” rest on force. This is a variant of the postmodernist dogma that what is termed “objective truth” is nothing more than a manifestation of the power relations between conflicting social forces. She writes:

White empiricism is the practice of allowing social discourse to insert itself into empirical reasoning about physics, and it actively harms the development of comprehensive understandings of the natural world by precluding putting provincial European ideas about science—which have become dominant through colonial force—into conversation with ideas that are more strongly associated with “indigeneity,” whether it is African indigeneity or another. (Emphasis added) [27]

The prevalence and legitimization of racialist theorizing is a manifestation of a deep intellectual, social, and cultural crisis of contemporary capitalist society. As in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, race theory is acquiring an audience among disoriented sections of middle-class intellectuals. While most, if not all, of the academics who promote a racial agenda may sincerely believe that they are combating race-based prejudice, they are, nevertheless, propagating anti-scientific and irrationalist ideas which, whatever their personal intentions, serve reactionary ends.

The interaction of racialist ideology as it has developed over several decades in the academy and the political agenda of the Democratic Party is the motivating force behind the 1619 Project. Particularly under conditions of extreme social polarization, in which there is growing interest in and support for socialism, the Democratic Party—as a political instrument of the capitalist class—is anxious to shift the focus of political discussion away from issues that raise the specter of social inequality and class conflict. This is the function of a reinterpretation of history that places race at the center of its narrative.

The 1619 Project did not emerge overnight. For several years, corresponding to the growing role played by various forms of identity politics in the electoral strategy of the Democratic Party, the Times has become fixated, to an extent that can be legitimately described as obsessive, on race. It often appears that the main purpose of the news coverage and commentary of the Times is to reveal the racial essence of any given event or issue.

A search of the archive of the New York Times shows that the term “white privilege” appeared in only four articles in 2010. In 2013, the term appeared in twenty-two articles. By 2015, the Times published fifty-two articles in which the term is referenced. In 2020, as of December 1, the Times had published 257 articles in which there is a reference to “white privilege.”

The word “whiteness” appeared in only fifteen Times articles in 2000. By 2018, the number of articles in which the word appeared had grown to 222. By December 1, 2020, “whiteness” was referenced in 280 articles.

The Times’ unrelenting focus on race during the past year, even in its obituary section, has been clearly related to the 2020 electoral strategy of the Democratic Party. The 1619 Project was conceived of as a critical element of this strategy. This was explicitly stated by the Times’ executive editor, Dean Baquet, in a meeting on August 12, 2019 with the newspaper’s staff:

[R]ace and understanding of race should be a part of how we cover the American story … one reason we all signed off on the 1619 Project and made it so ambitious and expansive was to teach our readers to think a little bit more like that. Race in the next year—and I think this is, to be frank, what I hope you come away from this discussion with—race in the next year is going to be a huge part of the American story. [28]

The New York Times’ effort to “teach” its readers “to think a little bit more” about race assumed the form of a falsification of American history, aimed at discrediting the revolutionary struggles that gave rise to the founding of the United States in 1776 and the ultimate destruction of slavery during the Civil War. This falsification could only contribute to the erosion of democratic consciousness, legitimize a racialized view of American history and society, and undermine the unity of the broad mass of Americans in their common struggle against conditions of social inequality and exploitation.

The racialist campaign of the New York Times has unfolded against the backdrop of a pandemic ravaging working-class communities, regardless of race and ethnicity, throughout the United States and the world. The global death toll has already surpassed 1.5 million. Within the United States, the number of COVID-19 deaths will surpass 300,000 before the end of the year. The pandemic has also brought economic devastation to millions of Americans. The unemployment rate is approaching Great Depression levels. Countless millions of people are without any source of income and depend upon food banks for their daily sustenance.

