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dee6000 · 3 years

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LoSlavery Is Not OUR "Original Sin" The thick lines show majority of African slaves went to Spain’s (they started trans-Atlantic slave trade) Latin American & Caribbean slave colonies, Muslim and African Countries. Few went to colony that became the US

How many times have you heard that slavery was “America’s original sin”? I’m not quite sure what that means, but I think the idea is that slavery was a uniquely horrible thing that defines the United States and will stain whites forever. It’s one of the few things Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and Barack Obama agree on. There are books about it. Here’s a college course at UC Davis called “Slavery: America’s Original Sin: Part 1."

The fact is, there has been slavery in every period of history, and just about everywhere. The Greeks and Romans had it, the ancient Egyptians had it, it’s all over the Bible, the Chinese and the pre-Columbian Indians had it, the Maoris in New Zealand had it, and the Muslims had it in spades. But I have never, ever heard of slavery being anyone else’s “original sin.”

About the only societies that never had slaves were primitivehunter-gatherers. As soon as people have some kind of formal social organization, they start taking slaves.

You’ve heard about slavery and mass human sacrifices of Central and South American Indians, but North American Indians were enslaving each other long before the white man showed up.

Tlingit and Haida Indians, who lived in the Pacific Northwest, went raiding for slaves as far South as California. About one quarter of the population were slaves, and the children of slaves were slaves. During potlatches, or huge ceremonial feasts, the Tlingit would sometimes burn property and kill slaves, just to show how rich they were. What’s a couple of slaves to a guy who lives in a house like this?

When we bought Alaska from the Russians in 1867, Indians were furious when we told them they had to give up their slaves. The Tlingit carved this image of Abraham Lincoln, the emancipator, to try to shame the government into compensating them for slaves.

What were called the Five Civilized Tribes of the American Southeast happily bought black slaves. In 1860, there were 21,000 Cherokee, and they owned 4,000 slaves. And that was just the Cherokee. Many took their slaves with them when they were forced to move West.

Free blacks in the South owned slaves. The fact of having been slaves didn’t stop them from wanting to be slave masters themselves. In 1840, in South Carolina alone, there were 454 free blacks who owned a total of 2,357 slaves. Only about 20 percent of Southern households had even one slave, but 75 percent of the free-black households in South Carolina owned slaves.

Don’t believe me? It’s all in this book by the expert on the subject, Larry Koger of the University of South Carolina. And he demolishes the idea that most blacks bought slaves only to get family members out of slavery. Like whites, some were kind masters and some were mean, but, for the most part, they owned slaves for exactly the same reasons whites did.

There’s a whole book about this black guy, Andrew Durnford.

He had a plantation of 672 acres along the Mississippi in Louisiana, and close to 100 slaves. Another black slave owner in Louisiana, P.C. Richards, owned 152 slaves. Black slaveowners avidly supported the Confederacy. There are no accurate estimates of the number of slaves held by free blacks at the time of the Civil War, but they would have been tens of thousands.

If slavery is somebody’s Original Sin, it’s sure not ours. Take a look at this map of the slave trade, beginning in 1500.

[Source: SlaveVoyages.com, click to enlarge]

The thicknesses of the lines represent numbers of slaves. What became the United States imported just around 400,000 slaves—about 3 percent of all the slaves who crossed the Atlantic. Look at all the slaves who went to Brazil and to the Caribbean Islands.They needed millions because, unlike American slaveowners who raised slave families, they bought grown men and worked them to death. And let us not forget, virtually every slave on this map was caught by blacks or Arabs.

And look at all the slaves who ended up in North Africa and the Middle East.

That’s millions of them going to Muslim countries at exactly the same time slaves were crossing the Atlantic. And Arabs had been taking black slaves out of Africa, across the Sahara, for 900 years before America was even discovered—and a forced march across the desert was a lot worse than crossing the Atlantic. In this article about Africa’s first slavers—the Arabs—historian Paul Lovejoy estimates that over the centuries, Muslims took about 14 million blacks out of Africa [Recalling Africa’s harrowing tale of its first slavers – The Arabs – as UK Slave Trade Abolition is commemorated, March 27, 2018]. That is more than the 12 million who went to the New World.

And you might ask, where are the descendants of all those Middle Eastern slaves? America has millions of slave descendants. Why don’t you see lots of blacks in Saudi Arabia or Syria or Iraq? Arabs castrated black slaves so they wouldn’t have descendants.

Muslims were even more enthusiastic about enslaving white people. Christian Slaves, Muslim Masters, by Prof. Robert C. Davis is the best book on the subject. Remember the Barbary Pirates of North Africa? Between 1530 and 1780 they caught and enslaved more than a million white, European Christians. During the 16th and 17th centuries, Arabs took more white slaves south across the Mediterranean than there were blacks shipped across the Atlantic.

Mostly, Muslim pirates captured European ships and stole their crews. In just three years, from 1606 to 1609, the British navy admitted it had lost 466 British merchant ships to North African pirates [Counting European Slaves on the Barbary Coast Past & Present, August 2001]. Four hundred sixty-six ships in just three years. Arabs took American slaves. Between 1785 and 1793 Algerians captured 13 American ships in the Mediterranean and enslaved the crews. This is a 1804 battle between Arab pirates and the USS Enterprise.

It was only in 1815, after two wars, that the United States was finally free of the Barbary pirates.

Muslim pirates also organized huge, amphibious slave-catching assaults that practically depopulated the Italian coast. In 1544, Algerian raiders took 7,000 slaves in the Bay of Naples in a single raid. This drove the price of slaves so low it was said you could “swap a Christian for an onion.”

After a 1566 raid on Granada in Spain netted 4,000 men women, and children, it was said to be “raining Christians in Algiers.” Women were easier to catch than men, and were prized as sex slaves, so some coastal areas lost their entire child-bearing populations. One raid as far away as Iceland brought back 400 white slaves.

Prof. Davis notes that the trade in black Africans was strictly business, but Muslims had a jihad-like enthusiasm for stealing Christians. It was revenge for the Crusades and for the reconquest of Spain from the Arabs in 1492. When Muslim corsairs raided Europe, they made a point of desecrating churches and stealing church bells. The metal was valuable but stealing church bells silenced the voice of Christianity.

It was a tradition to parade newly captured Europeans through the streets so people could jeer at them, while children threw garbage at them. At the slave market, both men and women were stripped naked to evaluate their sexual value. In the North African capitals—Tunis, Algiers, Tripoli—there was a big demand for homosexual sex-slaves. Other Europeans were worked to death on farms or building projects.

Prof. Davis writes that unlike in North America, there were no limits on cruelty: “There was no countervailing force to protect the slave from his master’s violence: no local anti-cruelty laws, no benign public opinion, and rarely any effective pressure from foreign states.” Slaves were not just property, they were infidels, and deserved whatever suffering a master meted out.

For a man, there was a fate even worse than being a sex slave. Hundreds of thousands became galley slaves, often on slave-catching pirate ships. They were chained to their oars 24 hours a day, and could move only to the hole where the oar went through the hull—so they could relieve themselves. If the men were rowing, they fouled themselves. Galley slaves lived in a horrible stench, ate rotten food, were whipped by slave drivers and tormented by rats and lice. They could not lie down and had to sleep at their oars. Many never left their ships, even in port. Their job was to row until they died, and to be tossed overboard at the first sign of weakness.

Muslims have taken slaves for as long as there have been Muslims, which is about 1,400 years.

Mohammed himself was an enthusiastic slave trader. Muslims still take black slaves. As this article points out, Libya still has slave markets, Mauritanian Arabs take black slaves, and there is still slavery in Niger, Mali, Chad and Sudan[Libya’s slave markets are a reminder that the exploitation of Africans never went away, by Martin Plaut, New Statesman, February 21, 2018].

And, of course, it was white people who abolished slavery, both in their own countries and, except for a few stubborn holdouts, the whole world. Africans, just like the Tlingit Indians, screamed about all the wealth we made them give up.

But slavery’s still our “original sin.” As Time magazine wrote just this month about slavery “Europeans and their colonial “descendants” in the United States engineered the most complete and enduring dehumanization of a people in history."[Facing America's History of Racism Requires Facing the Origins of 'Race' as a Concept, by Andrew Curran, July 10, 2020]

What a small minority of Americans did for 246 years—and in a relatively mild form—is worse than anything that was ever done anywhere by anyone.

That, ladies and gentlemen, is the power of white privilege. I hope you are enjoying it. Watch this video:

youtube

#Youtube

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sunbeamstarship · 4 years

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Trek posting once more

this edition is a refined version of my spirk analysis for the song Run To You by Pentatonix that I shared with @one-trash-man a while ago

MAJOR spoilers for Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan and Star Trek III: The Search for Spock

Also I’m not analyzing the chorus b/c as emotionally charged as it is it’s also very simple and literal so I don’t feel the need to give any interpretation

Cool ok so this song starts wrecking me immediately with:

"A light in the room

It was you who was standing there

Tried, it was true

As your glance met my stare

But your heart drifted off

Like the land split by sea

I tried to go, to follow

To kneel down at your feet"

Those lyrics conjure such vivid images of Spock’s death in WoK - the first four are Jim coming down into engineering and seeing Spock collapsed in the reactor chamber, and Jim knows he’s dying, his “heart is [drifting] off” so he tries to save him by following him into the chamber, and when he’s stopped from doing that he ends up kneeling at Spock’s side while he dies. The next verse is:

"I've been settling scores

I've been fighting so long

But I've lost your war

And our kingdom is gone

How shall I win back your heart

Which was mine? I have broken bones

And tattered clothes

I've run out of time"

This verse is like a transition between WoK and SFS because the whole of WoK is Jim "settling scores" with Khan, a man he first faced off with decades ago (”fighting so long”), and in SFS he’s battling Klingons, whose antagonism he’s been dealing with fairly consistently since TOS, and this commander’s reason for attacking him is just his reputation as someone who has defeated Klingon crews/commanders/etc. many times and is a major public figure in the Federation, which is opposed to the Klingon empire. So once again he’s settling scores with old enemies (although here the score being settled is more of the Klingon commander’s grudge against Kirk and it’s not as much Kirk’s feelings towards these Klingons specifically, because he’s too distracted with his husband to be actively engaging in this particular fight). "I’ve lost your war” is both Jim not being able to save Spock from dying and him having to push through so many obstacles to get to him and maybe not getting his body back at all, because the outlook around this point in the movie is very bleak as to reclaiming Spock’s body, considering the firefight and rapidly decaying planet. “Our kingdom is gone” is the Enterprise going down in flames (rip), the destruction of the ship where Jim and Spock met, lived, and commanded together for so many years. Then, Jim’s attempt to find Spock on the Genesis planet, is him trying to "win back [his] heart", but that doubles as an expression of how he feels when Spock's body is there without his katra, because his heart has yet to be returned to him. The end of this verse is more literal because by the last quarter of the movie he's injured and his clothes are ripped and he's "run out of time" because the planet is about to tear itself apart and then he’ll have failed to save Spock a second time. So now we’re at the last verse:

"Oh, I will break down the gates of heaven

A thousand angels stand waiting for me

Oh, take my heart and I'll lay down my weapons

Break my shackles to set me free"

So here he’s confronting all the Klingons in the last scene on the Genesis planet to get to Spock, and take his body to Vulcan. "Break[ing] down the gates of heaven" is a summary of this entire ordeal he’s gone through to retrieve Spock’s body, going somewhere he’s not meant to be to bring Spock back with him, both his body from its physical resting place and his mind from whatever semi-beyond realm it’s in while McCoy has it. Finally, he gets to Spock, and the Klingon crew is there and outmatches them significantly - “a thousand angels stand waiting” upon his arrival at his goal of bringing his loved one back from the other side. The Klingons are in control here both because of their firepower and because of their ship, which is the only way for any of them, including Spock, to get off of this planet before it explodes. They have control over the fate of Jim’s heart. That advantage leads Jim & the crew to literally lay down their weapons even in this situation where they’re practically their only protection. After everyone but the two commanders have beamed up Jim engages in his final fight with the Klingon captain, which he ends by kicking the Klingon commander until he lets go of Jim’s ankle and falls to his death - Jim ends the fight by breaking a shackle. That marks the end of every significant danger standing between Jim and Spock, setting him free to run to Spock and beam them up to the Klingon ship (which, unrelated, every time I watch that movie the fact that the ONLY way they get out is that Kirk paid enough attention and took the time to remember how to ask for a beam up in Klingon even when he’s distraught and facing doom in multiple different ways gives me such an immense amount of both stress and admiration). This isn’t a comprehensive explanation of every way you could apply this song to these two movies or K/S in general but this is the most cohesive & chronological interpretation I’ve come up with through all my Extensive consideration of how well this song applies itself to K/S angst. Also the parallels of SFS to the story of Orpheus and Eurydice are A Lot but that’s a different post.

TL;DR: Run To You by Pentatonix parallels ridiculously well to Jim’s desperate pursuit of Spock and his soul through WoK and SFS and it makes me Feel things

#star trek #star trek tos #spirk #spock #james t kirk #jim kirk #search for spock #wrath of khan #k/s #god when i talk i really Talk huh #thank god for readmores #really wish i could draw faster and simpler so i could at least like storyboard the music video i have in my head for this #wanna...make it #my playlist for jim really has a lot of angst #he keeps losing spock :(#poor man #trek talk

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adhd-worlds · 5 years

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Anglo-Saxon Futhorc

The Anglo-Saxon Futhorc wasn’t commonly used to be written down but dates between the 5th (500′s) to the 11th century (1000′s), during the time of the Elder Futhark. It’s believed that the Anglo-Saxons created more runes for the different phonetics in Old English, resulting in 33 runes, while other places such as Iceland had condensed it into to 18 runes (Younger Futhark). Not much is known about Anglo-Saxon Runes as they weren’t commonly used so it’s hard to say how they were used for magic. However, the first 24 runes are borrowed from Elder Futhark so they can be used if you so wish.

