Microblog Memes
A place to share screenshots of Microblog posts, whether from Mastodon, tumblr, ~~Twitter~~ X, KBin, Threads or elsewhere.
Created as an evolution of White People Twitter and other tweet-capture subreddits.
RULES:
- Your post must be a screen capture of a microblog-type post that includes the UI of the site it came from, preferably also including the avatar and username of the original poster. Including relevant comments made to the original post is encouraged.
- Your post, included comments, or your title/comment should include some kind of commentary or remark on the subject of the screen capture. Your title must include at least one word relevant to your post.
- You are encouraged to provide a link back to the source of your screen capture in the body of your post.
- Current politics and news are allowed, but discouraged. There MUST be some kind of human commentary/reaction included (either by the original poster or you). Just news articles or headlines will be deleted.
- Doctored posts/images and AI are allowed, but discouraged. You MUST indicate this in your post (even if you didn't originally know). If an image is found to be fabricated or edited in any way and it is not properly labeled, it will be deleted.
- Absolutely no NSFL content.
- Be nice. Don't take anything personally. Take political debates to the appropriate communities. Take personal disagreements & arguments to private messages.
- No advertising, brand promotion, or guerrilla marketing.
RELATED COMMUNITIES:
From the Wikipedia page
A newspaper account at the time suggested that Seneca Village would "not be forgotten"
Then later
The settlement was largely forgotten for more than a century after its demolition.
Also just kinda interesting that one of the residents was named Edward Snowden.
https://www.latimes.com/projects/us-freeway-highway-expansion-black-latino-communities/
Still happening to this day. This is in Houston 5 years ago.
Austin wiped out the lower income families for lofts.
Or Tulsa, where the whites were like “go make your own black town!” So they did, and prospered while the whites stayed poor. So the whites just straight up raped, pillaged and burned the black town and got away with it
Worse part of The Tulsa Race Massacre is it took fucking tv show for it to become widely known. My wife and ex wife grew up here never heard of it. Not fucking once had it been taught in schools. Now the local media talks about it constantly. But only because it had been exposed by the HBO show Watchman. Fucking racist fucks all around.
Not just the local whites, the government bombed and shot them.
Where I live they ran an interstate highway right through where the black business district was. Ripped through the middle of town. I hate that highway so much, they keep adding lanes too. Fucking racist twats and the effects reverberate to this day, no transit just more lanes because of handshake agreements between good ol' boys in the 1960s.
"Nothing changes, even when it wants to" Hayes Carll
People will see your comment and think "hey that sounds like my city", but you could say this about basically every major city in the US.
they ran an interstate highway right through where the black business district was
Do you have any idea how little that narrows it down?
This is part of what's called redlining.
To offer a refinement, if I can, redlining is adjacent to this highway abuse, so, easy to join them; same racially driven bastardry, different technique.
Redlining was a real estate / financial tool that kept certain homes on a map from having access to resources. Sort of like financial gerrymandering. It's kinda cool, in a privileged way, to see a city's ghetto map and a redlined map overlaid; there is little difference.
Anyway, I couldn't find a term for this neighborhood wrecking highway practice, but did find this article that goes into detail and links the book Dividing by Design.
The Roads That Tear Communities Apart https://share.google/6G6B8K9VNck1Cb0ZW
To add to y'all's reading list:
Dulles Airport (the big international airport that serves Washington DC and Northern Virginia) did the same: https://travelnoire.com/town-destroyed-international-airport
Also, maybe tangentially related, The Tulsa Race Massacre: https://www.okhistory.org/publications/enc/entry?entry=TU013
Plus the interstate system specifically chose to go right through black neighborhoods if they could
This is what happened in Hartford CT. Fucking ugliest, shit city I've ever been to. They ruined the whole fucking city because, racism. I believe the highway was built sometime in the 50s/60s and it's still a plague on the city.
Holy fuck I was not prepared for the sheer amount of similar events described in the comments. It's is almost as if racist people are inferior human beings, unable to understand empathy. Hen and egg problem, I guess. But yeah, w.r.t. structural racism, a Zager & Evans verse comes to mind: "[..] or tear it down - and start again."
