Rogers Pass (elevation 1,330 m or 4,360 ft) was “discovered” on May 29, 1881, by Major Albert Bowman Rogers, a surveyor working for the Canadian Pacific Railway.

Seriously, that James Baldwin quote I reblogged is very much the ENTIRE problem with the way things are set up in Palestine and why Israel has been occupying it for so long. It's always been about white colonialism and the displacement of indigenous groups within Palestine. Meaning, Muslims, Jewish people and Christians all living together BEFORE British invasion were targeted, displaced and killed.

Dahomey Slave Traders: True Story of "THE WOMAN KING" | Black Seeds: History

The Dahomey people in the motion picture THE WOMAN KING starring Viola Davis were actually major slave traders in Africa.

"Black Seeds: The History of Africans in America" is an epic two-part documentary film by award-winning filmmaker Bayer Mack  (director of 2014 black history documentary "Oscar Micheaux: The Czar of Black Hollywood" and 2019's "No Lye: An American Beauty Story") that re-examines the history of African people in America.

"Black Seeds" uses dramatic historical reenactments, rare period illustrations and an original music score to explain the socioeconomic reasons behind the development of the transatlantic slave trade and shows how the institution of chattel slavery took root in the United States of America.

god I'm so fucking furious at the removal of Te Reo Māori names from organisations around Aotearoa. it's a complete non-issue, every organisation has the English name directly underneath the Māori name. I have never once as an English speaker been unable to understand what an organisation is for. Winston Peters, the Deputy Prime Minister, who is literally Māori himself, said “Te Papa is a historic name but tell me this waka kotahi, how many boats have you seen going down the road?”. Waka does not just mean canoe. it means vessel, and waka kotahi (the transport agency of Aotearoa) explains this VERY SIMPLY on their official website. waka kotahi means to travel together as one. Can you see how fucking upsetting this is. A Māori person in power who is in agreement about banning his own language, being so cocky about something that he does not even understand due to the suppression of the language of his people. It makes me sick. I've seen reports from Māori people all over Aotearoa speaking out about how upset and furious they are, how decades of progress have been undone in the fight to restore the rights of their people who have for so long been oppressed and have suffered the effects of colonisation. Please share this if you can, I hate knowing how few people will hear about this, I know there is so much injustice in the world right now and it is so exhausting, I know. I love you all, keep it up.

https://waateanews.com/2023/11/27/te-reo-public-service/

I documented multiple cases with @/ EuroMedHR of Israeli soldiers abducting blonde children from #Gaza claiming they might be abductee Israelis. As Israeli forces are nearing my area of refuge, I just actually told my brother’s wife to dye her blonde daughter’s hair black! [@/ MahaGaza on X. 01/07/24.] Read this twice, took me twice Zionists are kidnapping blonde Palestinian babies and pretending they're isra*lis, Palestinians are being told to dye their children's hair black [@/ Lamis_Deek on X. 01/07/24/]

Thank you to a mutual for sharing/alerting me to this. This is absolutely horrifying. Like WHO was it that said blonde and blue-eyed babies were superior??

This also makes me think of white European colonizers kidnapping Indigenous children and bringing them to "residential schools" -which were mass genocide camps. If ya'll even know a little about this history, that's what it reminds me of. Indigenous children were forcibly separated from their families and cultures. They were forbidden to speak their languages and were violently abused, and many were killed in heinous and cruel ways -there are still MANY unmarked graves in the white-settler nation of Canada.

This is beyond disturbing. I can't even imagine the horrors behind something like this. The IOF are depraved.

*Edit: for context, I'm not saying that the history of cultural genocide of Indigenous people in settler-colonial countries like Canada and the United States is a direct parallel to what is happening or what appears to be happening to Palestinian children. It just brought up initial thoughts (in terms of my perspective) about the IOF kidnapping Palestinian babies for their 'perceived whiteness,' [which made me think of Nazi Germany's white supremacist discourses], and how very specific it is of them to be taking Palestinian babies/young children and saying they are 'Israeli' [which reminded me of how Indigenous children were forcibly taken from their homeland/cultures by violent settler-colonial states]. I think most of us can agree that the intentions behind this are nefarious, and no matter the reason -I am not trying to erase the severity of and atrocities behind nearly 2 centuries of anti-Indigenous racism and systemic violence against Indigenous communities. I saw a re-blog with commentary about this -and I just want to acknowledge what they had said because this is important to address.

correct me if i’m wrong cos i don’t watch dune.. but i’ve seen people call paul a tragic character. except isn’t he a whole white coloniser tricking indigenous poc into believing he’s a prophet to serve his own interests? that’s inherently evil that cannot be a tragic character imo

so yes that is correct that is what happens. the tragedy is that he is a sixteen year old boy who gets a vision of this happening and he is TERRIFIED and absolutely does not want this to happen at all. He does not want the holy war he does not want to be the chosen one he initially very much wants to fight alongside the fremen as equals trying to liberate themselves from their current colonizer without becoming the messiah because they have common political cause.

