Hey guys! D&D pin pre-orders are up in my shop, including a new black edition of the “Will Save” pin. You can also pick up remainders of the Creature Conservation pins and patches! Get ‘em HERE!
My FATHER went to a LEGALLY MANDATED segregated school until he was 8 and integration was then enforced. He was not legally allowed into a school or part of town with white people until he was almost ten
Many people forget black people couldn’t even vote until 1965. That’s not that long ago.
for the vast majority schools within the south, substantive de-segregation was completed only in like circa 1975. thats like fucking 20 years after Brown v. Board of education.
My father is 52 and he chopped cotton in Louisiana as a child until he was 11
Less than 65 years. King was murdered in 68, which was effectively the end of the movement and beginning of the Black Power era. My parents were both born in the 50s in the Jim Crow south, and remember it vividly. One of my mom’s friends was even killed at the 16th Street Baptist Church. People are delusional for acting like this was all so long ago.
There were schools in the U.S that still had segregated proms in 2012. Shit is still happening it’s not all in some distant past.
My parents were born in 1954 and 1956.
Interracial marriage was still illegal in parts of the US until 1963.
My paternal grandparents’ marriage would have been illegal in parts of my country when my biracial father was born. It was fully legalized when my uncle was born in 1964.
I had kids when I was growing up in the 90s who weren’t allowed to stay at my house or have me over because I’m a quarter Black. And not even American Black, immigrant Black. Haitian.
It’s maybe not immediately apparent to USAmericans under the age of thirty, because of the way human beings (myself included when I’m not careful) tend to parse anything they can’t personally remember as “history.” But anytime you read about the government deporting Central Americans who have lived in this country for 20 or 30 years, it’s important to recognize that you are reading about refugees from wars that the United States funded.
This history is exceedingly recent. Anyone in the region over the age of about 35 has clear memories; people in their mid-to-late 40s were adults when the wars ended (early 1990s); folks in their late 50s lived through arguably the bloodiest years of state terrorism in the early ‘80s, when atrocities like El Mozote or Dos Erres were being committed on a regular basis (cw: everything you’d expect when discussing stomach-turning war crimes). Odds are quite high that they personally know at least one person who was tortured or raped or murdered or disappeared – or that they have experienced or witnessed or been threatened with this kind of violence themselves.
Central American justice systems are only just managing to prosecute some of the people who orchestrated the death squads now. Forensic anthropologists are still exhuming mass graves. Efraín Ríos Montt died weeks ago, before he could be re-convicted of genocide after the initial guilty verdict (the first time a head of state has been convicted of genocide in his own country, iirc) was overturned on a technicality. Military and government leaders who were actively involved in committing and/or covering up human rights abuses are still very much a part of the power structure in these countries and in our own. (One suggestive example: Jose Rodriguez – the CIA’s deputy director for operations post-9/11, who infamously destroyed videotapes of interrogations and remains defiantly unapologetic about torture – joined the CIA in 1976 and spent virtually all of his career in Latin America.)
A lot of otherwise well-meaning and informative journalism fails to contextualize this. A disappointing amount of immigration activism fails to contextualize this. And it’s REALLY IMPORTANT CONTEXT. You can draw a pretty direct line between the US government’s refusal to grant asylum to refugees fleeing right-wing dictatorships during the 1980s – because doing so would have required them to acknowledge that their allies were indeed committing human rights abuses, and thus (at least theoretically) to cut off funding to them – and the question of who does and does nothave legal immigration status today.
tora42's nonsensne 