The Gateway Arch National Park in St. Louis was also a black community that got bulldozed. Unsurprisingly common
Now look up the Tulsa Massacre
Once i learned about what they did I can't forget it and will always bring up to people when relevant. Fucking insane what they burned it to the ground because they couldn't stand successful black people. And not one person ever faced justice for this.
It's very similar to how a lot of Americans didn't know about the Tulsa Race Massacre until it was in The Watchmen.
WTF
It is common to the point where you can look at pretty much any major public improvement or monument in an American city and odds are pretty good that some black folks lived there before it got built. That is ALWAYS the property that needs to be "improved" by stuff like this. Like, "hey we turned this shitty black neighborhood into a big arch or a field of flowers, what an improvement!"
Per the Wikipedia article, fewer than 20% of the Seneca Village residents owned the land they lived on - most was owned by local landlords who were paid pretty exorbitant amounts for their land in the final settlements (the final cost of the land was more than the US would later pay for the entirety of Alaska, and the Wikipedia article also notes one landowner who made more than 10x on his initial investment).
Also worth noting that of the ~1600 total residents displaced for the construction of Central Park, ~225 were from Seneca Village and large numbers of those displaced were also Irish and German.
Africatown Mobile, Alabama
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Africatown
In recent years they've done an archeology mission to find the Clotilda.
was formed by a group of 32 West Africans, who in 1860 were bought and transported against their will in the last known illegal shipment of slaves to the United States.
So as I remember the story--and perhaps the references in the article will be more accurate, bur a slaver made a bet with somebody that he could still traffick slaves after it became illegal. He arrived in Mobile, AL with slaves on his boat and went to collect on his bet. He left the crew with instructions to burn the ship and everyone on board (i.e. get rid of the evidence) if he did not return. And that's what they did. The people who founded Africatown escaped the fire.
The Wiki article says similar, but that the slaves were removed before scuttling the ship. Good if true, I guess. My memory isn't great.
Edit: typos
Writing races/skin colour with a capitalized letter seems strange when it doesn't include a continent name
Black, with a capital, is a culture. It’s fairly old news at this point, but the point is that it’s because of the shared experience and lack of ancestral knowledge of those people becaus of things like the slave trade and ongoing, systemic racism. They don’t get to say “African” because they were completely cut off from that culture, which is already such a wrong thing to say because “Africa” is not a single place nor a single culture, nor even only a dozen places with a few dozen cultures(it’s a helluva lot more). Besides, after developing their own strong cultures, Haitian or Jamaican immigrants are far more from there than from anywhere in Africa.
“White” is not a culture. White people will very often tell you where their family is from, to the city, without even being asked and if you don’t know you can even just look at the last name they were able to keep when their ancestors arrived in North America. White people have the privilege to not be lumped together in our society and being referred to by their country in Europe far more often than by simply “European” while Black people will just get a useless “African” tacked in front of their country of residence’s name.
Portland, Oregon did this with a hospital too
https://www.opb.org/article/2020/12/16/portland-oregon-affordable-housing-reparations/
The USA has always been hostile to non-white people.
Shit, they were hostile to the wrong kind of white people for most of the time as well...
Should have seen my face when re-watching The Pitt, getting to the part of the pacemaker/first paramedics arc. Opening wikipedia and being blown away by what I learnt.
But no, let's keep the fact that "black people invented peanut butter" as the cool fact. Not "black people helped standardise first aid"...
Just about everywhere in the US was taken from someone. And almost always a marginalized individual. All the way back to the native americans. It how human be human apparently.
People are erased all the time, our job is to make sure they were at least documented and were. The current administration is trying to erase recent and distant history. Hoard the data. Keep the dates. Write it down on paper, but still, we are watching the library burn in front of us.
Reminds me of Watchmen teaching a lot of Oklahomans about their black wall street.
On the one hand, every country has a fucked up history that they ain't teaching in classes. I learned most of my countries real history through reading books about this times
On the other hand: the US has a particular brutal and fucked up history that they ain't teaching