Don't be fooled by 'fake' or staged videos, especially when animals are involve. With some people going to extreme lengths for internet points, ask yourself: does this video make sense or is it too good to be true? Be cautious and make sure the animal rescue you watch is real – you don't want to be taken for a ride!
Are you ready to put your detectiving skills to the test? Don't get fooled by 'fake' or staged videos, especially when animals are involved - watch out for those people going to extreme lengths for internet points! Ask yourself: does this video make sense, or is it too good to be true? When you see an animal rescue, make sure it's real - you don't want to be taken for a ride! (Your post when it’s enhanced by ai shoutout to @icecubesapp for making this possible inside of the app)
I'm still not ready to talk about Black history. I still want to talk about white US history.
Q: Why do Black people see racism in everything?
A: A few years ago, European tech entrepreneur Martin Varsavsky asked some very good questions in good faith. He asked why San Francisco and Madrid were different in so many confusing and awful ways. I answered each of his questions. Please verify each and every answer with a skeptic's keen eye.
Q: Why are homeless people so rare in Madrid and so common in San Francisco when here GDP per capita is half?
A: Racism.
Of the homeless folk in the USA, 45% have mental health challenges and 40% are Black, even though only 13% of the pop is Black. In SF, less than 5% of the population is Black, but 37% of the homeless population is Black.
In the 80s, when Reagan killed mental health facility funding and Black homelessness exploded, no one cared. 🤷🏿♂️
But... most homeless US folk are still white? Facts. Unaffordable housing combined with a lack of social programs or safety net lead to homelessness in the US in general. Because in the US, most white people will oppose social safety nets if they believe that Black people will benefit, or if you remind them of "changing demographics." Because racism.
Q: Why is the murder rate 500% higher in California than Spain?
A: Racism.
Despite (and because of) racist over-policing, law enforcement in the USA is fantastically inept at catching killers that murder Black folk. Including Black folk.
Black citizens (wisely) don't call the cops. So murderers rack up astronomical body counts.
Less than 1 in 2 US murders is solved. That clearance rate is *lowest* in neighborhoods where cops brutalize innocent Black folk the most.🙂🙃
But is this correlation or causation? It seems almost like Black folk are suggesting that police activity *causes* more murders to happen?
We can test this (and we have!) by seeing what happens if you go into a neighborhood with a lot of murders, and get police to stop brutalizing innocent Black people, and focus only on stopping murders.
Result: You can end a murder wave in a city by getting cops to focus on murders instead of being evil.
Q: Why is health care free even for tourists in Spain paid for by Spanish taxpayers as a human right and so incredibly expensive and cumbersome in California? Our son fell in the bathtub and we had a $12k bill for a few stitches at Stanford ER.
A: Racism.
People hate Obama's Blackness so much, that their opinion of whether universal healthcare is good or bad depends on if you call it Obamacare.
Racist folk with terminal diseases and no insurance, will vote against free healthcare. Cuz Obama.
One of the best/most depressing books on that irony is "Dying of Whiteness"… basically digs into the research that shows many Americans are willing to *pay more* for *worse outcomes* for *themselves* as long as nonwhites don't get *incrementally better outcomes*
Q: Why are universities in Spain free and there is no student debt while in the USA there is more student debt than the GDP of Spain?
A: Surprisingly, also racism!
College in the US is too expensive, so loans.
Black kids are on average, lower income than white kids. Most college drop outs leave not due to poor grades, but for financial hardship. Poor kids very often don't graduate. 😢
Drop out without a degree, you still owe a huge debt.
Even if you graduate, you have a huge debt. But... Black kids are less likely to be hired than white kids. And if hired, are given lower starting salaries.
Deck stacked against you: Deeper in debt, and harder to climb out.
Black kids owe $7.5K more than white kids at graduation. But within 3 years, black kids owe $25K more than white kids.
Much of the $1.6 trillion debt is held by Black students. Yes, I said trillion. With a "T." And yes, I said "debt held by Black kids," who are hired less and paid less.
The unspoken part of the US student loan forgiveness "debate," is racists thinking "I am fundamentally opposed to anything that would lower the suffering of Black people or prevent the siphoning of their wealth."
You will take that deal and be on probation / parole.
Even if innocent.
Q: Why is inequality in the USA twice as high as that of Spain?
A: Racism. My thread from yesterday explained the ways in which systemic racism is designed to siphon net welath from Black people, but I don't think folks appreciate the scale.
Civil asset forfeiture alone steals more wealth than "all other forms of burglary combined."
Black median net wealth is on trajectory to be zero by 2053.🤷🏿♂️
The question shouldn't be "Why do Black folk see racism in everything?"
The question should be "Why do white folk not see any of this?"
The answer to the better question is of course, that there is an information delta between "what Black folk know about racism" and "what white folk know about racism."
Racist people don't want you to know any of this stuff. Because some people, on reading this stuff, say, "Sounds bad. We should maybe change things to be less bad?"
