LINES OF THE DAY

". . . But the past does not exist independently from the present. Indeed, the past is only past because there is a present, just as I can point to something over there only because I am here. But nothing is inherently over there or here. In that sense, the past has no content. The past -- or more accurately, pastness -- is a position. Thus, in no way can we identify the past as past." p. 15

". . . But we may want to keep in mind that deeds and words are not as distinguishable as often we presume. History does not belong only to its narrators, professional or amateur. While some of us debate what history is or was, others take it into their own hands." p. 153

Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (1995) by Michel-Rolph Trouillot

Friday, June 12, 2020

Horses Have Their Part FOR Black Lives Matter

     . . . . Horses continue to do their part for Black Lives Matter, as opposed to the horses coerced by police against Black Lives Matter.
How one woman on a horse at an Oakland protest became a symbol for revolution‘You can’t ignore a big, old pretty horse with a black woman on it,’ says Brianna Noble

Since she brought Dapper Dan to downtown Oakland on May 29, she’s inspired black cowboys and cowgirls throughout the country to join protests.

Though somehow Owen Wister*, author of The Virginian (1902), which takes place in Wyoming, and his best buddy, Theodore Roosevelt, who proudly claimed the title of Cattleman and Rancher to describe himself, and both wrote extensively about "the cowboy", somehow they both managed to not notice there were black cowboys. Theodore Roosevelt went so far as to say, invoking his slaveowning Georgia family, that being a "Cattleman" was as good as being a plantation owner.  Owen Wister's Virginian flatly stated that the West was "white man's country."

Judge Henry, the Rich Feller in Wister's novel, who like Theodore Roosevelt, in North Dakota, owns the vast kingdom that he calls his ranch, which is made up of public lands to great extent, flatly explains to the effete eastern school teacher, that all this land was made for his exploitation, and when he's extracted all the animals, grass and minerals, they will just move on.  

Explains a lot about this country, doesn't it.

Thus these stories of Black Lives Matter riders, both men and women, are particularly important parts of correcting our erroneous ideas of history, both of who 'settled' the West and who made western culture.

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*  Wister was one of the children English actress, Fanny Kemble, lost, when she left her husband, Pierce Butler, perhps at the richest slaveowner in the USA, appalled when she learned what slavery was.  Some years later she published (1863Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation 1838-1839. This was done at the urging of abolitionists in the hope this account of a slave plantation would mobilize British opinion against the CSA.

During the course of researching and writing The American Slave Coast, we got to visit St. Simon's Island, where the plantation Fanny Kemble lived on, was situated.  Bits and pieces of it are still there.

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