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.
When y’all talk about the AIDS epidemic and Reagan, please do not leave out black people. Like for real, there’s several popular posts that circulate around this site about the epidemic in the 80’s and none of them mention black people at all, which is really upsetting to me. Black communities were ravaged by aids in the 80’s just like gay communities were. They suffered along side each other. While Reagan celebrated the deaths of gay people, he was also celebrating the deaths of black people. AIDS was killing off the “welfare queens” that Reagan and other republicans were constantly harping on about. AIDS killing black people meant less dependency on the social programs that they loathed and wanted to get rid of. It was another thing that helped them keep us from gaining power while the CIA brought crack into our communities to weaken us. And till this day, black people are contracting HIV and AIDS at the highest rates.
Please stop leaving out black people when talking about AIDS and Reagan’s response to it.
It’s so significant too that this narrative was collected by Zora Neale Hurston, one of the greatest authors and anthropologists of her time. She was shunned by the “gatekeepers” of both of these professions, largely because of her Blackness, her womanhood, and her uncompromising commitment to honoring and showcasing both in her works. She died penniless and alone in a state-run institution in 1960. All of her works had gone out of publication by then. It took more than a decade before she was rediscovered. A young author by the name of Alice Walker had come across her work and was deeply inspired by it. “In 1973, after an exhaustive search, Walker came across Hurston’s unmarked grave in Ft. Pierce, Fla. She purchased a headstone for Hurston’s tomb and had it inscribed “A Genius of the South.“”
It is through Zora Neale Hurston’s pioneering sacrifice, and the acceptance of that inheritance by Alice Walker that we have found this missing piece of our history. Without the courageous and unfailing work of Black women, we wouldn’t have Cudjo Lewis’s story. We are slowly regaining a narrative that’s been hidden from us, one that continues to be lied about. Trust Black women to lead the way.
Salt of the Earth (1954), dir. Herbert J. Biberman
Damn, son.
EVERYONE SHOULD WATCH SALT OF THE EARTH
Salt of the Earth actually has a crazy interesting history- OP already said it was made in 1954, but that was in the middle of the Red Scare (communism scary cold war hysteria)
Congress’s anti-communism target fell hard on Hollywood, and those in the industry who were suspected of communism at all were blacklisted from all jobs, because studio’s didn’t want to face backlash from Congress
Salt of the Earth was made nearly 100% with blacklisted crew members from Hollywood, and had such difficulty finding actors that they hired local citizens and miners from the actual strike the plot is based on. There were only 5 trained actors involved, and one of them (Rosaura Revueltas, the woman in the gif) was deported to Mexico before they finished filming on accusations of communism, with no proof and no substance. The filming was plagued with police harassment and threats (according to my professor they were shot at more than once), and the local union hall was burned down.
The movie itself not only covers a real 1950′s labor strike demanding safer and more equal labor conditions for Mexican-American employees, but after the miners were facing arrest, their wives and children took up the strike in their place. The movie’s combination of blacklisted crew, civil rights and feminist message, and pro-union plot (during the red scare) got the movie blacklisted and only 12 theaters in the entire United States would show the movie- it was successful in Europe, but didn’t actually achieve viewership in the US until the 60′s
In 1851, members of a California state militia called the Mariposa Battalion
became the first white men to lay eyes on Yosemite Valley. The group was
largely made up of miners. They had been scouring the western slopes of
the Sierra when they happened upon the granite valley that Native
peoples had long referred to as “the place of a gaping mouth.”
Lafayette Bunnell, a physician attached to the militia, found himself awestruck.
[…]
The Mariposa Battalion had come to Yosemite to kill Indians. Yosemite’s
Miwok tribes, like many of California’s Native peoples, were obstructing
a frenzy of extraction brought on by the Gold Rush. And whatever
Bunnell’s fine sentiments about nature, he made his contempt for these
“overgrown, vicious children” plain: Any attempt to govern or civilize them without the power to compel
obedience, will be looked upon by barbarians with derision … The savage
is naturally vain, cruel and arrogant. […]
When the roughly 200 men of the Mariposa Battalion marched into
Yosemite, armed with rifles, they did not find the Miwok eager for
battle. While the Miwok hid, the militiamen sought to starve them into
submission by burning their food stores, souring the valley’s air with
the smell of scorched acorns. On one particularly bloody day, some of
the men came upon an inhabited village outside the valley, surprising
the Miwok there. They used embers from the tribe’s own campfires to set
the wigwams aflame and shot at the villagers indiscriminately as they
fled, murdering 23 of them. By the time the militia’s campaign ended,
many of the Miwok who survived had been driven from Yosemite, their
homeland for millennia
[…].
