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Whenever I hear other African Americans say they're not black but indigenous/aboriginal a part of me dies
#like you can't be pro black but then ashamed to call yourself#majority of african americans are descendants of slaves and that's ok#we don't all have to come from royal blood and we also don't have to be native to america#there is history books on the slave trade and how west africa was colonized#there is a difference from having the theory that black people were one of the first humans to exist and traveled to countries#which created the blue eye gene or light skin#but claiming to be native american or aboriginal when it's not in your dna or you're even a direct descendant of its just not accurate#because then that creates another issue where people are erasing another ethnic group#not to mention wearing regalia or items from just any tribe you can find is considered cultural appropriation#also there were native american tribes who enslaved black people so the logic just doesn't make sense#non blacks dni
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We give Belos way too much credit for feeling bad about his dead brother and Grimwalkers because like. He’s a racist white guy who’s murdered a culture and damaged its land across centuries but only feels guilt for his white brother and clones. He doesn’t hallucinate any witch or demon in FtF. He never got close to any of them sure, but that’s because of his racism which just further proves the point.
What this means is that for all his ‘guilt’, Belos doesn’t think his actual motives and goals as a witch hunter are wrong, just that human (adjacent) white guys shouldn’t be hurt in the process, but if they need to be they will. There’s the external setup for Belos to maybe change because of that remorse, but the internal setup that he won’t because he doesn’t even consider what the actual crux of the issue was, that being who he killed Caleb for fraternizing with, who Caleb died to protect, who has been brutalized far more than the Grimwalkers ever have been.
I’d even argue that Philip wouldn’t have minded if Caleb moved to another Puritan colony to settle with a Christian white woman; It was not so much Caleb leaving him, so much as who Caleb left him for. People like to reduce Belos to codependency with Caleb, as if his witch hunting fantasies weren’t established before Evelyn’s arrival; Philip let those inform his takeaway that he could not follow where Caleb was going, ergo Caleb betrayed him, because even Belos’ baggage with Caleb is rooted in racism. Mind you, Belos is still killing the Grimwalkers because he doesn’t really regret it, he’ll keep doing it because abusers are paradoxical like that. The ghosts just reinforce what’s wrong with him, instead of suggesting otherwise.
I think those fics and fanart of Belos being ganged up on in the afterlife by the Grimwalkers are missing the point, to Belos it would validate his racism by saying the only people whose suffering mattered, who deserve revenge, are the white guys he wasn’t explicitly targeting. I think a good take on the Belos suffering in the afterlife trope would have him be attacked by all the witches and demons and palismen he brutalized, without a single Grimwalker nor Caleb in sight.
As you can imagine, this is another reason why Eda and co. killing Belos works; Because once again he’s focused on Luz, whose framing parallels Caleb’s ghost from FtF, and talking about how only humans matter and Belos deserves to be spared for being human. Only for the witches and demons who were the actual emotional core of the issue that Caleb died for (one of whom is the descendant of the child he saved, not that Caleb factors to her motives because it’s not about Caleb) to step in and reiterate, Nah their suffering and anger is just as important.
People set up Belos’ fratricide and murdered nephews as the worst thing he’s ever done because they also think the white boys’ suffering is more important but tbh? It pales in comparison to the irreversible damage he committed to the Boiling Isles’ environment, its culture and history, its thousands of people as a whole, etc. The Titan is dead and its arm displaced because of him, so many resources and species have been depleted. To quote Castlevania and what a black revenge-seeking anti hero was told before encountering real evil in the form of a white man who enslaves en masse, “There are worse things than betrayal.”
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"But black people are not the only ones who were enslaved. Should descendants of all other groups who were enslaved receive reparations too?"
Yes. Everyone should receive reparations from the rich people who exploited them and continue to exploit them. All rich people should have to share their profits with the workers who made them rich.
But whenever anyone tries to do that, you fight tooth and nail against it.
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In fact, far more Asian workers moved to the Americas in the 19th century to make sugar than to build the transcontinental railroad [...]. [T]housands of Chinese migrants were recruited to work [...] on Louisiana’s sugar plantations after the Civil War. [...] Recruited and reviled as "coolies," their presence in sugar production helped justify racial exclusion after the abolition of slavery.
In places where sugar cane is grown, such as Mauritius, Fiji, Hawaii, Guyana, Trinidad and Suriname, there is usually a sizable population of Asians who can trace their ancestry to India, China, Japan, Korea, the Philippines, Indonesia and elsewhere. They are descendants of sugar plantation workers, whose migration and labor embodied the limitations and contradictions of chattel slavery’s slow death in the 19th century. [...]
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Mass consumption of sugar in industrializing Europe and North America rested on mass production of sugar by enslaved Africans in the colonies. The whip, the market, and the law institutionalized slavery across the Americas, including in the U.S. When the Haitian Revolution erupted in 1791 and Napoleon Bonaparte’s mission to reclaim Saint-Domingue, France’s most prized colony, failed, slaveholding regimes around the world grew alarmed. In response to a series of slave rebellions in its own sugar colonies, especially in Jamaica, the British Empire formally abolished slavery in the 1830s. British emancipation included a payment of £20 million to slave owners, an immense sum of money that British taxpayers made loan payments on until 2015.
Importing indentured labor from Asia emerged as a potential way to maintain the British Empire’s sugar plantation system.
In 1838 John Gladstone, father of future prime minister William E. Gladstone, arranged for the shipment of 396 South Asian workers, bound to five years of indentured labor, to his sugar estates in British Guiana. The experiment with “Gladstone coolies,” as those workers came to be known, inaugurated [...] “a new system of [...] [indentured servitude],” which would endure for nearly a century. [...]
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Bonaparte [...] agreed to sell France's claims [...] to the U.S. [...] in 1803, in [...] the Louisiana Purchase. Plantation owners who escaped Saint-Domingue [Haiti] with their enslaved workers helped establish a booming sugar industry in southern Louisiana. On huge plantations surrounding New Orleans, home of the largest slave market in the antebellum South, sugar production took off in the first half of the 19th century. By 1853, Louisiana was producing nearly 25% of all exportable sugar in the world. [...] On the eve of the Civil War, Louisiana’s sugar industry was valued at US$200 million. More than half of that figure represented the valuation of the ownership of human beings – Black people who did the backbreaking labor [...]. By the war’s end, approximately $193 million of the sugar industry’s prewar value had vanished.
Desperate to regain power and authority after the war, Louisiana’s wealthiest planters studied and learned from their Caribbean counterparts. They, too, looked to Asian workers for their salvation, fantasizing that so-called “coolies” [...].
