#black people who are descendants of enslaved people

[firelord-frowny]

!!!!!!!!!!!!!! ive always thought it's so wiiiiiiiiild that so many of these ~mansions~ that used to be slave plantations are now government-owned and converted into museums instead of being collectively owned by all black americans, liiiiiiiiiiike....

we should fucking own that shit! our ancestors RAN those farms! worked that land! built those mansions! yet somebody other than us is benefiting from it now???

honest to god i wish black folks could all own those properties like a timeshare lmao and we'd all be entitled to spend a few days a year living it up in our luxurious country homes in the deep south. catch me sipping lemonade on my veranda on a hot summer evening while my housekeepers clean up the kitchen after dinner.

#honestly the sheer scale of all the things the united states RIGHTFULLY OWES to black people is mind boggling #all the shit our ancestors were forced to do for free while suffering day in and day out #all the abuse our ancestors were subject to. #all the things that were stolen from us #from our languages to our religions to our own land and property when we were finally able to own things at all #honest to god sometimes i feel like black people in america shouldn't have to work a single day of our lives #let us live it up for a few centuries and accumulate wealth #in the same way that white ~americans~ were able to accumulate wealth by Not Paying Anyone A Damn Thing To Work For Them #i'm not even saying i want to deprive white people of anything lmao i dont give a fuck what they have or don't have #they can keep whatever wealth they've got i don't CARE #i just want what i'm owed #for the dignity of my great great great ancestors #if there's any sort of consciousness after death i would want them to have the satisfaction #of knowing that someone eventually inherited the cumulative worth of hundreds of years of enslaved labor #i'd want them to know that their suffering ultimately made their descendants filthy fucking rich #as rich or better yet RICHER THAN the descendants of the people who got rich off of us #but nope #black people at large are relegated to mostly unremarkable financial and social standing

[icanseethefuture333]

Whenever I hear other African Americans say they're not black but indigenous/aboriginal a part of me dies

#like you can't be pro black but then ashamed to call yourself #majority of african americans are descendants of slaves and that's ok #we don't all have to come from royal blood and we also don't have to be native to america #there is history books on the slave trade and how west africa was colonized #there is a difference from having the theory that black people were one of the first humans to exist and traveled to countries #which created the blue eye gene or light skin #but claiming to be native american or aboriginal when it's not in your dna or you're even a direct descendant of its just not accurate #because then that creates another issue where people are erasing another ethnic group #not to mention wearing regalia or items from just any tribe you can find is considered cultural appropriation #also there were native american tribes who enslaved black people so the logic just doesn't make sense #non blacks dni

[fatehbaz]

In fact, far more Asian workers moved to the Americas in the 19th century to make sugar than to build the transcontinental railroad [...]. [T]housands of Chinese migrants were recruited to work [...] on Louisiana’s sugar plantations after the Civil War. [...] Recruited and reviled as "coolies," their presence in sugar production helped justify racial exclusion after the abolition of slavery.

In places where sugar cane is grown, such as Mauritius, Fiji, Hawaii, Guyana, Trinidad and Suriname, there is usually a sizable population of Asians who can trace their ancestry to India, China, Japan, Korea, the Philippines, Indonesia and elsewhere. They are descendants of sugar plantation workers, whose migration and labor embodied the limitations and contradictions of chattel slavery’s slow death in the 19th century. [...]

---

Mass consumption of sugar in industrializing Europe and North America rested on mass production of sugar by enslaved Africans in the colonies. The whip, the market, and the law institutionalized slavery across the Americas, including in the U.S. When the Haitian Revolution erupted in 1791 and Napoleon Bonaparte’s mission to reclaim Saint-Domingue, France’s most prized colony, failed, slaveholding regimes around the world grew alarmed. In response to a series of slave rebellions in its own sugar colonies, especially in Jamaica, the British Empire formally abolished slavery in the 1830s. British emancipation included a payment of £20 million to slave owners, an immense sum of money that British taxpayers made loan payments on until 2015.

Importing indentured labor from Asia emerged as a potential way to maintain the British Empire’s sugar plantation system.

In 1838 John Gladstone, father of future prime minister William E. Gladstone, arranged for the shipment of 396 South Asian workers, bound to five years of indentured labor, to his sugar estates in British Guiana. The experiment with “Gladstone coolies,” as those workers came to be known, inaugurated [...] “a new system of [...] [indentured servitude],” which would endure for nearly a century. [...]

