If you read nothing else today, read this

[matt819]

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/26/opinion/confederate-monuments-racism.html

This is a powerful essay by African-American writer and poet Caroline Randall Williams. This is the American history we should have learned. This story of the Six Grandfathers/Mt. Rushmore is the history we should have learned. The genocide of Native Americans is what we should have learned. Instead we all were taught the nicely air-brushed version of America's creation story, complete with bogus discovery and Thanksgiving tales and quaint tales of Sacajawea.

Read this essay.

[FM123]

2. Profound. This is a must read.

Deeply moving and unnerving, as it should be.

[Phoenix61]

3. I've always thought the following says it all.

In 1851, Francis Parkman was the first historian to document Lord Amherst's “shameful plan” to exterminate Indians by giving them smallpox-in- fected blankets taken from the corpses of British soldiers at Fort Pitt in 1763 (Parkman 1991:646–651).

[bobbieinok]

4. Pequot women, children who survived the 1600 MysticFort, Fairfirld battles were sold into slavery

They were given to CT colonists or to the colonists' Native American allies. Or they were sold into slavery into the Bahamas

I NEVER learned that New England enslaved Native Ameicans during the colonial period. I learned this 10 or so yrs ago doing genealogical research on my ex's, and thus my son's family. One ancestor was Captain John Mason, who was a leader of the colonists. He wrote a book about the battles. In skimming the book I learned for THE FIRST TIME EVER that the colonists sold the surviving Native Americans into slavery!

So what do I/we think about the First Thanksgiving now? The Pequots were sold into slavery just a few yrs later. By colonists who came from the Massachusetts Bay and related areas!

[matt819]

5. What is remarkable, in the context of the tear-down of confederate monuments. . .

. . . is that there are thousands of states, cities, towns, villages, roads, and landmarks named for Native Americans. Native Americans who were the victims of a deliberate plan to wipe them from the face of the nation.

[wryter2000]

6. An story I heard

In Yosemite national park, there's a lake named after Chief Tenaya of the native people who lived there. When someone told him they were naming the lake after him, he said, "It already has a name."

[llashram]

11. And one of the reasons

that the African slave trade was turned to as useful in acquiring human beings kept in enforced and tortured bondage as slaves in this 'the NEW WORLD' was that Native-Americans made poor slaves because they knew the lay of the land and more often than not escaped their slaver and recapture.

[barbtries]

7. maybe someone could post excerpts.

i'd love to read it but they won't let me.

[volstork]

9. Here you go:

If there are those who want to remember the legacy of the Confederacy, if they want monuments, well, then, my body is a monument. My skin is a monument.
Dead Confederates are honored all over this country — with cartoonish private statues, solemn public monuments and even in the names of United States Army bases. It fortifies and heartens me to witness the protests against this practice and the growing clamor from serious, nonpartisan public servants to redress it. But there are still those — like President Trump and the Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell — who cannot understand the difference between rewriting and reframing the past. I say it is not a matter of “airbrushing” history, but of adding a new perspective.
I am a black, Southern woman, and of my immediate white male ancestors, all of them were rapists. My very existence is a relic of slavery and Jim Crow.

According to the rule of hypodescent (the social and legal practice of assigning a genetically mixed-race person to the race with less social power) I am the daughter of two black people, the granddaughter of four black people, the great-granddaughter of eight black people. Go back one more generation and it gets less straightforward, and more sinister. As far as family history has always told, and as modern DNA testing has allowed me to confirm, I am the descendant of black women who were domestic servants and white men who raped their help.

It is an extraordinary truth of my life that I am biologically more than half white, and yet I have no white people in my genealogy in living memory. No. Voluntary. Whiteness. I am more than half white, and none of it was consensual. White Southern men — my ancestors — took what they wanted from women they did not love, over whom they had extraordinary power, and then failed to claim their children.


(Emphasis mine)

[barbtries]

10. thank you so much Volstork

I'm not inclined to subscribe again to the NYTimes. There's an article in the magazine I would love to read as well - guess i've exhausted all my free articles for the month.

[erronis]

14. Try opening up a nytimes link in a private or containerized window that deletes all cookies on exit

There are lots of techniques to get around their trying to limit # of visits.

I still think they do enough of a good job that I subscribe. But The Guardian, Reuters, ProPublica, many other science and news outlets give me more than I can read in 24 hours.

[barbtries]

16. never a shortage of things to read.

I still subscribe to WP, but lost my job last year and got rid of almost all of my subscriptions, though I donate when I can, to the Guardian for instance.

[live love laugh]

17. More...

I have rape-colored skin. My light-brown-blackness is a living testament to the rules, the practices, the causes of the Old South. If there are those who want to remember the legacy of the Confederacy, if they want monuments, well, then, my body is a monument. My skin is a monument. Dead Confederates are honored all over this country — with cartoonish private statues, solemn public monuments and even in the names of United States Army bases. It fortifies and heartens me to witness the protests against this practice and the growing clamor from serious, nonpartisan public servants to redress it. But there are still those — like President Trump and the Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell — who cannot understand the difference between rewriting and reframing the past. I say it is not a matter of “airbrushing” history, but of adding a new perspective.

I am a black, Southern woman, and of my immediate white male ancestors, all of them were rapists. My very existence is a relic of slavery and Jim Crow. According to the rule of hypodescent (the social and legal practice of assigning a genetically mixed-race person to the race with less social power) I am the daughter of two black people, the granddaughter of four black people, the great-granddaughter of eight black people. Go back one more generation and it gets less straightforward, and more sinister. As far as family history has always told, and as modern DNA testing has allowed me to confirm, I am the descendant of black women who were domestic servants and white men who raped their help. It is an extraordinary truth of my life that I am biologically more than half white, and yet I have no white people in my genealogy in living memory. No. Voluntary. Whiteness. I am more than half white, and none of it was consensual. White Southern men — my ancestors — took what they wanted from women they did not love, over whom they had extraordinary power, and then failed to claim their children.

What is a monument but a standing memory? An artifact to make tangible the truth of the past. My body and blood are a tangible truth of the South and its past. The black people I come from were owned by the white people I come from. The white people I come from fought and died for their Lost Cause. And I ask you now, who dares to tell me to celebrate them? Who dares to ask me to accept their mounted pedestals?

You cannot dismiss me as someone who doesn’t understand. You cannot say it wasn’t my family members who fought and died. My blackness does not put me on the other side of anything. It puts me squarely at the heart of the debate. I don’t just come from the South. I come from Confederates. I’ve got rebel-gray blue blood coursing my veins. My great-grandfather Will was raised with the knowledge that Edmund Pettus was his father. Pettus, the storied Confederate general, the grand dragon of the Ku Klux Klan, the man for whom Selma’s Bloody Sunday Bridge is named. So I am not an outsider who makes these demands. I am a great-great-granddaughter.

[barbtries]

19. thank you.

It is powerful. A totally valid and almost unheard of perspective on the truth of the matter.

[volstork]

8. A friend forwarded this morning.

It is amazingly powerful.

[DanieRains]

12. Will Read Later

Remember, George Washington never told a lie. Ask anyone.

[erronis]

15. And donald-the-trump never told a truth. Fortunately we won't have to read his memoirs.

Altho there will be lots of compendiums of his twitterdumps.

[Talitha]

13. Very powerful - thanks for posting!

[ismnotwasm]

18. K&R