@wtfhistory / wtfhistory.tumblr.com
1956- Gordon Parks documented the everyday lives of an extended black family living in rural Alabama under Jim Crow segregation for Life magazine’s photo-essay “The Restraints: Open and Hidden.” (via)
On the morning of September 4, 1957, fifteen-year-old Dorothy Counts set out on a harrowing path toward Harding High, where-as the first African American to attend the all-white school – she was greeted by a jeering swarm of boys who spat, threw trash, and yelled epithets at her as she entered the building.
Charlotte Observer photographer Don Sturkey captured the ugly incident on film, and in the days that followed, the searing image appeared not just in the local paper but in newspapers around the world.
People everywhere were transfixed by the girl in the photograph who stood tall, her five-foot-ten-inch frame towering nobly above the mob that trailed her. There, in black and white, was evidence of the brutality of racism, a sinister force that had led children to torment another child while adults stood by. While the images display a lot of evils: prejudice, ignorance, racism, sexism, inequality, it also captures true strength, determination, courage and inspiration.
Here she is, age 70, still absolutely elegant and poised.
ok, i am fully sick of this shit, dictionaries are not sparkly magical oases of unbiased truth, utterly untouched by racism or political agenda
whose political agenda exactly? here, lemme show you. i took five minutes to search for the creators and current owners of merriam-webster and the oxford dictionary and this is what i got
noah webster, wrote the first webster’s. did you also know he was a hardxcore american nationalist and christian who thought the written word was explicitly a tool that needed to be used to control public dissent and individualism which he considered to be badwrong? LOOK IT UP, SHITDICK
oh but who owns it now? well websters became merriam-websters which is a subsidiary of encyclopaedia britannica inc. currently, but here are just some of the white dudes who owned the rights to webster’s shit along the way
hello richard warren sears, yes THAT sears, you are looking particular white and rich
senator william benton, yale graduate, founder of benton & bowles advertising company! rockin that rich whiteness
jacqui safra! member of the famous safra banking family, current owner of encyclopaedia britannica, and merriam-webster and spring mountain vineyard, friend of woody allen and financer of EIGHT of his films. how deliciously white and rich you smell.
here is a small sample of the white dudes that collabed on oxford dictionary originally, archbishop trench, herbert coleridge, frederick james furnivall and sir james murray by this point i was 500% done with reading biographies on boring white dudes doing boring white dude things so instead let’s just all bask in how boring and white they are
for added fun the wiki article on the oxford dictionary has a whole section on criticisms that basically outlines exactly the fucking problem here
Despite its claim of authority[5] on the English language, the Oxford English Dictionary has been criticised from various angles. It has become a target precisely because of its massiveness, its claims to authority, and above all its influence. In his review of the 1982 supplement, University of Oxford linguist Roy Harris writes that criticizing the OED is extremely difficult because “one is dealing not just with a dictionary but with a national institution”, one that “has become, like the English monarchy, virtually immune from criticism in principle”.[30]:935 Harris also criticises what he sees as the “black-and-white lexicography” of the Dictionary, by which he means its reliance upon printed language over spoken—and then only privileged forms of printing. He further notes that, while neologisms from respected “literary” authors such as Samuel Beckett and Virginia Woolf are included, usage of words in newspapers or other, less “respectable”, sources hold less sway, although they may be commonly used.[30]:935 He writes that the OED’s “[b]lack-and-white lexicography is also black-and-white in that it takes upon itself to pronounce authoritatively on the rights and wrongs of usage”,[30]:935 faulting the Dictionary’s prescriptive, rather than descriptive, usage. To Harris, this prescriptive classification of certain usages as “erroneous” and the complete omission of various forms and usages cumulatively represent the “social bias[es]” of the (presumably well-educated and wealthy) compilers.[30]:936
so basically, fuck you, you fucking fuck, if you trot out a dictionary definition as proof of racism against white people cuz THE DICTIONARY SAYS that racism is defined only as “racial prejudice or discrimination” (merriam-webster) or “prejudice, discrimination, or antagonism directed against someone of a different race” (oxford).
well guess the fuck what.