Thirty-nine years later, Yosemite became the fifth national park.
[…]
——-
More than a century ago, in the pages of this magazine,
Muir described the entire American continent as a wild garden “favored
above all the other wild parks and gardens of the globe.”
But in truth,
the North American continent has not been a wilderness for at least
15,000 years: Many of the landscapes that became national parks had been
shaped by Native peoples for millennia.
Forests on the Eastern Seaboard
looked plentiful to white settlers because American Indians had strategically burned them
to increase the amount of forage for moose and deer and woodland
caribou.
Yosemite Valley’s sublime landscape was likewise tended by
Native peoples; the acorns that fed the Miwok came from black oaks long
cultivated by the tribe. The idea of a virgin American wilderness – an
Eden untouched by humans and devoid of sin – is an illusion.
[…]
——-
Viewed from this perspective, Yellowstone is a crime scene.
America’s national parks comprise only a small fraction of the land stolen from Native Americans,
but they loom large in the broader story of our dispossession. Most of
the major national parks are in the western United States. So, too, are
most Native American tribes, owing to the Indian Removal Act of 1830
[…].
After Yellowstone was established and Indians were removed and in some
cases excluded from its spaces, the same – and worse – happened elsewhere.
The Blackfeet, living in three bands in northwestern Montana and
southern Alberta, had long thought of the Rockies as their spiritual and
physical homeland. They wouldn’t have dreamt of ceding it at the treaty
table, but in the 1880s and ’90s, they were forced to negotiate with
the U.S. government.
[…]
Not long after a harsh winter that killed as many as 600 Blackfeet, the
tribe signed away land that would become Glacier National Park. The deal
was brokered by George Bird Grinnell, the naturalist founder of the
Audubon Society of New York. Grinnell had joined George Armstrong Custer
on his expedition into the Black Hills in 1874 in search of gold. The
trip was in direct violation of the treaty guaranteeing that the Black
Hills would remain in Native control. Grinnell was often called a
“friend of the Indian,” but he once wrote that Natives have “the mind of
a child in the body of an adult.” In 1911, a year after Congress
approved the creation of Glacier, Montana ceded jurisdiction of the park
to the U.S. government.
So many of the parks owe their existence to heists like these. Apostle
Islands National Lakeshore, in Wisconsin, was created out of Ojibwe
homelands; the Havasupai lost much of their land when Grand Canyon
National Park was established; the creation of Olympic National Park, in
Washington, prevented Quinault tribal members from exercising their
treaty rights within its boundaries; and Everglades National Park was
created on Seminole land that the tribe depended on for food. The list
goes on.
——-
Headline and text published by: David Treur. “Return the National Parks to the Tribes.” The Atlantic. 12 April 2021.
Racism, white supremacy, and the confederacy have touched things you don’t even think about. For example, I had no idea that Six Flags was named as such because it’s named for the six flags that have flown over what is now Texas: Spain, France, Mexico, Republic of Texas, United States, and the Confederacy. Six Flags is only JUST announcing that they’ll be taking the Confederate flags down (in Texas and Georgia) in the wake of Charlottesville.
It’s wild to me that people don’t know that. I used to go on daily rants about how Six Flags in other states don’t make sense.
Amazing Grace was named after a slave ship
Slavery, in particular, has had a huge impact on American (and British, Spanish, etc) culture. In terms of medical advancement, though, I don’t think people fully grasp how much medical knowledge was discovered through slavery.
There were so many American, British, and Spanish doctors boarding slave ships to examine the bodies of living, dying, and dead slaves. Most medical knowledge of illnesses like smallpox, yellow fever, malaria and so many more; came from slaves who were examined constantly by doctors. The doctors experimented on ways to raise mortality rates and fertility, as a lot of the knowledge we know on fertility came from slaves as well. An epidimic of blindness on a french slave ship in 1819 is what provided majority of the medical knowledge on what is known as trachoma. The list really goes on, you’d be surprised by the amount of medical knowledge that can be attributed to slavery.
