THE MAU MAU UPRISING
“The Mau Mau Uprising was an insurgency by Kenyan rebels against the British Colonial administration that lasted from 1952 to 1960.”
I caution those doing further research on the Mau Mau Uprising to beware of the dangers of a single story. For a relatively decent source, browse the source below.
Source: http://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Mau_Mau_Uprising
Image: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-1375307/A-Radio-4-interview-ask-Was-dad-racist.html
-Aisha
RIP MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR. (January 15th, 1929- April 4th, 1968)
Beyond the Dream.
Today, I urge us to complicate the narrative we are taught of Dr. King’s political activism to reveal his changing ideologies towards a discourse of “Black Power” near the final years of his life.
“Power is not the white man’s birthright; it will not be legislated for us and delivered in neat government packages, ” he concluded. “It is a social force any group can utilize by accumulating its elements in a planned, deliberate campaign to organize it under its control.” – Martin Luther King, Jr in Where Do We Go from Here?, quoted in Waiting ‘til The Midnight Hour: A Narrative History of Black Power In America by Peniel E. Joseph
-Aisha
Police Forcefully Evict Native Brazilian Squatters After Long Resistance
Police evicted two dozen Amazon natives on Friday from an old native museum that will be demolished to clear areas adjacent to Brazil’s legendary Maracana soccer stadium, the main venue for next year’s World Cup.
The natives from different Amazon tribes had been living on the grounds of the Rio de Janeiro museum since 2006 and were resisting its demolition, which caused further delays to the overhaul of the stadium complex.
Riot police handcuffed the natives, some of whom wore feathered headdresses and body paint, and used tear gas to disperse street demonstrations by sympathizers trying to block the eviction.
The museum area was originally planned to become a parking lot for the stadium, but after the protests Rio authorities decided to build a sports museum on the site. The Indians were taken to alternative housing provided by the city.
Day 19 of White History Month: Medical Racism
The United States (along with other countries in the Western world) has a history of medical racism. The general population is unaware of the history of medical racism, and white health professionals are as well. John M. Hoberman of UT-Austin says that medical schools do not teach students about the history of medical racism, nor do they give them proper diversity training. Many Americans of color have grown to distrust medical professionals, and many white Americans attribute this to paranoia rather than their knowledge of historical and contemporary medical mistreatment.
Medical racism has often benefitted white Americans disproportionately while simultaneously harming Americans of color, as well as people of color outside of the United States. White Americans benefit from medical advances, while individual people of color were harmed, and in some cases, large groups of people of color have been harmed. From trying to “better” the race, to making scientific advances, white people have used and disregarded the rights people of color for their own benefit. Medical racism shows the lack of value ascribed to the bodies and lives of people of color.
Eugenics
The eugenics movement in the United States became very popular and manifested itself in many different ways. Anti-miscegenation laws, birth control, sterilization, forced abortions, forced pregnancies (of white women), and the promotion of higher birth rates for neurotypical white women. Eugenics policies were first instituted in the United States. Laws that advocated the sterilization of those with mental illnesses were in effect in the early 1900s, and soon spread to other countries.
Eugenics movements advocated for the eradication of those with mental illness, those who were homosexual, “promiscuous”, and most of all, those who were outside of the “Nordic” or “Aryan” race. Eugenics was advocated for by many famous white Westerners, including world leaders such as Winston Churchill, Theodore Roosevelt, and Calvin Coolidge.
While eugenics was highly unpopular after the Holocaust, the eugenics tradition of the United States actually provided the background for Nazi Medicine. While most people are aware to some extent what the horrors of Nazi medicine entailed, few people are aware of the American eugenics tradition that inspired it. Eugenics societies promoted “fit families” and “better babies” through awards at contests, but they also promoted harmful legislation barring immigrants and sterilizing “undesirable” people.
Controlling Reproductive Rights of Women of Color
Black Women
Due to the eugenics movement, thousands of Black women were sterilized. In North Carolina, 7600 people were sterilized between 1929 and 1974, 85% of them women and girls, and a disproportionate number of them people of color (39% in the 1940s, 60% in the 1960s while making up only 25% of the population). The program that allowed for their sterilization was not eliminated fully until 2003. Black women were also sterilized without their consent in other states.
Puerto Rican Women
The United States has held Puerto Rico as a territory since 1898. As a solution to Puerto Rican economic problems, the US government felt that reducing the population of the Puerto Rican government would help. The US sterilized over one-third of Puerto Rican women, many uneducated and working class, between the 1930s and 1970s. Most of these women did not understand the procedure and did not know that it would render them sterile.