I love every question that Martin Varsavsky asked, and I believe that he was asking them in good faith. If anyone views this as a "dunk" or criticism of him then they are completely missing the point.
Similarly, if anyone views this as me saying "All white people are bad!" They've also completely missed the point.
The point is that we can't resolve any of these questions without understanding the systems that they operate in. That means understanding US racism, and how we all play a part in it
If I, as a Black dude, don't understand these systems (and their leverage points), even I can contribute to it and make it worse. Racism isn't "who called who the N-word."
Consider these statements that I could make:
"I value education because I'm Nigerian! Black Americans don't value education!"
"I believe in unpaid internships. Hustle and grind early in your career!"
"I would never hire someone with a criminal record!"
"Ugh! I'm not going there! That's the hood! Full of ghetto people!"
The first statement makes me very sad. Black folk in the US pay *more* for their education than anyone else on planet earth. This is an objective fact. To suggest that Black folk in the US don't "value education," but somehow Nigerians, Kenyans, South Africans, Ghanaians, and Cubans do, is to ignore US racism and blame its victims. It's to ignore white US history.
Good education in Nigeria is Black history*. Cool story. Happy for you👍🏿
TBH, the last phrase was given to me as an advice by a black militant when I asked him for contacts in the USA (and because he wouldn't have been at the time able to come with me in "the hood").
as a white person, I cannot agree more. White people often view only overt acts of racism as racism.
Many think it is easier to ignore the systemic part, or blame it on other things in order to deflect and keep their power unwittingly, rather than see what is plain to see.
It's the same reason that white people claim they "don't see color". It's a socialized unconscious deflection.
well, Martin Varsavsky is also know to be an entitled smart ass. Most of his ventures ended up with lots of people losing money and him getting richer. And during pandemic he criticised restrictions because he wasn't able to go to his multiple houses around the world. Please feel free to dunk on him.
When we're taught about racism, it's often more about etiquette and not saying the n-word more than about addressing discrimination and equality. Since "racism is bad", there's basically a mental checklist of finding other ways it could possibly be interpreted before concluding racism is a factor at all. It's a collaborative defense mechanism against our shame and it keeps us from seeing what is happening right in front of us.
True story: In the late 80s in rural upstate New York I went to the drive-in theater with a bunch of friends. There was enough of us we took two cars.
During the double feature we spent around four hours passing the bong back and forth between the cars, laughing and generally being rowdy young people.
The next day the loss prevention officer at the drug store where I worked asked me if I'd done anything the night before... just basic friendly break room chat.
I mentioned the drive-in, at which point he burst out laughing - "I thought that was you!" He and a STATE TROOPER friend were parked behind us, watching our very illegal frivolity. They laughed it off, and that was the end of the conversation.
Every time I see someone dismissing or downplaying white privilege, I think of this story. If I had been arrested then, my life and career prospects would have been destroyed.
Have to disagree with you on this causation. The real reason is "student contestation" (yes, the SDS and SNCC included). Basically, tuition and the debt it produces is a permanent Damocles' sword over the head of any student without independant wealth who would dare to think independantly and even envision to not fall in line.
US social rights do not exist. I would love to go there for holidays but would never live there. Right for medical care should be you first right not to use a gun... @PeggyJoan
but they screamed and fussed about “socialized medicine” long before Obama, so it’s not JUST him - but the idea that Black people might benefit was enough to turn people against it decades earlier
Can you imagine keeping your job if you failed 50% of the time!? The clearance rates are often overlooked but are a vital data point in showing how utterly useless cops are.
Surely true, but also the easy access to firearms must play a role, enabling as they do 'hands-off' killings - which are easier to commit and harder to solve - and impulse killings, as well as turning violent but survivable quarrels deadly. But of course the two are closely connected.
It's true. From what I've read, white opposition to helping the poor dramatically expanded with resistance to Lyndon Johnson's Great Society programs, which were portrayed (sometimes correctly) as aimed at helping black Americans, and as wasteful and ineffective.
I think here you can also add Racism as the reason why housing is so expensive in those areas. # R1 zoning to "preserve the character of the neighborhood" # Tearing up (black) neighborhoods for roads for the cars required by R1 zoning, further reducing housing. # Opposing any/all dense housing because "It'll change the character of the neighborhood # Opposing transit for similar reasons
A large number of people won’t vote for policies that they don’t see as personally benefiting themselves or those they have a “group identity bias” for. Broader support for policies means using rhetoric that appeals to voters across many group identities
yup. Go to Shirley, NY. Lee Zeldin (Jan6ther crazy Q). All white, kinda homeless, desolate land. He did nothing for them, his "hometown" for 8 years. Lots of White Homeless Veterans. It's painful to see.
yup. Go to Shirley, NY. Lee Zeldin (Jan6ther crazy Q). All white, kinda homeless, desolate land. He did nothing for them, his "hometown" for 8 years. Lots of White Homeless Veterans.
this is so obvious that my half-demented, un-woke father said “we can’t have nice things out of of a fear that somewhere a black person might benefit.”
while it's not the sole reason for every ill, it's a pervasive and ever present thread. ignoring it because something else gives some cover or excuse is like the old joke:
"But other than that, Mrs Lincoln, how was the play?"
