October Surprise Revolution

‘At the Brent home (Brentwood), Mother Brent (Fay Wray) takes Pilgrimage Week quite seriously thank you very much. Each year Brentwood hosts the “Rebel Ball.” A Jezebel style dance. Unfortunately for us, Bette Davis is not there to spice things up. Instead we must make do with pandering home owners and gullible tourists in a world where everyone has forgotten about the defining characteristic of the antebellum south: Slavery.

To say they have forgotten is actually not accurate. Members of the Brent household do reference slavery. In a matter of fact, off handed way. The maid Osai (played by the incredible Louise Beavers in an outrageously small part) expresses her irritation at being forced to wear the itchy “slave time bandanna” to the ball. Peter points out the work of the bookshelf is made by “slave artists”. Trying to make a buck, Peter’s aunt Renie (the very likable Mildred Natwick) tries somewhat jokingly to pass her own art off as the work of “slave artists”.

The problem is you cannot celebrate the antebellum South without celebrating slavery. A celebration of slavery is not just the celebration of the oppression of Black Americans, but of a pain wrought on all Americans. Every part of antebellum life was made possible by the enslavement of millions of people.

[…]

When I first noticed this shot, I was convinced it was a mistake.
After all, this was a romantic scene. We are meant to focus on Tammy’s earnestness and melt under the spell of her innocent charm.
We may find this difficult to do however, for someone is lurking in the corner of the screen. It is Osai the maid in her slave time bandanna.
This might be slightly less distracting if Osai were occupied with some other business, but she isn’t. She pays close attention to Tammy’s conversation. She watches. This is really what makes it feel like a mistake. Beavers seems almost as though she is off camera watching Reynold’s performance. No other character is paying attention. This is sloppy direction. Why didn’t Pevney tell Beavers “hey, talk to that guy to your left during the scene” or “fill the cups with punch”. See how easy it is? I’m so aggravated by this shot. It’s the the icing on a “couldnt care less” cake.

As infuriating as the shot is, Osai is aware and this is striking. She is watching. She is there. A presence. Most importantly, she is judging. Beavers becomes the focus of the scene. She is silent, but her presence is clearly felt. Like the legacy of slavery itself. It is always there, lurking in the corner of our minds.’

via Racialicious

Comments

howtobenoladarling:

From Chapter five: it’s a dick thing of We Real Cool by bell hooks, pg. 68

(Source: howtobeterrell, via theoryactionpractice)

Comments

denitza:

This is one of the very earliest known works to depict a freed slave in the United States and the earliest known painting of a Muslim in America.

Yarrow Mamout, 1819 is an exceptionally rare portrait painted by Charles Willson Peale (1741-1827) depicting an aged man who had been born in Guinea in western Africa, taken into slavery in the American colonies and later freed by his owner.

(via diasporicroots)

Comments

fuckyeahlatinamericanhistory:

art-history:

Richard Caton Woodville
War News from Mexico 1848
Oil on canvas 27 x 24 in
Manoogian Collection, Grand Rapids, Michigan

Exhibited at the American Art-Union in 1849 and distributed nationwide in an 1851 engraving, War News from Mexico attracted notice because of its lively depiction of the home front at a time of national crisis. It portrays a sampling of the electorate gobbling up the latest news from a daily paper, which dominates the composition and serves as its focal point.

Radiating outward from the newspaper are eleven figures and the bottom half of an eagle, all gathered under or beside the portico of a combined tavern, inn, and post office identified, with heavy-handed significance, as the “American Hotel” (hence the eagle). With wide eyes, gaping mouth, and exaggerated body language, the man at center stage reads aloud from the newspaper clutched in his fists. It reports on the latest happenings in the Mexican War (1846-8), which cost the lives of thousands of soldiers on both sides and resulted in the addition to the United States of 500,000 square miles of conquered territory in the West. The supporting players mug and gesticulate their reactions: one figure, in the shadowy background, throws up his hand; another grasps the frame of his eyeglasses; a third raps his knuckles against one of the portico’s pilasters; a fourth, who relays the news to an old gentleman with hearing difficulties, points a thumb emphatically toward the newspaper.

Despite the obviousness of these gestures, it’s not altogether evident whether the news is good or bad for the denizens of the American Hotel. Clearly, though, they’re all personally involved in what they are hearing, and that includes the humble black man and his little girl in rags; the outcome of the war had a direct bearing on how far west Congress would permit slavery to extend. Those opposed to slavery also opposed the war. The black family is situated at the periphery: they are not part of the consensus, and although they have a personal stake in the war, they have no democratic say in it. A white woman, squeezed to the side of the canvas and visible in the window, is similarly characterized as marginal to the sphere of public discourse, which Woodville shows to be populated exclusively by adult white men. Yet she, unlike the two African Americans, occupies a place securely within, rather than outside, the national hotel.

In Woodville’s day, the elderly gentleman in old-fashioned knee breeches would have been understood as a member of the Revolutionary-era generation. His presence in the scene lends legitimacy to the current military conflict, suggesting that the war that started in 1846 embodied the ideals behind the war declared in 1776. But to the extent that the old man wears a grim or confused expression, the painting implies that ’46 is not indisputably the moral successor to ’76, and that the values of the present do not necessarily accord with those of the past.

—Angela L. Miller, et al., American Encounters: Art, History, and Cultural Identity (2008)

I think I posted this painting before, here’s some analysis.