#new york times #wsws #1619 project #race #racism #racialism #whiteness #white privilege #american history #US history

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thegeminisage · 4 years

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the south is like another country

i have an entire essay on how the current radicalism and steep political divide in this country can be traced directly back to the civil war - rural white southerners here playing the part pre-ww2 germany, the part of a resentful, conquered nation assimilated into the nation that conquered them, because if you think about it the south/the confederacy WAS its own nation for a time, that lost a very bloody war, and paid very steeply for it (not that slavers didn’t deserve every bit of misery the “carpetbaggers” threw at them), and the bitterness from that loss/the lost capital from having their slaves freed has been handed down through the generations, to people who now live in abject poverty while their livelihoods are destroyed by late stage capitalism, and their schools are so broke a lot of people here don’t even know how to read, and their towns are eaten alive with meth, and they’re still looked down upon by most of the country for being racist uneducated backwater hicks (to be clear, we should always look down on racism and racists, but it’s not making them any less bitter/ripe for being drawn into the cult of tr*mp’s america and f*cism).

but anyway this post isn’t about that! this post is about how when i go up north and i say “y’all it really is like i’m living in a different country” NOBODY BELIEVES ME. we speak the same language, we’re all americans, right? PFFFFFT. this amazon van thing just drives it home (pun intended). here’s a list of differences from the deep south* to the rest of the country*:

*the deep south here meaning the RURAL deep south. sorry to everyone who lives in cities/the suburbs and/or in border states like maryland and virginia. i’ve been to maryland and virginia and they are technically southern and some of this applies to them but it is not quite as extreme as it is here. the rest of the country includes the other states i’ve been to (california, washington state, new york, etc), which are in mostly every area except the midwest. i cannot personally vouch for the midwest. sorry, midwesterners! rural midwest probably has a lot of things in common with the deep south because rural life is different and also how easily people move around this country, but whatever

this is a long-ass post get ready

difference #1: DRIVING. driving & pedestrians are entirely different un rural areas vs urban areas. for starters, southern towns often do not even have sidewalks. this is because of 1. budget and 2. racism.

budget: rural towns are very spread out, and it costs major $$$ to put sidewalks in. it’s just not worth the trouble, financially, to put a sidewalk where only 12 people are ever going to use it, AND spend the money to maintain it. never gonna happen. racism: initially, suburbs especially in the south were seen as safe havens where people could get away from the stress of living in “urban” (re: integrated) areas. that the neighborhoods were only accessible by car and NOT by people who were too poor (black) to afford automobiles were just an added bonus.

as such, the first time i left the southeast, i was SHOCKED to see people walking and biking WITH (or indifferent to) the flow of traffic. down here we are taught that if you are walking along the road (or biking, because bikers get lumped in with pedestrians down here), it is very very very crucial that you walk against the flow of traffic, because you cannot expect drivers to see you and not mow you down. the onus is on YOU to get out of THEIR way. additionally, walking in knee-high grass along the side of the road sucks, and because there aren’t many people here, the roads are usually totally empty. so oftentimes pedestrians just straight up walk ON the road. and if you do that you absolutely have to be able to see a car coming from a long way away, because rural drivers on completely empty roads tend to take them at extremely high speeds just for fun. the people who live diagonally across from me have had to replace their mailbox four times because folks take that blind curve at 90mph. i had a cat get hit by a car on that road. (they all live indoors now.) i even witnessed a car accident happen there when i was just outside minding my own business. ever see a tire fly 12 feet into the air and come down into someone’s windshield? that’s what happens when you hit power line pole driving like that.

the first time i ever encountered one of those pedestrian crossing buttons was in california in the early 2010s. i had literally never seen one before because we simply don’t have them here. they’re not very self-explanatory if you have been jaywalking your whole entire life because all you’re taught to do is look both ways and make sure the street is empty before you cross. northern/urban roadways are made so that pedestrians and drivers can both get to where they’re going. in rural/southern areas pedestrians might as well not bother.

interestingly, while not an entirely southern problem, there’s a loose correlation between rural areas and more problems with drunk drivers.

on the driving side, driving in a city is batshit insane. it’s both faster and slower. there is NO space and you’re expected to go whenever you have so much as an inch to worm your way in. there’s more traffic, and the traffic totally dictates your speed. in the south you can change lanes if you want to drive faster or slower and weave around traffic or let it weave around you, but in a city there’s no other lane to change to and if you don’t drive at the speed of the people ahead of and behind you you will die. you turn fast, you brake fast, etc. whenever i come back from driving in a city the people who ride with me think i’m insane. you don’t PULL ONTO A ROAD if you can SEE ANOTHER CAR THERE, what the fuck? meanwhile i’m like “lol that is six miles of space i have plenty of time” and give everyone in my vicinity heart palpitations until i readjust.

