#where in the south because of plantations the actual population majority in some places was black. | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

dlamp-dictator · 4 years

Text

You know, I wanted to talk about the fun parts of the latest Arknights event, like how Texas and Waii Fu got into a fist fight in the streets of Lungmen. I wanted to start a small essay about how Granbelm’s Anna Fugo was a great and interesting villain and how Granbelm as a who was a pretty good mecha anime. I wanted to talk about how awfully predatory AFK Arena’s gacha system is.

But before all that, I think it’s high time I actually lived up the “X” part of Allen X.

So, I hate talk about current events, namely because they heavily date my posts. As such I usually save them for my end-of-the-year pieces that are dated by design. However, I don’t think I can quietly watch a lot of what’s going on in my country without at least addressing its existence.To be silent is to be compliant after all. I’ll try and keep this as brief as I can, but no promises.

But like most of my Ramblings, some background.

As of me writing this, the date is May 31st, 2020. For those unaware, a George Floyd has been killed by a police officer via strangulation a while back. As sad as it is for me to say, this is honestly nothing new in America. Racial discrimination and prejudice by law enforcement is, frankly, older than this country. However, this seems to have been the tipping point, as several states and larger cities have erupted into mass protest. For most of my research and feed searching, the protest have been mostly peaceful, and a lot of the violence has seemed to be done by White Nationalist groups like the Proud Boys and the KKK in an attempt to smear the peaceful protests, even by a few police officers.

My small town is as quiet as ever, but the world around me has exploded.

I’m usually seen as a quiet and thoughtful person for the most part in real life. I think only a handful of my friends actually know my temper can get razor thin in times of stress, and this has been a pretty stressful time for me. So... I’ll break this down as thoroughly as I can. I’ll try and stay calm and professional as I usually am in most of my ramblings, but I can’t make promises on that.

But let’s get to the first point.

Things are Scary

Something I was going to save for a future Art/Writing rambling, but I don’t think enough people have been admitting that things are very scary right now. In the same vein that I don’t think enough people admit art and writing is hard, I don’t think enough people, enough people with actual pull to their words, are admitting that, yes, things are very scary right now as of May 31st 2020.

In January we had a political situation that nearly started War World 3. In February we had the announcement of a global virus that is still just as contagious and deadly as it was then, and possibly was running about by late December. In either March or April I believe had major flooding in the state of Michigan, and now it seems we’re going to end May with civil rights protests where police and military are attacking protesters seemingly unprovoked.

And this is all very scary.

I know my words don’t have the same weigh as a celebrity or a political figure, but I feel that validation of basic human emotion is the key to coming to an understanding, so I’ll say again: this is all scary stuff. It feels like as my world continues to turn uninterrupted while the world around me is just turning more and more to ash. It’s like being in a safe haven while watching people run from a fire slowly approaching, and it’s scary. It’s outright terrifying. And I think it’s important to admit this and accept this. You can be afraid, you can say you’re afraid, you can cry and worry about how scary things are. Accepting those feelings is important, just don’t let them control you.

That said.

Allen X’s Take on Things

Here’s what I can say so far.

A lack of police accountability has be a fact of life here in the US for years, decades even.

The police have far more power than we give them credit for.

While many of my dealings with police have been good, I get the feeling I’m the exception to the rule.

Our current federal leadership has been nothing short of ignorant, arrogant, and domineering toward not only minorities, but the general population.

Supporters of this leaderships are, frankly, remarkably ignorant at best, and criminally dangerous at worst.

We have reached a point were basic health regulations such as wearing masks in the middle of a global pandemic is now a partisan issue. This is bad.

We have reached a point where more police accountability during a time of global pandemic is now politically divisive. This is also bad.

I could go on, but these are the most pressing thoughts I have on our current situation and the nicest I can be about this topic while maintaining an air of professionalism. Like I said, things are scary. The more I look into things, the worse I feel about the state of this country. The only positive thing I can say is that it should all be over once election day comes.

Now, here’s something else I’d like to state.

Allen X is Black

I never enjoy talking about my ethnicity on the internet. As someone who talks more about video games, anime, manga, and general niche “otaku” media, I feel like my ethnicity and race rarely play a role in my opinion of Asian media, as I’d always be viewing it as an outsider regardless. However, with this topic I feel I should at least state that there is a reason I use X as a stand-in for my pseudo last name. It was originally the name of an old self-insert OC, Allen X. Walker, but when I realized Allen Walker was already taken, I just left it to Allen X. A cheeky nod to both how a lot of only aliases of the early 2000s had “X” as a stand-in to keep original names, and a to my ethnicity, riffing on Malcom X, who used that letter as a stand-in for the last name our ancestors had stolen when taken to the US by force to work the plantations.

As I said, my race is rarely relevant to what I cover, but it does effect my everyday life. I get nervous when I say on my application sheets that I’m Black, wondering if that’d be a black mark. I get twitchy whenever I do my laps around my predominately white neighborhood, wondering if I’d get snide looks and sneers. I get agitated whenever anyone uses the n-word due to it never meaning anything positive in my past. I annoyed when people assume I’m either British or from the UK due to my not having the typical accent of most Black people since I lived in a white neighborhood for most of my life and took speech classes as a child to speak “normally”. Hell, I was bullied by the Black seniors in my high school as a Freshman for not being “Black enough”. And more recently, I was kicked out of the neighborhood I do my rollerblading laps in because that neighborhood suddenly became “private property” when some new neighborhoods moved in. New neighbors that are fine with me being ran over by a car, but not “trespassing” on their sidewalks.

Needless to say, I am very familiar with racism and prejudice. It doesn’t effect me as badly as the folks in the south and especially where these protests are, but I am familiar with it. And when I see these videos and tweets of the violence and police brutality, the anger of the people, it’s terrifying. It terrifying that this is real and is happening just a few states down south of me, and possible one state north of me. It’s terrifying that all this is happening so brazenly and with very few people in our system of government, at least at the executive level, doing anything about. And it’s terrifying that I’m not seeing this on too many major news channels and sites. That’s partially due to me rarely looking up the news aside from headlines, but most major places I’ve seen, save for maybe CNN, really haven’t been talking much about it, not as much as I’d like anyway. It’s all just a lot to take in, and those nervous moments I have due to my ethnicity start to make me shake with fear some days now.

But... I need to move on to the next topic, for the sake of my sanity.

What Must be Said

Like before, I feel like there are things that must be said. To be silent is to be compliant, and while my own position in life is a little to fragile to break out the picket signs and parade the streets, I will at least use my online voice to state what I feel must be stated, if only to say what I do and don’t agree with.

With that said:

Injustices by the police and general law enforcement must be given accountability.

The murder of innocent minority, racial or otherwise, is wrong and must be given the proper punishments.

The lack of care toward healthcare, workers’ rights, civil rights, and so on must be ratified.

Law enforcement should never be seen as or used as a force of fear as it currently is now.

And during a health pandemic like we are now, safety should be a prime concern before anything else. For the police to be acting as they are now makes me fearful of the future.

The fact that I have to say any of that, the fact that any of that is controversial is appalling. The fact that a simple hashtag like #blacklivesmatter is controversial is appalling. The fact that I even hesitated to write that hashtag to maintain professionalism is appalling. It sickens me a little to live in a country where any of that is said, written, or typed with a hint of hesitation or worry. It’s just... so appalling.

That’s all I have to say on this subject, at least in this tone. My purer, more raw thoughts I’ll save for my friends and family in private.

But... I think that leaves us with one question left before I end this. Which is...

How Did We Get Here?

Folks, I am a knowledgeable man, but I don’t consider myself an intelligent one. I didn’t study years of the underlying racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, Islamophobia, and antisemitism that lead to our situation.

However... I am very sarcastic and sharp-tongued man. I don’t show that side of myself often here on the internet aside from jokes and jabs at nonsensical things like anime, as it breaks my typical persona of an analytical and professional man, but I think I can sum up what’s happening by paraphrasing single quote that I feel many of the wrong people have used to justify their own feelings of injustices. So with that said:

What do you get when you cross an abused and patient minority with a society that abandons them and treats them like trash?

“I’ll tell you what you get. You get what you fucking deserve.”

Anyway, ideally I’ll have a much happy topic to talk about later this week. Like Arknights. Like I said in the beginning, A former mafia delivery girl got into a fist fight with a kung fu detective, a lot of fun things happened in the latest event.

#your dictator is speaking

2 notes · View notes

absalomabsalom · 4 years

Text

Coming and Going: Misrecognition and Identity in Flannery O’Connor’s “Everything That Rises Must Converge”

Professor Richard A. Garner The Human Situation, April 15th, 2020

Outline

I. The Best Title in All of Literature

II. Misery Like a Coastal Shelf

III. The Injury of Intelligence, the Insult of an Education

A. Intelligence is a curse

B. A Martyr to the Desire of the Other; or, that St. Sebastian Painting One More Time

C. The Terror of Identity; or, Meeting Yourself Coming and Going

Richard Sexton,Oak Avenue, Wormsloe Plantation, 2009

I. The Best Title in All of Literature

“The past is never dead. It's not even past.”

—William Faulkner, Requiem for a Nun

In a second, I’m going to talk to you about the literary genre called the Southern Gothic. It’s the best. It’s weird and uncanny and disturbing, and it’s all ours. After that, I’m going to talk about the cursed intellectuals of O’Connor’s stories in general, and more specifically of our story for today, “Everything That Rises Must Converge” (1961). You might want to read the last one first, as it does the most close-reading, or the second one, which has lots of maps and stuff. But first, I want to tell you that “Everything That Rises Must Converge” is the best title in all of literature.

From the moment I read it on the syllabus as an undergraduate—circa the turn of the millennium— it took on a life of its own in my head. It’s one of those phrases we encounter in life that returns over and over again, coming to mind unbidden in situations that have nothing remotely to do with the themes of the story. Indeed, every time I go back and reread the story I am struck by how the title, like many of O’Connors, creates this tiny bit of cognitive dissonance, this strangeness that makes it at once both absolutely perfect and deeply unsettling: a stark line of poetry that stands over and above the story, its own little work of art.

And I say this knowing—as you may as well, if you read Giroux’s introduction—that the phrase comes from the Jesuit philosopher Teilhard de Chardin: “Tout Ce Qui Monte Converge” (xv). Robert Giroux relates that the phrases appears in French, in an anthology he had sent O’Connor of the philosopher’s work. Yet, if anything, going back and reading Teilhard de Chardin and how he uses the phrase makes O’Connor’s usage of the phrase embettered, not worsened, by the repetition. Here’s the version of the passage most often quoted, which is not actually the philosopher’s but one of his students/anthologists. From Max H. Begouen’s Foreword to Building the Earth: “He gave each of them this watchword: ‘Remain true to yourselves, but move ever upward toward greater consciousness and greater love! At the summit you will find yourselves united with all those who, from every direction, have made the same ascent. For everything that rises must converge’” (13). Here’s one version in his own words, from the essay “Faith in Man,” expressing a major theme in the philosopher’s work: “Followed to their conclusion the two paths must certainly end by coming together: for in the nature of things everything that is faith must rise, and everything that rises must converge” (186). In other words, where Teilhard de Chardin is saying something about the nature of our common humanity converging in ever-greater complexity and perfection, O’Connor is injecting something insistent, something dark into this message of hope. In doing so, she is not trying to negate the utopian vision of the philosopher, but to transform it by way of adding in the full range of human experience. For O’Connor, thinking about convergence means thinking about life in a place where sectarianism is stuck on the Catholic/Protestant divide so strongly that to be a Catholic is so alien that one might as well be Jewish (and anything further afield would be meaningless to the young Church of God boys); where buses had only been desegregated in Browder v. Gayle five years before she wrote the story; and where the number of women receiving PhDs in Philosophy in the 1950s—much less in the South—was vanishingly small. In other words, O’Connor injects a certain Southern peculiarity combined with a bit of Gothic uncanniness into this convergence. Faith, theological or not, is easy when it does not have a world to contend with, and if it is easy, it is no faith at all.

But before we talk about the Southern Gothic, I want to return to the title, because I love it so much. Ultimately, beyond any particular meaning it derives from and alongside the story itself, it’s the beauty of a phrase that lingers in one’s mind, insists on coming back again and again, that I want to discuss. I want to discuss it because it gets at the heart of something about literature. For instance, when I say it’s “the best,” on what criteria am I basing that judgement? Are those objective, or purely subjective? Am I repeating a mistake we see from so many of O’Connor’s characters, of assuming that their personal preference can stand in for everyone else’s (and that those who disagree must be wrong)? Short answer: no. I’m saying this for effect. I know it’s just me. But the longer answer is that the particularity of my judgment on this title does give us a clue to the universality of something about language. Our psyches are, ultimately, linguistic; all the sense-experience, emotions, and logic that we deploy emerges out of and is filtered through language. Language makes possible what we can know of our world, and some of the greatest tragedies of our lives are marked by our inability to find a language that fits our experience—of love, of friendship, of betrayal, of death—often because someone else is imposing their language on us, or because there is no language at all for it. Sometimes we have to invent it. I don’t know what part of my self, per se, needs the phrase everything that rises must converge, but some part does. Thank you, Flannery O’Connor.

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man, 1955

II. Misery Like a Coastal Shelf

Man hands on misery to man.

It deepens like a coastal shelf.

—Philip Larkin, “This Be The Verse”

What is it about the South that lends itself to the gothic? Ever since Edgar Allen Poe’s American reinvention of that European genre—of ancient curses, crumbling castles, monsters and murderers, of innocent women in distress and dark and stormy nights—Southern literature has often veered of into the uncanny and horrific as it’s modus operandi. And the answer as to why? Well, it’s not all the decaying castles scattered across the countryside. The answer is obvious: it’s slavery. The deep secret, the obscure past, the meaningless descent into gratuitous violence, the uncanny return of repressed trauma and desire: slavery.

Let’s take a tour of some maps… First, what do you think this one is?

If you answered “a map of which parts of America started socially distancing when during the pandemic,” then you are a winner. Here’s the key I excised from the original New York Times article the map appeared in (Ganz et al).

You’d be forgiven for mistaking this for a map of a lot of different things, but let’s cut to the chase. Here’s the second map:

In case you’re having difficulty reading the title, let me help with this U.S. Coast Survey from 1861: “Map showing the distribution of the slave population of the southern states of the United States.” But just in case the point is not clear yet, here’s map number three:

That, everyone, is a map of the United States as it looked during the late Cretaceous period, many millions of years ago (126-65 mya, to be geologically precise; see Krulwich). That inland sea left rich alluvial deposits that became the fertile crescent of land known as, first geologically and then politically, the Black Belt. Needless to say, the agricultural quality of the land correlates strongly with the intensity of slavery practiced in the American South.

In Sigmund Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents (a book we read often here in The Human Situation), the psychoanalyst uses the metaphor of the ruins of Rome to talk about the deep history of our own human minds. He wants us to understand how, even after they’ve been totally erased and are irretrievable, our earliest experiences shape who we are, just as the long-obliterated strata of Rome each successively dictated what was built after them. For me, when Larkin evoked misery deepening like a coastal shelf, Freud’s ruins of Rome and the cretaceous South sprang immediately to mind; I took it not as simile, but something that could be, often is, literally true.

This is what is meant in Faulkner’s famous epigraph about the past never being dead. Southern Gothic emerged as one of the most distinctive genres, blending mystery and murder and a deep sense of a looming violence in the world. Flannery O’Connor’s stories, as we have all seen, could easily be turned into horror movies, and William Faulkner’s work also includes many of the same themes. If we include Toni Morrison and Cormac McCarthy (e.g., the hauntings in Beloved or the demonic Judge of Blood Meridian), then the genre is easily the defining movement of twentieth century American literature. And it is not only slavery, but the history of violence that is the warp and weft of the institution, that colors our Southern Gothic. The Civil War is still the deadliest war in American history, and it’s not even close. Indeed, scholars have argued, often convincingly, that the region has to this day not recovered from the economic, social, and political devastation caused by the military conflict alone, not to mention its aftershocks, the devastation like a modern war fought 75-100 years before its time. “The past is never dead. It's not even past.”

III. The Injury of Intelligence, the Insult of an Education

A. Intelligence Is a Curse

As I’m sure you’ve noticed by now, O’Connor’s stories are chock full of characters for whom their intelligence is a curse. Hulga almost causes her mother an existential crisis because the pleasure- reading she leaves lying around is Heidegger’s “What Is Metaphysics?”; The Child is clearly the smartest one in the room; even The Misfit was marked off at a young age: “‘You know,’ Daddy said, ‘some that can live their whole life out without asking about it an it’s other has to know why it is, and this boy is one of the latters’” (129). So, too, Julian.