I am old enough that, when homelessness recently increased, my first thought was that the streets looked like the 80’s again. Also, having homeless people is a policy choice. When I was in my early 20’s, I moved from a place where it never snows, and people were living on the streets all over, to a place with arctic winters, and somehow they found a place inside for everyone.
This is such a great, informative thread. Thank you for sharing.
Sadly, racism is part of America’s DNA. And yet, many white people don’t recognize see that.
I remember when Obama was elected, one of the cable news channels reporting “is this the end of racism in America?” *That* is the type of ignorance we’re up against.
"Nothing new needs producing and no e-waste needs processing. If your new software no longer runs on old hardware, it is worse than the old software. "
Yes. So much this. I recall writing serial letters on a 386 PC using Microsoft Works. It worked like a charm, and back then, RAM in the Gigabytes was totally unheard of.
The first sentence is from a paper on the various names of permacomputing by Marloe, and the second is a rephrasing of @viznut's notes in the original permacomputing paper
Could you please give more detailed refs when you have time. I feel this is extremely important work that anyone who uses technology must have access to.
@Devine Lu Linvega In the research article, there should have been discussion of the nature of the mastodon network: the biased population, disproportionate impact of the poll, etc.. Useful concepts, nonetheless.
This review is based on the results of a survey conducted on Mastodon, an open source decentralized social network with a user base that includes many developers and activists working on sustainability and social justice in relation to computing.
I've always felt like a wanderer or an outsider, even when I've been in one place. I used to think it was migrant childhood, now I think it's just my soul.
*Creating* generational wealth is not hard for Black people. It's happened many times in US history. There have been thriving communities.
*Keeping* generational wealth has proved to be nearly impossible. Between racist pogroms, and eminent domain used to create parks, freeways, reservoirs, and shopping malls, Black folk in the US have consistently had their wealth stolen by white folks.
I still run into New Yorkers that go to Central Park every week, but have never heard of Seneca Village.
We are truly in a golden age of TV shows, because now I don't sound like I'm making stuff up when I talk about Greenwood (thanks Watchmen!). But Black towns were destroyed with fire and water.
Imagine in the 70s stealing all wealth from white Dallas residents(oil), and in the 80s from all Manhattan residents (finance), and 2000s all Atherton, SF, and Medina residents(tech)
and then asking why white folk can't seem to build wealth, from your yacht on "Lake Menlo Park."
Why do white Americans learn about the dozens of wealthy Black towns that were destroyed by racism, from: * Fictional TV shows made by HBO * Black women comedians (Amber Ruffin) * Random Black dudes that post on the internet 🙋🏿♂️
Instead of from their history text books?
Again folks will ask "Why was I not taught this in school?" And again, I will say, "You know why." Look at what DeSantis is doing. Look at what the Texas Board of Education has always done.
Yep, I forgot to mention that too. Lovecraft Country (between the fantastical scenes) depicts several real world situations for Black people in the middle of the 20th century, which still linger in prejudices today. Many friends of mine thought both shows were overly dramatizing or even making shit up until I gave them real historical references to read.
There's a former sundown town just east of Atlanta where a friend of mine lives, and to this day it's pretty lily white.
I have to give credit to my Appalachian father 50 years ago. He took me to copper hill, Tn https://www.appalachiabare.com/copperhill-a-legacy/ and a sundown town in the area.He also told me of the coal mining company stores. So company stores, racism and environmental destruction we all joined in my 10 year old mind
For my friends with MBAs, here are some case studies / interview prep questions.
1) Try and guess the 5 wealthiest white zip codes in the US. Now imagine all of the wealth in those neighborhoods is just stolen and given to Black people. What does that do to the race wealth gap? Hint: Medina Washington alone has about the same net worth as all Black Americans combined.🤡
2) How much does Manhattan real estate *in central park* sell for per square foot? Estimate the value of just Seneca Village.
We all admire Amsterdam for having the vision to replace car infrastructure with bike infrastructure. We see the positive uplift in small business activity, and livability. 🙂👍🏿
Now imagine doing that in reverse. Replace relatively safely walkable and bikeable infrastructure with car infrastructure. In fact, put in freeways. Demolish entire thriving wealthy neighborhoods with freeways that don't serve the neighborhood.🙃
That's what we did to Black folk. That's how we destroyed Black wealth.
We would never even consider bulldozing the nicest homes and businesses in Beverly Hills to make it easier for Black folk who want to work in Long Beach live in the suburbs of Ventura.