Below are the list of runes and their meanings. If you find an issue with the information provided, please inbox me with the correction. Don’t reblog/comment with the correction, I won’t see it and therefore I won’t update it with the correction. Thank you.

ᚠ - Feoh - Cattle - f: Cattle. Material possessions. A time to share. Working hard to produce great wealth. Generosity and riches.

ᚢ - Ur - Aurochs u: Ox. Strength. Energy. Proving your abilities. Adventure and enterprise.

ᚦ - Th - Thorn - þ: Frost Giants. Thor’s protective power. Balancing dangerous opposites. Chaos. Harmful obsessions. Gain at a cost. Impending disruption alongside a balancing force. Discipline. Knowledge. Make careful and thoughtful decisions to look after your well-being.

ᚩ - Ós - Mouth/God - o: From Ansuz, the ancestral god, Odin. Communication. A revealing message or insight. The power of words and naming. Good news and tidings are received from a friend. Justice. Truth

ᚱ - Rad - Journey - r: Thor’s chariot. Travel. Change. A journey undertaken. An emotional and physical rite of passage.

ᚳ - Cen - Torch - c: Wisdom. Creativity. Fiery passion and romance. Carnal knowledge.

ᚷ - Gyfu - Gift - g: A very good omen. A new love. The reception of gifts. Marriage. Freedom.

ᚹ - Wynn - Joy - w: Happiness and fulfilment. Success at the end of a long journey.

ᚻ - Hæg - Hail - h: Hail. Loss. Destruction. A disruption to plans. Drastic change. Life lessons. An unavoidable but temporary setback

ᚾ - Nyd - Need - n: Need and responsibility. Pragmatism and practically. Poverty. Hardship. Events will progress at their own rate. Developments cannot be forced. Change will happen naturally.

ᛁ - Ice - i: Patience. Reflection. Freezing lake. Hibernation for the winter. Putting projects on hold. Resting.

ᛄ - Jara - Year - j: Yearly harvest. Effort with rewards. Predictable change. The cycle of life. Hard work through the season. Wealth and riches at the end.

ᛇ - Eoah - Yew Tree - ɨ: The tree of life defeating all else. Honesty and reliability. Trustworthiness. Driving force. Rising sap. Green energy.

ᛈ - Peorð - The Game - p: A secret. The fickleness of fate. Rebirth. Feminine mysteries and fertility. Magic. Best not to know the answer to your question. A danger sign. Act wisely and succeed.

ᛉ - Eolh - Elk Sedge - x: Protection. Support. A friend who will protect or assist.

ᛋ - Sigel - Sun - s: Health. Energy and competition. Growth. Success. Power. Rewards, luck and new life.

ᛏ - Tir - Creator - t: The creator. Strength. Warrior. Duty. Victory and courage. Strength and fortitude will overcome a difficult situation.

ᛒ - Beorc - Birch Tree - b: Fertility. New Beginnings. Birth. Spring and new life. A fresh start. A positive change.

ᛖ - Eoh - Horses - e: Travel and movement. Swiftness. Migration to new grounds. Power. Teamwork. An ideal partnership.

ᛗ - Mann - Man - m: Self, family, Relationships. Sharing problems with friends and family. Caring and helping through troubles. Kindness.

ᛚ - Lagu - Water - l: Emotions. Revelation. Counsel. Changing of moods. Romance and companionship. The fickleness of and unpredictability of nature.

ᛝ - Ing - Fertility - ŋ: New birth. Fruitfulness. Male fertility. Sex. Balance. Productivity. Positive change. The end of a barren period. The arrival of success and contentment.

ᛟ - Éðel - Home - œ: The home and family duties. Fairness. Inheritance. Legacy. Using power wisely. Help and be helped in return.

ᛞ - Dæg - day - d: New beginnings and positive changes. Awakenings and awareness. Happiness and success. Light and energy. The start of new projects. Looking forward.

The five runes are unique to the Anglo-Saxon and Anglo-Frisian systems.

ᚪ - Ác - Oak Tree - a: From Ansuz, the ancestral god Odin. Strength. Sturdiness. Intellectual. Deep roots. The great power of strong, continuous growth.

ᚫ - Æsc - Ash Tree - æ: From Ansuz, the ancestral god, Odin. Growing tall. Strength with flexibility. Aiming high. Growth of the soul. Feeding the spiritual nature. Poetry. Arts. Guardian of children. Protection. Healing.

ᚣ - Yr - Yew Bow - y: Mastery. Combination of all skill and knowledge. The tool of a knight. Arrow to target. Lost things found. Fruits of labour. Transformation . Turning point.

ᛡ - Ior - Eel - io: Eel. Serpent. An amphibious river fish that lives in water and eats on land. Dual nature. Living between two worlds. Duplicity. Hardships.

ᛠ - Ear - Earth - ea: Earth. Grave. Life and Death. The unavoidable end to all things. Decay. Leave the past behind. Time to look forward to the future.

The following four runes are not present in more southerly saxon realms in England or the Anglo-Frisian/continental variants of the rune row. They can loosely correspond with the four elements of Wicca and the four suits of the Tarot.

ᛢ - Cweorð - Fire-Twirl/Sword - kw: Flame. Destruction and transformation. Liberation of the spirit through fire. Ritual cleansing. The sacredness of the hearth and home. Phoenix rising from the ashes.

ᛤᛣ - Calc - Cup/Chalice - k: The natural ending or conclusion of a process. Death. Offerings. Honouring the gods. Femininity. Intuition. Spiritual insight. Magic

ᛥ - Stan - Stone - st: Stone. An obstruction. A blocked path. The link between the spiritual and the earthly. Breaking down walls. Obstructing and turning back opposition.

ᚸ - Gar - Spear (Odin’s Spear Gungnir) - ḡ: Odin’s spear, Gungnir. The centre point. Always hitting the target. Reliable success. Great power and skill. Mastery and balance. The hunt. Battle and victory

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trekfm · 5 years

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102: Set Phasers to Fun!

Star Trek: Dark Remnant with Matthew Carl Earl. Star Trek: Dark Remnant puts you in control of the U.S.S. Galileo, Starfleet’s latest and most advanced stellar research vessel, accompanying the U.S.S. Enterprise on a routine mission to evacuate a stellar observatory located in the middle of the Klingon Neutral Zone and learn more about the decaying neutron star it orbits. When the neutron star collapses prematurely it leaves the Enterprise incapacitated. It’s now up to YOU to protect her from stellar debris – and the unwelcome arrival of a Klingon ship out for vengeance.

With several completely different endings combined with other elements of variability, including subtle differences in gameplay, randomized player characters, and dialogue that responds real-time to your performance, Star Trek: Dark Remnant is never the same experience twice. You might even observe the fate of a poor redshirt ensign!

In this episode of Melodic Treks, host Brandon-Shea Mutala is joined by Matthew Carl Earl, composer for Star Trek: Dark Remnant to discuss the new VR experience. We also discuss working in the video game world, Giacchino's inspiring music, the sound design, and some of Matthew's other composing works.

Chapters Intro (00:00:00) Welcome to Melodic Treks (00:01:00) Matthew, Dave, and Buster (00:01:48) Dave and Buster's Commercial (00:04:56) Finding Matthew (00:17:13) "Summer 2018 Login" from Kingdom Craft (00:19:35) "Flip the World" Arena of Valor (00:21:18) Closing (00:26:43) Host Brandon-Shea Mutala Guest Matthew Carl Earl Production Brandon-Shea Mutala (Editor and Producer) C Bryan Jones (Executive Producer) Matthew Rushing (Executive Producer) Ken Tripp (Executive Producer) Norman C. Lao (Associate Producer) Tony Robinson (Associate Producer) Stephen Boyd (Associate Producer) Bobby Tucker (Associate Producer) Chris Tribuzio (Associate Producer) Richard Marquez (Production Manager) Tony Robinson (Show Art) Brandon-Shea Mutala (Patreon Manager)

New podcast episode:

#Star Trek #Music #Podcast #Melodic Treks #Trekfm

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auroradicit · 2 years

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@traiilblazer said: bls and thank you

Can’t hear you over the sound of being all abt that bass,,,

#i need a crack tag #c: fate-protected (Enterprise)#traiilblazer

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aion-rsa · 3 years

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How Star Trek: The Next Generation’s Killing of Tasha Yar Became an Awkward Mistake

https://ift.tt/32BBsEk

“[I] died a senseless death in the other timeline. I didn’t like the sound of that, Captain. I’ve always known the risks that come with a Starfleet uniform. If I am to die in one, I’d like my death to count for something.”

Denise Crosby’s Lt. Tasha Yar, Star Trek: The Next Generation’s inaugural chief of security, managed—due to some alternate timeline trickery—to take that legendary meta-minded dig at her own death from two years earlier in the Season 1 episode, “Skin of Evil.” With that episode having originally aired on April 25, 1988, the anniversary is a good occasion to look back on the controversial behind-the-scenes circumstances that resulted in poor Tasha’s unspectacular, abrupt, red-shirt-like fatal encounter with an alien tar monster on a cheap-looking set.

“Skin of Evil” was the 22nd episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation’s inauspicious inaugural season—just three episodes away from the season finale. Consequently, with audiences at this point having stuck with the show for seven months since its September 26 premiere, the death of a main cast member certainly felt like a stakes-redefining kick against procedural complacency. However, those who had been following industry trades, and read the then-fresh, spoiler-teasing cover story exposé in Starlog magazine, titled “The Security Chief Who Got Away,” pretty much already knew that Crosby was on the outs with the series. Thus, the prevalent question going into Season 1’s final few episodes was not if Tasha Yar was leaving the Enterprise D, but how. Well, said how would prove to be one of the most controversial, lamentable moments in Star Trek history.

While Crosby denied the growing rumors of her impending exit during contemporaneous interviews published before “Skin of Evil” aired, she had indeed quit the series, mostly due to the lack of character development given to Tasha Yar. While she was given a backstory of a rough upbringing on the lawless abandoned Earth colony, Turkana IV, Yar’s only real moment in the spotlight (besides her famous seduction of android Data in “The Naked Now” while under alien viral influence,) had been Episode 3, “Code of Honor,” in which she became the amorous focus of an authoritarian alien leader, and would be forced to participate in a campy fight to the death with the leader’s outraged first wife. Thus, dealing with the show’s notoriously demanding schedule, and faced with the believed prospect of spending years soullessly saying “hailing frequencies open,” Crosby put in a request to be released from her contract, which creator Gene Roddenberry granted.

Unfortunately for Tasha Yar, Roddenberry’s acquiescence would come with a shocking caveat: a sudden and underwhelming onscreen death. “Skin of Evil,” directed by Joseph Scanlan, written by Joseph Stefano and Hannah Louise Shearer, set things up with a rescue mission after an Enterprise shuttlecraft containing Counselor Deanna Troi and pilot Lt. Ben Prieto crashed on the barren planet, Vagra II. Accordingly, Yar joins an away team consisting of Cmdr. William Riker, Lt. Cmdr. Data, Dr. Beverly Crusher to the planet surface, on which they encounter a powerful, tar-like creature that calls itself Armus. There, Yar quickly loses patience as the creature continues to block their rescue effort, and tries to move past it, resulting in an attack that sends her flying backwards, leaving her tar-marked face lifeless on the ground as the essence drains from her body; a condition even beyond the help of subsequent emergency efforts back on the Enterprise. Thus, Yar’s arc, for what it was, had come to an anti-climactic conclusion; a fate attributed to the dangerous nature of Starfleet service, especially for someone in security. However, said fate allegedly wasn’t inspired by any artful motivations.

Why Star Trek Needs More Characters Like Captain Lorca

By Lacy Baugher

Q’s Return on Star Trek: Picard Season 2 will Follow “Significant Trauma”

By Joseph Baxter

So, why did Yar’s exit down this way? Crosby recounted in 1993 behind-the-scenes book, Trek: The Next Generation Crew Book that “Gene [Roddenberry] really felt that the strongest way to go would be to have me killed. That would be so shocking and dramatic that he wanted to go with that.” However, another anecdote-touting tome, 1992’s Trek: The Unauthorized Behind-The-Scenes Story of The Next Generation, alleges that the “Skin of Evil” script—as with other Season 1 episodes—was secretly tweaked and/or rewritten by Roddenberry’s lawyer, Leonard Maizlish, who held an ambiguously-defined full-time staff position on the series. The purported rewrite, which would have been illegal in the Writer’s Guild, was believed to have been designed to deny any dramatic or sentimental value to Crosby’s character. With Roddenberry having recently lost creative control of the Star Trek movie franchise from Paramount Pictures, Maizlish may have been there to protect his bottom line, in this case ensuring that a dead-and-forgotten Tasha would leave no incentive for a potentially-costly new contract for Crosby down the line.