RICH WHITE PEOPLE WRITE AND CONTROL ENGLISH DICTIONARIES.
RICH WHITE PEOPLE ARE THE ONES DEFINING THE WORDS THAT MAKE IT INTO ENGLISH DICTIONARIES.
AND IF YOU THINK FOR A SECOND THAT RICH WHITE PEOPLE ARE WITHOUT MAJOR FUCKING BIAS YOU’VE GOT ANOTHER FUCKING THING COMING, MAINLY A WHOLE WORLD OF UNCHALLENGED IGNORANCE
all of this.
what i like to bring up as an example is the tomato. you know how everybody argues about whether or not it’s a fruit or a vegetable? so get this: legally, the tomato is a vegetable. the SCOTUS ruled in 1893 that the tomato is a vegetable because they wanted it to get taxed (at that time there was no tax on fruits and U.S. markets were being flooded by foreign fruits).
you guys, the definition of a tomato had a political agenda.
a fucking tomato.
what on earth does quoting the dictionary on oppression (which is vastly more complex than a tomato, mind you) make you think that you’re somehow unbiased or neutral
For anyone who wants to harass me about the “white dictionary” thing ever again
"I had reasoned this out in my mind, there was one of two things I had a right to, liberty or death; if I could not have one, I would have the other. I freed a thousand slaves I could have freed a thousand more if only they knew they were slaves." —Harriet "OG" Tubman.
I got dressed in my traditional Indian regalia, but there was a man, he was the producer of the whole show. He took that speech away from me and he warned me very sternly. “I’ll give you 60 seconds or less. And if you go over that 60 seconds, I’ll have you arrested. I’ll have you put in handcuffs.”
- Sacheen Littlefeather in Reel Injun (2009), dir. Neil Diamond.
They were MAD, CONFUSED AND PRESSED that Marlon Brando would betray White Supremacy in this way. To this very day, they are TWISTED over this. And when Littlefeather got up there and READ THEM FOR FILTH, they GAGGED. For eons.
So I imagine there are people like me out there who’ve never even heard of Marlon Brando and are extremely confused over why this is important.
Marlon Brando was the Don in The Godfather, and in 1973, he was nominated for and won an Academy Award for it. However, he was also a huge Natives rights activist, and boycotted the ceremony because he felt that Hollywood’s depictions of Native Americans in the media led to the Wounded Knee Incident (which I was always taught as “the second massacre at Wounded Knee” but apparently that’s not the real name). He sent Sacheen Littlefeather, an Apache Native rights activist, in his stead. Wikipedia’s article on her explains the rest:
Brando had written a 15-page speech for Littlefeather to give at the ceremony, but when the producer met her backstage he threatened to physically remove her or have her arrested if she spoke on stage for more than 60 seconds.[5] Her on-stage comments were therefore improvised. She then went backstage and read the entire speech to the press. In his autobiography My Word is My Bond, Roger Moore (who presented the award) claims he took the Oscar home with him and kept it in his possession until it was collected by an armed guard sent by the Academy.
That is what this gifset is about.
Frozen Inuit princesses redesigns. <3 I think it would have been really awesome if they did something like this instead. Either way, it was really fun to gather reference and draw some snowy cuties.