We would never consider knocking down skyscrapers in Manhattan to make it easier for Black folk from Brooklyn to work on Wall Street.
But we do this to Black folk in the US *constantly*
Then when we see people living under the freeways we yell "Bootstraps! Why can't you have a nice neighborhood? Asians did it!"
It should become clear why Black folk can't seem to build generational wealth in the United States.
This failure is not something intrinsic in the makeup or behavior of Black people.
This failure is baked into how Black people in the US are treated. In other words, racism.
Black folk cannot just "bootstraps" or "education is the key" or "LLC Twitter" or "Hustle, grind, put in work," their way out of this reality. We need to address the racism head on. And we can't do it alone.
not to mention that when Black PoC carve out communities in which they start building that wealth, my fellow Americans tend to just obliterate entire city blocks, like in Tulsa and Rosewood.
I took several "American History" classes in public schools and universities where I learned about MLK's dream.
It was outside that curriculum where I learned about Tulsa, and nearly a decade later I learned about Rosewood.
And Wilmington, NC and I'm sure many other places. Or the less "overtly" violent urban renewal, neighbors destroying interventions in almost every city in the US in the 50s/60s. White supremacy is the defining force in this country ☹️
On a very personal level I used to feel in my heart of hearts that I wasn't racist (or sexist). But I used terms like "reverse racism".
I *thought* that we had solved racism after MLK marched on Washington, and sure there were pockets of backwards racists out there but it was just corner cases, right?
Until I *listened* to the experiences of Black PoC. And learned about Tulsa. And I realized that maybe I wasn't quite as good as I thought.
to be fair, *no one* can do those things to lift themselves into wealth - white folks just convince ourselves we did by ignoring the systems that actually got us here
Oh, I realize I was too subtle about one aspect of white folk intentionally stealing the wealth.
Most of the time when US newspapers have talked about "Race riots," what they really meant was that there was a Black town next to a white town, and the Black town grew more prosperous than the white one. This made the white folks mad, so one day the white folk just... took a bunch of guns and walked over to the Black town and killed as many people as they could, and stole the Black folks' stuff.
It always amazes me how many white people hear "race riots" and just ASSUME the rioting race would be Black people. Like, wow guys. Way to come clean about your personal prejudices.
Some US history books will talk about the "Great migration" when about 6 million Black folk fled the South and headed to the North and West of the US.
It's often framed as "Black folk headed North and West looking for jobs." But if you talk to Black folk with relatives that left the South during this time, they'll tell you that their families were fleeing economic persecution in the South: having their money and stuff stolen through lynching, false imprisonment, straight up theft, etc.
Owning a valuable piece of land should ensure generational wealth. But for many Black families, it spelled doom, as a white family would want that land, and they would get it, with the help of corrupt bankers and land assessors.
FYI Did you know that the family is now selling it back to LA County? And for much less than it’s been valued because in the fine print they are only allowed to sell it to LA County, no one else.
Yep. Sad. And wrong. Some say at least they’re getting their money, but they should be getting much more. LA County and the governor helped them get ownership of the beach, seemingly just so the County could get their hands on it for cheap and not even give the family what they deserved.
Imagine how much different things would have been, if after the civil war every plantation owner simply had their land expropriated and given to the people they previously enslaved. Either to hold in common or divided into parcels, or a combination. Imagine they got to keep that land. The history of the united states post civil war, would have been very different.
But you see, saying "had their farms stolen from them by white elites" would be [all together now] "political" (and maybe even "divisive", the horror).
It's always okay to blame disempowered people for the abuse they experience. Apparently.
I vaguely remember the atlantic story popping up while I was reading about all the manmade lakes that "mysteriously" seem to be where there used to be a black town or neighborhood.
most black families never owned any land, it belonged to the tribe and the chief, they merely had squatters rights. Even today there are no records of ownership
sadly, we weren’t terribly better to the North and West and continued to lie, cheat, and steal from Black folk who left the South. I didn’t learn about redlining in school and I didn’t learn that the GI Bill de facto didn’t cover Black GIs from the Navy when they taught us history either. amazon.com/Color-Law-Forgotten…
Reading this, after today’s New York Times report on the amount of black people now picking up and RETURNING to the South as racism, gerrymandering, and civil rights are being legislatively rolled back in those states, and anti-CRT and African-American studies being banned. And that’s the loud stuff. The quiet steps are much worse.
I’ve always wondered this, and maybe you can shed some light on this (but this is heavy, and I don’t expect you to have all the answers here): why don’t we start calling all those “race riots” what they really were? They were pogroms.
Because the people writing about them are usually white, and in the US, white "historians" have been deeply uncomfortable with calling things what they really are.
Most of US history is deeply racist. We've grown accustomed to minimizing that racism, and victim blaming the Black folk that are frequently its targets.