A lot of mental disorders and illnesses were not even identified or discussed in any sort of medical text until the symptoms were displayed by slaves. In a time where mental illness was said to have been caused by demons, doctors began relating psychological trauma to slaves. When doctors witnessed the psychological damage that’d been caused by being severely underfed and left to sit in complete darkness with hundreds of other people crying and screaming; this sparked use of words such as melancholia, nostalgia, and schism in psychological contexts.
Basically, putting an inumberable amount of humans through unthinkable physical and psychological trauma is how we have majority of our medical knowledge today. I used the word doctor a lot in this comment but by no means were they interested in the wellbeing of these slaves. It was common knowledge amongst medical professionals, even way after slavery, that black bodies were nothing more than cadavers. Doctors have been quoted in as late as the 1960s as saying, publicly, that black people’s only purpose is to serve the medical community, that it’d be cheaper and more beneficial to use us for medical purposes than to send us to school.
So how can someone say that we are not owed reparations, when this much medical knowledge has been quite literally learned through the torture and deaths of our ancestors.
brb gotta get some paper towels and sop up the gray matter thats leaking out of my ears
Duh… wtf yu think it’s so many Spanish street names lol
^ and whole cities. Los Angeles? San Francisco? lol
Thank you!!!!!!!
entire states be named in spanish!!!!!! df you thought colorado meant?? like foreals
k but the story about how the president got California is fucking wild man. So basically he ran his ENTIRE campaign based on the fact that he was going to buy all the Californias from Mexico and add them to manifest destiny or whatever. But when he got in office he threw the money at Mexico and they were like “…no?” and he got so fucking mad that the mexicans wouldnt fucking SELL HALF THEIR LAND to him just because he said he wanted to buy them. So he stationed a bunch of soldiers at the boarders and p much painted targets on their chests and ordered them to do stupid childish bullshit like throw rocks so when the first Mexican soldier shot the following massacre was technically in self defense. and now we got california, and there are families who have lived in the same goddanmed house for generations who technically are illegal immigrants
Never mind that the Apache, Pueblo, and Navajo peoples had been living in the southwest for thousands of years–New Mexico was “settled” in the late 1500s by Spanish explorers. Santa Fe is the third oldest city in the US founded in 1610. During the 1800s the territory became part of the independent Mexican Empire and the first Mexican Republic (pictured above.) After the Mexican-American war in the 1850s Mexico ceded the southwest part of the current US to the US Government. New Mexico became the 47th US state in 1912. The people who lived there were a mix of First Nations, Mexicans with European ancestors and poorer indigenous Mexicans who were uneducated and worked as laborers. You better believe there is a divide between people with European and Mexican roots and people who are indigenous. There’s both a race and class divide there that I don’t really understand as a white person from NY. I only lived there for four years.
To show you how complicated this situation has become over hundreds of years of people living there under various governments–current census data for NM says that 80% of the population identifies as White/European, but only 28% of them identify as non-Hispanic, while 54% of residents identify as Hispanic of any race. They’re not El Salvadorans, Guatemalans, or Mexicans who came yesterday. There are people who have literally been living in the territory for generations and had to fight to get recognized by the US government in many cases. So this creepy persistent idea that white people were here first is so wrong and so ridiculous.
Part of my roadtrip tool me to Atlanta. And, the Civil Rights Center was amazing. Very powerful. They have this one exhibit where you sit at a lunch counter and close your eyes and put on headphones. And It plays sounds like you are at a sit in and people are yelling. And it times how long you can sit there for. I think i lasted almost a minute before i was almost crying.
It…made its point.
And most of those people were being physically assaulted too
That’s a brilliant exhibit
If you make it long enough, the chair actually shakes a little, along with the sound of someone hitting the chair with a bat. It was super intense. (It included a trigger warning for obvious reasons.)
my grandfather is a residential school survivor. he literally has a BRAND of a number on his shoulder. he was a 6 year old child who was branded like a cow. he was given a new last name (he doesn’t even know his real last name) and was essentially brain washed into being white. the man, a full oglala lakota, doesn’t even call himself native anymore because he was beaten into being ashamed of it.
do yall wanna tell me why it’s okay for you to dress up and play “indian” whenever less than 70 years ago, we were literally beaten and killed for being indian?
