A demonstrator confronts police near Camden Yards during a protest against the death in police custody of Freddie Gray.
Jared Ball explains the history in ‘Black August and the Unmasking of the US Police State’, telesur english
He opens:
“Black August, paradoxically, shines a light on the contradictions of a country that never was, yet must always be.
“The reason you call the police is because you’re in a police state.”
– Dhoruba bin-Wahad
“Before our eyes and ears, a ‘web of business relationships that now defines America’s media and culture’ has one particular business raking in billions of dollars while another defines the culture of a specific demographic as criminal.”
– Homeboy Sandman
Much like a credit card that finances a lifestyle far beyond our means, prison has long been central to maintaining a certain racial, social and class structure in the United States and masking social contradictions. Mass incarceration helps to obscure stagnant wages for labor, and enormous profits for bosses and owners and a low-wage, captive workforce — quite literally — that answers our customer service calls, produces our furniture and clothing and, with their ancillary associates in policing and the courts, exists as fodder for TV cop dramas, sitcoms, movies and documentaries.
All of that product makes a ton of money for the prison, media, and other industries, and, just as importantly, helps sharpen the cultural narratives which defines who is “good,” and who is “innocent” and who is “guilty” just by their mere presence.
Black August refers to the coordinated efforts of U.S. political prisoners — or more accurately prisoners of war — to “unmask” their jailers and the interests on whose behalf they toil, and to commemorate, study and learn from the history of Black liberation struggles in this country. Specifically, as recounted in the history of Black August by the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement:
Black August originated in the concentration camps of California to honor fallen Freedom Fighters, Jonathan Jackson, George Jackson, William Christmas, James McClain and Khatari Gaulden. Jonathan Jackson was gunned down outside the Marin County California courthouse on August 7, 1970 as he attempted to liberate three imprisoned Black Liberation Fighters: James McClain, William Christmas and Ruchell Magee.
It is a time to fast, train, study and reflect on the importance of past examples of struggle that may inform the present. It can also be a time to recalibrate standards by which we assess both our progress and our peril. Black August challenges the very nature of the state and its claim on human beings as colonial subjects, and its insistence, in word and deed, that this, is the natural, almost divine order of things.
For this reason, Black August is all that the state abhors; humanity, dignity, principle and adherence to so many of the state’s hated isms; pan-Africanism, socialism, communism, intercommunalism. To a ruling elite, Black August is an uncomfortable, repressed memory of the traditions, militancy and robust responses to injustice and oppression–and therefore a reminder of their depravity– in a state that insists on only sanctioned forms of resistance.” (the rest is here, including current political prisoners of color, both Clintons’ relevant histories, and three excellent videos.)
for THD who may even have been there:
Jared Bell: “Black August reminds us that too little has changed in the lived experience of African people in this or any hemisphere. It is, as Bob Marley once sang, a call to “Want More!” Our expectations have been unacceptably downsized. Want More!”
From Black Agenda Report:
‘Washington: A One Party State; by Danny Haiphong
“The two corporate parties agree on almost everything of substance. “The one-party state doesn’t negotiate police brutality, mass incarceration, or any other manifestation of white supremacy. Nor does it think twice before enforcing sanctions on Syria or Venezuela.” They can’t change Obamacare, simply because it is the perfect corporate bill. “Both parties agree that the profits of the rich must be maximized by any means necessary.”
‘Mumia Abu-Jamal Speaks About Black Lives Matter and Police Violence’, by Tasasha Henderson
“A new book of essays by Mumia Abu Jamal sheds light on the historical roots of police violence. “The state will always utilize its ‘law” as a tool of repression, but movements must create and expand the space to raise contradictions.” Huey Newton, says Mumia, “called for deep transformation of police, to bring forth Citizen Peace Forces, designed to solve problems, not bomb them.” Body cameras and better training for cops “is a bourgeois mirage.”