---

Bonaparte [...] agreed to sell France's claims [...] to the U.S. [...] in 1803, in [...] the Louisiana Purchase. Plantation owners who escaped Saint-Domingue [Haiti] with their enslaved workers helped establish a booming sugar industry in southern Louisiana. On huge plantations surrounding New Orleans, home of the largest slave market in the antebellum South, sugar production took off in the first half of the 19th century. By 1853, Louisiana was producing nearly 25% of all exportable sugar in the world. [...] On the eve of the Civil War, Louisiana’s sugar industry was valued at US$200 million. More than half of that figure represented the valuation of the ownership of human beings – Black people who did the backbreaking labor [...]. By the war’s end, approximately $193 million of the sugar industry’s prewar value had vanished.

Desperate to regain power and authority after the war, Louisiana’s wealthiest planters studied and learned from their Caribbean counterparts. They, too, looked to Asian workers for their salvation, fantasizing that so-called “coolies” [...].

Thousands of Chinese workers landed in Louisiana between 1866 and 1870, recruited from the Caribbean, China and California. Bound to multiyear contracts, they symbolized Louisiana planters’ racial hope [...].

To great fanfare, Louisiana’s wealthiest planters spent thousands of dollars to recruit gangs of Chinese workers. When 140 Chinese laborers arrived on Millaudon plantation near New Orleans on July 4, 1870, at a cost of about $10,000 in recruitment fees, the New Orleans Times reported that they were “young, athletic, intelligent, sober and cleanly” and superior to “the vast majority of our African population.” [...] But [...] [w]hen they heard that other workers earned more, they demanded the same. When planters refused, they ran away. The Chinese recruits, the Planters’ Banner observed in 1871, were “fond of changing about, run away worse than [Black people], and … leave as soon as anybody offers them higher wages.”

When Congress debated excluding the Chinese from the United States in 1882, Rep. Horace F. Page of California argued that the United States could not allow the entry of “millions of cooly slaves and serfs.” That racial reasoning would justify a long series of anti-Asian laws and policies on immigration and naturalization for nearly a century.

---

All text above by: Moon-Ho Jung. "Making sugar, making 'coolies': Chinese laborers toiled alongside Black workers on 19th-century Louisiana plantations". The Conversation. 13 January 2022. [All bold emphasis and some paragraph breaks/contractions added by me.]

#abolition #caribbean #imperial #colonial #ecology #plantation #multispecies #landscape #indigenous

[matan4il]

I saw an article in an Israeli leftist newspaper, which talked about a phenomenon nicknamed, "Blaxit." For those unfamiliar, it's a movement calling for Americans and Europeans of Black/African descent to move to Africa.

This is actually not a new idea (though according to the article, it has picked up some momentum since the George Floyd murder). The "Back to Africa" movement was based on the exact same idea, and was even successful in establishing a whole country for returning Africans, Liberia, as far back as 1847.

And here's the most ironic part: it's the EXACT same principle that drives Zionism. It's the notion that, "our ancestors were removed from our ancestral homeland a long time ago in order to be used as slaves by Europeans, and even though over time our people became free, we never became equal. We are tired of it, and even though we understand that our quality of life will drastically drop if we leave the places that thrived in part thanks to our people's labor over the years, especially as we leave them for the place we're originally from, which stagnated under the exploitative and oppressive influence of colonialism, we still prefer that hardship and sacrifice to a life of being second hand citizens (at best), of always being less than, of knowing our very right to live depends on the good will of the majority, made up of the descendants of those who enslaved our ancestors, a situation we can no longer bear."

I've never seen anyone chanting for the genocidal eradication of Liberia, or Sierra Leone (where 10% of the population is made up of the descendants of freed slaves from the US and Jamica), never heard anyone calling for the canceling of Maya Angelou because she returned to Africa by settling in Ghana, never heard anyone calling Ghana "an apartheid state" for giving returning Africans preferential treatment in immigrating there from 2019 on, or Sierra Leone for doing the same, I doubt anyone would call Africans adopting the Blaxit idea "colonizers" or "black supremacists." Yet all of that has been done to Jews and the Jewish State we've established in the Jewish ancestral homeland that our ancestors were removed from, when they were taken to be slaves across the Roman Empire. It's discriminatory in nature towards Jews, and it IS antisemitic.

#antisemitism #israel #israeli #israel news #israel under attack #terrorism #anti terrorism #hamas #antisemitic #antisemites #jews #jew #judaism #jumblr #frumblr #jewish #israel under fire #israelunderattack #blaxit #back to africa

[thechanelmuse]

Juneteenth is a Black American holiday. 

We call Juneteenth many things: Black Independence Day, Freedom Day, Emancipation Day, Jubilee Day. We celebrate and honor our ancestors. 

