Icon from a picrew by grgikau. Call me Tir or Julian. 37. He/They. Queer. Twitter: @tirlaeyn. ao3: tirlaeyn. 18+ Only. Star Trek. Sandman. IwtV. OMFD. Definitionless in this Strict Atmosphere.
I just left a plantation tour in Louisiana. I have a lot to say…
SAY IT!
I honestly thought I knew everything about slavery. Not so.
The owner of this particular plantation had it built by slaves for 3 years. Every brick was handmade. Over 120,000 bricks on 2,000+ acres of land (this place was huge.) The clay used for the bricks came from the Mississippi River. The majority of the slaves are buried under the Levees and water. Some are buried with their Masters. Not allowed to live with them but could be dead with them.
Before you enter the house, there’s a list of slaves who lived here including their age and how much they were purchased for. 124 total. Some slaves were worth as little as $25. As young as 5 years old.
On this particular plantation, the owner was big on punishment…he used noise making neck restraints. Imagine three 4lb balls around your neck with bells inside. Children were restrained by ankle locks that connected between their ankles.
This was a sugar cane plantation, one the worst practices to involve slaves because of its danger. A lot of slaves were decapitated, amputees and killed from the fields and machinery. A lot of kids lost their lives creating sugar. Speaking of children, a child stood in the living room and operated the fan with a string while guests ate dinner. As young as 3 years old.
Here’s what shook me even further: Before the Civil War, a lot of slave owners were going in debt and could not afford their properties and were not producing enough cotton and sugar to maintain their lifestyles. Slaves were used as HUMAN CREDIT CARDS. Slaves were a guaranteed line of credit. You could get HALF of your property’s value depending on how many healthy and able slaves you owned.
My people were human credit cards and lines of credit to BANKS. We were property. We were labeled as equipment and nothing more.
There is no such thing as a good slave owner. They owned my PEOPLE and used them as checks and balances. This cycle continues with prison and brutality. I do not want to hear shit about “Why can only Black people say this or that?” I don’t want to hear shit about “we’re all human.”
And by the way, not one of those slaves are at rest. Those spirits were so alive, you could feel their presence, their pain and someday, their revenge.
For people who still don’t see anything wrong with cultural appropriation, who still call cornrows “boxer braids”, “Kim K braids” or whatever - our cornrows symbolize liberation and freedom, it’s not your trendy hairstyle, it actually does have a history.
Since slaves were never taught to write and drawing directions was dangerous, because they could lead to them being discovered, captured, sold again or even killed by their master.
To reduce the risk of being discovered, women started weaving the maps in their hair, carving out paths with their cornrows. Some of the patterns even had hidden messages!
Yes, braiding existed in Africa way before, but it got a whole new meaning when Europeans enslaved millions of people. So next time you decide to go for a “Kim K look”, do a little research before you end up disrespecting someone’s culture and just, in all honesty, looking silly.
#AppreciateDontAppropriate
That’s the most fucking badass thing that i think I’ve ever read
For people who say slavery was long time ago: imagine, how close to it was a woman who is only 87 years old. You still have a living direct descendent of slaves…. I still hear stories of my grandparents and parents in which they endured severe discrimination… We still live with the legacy of slavery today and to some extent are still enslaved! To everyone who keeps telling black ppl to get over slavery because it was 1000 years ago, wonder how you’re going to lie and dismiss your way outta this one!
Dehumanizing stereotypes have existed in American culture from the very beginning. Centuries later, and racism remains the default justification for discrimination and brutality.
Reblog everytime someone brings up Sally. Let them know he never thought of her or their own as human.
CultureHISTORY: The “Lost Friends” Ads - New Orleans, LA (1879-1880)
A heartbreaking piece featuring the newly digitized collection of
original advertisements from a New Orleans newspaper between November
1879 and December 1880. Because it was part of the institution of
slavery to split up families, after the Civil War, African Americans
began the search for their lost kin. Once they were free, this was one
of the few options former slaves had to try and find their families.
Writing ads in local newspapers. Just another piece of American History.
I’ve seen so much written about Holocaust survivors trying to locate their families, but the agony of former slaves tends to get overlooked. An important piece of history that deserves more attention.
Many visitors walk right past it, but those who read the description tend to stop in their tracks and linger, studying the 150-year-old scrap of fabric. It’s known as “Ashley’s Sack,” and belonged to an enslaved woman named Rose at the Middleton Place rice plantation in Charleston, South Carolina.
My great grandmother Rose mother of Ashley gave her this sack when she was sold at age 9 in South Carolina it held a tattered dress 3 handfulls of pecans a braid of Roses hair. Told her
“Knowing that they were losing “valuable product” due to their slaves’ propensity to swim, slave owners began taking drastic steps to protect their property. One of these steps was to instill a fear of the water by dunking disobedient slaves in water until they nearly drowned and by creating fear through stories of creatures living in the water. Thus it didn’t take long to excise or destroy the West African swimming tradition from African- American culture. The Jim Crow laws that were enacted after The Civil War prohibited blacks from the popular seaside resorts in places like Atlantic City, N.J. and Revere Beach, Mass. And by the 20th Century, as the swimming pool began to gain in popularity in the United States, the color line prohibited blacks from enjoying this pleasant recreational skill.
In addition, self-segregation also played a role in limiting those of African ancestry from getting in the water. I remember my Aunt saying to stay away from the pool because, “black folk don’t swim.””
