scATX: Speaker's Corner in the ATX

ABC reported today:

Gingrich, who found himself in hot water last month for saying America’s child labor laws are “truly stupid,” called on Trump to create an “Apprentice”-style program for 10 inner-city New York children to teach them “work ethic.”

“We’re going to be picking 10, young, wonderful children, and we’re going to make them ‘apprenti,’” Trump said after a high-profile meeting with Gingrichon Monday. “We’re going to have a little fun with it, and I think it’s going to be something that is really going to prove results. But it was Newt’s idea, and I think it’s a great idea.”

While it is unclear if the program will run as a reality TV show, like Trump’s NBC show “The Apprentice,” Gingrich said the program is intended to give students “an opportunity to earn money, and get them into a habit of showing up and realizing that hard work gets rewarded.”

Gingrich, the current GOP front-runner, has been a target of fierce attacks from unions and liberal commentators after he said poor school districts should fire unionized janitors and replace them with schoolchildren.

“Young children who are poor ought to learn how to go to work,” he said, defending his stance in an interview with ABC’s Jake Tapper last week. “What I’ve said is, for example, it would be great if inner city schools and poor neighborhood schools actually hired the children to do things. Some of the things they could do is work in the library, work in the front office. Some of them frankly, could be janitorial.”

Maybe I am biased because I know history, but when I hear about white guys wanting to offer apprenticeships to children from poor neighborhoods, especially since Mr. Gingrich is talking specifically about “inner city” children, I think of another time when white dudes “apprenticed” black people: post-emancipation Jamaica.

This is what post-emancipation Jamaica’s “apprenticeship” program was:

Although emancipation laws required former masters to provide apprentices with lodging and food, many owners charged for food or for rent in the form of extra labor. The special magistrates were intended to put a stop to these injustices, but they could not be at every plantation at once, and the majority worked extremely hard to improve the conditions of the apprentices.

Another problem of apprenticeship was the division of labor hours. The apprentices were required to work 40.5 hours per week for the master, but the hours were not divided. While special magistrates fought for a nine-hour day – leaving the apprentices half a day on Friday as well as Saturday free for other work – planters almost always insisted on eight-hour days, meaning the apprentices were not given much time for their own.

The plantation owners also charged exorbitant rates to former slaves who wanted to buy their own freedom, though nearly 1,500 did in two years – the highest recorded sum being more than £100. Planters were also known to work their apprentices more harshly than they had when the blacks were slaves, with more brutal punishments as well.

Such brutal punishments included the treadmill: This had been introduced to Jamaica by Lord Sligo in an attempt to help the apprentices because he had always hated the use of whips, particularly on women. The treadmill is not like those we know today, but instead was a large cylinder with a series of steps attached to it. The person’s weight on these steps caused the cylinder to spin, and they would have to step quickly to remain standing. If a person fainted or fell, he would hang by the wrists tied to a handrail while the steps hit him.

Image of said treadmill:

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On Thursday, my partner and our son participated in Austin’s Turkey Trot. I had my camera with me to document our son running his first 1K. I ended up using it to also document some of the people who chose to “celebrate” Thanksgiving by running in a race while wearing a “costume” that was supposed to represent Native Americans and/or their culture (I guess).

This is not okay.

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The website from where I took this image from has this caption:

A group of Native American Indians, part of the Indians of All Tribes Inc., occupying the former prison at Alcatraz Island, stand under graffiti welcoming Indian occupiers to United Indian Property on the dock of Alcatraz Island, San Fransico Bay, Ca., Nov. 25, 1969. The occupiers are demanding a visit by Secretary of the Interior to discuss possession of the surplus mid-bay property.

Part of the reason Native American chose to occupy Alcatraz:

The website from where I took the above image (of Hopi prisoners at Alcatraz in 1895) say this:

Nineteen members of the Hopi Tribe, called “Hostiles” by government agents, made up the largest group of Indian prisoners to be confined on Alcatraz. Their crimes were unique in the 140-year history of incarceration on the Rock: they wouldn’t farm in the ways the federal government instructed them, and they opposed the forced removal and education of their children in government boarding schools. Both “offenses” were part of widespread Indian resistance to U.S. policies designed to erase each tribe’s language and religion.