December 31 is recognized as Watch Night or Freedom’s Eve in Black American churches because it marks the day our enslaved ancestors were awaiting news of their freedom going into 1863. On January 1, 1863, President Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation. But all of the ancestors wouldn’t be freed until June 19, 1865 for those in Galveston, Texas and even January 23, 1866 for those in New Jersey (the last slave state). (It’s also worth noting that our people under the Choctaw and Chickasaw Nations wouldn’t be freed until April 28, 1866 and June 14, 1866 for those under the Cherokee Nation by way of the Treaties.)

Since 1866, Black Americans in Texas have been commemorating the emancipation of our people by way of reading the Emancipation Proclamation and coming together to have parades, free festivities, and later on pageants. Thereafter, it spread to select states as an annual day of commemoration of our people in our homeland. 

Here’s a short silent video filmed during the 1925 Juneteenth celebration in Beaumont, Texas:

(It’s also worth noting that the Mascogos tribe in Coahuila, Mexico celebrate Juneteenth over there as well. Quick history lesson: A total of 305,326 Africans were shipped to the US to be enslaved alongside of American Indians who were already or would become enslaved as prisoners of war, as well as those who stayed behind refusing to leave and walk the Trail of Tears to Oklahoma. In the United States, you were either enslaved under the English territories, the Dutch, the French, the Spanish, or under the Nations of what would called the Five “Civilized” Native American Tribes: Cherokee, Creek (Muscogee), Chickasaw, Choctaw, and Seminoles. Mascogos descend from the Seminoles who escaped slavery during the Seminole Wars, or the Gullah Wars that lasted for more than 100 years if you will, and then settled at El Nacimiento in 1852.)

We largely wave our red, white and blue flags on Juneteenth. These are the only colors that represent Juneteenth. But sometimes you may see others wave our Black American Heritage flag (red, black, and gold).

Juneteenth is a day of respect. It has nothing to do with Africa, diversity, inclusion, immigration, your Pan-African flag, your cashapps, nor your commerce businesses. It is not a day of “what about” isms. It is not a day to tap into your inner colonizer and attempt to wipe out our existence. That is ethnocide and anti-Black American. If you can’t attend a Black American (centered) event that’s filled with education on the day, our music, our food and other centered activities because it’s not centered around yours…that is a you problem. Respect our day for what and whom it stands for in our homeland. 

Juneteenth flag creator: “Boston Ben” Haith 

It was created in 1997. The red, white and blue colors represent the American flag. The five-point star represents the Lone State (Texas). The white burst around the star represents a nova, the beginning of a new star. The new beginning for Black Americans. 

Black American Heritage Flag creators: Melvin Charles & Gleason T. Jackson

It was created in 1967, our Civil Rights era. The color black represents the ethnic pride for who we are. Red represents the blood shed for freedom, equality, justice and human dignity. Gold fig wreath represents intellect, prosperity, and peace. The sword represents the strength and authority exhibited by a Black culture that made many contributions to the world in mathematics, art, medicine, and physical science, heralding the contributions that Black Americans would make in these and other fields. 

SN: While we’re talking about flags, I should note that Grace Wisher, a 13-year-old free Black girl from Baltimore helped stitched the Star Spangled flag, which would inspire the national anthem during her six years of service to Mary Pickersgill. I ain’t even gon hold you. I never looked too far into it, but she prob sewed that whole American flag her damn self. They love lying about history here until you start unearthing them old documents. 

In conclusion, Juneteenth is a Black American holiday. Respect us and our ancestors.

#juneteenth #juneteenth flag #black american history #black american culture #ben haith #black american heritage flag #melvin charles #gleason t jackson #grace wisher #american flag #mascogos #juneteenth 2023

[froody]

It burns me up that they perpetually build roads, lakes, housing developments etc. over historical Black cemeteries in the American south. It really does. The thin excuse of “urban development and progress” doesn’t change the fact that is 9/10 times you hear about a cemetery being relocated or otherwise desecrated, it was a cemetery for POC. It is an act of willful, disgusting racism and targeted disrespect towards their lives and their loved ones and descendants.

In Roanoke, I-581 is built over Big Lick Cemetery, a historical Black cemetery dating back to the 1890s containing the graves of more than 700 Black men, women and children, most of whom moved to Roanoke during The Great Migration when it was a developing railroad town. These are the graves of the people who built the city. These are the graves of people who came to make a better life for themselves and their children. The graves of the formerly enslaved, their children, their children’s children. The cemetery contains a disproportionate amount of children, even for a cemetery dating from a time when childhood mortality was high. Stillborn babies, children who died of marasmus (malnutrition) or diseases like tuberculosis and typhoid due to inhumane and cramped living conditions.