Nevertheless, “Skin of Evil” concluded with an emotional sendoff for Yar, with a memorial service—consisting of only the main cast member characters—set on the holodeck, where the late security chief posthumously delivers well wishes to her colleagues, notably a weeping, possibly guilt-ridden rescuee, Troi (actress Marina Sirtis was reacting to Crosby’s set presence off-camera). Yet, Crosby still had to endure the show’s apparent power plays, even after said memorial, since the show’s out-of-sequence production schedule resulted in her having to shoot one last appearance for her death episode’s immediate predecessor, Episode 21, “Symbiosis,” which also provided another famous Tasha Yar moment, in which she delivers a ham-fisted, Just-Say-No-era anti-drug speech to Wesley Crusher when addressing the episode’s alien drug pushers. It’s a bit of trivia that Crosby famously used in 2019 in a now-famous Twitter dunk on controversial executive producer Rick Berman.

Oh friend, my final scene on @StarTrek was not in SKIN OF EVIL but SYMBIOSIS which was filmed out of order. You came to the set to thank me and brought a cake, then ceremoniously ripped off my Communicator badge saying “you won’t be needing this anymore.” Don’t remember?

— Denise Crosby (@TheDeniseCrosby) February 4, 2019

While Crosby’s post-Star Trek aspirations wouldn’t quite pan out the way she had likely envisioned, save for a co-starring role in 1989 movie Pet Sematary, (she’s recently banked an impressive amount of TV appearances, notably on shows like The Walking Dead and Ray Donovan,) her apparent status as persona non grata on the Enterprise wouldn’t last long, and she would make a monumental return as Tasha in 1990 Season 3 episode “Yesterday’s Enterprise,” in which a temporal anomaly alters the timeline of the Enterprise D, creating a reality in which the Enterprise D is fighting a war with the Klingon Empire, and an anachronistic Season 3-era Yar is very much alive. Pertinent to the episode’s time-bending meeting with predecessor vessel the Enterprise C, Yar—after learning of her main timeline death from Guinan—would transfer to the embattled historical ship (after the earlier-quoted speech,) to ensure that it fulfills a sacrificial destiny to prevent a war that wasn’t supposed to take place, finally giving meaning to her death.

“Yesterday’s Enterprise” was so well-received that it facilitated more Yar-adjacent material, first with the 1990 Season 4 episode, “Legacy,” in which the Enterprise crew go to Tasha’s home, Turkana IV, and become embroiled in a scheme concocted by her bitter estranged sister, Ishara (Beth Toussaint). However, a prominent Crosby comeback would dominate Seasons 4-5’s two-part cliffhanger storyline, “Redemption,” when she played Commander Sela, the daughter of the “Yesterday’s Enterprise” alt-timeline Tasha Yar and a Romulan general to whom she was forced to become a concubine after the Enterprise C’s war-preventing act. In a twist of fate, Crosby, once an underutilized outcast crew member, had been positioned to play one the show’s most memorable villains, since Sela is a ruthless, unwaveringly loyal servant of the bellicose Romulan Empire, and displays her own heartlessness when revealing that her mother, alt-Tasha, was killed while trying to escape with her as a child. Additionally, Crosby reprised the role of prime-Tasha in Picard’s Q-conjured pilot-era flashbacks of 1994 two-part series finale “All Good Things.”

Paramount Television

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Historically, it seems clear that a series of myopic mistakes rendered Denise Crosby’s Star Trek journey more circuitous than necessary. However, the result was a character arc that stands the test of time. Plus, not for nothing, the fantastical nature of current spinoff series Star Trek: Picard could easily facilitate a contemporary Crosby comeback—either as Commander Sela (who eventually became a Romulan empress in the non-canon story of video game Star Trek Online,) or even as alt-Tasha, whose alleged death was never confirmed onscreen. To put it in the parlance of the late security chief, such a comeback would be a jewel for fans.

The post How Star Trek: The Next Generation’s Killing of Tasha Yar Became an Awkward Mistake appeared first on Den of Geek.

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tipsycad147 · 5 years

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The Runes

FEHU (Feoh/Fe/Fa): cattle Phonetic equivalent: F

DIVINATORY MEANINGS:

Prosperity, money, wealth, concern with physical and financial needs, goals, promotion, self-esteem, centeredness, karma

MAGICAL USES:

For money, business, promotion, finding a job, achieving a goal, starting new enterprises

ASSOCIATED MYTHS & DEITIES:

Freyr, Brisingamen, Gullveig, Dwarfs, Sigurd & the Otter's Gold

ANALYSIS:

Fehu is both the day-to-day reality of our lives and the catalyst that awakens us to what lies beyond. It is whatever we think we are seeking, which frequently bears no resemblance to what we will eventually find. It is also our home, for after all our wanderings we will still need to attend to our physical needs and ground ourselves in the simple pleasures of home, family, and good work. Oz might be a fun place to visit, but after a while all you really want to do is go back to Kansas.

Fehu reminds us that we must be secure in our physical situation before embarking upon any spiritual journey. We all must begin with the mundane reality of our lives, although many people never get beyond this. In many ways, we have become as domesticated as the cattle, living our day to day existence without wanting or even being aware of anything more being possible. The first step in breaking away from this situation is to catch a glimpse of what is possible, without dwelling on what security we may lose to attain it.

URUZ (Ur): aurochs Phonetic equivalent: U

DIVINATORY MEANINGS:

Energy, passion, vitality, instinct, wildness, sexuality, fertility, the unconscious, primitive mind, irrationality, shamanic experience, rite of passage

MAGICAL USES:

To strengthen the will, increase sexual potency and energy; for hunting

ASSOCIATED MYTHS & DEITIES:

Ullr, Loki, Odin (as shaman)

ANALYSIS:

The aurochs was a species of wild ox, similar to a longhorn bull, that was once found all over Europe, but which became extinct sometime in the 17th Century. They were said to be

slightly smaller than elephants, and had horns as long as six feet, which were highly prized by the Germanic as drinking horns. This may or may not have been an exaggeration. Paintings of aurochs have been found in Neolithic caves, and it is believed that the aurochs hunt had some significance as a rite of passage for a boy entering manhood. The aurochs is the epitome of the wild animal, as opposed to the domesticated cattle represented by fehu.

Uruz is the rune of the God of the sacred hunt and his shaman/priest. Following the kind of mundane, day to day survival represented by fehu, it is the first recognition by mankind of the divine in nature, and his first attempt to control it through the use of sympathetic magic. It also represents an awareness of death and our own mortality, which may well be the only thing which truly distinguishes us from other animals. The energy of this rune is raw, powerful, and distinctly masculine, in the sense that it is pure, elemental fire. The boy who has killed the aurochs has just entered manhood, and has therefore been initiated into the first level of the mysteries - the awareness that the source of life is death.

THURISAZ (Thorn): giant Phonetic equivalent: TH (as in 'thing')

DIVINATORY MEANINGS:

Hardship, painful event, discipline, knowledge, introspection, focus

MAGICAL USES:

Aid in study and meditation, self-discipline, clearing out a bad situation

ASSOCIATED MYTHS & DEITIES:

The Frost Giants, Loki

ANALYSIS:

Thurisaz is the first of the 'obstacle' runes. These obstacles are not necessarily destructive things, but are placed in our path to strengthen and teach us. After all, you can't have a mythic hero without dragons to slay or giants to fight!

The lesson of this rune is 'to learn you must suffer', meaning not only literal suffering, but also in the biblical sense of 'allowing' - allowing one's destiny to unfold as it should, and allowing one's self to experience all that life offers us. What may at first appear to be a negative, destructive event, may well turn out to contain an important lesson. The Giants may seem to be evil and destructive to the Aesir, but they bring about change, and eventually clear the way for a new age.

ANSUZ (As/Ansur/Os) : Odin Phonetic equivalent: A (as in 'fall')

DIVINATORY MEANINGS:

Authority figure, leader, mind & body balance, justice, shaman, clairvoyant

MAGICAL USES:

For wise decisions, success, leadership; to help in divination and magic

ASSOCIATED MYTHS & DEITIES:

Odin

ANALYSIS:

This rune represents the instinctive, primal energy of uruz tempered with the discipline and experience of thurisaz. These elements are combined in the personage of Odin, who exhibits the characteristics of both chieftain and shaman - a god of wisdom as well as war. Odin is also a shaman, travelling between the worlds on his eight-legged horse, Sleipnir.

Ansuz is a balanced rune. As with fehu, many people choose to remain at this point in their journey. It represents power, both secular and magical, and this power can be quite seductive. Odin has learned the lessons of the first three runes, thus gaining the wisdom to rule wisely, but this is really only another beginning. He has only gained temporal power, and has only a few of the tools he will need to perfect himself spiritually. There is a certain lack of compassion and perspective in this rune. Odin sits high above his world, looking down and making decisions, but he doesn't yet have the capacity to really care about or understand his people or himself. He still needs that emotional connection to become a truly great leader

RAIDO (Rad/Reidh/Raidho): journey Phonetic equivalent: R

DIVINATORY MEANINGS:

Journey, pilgrimage, change, destiny, quest, progress, life lessons

MAGICAL USES:

Protection for travelers, to ease or bring about change, to reconnect

ASSOCIATED MYTHS & DEITIES:

The Norns, Sigurd's journey

ANALYSIS:

Raido represents the path of a person's life and how it intersects and interacts with other paths. In Norse mythology, these paths are seen as threads of fate, and are regulated by the Norns. The Norns are three sisters who live near the first root of Yggdrasil, which they tend with the water from the well of Wyrd. They also spin the fates of Gods and men, which is important when understanding the mechanism of runic divination and magic.

The complex network of relationships formed by these threads of fate can be thought of as a web. Every chance encounter forms another connection in the web, and by tugging on one thread you affect everything else in the system. Most people do this completely unconsciously, but by becoming aware of the pattern of the threads surrounding you, it becomes possible to recognize and follow up on the kind of catalytic events that seemed to happen to us randomly back at fehu. In this way, we can find our way more easily along the path of our own journey, thus deriving the greatest benefit from its lessons. Otherwise we tend to get distracted and end up on detours and dead ends.

Raido reminds us that, although it may seem that we have accomplished our goals at ansuz, life and change continue and we must always go on. We will eventually end up where we began, but on a higher level and with a better perspective. The journey never really ends.

KENAZ (Ken/Kano): torch Phonetic equivalent: C (as in 'candle')

DIVINATORY MEANINGS:

Wisdom, insight, solution to a problem, creativity, inspiration, enlightenment

MAGICAL USES:

For creative inspiration, aid in study, fertility, dispelling anxiety and fear

ASSOCIATED MYTHS & DEITIES:

Mimir, the Dwarfs, Muspellheim

ANALYSIS:

In modern usage, the Scottish 'ken' means to know or understand, and this is the sense in which the rune should interpreted. Today, light, inspiration and knowledge are often associated, as in 'gaining enlightenment' and 'shedding light on the problem', and even in the image of a light bulb going on over someone's head when they get an idea. To bring light is to make the invisible visible.

Unlike the wisdom gained at thurisaz, kenaz only allows us to take bits and pieces of this knowledge away with us as we need it, usually at the discretion of the Gods. This knowledge will generally come in the form of a sudden inspiration, and we will be able to see clearly the answer that was once hidden from us. This form of wisdom is more closely associated with the right half of the brain than the left, since it does not come through conscious effort but rather through passively opening one's self to it. Thus, a more feminine element is added to our journeyer's experience.

The act of bringing light into the darkness is also a creative one. Again consider the image of the person carrying a torch, representing the masculine elements of fire and air, entering the cave and penetrating the feminine realm of earth and water. This joining of masculine and feminine elements results in the creation of new ideas. In physical terms, this can be correlated to the application of fire to mould and shape matter - the art of the smith.

GEBO (Gyfu): gift Phonetic equivalent: G (as in 'girl')

DIVINATORY MEANINGS:

Gift, offering, relationship, love, marriage, partnership, generosity, unexpected good fortune

MAGICAL USES:

To find or strengthen a relationship, for fertility, to mark a gift or offering, to bring luck

ASSOCIATED MYTHS & DEITIES:

Sigurd & Brunhild: Aesir & Vanir treaty

ANALYSIS:

Gebo is a rune of connection, particularly the connections between people. Up until now, our journey has been a solitary one. This rune represents those places where our path intersects with others, and allows us to begin to form conscious relationships. Such relationships are strengthened and sanctified by the exchange of gifts.

The use of the gift as a symbol of an oath or a bond is an ancient one. When a lord wanted to ensure the loyalty of one of his subjects, he would give that person a gift. The gift would create a debt on the part of the person receiving it, and this debt would ensure his readiness to serve his lord. Similarly, a gift given between lovers, especially that of the ring, symbolizes the bond between them. Originally, only the man gave the ring in a marriage for much the same reason as the lord giving gifts to his vassals, but today the arrangement is usually more equitable. Gifts or offerings given to the Gods often carry the same meaning, representing the giver's love for or loyalty to their Gods. The giving of a gift implies the acceptance of a debt with the understanding that the debt will not be repaid

WUNJO (Wyn/Wynn) : glory Phonetic equivalent: W

DIVINATORY MEANINGS:

Success, recognition of achievements, reward, joy, bliss, achievement of goals, contentment

MAGICAL USES:

For success in any endeavor, to motivate, to complete a task.

ASSOCIATED MYTHS & DEITIES:

Baldr, Asgard

ANALYSIS:

Wunjo is the last rune of the first aett, and thus represents both the end of one cycle and preparation for the next. It is a very positive, stable rune, and is another place where people tend to get stalled along their journey. Christian poets related it to heaven, but in fact it more closely resembles the Pagan Valhalla, since this particular paradise is not a permanent one.