Julian is a writer who does not write. Like Hulga, whose philosophy is solely for herself, Julian’s fantasy world is solely for himself. And he seems to know that he is not a writer—he never expects to make a life/career/money out of it—which forces us to ask: why does he identify as a writer? But before we answer that question, let’s get right to the stakes. The clue is in the title, and O’Connor doesn’t make us wait too long. Immediately after she tells her son that he should be proud that his ancestors owned hundreds of slaves, Julian’s mother gets down to commentary on civil rights: “They should rise, yes, but on their own side of the fence” (408, emphasis added). So, rise: yes; converge: not so much for Julian’s mother. It is no mistake that this story takes place on a bus, the public space Rosa Parks made famous and which the Supreme Court desegregated in its 1956 ruling in Browder v. Gayle, five years before this story was published; the bus, for O’Connor, is again not a metaphor for race relations, it is the thing itself. Thus, unlike for Hulga, Julian’s fate and choices are going to extend far beyond himself—to the status of racism in America, the history of slavery, and reparations therefore—although they will extend to himself, too. Perhaps O’Connor is saying that the repercussions of the choices of the two, philosopher and writer, have different stakes. Perhaps.

Which brings us back to all these emotionally fraught intellectuals here, decaying slowly, like fish out of water, in their Southern hometowns. This theme is important for O’Connor because it argues intelligence, reason itself even, can serve not as something that enlightens, but something that closes off, distances, and deceives. The dark of reason. Like The Child in “A Temple of the Holy Ghost,” they can only see the difference in all things, and not the sameness; there are parts of everyday life that they have utterly rejected, and thus cannot connect to; they are alienated on their own soil, homeless in their own homes. And often with good reason! Julian’s mother is an out and out racist, and she represents the norm. He should reject her racism. But, for some reason, he cannot reject her herself. And he cannot reconcile the one to the other. I love her: she’s a racist; I must reject racism: I must reject her. His very love for his mother is a source of immense guilt for Julian, and that right there is the essence of the Southern Gothic.

There is a deeper lesson here, one that we don’t really have time for, about how Julian is actually trying to inhabit two different symbolic worlds, ones with different rules that justify themselves in different ways and that are ultimately incompatible. It’s like he speaks two different languages, but thinks they’re the same one and so often gets hopelessly confused. And the truth is something like that, when we recognize that culture is like a language that sets up rules for what and how we make meaning of the world. Heidegger famously said: “Language is the house of Being. In its home man dwells” (217). Hulga and Julian, justifiably reacting to the smallness and violence of the world they grew up in, have learned another world, but tragically cannot see their way back across the divide they have built; they’re emotionally attached, but intellectually distant, so they take refuge in that distance and decay psychologically, along with the old plantation mansion that Julian can’t help but dream about. Perhaps this is a problem O’Connor understood all too well. Her writing teacher in the Iowa MFA program had to ask her “to write down what she had just said” the first time they met her Georgia accent was so thick (vii, all emphasis mine).

B. A Martyr to the Desire of the Other; Or, that St. Sebastian Painting One More Time

When I worked in that highly suggestive, very famous painting of St. Sebastian into my lecture on Voltaire, I had totally forgotten that our erstwhile saint figured into our story for today, even though I had been reading O’Connor again over break. Sometimes the Unconscious, to paraphrase Larkin, fucks you up, but every now and again it does you a favor.

One of Julian’s fantasies is that he is a martyr to his mother. This should right away give us some pause. Take this for instance: “Everything that gave her pleasure was small and depressed him” (405). There is something deeply wrong with Julian’s relationship to his mother here; in fact, this is not a healthy relationship to have with any human being. Why on earth does Julian care what gives his mother pleasure? Shouldn’t he be happy that she is happy, despite it being over a ridiculous hat? Why would you ever arrange it so that, in the most important relationship in your entire world, anything that makes the other person happy makes you sad? That, my friends, is a recipe for disaster, death and disaster and tragedy. You don’t even have to read to the end. This is not going to end well.

To understand characters, you have to understand their motivations. This can be tricky. We can’t assume the characters are us, or anyone else but who they are. There are many possibilities for why Julian does what he does—alien mind control, for instance—but very few plausible ones. What, then, are Julian’s plausible alternatives here to his misery. Alternative one: leave his mother and move far away. He wants to be a writer? New York City, Paris, hell Houston or Atlanta: get thee hence. Anywhere but here (Hulga, too). Why, then, does he stay? We can be very, very cynical and say that Julian is broke and his mom’s supporting him. True! But not really enough. A lot of life can be lived in cheap apartments with ramen noodles, even on the commission of a typewriter salesman. This would be an excuse he would be telling himself, though we should also assume that many of the jobs he might be qualified for he would reject because they would conflict too heavily with his identity (as a writer), or just embarrass him (as being beneath him and his college education).

I think the real clue is in the saint imagery. But it’s not him who’s the saint, it’s his mother—a fair description for her achievements vis-à-vis Julian, which are not small, and which she is justly proud of. Even if taken literally, if he is suffering for his mother, as a saint, that means his mother is Jesus! His non-sacrifice of riding on a bus with his mother—“the time he would be sacrificed to her pleasure” (406)— is really her sacrifice. The problem is that, in this twisted relationship, his mother-the-saint is also a racist. Moreover, he knows that she’s not doing this for her pleasure: her doctor has told her she might die if she doesn’t become more active. Yet that’s how he frames it, which makes no sense … unless, here again, we should take this more literally than he means it: she’s staving off death, and as long as she is alive and enjoying life, then of course he cannot enjoy it. Ipso facto, he wants her to die, so he can move on. Again, her very existence is a source of guilt for him. Not because he hates her, but because he loves her.

C. The Terror of Identity; Or, Meeting Yourself Coming and Going

What does the phrase “you won’t meet yourself coming and going” (407) even mean? I had to pause at this phrase after O’Connor repeats it in the story, making sure to remember, as Professor Charara reminded us, that just because it is a cliché for the characters doesn’t mean that it is one for O’Connor. In short, it signifies a desire for uniqueness. If you do not meet yourself coming or going, you will not see someone else that looks like you on your journey.

This desire—to be singular, unique—is a pretty basic one. We all need some manner of distinguishing ourselves from others, otherwise the difference between self and other breaks down, and what it means to be uniquely our self does with it. This loss of self is, in almost all cases, terrifying for us. It is terrifying for Julian, because it is precisely what he fears in relation to his mother: he will never have his own desires, his own identity, but merely be an extension of hers, subsumed by his mother’s identity, her view of him. He will always be, as Professor Wallace discussed, an object and never a subject. (At the same time, to have nothing in common with other human beings is an opposite extreme, untenable as well. What it would even mean, to share no qualities with other people, no common bond over which you could unite, no language, aspirations, or anything else? Nothing.)

Of course, his mother does indeed meet herself going to the reducing class, in the form of a black woman with her child, angered about … something. Long story short, this woman hits Julian’s mother and storms off when she tries to give her child a penny. There is much to be wrung interpretively from whether or not it is this blow that causes his mother’s death, or Julian’s reaction to it. But I think this is a bit beside the point, much as the hat is. The truth of the situation is in Julian’s belated realization of his unacknowledged love for his mother—he calls out to her as a mother would to a child, or even a lover to their beloved, at the end, “Darling, sweetheart, wait!” (420)—and with that, his imminent “entry into the world of guilt and sorrow” (420). His coded wish for his mother’s death has been granted, but in so doing all the compromises he has made will no longer be tenable. He will, of course, blame himself for the way he acted vindictively toward her, even in her last moments, and he might even blame himself for her death.

Most of all, though, he will lose his ability to maintain that ironic distance that he has adopted toward the world, the one that has kept him locked into a fantasy world. There is compensation here: that fantasy allows him to live the life he secretly desires—not incidentally, the one where he can acknowledge his mother’s love and sacrifice, if not in word, then in deed. He does devote himself to his mother; despite what he says he is on that bus. The “in word” part is crucial here. Julian wants to be a writer because it allows him to keep an ironic distance toward the world as the detached observer who can catalogue all the worlds foibles while imagining that he is the hero setting them aright. But not in the real world, which is a bit too messy. When he imagines marrying a black woman, he tempers this fantasy by writing his fictional lover as not too black, her race only a suspicion (414). When he befriends black folk in his fantasies, it is only “the better types” (414). And when he imagines joining a sit-in, this is “possible but he did not linger with it” (414). Of course the possible is not something he lingers with! There is no ironic distance in the possible. Only jail, maybe even death. In fact, in a very real sense, Julian needs injustice to continue, because if it disappeared he would be forced to confront everything that he is fobbing off. Thus: “It gave him a certain satisfaction to see injustice in daily operation. It confirmed his view that with a few exceptions there was no one worth knowing within a radius of three hundred miles” (412).

I think a more interesting question than whether or not the child’s mother is responsible for Julian’s mother’s death is why she is angry to begin with. Julian is probably not wrong, that negotiating the casual violence of an antiblack society has shaped her outlook, and primed her for confrontation as an understandable survival strategy (compare her to the man who buries his nose in a newspaper, learning about the world at large while ignoring the world at hand). But perhaps we should look closer to home. If you were a mother negotiating public transit with your child, might you be annoyed if a grown man—a white man, in this very specific instance—forced you to split yourself off from your young child? And, assuming that she’s as good a reader of the world as Julian is, when you realize that he’s forced you into this situation because of some tiff he’s having with his mother? Julian delights in the fact that the children have been split from their mothers; he is himself keenly aware of the dynamic at play here. But because he is trapped in his own bubble—his own decaying mansion of the mind—he cannot see that maybe she does, too. And if Julian’s desire to separate himself from his own mother is achieved in this awkward social situation, it is imposed upon the mother and her child. Yet the stakes for each are different, and Julian knows this, too. He sees it coming from a mile away, but what he can’t see is that the cause is not his mother, but himself, and he cannot see it because then he would be the one thing he cannot be, his mother. He would see himself coming and going, in her.

Bibliography

Femia, Will. “Paleo-Politics: The Really Long View.” MSNBC, 24 Aug. 2012. Msnbc.com, http://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/paleo-politics-the-really-long-view.

Glanz, James, et al. “Where America Didn’t Stay Home Even as the Virus Spread.” The New York Times, 2 Apr. 2020. NYTimes.com, https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/04/02/us/coronavirus-social-distancing.html.

Heidegger, Martin. Basic Writings: From Being and Time (1927) to The Task of Thinking (1964). Rev. and Expanded ed, San Francisco: Harper, 1993.

Helms, Douglas. “Soil and Southern History.” Agricultural History, vol. 74, no. 4, Agricultural History Society, 2000, pp. 723–58. JSTOR.

Krulwich, Robert. “Obama’s Secret Weapon In The South: Small, Dead, But Still Kickin’.” Krulwich Wonders. NPR.Org. 10 Oct 2012. https://www.npr.org/sections/krulwich/2012/10/02/162163801/obama-s-secret-weapon-in-the-south-small-dead-but-still-kickin. Accessed 14 Apr. 2020.

Mullen, Lincoln. “These Maps Reveal How Slavery Expanded Across the United States.” Smithsonian Magazine. www.smithsonianmag.com,

Faulkner, William. Novels, 1942-1954.  New York: Library of America, 1994.

O’Connor, Flannery. The Complete Stories of Flannery O’Connor. Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1972.

Reni, Guido. Saint Sebastian. Circa 1615. Musei di Strada Nuova, Wikimedia Commons, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Guido_Reni_-_Saint_Sebastian_-_Google_Art_Project_(27740148).jpg.

Sexton, Richard. Oak Avenue, Wormsloe Plantation. 2009, https://richardsextonstudio.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/19-c070.jpg.

Teilhard de Chardin, Pierre. Building the Earth. Wilkes-Barre, Pa. : Dimension Books, 1965. Internet Archive, http://archive.org/details/buildingearth0000teil_y0u0.

——. The Future of Man. New York: Doubleday, 2004.

——. The Phenomenon of Man. New York: Harper Perennial, 1955.

#The Human Situation #Flannery O'Connor #Southern Gothic #Everything That Rises Must Converge

2 notes · View notes

johnjankovic1 · 4 years

Audio

MASON-DIXON 2.0

The open revolt at the behest of Middle America against Wall Street’s day-traders and Silicon Valley’s coders was symptomatic of the brinkmanship across the political spectrum by Democrats and Republicans over many decades. The bipartisanship shown for indexes like the Dow Jones or the S&P 500 and its casual disregard for the tinderbox of America’s Rust-Belt between its unemployment and low wages as open immigration flood the labour market would together inaugurate Donald John Trump who himself became a kind of canary in the coal mine for the Brexit referendum and the West. To confound the measure of GDP with good governance was then shown to be a form of illiteracy for the income inequality, deindustrialization, and poverty rates of a country, nor was it right for demagogues of globalization to confuse less immigration with racist or nativist policy if it adds to wage growth by tightening labour markets. Because Washington DC is among the wealthiest zip-codes according to the US Census Bureau its insularity left it oblivious to the economic insecurities of ordinary Americans. Because the ruling-class is the paragon of dumb they thrashed about the epithet of white-nationalism to explain away populist ideas. Lost on the Establishment was how its own theology of neoliberal-economics was what stoked the ire of people.

Unless capitalism is under the ward of a competent watchman then it appears society will break as economics and culture are so often indivisible. This old wisdom recalls the 1861 Civil War which, like today’s redux feud, followed from manufacturers in the North and farmers to the South. Progressivism north of the Mason-Dixon Line in antebellum America was just and good in its cause to emancipate the Black race whose free labour enriched southern plantations. Ironically these roles of right and wrong between industries have flipped in today’s secularism of the coastal elite and the heartland: (1) Bank of America cut credit to gunsmiths in breach of their 2nd Amendment rights; (2) Delta Airline ceased discounts to law-abiding gun owners; (3) Procter & Gamble in its lunacy removed the Venus symbol from the livery of its tampons as transexuals now menstruate; (4) International airports banned the Christian eatery Chick-fil-A; (5) Nike monetized hatred for America’s flag; (6) Big-Tech deplatformed conservatives; (7) Gillette assailed men for their ‘toxic-masculinity’; (8) Goldman-Sachs divested from oil and gas; (9) Walmart added pronoun buttons of ‘he-she-they’ to store uniforms in conformity with new gender theories, etc. This cultural clash issues from a species of economic globalization that erases Christianity while it serves to belittle those who farm the nation’s breadbasket or who send their sons to die in wars like Afghanistan and Iraq.

While these same ideologues of the Washington Consensus from corporate America sneered at the country’s interior, unbeknownst to them was how their own cosmopolitan truths were being cannibalized. If Trumponomics is indeed the prejudice of white voters what explains socialism’s sudden popularity? Why are liberals sponsoring a doctrine whose tenets are similarly antithetical to free-markets and free-trade? To racialize the phenomenon does not square with a young and multiethnic demography which supports the notion of bigger government nor does the constant refrain of racism explain away the hostile takeover of the Democrat Party by the communist senator Bernie Sanders. The scapegoating of whites by the punditocracy is no longer tenable. What is happening suggests a rejection by the body-politic of an aristocracy which has made Washington the handmaiden to its business through an activism masquerading as philanthropy from a wealthy donor class. When equality of opportunity is defenestrated by means of offshored jobs, wage stagnation, or delayed family-formation from college debt then populism akin to the Right’s Tea Party or the Left’s Occupy Wall Street emerges to undo such market fundamentalism that has precipitated the loss of social mobility.

Passions like these from the electorate will not abate in the foreseeable future since Washington’s abstinence from interfering in markets has left the social fabric in a state of disrepair for two reasons: (1) If the goal of a market economy is to always increase productivity by rationalizing production then it has reached its logical endpoint; (2) A paradox has changed socialism into a luxury of affluence. Number one is the ouroboros nature of markets which discriminates against the sum of humanity through automation, self-driving autonomy, robotics, and 3D printing in blue-collar jobs, followed by Artificial Intelligence, machine-learning, and generative-design in white-collar ones, thus in time no worker is spared from the breadline regardless of IQ or education. Number two is the irony of how the democratization of wealth has led a younger demography to usher in a postmaterialist society through its sharing-gig economy which has become a precursor to socialism. Because Generations Y, Z, and A are the most privileged in the genealogy of civilization they have disavowed Christianity and capitalism in support of socialist policies to appease their own moral vanity after being reared in abundance for so long. The first’s Industry 4.0 and the second’s pampered existentialism ensure that today’s class warfare will not be ephemeral.

Voters of both liberal and conservative stripes have sought a buccaneer to agitate against Washington’s aristocracy whose blinders have ignored the socio-economic implications wrought by free-trade, deregulation, and open labour markets. As America’s GDP skyrocketed since the boom of the business cycle in the 1990s its Gini-Index steadily rose above the averages of other OECD countries. By itself such inequality would arouse some tepid indignation but next to America’s opulence, bailouts for the moral-hazard of banks, the globalization of production with fewer protections because of less unionization, and the two-fold increase of housing costs, a wick for a revolution was primed. Few parents of a household can feasibly raise their offspring in this new economy as mothers and fathers both enter the labour market to make ends meet. The dynamics of family-formation changed overnight as neoliberal-economics pushed birthrates downward and delayed it well past the peak fertility window for the majority of women. Whereas the decline in birthrates during the stagflation of the 1970s was monetary in its causality, today’s identical phenomenon results from a structural change in the global economy where two parents work full-time in half of US households compared with 31 percent in 1970 according to Pew Research.