There is a road built on top of them, babies, boys, girls, men and women and no acknowledgment of their lives. Remaining undisturbed graves are visible from the road, it’s surrounded by a chain link fence and marked from the road only by a wooden sign bolted to the fence. Driving by you could not fathom the size of the cemetery or its significance or the stories of the people interred there. It’s notoriously badly kept, grown up, covered in litter, graves that are less than a century old already obscured by plant growth.

Please be mindful of the Black and Indigenous cemeteries in your area, protect historical cemeteries, protest their destruction, volunteer with cleanup and survey efforts and always be conscious that plans to develop over them are not innocuous, not an unfortunate but necessary sacrifice so your town can have a new Sheetz and a 4 lane highway. It is an act of racism.

The next time you drive through Roanoke, think of them.

#racism / #child death / #historical cemeteries #stillbirth /

[4ft10tvlandfangirl]

You know what's incredibly upsetting? Seeing so many pro-Israel or pro-Zionist posts parrot that the only reason anyone could be pro-Palestine or call for a free Palestine is because they hate Jews.

I know what this tactic is meant to do and I know how making people apathetic, how discrediting their knowledge of a topic or questioning the genuineness of their empathy and other similar tactics are used to benefit the oppressive group but it's still pissing me off.

I am a descendant of enslaved people.

Our history lessons always begin with the slaughter & genocide of the indigenous peoples that were here first, primarily the Taino, who thankfully have a few descendants living in isolation along with the protected Maroon villages. It is normal throughout high school to take history trips to former great houses & plantations and see for ourselves the sites where our ancestors were brutalized and massacred; the weapons and tools of torture preserved and on display so that we knew but a taste of what they went through.

My university is built on the grounds of a former plantation. There are businesses and homes built on top of mass graves & on top of sites of slaughter. There is literally no escaping our colonial history because it touches everything. Our last names are not even our own! Most of us have English, Scottish and Irish last names given by the plantation owners to our ancestors. Or you know...because many children were the product of rape. We cannot accurately trace our true heritage more than 4-5 generations back because most families have no complete records.

A lot of you like to bring up grandparents. Cool. My great-great grandmother was the daughter of a mulatto free woman and a white Scottish sailor. She was white passing. Because land and work were hard to get here under colonial rule, she left the island for a better life with her husband who was a Cuban born mulatto and they ended up living in the US through WWII and after. They were considered an interracial couple (black & white rather than both being seen as mixed) and could not live in certain places because it was illegal. Papa couldn't find work, was treated horribly, because he had darker skin but Grandma found work passing as white and was treated much better. She worked 2-3 jobs to provide for them and their 5 children.

But, there were times when she would appear darker like if she was out in the sun too long or her curls would start to show and a Jewish neighbour/coworker suggested to her it might be safer to tick Jewish on forms rather than white if her race was ever questioned. I suppose due to that kindness the family formed friendships within the Jewish community where they lived & Grandma's eldest son actually married a Jewish woman. His kids and grandkids are all Jewish and they still live in the US.

I share this specific thing because I have very real concerns for those members of my family. But while I worry for them in this time of increasing anti-semitism and absolutely decry any verbal/physical attacks against them, I am still going to speak against things that are wrong. What Israel is doing is wrong. Of course as a non-Jewish person I can acknowledge I may misstep and if I say/do something that is genuinely anti-semitic I'll take the correction. But if your aim is just to intimidate me into silence it's not going to work.

And trying to tell me 'well black people are not welcomed there or black people wouldn't get treated well in Palestine' as if that affects the cost of bread. Guess what? Black people face racism everywhere. Even among our own and colonialism has a lot to do with that. That same grandmother, I was fortunate to grow up with her in the latter part of her life after she returned to the island and every time I went out with her there were questions of whether my family worked for her. Or why was I, this little black girl with this little old white lady as if I meant her harm. She had to say proudly, "This is my granddaughter." How other people view me or treat me isn't going to stop me from speaking up for what's right.

With the history of my people I could never ever ever side with the oppressor. Ever. Whether its here in the west or in the east, whether it's happening to my fellow black people, or any other group of people, I cannot in good conscience stand with the oppressor. My ancestors were forcibly stripped of their humanity, called savages, animals, barbarians and all of that was brutally beaten into them. That same language and similar acts of brutality are being used against Palestinians today.

You think you can cower me into staying silent on that? With unfounded accusations of hate? I refuse.

N.B. - my use of the word mulatto here is strictly to provide the historical context of how my grandparents were seen/classified and spoken of. It is not a term we use.

