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@newworldavengers
New World Avengers of Haiti
Most of their names are unknown. But we celebrate all of our revolutionary Ancestors as we call upon some of the shining ones: https://www.teepublic.com/t-shirt/360847-new-world-avengers-of-haiti
Blerdy Haitian-Americans of a certain age and silliness might appreciate this one: https://www.teepublic.com/t-shirt/360268-bwa-kayiman-blerd
In any case, we’ve called out the bad guys. Now let’s celebrate. January 1st is coming soon.
“If trashing this flag offends you, you need a history lesson.”
Over the July 4th weekend, while visiting Gettysburg, PA with my family, I walked up to a family (parents and a teenager) who were all wearing Confederate Flag t-shirts. The man was wearing a bizarre early 90s throwback (“you wear your X and I’ll wear mine”) and the woman and their daughter were wearing the unintentionally ironic “if this flag offends you, you need a history lesson.”
I politely asked for a history lesson. “Teach me the history that would make someone who finds that flag offensive find it inoffensive.” They obliged and said the Confederacy and their flag was about state rights and resisting federal tyranny. The man said he won’t deny slavery was part of it, but said the cause was mainly about state’s rights.
I wanted to laugh. These people are ignorant of basic facts, but they still walk around “flagging” in costumes intended to provoke.
Prior to approaching them, I pointed to them and told my wife I had never met anyone with their viewpoint that could explain their perspective with valid arguments supported by credible and primary sources. I was curious whether they might be the ones to offer something new that at least sounded remotely “truthy.” Although we were in Gettysburg, where Civil War history is celebrated and recalled all year, nothing changed.
I told them how the words written by Confederates to describe their government and cause explicitly state that keeping African people enslaved was the core objective and not something incidental. I told them there was no support for their too common “state’s rights” rationalization and that the primary sources that prove slavery was the Confederacy’s purpose (I should have said “cornerstone”) were easily accessible in a way they were not when I was a teenager learning this stuff.
They had nothing. I gave additional specifics, and we chatted a little while longer, but ultimately, they appeared embarrassed. I’m glad their kid was there.
Although they aligned themselves with an evil heritage, I was kind and thanked them for indulging my curiosity. It was punching down, but I had fun confronting them. And I’m going to do it again.
Their ridiculous shirts made me wish I had a shirt of my own to wear when I put my red pen on these jokers. Happily, I have an artist/designer friend who helped me turn my amateur idea into something worth sharing.
When I cooked people of that tribe when I was young, I felt like a tiny expression of powerful ancestors and noble heritages. Now, through the work of a brilliant generation of writers and activists, I feel like I am also aligned with a contemporary spirit that leaves fewer safe spaces for the old enemy.
I may have underestimated what my people could force into the mainstream.
I’m really enjoying how the real history of the Confederacy and associated symbols is being shoved down the throats of people long deluded by neo-Confederate mythology. I’ve never seen such widespread discussion of the relevant facts and sharing of what primary sources prove.
The self-selected heirs of the open enemy have the right to display their symbol on their private property, and other people have the right to confront them with what it is. And it’s never been easier. They’ll whine about “political correctness” because they can not handle how “correctness” in terms of historical fact disrupts their preferred narrative.
If you’d like a shirt, get them here.
Onward.
“Throw away the image” - In remembrance of #BwaKayiman
At an event last year, I recited a piece that riffed on a 19th century poem by Haitian intellectual Herard Dumesle. The words of Dumesle’s poem are now associated in living myth with the fighting spirit invoked by Sesil Fatima and Boukman, and included a call to discard an image that only thirsted for our tears.
My piece asserts that there are other images that should also be tossed. Images that position us as only victims and slaves without agency or power also “thirst for our tears.” And the ones I reference obscure important truths.
Arrogant, ignorant, would-be “saviors” and open enemies can have their trash back.
Li pa kache nan yon nwaj. Li vle yon figi. Nou se kote l’ap viv. Bay Li yon bon imaj.