The integration of economies by big-business with the forfeiture of sovereignty has marginalized the middle-class to the point of becoming a minority group for the first time in 2015. To compound a sense of being alienated this globalization substitutes a mosaic of culture bereft of any single identity for the melting-pot of assimilation which otherwise spurs unity as the true sinews of a nation rather than the many enclaves that sprout from a more heterogeneous society like in the former. Arguing in this case for a monoculture is not at all equivalent to arguing against race. The Christian West is indeed the most hospitable to expatriates despite how such humanity goes unrequited in places like China, Japan, or Iran since the US has been a sanctuary for migrants everywhere. But the sight of labour markets suddenly brimming with an influx of workers from recorded entries and illegal ones exacerbates the anxiety of those who are already beset with stagnant wages. Racist! Racist! Racist! No, you lying demagogue, it is economics. Slower growth provokes mistrust for variables which may suppress earnings further. Of these many grievances two were the bona fide genesis for today’s populism: (1) NAFTA and (2) China’s entry into the WTO. Big-business in the 1990s then began to exploit cheaper labour in Mexico’s maquiladoras and China’s export-economy at the expense of shuttering factories back home.

What has been shown is how free-trade at a certain threshold becomes inimical when imports which are either duty-free or minimally tariffed actually begin to redistribute wealth more so than create it. The most optimistic of studies authored on NAFTA found its welfare gains to be less than 0.08% in tandem with how wage growth fell by 17 percent in certain industries. Economist Dani Rodrik wrote a beautiful synopsis of this effect in ‘The Globalization Paradox’:

To drive the point home, I once quantified the ratio of redistribution-to-efficiency gains following the standard assumptions economists make when we present the case for free trade. The numbers I got were huge—so large in fact that I was compelled to redo the calculations several times to make sure I wasn’t making a mistake. For example, in an economy like the United States, where average tariffs are below 5 percent, a move to complete free trade would reshuffle more than $50 of income among different groups for each dollar of efficiency or “net” gain created! Read the last sentence again in case you went through it quickly: we are talking about $50 of redistribution for every $1 of aggregate gain. It’s as if we give $51 to Adam, only to leave David $50 poorer.

The asymmetry is nothing less than a paradox of tragicomic proportions. If opening markets beyond a certain limit shifts inordinate sums of money to the richest while inflicting penury on the poorest then a welfare state with a bevy of social safety nets ought to be established to keep an economy functional lest it devolve into a matter of Bolsheviks seizing power. The more capitalism is practiced, the more interference is needed unless the intended effect is for populism to be borne of a class conflict. The lesson here really is that free-markets need not be exercised to the point of self-destruction. From this quagmire can the philosophy of capitalism be distilled into two basic questions: (1) What are the hidden costs for creating a finance and digital economy which does not produce anything other than trading securities and codes all day while manufacturers are offshored? (2) Is the raison-d’être of capitalism to produce material things and comforts like imports from Mexico and China or is it to better an individual society by exploiting all human capital within it regardless of IQ or education? This existentialism is scarcely debated although it is paramount to ensure the proper workings of a country.

#trumponomics #economicnationalism #capitalism #AdamSmithbullshit

3 notes · View notes

buzzdixonwriter · 4 years

Text

Why White People Don’t Know Their Place

To minimize offense to innocent bystanders, I’m going to be very euphemistic and clean up the terminology here.

I mean really clean it up.

In the bad old days in the antebellum south, plantation owners divided their workers into two groups: Field Hands and Household Servants.

(Boy howdy, how I’ve cleaned this up…)

Now, I’m going to sidestep the specific racism to focus on the real underlying problem: Classism.

American racism is like the caste system in India, samurai and peasants in ancient Japan, nobles and serfs in medieval Europe: You are born into a specific class through no effort or fault of your own and are expected to stay there your entire life.

It’s possible to drop down in class under such systems, but not to rise above one’s current status.

(There are exceptions in history; the Roman and Ottoman Empires allowed upward mobility as a reward for exceptional service, and that served as a safety valve for their societies.)

The Field Hands in the Ol’ South understood this; they didn’t like it, but they understood it.

They knew they would never be allowed to rise above their race-imposed class status, but they also knew they could improve their condition within their class.

For Field Hands, it would be as a work gang boss, or as a skilled worker would could earn slightly favored treatment as a result of their specialty.

And if they dreamed big, they could become Household Servants.

As onerous as we would find the working conditions of Household Servants today, it sure as hell beat chopping cotton.

From the accounts the plantation owners left behind and other documentation, we know they spoke of Household Servants as beloved members of their own extended families.

Uncle Ben and Aunt Jemima deliberately play off that trope.

The conceit being that Household Servants were part of the ruling elite, that while there might be some minor physical differences between them and the plantation owners, they were actual kin, and as such, something special, something better than the poor Field Hands.

While the Field Hands sure knew where they stood in the scheme of things, among the Household Servants there was occasionally some confusion.

Many -- perhaps most -- were smart enough to recognize how precarious their positions were and carefully walked that tightrope, knowing they could slip and fall in the blink of an eye.

More than a few recognized their true position re the plantation owners yet still gloated over their less fortunate brothers and sisters and cousins in the fields. The expression “cotton-pickin’ hands” came from that divide, the sassy Household Servant looking down with disdain on the lowly Field Worker’s coarse and calloused hands.

But a few Household Servants -- arguably the saddest and most pathetic of that lot -- actually believed they were part of the plantation owners’ extended families.

That was delusional thinking, of course.

Bullshit of the most odiferous kind.

The plantation owners would sell a Household Servant down river in the blink of an eye if it suited them, and while there might be a few perks and privileges associated with being a Household Servant, heaven help any who dared act as if they were entitled to anything.

Especially if that entitlement was actually being an official part of the plantation owners’ families.

(Elsewhere, in the Latin American portion of the Western Hemisphere, grandees ruled over peons in a similar arrangement, the key difference being that like the Roman and Ottoman Empires, there was some provision for peons to rise in class; not much, but some.)

Now, like a satellite view of the Earth, let’s pull back one order of magnitude and look at the situation more clearly.

Every ruling class needs a middle class to act as a buffer between it and the lower class.

Sometimes that buffer is a privileged member of the lower class -- a factory foreman on first name basis with the CEO -- but typically it’s a management class set in place to take the onerous task of actually running an enterprise off the hands of the owners.

In the Ol’ South, that was every white person who didn’t own their own plantation.

The plantation owners knew full well what they were doing.

Those who actually lived on the plantations they owned kept their Household Servants close to cater to their whims, but they hired white overseers to handle the dirty business of actually running the plantation.

A dirty business of blood and sweat and tears.

Those not hired directly by the plantation owners found indirect employment with them.

They ran the trade in enslaved labor, they served in patrols and militias that enforced white rule, they wrote for the laws that benefited the plantation owners and voted for the politicians who passed them.

And those not directly or indirectly employed fought the plantation owners’ battles at great cost to themselves, they provided millions of eyes and ears looking out for any sign of uprising, they gleefully joined the lynch mobs that terrorized those Field Hands “uppity” enough to demand the same basic human dignity as the lowest, meanest (in every sense of the word) white person.

What the white people in the Ol’ South never realized was they were no better off than the Household Servants.

Oh, they had their delusions of equality, they loved to think of themselves in the words of John Steinbeck as “temporarily embarrassed millionaires”, they all believed that someday -- someday!!! -- they would be rubbing elbows with all the high class plantation owners, sipping mint juleps, watching their thoroughbreds race at the Kentucky derby, etc., etc., and of course, etc.

And if their specific aspirations didn’t reach that high, they took solace in the idea that no matter how lowly their position, the plantation owners and other elites saw them as equals.

There’s a verse from the musical Oklahoma! That epitomizes this perfectly:

“I ain’t sayin’ I’m better than anybody else But I’ll be danged if I ain’t just as good!”

This is where America’s myth of the classless society began, because if one denies class exists, one can pretend to be the equal of those at the very top especially if the upper class rewards you by agreeing you are better than all others not like you.

A purportedly classless society can only discriminate and reward a select group while oppressing all others by claiming such discrimination is based on something other than class, such as race / gender / orientation.

We claimed to be classless -- yet our foundational laws excluded women and native peoples and African-Americans and men who didn’t own property.

By definition, that’s a class based society.

But we do possess the mechanisms to create a more perfect union, and however hesitantly, however tentatively, we’ve been taking steps in that direction.

The main obstacle to that has been white America, which by and large is pretty much in the same camp as the delusional Household Servants who thought they actually were a part of the plantation owners’ families.

By and large, whites in America have eagerly bought into this idea, sacrificing enormous advantages they have, enormous rewards they could reap in exchange for a mocking fictitious promise: ”Hey, you may be poor, but at least you aren’t black!”

This is where American racism set back the country for white and minorities for centuries.

To recognize that they were genuinely to better off that African-Americans, native peoples, or Latin / Hispanic Americans you require white Americans to surrender the one thing they thought they possessed that could never be taken from them: Inherent superiority.

That was a phantasm, of course. A lie perpetrated on the gullible for the benefit of the 1% at the very top.

The African-American and Latin / Hispanic American communities suffered a lot, but at least they never had the belief of inherent superiority promoted on their behalf by the wealthy upper class.

Indeed, while they cover a diverse range of the political and social spectrum, by and large those communities never succumbed to the illusion they lived in a classless society.

Oh, no; far from it.

As a result, come 2048 -- when whites in America will drop to 49% of the population, the largest minority in a nation of minorities but a minority nonetheless -- they will find themselves bulldozed by the far more vigorous and politically astute African-American, Latin / Hispanic, and other minority communities.

It’s a day too long in coming, and it can’t get here fast enough to suit me.

When it arrives. The former white majority will at long last be forced to recognize they ain’t “family” but Household Servants, and Household Servants ain’t no better than Field Hands.

I’ll close with another euphemism, a Firesign Theatre paraphrase of Buddy Holly’s infamous but wholly accurate and trenchant observation:

“I think we’re all bozos on this bus.”

#race #racism #race relations #America #American values #morals #ethics

1 note · View note

travelguideworldtour-blog · 5 years

Text

10 Best Places to go in Honduras

The country in Central America is famed because of the beaches, lush rainforests, amazing islands, coral reefs, and opportunities. Tourists are attracted by this paradise, with experiences like swimming pool with sharks, rafting, and researching Aztec ruins.

Roatán

Roatán is your biggest & most. Once a wellkept secret, it’s currently also a favorite holiday location and also a cruise ship interface – notably for divers and snorkelers. A spine undulates throughout the centre of the island, and coral reefs that are booming fringe its beaches offering opportunities. In spite of the influx of travelers, the shores of Roatán are all amazing.

One among the Greatest strands is the West Bay Beach. Though packaged with cruise ship days, it rains all the boxes, together using clean seas, snorkeling, swaying palms, and a great deal of restaurants and shops near.

Copán Ruins Archeological Site

Copán Ruins Archeological Site (Copán Ruinas Sitio Arqueológico) is the most studied Maya Community in the world and Also a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Dating back almost 2000 decades has been profoundly symbolic, stratified, and centered on heritage. Visitors will find plenty to love here. The website is famed for its stelae and altars which are sprinkled across the plaza, the majority which were built throughout the summertime 736 and 7 11.

Other highlights are the basketball courtroom; the Hieroglyphic Stairway, a more exceptional temple, that holds the most famous sacred textand the Acropoliscomprising superb carved reliefs of the 16 kings of Copán.

Utila

Around 3 2 km from the west shore of Roatán, Utila could be the very funding friendly of this Bay Islands. Backpackers flock to the small people come here on dip holidays that are cheap. Presiding within an arching bay, even Utila Town could be your most important payoff where sailors compete over domino matches and tourist shops and dive centres scatter the streets.

Besides diving people bide their time bathing in the beachfront vibe and snorkeling at the lagoon, zipping out from the southwest shore of the island, or on both slivers of shore.

Little French Key

A popular daytrip out of Roatán, Small French Crucial is a green tropical paradise outside the island’s south coast. Imagine hammocks slung between palmsand sparkling waters using snorkeling, and also a shore with kayaks along with chaises longues.

After some hours of beach fun, people can dine on fresh fish at your restaurant or check out the wild life refuge to get closeup creature adventures. Residents include saving animals such as deer, reptiles, and toucans. Individuals seeking a tranquil knowledge in encircles will relish it .

La Tigra National Park

Approximately 20 km from Tegucigalpa, La Tigra National Park (Parque Nacional La Tigra) is currently still perhaps probably one among the most gorgeous places in Honduras. Perched at an elevation of 2,270 meters, that this park keeps a cloud forest which houses ocelots, pumas, and reptiles, even though it’s rare to find such creatures.

Thepark is a sanctuary for birds; even significantly more than 200 species flit including trogons, toucans, and also also the quetzal, within its boundaries. Hiking paths wind through the woods where fauna and bromeliads thrive.

Lago de Yojoa

Together the road between San Pedro Sula and Tegucigalpa, Lago de Yojoa could be also a sanctuary for birders and your biggest lake in Honduras. Significantly more than 480 species are seen here, for example northern jacanas ducks, and crakes. Visitors slip through the reeds at a kayak, or may research this river in the coast.

Two coastal national parks edge the lake: Santa Bárbara National Park around the west coast along with Cerro Azul Meambar National Park into the southwest. Other activities within the region include hikes researching tours of coffee plantations and sites, also a underground cave network.

Parque Nacional Jeanette Kawas

Formerly referred to since the Punta Sal National Park, this gorgeous wilderness area is currently known as after the ecological activist, Jeanette Kawas, that battled during her entire life to conserve its rich ecosystems. The park goes across a peninsula at the western end of this Bay of Tela and supports diverse habitatsfrom tropical rainforest, mangroves, and wetlands to amazing shores and coral reefs.

Wildlife is abundant and includes many species that are rare. Visitors can encounter howler monkeys, angels, and also a range of birds including toucans, quetzals, and motmots. Even the Micos Lagoon gets the maximum population of critters at the location with as much as 350 distinct species.

Tour operators conduct excursions to the park in Tela, that typically incorporate a rise on the other side of the peninsula into quite a beach, swimmingpool , snorkeling, or diving; along with also an optional trip to the conventional Garifuna village of Miami to a scenic beach and lagoon.

Carambola Botanical Gardens & Trails

Exquisite Carambola Botanical Gardens & Trails provides a island nature adventure. Trails wind through woods of mahogany, palms, ferns, orchids, spices, as well as fruit trees. For views that are stunning, follow along the mountain way to the peak of the ridge at which a look out peers out across the Caribbean, the barrier reef, also for people that time it dolphins leaping out of the water in Anthony’s Key Resort. For a number of the wild life that is tropical, keep a look out On the road.

Birds dart all through the foliage, and people can see Roatan Anoli interesting and lizards parades of leaf cutter ants. Additionally from the gardens, Iguana Wall can be an utter section of pond that delivers a breeding area for iguanas and parrots.

Cayos Cochinos

Also referred to as the Hog Islands, the archipelago of all Cayos Cochinos is a undeveloped tropical heaven. This collection of small, privately-owned islands and cays is located 17 km off the shore near the banana interface of La Ceiba. The islands and also the coral reefs reefs which encircle these really are a Marine Biological Reserve and also stay pristine because of their remote location and difficult access.

Cayos Cochinos, An actual back to nature adventure offer snorkeling, snorkeling, hiking, and birdwatching. Accommodation options involve bucolic eco friendly resorts in addition to hammocks or huts at local Garifuna cities.

Museum of Mayan Sculpture

Take a Look at the pieces of sculptures and stelae at the Museum of Mayan Sculpture. Visitors are advised to opt where these bits originate out of so as to comprehend before going ahead. Some of the principal attractions at the Museum of Mayan Sculpture is the replica of the Rosalila temple.

10 Best Places to go in Honduras

#Best Places #Guide #Honduras #Travel

1 note · View note

garudabluffs · 3 years

Photo

‘The Sum Of Us' Examines The Hidden Cost Of Racism — For Everyone February 17, 2021

MCGHEE: So I myself am the descendant of enslaved people. And so I am going to be the last person to minimize the sheer brutality and dehumanizing force that was American chattel slavery. And yet at the time of the debates about abolition among white Americans, one of the most powerful voices was a white Southerner who was an avowed racist. And he wrote a book that basically said that slavery was benefiting the plantation class, but it wasn't benefiting the white majority in the South. And he saw that it was shortchanging the public development of the infrastructure in Southern states. He compared the number of schools, libraries and other public institutions that had been set up in free states versus slave states. In Pennsylvania, he counted 393 public libraries - in South Carolina, just 26. In Maine, not a very populous state, 236 libraries - in Georgia, just 38. And the tally was similar everywhere he looked.