#long post #vent post #palestine #pro palestine #free palestine #anti oppression #colonialism #anti colonialism #antisemitism #personal #genocide #anti genocide #social justice #indigenous people #taino #maroons #jamaica #i will not shut up about this #anti zionism #from the river to the sea palestine will be free #i stand with palestine #free palestine 🇵🇸

[odinsblog]

Lmao. Twitter user georgina4781 is like, “I hope future generations judge you by the same social standards” — aka: being against white supremacy, Apartheid & imperialism that destroyed the lives of literally MILLIONS of Black and indigenous peoples. And they said that shit with their whole entire chest out! You and your pesky “modern standards” of …. *checks notes* …. not enslaving entire countries and depleting said countries of valuable material resources.

Look, Imma let everyone in on a little secret here: throwing down the, “BUT THEY DIDN’T KNOW ANY BETTER BACK THEN” excuse is 💯bullshit. But white people can be counted on to stay eating it up. Because that false framing serves a purpose.

Are we really and truly expected to believe that absolutely noooobody back then had any inkling that things like slavery, colonialism and Apartheid were evil? Nobody at all back then knew it? C’mon now. See? More “white innocence” bullshit. You think Jeff Bezos doesn’t know that people dying in Amazon warehouses is easily preventable and him not taking precautions to avoid more deaths is “bad”? People know wrong now, and they knew it back then. Still not sold? Okay, how about this: if nothing else, the Black and indigenous people being colonized knew it and expressed their views, but colonizers intentionally ignored them and did not listen to them. And I’m pretty sure we won’t need to search very hard through history books to find white people who knew it was wrong too. Just because their voices did not prevail doesn’t mean that “everyone back then” somehow did not know better. Many knew better and simply did. not. care. Kinda like Jeff Bezos right now.

When we accept the false premise that “they just didn’t know any better back then,” we are allowing a form of whitewashing history to happen — we are allowing today’s racism deniers to deftly delete the agency of colonizers, and replace their cruelty and greed, with innocence. And POOF! Just like that, the myth of white innocence is maintained, and the cruelty and greed behind all imperialism is parsed, equivocated and whitewashed away into something less heinous and more palatable.

And the thing white people seem to call “bringing up the shitty parts of history” is literally what everyone else, under ordinary circumstances, refers to as the truth, but apparently everyone is supposed to stay quiet so that colonizers and their beneficiaries can continue whitewashing history and continue pretending that it wasn’t really that bad, or advise everyone to just “get over it” because was “a long time ago,” or eventually argue that it never happened at all.

I’ll let you in on another secret: white people who want to downplay & deny racism love to throw racism into this far away safe space called, “the past”. I’m reminded of an old saying that goes something like, “your grandfather may have chopped down the tree, but we are still suffering from no shade today because of his actions.” An incredibly bad paraphrase on my part, but the point is, Uju Anya is a survivor of war and genocide caused by recent colonialism, and the person who was instrumental in that - in chopping down the proverbial shadetree - just died. Uju Anya is still experiencing the loss of diaspora caused by Queen Elizabeth’s kingdom, and telling her how to process her very real and very current grief is so presumptuous that I would need to live a million years as a white person to even begin to comprehend how presumptuous that is.

White fragility is a hell of a thing. But demanding that the still-living and still-impacted descendants of imperialism just shut up so that European whites don’t have to be reminded of their queen’s active role in colonialism … that’s strait up bullshit.

Apparently American conservatives aren’t the only ones upset with honestly talking about theories critical of racist systems.

Sending out much love to Uju Anya, who is now having Jeff fucking Bezos, one of the richest white men in history, and others harass her and lecture her about “kindness” and “respectability politics”.

#politics #uju anya #queen elizabeth #white fragility #whitewashing history #revisionist history #imperialism #colonialism

[creatingblackcharacters]

Hello! So, I'm black and I'm not usamerican, could you explain to me what exactly AAVE is? I just know it's like a dialect

I had to find a link bc it would take me far longer to try to organize my thoughts on this myself lol. I actually learned something new myself, as I'm not a linguistics master or anything like that.

Exploring Black Languages, a quick look at AAVE (African American Vernacular English)- Temi Oyenuga

AAVE + Its Origins

Black languages came out of the experience of enslaved African and their descendents in the Diaspora.

West Africans – who were enslaved in the Americas – were forced to understand English on plantations. Newly enslaved West Africans would have limited access to learn to speak English and there were laws in place that forbade them from being taught to read English. There were also policies and laws in place, which ensured that enslaved Africans were not allowed to speak in their mother tongue.

The roots of this African American language further lie in the resistance to the above oppression.