Additionally, the US used Puerto Rican women to test out birth control pills in the 1950s. These women were not informed that the pills were experimental – only that they would prevent pregnancy. They were not informed of the possible side effects ranging from nausea to possible death – three women died during the birth control pill trials. Women who reported side effects had their concerns dismissed by researchers.
Native American Women
Native American women who used the Indian Health Services were subject to numerous violations of their rights, particularly their reproductive rights. Some women who underwent procedures such as appendectomies would also have hysterectomies performed on them without their consent. At least 25 percent (and as high as 50 percent) of Native American women of reproductive age who used Indian Health Services were sterilized without their consent or after coercion. Largely white male doctors would use Native American women as “practice” for performing gynecological procedures on white women.
Tuskegee Experiment and Guatemala STD Experiment
In 1932, the Tuskegee Institute worked with the United States government to perform a study on a group of Black men with syphillis. The men were recruited to the study with promises of free meals, transportation to the clinic, medical exams and even treatment for minor medical concerns. The study lasted 40 years and involved the participation of over 600 Black men. This sounded like a good arrangement in theory, but researchers did not hold up their end of the bargain. By 1947, penicillin was widely used as treatment for syphillis. The researchers neglected to inform the men involved in the study in addition to refusing to treat the men.
As a result of the Tuskegee Experiment, nearly a hundred men died, and hundreds of partners and children were infected with the disease as well. Not only was this a breach of research ethics, as the participants did not give informed consent and were not treated for their ailment. The men and their families won a $9 million class action lawsuit in 1973, but this of course was not enough to make up for the damage that was done.
Similarly, the same researcher who uncovered the Tuskegee Syphillis experiment, Susan Reverby, discovered that a similar situation occured in Guatemala. The US Public Health Service and Pan American Sanitary Bureau worked with the Guatemalan government to do research on 1300 Guatemalans that involved intentionally exposing them to STDs.
The experiment involved many who are considered disposable in society – sex workers, mental patients, prisoners, and soldiers. Only 700 of these people were treated, and during the study 83 people died. Some of the most disturbing incidents during the study involved injecting epilepsy patients in the back of the head with syphillis, as well as the infection of a terminal illness patient with gonnorhea (she died six months later). The Guatemalans in the study also did not give informed consent.
Henrietta Lacks
Henrietta Lacks (1920 – 1951) was a Black woman who went to Johns Hopkins Hospital to be examined for serious medical concerns. After a biopsy was performed, she was diagnosed with and subsequently treated for cancer. While she was being treated, healthy and cancerous cells were removed from her cervix without her consent. She died in 1951, but the cells stolen from her body continued to be used. Though she died poor and was buried without a gravestone, her cells were used for many medical tests. From routine tests for human sensitivity to substances to the development of the Polio vaccine, her cells were used for medical advances. Her family only learned about the removal of her cells in the 1970s, and she is largely unknown despite the contributions to science she had made.
Current medical racism
Distrust of medical health professionals, along with racist attitudes probably contribute to medical health disparities. Racially linked anxiety disorders have been linked to racism at the hands of white people. A significant number of Black women report racism and sexism contributing to their stress and to stress-linked overeating.
Stressful life circumstances are reasons for hypertension and many mental health ailments. Working and middle class Black women who report multiple forms of discrimination are more likely to have high blood pressure than those who report fewer incidents. Black Americans who are more confrontational about racism are less likely to have elevated blood pressure than those who stay silent, which can be attributed to the effects of suppressed hostility.
Today, doctors still exhibit subconscious racist attitudes. A study in the American Journal of Public Health (March 2012) showed that a full two-thirds of the doctors in the sample were racially biased. White and Asian health professionals showed anti-Black bias, but Black health professionals showed no bias.
Doctors are more likely to speak more slowly to Black patients, extend their visits, and to lecture and talk down to them. This shows that the doctors are paternalistic and don’t care about respecting their patients or asking for their input
Additionally, white doctors are prone to giving worse care to patients of color, regardless of their income. People of color are less likely to get the diagnoses and treatment that they need, for everything ranging from heart disease medication, HIV treatment, and dialysis. Black women are the least likely to receive the pain medication that they need. Mental health professionals are less likely to diagnose people of color with an appropriate diagnosis because of their race.
