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This is a belated Christmas gift that now gets to be a Valentine’s Day gift! Yay! It’s a poster of my partner’s favorite anarchists! The quote belongs to Buenaventura Durruti (second down, middle column).
best Valentina’s day ever.
By 1680, you see the beginning of the changes. What had happened - and this is a complicated story - was that colonial leaders had to deal with Bacon and that rebellion. The British sent a fleet of three ships and by the time they got to Virginia, there were 8,000 poor men rebelling who had burned down Jamestown - blacks, whites, mulattos. And it was quite clear that this kind of unity and solidarity among the poor was dangerous.
After that, they began to pass laws, very gradually. They passed laws that gave Europeans privileges while they increasingly enslaved Africans. They passed a number of laws that prevented blacks, Indians, and mulattos from owning firearms, for example. Everybody had firearms. Everybody in Virginia still has firearms!
Then there was another change: There was a decline in the number of European servants coming to the New World. At the same time, there was an increase in the ships bringing Africans to the New World. By the 1690s or so, the English themselves had outfitted their ships to bring Africans back from the continent, and this is the first time that they had had direct connections.
But the Africans also had something else. They had skills which neither the Indians nor the Irish had. The Africans brought here were farmers. They knew how to farm semi-tropical crops. They knew how to build houses. They were brick makers, for example. They were carpenters and calabash carvers and rope makers and leather workers. They were metal workers. They were people who knew how to smelt ore and get iron out of it. They had so many skills that we don’t often recognize. But the colony leaders certainly recognized that. And they certainly gave high value to those slaves who had those skills.
After 1690 things begin to change. All of the Europeans become identified as “white.” And Africans take on a different kind of identity. They are not only heathens, but they are people who are perceived as vulnerable to being enslaved. And that’s a major point. Africans were vulnerable because it became part of the consciousness that they had no rights as Englishmen. Even the poorest Englishman knew that he had some rights. But once a planter owns a few Africans, the idea that the Africans had no rights that they had to recognize became very clear. And that’s why they were vulnerable to being enslaved, and kept in slavery. The laws that were passed after that all tended to diminish the rights of African people. But between 1690 and 1735, even those Africans who had been free and who had been there for many generations, had their rights taken away from them.
Once you magnify the difference between the slaves and the free, then it was possible to create a society in which the slaves were little better than animals. They were thought of as animals. And the more you think of slaves as animals, the more you justify keeping them as slaves.
After a while, slavery became identified with Africans. Blackness and slavery went together in the popular mind. And this is why we can say that race is a product of the popular mind, because it was this consciousness that blackness and slavery were bound together, that gave people the idea that Africans were a different kind of people.
Think of the early 17th century planter who wrote to the trustees of his company and he said, “Please don’t send us any more Irishmen. Send us some Africans, because the Africans are civilized and the Irish are not.” But 100 years later, the Africans become increasingly brutalized. They become increasingly homogenized into a category called “savages.” And all the attributes of savagery which the English had once given to the Irish, now they are giving to the Africans.
"Why were Africans the slaves of choice?
Audrey Smedley is a professor of anthropology at Virginia Commonwealth University. She is author of Race in North America: Origins of a Worldview.
(via howtobeterrell)
The construction of race and racism really needs to be studied. People really think this shit got invented in the 1960’s and ended in the 1960’s
(via hamburgerjack)
(via amodernmanifesto)
Every machine has had the same history - a long record of sleepless nights and of poverty, of disillusions and of joys, of partial improvements discovered by several generations of nameless workers, who have added to the original invention these little nothings, without which the most fertile idea would remain fruitless. More than that: every new invention is a synthesis, the resultant of innumerable inventions which have preceded it in the vast field of mechanics and industry.
Science and industry, knowledge and application, discovery and practical realization leading to new discoveries, cunning of brain and of hand, toil of mind and muscle - all work together. Each discovery, each advance, each increase in the sum of human riches, owes its being to the physical and mental travail of the past and present.
By what right then can anyone, whatever appropriate the least morsel of this immense whole, say, “This is mine, not yours”?
"Peter Kropotkin - The Conquest Of Bread, Chapter 1: Our Riches II (via ragemovement)
Bobby Hutton.
He joined the Black Panther Party at the age of 16, in 1966. On April 6th, 1968, he was traveling in a car with a few other Black Panther members, when they were ambushed by the Oakland police. They ran for cover in a building nearby. When the police finally threw tear gas into the building, Hutton stripped down to his underwear so that the police would know he was unarmed and he walked out.