Like the wealth of fehu, the glory of wunjo is only an illusion. We have achieved success on one level only, and there are many more lessons to be learned. It is, however, a welcome respite which allows us to rest, re-charge our batteries and prepare ourselves for the rest of the journey. It also gives us some perspective, allowing us to look back and reflect on the road thus far. Wunjo gives us a glimpse of what is possible, but if we try too soon to reach out and grab it, like the Grail it will disappear between our fingers.

HAGALAZ (Haga/Haegl/Hagall : hail Phonetic equivalent: H

DIVINATORY MEANINGS:

Sudden loss, ordeal, destruction, disaster, clearance, testing, karmic lesson, drastic change.

MAGICAL USES:

Removing unwanted influences, breaking destructive patterns

ASSOCIATED MYTHS & DEITIES:

Ragnarok, Loki, Frost Giants

ANALYSIS:

The idea of the destruction of the old being necessary to the growth of the new, as contained in the Norse myth of Ragnarok, is essential to our understanding of this rune. Interestingly enough, hagalaz lies between kenaz (fire) and isa (ice), reminding us of the Norse creation myth and the creative potential that lies between these two opposites, even though their meeting may seem at first to be destructive. Like the Tower in the Tarot, hagalaz is only a negative rune if we choose to view it in that way, and refuse to learn its lessons. Appearing as it does at the beginning of the second aett, it marks both a beginning and an end, and knocks us out of the safety and complacency of wunjo. It represents what a friend of mine used to refer to as the 'flying ladle syndrome' - that whenever things appear to be going too well, you can expect a good, healthy whack in the head from the Fates, just to make sure you're paying attention.

These sorts of 'wake-up calls' from the Gods will happen frequently throughout a person's life, but are often misinterpreted as divine punishment for some imagined wrong when in fact they are merely a way of drawing your attention to a recurrent pattern in your life. Unfortunately, these types of events have a tendency to repeat themselves with greater and greater severity until the lesson is learned and the pattern is broken. For example, someone who needs to break their dependency on a certain type of person will find themselves in relationships with such people over and over again with more and more disastrous results until they recognise the pattern as emanating from them and break it willingly.

NAUTHIZ (Nyd/Naudhr): need, necessity Phonetic equivalent: N

DIVINATORY MEANINGS:

Poverty, hardship, responsibility, discontent, obstacle, frustration

MAGICAL USES:

To represent a need to be filled

ASSOCIATED MYTHS & DEITIES:

Freyr & Gurd, the Otter's Gold

ANALYSIS:

If hagalaz is a flying ladle, then nauthiz is the empty pot. It is a gentle, nudging reminder that all is not as it should be. Life appears to be out of synch, and nothing seems to be going right. No matter how much you have, it is never enough, and there is an ever present desire for something more, something better. On the positive side, this dissatisfaction with the status quo can serve to draw one away from the relative safety of wunjo and motivate towards change.

Nauthiz represents an imbalance between one's desires and one's assets. How you resolve this situation will influence the rest of the journey, but the awareness of the imbalance itself can also be illuminating. It causes you to closely examine and perhaps reassess your values and priorities, and forces you back onto the path of your own happiness. Perhaps mythologist Joseph Campbell said it best when he enjoined us to 'follow our bliss'; in other words, that we will know that we are on the right track spiritually when we are doing those things which make us the most happy and fulfilled. Nauthiz helps us to take the first step on that path by letting us know when we have strayed from it.

ISA (Is/Iss): ice Phonetic equivalent: I (ee as in see)

DIVINATORY MEANINGS:

Inactivity, blockage, stagnation, potential, patience, reflection, withdrawal, rest

MAGICAL USES:

To stop a process; to represent primal form

ASSOCIATED MYTHS & DEITIES:

Auðumla, Nifelheim

ANALYSIS:

In modern symbolism, fire is generally masculine and ice (or earth) is feminine, but it is unknown whether the Norse shared this association. Certainly, ice was a constant factor in their day to day lives. It threatened their crops and their ships almost throughout the year, but it also served as a symbol of creation, from which all life will eventually spring. It says something about the Norse mind that they could recognize the need to have such a seemingly destructive joining of elements in order to create and maintain life. Fire may be warm and pleasant, but it must be balanced by the freezing of winter just as birth must be balanced by death. Even the little death of sleep has been proven to be vital for our mental and physical well-being.

Isa encompasses all of these ideas, but primarily represents a period of rest before activity, and itself forms the material from which life can be created. It is matter, inert by itself, but transformed into the stuff of stars when wedded with energy. It is the immovable form acted upon the irresistible force. In many ways, the Norse predicted Einstein with their version of the creation of the universe, recognizing that everything in their world contained both fire and ice (energy and matter), and that the relationship between the two defined the processes of life itself.

JERA (Ger) : year, harvest Phonetic equivalent: Y (but may be used in place of 'j')

DIVINATORY MEANINGS:

Change, cycle turning, reward, motion, productivity, inevitable development

MAGICAL USES:

To bring change; for fertility and growth

ASSOCIATED MYTHS & DEITIES:

Sif, Thor, Freyr, Granni

ANALYSIS:

In this modern age of central heating and oranges in February, it is difficult to imagine the close ties that people once had with the cycles of the year, particularly in the more Northern climes. The changing seasons affected not only the weather, but also the day to day activities and even the diets of ancient peoples. Constant change was the norm, and the object was to become attuned with those changes, not to fight against them. An ancient farmer (or even some modern ones) wouldn't need to look at a calendar to tell him when to plant, or read a weather forecast to know when the snows were coming. The changing seasons were a part of his blood and bones, and his very existence depended on adapting to change.

Jera follows Isa just as spring follows winter. The frozen stagnancy of ice is broken by the turning of the wheel, and things are once again moving along as they should. In fact, we have now broken out of the entire set 'negative' runes with which we began this aett. This has been accomplished not by fighting to escape the ice or railing against the unfairness of fate, but by learning from those experiences and simply waiting for the inevitable thaw. Jera is the communion wine - the product of the joining of opposites bringing life. Storms may come and go, but the sun is always there and life is generally pretty good. Enjoy it while you can.

EIHWAZ (Eoh): yew Phonetic equivalent: EI

DIVINATORY MEANINGS:

Change, initiation, confrontation of fears, turning point, death, transformation

MAGICAL USES:

To bring about profound change, to ease a life transition

ASSOCIATED MYTHS & DEITIES:

Hel, Yggdrasil

ANALYSIS:

The yew tree has been associated with runes, magic and death in northern and Western Europe since time immemorial. The reasons for this ancient association are numerous, but seem to principally derive from the fact that yews are evergreens which retain their greenery even through the death of winter, and because their red berries are symbolic of the blood of life. The yew is also extremely long-lived, thus effectively 'immortal'. Reverence for the yew dates back to before the times of the Celts, and continues today in Christian tradition. Eihwaz is the thirteenth rune in the futhark, and marks the middle of the alphabet. (It is interesting to note that the Death card in the Tarot is also the thirteenth card.) This rune is the turning point in the runic journey, and represents the transformation phase of the initiatory process. All rites of passage, particularly those marking the transition into adulthood, contain the symbolism of death, the idea being that one's former 'self' has died and given birth to a new persona. Eihwaz is the passage through which we must enter the realm of Hel in order to gain the knowledge and acceptance of our own mortality, as well as those mysteries which can only be learned from the dark Lady of the dead. The process is a truly frightening one, but it is something we all must go through if we are to confront our deepest fears and emerge with the kind of wisdom that cannot be taught but must be experienced. Eihwaz is the gateway to this wisdom, and lies between life (jera) and rebirth (perthro).

PERTH (Peorth/Perthro) : dice-cup or vulva Phonetic equivalent: P

DIVINATORY MEANINGS:

Rebirth, mystery, magic, divination, fertility, sexuality, new beginning, prophecy

MAGICAL USES:

Fertility, easing childbirth, to aid in divination and magic, enhancing psychic abilities

ASSOCIATED MYTHS & DEITIES:

Freya, Angrbode

ANALYSIS:

The actual interpretation of perth has been the subject of much controversy among runic scholars. The problem lies in the fact that the initial P sound doesn't occur anywhere else in the old Germanic language, leading to the belief that the word was imported from another language. The Old English rune poem seems to indicate that it had to do with some sort of game, leading many to interpret it as 'chess pawn' or 'dice-cup'. The dice-cup meaning is particularly interesting as it not only fits the shape of the rune, but also hints at such an object's original use as a container for the runes themselves. An alternate interpretation of perth is derived from the Slavic 'pizda', meaning 'vulva'. This meaning (although obscure and somewhat unlikely) fits quite well into the progression of runes up until this point, symbolizing the rebirth that follows death. Viewing it as a symbol of the womb of the Goddess, it represents the same element of the mysterious and hidden as 'dice-cup', but taken literally as 'vulva', it adds a powerful, feminine, sexual counterpart to uruz that would otherwise be missing from the futhark.

However you choose to interpret the literal meaning of perth (and again, nobody really knows what that is), the basic symbolism is that of a vessel, nurturing and giving 'birth', keeping hidden and secret all those mysteries which can be uncovered only after the initiation of death. The rune is closely tied in with the idea of fate, that the road we travel, regardless of what we choose to do along the way, is pre determined from the moment of our birth. The very act of being born sets us along a course of cause and effect, action and reaction that we may choose to follow blindly, or try to divine through the runes or other means in order that we may better understand the lessons we will learn. Perth is the beginning of this process, as well as the tool for accomplishing it.

ALGIZ (Elhaz/Eolh): protection Phonetic equivalent: X,Z

DIVINATORY MEANINGS:

Protection, assistance, defense, warning, support, a mentor, an ethical dilemma

MAGICAL USES:

For protection, hunting

ASSOCIATED MYTHS & DEITIES:

Heimdall Gjallerhorn

ANALYSIS:

Heimdall is an interesting and mysterious figure in Norse mythology, and I associate him with the rune algiz because of his role as protector and guardian. He is the watcher at the gate who guards the boundaries between the worlds and who charges all those entering and leaving with caution. He is best known for his famous horn, but his sword is also important in the consideration of this rune. Snorri mentions that the poetic name for a sword is 'Heimdall's head', and the poetic name for a head is 'Heimdall's sword'. This is particularly significant if we consider that one form of his name was 'Heimdali', meaning 'ram'. Through the image of the ram, Heimdall's sword and his horn can be seen as two different sides of the same image. Both the sword and the ram's horns (or the elk's antlers) are symbols of power which may be used for either offence or defense, depending on the situation.

In terms of the journey, we have passed through death and rebirth, and must now face the Guardian before returning to our world. It is he who charges us to use our new-found power wisely. The person can no longer be simply concerned with their own personal development, but must now consider the effect that their actions may have on others. This is a crucial turning point, and the person will either choose to adopt a system of ethics or ignore the effect on others and only work to serve their own ends. Again, the sword is in their hands, but they must decide whether to use it for defence or offence.

SOWELU (Sigel/Sowilo): sun Phonetic equivalent: S

DIVINATORY MEANINGS:

Success, positive energy, increase, power, activity, fertility, health

MAGICAL USES:

Energy, strength, success, healing, fertility

ASSOCIATED MYTHS & DEITIES:

Sunna

ANALYSIS:

The sun is held sacred by almost every religion in the world. Its light and warmth symbolise life and growth and all that is good. Norse cosmology describes the sun being driven around the heavens in a chariot and chased by a great wolf, which will devour it at Ragnarok. Throughout Indo-European Paganism, the sun has frequently been associated with the horse, often described as being carted around the sky by a horse. Both are symbolic of life and fertility, and are usually considered 'masculine' in polarity, although in Norse myth the chariot is driven by a girl. The swastika or sun wheel is a constant motif in rock carvings dating back to Neolithic times, and occurs throughout Europe and Asia. The sun rune itself is a variation on this symbol, and represents motion and energy.

Sowulo marks the end of the second aett, and like wunjo represents success and glory. However, unlike the rest and relaxation of Valhalla, the sun is very much an active symbol. We have reached the end of the aett successfully, and the conclusion is a positive one, but in this case we are fully aware of the changing and transient nature of the universe. We can see the wolf at our heels, and we know that we must move on. Here, though, the journeyer may pause briefly in the warmth and light of the sun, absorbing and applying its energy to the work ahead. This time we won't need to be blasted out of our safe position, but will rather choose to leave it in order to continue on the journey.

TIWAZ (Thorn) : Tyr Phonetic equivalent: T

DIVINATORY MEANINGS:

Duty, discipline, responsibility, self-sacrifice, conflict, strength, a wound, physicality, the warrior path

MAGICAL USES:

Protection, victory, strength, strengthening the will, healing a wound

ASSOCIATED MYTHS & DEITIES:

Tyr and the Fenris Wolf, Odin's ordeals

ANALYSIS:

Just as the second aett began with the cleansing destruction of hagalaz, so too does the third aett begin with a loss. However, hail is imposed by the Gods to force the sacrifice of those things which aren't really vital to our development. Tiwaz, on the other hand, represents a voluntary sacrifice, made by someone who understands exactly what they are giving up and why.

