Anyone offended by history needs to reflect on their priorities and identity.
I'm not offended that white people claimed this land at the point of a sword, and even worse, in the embrace of a smallpox blanket. Horrified, yes, but not offended. I'm not offended that the backbone of the economy for a hundred years was built on the backs of stolen people on stolen land.
I'm not offended by history.
What I am offended by is the present. I'm offended that people who have been oppressed and started out life with less than nothing have been told by the privileged elite to "pull themselves up by their own bootstraps like the rest of us did". That's fucking vile. I'm offended that we keep trying to whitewash confederate slave owning generals, instead of teaching who they really were, and what they really killed for, and ordered other people to die for. Be offended about what we are doing now, and use history as the reason why we should change it.
It's incredibly jarring to have the burden of knowledge while others revel in their own ignorance. As a minority and a former Marine, I am deeply ashamed and disappointed in my fellow Americans.
The thing that offends me about history is how we humans never learn a damn thing from it.
If you treat minorities (or really, people in general) with respect, then you should have no qualms about learning about how they've been poorly treated in the past.
Sadly, conservatives never treat minorities with respect, and so they don't want to learn about how history judges bigots like them.
Regardless of what's being defended, this is a "poisoning the well" fallacy, and should be avoided as a rhetorical tactic. This particular example serves no purpose than the stroke the ego and sense of moral superiority of those on one side, and alienate those on the other, and create a divisive binary where there isn't one, and shouldn't be one.
Suppose someone argues that the solution is making sure no historical figures are diminished due to their race, not just during a certain month, but always, and therefore doesn't believe that focusing on a single race for an arbitrary amount of time is productive. Well, OP would dump them squarely into the 'enslavers and segregationists' camp, where they obviously do not belong.
I'm reminded of my gay friends who hate many modern pride events because they feel they do the opposite of normalizing homosexuality in focusing on garish oversexualized public displays. They'd be called homophobes by the equivalent of the OP--isn't that a bit ridiculous?
I don't believe it, common sense in Lemmy? Wild.
I went to school in the UK. We had to learn a whole lot shittiness that we did in the past. It's sort of funny because I'm ethnically Chinese and I moved to Canada later on. Whenever something bad that the British did came up, I would always be made fun of.
I moved back to the UK from Canada again at a later date and we were watching a video about more bad stuff the British did as apart of our curriculum and I immediately felt flush with embarrassment. Then I remembered that everyone around me was British too.
I sometimes wonder if the Americans that chastise the Chinese for wiping out history like Tiananmen Square are those that advocate for wiping out Black History Month and wanting to wipe contribution from minorities on their websites right now.
To be clear, I think that Black History Month should just be apart of American history. Like integrated into the curriculum and books and stuff. However, you can't trust Republicans to just wipe it out entirely. They "say" they will and just never get around to doing it properly because Heaven forbid you feel a bit uncomfortable while learning things.
The reverse isn't much better. I'm Dutch, and if you go to Indonesia, outside the cities there will often be people pointing out what awesome things the Dutch built "for them". It's super weird when the people your country exploited and abused start thanking you.
Indonesian person: "Oh, the town well, yeah the Dutch built that for us, but we can't maintain it, so now we walk down to the other well to get water. The Dutch were so nice to us. "
My brain: "Yeah, I can see how that totally makes up for a century and a half of murderously harsh exploitation and killing 200.000 indonesians when you tried to be independant"
My mouth: "Oh, that's... nice?"
Now, I get that everything the Dutch did kinda gets snowed under compared to what the Japanese and the Americans did in the span of a few decades, but I grew up when our history books moved from a half-page "And then there were some police actions in the East Indies, and suddenly there was Indonesia" and towards a somewhat more realistic picture.
People get nostalgic for order and predictability that came at the point of a gun. “At least we had food and everything wasn't falling apart!” Plenty of Russians I’ve been around remember the “good old days” under authoritarian “communism” and were unhappy with the turmoil and unpredictability when the USSR collapsed, and they’re the same ones that are happy with Putin’s and trump’s authoritarian methodology and threat of violence to enforce compliance.
So people absolutely can have a fondness for their abusers, especially if freedom from them leads to unpredictability and poverty.
I really want either a miniseries or a bunch of movies telling the story of the Haitian Revolution. Sadly, that seems to never be able to get funded. It’s almost as if Americans or the French, who would be most likely to tell the story, don’t want people to know this story.
Well there's always the play Toussaint Louverture, written in 1934. Paul Robeson played the title role in 1936 in London. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toussaint_Louverture:_The_Story_of_the_Only_Successful_Slave_Revolt_in_History
The playwright, CLR James, later wrote a book about the revolt, and revised his play, which went on the stage as The Black Jacobins.
From the Wiki: "In 2018, it was announced that the book was going to be made into a television programme thanks to Bryncoed Productions, with the assistance of Kwame Kwei-Armah."
Bryncoed was founded by Foz Allan. I did a bit of poking around but found nothing linking either of them or Kwei-Armah with The Black Jacobins. I would love to see a TV series on the revolt, I hope something comes to pass. CLR James was an interesting fellow too, his achievements deserve more recognition.
How about a board game?
There is a lot of good history boardgames can teach. And fun alternate history they can create :)
They mentioned it in the new Castlevania series. That is probably the most I learned about it from media.
I saw that too. It was a nice way to indroduce Voudon to it.
I don't have strong feelings one way or another, with one exception: why in the hell did anyone think it was okay to own a person and why the fuck did it continue for as long as it did?
That's seriously fucked up.
I'm not a person of color, so I don't think my opinion matters much in the discussion. Black history is just a part of the history of humanity. It should not be erased, it should be viewed as a lesson, like most of the rest of history.
why in the hell did anyone think it was okay to own a person and why the fuck did it continue for as long as it did?