‘Tell Trump, and the Democrats, Too: We Demand Black Community Control of the Police’, by Glen Ford
Dunno Glen; while I can honor your faith in blacks, all too often we’ve seen that when people of color zip on the uniform, they become ‘the police’ writ large.
davidly
Greyson Smythe
LeMoyne
juliania2
ohiobarbarian
stephenadavis1
wendyedavis
café babylon 
i’m shutting down for the night; sleep well, dream well if you can. in your dreams, may you hear this glorious + peter tosh cover by the playing for change band (oh, Titi, my love for you is boundless!):
A friend of mine lives on Paul Robeson Str. just around the way. The GDR and various orgs from the 50s to 80s had a penchent for honoring his activity, with i.a. titles like that street, a school, and honorary doctorate.
After seeing Detroit, Roger dug deeper into the coverage of the time(s) and found,
Here:
http://limitedinc.blogspot.de/2017/08/keep-your-electric-eye-on-me-babe.html
ooof and whoosh; roger said it right; thanks for taking us to roger’s place. he hadn’t mentioned the hough ave. riots in cleveland, although they were in 1966. i just spent waaaay too much time reading sources about it again. but similarly, the press blamed the riots on ‘hate whitey’ commies and black nationalists’, and one cleveland plain dealer editor was the foreman for the grand jury empaneled to investigate the riots.
revisionist history names poverty, police brutality, racism, and lack of services, but the area hasn’t ever healed, of course. i was living next door to hough w/ my parents the following summer, in shaker heights, then the highest per capita area in the state. quite the contrast.
just the brief video on the riots in detroit on telesur told a damning as hell story in 1:32, and i would have embedded it, but i couldn’t find it on youtube. so i guess the detroit film roger saw told the story from an (ahem) different perspective?
our first visit to pat boone world.
may not be everyone’s cup of alternately hilarious & disturbing tea, but speaking of whiteness…jeezus h. complete erasure of difference except as kind of a zoo or quaint shopping mall option. I love how the old Bell Labs is selling these crackers on how great call forwarding & crap like that will make life for white people. that sounds like an Apple or Google ringtone doesn’t it? there may be more Asians & even an occasional black person or woman or gay in Bill Gates world today, but the infantile giddiness one is supposed to feel over the techno-baubles on offer for not cheap is exactly the same. I imagine hell is something like this. these same guys’ viddy on some Farmville hick going on assignment in the oil patches of Venezuela, struggling mightily to say, “Hello” in Spanish as he surveys all the wonderful things Chevron is doing for VZ (“aren’t those American cars great?”). and Fun in Balloonland. and the Chicken of Tomorrow (Big Chicken is bro’t to you by Big Oil. all those chickens and only one brief sentence about a huge issue: chicken shit.) i’m not in to shooting stuff or unnecessary medical procedures, but these viddies really do make me want to sterilize certain people. American culture=death.
I know it’s not exactly true, but it’s tempting to think that everything good about this country at the moment comes from black people. Europe & elsewhere have a pre-industrial world whose remnants still exist as a reminder of life before today’s capitalist hellhole. and a certain amount of struggle against capitalism can rightly be focused on their preservation. but we in the US have the African experience in the “new world.” (and others, but the experience of blacks looms so large and is the focus of so much repression & violence.) it must be erased, coopted, degraded, commodified and/or made marketable b/c it is the truth of our country. the owners are so cynical that they will use a black guy, a more than eager house slave Obama, to obliterate the truth of history. Him sitting at Lincoln’s desk is supposed to be some kind of resolution, compensation, recompense, for even *one person* who was lynched? like the kids in that ghastly Century 21 video, people, esp. us white people, really do want to have our consciences bought off with a marketing gimmick. didn’t some guy write a book about the dangers of pursuing whiteness? ;)
I think the cockney rhyming slang “seppo” or “septic,” an insult against Yanks, should be used for the real white trash, no longer restricted to just white people, Bill Gates, Michelle Obama, etc. seppo bastards all.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ethnic_slurs_by_ethnicity#Americans
i loved it! where did it come from? more soon, but as to your glorious obama point, and gag me with three spoons:
RT: ‘Barack Obama, the former US President and darling of many, celebrated his 56th birthday Friday. Amid the outpouring of online adulation, and from many in the press, lawmakers in his home state of Illinois has declared August 4 in his honor.
