...Replaced...It's All Good w/ Revolutionary Cries

May 31

[video]

quixotess:

closetospring:

noteleanor:

karnythia:

lionheartedgrrrl:

femmenoire:

lionheartedgrrrl:

ceasesilence:

femmenoire:

ceasesilence reblogged your quote: You may believe abortion is wrong. We respect your…

Changed the cissexist wording.

This is a quote from an actual historical document. You can have a problem with the wording but I have a serious problem with you erasing these women’s words. That’s really not ok.

I didn’t change it and pretend that’s what they originally said. I clearly say that I changed it. Anyone who doesn’t like the change can reblog the original. I don’t see the problem.

femmenoire, your problem should be with the historical document that is cissexist. What does that say when you take offense to somebody pointing out the document is oppressive to them and changing it so that it isn’t anymore? You’re a shitty ally if you think it’s okay to post or reblog something cissexist without at least pointing out that it is so.

When did I take offense to the cissexism being pointed out here? When?

What I said was that it is wrong to erase these African American women’s words. I’m an historian and I believe that people’s words ideas about their lives should be respected. I also said that you can critique that but to change those words is NOT. OK.

And one more times, it’s a historical document talking specifically about the ciswoman’s experiences who wrote it. I would never change that.

You took offense to ceasesilence pointing out the cissexism by changing it to gender neutral terms. Ceasesilence did not erase the point of the document, ze erased the cissexism. I’m a womanist and I believe that you have no right to be oppressive or to try to deny this quote you’re clinging to is oppressive. If you believe in respect, try practicing it first. Being a historian is not a get out of jail free card to be a shitty ally. If you think it’s not okay to erase the cissexist terms, you obviously think it’s okay to shit all over transgender people’s lives, and that’s not okay.

So the historical context of that wording & the fact that it was explicitly about a history in which black cis women were being forced to breed doesn’t matter? Oh. Okay.

You don’t EVER change what the author was saying in a primary source document. It doesn’t matter what they were saying or how bigoted they were being. Altering an historical document is ahistorical and wrong. We do not apply our present-day views to them, we examine them in the context in which they took place (which karnythia already pointed out). In fact, changing the wording of an historical document simply erases whatever problematic wording that was there and erases any evidence of cissexism existing in said document, which is not a good thing because it alters the historical record to ignore that instance of cissexism.

besides all the above commentary, i wonder if every quote that uses “he”/”his” generally (to mean “people”) gets corrected, or if it only happens when someone uses “her.” cuz i have to say, i’ve only seen the latter.

bolding mine

fuck all y’all — meaning lionheartedgrrrl and ceasesilence.

ooooh this is what K was talking about this morning. i swear i read that document over and over trying to figure out what the alteration was. i never saw this post.

(via so-treu)

[video]

withrevolutionarycries:

strugglingtobeheard:

withrevolutionarycries replied to your post: i think when people talk about appropriation of…

i think a significant issue in this is that we’re also taught, it’s mythologized even, that Black USians don’t have enduring cultural practices that can be traced back to specific regions of the continent. that’s a lie but it takes work to connect

this is very true. that’s kind of what i said here. but like you said, it is hard to track and connect. and i find it’s kind of where to want in one way, to draw this line once that is found as being from that place specifically, but when its influences carry over to here and morph over time, that’s also somehow not original either. this weird state of having the idea that we don’t have a culture or when we do, it really came from someplace we really can’t claim part of anyways…

i know you said this was a hard convo so feel free not to respond in the moment (or ever really, I appreciate your commentary but i’m not owed it.)

i think for me the issue with this discourse around Black american folks connecting with histories and cultural practices of *any* group of indigenous Africans is that it suggests that what we want to do is claim ownership over it. and i guess some folks do. but that hasn’t ever been my personal intent. which i know “not all of us are like that” right? but what i can do is affirm that while I know that I’m African in a sense, that isn’t me trying to claim sort of indigenaity to a particular group or area of Africa. like i’m under no illusion that my desire to learn twi/akan makes me ghanian or something. personally i want to learn the language because i want to visit ghana and i would rather be able to speak to some of the people in non-colonizer languages. i don’t think any one cultural practice or artifact holds the essence of what it means to belong to a people so i’m not under the illusion that gaining any fluency in one or two will turn me into something that i’m not.

i also think i’m very privileged to grown up in a family that made it clear that i had a very strong legacy of Blackness to pull from here in the US. that we put a lot of emphasis in our family about being proud of our family’s endurance and resistance to white supremacy right here. while i have always wanted to be in closer community with Black folks from all over the world—i’ve never felt like i was cultureless or that i lacked something by virtue of being born descended from folks who endured enslavement and any issues that came from that (such as not knowing the exact origins of the melanin in my skin.)

i tell it like this, i’m from a small town. i grew up in the place that both sides of my family was emancipated in. both my grandmother’s lived across from the two cemeteries where Black folks were allowed to get buried in that town. so when we would walk through those cemeteries or drive past them—i was always told and made aware that these were the people that i came from. these are my roots. i was always surrounded by the physical manifestations of a past. now there are parts of that past that i didn’t really know that much about (and still don’t) like the native parts of my bloodline. but it’s like this… you know my grandma on my mother’s side didn’t have a birth certificate when she was born so her birth year is based on her recollection/and some digging my family did. but sometime when she was like in her 80s we all just decided that this was the year we were going to go with and that was that. no one can tell us she wasn’t born or what year we have to celebrate. like no one can tell me i’m not native. like i don’t know the particulars and it’s been hard to find details about it. but in the end i know what i know about who i am. i don’t talk about it because i’m not interested in other people’s ignorance about how that ish works out in the lives of folks descended from enslaved African peoples.

anyway anyway i get what your post meant about it being hard to feel like no one ever wants to claim you/us as Black americans. and how it sucks to feel like you have to walk through a minefield of feelings about cultural ownership in order to even make discoveries about your personal histories. my thing is all you can try to do is make those discoveries with integrity, respecting the difference in your/our relationships to whichever indigenous African cultures and those of the folks living on the continent within the the contemporary manifestations of that cultural legacy, and calling out folks who do act in ways that are culturally imperialist, and squarely acknowledging how the colonialist past of white-supremacy operates in the emotional and psychological perspectives on what it means to be a Black diaspora (which is my nice way of saying fuck the anti-Black american bullshit.)

i’m just reblogging this for the receipts that folks seem to want to collect about this discussion. if you click the title link that will take you to struggling’s original post. you can see from the notes how folks responded to her post. i added some commentary but more clearly pored in over the evening. also according to others (i say others because i don’t follow this person so i don’t know the time specifically) soon after she posted this eclecticelectrickwhatever made a post that was passive aggressively referenced some of what struggling spoke to in her post in a way that was dismissive at best. and to me a particularly asshole move because strugg said explicitly that she was writing something brief, at the moment, because she didn’t/couldn’t handle getting deep into it for emotional reasons. i could speak more to what i think about that but i won’t to keep this civil. now what strugg saw/read that caused her to make her post i’m not really sure.