Because it made them a lot of money. You can go back to any point in history and find people saying slavery is immoral, and not just the enslaved people.
So what you're saying is.... Capitalism is the problem.
DOWN WITH THE SYSTEM!
nothing triggers fragile white nationalist bumpkins like 1/12th of the year being set aside to recognize black people
https://youtu.be/MpnpIhqSLto
i like morgan freeman’s take on black history month
If you have morality doesn't it kind of suck to hear about century after century of slavery, violence, and exploitation?
Honestly I feel like if any type of history "slaps" then you're probably viewing it through a very narrow lens that omits an immense amount of human suffering. History is depressing as fuck. It can definitely serve a purpose to focus on the cool events and forget about the rest at times, but it's also misleading if that's all you do.
I think they mean learning about history slaps. History is both interesting and extremely important even when it's depressing.
Encouraging learning about history is something we should continue to do, even if it means using collloquialisms.
I guess it makes slightly more sense if they meant to say learning about history.
But still, I'm not sure making claims like this is going to reverse the eternal reality of young people not giving a shit about history and only starting to recognize its importance after they have made the same mistakes.
It's like "Math is fun kids!", "history slaps!". While young people just roll their eyes. Just because the slang is slightly updated doesn't actually make the message any more compelling.
I'm not sure why I'm being so negative here, I guess I just feel like the tweet is kinda dumb and virtue signalling and that's setting the tone for my interaction with it.
The History of Slap Fighting slaps
Nah. Robert Smalls slaps.
Robert Smalls was a really awesome dude. The historical circumstances that determined the course of his life are profoundly tragic.
If you view his life from a cinematic perspective, yeah it slaps. From a historical perspective, he lived and died and the societal conditions which he struggled against remained essentially unchanged. He's a historical footnote.
"B-b-b-b-but where's WHITE history month????? uncontrollable sobbing"
Every month is white history month! Yes, February as well.
George Washington Carver, IS NOT the man that carved up George Washington...Bart. He is probably one of my most revered entities because I genuinely don't know if he actually expected to find all of the uses he did for peanuts. His genius borders on insanity and I love it. I mean what single other person can say they found food, industrial, and cosmeceutical, uses for a single thing like the peanut? Most the other mass use products I've found had maybe 1 founder that found something interesting,(there is a few standouts including the creator of vaseline-he ate a spoonful a day for health go figure) but George Washington Carver turned peanuts into something that is still the cornerstone of industries(they remove the oil from peanut butter and sell it for industrial uses cuz it's worth so much, which is also why I'm upset at Mr Carver, peanut butter with the oil is delicious, but I digress that's a bit off topic). A quick glance at his Wikipedia indicates he actually did a ton more than peanuts, but the amount of uses he discovered personally has always astounded me. Those who are offended by history are likely trying to recreate a stupid mistake already made by others.
Too bad he went insane trying to press a peanut into a record needle. https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x2ix03e?start=1221
If you use the word "slaps" you're not talking to the population as a whole, you're talking to specific people. And likely ones who already agree with your point.
Slammed!
BLASTS
Are you saying black people should use white vernacular when advocating for their equality?
Non-slang is not "white", or even American. Drag should understand the difficulty caused when drag invents terminology that needs to be explained to any outgroup who can't be expected to be familiar with words drag has only popularised recently. Doesn't drag think that if anything it's kind of exclusionary against second-language speakers?
Is this... controversial? o.O
It's fucking insane to watch watch happening in the US from other countries.
edit to make my position clearer, Django is a fucking awesome movie not because it shows slavery, but because it shows black history making me better able to empathise with it and it has crackers getting what they deserve (and I'm white btw and used to be I thought "cracker" meant the colour of like crackers as in biscuits, but then later learned it's because they're cracking a whip, which makes much more sense).
Reminds me when Morgan Freeman said he didn't want a Black History Month, I immediately went like "dude, shut the f*** up".
Surely he was just saying 'All history is our history. Why would you relegate it to a month and label it?' He's allowed to feel aggrieved as it does feel like apportioning it to something lesser, like 'Here,have the short month then shut up about it.'
i'm sure he'll be happy to know that all talk of black history, period, will be gone, as soon as pres elmo gets his way
Try finding the whole clip then watch it in context. He wants black history taught in American history classes. He doesn’t want it to be separated.
thats kinda of a wierd justification from him, he doesnt want a month of honoring AA people, but only taught in class, where its obviously not there anyways.
there are two people i lost some respect due to a shitty r/iama: Woody Harrelson and Morgan Freeman
Harrelson was so early the AMA process that he should be cut slack. He was there to promote a movie not answer a question about a person he might have had sex with.
Freeman is/was old and likely never gave a fuck.
To paraphrase an old saying, “Never get to know your heroes.”
With the exception of Robin Williams. He is, was, and always will be the GOAT.
What counts as 'black'? Perhaps people from minority groups shouldn't be excluded from regular history, so every group doesn't need its own history month - it's just history.
Until we reach that point, we need to dedicate time to remind society that it is being ignored.
[email protected] does its thing. Denying history and access to culture is ugly.
I'm watching a science fiction movie and it suddenly starts focusing on black history instead.
So I'm offended by that bait and switch, or whatever you call it.
Is that valid?
Let's try our own bait and switch:
I'm watching a science fiction show and suddenly they start focusing on American history instead.
So I'm offended by the bait and switch, or whatever you call it.
Is that valid?
The answer is still no, it's not valid to equate a movie to, oh... systematic oppression. If you didn't like the movie, you didn't like the movie.
Which movie?
Star Wars: Acolyte
Depends - would you be okay with it focusing on white history?