Thousands of Chinese workers landed in Louisiana between 1866 and 1870, recruited from the Caribbean, China and California. Bound to multiyear contracts, they symbolized Louisiana planters’ racial hope [...].
To great fanfare, Louisiana’s wealthiest planters spent thousands of dollars to recruit gangs of Chinese workers. When 140 Chinese laborers arrived on Millaudon plantation near New Orleans on July 4, 1870, at a cost of about $10,000 in recruitment fees, the New Orleans Times reported that they were “young, athletic, intelligent, sober and cleanly” and superior to “the vast majority of our African population.” [...] But [...] [w]hen they heard that other workers earned more, they demanded the same. When planters refused, they ran away. The Chinese recruits, the Planters’ Banner observed in 1871, were “fond of changing about, run away worse than [Black people], and … leave as soon as anybody offers them higher wages.”
When Congress debated excluding the Chinese from the United States in 1882, Rep. Horace F. Page of California argued that the United States could not allow the entry of “millions of cooly slaves and serfs.” That racial reasoning would justify a long series of anti-Asian laws and policies on immigration and naturalization for nearly a century.
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All text above by: Moon-Ho Jung. "Making sugar, making 'coolies': Chinese laborers toiled alongside Black workers on 19th-century Louisiana plantations". The Conversation. 13 January 2022. [All bold emphasis and some paragraph breaks/contractions added by me.]
#abolition#tidalectics#caribbean#ecology#multispecies#imperial#colonial#plantation#landscape#indigenous#intimacies of four continents#geographic imaginaries
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Juneteenth is a Black American holiday.
We call Juneteenth many things: Black Independence Day, Freedom Day, Emancipation Day, Jubilee Day. We celebrate and honor our ancestors.
December 31 is recognized as Watch Night or Freedom’s Eve in Black American churches because it marks the day our enslaved ancestors were awaiting news of their freedom going into 1863. On January 1, 1863, President Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation. But all of the ancestors wouldn’t be freed until June 19, 1865 for those in Galveston, Texas and even January 23, 1866 for those in New Jersey (the last slave state). (It’s also worth noting that our people under the Choctaw and Chickasaw Nations wouldn’t be freed until April 28, 1866 and June 14, 1866 for those under the Cherokee Nation by way of the Treaties.)
Since 1866, Black Americans in Texas have been commemorating the emancipation of our people by way of reading the Emancipation Proclamation and coming together to have parades, free festivities, and later on pageants. Thereafter, it spread to select states as an annual day of commemoration of our people in our homeland.
Here’s a short silent video filmed during the 1925 Juneteenth celebration in Beaumont, Texas:
youtube
(It’s also worth noting that the Mascogos tribe in Coahuila, Mexico celebrate Juneteenth over there as well. Quick history lesson: A total of 305,326 Africans were shipped to the US to be enslaved alongside of American Indians who were already or would become enslaved as prisoners of war, as well as those who stayed behind refusing to leave and walk the Trail of Tears to Oklahoma. In the United States, you were either enslaved under the English territories, the Dutch, the French, the Spanish, or under the Nations of what would called the Five “Civilized” Native American Tribes: Cherokee, Creek (Muscogee), Chickasaw, Choctaw, and Seminoles. Mascogos descend from the Seminoles who escaped slavery during the Seminole Wars, or the Gullah Wars that lasted for more than 100 years if you will, and then settled at El Nacimiento in 1852.)
We largely wave our red, white and blue flags on Juneteenth. These are the only colors that represent Juneteenth. But sometimes you may see others wave our Black American Heritage flag (red, black, and gold).
Juneteenth is a day of respect. It has nothing to do with Africa, diversity, inclusion, immigration, your Pan-African flag, your cashapps, nor your commerce businesses. It is not a day of “what about” isms. It is not a day to tap into your inner colonizer and attempt to wipe out our existence. That is ethnocide and anti-Black American. If you can’t attend a Black American (centered) event that’s filled with education on the day, our music, our food and other centered activities because it’s not centered around yours…that is a you problem. Respect our day for what and whom it stands for in our homeland.
Juneteenth flag creator: “Boston Ben” Haith
It was created in 1997. The red, white and blue colors represent the American flag. The five-point star represents the Lone State (Texas). The white burst around the star represents a nova, the beginning of a new star. The new beginning for Black Americans.
Black American Heritage Flag creators: Melvin Charles & Gleason T. Jackson
It was created in 1967, our Civil Rights era. The color black represents the ethnic pride for who we are. Red represents the blood shed for freedom, equality, justice and human dignity. Gold fig wreath represents intellect, prosperity, and peace. The sword represents the strength and authority exhibited by a Black culture that made many contributions to the world in mathematics, art, medicine, and physical science, heralding the contributions that Black Americans would make in these and other fields.
SN: While we’re talking about flags, I should note that Grace Wisher, a 13-year-old free Black girl from Baltimore helped stitched the Star Spangled flag, which would inspire the national anthem during her six years of service to Mary Pickersgill. I ain’t even gon hold you. I never looked too far into it, but she prob sewed that whole American flag her damn self. They love lying about history here until you start unearthing them old documents.
In conclusion, Juneteenth is a Black American holiday. Respect us and our ancestors.
#juneteenth#juneteenth flag#black american history#black american culture#ben haith#black american heritage flag#melvin charles#gleason t jackson#grace wisher#american flag#mascogos#juneteenth 2023
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I saw an article in an Israeli leftist newspaper, which talked about a phenomenon nicknamed, "Blaxit." For those unfamiliar, it's a movement calling for Americans and Europeans of Black/African descent to move to Africa.
This is actually not a new idea (though according to the article, it has picked up some momentum since the George Floyd murder). The "Back to Africa" movement was based on the exact same idea, and was even successful in establishing a whole country for returning Africans, Liberia, as far back as 1847.
And here's the most ironic part: it's the EXACT same principle that drives Zionism. It's the notion that, "our ancestors were removed from our ancestral homeland a long time ago in order to be used as slaves by Europeans, and even though over time our people became free, we never became equal. We are tired of it, and even though we understand that our quality of life will drastically drop if we leave the places that thrived in part thanks to our people's labor over the years, especially as we leave them for the place we're originally from, which stagnated under the exploitative and oppressive influence of colonialism, we still prefer that hardship and sacrifice to a life of being second hand citizens (at best), of always being less than, of knowing our very right to live depends on the good will of the majority, made up of the descendants of those who enslaved our ancestors, a situation we can no longer bear."