Obama joins a select list of former presidents to have a day in their honour, adding his name to the illustrious list of the likes of George Washington and Abraham Lincoln. Albeit only in Illinois, the state in which he began his political career in 1997.
Though it won’t be an official state holiday, one in which many people get a day off, Illinois Gov. Bruce Rauner signed the law to honor Obama Friday. Rauner noted the 44th president’s efforts in building “bridges across communities” and “protecting Americans’ rights”, without going into details of the methods used, such as spying on everything they’re doing.’
“how do animals learn?” “as long as they learn to taste good, I don’t care.” what’s up w/the double helix w/the hearts, clubs, spades, and diamonds? your dna is the luck of the draw? don’t tell whitey no facts. it only confuses him. those guys were on comedy central way back when it first started. as for the racial slur part, one should be on the lookout for ways to insult the turds our septic society cranks out w/an ease that Metamucil would envy. what is it that keeps our country so regular that way? who is using the capitalist Zohar to conjure all these shit golems?
children are the mirror. they don’t have the affectations, repressions, ambitions, and self-deceptions that adults have internalized.
“There is also the example of the thousands of young people who have been gunned down by police during this period.” (a very sad read on teen suicide in the US).
http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2017/08/07/suic-a07.html
b/c kids haven’t fully developed the learned myopia expected of them, they can’t help but see the overwhelming violence of our society or its inordinate impact on minority populations, esp. blacks. the revulsion & the desire to rebel among most strata of youth (not Chelsea Clinton of course) arising from such knowledge must be coopted. so the true “gangbanger” hoodie rebel becomes an ever more filthy version of Donald Trump. puttin’ a cap in that ass & grabbin’ the cash is life. (even in a movie as silly as Back to the Future, it is Marty, M J Fox, who teaches the black musicians how to jam. yes, thru the miracle of movies, you too can go back & rape & pillage African-American culture. quite insidious of Spielberg. white entertainers stealing black music is no theft at all.)
same guys. “thank you, black man. we won’t be needing you any more in this film.” “I feel my IQ lowering…” that’s the plan.
tragic stats. i might have posited a few more reasons, but this may be the most violent culture on the planet. were alice miller alive today, she’d have more to say on the authoritarian culture of violence, but back in the day she’d name the disease cause ‘male authoritarianism’, hadn’t she? i was glad to see a bit of pushback in comments on the ‘trump whitehouse will mock them’ at the bottom (and obama as well). but i’d also hearted:
“Authoritarians relish viewing life as a struggle of the fittest, and may even cry crocodile tears over children whose real needs they will never fully understand.
With the help of modern psychiatric labeling, they can shift blame and brand children to better control and manage them. These labels also provide ideal excuses for exercising coercive measures should some children grow up to be rebels or dissidents.
I think it is rather disappointing that only a small minority in the psychiatric profession today (and so few of our larger society) recognizes the significance of “life-overwhelm” as the greatest factor in causing what we commonly call mental illness.”
as per edward curtain’s “We have been told interminably that our lives revolve around our brains (our bodies) and that the answers to our problems lie with more brain research, drugs, genetic testing, etc. It is not coincidental that the U. S. government declared the 1990s the decade of brain research, followed up with 2000-2010 as the decade of the behavior project, and our present decade being devoted to mapping the brain and artificial intelligence”, etc.
as for the zohar and many golems, heh, spin the kabbalh tree, it might look like the deck o’ cards dna double-helix.
glad that you added: “(and others, but the experience of blacks looms so large and is the focus of so much repression & violence.) yes, the first americans, yes? but where in eurpoe is a pre-industrial world, bed o’ nails? apologies in advance for my ig’rance.
but sure, billy and mellie are always about ‘teh women folk’! in developing nations, and tech-nol-ogy. automatic birth control chips, smart phones for women farmers, etc. at least they’re now touting breast-feeding. sure: consume this, life will be a breeze. can’t afford it? go directly to jail, cuz that’s exactly what you’re worth, especially if you Resist!
