I am so glad to see that so many more people who have been harmed by the actions of white people are no longer accepting their meaningless apologies. No apology from a person who has no intention of ceasing their evil behavior should ever be accepted. We are now understanding that accepting an apology from those people gives them a pass to continue the offending behavior.
Ideologue–an often blindly partisan advocate or adherent of a particular ideology.
Ideology–a manner or the content of thinking characteristic of an individual, group, or culture.
synonyms of ideology–doctrine, gospel, dogma, manifesto.
Looking for the good in evil will get you killed. If it quacks like a duck, looks like a duck, moves like a duck, one really should believe that one is dealing with a duck! Just to say that in positions of power, in this country, we are dealing with ideologues. Believe them when they say their goal is the destruction of democracy. Ideologues cannot be reasoned with. Their ideology is them. They cannot imagine a “them” without it. They will murder anyone who does not believe in their ideology. Ideologues have to die–one by bitter one. And the ideologues in power today worship/love greed…selfish greed. Remember the song “For the Love of Money” by the O’Jays? You’d think we’d be singing a different song 50 plus years later in 2024!
GREED
An insatiable desire for wealth, power, material gain, social value.
Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s house, thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s wife, nor his manservant, nor his maidservant, nor his ox, nor his ass, nor any thing that is thy neighbor’s.
For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil. Some have been led astray from the faith in their greed, and have pierced themselves through with many sorrows.
How quickly nature falls into revolt, When gold becomes her object!
Earth provides enough to satisfy every man’s needs, but not every man’s greed.
Some people have a problem with the history set forth in the 1619 Project because there was an African presence in what is now the United States before 1619. I have set forth some of that history below. I do not have a problem with that date because it is a starting point for the horrific chattel generational slavery created by the English colonizers. ( I am not giving a pass to the Portuguese or the Spanish enslavers as, from what I’ve read, some of the most sadistic, barbaric, inhumane slavers were Portuguese and Spanish, but especially the Spanish. However, apparently, the Portuguese and Spanish did not practice generational chattel slavery. Maybe because there was an exceptionally high death rate among their Slaves? And ill-fed, over-worked, and sickly Slaves probably did not have that many viable offspring?)
https://www.nps.gov/casa/learn/historyculture/african-americans-in-st-augustine-1565-1821.htm Excerpt below:
1513: Africans arrive in Florida with Spanish explorer Juan Ponce de León, the first European to lay claim to Florida.
September 8, 1565: St. Augustine is founded nearly a half century before Jamestown by Don Pedro Menéndez de Avilés, who arrived from Spain with 800 colonists including approximately 50 Africans, both free and enslaved. The Africans brought by Menéndez become an integral part of America’s first colony.
1595: The first recorded African American child is born in St. Augustine.
1598: The first recorded African American marriage takes place in St. Augustine.
1672: Construction of the Castillo de San Marcos begins. Enslaved African Americans make up a small percentage of of the workforce.
1687: Eleven enslaved Africans – eight men, two women and a nursing child – escape from the Carolinas and arrive in St. Augustine. Governor Quiroga grants their request for sanctuary, sees them baptized in the Catholic Church, and hires the men as paid labor at the Castillo de San Marcos. He also refuses British demands to return the escapees.
http://www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/events-african-american-history/san-miguel-de-gualdape-slave-rebellion-1526/ Excerpt below:
In 1526, (S)panish explorers brought 100 slaves with them to a doomed settlement in what is now South Carolina or Georgia. Within weeks of their arrival, those enslaved Africans revolted. Then they vanished.
…
By the early 1520s, nearly all of the indigenous people in the Spanish colony of Hispaniola were dead. Enslaved Africans were brought in to replace them in the backbreaking search for gold — gold that was getting harder and harder to find.
Lucas Vázquez de Ayllón, a government functionary in the colony, wanted to start a settlement of his own, and he got permission from the King and Queen of Spain to send scouts sailing up the east coast of what is now the United States to find a good spot. According to historian and anthropologist Guy E. Cameron, that permission came with the specific instructions that they build friendly relationships with any indigenous people they encountered.
The scouts returned with details of the coastline of what is now South Carolina and Georgia and something else — 70 indigenous people they had abducted and enslaved.
Ayllón was angry; kidnapping was not exactly a building block of comity and friendship. Still, he did not order their immediate return. Soon the captives all started to die “of sorrow and hunger, for they would not eat,” according to a Spanish historian at the time.
One of the captives, named Francisco, survived. He quickly picked up Spanish, and Ayllón grew to like him. Ayllón brought Francisco to Spain to help convince the king and queen that although the scouting missions had not gone as planned, they should still be allowed to colonize. Francisco told them how amazing the land was — just like Spain! — and how welcoming his people, the Shakori, would be. He embellished quite a bit, Cameron wrote, and it is easy to see why: Convincing the Spanish to sail back to the Carolina coast was the only way he could get home.
Permission granted, Ayllón and Francisco sailed for Hispaniola, where they gathered people and supplies for their settlement. A few months later, likely in early June of 1526, they had 500 colonists, 100 enslaved Africans, plus livestock, plants and provisions packed onto three ships.