Aminta
“Consider how textbooks treat Native religions as a unitary whole. The American Way describes Native American religion in these words: “These Native Americans [in the Southeast] believed that nature was filled with spirits. Each form of life, such as plants and animals, had a spirit. Earth and air held spirits too. People were never alone. They shared their lives with the spirits of nature.” Way is trying to show respect for Native American religion, but it doesn’t work. Stated flatly like this, the beliefs seem like make-believe, not the sophisticated theology of a higher civilization. Let us try a similarly succinct summary of the beliefs of many Christians today: “These Americans believed that one great male god ruled the world. Sometimes they divided him into three parts, which they called father, son, and holy ghost. They ate crackers and wine or grape juice, believing that they were eating the son’s body and drinking his blood. If they believed strongly enough, they would live on forever after they died.” Textbooks never describe Christianity this way. It’s offensive. Believers would immediately argue that such a depiction fails to convey the symbolic meaning or the spiritual satisfaction of communion.”
— Lies My Teacher Told Me, James Loewen
Aminta
This is a piece I did for the Native show at Emily Carr.
The names written on my body are actual names for “sexy indian” costumes that can be bought online.
This piece is a visual response to when Halloween comes around again, and people feel it right to dress up as my culture in horrible old stereotypes and pass it as honouring our culture. But it doesn’t. It only adds to more to poorly represented image of Native Americans, and objectifies Native women.
I am a real Native Women and this my body and my culture. And I have a voice
Source:http://fothefox.tumblr.com/post/45737414526/this-is-a-piece-i-did-for-the-native-show-at-emily
Aminta
Is this ok? This feels incredibly reductive and off base. It also uses stereotypical classification of terms most of us would associate with Native Americans and doesn’t add a whole lot of depth or educational value. They are literally being reduced to landmarks to be ‘stepped’ over, played on and thatjust seems inappropriate given our history.
Look at it this way,” offers Sean. ” When a white person dies the children inherit whatever their parent left them. Money. Houses. Investments and retirement money the parent didn’t get a chance to spend. Well, they didn’t earn that, did they? I mean, their parent earned that. Well, our treaty rights are like that. Our grandparents and great-grandparents worked to keep our land and our rights and we get to benefit from that. That’s just how it works. If Chief Migizi or Shabashkung or whoever had called it quits and moved to White Earth we wouldn’t even have a rez. But they stuck it out They stayed when the world was against them. And because of that we have casinos and our fishing rights and our communities and our ceremonies. It’s our inheritance. Why isn’t that fair?
Rez Life by David Treuer, page 107
“Despite how involved in America’s business Indians have been, most people will go a lifetime without ever knowing an Indian or spending any time on an Indian reservation. Indian land makes up 2.3 percent of land in the United States…It is pretty easy to avoid us and our reservations. Yet Americans are captivated by Indians. Indians are part of the story that America tells itself, from the first Thanksgiving to the Boston Tea Party up through Crazy Horse, the Battle of the Little Bighorn, and Custer’s Last Stand…No one in America today is untouched by our lives.”
– David Treuer, Rez Life: An Indian’s Journey Through Reservation Life, pp. 24-26 (eBook version)
“Red Lake Reservation, with nearly 10,000 members, is a huge voting bloc in the region and has the highest voter turnout in the entire county:according to some statistics more than 90 percent of Red Lakers go to the polls.” – Rez Life: An Indian’s Journey Through Reservation Life by: David Treuer ( pg. 826/4966 kindle version.)
Aminta
Img source :http://riverazurisadai.tumblr.com/
In light of what we watched in Reel Injun on Friday, this article seemed to coincidental not to post here. In it, Ruth Hopkins nicely outlines exactly what is wrong with cultural appropriation and why it is so damaging. She also expresses a sentiment about redface we’ve often heard about blackface – it doesn’t matter what the occasion, it’s always going to be wrong. Always.
– Nisa
Download These Slides and Take Your Picture with Them To Help Raise Awareness
I recalled seeing this post on my personal tumblr, and after seeing the “Indian women in Alaska are two and a half times more likely than white women to be the victims of sexual assault” from Rez Life, I thought it belonged here too (150).