I've never seen anyone chanting for the genocidal eradication of Liberia, or Sierra Leone (where 10% of the population is made up of the descendants of freed slaves from the US and Jamica), never heard anyone calling for the canceling of Maya Angelou because she returned to Africa by settling in Ghana, never heard anyone calling Ghana "an apartheid state" for giving returning Africans preferential treatment in immigrating there from 2019 on, or Sierra Leone for doing the same, I doubt anyone would call Africans adopting the Blaxit idea "colonizers" or "black supremacists." Yet all of that has been done to Jews and the Jewish State we've established in the Jewish ancestral homeland that our ancestors were removed from, when they were taken to be slaves across the Roman Empire. It's discriminatory in nature towards Jews, and it IS antisemitic.
#antisemitism#israel#israeli#israel news#israel under attack#terrorism#anti terrorism#hamas#antisemitic#antisemites#jews#jew#judaism#jumblr#frumblr#jewish#israel under fire#israelunderattack#blaxit#back to africa
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Jade + Aventurine analysis bc you guys can't read
A somewhat pretentious analysis of Jade and Aventurine by your friendly local neuroscience major (with receipts) (I am putting my academic knowledge to good uses obviously)
Let’s recap what we know about Aventurine
He is, insofar as he’s aware, the last surviving member of the Avgin people of Sigonia
Is he actually the last member? It’s unclear, but the IPC seems to think so (which will become relevant later)
The genocide of his people occured on the day of the Kakava festival, his birthday, by the Katicans, an opposing clan of the Avgins. Both the Katicans and the Avgins were exiled to the desert because of the fighting. The assorted clans of Sigonia were not willing to protect the Avgin people, and they knew that if they were to be let inside the city, the Katicans would follow
The origin of their fighting is uncertain. It is implied that none of the clans got along well. (Aventurine’s second character stor)
Why did the genocide happen? Because of the Katicans and the IPC
But wait!! I hear you yell, didn’t you just say the Katicans are the ones who killed the Avgins?
And to that I say, yes! I did! But the IPC is still the reason they died. During the 2.1 story, All the Sad Tales, during the cutscene with Kakavasha and his sister right before the massacre.
“Little do the katicans know, this time we will fight back! The men in black that descend from the skies are on our side. The Katicans stand no chance against them…” (Kakavasha’s Sister)
This means that the Avgin people only decided to fight back because the IPC told them that they’d protect them, which they clearly did not do
The IPC also had a financial motive for getting rid of the Avgin people (and the Katicans, though that’s not relevant to the discussion)
We can see in Aventurine’s character story I, “And let’s not forget the letters from the councilors of the Sigonian Sovereignty. They denounce his tribe for once breaking arrangements and sowing discord… resulting in repeated delays in the signing of agreements between Sigonia and IPC.”
The IPC therefore had a very clear motive for deceiving the Avgin people and allowing them to enter a fight unprepared
To make matters worse, the IPC, the hub for technological advancement, medical discoveries, etc, could not save a single person? Not a single man, woman, or child could be saved? Forgive me if I find that unbelievable
“The clan launched a massive attack on the Avgin… who were under the protection of the IPC, resulting in 6,728 deaths and 3,452 missing.”
So… around 4,000 people were missing…? This brings me to my second concern:
The Katicans do not particularly strike me as the type of people who take prisoners - their goal is clearly to exterminate the Avgins
4,000 missing individuals implies that either
1) The IPC did not give a single fuck and simply decided not to search for them (didn’t bother collecting their bodies, tracking down the Katicans who took them, giving them proper burials, etc), or,
2) The IPC DOES know where they are, and decided to mark them as missing persons
As far as real-world tragedies go, I am not inclined in the slightest to give the IPC any benefits of the doubt. These are the same guys who nuked Boothill’s planet. And are currently extorting Belobog. And canonically forced Topaz’s planet into indentured servitude (and were likely going to try the same with Belobog). We don’t even know the full extent of the damage they’ve caused, honestly, and I don’t think we ever will.
After the genocide, there is an unspecified period of time between Kakavasha’s escape and his enslavement. The ‘indifferent man’ in his quest calls him a “scrawny brat”, so he was probably a teenager/young adult at that time. It’s unclear what his history was prior to that point, however we do know:
Indifferent male: “The guys in black didn’t say much…”
…the guys in black? As in, the IPC? Those are the EXACT WORDS that Kakavasha calls the IPC workers multiple times throughout the quest
It also means that he bought him from the IPC
So, at the VERY LEAST one department of the IPC was involved in human trafficking
It would make sense if the IPC had somehow captured him at some point, as he would’ve been like. An unsupervised 7yo in the desert. And of course, upon realizing someone survived the massacre, decides to ‘maximize profit’, for lack of a better word
It’s unclear to me currently why the case of Kakavasha tricking the IPC and the Intelligentsia guild is called the “Eghazyo Aventurine case” because this would have happened before Kakavasha became Aventurine, unless this is a mistake or mistranslation. The voiceover seemed to imply that the name of the case was aired during the time that Kakavasha was testifying, so I doubt that it’s called the Aventurine case because Kakavasha became Aventurine
Another option I’ve seen is that ‘indifferent male’ is the previous Aventurine, which I can’t confirm or deny, though it seems likely
Only thing that doesn’t make sense to me is that if he was the previous Aventurine, why would he call his fellow IPC workers “men in black?” Does anyone know if there are other instances of IPC workers calling each other this?
Aventurine is forced, by ‘indifferent male’ to kill 34 other slaves. He essentially Hunger Games’d 35 people. It’s also implied that it was broadcasted, because other people were betting on it and were making comments about he “looked good”.
At some point, Aventurine manages to trick the IPC and Intelligentsia guild into believing that the remains of Tazzyronth (or the Sand King) are buried in the unclaimed Sigonian desert, costing the IPC billions of dollars and eventually killing the man who bought him (rightfully so)
After that point, he’s taken to trial before Jade, where he strikes a deal: he gets off death row if he proves to be a good investment
Now, let me make myself clear: Jade did not save Aventurine from shit. Aventurine got himself out of a horrible situation by any means he had available to him, and those means happened to involve leveraging his situation and putting his life on the line to prove to Jade he was a worthy investment. I’ve seen people try to argue that ‘joining the IPC is what Aventurine wanted’ but I think this is a shallow and disingenuous argument because it removes the context of his decision entirely. He did that because he felt cornered, and then, presumably, because he hoped he could use the power within the IPC to protect other Avgin people (which is why he asks after them in his character story). I also saw people saying that Aventurine deserved to be on trial…. Which is certainly an interesting opinion. Mind you, the man who Aventurine killed was responsible for the deaths of 34+ people and was actively buying human beings on the black market, so as far as I’m concerned killing him was an act of public good.