They arrived on Aug. 9 and immediately ran into a big problem when one of the ships sank. They managed to rescue all of the passengers but lost most of their food.
As soon as they were on land, Francisco disappeared into the trees, leaving the colonists no way to communicate with their new neighbors. The colonists settled farther south — between South Carolina’s Pee Dee River and Georgia’s Sapelo Island — named it San Miguel de Gualdape and ordered the enslaved Africans to clear the land and start building homes and a church.
They had arrived too late in the season to plant crops, however, and with the food supplies destroyed, the colonists began to starve. Plus, as Cameron’s research with Stephen Vermette in the Georgia Historical Quarterly indicates, they experienced an unusually cold fall.
Then, an unknown infectious disease spread through the settlement. And a group of settlers who sought help from indigenous neighbors were killed. Within a few months, 350 of the 500 settlers had died. It is unknown how many of the enslaved people perished; the Spanish did not keep a count.
Then, on Oct. 18, Ayllón himself died. His chosen successor did not sit well with some of the settlers, and two factions developed. Then, the Spanish historian wrote, “it happened that some of the Negro slaves independently set fire to [a leader’s] house … and as the fire burnt they all gathered to kill him; and in this way they managed to escape.”
Thus the first enslaved Africans known to have been brought to the continent were also the first to revolt.
“It appears that the Africans ran into the forest, never to be seen again,” Cameron wrote.
Weeks later, when the remaining Spanish bailed on the settlement and sailed away, there was no mention of any enslaved Africans onboard.
It is impossible to know what happened to the Africans when they escaped into the forest. There are no written records. Would the Shakori or another indigenous group have recognized them as victims of the Spanish and taken them in? Or would they have seen them as an extension of the colonizers and killed them? Would they have been able to survive on their own?
Little is known about the Shakori today, but Cameron speculates they probably would have helped the Africans so long as it did not negatively impact their own preparations for winter. It is also possible some of the Africans traveled south as winter approached; Africans knew about the movement of the moon and stars, and would have known that the weather would be warmer farther south, Cameron wrote.
There is some controversy as to the status of the Blacks who were brought to the U.S. in 1619. Some could have been sold as indentured servants and some could have been sold as slaves. However, I think that the Blacks who were sold in 1619 marked a turning point. Indians were slaves, but could easily escape and the readily succumbed to the white man’s diseases. The indentured servants had rights–few, but they had some rights.
In the years after 1619, the presence of the Black Slaves/Indentured servants served as an “Aha” moment for the English colonizers who required cheap labor in that non-mechanized era. Here was a people who stood out because of the color of their skin, had no where to escape to, and had no rights pursuant to English law. By 1661, Virginia had passed the first of many laws regarding slavery and, by 1667, Virginia had codified that any child born to a Slave mother would be a slave for life.
Chattel slavery– enslaved people were the personal property of their owners for life, a source of labor or a commodity that could be willed, traded or sold
like livestock or furniture. And as practiced by the English colonizers, the only way to change that status while living was to be manumitted by the slaver or to buy one’s freedom. However, even if one had papers, there was no guarantee that one could not be sold into slavery because the color of one’s skin damned one as a Slave.
45 wants to be a dictator. I don’t think the ill-educated citizens of this country understand how miserable their life would be if this country became an authoritative theocracy which apparently many Republicans are espousing. In a dictatorship (authoritarian theocracy), from what I’ve read and observed, one of the first institutions to be dismantled is the justice system. Courts are not necessary (too unpredictable) when the will of the dictator is the only “justice” the “dictated to” will ever experience and there is no rule of law, only appetite…the dictator’s appetite.
There will be no safety net. No go-fund mes. The hoi polloi will pay taxes, exorbitant taxes, to fund the lifestyles of the dictator and the dictator’s current favorites. There will be no bread, much less cake, as the hoi polloi works day and night to support the insatiable cravings of the dictator. The dictator’s appointed overseer will sadistically crack a metaphorical whip to maintain production and output. All will be expendable. The changes might be so incremental as not to be noticeable or one might wake up to a world so foreign that one might think one is in a waking nightmare.
There will be no body autonomy. That has begun at this time with a woman’s right to make her own decisions as to pregnancy. (Note: spontaneous miscarriages are criminalized. See Watts case in Ohio. No constitutional right to abortion, no divorce if woman is pregnant, etc.) There will be no free will or thought autonomy. Every person will be the enemy of every other person. (Remember the Soviet Union and the Iron Curtain?) There will be no safe places. White, landed males will be the only ones with rights, just as it was four hundred years ago. And, just as it was four hundred years ago, the whites will have their caste system among themselves, i.e, some will be deemed “whiter” than others. Too bad that the Black males (and Black females) who advocate ‘do not vote, sit home’ or vote Republican do not understand that their skin color will relegate them to the caste responsible for dung disposal.
But…maybe I’ve read too many history books and novels. But the history books and novels tell us that we revel in and glorify our worse selves and such reveling never ends well for us or this Earth.
To know your Enemy, you must become your Enemy. Sun Tzu
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