The police shot him 12 times. At the age of 17, Bobby Hutton was murdered by the police.
(via anarchistpeopleofcolor)
A fourth person has been jailed for refusing to talk about other anarchists as part of the Seattle grand jury.
Please LIKE/REBLOG if you SUPPORT the principled stand that Maddy Pfeiffer, Matt Duran, and Katherine Olejnik are taking!UPDATED information: http://www.greenisthenewred.com/blog/maddy-pfeiffer-jailed-grand-jury-anarchists/6670/
(via ragemovement)
We are sad to report the death of David Lomon, the last known survivor in Britain of the more than 2,500 volunteers from the British Isles who joined the International Brigades. He died today (21 December 2012), aged 94.
David arrived in Spain in December 1937 and was captured by Italian troops in the following spring. He was repatriated in a prisoner-of-war exchange in October 1938.
In one of the last interviews he gave in Madrid, he declared that coming to fight Fascism in Spain was ” the best thing I have ever done in my life. ”
He shall be dearly missed. Rest In Peace Good Man. ¡No Pasarán!
(Source: tiocfaidharlulz, via frozenrevolutionary)
On Monday, while visiting my family, I will explain this analysis to my nieces.
(Source: withoutphilosophy, via remuslumpen)
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Photo Caption: Roman & Ramona Cuevas with their son Leonel Cuevas in Lincoln Hospital. Leonel, 17, is now paralyzed after being hit by a police car while riding on a dirt bike. He is also the cousin of Reynaldo Cuevas, a Bronx deli worker who was shot and killed by the NYPD in September.
Exclusive: NYPD Account of Accident That Left One Dead And Another Paralyzed Is Bogus (Must Read)
The NYPD is lying about the death of a young man and the near-fatal injuries to another who were mowed down by a squad car in October, a witness told the Daily News.
Cops said Ronald Herrera, 20, who died a week after the Oct. 27 Bronx motorcycle accident, and his now-paralyzed passenger, Leonel Cuevas, 17, were aboard Herrera’s Kawasaki off-roader when it “attempted to overtake” the cop car while zooming down Walton Ave.
The dirt bike then ricocheted into a double-parked car as the cop plowed into a second parked car, the police account said.
But a witness to the bloodbath on Walton Ave. told The News the police story is false.
“They hit the dirt bike from behind, the bike twisted and Leonel flew off,” said the 18-year-old witness, who asked to remain anonymous.
“It (the bike) went down and Ronald was still holding on,” added the witness, who was on another off-road motorcycle. “It started throwing sparks. The police car completely ran over him. They really didn’t have to crash him off the bike.”
An NYPD spokeswoman said that the Internal Affairs Bureau is investigating the accident, but that there has been no change in duty status of the cops involved.
The official police account — which claims the cop car was not pursuing Herrera and Cuevas, even though its flashers were whirling — comes from the driver of the squad car, Officer Sabrina Alicea.
But that report leaves a lot out, said Cuevas’ lawyer Sanford Rubenstein.
“The question is, did the officer operating the police vehicle use it as a deadly weapon?” asked Rubenstein.
The NYPD Patrol Guide prohibits “ramming” in an attempt to stop a vehicle.
The Cuevas family requested the accident report on Nov. 5, but did not receive it until Dec. 6 — along with an apology from Inspector Kevin Catalina “for any inconvenience that this may have caused you.”
The delay in producing the basic information about the case left the Cuevas family fuming.
“I have no confidence in the Police Department,” said the paralyzed victim’s mother, Ramona Cuevas, who is also the cousin of Reynaldo Cuevas, an unarmed Bronx bodega worker shot to death in September by a Bronx cop who mistook him for a robber.
Residents of the neighborhood share that suspicion. After cops sealed off the accident scene, there was a tense confrontation with onlookers caught on cell phone video.
In the video, a cop removed his gun and equipment belt and appeared ready to brawl after an onlooker questioned his toughness.
“There’s a lot of disrespect from that precinct,” said Arabellis Herrera, the dead man’s sister.
Herrera’s death marks at least the third questionable fatal run-in with an NYPD cruiser this year — but that figure is tough to quantify because there could be other incidents, like Herrera’s, that were never reported to the media.
This Saturday, we are having a candlelight vigil and Fuck The Police March with the family of Reynaldo and Leonel Cuevas. We will be marching to the PSA 9 precinct to demand justice for Reynado, Leonel and Ronald.
NYC: This Saturday. Be there.
(via inarumabo)
Be aware that I’m not asking you to hand over your property. I intend to take it by force.
