I have not had time to watch this yet, but it seems very interesting!
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Charles M. Blow was on CBS Sunday Morning, discussing Juneteenth and erasure of Black History:
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Black elders aren’t reacting to Trumpism as if it’s a new threat. They’re reacting to it like a return. The slogans are different. The tech is fancier. But the menace feels identical. This isn’t abstract for them. It’s embodied. It lives in their bones and blood pressure. Trump doesn’t just remind them of Jim Crow. He is Jim Crow, reborn in a musty red hat.
She thinks the parade is cover. That white supremacists are going to treat it like open season on Black neighborhoods.
This is a woman who was crowned Miss A&T back when being a poised, brilliant Black college student was itself a radical act. Her husband was president of two HBCUs. She was in grad school at Jackson State in 1970, the night white cops fired hundreds of rounds into a women’s dormitory. She knows people who were lynched or were “run out of the South,” as the elders say.
Now, as she approaches the sunset of her life, all those memories she tried to keep folded neatly in the back of her mind have come rushing to the surface, vivid and untamed. She talks incessantly about lynchings like they happened last week. She asks me questions like:
“Do you have gas or electric at your house?”
“Electric.”
“Good. Because you know they can blow up entire Black neighborhoods through the gas lines.”
Black elders aren’t reacting to Trumpism as if it’s a new threat. They’re reacting to it like a return. The slogans are different. The tech is fancier. But the menace feels identical. This isn’t abstract for them. It’s embodied. It lives in their bones and blood pressure. Trump doesn’t just remind them of Jim Crow. He is Jim Crow, reborn in a musty red hat.
What we’re witnessing is generational PTSD triggered in real time. These Black elders are people whose nervous systems were trained to flinch at sirens and white laughter. Who were taught to read the temperature of a room, a street, a nation, for signs of violence hiding in plain sight. Trump’s presence in the White House doesn’t just offend their politics, it reanimates their terror.
So when my Village Mama says she’s sleeping in a hotel away from Black neighborhoods during the Nazi parade, I don’t dismiss it as old-folks’ paranoia.
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What we’re witnessing is generational PTSD triggered in real time.
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What I am thinking is we are getting ready to see this generation’s Kennedy/Kent State/Challenger/911 moment, the “You will always remember where you were when…” I don’t know what the actual event will be, but I am terrified of what it might be. Please, everybody, try to stay safe and don’t fall for the traps they will unquestionably set for us.
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Yeah, I’m inclined to agree…
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For the first time ever, Juneteenth and the John Brown Jamboree coincided this year.
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Some interesting analysis from FD, as usual. But this also introduced me to a term and movement within Black politics that I was not familiar with, the term, at least. FBA / ADOS…
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What does FBA mean?
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Foundational Black Americans, apparently…
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There were Blacks in Colonial America who were never enslaved but still had a much more difficult and dangerous time (and lack of human and civil rights) so it’s good that they’re included rather than separated out.
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In his efforts to demolish and disappear Black culture and the institutions that support it, Trump has made a loud admission: if he truly believed that Black culture were inferior, he would be leaving it on display and intact. Its mere existence would prove white supremacy. Trump knows the real threat of Black culture that has been shortchanged in the public DEI discourse, as his administration is a metaphor in itself for mythology of white supremacy: extensively kleptocratic, grossly inept and held in power by depraved and ruthless violence. As Haki Madhubuti, a BAM founding father, explains of the movement’s endgame: “The mission is how do we become a whole people, and how do we begin to essentially tell our narrative, while at the same time move toward a level of success in this country and in the world? And we can do that. I know we can do that.” Trump’s great fear is knowing we can, too.
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Has this been posted? It’s from a couple of weeks ago…
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