Here’s a bit of a follow-up on the disturbing quote from Truer’s Rez Life posted above. “[Rape] is more expected than unexpected. It has become a norm for young women,” says Sioux health advocate Charon Asetoyer.
given recent postings on race and the fashion industry…
(from The Times Magazine February issue, photograph by Danielle Levitt)
“We’re used to warfare. We’re used to fighting. That’s who we are. People talk about how we’re a gentle people, you know. How we respect everything. We do, but we’ve had to fight for it. It’s kind of a curse sometimes, you know… That attitude, that fighting attitude, goes back to Chief Bagonegiizhig and Changing Feather, back to those guys. Maybe it needs to change. But it’s kept us alive, too. We’re alive because we don’t back down. There’s a message in that, maybe” – David Treuer’s Rez Life (p.57)
Image:
http://www.history.com/photos/native-americans-warriors-and-battles
A little bit silly, but I was curious about the details of the Walleye fish that Treuer creates his extended metaphor with in Rez Life. Here is a link to a short background on this essential Ojibwe fish.
http://www.dnr.state.mn.us/fish/walleye/index.html
-Christiaan
They were falling in, the roof boards were rotted out, and tar paper was waving in the wind. All of them were small, none bigger than sixteen by twenty feet. I was surprised no one had burned them down. Maybe the tribe kept them standing to remind themselves of the hardships it had faced during the past century.” (Rez Life by David Treuer, 65)
This quote describes old deteriorating shacks on the Mille Lacs Reservation, leading me to choose this 1920 image of a makeshift home and its Ojibwe inhabitants at Mille Lacs. I find it so startling how this makeshift home was already in disrepair, constructed out of straw and cardboard, denoting very small change from it’s inception to it’s decomposition. This only shows how much poverty and despair that the Ojibwe already lived in, almost 100 years before the creation of this book.
On a less relevant note, I find the header ‘Indian Home’ very interesting. This simple terminology denotes an instinct to term this specific group, the Ojibwes, as just Indians. They are given no further identity besides Indian, giving us a frame into the mindset of how Americans tended to view various Native American cultures.
-Christiaan
[CRITIQUE, QUESTIONS AND CREDITS]
MOVEMENT RESEARCH GROUP PRESENTATION: EVERY 36 HOURS
by RACIAL AMERICANA, A SOCIOLOGY CLASS @ SARAH LAWRENCE COLLEGE
[LOCAL CASE STUDIES]
MOVEMENT RESEARCH GROUP PRESENTATION: EVERY 36 HOURS
by RACIAL AMERICANA, A SOCIOLOGY CLASS @ SARAH LAWRENCE COLLEGE
[LEGISLATION UNDER FIRE]
MOVEMENT RESEARCH GROUP PRESENTATION: EVERY 36 HOURS
by RACIAL AMERICANA, A SOCIOLOGY CLASS @ SARAH LAWRENCE COLLEGE
MOVEMENT RESEARCH GROUP PRESENTATION: EVERY 36 HOURS
by RACIAL AMERICANA, A SOCIOLOGY CLASS @ SARAH LAWRENCE COLLEGE
We need to “move towards slavery, not away from slavery, because it follows us today” – Dr. Helena Woodward
500 Years Later Documentary
Dr. Helena Woodward. 500 Years Later Documentary
*she’s discussing the way in which our current day society manages to run away from the remnants of slavery, and what will happen if we do the exact opposite.
“If I could have convinced more slaves that they were slaves, I could have freed thousands more.”
-Harriet Tubman
http://www.civilwar.org/education/history/african-american-experience/the-african-american.html
“Dehumanization, which marks not only those whose humanity has been stolen, but also (though in a different way) those who have stolen it, is a distortion of the vocation of becoming more fully human.” (Freire 44)
Posted by Briaan
“Every generation confronts the task of choosing its past. Inheritances are chosen as less of “what happened then” than on the desire and discontents of the present. Striving and failures shape the stories we tell. War recall has as much do with the terrible things we hope to avoid as with the good life for which we yearn” -Lose Your Mother, Saidiya Hartman 1518/4438
Aminta
The number of people who identified as black, either alone or in combination with one or more other races, in the 2010 Census. They made up 13.6 percent of the total U.S. population. The black population grew by 15.4 percent from 2000 to 2010.
18%
Percentage of blacks 25 and older who had a bachelor’s degree or higher in 2010.
$32,068
The annual median income of black households in 2010, a decline of 3.2 percent from 2009.
27.4%
Poverty rate in 2010 for blacks.
