@davidhmccoy@TheConversationUS@blackmastodon The implication being that you can't find out the black experience by, say, talking to black people and then believing what they say.
My dad had Black Like Me on his bookshelf, as a psychologist. It wasn't merely professional, either. Our Irish ancestry has a darker skin tone than normal, but still 'white', and afro-textured black hair. In the service at the end of WWII he was denied restrooms in Georgia.
I find the inference that posing as black for discovery is just another form of blackface to be very interesting, and a tell of racism, realized or not, within the speaker themself. It's also interesting see how people want to form the line of color on a spectrum that is largely seamless.
Today in Labor History June 7, 1929: Striking textile workers battled police in Gastonia, North Carolina, during the Loray Mill Strike. Police Chief O.F. Aderholt was accidentally killed by one of his own officers during a protest march by striking workers. Nevertheless, the authorities arrested six strike leaders. They were all convicted of “conspiracy to murder.”
The strike lasted from April 1 to September 14. It started in response to the “stretch-out” system, where bosses doubled the spinners’ and weavers’ work, while simultaneously lowering their wages. When the women went on strike, the bosses evicted them from their company homes. Masked vigilantes destroyed the union’s headquarters. The NTWU set up a tent city for the workers, with armed guards to protect them from the vigilantes.
One of the main organizers was a poor white woman named Ella May Wiggans. She was a single mother, with nine kids. Rather than living in the tent city, she chose to live in the African American hamlet known as Stumptown. She was instrumental in creating solidarity between black and white workers and rallying them with her music. Some of her songs from the strike were “Mill Mother’s Lament,” and “Big Fat Boss and the Workers.” Her music was later covered by Pete Seeger and Woodie Guthrie, who called her the “pioneer of the protest ballad.” During the strike, vigilantes shot her in the chest. She survived, but later died of whooping cough due to poverty and inadequate medical care.
For really wonderful fictionalized accounts of this strike, read “The Last Ballad,” by Wiley Cash (2017) and “Strike!” by Mary Heaton Vorse (1930).
Today in Writing History May 22, 1967: Writer and activist Langston Hughes died. Hughes was a leader of the Harlem Renaissance and one of the early pioneers of Jazz Poetry. During the Civil Rights Movement, from 1942-1962, he wrote a weekly column for the black-owned Chicago Defender. His poetry and fiction depicted the lives and struggles of working-class African Americans. Much of his writing dealt with racism and black pride. Like many black artists and intellectuals of his era, he was attracted to communism as an alternative to the racism and segregation of America. He travelled to the Soviet Union and many of his poems were published in the CPUSA newspaper. He also participated in the movement to free the Scottsboro Boys and supported the Republican cause in Spain. He opposed the U.S. entering World War II and he signed a statement in support of Stalin’s purges.
Remembering the ethnic cleansing, massacres and Zionist terrorism that lead to the creation of #Israel which remains to this day a pariah state and a plague on the Middle East and the world.
@nicholas_saunders@radiofreearabia@palestine@israel The tunnels can be like the ones in Gaza or they are what we call "the logic path" to reach everything, since we need some sort of "tunnel" to focus on any subject.
That is why and how, academic and scientists do, when ignoring what can have a relation but is not included in some subject.
Nordic and Egipts talk about using symbols to talk with "god". If we are talking about the Abrahamic religions, we ignore that knowledge.
Today in Labor History July 4, 1832: John Neal delivered one of the first known public lectures in the US advocating for the rights of women, including suffrage and equal pay. Neal was a writer, abolitionist, advocate for racial and gender equality, and creator of the American gymnastics movement. He fought against the poll tax, arguing that both "the poor and the rich are taxed ... under the militia law" which was designed "to defend property of the rich man. The rich, of course, do not appear in the field. The poor do. The latter cannot afford to keep away; the former can." He proposed replacing the poll tax with a property tax. He also wrote that the Indian is the only true native American. (In those days, “Native American meant a white person born in America, as opposed to immigrants). He also wrote that American Indians "have never been the aggressors" in conflicts with European-Americans and that "no people, ancient or modern ... have been so deplorably oppressed, belied, and wronged, in every possible way." And he proposed legalizing interracial marriage, but for proto-eugenicist reasons: so that future generations of "the negroes of America would no longer be a separate, inferior class, without political power, without privilege, and without a share in the great commonwealth." As a writer, he is the first to use the phrase son-of-a-bitch in a work of fiction. Neal was also the first U.S. daily news columnist, its first art critic, author of the first history of American literature, and a pioneer in children’s stories.
Yeah, the U. S. Declaratory of Independence really helps people*:
'"When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands... they should declare the causes...." This was the opening of the Declaration of Independence. Then, in its second paragraph, came the powerful philosophical statement:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Gov- ernments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, that whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government.
It then went on to list grievances against the king, "a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an ab- solute Tyranny over these States." The list accused the king of dissolving colo- nial governments, controlling judges, sending "swarms of Officers to harass our people," sending in armies of occupation, cutting off colonial trade with other parts of the world, taxing the colonists without their consent, and waging war against them, "transporting large Armies of foreign Mercenaries to compleat the works of death, desolation and tyranny."
All this, the language of popular control over governments, the right of rebellion and revolution, indignation at political tyranny, economic burdens, and military attacks, was language well suited to unite large numbers of colon- ists, and persuade even those who had grievances against one another to turn against England.
Some Americans were clearly omitted from this circle of united interest drawn by the Declaration of Independence: Indians, black slaves, women. In- deed, one paragraph of the Declaration charged the King with inciting slave re- bellions and Indian attacks:
He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.'