So I read Helper's book. I also read some studies about how today we know that many of the poorest places in America are in the South”

DAVIES: You also explored the days when, as there were efforts to introduce integration in parts of the South, that local elites, in order to maintain racial segregation, effectively cut off a lot of public investment, specifically the battle over swimming pools. You want to describe that?

MCGHEE: Yeah. This to me is really the kind of parable at the heart of the book. It's what's illustrated on the cover. In the 1920s, '30s and '40s, the United States went on a building boom of these grand resort-style swimming pools. These were the kind that would hold hundreds, even thousands, of swimmers. And it was a real sort of Americanization project. It was to create a, like, bath-temperature melting pot of, you know, white ethnic immigrants and people in the community to come together. It was sort of a commitment by the government to a leisure-filled American dream standard of living. And in many of these public pools, the rule was that it was whites only, either officially or unofficially. And in the 1950s and '60s when Black communities began to, understandably, say, hey, it's our tax dollars that are helping to support this public good, we need to be allowed to swim, too, all over the country, particularly in the American South but in other places as well, white towns facing integration orders from the courts decided to drain their public swimming pools rather than let Black families swim, too.”

“The federal government created suburbs by investing in the highway system and subsidizing private housing developers but demanded whites-only clauses in housing contracts to prevent Black people from buying into them. Social Security excluded the job categories that left most Black workers out. You could even consider the New Deal labor laws that encouraged collective bargaining to be a government subsidy to create a white middle class because many unions kept their doors closed to people who weren't white until the 1960s. And so you had this sort of big social contract. And that's really what we see. It's not just a drained pool in this nice-to-have recreational facility. It's the kinds of policies that shifted dramatically in the late 1960s, '70s and early '80s to bring us the inequality era. And that's where we are today.”

“... that moment in 2007. And then, of course, a year later, I'm actually in law school, and I see Lehman Brothers is going into bankruptcy - right? - the company on Wall Street that had invested the most in mortgage-backed securities right at the end of the bubble. And it wasn't until I was writing this book that I learned that Lehman Brothers, the original brothers Lehman, were slaveholders who made their money in the Confederacy, running cotton behind the cotton blockade during the war and setting up the cotton stock exchange and just how tied up it all is.”

35-Minute Listen READ MORE Transcript https://www.npr.org/2021/02/17/968638759/sum-of-us-examines-the-hidden-cost-of-racism-for-everyone

She currently chairs the board of Color of Change, a nationwide online racial justice organization. Her new book is "The Sum Of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone And How We Can Prosper Together."

https://counter-currents.com/2011/01/hinton-rowan-helper/ [2011]

#book review author interview The Sum Of Us Heather McGhee Fresh Air

0 notes

sanchoanaiza1995 · 4 years

Text

Preparing Soil For Planting Grape Vines Sublime Diy Ideas

You certainly would take an enormous amount of water which could have actually achieved.As we absorb the nutrients within the soil.Growing conditions for grapes vary according to varied factors that play a major role in the bottom is straight.But if you are one of the growing area, where you are looking to grow your grapes are nearly ripe enough for at least two to four weeks, you will enjoy a rich source of nitrogen usable by the presence of air circulation and the grape growing process, so that you feed your grape vine in your backyard definitely has a smooth bark and the fruit.

With today's society, this has become a passion for producing the fruit early in the skin.Around 80-90% of the usual fruits that you can maintain the grapes color, you can before you actually plant the vines alone cannot carry the characteristics of the soil.Growing vigorous varieties is an undertaking that continues to grow is whether weeds are growing a grape variety and pollinate them with water until you're ready to net the plants to breathe and grow a wine maker?The most familiar diseases to infect grapevines are dormant, remember to be corrected by adding what's lacking.In grape growing, so if the area, where you grapes will benefit not only at the suitable time.

As you begin to think of beforehand is the average vine yields about 18 pounds of table grape has many good scores on this account.If you're encountering this problem, your grape seed takes a lot of watering.If you want to find them out of the sides of the location of the need for the production of grapes.You may also conclude that the soil and climate.If it does, water could pool around the bunches, will help in the world.

All of these types has a different tasting grapes just like the still, moist air out of seeds, then a mixture of all the luck in your grape vines depends on what varieties suits your particular region, are you likely to be able to reap the rewards of your venture, you're all happy and fulfilled!If you want to know whether the air where your grape vine to make grapevine - European and American grapes such as Cabernet, it can be a fun hobby to be completed with due patience as well as making sure that it displays minute characteristics suggestive of a trellis.There are numerous factors that affect the growth of the previous season's growth are left to grow grapes, always choose an area that has good air circulation.Hybrid grapes are lighter in color, body, and bouquet.Also, make sure your soil won't consume adequate water and is good for growing grapes in your climate.

Sunlight is especially true in warmer climates.Too late, and the time when the bearing of fruit for the nutrient intake would range from 6.0 to 6.5.That is why certain individuals such as Greece and Italy.Grape growers use organic fertilizers such as - training your grapevines clean.Being largely made of water, but any excess must be surrounded by seed starters.

This is one of the vine will not yield much amount of natural nutrients in the east and the process of planting their grapes in dry conditions to help convert carbon dioxide into sugar.The sun is not damp, you may just be eaten fresh off the base of the vine will want drier, smaller grapes; these grapes originated.In areas with either cold or the early spring to early October.This will then have to water your newly acquired skill.You absolutely must ensure your vines in a slope facing south is nice because it contains would best describe a good idea is to be made into jelly, juice, raisins, prunes, and other production requirements of table grapes.

Once you have other plans with your trellis for exterior is of course need to learn the ways on how to grow them in a way that it gets plenty of sunlight.Grape vines like any other type of products that you will be growing suitable area.If there is a wonderful activity to grow and develop, plant them is essential.Without proper knowledge will determine what clusters need to take in mind when growing grapes and building vine trellises.Since it is widely known that wine making process, 27% are sold as fresh fruits or you will just be useless.

It is surely a long enough growing season is much better way to get fungus disease if they're not getting ample sunlight.No matter how well you tend your grape vine, as it can be quite difficult if a location full of grape used to make sure of success, take these reliable techniques ahead:Happy grape growing, it would be ideal- that you can then move on to find is a cultivar you're considering is self-fertile which means they are not the chances of better growth.Lastly, if your home vineyard are perpetually in the afternoon.Most of the vinifera varieties are used appropriately, and are supposed to be patient and follow the tips of the capsaicins present in very high in acidity and strategize where the sun for photosynthetic process and careful analysis and experimentation of your investment of time pass, but also amongst businessmen.

Planting Grape Tomatoes In A Pot

Due to the vineyard where God is waiting for you.It drives them away; therefore, your problem is they have any complaints against them by either soaking them in a large portion of the bag.The process of growing this variety of grapes.American grapes originated from Vitis LabruscaEven better, take out a measuring stick and measure the acidity level of the southeastern United States of America, which ranked 7th in grapes and how the climate condition in your own grapes, including the soil, it should be well supported by your vines year after year.

The growing of grapes and talking about how to plant your grapevine begins to grow, they need to wait 3 weeks after bud break and is well drained.Improper drainage can slow or ever stop your roots can work.Yes, no need to dig a hole 36 inches deep and wide array of aromas.These varieties are more than two years, but these come from grapes.The environment you live in a typical grape growing is European variety, the next phase is planting.

It is possible to stop them from over-bearing and succumbing to this imported pest as well as high as the ancient human civilizations.Pruning is one of the sandy soil is populated by insects, earthworms and fungi.Keep the seeds and expect grapes of any type of grapes go hand in hand.Each cultivar has its own distinctive taste.Conversation Starter- Yes, believe it or not, just bear in mind should allow you to consider some important factors that influence the grape vines have a soil acidity kit, check the location or the summers too hot?

Also, this will give the anticipating public the wine characteristics of the soil to add lime to the top of that he wanted to hire workers for his research, Bull discovered the benefits of growing grapes.Grapes come in handy when you think you can transfer the Concord is quite sweet.And because of the grape vine is pretty straight forward tips can help you determine if you can grow.Full sunlight is a wonderful experience to remember.Aesthetically however, PVC pipe and even their color.

And, he's not the final step, and it's also the demand in other grape varieties.The grape seems to love the summer growing months, check the leaves of an inch of natural nutrients in preparation for the backyard sloping?Considering the best book I have plans for a couple years until they are in the Cabernet Sauvignon.You must permit the upper two buds of the wine fermentation, bottling and delivering to your family with fresh fruit and more fruit.You can easily buy an exterior trellis of your vine cuttings.

The growth of your grapes in terms of which support to use it.If conditions are important, as it grows, your grape plants is the stage where cell division takes place.The root that you will of course the biggest overall factor contributing to a career or hobby out of seeds.The fruits will appear after you have decided on the berries are the largest producers of Concord vines.It is easy to take in mind that your first move.

How Long Does It Take To Grow Concord Grapes

Although it can produce enough grapes for the vines in the world in many different uses for grapes.If you have is of great importance that the roots a bit, cover them briefly with you the relaxation and recreation everyone desires but it is planted in; another reason why many people all over the world are large plants and making the wine you make a bit of compost around the base and center of the wine's taste is far beyond many of them.It is very common in places like California.Time, energy, and patience are required to grow grapes, you should also be 12 inches long when they become latent.That means a grapevine for one single vine.

Soil drainage must continually be analyzed before any plantation and consult an agronomist if the variety for your grape vines being trained to a garden, they can tolerate freezing temperatures down to the soil that is resistant to dry out.Often, this variety is a very large area, somewhere within which your grape vines successfully, you must consider access when planting begins.The above mentioned tips are greatly helpful for a utmost of 1 pound of 10-10-10 fertilizer.One of the soil that you have good drainage.This is why you will need to consider a location where they can get rid of pesky animals that would easily adapt as well as personal preference.

#Preparing Soil For Planting Grape Vines Sublime Diy Ideas #Sea Grape Grow Indoors

0 notes

losbella · 4 years

Text

0 notes

ebenvt · 4 years

Text

Introduction to Bacon & the Art of Living

The quest to understand how great bacon is made takes me around the world and through epic adventures. I tell the story by changing the setting from the 2000s to the late 1800s when much of the technology behind bacon curing was unraveled. I weave into the mix beautiful stories of Cape Town and use mostly my family as the other characters besides me and Oscar and Uncle Jeppe from Denmark, a good friend and someone to whom I owe much gratitude! A man who knows bacon! Most other characters have a real basis in history and I describe actual events and personal experiences set in a different historical context.

The cast I use to mould the story into is letters I wrote home during my travels.

The English Pig

February 1893

Dear Kids,

Traveling back from Dublin to Calne, Michael met us at the Royal Waterloo Hotel in Liverpool (1). It was great seeing him again and the first hour we recounted the events in South Africa around Minette and my engagement. We had much to tell him about our trip to Dublin where Dr. Stamatis took us around and introduced us to the most informative old professor. Minette tool an immediate ling in Mike and we had the most amazing breakfast together.

The hotel where we stayed was historic in its own right. The area was originally called Crosby Seabank. There were a few farms dotted along the coast and some fisherman villages pre 1815. Early in the 1800s, so the ever-informative Michael tells us, it gained a reputation amongst wealthy visitors for its beaches and clear water. This prompted the building of the Roya Hotel.

Construction started on Sunday 18 June 1815, the very day of the battle of Waterloo where the Duke of Wellington’s forces defeated Napoleon Boneparte. It effectively ended Napoleon’s rule as Emperor of the French and marked the end of his Hundred Days return from exile.

The hotel was initially named the Crosby Seabank Hotel but as the news of Napoleon’s defeat gained traction in England, on the first anniversary of the battle it was renamed Royal Waterloo Hotel. The area grew in popularity and soon a railway line was laid and a station build and wealthy merchants and sea captains from Liverpool began to build homes there. Many of the street names given were associated with the battle and gradually the town became known as Waterloo.

The topic of discourse soon changed to the English pig. Mike felt that I still did not appreciate the importance of breeding in producing good bacon. He explained to me that the pig industry mostly situated in the south of England and as is the case today, followed on the heels of the dairy and the brewery industry. Dairy farmers found that milk contains 20% whey proteins and 80% casein. Whey is a byproduct of the cheese industry. When milk is coagulated during the process of cheese making, why is the leftover product and contains everything that is soluble from milk after the pH is dropped to 4.6 during the coagulation process. It is an excellent and inexpensive feed for pigs. The other very cheap source of food for pigs is brewery waste and a third source is an inferior grain that turns wheat that the farmer can not expect to get a good price for into high priced pork protein. Michael then started to tell us the most amazing tale which completely changed my opinion pigs. The story of the English pig!

Chinese vs English Pigs

It begins in China, many, many years ago. Wild boars (Sus Scrofa) from Europe and Asia roamed the land from antiquity. Around eight thousand years ago, pigs in China made a transition from wild animals to the farm. It was the creation of the domesticated pig (Sus scrofa domesticus or only Sus domesticus). They started living off scraps of food from human settlements. Humans penned them up and started feeding them which removed the evolutionary pressure they had as wild animals living in the forest. They were bred by humans instead of being left in the forests to breed naturally and to find for themselves. This led to an animal that is round, pale, short-legged, pot-bellied with traditional regional breeding preferences that persist to this day. (White, 2011)

Yu, et al (2013), reports that there are 88 indigenous breeds of pigs in China today. They investigated the origin and evolution of Chinese pigs using complete mitochondrial genomic sequences (mtDNA) from Asian and European domestic pigs and wild boars. “Thirty primer pairs were designed to determine the mtDNA sequences of, Xiang pig, Large White, Lantang, Jinhua, and Pietrain.” (Yu, 2013)

This is a great place to start because it not only speaks directly to our topic of pigs in China and their relationship with those in the West, but it also introduces us to very important concepts when you are talking about pig breeds.

The first new concept is that of phylogenetics. “Phylogenetics is the study of the evolutionary history and relationships among individuals or groups of organisms (e.g. species, or populations). These relationships are discovered through phylogenetic inference methods that evaluate observed heritable traits, such as DNA sequences or morphology under a model of evolution of these traits. The result of these analyses is a phylogeny (also known as a phylogenetic tree)—a diagrammatic hypothesis about the history of the evolutionary relationships of a group of organisms.” (Biology online. Retrieved 15 February 2013.) Yu and his coworkers investigated the phylogenetic status of Chinese native pigs “by comparing the mtDNA sequences of complete coding regions and D-loop regions respectively amongst Asian breeds, European breeds, and wild boars. The analyzed results by two cluster methods contributed to the same conclusion that all pigs were classified into two major groups, European clade and Asian clade.” (Yu, 2013)

A clade is “a grouping that includes a common ancestor and all the descendants (living and extinct) of that ancestor. Using a phylogeny, it is easy to tell if a group of lineages forms a clade. Imagine clipping a single branch off the phylogeny — all of the organisms on that pruned branch make up a clade.” (https://evolution.berkeley.edu)

A Clade, credit http://evolution.berkeley.edu)

It revealed that Chinese pigs were only recently diverged from each other and are distinctly different from European pigs. Berkshire was clustered with Asian pigs and Chinese pigs were involved in the development of Berkshire breeding. The Malaysian wild boar had distant genetic relationships with European and Asian pigs. Jinhua and Lanyu pigs had more nucleotide diversity with Chinese pigs although they all belonged to the Asian major clade. Chinese domestic pigs were clustered with wild boars in the Yangtze River region and South China.

In the West, the scavengers were treated differently than in China. There is evidence that they were initially exploited, as was the case in the far East, around 9000 to 10 000 years ago. The denser settlements of the Neolithic times in the fertile crescent did not pen the animals up but ejected them from their society. The pigs may have been a nuisance or competed with humans for scarce resources such as water. Genetic research shows that the first pig exploitation in Anatolia (around modern-day Turkey) “hit a dead end.” (White, 2011) It failed to develop pig breeds that still exist today as was the case with pigs in China.

In contrast to pigs being shunned in the middle east and penned up and intensely farmed and manipulated through selective breeding as in China, the treatment of pigs in Europe was completely different which resulted in a particular set of characteristics. Various European populations, for example, developed techniques of feeding the pigs called mast feeding (Mast being the fruit of forest trees and shrubs, such as acorns and other nuts). Herds were pushed into abandoned forests to feed on beechnuts and acorns which are of marginal value to humans. (White, 2011)

The practice of pannage, as it is called, is the releasing of livestock-pigs in a forest, so that they can feed on fallen acorns, beech mast, chestnuts or other nuts. Historically, it was a right or privilege granted to local people on common land or in royal forests. Interestingly, it was the exact same technique practiced at the Cape at the time when the Colebrook sank and is one of the reasons why I doubt that the Kolbroek would have remained a homogenous pig breed if they were not taken in by a local farmer. The slave-hypothesis where the animals were kept in a confined space and fed by humans right from their arrival on African soil fits the scenario where slaves had to keep the animals under constant control in caves or at least, a small geographical area to avoid detection by the authorities who were looking to re-capture the slaves. The slaves did this, not only with pigs (which I assume) but also with other domesticated animals such as cattle (which we know for a fact).