Chartres? the Kremlin? Stonehenge? from that time before the only thing that endures is planned obsolescence.
for a variety of reasons, the experience of the natives, and others, here doesn’t figure so prominently in the day to day consciousness of many of us. certainly it’s easier to hide an issue like police brutality on an Indian reservation than in W. Baltimore. and when will a native family get its own Cosby show? surely one of the casino families is worthy?
despite pay inequities, etc., etc., the essential patriarchy of capitalism is also elided from consciousness. not hard to do for lots of males. not difficult at all. Hillary’s struggle w/the glass ceiling (megalol) is capitalism’s elision of its essential patriarchy. an instance of it.
the natives & the slaves are twins. one was killed, the other enslaved. to separate these two, even as historically they were (and are) happening at the same time, is quite the magic trick. it helps to animate the notion that blacks are getting the shaft b/c of their own deviance. forget the one, pathologize the other. (but your post is about African Americans).
language controlling consciousness: it’s another magic trick, on the devilish side, to have people give one second’s thought to the notion of “mental illness” when analyzing the phenomenon of US teen suicide. even one second. the owners of our cages prefer armchair spokespersons and unwitting advertisers for Big Pharma who think they are doing “psychiatry”. far preferable to any actual socialists trying to break out of the national Skinner box before getting all medical & clinical on the affects & transgressions of the oppressed.
“Racial prejudice is a terrible thing, Yossarian. It really is. It’s a terrible thing to treat a decent, loyal Indian like a nigger, kike, wop, or spic.”
Chief White Halfoat
.
no, induns aren’t in the awareness of the USian zeitgeist, although slightly more than half of them live ‘off-reservation’ now. added to the fact that so many tribes were totally eradicated in the post-columbian times, that pbs even did a ‘we shall remain’ series.
https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=we+shall+remain+pbs
i dunno how many first americans were enslaved, but it was common among the catholic missions in california, and apparently many were murdered there, as well. and junipero sera was one of the key enslavers, but this pope of liberation theology claim canonized him in 2015. grrrrr.
OMG: i just scanned the facts…and am sick again. great satirical quote.
https://cafe-babylon.net/2015/09/24/on-the-popes-canonization-of-the-most-despicable-junipero-serra/
the future ecological devastation of post-industrial capitalism was mapped out already in pre-industrial capitalism’s wiping out of the natives (which didn’t stop w/the invention of the steam engine, as neither did slavery. it only accelerated.)
I had one of my students, an 11 yr old from Beijing on vacation right now in Europe text me saying: “the air is so fresh.” and then a 15 yr old also from Beijing, while we were reading some thing on light pollution that I picked at random, said, “it’s been 3 years since I have seen anything in the night sky except the moon.” he had no concept of the milk in the milky way. (many residents in an earthquake-caused blackout in L.A., CA, in 1994 reported being alarmed by this unusual cloud in the night sky, per this article we were reading.)
but you know one thing these students from China have seen, and lots of? scary images of black people in the US.
signed, benumbed.
wait. you’re saying that there isn’t large-scale manufacturing in europe, not even in germany, for instance? i’d find that jolting. have they off-shored it all, then?
now the skies in metro-areas in china are certainly obscured by coal smoke from those little heaters that take pressed coal with holes in them to facilitate burning, but china is leading the world in solar, even with the external costs of that.
but arrrrggh on the students seeing lots of scary images of blacks in the US. and that’s one of the things i’d meant to bring up earlier: due to skin melanin levels, blacks are so very noticeable, aren’t they? and given that so many, especially males of a certain age, are painted as ‘dangerous’ due to charges of criminality, conviction rates, incarceration rates, they are a suspect (slightly depending on class), and are treated as such. guilty until proven innocent, just for sitting in a car, on a corner. in stores: “n*gger on aisle ten!” our son used to jest. but yes, few indigenous are noticeably ‘of color’, save in areas like ours near reservations. but even here, many consider them suspect, or maybe because if it, i dunno.
it’s an 11 yr old on vacation.
i steer clear of certain topics w/kids in China. students in the US is a different story.
China Mieville’s sci-fi murder mystery “the city & the city” is already true, and becoming more true w/google censorship and the like, in cyberspace. and everywhere else.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_City_%26_the_City
“all city-dwellers collude in ignoring real aspects of the cities in which they live – the homeless, political structures, the commercial world or the stuff that’s ‘for the tourists’…” yeah, and the unbreathable air & invisible sky.