It seems to me that the simplest way to put a price tag on Reparations for Jim Crow and other forms of institutional racism is to simply take the wealth gap between Black families and white ones, and set that as the level to reimburse.
I don’t consider that a moral restitution, obviously, esp. for slavery. (What value has that level of stolen life? Incalculable.)
But we CAN set a price on institutional racism. And should—soon. The price isn’t going down...
for your last point, that is only due to the demographics of the prison population. If the other parts of the justice system were fixed, this would even itself out automatically.
The demographics of the prison system are specifically because the laws are intentionally designed to target Black people.
As in, politicians are on record saying, "We should make thing [x]illegal, because then it will allow us to lock up more Black people, who we can then use for prison labor."
Shorter versions: 1. Just listen to Atwater (designer of modern GOP strategy) admit that it's just coded racism against Black people without saying the N word.
And the specific Asian-Americans they point to generally came over here while certain immigration restrictions were in effect so that only those with highly marketable skills could even get into the country.
Most Laotians came here after we bombed the crap out of their country, and many of them aren't on the list of people those racist idiots are pointing to when they say those awful things to African-Americans.
If you're Asian-American, your outcome can vary by a lot.
my god. I wonder how much this was actually the real drive behind the policies, or at least a significant perceived (but unarticulated) benefit for rich people. 😬
Came here to post this! Twin Cities folks, look up the history of the Rondo neighborhood in Saint Paul. They had two possible routes for I-94. One would have gone down what is now the Pierce Butler Route: mostly light industry, huge amounts of empty space. But they chose to put it right through the middle of the Rondo neighborhood — literally down the main street — to “clean up” the neighborhood. Which was the city’s major Black and Jewish community.
I-35 isn't quite as bad but the original plan was to put it through a well-off white neighborhood - those people complained and there's a curve in it now so it could go through a poor black neighborhood instead.
Yup. And they got a lowered speed limit and trees down the middle. (It’s officially a “parkway,” IIRC!)
There’s growing general awareness that freeways destroy neighborhoods that don’t have the power to fight. The thing I think is less well known is that destroying neighborhoods was also an explicit •selling point•. Part of the Rondo pitch was “Let’s not squander this golden opportunity to bulldoze Black people’s homes!” Both factors at play.
Robert Moses was the sort of racist that startled other racists. Making public infrastructure at the cost of Black people was policy, as was making it inaccessible.
As a #Atlanta resident living near I-20, seeing that before and after always hurts. My street literally dead ends into the side wall of the highway and I think about this destruction almost every day.
We need to demolish the freeway, reconnect the Atlanta street grid and build large amounts of affordable housing to begin to repair our city.
the east side of Buffalo, near where I grew up, was so badly wounded by this - a beautiful Olmsted-designed parkway torn out in the late 1950s when the neighborhood was no longer sufficiently white, and replaced with a freeway straight from the airport to downtown
we do all admire Amsterdam for this, but as an Amsterdammer, I can tell you that the city also very conveniently created a Black enclave on the other side of the highway, many people of which deal with terrible stigmas and disenfranchisement every day. I love your analogy, but as great as we are with bikes...
In #Chicago we have 4.7 CPD per 1K people; national avg is 2.4/1Kpeople. #MoreCopsOnTheStreet is not working. Chicago Mayoral candidates must propose something NEW. Invest in black/brown citizens ability to grow wealth; their homes, properties, neighborhoods.
When you say that, what you really mean is Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos, who live in Medina. It's a wealthy area, but Bill and Jeff are worth much more than any of their neighbors.
No, I meant exactly what I said. Please refrain from trying to tell me "what I really meant." And feel free to make the distinction between centi-billionaires, deca-billionaires, and basic old common billionaires, on a different thread.🙂
There are many billionaires that live in Medina. There are even more centi-millionaires, deca-millionaires, and millionaires.
I'm not dissing Medina. I'm pointing out that white wealth is concentrated in a few neighborhoods, just like Black wealth.
If you think me saying, "Please refrain from telling me what I really meant" during Black history month is being a jerk, then you're really not going to like most of what I have to say. Seriously.
Just unfollow or block me!👍🏿
Save us all some time!
If your version of conversation involves you telling people what they "really meant," but not liking it when they tell you, "No, I said what I said," then you're not going to enjoy "conversing" with me
My kid's public NYC middle school had metal detectors and cops at the doors. There were many things about it I hated.
But there was the time his class was assigned a six week project culminating in a trial over reparations using the 2014 Ta-Nehisi Coates piece as a starting reference. My kid (who could lawyer or charm his way out of any school consequences) was asked to argue against.
I sat in the back of the class the day of the trial and was never so proud to see my kid lose.
You use Texas politics as an example - but that’s a bad example because they’ve NEVER taught accurate history, ever. It’s ILLEGAL to teach the real story in Texas (literally, it’s a law. You HAVE to teach that the Alamo was a bunch of heroes.) Santa Anna was an abolitionist - they don’t teach that. The Rangers was founded to catch runaway slaves. Texas broke away from Mexico so they could keep their slaves.
