#slavery

[bakkfity]

AHHHH! I love the rosi slave au!! neer seen anything like it so far, lowkey worried on how doflamgino will react when he learns that rosi was a slave... gyulp...

on another note, r there any activities that rosi does on a day to day basis? what's his routine?

Huh, it wouldn’t be easy to process. There are so many things that still need to be revealed—things that would really shake up Doffy’s life and beliefs. He’ll definitely need to rethink his motivations and plans in the future…

I don’t think Rosinante has a very typical daily routine, but I tried to put together a quick one for him anyway.

Hope you like it! 😂😂

[whencyclopedia]

Bleeding Kansas: Dress Rehearsal for the American Civil War

'Bleeding Kansas' was a term coined by the New York Tribune in 1856, referring to the escalating hostilities in the Kansas Territory between pro-slavery activists and anti-slavery 'free staters' following the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854. Violent confrontations between these two factions went on from 1854 to 1859, though hostilities would continue through 1861, when Kansas was admitted to the Union as a free state, and continue through the American Civil War.

Bleeding Kansas is understood as an overture to the American Civil War (1861-1865), as the factional violence clearly showed that the issue of slavery could only finally be dealt with through military action. It also highlighted how divided the United States had become over slavery as neighbor killed neighbor in disputes over whether Kansas should be a free state or a slave state.

These disputes were encouraged by the provision in the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 allowing for popular sovereignty in deciding the matter. The people in the Kansas Territory would vote on which they wanted their state to be. The problem with this, as became clear quite quickly, is that it drew people from both sides of the issue to fill the region with as many supporters of their respective causes as possible and also encouraged pro-slavery 'border ruffians' from Missouri to cross into the territory to vote illegally.

The tensions in the region were never resolved, and hostilities between free staters, pro-slavery advocates, and their allies, the border ruffians, continued throughout the Civil War. At least 60 people died between 1854 and 1859, though that number is most likely low. Although Bleeding Kansas is usually understood in reference to the years 1854-1859, hostilities were only finally ended by the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment in 1865, abolishing slavery.

Background

In 1787, Congress passed the Northwest Ordinance, prohibiting the spread of chattel slavery into the Northwest Territory, and, in 1807, it abolished the trans-Atlantic slave trade. Slavery was restricted to those states in which it had already been established, and each state could decide for itself whether to maintain the 'peculiar institution' or vote for abolition.

Northern states, generally, were less dependent on slave labor than those in the South and so slavery was gradually abandoned there, but in the South, with its large plantations of cotton and tobacco, slavery continued to flourish, especially after the invention of the cotton gin in 1793, which sped up the process of cultivating cotton but required more labor in picking and transporting the crop.

The Louisiana Purchase of 1803 nearly doubled the size of the United States but created controversy over whether that region, once it was divided into states, would be admitted to the Union as free or slave. This problem was addressed by the Missouri Compromise of 1820, which admitted Missouri (part of the Louisiana Purchase) as a slave state and Maine as a free state in 1820, thereby maintaining the balance of power between slave and free states. The Missouri Compromise also outlawed slavery north of the 36°30´ parallel and west of the Mississippi River except for Missouri.

After the Mexican American War (1846-1848) and the acquisition of more land in the so-called Mexican Cession, the question arose again and was answered by the Compromise of 1850, which included the provision that slavery in the states of New Mexico and Utah would be decided by popular sovereignty. The compromise also included the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, compelling authorities, law enforcement, and private citizens in free states to help capture and return fugitive slaves to their masters; a law which was extremely unpopular and increased tensions between free and slave states.

The Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 was drafted by the same man who had submitted the final version of the Compromise of 1850, Senator Stephen A. Douglas (1813-1861) of Illinois. Since Kansas and Nebraska were both north of the 36°30´ parallel, Douglas' act abolished the Missouri Compromise of 1820 in leaving it up to the people themselves to choose slavery or reject it. As Nebraska was further north, it was assumed the people would reject slavery, but Kansas, bordered by the slave state of Missouri, and with wide open plains for cultivation of crops, was expected to enter the Union as a slave state.

Problems began with the provision of popular sovereignty in the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854, as each side of the issue saw an opportunity to increase their power in representational government by filling the region with supporters as quickly as possible. Consequently, immigrants from free and slave states hurried to Kansas to establish the residency required to vote on the issue. Since Kansas was so close to Missouri, pro-slavery activists arrived first, establishing the towns of Atchison and Leavenworth. Anti-slavery free staters also arrived in 1854, setting up communities in what would become Lawrence and Topeka. The vote was set for November 1854, and all the players were in place for the hostilities to begin, which would, within two years, be referred to as Bleeding Kansas.