The resistance movement is where enslaved African American created a coded way in which they spoke that relied on the grammatical understanding they had from Africa. It also relied on other techniques like using negative words to describe positive things so the white slave owners would not be able to understand them when they spoke to each other. Thus, AAVE was a speech created as a communication system by Black people unintelligible to speakers of the dominant white class.

The shared Black experience has resulted in common language practices in the African Diaspora. AAVE is just one of many examples of this.

Coded Resistance: Freedom Fighting and Communication - for more explanation on how it's not just AAVE that was part of "creating a language" meant for only us to understand.

Language Jones- What is AAVE?

#its interesting how things i just take for granted as language are this complex #creatingblackcharacters #aave #black history

[am-i-the-asshole-official]

WIBTA for trying to find information on the descendents of people who were enslaved by my ancestors?

I (30, M) am from a mostly white family and was doing some genealogy digging. I found one branch of my direct ancestral family who lived in the USA and owned several Black slaves- they were mentioned in a will by first names, there were maybe 4 or 5 people. Maybe it's sympathy, white guilt or selfish, morbid curiosity, but I want to know if those people survived- what happened to them, how their families (if there are any) are now. I know the city where they would have lived, and checking records there would be a good start.

On one hand, I feel like more white people should take accountability and learn about their specific family misdeeds. I don't have much of anything to my name, but who knows? Maybe in some small way I could make their life better. It doesn't fix anything but avoiding it is cowardly and smacks of people who pretend white supremacy is "fixed now."

On the other hand, "hey, your great great great great grandparents were enslaved by mine and I dug through their records to find you and let you know I think that was fucked up" feels like an absolutely insane sentiment to hear. And doing something like anonymously keeping tabs on a family is creepy. It's not like there are any estates to sue- at least that we ever knew about.

I also know from my friends that are Black that a lot of questions go unanswered when it comes to family history, and that not knowing and having to assume can be traumatic too.

At the end of the day I just want to know if they have any living relatives today, if I can even find out what happened to them after slavery. WIBTA for this?

What are these acronyms?

#aita #am i the asshole

[kikovanitysimmer]

Hi Kiko,

I love your work, you are my favorite sim creator, you have the best hair styles for sims 4 people of color.

I wanted to know if you can make more long natural hair styles - (locs with clips/gold and silver) in different styles for the women in sims 4 :)?

like some long locs with long side bangs

some with clips

different ombre and color options

more edges

hidden scalp, or brown variation of scalps, (brown or black scalp)

I used the gif below to show a example hairstyle that looks different and cool.

-

Hair, clothes, and shoes is most important to me in sims 4.

Thank you for having this option to contact you,

Sincerely,

Nikki

I appreciate your admiration towards my artwork but this is a very disrespectful thing to ask of me. I'm not sure if this is an innocent ask, I don't see how it is because I know you've heard black people ask other cultures to not appropriate our hairstyles but I could be wrong, if this is innocent below are my boundaries, and explanations on why I (Kiko Vanity; I'm not speaking for the whole black community) I'd like to not be asked things like this in the future.

my boundaries and why

I do not make hair for people of color. People of color is a broad way to say people who are not of White/European/Anglo-Saxon phenotypes. That means people of Asian, Hispanic/Latino, African, Mixed-Race, and Aboriginal descent; and I create CC for simmers who appreciate my artwork but mainly and ideally create CC HAIRS for simmers of African descent, (including mixed race if they also have African descent) because of the lack of black hairstyles in the initial release of the game in 2014, with that, these black simmers create sims that also reflect their environments and black upbringings. I make black content if you feel comfortable downloading my content you should be comfortable saying black. I want to stress black and not African-American (despite me being African American) because there are different ethnicities for each race, including black people.

2. I am not currently taking hair requests because I'd get too many at one time and that's not great for my mental health. To piggyback off the last sentence and statement 1, please do not request my cultural hairstyles using someone who doesn't respect our wishes. You may be asking yourself, "why is this an issue? hair is hair?" (look below)

During chattel slavery, every fiber of the enslaved Africans' lives was controlled by the narcissistic people who kidnapped them. including hair, being made to cover their hair, and calling them names & degrading them for their natural hair. As the years went by and slavery ended black people but more specifically black fem presenting people held the shame for their hair. Fast forward to today, even with all the turmoil the world is facing due to greed, classism, and the patriarchy) this is the first time in history that their descendants (me being one of them) can set boundaries and say what we are comfortable with and what we are not comfortable with. And to put this as bluntly as I can:

Do not send me videos/photos/gifs of people culturally appropriating in black people's hairstyles, it's anxiety-inducing.