Next time you hear someone ask questions like, “Why don’t black people swim?” Or “Why are so many black people afraid of dogs?” And, “Why are there do so many black people live in poverty?”…..let ‘em know that those aren’t coincidences. These things didn’t just happen naturally, all on their own. There’s a reason for it, and you don’t have to be an historian to know they’re all interconnected through slavery, endemic racism and persistently racist cultural norms.
Without the electoral college, the determining factor of the elections would be California, Chicago and New York just because they have more people concentrated in one area. Our system is the best of the best and the people spoke. I’m hurt as well as most of America but the best thing we can do is keep an open mind, accept, and move on.
So what? Why does it matter if the majority of votes come from one area? If most of the people in the country want one person to be president, then that person should be president. Why should it matter where they’re from?
And that’s not even the reason the college was made in the first place. It was made for 2 reasons. 1. The founding fathers didn’t trust the citizens. They thought the citizens were too uneducated to make a good choice. And 2. It’s easier to count the votes of a small group of people all in one place rather than millions across the country when there’s no cars or internet.
In today’s age, neither of those reasons are valid anymore. There is no good reason for the electoral college to exist. If the majority of people want someone as president, that person should be president.
Here is why the electoral college sucks:
Without the electoral college, every single vote would count exactly the same. No vote anywhere in the country would be worth more than any other vote. Now you may ask, but Raymond, isn’t it like this already?
NO. IT FUCKING IS NOT.
Take Wyoming for example. Wyoming has a population of 584,000 people. They also have 3 electoral college votes. This means that each 194,667 votes is worth one electoral college vote in Wyoming. Now let’s look at California. California has a population of 38.8 million people and 55 electoral college votes. This means that it takes 705,455 votes for each electoral college vote.
A VOTE IN WYOMING IS WORTH 3.5X MORE THAN A VOTE IN CALIFORNIA.
It literally takes 3.5 times more votes to get 1 electoral vote in California than it does in Wyoming. How tf is that fair?
Don’t come in here and tell me how it’s the best system and without it the only determining factor would be certain cities. How does that even make sense? Without it, a vote in New York City is worth the exact same amount as a vote in any other city, or town, regardless of population. I personally would like my vote to count for exactly the same as anyone else. My vote shouldn’t count as less because I live in a more densely populated city.
What a good explanation! ^
you know what? no, i need to add something. a lot of something.
this is NOT just a vestige of the rural vs. populated issues, or even coastal vs. interior. the electoral college persists because of fucking racism, and exists because the southern states wanted an unfair advantage in 1800.
because see, smaller states DO get special privileges. every state gets two seats in the senate (whereas the number of house seats is determined by the population of your state), and congress was specifically designed that way so that less populated states wouldn’t be at a disadvantage, with giving them an overwhelming advantage either.
At the Philadelphia convention, the visionary Pennsylvanian James Wilson proposed direct national election of the president. But the savvy Virginian James Madison responded that such a system would prove unacceptable to the South: “The right of suffrage was much more diffusive [i.e., extensive] in the Northern than the Southern States; and the latter could have no influence in the election on the score of Negroes.” In other words, in a direct election system, the North would outnumber the South, whose many slaves (more than half a million in all) of course could not vote. But the Electoral College—a prototype of which Madison proposed in this same speech—instead let each southern state count its slaves, albeit with a two-fifths discount, in computing its share of the overall count.
Virginia emerged as the big winner—the California of the Founding era—with 12 out of a total of 91 electoral votes allocated by the Philadelphia Constitution, more than a quarter of the 46 needed to win an election in the first round. After the 1800 census, Wilson’s free state of Pennsylvania had 10% more free persons than Virginia, but got 20% fewer electoral votes. Perversely, the more slaves Virginia (or any other slave state) bought or bred, the more electoral votes it would receive. Were a slave state to free any blacks who then moved North, the state could actually lose electoral votes.
If the system’s pro-slavery tilt was not overwhelmingly obvious when the Constitution was ratified, it quickly became so. For 32 of the Constitution’s first 36 years, a white slaveholding Virginian occupied the presidency.
Southerner Thomas Jefferson, for example, won the election of 1800-01 against Northerner John Adams in a race where the slavery-skew of the electoral college was the decisive margin of victory: without the extra electoral college votes generated by slavery, the mostly southern states that supported Jefferson would not have sufficed to give him a majority.As pointed observers remarked at the time, Thomas Jefferson metaphorically rode into the executive mansion on the backs of slaves.
but wait! there’s more!
WE STILL DO THAT
slavery is over, but we just replaced that system with the prison industrial complex. did you know people incarcerated can’t vote (with the exception of two states)? did you know that in many states people with felonies also can’t vote, even after they’ve been out of prison for a while? DID YOU KNOW THAT THEY ARE STILL COUNTED AS PART OF THE POPULATION TOWARDS THE ELECTORAL COLLEGE. a prison is a HUGE boon in most areas. it’s not just a source of jobs. it’s a source of grant money (because oh look suddenly the town’s population is way blacker, and there are grants that those towns are suddenly eligible for, it doesn’t matter that those black people are in PRISON, and that they have no say in where they’re incarcerated, and WILL NOT BENEFIT FROM THAT GRANT MONEY), and the prison’s population will also empower that town politically. it is not a fair system. it has never been a fair system. it a system that thrives on stealing primarily people of color from their communities and manipulating population numbers in order to benefit largely wealthy white people.