A few more things to clear up about this situation:
In the IPC broadcast about the Eghazyo Aventurine case, it conveniently leaves out that Aventurine was enslaved, probably because that could influence public opinion; additionally, I think the erasure of the whole ‘slave’ thing was just to cover their own ass because they knew that shit wouldn’t fly
Aventurine was not ‘in control’ of this situation; too many of you don’t understand what coercion is and that scares the hell out of me. He killed that man because that was the only way he could be free, and after that the IPC sentenced him to death. It isn’t a choice when your only other option is death. It baffles me that people think this.
Jade does not give a single fuck about Aventurine beyond what he provides to the IPC because she cannot conceptualize relationships or the value of human life outside of a transactional purpose, which tracks with her being a debt collector…
Jade literally says, and I quote, “A servant should obey his master”. For the people in the back, A SERVANT SHOULD OBEY HIS MASTER. Who the fuck says that. Even if she isn’t personally involved with whatever human trafficking the IPC has going on (which I seriously doubt she isn’t at least aware of, given her rank), she sympathizes with a literal slave owner over his victim which is genuinely insane.
Something also incredibly important: Aventurine had no legal defense
Like… none at all? I’m not overly familiar with the US legal system, but even in this case I feel like there would be some kind of self-defense justification. Like. He bought people. On the black market. And then made them kill each other. I don’t think killing him warrants a death sentence for Kakavasha (especially one that holds over once he’s a Stoneheart)
This extreme overreaction on behalf of the IPC probably also has something to do with him not having an ‘interastral refugee travel permit’ (mentioned in the first broadcast message during All the Sad Tales) which also begs the question what in the godamn fuck is an interastral refugee travel permit. I can only assume that the IPC is handing out these ‘travel permits’.... Which also means that they are directly responsible (for the sole survivor of a genocide THEY caused) not having one
The fact that the legal system is structured like this does not surprise me at all. It was stacked against him from the beginning and we need to stop pretending this was a power play on Aventurine’s part rather than a desperate last ditch attempt at some form of freedom
Additionally, Aventurine’s banner is literally called “gilded imprisonment” and his light cone is called “inherently unjust destiny” like they literally could not make it more obvious. He just exchanged his old shackles for shinier ones :/
Something else I’d like to point out: Penacony has a grand overarching theme of “a cage is still a cage”; in fact, Himeko says that verbatim in 2.2! I think that’s also important to consider when looking at this situation.
Also, Aventurine also feels so little autonomy that he was literally willing to kill himself to escape. Like full stop kill himself. His future self tells him that “death” is the only real freedom he will ever experience, and I think that alone demonstrates that the IPC has done nothing more but lengthened his leash. I don’t think it’s fair at all to claim that any of this is what he “wanted” or that he’s like. Enjoying himself. Because 2.1 makes it so abundantly clear that he’s fucking miserable. Like you’re aware that this is still coercion right. What do you think happens if he stops performing well? What do you think the IPC will do to him if he is no longer producing money for them? Quickly. Look me in my eyes
Now onto the elephant in the room: Jade herself
Personally I find her character design gross fetish-bait, but to each their own I guess. It’s not really my business if you like her character for whatever reason. I’m not saying that you can’t enjoy her character, but I do think people should be examining their reasons for liking her a little more closely. Or at the very least not making jokes about slavery. That is very strange.
I’ve seen a lot of people say that we should reserve judgment for what her character is like until after she’s out; I disagree. I think we have everything we need. (This is coming from someone who could see Aventurine’s backstory from a mile away and predicted it in 2.0. So far my track record is unblemished but if you don’t want to take my word for it I have evidence).
Let’s take a look at her eidolons:
E1: Altruism? Nevertheless Tradable
E2: Morality? Herein Authenticated
E3: Honesty? Soon Mortgaged
E4: Sincerity? Put Option Only
E5: Hope? Hitherto Forfeited
E6: Equity? Pending Sponsorship
That’s a mouthful, right?
Eidolons are supposed to be the truest reflection of one’s soul and provide us information on the character themself. All of her eidolons reference a kind of transactional relationship - in which she evaluates concepts like altruism, morality, and honesty on a scale of how much worth she can drag out of them. This is consistent with what we’ve seen from her character so far. I find the specific statements ‘Hope? Hitherto Forfeited’ and ‘Equity? Pending Sponsorship’ to be… so sinister lmao. Like she is straight up saying the quiet part out loud. Now let’s compare her eidolons to Aventurine’s:
Aventurine’s E1: Prisoner’s Dilemma.
The Prisoner’s Dilemma game theory wherein two people, separated, must cooperate for mutual benefit, or betray their partner for an individual reward. This perfectly reflects Aventurine and Ratio’s plan in 2.1, and goes to emphasize the importance of trust that Aventurine has.
Aventurine’s E4: The Unexpected Hanging Paradox
At first inspection, the ‘unexpected hanging paradox’ appears to be a regular thought experiment, but actually has to do heavily with probability. The Unexpected Hanging Paradox entails a situation where a criminal is sent to death, however the Judge does not tell the prisoner which day he will be executed on, only that the executioner should ‘surprise him’ over the course of the next week. The prisoner therefore concludes that he will not be executed because it will be impossible to surprise him based on a game of probability. This directly references Aventurine’s experience in court both as Kakavasha, on trial for murder, and when he confronts Sunday.
We can see here that eidolons are absolutely reflective of character goals, intentions, and thoughts. Jade’s eidolons are based entirely on a manipulative, exploitative worldview. Whether or not her worldviews include herself are up for interpretation at this point, but it’s obvious to me that she sees Aventurine as an investment and not a person. The first thing she comments when she sees Aventurine is how pretty his eyes are - immediately assigning material value to his body, which is especially gross considering she is well aware that he was enslaved.
Then, at the end of 2.2, she makes another cameo - and Aventurine does not seem to receive her well. Understandably so. He mentions wanting to “escape her” during his phone call, providing us with insight into his framework and how he perceives her. He literally uses the word ‘escape’. He does NOT like her. Jade proceeds to call him “child”, which I interpret as at least partially demeaning. She also didn’t seem to care at all when she thought he died in 2.1, so I’m not really sure where anyone got the idea that they were close.
As another note on Jade’s character design before I wrap up, I personally find it extremely uncomfortable that she has a whip. Again, I’m not going to tell anyone that you can’t enjoy her character, but there are definitely some extremely strange undertones that hyv is leaning into that I really don’t appreciate. I also think the greater reception of Jade’s character deserves its own post because I don’t even know where to start with that.
