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Three Good Links

@protoslacker / protoslacker.tumblr.com

I read posts online that interest, infuriate, stimulate, inspire, or otherwise move me. I'll share short snippets. Mastodon Shuffle
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Furthermore, social services agencies in the twentieth century treated Native families as incapable of raising their own children. By 1978, 25% to 35% of all Native children in the U.S. were removed from their homes and placed in foster care, adoptive homes, or institutions. In nearly all cases, Native children were placed with families who were not Native, leading to the widespread loss of children’s cultural identity and connection with their tribal communities.

Wenona Singel in MSUToday. Faculty voice: Intergenerational trauma to indigenous families is real

Via Turtle Talk. November is Native American Heritiage Month. Professor Singel is writing a book about her family. It's important work. Earlier in the Month Turtle "Talk there was a post about Matthew Fletcher's fortcoming short story collection, Stick Houses.Stories are essential to the generations.

#native american heritage#intergenerational trauma#crt#stories#healing
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www.bbc.com

The work is not very big and we think he [Banksy] just came into the museum like any other visitor and installed it himself - but we just can't be sure.

At first sight the British Museum seems to be a reinforcement, if not a celebration, of authority. But... there are extraordinary objects that bear witness to someone questioning the authorised version of their times and deciding to make a small though often lasting protest.

Ian Hislop quoted in an article at BBC (May 2018). Banksy hoax caveman art to go back on display at British Museum

#question authority#bansky#museums
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As November's election date drew closer it became clear that so many people in my community are in a media/information bubble that is foreign to me. I work a lot and don't have lots of time for the news of the day. So I probably fall into some sort of bubble too.

It's a day off today and following the news I am astonished how Trump's Cabinet is shaping up: Tulsi Gabbard as Director of National Intelligence, Pete Hegseth as Defense Secretary, and Matt Gaetz as Attorney General.

Following Trump's vow to be dictator from day one, he is demanding that the Republican Senate Majority Leader let him make Cabinet appointments without the Constitutional requirement of Senate approval. It is unclear to me whether or not John Thune has obeyed in advance with Trump's demand. But I presume he's keen to eliminate any idea of checks and balances.

#dj tump#dictatorship#autocaracy#kakistocracy.
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Book bans – often initiated by school boards, legislators and prison authorities  – are one of the most symbolic forms of censorship, but our findings also suggest they are being used as a form of political activism. This means that in addition to the traditional questions around censorship, such as what information children have or don’t have access to, there are questions about the political actions behind book bans and how they might attract or dampen a community’s civic participation.

Katherine Spoon and Isabelle Langrock at The Conversation. Most US book bans target children’s literature featuring diverse characters and authors of color

Journal article: Book bans in political context: Evidence from US schools

#book bans#whiteness#politics
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Roy is the human manifestation of whatever it is that the word ‘hip’ was supposed to mean before it just became a word. Always in the moment, always in this time, eternal and classic and at the same time totally nonchalant about it.

Pat Metheny quoted in an obituary of Roy Haynes by Ben Beaumont-Thomas and Safi Bugel in The Guardian.

Roy Haynes, jazz drummer whose career spanned nine decades, dies aged 99

American drummer who began in 1940s swing and bebop scenes played with Charlie Parker, John Coltrane and dozens more

#music#roy haynes#RIP
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Miriam Makeba - A luta continua (1981)

Les archives de la RTS

At work we use Zebra mobile computers. They're very expensive mobile phones with too many wonky apps that have become essential to our work. Of course they are password-protected. When I went to sign my user name into the space it was already filled with "Go Trump!." I wondered what I could leave on a phone instead. My first thought was "A luta continua!"

It's too obscure a reference to cause any good trouble.

The song was written by Miriam Makeba's daughter Bongi. Bongi died from complications of a pregnacy in 1985 at the age of 34. Her death affeced Miram Makeba deeply.

Miriam Makeba's life is very inspiring. She cared. She struggled. She suffered much. And she still cared deeply for the lives of orinary people.

A Luta Continua a track on Miraiam Makeba's 1989 album Welela.

#music#miriam makeba#struggle#a luta continua#Youtube
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The ancient Greeks populated the city for six centuries, spanning three major periods of Greek history−Archaic, Classical, and Hellenistic, from 631 BCE until 96 BCE. During the following two centuries, the ancient Roman empire expanded and ruled the area. Both cultures left an indelible mark on the region’s history; sacred temples honoring mythological gods can still be visited today. During this long stretch of time, marked by shifts in literacy, medicine, and art, the economy in Cyrene prospered due to the increasingly popular silphium plant; proof is found in ancient silver coins that bear the plant’s image. Because of its limited geographic distribution, the plant was extremely expensive−harvested and shipped at great cost across land and sea−and yet remained popular and highly sought after among many love-thirsty people.

Maria Christodoulou at The Herbal Academy. The Herbs That Got Away: Rediscovering Silphium and Other Missing Historical Plants

I hadn't heard of silphium until reading Aaron Bady's recent article about people having children. I am glad I found out about it.

#plants#history#extinction#contraception
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The horror of class stratification, racism, and prejudice is that some people begin to believe that the security of their families and communities depends on the oppression of others, that for some to have good lives there must be others whose lives are truncated and brutal. It is a belief that dominates this culture. It is what makes the poor whites of the South so determinedly racist and the middle class so contemptuous of the poor. It is a myth that allows some to imagine that they build their lives on the ruin of others, a secret core of shame for the middle class, a goad and a spur to the marginal working class, and cause enough for the homeless and poor to feel no constraints on hatred or violence. 

