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Do you know how many of my students can’t even say the word white? You all will talk about African-Americans, Latinos, and Asian-Americans all day long but at soon as it comes time to say white peoples’ voices drop. You ain’t have seen that? Come on man, people come up with crazy terms you have never seen before, they would be like: “And that Caucasoid…” You can always tell, you could always tell where the supreme power rests in the society because of the reluctance people have in naming that power.

Part of what privilege requires, guys privilege cannot operate without silence. It cannot operate without silence, and this tremendous silence around whiteness, if you are foolish enough to post a blog on your Facebook that mentions whiteness the amount of attacks that you will get, because privilege defends itself viciously, to maintain the silence that is required for its operation.

So, given this I would argue that the other thing that we need to do is coming off of James Scott’s idea of “anarchist calisthenics,” we need to practice racial anarchist calisthenics. What he, what Scott meant by anarchist calisthenics is that this society has ton of little rules that we all practice without thinking. And he argues that we need to practice breaking little rules consistently because one day this society is going to ask you to prosecute a horrifying rule, that I think we will long live to regret, and the muscles of resistance needs to be exercised, they need to be prepared for the time we need to make that big, big, big, big stand.

And so racial anarchist calisthenics, I would say, begins with all of us getting that tongue muscle back in to place and saying Saurons name. I challenge people; I challenge people every time you say African-American, Asian-American, whatever the group count it and say white just as much. And say white just as much. We don’t do it you guys, we don’t do it, we don’t do it. And yet if we were ever going to confront in a real way white supremacy, which is not only linked to white folks you guys. White supremacy is the racial order in all of us, but if we are not able to discuss whiteness as a category, as a critical way of looking at the world and even simply as just the racial group, we are in some serious trouble. The reality is even if we took every white person on Earth and put them on a space ship and sent them to outer space white supremacy wouldn’t miss a beat.

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oxfordcommas:

10 Things You Should Know About Slavery and Won’t Learn at ‘Django’

Consequently, here’s my top-10 list of things everyone should know about the economic roots of slavery.

1) Slavery laid the foundation for the modern international economic system.
The massive infrastructure required to move 8 to 10 million Africans halfway around the world built entire cities in England and France, such as Liverpool, Manchester and Bordeaux. It was key to London’s emergence as a global capital of commerce, and spurred New York’s rise as a center of finance. The industry to construct, fund, staff, and administer the thousands of ships which made close to 50,000 individual voyages was alone a herculean task. The international financial and distribution networks required to coordinate, maintain and profit from slavery set the framework for the modern global economy.

2) Africans’ economic skills were a leading reason for their enslavement.
Africans possessed unique expertise which Europeans required to make their colonial ventures successful. Africans knew how to grow and cultivate crops in tropical and semi-tropical climates. African rice growers, for instance, were captured in order to bring their agricultural knowledge to America’s sea islands and those of the Caribbean. Many West African civilizations possessed goldsmiths and expert metal workers on a grand scale. These slaves were snatched to work in Spanish and Portuguese gold and silver mines throughout Central and South America. Contrary to the myth of unskilled labor, large numbers of Africans were anything but.

3) African know-how transformed slave economies into some of the wealthiest on the planet.
The fruits of the slave trade funded the growth of global empires. The greatest source of wealth for imperial France was the “white gold” of sugar produced by Africans in Haiti. More riches flowed to Britain from the slave economy of Jamaica than all of the original American 13 colonies combined. Those resources underwrote the Industrial Revolution and vast improvements in Western Europe’s economic infrastructure.

4) Until it was destroyed by the Civil War, slavery made the American South the richest and most powerful region in America.
Slavery was a national enterprise, but the economic and political center of gravity during the U.S.’s first incarnation as a slave republic was the South. This was true even during the colonial era. Virginia was its richest colony and George Washington was one of its wealthiest people because of his slaves. The majority of the new country’s presidents and Supreme Court justices were Southerners.