tailgating in a rural area is something only assholes do (done by people on a two-lane road to encourage the person in front of them to go faster because the only other lane is for oncoming traffic), and if someone gets within one car length of me on a two-lane road i can very passively aggressively slow my vehicle to a crawl until they back the fuck off. in a city you’re lucky if you have a twelve inches between your bumper and the next car’s hood ornament.

difference #2: LANGUAGE. this is a small one, but the southern dialect combined with the lack of literacy means i am learning certain things late in life. phrases i have heard verbally with my ears but had never seen written out include: “chest of drawers” which i thought was “chester drawers” - “seven year itch” which i thought was “seven year each” - “albeit” which i thought was “i’ll be it.” i’ve made a deliberate effort to unlearn mine own accent/dialect but i run into weird shit all the time. remotes are mashers, shopping carts are buggies, you put stuff up instead of putting it away, i fix you a drink instead of pouring you one, we shoot the game instead of play it. my mom LITERALLY can’t understand me if i speak too quickly - she has to remind me all the time to slow down and put on my southern.

difference #3: TECHNOLOGY. issue of whether or not you personally have the creepy amazon vans aside, the rural south is behind the rest of the country on technology. things in cities are AUTOMATED. things like the little button you press to cross the street, tickets you take at parking garages, even the parking meters you find in cities, that’s just the beginning of it. one time i came across a little computer touch screen in a MCDONALDS where you put your order in. you didn’t even go up to the counter. you just put your order on the screen and swiped your card and then they got it ready for you and you never had to speak to a human person. self-checkouts, gas pumps where you can swipe your card and not go in and pay at first...the south got those YEARS behind everybody else. in the mid-2010s i went to DC and visited a target for maybe the 5th time ever and i was BAFFLED by the self-checkout. i had no idea how to use it! it was like less than ten years ago and i was IN MY TWENTIES and i had never seen one before! when we send a package we have to talk to a human person. when we order food we usually have to talk to a human person. apps for places like dominos and subway have not been in use here for very long. my county just got doordash LAST YEAR.

because i am 31, and because the south is so technologically behind, i am actually old enough to remember how when you used to go to a gas station an attendant would not only pump your gas but wash your windshield for you while you just SAT IN THE CAR. that seems like something from the 50s but it actually was a thing here in my childhood IN the 90s. i wish i was making this up.

difference #4: INFRASTRUCTURE. this sort of goes hand-in-hand w/ the last point because so much of our infrastructure is made of technology, and it’s also more of a rural/urban thing than a south/north thing. but just for fun here’s a non-exhaustive list of things i don’t have in my town:

starbucks* - the first time i went to a starbucks i was in my 20s

a public pool - we used to, but now the only pool here requires a YMCA membership. the only baseball diamond in this county is also at the Y.

walmart

in fact, ANYWHERE to buy clothes that is not a goodwill or other secondhand store. i cannot buy clothing unless i order it online or LEAVE MY TOWN. almost all of the clothing i own is from walmart because it’s one of the only places in my entire county where you can actually PURCHASE clothing.

grocery store chains? pffft. my town has two entire stores and both are small southern chains. i didn’t go into a publix for the first time until two years ago when i went to florida. i’ve NEVER entered a whole foods.

food delivery? yeah, no. like i said, we got doordash last year, but before that the only place you could get delivery from was a pizza chain. we only have two pizza places in my town that deliver, and one is a local place, not attached to any chain, so i can’t spend my loyalty points there. (it’s very expensive there too.) last year it was CLOSED for six months because the manager got caught dealing meth. every last one of the delivery drivers was trafficking it for him. they all got fired and had to restart from the ground up. for that short time, it was not possible to get any food delivered to your house whatsoever.

a hospital/ambulance services - if someone is sick, we have to take them to the hospital in laurens, the town next door (about 15-20 minutes by car). the town i live in lucky - we have our own police and fire departments. (acab but you know what i mean.) joanna is a smaller town next to mine that isn’t a real town - it’s been demoted to a census designated area because only 2000 people live there. if they have an emergency, they have to use OUR fire and police departments, and LAURENS’s ambulance/hospital system

after-school places kids can go to keep from getting into trouble. we have the Y, if you have money (no one here has money), and we have churches, but mostly schools can’t afford to run too many extracurriculars. there’s nothing to do here but church and meth.

food banks: zero. we have food DRIVES sometimes where people will come from further away and bring free food, but if you’re hungry, there’s nowhere you can go for help - you have to wait for help to come to you.

libraries: we don’t have our own library. we have a branch of the county library that’s physically located in our town. but we share books with the rest of the entire county, so everything is always checked out or at the other branch.