Source: U.S. Census Bureau, Income, Poverty and Health Insurance Coverage in the United States: 2010
Information from:
http://www.census.gov/newsroom/releases/archives/facts_for_features_special_editions/cb12-ff01.html
Saidiya Hartman,Lose Your Mother pg 144
“If you believed that slavery was a relatively benign institution in Africa, then you certainly would not expect to hear such things, but in fact, masters and traders spoke about their slaves in exactly these terms and people continue to do so today. In my company, the polite refrained from such remarks and instead made jokes about how I had found my way back home or teased me about searching for my roots. They were used to Americans with identity problems.
Saidiya Hartman, Lose Your Mother pg 144
I called the officer every foul name a good twelve-year-old girl who attended Catholic school and who was prohibited from cursing could utter, the first being a racist and the second being a bully; had I known the word ‘fascist’ then, I would have called him that too. I asked the officer if he was going to lock us up or shoot us because my mother’s brakes failed and she left her license at home. He closed his ticket book with my mother’s half-written ticket inside and said, ‘Young lady, I’m sorry you believe all that,’ and walked back to his patrol car.
I’m certain the police officer could not have imagined his daughter saying the awful things I had said to him… He recoiled from the ugliness of it. To put on that uniform each day, he needed to believe it wasn’t true. As he drove away, I’m sure he was thankful no child of his lived in the same country I did.
Lose Your Mother by Saidiya Hartman (Pg.131)
Read some of the comments. Do you agree? How might you challenge what they are saying?
Ottobah Cugoano (1757 – after 1791) was an African abolitionist who was active in England in the latter half of the eighteenth century. Captured and sold into slavery at the age of 13 in present-day Ghana, he was shipped to Grenada. In 1772 he was purchased by an English merchant who took him to England, where he was freed. Later working for the Cosways, he became acquainted with British political and cultural figures, and joined the Sons of Africa, abolitionists who were Africans.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ottobah_Cugoano
Olaudah Equiano (1745-1797) also known as Gustavus Vassa, was a prominent African involved in the British movement for the abolition of the slave trade. He was enslaved as a child, purchased his freedom, and worked as an author, merchant, and explorer in South America, the Caribbean, the Arctic, the American colonies, and the United Kingdom, where he settled by 1792. His autobiography, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, depicts the horrors of slavery and influenced the enactment of the Slave Trade Act of 1807.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olaudah_Equiano
Ignatius Sancho (1729 – 14 December 1780) was a composer, actor, and writer. He is the first known Black Briton to vote in a British election. He gained fame in his time as “the extraordinary Negro”, and to 18th-century British abolitionists he became a symbol of the humanity of Africans and immorality of the slave trade. The Letters of the Late Ignatius Sancho, an African, edited and published two years after his death, is one of the earliest accounts of African slavery written in English by a former slave of Spanish and English families.
-Aisha
So after reading about the NY Times article mentioned in chapter 4 of Lose Your Mother, I got a little curious. I went looking for the article itself, and while this isn’t it, it’s somewhat similar. This article reports on the digitization of some of the records collected by the Freedman’s Bureau. It’s interesting to read in the article the reaction of one woman to finding out about one of her ancestors and compare it to the anguish of the man Hartaman recalls reading about.
“Love encourages forgetting, which is intended to was away the slave’s past. Love makes a place for the stranger; it domesticates persons from ‘outside of the house’ and not ‘of the blood’; it assuages the slave’s loss of family; it remakes slaveholders as mother’s and fathers. Owning persons and claiming kin are one and the same; so love cannot be separated from dispossession of property in persons. Affection perhaps softens the sting of dishonor but does not erase is…it doesn’t remedy the isolation of being severed from your kin and denied ancestors.”
– Saidiya Hartman, Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route, pp. 102-103
“I, TOO, LIVE in the time of slavery, by which I mean I am living in the future created by it. It is the ongoing crisis of citizenship. Questions posed in 1173 about the disparity between “the sublime ideal of freedom” and the “facts of blackness” are uncannily relevant today. The echoes could be heard in the plea, still waiting for an answer, chalked onto a rooftop in the Ninth Ward of New Orleans: “Help. The water is rising. Please.” Six of people are trapped on the roof and two of them are waving American flags, hoping against the odds that the Stars and Stripes might make their plight visible, keep them afloat, and demonstrate unequivocally, “We are citizens too.” But the anxiety and the doubt fueling the assertion was made plain by the photograph’s caption: “Cast Away.” Saidiya Hartman, Lose Your Mother (p. 133)
-Aisha
In 2006, when Saidiya Hartman published Lose Your Mother, she states on page 129 that black men are “five times” more at risk to be infected with HIV. In 2008, the U.N. stated that over 50% of new HIV cases in the United States were reported in black men. As of 2011, the CDC reported that one out of every 16 black men will be diagnosed with HIV. This is almost 7x higher than the statistic for white men. The dialogue about heterosexual vs. homosexual HIV incidence is often discussed, but unfortunately, the racial aspect of the issue is rarely as publicized.