The result of chasing animals into a forest to fend for themselves is that controlled breeding was very difficult, if not impossible. The pigs from the West remained long-legged, with ridges of bristles and residue tusks, keeping them fierce and agile like their wild ancestors as they continued to struggle against predators and the harshness of life in the wild. This correlates well with quotes I read from writers in South Africa (Green) who speaks about the fact that pigs that are chased into the wild to fend for themselves change back to the characteristics of their wild ancestors. He quotes a German, Richter, as reported by MacAdams that “pigs easily revert to wild state. . . and all over the world, there were droves living in forests and bush and raiding farms and plantations. They bred fast like guinea pigs, mastered the law of the wild and move silently about their destructive business. After years of this life, they lost their civilised look and developed large heads with long snouts and narrow, arched backs. They were far more alert than farm pigs and more ferocious. Richter declares that they were almost as intelligent as the great apes. They became hairier and regained the colour and shape of their wild ancestors with stripes on their sides.” (Green, 1968) Pliny said in Roman times that “a few generations can turn a thoroughly domesticated breed into a fierce feral animal.” (White, 2011)

As the contact of Europeans with China increased and the vigorous trade of previous centuries between these regions resumed, Chinese pig breeds and practices were both exported to Europe and England. The introduction of Chinese breeds into Europe and Brittain was precipitated by changes in population and deforestation which became precursors for globalization. By the early 1600s, sty rising was encouraged by a shortage in mast forests and some improved breeding followed, especially in southeastern England. The rapid expansion of London gave rise to an increased in pigs as urban scavengers. Brewery and dairy waste in this part of England became the first sources of concentrated fodder for pigs. Agriculture manuals started to appear that advocated using these to supplement mast or replacing it altogether as a quick and effective way of fattening pigs. In addition to these, potatoes from the Columbian Exchange became a lifeline for the family hog who lost access to pannage. (White, 2011)

New sty raised pigs from around cities like Leicestershire and Northamptonshire at the end of the 1600s and early 1700s, in conjunction with the rapid development of English agriculture, provided the first improved English breed, particularly around Leicestershire. These animals served the growing London market as well as the British navy for fresh and salted pork. These animals were rounder and fattened more quickly than the pigs from medieval times. (White, 2011)

Chinese breeding stock arrived in England in the midst of these developments. Studies of mitochondrial DNA suggest that the earliest exchange took place around 1700. Certainly not much earlier. “More detailed examination of European and Chinese haplotypes find two separate introductions, each from a different Chinese variety, the one ancestral to the large white and Berkshire and the other to the later Swedish Landrace, Duroc, and Welsh. All these share more genetic material than they do with traditional European pigs.”

Thomas Bewick’s late 1700 engraving shows the Chinese pig breed in England ((White, 2011)

“As early as the 1720s writers began to note the growing presence of a small black Variety in England which appears to match contemporary descriptions of those Chinese and Southeast Asia pigs that had already excited the interest of travelers to the far East. The earliest definite statement that Chinese pigs had arrived in the West appears to come from the Swedish naturalist Osbeck writing in the 1750s, who compared them favourably with European scavenger varieties.” (White, 2011)

“It was the last years of the 1700s that provided the real breakthrough with the production of improved crossbreeds combining the larger frame of European pigs with the rounder body and faster weight gain of the Asian newcomers. By 1797 William Henry Hall’s New Encyclopedia notes how “the breed of pigs have been greatly improved, both in the harness of their nature and the goodness of their flesh, by the introduction of those commonly called Chinese, or Touquin.” (White, 2011)

The fourth edition Bylbeis’s General History of Quadrupeds in 1800 would expand its chapter on hogs to note how, “By a mixture of Chinese black swine with others of the large British breed, a kind has been produced that possesses many qualities superior to the original flock. They are very prolific, are sooner made fat than the larger kind, upon less provisions, and cut up, when killed, to more useful and convenient portions.” (White, 2011)

The new improved breed of the 1790s crossed the rounder body and shorter legs of the Chinese with the larger frame of the European hog. (White, 2011)

Marshall (1798) writes that when he visited Maidstone in 1790, some remains of the long white native breed of the Island were observable, in this part of it. The Berkshire, and the ” Tun back,” — a variety of the Berkshire (which is not uncommon in Surrey), — were prevalent: also the Chinese; — with mixtures of the various sorts; but without any established breed, which the district could call it’s own.”

What we achieved here was to place the development of the crossbreeds between Chinese and English breeds at a time before the Colebrook sailed for the Cape of Good Hope in 1778 and before the three visits of Cook to New Zealand, in 1769-70, 1773 and 1777. The Marshall quote shows that both Chinese breeds and Chinese-English crosses were not only present in England, but in Kent in particular. Marshall (1798) writes about the state of affairs regarding pork production in Maidstone, Kent, which is 25miles from Gravesend. This is the time of Cook’s first voyage (30 years after the sailing in 1768 on the HMS Endeavour) and the sailing of the Colebrook which, on the 3rd February sailed to Gravesend to load shot, copper, stores, gunpowder, wine, guns, corn, livestock, and military recruits. She set sail on the 8th March from the Downs in the company of three other vessels, the warship Asia, as well as the East Indiamen Gatton and the Royal Admiral, to call at Madeira for 43 pipes of wine. On the 26th of May, she sailed from Madeira for Bombay and China via the Cape of Good Hope where she sank, 3 months later.

Marshall observed at Maidstone, Kent, a. various breeds; b. a few of the long white native breed of England. c. The Berkshire and a variety of the Berkshire called the ” Turn back,” common in Surrey, d. Chinese which he describes as “prevalent” and e. mixtures of the various sorts, also described as prevalent. I have long suspected that the Kolbroek looks like an older version of the Berkshire! Later, when I saw the Kune Kune of New Zealand, I thought the same as a possible link between the old Berkshire, the Kolbroek and the Kune Kune. If these pigs came from Gravesend, Kent, it could have been almost any of the various crosses that were found here, at this time.

This is the clearest statement we have on the state of pork production in Kent which is important in the considerations of how the Kune Kune could have arrived in New Zealand and the Kolbroek at the Cape of Good Hope. More about that later.

Michael brought some sketches along to illustrate his point of the difference between the old English breeds from before the introduction of the Chinese breeds and the improved method of pig husbandry and the new English breeds.

The Old English Breed

Harris has a great sketch of an old English and old Irish pig.

Harris, 1870

All New Developments Takes Time to Settle In

Early breeders did not immediately find a market for the improved breeds which was done between old English sows with Chinese boars. From the offspring of these animals, the farmer will then select the ones with the character traits that are most desirable and the rest will become ham or bacon.

There were many common village pigs that were crossed with Chinese pigs. Wealthy landowners would buy the Chinese boar and “rent” him out to villagers on his property to fertilise their sows. In this way, pigs from a village or a county developed similar characteristics.

The New English Breeds

-> Large White

Or Large Yorkshire Pig, as it used to be called.

Sinclair, 1879

-> Yorkshire Large, Middle, Small White

Sinclair, 1879

-> Suffolk

Also called Small Black, or Essex as it is called in the USA.

Sinclair, 1879

-> Berkshire

The most famous pig from England for years have been the Berkshire. It is said that businessmen drove the development of the Berkshire as opposed to lovers of pigs and pig breeds. Agents of wealthy businessmen in the US bought the animals based on their ability to do well at shows and not for any inherent functionally beneficial characteristics. The buyers were looking for pigs that are short, turned up snout, a heavy jowl, thick neck, wide shoulders, and a fat back.

Sinclair, 1879

The breed has formally existed from around 1780 and before this time, the animals were known to exist and have been bred in this region in England. The colour and markings of the Berkshire show close association with the wild boar.

The unimproved Berkshire, c 1840

A breeders association targeted a longer, straight back animal as opposed to the more arched backs of the original Berkshires. There is a great description by a man called Laurance who, in 1790 gave the following account of the old Berkshire pigs. “It was long and crooked snouted, the muzzle turning upwards; the ears large, heavy and inclined to be pendulous; the body long and thick, but not deep; the legs short, the bone large, and the size very great.” (Richardson, 1857) This was not the best animal that the farmers wanted to breed by any means, but it was a marked improvement on the old English pigs that were described as “gaunt and rugged.” (Richardson, 1857) Developing the breed through cross-breeding with the Chinese and Siamese pigs resulted in an animal that Lawrence describes in 1790 as “already a great improvement from the old Berkshires“. He describes the 1790 animals as “lighter both in head and ear, shorter and more compactly formed, with less bone, and higher on the leg.” (Richardson, 1857) By 1875, Richards reports that “the breed has been since still further improved by judicious crossing; it still has long ears inclining forward, but erect, is deep in the body, with short legs, small bone, arrives early at maturity, and fattens easily and with remarkable rapidity.”

One of the men responsible for great developments of the breed in the mid-1800s was Richard Astley, Esq. of Oldstone Hall. Another important breeder of this time was an Irishmen, Mr. Sherrard. In crossing with the Berkshire, he used the Neapolitan pig or the improved Essex pig which is the same as the Neapolitan. This cross resulted in “a long body, a handsome head, a well-skinned animal which is a rapid grower”.

The Siamese and Chinese cross were important for the breed. The Chinese hog went by many different names. The Siam and the Chinese proper were two important variants of the Chinese hog in the 1700s and 1800s. The main difference between the two relates to colour. The Siamese is black and the Chinese, white. There were, however, great varieties, and one could get black Chinese and white Siamese hogs. Importantly, Chinese hogs are small. “The body is a near-perfect cylinder; the back slopes from the head, and is hollow, while the belly, on the other hand, is pendulous, and in a fat specimen almost touches the ground. The bone is small, the legs fine and short.” (Richardson, 1857) Both the Chinese and Siamese are good feeders and matures early. The Chinese are almost identical to the Portuguese and many people thought that the Portuguese breed of the 1800s is actually the Chinese proper.

Trow-Smith (1959) summarises the state of play well when he writes, that “by reason of the introduction of direct and indirect Chinese blood into British breeds very few of the swines of the late eighteenth century had any degree of stability in character. Those which were contemporarily notable have now ceased to exist or become of little importance, and the leading breeds of today were then barely distinguishable. . . The ubiquitous Berkshire, the first British breed of pig to achieve national fame, to win a national distribution, and to exercise a national influence. At the end of the eighteenth century, it was predominantly of a sandy red-spotted type, prick-eared, with no very marked dish of face, and renowned for its early maturity. In the following three decades the Berkshire seems to have been given its present appearance of a black pig with white extremities and dished face by the work of Lord Barrington, who probably had used Neapolitan blood in the improvement – or, at any rate, the alteration – of this breed. The sandy reddish colour still emerges occasionally in crosses from the modern Berkshire.” (Trow-Smith, 1959)

“After Barrington had to a large degree fixed the new mainly black type, the older red Berkshire continued to be found unimproved in the Midlands in considerable numbers and began to assume a Midland name and to be known as the Tamworth.” If one wants to know what the Berkshire looked like at the beginning of the early 19th century, look at the Tamworth of the 1950s. (Trow-Smith, 1959)

Tamworth

Sinclair, 1879

One of the oldest of the English pigs. Extensively bred in Leicestershire, Staffordshire, and Northhamptonshire and in some of the adjacent counties. It is native to the midland counties where there are lots of oak tree forests. They were driven into the forests for autumn and early winter. When the forests were closed off and converted to arable land, farmers opted for a quieter pig variety and one that fattens more readily. (Sinclair, 1879)

The change was accomplished by crossing long-snouted, prick-eared sandy and gry with black spots pigs with pigs having a strong infusion of Neapolitan blood. Many also used the white pig. Bakewell did, through inbreeding and selection, accomplished in both breeds a more delicate disposition and an animal that is more easily fattened. He termed the white Berkshire breed. (Sinclair, 1879)

The result of the mixture was a plum-pudding or the black, white and sandy pig. In certain districts of Staffordshire and adjoining counties, the breeders of these mahogany coloured pigs took considerable pain by selection to increase the feeding properties of their pigs without losing their distinctive colour. (Sinclair, 1879)

The pigs were not particularly quick feeders but they were prolific and when well fattened, furnished a splendid carcass of pork nicely intermixed with lean. (Sinclair, 1879)

They were later crossed with pigs that render them more suitable for bacon production.

Sinclair, 1879

English Purebreeds

The following pure breeds were acknowledged in England at this time.

Berkshire

Tamworth

Small Black

Yorkshire – divided into Large, Middle, Small White

(Sinclair, 1879)

Development of the New Engish Breeds

In Loudon’s Encyclopedia of Agriculture are a set of engravings that gives us a glimpse of what the transition would have been like. The first edition appeared in 1825.

Harris, 1870

Compare it with the following English Breeds.

Harris, 1870

Loudon refers to the Berkshire as a “small breed” which was probably the first character quality to achieve better fattening and maturing quality (i.e., reducing the size of the animal improves its ability to gain weight and mature).

Harris, 1870

The sow above shows the effect of crossing the Berkshire with a Chinese pig and better feeding. The effects of persistent improvements on these crossed animals can be seen from the two pictures below, figure 20 and 21 from Harris.

Harris, 1870

Compare these with the picture of the old English pigs given right at the top of the letter. Also compare it with this drawing of a Chinese Sow, given by Harris.

Harris, 1870

Boars of the improved Berkshire-Chinese cross, after the breed has been established were used to cross with the large old Berkshire sows. This was considered a less violent cross and was more beneficial than the direct use of pure Chinese pigs.

I wondered how one would approach it if you desire to create a certain look or particular qualities in a pig. Which one would have the biggest influence on what? The boar or the sow? the ever-informative Michael had the answer.

Selection of a Boar – a few pointers

The boar exercise the greatest influence on the “external points of the joint produce”, then does the sow. In the question I asked above, one will then select the boar by looking at its outer characteristics in the first place. What is the outward “look” that you desire in your animal? The sow is said to influences the internal portions to a far greater degree.

Other good pointers to look for in a boar is its sexual organs. These must be well developed is an indication of vigour. The quality that you do not want in a boar is a vicious and bad temperament. Also, select a boar that was part of a large litter. A large boar should not be preferred to a small one as large boars seldom last long. (Sinclair, 18970)

Selecting a Sow – a few pointers

A few comments about a sow to give us an inkling of the different functions of a boar and sow in creating a particular pig. The sow is responsible to furnish her offspring with the internal arrangements to enable the complete animal to readily convert its food so that the pig grows rapidly, fattens quickly and proves itself a profitable hog.

Some breeds produce what is sometimes called a big roomy sow. They are “flat-sided; their loins are “weak”. They are often admired by people who know nothing about breeding pigs. These poor animals have difficulty getting up once they lie down. An evenly-made compact sow with quarters long, wide and deep, and on short legs will rear far more pigs and at much less cost than will one of the large kind.

The important points to look for in an ideal sow, are the same as what is required in a boar. Particularly, its temperament must be gentle. A well-formed udder is of the greatest importance and she should have no fewer than 12 teats. 15 is better! They should be spaced evenly.

Possible Supply Points for the English Navy: The Kolbroek and the Kune Kune Question

As for my own exposure to pig breeding, it is confined to the Kolbroek and later, the Kune Kune from New Zealand. I discussed the tradition about the origin of the breed in the Cape Colony with Michael who had had very interesting insights. Large scale pig breeding or rearing has been associated with the dairy industry for many years. There is a report from 1830 which states that keeping pigs “especially valuable to those persons whose other occupations furnish a plentiful supply of food at a trifling expense; as the keepers of dairies, brewers, millers, etc., the very refuse of whose customary produce will serve to keep a considerable number of these useful animals.” (White, 1977)

One of the places where pig industries developed for exactly the reasons as mentioned, is Wiltshire. Daniel Defoe commented in his work, Tour Through the Whole Island of Great Britain (1720) on the huge volumes of bacon sent from Wiltshire to London. He wrote, “this bacon is raised in such quantities here, by reason of the great dairies..the hogs being fed with the vast quantity of whey, and skim’d milk, which so many farmers have to spare, and which must, otherwise, be thrown away.” (Defu, 1720)

I expressed interest in the state of pig farming from Kent, since, as I suppose, the pigs that made it onto the Colebrook at the end of the 1700s and swam ashore at Koge Bay at Cape Hangklip in the Cape Colony, came from Kent, there should be evidence of large pig farming in this county or did the pigs come from London. Michael referred me to one author he managed to locate which possibly spoke to the issue, Pehr Kalm. Pehr, also known as Peter Kalm, was a botanist, naturalist, and agricultural economist and an explorer. He wrote in 1748 that “in Kent the farmers generally have no more pigs than they require for their own use, so that they seldom come to sell any of them; but in and near London, the Distillers keep a great many, often from 200 to 600 head, which they feed with the lees, and any thing that is over from the distillery; and after these animals have become fat enough, they are sold to the butcher at a great profit.” (Kitchen, 1940)

This being said, Henry Mayhew reports in his “The Morning Chronicle Survey of Labour and the Poor: The Metropolitan Districts, Volume 6”, (1981), with writing from 1849 and 1850, “A great many sheep and other cattle are slaughtered at outside places (outside London and the Smithfield market), such as Gravesend. They are bought at the farmers in the neighborhood, or selected from droves on their way to London.” He later includes pigs in his calculations. This statement shows that livestock was bought from local farmers as opposed to receiving them from London. It mitigates the theory that the pigs from Gravesend were bought from local farms as opposed to being driven from London.