Tyr's sacrifice of his hand to allow the binding of the Fenris Wolf was a noble one, and notable in a pantheon of deities not known for their sense of duty and ethical responsibility. He is believed to be one of the oldest of the Norse Gods - a Bronze-age rock carving was found in Scandinavia depicting a one-handed warrior - and his position may well have originally superseded that of Odin. Tyr's rune is also one of the oldest in the futhark, having survived virtually unchanged from the earliest Bronze-age carvings. It represents all those qualities associated with the God: strength, heroism, duty and responsibility. But it also represents a deeper mystery - that of the wounded God. Like thurisaz, the pain of tiwaz focuses the attention and forces discipline. However, in this case the effect is more conscious and the wound carries a greater significance. Uruz has been confronted and bound, and the lessons of tiwaz and hagalaz have been learned. This is the path of the warrior

http://sacredwicca.jigsy.com/runes

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programmerandcoder · 5 years

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Using 7 Mysql Strategies Like The Pros

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Flexibility: no need to oversupply Online data Redistribution No downtime Read / Write dividing Optimal for scaling read - intensive software Replication lag - established routing Enhances data consistency and isolation Read stickiness following writes Ensure consistent and dispersed database functioning 100% compatible MySQL proxy Software unmodified Standard MySQL interfaces and tools MySQL databases unmodified Info is protected within MySQL InnoDB / MyISAM / etc.

The dilemma is solved by database encryption, but Once the root accounts are compromised, it can't prevent access. You get rid of the ability of SQL, although application level encryption has become easily the most flexible and protected - it is pretty difficult to use columns in WHERE or JOIN clauses.

It is possible to incorporate with Hashicorp Vault server through A keyring_vault plugin, fitting ( and even expanding - binary log encryption ) the features available in Oracle's MySQL Enterprise version. Whichever MySQL taste you use, so long as it's a current version, you'd have choices to apply data at rest encryption through the database server, so ensuring your information is also secured.

Includes storage - engine frame that System administrators to configure the MySQL database for performance. Whether your system is Microsoft Linux, Macintosh or UNIX, MySQL is a solution that is comprehensive with self - handling features that automate all from configuration and space expansion to database management and information design.

By migrating database programs that are current to MySQL, businesses are currently enjoying substantial cost savings on jobs that are brand new. MySQL is an open source, multi-threaded, relational database management system ( RDBMS ) written in C and C++.

The server is Acceptable for assignment - Critical, heavy - load production systems in addition to for embedding into mass installed applications. MySQL is interactive and straightforward to use, in comparison to other DBMS applications and is protected with a data protection layer providing information with encryption.

MariaDB is a general - purpose DBMS engineered with extensible Structure to support a wide group of use cases through pluggable storage engines.MySQL users may get tens of thousands of metrics in the database, and so this guide we will concentrate on a small number of important metrics that will let you obtain real-time insight into your database wellbeing and functionality.

Users have a number of options for monitoring Latency, by taking advantage of MySQL's both built-in metrics and from querying the operation schema. The default storage engine, InnoDB of MySQL, utilizes an area of memory known as the buffer pool to indexes and tables.

Since program databases -- and information warehouses -- are Constructed on SQL databases, also because MySQL is among the most well-known flavors of SQL, we compiled a listing of the highest MySQL ETL tools that will assist you to transfer data in and from MySQL database programs. KETL is XML - based and operates with MySQL to develop and deploy complex ETL conversion projects which require scheduling.

Blendo's ETL - as - a - service product makes it Simple to get data From several data sources such as S3 buckets, CSVs, and also a massive selection of third - party information sources such as Google Analytics, MailChimp, Salesforce and many others.

In we, Seravo Migrated all our databases from MySQL into MariaDB in late 2013 and through 2014 we also migrated our client's systems to utilize MariaDB. Dynamic column service ( MariaDB just ) is interesting since it allows for NoSQL form performance, and thus a single database port may offer both SQL and" not just SQL" for varied software project requirements.

MariaDB as the Number of storage motors and in excels Other plugins it ships together: Link and Cassandra storage motors for NoSQL backends or rolling migrations from legacy databases, Spider such as sharding, TokuDB with fractal indexes, etc.

MySQL is a relational database - Standard information schema also is composed of columns, tables, views, procedures, triggers, cursors, etc. MariaDB, therefore, has exactly the database structure and indicator and, on the other hand, is a branch of MySQL. Everything -- from the information, table definitions, constructions, and APIs -- stays identical when updating from MySQL into MariaDB.

MariaDB has experienced an increase in terms of Security features such as internal password and security management, PAM and LDAP authentication, Kerberos, user functions, and robust encryption within tablespaces, logs, and tables. MySQL can not do hash link or sort merge join - it merely can perform nested loops method that demands a lot of index lookups which might be arbitrary.

In MySQL single question runs as only ribbon ( with exception Of MySQL Cluster ) and MySQL problems IO requests one for question implementation, so if only query execution time is the concern many hard drives and the large variety of CPUs won't help.

With table layout and application design, you Can build programs working with huge data collections according to MySQL.OPTIMIZE assists for specific issues - ie it types indexes themselves and removers row fragmentation ( all for MyISAM tables ).

Even though it's Booted up to 8 TB, MySQL can't operate effectively with a large database. Mysql continues to be my favorite database because I started programming, so it's simple to install, it is easy to obtain an application that links to the database and perform the management in a graphical manner, many articles supervisors and e-commerce stores utilize MySQL by default, and it has let me execute many projects, I enjoy that many hosting providers have MySQL tutorial service at no extra price.

Mysql is fast the setup, and light requirements Are minimal and with few tools, I've used it in Windows and Linux with no difficulty in either, but the server operating system hasn't been a restriction and that I utilize it in a Linux environment whenever it is potential.

MySQL provides its code Beneath the GPL and gives the choice of Non - GPL commercial supply in the kind of MySQL Enterprise. MariaDB also supplies motor - separate table numbers to enhance the optimizer's functionality, speeding up query processing and data evaluation on the dimensions and arrangement of their tables.

Utilization in MySQL is sub - InnoDB and Optimum tables eventually become fragmented over time, undermining functionality. Shifting from MySQL into MariaDB is relatively simple and is a slice of cake for most systems administrators.

For program, Example Hosts ( even though they need to be okay with attaining MySQL via proxies ), the proxy layer, and perhaps a management host. You ought to check of the logs and settings files and confirm that they're not readable by others.

Data may be moved between MySQL servers, For instance via MySQL replication that is regular or inside a Galera cluster. Flexibility is incorporating the features your company needs, although pushing arbitrary JSON seems elastic.

Among those enterprise qualities, Informix relational Databases, recently launched a new variant ( v12.10. XC2 ) which supports JSON / BSON info as a native from inside the relational database frame and fully supports each the MongoDB APIs so that any program is composed to the MongoDB, protocol may just be pointed in the Informix server and it'll just work.

On top of the IBM Engineers ( Informix Is currently an IBM product ) extended the JSON kind to encourage files Up to 2 GB in size ( MongoDB limitations files to 16 MB). In MySQL and Oracle, working memory Is shared links because links Are serviced by a single procedure.

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newstfionline · 6 years

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In West Bank, 99.7% of Public Land Grants by Israel Go to Settlers

By Isabel Kershner, NY Times, July 17, 2018

JERUSALEM--Over five decades in control of the West Bank, Israel has marked out hundreds of thousands of acres as public land, and it has allocated almost half of them for use.

But only 400 of those acres--0.24 percent of the total allocated so far--have been earmarked for the use of Palestinians, according to official data obtained recently by an anti-settlement group after a freedom of information request. Palestinians make up about 88 percent of the West Bank’s population.

The group, Peace Now, said the other 99.76 percent of the land went to help Israeli settlements.

The lopsided allocation is hardly surprising. Israeli legal experts say the whole point of seeking out state lands, the bulk of which were designated in the 1980s, was to aid the growing settlement enterprise, which most of the world considers a violation of international law.

But the paucity of land allocated to the Palestinians shows the extent of competition over territory, and the effort Israel puts toward building the settlements.

“We took the most important and precious resource--the land--for our use only,” said Hagit Ofran of Peace Now’s settlement-watch unit.

“The protected population has nobody else to care for it,” she said, referring to the Palestinians, “so the occupier has to do that.”

Peace Now based its calculations on data obtained from the Civil Administration, the Israeli authority that carries out civilian policy in the West Bank, including land administration, under the command of the military.

The Civil Administration gave the numbers to Peace Now in mid-June, more than two years after the group submitted a request under the Freedom of Information Act, together with the Israeli Movement for Freedom of Information.

The issue is a pressing one for the Palestinians in the 60 percent of the West Bank known as Area C, which remains under full Israeli security and civil control.

The fate of a tiny Bedouin community, Khan al-Ahmar, in dry, beige hills east of Jerusalem that Israel has declared as state land, now hangs in the balance. Bulldozers are at the ready to demolish the village’s makeshift shacks, tents and mud-and-tire school, erected without permits, and to forcibly relocate the residents. A settlement nearby has plans to expand.

But Israel’s Supreme Court has issued a temporary injunction to freeze the demolition orders after residents submitted a last-ditch application for permanent construction to the Civil Administration’s planning bureau. They have also raised claims that the village sits on private land.

Since capturing the West Bank from Jordan in the 1967 war, Israel has declared as state land nearly 347,000 acres, or about 42 percent, of Area C, where the settlements are, and it has allocated 167,000 acres of that, ostensibly for public use. The vast majority of West Bank Palestinians live in Areas A and B, where the Palestinian Authority exercises civil and partial security control. Roughly 300,000 Palestinians reside in Area C, according to the United Nations, as do up to 400,000 Jewish settlers.

Israel began marking out state land in earnest in the 1980s, on the basis of old Ottoman land laws, after a Supreme Court ruling in 1979 against the seizing of privately owned Palestinian land for nonmilitary purposes like settlement building.

In 2013, in response to a court petition filed by two other groups, the Association for Civil Rights in Israel and Bimkom, the Civil Administration reported that 1.27 percent of allocated state land had gone to the Palestinians. This figure proved to include all land allocations, not only those of state land.

The Israeli government considers the West Bank to be disputed, not occupied, territory, because it was not part of a sovereign Palestinian state before 1967. The settlers, it argues, were not deported or transferred there, in contravention of the Fourth Geneva Convention, but went voluntarily.

“According to the Hague regulations, as long as the land is not privately owned, then the occupying power has got the right to enjoy it,” said Alan Baker, a retired Israeli diplomat and former legal adviser to the Israeli Foreign Ministry. Citing the rule of usufruct, he said, “You can enjoy the apples but can’t cut down the tree.”

It is on this basis that Israel approves settlement building. Mr. Baker, who lives in Har Adar in the West Bank, noted that his home, like all those in the settlements, is built on land lent from the Israel Lands Authority.

He said it was “completely possible, and not a violation of the law” to allocate more land to Jews than to Palestinians.

But Talia Sasson, an Israeli lawyer who worked in the state attorney’s office and is now the president of the board of the New Israel Fund, a nonprofit group that promotes civil rights in Israel, said: “This is beyond the question of legality according to international law or Israeli law or any other law--the Palestinians’ right to suitable housing and income from the land cannot morally be negated.”

Xavier Abu Eid, an official of the Palestine Liberation Organization’s negotiations department, said, “The fact is that Israel is a belligerent occupying power trying to turn a territory under occupation into part of its own county.”

“These figures bring you back to the big picture--that Area C and state land are being used by Israel as a reservoir for Israeli settlement,” he added. “That’s the reality.”

#Israel #West Bank #Israeli settlements #Israeli settlers

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sotcpod · 7 years

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Making a Conspiracy Work

WARNING: This blog post will contain spoilers for the show. If you haven’t listened past episode 5 or 6, read at your own risk!

So, it’s no secret that I am a fan of conspiracies and shadowy organizations trying to overthrow the powers-that-be. The lore in L5R has a perfect villainous organization to serve as my adversaries in the campaign, in the Kolat Conspiracy! But the L5R books give terrible advice in running campaigns, so I had to take matters into my own hands to make this game work (and be listenable to an audience). So, what are the problems associated with running a game about fighting a centuries-old heretical conspiracy? 1. Conspiracies are inscrutable and inaccessible by definition. The only successful conspiracies are inaccessible. That is, it’s really difficult to get a grasp on their structures or organization, and interact with them in meaningful ways during play. The only reason that they are successful is that they are good at staying hidden, and they are compartmentalized enough that connecting the dots between members or events is difficult. The conspiracies that last long enough to be a threat are hard to pin down, and trying to get a big-picture handle on what the conspiracy is doing and where it’s going is even harder. 2. Conspiracies are complicated.

A conspiracy big enough to threaten an entire nation has a lot of moving parts. They consist of personnel (both active and passive), leadership, lines of communication, rank hierarchies, not to mention logistics, funding, protection, legitimate and illegitimate business enterprises. Simulating these things as a GM can be a nightmare.

3. Rokugan is a world where the social structure is set in stone.

A samurai’s word is her honor. To accuse a samurai of lying or deliberately contributing to dark powers is an insult to her honor, and duels are the final word in the judicial system of Rokugan. The word of a samurai will outweigh the word of any number of peasants, all day every day. Even if forensic evidence points a samurai to guilt, their skill with their blade or the testimony of a superior will exonerate them in the eyes of society.

So, how do we turn this into a fun, playable, interactive game? Well, to answer that, first we have to talk about vampires.

Kenneth Hite’s Night’s Black Agents is an incredible roleplaying game. Using the GUMSHOE system, the game focuses on Jason Bourne/John Wick-style badass superspies and underworld agents taking on international vampire conspiracies. But to me, the most genius thing to come out of the game is the concept of the Conspyramid.