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⇒ Bleeding Kansas: Dress Rehearsal for the American Civil War

[ashortstoryaboutlove]

And the best reply:

[Source 1] [Source 2]

Edited to add:

[Source]

[diaryofaphilosopher]

"The shift from the Afro-Caribbean zombie to the U.S. zombie is clear: in Caribbean folklore, people are scared of becoming zombies, whereas in U.S. narratives people are scared of zombies. This shift is significant because it maps the movement from the zombie as victim (Caribbean) to the zombie as an aggressive and terrifying monster who consumes human flesh (U.S.). In Haitian folklore, for instance, zombies do not physically threaten people; rather, the threat comes from the voduon practice whereby the sorcerer (master) subjugates the individual by robbing the victim of free will, language and cognition. The zombie is enslaved."

— Justin D. Edwards, "Mapping Tropical Gothic in the Americas" in Tropical Gothic in Literature and Culture.

Follow Diary of a Philosopher for more quotes!

[theconcealedweapon]

And who enforces this? Is it just a few bad apples, or is it all cops?

How hard is it for them to find cops willing to enforce this? Do they have to sift through hundreds of heroic cops who refuse until they find the one cop who's monstrous enough to enforce this, or do they easily find cops willing to enforce this because monstrous cops are everywhere and being a monster is part of the job?

"All cops are bad" is not a stereotype. It's literally a requirement for the job that every single one knew about.

[ziddiladki]

[beggars-opera]

On the road leading into the center of Concord, Massachusetts, there sits a house.

It is a plain, colonial-style house, of which there are many along this road. It has sea green and buff paint, a historical plaque, and one of the most multi-layered stories I have ever encountered to showcase that history is continuous, complicated, and most importantly, fragmentary, unless you know where to look.

So, where to start? The plaque.

There's some usual information here: Benjamin Barron built the house in 1716, and years later it was a "witness house" to the start of the American Revolution. And then, something unusual: a note about an enslaved man named John Jack whose epitaph is "world famous."

Where is this epitaph? Right around the corner in the town center.

It reads:

God wills us free; man wills us slaves. I will as God wills; God’s will be done. Here lies the body of JOHN JACK a native of Africa who died March 1773 aged about 60 years Tho’ born in a land of slavery, He was born free. Tho’ he lived in a land of liberty, He lived a slave. Till by his honest, tho’ stolen labors, He acquired the source of slavery, Which gave him his freedom; Tho’ not long before Death, the grand tyrant Gave him his final emancipation, And set him on a footing with kings. Tho’ a slave to vice, He practised those virtues Without which kings are but slaves.

We don't know precisely when the man first known only as Jack was purchased by Benjamin Barron. We do know that he, along with an enslaved woman named Violet, were listed in Barron's estate upon his death in 1754. Assuming his gravestone is accurate, at that time Jack would have been about 40 and had apparently learned the shoemaking trade from his enslaver. With his "honest, though stolen labors" he was then able to earn enough money to eventually purchase his freedom from the remaining Barron family and change his name to John, keeping Jack as a last name rather than using his enslaver's.

John Jack died, poor but free, in 1773, just two years before the Revolutionary War started. Presumably as part of setting up his own estate, he became a client of local lawyer Daniel Bliss, brother-in-law to the minister, William Emerson. Bliss and Emerson were in a massive family feud that spilled into the rest of the town, as Bliss was notoriously loyal to the crown, eventually letting British soldiers stay in his home and giving them information about Patriot activities.

Daniel Bliss also had abolitionist leanings. And after hearing John's story, he was angry.

Here was a man who had been kidnapped from his home country, dragged across the ocean, and treated as an animal for decades. Countless others were being brutalized in the same way, in the same town that claimed to love liberty and freedom. Reverend Emerson railed against the British government from the pulpit, and he himself was an enslaver.

It wouldn't do. John Jack deserved so much more. So, when he died, Bliss personally paid for a large gravestone and wrote its epitaph to blast the town's hypocrisy from the top of Burial Hill. When the British soldiers trudged through the cemetery on April 19th, 1775, they were so struck that they wrote the words down and published them in the British newspapers, and that hypocrisy passed around Europe as well. And the stone is still there today.

You know whose stone doesn't survive in the burial ground?

Benjamin Barron's.