So, giving Jade EVERY benefit of the doubt, we can conclude that she: she ONLY knows about the enslavement - but has no personal ties - and does not care, does not appear to care that her colleagues were participating in human trafficking (specifically seemed more put-off about the lack of revenue than the various human rights violations, which makes sense because she doesn’t seem to care about any of the other human rights violations, such as nuking planets, either), would have had no problem sentencing him to death had he not been a company asset, implied that slavery is good, claimed that she didn’t know why Aventurine would kill the person who owned him because it ‘didn’t benefit him’, is participating in the repossession of Penacony by the IPC, is a debt collector (derogatory), did not gaf that her colleague was going on a suicide mission, and did not gaf when her colleague presumably died.
Footnote: Before you start, no disliking Jade but liking Aventurine is not misogynistic (and that accusation is, in itself, misogynistic), yes, it is disingenuous to claim that Aventurine was not coerced, it is also disingenuous to claim that the IPC had no knowledge of the human trafficking, yes you can still like her. Idgaf. And stop making jokes about racism and slavery, it’s weird and I think your brain should be studied in a lab so that doctors can determine what is wrong with you
In conclusion:
Media literacy is dead and the hsr fandom killed it.
#hsr#hsr jade#hsr aventurine#i hate it here#i should've known better than to get into another hyv fandom
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For Juneteenth I want to tell you about Sarah Boone: inventor of the modern ironing board, and the second Black women to receive a US patent.
Sarah was born into slavery in Craven County, North Carolina in 1832. Legally barred from education, her grandfather secretly taught her instead. In 1847 she married freedman James Boone, and was herself freed for unknown reasons. They moved to New Haven, Connecticut before the civil war, and had 8 children together.
James worked as a brick mason, and Sarah worked as a seamstress and dressmaker. While other inventors of the 19th century had been slowly improving the design of ironing boards, Sarah found them inadequate for the job, so she set about making something better.
She wrote in her very detailed patent,
"The purpose of the invention is to produce a cheap, simple, convenient and highly effective device, particularly adapted to be used in ironing the sleeves and bodies of ladies’ garments."
Her ironing board was narrow, curved, symmetrical, and tapered so that the narrowest parts of a garment could fit around it flatly without ceasing while easily turning the garment for each side. It was padded so the fabric would drape more gently, also reducing ceasing. It had collapsible legs that started towards the center of the board so that there was plenty of room for clothes to fit around it while also being mobile and easy to store. It was easy and cheap to manufacture so that it would be accessible for anyone to buy. Especially important when Black people were (are) both poorer and more harshly judged for their appearance.
She submitted she her patient in July of 1891, and obtained United States patent number 473,563 in April of 1892. 132 years later we are still using Sarah Boone's design with very few changes.
She died in 1904 at the age of 72 and is buried in the family plot in Evergreen Cemetery in New Haven.
So next time you iron something, admire how well thought out and purpose built Sarah's design is. Black excellence and freedom made that possible. If she'd remained in slavery she would never have been able to design it or patent it.
I'm thinking about her story today and mourning the generations of Black innovation we never got because because of slavery. All that brilliance held back by such an evil and dehumanizing institution. All the Black innovation held back today due to the legacy of slavery and ongoing racism. The inmates who are still legally enslaved in this country and not given a chance to thrive and create. I'm thinking about how reparations could help other descendents of slavery have the money to work on their ideas. (Or just live other fulfilling lives because no one should have to be exceptional to be respected.)
I'm also thinking about how vital Sarah's ironing board has been to activist organizing. They're cheap, flat, long, fit in small crowded rooms, and historically everyone had one. The humble ironing board was vital to the Civil Rights movement, union organizing, and the queer rights movement among others. Ironing boards are an unsung hero of Black liberation.
Ironing boards are so simple that we never think about the care that went into their design or the woman behind them. But we should. And now you know the story.
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It burns me up that they perpetually build roads, lakes, housing developments etc. over historical Black cemeteries in the American south. It really does. The thin excuse of “urban development and progress” doesn’t change the fact that is 9/10 times you hear about a cemetery being relocated or otherwise desecrated, it was a cemetery for POC. It is an act of willful, disgusting racism and targeted disrespect towards their lives and their loved ones and descendants.
In Roanoke, I-581 is built over Big Lick Cemetery, a historical Black cemetery dating back to the 1890s containing the graves of more than 700 Black men, women and children, most of whom moved to Roanoke during The Great Migration when it was a developing railroad town. These are the graves of the people who built the city. These are the graves of people who came to make a better life for themselves and their children. The graves of the formerly enslaved, their children, their children’s children. The cemetery contains a disproportionate amount of children, even for a cemetery dating from a time when childhood mortality was high. Stillborn babies, children who died of marasmus (malnutrition) or diseases like tuberculosis and typhoid due to inhumane and cramped living conditions.
There is a road built on top of them, babies, boys, girls, men and women and no acknowledgment of their lives. Remaining undisturbed graves are visible from the road, it’s surrounded by a chain link fence and marked from the road only by a wooden sign bolted to the fence. Driving by you could not fathom the size of the cemetery or its significance or the stories of the people interred there. It’s notoriously badly kept, grown up, covered in litter, graves that are less than a century old already obscured by plant growth.
Please be mindful of the Black and Indigenous cemeteries in your area, protect historical cemeteries, protest their destruction, volunteer with cleanup and survey efforts and always be conscious that plans to develop over them are not innocuous, not an unfortunate but necessary sacrifice so your town can have a new Sheetz and a 4 lane highway. It is an act of racism.
The next time you drive through Roanoke, think of them.
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by Dion J. Pierre
The University of Michigan’s Black Student Union (BSU) has resigned from the anti-Zionist student group Tahrir Coalition, citing “pervasive” anti-Black discrimination fostered by its mostly Arab and Middle Eastern leadership.
“Black identities, voices, and bodies are not valued in this coalition, and thus we must remove ourselves,” BSU said in a statement posted on Instagram. “The anti-Blackness within the coalition has been too pervasive to overcome, and we refuse to endure it.”
Proclaiming its continued support for the anti-Zionist movement, the group continued, “The BSU’s solidarity with the Palestinian people is unwavering, but the integrity of the Tahrir Coalition is deeply questionable. We refuse to subject ourselves and our community to the rampant anti-Blackness that festers within it. For this reason, we will no longer be a part of the Tahrir Coalition.”