I'd like to also say I'm not angry because I know there is an angry black person stereotype, this is simply uncomfortable and disheartening. I hope you can respect my wishes if not please feel free to block me.

Lastly,

You don't have to respect or do anything I am saying. You may do as you wish after reading this. Just if you are going to engage with me these are my boundaries.

[shewhoworshipscarlin]

Anderson Bonner

Prominent Texas landowner and businessman Anderson Bonner was born enslaved in Alabama around 1839. Not much is known about his younger years. Family history states that Bonner was given as a wedding present to the daughter of his former master, who moved him from Alabama to Arkansas. Anderson may have been “refugeed” in Texas during the Civil War when nearly 100,000 enslaved people from neighboring states were forcibly brought there by slaveholders to avoid the Union Army freeing them as it gradually occupied more of the Confederacy. If Bonner was in Texas by 1865, he—like other Lone Star state enslaved people—gained his freedom when Union General Gordon Granger and Union Troops under his command arrived in Galveston on June 19, 1865 and pronounced the end of slavery. That announcement became the basis for the Juneteenth holiday.

Sometime in 1865 Bonner married a woman known only as Eliza. Over time the couple had ten children, Anderson Jr, Newton, William, Ed, John, Andy, Mary, Martha, Charlie and Nash. Bonner arrived in Dallas, Texas, around 1870 with his brother Louis, and sister Caroline and they worked on a farm in the White Rock Creek area. Bonner by this time had acquired modest wealth. The 1870 Census lists his financial worth at $275 or approximately $5,456 in 2020 dollars. On August 10, 1874 Bonner purchased sixty acres of land, signing the deed with an “X”, as he never learned to read or write. He soon began leasing his land and the houses on it to cotton growing sharecroppers. With the money he earned, he bought more land. Bonner eventually amassed over two thousand acres of land in what is now North Dallas and the Dallas suburb of Richardson. The Medical City Dallas Hospital now sits on what was once the Bonner farm and the North Central Expressway divides Bonner’s original property.

Census records in 1900 reveal that six of the ten Bonner children still lived on the Bonner farm. Cotton, corn, and fruits were grown on the family farm worked mostly by Bonner, his children, and sharecroppers. Bonner’s sister, Caroline married into the Fields family, and one of her children married into the Giddings family, both prominent African American families of Dallas in the late 19th Century. In 1903, Eliza was killed in a oil lamp explosion in the family home. Sixty-four-year-old Bonner then married a woman named Lucinda, but the couple had no children.

Anderson Bonner passed away at the age of 82 in 1920. He was buried in White Rock Colored Union Cemetery (now White Rock Garden of Memories Cemetery), in Addison county. His descendants established the Anderson Bonner Endowment Scholarship that helps support Richardson Public School students who attend Prairie View A&M University. The first public school for black children in the North Dallas, the Vickery and Hillcrest school was renamed the Anderson Bonner School before its closing in 1955. The city of Dallas officially named the park west of Medical City Hospital, Anderson Bonner Park in 1976. The park consists of 44.1 acres of Bonner’s original land.

#historical #black history month #land owner #formerly enslaved

[trans-girl-nausicaa]

Direct action works.

Shamefully, there used to be a monument to the confederacy in a cemetery in Seattle, Washington until some cool people tore it down.

From the South Seattle Emerald, July 5, 2020:

A group of local activists supportive of racial justice and the Black Lives Matter movement has taken credit for toppling a nearly century-old monument to Confederate Civil War veterans at Lake View Cemetery in Seattle.

First erected in 1926 by The United Daughters of the Confederacy, the granite monument was a product of the Lost Cause movement — a propaganda campaign of historical revisionism employing school textbooks and memorials to shift attitudes toward the Confederacy after the U.S. Civil War.

The “Daughters” had the granite for the monument shipped in from Stone Mountain, GA, which is the birthplace of the modern Ku Klux Klan.

In advancing the Lost Cause Doctrine, groups like the “Daughters” used statues such as the one in Lake View to heroicize Confederate soldiers and also to serve as forbidding symbols of white supremacy to intimidate newly freed Black Americans.

While protestors had petitioned for its removal and city officials had spoken out against the monument over the years, they had little power to remove it, as Lake View Cemetery is privately owned.

Though the monument has been repeatedly vandalized and defaced, including an incident in 2018 when parts of the memorial were busted, it had stood mostly intact for 94 years.

That was until later Friday night/early Saturday morning when local activists decided to take matters into their own hands, toppling the nearly 10-ton structure.

