Monthly Archives: September 2016

I wonder if there are any books on, or books set in, the African-American community in Boston prior to the Civil War. When slavery was abolished in Massachusetts in 1783 by the Supreme Judicial Court, it took effect immediately rather than the gradual, generational abolition which had been authorized in Pennsylvania and other surrounding states. The Boston African-American community was the largest in the United States to enter the 19th century entirely as legal free people.

Of course Boston is known for being a center of abolitionist sentiment before New York City became the primary metropolitan community of free Africans in North America after 1827. But I’m pretty sure that there is a lot more to the history of the Boston community in the period between 1783 and 1827 beyond the abolition movement. What were the relationships, the cultural expressions, the institutions, the social class structures, the political advancements which developed so early among this early-free community?

One of my fave sci-fi short stories is “Flash Crowd” by Larry Niven. Written in the 1970s, it depicts much of what the world would be like if we had teleportation as a main mode of personal transport. Replace “newstaper” with “blogger” and you’d essentially update this short story by a bit. And smartphones, definitely need those. Meanwhile, we are on the cusp of autonomous, self-driving taxis. These may be the closest thing we have to personal teleportation.

The Racism of Chicago in the White Conservative’s Mind

Uncategorized, , , , , , ,

Something I’ve noticed: certain demographics from outside of Chicago love to describe Chicago’s African-American population and neighborhoods as a Third World country, like it is Hell on Earth.

Apparently, it’s not so “dark”, dysfunctional and evil of a place that most of the European-Americans in Chicago proper flee in droves from the city.

In fact, despite decades of petty gang-gun violence largely concentrated in the African-American population, it’s still the third largest city in the United States.

Maybe most of the African-American population is tucked away in a certain physical memory hole called the South Side, where murders happen and outsiders cynically tsk-tsk the surviving residents (or burnish their 2nd Amendment grievances with the bloody cloth of Black gun violence, or rage against the “niggers” and “race pimps” sullying the good name of yet another nice city) before moving on with their day?

Maybe deindustrialization happened, making life harder and encouraging many who had their highest skills in manual labor to turn to drugs, which entailed a turn to the violence which follows?

Maybe the culture of honor in the White South was adopted by us early in our belated freedom, and was brought by us to places like Chicago during the Great Migration when we should have left it in Jim Crow Land?

Nah, none of that could possibly be true! Chicago is just our sideshow, our American Mordor! Let’s always talk about Chicago’s Black people as if they are all crazy, evil and feral, and then pin that on President Obama like we’ve done since 2007.

Lineage-based Fraternal Societies

Politics, Uncategorized, , ,

Reading about Essie Mae Washington-Williams, the mixed-race oldest daughter of Strom Thurmond who he never publicly recognized in his 100-year life. I noticed that she tried unsuccessfully to join the United Daughters of the Confederacy through her father’s descent from Confederate soldiers, but emphasized the need for African-Americans to join more lineage-based fraternal societies in order to forge closer ties to the earlier United States. Dr. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. has also joined the Sons of the American Revolution by way of a free man of color who fought for Continental forces in the Revolutionary War.

This led me to the list of lineage-based fraternal societies in the United States, most of which are either based on participation in war, settlement of a state or region at a particular time, ethnicity, service in some military branch.

Most of these tend to be of the accidental, circumstantial type that would involve some catechism of honor to esteem the “honorable ancestors”, the sort of unchangeable accident of history involving some distant soldier guy (or nurse woman) who, if you were not reminded of it or cognizant of research, you would totally forget or ignore. Similar to this practice is the war or period reenactment culture (like RenFaire and Civil War reenactment).

The only African-American-oriented genealogical [NOT lineage] society which I can find right now is the AAHGS-Afro-American Historical and Genealogical Society, Inc. and their state chapters, which exist to “share resources and methodology for pursuing historical and genealogical research” and “to trace the historical ties that bind us one to another, mold the present, and shape the future.”

So it’s not exactly “Sons/Daughters of [whatever]”.

It seems to predominantly be a Euro-American thing. It’s hard for us to squeeze into most of these organizations.

 

The Short Life and Quiet End of the CV Pride Center

Uncategorized,

I really wanted the CV Pride Center to succeed, but I knew that it was burning through money from the moment it opened. I was constantly reminded of this by its operators, every time I vocalized my idea that the center should reach out to CenterLink: The Community of LGBT Centers.

The building, formerly a storage facility for ad signs, was of poor architecture, had huge glass windows on the front, and had poor insulation. It was never built to hold people, and even renting half of the building and operating the AC/Heat was very expensive.

The center was open for barely a year. I did what I could by voluntarily building a website for it as a personal project.

So I find it a weird sort of justice to know that the former CV Pride LGBT Community Center, which closed in October 2015, is now the Trump/Pence campaign office for Columbus.

But some of the most dedicated volunteers for the center now regret ever having worked for it, or for those who owned it. I don’t regret my work for it, but it should be a warning and reminder to those who want to plan another, better LGBT center here in Columbus, GA.

In the meantime, we have Colgay PRIDE of Columbus Georgia, which is operated by people who are more observant and dedicated to LGBT-inclusive social justice and community organizing. Even without a dedicated building, Colgay Pride is doing the non-partisan activism and outreach to LGBT people and their friends and family which is needed here in #ColumbusGA.

#LGBT

It Isn’t Good That Police Shoot Twice as Many Unarmed White Civilians as Black Civilians

Politics, Uncategorized, , , ,

If police kill twice as many unarmed European-Americans as they do African-Americans, isn’t that a problem with police, too? Shouldn’t the police be fixed to stop killing so many people across the country?

Why do you think there are so many White sovereign citizens who proclaim themselves to not be subject to American law? Why do you think that anarchist/libertarian White guys run Cop Block and Photography Is Not A Crime! in direct and sustained critique of police behavior?

Don’t be so cluelessly self-absorbed as to think that only Black, or only liberal, or only “SJW” people are raging against law enforcement abuse.

It’s not just #BlackLivesMatter. It’s not just #Kaepernick.

It’s also #StopKillingUs.

The “lewd acts” include “watching porn and masturbation.” I didn’t know that NYC had this, but they were going to run into this sooner or later. Potential solutions: time-limits, content filters, and maybe a door for entry like the good ole days. Does one use one’s idNYC card with these kiosks? Question for NYC residents: have you used one of these yet? #LinkNYC #tech #InternetAsPublicUtility

René Préval

Politics, Uncategorized,

René Préval, who served as President of Haiti from 1996-2001 and 2006-2011, is perhaps the greatest democratic survivor of Haitian politics. He managed to both receive and turn over presidential powers peacefully and democratically, twice over.

He weathered food riots, a dysfunctional government, frequent turnover of prime ministers, and the Haitian earthquake of 2010 where his own presidential residence was destroyed and left his family homeless. Yet, he never led or encountered a coup, unlike his democratic predecessor Jean-Bertrand Aristide, who suffered two coups. He did not have his own death squad, did not exceed his own presidential mandate.

Since independence in 1804, Préval is only the first elected Haitian president to serve his full term and voluntarily retire (and only the second overall after Nissage Saget, who had taken power by coup in 1867 but left office voluntarily after five years), and the first to be elected in non-consecutive terms. No other head of state in Haiti’s history can claim to have had a similar experience as René Préval.