BSU did not cite specific examples of the racism to which Black students were allegedly subjected, but its public denouncement of a group which has become the face of the pro-Hamas movement at the University of Michigan is significant given the history of cooperation between BSU and anti-Zionist groups on college campuses across the US.
BSU’s Black members are not, however, the first to openly clash with anti-Zionist Arabs.
When Arab and Palestinian anti-Zionist activists launched a barrage of racist attacks against African Americans on social media in August, Black TikTok influencers descended on the platform in droves to denounce the comments, with several announcing that they intended not only to remove Gaza-related content from their profiles but also to cease engaging in anti-Zionist activity entirely. The conversation escalated in subsequent posts, touching on the continuance of Black slavery in the Arab world and what young woman called “voracious racism” against African Americans.
“What’s even crazier is that earlier people were like, oh these are bots, no — this is how people really feel. And she made a video that’s a real human being that feels exactly that way,” one African American woman said. “These are people who feel like they are entitled to the support of Black people no matter what, that they get to push us around and tell us who the hell we get to vote for if we support them … They’ve lost their minds.”
An African American male said, “Why don’t we talk about the Arab slave trade? And keep in mind that the Arabs have enslaved more Black people than the Europeans combined.” Another African American woman accused Arabs of not denouncing slavery in Antebellum America.
#university of michigan#university of michigan's black student union#racist attacks#racist attacks against african americans#anti-zionists#arab anti-zionists#palestinian anti-zionists#tahrir coalition
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WIBTA for trying to find information on the descendents of people who were enslaved by my ancestors?
I (30, M) am from a mostly white family and was doing some genealogy digging. I found one branch of my direct ancestral family who lived in the USA and owned several Black slaves- they were mentioned in a will by first names, there were maybe 4 or 5 people. Maybe it's sympathy, white guilt or selfish, morbid curiosity, but I want to know if those people survived- what happened to them, how their families (if there are any) are now. I know the city where they would have lived, and checking records there would be a good start.
On one hand, I feel like more white people should take accountability and learn about their specific family misdeeds. I don't have much of anything to my name, but who knows? Maybe in some small way I could make their life better. It doesn't fix anything but avoiding it is cowardly and smacks of people who pretend white supremacy is "fixed now."
On the other hand, "hey, your great great great great grandparents were enslaved by mine and I dug through their records to find you and let you know I think that was fucked up" feels like an absolutely insane sentiment to hear. And doing something like anonymously keeping tabs on a family is creepy. It's not like there are any estates to sue- at least that we ever knew about.
I also know from my friends that are Black that a lot of questions go unanswered when it comes to family history, and that not knowing and having to assume can be traumatic too.
At the end of the day I just want to know if they have any living relatives today, if I can even find out what happened to them after slavery. WIBTA for this?
What are these acronyms?
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How's show Armand not racist though he did specifically write the trial to lynch them and added racial aggressions against Louis too
uhhh look. i don’t wanna definitively say armand isn’t or is racist both because i’m white, and because there’s so so much nuance there. how does armand view himself, or the non white members of the coven, or louis and claudia? after his history of being trafficked and sent to various majority white european countries, and ordered to rule as the master of the coven?
what does he think about louis & claudia’s history with slavery: being descended from american slaves, and louis having inherited his money from a slave plantation, claudia’s resentment of lestat as their white “master”. vs his own history: enslavement being the first thing he can remember, his being so conflicted over belonging to marius, wanting to belong to lestat (and being passed over for louis and claudia, who resent and kill lestat!) is he jealous? resentful? sympathetic? uncaring?
let alone the question of: did armand write the trial? we don’t actually know that. we know he directed it, but a huge amount of the behind the scenes details are ambiguous for now. (i assume by “racial aggressions” you mean the idea of louis being predatory towards lestat? i do think this could have come from armand, but we don’t actually know that. it could be a “see lestat didn’t really want him over me, it was all louis’s idea” manifestation of jealousy, which does rely on the audiences racist belief that a black man is more sexual & predatory… but the version of louis that armand sees, and likes, is dominant in bed & ran brothels as a human, whereas armand grew up abused in brothels. or is he aware of louis’s shame at both being gay and a vampire, and he’s pressing on that to hurt him? idk. as of now, it could’ve been armand or the coven imo)
my personal interpretation is that armand is actually… less racist than most of the characters? daniel has his modern day american biases, and lestat’s first words to louis were basically “how’d they let you in here?” which. christ lestat wtf. whereas armand has always felt like an outsider and an otherworldly being. by the time he meets louis, i don’t think he believes almost anyone is his equal.
anyway. i don’t think killing claudia and louis inherently means that armand is racist, and because his exact level of involvement in the trial is so ambiguous i would hesitate to draw firm conclusions about his character from specific lines just yet. and i would keep in mind that slavery is a big part of armand’s backstory and references to it aren’t always targeted at louis.
overall what i meant was i just think some people on twitter are being silly for saying armand is too evil to ship with lestat and louis specifically because armand might be racist. they are all evil. also he let their daughter die on purpose.
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just seen a palestinian auntie post about her niece being born w red hair and she constantly fans over it and goes on about how it’s a blessing and the comments are other palestinians and arabs fanning over the white pale skin and blue eyes and blonde/red hair of some of their relatives. even going on to call those relatives swedish/russian/white as nicknames.
but when jews esp israeli jews talk about their natural fair skin, or blue eyes/light hair (which is a minority in the jewish world, majority of jews do not have light features the same as arabs) in the slightest, they are called hitler 2.0 and it’s used as ‘proof’ that we as a whole can’t possibly be indigenous. like these features have always existed in the levant. they weren’t as prevalent in the levant as some ppl think, but they were there.
i see the same happen w black jews. despite black ppl being in the levant for a very long time, pre-enslavement and after, due to migration, pilgrimage, intermarriage etc etc etc, they are told they can’t possibly be native. while some afro-palestinians who came just a few decades before are native? and i’m not talking about those that are the descendants of enslaved people, if you are trafficked from you land and assimilated/forced into a new ethnicity due to that you have every right to consider yourself a native bc you were literally forced to be one. i’m talking about those that are the descendants of migrants and pilgrims, who set up shop in jerusalem during the ottoman empire and are now supposedly more native than black jews who in most cases are there bc their ancestors were expelled or had to flee and bc they have an actual cultural, genetic and historical link to the land even before that.