*we technically have a starbucks that’s in the local college campus, but only college students are allowed to be there. they’ll still serve people without a college ID because no one gives a fuck, but you can’t linger and loiter and hang out like you do in a normal starbucks. we also have one in the barnes and noble in greenville, which is about an hour away by car, but again, it’s a mini starbucks that serves a limited menu and none of that weird Starbucks Culture™

here’s a few things i don’t have in my ENTIRE COUNTY:

movie theaters - technically. we have a Historial™ one-screen theater in laurens that shows one movie for two weeks a month after it hits regular theaters and then switches to another, and if you miss it, too bad. this is a VERY recent addition - it wasn’t restores until i was in my 20s as a kid and a teenager i had to ride in a car an hour or more to go to the movies.

target. only commies and yankees have target. down here we do walmart.

malls

arcades

skate parks/skating rinks

bowling

museums

zoos/aquariums

campgrounds

fairs. our county fairground got razed a decade ago because there just werent enough people showing up to justify the expense. so no more fairs. you have to have people to fund things and down here there just aren’t enough people anywhere.

you get the idea. we don’t have entertainment. like i said, nothing to do but church and meth.

CLASSES FOR STUFF: knitting classes, dancing classes, driving classes? nope. gymnastics, karate dojos, golf, knitting groups, books clubs, cooking classes? [GAMESHOW BUZZER]. you can’t even hire a clown for a birthday party out here. we do have a shooting range. ONE. in the entire county. and a race track. and a rather infamous former kkk memorabilia store. they made a movie about that (serious tw for this trailer - they’ve got white hoods, burning crosses, pepper spray, the whole nine), which, yes, takes place in laurens, aka right next door to me. i used to walk by that place all the time when i was playing pokemon go. haven’t seen the movie but the shooting locations in the trailer make laurens look a lot bigger and prettier than it really is in real life - especially the racetrack, which, in the trailer, is actually PAVED. (this is inaccurate to real life.)

EDUCATION: lots of people can’t read. we have two schools for illiterate adults, one religious college, and one branch of one of the state colleges that has a skeleton staff and a fuck ton of computers (you basically just go there to distance learn/e-learn - if you want to take real classes from this college, you have to drive at least an hour.)

support groups/group therapy: almost none. we have al-anon and weight watchers, but that’s about it. there’s only half a dozen therapists in my entire county, and none that operate from my town. mental healthcare down here is bullshit.

on food: we don’t have many sit-down restaurants, where servers bring you your menu and your food. if you don’t count waffle houses, my town has 4. my county has 9. in and out, 5 guys, applebees, ruby tuesday, red lobster, olive garden, panda epxress? forget it. those places were and still are rare treats. i’ve only been to an olive garden twice. red lobster once. whenever i leave my county i BEG for chinese because there’s only two chinese restaurants in our entire county and one of them is crazy expensive and the other one sucks.

we also don’t have the more important stores you need to like, live. if we need to exchange our router at a charter store? yeah, we don’t have one. need to visit the sprint store to get your phone repaired? nuh-uh, we don’t have any phone stores either. my family recently switched to at&t because it was the only company that had a physical location in our county. before that, we had to drive an hour for even the smallest repair.

on a grimer note: we don’t have homeless shelters! homeless in laurens county? too bad for you. we do have homeless PEOPLE. they just have nowhere to go except the churches

hospitals? only kind of. like i said, our county has one, but it’s not equipped to take seriously sick people. when my mom had a heart attack she had to be driven straight to greenwood, which is 45 minutes away if you’re not in an ambulance. they obviously made it faster than that, but still. that was scary. it took them a long time to get here. i had a distant relative of mine die before the ambulance made it because they were SO far out in the sticks, even further than me.

