When I was a small girl in Atlanta, Grandma’s lap and bedroom remained my soft landing if I had misbehaved and Mama was patiently waiting to give me that lecture about my behavior.
Grandma’s bed had a ton of blankets where I couldn’t move if I got in it, but the visit was worth the trip because Grandma had a sweet tooth. There was candy I wasn’t supposed to have in her nightstand and her pockets.
Before I began going to school and even after I started school, Grandma and I had a daily routine of debate and opinions and arguments that could only be had between a 78-year-old woman and her 4-year-old granddaughter whose job was to help sort home grown tomatoes, snap beans, squash and peas from the garden except when I stopped to make mud pies from the rich red Georgia clay after a rain.
We spent hours discussing everything like two old women, but I was a midget version of an old woman. Grandma insisted on me having a reason and an explanation for why I believed certain things, nurturing propositions and hypotheses from my diminutive brain before I knew what a proposition or a hypothesis was.
It can be argued that tariffs helped fuel the US Civil War. By the mid-1800s, the northern economy was based on manufacturing and was in direct competition with an agricultural, slave-based southern economy. Tariffs on imported goods were great for the Northern states as they provided a huge amount of revenue. Tariffs also protected American businesses from foreign competitors and provided revenue for the federal government. In the South, tariffs were a big negative.
In 1828, a tariff that southerners called the Tariff of Abominations became law. This tariff protected Northern manufacturers, but it penalized Southern slaveholders who relied on exporting their agricultural products (cotton) that were produced by Black slave labor. These same Southerners imported goods from Europe.
The Morrill Tariff passed in 1861 around the time several Southern states had seceded from the Union because tariffs placed a heavy economic burden on the South. The big issue was, however, the expansion of slavery.
The American South sought to transplant slavery in newly acquired western territory due to its own self-produced ecological disaster, namely soil exhaustion. Yet, it was often difficult to transplant slavery in the western portion of what is now the United States due to the fact that laws differed in these newly acquired regions. California became a state in 1850, but it had abolished slavery. The Compromise of 1850 granted statehood to California as a free state with the expectation that California would uphold the Fugitive Slave Act.
Once the Mexican-American War was over in 1848 and the Treaty of Guadalupe was signed, Mexico ceded over 500,000 square miles of its territory to the United States. Those square miles included modern-day Utah, Nevada, Colorado, New Mexico, California, and large portions of Arizona, Wyoming, Oklahoma and Kansas. So, do not think that Felon 47’s desire for extra territory is something new. And for Goddess sake don’t think the USA had or has any respect for actual geographic boundaries.
(Arlington Cemetery, c. 1865, Library of Congress)
Tariffs in the United States only waned after this country’s “protectionist” period ended roughly in the early 1930s. By the end of World War II, the United States entered full swing into a period of open markets and greater engagement with markets in other countries.
But here’s the thing. What Felon 47 is doing is not new. In the mid-1800s while Northern industrialists reminded poorly paid white factory workers that they had privileges and supremacy over Black folks who were slaves, Southern slaveholders were selling the exact same argument to poor whites and middling white yeoman farmers.
The white oligarchy didn’t fight in the Civil War on either side. They used poor whites to do it for them. And the South lost—Thank You Jesus! Yet, what most folks forget is that Black folks in the South were its property and its wealth. Setting them free WAS NOT the initial aim of the war. It was not until Black abolitionist and former slave Frederick Douglass pushed at President Abraham Lincoln to make ending slavery a war objective.
Douglass made it plain. If Lincoln wanted to end the war, and force the South back into the Union, the simplest way to do it was to free the slaves. After all, Black slaves were one third of the population of the entire South, and Black bodies were the primary source of wealth of a minority of white southern oligarchs. That strategy worked.
Yet, here’s something to contemplate on a more personal level. After he was around the age of 6, abolitionist and former slave Frederick Douglass never saw his mother again and never learned what happened to her. After he escaped from his owner, he remained a fugitive for years. Eventually his freedom was purchased by Quakers in the UK for $711.66 (around $30K today) in 1846. After the Civil War ended, roughly two generations of white southern women who hoped to marry and have children never did so in certain areas of the South because there simply were not enough men to go around. A majority of the men they might have married were killed during the Civil War.
As a Black woman historian, nothing that Felon 47 is doing is new to me. Although I must admit he seems to be an old American history lesson on steroids. The American North tore up the Slaveholding South, imposed tariffs that favored their industries and never lost a wink of sleep; and never once worried about the personal costs of doing any of it.
So, while there are plenty of Black fools out there (trust me, I know many of them), a majority of us Black folks know that there is no limit to how oligarchs will play with our lives, crush economies, steal from us, and attempt to throw our Black asses on the frontlines of military interventions and sacrifice us on an assortment of altars. They have done all of this to us for centuries. What is different now is that white folks are finding out that they too will be placed in these same untenable positions.
