sheshe2
sheshe2's JournalWe now know, beyond a shadow of doubt...
That God is indeed a woman. Vengeance is mine. Let it rain on his charade.
America the Beautiful, America the Cruel
Lawrence Ross
Image: iStock
The Fourth of July, or the Fourth of You Lie as we black folks like to call it, is here again. And we’ll be inundated with bold-faced lies about American exceptionalism. You’ll hear it from television commentators. From politicians. From dudes wearing a red, white and blue t-shirt…made in China.
They’ll talk about how we’re a country that believes in democracy, just as the United States Supreme Court decided last week to allow partisan gerrymandering to disempower minorities. Commentators will spout platitudes about the wisdom of the so-called Founding Fathers, even as they all benefited from creating a white supremacist society built on the backs of black men and women.
But the most egregious thing you’ll hear while scarfing down ribs and non-Becky prepared potato salad? That we’re better than what’s happening under the Trump administration. That Trump doesn’t represent the true America. That this current time is an aberration and abnormal. And to that, I say one word…
Bullshit.
This is not to say that America doesn’t do good things. We do. There’s a long list of good things we do, and I’m not gonna waste good column space recounting them. But it’s also important to note that America’s side hustle has always been cruelty, and when it comes to cruelty on this July 4, business is good in the hood.
As we celebrate our founding, never forget that desperate Honduran, Guatemalan and El Salvadorian undocumented immigrants who yearn to be free from the violence and economic depravity in their own lands, are being held in cages. By America. The same America that once held enslaved Africans in cages.
Read More: https://www.theroot.com/america-the-beautiful-america-the-cruel-1836086688
Well worth the read. Our past and our present.
" I love what this country called American can be, just not what it is right now. And right now, it’s more America the Cruel than America the Beautiful. And that’s nothing to celebrate."
Trumps use of this military parade reminds me of Ferguson.
This charade of a parade is about fear, intimidation, threats to anyone different. He is a dictator wanna be and is trying to show us all how big he wishes his d**k was.
Remember Ferguson? I do. If you don't watch the video at the link.
For several nights this week, tanks, combat gear and assault rifles were seen in Ferguson, Missouri.
It looked like a military operation ion one of the most dangerous war ziones.. That's because police departments in the St. Louis area -- like those across the country -- are arming their officers with equipment once on the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan. Much of it is free of charge or bought with federal grant money authorized by Congress, CBS News' Jan Crawford reports.
In the past year, the Department of Defense has given local law enforcement over 600 MRAPs, the armored vehicles designed to withstand roadside bombs. Texas alone has received 68, Florida 45.
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The Pentagon program has given departments over $5 billion worth of surplus equipment since the program launched in 1991: helicopters, firearms, protective gear, night vision, even computers and camouflage clothing.
The local police also get federal grant money to buy the military-style equipment.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/ferguson-missouri-response-shows-police-use-of-military-equipment/
Many police departments already own this military gear. tRump is giving them the nod to use it against all enemies. Those enemies are not foreign terrorists, they will be black and brown people. They will be gay, Native American, Jewish, and Asian. They will come for the women as well.
Fact is none of this might and fright will be use against any white man. Not the Bundys. Not the neo nazis that murdered a woman in Charlottesville because of course they are really fine people.
No 4th celebration for me again this year. Nothing to celebrate here. Nothing.
Where in the world is Rosa Parks House?
An Artist Rebuilt and Preserved Rosa Parks’s Home. Now That It Failed to Sell at Auction, Its Fate Hangs in the BalanceThe humble monument to the Civil Rights movement could be saved by a university, a foundation, or a pair of Detroit businessmen.
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It has been a grueling month for Ryan Mendoza, the Berlin-based American artist who helped save the little wooden structure by reconstructing it in the German capital last year. But Mendoza is staying positive. He hopes that Parks’s house, which failed to meet its $1 million reserve when it went to auction at Guernsey’s, will ultimately become a national monument to the civil rights movement somewhere in the US. “Rosa Parks is having a teaching moment, once again, through this house,” he says.
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The Rosa Parks House, which was owned by her brother, had been languishing in an abandoned state and was on the City of Detroit’s demolition list when Parks’s niece, Rhea McCauley, stepped in and bought her childhood home from the city for $500 in 2014 with the hope of restoring it. Located in Southwest Detroit, the house, which was built in 1936, would become an example of the kind of overcrowded living conditions many African Americans experienced at that time, especially when fleeing the South: Parks lived there with McCauley and 16 other family members in the late 1950s. After taking ownership of the home, Parks’s niece enlisted Mendoza’s help, who took it apart and resurrected it on his property in the German capital.
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“The unsung story behind the Rosa Parks House is one of redlining, housing inequality, and its persistent effects on millions of Americans today,” Mendoza says, referring to racial segregation of neighborhoods. “From Brooklyn to Oakland, with pen in hand, 80 years ago, city planners mapped out where Blacks would live.” Mendoza sees a connection between the segregated planning of inner cities in postwar America and Germany in the 1930s. “These were, in reality, ghettos, comparable to the ones created in Germany,” he says.