Saw one here yesterday, some guy had a buddy from Georgia that had no idea why the civil war was fought, thought it was infringement of southern civil rights. There is no hope for the south.
I learned about some of this history from books like "Buried in the Bitter Waters" (2006) and a PBS # documentary called "Banished: The Ethnic Cleansing of Blacks in America" (2008). The information is out there, but you're absolutely correct that it's not taught in schools and should be.
It’s very upsetting that Florida has gone down the wrong path when 30 years ago there was a government task force on the Rosewood massacre and 20 years ago it was made a Florida Heritage Landmark. I grew up in Florida and never heard about Rosewood or Ocoee. I didn’t find out about Tulsa until 10 years ago.
Most are never taught about the Wilmington Race Riot of 1898...at that time Wilmington, NC was a mecca for black professionals-- attorneys, doctors, bankers - the town paper was black owned. The newspaper office was set afire and led to blacks being chased from the city. Blacks have never recovered economic prosperity in the city.
I grew up only a few hours away from Tulsa, and I literally never heard about the Tulsa Race Massacre until one day randomly on the internet in my 20s after I'd moved out of state and already graduated college.
I was just thinking about that... like even knowing how distorted our history has been it drives the point home to be an adult and see what the adults around you were up to at a time when you didnt understand all that context.
It blows my mind that baby boomers are behind this and they were alive during segregation and I hear them say shit like how there was no such thing as racism in America anymore until Obama singlehandedly enforced it and brought it back from the dead.
Textbook publishers appeasing states like Texas, which is a massive market for their product, is part of the issue. Despite growing up in liberal Illinois, my history books glossed over a lot of stuff because the publisher wanted to sell that same book in the south.
as a white-presenting mixed race person, I learned about the Black communities destroyed by freeways from living through an era where it was totally normal and celebrated to "eminent domain" (a noun turned into a word) *only* non-white areas of the city for freeway development.
It was gruesomely bad.
I will never truly recover from seeing this happen. I come from a point of view that this is genocidal warfare. They leveled hundreds of homes with little to no notice.
Listening to what DeSantis is doing to Florida's education system, especially AP African American History, it isn't hard to label it fascism. Unfortunately that is a word that most Americans don't really understand.
Yup. I was planning lessons that included this sort of thing several years ago, then my state made it vaguely illegal, so now even saying the word “racism” causes people to scream “CRT INDOCTRINATION!!!”
Totally agree. And I'm so angry. I'm 58 & only TONIGHT did I learn about the 11/1898 Wilmington, NC Coup d'etat & the "Secret 9" (rich White men who weren't happy w/the successful Black American business owners- but of course). Innocent Black men, women & children were murdered by mobs of White people. And this & so many others like it (I'm talking in addition to slavery) have never been/are NOT discussed in school- Whites are whitewashing & erasing history. So disheartening.
Sadly, distressingly, disgustingly, because as one of my few good teachers once put it back in the day:
"History is a story told by rich white landowners, about rich white landowners, for the benefit of rich white landowners. Anyone saying otherwise is deluded or selling something."
I am as glad to slowly be learning how vast my ignorance is as I am horrified at what I have been ignorant of.
Sadly, even as a white historian in Britain, the answer to the question of "Why was I not taught about this example of terrible racism/colonialist atrocity/deliberate cultural genocide/[insert awfulness here]" at school is to cough politely and gesture at the whole structure of how power is maintained in our civilisation*.
(* I'm British, so doing that is actually a fairly blistering condemnation.)
Not only did I not learn about that Black History, I didn’t learn about the Japanese Internment! A co-worker, who was much more Politically-minded, told me. I was 25!😭 The fact that information about successful Black communities destroyed by White racists has been held from citizens for decades is a tragedy!
I was in high school in the '60s, during some of the worst of the desegregation confrontations- fire hoses, dogs, clubs - & atrocities like church bombings, freedom rider murders. I don't recall specific lessons, but I definitely was aware of a 1920's "race riot" in my town & the general history of jim crow. I knew that current events were against a backdrop of 100 yrs of atrocity. Maybe current events forced it to light. Now the perps deny history, paint everything as "Antifa"
In Canada, we're taught about the Underground Railroad, but not that enslavement was legal here too until 1833 and that (unlike in the U.S.) the British government reimbursed enslavers in the colonies for their so-called "lost property" after Abolition.
My daughter had a rowing competition on Lake Lanier and in researching the area we came across the history of it and the event went from "oh this will be fun!" to "well this is deeply uncomfortable." History does matter.
Thanks for history lesson. I was a New Yorker for 5 years during the height of anti-VietNam-war protests, including protests in Central Park, and had never heard of Seneca Village.
Have you read/listened to Clint Smith’s “How the Word is Passed”?