Simply put, the Conspyramid is a campaign organizational framework that allows you to outline a conspiracy (or cabal, or shadowy organization) in a way that makes it conducive to play. You set nodes in the Conspyramid, each one being a component of the greater conspiracy. These nodes could be bosses, protection, sources of funding, organizations, or safehouses that the conspiracy in question uses for their purposes. Each node lies on a different tier of the Conspyramid, with the higher tiers representing more and more powerful agents, bosses, or organizations in the conspiracy that has a higher influence over the others beneath them. Finally, we connect these nodes together with clues for the players to uncover, so that by taking on one node of the conspiracy, they can compromise it and unlock the connections to the other parts of the conspiracy.

So how does this help us for planning the Kolat? Well, if we turn the Conspyramid on its side, we have low-level nodes on the left, and higher-level nodes on the right. Now we have a campaign map. The players begin with a few nodes of knowledge on the left, and follow clues to the right, up the chain of command, and burying themselves in the intrigues of the conspiracy that they attempt to unravel. This way, unraveling each node of the Conspyramid is its own session, at the end of which the players gain clues that give them leads to other nodes of the conspiracy.

At the end of the day, as a GM you have constructed a narrative jungle gym on which the players can climb and explore the way they want to. As long as you guarantee that the players get the clues they need to continue (an excellent piece of design philosophy from the GUMSHOE system, worth stealing for any game), the players can tackle which threats seem the most pressing. This allows a good balance of being able to prepare structured plots and scenarios with the depth that L5R excels with, but also gives the players power to choose their own fates, leading to a pseudo-sandbox experience where player agency comes to the forefront.

So, using this Conspyramid tool, let’s look back at our original troubles in running a game about the Kolat conspiracy in L5R. Conspiracies are inscrutable and inaccessible by definition.

By using the Conspyramid, we have just outlined the way our conspiracy is structured. Nodes are connected to one another by clues that the players will stumble across, and this allows them to actually progress and explore the conspiracy in a meaningful way, rather than it being lost to the shadows of mystery and intrigue. Conspiracies are complicated.

Still true. But, at least using the Conspyramid, we have a way to outline and connect the dots of the most interesting parts of the Kolat, without having to worry about the exact wherabouts and responsibilities of every agent. As a GM, we don’t need to know the details about how Agent A is passing his information along through Couriers B, C, and D to get the information in the hands of Agent Z. All we need to know about is the big players in the conspiracy and how they interact with one another. Now all we need to know is that Agent A is providing money and resources to Agent B, and Agent B is being protected by a gang of thugs from Organization C. Much more palatable!

Even if you realize halfway through play that your conspiracy needs more or less nodes, it’s easy to improvise and change the structure of the Conspyramid once you draw it up. What if the conspiracy responds to the players’ actions by flipping a mercenary army to its own side? Easy! Figure out what tier of influence the conspiracy’s new army fits into, and add a few connections to the already-existing nodes so that the players can eventually uncover it and take them on.

Rokugan is a world where the social structure is set in stone.

Also still true, but we have to remember one major thing about the Kolat: They don’t play by the rules. The Kolat advocate for equality and the downfall of the Kami and the Imperial line. They are enemies of any upstanding Rokugani, and Rokugan’s strict social structure becomes a double-edged sword to them. True, they do not have to organize themselves in a way that is beholden to any accepted feudal structure of lords and servants, but the players also have considerable power as samurai. With the right allies, positions, and privileges, the players can make moves to beat Rokugan’s “Game of Daimyos” at their own game, leading to some awesome court and social scenes, something L5R is very happy to do.

So, for any of you L5R GMs who plan on running a Kolat game, I can’t stress enough how useful reading through Night’s Black Agents was for me. Adapting the Conspyramid structure and changing a few words around (changing ‘Nations’ to ‘Clans’), you can drag and drop elements into your game to make a centuries-old philosophical conspiracy easily manageable, and create an engaging narrative playground for your players to explore.

#L5R #shadow of the cabal #RPG #podcast #GM advice #DM advice

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bountyofbeads · 5 years

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The Great Land Robbery

The shameful story of how 1 million black families have been ripped from their farms

By VANN R. NEWKIRK II | September Issue 2019 | The Atlantic Magazine | Posted August 14, 2019 1:48 PM ET |

I. Wiped Out

“You ever chop before?” Willena Scott-White was testing me. I sat with her in the cab of a Chevy Silverado pickup truck, swatting at the squadrons of giant, fluttering mosquitoes that had invaded the interior the last time she opened a window. I was spending the day with her family as they worked their fields just outside Ruleville, in Mississippi’s Leflore County. With her weathered brown hands, Scott-White gave me a pork sandwich wrapped in a grease-stained paper towel. I slapped my leg. Mosquitoes can bite through denim, it turns out.

Cotton sowed with planters must be chopped—thinned and weeded manually with hoes—to produce orderly rows of fluffy bolls. The work is backbreaking, and the people who do it maintain that no other job on Earth is quite as demanding. I had labored long hours over other crops, but had to admit to Scott-White, a 60-something grandmother who’d grown up chopping, that I’d never done it.

“Then you ain’t never worked,” she replied.

The fields alongside us as we drove were monotonous. With row crops, monotony is good. But as we toured 1,000 acres of land in Leflore and Bolivar Counties, straddling Route 61, Scott-White pointed out the demarcations between plots. A trio of steel silos here. A post there. A patch of scruffy wilderness in the distance. Each landmark was a reminder of the Scott legacy that she had fought to keep—or to regain—and she noted this with pride. Each one was also a reminder of an inheritance that had once been stolen.

Drive Route 61 through the Mississippi Delta and you’ll find much of the scenery exactly as it was 50 or 75 years ago. Imposing plantations and ramshackle shotgun houses still populate the countryside from Memphis to Vicksburg. Fields stretch to the horizon. The hands that dig into black Delta dirt belong to people like Willena Scott-White, African Americans who bear faces and names passed down from men and women who were owned here, who were kept here, and who chose to stay here, tending the same fields their forebears tended.

But some things have changed. Back in the day, snow-white bolls of King Cotton reigned. Now much of the land is green with soybeans. The farms and plantations are much larger—industrial operations with bioengineered plants, laser-guided tractors, and crop-dusting drones. Fewer and fewer farms are still owned by actual farmers. Investors in boardrooms throughout the country have bought hundreds of thousands of acres of premium Delta land. If you’re one of the millions of people who have a retirement account with the Teachers Insurance and Annuity Association, for instance, you might even own a little bit yourself.

A war waged by deed of title has dispossessed 98 percent of black agricultural landowners in America.

TIAA is one of the largest pension firms in the United States. Together with its subsidiaries and associated funds, it has a portfolio of more than 80,000 acres in Mississippi alone, most of them in the Delta. If the fertile crescent of Arkansas is included, TIAA holds more than 130,000 acres in a strip of counties along the Mississippi River. And TIAA is not the only big corporate landlord in the region. Hancock Agricultural Investment Group manages more than 65,000 acres in what it calls the “Delta states.” The real-estate trust Farmland Partners has 30,000 acres in and around the Delta. AgriVest, a subsidiary of the Swiss bank UBS, owned 22,000 acres as of 2011. (AgriVest did not respond to a request for more recent information.)

Unlike their counterparts even two or three generations ago, black people living and working in the Delta today have been almost completely uprooted from the soil—as property owners, if not as laborers. In Washington County, Mississippi, where last February TIAA reportedly bought 50,000 acres for more than $200 million, black people make up 72 percent of the population but own only 11 percent of the farmland, in part or in full. In Tunica County, where TIAA has acquired plantations from some of the oldest farm-owning white families in the state, black people make up 77 percent of the population but own only 6 percent of the farmland. In Holmes County, the third-blackest county in the nation, black people make up about 80 percent of the population but own only 19 percent of the farmland. TIAA owns plantations there, too. In just a few years, a single company has accumulated a portfolio in the Delta almost equal to the remaining holdings of the African Americans who have lived on and shaped this land for centuries.

This is not a story about TIAA—at least not primarily. The company’s newfound dominance in the region is merely the topsoil covering a history of loss and legally sanctioned theft in which TIAA played no part. But TIAA’s position is instrumental in understanding both how the crimes of Jim Crow have been laundered by time and how the legacy of ill-gotten gains has become a structural part of American life. The land was wrested first from Native Americans, by force. It was then cleared, watered, and made productive for intensive agriculture by the labor of enslaved Africans, who after Emancipation would come to own a portion of it. Later, through a variety of means—sometimes legal, often coercive, in many cases legal and coercive, occasionally violent—farmland owned by black people came into the hands of white people. It was aggregated into larger holdings, then aggregated again, eventually attracting the interest of Wall Street.

Owners of small farms everywhere, black and white alike, have long been buffeted by larger economic forces. But what happened to black landowners in the South, and particularly in the Delta, is distinct, and was propelled not only by economic change but also by white racism and local white power. A war waged by deed of title has dispossessed 98 percent of black agricultural landowners in America. They have lost 12 million acres over the past century. But even that statement falsely consigns the losses to long-ago history. In fact, the losses mostly occurred within living memory, from the 1950s onward. Today, except for a handful of farmers like the Scotts who have been able to keep or get back some land, black people in this most productive corner of the Deep South own almost nothing of the bounty under their feet.

II. “Land Hunger”

Land has always been the main battleground of racial conflict in Mississippi. During Reconstruction, fierce resistance from the planters who had dominated antebellum society effectively killed any promise of land or protection from the Freedmen’s Bureau, forcing masses of black laborers back into de facto bondage. But the sheer size of the black population—black people were a majority in Mississippi until the 1930s—meant that thousands were able to secure tenuous footholds as landowners between Emancipation and the Great Depression.

Driven by what W. E. B. Du Bois called “land hunger” among freedmen during Reconstruction, two generations of black workers squirreled away money and went after every available and affordable plot they could, no matter how marginal or hopeless. Some found sympathetic white landowners who would sell to them. Some squatted on unused land or acquired the few homesteads available to black people. Some followed visionary leaders to all-black utopian agrarian experiments, such as Mound Bayou, in Bolivar County.

It was never much, and it was never close to just, but by the early 20th century, black people had something to hold on to. In 1900, according to the historian James C. Cobb, black landowners in Tunica County outnumbered white ones three to one. According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, there were 25,000 black farm operators in 1910, an increase of almost 20 percent from 1900. Black farmland in Mississippi totaled 2.2 million acres in 1910—some 14 percent of all black-owned agricultural land in the country, and the most of any state.

The foothold was never secure. From the beginning, even the most enterprising black landowners found themselves fighting a war of attrition, often fraught with legal obstacles that made passing title to future generations difficult. Bohlen Lucas, one of the few black Democratic politicians in the Delta during Reconstruction (most black politicians at the time were Republicans), was born enslaved and managed to buy a 200-acre farm from his former overseer. But, like many farmers, who often have to borrow against expected harvests to pay for equipment, supplies, and the rent or mortgage on their land, Lucas depended on credit extended by powerful lenders. In his case, credit depended specifically on white patronage, given in exchange for his help voting out the Reconstruction government—after which his patrons abandoned him. He was left with 20 acres.

In Humphreys County, Lewis Spearman avoided the pitfalls of white patronage by buying less valuable wooded tracts and grazing cattle there as he moved into cotton. But when cotton crashed in the 1880s, Spearman, over his head in debt, crashed with it.

Around the turn of the century, in Leflore County, a black farm organizer and proponent of self-sufficiency—referred to as a “notoriously bad Negro” in the local newspapers—led a black populist awakening, marching defiantly and by some accounts bringing boycotts against white merchants. White farmers responded with a posse that may have killed as many as 100 black farmers and sharecroppers along with women and children. The fate of the “bad Negro” in question, named Oliver Cromwell, is uncertain. Some sources say he escaped to Jackson, and into anonymity.

Like so many of his forebears, Ed Scott Sr., Willena Scott-White’s grandfather, acquired his land through not much more than force of will. As recorded in the thick binders of family history that Willena had brought along in the truck, and that we flipped through between stretches of work in the fields, his life had attained the gloss of folklore. He was born in 1886 in western Alabama, a generation removed from bondage. Spurred by that same land hunger, Scott took his young family to the Delta, seeking opportunities to farm his own property. He sharecropped and rented, and managed large farms for white planters, who valued his ability to run their sprawling estates. One of these men was Palmer H. Brooks, who owned a 7,000-acre plantation in Mississippi’s Leflore and Sunflower Counties. Brooks was uncommonly progressive, encouraging entrepreneurship among the black laborers on his plantation, building schools and churches for them, and providing loans. Scott was ready when Brooks decided to sell plots to black laborers, and he bought his first 100 acres.

Unlike Bohlen Lucas, Scott largely avoided politics. Unlike Lewis Spearman, he paid his debts and kept some close white allies—a necessity, since he usually rejected government assistance. And unlike Oliver Cromwell, he led his community under the rules already in place, appearing content with what he’d earned for his family in an environment of total segregation. He leveraged technical skills and a talent for management to impress sympathetic white people and disarm hostile ones. “Granddaddy always had nice vehicles,” Scott-White told me. They were a trapping of pride in a life of toil. As was true in most rural areas at the time, a new truck was not just a flashy sign of prosperity but also a sort of credit score. Wearing starched dress shirts served the same purpose, elevating Scott in certain respects—always within limits—even above some white farmers who drove into town in dirty overalls. The trucks got shinier as his holdings grew. By the time Scott died, in 1957, he had amassed more than 1,000 acres of farmland.