Voye jete imaj ki di ke, “Ayiti te fonde pa esklav yo.” Li kache verite nan yon nwaj. Pa gen moun ki fèt esklav. Lè Ayiti bat Lafrans, tout moun te wè libète a nan kè nou.
Voye jete imaj ki di ke… “Ayiti se peyi pi pòv nan emisfè ya.” Li kache verite. Li kache konteks. Li kache koz. Tout bagay kache nan yon nwaj.
Wi, konpasyon se bon. Men, gen dèt anpil. Si nou renmen libète, nou dwe vanjeur Ayiti yo. Epi sonje pri nan san peye pa jenerasyon Ayisyen yo. Non yo anpil kache nan yon nwaj.
Tande libète kap pale nan kè nou. Nou se figi L’ Bay Li yon bon imaj.
The fun will start soon. Hold tight.
Four Reasons the Confederate Flag should NOT be equated with the American Flag
Here are four reasons it makes little sense to equate the American flag with the Confederate flag:
1) The Confederacy was vanquished. It no longer exists. It makes no sense to fly any flags associated with a vanquished enemy nation within the United States. The United States of America exists so its flag flies within its borders.
2) The United States exists (see reason# 1). You can’t take it down.
3) Confederate symbols belong to a special category of human symbols. It’s where we keep the Nazi stuff.
Most, if not all, human governments do and facilitate evil under the cover of their flags. That said, the Confederacy and its symbols are outliers.
Slavery existed for four years under the flags of the Confederate States. Slavery existed under the flag of the United States for eighty-nine years (1776 to 1865). The Three-Fifths Compromise was once law. The Fugitive Slave Clause and the consequent fugitive slave laws are not myths. And then, under the flag of the United States, there was neo-slavery for seventy-five years, Jim Crow, assault, rape, lynching, terrorism, COINTELPRO, police brutality, property theft, redlining, plunder, and other evils stretching into the present.
Here is where there is a difference. There could not be a David Walker of the Confederacy. There could not be a Frederick Douglass.
David Walker called out Thomas Jefferson and the elite of the USA for their wicked tyranny and hypocrisy. Despite all the evil, the United States has values and ideals that allow for its framers and elites to be called hypocrites due to their monstrous treatment of Black people.
Despite the presence of very real human evil, the United States has produced heroes whose work in service of humanity makes them truer representatives of those values and ideas. Here I am speaking of people like David Walker, Maria Stewart, Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, John Brown, Ida B. Wells, Ella Baker, Bayard Rustin, Robert F. Williams, Fannie Lou Hamer, Viola Liuzzo, Martin Luther King, Jr, and Rosa Parks.
The only way to truly represent the Confederacy’s values and purpose would be to terrorize and enslave Black people. It existed to enslave Black people. And then, in the 20th century, the Confederacy’s symbols were deployed across public spaces in common cause with terrorists and segregationist tyrants. If people claim Confederate values and symbols, they are hypocrites only if they are not terrorists.
4) Concern trolling. All of you creeps who feel like you lost another battle in the culture war need to stop bringing up groups with heritages you don’t identify with (e.g, Japanese, Indigenous, Black) and saying they could be offended by the American flag. You aren’t sincere. Shut up.
Or forgive.
https://www.teepublic.com/t-shirt/324920-no-you-need-a-history-lesson
With Malice Towards None...
As Confederate flags and icons fall, we witness people who feel like their side took a loss. They say “but what about ‘x’?”. Maybe they claim to have never supported flying a symbol raised exclusively for white supremacist violence, but clearly they are aggrieved because they picked now for “but what about ‘x’?”. They’re upset. They want to retaliate.
“X” will usually equal something they think of as Black. Maybe it will be Hip-Hop, or Black History Month, or a style of clothing, or maybe a monument, or maybe it will be an organization. It will be something. That train is never late.
Maybe they’ll work in an “x” from another group that “offends” their subset of society.
Maybe they will try a weak “slippery slope” argument that ignores how according to the easily accessible words of its founders and proponents this symbol (like the Confederacy itself) was raised for no purpose other than evil. The only way to live up to the values and purpose expressly and explicitly intended to be symbolized by Confederate flags would be through terrorism.