You do realise that Frozen is based on a fairytale by Hans Christian Andersen - a Dane. And let me inform you that the ethnic demografic of Denmark was almost exclusively caucasian until after WWII - so I think it is really unfair to criticise Disney of whitewashing when it was written and takes place in a country where literally everyone was white!
it’s got a fucking talking snowman and a breed of mono-antlered reindeer with split hooves that’s being impossibly ridden like it’s a fucking caribou and you wanna go out of your way to paragraph at someone about “criticism” when it’s just a picture with the caption “would have been cool if it were like this but i had fun drawing”
you literally want to flop in “historical accuracy” when it’s set in a fictional kingdom, with an amalgamation of clothing styles that are either butchered attempts or native to no one, freaking snow magic, and—allow me to repeat— talking snowmen and improper riding of reindeer that aren’t built to be ridden in the first place. but suddenly Inuit redesigns aren’t historically accurate enough? Because the author of a fictional story was a white Dane?? Might you be interested in learning that the earliest known version of Cinderella was about a Greek slave girl and an Egyptian pharaoh? Historical accuracy doesn’t mean squat to Disney and everyone knows it, it’s an extremely tripe card to pull.
you wanna talk history tho? Greenland was settled by pre-Inuit cultures around what is believed to be 2500BC give or take. King Christian IV claimed Greenland for Denmark in the early 1600s. Which they ‘inherited’ from the Norse, who still only got there in about 980 AD a good 3000 years after the Saqqaq culture(pre-Inuit) did.
do you literally think that every single person in Denmark/Scandanavia was some kind of 100% white Aryan wet dream until magically after world war 2 some brown people finally wandered by??? even though they had an entire country full of indigenous peoples under their thumb AND a monopoly on trade with the place until like 1953 like is that really something that is going through your head at this very moment because i am truly aghast.
Ask yourselves why you find yourselves thinking, believing, and vehemently protesting that "there were no PoC in [insert european country here] at the time anyways!!!!" like seriously sit down and think about who taught you that white people hold a monopoly on existing every goddamn where.
It’s fanart, a redesign, based on what would have been neat. and there’s literally zero reason to tear it apart just because you’re uncomfortable about the fact that they’re not white.
Also Caucasian is not another word for white
We always like a good smackdown
So never ever try to disguise racism with "historical accuracy" because I will smack you into the 14th century.
Cecil Williams in the 1950s - and today. I am taking the liberty of posting Mr. Williams again so people can see him now. From my original post: I thought about this searing, beautiful picture today in light of recent events in the United States. I, like many others, shared it a few years ago on my blog, but it was only today that I finally found the name of the man in the photograph! His name is Cecil Williams and, he happens to be a photographer himself.
The photo was probably taken by Mr. Williams’s mentor, John Goodwin, who joined him for a talk at Richland Library in Columbia, South Carolina in September 2013 about their experiences as black photographers in South Carolina during Jim Crow and the Civil Rights era.
Mr. Williams, an Orangeburg, South Carolina native was a correspondent for Jet Magazine when he was only 15 and made national news after shooting some crucial pictures after the 1968 Orangeburg Massacre.
This picture of Mr. Williams currently hangs over the water fountain on the Garden level of the Richland Library in Columbia, South Carolina.
I have always wondered who that awesome man was, and where he was now. Thanks so much for this post.
Right on.
Actual Irish person here. Yes, Irish immigrants experienced prejudice. Ireland itself had centuries of oppression under English rule. These things are NOT THE SAME as historical and ongoing oppression against POC in America. (Also fuck you, you don't give even the tiniest shit about what my ancestors experienced. You're just using it to score imaginary internet points. I keep seeing my heritage brought up like this and used against POC and I am SICK OF IT.)
This is something I've seen compared a LOT and it's really ridiculous. While both are serious issues of oppression and while the American and Irish Civil Rights struggles have been compared and contrasted, they are two entirely different things.
You don't get to point to the plight of the Irish under English occupation as some gross excuse for racially based oppression just because they were the first example of oppressed white people you could think of. You don't know what you're talking about, show me some sources or sit the fuck down.
Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present by Harriet A. Washington (via callingoutbigotry)
(Not fun, actually terrible) Fun fact!
There was a eugenics program in California in the 1900s that was SO "successful" that professionals in the Nazi Germany regime contacted them to get advice on racial cleansing.
The Nazis. Asked California. To assist them.
And California fucking helped.
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