Scott-White guided me right up to the Quiver River, where the legend of her family began. It was a choked, green-brown gurgle of a thing, the kind of lazy waterway that one imagines to be brimming with fat, yawning catfish and snakes. “Mr. Brooks sold all of the land on the east side of this river to black folks,” Scott-White told me. She swept her arm to encompass the endless acres. “All of these were once owned by black families.”

III. The Great Dispossession

That era of black ownership, in the Delta and throughout the country, was already fading by the time Scott died. As the historian Pete Daniel recounts, half a million black-owned farms across the country failed in the 25 years after 1950. Joe Brooks, the former president of the Emergency Land Fund, a group founded in 1972 to fight the problem of dispossession, has estimated that something on the order of 6 million acres was lost by black farmers from 1950 to 1969. That’s an average of 820 acres a day—an area the size of New York’s Central Park erased with each sunset. Black-owned cotton farms in the South almost completely disappeared, diminishing from 87,000 to just over 3,000 in the 1960s alone. According to the Census of Agriculture, the racial disparity in farm acreage increased in Mississippi from 1950 to 1964, when black farmers lost almost 800,000 acres of land. An analysis for The Atlantic by a research team that included Dania Francis, at the University of Massachusetts, and Darrick Hamilton, at Ohio State, translates this land loss into a financial loss—including both property and income—of $3.7 billion to $6.6 billion in today’s dollars.

This was a silent and devastating catastrophe, one created and maintained by federal policy. President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal life raft for agriculture helped start the trend in 1937 with the establishment of the Farm Security Administration, an agency within the Department of Agriculture. Although the FSA ostensibly existed to help the country’s small farmers, as happened with much of the rest of the New Deal, white administrators often ignored or targeted poor black people—denying them loans and giving sharecropping work to white people. After Roosevelt’s death, in 1945, conservatives in Congress replaced the FSA with the Farmers Home Administration, or FmHA. The FmHA quickly transformed the FSA’s programs for small farmers, establishing the sinews of the loan-and-subsidy structure that undergirds American agriculture today. In 1961, President John F. Kennedy’s administration created the Agricultural Stabilization and Conservation Service, or ASCS, a complementary program to the FmHA that also provided loans to farmers. The ASCS was a federal effort—also within the Department of Agriculture—but, crucially, the members of committees doling out money and credit were elected locally, during a time when black people were prohibited from voting.

Through these programs, and through massive crop and surplus purchasing, the USDA became the safety net, price-setter, chief investor, and sole regulator for most of the farm economy in places like the Delta. The department could offer better loan terms to risky farmers than banks and other lenders, and mostly outcompeted private credit. In his book Dispossession, Daniel calls the setup “agrigovernment.” Land-grant universities pumped out both farm operators and the USDA agents who connected those operators to federal money. Large plantations ballooned into even larger industrial crop factories as small farms collapsed. The mega-farms held sway over agricultural policy, resulting in more money, at better interest rates, for the plantations themselves. At every level of agrigovernment, the leaders were white.

Major audits and investigations of the USDA have found that illegal pressures levied through its loan programs created massive transfers of wealth from black to white farmers, especially in the period just after the 1950s. In 1965, the United States Commission on Civil Rights uncovered blatant and dramatic racial differences in the level of federal investment in farmers. The commission found that in a sample of counties across the South, the FmHA provided much larger loans for small and medium-size white-owned farms, relative to net worth, than it did for similarly sized black-owned farms—evidence that racial discrimination “has served to accelerate the displacement and impoverishment of the Negro farmer.”

In Sunflower County, a man named Ted Keenan told investigators that in 1956, local banks had denied him loans after a bad crop because of his position with the NAACP, where he openly advocated for voting rights. The FmHA had denied him loans as well. Keenan described how Eugene Fisackerly, the leader of the White Citizens’ Council in Sunflower County, together with representatives of Senator James Eastland, a notorious white supremacist who maintained a large plantation there, had intimidated him into renouncing his affiliation with the NAACP and agreeing not to vote. Only then did Eastland’s man call the local FmHA agent, prompting him to reconsider Keenan’s loan.

A landmark 2001 investigation by the Associated Press into extortion, exploitation, and theft directed against black farmers uncovered more than 100 cases like Keenan’s. In the 1950s and ’60s, Norman Weathersby, a Holmes County Chevrolet dealer who enjoyed a local monopoly on trucks and heavy farm equipment, required black farmers to put up land as collateral for loans on equipment. A close friend of his, William Strider, was the local FmHA agent. Black farmers in the area claimed that the two ran a racket: Strider would slow-walk them on FmHA loans, which meant they would then default on Weathersby’s loans and lose their land to him. Strider and Weathersby were reportedly free to run this racket because black farmers were shut out by local banks.

Thousands of individual decisions by white people, enabled or motivated by greed, racism, existing laws, and market forces, all pushed in a single direction.

Analyzing the history of federal programs, the Emergency Land Fund emphasizes a key distinction. While most of the black land loss appears on its face to have been through legal mechanisms—“the tax sale; the partition sale; and the foreclosure”—it mainly stemmed from illegal pressures, including discrimination in federal and state programs, swindles by lawyers and speculators, unlawful denials of private loans, and even outright acts of violence or intimidation. Discriminatory loan servicing and loan denial by white-controlled FmHA and ASCS committees forced black farmers into foreclosure, after which their property could be purchased by wealthy landowners, almost all of whom were white. Discrimination by private lenders had the same result. Many black farmers who escaped foreclosure were defrauded by white tax assessors who set assessments too high, leading to unaffordable tax obligations. The inevitable result: tax sales, where, again, the land was purchased by wealthy white people. Black people’s lack of access to legal services complicated inheritances and put family claims to title in jeopardy. Lynchings, police brutality, and other forms of intimidation were sometimes used to dispossess black farmers, and even when land wasn’t a motivation for such actions, much of the violence left land without an owner.

In interviews with researchers from the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History in 1985, Henry Woodard Sr., an African American who had bought land in the 1950s in Tunica County, said he had managed to keep up for years through a combination of his own industry, small loans from the FmHA and white banks, and the rental of additional land from other hard-pressed black landowners. Then, in 1966, the activist James Meredith—whose 1962 fight to integrate Ole Miss sparked deadly riots and a wave of white backlash—embarked on the famous March Against Fear. The next planting season, Woodard recalled, his white lenders ignored him. “I sensed that it was because of this march,” he said. “And it was a lady told me—I was at the post office and she told me, she said, ‘Henry, you Negroes, y’all want to live like white folks. Y’all don’t know how white folks live. But y’all are gonna have to be on your own now.’ ”

Woodard’s story would have been familiar to countless farmers in the Delta. In Holmes County, a crucible of the voting-rights movement, a black effort to integrate the local ASCS committees was so successful that it was subject to surveillance and sabotage by the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission, an official agency created by Governor J. P. Coleman in 1956 to resist integration. Black landowners involved in running for the committees or organizing for votes faced fierce retaliation. In 1965, The New Republic reported that in Issaquena County, just north of Vicksburg, the “insurance of Negroes active in the ASCS elections had been canceled, loans were denied to Negroes on all crops but cotton, and ballots were not mailed to Negro wives who were co-owners of land.” Even in the decades after the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, formal and informal complaints against the USDA poured out of the Delta.

These cases of dispossession can only be called theft. While the civil-rights era is remembered as a time of victories against disenfranchisement and segregation, many realities never changed. The engine of white wealth built on kleptocracy—which powered both Jim Crow and its slave-state precursor—continued to run. The black population in Mississippi declined by almost one-fifth from 1950 to 1970, as the white population increased by the exact same percentage. Farmers slipped away one by one into the night, appearing later as laborers in Chicago and Detroit. By the time black people truly gained the ballot in Mississippi, they were a clear minority, held in thrall to a white conservative supermajority.

Mass dispossession did not require a central organizing force or a grand conspiracy. Thousands of individual decisions by white people, enabled or motivated by greed, racism, existing laws, and market forces, all pushed in a single direction. But some white people undeniably would have organized it this way if they could have. The civil-rights leader Bayard Rustin reported in 1956 that documents taken from the office of Robert Patterson, one of the founding fathers of the White Citizens’ Councils, proposed a “master plan” to force hundreds of thousands of black people from Mississippi in order to reduce their potential voting power. Patterson envisioned, in Rustin’s words, “the decline of the small independent farmer” and ample doses of “economic pressure.”

An upheaval of this scale and speed—the destruction of black farming, an occupation that had defined the African American experience—might in any other context be described as a revolution, or seen as a historical fulcrum. But it came and went with little remark.

IV. The Catfish Boom

World War II transformed America in many ways. It certainly transformed a generation of southern black men. That generation included Medgar Evers, a future civil-rights martyr, assassinated while leading the Mississippi NAACP; he served in a segregated transportation company in Europe during the war. It included Willena’s father, Ed Scott Jr., who also served in a segregated transportation company. These men were less patient, more defiant, and in many ways more reckless than their fathers and grandfathers had been. They chafed under a system that forced them to relearn how to bow and scrape, as if the war had never happened. In the younger Scott’s case, wartime service sharpened his inherited land hunger, pushing him to seek more land and greater financial independence, both for himself and for his community. One of his siblings told his biographer, Julian Rankin, that the family’s deepest conviction was that “a million years from now … this land will still be Scotts’ land.”

Upon his return to the Delta, Scott continued down his father’s hard path, avoiding any interface with the FmHA and the public portions of the agrigovernment system, which by that time had spread its tendrils throughout Sunflower and Leflore Counties. He leaned on the friendships he and his father had made with local business owners and farmers, and secured credit for growing his holdings from friendly white bankers. Influenced by the civil-rights movement and its emphasis on community solidarity and activism, Scott borrowed from Oliver Cromwell’s self-sufficiency playbook too. He used his status to provide opportunities for other black farmers and laborers. “Daddy said that everyone who worked for us would always be able to eat,” Willena Scott-White told me. He made sure of more than that. Scott sent relatives’ and tenants’ children to school, paid for books, helped people open bank accounts and buy their own land. When civil-rights activists made their way down for Mississippi’s Freedom Summer, in 1964, he packed up meals and brought them to rallies.

When Scott-White thinks of her father, who died in 2015, she seems to become a young girl again. With allowances for nostalgia, she recalls a certain kind of country poorness-but-not-poverty, whereby children ran barefoot and worked from the moment they could walk, but ate well, lived in houses with solid floors and tight roofs, and went to high school and college if they showed skill. “We lived in something like a utopia,” Scott-White told me. But things changed at the tail end of the 1970s. Plummeting commodity prices forced highly leveraged farmers to seek loans wherever they could find them. Combined with the accelerating inflation of that decade, the beginnings of the farm-credit crisis made farming at scale without federal assistance impossible. Yet federal help—even then, two decades after the Civil Rights Act—was not available for most black farmers. According to a 2005 article in The Nation, “In 1984 and 1985, at the height of the farm crisis, the USDA lent a total of $1.3 billion to nearly 16,000 farmers to help them maintain their land. Only 209 of those farmers were black.”

As Rankin tells it in his biography, Catfish Dream, Scott made his first visit to an FmHA office in 1978. With the assistance of Vance Nimrod, a white man who worked with the black-owned Delta Foundation, a nonprofit promoting economic advancement for black Mississippians, Scott secured an operating loan for a season of soybeans and rice from the FmHA agent Delbert Edwards. The first time was easy—although, crucially, Nimrod accompanied him to the Leflore County office, in Greenwood. When Scott returned the next year without Nimrod, driving a shiny new truck the way his father used to, Edwards asked where Nimrod was. According to Rankin, Scott told the agent that Nimrod had only come to help secure that first loan; he wasn’t a business partner. When Edwards saw Scott’s vehicle, he seemed perplexed. “Who told you to buy a new truck?” he asked. Edwards ended up denying the requested loan amount.

At the same time, Edwards and the FmHA were moving to help local white farmers weather the storm, often by advising them to get into raising catfish. Commercial catfish farming was a relatively new industry, and it had found a home in the Delta as prices for row crops crashed and new legislation gave the USDA power and incentive to build up domestic fish farming. FmHA agents pushed white farmers to convert wide fields on the floodplain into giant catfish ponds, many of which would become contract-growing hubs for Delta Pride Catfish, a cooperative that quickly evolved into a local monopoly. The federal government poured millions of dollars into the catfish boom by way of FmHA loans, many of which were seized on by the largest white landowners, and kept those white landowners solvent. Mississippi became the catfish capital of the world in the 1970s. But the FmHA did not reach out to Scott, nor is there evidence that it supported the ambitions of any black farmers who might have wanted to get into catfish.

Scott decided to get into catfish anyway, digging eight ponds in fields where rice had grown the season before. He found his own catfish stocks and learned the ins and outs of the industry pretty much on his own. Scott finished digging his ponds in 1981, at which point, according to Rankin, Edwards of the FmHA visited the property and told him point-blank: “Don’t think I’m giving you any damn money for that dirt you’re moving.” The Mississippi FmHA would eventually compel Edwards to provide loans for Scott’s catfish operation for 1981 and 1982. But as court records show, the amount approved was far less than what white catfish farmers usually got—white farmers sometimes received double or triple the amount per acre that Scott did—and enough to stock only four of the eight ponds. (Edwards could not be reached for comment on any of the episodes recounted here.)

