It’s news to no one that the Rebeccas and Karens of the world will not cease until they call cops on every single black person in this country for the most minuscule of perceived infractions.
In the past month alone we’ve had incidents of police being called on black people for napping while black, cooking while black, dining while black and moving while black. And now we have real-estate-ing while black.
In a video posted to YouTube earlier this month, Michael Hayes, a real estate investor in Memphis, Tenn., went to a house that was in desperate need of a fixing up to inspect it. It was at that point, he said, that a woman came out of a neighboring house demanding to know what he was doing. Ever affable, Hayes said that he readily showed the woman his investment contract, which showed that he had permission to work on the house, as well as the written permission he received from the homeowner.
Still, Karen the unidentified woman wouldn’t be swayed and called the police anyway.
Thankfully, in this case, the police were quick to call the woman out on her bullshit and defended Hayes’ right to be there.
“You keep the camera rolling. If you have any problems with her, what I want you to do is call me back over here,” a white male officer reassures Hayes. “She will go to jail for that.”
The woman says something that sounds like, “I’m friends with the sheriff,” but the same officer shuts her down.
“I don’t care if you’re friends with the president,” he snaps. “You’re going to let him do what he’s going to do. If you try to do anything to stop him, I’m going to take you to jail.”
“Hurry up, do it and get out!” the woman sneers in Hayes’ direction.
Again, the cops were not having it.
“No, no. He can take his time,” a female officer chimes in.
“He can take all day,” the male officer agrees.
At Hayes’ request, and after he voiced his own discomfort, the officers agree to stick around while he takes pictures of the property to ensure his safety.
This is the year 2017 and I’m still having to yell about how ridiculous Maya extinction myths are and tell people we are ‘Maya’ not ‘Mayan’. I’m not saying shame shame if anyone reads this and didn’t know. I’m so angry concerning how slowly these issues are being picked up by educational institutions, at how often I have to bring these things up to higher education professors.
We are a massive massive group of peoples. One of the largest Indigenous groups in the Americas. Wikipedia cites 7 million or so of us total but honestly that’s way off because that’s about how many Maya folks there are in Guatemala alone.
We’re not dead. The Maya did not ‘mysteriously disappear’. We did not ‘fall’. We did not fade into obscurity. We’ve led revolts and rebellions against colonial powers for hundreds of years. We’ve had a big hand in shaping legislative definitions and protections for Indigenous Peoples in Mexico, Belize, Guatemala, and El Salvador.
We haven’t lost our cultures. We’re constantly threatened and experience a lot of violence and have our resources stolen but we are still very much alive and our cultures have persisted.
And don’t even try me with the whole “Oh well we mean your CIVILIZATION disappeared, not you.” The structure of our societies and layout of our network changed and decentralized in many areas. That didn’t make us turn invisible. That didn’t make us not still be large in numbers with a relationship with our lands and lose influence in the areas we live. We still held power in large cities way after what people like to cite as “the fall of the Maya Civilization” (around 600-900 A.D. when we still had cities that we held power of until nearly 1700 when the last was “conquered” by Spain.)
Which brings me to the next issue. Being “conquered” or having a colonial government installed does not erase Indigenous societies or civilizations. That’s an extremely eurocentric way of thinking. We didn’t suddenly turn into Spaniards. We still had massive amounts of towns and villages with leaders. We still had our cultures, our trade, our networks, our influence, while Spain focused on putting up flags in our cities.
So yeah. All your history books have you all convinced that an extremely large group of people, with a greater population than more than half of the countries in Europe, all died out 1100 years ago.
Now try to imagine what kind of shit Indigenous Peoples with much less numbers and much lower access to resources go through.
This has gotten A LOT of attention so I figured I’d add a few links to some more recent Maya history:
TO HISTORY BUFFS/HISTORIANS/ANTHROPOLOGISTS, read this first before commenting or sending me asks.
You will be blocked if:
– You think it’s your place to educate me on my own people and culture.
– You infer in any way that I am not educated enough to criticize the way my people are framed and discussed in mainstream social studies or to criticize academia in general.
– You think you need to explain to me what civilizations or empires are or the popular social structure categories. If I didn’t know them I wouldn’t be criticizing their definitions/use/focus.
– You come at me with “not all history books”, “not all historians”, “not all professors” to dismiss my point about a broad institutionalized issue. If you can’t get past that someone saying “you all/y’all” doesn’t mean every single person everywhere then I don’t know how to help you.
– You compare us… to the Roman Empire or the British Empire to try to explain to me what a fall of a civilization/empire means. In fact with this one I require a 10 page paper explaining why you think we’re equatable including your evidence of a singular Maya Empire.
do you want to know something?? I always wondered what the hell kind of hairstyle the Ancient Egyptians were trying to portray with depictions like these
and this
until I did my hair this morning and
oh
welp
you can take the noses off our statues but until you find a way to take Egypt out of Africa we’re still going to find ourselves
I’m reblogging this post without all the salty, racist commentary because I’m sick of looking at it. please spread this around again in its pure form for posterity.
What’s funny is that white people thought they were hats/crowns 😂
And here’s some pictures of the Afar people, who still live on the horn of Africa today.
Cool, huh?
Beautiful
People thought it was Hats and Crowns? How could they not see hair?
The same reason archaeologists, upon finding a woman’s skeleton in the grave of a famous Roman gladiator, immediately wondered where the gladiator’s skeleton was: Old Straight White Man™ brand denial.
Same way they denied the Really Gay Egyptian Tomb, too. It’s kind of a Thing.
This post is amazing, I’m so glad it exists. I have learned.
There is so much greatness in this post and all white people care about is defending why they thought the depictions are hats. White people??? Why are you like this???
I’m salty as fuck that we were taught they were crowns at SCHOOL. For Christ sake.
Oh my god. Read this whole thing if you want to be borderline despondent on the state of prestige cinema LMAO
The worst part is she votes for The Shape of Water in almost every category, but doesn’t even consider Octavia Spencer for best supporting actress in that movie because she thinks Octavia is acting the same role in every movie? Which isn’t true and just seems so much like an excuse.
And she keeps dissmissing Get Out in every category it is nominated in. She keeps saying it’s not oscar worthy.
She also isn’t voting for coco because she said the theater (for a kids movie) was full of noisy kids.
“How do I explain, as comprehensively as possible, that I’m racist, without admitting I’m racist?”
myblog 