Or any of his family that I know of. Which is absolutely astonishing, because this story is about to get even more complicated.

Benjamin Barron was a middle-class shoemaker in a suburb that wouldn't become famous until decades after his death. He lived a simple life only made possible by chattel slavery, and he will never show up in a U.S. history textbook.

But he had a wife, and a family. His widow, Betty Barron, from whom John purchased his freedom, whose name does not appear on her home's plaque or anywhere else in town, does appear either by name or in passing in every single one of those textbooks.

Terrible colonial spelling of all names in their marriage record aside, you may have heard her maiden name before:

Betty Parris was born into a slaveholding family in 1683, in a time when it was fairly common for not only Black, but also Indigenous people to be enslaved. It was also a time of war, religious extremism, and severe paranoia in a pre-scientific frontier. And so it was that at the age of nine, Betty pointed a finger at the Arawak woman enslaved in her Salem home, named Titibe, and accused her of witchcraft.

Yes, that Betty Parris.

Her accusations may have started the Salem Witch trials, but unlike her peers, she did not stay in the action for long. As a minor, she was not allowed to testify at court, and as the minister's daughter, she was too high-profile to be allowed near the courtroom circus. Betty's parents sent her to live with relatives during the proceedings, at which point her "bewitchment" was cured, though we're still unsure if she had psychosomatic problems solved by being away from stress, if she stopped because the public stopped listening, or if she stopped because she no longer had adults prompting her.

Following the witch hysteria, the Parrises moved several times as her infamous father struggled to hold down a job and deal with his family's reputation. Eventually they landed in Concord, where Betty met Benjamin and married him at the age of 26, presumably having had no more encounters with Satan in the preceding seventeen years. She lived an undocumented life and died, obscure and forgotten, in 1760, just five years before the Stamp Act crisis plunged America into a revolution, a living bridge between the old world and the new.

I often wonder how much Betty's story followed her throughout her life. People must have talked. Did they whisper in the town square, "Do you know what she did when she was a girl?" Did John Jack hear the stories of how she had previously treated the enslaved people in her life? Did that hasten his desperation to get out? And what of Daniel Bliss; did he know this history as well, seeing the double indignity of it all? Did he stop and think about how much in the world had changed in less than a century since his neighbor was born?

We'll never know.

All that's left is a gravestone, and a house with an insufficient plaque.

[whenweallvote]

Many of us are taught that slavery came to an end with the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863, but for enslaved people in Texas, freedom didn’t come until June 19, 1865.

Swipe to learn about the history of Juneteenth, and why it’s a celebration of freedom, culture, and progress.

[bakkfity]

Sorry if anyone asked already but I haven't seen it so... why does Rosi not talk? Is he mute? Is he... ✨traumatized✨?

Well, everything you wrote is true.

He was heavily traumatized. After becoming a slave, he found himself in a very special role. The Celestial Dragons found joy in his suffering—and Rosinante became their entertainment. He was a unique kind of slave, unlike any before, because almost every Dragon knew he had once been one of them.

You could say they were more “patient” with him—they didn’t kill him after his first or even his second wrongdoing. They loved making him miserable, watching him sob and break down.

BUT they absolutely hated THE NOISE.

So… they obtained the Nagi Nagi no Mi and forced Rosinante to eat it. He had to use his powers day and night. It became a new lifestyle—a forced habit—not to make a sound, and never to speak. So essentially, he developed a form of selective mutism.

The more time he spends with the Donquixote family, the more he begins to relax. As he forms deeper and deeper bonds with the members, cracks begin to appear in his silence. But still… he can’t make real progress until his past finally comes to light. That’s the true mental wall he just can’t break through.

I posted a little thing about this here earlier.

[a-little-revolution]

Something I've skirted around before and want to make clear this October (Dwarfism Awareness Month) is that we were slaves.

We were court dwarfs, freak show oddities, and circus performers. We were owned and sold and stollen by able bodied people for the purpose of entertainment, public display, personal property and even fashion. We were raped, beaten, starved, and abused. That was our reality until the 1970s.

And that is why the lingering hateful culture hurts so much. Why making a mockery of bodies like mine holds so much pain.

[blogbellafrosh]

[northern-punk-lad]

A very important video on the money Glasgow made from the empire and especially Scotland role in the slave trade

[antisemitism-us]

[sayruq]

Here's his GoFundMe. It has passed its initial goal but keep sharing and donate if you can to help Hamza.

[nando161mando]

Hmmmm I wonder if there's a connection here.....