The audible version is wonderful. It’s a beautiful book. I’m always interested in black and Native American history in the US- and this book was so well done.
White folks even screw over each other. The water company in north Jersey used eminent domain to seize property. Later the company decided it had too much land but instead of giving the land back to its original owners they sold it for a huge windfall.
any guesses as to who lived in the thriving, successful community of Albina in North Portland? Shown here getting split and decimated by highway construction. Memorial Coliseum was also constructed on part of this neighborhood. This is still playing out today of course
since this is getting some boosts, here is a locally made documentary on the Civil Rights struggle in PDX with extensive coverage of the "urban renewal" destruction of Black neighborhoods
Elephant in the Room: Almost the enitre USA stolen from Natives. Alaska bought from Russia, who had no ownership right, bits cheated or taken from Mexico or French, who had taken it from natives. Most Black people forced to go to Americas, not a choice.
this is a thing I wonder about when some stale crust of wonderbread is complaining about not having a white history month. Cause like first of all we have twelve but also... A lot of Black History Month is actually an abbreviated history of white supremacist fuckery?
It is not just US education. In Denmark we basically learned that black people had to sit in the back of the bus, and that there were stores that wouldn't serve black people. Not good things, but seemingly far from the worst parts either.
Great thread. Another factor is that our immigration policy since 1965 has favored people who come here with wealth or advanced degrees or both. It creates the impression that other minoritized groups have built more wealth here than they have, and then that gets used against Black people.
and this is why I believe today’s government owes Black people reparations. Sure, none of us had slaves, but I would bet our parents participated in red lining. Which prevented the building of generational wealth, among a whole bunch of other disgusting things that we have done to Black people in this country within the past 50 years.
For others reading this thread that want to learn more and like to get their history in podcast form, may I recommend the excellent Dreams of Black Wall Street podcast by Nia Clark: https://www.dreamsofblackwallstreet.com/
She's gone through three seasons of deep dives into specific times and places where Black wealth was created, and then deliberately destroyed.
Worse, they point at Asian-American communities as they say this (I'm half Asian).
How well an Asian family does depends largely on when they came and where they came from.
At certain times, ONLY professionals with marketable skills were allowed in the country, so of course they are doing better, but this causes people to overlook poverty-stricken corners of the Asian-American community where people struggle to keep their heads above water.
generational Black wealth in Pittsburgh was destroyed by first cutting off the Hill District from downtown and the Strip by removing the railcars and funicular in favor of a roadway that connected downtown to a mostly white suburb (with limited access to the Hill, where most folks hadn't needed cars), then by using eminent domain to seize the devalued land and build a sports venue there. 100 years of Black wealth & history destroyed in a decade, and now the arena is a parking lot.
I just wanted to let you know that, as someone who immigrated to the US about 15 years ago, I've found your threads here incredibly insightful. I've learned so much and am grateful for everything you take the time to share.
In Portland Oregon we have the double whammy of the flooding of Vanport followed by the destruction about a decade later of the Albina neighborhood for the I-5 and Emanuel Hospital expansions. I initially learned about them via guerrilla street art which also touched on the extensive redlining that happened in Portland. My kids, thankfully, learned about both in school, but not to the extent that they should.
This considers just the urban impact of racism; a huge transfer of billions of black rural land wealth was effected by the discrimination of the Dept. of Agriculture's farm lending program, and outright land theft.
Add San Francisco’s Fillmore district to that list. It was known as the “Harlem of the West” in the 1950s and was totally destroyed, businesses and houses stolen under pretense of “redevelopment.”
Many Black owners had to move to Hunter’s Point to find anything affordable.
See James Baldwin’s 1963 document “Take This Hammer” for much more:
i felt that i was aware of at least a few of the ways white people have directly torn down black community. after doing more reading on the subject, especially the work of Isabel Wilkerson, i realized how little i had known.
it's truly disgraceful that most white ppl in our country are now fighting a battle to try to keep this crucial information about our history hidden.
@Yup_Its_Holly If I may… the same happened to Native Americans. Pushing them into reservations and stripping the right to own the property and resources. Same thing. So less - and I am not apologizing for white people - a problem of white people, but more a problem of Capitalism and objectification of others.
@Khrys Tu as vu ce thread (pour ton 'presso) ? Il est bien écrit et très riche en informations généralement peu connues (je connaissais le massacre de Tulsa et deux-trois autres exemples, mais l'accumulation est impressionnante).
Yes, and in many places it was illegal for a Black person to buy a house. The house I lived in from age 11 until I moved away from home had language in the title deed forbidding the sale of the house to a Black person, and such language was common. The Fair Housing Act of 1968 made those kinds of clauses invalid, but right up until 1968 those terms were binding, and a lot of my fellow white people have no idea.
Even better, a lot of Black homeowners own houses where the deed says that it's illegal to sell the house to a non-white person. 🤡
If you bought your house before *checks notes* 2022, there's a good chance that there's a clause in your deed saying that it's illegal to sell the house to non-white people. But it's "OK" because another law says "let's ignore that part!"