Scott’s Fresh Catfish opened in 1983. As a marker outside the old processing shed now indicates, it was the first catfish plant in the country owned by an African American. But discrimination doomed the enterprise before it really began. Without enough capital, Scott was never able to raise fish at the volume he needed. He claimed in court and later to Rankin that he had also been denied a chance to purchase stock in Delta Pride—a requirement to become a contract grower—because he was black. Without access to a cooperative, he had to do the processing and packaging himself, adding to the cost of his product. In 2006, Delta Pride and Country Select Catfish were combined into a new business entity, Consolidated Catfish Producers. When reached for comment, a spokesperson for Consolidated Catfish said that no employee at the new company could “definitively answer” questions about Scott or alleged discrimination against him.

Scott was in his 60s by the time his plant got off the ground. The effort took a toll. He slowly went blind. Arthritis claimed his joints. His heart began to fail. The plant limped quietly through the ’80s and then shut down. Lenders began the process of foreclosing on some of Scott’s cropland as early as 1983. In 1995, the FmHA approved a request from Scott to lease most of his remaining acres. The USDA itself had claimed most of his land by the late 1980s.

The downfall of the Scott catfish enterprise was proof of the strength and endurance of what the federal government would later state could be seen as a federally funded “conspiracy to force minority and disadvantaged farmers off their land through discriminatory loan practices.” The Scotts were not small-timers. They had the kind of work ethic and country savvy that are usually respected around the Delta. When the powers that be finally prevailed over Ed Scott Jr., they had completed something decisive, something that even today feels as if it cannot be undone.

V. Farmers in Suits

But land is never really lost, not in America. Twelve million acres of farmland in a country that has become a global breadbasket carries immense value, and the dispossessed land in the Delta is some of the most productive in America. The soil on the alluvial plain is rich. The region is warm and wet. Much of the land is perfect for industrialized agriculture.

Some white landowners, like Norman Weathersby, themselves the beneficiaries of government-funded dispossession, left land to their children. Some sold off to their peers, and others saw their land gobbled up by even larger white-owned farms. Nowadays, as fewer and fewer of the children of aging white landowners want to continue farming, more land has wound up in the hands of trusts and investors. Over the past 20 years, the real power brokers in the Delta are less likely to be good ol’ boys and more likely to be suited venture capitalists, hedge-fund managers, and agribusiness consultants who run farms with the cold precision of giant circuit boards.

One new addition to the mix is pension funds. Previously, farmland had never been a choice asset class for large-scale investing. In 1981, what was then called the General Accounting Office (now the Government Accountability Office) released a report exploring a proposal by a firm seeking pension-investment opportunities in farmland. The report essentially laughed off the prospect. The authors found that only about one dollar of every $4,429 in retirement funds was invested in farmland.

But commodity prices increased, and land values rose. In 2008, a weakened dollar forced major funds to broaden their search for hedges against inflation. “The market in agricultural land in the U.S. is currently experiencing a boom,” an industry analyst, Tom Vulcan, wrote that year. He took note of the recent entry of TIAA-CREF, which had “spent some $340 million on farmland across seven states.” TIAA, as the company is now called, would soon become the biggest pension-fund player in the agricultural real-estate game across the globe. In 2010, TIAA bought a controlling interest in Westchester Group, a major agricultural-asset manager. In 2014, it bought Nuveen, another large asset-management firm. In 2015, with Nuveen directing its overall investment strategy and Westchester and other smaller subsidiaries operating as purchasers and managers, TIAA raised $3 billion for a new global farmland-investment partnership. By the close of 2016, Nuveen’s management portfolio included nearly 2 million acres of farmland, worth close to $6 billion.

Investment in farmland has proved troublesome for TIAA in Mississippi and elsewhere. TIAA is a pension company originally set up for teachers and professors and people in the nonprofit world. It has cultivated a reputation for social responsibility: promoting environmental sustainability and respecting land rights, labor rights, and resource rights. TIAA has endorsed the United Nations–affiliated Principles for Responsible Investment, which include special provisions for investment in farmland, including specific guidelines with regard to sustainability, leasing practices, and establishing the provenance of tracts of land.

Each black farmer who left the region represented a tiny withdrawal from one side of a cosmic balance sheet and a deposit on the other side.

The company has faced pushback for its move into agriculture. In 2015, the international nonprofit Grain, which advocates for local control of farmland by small farmers, released the results of an investigation accusing TIAA’s farmland-investment arm of skirting laws limiting foreign land acquisition in its purchase of more than half a million acres in Brazil. The report found that TIAA had violated multiple UN guidelines in creating a joint venture with a Brazilian firm to invest in farmland without transparency. The Grain report alleges that when Brazil tightened laws designed to restrict foreign investment, TIAA purchased 49 percent of a Brazilian company that then acted as its proxy. According to The New York Times, TIAA and its subsidiaries also appear to have acquired land titles from Euclides de Carli, a businessman often described in Brazil as a big-time grileiro—a member of a class of landlords and land grabbers who use a mix of legitimate means, fraud, and violence to force small farmers off their land. In response to criticism of TIAA’s Brazil portfolio, Jose Minaya, then the head of private-markets asset management at TIAA, told WNYC’s The Takeaway: “We believe and know that we are in compliance with the law, and we are transparent about what we do in Brazil. From a title perspective, our standards are very focused around not displacing individuals or indigenous people, respecting land rights as well as human rights … In every property that we have acquired, we don’t just do due diligence on that property. We do due diligence on the sellers, whether it’s an individual or whether it’s an entity.”

TIAA’s land dealings have faced scrutiny in the United States as well. In 2012, the National Family Farm Coalition found that the entry into agriculture of deep-pocketed institutional investors—TIAA being an example—had made it pretty much impossible for smaller farmers to compete. Institutional investment has removed millions of acres from farmers’ hands, more or less permanently. “Pension funds not only have the power to outbid smaller, local farmers, they also have the long-term goal of retaining farmland for generations,” the report noted.

Asked about TIAA’s record, a spokesperson for Nuveen maintained that the company has built its Delta portfolio following ethical-investment guidelines: “We have a long history of investing responsibly in farmland, in keeping with our corporate values and the UN-backed Principles for Responsible Investment (PRI). As a long-term owner, we bring capital, professional expertise, and sustainable farming practices to each farm we own, and we are always looking to partner with expansion-minded tenants who will embrace that approach and act as good stewards of the land.” The company did not comment on the history of any individual tract in its Delta portfolio.

But even assuming that every acre under management by big corporate interests in the Delta has been acquired by way of ethical-investment principles, the nature of the mid-century dispossession and its multiple layers of legitimation raise the question of whether responsible investment in farmland there is even possible. As a people and a class, black farmers were plainly targets, but the deed histories of tax sales and foreclosures don’t reveal whether individual debtors were moved off the land because of discrimination and its legal tools.

In addition, land records are spotty in rural areas, especially records from the 1950s and ’60s, and in some cases it’s unclear exactly which records the investors used to meet internal requirements. According to Tristan Quinn-Thibodeau, a campaigner and organizer at ActionAid, an anti-poverty and food-justice nonprofit, “It’s been a struggle to get this information.” The organization has tried to follow the trails of deeds and has asked TIAA—which manages ActionAid’s own pension plan—for an analysis of the provenance of its Delta portfolio. Such an analysis has not been provided.

What we do know is that, whatever the specific lineage of each acre, Wall Street investors have found a lucrative new asset class whose origins lie in part in mass dispossession. We know that the vast majority of black farmland in the country is no longer in black hands, and that black farmers have suffered far more hardships than white farmers have. The historian Debra A. Reid points out that “between 1920 and 1997, the number of African Americans who farmed decreased by 98 percent, while white Americans who farmed declined by 66 percent.” Referring to the cases studied in their 2001 investigation, Dolores Barclay and Todd Lewan of the Associated Press observed that virtually all of the property lost by black farmers “is owned by whites or corporations.” The foundation of these portfolios was a system of plantations whose owners created the agrigovernment system and absorbed thousands of small black-owned farms into ever larger white-owned farms. America has its own grileiros, and they stand on land that was once someone else’s.

VI. A Deeper Excavation

As we drove through the patchwork remnants of the Scotts’ land, Willena Scott-White took me to the site of Scott’s Fresh Catfish. Gleaming steel silos had turned into rusting hulks. The ponds were thick with weeds and debris. The exterior walls of the plant itself had collapsed. Rusted beams lay atop ruined machinery. Fire ants and kudzu had begun nature’s reclamation.

Late in Ed Scott Jr.’s life, as he slipped into Alzheimer’s, Willena and his lawyer, Phil Fraas, fought to keep his original hopes alive. In the Pigford v. Glickman lawsuit of 1997, thousands of black farmers and their families won settlements against the USDA for discrimination that had occurred between 1981 and the end of 1996; the outlays ultimately reached a total of $2 billion. The Scotts were one of those families, and after a long battle to prove their case—with the assistance of Scott-White’s meticulous notes and family history—in 2012 the family was awarded more than $6 million in economic damages, plus almost $400,000 in other damages and debt forgiveness. The court also helped the Scotts reclaim land possessed by the department. In a 1999 ruling, Judge Paul L. Friedman of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia acknowledged that forcing the federal government to compensate black farmers would “not undo all that has been done” in centuries of government-sponsored racism. But for the Scotts, it was a start.

“The telling factor, looking at it from the long view, is that at the time of World War I there were 1 million black farmers, and in 1992 there were 18,000,” Fraas told me. The settlements stemming from Pigford cover only specific recent claims of discrimination, and none stretching back to the period of the civil-rights era, when the great bulk of black-owned farms disappeared. Most people have not pushed for any kind of deeper excavation.

Any such excavation would quickly make plain the consequences of what occurred. During my drive with Scott-White, we traveled through parts of Leflore, Sunflower, and Washington Counties, three of the counties singled out by Opportunity Insights, a Harvard University research group, as among the worst in the country in terms of a child’s prospects for upward mobility. Ten counties in the Delta are among the poorest 50 in America. According to new data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on all 74,000 U.S. census tracts, four tracts in the Delta are among the lowest 100 when it comes to average life expectancy. More than 30 tracts in the Delta have an average life expectancy below 70. (The national average is 79.) In some Delta counties, the infant mortality rate is more than double the nationwide rate. As if to add gratuitous insult to injury, a new analysis from ProPublica finds that, as a result of the Internal Revenue Service’s intense scrutiny of low-income taxpayers, the Delta is audited by the IRS more heavily than any other place in the country. In sum, the areas of deepest poverty and under the darkest shadow of death are the ones where dispossession was the most far-reaching.

The consequences of dispossession had long been predicted. Fannie Lou Hamer, a Sunflower County activist whose 1964 speech to a Democratic National Convention committee galvanized support for the Voting Rights Act, spoke often of the need for land reform as a precondition for true freedom. Hamer’s utopian Freedom Farm experiment stressed cooperative landownership, and she said the concentration of land in the hands of a few landowners was “at the base of our struggle for survival.” In her analysis, mass dispossession should be seen as mass extraction. Even as the U.S. government invested billions in white farmers, it continued to extract wealth from black farmers in the Delta. Each black farmer who left the region, from Reconstruction onward, represented a tiny withdrawal from one side of a cosmic balance sheet and a deposit on the other side. This dynamic would only continue, in other ways and other places, as the Great Migration brought black families to northern cities.

This cosmic balance sheet underpins the national conversation—ever more robust—about reparations for black Americans. In that conversation, given momentum in part by the publication of Ta-Nehisi Coates’s “The Case for Reparations” in this magazine in 2014, I hear echoes of Mississippi. I hear echoes of Hamer, the Scotts, Henry Woodard Sr., and others who petitioned the federal government to hold itself accountable for a history of extraction that has extended well beyond enslavement. But that conversation too easily becomes technical. How do we quantify discrimination? How do we define who was discriminated against? How do we repay those people according to what has been defined and quantified? The idea of reparations sometimes seems like a problem of economic rightsizing—something for the quants and wonks to work out.

Economics is, of course, a major consideration. According to the researchers Francis and Hamilton, “The dispossession of black agricultural land resulted in the loss of hundreds of billions of dollars of black wealth. We must emphasize this estimate is conservative … Depending on multiplier effects, rates of returns, and other factors, it could reach into the trillions.” The large wealth gap between white and black families today exists in part because of this historic loss.

But money does not define every dimension of land theft. Were it not for dispossession, Mississippi today might well be a majority-black state, with a radically different political destiny. Imagine the difference in our national politics if the center of gravity of black electoral strength had remained in the South after the Voting Rights Act was passed.

Politics aside, how can reparations truly address the lives ruined, the family histories lost, the connection to the land severed? In America, land has always had a significance that exceeds its economic value. For a people who were once chattel themselves, real property has carried an almost mystical import. There’s a reason the fabled promise that spread among freedmen after the Civil War was not a check, a job, or a refundable tax credit, but 40 acres of farmland to call home. The history of the Delta suggests that any conversation about reparations might need to be more qualitative and intangible than it is. And it must consider the land.

Land hunger is ineffable, an indescribable yearning, and yet it is something that Americans, perhaps uniquely, feel and understand. That yearning tugged at me hardest as Willena Scott-White rounded out her tour of the fields, the afternoon slipping away. Out among the Scotts’ fields is a clearing with a lone, tall tree. In the clearing is a small cemetery. A handful of crooked, weathered tombstones stand sentinel. This is where Ed Scott Jr. is buried, and where some of Willena’s older siblings now rest. Willena posed for a picture beside her parents’ grave. She told me that this is where her own bones will rest after her work on Earth is done.

“This is our land,” she said.

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