However, the invention of the cotton gin took the South’s national economic dominance and transformed it into a global phenomenon. British demand for American cotton, as I have written before, made the southern stretch of the Mississippi River the Silicon Valley of its era. The single largest concentration of America’s millionaires was gathered in plantations along the Mississippi’s banks. The first and only president of the Confederacy—Jefferson Davis—was a Mississippi, millionaire slave holder.

5) Defense of slavery, more than taxes, was pivotal to America’s declaration of independence.
The South had long resisted Northern calls to leave the British Empire. That’s because the South sold most of its slave-produced products to Britain and relied on the British Navy to protect the slave trade. But a court case in England changed all of that. In 1775, a British court ruled that slaves could not be held in the United Kingdom against their will. Fearing that the ruling would apply to the American colonies, the Southern planters swung behind the Northern push for greater autonomy. In 1776, one year later, America left its former colonial master. The issue of slavery was so powerful that it changed the course of history.

6) The brutalization and psychological torture of slaves was designed to ensure that plantations stayed in the black financially.
Slave revolts and acts of sabotage were relatively common on Southern plantations. As economic enterprises, the disruption in production was bad for business. Over time a system of oppression emerged to keep things humming along. This centered on singling out slaves for public torture who had either participated in acts of defiance or who tended towards noncompliance. In fact, the most recalcitrant slaves were sent to institutions, such as the “Sugar House” in Charleston, S.C., where cruelty was used to elicit cooperation. Slavery’s most inhumane aspects were just another tool to guarantee the bottom line.

7) The economic success of former slaves during Reconstruction led to the rise of the Klu Klux Klan.
In less than 10 years after the end of slavery, blacks created thriving communities and had gained political power—including governorships and Senate seats—across the South. Former slaves, such Atlanta’s Alonzo Herndon, had even become millionaires in the post-war period. But the move towards black economic empowerment had upset the old economic order. Former planters organized themselves into White Citizens Councils and created an armed wing—the Klu Klux Klan—to undermine black economic institutions and to force blacks into sharecropping on unfair terms. Isabel Wilkerson’s Pulitzer Prize-winning book, “The Warmth of Other Suns”, details the targeting of black individuals, as well as entire black communities, for acts of terror whose purpose was to enforce economic apartheid.

8) The desire to maintain economic oppression is why the South was one of the most anti-tax regions of the nation.
Before the Civil War, the South routinely blocked national infrastructure protects. These plans, focused on Northern and Western states, would have moved non-slave goods to market quickly and cheaply. The South worried that such investments would increase the power of the free-labor economy and hurt their own, which was based on slavery. Moreover, the South was vehemently opposed to taxes even to improve the lives of non-slaveholding white citizens. The first public school in the North, Boston Latin, opened its doors in the mid-1600s. The first public school in the South opened 200 years later. Maintenance of slavery was the South’s top priority to the detriment of everything else.

9) Many firms on Wall Street made fortunes from funding the slave trade.
Investment in slavery was one of the most profitable economic activities throughout most of New York’s 350 year history. Much of the financing for the slave economy flowed through New York banks. Marquis names such as JP Morgan Chase and New York Life all profited greatly from slavery. Lehman Brothers, one of Wall Street’s largest firms until 2008, got its start in the slave economy of Alabama. Slavery was so important to the city that New York was one the most pro-slavery urban municipalities in the North.

10) The wealth gap between whites and blacks, the result of slavery, has yet to be closed.
The total value of slaves, or “property” as they were then known, could exceed $12 million in today’s dollars on the largest plantations. With land, machinery, crops and buildings added in, the wealth of southern agricultural enterprises was truly astronomical. Yet when slavery ended, the people that generated the wealth received nothing.

The country has struggled with the implications of this inequity ever since. With policy changes in Washington since 1865, sometimes this economic gulf has narrowed and sometimes it’s widened, but the economic difference has never been erased. Today, the wealth gap between whites and blacks is the largest recorded since records began to be kept three decades ago.