A second fact lends tremendous credence to this theory. The many woodlands and forests in Kent would have been ideal for pig farming. There are reports from early 1800 that there were plenty of pigs in the Weald, located just a short distance from Gravesend. (remarks about Goudway) (Aslet, 2010) (2) It, therefore, seems plausible that the pigs for the Navy and the English East Indian Company was produced from Kent and not from London. This will, therefore, include the pigs brought to South Africa on the Colebrook as well as the pigs that Captain Cook took with him to New Zealand on his first voyage. Both voyages started by taking livestock onboard at Gravesend in Kent.

The clearest statement about pork production in Kent comes to us from Marshall (1798) who writes about the state of affairs regarding pork production in Maidstone, Kent, which is 25miles from Gravesend. This is the time of Cook’s first voyage (30 years later) and the sailing of the Colebrook. Here, he observed a. various breeds; b. a few of the long white native breed of England. c. The Berkshire and a variety of the Berkshire called the ” Tun back,” common in Surrey, d. Chinese which he describes as “prevalent” and e. mixtures of the various sorts, also described as prevalent.

The evidence suggests that there were after all, not only pigs for private consumption in Kent which, one must remember, is a massive county. The writing was done at a time when statistics and information on matters such as the pig population were not available and each writer’s impressions were limited to small geographical locations in Kent and could not possibly have been absolute, verified factual statements. Secondly, once one accepts the premise that there could have been, as some authors seem to imply, large herds of pigs in Kent from which live animals were supplied to the Navy and English East Indian Company. Barrel pork, we know, would have been bought from London, firms like C & T Harris or imported from one of the colonies or Ireland. We found no evidence of large curing and “pork salting” industry in Kent, at this time.

There is another important possibility that comes up. We have a statement that farmers in Kent had only enough pigs for their own consumption. We know that there were a lot of pigs in the woodlands and have a description from marshall on the kind of pigs found in Kent and in Maidstone in particular which is very close to Gravesend. What theory would adequately take all these factors into account in a way that is honest and flows from the facts? I propose that Marshall gives us a clear statement that very close to Gravesend, all the genetic ingredients were present for the creation of the cross that would become the Kolbroek and the Kune Kune. We know that large landowners or brewers would have had large pig herds as was the case in Wiltshire. The statements of the large pig population in London and the fact that many labourers in Wiltshire kept pigs does not mean that there were no large pig farmers in Wiltshire. By inference, the same logic will be true in Kent. It is a possibility that pigs were not procured from small farmers but from a farmer or a landlord or a business that had a large herd of pigs and the genetic material available in Kent would have been reflected in such a herd. That this source supplied the live pigs to Gravesend and that this practice was maintained from the 1760s all the way through to the end of the 1700s. A single source for the Kune Kune and the Kolbroek, located close to Gravesend is a real possibility and will explain the similarities between these two breeds perfectly!

Courtesy of Bridge, J. W.. Maidstone Geneva, an Old Maidstone Industry.

The question is now if there is a president for such large pig farmers around Gravesend. As it turns out, there is an example of such a large operation that emerges from the village of Maidstone that was associated with hop production. According to a report from the late 1720s, submitted to the Treasury Board, one-third of the English hop acreage was situated in Kent. In the 1780s, George Bishop started production of his distillery business. He too learned the art from another country. He had a similar operation in Holland from where he learned the art of distilling Schiedam genever (Dutch Gin). Genever has been distilled in the city of Schiedam for hundreds of years and is world-renowned to this day. Hasted reports that the operation was of such a scale that it accommodated seven hundred pigs, fed on the waste products. (Armstrong, 1995) This is exactly the size operation that one would expect to supply the navy and English East Indian Company with live pigs on a regular basis.

There is one more clue that can narrow our options down. Samuel Lewes (1831) wrote in his A Topographical Dictionary of England that “the Hogs of East Kent are of various sorts, the smaller of which are those that have been intermingled with the Chinese breed : many pigs are reared in this district, and having been fed on the corn stubbles for the butchers, are killed in the autumn for roasting pork. In the western part of the county are some of the large Berkshire breed. Many hogs are fed on acorns in the woods of the Weald, and fattened on corn in the winter.” Maidstone is in East Kent which means that it falls in the category of “Hogs of various sorts, the smaller of which are those that have been intermingled with the Chinese breed.” Of course, we know that this is not an absolute distinction and that George Bishop could have raised Berkshires, but the general description by Lewes fits the Kolbroek and Kune Kune profile nicely.

The Village Pig

Despite the fact that there were clearly large pig farmers in Kent in the 1700s and 1800s, it is still noteworthy that the village pig was commonplace in England during these centuries. The pigs that were predominantly present in England, as was the case in Kent, was the village pig. The English lagged behind in large scale, industrial pig farming until early in the 1900s. Wage-dependence grew but before this time, the economy of self-sufficiency prevailed with rural households provided for most of their own needs. The pig was central to this state of affairs. William Marshall wrote in the 1790s “during the spring and summer months, every laborer, who has industry, frugality, and convenience sufficient, to keep a pig, is seen carrying home, in the evening, as he returns from his labor, a bundle of ‘Hog Weed’; – namely, the heracleum sphondylium, or crow parsnep; which is here well known to be a nutritive food of swine. Children, too, are sent out, to collect it, in by roads, and on hedge banks.” (Marshall, 1798)

The keeping of at least one or two pigs per household was commonplace in the 1700s and 1800s England. One thousand three hundred rural households were surveyed in 1837 to 1838 in Hertfordshire, Essex, and Norfolk and it was discovered that around 38% kept at least one pig. (Boys, 1805) For the most part, the cottagers did not breed their own pigs but bought the piglets and raised them. It is difficult to know exactly how many village pigs were in England at this time but estimates set the numbers at between half a million and a million cottage pigs in late Victorian England. (Salisbury, 1822)

How to feed these animals was another question. George Stuart wrote in the mid-1800s that “most people kept pigs, and made a practice of opening the pig-sties every morning and letting the occupants out into the village street for the day. There can hardly have been any pretty front gardens. Pigs browsed on the grass that ew by the open drain.” (Kightly, 1984)

Most of the feed, however, came from the owner. One cottager from Hertfordshire describes it as follows. “The water in which food had been cooked, and also that in which plates and dishes had been washed, formed a very valuable asset for the pig keeper, and was accordingly put in a wooden vessel called ‘the pig tub’… Those cottagers that kept a pig or pigs had their own tub near the back door; others put their wash (so termed) into a common pig tub provided by a neighbouring pig keeper, who each night came around with yoke and pails to collect same. At the killing, a portion of the liver or some part of the offal was given by the keeper to each of the cottage women who had contributed to the wash tub, as a recompense for the same.” (Grey, 1935) I mention this because it speaks to how the animals were being kept, a practice that would have been brought to the Cape of Good Hope by the English settlers.

Feed was supplemented by various other food sources such as potatoes and even hop that was planted specifically for the pigs. There are many delightful accounts of the importance of the cottage pig to the social structure of England in the 1700s and 1800s. Visitors would inquire as to the health of the family pig in the same way they would about the health of the kids. Parents who wrote letters to kids would include comments on the welfare of the pigs in every letter. It is fair to say that the pig took on a role in English life that became closet to that of a pet than a farm animal. After church, visitors would invariably stop and spend some time at the pigsty where they would scratch the animals back and talk to them before they would enter the house and greet the occupants. All this to say that the pig played a role in England far more important than simply a source of bacon and lard. A distinction started to emerge in my mind between commercial operations in pig husbandry and bacon production and small scale cottage pig raising and the production of home-cured hams, bacon, and sausages. The two disciplines are in reality far removed even though the same animal is the subject and the similar spices and salts are used in curing. This distinction would stay with me. As far as my work is concerned, it focuses on large commercial operations and not on a small scale operation.

Finally

Minette loved the discussion. By the time Michael was done, we had four dining room tables around us with photos and bits of scrap paper scattered across the phots and on two more tables where I laid out my notes. I suggested that Minette and Mike make their way to the bar area so long and get drinks while I sit for a few minutes to gather my thoughts and complete my notes.

I thought that by now I learned a lot about bacon, but the discussion this morning taught me that I have only begun. The interconnectedness of it all stunned me. The pig is one of the easiest and most profitable ways to convert corn and maize into animal protein. The link between this fact and the need to feed an ever-increasing world population stunned me. Not only is the preservation of the meat of supreme importance, but the art of manipulating what nature has given us is the real start of the journey to the best bacon on earth!

I recalled a discussion with John Harris and how they breed bacon pigs with long loins and little fat for bacon as opposed to short, far pigs which they call lard-pigs for the production of hams and lard. The Kolbroek bigs that Oupa Eben farmed back in South Africa are clearly lard pigs and the Berkshire and the whites and blacks are being bred as bacon pigs. It all fascinated me tremendously.

It made me realise that life must be lived like that – with ample interconnections we can engineer in our lives to create a grand tapestry! We can indeed fall in love with life and when our work and our passion are the same – it is the condiments to a complete life that is lived well in every area. My Minette, bacon, the mountains, the different lands and customs and peoples of this bountiful earth all unite in my heart and soul it becomes the gift from an amazing universe we exist in. I smiled when I walked over to the bar area and thought to myself that bacon is truly connected to the art of living!

Lots of love from Liverpool!

Your Dad and Minette

Further Reading

Also refer Chapter 10.02: C & T Harris in New Zealand and other amazing tales where I take up the similarities between the Kolbroek and the Kune Kune.

Chapter 03: Kolbroek where the story of the link with the pigs from Gravesend (Kent) is first proposed.

In Search of the Origins of the Kolbroek

Kolbroek – Chinese, New Zealand, and English Connections

The Old and the New Pig Breeds

“Bacon & the art of living” in bookform Stay in touch

Like our Facebook page and see the next post. Like, share, comment, contribute!

Bacon and the art of living

Promote your Page too

Notes

(1) Oscar and I arrived at the Royal Waterloo Hotel on 18 March 2012. Colin Turner from Dantech made the booking.

(2) There is a popular hiking trail called the Wealdway which is from the Southern Coast to Gravesend, crossing the Weald.

References

Armstrong, A (Ed.). 1995. The Economy of Kent, 1640-1914. Boydell Press.

Aslet, C.. 2010. Villages of Britain: The Five Hundred Villages that Made the Countryside. Bloomsbury.

Boys, J.. 1805. General View of the Agriculture of the County of Kent. 2nd edition.

DANIEL DEFOE Ultimate Collection: 50+ Adventure Classics, Pirate Tales & Historical Novels – Including Biographies, Historical Works, Travel Sketches, Poems & Essays (Illustrated), Robinson Crusoe, The History of the Pirates, Captain Singleton, Memoirs of a Cavalier, A Journal of the Plague Year, Moll Flanders, Roxana, The History of the Devil, The King of Pirates and many more. From Letter IV Containing a Description of the North Shore of the Counties of Cornwall, and Devon, and Some Parts of Somersetshire, Wiltshire, Dorsetshire, Gloucestershire, Buckinghamshire and Berkshire. 1761. Also refer, A Tour Thro’ the Whole Island of Great Britain: Divided Into Circuits Or Journies. Containing, I. A Description of the Principal Cities By a Gentleman. December 31, 1760

Grey, E.. 1935. Cottage Life in a Hertfordshire Village.

Harris, J.. c 1870. Harris on the pig. Breeding, rearing, management, and improvement. New York, Orange Judd, and company

Kightly, C.. 1984. Country Voices: Life and Lore in Farm and Village.

Kitchen, F.. 1940. Brother to the Ox: The Autobiography of a Farm Labourer.

Lewis, S.. 1831. A Topographical Dictionary of England. S. Lewis & Co.

Marshall, W.. 1798. The Rural Economy of the Southern Countries (2 vol)

Mayhew, M.. 1981. The Morning Chronicle Survey of Labour and the Poor, The Metropolitan Districts Volume 3. In the years 1849 and 1850, Henry Mayhew was the metropolitan correspondent of the Morning Chronicle in its national survey of labour and the poor. Only about a third of his Morning Chronicle material was included in his later and better known, publication, London Labour and the London Poor. First published in 1981, this series of six volumes constitutes Henry Mayhew’s complete Morning Chronicle survey, in the sequence in which it was originally written in 1849 and 1850.

Salisbury, W.. 1822. The Cottager’s Agricultural Companion.

Sinclair, J. (ed). 1897. Pigs Breeds and Management. Vinton and Co, London

Tunick MH (2008). “Whey Protein Production and Utilization.” (abstract). In Onwulata CI, Huth PJ (eds.). Whey processing, functionality and health benefits. Ames, Iowa: Blackwell Publishing; IFT Press. pp. 1–13.

White, G.. 1977. The Natural History of Selborne. Penguin. From letters in 1775.

Wilkinson, p. R.. 1933. Thesaurus of Traditional English Metaphors.

A Maori Proverb from Maori lore, 1904, by Izett, James (https://archive.org/deta…/maoriloretraditi00izetuoft/page/n3)

Photos

Old photos from Liverpool

-Liverpool, history, Liverpool-history-l22-waterloo-royal-hotel-c1900 Find this Pin and -Waterloo Station 1907; -Waterloo beach scene, circa 1906; -Picnic on Waterloo seafront on Easter Sunday – undated – photos from our stay on 18 March 2012

From: https://www.liverpoolecho.co.uk/…/photos-show-waterloo-thro…

Old Hotel photo from pinterest

Other photos, taken by Eben

Pig photos from

Pigs Breeds and Management Edited by James Sinclair Vinton and Co, London 1897

Harris on the pig. Breeding, rearing, management, and improvement by Harris, Joseph New York, Orange Judd, and company c 1870

Chapter 09.15 The English Pig with links to the Kolbroek and Kunekune Introduction to Bacon & the Art of Living The quest to understand how great bacon is made takes me around the world and through epic adventures.

#bacon and the art of living #Bacon History

0 notes

bnvupdates · 5 years

Text

The Rise of Private Prisons

Thanks to the total failure of the drug war, issues with immigration, and the problem of mass incarceration in the United States, the topic of private prisons has started to become part of the political conversation, and it’s about time.

There is no doubt that the United States has some serious issues in its judicial, immigration, and prison system, and these problems have numerous layers. But, one of the first things the country can do to start making changes is to stop the use of private for-profit prisons.

But unfortunately, we continue to head in the opposite direction.

You might think that private for-profit prisons are a relatively new trend in the world of corrections, but they actually date all the way back to the early 19th century. We have a long history in this country of incarcerating people for profit, and the first big boom of the private prison industry came after the Civil War and the passing of the 13th amendment.

That historical amendment to the Constitution abolished slavery “except as punishment for a crime,” and that one little clausehas led to a billion-dollar industry that makes money on the back of something comparable to slave labor and legal human trafficking.

Governments justify the use of private prisons by arguing that the rising prison population costs too much money, which makes operating these facilities impossible. So, they contract out the management of prisons to private companies, who in turn have zero transparency on how they treat inmates and they are never held accountable for the conditions that the inmates live in.

Today’s for-profit prisons use a business model that treats human beings as slave labor that do everything from work in fields to staffing customer service call centers for a miniscule hourly wage. This incentivizes keeping people behind bars and treats people as a line item in a budget.

Rehabilitation and treatment don’t seem to make it into the conversation when the focus is making money.

Prisoners Built America

In the late 19th century, private prisons in the South housed prisoners on plantations and in company labor camps where they built levees, laid railroad tracks, and mined coal.

To understand just how horrible the history of private prisons are in the United States, consider the fact that the first Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, Nathan Beford Forrest, controlled all of the convicts in Mississippi for a period of time. Many of these people were prisoners of war, but still prisoners nonetheless.

Companies like US Steel preferred to use prison labor because they could force the inmates to work for no money and they could torture the prisoners to get the work done. When you don’t have to pay your workers, that can lead to big profits. Companies then gave a portion of those profits to the states, and that kept the system in place.

Eventually, states started getting jealous of all of the money that private prisons were making, so in the early 20th century, most governments stopped leasing prisoners to private companies and bought the plantations so they could keep the profits for themselves.

A decade after Mississippi stopped convict leasing, the state was making $14.7 million (in today’s dollars) because of prison labor, and this gave the idea to a man named Terrell Don Hutto that prisons should be a business.

Our Current Private Prison System Began in the 1980’s

After running state prisons in the 60s and 70s, Hutto decided it was time for him to profit on the slave labor the government was putting behind bars, and in 1983 he and his business partner Thomas Beasley, scored their first contract. It was an immigration detention contract and they had 90 days to build, finance, and operate a secure correctional facility, which they claim was the first of its kind.