And then the entire second half of the first book (and the second movie) are about the concessions he makes to himself bit by bit by bit (well it’s the only way to save his mom and sister. well it’s the only way to prevent nuclear war. well he does want his revenge. well maybe he IS special.) Until by the end he has lost 100% of his humanity, fully wants to be the messiah and is willing to manipulate people into thinking so, and has declared himself duke of arrakis in his father’s name and made a play for the imperial throne.

you’re right that it’s evil. the book and these movies agree with you. the tragedy is watching a child who desperately wanted to avoid this slowly completely lose himself to it anyways. i don’t think “tragic” and “evil” are inherently mutually exclusive.

“But what about Hamas?” I grew up with this question whipped at my face every time I declared my people’s right to survive. “What about Hamas?” It didn’t matter if I’d just asked for clean water or the right to return to our stolen land. “What about Hamas?” they’d ask, holding my humanity hostage. Their smug smiles at this question, which they saw as a rhetorical coup. I gave them hours, pages of my words. I filled rooms with my hot breath, panting, “We are not terrorists—Hamas is a symptom of oppression—yes of course I condemn extremism—this is a struggle for human rights—Israel propped up Hamas for years—please look at our children—please, don’t you see our helpless elders?—please, if you don’t respect us as humans, could you spare some pity?”

Sarah Aziza, Doomsday Diaries.

[emphasis added]

I believe it was the work of legal scholar Florence Ashley where I first encountered this term (it might have also been Serano), but I’m becoming more and more committed to saying “degender” as opposed to “misgender.” like I think the term ‘misgender’ fails to properly identify the mechanism behind the process it describes: misgendering is not an act of attributing the wrong gender characteristics to a trans person, it is an act of dehumanisation. I think the term ‘misgender’ especially gives people much easier rhetorical cover to argue that trans women are hurt by misandry by being ‘mislabeled as men,’ or that they are in fact ‘actually men’ and benefit from male privilege, because the (incorrect) assumption underlying this is that when trans women are ‘misgendered’ they are being treated like men - to follow this line of thinking to its natural conclusion, this denies the existence of transmisogyny altogether, because any ‘misgendering’ of trans women is done only with the intent, conscious or otherwise, to inscribe the social position (and the privileges this position affords) of men onto them, as opposed to stripping them of their womanhood (and thus, their humanity).

The term degendering, however, I think more accurately describes this dehumanising process. Pulling from the work of both Judith Butler and Maria Lugones, gender mediates access to personhood - Lugones says in the Coloniality of Gender that in the colonial imaginary, animals have no gender, they only have (a) sex, and so who gets ‘sexed’ and who gets ‘gendered’ is a matter of who counts as human. She describes this gendering process as fundamentally colonial and emerging as a colonial technology of power - who is gendered is who gets to be considered human, and so the construction of binary sex is a way of ‘speciating’ or rendering non-human the Indigenous and African people of colonized America, justifying and systematising the brutal use of their land and/or their labour until their death by equating them to animals. Sylvia Wynter likewise describes in 1492: A New World View that a popular term used by Spanish colonizers to describe the indigenous people was “heads of Indian men and women,” as in heads of cattle. By the same token, white men are granted the high status of human, worthy of governance, wealth, and knowledge production, and white women are afforded the subordinate though still very high responsibility of reproducing these men by raising and educating children. Appeals to a person’s sex as something more real, more obvious, or ‘poorly concealed’ by their gender is to deny them their gender outright, and therefore is a mechanism to render them non-human. Likewise, for Butler, gender produces the human subject - to be outside gender is to be considered “unthinkable” as a human being, a being in “unliveable” space.