The image is taken from the CDC’s website: http://www.cdc.gov/hiv/topics/surveillance/resources/slides/race-ethnicity/index.htm
Imagine that hundreds of black protesters were to descend upon Washington DC and Northern Virginia, just a few miles from the Capitol and White House, armed with AK-47s, assorted handguns, and ammunition. And imagine that some of these protesters —the black protesters — spoke of the need for political revolution, and possibly even armed conflict in the event that laws they didn’t like were enforced by the government? Would these protester — these black protesters with guns — be seen as brave defenders of the Second Amendment, or would they be viewed by most whites as a danger to the republic? What if they were Arab-Americans? Because, after all, that’s what happened recently when white gun enthusiasts descended upon the nation’s capital, arms in hand, and verbally announced their readiness to make war on the country’s political leaders if the need arose.”
-Excerpt from Imagine if the Tea Party was Black by Tim Wise
karkles-the-adorabloodthirsty:
I got dressed in my traditional Indian regalia, but there was a man, he was the producer of the whole show. He took that speech away from me and he warned me very sternly. “I’ll give you 60 seconds or less. And if you go over that 60 seconds, I’ll have you arrested. I’ll have you put in handcuffs.”
– Sacheen Littlefeather in Reel Injun (2009), dir. Neil Diamond.
They were MAD, CONFUSED AND PRESSED that Marlon Brando would betray White Supremacy in this way.
To this very day, they are TWISTED over this.
And when Littlefeather got up there and READ THEM FOR FILTH, they GAGGED. For eons.
So I imagine there are people like me out there who’ve never even heard of Marlon Brando and are extremely confused over why this is important.
Marlon Brando was the Don in The Godfather, and in 1973, he was nominated for and won an Academy Award for it. However, he was also a huge Natives rights activist, and boycotted the ceremony because he felt that Hollywood’s depictions of Native Americans in the media led to the Wounded Knee Incident (which I was always taught as “the second massacre at Wounded Knee” but apparently that’s not the real name). He sent Sacheen Littlefeather, an Apache Native rights activist, in his stead. Wikipedia’s article on her explains the rest:
Brando had written a 15-page speech for Littlefeather to give at the ceremony, but when the producer met her backstage he threatened to physically remove her or have her arrested if she spoke on stage for more than 60 seconds.[5] Her on-stage comments were therefore improvised. She then went backstage and read the entire speech to the press. In his autobiography My Word is My Bond, Roger Moore (who presented the award) claims he took the Oscar home with him and kept it in his possession until it was collected by an armed guard sent by the Academy.
That is what this gifset is about.
You have GOT to read up on this. The Wounded Knee Incident, Marlon Brando and Sacheen Littlefeather, Anna Mae Aquash. ALL OF IT.
Her name was known in my house, I hope it’s known in many, many more in the future.
“Every tale of creation I have ever read began in a place like this-in the underworld, in the bowels of the earth, in the gloom of man’s prehistory. The cradle of life bore an uncanny resemblance to the grave, making plain the fact that the living eventually would assume their station among the ranks of the dead. Human life sprang from a black abyss, and from dust and muck we traced our beginning….
Adam and Eve were created in this filthy pit. So the British called the first man and woman plucked from the dungeon and bound aboard the slave ship, replaying the drama of birth and expulsion in the Africa trade.”
– Saidiya Hartman, Loser Your Mother, page 110.
image of a Ghanese slave hold, taken by Christina Agubretu, 2009, from http://worldmeets.us/myjoy000001.shtml#axzz2M2KvQ0nY
When this article was originally published, writer Falguni A. Sheth titled it “The Onion’s Hipster Racism.” She has since replaced the word racism with misogyny. However, in the middle of the article, she makes provocative and relevant claims regarding the loaded racial implications of misogynistic profanity in a world that is “very-uncolorblind”, (specifically in reference to The Onion’s “ironic” tweet referring to Quvenzhane Wallis as a “kind of a cunt”.)
On page 102 of Lose Your Mother, Saidiya Hartman speaks about the slave colony of Liberia. I didn’t know too much about it, so here is some basic info about it’s foundation.
Racial Americana 