It will be something.
Here’s another option they could take: forgiveness. They could pretend to exercise the forgiveness that Black people are ostensibly celebrated for when we are harmed. Not that neo-lost-causers are actually being harmed, but they imagine this is so.
Forgive.
Forgive everyone seized by a “politically correct” spirit that gives less room for their pretensions to knowledge of history.
Forgive the removal of their symbol of secession for the purpose of enslaving Black people.
Forgive those who shine light on their symbols of common (lost) cause with terrorists, terrorist sympathizers, and segregationist tyrants of the 20th century.
Nothing is really being banned. They can “keep it flying” at home. Civilized people are simply removing their icons from spaces that are ostensibly for everyone including those of us who don’t particularly care for symbols of white supremacist violence. It’ll be ok. They can forgive.
But can they cry at home? Why not eat this with silent dignity for once?
Texas abandoned her separate national existence and consented to become one of the Confederated Union to promote her welfare, insure domestic tranquility and secure more substantially the blessings of peace and liberty to her people. She was received into the confederacy with her own constitution, under the guarantee of the federal constitution and the compact of annexation, that she should enjoy these blessings. She was received as a commonwealth holding, maintaining and protecting the institution known as negro slavery-- the servitude of the African to the white race within her limits-- a relation that had existed from the first settlement of her wilderness by the white race, and which her people intended should exist in all future time.
The Declaration of Causes of Seceding States: This set of primary documents for South Carolina, Georgia, Mississippi, Texas, and Virginia (4 of the 11 seceding states) prove the purpose of the Confederacy was to keep Black people in slavery. http://www.civilwar.org/education/history/primarysources/declarationofcauses.html?
Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its corner- stone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth.
Alexander H. Stephens (VP of the Confederate States of America), “Corner Stone Speech”, March 21, 1861 http://teachingamericanhistory.org/library/document/cornerstone-speech/
Mr. Chairman, I understand, and I have no doubt that such is the fact, that it was the object of the Committee, by this section, to recognize as now existing the system of African slavery; and to recognize it precisely as it is existing and is now protected by the stringent slave code of the territory of New Mexico. I understand from the argument of my friend, the Chairman of that Committee, just now delivered that such was the purpose of the Committee, and, I repeat, that I have no doubt that such was their purpose ; but to my mind, they have not by this section attained that end with absolute certainty. And why do I say so? It seems to me that no person can for a moment shut his eyes to the fact, on looking at this section of the report, that you must go outside of it to ascertain whether African slavery is protected or not. What are we doing, Mr. Chairman? We are endeavoring now to make plain what was before controverted—to make clear and certain what was before obscure and uncertain, and thus to protect the rights of the Southern people under the Constitution of the United States. And what, under such circumstances, is our obvious duty? Evidently, to make the Constitution so plain that he who runs may read—to leave nothing to construction.
transcribed Virginia secession debates of 1861, Wood Bouldin speaking on April 13, 1861 http://collections.richmond.edu/secession/documents/index.html?id=pb.3.698
Gentlemen of Virginia, never since liberty came into the institutions of man have a people borne with more patience, or forborne with more fortitude than have the people of these Southern States in their relation with their confederates of the North. As long as it was a merely silly fanaticism or a prurient philanthropy that proposed our destruction, we scarcely complained. Even when a long series of unjust, partial and oppressive taxation was grinding us into the very dust of poverty, with one convulsive struggle we bore that happily. Even when a number of our confederate States refused to carry out the provisions of the Constitution, vital to our interests, by municipal and State regulations —even when hordes of their people, under the sanction of these regulations, robbed us of our property and murdered our citizens, and bands of wild fanatics, under the same sanction, invaded slave territory and proclaimed the destruction of slavery by the annihilation of the slaveholder—even when some of our confederates proclaimed in the federal legislature and by their sovereign decrees that we ought to be driven from the civilization in which we lived—even when one of our confederates sought to defame and vilify us before the civilized world, we bore all these accumulating calamities, and continued to give them our blood and our treasure to build up the grandeur and maintain the power of that Republic.