Mendoza explains that Parks’s home was in a “redlined” neighborhood of Detroit, which was demarcated as less valuable. His goal with the project is multifaceted, but, above all, he wants to give this chapter of Parks’s story proper value. Back in the late 1950s during the time Parks stayed at the home, residents—a majority of whom were African American—had less access to essential goods and services, from banking and healthcare to supermarkets. The otherwise unremarkable two-story building, he says, is a symbol of the systemic discrimination against African Americans through racist zoning laws. It was yet another form of segregation that Parks fought valiantly throughout her life, most famously when she refused to move to the back of a bus in Montgomery, Alabama, on December 1, 1955.
After McCauley gifted the house to Mendoza in the summer of 2017, he disassembled it by hand, so that he could take it to Germany as part of what he calls “The Rosa Parks House Project.” Packing and shipping cost the artist around $13,000. “America will have to show that they really care about her legacy,” McCauley told Fox 2 last year as the house headed off to voluntary exile in Germany.
More https://news.artnet.com/art-world/rosa-parks-house-auction-1327121
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It is home, well almost. It is on display in Rhode Island.
Ryan Mendoza’s art installation “The Rosa Parks House Project” is on exhibition at the WaterFire Arts Center
Thanks to support from a number of beneficiaries including WaterFire Providence and the Nash Family Foundation along with a wide outpouring of public support from members of the Providence community, the Detroit house Rosa Parks had taken refuge in after the tumultuous 1955 bus boycott has returned home to America. Ryan Mendoza’s “The Rosa Parks House Project” is an art installation that honors Rosa Parks and the struggles she faced due to her courageous leadership in the civil rights movement. The artwork was created with the support of the nieces and nephews of Rosa Parks and includes recreations of remembered details of her stay with them in that house.
The house, formerly owned by Rosa McCauley Parks’ only sibling Sylvester McCauley, speaks to issues of the centrality of family connection in the African American experience, of the Great Migration, of segregation, of red lining, of faulty mortgages and the housing crisis, of misogyny, as well as of the marginalization of black oral history. The McCauley family living in this house was the reason and hope that lead Rosa to move from the south to Detroit. Rhea McCauley repurchased the house back from the Detroit demolition lists in 2016 to honor Rosa Parks and to preserve the evidence of the precarious struggle of Rosa Parks to keep a roof over her head in the “Northern promised land that wasn’t.” Rhea entrusted the house and its message about Parks to the artist Ryan Mendoza, who had to move the house to Berlin and back, to accomplish his goals.
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“We believe in art and its capacity to advance the public discourse about important subjects. We stepped up when there was a danger of the house returning to Berlin unseen. We could not allow artist’s voices and black voices to be silenced. We need more discussion about race in America.” -Barnaby Evans, WaterFire Providence’s Executive Artistic Director
More https://artscenter.waterfire.org/rosa-parks-house-project/
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THIS!
“There are 1,500 monuments to the Confederacy, which is absurd,” Mendoza says. “There are 76 monuments to the civil rights movement. Let this be the 77th.”
In a few hours it will be Fathers Day.
I don't have one to celebrate with. I miss him.
My Father. He slipped quietly away from me early morning 11/09/2014. Alzheimer.
You?
Barack Obama's 12 most memorable speeches; KU expert discusses outgoing president's rhetorical legac
The most inspirational speaker of our time. I included the video of his keynote speech at the DNC. That is where he caught my attention and held it all these years.I only high-lighted a few, you can find the rest of them here:
https://www2.ljworld.com/news/2017/jan/09/barack-obamas-12-most-memorable-speeches/
“It’s just much harder to present a complicated message to the American people,” Rowland said.
Obama, however, will be better remembered for his usually inspirational speeches, Rowland said. Here are his 12 most important addresses, along with some key highlights, according to Rowland:
• Jan. 8, 2008 — New Hampshire primary concession speech. Obama said, “In the unlikely story of America, there has never been anything false about hope,” and used the refrain “Yes, we can.”
• Aug. 28, 2008 — Acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention. Rowland called it “the story of America gradually becoming more welcoming and inclusive … he talks about the evolution of the American dream.”
• March 7, 2015 — Civil rights march anniversary speech at the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Ala.
The Speech that Made Obama President
The Reality Of How America Was Built.
http://all-hat-no-cattle.blogspot.com/2019/06/president-trump-likens-melania-trump-to.html
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-I got up here myself, why can't you?
I saw this toon a few years ago and in fact have been looking for it on and off for a long time. Then boom, here it is.
Nothing says racism more than this image. Nothing. Absolutely nothing.
CNN: Trump just compared Melania to Jackie O.
Header: We have our own Jackie O... her name is Melania T.
Loose quote.
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