Dorothy Allison at History Is A Weapon. A Question of Class

An obituary by Brittany Allen at LitHub. Dorothy Allison, author and force of nature, has died.

#dorothy allison#RIP
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Whiteness, then, is a political project. It is distinct from, but often acts in concert with, the political projects of making and sustaining nation, ethnicity, and ethnic nationalisms. Whiteness is a political project and it is also a logic, by which I mean it is a calculus, a way of sorting oneself and others into categories of those who must be protected and those who are, or soon will be, expendable.

Christina Sharpe in The New Inquiry (Nov. 2016. Lose Your Kin

White people must refuse reconciliation to ongoing brutality; they must rend the fabric of the kinship narrative

#whiteness#slavery#racial capitalism#throw away people#garbage
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Big Daddy Trump

I start work at 5:30 AM, but on Tuesday I voted before going to work. I was in line before the polls opened at 7:00 and there were already about a hundred people in line. As the line wound around inside the firehall I could see from the window that about a hundred more people had joined the line. I wondered if I was the only one voting for Democrats? There was a Black couple in line. I felt that even if they were voting for Trump, they were probably as uncomfortable in this crowd as I.

In 1988 I was student teaching fifth grade in a rural Pennsylvania school. I made a unit on elections. The bulletin board I made featured the infamous picture of a helimited Michael Dukakis riding in a tank. I felt quite a lot of pressure not to expose my political biases.

I was nervous when presenting a lesson to the students. My tongue got tied. I said "regular erections" instead of "regular elections." I had to pretend not to notice the observing teacher's expression at the back of the classroom.

I had made cards with imaginary voters in the 1912 election. The cards provided a brief biography of a person and who they voted for. As the 19th Amendment hadn't been ratified in 1912, not everyone could vote. Each student took a card, I don't remember what the writing prompt was, but they were supposed to write something.

One boy's essay was an argument against electing a women president. The argument was succinct: If a women is elected then we wouldn't have any freedom.

George Lakoff contends that Americans tend to view the nation through a metaphor of the family and the government as parents. He contrasts a strict-father model of parenting with a nurturing-parent model. Pundits often present Trump as a "strict father" presidency.

Standing in line to vote there was a guy wearing a t-shirt with Trump's Georgia mugshot image and the tag, "I'm voting for the convicted felon." Another shirt in the crowd read "Fast Cars and Freedom."

An American ten year old knows he's got to do what his mother tells him to do, so the notion of a woman as president connotes a constriction of freedom. It would seem that as violent and capricious as Trump is, seeing him as a "strict father" implies that freedom must available through fecklessness.

#politics#metaphor#misogyny#authoritarianism
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In my decades of research in the archival correspondence of Black feminist writers I have found the words that serve as the title of this letter again and again: “stay strong.” These words appear as a form of sisterly punctuation across a range of events. Health episodes, break-ups, deaths in the family and community, horrible headlines, and, yes, election results and their aftermath. The alliteration of “stay strong” circulating among Black women writers—those intentional wordsmiths—in no way buys into the unhealthy stereotype of Black women, those whose labor and presence is a deciding factor in so many movements, industries, and elections, as a form superhuman strength that can take infinite abuse while continuing to provide infinite care. In fact, it is the quite the opposite. The words “stay strong” between sisters acknowledge vulnerability and grief, an intimacy of witness that reminds us that we do not have to pretend to be okay when we are not. 

Alexis Pauline Gumbs in Southern Cultures. “stay strong”

#love#black feminist traditions#stay strong#power with
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So for me it’s been important to think about things like sound as a space of invitation I want to create and occupy; that I want for others; that I want to be in with others who generate that. I think that’s a space academic work can make possible and has increasingly been made possible. I think there’s work that’s emerged that does that now, that is inviting. I don’t mean that makes it easy. I don’t think that makes it, you know, digestible. But I think it holds you in its beautiful sentences. And that holding lets you go where you need to go and sometimes these are very difficult places to be.

K'eguro Macharia in an article in Parallax Journal (Vol. 29 2023-issue 2). ‘You don’t have revolution without sound’: A Conversation between Christina Sharpe, Françoise Vergès and K’eguro Macharia

This conversation is wonderful. K'eguro's "sound as a space of invitation" captures how the participants listened to one another and invited their responses. The invitation extends to the reader too.

#conversation#keguro macharia#christina sharpe#francoise veres#breathe
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Hrdy contends we are now in an evolutionary moment where the relationship between genes and phenotypes is being radically revised. Citing Mary Jane West-Eberhard’s wasp studies, she observes that genes are often the “followers rather than the initiators of evolutionary change”; rather than the kind of “operating system” that an analogy with computer code would suggest, our genes might be better understood as a toolkit of inherited and latent possibilities for organisms to draw from as the world around them changes. Nothing is more natural, in other words, than for what is “natural” in a species to change (and to do so by reviving genetic possibilities that we might tend to associate with our non-primate evolutionary ancestors). When the world is changed—or when we’ve changed the material conditions of the world in which we reproduce—our “nature” is to evolve to thrive in our new context.

Aaron Bady on Sarah Blaffer Hrdy in an essay at The Boston Review. The Parenting Panic

Contrary to both far right and mainstream center-left, there’s no epidemic of chosen childlessness.

#evolution#culture#change
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