John S. Preston, a commissioner from South Carolina, addresses Virginia’s secession convention on February 19, 1861 describing what South Carolina was fighting for the liberty to do (enslave Black people). http://collections.richmond.edu/secession/documents/index.html?id=pb.1.108
By the agency of a large proportion of the members from the non slaveholding States books have been published and circulated amongst us the direct tendency and avowed purpose of which is to excite insurrection and servile war with all their attendant horrors. A President has recently been elected, an obscure and illiterate man without experience in public affairs or any general reputation mainly if not exclusively on account of a settled and often proclaimed hostility to our institutions and a fixed purpose to abolish them. It is denied that it is the purpose of the party soon to enter into the possession of the powers of the Federal Government to abolish slavery by any direct legislative act. This has never been charged by any one. But it has been announced by all the leading men and presses of the party that the ultimate accomplishment of this result is its settled purpose and great central principle. That no more slave States shall be admitted into the confederacy and that the slaves from their rapid increase (the highest evidence of the humanity of their owners will become value less. Nothing is more certain than this and at no distant day. What must be the condition of the slaves themselves when their number becomes so large that their labor will be of no value to their owners. Their natural tendency every where shown where the race has existed to idleness vagrancy and crime increased by an inability to procure subsistence. Can any thing be more impudently false than the pretense that this state of things is to be brought about from considerations of humanity to the slaves.
unpublished Declaration of Causes from Florida’s 1861 secession convention http://www.civilwarcauses.org/florida-dec.htm
ON the 24th day of February, 1860, the Alabama Legislature adopted the following Joint Resolutions, with great unanimity–there being but two dissenting voices: WHEREAS, anti-slavery agitation persistently continued in the non-slaveholding States of this Union, for more than a third of a century, marked at every stage of its progress by contempt for the obligations of law and the sanctity of compacts, evincing a deadly hostility to the rights and institutions of the Southern people, and a settled purpose to effect their overthrow even by the subversion of the Constitution, and at the hazard of violence and bloodshed; and whereas, a sectional party calling itself Republican, committed alike by its own acts and antecedents, and the public avowals and secret machinations of its leaders to the execution of these atrocious designs, has acquired the ascendency in nearly every Northern State, and hopes by success in the approaching Presidential election to seize the Government itself; and whereas, to permit such seizure by those whose unmistakable aim is to pervert its whole machinery to the destruction of a portion of its members would be an act of suicidal folly and madness, almost without a parallel in history; and whereas, the General Assembly of Alabama, representing a people loyally devoted to the Union of the Constitution, but scorning the Union which fanaticism would erect upon its ruins, deem it their solemn duty to provide in advance the means by which they may escape such peril and dishonor, and devise new securities for perpetuating the blessings of liberty to themselves and their posterity.
The History and Debates of the Convention of the People of Alabama, Begun and held in the City of Montgomery, on the Seventh Day of January, 1861 in which is Preserved the Speeches of the Secret Sessions, and Many Valuable State Papers http://docsouth.unc.edu/imls/smithwr/smith.html
The people of Louisiana were unwilling to endanger their liberties and property by submission to the despotism of a single tyrant, or the canting tyranny of pharisaical majorities. Insulted by the denial of her constitutional equality by the non-slaveholding States, outraged by their contemptuous rejection of proffered compromises, and convinced that she was illustrating the capacity of her people for self-government by withdrawing from a union that had failed, without fault of hers, to accomplish its purposes, she declared herself a free and independent State on the 26th day of January last. History affords no example of a people who changed their government for more just or substantial reasons. Louisiana looks to the formation of a Southern confederacy to preserve the blessings of African slavery, and of the free institutions of the founders of the Federal Union, bequeathed to their posterity.
Address of George Williamson, Commissioner from Louisiana to the Texas Secession Convention on February 11, 1861 http://www.civilwarcauses.org/gwill.htm