The Tulsa ‘race riots’ in ‘black wall street’, which were committed by yanno, barbaric whites. what an ugly, ugly, story.
“Believed to be the single worst incident of racial violence in American history, the bloody 1921 Tulsa race riot has continued to haunt Oklahomans to the present day. During the course of eighteen terrible hours on May 31 and June 1, 1921, more than one thousand homes and businesses were destroyed, while credible estimates of riot deaths range from fifty to three hundred. By the time the violence ended, the city had been placed under martial law, thousands of Tulsans were being held under armed guard, and the state’s second-largest African American community had been burned to the ground.”
and the MOVE bombing in 1985.
“On May 13, 1985, the Philadelphia police engaged in a race riot when they dropped a bomb on the roof of a row house in a Black section of West Philadelphia. It was Mother’s Day, and Black mothers and children were killed that day, intentionally burned and shot to death by police. Eleven people, including five children ages 7 to 13 — all members of the radical Black liberation group MOVE — died.” (atlanta black star)
John Mellencamp: Easy Target (listen and weep) i’d love to have the shadow box as an illustration. wish i knew how to make a screen-shot. thank you once again, john. (h/t k. gosztola)
could also call myself Scheisskopf. i didn’t know about Tulsa until very recently. ain’t that “invisible hand” grand? and the J Cougar M. thanks.
100 years ago, threats began against people attempting to evade or resist the draft, incl. by untimely love & marriage. threats of charges of treason & execution. nothing stifles love like a touch of war. and if that isn’t true, your local draft board will make it true by compelling you to explain how Ms. Mayella became Cornpone Queen 1917 of your heart.
“When I look up, I see people cashing in. I don’t see heaven, or saints or angels. I see people cashing in on every decent impulse and human tragedy.” Catch 22
When I saw #Black August, my first mental connection was Michael Brown and Ferguson, MO four years ago. And that is there but more recent.
Yes, “race riot” in the US means anti-African pogrom. And “black Wall Street” means “segregated black business area shut down by desegregation and urban renewal”. And “urban renewal” means “Negro removal”. The euphemisms multiply.
The Durhamite (“dermite”) interview was downtown very close to City Hall. The urban renewal that created the downtown freeway took three parallel blocks of black-owned businesses. The father of the guy who fixes our car owned one of them and moved to his current location in 1975. That was with money from the eminent domain settlement.
On this topic and on the previous one from Davidly, my current reading is Philip D. Morgan, Slave Counterpoint: Black Culture in the Eighteenth Century Chesapeake and Lowcountry [South Carolina]. Davidly’s post causes me to read with a little more sensitivity to what is going on midst the description of the banality of Eighteenth Century lives and remember that despite the opportunities for slaves to have some control of their time (under the task system and scheduled days off) and earn compensation for work done on their time off, it still was a society of white dominated slavery on the edge of the frontier of a settler colonial country that was engaged in genocide of indigenous people. And it still was the field trials of forms of capitalist large task and large gang management that would reshape manufacturing by the end of the century. It is very fascinating how similar the organization of slave labor and the organization of free labor are. As some Alt-Right folk point out, all that is missing is the lifetime employment guarantee of slavery. There are more subtle points. And I am early pages into it. But it is thoroughly researched for any with the inclination to take a new look at what seems so thoroughly familiar. Even benni seeds, okra, yams, and chickpeas. Or sweeping country dirt yards. Or some of the houses in coastal South Carolina that are familiar from trips to the beach during my childhood.
In this area, the experience of black and red, African and indigenous, are mixed in with a little white (both rich and poor). I have two neighbors from the Carolinas who traditionally have identified as black and have married black but are in fact both of them mixtures of the remnants of Piedmont indigenous towns crushed between English settlement and the power of the indigenous confederacies that formed in reaction (Creek and Cherokee in this area). One is from eastern Siouian people; the other from Tuscarora-Lumbee people. Their indigenous ancestors where caste as “colored” or “mulatto” and hid out in swamps to avoid impressment into slavery until civilization forced them into a post-Civil War Jim Crow society. Indigenous people are still here and are my neighbors.. and also can participate in #Black August. That is the history of other ancestors. And for years, the Qualla Tribe of the Cherokee Nation has opposed their recognition as “Indian” by the US of A. But the State of North Carolina recognizes both groups. One historically met DeSoto on his expedition; the other (the Tuscarora) brutally killed the colonial surveyor, which preciptated a war that they lost and retreated to their relatives the Haudenosaunee in what is now upstate New York.
