Our country is built on these two primal sins: the sin of slavery and the sin of genocide, and I think we can’t really become a fully functioning, mature country unless we own up to how we started.
This, also keep in mind that the “American cowboy” has been exaggerated greatly by Hollywood and popular myth – it was really only a twenty/thirty year period in the mid-19th century that essentially ended around the American civil war when barbed wire was introduced and eliminated the need for them.
Also I have gotten a number of “I’m not racist, Asian girls are my type” and “well obviously you’re smart, you’re Asian”
I hate. Hate. HATE. Having my academic performance/intelligence attributed to my race. I’m adopted and I’m 100% American; my parents, who are white, have never put any pressure on me as a student – other than to tell me to stop studying so much. But my accomplishments, and what I go through and how hard I work to achieve them, are dismissed in the blink of an eye by one stereotype.
“Chill! It’s a good stereotype!” There is NO SUCH THING as a “good” stereotype. So no, I am not going to chill, and I am never going to be flattered by people assuming I’m smart and good at violin and math because of how I look and where I was born.
^^^^This. Sure, he ripped off the coffee labels. After waiting a few weeks with full knowledge of what was going on.
And that scene when he gives Katherine the chalk in the board meeting? It was supposed to look like he had confidence in Katherine. Honestly, though, it carried almost no risk for him – if she failed, he could simply blame it on her and her blackness and her femaleness. Much riskier move would have been to give the chalk to Paul his chief engineer – if Paul had failed, his entire department would have been tarnished. Basically that scene was Kevin Costner’s character throwing Katherine into the middle of the road to see if she gets run over by a bus or not.
And the whole movie, I just kept thinking – every time these women walk into a room full of white people, they have no idea which of them are in the KKK. Probably a lot of them. They have no idea if their coworkers could set them up as targets. The courage, the bravery just to go to work in that environment every single day…it gives me the shivers.
The fertility of enslaved women was examined by owners to make sure they were able to birth as many children as possible. Secretly, slave owners would impregnate enslaved women and when the child was born and grew to an age where he could work on the fields, they would take the “very same children (of their) own blood and make slaves out of them,” as pointed out in the National Humanities Center Resource Toolbox on Slaveholders’ Sexual Abuse of Slaves.
It was common for the slave to be subordinated sexually to the master–even men with enslaved males. It was part of the enslaved man’s function as an “animated tool,” an instrument of pleasure.
When enslaved males turned 15 years old–and younger in some cases–they had their first inspection. Boys who were under-developed, had their testicles castrated and sent to the market or used on the farm. Each enslaved male was expected to get 12 females pregnant a year. The men were used for breeding for five years. One enslaved man name Burt produced more than 200 offspring, according to the Slave Narratives.
To combat the high rate of death among the enslaved, plantation owners demanded females start having children at 13. By 20, the enslaved women would be expected to have four or five children. As an inducement, plantation owners promised freedom for enslaved female once she bore 15 children, according to Slavery in the United States by John Simkin.
If the enslaved woman was considered “pretty,” she would be bought by plantation owner and given special treatment in the house, but often subjected to horrifying cruelty by the master’s wife, including the beheading of a child because he was the product of a enslaved-master affair.
Often, the plantation owner would entertain his friends by forcing the enslaved Blacks to have orgies–multiple pairings having sex in front of them. And the white men often would participate in the debauchery.
People often forget to examine and discuss the sexual exploitative nature of slavery and how it was “necessary” to ensure the survival of the slave system. It’s sooooo sick! My soul is disturbed. We are a resilient people but damnit if our history isn’t one of terror and unimaginable evil. God bless and comfort my ancestors! Smh. #Hate it!
If the enslaved woman was considered “pretty,” she would be bought by
plantation owner and given special treatment in the house, but often
subjected to horrifying cruelty by the master’s wife, including the
beheading of a child because he was the product of a enslaved-master
affair.
Just wanted to highlight this part too for people trying to excuse white women’s part in the abuse of slaves back then and their children.
Reading this took everything out of me, broke me down.
This is the reason why your slavery narratives in your fiction and your fetishization of Black bodies are abhorrent. This is why I will always shit directly on anyone who tries to sell the slavery as a ‘romantic meet-cute’ in any form of media.
Mel Gibson and Vince Vaughn are set to co-star in a movie about police brutality.
Titled Dragged Across Concrete, the film will see the two stars playing “cops who are suspended when a video of their strong-arm tactics gets wide attention,” according to Variety. Then they decide to take revenge among criminals.
The two noted Hollywood conservatives feel like odd choices for a nuanced take on police brutality, to say the least.
During this heated political moment, where more and more investigations reveal systemic abuse within police departments, do we really need these men to offer their takes? Read more
Colonists are people who come to steal land from others, destroy their culture, and force them to assimilate to their own.
If you don’t understand the difference between that and an immigrant that is concerning.
I… kind of feel like you’re both arguing on the same side here and just getting hung up on semantics, and degree of anger?
Semantics are fairly important – we understand the world through words.
I understand OP’s point and I applaud the general gist of the message i.e. NO DAPL, NO DRILLING ON STOLEN LAND
Yet the current tendency to talk about “we’re a nation of immigrants and refugees” is fairly disingenuous – artificially rosy – since not everyone received the “immigrant treatment” so to speak – prejudice against jobs, social exclusion, etc.
And then there is that group of people who were kidnapped and continually kept enslaved for centuries. >.>
If we’re engaging in wordplay to make a political point, it’s only just to consider all the words we’re using.
As Anne of Green Gables says, “I read in
a book once that a rose by any other name would smell as
sweet, but I’ve never been able to believe it. I don’t believe a
rose WOULD be as nice if it was called a thistle or a skunk
cabbage.”
Citing Anne Shirley in support of your POV is an automatic win. 🙂
And yes, it is important to use and employ semantics, and to refine OP’s original point. I just felt the first three posts were unnecessarily adversarial and aggressive for people who are, essentially, in support of the same ideas. Especially since OP was a tweet (ie, sound-bite, max impact, not necessarily going to be perfectly phrased). And especially now that there’s some pretty globally hefty enemies that are doing their best to divide opposition by setting different groups against each other, and to give us so many battles to fight that we can’t unite.
Semantics are important, I agree. Hell, I’m a linguist and I have eons of frustration available for humans in general using language imprecisely. But at this point in history I think it’s important to not let them become a point of division. 🙂
Hahaha, thanks – rereading Montgomery right now is a joy ^_^
I would also like to add that if semantics are important, they are important regardless of tone.
We can’t begin to unite and to heal divisions without examining them first.
Tweets are just as ripe for analysis as any other source – otherwise we wouldn’t have so many news articles about Tr*mp’s tweets.
myblog 