You see something absurd. You hear something absurd. You read something absurd = Yeah,TNTG. Posts tagged slavery.
“…The Memphis City Council on Tuesday voted 9-0, with three abstentions, to approve changing the names of three of its parks to rid them of their Confederate ties. One of the names also memorialized a leader who had ties to the KKK. Stripping the park of its name has angered the white power organization, which plans to hold a massive rally in the park.
Forrest Park, which was named after Confederate cavalry leader and slave trader Nathan Bedford Forrest, will be renamed “Health Sciences Park”. But Forrest was more than just a Confederate leader: he became the KKK’s first “Grand Wizard” after the Civil War, which is the title given to the Klan’s state leader. The only position more prominent is “Imperial Wizard” – the national leader. Forrest’s body is buried in the park that was named after him, but the council has assigned the park with a new, temporary name until it comes up with a permanent one.
…The changes have angered the KKK, which plans to protest the renaming. Klansman “KKK Exalted Cyclops”, who also goes by Edward, told WMC-TV that the KKK will hold the largest rally that Memphis has ever seen.
“It’s not going to be 20 or 30, it’s going to be thousands of Klansmen from the whole United States coming to Memphis, Tennessee,” he said.”
“I’ve never understood why racist people tell black people “go back to Africa”. That’s like kidnapping someone and then saying ‘Go home’” - @vohandas
“ Slavery made your mother into a myth, banished your father’s name, and exiled your siblings to the far corners of the earth. The slave was as an orphan, according to Frederick Douglass, even when he knew his kin. “We were brothers and sisters, but what of that? Why should they be attached to me, or I to them? Brothers and sisters we were by blood; but slavery had made us strangers. I heard the words brother and sisters, and knew they must mean something; but slavery had robbed these terms of their true meaning.” The only sure inheritance passed from one generation to the next was this loss, and it defined the tribe. A philosopher had once described it as an identity produced by negation.
— Saidiya Hartman, Lose Your Mother: A Journey Across the Atlantic, p. 103 (via cholaempire)
“ …fear of sexuality takes on new meaning when considered in light of the fact that the freedom to choose sexual partners was one of the most powerful distinctions between the condition of slavery and the postemancipation status of African Americans. In this sense, the incorporation by the black church of traditionally Christian dualism, which defines spirit as “good” and body as “evil,” denied black people the opportunity to acknowledge one of their most significant social victories.
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Angela Y Davis, Blues Legacies and Black Feminism: Gertrude “Ma” Rainey, Bessie Smith and Billie Holiday. (via jalylah)
This book is absolutely amazing & helped me to understand a lot of things about Black sexuality overall, but especially Black women’s sexuality. All little Black girls should read it at least once.
(via weian-fu)
“ Slavery made your mother into a myth, banished your father’s name, and exiled your siblings to the far corners of the earth. The slave was as an orphan, according to Frederick Douglass, even when he knew his kin. “We were brothers and sisters, but what of that? Why should they be attached to me, or I to them? Brothers and sisters we were by blood; but slavery had made us strangers. I heard the words brother and sisters, and knew they must mean something; but slavery had robbed these terms of their true meaning.” The only sure inheritance passed from one generation to the next was this loss, and it defined the tribe. A philosopher had once described it as an identity produced by negation.
— Saidiya Hartman, Lose Your Mother: A Journey Across the Atlantic, p. 103 (via so-treu)
“ Enslaved women working as domestic servants in Southern plantations were taken from their families and forced to nurse white babies while their own infants subsisted on sugar water. They were not voluntary members of the enslaver’s family; they were women laboring under coercion and the constant fear of physical and sexual violence. They had no enforceable authority over their white charges and could not even resist the sale and exploitation of their own children. Domestic servants often were not grandmotherly types but teenagers or very young women. It was white supremacist imaginations that remembered these powerless, coerced slave girls as soothing, comfortable, consenting women.
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Melissa V. Harris-Perry, Sister Citizen
This reminded me of that picture of a slave woman breastfeeding a white baby that was circulation a little while ago.
(via distractedandclueless)
“ As I reflect on my early educational experiences, I see that the messages I received as a child, an adolescent, and an adult blamed the victim. For example, we were taught that the African people who “came” to America were not civilized; therefore, they could not pursue the American dream as initial settlers and white immigrants had been able to do. The lack of black participation in mainstream American society was attributed to lesser abilities, defective cultures, lack of motivation, and so forth.
To make a “victim-blaming” attribution, teachers did not actually have to say that black Americans were lazy, ignorant, or savage—although that would surely do the trick. Instead, victim-blaming was subtly encouraged in classes where images of America as the land of freedom and opportunity were juxtaposed with the black experience, without any reconciling of the contradictions through a structural explanation. Students then relied on prevailing myths and stereotypes to explain the black “anomaly.
To make a “victim-blaming” attribution, teachers did not actually have to say that black Americans were lazy, ignorant, or savage—although that would surely do the trick. Instead, victim-blaming was subtly encouraged in classes where images of America as the land of freedom and opportunity were juxtaposed with the black experience, without any reconciling of the contradictions through a structural explanation. Students then relied on prevailing myths and stereotypes to explain the black “anomaly.
— Elizabeth Higginbotham (via wretchedoftheearth)