Definitely didn’t know a bunch of this.

(via bonnienoire)

this-is-not-native:

A Recent TV Slur Revives Debate About Sacheen Littlefeather and Her Role in Marlon Brando’s Oscar Refusal

cassket:

History was made in 1973 when Marlon Brando declined to accept the best actor Oscar for his role in The Godfather to protest the treatment of American Indians. His demurral, which was delivered on stage by a young Native American activist named Sacheen Littlefeather, generated intense controversy and criticism throughout the country. Almost 40 years later, some in Hollywood still seem to hold a grudge.

The subject came up on the August 27 airing of NBC’s Tonight Show while host Jay Leno was talking to comic and FOX-friendly pundit Dennis Miller. The conversation turned to Massachusetts senatorial candidate Elizabeth Warren:

Miller: Elizabeth Warren? Is that the chick that says she’s an Indian?

Leno [chuckling]: Well, yeah, no.

Miller: She’s about as much Indian as that stripper chick Brando sent to pick up his Oscar for The Godfather, all right?

Leno: Check that reference! Hang on, you mean Shawsheen [sic] Littlefeather?

Miller [audience laughter]: Sacheen Littlefeather. Of course I remember!

Leno: 1971 was that? Oh my God!

Miller: You know, I sent the Warren campaign a donation today, but just to piss her off I sent it in beads.

Miller’s comments—and the laughing audience—are glaring reminders that ugly Native American stereotypes are still pervasive. A few weeks after Miller’s appearance with Leno, staffers for Senator Scott Brown, Warren’s opponent, were taped doing tomahawk chops and war whoops as they mocked her campaign. Racial slurs that deny a person’s Native American heritage are a peculiar type of racism, and all the better when the target is a woman, especially one as high profile as Elizabeth Warren or Sacheen Littlefeather.

Marlon Brando asked Littlefeather, then a budding actress, to attend the Academy Awards and refuse the Oscar for him to protest the way the film industry perpetuated harmful stereotypes of Native Americans, and to show his solidarity with American Indian activists who were at that moment engaged in an armed battle with the FBI at Wounded Knee. After his name was announced as the winner, Littlefeather mounted the stage dressed in full traditional regalia and gave a very brief speech explaining Brando’s reasons for declining the award. Brando had prepared a 15-page speech, but the show’s producer threatened to have Littlefeather arrested if she attempted to read all that and instead gave her only 60 seconds on stage, which meant that the short speech she delivered was improvised. Put on the spot without a script in front of millions of people and painfully shy to begin with, she introduced herself demurely as the president of the National Native American Affirmative Image Committee. She then explained that Brando could not accept the very generous award because of the treatment of American Indians by the film industry and on television and because of “recent happenings at Wounded Knee.”

After the show she read the full speech in a press conference and The New York Times published it in its entirety.

“John Wayne was backstage, and he became very upset at my speech, and it took four to six men to restrain him from coming to drag me off stage,” says Littlefeather.

Littlefeather says she was immediately blacklisted in Hollywood. She received death threats and was lied about in the media, with some reports claiming, for example, that her Native dress for the Oscars event was rented. (It was her Northern Traditional pow wow dance outfit.)

“I found out from friends in the industry that they had been visited by FBI agents right after the Academy Awards who had threatened to put them out of business if they hired me. In those days [the FBI] planted a lot of seeds in the media,” she says, referring to the FBI’s efforts to infiltrate many of the social movements of the day in divide and conquer tactics to discredit and destroy civil rights groups like the Black Panthers and the American Indian Movement.

The biggest lie told by the media was that she was not an Indian, a misconception that is still surprisingly persistent today, as demonstrated by the Leno-Miller exchange. Miller’s reference to her as a “stripper” was a further attempt to discredit her, a deliberate exaggeration that probably referenced a photo shoot she had done for Playboy the year before her appearance on the Academy Awards. “I am not a stripper,” she says. “People pay me to keep my clothes on! [laughing] I’m 65 years old and an elder now, going to the other side soon. I was young and dumb [when I did the photo shoot].… It was shot in 1972, with nine other Indian women whose names I won’t disclose to protect their privacy.”