I was a young boy when my grandparents explained to me about the events of Greenwood. It shook me to my core and haunts me to this day to believe the community of people I knew and trusted would/could behave so savagely towards fellow neighbors. Fellow humans. I have hope for a brighter, much more inclusive future but have to admit, things look bleak right now and that saddens me because I don't know what to do to make it better except to stand strongly against racism.
I don't understand this ugliness in all it's bloodiness written in ignorance to suppress.
Well I do, but it' beyond comprehension
My dad as we were to go to his friends stopped the car on edge of road and likely because I would sit still at a young 13 explained racism ato me. 3/4 of an hour later he said he expected me to know the difference and not be a racist. More so that everyone to be treated equal. Rambling here Know I care and I am sorry
I'm also interested in this topic. The book 'white by definition ' is an eye opening explanation of how the process of not allowing blacks or mixed race to inherit anything was codified into law, right up to the Supreme Court, especially in Louisiana. It's a bit heavy on legal jargon but chilling and shocking and worth reading.
I had 6 eggs. I broke 2, I fried 2, I ate 2. How many are left?
Given the progression implied from broken to eaten, I'd say four remain. But zero is plausible as well, and it could be argued that two isn't out of the question either. The logic went downhill from there though.
"#Amazon has long wanted to become not indispensable, but unavoidable. The key difference there is that a company is indispensable through quality of service and affordability; a company is unavoidable simply by being in the way"
Yeah, I do wonder how many non-tech people realize just how much of the internet actually runs in an Amazon data center (or to lesser extents IBM, Google, MS, and a few others)?
Or how much government (or gov contracted) data is flowing in and out of AWS? Or how much amazon-owned servers are critical to the infrastructure of it all: cloudflare, CDN, DNS, spam control, WAF, and on and on.
They bought up ALL the prescription strength Azelastine 0.15% before it went OTC so I had to order it from them if I wanted medicare to cover it. I was so sad, I didn’t want to use his pharmacy but it’s the only allergy medication that works for me.
JOB ALERT: Controlled Digital Lending Program Manager with Boston Library Consortium to lead the consortial implementation of CDL for interlibrary loan. 12 month grant-funded position, annual salary of $65k-75k with benefits. Details: https://blc.org/page/were-hiring
A mentally ill homeless guy walked onto a high school campus in my suburb, wearing all black, carrying a big duffel bag. Now, it’s reasonable to be concerned about that and want to identify who it is, assure he’s not carrying weapons onto the campus, and so forth.
But the community (as, perhaps, poorly represented on Facebook) is coming completely unhinged.
It is not so much that I am concerned about the avian flu as that I fear the current pandemic has so ravaged us that whatever calamity strikes us next will find us completely lacking in the sense of solidarity necessary to meet it.
Every morning it posts an image with the latest Covid sewage charts for various locations around the San Francisco Bay Area - because the sewage charts are the only figures I still trust!
Amusingly, I found toot because I sat down to build myself a CLI tool for posting to Mastodon (an equivalent of my existing https://github.com/simonw/tweet-images tool) and checked PyPI to see if the name "toot" was available... and it had already been taken by a tool that did EXACTLY what I wanted to do
got it working. I’d pasted the https link and was relying on Ivory to parse the “user” URL, which has worked in the past. Maybe there’s a subtle bug in there somewhere.
I realized my bot built with https://cheapbotsdonequick.com/ will likely die soon, along with the access to the "source code" (mostly text). Have you used this, and know of any way to migrate from there to Mastodon?
My bot https://twitter.com/homerlines just posts a random line of text from a big list, and needs to avoid obvious duplicates. I don't know how to store the necessary state with GitHub Actions...
Makes sense! I can put the text input in one file, and reference the last x published lines in another, than find a good shuffle algorithm that would also work for a song playlist...
Or just shuffle the input once, then store the current line and roll over from the end back to the beginning... (and shuffle again?)
the tl;dr is you add a Dockerfile (shot-scrapper install + playwright install) and an action.yml file to your repo and then you can call it / pass args/options to it like any other action step you use.
since it's been >6 months since I last played with it, I think I had to build the image and then push it on my own.
Then I had a Dockerfile which reference that image referenced in my actions.yml file. I need to try it out again because they may have updated it to just work without the build/push step.
Last time I did this, it would rebuild the image on every usage. Got much better performance by building the image and storing it on ghcr.io, but then you’ve got *another* pipeline
I'm still pretty uncomfortable with any GitHub Actions pattern that could allow someone else to break my workflows by updating their action that I'm reusing - most of mine tend to stick to the official https://github.com/actions building blocks for that reason
for exactly this reason (and to make life during audits simpler) I started to bundle all third party actions. The only drawback is that updating them in case of new features or bugfixes is a manual process :/