we also don’t have any specialty stores. sporting goods, gamestops, shoe stores, florists, craft stores, bookstores, best buys...forget it. if you can’t buy it at walmart, you just can’t buy it. the exceptions: my TOWN has one jewelry store, two hardware stores, and two auto repair stores. my COUNTY has three clothing stores, none of which are in my town, one place that sells used TVs, and one movie rental place. thrilling, right? i can rent a movie if i drive out of town. (i know streaming killed the rental business, but we also only had two places when i was a kid, if you counted the rental section in the grocery store.)

so, yeah. i know the term “shithole” is really loaded these days, but rural areas are just plain less developed, and often in seriously poor repair because nobody fucking uses them. there USED to be more stuff here - my mom was on a bowling league, and as a kid i had a birthday party at a skating rink - but late stage capitalism and drugs destroyed it all. people ran out of money to do things like skate and bowl and so those places closed. the south is full of empty store fronts and deserted strip malls slowly being eaten by kudzu. my brother got out of this town and whenever he winds up back here (not often) he remarks on how completely and utterly dead everything feels. “my friends who live in greenwood now think they’re all rural,” he said once. “they complain constantly about how remote it is. but they have no idea. they wouldn’t make it five minutes out here.” greenwood has its own movie theater, mall, starbucks, homeless shelter, food bank, and hospital.

so, yeah! if you were wondering what rural white southerners are so fucking mad about, that’s part of it. propaganda and xenophobia and racism has their anger directed ENTIRELY at the wrong people, but it’s hard to argue that the anger itself isn’t just a little bit justified.

difference #5: CULTURE. specifically culture around food, and the culture around the civil war. i could write an entire other essay about the culture of the church being everything because the church IS the only semblance of infrastructure we have and this is why the south is so homophobic, but we’ll skip that for now.

food: this is a quickie, because i sort of touched on it already, but there are like, almost NO vegetarian options here. there’s very limited choices of cuisine. it’s ALL waffle house and soul food. we have a lot of mexican places because we’re physically close to the mexican border, but aside from that, forget finding like indian or thai or japanese or anything like that. no sushi. forget finding a menu that has meals that are halal or kosher. there’s just. no culture here. no variety. you know? like i said, our entire county doesn’t even hit double-digits for proper sit-down restaurants.

civil war: i’m not going to go into the big stuff since i sort of covered it at the top and also this post is getting way too long, but to other white rural southerners there is legitimate baggage around the fact that my mom married a yankee and that i am half-yankee. and he’s not even a real yankee! he was born up north but raised in southern florida. (florida is weird. the further south you go geographically, the less southern you are culturally.) yet: my family makes jokes that are sometimes not jokes about this. when i drop this information in casual conversation people get that look on their faces like: ah, that explains it. it being that i am not religious and don’t laugh at racist jokes and maybe i am queer?? (strangers tend to be unsure about this last part, even when i’m wearing rainbows.) it’s because i’m half-yank! that explains everything! the xenophobia is SO strong here that white people are even xenophobic at OTHER WHITE PEOPLE.

so in conclusion when i say the north is like another country, it’s because the people who raised me think of it like another country. and culturally! it is buck wild! the differences that there are! when i leave this town i feel like i step into fucking star trek! if you are not from the rural south, and you have never been to the rural south, please do not come here! i’ve been to a few different places now and this is definitely my least favorite one.

#personal #i guess #it's ok to rb if you want to though??? tbh i don't think most people will even get to the end lol #anyway here's my college lecture about the south it's not very good or college level actually lmao #this is AIRQUOTE FIELD STUDY AIRQUOTE #the experiences u have as a half-yank white person in the rural south are crazy #bc other white people think you're okay to listen to them say what they REALLY think #and then backtrack rapidly when they realize you aren't #now that i'm grown and woke i can't believe half-yankee is even a thing.#anyway this post brought to you by the maddening realization of how technologically far behind we are #WE DON'T EVEN HAVE THE CREEPY AMAZON VANS #the automated package sending...what i wouldn't give not to have to talk to people to mail stuff #rip. :/

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