The spread, which was to have been called “10 Little Indians,” was killed by Playboy editors because of the Wounded Knee confrontation. But a year later the magazine ran the shots of Littlefeather, who had by then rocketed to fame.

Sacheen Littlefeather was born Marie Cruz in Salinas, California. She was raised primarily by her mother’s Caucasian family, but her father was a full-blood Indian of mixed White Mountain Apache and Yaqui descent. In a 2010 interview for Native American Times, Littlefeather said she began exploring her Native identity in depth when she was in college at California State University at Hayward. She became involved in the Intertribal Friendship House in Oakland and from there joined the Alcatraz Island occupation where she connected with important Native American leaders like Wilma Mankiller, John Trudell and Anthony Garcia, and was mentored by Adam Fortunate Eagle and Don Patterson, tribal president of the Tonkawa Tribe of Oklahoma.

A longtime resident of the San Francisco Bay Area, Littlefeather is a highly respected member of the Native American community. She has served as head woman dancer at many pow wows and is known for her work in health-care education in the Native community. In the 1980s she worked with Mother Teresa ministering to AIDS patients in hospice care, leading to her becoming one of the founding board members of the American Indian AIDS Institute of San Francisco. In 1981 she worked for the Kiowa tribe in Oklahoma and wrote a health-related column in the tribal newspaper. She has helped produce numerous Native American films, even sharing an Emmy Award in 1984 for her contribution to PBS’s Dance in America: A Song for Dead Warriors, which featured a ballet based on the life of Richard Oakes, one of the Alcatraz occupation leaders. She is also a co-coordinator of the Kateri Prayer Circle of San Francisco.

Most recently, she appeared in the award-winning film Reel Injun, where she talked about her Academy Awards experience and Marlon Brando’s desire to publicize what he saw as unfair treatment of American Indians. In the film, Russell Means recalls being at Wounded Knee and watching the Academy Awards: “We don’t believe we’re going to get out of there alive and the morale is down low, and Marlon Brando and Sacheen Littlefeather totally uplifted our lives.”

The Leno-Miller segment about Littlefeather mostly escaped the notice of the media, but that’s partly because she deliberately delayed responding to it. She is surviving a battle with breast cancer just this year, having only recently been officially declared in remission. “Having cancer has been the fight of my life. Staring death in the face changes your life,” she says. “Late-night TV has stooped to racism and bigotry. [Miller and Leno] came off as bitter, old white farts. Would they have gotten away with it if they had referred to Oprah as Aunt Jemima?”

The cancer treatments have left her very weak and vulnerable to stress—she says the Leno-Miller conversation so disturbed her that it triggered an episode of internal bleeding which required medical attention. Since then she has written a letter of protest to Leno and has mounted a campaign demanding an apology. So far her letter has been met with silence, and The New York Times declined to publish a letter written by longtime friend Priscilla Burgess on Littlefeather’s behalf. High-profile feminist lawyer Gloria Allred refused to represent her and instead referred Littlefeather to a lawyer in Los Angeles who offered to represent her—for $150,000.

(via downlo)

lalie:

I feel like Biden’s just saying all the shit with all the fire that they wished Obama could have said but couldn’t without being the Angry Black Man.

(via downlo)

tw: racism.

katnissisoliveskinneddealwithit:

Why does everyone say that Katniss has BLACK hair? She doesn’t have black hair! She has BROWN! The book says that she has DARK hair, NOT BLACK! If it was black, she would have said black, but she said dark, so that means brown. KATNISS IS NOT BLACK! SHE ISN’T MEXICAN, EITHER! She is just normal skinned. So, is Peeta Mellark. AND GALE. READ, PEOPLE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Look what I found today.  This fandom.  Ugh.