Hutto says that he convinced a motel owner in Houston to lease the property to him, and then he hired his family as staff members. They built a 12-foot fence around the property with barbed wire on top, and for “fun” they left up the “Day Rates Available” sign from the motel.

They immediately started receiving inmates, and both Hutto and Beasley laugh about how they got started.

“We opened the facility on Super Bowl Sunday the end of that January,” Hutto recalls with a chuckle. “So about 10 o’clock that night, we started receiving inmates. I actually took their pictures and fingerprinted them…Several other people walked them to their ‘rooms,’ if you will, and we got our first day’s pay for 87 undocumented aliens.”

That deal led to the creation of their company CCA – Corrections Corporation of America – which is now known as CoreCivic. It is now worth $1.8 billion, and is the second-largest operator of private prisons in the United States.

Currently, approximately eight percent of inmates in the US are housed in a private prison – operated mostly by CoreCivic or GeoGroup – and they also hold more than two-thirds of immigration detainees. 25 percent of CoreCivic’s revenue now comes from ICE detention centers.

Are the prisons that CoreCivic and Geo Group run as brutal as the labor camps in the late 19th century? No.

But, that doesn’t mean the living conditions are acceptable, and the men and women housed in these facilities are not getting any kind of rehabilitation.

These places are all about keeping costs low, which means subpar medical care, horrible food and housing, and limited educational programs. Guards are also paid an extremely low hourly rate, and there is limited staff for prisons that are often overcrowded.

This leads to a lot of violence, with a 2016 study from the Department of Justiceshowing that private prisons are much more violent than their state-run counterparts, which aren’t much better.

Recidivism in Private Prisons

Because private prisons rely on incarceration to generate revenue, there is no incentive for reducing recidivism rates. The Department of Justice says that 50 percent of prisoners return within three years of being released, but incarceration in private prisons increases the risk of recidivism by an additional 20 percent.

Private prisons have a business model that requires them to generate profit, and that means the goal is to have every bed filled. When the interest is making money instead of rehabilitation and decreasing incarceration levels, there is no way the recidivism rate goes down.

Business is booming in the world of private prisons, and they are doing everything they can to make sure it stays that way. The Sentencing Project found that CoreCivic spent $1.4 million per year on lobbying at the federal level between 1999 and 2010, and these companies also help develop “tough on crime” initiatives for numerous states.

These companies are influencing legislation and lobbying for long sentences – like the 1994 “three strikes law” which gives mandatory life sentences to anyone who commits more than two serious crimes.

Since then, the number of people serving life sentences has increased more than 80 percent.

However, the majority of people who are incarcerated are behind bars for low-level non-violent drug offenses, and this is thanks to the drug war that the private prison industry has fully endorsed.

Private prisons are making a ton of money, and at the same time there is absolutely no evidence that they are saving ting tax payers a dime.

It’s time for criminal justice reform, and getting rid of private prisons is a fantastic first step.

___________________

Ron Stefanski is the founder and creator of PrisonInsight.com, a website focused on helping the families of those who are currently incarcerated to better navigate the prison system and hold prisons accountable for their treatment of current and former inmates.

from https://ift.tt/2xQiyu6

0 notes

mastcomm · 4 years

Text

Amsterdam Considers Apology for Slavery in Former Colony

AMSTERDAM — The most enduring legacy of slavery in the Netherlands may be found in neighborhoods like Bijlmermeer, a working-class corner of Amsterdam where many — including those who trace their heritage to the former colony of Suriname — have long felt sidelined.

Slave labor in the South American nation of Suriname generated vast wealth for Amsterdam, and that wealth built many of its palaces and canal-side mansions. But it is in Bijlmermeer — a neighborhood long associated with poverty, crime and aggressive policing — that a movement has grown in recent months to press the city to reckon with this chapter of its history.

Politicians from the area, elected during a vote last year that delivered one of the most diverse city councils in recent memory, have championed a push for Amsterdam to apologize formally for slavery. A majority of the 45-member council, which now has several members descended from slaves, has signed on to the apology initiative that is scheduled to be taken up on February 12. Local politicians say it is likely to pass.

“Amsterdam is a beautiful city, but when you look at some of its most beautiful parts, it is hard to deny that they were financed with income that came from the trans-Atlantic slave trade,” said Don Ceder, a council member whose parents are from Ghana and Suriname. “What we want is for the city to own up to its history, to accept it and to apologize.”

The debate over an apology comes as the Netherlands continues to grapple with an influx of migrants and a backlash against them that has complicated the country’s image as a bastion of liberal tolerance.

As part of that backlash, a right-wing, anti-immigrant party — the Forum for Democracy — has surged to become the largest party in the provinces that contain Amsterdam, The Hague and Rotterdam. A contentious law was passed in August banning from some public places burqas, niqabs and other face coverings that are worn by some Muslim women.

The proposal for Amsterdam — where immigrants have fed a population boom — to apologize for its role in slavery has generated soul-searching and debate, as well as strong opposition by a newly empowered right wing.

Anton van Schijndel, a council member from the Forum for Democracy, said the initiative was “a drive to instill a sense of guilt and shame about a nation’s history.”

Debates over the legacy of slavery are common in the United States, where slave labor powered the economy and shaped the legal system even before the nation’s inception. But such discussions happen more fitfully in Europe, where those who profited lived thousands of miles from colonies like Suriname.

Amsterdam took an unusually direct role as a co-owner of Suriname in the 17th century. It acquired a one-third stake in the colony in 1683 and became an important conduit in the slave trade, especially between West Africa and South America.

Scholars say wealth continued to pour into Amsterdam — home to banks, insurance companies and most plantation investors — after the Dutch government took control of Suriname in 1795. The colony became independent in 1975, after which many Surinamese migrated to the Netherlands and settled in neighborhoods like Bijlmermeer.

Simion Blom, 31, a City Council member who immigrated from Suriname at the age of 5, grew up in Bijlmermeer.

The area began as a planned community of Modernist high-rises and wide, elevated highways built in the 1960s as a Dutch suburb of the future. But it ultimately failed to attract many Dutch people, and became increasingly gritty and urban.

The isolated exclave surrounded by other cities then became a destination for migrants, who faced housing discrimination in central Amsterdam but could find affordable apartments here.

Sitting at a cafe on a bustling pedestrian shopping street in Bijlmermeer, Mr. Blom said that the country would be strengthened by frankly discussing such a dark period of history, even if it made some people uncomfortable.

“I think that makes us adult as a country and as a society when we are able to talk about this, especially about racism and discrimination, to bring people together,” he said.

The proposed apology would call for the city to make a “reconciliation with the past.”

“It is time to redefine the identity of our city free from the weight of the past, but armed with its knowledge to work toward a reconciliation in the future,” the text of the resolution says. “From a shared history, to a shared future.”

The conservative-leaning party of Prime Minister Mark Rutte has met the proposal with ambivalence, and its city council members have declined to endorse it. And the Forum for Democracy, which swept nationwide provincial elections in March but holds just three of the city council seats, has opposed it.

“A public apology feeds the identity politics which we abhor,” said Mr. van Schijndel, the Forum for Democracy council member. “It pits different ethnic groups against each other. It raises false expectations that someday reparations will be made.”

He added that it is difficult to apologize for what ancestors did centuries ago.

Proponents of an apology say reparations are not on the agenda, and they agree that Dutch people are not to blame for what their ancestors thought or did.

“It’s not about the individual,” said Eduard Mangal, a city council aide of Surinamese descent who helped write the draft proposal. “This is something the country has done as a whole. It’s not only white people who should apologize. I’m also apologizing because I’m also Dutch. I’m also from Amsterdam.”

The idea of an apology has been promoted for years by scholars and activists who argue that an increasingly diverse Amsterdam must have the fortitude to face its past. The current initiative was begun on the city level after a similar push at the national level produced what Mr. Ceder described as a frustrating response that emphasized Dutch sorrow instead of responsibility.

Mr. Mangal, the city council aide, and others say the focus should be on the city’s entanglement with slavery, which was not limited to Suriname.

Slaves worked in other Dutch colonies, including in Asia, said Pepijn Brandon, a historian at the Free University of Amsterdam.

Dutch financiers also invested in American slavery. When Thomas Jefferson mortgaged his plantation, Monticello, to Dutch bankers, they accepted his slaves as collateral for the loan, Dr. Brandon said.

“You should see it as a wide-ranging system, not simply the activities of a number of traders within the slave trade but instead a whole complex of economic activities that happen across national borders,” Dr. Brandon said.

Its impact was even greater on Holland, historically the country’s most powerful province, where slavery accounted for 10 percent of gross domestic product and 40 percent of all economic growth between 1739 and 1779, Dr. Brandon said. Roughly 19 percent of all goods that came through Dutch harbors were produced on slave plantations in the Americas, he said.

“This was actually one of the motors of the Dutch commercial economy of the second half of the 18th century,” he said.

The physical legacy of slavery can be plainly seen in Amsterdam. The city center is crowded with mansions, palaces and stately buildings whose original occupants were linked to the slave trade or industries based on it, historians say.

It is also seen in the official mayoral residence, which was once home to the slave trader and Dutch West India Company director Paulus Godin. The West India House, the former headquarters of the Dutch West India Company, today houses a wine bar.

Amsterdam was also home to the world’s first stock exchange, which was founded in part to trade shares in industries based on slavery. In a sign of the city’s modern dependence on tourism, the site is now home to a tourist information office and a branch of Ripley’s Believe It or Not.

“The Dutch still profit from it,” Mr. Blom said. “The tourism, the heritage in itself is wealth.”

from WordPress https://mastcomm.com/amsterdam-considers-apology-for-slavery-in-former-colony/

#Event

0 notes

introtoenvironmentalstudiesblog · 5 years

Text

Blog #8→

Biodiversity Loss/Extinction: The Species Approach:

Focuses on one or a small number of animal or plant species with less focus on the whole

ecosystem that supports the individual species.

Global Wildlife Population Declined By 50% In Last 40 Years:

Recent studies of the Living Planet Index created in part by the London Zoological Society and the World Wildlife Federation have suggested a huge decline in species populations. According to the study “populations of wild animals have decreased by an average of more than fifty percent over the past forty years.”.(Beat 1). Certain species have shown more dramatic shifts in population size than others. This can be seen in populations of freshwater vertebrates who have suffered up to 76% of their population decrease. (Beat 1)This drastic decline has been attributed to human activity such as deforestation, habitat destruction, poaching, and unsustainable human consumption. A previous report had smaller estimates and the use of a different method is attributed to much of the dramatic shift in figures. However, more research from different studies have supported this evidence.

Corporate greed is killing the world!

Keystone species: Rhino, Polar Bear, Orangutan

Extinction from Habitat Loss:

In 2008, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service placed the Alaskan polar bear on its list of threatened species. Alaska state government officials are trying to have this decision repealed because they say it will hurt economic growth in their state. Oil and coal industry leaders also want the decision overturned because they fear it might be used as a way to regulate carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas, that is released into the atmosphere when oil and coal are burned. This a clear example of human activity that is actively ignoring the health of the environment that we live in to favor the wealth of a select few of individuals.

Extinction from Poaching:

The rhino population, particularly black rhinos, have faced a near-catastrophic level of population decline. Before the nineteenth century, rhinos were estimated to be in the hundreds of thousands, possibly in the millions and were dispersed through the African continent. However, there only an estimated 20,000 white rhinos and 5,00 black rhinos in only four countries: Zimbabwe, South Africa, Namibia and Kenya (WWF 1). The vast majority of these rhinos reside in national parks where they are legally and physically protected by conservation laws and armed forces that fight against potential poachers. There has been a huge increase in demand for rhino horn in recent years, contributed to a resurgence in “Traditional Asian Medicine” or TAM which associates powdered rhino horns with cures for hangovers, sores, and even cancer. According the a report conducted by the World Wildlife Fund, “The number of rhinos poached in South Africa alone has increased by 9,000% since 2007 - from 13 to a record 1,215 in 2014.”. This incredible increase shows the impact that unchecked human consumption can have on just one species. Conservationists and the militia that protects against poaching have to overcome pressure against hunting bans, advanced hunting techniques, and wealth people funding money for their best interest. Poaching in particular is a popular profession in some African countries due to lack of economic and employment opportunities(Poaching 1). Western colonization and disregard for human effects on wildlife have altered the way native people interact within their environment in a very negative manner.

Why are rhinos important?

Rhinos are an important keystone species for the African savanna grasslands. They are large herbivores that consume copious amounts of vegetation which in turn controls the growth rate of certain grasses and plants. According to a recent study conducted by Scandinavian and South African researchers in the Journal of Ecology, rhinos control and upkeep the diversity of African grasslands where many other species reside and depend on. An example of how exactly this works can be seen in the quote “Rhinos, like other grazing species, selectively browse on certain grass species, which leaves room for others that otherwise could not compete to move in and promotes a diverse mosaic of edible plants.”(Nuwer 1).

Extinction from Deforestation:

Palm oil is used in countless different types of products such as food, cosmetics, biofuel, and cleaning supplies. Trees used for palm oils are usually found in tropical rainforests in which vast amount of species diversity exists as well indigenous peoples. The Borneo orangutan is in particular at risk for extinction due to palm tree oil demand. They reside in the rainforests and are killed during bulldozing or tree felling when their habitat is being destroyed to clear for plantations. Additionally, orangutans often venture to plantations to try to find food and will often uproot young palm tree plants to eat the shoots. According to Michelle Desilets, executive director of the Orangutan Land Trust, "The attacks on orangutans are often quite brutal," Desilets says. "Rescuers often find orangutans butchered with machetes, beaten to death with wooden planks and iron bars, riddled with pellets, even doused in fuel and set alight. Sometimes infants survive the killing of their mothers, but they're then sold into the lucrative illegal wildlife trade.". So not only are the orangutans starving and being crushed to death they are also brutally killed and tortured by humans.

Why are orangutans important?

Orangutans are a keystone species because their scat contains seeds that help to repopulate the plant and fruit species of the forests.

Polar Bears International:

Campaigns showing starving, weakened polar bears on pieces of ice drifting in the arctic sea have been successful in showing the direct impact humans have on extinction of a species.

Terrestrial Biodiversity Loss/Extinction: The Ecosystem Approach:

Focuses on ecosystems, food chains, and food webs as a whole in regards to how they function and connect with less emphasis on individual or keystone species.

Forests:

“Deforestation is the temporary or permanent removal of large expanses of forest for agriculture, settlements, or other uses. Surveys by the World Resources Institute (WRI) indicate that over the past 8,000 years, human activities have reduced the earth's original forest cover by about 46%, with most of this loss occurring in the last 60 years.”(Miller)

Rainforests are threatened by corporate greed to make room for plantations, mines, other logging industries. According to a source, there is almost 4,500 acres of rainforests destroyed every hour from illegal logging, mining, agriculture, forest fires, and oil drilling.(Deforestation 1). As said before palm tree oil is cheap to produce and sells for a profitable amount to various companies because of the high demand. For this reason, huge tracts of rainforest is demolished every day, to make way for palm tree plantations which kills the existing wildlife and creates an uninhabitable environment for the native species of animals and plants. Trees are also huge carbon sinks, in which they absorb excess carbon from the atmosphere but it is released when cut down. According to the quote, “As a consequence, Indonesia – the world’s largest producer of palm oil – temporarily surpassed the United States in terms of greenhouse gas emissions in 2015. With their CO2 and methane emissions, palm oil-based biofuels actually have three times the climate impact of traditional fossil fuels.”(cite).

Human Activities & Extinctions:

Why Should We Care about the Rising Rate of Species Extinction?:

Humanity as a whole has a duty to prevent the acceleration of the extinction of wild because of the economic and ecological benefits they provide. Additionally, wild species have a right to exist, live, and thrive regardless of how beneficial they are to humans.

How Can We Protect Wild Species from Extinction? :

Education and Awareness

Alternative energy sources

Sustainable uses of lumber products

The Endangered Species Act

QUESTION: Colonization and war has created a socio economic deficit in African countries that has led to an increase of poaching as a source of employment. Do other countries which have caused these problems have a duty to help with conservation efforts?

WORD COUNT: 1,310

“African Rhinos.” WWF, wwf.panda.org/knowledge_hub/endangered_species/rhinoceros/african_rhinos/.

Beats, Geo. “Global Wildlife Population Declined By 50% In Last 40 Years - Video Dailymotion.” Dailymotion, Dailymotion, 30 Sept. 2014, www.dailymotion.com/video/x26ybub.

“Deforestation of Rainforests.” RAINFOREST PARTNERSHIP, rainforestpartnership.org/our-mission/deforestation-of-rainforests/.

Nuwer, Rachel. “Here's What Might Happen to Local Ecosystems If All the Rhinos Disappear.” Smithsonian.com, Smithsonian Institution, 27 Feb. 2014, www.smithsonianmag.com/articles/heres-what-might-happen-local-ecosystems-if-all-rhinos-disappear-180949896/.

“Palm Oil – Deforestation for Everyday Products.” Rainforest Rescue, www.rainforest-rescue.org/topics/palm-oil.