Don't be shy about citing this:
My grandfather, born on an actual shtetl in Poland, was the spitting-image lookalike for Hafez Assad. Speaking of Syrians, here's pro wrestler Sami Zayn. Hajj Amin al-Husseini famously had blue eyes and red hair, which might have helped him befriend Hitler. As bad as colorism is in any context, it is all the more infuriating from an I/P perspective when so many people just accept from the outset that people like you, people who look like you, have no right to live in certain areas (even though we always have). Read long enough in Palestinian, Syrian, and Lebanese communities to see their perspectives on Jews and Israel and you can't help but notice the fairly frequent comments about (and I swear I have seen this quote near-verbatim) "We Syrians have such beautiful white skin and beautiful blue eyes, we are not at all like those Saudis or Yemenis, who are as dark as Indians!".
Afro-Palestinians are pretty much always used unfairly and tokenistically by pro-Palestine outsiders; in their daily lives they are regularly called "abeed" (slave) and sometimes even with their neighborhoods known as that. It's not unlike how goyim only ever bring up Ethiopian Jews to spin yarns about "sterilization" while also cheering for groups who want to kill them alongside the rest of Israel.
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Hi Kiko,
I love your work, you are my favorite sim creator, you have the best hair styles for sims 4 people of color.
I wanted to know if you can make more long natural hair styles - (locs with clips/gold and silver) in different styles for the women in sims 4 :)?
like some long locs with long side bangs
some with clips
different ombre and color options
more edges
hidden scalp, or brown variation of scalps, (brown or black scalp)
I used the gif below to show a example hairstyle that looks different and cool.
-
Hair, clothes, and shoes is most important to me in sims 4.
Thank you for having this option to contact you,
Sincerely,
Nikki
I appreciate your admiration towards my artwork but this is a very disrespectful thing to ask of me. I'm not sure if this is an innocent ask, I don't see how it is because I know you've heard black people ask other cultures to not appropriate our hairstyles but I could be wrong, if this is innocent below are my boundaries, and explanations on why I (Kiko Vanity; I'm not speaking for the whole black community) I'd like to not be asked things like this in the future.
my boundaries and why
I do not make hair for people of color. People of color is a broad way to say people who are not of White/European/Anglo-Saxon phenotypes. That means people of Asian, Hispanic/Latino, African, Mixed-Race, and Aboriginal descent; and I create CC for simmers who appreciate my artwork but mainly and ideally create CC HAIRS for simmers of African descent, (including mixed race if they also have African descent) because of the lack of black hairstyles in the initial release of the game in 2014, with that, these black simmers create sims that also reflect their environments and black upbringings. I make black content if you feel comfortable downloading my content you should be comfortable saying black. I want to stress black and not African-American (despite me being African American) because there are different ethnicities for each race, including black people.
2. I am not currently taking hair requests because I'd get too many at one time and that's not great for my mental health. To piggyback off the last sentence and statement 1, please do not request my cultural hairstyles using someone who doesn't respect our wishes. You may be asking yourself, "why is this an issue? hair is hair?" (look below)
During chattel slavery, every fiber of the enslaved Africans' lives was controlled by the narcissistic people who kidnapped them. including hair, being made to cover their hair, and calling them names & degrading them for their natural hair. As the years went by and slavery ended black people but more specifically black fem presenting people held the shame for their hair. Fast forward to today, even with all the turmoil the world is facing due to greed, classism, and the patriarchy) this is the first time in history that their descendants (me being one of them) can set boundaries and say what we are comfortable with and what we are not comfortable with. And to put this as bluntly as I can:
Do not send me videos/photos/gifs of people culturally appropriating in black people's hairstyles, it's anxiety-inducing.
I'd like to also say I'm not angry because I know there is an angry black person stereotype, this is simply uncomfortable and disheartening. I hope you can respect my wishes if not please feel free to block me.
Lastly,
You don't have to respect or do anything I am saying. You may do as you wish after reading this. Just if you are going to engage with me these are my boundaries.
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The Return of Ta-Nehisi Coates
A decade after "The Case for Reparations," he is ready to take on Israel, Palestine, and the American media.
It is in the last of these long, interconnected essays that Coates aims for the sort of paradigm shift that first earned him renown when he published "The Case for Reparations" in The Atlanticin 2014, in which he staked a claim for what is owed the American descendants of enslaved Africans. This time, he lays forth the case that the Israeli occupation is a moral crime, one that has been all but covered up by the West. He writes, "I don't think I ever, in my life, felt the glare of racism burn stranger and more intense than in Israel."
He was astonished by the plain truth of what he saw: the walls, checkpoints, and guns that everywhere hemmed in the lives of Palestinians; the clear tiers of citizenship between the first-class Jews and the second-class Palestinians; and the undisguised contempt with which the Israeli state treated the subjugated other. For Coates, the parallels with the Jim Crow South were obvious and immediate: Here, he writes, was a "world where separate and unequal was alive and well, where rule by the ballot for some and the bullet for others was policy." And this world was made possible by his own country: "The pushing of Palestinians out of their homes had the specific imprimatur of the United States of America. Which means that it had my imprimatur."
That it was complicated, he now understood, was "horseshit.""Complicated" was how people had described slavery and then segregation. "It's complicated," he said, "when you want to take something from somebody."
What matters to Coates is not what will happen to his career now — to the script sales, invitations from the White House, his relationships with his former colleagues at The Atlantic and elsewhere. "I'm not worried," he told me, shrugging his shoulders. "I have to do what I have to do. I'm sad, but I was so enraged. If I went over there and saw what I saw and didn't write it, I am fucking worthless."
The first inkling that Coates might want to write about Israel came around the time he was leaving The Atlantic. He was partly spurred by criticism he'd received over a passage in "The Case for Reparations" in which he cited reparations paid by the German government to the State of Israel after the Holocaust as a potential model. "We did an event when 'Case for Reparations' came out, at a synagogue in D.C., and I remember there was a woman who got on the mic and yelled about the role of Palestinians in that article," he told me. "And I couldn't quite understand what she was saying. I mean, I heard her, but I literally could not understand it. She got shouted down. And I've thought about that a lot, man. I've thought about that a lot." It hadn't occurred to him that Israel might itself be in the debt of a population that it had oppressed, a blind spot that remains a source of regret to this day. "I should have asked more questions," he told me. "I should have done more. I should have looked around and said, 'Do we have anybody Palestinian who's going to read this before we print it?'"
On the ground in the occupied territories, he saw the segregated roads, the soldiers with their American-made weapons, the surveillance cameras, and the whole archipelago of impoverished ghettos. "I felt a mix of astonishment, betrayal, and anger," he writes. "The astonishment was for me — for my own ignorance, for my own incuriosity … The betrayal was for my colleagues in journalism — betrayal for the way they reported, for the way they'd laundered ethnic cleansing, for the voices they'd erased. And the anger was for my own past — for Black Bottom, for Rosewood, for Tulsa — which I could not help but feel being evoked here."