Therefore the process of trans women going from women -> “male” is not “being gendered as a man,” it is being positioned as non-human. when people deny the gender of trans women, most especially trans women of colour, they invariably do this through reference to their genitals, to their ‘sex,’ as something inescapable, incapable of being concealed - again, this is not a process of rendering them as men, it is the exact opposite: it is a process of rendering them as non-human. there is not a misidentification process happening, they are not being “misgendered as men,” there is a de-identification of them as human beings. Hence, they are not misgendered, they are degendered, stripped of gender, stripped of their humanity

Maybe I lose some followers along the way but that is okayyy I am not sorry to see them go ✌️

The Yosemite Valley was “discovered” in California on March 25, 1851.

landback everywhere

Everyone asks what I read and truth be told I learned a lot of politics through experience and listening to Black revolutionaries.

There is nothing- nothing- that I say on my blog that Malcom X or James Baldwin or Frantz Fanon or Thomas Sankara or Frederick Douglass didn't say first (and much more eloquently)

Further, their words have given me the tools to think critically about not just my place, but everyone else's and what we owe each other.

I myself, wouldn't have a Lot of the politics I do had I not been exposed to the ideas they talked about with such knowledge and experience. Whether it was by following activists or looking up things up or learning about them myself, they're influential and I would even say foundational to decolonization and dismantling white supremacy.

My usual recs are Wretched of the Earth and Braiding Sweetgrass, but those are just starters since people just usually ask where to begin.

So I wanted to make this post and for them to be Very Much credited for the following I have and my politics since I don't often mention them.

For example, I talk a lot about how the comfort of the privileged is an obstacle that stems directly from their privilege. How libs who only conditionally support peaceful protests don't understand what's necessary; that challenging the status quo can't be done comfortably and it's never been "peaceful" for the oppressing classes. How it's detrimental to progress to compromise on how we fight for our rights and to have been liberals telling us we demand too much.

Frederick Douglass:

Frantz Fanon:

Privileges multiply and corruption triumphs…Today the vultures are too numerous and too voracious in proportion to the lean spoils of the national wealth. The party, a true instrument of power in the hands of the bourgeoisie, reinforces the machine, and ensures that the people are hemmed in and immobilised.

Thomas Sankara:

Malcom X:

James Baldwin:

In a way, I owe the invitation to the incredible, abysmal, and really cowardly obtuseness of white liberals. Whether in private debate or in public, any attempt I made to explain how the Black Muslim movement came about, and how it has achieved such force, was met with a blankness that revealed the little connection that the liberals' attitudes have with their perceptions or their lives, or even their knowledge—revealed, in fact, that they could deal with the Negro as a symbol or a victim but had no sense of him as a man.

Bonus MLK Jr quote:

Over the last few years many Negroes have felt that their most troublesome adversary was not the obvious bigot of the Ku Klux Klan or the John Birch Society, but the white liberal who is more devoted to “order” than to justice, who prefers tranquillity to equality. In a sense the white liberal has been victimized with some of the same ambivalence that has been a constant part of our national heritage. Even in areas where liberals have great influence— labor unions, schools, churches and politics—the situation of the Negro is not much better than in areas where they are not dominant. This is why many liberals have fallen into the trap of seeing integration in merely aesthetic terms, where a token number of Negroes adds color to a white-dominated power structure."

Whether your medium is a PDF, a book, movie, clips, quotes, podcast, whatever. However you digest info easiest: learn about them and their words. Think about them. Talk about it and process it with friends.

That's how you shape your politics to be similar to the ones you find on my blog.

armed resistance against your colonizers was, is, and will always be rightful, necessary and morally correct... glory to the resistance!

If you want to know how bad the injuries caused by white phosphorus Israel is using in Gaza, just know that senior UK doctors shown images of children burnt by it had to sit down from shock. The burns are down to the bone.The agony is unbearable. Gaza is out of pain killers.KIDS! [@/ MyriamFrancoisC on X. 12/31/23.]

Lebanon: Evidence of Israel’s unlawful use of white phosphorus in southern Lebanon as cross-border hostilities escalate

Israel Allegedly Used White Phosphorus Munitions in Gaza and Lebanon. Here’s What to Know

Israel used U.S.-supplied white phosphorus in Lebanon attack

The IOF has used white phosphorus in Gaza and Lebanon. There was evidence it happened and was confirmed by Amnesty International weeks ago -the Washington Post even covered it, but there have been ZERO follow-ups for investigations in these blatent war crimes. The IOF is depraved and monstrous.