My neighbors? One is a business manager of a small pharmaceutical company. The other is a retail appliance department manager at Penney’s and her mom is a cook at a nursing home. Both work long hours. That is where we are on the optimistic side of the current situation.
Nagelbett’s Pat Boone video reminds me of the anxiety I had in moving from Atlanta to Green Bay mid-1970s. I finally figured it out. I went from taking a bus to work from Decatur to Rich’s (folks familiar with that downtown location will understand) and walking to work. In Green Bay, I had to drive everywhere and the only black people I saw were driving Mercedes. (Those who’ve lived in Green Bay will understand.)
In Pat Boone’s Jetson’ s future there seem to be no black people in Seattle.
no more making fun of pat. he’s a total hepcat these days.
though youtube helpfully informs us he’s not the only one who’s done this kind of stuff:
oh, my. i wiki-ed michael, and he was assassinated on aug. 9; such a memory, thd! law enforcement mustta spent a hella lotta time and energy on that entry. the portions on credible v. non-credible witnesses was…i can’t even think of a fitting literary metaphor. maybe something from alice in wonderland, though. but reading it reminded me of two things, one was from davidly’s friend roger’s essay:
“Anyone is a nice disguise. It is used today whenever black lives matter is mentioned. Don’t all lives matter?” and that, of course, had pinged memories of a former café commenter who said the same, including that the ‘hands up, don’t shoot’ plea was based on a lie. well, yeppers; the wiki proves it! but i loved these lines of roger’s that davidly had chosen; and of course we see it today…every day.
““When the police beat peeps in the street, that wasn’t rioting, but anti-rioting. In this way, a riot is unlike a dance, in which both partners are described as dancing.”
thanks for the local histories, including the blending of indigenous and blacks hiding, meeting, in solidarity of purpose. similarly, lowlands, swamps in florida and lou’siania had similar de facto inter-marriages. when i put up the diary on ‘treme’ some time back, i’d been prompted to look about for more of that history. and of course, all of those cultural blends were showcased so gloriously in the music.
i’m not getting this, though; could you please say more? “And for years, the Qualla Tribe of the Cherokee Nation has opposed their recognition as “Indian” by the US of A.”
curious about more of the history of #black august, i went to the malcom x grassroots movement’s website, and learned a hella lot more, including ‘fasting’. you’ll all remember that they’d created the 2012 ghetto storm report, seriously revelatory documentation of how often blacks are killed extra-judiciously ever X (i’ve forgotten) hours.
african globe tells the story as well.
re: credible witnesses: from the guardian today: ‘Venezuela: UN rights chief decries excessive force used against protesters;
Security forces and pro-government groups responsible for the deaths of at least 73 protesters, investigation finds’
“After receiving no response to repeated requests for access to Venezuela to investigate the situation in the country, the UN rights chief, Zeid Ra’ad al-Hussein,deployed a team of human rights officers to monitor the country remotely. According to the preliminary findings, security forces were allegedly responsible for the deaths of at least 46 of the protesters, while pro-government armed groups were behind 27.”
“The rights office also decried “credible reports of cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment by security forces of such detainees, amounting in several cases to torture,” saying tactics included “electric shocks, beatings, suffocation with gas, and threats of killings, and in some cases threats of sexual violence”.
but of course, those damned socialists have arrested a number of police, national guard, yada, yada. wish i could remember where i stashed abby martin’s report on that, not that they’d believer HER. but torture? ‘credible reports’. but this shit is why the int’l crisis group has their collective eyes on VZ, isn’t it?
oh, but a least corbyn’s singing a slightly different tune today, and decries violence on both sides, favors…dialogue.
on edit: Oh, how fortuitous: ‘Here’s Your Guide to Understanding Protest Deaths in Venezuela’, telesur today. a graphic notes that ‘of the 124 victims, 5 have been killed by police, *many others are being investigated. the 124 are color-coded.