Did you catch that? Hopi Indians were prisoners at ALCATRAZ because they refused to give their children over to the US government for the government’s late-nineteenth/early-twentieth century Indian boarding schools. They refused the forced removal of their children so that the government could send them to military-style boarding schools (to which the children could go for 9, 10, 12 years before returning home and where a fair amount of Indian children).

Sometimes US history literally blows my mind.  This happened here. In the US. Hopi Indians sent to Alcatraz because they wouldn’t turn their children over to the US govt (before the government arrested Native Americans and sent them to federal prison, they simply withheld food and subsistence from them).

Here’s the history of the occupation of the island (from here):

October 9, 1969 – American Indian Center in San Francisco burns down. It had been a meeting place that served 30,000 Indian people with social programs. The loss of the center focuses Indian attention on taking over Alcatraz for use as a new facility.

November 9, 1969 – Mohawk Indian Richard Oakes leads an attempt to occupy Alcatraz Island twice in one day. Fourteen Native Americans stay overnight and leave peacefully the following morning.

November 20, 1969 – The 19-month occupation of Alcatraz begins when approximately 80-90 American Indians – mostly college students – take over the island.

December 1969 – Members of the American Indian Movement, led by AIM co-founder Dennis Banks (Leech Lake Ojibwe), arrive at Alcatraz. After about two weeks, they return to Minneapolis bringing new ideas about confrontational activism and land seizure as a tool to confront the federal government’s Indian policies.

August 1970 – California governor Ronald Reagan announces a $50,000 planning grant to the Bay Area Native American Council for programs addressing the needs of urban Indians in the San Francisco Bay Area.

June 11, 1971 – The 15 remaining Alcatraz occupiers are escorted off the island by U.S. marshals and FBI agents, officially ending the 19-month, nine-day long occupation.

Great selection of photos from the occupation.

Alcatraz was just the beginning of the Indian Occupy movement (quote via):

Today, the Alcatraz occupation is recognized as the springboard for the rise of Indian activism that began in 1969 and continued into the late 1970s, as evidence by the large number of occupations that occurred shortly after the November 20, 1969 landing. These occupations continued through the BIA headquarters takeover in 1972, Wounded Knee II in 1973, and the June 26, 1975 shootout between American Indian Movement members and Federal Bureau of Investigation agents on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. Alcatraz was the catalyst for this new activism as it became more organized and more “pan-Indian.” Many of the approximately seventy-four occupations of federal facilities and private lands that followed Alcatraz were either planned by or included people who had been involved in the occupation of the island.

40 people riding a bus.

Last night I finally started watching the Freedom Riders’ documentary that aired on PBS in May (Oprah did a big lead up to it, also).

At the beginning of the documentary, a historian discussing the Jim Crow South remarks that the entire system was so incredibly precarious that EVERYTHING in the society, down to where people sat on a bus, had to reinforce the inferiority of people of color and the superiority of whites.  If one thing, even a tiny thing, suggested that a different type of society was possible/better or that people of color did, in fact, share the humanity of their white counterparts, the whole system could quickly come crashing down.

So, in reaction to this fear of the unstable nature of the Jim Crow system, white people often acted in ways that were shocking, violent, and completely disproportionate to the apparent threat.

For example, when a group of a dozen or so people (both white and black) rode through the south on a bus attempting to de-segregate some bus terminals, a mob of white people did this to bus (luckily no one was killed):

I’ve only made it through half of the documentary.  And so far, forty people have participated in the Freedom Rides (the number eventually rises close to 400 – at this link, I am talking about the May 4 and May 16 riders).  The level of violent response from white Southerners to these bus riders was so high that it got the ear and eye of the President of the US (JFK) and his attorney general (RFK).  In Montgomery in 1961, a mob threatened a church full of 1500 people who had gathered in support of the Freedom Riders, during which MLK spoke directly on the phone to RFK, and JFK and RFK forced the governor of the state to provide military protection to those people held hostage in the church.

40 people riding a bus.

Here’s the thing: those racists in the South were right.  The Jim Crow system was incredibly precarious.  Obviously.  Because all* it took to get JFK and RFK to really pay attention to what was happening to people of color in the South was for a few dozen brave, young adults to climb on board a bus and dare to ride it through Alabama and Mississippi.