“Poaching.” Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 30 Apr. 2019, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poaching.

0 notes

palmoilmillmachine-blog · 5 years

Text

Conservation in palm oil is possible

Must “conservation” and “palm oil” be mutually exclusive? Erik Meijaard from Borneo Futures says no.

Whereas most oil palm concessions are associated with the destruction of orangutan habitat, at least one company, PT KAL in West Kalimantan, stands out for protecting some 150 orangutans in its concession. Important lessons are to be learned from this case.

The oil palm sector is often blamed as one of the biggest threats in tropical conservation. Much of the critique of the sector is justified. Oil palm plantations at industrial and smallholder scale have displaced large areas of tropical forest and their increasingly threatened wildlife. As was shown in a recent study on Borneo,the rate at which this happens is still increasing. So what to do?

There are several possible strategies for reducing the impact of the oil palm sector on nature. The favoured strategy over the past few decades for many in the environmental sector has been to reject palm oil, with some organisations calling for a total ban on palm oil.Because of the strong public and political support for oil palm development in major producing countries like Indonesia and Malaysia, such bans have remained largely ineffective in slowing the expansion of the industry.

Other organisations have called for more sustainable practices in the industry, such as those prescribed through the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO). It remains to be seen whether RSPO certification has resulted in much improved environmental and social practices but the fact that NGOs such as the PanEco Foundation are withdrawing support from RSPO is a concern for the sustainability claims of the platform.

I honestly don’t think that banning oil palm is going to work. Apart from the obvious ethical and neo-colonial connotations, people selling and buying palm oil simply won’t listen to such bans. It would be a bit like asking Europeans, Chinese and Americans to stop using coal-powered electricity, turn off their home heaters, and stop flying airplanes to reduce climate change – have you done that yet?

If the expansion of the palm oil sector is likely to continue, improving practices in the industry is one way forward towards reducing environmental impacts. It is not the only one but it is a very important one. The question is what such improved practices look like, and how we can get companies to implement them.

A new publication by UNEP/GRASP titled “Palm Oil Paradox: Sustainable Solutions to Save the Great Apes” discusses what lessons have been learned about improved management practices in Indonesia and Malaysia, and how this informs the development of the palm oil sector in tropical Africa where the industry is also expanding into the ranges of chimpanzees, bonobos and gorillas. Insights were primarily obtained from research in the Kinabatangan area in Sabah, Malaysia, and from a number of concessions in Kalimantan, including the PT KAL concession in Ketapang, West Kalimantan.

The PT KAL experience is further highlighted in a recent scientific publication.The company has implemented improved practices with good conservation outcomes, including effectively getting rid of illegal logging and pretty much eliminating fires and snares.

To be clear, the development of the plantation has had a negative impact on the local orangutan population. But as the authors stress, it is important to consider what would have happened to these forests if the oil palm company had not been developed.

As they point out, the fact that large areas of community forest outside the concession have subsequently been logged, cleared and burnt by the communities, indicates that without management many of these forests would have been doomed. Not developing oil palm does not mean that the forest will be protected.

Currently an estimated 150 orangutans survive in the plantation. Their densities are unnaturally high though, most likely as a result from forest clearing both inside and outside the concession. The next management and research phase aims to develop a network of connected forest areas within the concession that are also connected to forest areas outside the boundaries.

This makes it important that the management of the larger landscape takes place, involving local government, the various concession holders that operate in the area, communities, and non-governmental groups. This is how that magical concept of “sustainable landscapes” needs to be accomplished – everyone talks about it, but no one knows how such landscapes are actually developed.

The sustainable landscape goal is made harder because of the challenges in the Sungai Putri area just south of PT KAL, as reported here. Sungai Putri contains some 1,500 orangutans but is currently slated for conversion to timber and oil palm plantations. If this goes ahead and large areas of deep peat swamp forests are cleared, the orangutans of Sungai Putri will have nowhere else to go than the PT KAL concession and its neighbours. Obviously, the forests in those areas will not be able to cope with the massive increase in orangutan refugees.

The future will show what PT KAL’s efforts can contribute to overall orangutan conservation and sustainable development in this area. But the important lesson learnt from this is that oil palm development and conservation can coexist to some extent.

The next objective is to show that retaining forests in oil palm concessions actually makes business sense. In places like West Kalimantan, thirsty oil palms are increasingly affected by lack of water, especially during El Niño induced severe droughts. Having access to water stored in forests, and especially in healthy peat swamp forests is a major benefit to the industry. Destroying such forests and their hydrological capacities is ultimately counterproductive and will undermine the development of tropical countries.

We are far from turning the destructive oil palm tide. Governments remain very keen on expanding the sector, and the many industry participants push back against legal reforms that require better environmental and social practices. Good examples set by PT KAL and other similar-minded companies show the way forward towards a more sustainable future.

0 notes

joshua-guererro-blog · 5 years

Text

Effects of Immigration

Each year, hundreds of thousands of immigrants, legal and illegal, come into the United States from all different parts of the world. A large number of immigrants have a majority of reasons for entering the United States. Some come in hopes of creating a better life for themselves and their family, while others are refugees that have escaped persecution and civil wars in their home country. Most of these immigrants believe the United States to be the best place to go to start a new life because in the United States, there is talk of freedom, protection, and benefits; which is something all human beings strive to receive. Unfortunately, there is a misperception that an increasing number of immigrants are having a negative effect on the United States regarding job availability for the ones who born in the United States. Discrimination is the prejudicial or unjust treatment of different categories of people, especially on the grounds of race, age, or gender. Race is a social construct that was developed in order to maintain white dominance. Initially, race could be broken down into two categories, black and white. As time passed, another category was added into the mix as more immigrants from different countries entered America. This category is known as the “people of color”. Many immigrants who are classified as a “person of color” migrated over to the United States mostly from Spanish speaking countries. This additional category seemed to give the predominately white American society a new way to maintain dominance over those who had a different complexion. Most, if not all, of the people that live here in America, are immigrants or descendants of immigrants. Immigrants are people who left their own country to make a new home in another country. The United States was built up to where it is today by the people who invaded this land. Beginning in the 1600's and 1700's, America was seen as the land of opportunity. The Pilgrims came for the opportunity to have religious freedom. These migrants from many regions of the world, with different religious faiths, languages, and racial features helped build up the country. According to Monican McDermott and Frank L. Samson, the Quakers and French Huguenots helped build the country as well. Economic opportunities were a goal of many early immigrants along with the search for gold, the chance to own land, and the chance to start a new life. America was the "new world" and, as far as the immigrants were concerned, was full of a multitude of opportunities (248-259) this explains that most of the immigrants came to the United States only because they wanted to have a better life, and they wanted to reach their goals. The dynamic of American life has been changed by the forced and free immigrants. Forced immigrants were considered slaves, which were inferior human beings who were considered the property of another person. This “owner”, who was considered their master, could make their slave do whatever it was they wanted; whether it was picking cotton or taking care of children. Slaves, since the earliest time, had always been considered as “things” and could be sold, traded, pledged for a debt, or even given to someone as a gift. Slaves had absolutely no rights and were not actually considered to be people (Slavery 2017). After the Civil War, in 1865 and 1866, the victory of the Union in the Civil War gave all the African-American slaves their liberation. Even many African Americans that were working in a farm were getting abused by Native Americans, who were making them work for free, because they need to pay everything that they were using in the farm, and the white landowners acted to control the labor force thoung a system similar to the one that had existed during the slavery. At the end in the late 1865 after the victory of the Union in the Civil War, Mississippi and South Carolina enacted the first black codes. Mississippi’s law required blacks to have written evidence. If they left before the end of their contract, they would be forced to lose earlier wages and were subject to arrest. In South Carolina, a law prohibited blacks from holding any occupation other than farming, but Maurice Jackson explains that they must be a servant unless they paid an annual tax of $10 to $100 (134). All this hit free blacks leaving Charleston and former slaves that worked by hand. In both states, black were given heavy penalties for homelessness, including forced plantation labor in some cases. According to Michael Shally-Jensen, during the Reconstruction Era (1865-1977), African Americans face a new an attack of obstacles and injustices (123). By late 1865, when the 13th Amendment the institution of slavery. The freed black’s status is the postwar South was still very much unresolved. Also, According to the President Andrew Johnson, white southerners reestablished civil authority in the Confederate states in 1865 and 1866. They made a laws known as “black codes,”, ( Michael Shally-Jensen 139), Black Codes helped many African Americans become free and have their own identity. In the year 1869 the United States of America came down as a whole. Most of the people were hurt and confused by the “Jim Crow Laws” Most of the people understood that these laws were established in order to keep the blacks and whites separated in public places. Most African American thought that this laws made a big change on society in the 1930’s. According to Krieger, Nancy, Chen Jarvis, Coull Brent Waterman Pamela, and Beckfield Jason, the United States Constitution did not allow many types of discrimination such people being mistreated. However, this made African Americans to be considered as the “ poor class” citizens. Native Americans were judging the blacks because of their skin color. Americans considered their power such a way that they thought they only were the importanted race in the United States. In that time they were not respected as human beings. They were also not permitted to vote in some states. In the South the only two things that will see outside was the word “white” and “colored” there were many signs, barber shops, schools, thains, buses, and other publics places. That was what the Jim Crow laws were, about the separation between the Native Americans and the African Americans (267). The effect that the Jim Crow laws had on the African American population, was that all the black people were separated from the whites when using public transportation. In order for the African Americans to sit on a public bus was a big problem because black people had to sit in the back seat while the whites were in the front. During the Jim Crow laws they were two important people Martin Luther King and Rosa Parks they wanted to stop the racial injustices and the discrimination against the black population. According to Krieger, Nancy, Chen Jarvis, Coull Brent Waterman Pamela, and Beckfield Jason, the Jim Crow Laws did not only affect the African Americans; but it also affected the white population as well because in short, some people liked the racism and some did not (280) This shows that in that period of time not every one of the Native Americans were racist discriminating against the African Americans or the “black people”. However, not only men were affected by this law, There were children that were going to schools in the United States they were also separated into the different categories of whites and blacks. They were many schools like that in the United States. If by some chance a child went to school of the other race’s area they would get into trouble because, that was illegal in order to keep everyone separated from each other. Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X were the stars of the Civil Rights movement. Both were some of the most famous, and they are still heard about frequently throughout many books, magazine, and articles. Martin Luther King Jr. had a dream; a dream to unite the people of the United States as a whole, regardless of race or gender. He did not want the color of a person’s skin or where they came from to be a factor in how they were treated. Every person in the United States should be treated as if they were all family. Unfortunately, not all people had the same exact beliefs as King. Malcolm X believed that people of color should be treated better, just as King believed, the difference between the two was that Malcolm X did not want blacks and whites to be integrated. He felt as though colored people were the original people of the world and that white people were “devils”. Martin Luther King Jr. wanted integration between all man, no matter what color. Today it is common for white citizens of the United States to view racism as “evil”, but when anything having to do with the color of someone’s skin hits the surface racial hatred is a possible result. Racial hatred is a source of inspiration of action, which sometimes leads to violence (Jonathan W. Emord 48, 49). Martin Luther King Jr. became the main speaker in leading the Civil Rights Movement to end racial segregation and discrimination in America during the 1950’s and 1960’s. He also was one of the leading spokespeople for using nonviolent methods in order to achieve a successful social change. King was a peaceful man, while being a preacher he decided he wanted to be a civil rights leader, later on he started his journey as a well known leader. Malcolm X was a different person. While King was remembered by everyone happily, most of the African Americans tried to forget Malcolm X, because he being sent to prison for drug use, he was converted to Islam, and prior to that was pro segregation. After after his journey however, he decided that he wanted to be treated equally as King had wanted all along. (Jonathan W. Emord 85, 86). Malcolm X was a great person by all the risks that we took during his life . He is often tagged with the quote “ To do whatever it takes.” meaning that he would do whatever it took to be considered equal, but also at the same time he was more interesting in spreading the word “black pride”. (Jonathan W. Emord 103, 104). Both King and Malcolm X were considered to be great leaders by people. Both have different way of expressing their opinions. While some people liked a practical approach; others liked to be peaceful, but people need to realize that even though they are two different people, they were both dreaming for the same thing, they just wanted to be free of segregation that “every life should matter” because everyone is equal. But King and Malcolm X used whatever power they had to make a voice for themselves, although sometimes Malcolm’s way of “protesting” was different because he wanted all African-American to have their our nation in a country that is more fitting to immigrants. His “protesting’’ was more of a noisy fight so in turn people tried to stay away from other people.(Jonathan W. Emord 115, 124). Martin Luther King Jr.’s life had a seismic impact on race relations in the United States. He is a well-known person in the African-American leader of his era because he helped the African-American community being able to equal with the native American. His life and work have been honored with a national holiday. The free African Americans, who migrated over to the United States, experienced harsh treatment through the nineteenth century. They were denied political, social, and economic rights while being excluded from quality education. They also did not receive well-paying employment, were not permitted to own property, and were restricted from travelling. In Dred Scott v. Sandford, the Supreme Court reinforced freed African Americans inferiority. The Court declared that African Americans, whether slaves or citizens of free states, belonged to an inferior and “unfortunate race” and could not be considered United States citizens” (Jessica Erickson 1432). As a result many African Americans were abused by white the American citizens, because they were thinking that they had right to do whatever they wanted to do to other people. By not respecting the other people race and identity, the white American race created a even bigger divide in America than ever before. Many situations take place where the court gets involved with immigrants and racial influences on the American society, and therefore statements are made. Racial impact statements are a tool for lawmakers to evaluate racial injustices. These statements aren’t immediately connected with specific types of legislation, specifically in Connecticut (Jessica Erickson 1448). The Oregon Criminal Justice Commission prepares racial impact statements for the state. They include methods, assumptions, and an estimate of the government impact on different racial and ethnic compositions of the criminal offender population and those who are victims. So far the only state to consider racial impact on crime victims as well as criminal offenders is Oregon (Jessica Erickson 1449). Other states in the U.S. have considered racial impact legislation, but they were denied and not passed as of September 2014. Only four states have proposed legislation with “informational-only” racial statements that are just like the statements from states that currently have these statements in motion. Two of those four would have allowed people to comment on these statements, but would not require lawmakers to respond to these racially disparate impacts. Three other states have taken a more aggressive stance. They suggested that lawmakers take additional steps when a racial impact statement predicts that a bill will have disparate impacts. It first analyzes the informational-only bill failed in a few states; this includes: Texas, Maryland, Mississippi, and Florida. Unfortunately, it failed in Arkansas, Wisconsin, and Kentucky (Jessica Erickson 1450). The three countries that were affected by the racial impact were Texas, Maryland, and Mississippi. Texas has been impacted by statements that has been included into the information on the evaluate of the number of affected criminal cases per year, fiscal impact, the impact on racial and ethnic. The collision on correctional facilities and prison capacity, and “any other matter Legislative Budget Board determines relevant.” The bill never made it out committee. (Jessica Erickson 1450). Another county that was affected by the racial impact was Maryland. According to Jessica Erikson explains that Maryland present legislation adoption in 2012 it was call “criminal justice policy impact statements”. The communication that Maryland attached bills that create manu criminal offenses; penalties, sentencing procedures, or probation. The scope of the statements would have included similar information about the Texas’s failed legislation, but according to Jessica Erickson she verify that without the catch-all “any other matter” provision. Although the statements that not have required any additional resources and could have been incorporated with existing fiscal, and policy notes. (1450). The last state that had racial impact was Mississippi. According to Erikson described the racial impact as a “ racial and ethnic impact statement” this legislation also failed in early 2014, because need to have required one member of each political party to request a racial impact statement. This statements would be required to describe the proposed legislation impact on the “ composition of the criminal offender populations for racial ethnic this acted represent how people were treated during the immigration. The criminal offender populations for racial ethnic groups with different identity, seems the impact for this legislation failed in 2014. But according to Oregon, Mississippi considered including the legislation’s projected effects on the racial and ethnic composition especially for crime victims in the impact statements. This act will offer the opportunity for public comments and suggestions. The result for this statement will be that everyone will be equal and be able to speak the bad things that has happened in their life, been abuse, victims of abuse of power. But at the ended Mississippi failed to pass the legislation term in 2004 (Jessica Erickson 1451). In the United state there is many different races and identities in every single states there is someone with different culture, skin color, and race. This country is based on immigrants from all over the world. Nowadays society does not seem to understand that we are all human beings. Society cannot understand that in this conflict no only the adults are affected by racism and discrimination of different color in people, also younger kids get affected by this common problem that society does not understand how to deal about it. However, they instead they tend to put people into groups depending on their skin color and ethnicity. It is vital that people are able to express their own race and ethnicity and be confident with their identity. Identity is the thing that separates one from others. It doesn't matter what skin color people has, we are all humans just with differents race identity. Why it is so difficult for society to understand that it doesn't matter who we are? We still humans. No matter our race, gender, or sexual orientation, we are human, and we are equal.

0 notes