(via fylatinamericanhistory)

Comments

aleki-says:

thegoddamazon:

pixyled:

esmeweatherwax:

racemash:

thespunkywallflower:

J. Marion Sims is called “the Father of Gynecology” due to his experiments on enslaved women in Alabama who were often submitted as guinea pigs by their plantation owners who could not use them for sexual pleasure.

He kept seven women as subjects for four years, but left a trail of death and permanently traumatized black women.

Anarcha was one of the women Sims experimented upon. A detailed history of this monster is in Harriet Washington’s book, Medical Apartheid.

Sims believed that Africans were numb to pain and operated on the women without anesthesia or antiseptic. The procedures usually happened this way.

Black female slaves who were guinea pigs would hold one subject down as Sims performed hysterectomies, tubal ligation, and other procedures to examine various female disorders.

Sims also performed a host of operations on other slave populations. The following excerpt details his “practice” on enslaved infants.

Sims began to exercise his freedom to experiment on his captives. He took custody of slave infants and, with a shoemaker’s awl, tried to pry the bones of their skulls into proper alignment.

You guys should really google him.

(if you click the link, I did it for you)

fucking hell I just nearly got sick.

tumblrs tuaght me so much
I had NO IDEA how SO MANY THINGS we have in modern days was LITERALLY made at the expense of black women. The fact that they skip over this in things like biology classes and stuff like that is disgusting.

This is just

apalling

But guys, we’re just supposed to get over it, right?

:( This is horrible.

(via fuckyeahmarxismleninism)

Comments

socialsociety:

An in depth book on the true story of American history and why lies are taught every day in classrooms all over the United States. Download link is below

http://www.sharebeast.com/8hw55ki5laz0

PLEASE RE-BLOG!

An earlier edition was a very important book for me as a 13 year old.

(via soleilateight)

Comments

fifty50fifty:

Lighter skinned slave children of mixed race heritage were used as part of a fundraising campaign to help struggling African American schools in 1860s New Orleans. Campaign organizers believed the lighter complexioned children would help boost donations to their cause.

(via flaglog)

Comments

matthewdgold:

deliciouskaek:

fralcon:

Here are some pictures of the “Angola Prison rodeo”, where prisoners compete to win packs of smokes and a few bucks. By sitting in a poker table while a bull charges them. The goal? To get the poker chip hanging off its horns.

These people aren’t cowboys, or glorified participants in a well respected tournament. These prisoners are shuffled over to this thing to be trampled by raging bulls for SMOKES, and maybe a hundred bucks. This is not something that would happen to anyone other than prisoners, and is part of an institution that systematically devalues their worth as people.

The rodeo rakes in millions of dollars a year, and that’s just the beginning of how shady the place is:

That year, the rodeo produced $2,463,822 in revenue.

But for all the hair-raising moments, the most unsettling part may be the strange symbolism of the opening pageantry. Putting a Confederate flag in a black man’s hands on a former slave plantation seems a little too deliberate for an institution that claims to have shed its darker past.

“I have always said, and I continue to say, that if slavery had persisted up until 2010, into the modern day, that would probably have been a well-run slave plantation,” Wilbert Rideau says. “I think it would have evolved into what exists right now at Angola.” We’re in his living room in Baton Rouge, with his wife, Linda.

Angola was a plantation first, housing slaves who cut sugar cane for the master. At the end of the 19th century it evolved into a prisoner lease system, with sentenced prisoners being rented to area companies. In 1901, Angola officially became a state-operated penitentiary, but in name only. It remained a plantation, with prisoners crowded into large wooden buildings and working from sunup to sundown in sugar cane and cotton fields—rain or shine, 12-14 hours a day, seven days a week.

http://colorlines.com/archives/2011…ana_prison.html

“Angola is disturbing every time I go there,” Tory Pegram, who coordinates the International Coalition to Free the Angola 3, told Truthout. “It’s not even really a metaphor for slavery. Slavery is what’s going on.

Angola is not alone. Sixteen percent of Louisiana prisoners are compelled to perform farm labor, as are 17 percent of Texas prisoners and a full 40 percent of Arkansas prisoners, according to the 2002 Corrections Yearbook, compiled by the Criminal Justice Institute. They are paid little to nothing for planting and picking the same crops harvested by slaves 150 years ago.

http://theredphoenixapl.org/2011/04…tation-prisons/

ETA: the colorlines link above doesn’t work, but here is another article they wrote about it.

ETA2: the redphoenix link doesn’t either. here’s the actual article.

there is no way that the racism of the prison-industrial complex could get any more obvious than this.

(Source: mochente, via bad-dominicana)

Comments

dumbthingswhitepplsay:

tyrawm:

For some reason Tumblr wouldn’t upload this as a photoset o-o

If someone could upload this as a photoset that would be great <3 *please link to me though* <333

so many facts

(via bad-dominicana)

Comments

“

What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July? I answer: a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelly to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciations of tyrants, brass fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade, and solemnity, are, to him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy—a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages. There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices, more shocking and bloody, than are the people of these United States, at this very hour.

Go where you may, search where you will, roam through all the monarchies and despotisms of the old world, travel through South America, search out every abuse, and when you have found the last, lay your facts by the side of the everyday practices of this nation, and you will say with me, that, for revolting barbarity and shameless hypocrisy, America reigns without a rival.

—

Frederick Douglass “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?” (via ladyatheist)

(Source: brashblacknonbeliever, via fala7idreams)

Comments

Lighter skinned slave children of mixed race heritage were used as part of a fundraising campaign to help struggling African American schools in 1860s New Orleans. Campaign organizers believed the lighter complexioned children would help boost donations to their cause.

Following: