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Posts tagged genocide
Now imagine you’re an “objective” racist white scientist who decides to give a group of black men a STI and, instead of treating them for it, watch them slowly suffer from it so you can study it FOR SCIENCE.
Now imagine you’re the white supremacist sexist medical establishment that denies women the right to get their tubes tied unless they already have loads of kids and require them to get their husband’s permission while at the same time forcibly sterilising legions of native and black women.
Now imagine you’re an “objective” racist psychologist who decides that slaves wanting to escape is a psychological disorder called “drapetomania” and the “cure” for that is lashings and cutting off toes.
Now imagine that you’re the “objective” and “scientific” medical establishment that deems queerness a disorder and decides that electroshock treatments or lobotomies are the effective solution or feels the need to “intervene” by surgically altering the bodies of intersex infants to fit your perceptions of what genitalia should look like.
Religion has done a lot of fucked up shit. But I’m sick and tired of people acting like SCIENCE hasn’t been involved in wars, death, and genocide either. And it’s the assumptive bullshit notion that ALL religions are somehow stupid and not worth your consideration that perpetuates this colonialist bullshit approach that white people have now upon Native and other individuals when tribes fight for the right to their sacred lands of, “Oh you’re religion is just hooey!”
First they “civilised” us with religion and now it’s science and repatriation. Stealing native lands and native artefacts and native bodies FOR SCIENCE so you can profit off of them.
If you’re going to lay in on the death religion causes, IMO you better realise that there’s a difference between the bastion of white supremacist cisheteropatriarchy that is modern Christianity and other religions which have little in the way of social power in comparison. AND you better recognise that science can be just another extention of white supremacist cisheteropartiarchy too and FURTHER the goals of that power structure rather than being as “objective” as they claim and countering it.
Haha. Imagine that.
Also, Ricky Gervais is a jerk.
May I add to this the cephalic index and institutionalized, eugenicist programs wherein orphaned and homeless children constitute “threat to mankind.”
6,656 notes (via glitterlion & onlytruthmatters)
illegal immigrants? you mean white people
except that white people didn’t immigrate into the united states… they funded the united states. you can’t illegally immigrate into a society you created.
it’s time to play “spot the white boy”
123,489 notes (via midnight-water & portablemiah)
Shame on Brazil: Forceful Removal of Indigenous Group Stains World Cup With the Blood of 500 Years of Genocide
While nations competed to go to the 2014 World Cup in Brazil on Friday, more than Brazil’s Indigenous Peoples were clashing with police over a building they’ve used as a community center in Rio de Janeiro for almost 30 years.
With the World Cup and the Olympics around the corner, local authorities have been under pressure from FIFA and International Olympic Committee to make room for housing, parking and administrative offices.
It so happens the space in question is literally steps from the famous Maracanã Stadium and was designated to become a parking lot by the World Cup organizing committee. However, leaders of Aldeia Maracanã (Maracanã Village), the group living in the building that was formerly the National Indigenous Museum, had plans to make their presence permanent and covert the space into an Indigenous school.
The forced removal of Native Brazilians by police was characterized by Aldeia Maracanã leaders as part of “513 years of struggle.”
Brazilian authorities, World Cup and Olympic organizers need to know the world is watching. This blog and many of our readers are very upset that our brothers and sisters in Brazil were treated as foreigners on their own land and violently removed from their center.
We demand accommodations be made for the Aldeia Maracanã to return and for resources to be appropriated for the establishment of an Indigenous cultural and academic center within sight of Maracanã Stadium, so that locals and tourists are forever reminded that the country’s original inhabitants are still very much alive and present in Brazil.
Photo credit: Vanderlei Almeida, AFP
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462 notes (via lostintrafficlights & iggymogo)
Fact: The invasion of the Americas was histories largest genocide and demographic devastation to date, killing over 90% of the original population.
Native genocide continues in certain parts of the southern hemisphere, where mining companies and government personal have been known to gun down communities.
10,548 notes (via lostintrafficlights & snowyowlwhitecotton-deactivated)
i fucking hate seeing that comic post, with the old white guy who’s part of the klan, and then goes to PoC countries and “becomes not racist”
because that’s not how that works
living people are not your fucking teaching tools
and imagine how many fucking people he must have hurt
how many awful fucking things he must have done and said during his “not racist no moar” journey
seriously i fucking hate that post more than words can describe
not to mention it entirely presents the situation as something *we* (poc) can fix and should be trying to fix (for him and people like him). As if we’re not ~human~ and ~inspiring~ enough in our natural poverty near him.
the comic seems to ignore that the largest swells of the klan live in areas with the most non-white populations. The klan is huge in Georgia, the klan is huge in Texas, the klan is huge as a response to being dared to live with people of color.
You don’t see a huge klan in Portland proper not because white people here aren’t racist but because they don’t have a legacy of poc to ~rebel against~ because the feel slighted by our freedom and citizenship. (but don’t worry, it’s waiting just outside the city limited, in rural Oregon where poc are being pushed out to).
We can’t fix the racist guy, you can’t just send him to us to “fix.” And if you do we might “fix” him in a different way, like fixing him a giant kick in the nuts.
Very much co-sign.
At the risk of distracting from your point, the rest of this is a sidebar expansion on your statement, “[white people in Portland] don’t have a legacy of poc to ~rebel against~,” because as it turns out, our “not having a legacy of POC” is an ugly, ugly story. It wasn’t just happenstance, the way so many Oregonians tend to believe. You may already know this, in which case, please ignore it; I’m posting it because Oregonians tend to forget, ignore and/or deny this shit.
First off, the original Oregon State Constitution outright *prohibited* black people from living in the state. And before Oregon became a state, the territorial government also excluded black people from the territory. And before Oregon became a U.S. territory, when “Oregon” was just a bunch of white squatters in Oregon City… That’s right, those heroic white settlers crossing the Oregon Trail, *this* was what they made their first order of business on arrival: writing a law that said that black people couldn’t come to Oregon.
(I grew up in Washington state, and our first black settler there was a man named George Washington Bush. He was instrumental in establishing the U.S. claim to the Washington Territory as superceding the British counterclaim. [*twitch* *writing as if colonial claims are legitimate* *twitch*] The only reason he was in the Washington Territory at all is because he had been driven North across the Columbia by Portlanders who were backed by Oregon’s black exclusion law.)
(…by the way, the reason that Oregon even became a state was because of local panic about the Dred Scott decision. I forget exactly what the details were, but yeah, it had something to do with the possibility that Oregon wouldn’t be able to exclude black people any more.)
Black exclusion wasn’t repealed until 1927. In the meanwhile, Oregon had become a refuge for white racists: there was a big influx of Southern whites “fleeing” here after the Civil War, for instance. Consequently, even though there weren’t many black people in the state, the Klan was actually quite big in Oregon, at least through the 1920s. Even after the repeal of black exclusion, black people weren’t exactly falling all over themselves to come live here: it wasn’t until WWII and the demand for labor to build ships at Vanport, I think, that Portland started to have a significant black community. (There had been a small one before then, permitted by a grandfather clause in the black exclusion laws.) That black community has been displaced several times over, starting with the Vanport flood, and has now been almost wholly pushed out of the city with the gentrification of North Portland.
Anti-Chinese racism in Oregon was… well, it feels wrong to say “a much bigger deal” than anti-Black racism, so let’s say something like, “much more violent,” seeing that it involved riots and massacres. On a national level, there’s a tendency to define racism as an anti-Black thing, which tends to let west coasters feel smug about how “not-racist” our history is. Which is complete and *utter* bullshit. We have a long history of nasty and vicious race riots out here, but they were usually anti-Chinese riots. Plus shit like the time that the city of Tacoma, Washington, cold-bloodedly announced that they intended to raze Tacoma’s Chinatown to the ground. On the scheduled day they rounded everyone up, put them on cattle cars, shipped them off to Portland, and then, yes, put everyone’s homes to the torch. This happened with the Washington state governor’s fucking *blessing,* btw: everyone knew it was going to happen — they put up public notices with the date on! — and the governor outright refused to mobilize the national guard to stop it. And oh, yes, as if this wasn’t horrific enough, people died of exposure on those cattle cars, too.
Oregon was somewhat safer for Chinese than California and Washington were, and Portland was somewhat safer than the rest of Oregon. Which means that when Portlanders tend to talk about anti-Chinese racism, they tend to position themselves as the comparative good guys. I don’t have a good summary link for the history of Chinese in Oregon and in Portland proper, but this alludes to a fair sampling of it, and likewise points out how white Portlanders tend to minimize and deny it. In general, I enthusiastically recommend Marie Rose Wong’s Sweet Cakes, Long Journey: The Chinatowns of Portland, Oregon, which can be a dense read in places (it began as a doctoral thesis), but is an absolutely gripping read in others. It will absolutely be at my fingertips if I ever write historical fiction about Oregon.
Oh, and there was also a decent-sized Hawaiian population here back when, too. (From the colonial point of view, there was a massive labor shortage in the Northwest for a long while, and it was common to import people from Hawaii.) I don’t much know the details, but from what I have been able to gather, they mostly took refuge with Native communities when the shit started hitting the fan. Many of the local “Native” placenames are actually Polynesian, and there’s a fair amount of Hawaiian in some of the local tribal languages, nowadays.
And of course, no discussion of Portland and/or Oregon “not having a legacy of POC” would be complete without an enumeration of what went down with Native people. But forgive me, I can’t. I will leave the details as an exercise for the reader.
…so when contemporary Portlanders get all smug about not having the Klan, you are very correct to point out that it has a lot to do with Oregon not having a local “legacy of POC to be racist against.” But the reason there isn’t a legacy of POC to be racist against, is because historical Oregonians were *very fucking effective* in their racism. So, *no*, contemporary Portlanders, we *don’t* get to feel smug about the Klan not being a big deal hereabouts nowadays.
And since I was having a link-drop fest above anyway, here have one more: In which I analyze the original Oregon State Constitution’s racial provisions, article by article, line by line. For those who want it, there’s a tl;dr at the end.
holy shit all this history I didn’t fucking know
wow
fuck you Oregon
#Portlandia
(Source: deliverysuspended)
553 notes (via lostintrafficlights & deliverysuspended)
Haha this made me laugh XD
I’m sure they would’ve, if they didn’t decided to abandon colonizing here, but for some reason they just decided to”fuck it” and leave…
Right? Pretty sure the Vikings were conquerors.
Maybe the Vikings were not conquerors as popularly imagined?
lol. okay guys this is what happened.
Erik the Red got kicked out of Iceland cos he killed someone. He wandered over to Greenland and then started trying to convince people to come live with him and they set up this sad little settlement there. Later another dude got blown off course trying to get there and happened to see North America, so he told Erik’s son Leif and Leif went to go check it out, but they didn’t see any people.
A few years later Leif’s brother Thorvald went exploring to try and get some furs and stuff. He found nine indigenous people sleeping under canoes and so what does he do? Yeah he kills eight of them and the ninth one runs off and comes back with a force of very angry Inuit who then killed him. Not exactly a promising start.
Anyway long story short, the Norse did a really crappy job interacting with the indigenous people so the Inuit just beat them back to Greenland and then they were too stubborn to eat fish like the native people instead of trying to raise sheep in Greenland so they either died or moved back to Iceland.
Basically, it’s not that they were significantly nicer than Columbus, it’s mostly that they happened to piss off the Inuit before they managed to transmit diseases to them.
This is why I have issues with “American ingenuity” bullshit about how the colonists took over America. No. It was not superior weapons or ingenuity. It was that we wiped out their populations with disease.I am reblogging just because I never like to miss a chance to remind people that Natives consistently controlled and overwhelmed European forces before they were hit by epidemics. People of the northeast coast kept a very tight leash on Europeans until the early 1600s when disease hit (and Europeans commented that they couldn’t settle there because there were too many people), the Spanish got their butts kicked in Mexico until smallpox ravaged the Triple Alliance, and the majority of the middle part of the continent was entirely dependent on Native whims until the huge epidemic of 1780 (Native domination lasted longer in some areas of course, well into the 1800s, but before the epidemic Europeans didn’t even have a chance).
I feel very confident saying that if diseases had not affected indigenous Americans, then Europe would not have conquered the continents.
Reblogging because it is important for people understand the bold. it is true, the Europeans could not have won without the diseases brought to us. The argument saying that they won because they were “advanced” is invalid because not even their weaponry was enough to beat native people. It was their diseases, which they knew, that could potentially decimate our population. So no, Europeans were not more “advanced” they were just a filthy, which is the reason why they carried disease in the first place.
White folks = nothing but a bunch of filthy, uncivilized, diseased, shit-drinking drunkards (srsly, Northern Europeans were so lazy they turned to savage levels of alcohol consumption rather than get off their backwards asses and stop shitting into their own goddamn water supplies)
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At its peak, the Maya civilization had one of the richest cultures in the Americas. Today, ethnic Mayas in central America and Mexico suffer from discrimination, exploitation and poverty.
In Guatemala, where nearly half of the population is indigenous, descendants of the once-mighty ancient civilization have even fallen victims to genocide.
The rich Mayan culture will be in the global spotlight Friday when revelers — and doomsday watchers — will mark the end of a 5,200-year era as sketched out in the elaborate Mayan calendar.
But the plight of indigenous Mayas in the region will likely go undiscussed.
“The indigenous population was always seen as cheap labor and this persists to this day,” said Guatemalan anthropologist Alvaro Pop, a member of the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues.
“They are seen as a tool and are not the focus of public policies.”
The Maya civilization reached its peak between the years 250 and 900, but then slipped into decline around 1200.
Three centuries later, during Spanish colonization, the Mayas were dispossessed of their lands and reduced to poverty as well as servitude.
Today, there are currently an estimated 20 to 30 million direct descendants of the ancient civilization living in southern Mexico, Belize, Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala, where the indigenous group is most prevalent.
In Guatemala, ethnic Mayas often find themselves on the margins of society, with limited access to education, health care and other basic services. Their native languages are not officially recognized.
Within the indigenous community, which accounts for 42 percent of Guatemala’s 14.3-million-strong population, the poverty rate is 80 percent.
Nearly six in 10 indigenous children suffer from chronic malnutrition, and the infant mortality rate has hit an alarming rate of 40 per 1,000 live births, according to the United Nations Development Program (UNDP).
In Mexico, social misery and exploitation led to the creation in 1994 in Chiapas state of the media-savvy but later weakened Zapatista National Liberation Army, which drew attention to the community’s plight.
But ethnic Mayas paid perhaps the heaviest price during Guatemala’s civil war that pitted the army against leftist guerrillas from 1960 to 1996.
“There were external reasons which exacerbated the population’s poverty and led to a stigmatization of indigenous people,” according to Pop.
More than 600 massacres of indigenous communities were recorded during that period and tens of thousands of Indians sought refuge in southern Mexico from the brutal counter-insurgency by the military, according to a 1999 UN report.
520 years later… still.
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