One of his first encounters with the Israeli state is a soldier stopping him on the street to ask him his religion, a confusing question for an atheist. It becomes clear that if he does not give the correct answer — "Jew," "Christian," anything but "Muslim" — he will not be allowed to pass. "On that street so far from home," he writes, "I suddenly felt that I had traveled through time as much as through space. For as sure as my ancestors were born into a country where none of them was the equal of any white man, Israel was revealing itself to be a country where no Palestinian is ever the equal of any Jewish person anywhere."
In Coates's eyes, the ghost of Jim Crow is everywhere in the territories. In the soldiers who "stand there and steal our time, the sun glinting off their shades like Georgia sheriffs." In the water sequestered for Israeli use — evidence that the state had "advanced beyond the Jim Crow South and segregated not just the pools and fountains but the water itself." In monuments on sites of displacement and informal shrines to mass murder, such as the tomb of Baruch Goldstein, who gunned down 29 Muslims in a mosque in 1994, which recall "monuments to the enslavers" in South Carolina. And in the baleful glare of the omnipresent authority. "The point is to make Palestinians feel the hand of occupation constantly," he writes. And later: "The message was: 'You'd really be better off somewhere else.'"
By the time Coates returned to New York, Palestine was his obsession. Right away, he began sending work and research to group chats of various friends. "You wake up and Ta-Nehisi has overnight written four different walls of text and posted three different e-book screenshots and highlighted things," Ewing told me. "We have probably talked about Palestine pretty much every day since returning." Later that summer, just after he returned to the U.S., Coates introduced himself to the Palestinian American historian Rashid Khalidi at Columbia, who invited Coates and his wife to dinner to discuss his trip. "I think he felt that he had been conned," Khalidi told me. "And I think he felt he had to — I don't think atone is the right word, but make up for what he had mistakenly believed." So Coates began his education in earnest with Khalidi guiding him through the literature in a running dialogue that lasted months. It was a process not dissimilar to his preparation for "The Case for Reparations": Coates leaned on friends, family, and experts, Jews and Arabs and others, to stress-test and expand his ideas. "He's a very public learner," Ewing said.
While The Atlantic has certainly published some dissenting views in these areas, the central pillars of its perspective are unshakable. In November 2023, as Israeli forces were beginning their decimation of Gaza, Yair Rosenberg predicted that a new moral authority in Israel would rise from the rubble of Netanyahu's failures. Amid news of Israel bombarding schools and hospitals, the magazine's April cover story, by Franklin Foer, claimed that the left's sympathetic response to the October 7 attack had augured the end of "a golden age" for Jews in America. In May, in an article quibbling with the U.N.'s estimate of the death toll in Gaza, Graeme Wood wrote, "It is possible to kill children legally, if for example one is being attacked by an enemy who hides behind them." When Hamas murdered six Israeli hostages in late August, Foer wrote a wrenching obituary for one of the victims, Hersh Goldberg-Polin, treatment that is rarely afforded to Palestinians who have been killed in the conflict. And as student protests against the ongoing assault on Palestinian civilians took hold across the U.S., The Atlantic applied a full-court press: The demonstrations were "heartless" (David Frum), "oppressive" (Michael Powell), "threatening" (Judith Shulevitz).
#Ta-Nehisi Coates#Palestine#Apartheid#Colonialism#Occupation#Settler Colonialism#Segregation#New York Magazine#The Message
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I finally finished this documentary-drama series from 2013, and I highly recommend it, if you have any interest in the War of 1812. Commentary from a diverse group of historians representing Canadian and US perspectives (including Indigenous historians) is interspliced with reenactments of events on the western frontier of Upper Canada. They didn't have the biggest budget, but it's as close as you can get to a War of 1812 movie.
The focus of the three-episode series is on the suffering of ordinary people in the region, who wanted nothing to do with the war but found themselves in a war zone. Clockwise from top left, three of the actors in the series are portraying Duncan McArthur, who was a commander of the U.S. Army of the Northwest and later governor of Ohio, Brother Denke of the Moravian religious community, who repeatedly relocated to escape the war, and Andrew Westbrook, "the traitor Westbrook" who supported the invading Americans despite being a descendant of Loyalists in Upper Canada.
I watched the first two episodes thinking that the title referred to growing cultural and ideological differences caused by the War of 1812 pitting neighbor against neighbor, but there was a significant Title Drop moment in the last episode when it was revealed to be a phrase used in a letter by Michigan territory governor Lewis Cass. Cass was advocating for the complete devastation of Upper Canada to create "a desert between us and them" that could not feed or support British troops and their Indigenous allies.
Look—I love my country, but there's just no getting around the fact that the USA is the villain in the War of 1812. We invaded Canada on flimsy pretences for a landgrab and caused incredible devastation to specifically civilian areas (e.g. the Burning of York); it was even worse on the frontier. It also does not reflect well on us that the British had planned for years to exploit the many discontents in the territories of the United States: enslaved people who would eagerly work against their enslavers, and Indigenous people who had been exploited and attacked after multiple violated treaties and military incursions.
Almost needless to say, both of these groups fought for the British in the War of 1812. (Black and Indigenous veterans on the US side were poorly treated, despite their loyalty). The War of 1812 ultimately expanded slavery in North America, and it's directly connected to imperialist ideas of Manifest Destiny that saw the US turn to western expansion and the forced removal of Indigenous residents. The more you examine the beliefs of the War Hawks the worse we look!
Even knowing all this, A Desert Between Us and Them made me reconsider some of the narratives I've read about the War of 1812 in Upper Canada (the part of modern-day Ontario between all of the Great Lakes). I have read several academic articles and books recently that were critical of the Kentucky Militia, but they didn't say anything about their terrorism of Upper Canada! They're a lot less sympathetic in this account.
youtube
(This YouTube channel has many excerpts from A Desert Between Us and Them)
McArthur's raids are part of a more brutal phase in the War of 1812. They really did use Napoleonic era total war strategy, and the towns of Upper Canada's western reaches were depopulated for years. I appreciated how A Desert Between Us and Them explored some of the political intrigue and personal rivalries between all of the militia and community leaders in the Old Northwest/Upper Canada region at the time.
The trailer is worth a watch! (link if embedded video doesn't work).
youtube
#war of 1812#documentary#military history#canadian history#us history#a desert between us and them#the guy playing duncan mcarthur is one thousand times hotter than the real guy#they have a decent sir isaac brock#one hundred fixed typos later#i published this by accident while editing
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