The activists took credit for the toppling in an email sent to the Emerald at 12:12 a.m Saturday, before news of their actions broke:

This monument to the Confederate traitors, who so cherished the practice of enslaving their fellow human beings that they started a war to defend it, has been a blight on our community for far too long. There is no place for monuments such as these in the More Perfect Union, the America that must surely come, for that nation cannot be born until it makes full recompense to the descendants of those enslaved and ceases to justify or cover up its brutal past.

This action is for everyone, living or dead, who has been stolen, murdered, enslaved, raped, tortured, brutalized, terrorized, displaced, incarcerated, colonized, exploited, or separated from land, family, and culture by white supremacy. May the memory of those who have gone home be a blessing to us all, and may their descendants know the peace of true and everlasting justice.

We uplift and center the demands of King County Equity Now and the Poor People’s Campaign and call upon our neighbors to use whatever power they may have to ensure that these demands are met.

Other than saying they were a “group of concerned citizens” worried about “racism in Seattle and in general,” the group did not specifically identify themselves through a spokesperson who wished to remain anonymous.

However, they did say that they consulted with multiple experts and used gear that was rated to move objects that weigh several tons — and they cautioned others about the dangers of tackling similar monuments and suggested taking safety precautions before toppling them.

Seattle City Council Member Tammy Morales, who represents South Seattle, was supportive of the action.

“This monument wasn’t erected to memorialize the deaths of particular individuals. It was erected at a time when Black communities were being terrorized by the KKK in an effort to keep people down. It’s way past time for these monuments to racism to come down,” Morales said in a text to the Emerald.

The Emerald has reached out to representatives of Lake View Cemetery for comment.

The rubble was later removed from the site by Lake View Cemetery.

As of March 14, 2024 there are no plans to rebuild the monument.

#direct action #blm #black lives matter #confederate states of america #white supremacy #racism

[crazycatsiren]

Do you know who might be reading your "men should be enslaved" posts? Black people who are descendants of slaves.

Do you know who might be reading your "males should be euthanized" posts? BIPOC and Jews whose families and ancestors have been through/survived genocides and ethnic cleansings.

Do you know who might be reading your "boys should be rounded up and killed" posts? Parents and families who have lost children in school shootings.

Do you know who might be reading your "male fetuses should be aborted" posts? Romani women, Jewish women, native American women, and other women of color and their mothers, grandmothers, sisters, who were put through forced abortions and sterilizations.

And you think you're being funny.

You're not a feminist.

You're a fucking terrorist.

#radfem bullshit #radfems are fascists #hate group cult #radfem terrorism #genocide tw #pedicide tw #slavery #ethnic cleansing #violence tw #school shooting tw #abortion #radical feminism to fascism pipeline

[fiercynn]

Like persons of the Palestinian diaspora, and some in the Jewish community, I am a descendant of a displaced people (namely West Africans forcibly removed, brutalized, and enslaved). I understand desires to correct or minimize historical wrongs and return to a homeland.  The founding and colonization of Liberia by African Americans in the 1820s was one attempt to correct the tragedy of American slavery. Viewing Africa as the “Promised Land,” African Americans, sponsored by the American Colonization Society, repatriated in West Africa. African Americans did this despite the fact that the region was already inhabited and settled by ethnic groups that had been there for centuries. Though empathizing with African Americans fleeing American racism, I must not forget that these settlers (now called Americo-Liberians) colonized and seized the lands of pre-existing West African populations. I admit this while recognizing that my beloved hometown of Petersburg, Virginia, and its historically large free Black population sent many Black settlers to Liberia (including Joseph Jenkins Roberts, the first president!). While ensuring that the histories of Blacks from my hometown are not forgotten, I must also remember that Indigenous Liberians were forced to suffer for the sins of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade. I sympathize with the need of Jewish people (particularly Holocaust survivors) to have a sanctuary from the inhumanity of Nazi Germany, the horrifying legacy of European pogroms and massacres, and other forms of antisemitic racism. As I recall the horrors of the Holocaust, I will not forget how Palestinians are continually forced to suffer for the sins of the Nazi Holocaust against European Jews. [x]

personal essay on solidarity with palestine by lory j. dance, published in mondoweiss on october 25, 2023

#free palestine #black and palestinian solidarity

[tchallasbabymama]

Seeing Black people, especially those of us whose ancestors were enslaved, be too pussy to stand with Palestine, Congo, Sudan, and countless other people who are fighting to survive genocide truly makes me fucking sick.

Your cowardice and willingness to align with the oppressor (who will never really love you btw) will come back to haunt you and/or your descendants.

Harriet would’ve shot you weak niggas.

Aśe.

#cece’s ramblings