*many are still being investigated.
Relative to Eastern Band of Cherokee (Qualla Tribe): Because most of the descendants of remnant families of Piedmont area indigenous people were forced into slavery, the few families that can meet the proportion of “blood” for federal registration are often 1/4 mixed with African-American “blood”. The Eastern Band of Cherokee, like their neighbors have been racist toward African-Americans for quite some time. (African-Americans were sometimes sent as troops in the colonial raiding expeditions against indigenous people, but more often a hostile groups of towns were sent — Catawba against Cherokee, Cherokee against Creek, Chickasaw, and Choctaw.) That caused the Qualla Tribe to lobby against recognition of the Robeson County band of Lumbee and Tuscaroras who were seeking federal recognition. Other Piedmont families are the Orange County band and Halifax-Warren County band (Haliwa) of Occaneechi, Saponi, and Meherrin.
What is going on is anthropologists, archaeologists, and historians are investigating the US Census records for early records of “free non-white” peoples in community clusters, tracing the genealogies forward to current residents, doing interviews about family stories, and conducting DNA cladistic tests to see who in the historical area of residence might have been descendants. Most now do not have the proportional heritage to meet federal or state registration standards. But the specific families involved in the mixture of red, white, and black in the Southeast is beginning to be unraveled and then traced to descendants outside the Southeast.
Daniel K. Richter’s Before the Revolution: America’s Ancient Pasts is very good about summarizing what is known about the Southeast, which was among the first areas of genocide and ethnic cleansing to clear the way for slave plantations. He also has a section that sets the Southeastern towns into the context of the “Mississippian” mound-building civilizations of roughly 1200 BCE. And what is currently known about the period between Columbus’s landfall in 1492 and the settlement of Jamestown in 1607. Also, the way that colonies differed but came to similar results in their “diplomacy” with indigenous groups, which by the mid-1700s had stimulated the rise of strong chief societies and confederacies that subsumed multiple linguistic groups.
Genocide and ethnic cleansing were much more difficult operations than even well-armed Europeans expected. That is why it took 400 years to get from Columbus’s landfall to Wounded Knee, and the expected suppression still is not sufficiently complete for a lot of white Americans.
And still white men can’t accept accountability for their roles in stirring that racial melting pot. The earliest I came on a tellling of that sorry history was in high school when I read Bernard de Voto’s The Course of Empire, which depended purely on white telling of events in records, journals, and diaries. Still a classic.
thanks, and i’ll bet my last amerikan dollar that you’ve said this *from memory*, too. ;-) but as to blood quantum, i’d thought the division was 3/4, not 4/4, but…maybe i’m wrong, or apparently wrong. but yes to racism has so many forms. navajo look down on utes, as some utes were said to have scouted for the odious kit carson (see their last stand in canyon de shelley, in which his troop burned down their luscious, life-giving orchards) utes kinda look down of blacks, and some loathe white, a fact we discovered when we were invited by our friend the sundance chief to camp out with their family on ute mountain one year. bless him, he even hauled our tip and poles onto the mountain…his reasoning was that as our daughter is UMU, she/we had a right to be there.
and yes to your para on genocide wasn’t all that easy. gotta scoot, and thanks again, but i did save this news for you, albeit that you’ve likely heard it.
‘Following an ugly campaign, Nissan workers in Canton, Mississippi, lost a historic union election by a margin of 2,244 to 1,307 last week.
Workers say that they aren’t giving up in their attempts to organize. The union immediately pledged to challenge the results at the National Labor Relations Board.
Late last month, the NLRB charged Nissan with illegally threatening workers and bribing workers to vote against the union. On the day of the election, the UAW filed seven more unfair labor practice charges with the NLRB. If the federal body decides that Nissan broke the law, it could order another election within six months.
Workers say that during the next 6 months the union will have to prove the promises made by the company to stop the union drive were empty.”, ect. at trnn