*By “all” I am talking about people literally putting their bodies and their lives on the line.  By “all”, I am mainly referring to the very small number of people who very openly and vocally put their bodies and lives on the line (because, of course, in the every day of the Jim Crow South any person of color especially or any ally was constantly in danger and always threatened).

Also, ironically (or, perhaps, nicely) by reacting with such a high level of hate/anger/violence (which is, in and of itself, implicitly admitting to the shaky nature of the system in place), white Southerners gave this small group of Freedom Riders the power to affect change.  It showed the rest of the country and even large portions of the world how much the South depended on violent underpinnings to function, how dangerous life was for people of color, and how easily things could unravel.

40 people riding a bus.

It took years, much more violence, much of it at the hands of the government that supposedly existed to protect all its citizens, and the sacrifice of many more people before there were major legal advances in civil rights.  And certainly that struggle has not ended.

But these Freedom Riders, by refusing to be violent in the face of violence and by doing something as simple as riding a bus, showed the very precarious nature of the racist Jim Crow system.

How brave.  How breathtaking.

How simple an act, how large a consequence.

How incredibly awe-inspiring.

How important. How necessary.

40 people riding a bus.

Confederate License Plates May Soon Hit Texas

No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No.

From the Texas State Library & Archives Commission:

Although only about 22,000 Texas families, approximately one in four, owned slaves, and most slave-holders lived in the eastern part of the state, most Texans believed that slavery was vital for continued prosperity. The election of President Abraham Lincoln in November 1860 alarmed them. In a June 1858 speech Lincoln had stated, “A house divided against itself cannot stand. I believe this government cannot endure permanently half slave and half free. I do not expect the Union to be dissolved. I do not expect the house to fall, but I do expect it will cease to be divided.”

At a state convention held in Austin in early 1861, delegates voted 166 to 8 to secede from the Union. (Some 70 percent of the delegates owned slaves.) Texans overwhelmingly approved the ordinance of secession, and in late March, Texas joined the Confederacy.

Who thinks: “TEXANS USED TO LURVE SLAVERY! We should put that on a license plate”?

[h/t MV]

You never know what you will find on Tumblr.

My favorite Tumblr right now is Wicked Knickers, this amazing vintage erotica site [WARNING: No links on this post are safe to view wherever you don't want people to know you are viewing porn].

Where do they get these old school pornographic images?  I love it because it breaks down this false belief that somehow we became more sexual and less-prudish after the so-called sexual revolution of the 1960s.  Lesbian porn from the 1920s?  Yes, please.  A turn-of-the-century threesome?  OKAY!

See, kids – history can be fun!

From MSNBC:

Starting this weekend Sarah Palin will embark on a one nation tour of historical sites that were key to the formation survival and growth of the United States of America. The tour will originate in Washington DC. and will proceed north up the East Coast.

This woman doesn’t seem know a damn thing about the history of this country.  So, her choice of “historical sites” should be good.  I’m sure they will prominently feature sites where white dudes did some things.

Since the Paul father and son duo can’t seem to stop using slavery as the metaphor they use to talk about their dislike of the government providing social services to the needy, I propose a crash course on what actually counts as slavery.

Slavery is slavery.

Human bondage is slavery.

Human chattel is slavery.

The absence of personhood, humanity, and citizenship is slavery.

Violence and death are slavery.

That’s it.

You’re welcome.

I hope this means we can stop talking about slavery as anything other than slavery. If nothing else, do it for the enslaved – those people who were exploited for centuries in this country, brutally beaten and raped, and who died in numbers too large to comprehend. Do it for the millions of people around the world who are currently enslaved right now at this moment.

When you call Social Security or Universal healthcare slavery, you erase all those peopl, all the enslaved from the books. They were/are the enslaved, Pauls. You are lucky you will never know what it means to be them.

[TW for extreme violence and dehumanization]

UPDATED: Here’s video of Paul making his remarks and watching it just makes me livid.  What a privileged, selfish never-been-thirsty-or-hungry-one-day-in-his-life jerk:

Listening to him, it makes me to want to say this, too:

If the government creates universal health care, it’s not enslaving the janitor or the person who cleans the hospital.  It’s ensuring that they have both jobs and health care.

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[I got the title from a Tweet that @MacGuffinPuffin sent me today with the link to this image.]