I remember when master filmmaker Ava DuVernay started AFFRM which stood for African-American Film Festival Releasing Movement. Later she modified it and renamed it ARRAY which has gone on to release one masterpiece independent film after another by Black women, Women of Color, white Women filmmakers and other Black filmmakers.
Goddess knows that Ava’s television series Queen Sugar remains my all time favorite television series of all time, right up there with POSE. Her film ORIGIN completely shattered every boundary of how a film infused with activism and history could be made and change minds. If you haven’t seen that film, I really don’t consider you a member of the Left if you haven’t done so. If you watch it, you will not be the same. You will never think the same; and every assumption you ever had, you will rethink it.
(Ava DuVernay here with Dr. Suraj Yengde who portrayed himself in the film ORIGIN. The film received a 9-minute standing ovation at the Vienna Film Festival in 2023.)
There was one thing Ava did when Queen Sugar hit the airwaves. She decided that only women, and particularly Black and other women of color, would direct the show. She gave over 40 women directors their television directorial debuts because, she reasoned, if she did not do it they would never be given the chance.
The irony is that DuVernay’s production of Queen Sugar earned recognition as one of the most ethnically and racially diverse crews in television history. Ain’t that something?
So, here’s something to think about. Ava DuVernay has some real badass men around her. Yet, ARRAY was and still is staffed primarily with women; and this company has run like a top since its inception.
So, here’s something else to ponder. Since Felon 47 is hellbent on controlling women, eliminating the histories of Black people and other POC from the record, and granting companies the right to not give a good Got-damned whether any of us will be hired for any job, isn’t it just as plausible for us to not hire or phuck with any of them?
I mean, if I am a Black woman running a successful business and I don’t want to be bothered with sexism or racism, then I can simply not hire any man of any color and not hire any white person of any gender. And what I will be doing will be perfectly legal under the administration of this president. Marinate on that for a moment.
The other day I told a friend about the year I got a chance to watch a Brown Thrasher build a nest in a tall shrub near my carport. I watched her pick up pine needles and leaves, and craft them together until a nest was in place.
I watched her sit on her eggs. Then later still, I heard the sound of chicks; and finally I saw her nudge them out of the nest. Her babies were gone. She left the nest as well. That nest stayed intact, however, for several years.
Then I remember when the late Dr. Sadye Young told me about her father who built whole houses without any floor plans. Although she was then a retired college professor, Dr. Young knew her way around a house. She had learned certain aspects of building because when she was a child, she often accompanied her father when he was building a home. My eyes brightened because my late maternal Uncle Frank could do the same thing.
Both of these men built foundations, installed plumbing, wiring, and etcetera without any floor plans. Neither of these men had college degrees. Both had been apprentices of carpenters, plumbers, and electricians. But neither of them set foot in a college classroom and majored in architectural engineering. Yet, the homes they built stood the test of time.
Dr. Young’s father and my uncle had something in common with each other and with that Brown Thrasher. They built homes from scratch. They relied on their observations, practice, and their skills, not on architectural drawings. That Brown Thrasher relied on her instincts.
The current state of affairs in this country is going to require all of us to go back to some basics that many of us have lost. We all have instincts, yet we no longer use them. My late maternal grandmother (born in 1886) could predict when it was going to snow simply by observing whole flocks of birds gathering.
We now rely quite heavily on gadgets and technology and self-appointed pundits to tell us everything. But real knowledge comes from reading, research, study, practice, listening, and observation. It is only when we do all of the above that we can trust our gut instincts again.
As Felon 47 attempts to destroy one institution after another, we better ready ourselves to rebuild from his wreckage. Depending on how bad the damage is, we need to prepare to rebuild from scratch which is made more difficult by a population accustomed to having everything done with the press of a button. It is not going to work like that this time.
This is not a full book review. I don’t have the strength to do that right now. Yet, when you are a historian there are certain books that stay with you because they are so provocative. One of them is “Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland” by Christopher R. Browning.
People often forget that the Holocaust in Nazi Germany didn’t just extinguish millions of Jews, but it also exterminated Afro-Germans, Gypsies, LGBTQIA, and people with disabilities. Anything or anyone that was viewed as defective was subject to be put to death. But that’s not exactly what I want to write about here.
The title of this book says it all. This battalion was charged with the duty of marching groups of Jews out to a ditch, having them lay in that ditch; then the battalion would shoot them to death.
The first time they carried out this heinous order, most of the men balked at having to carry out such an awful task. Several men vomited at the sight of the murders; others ran and went AWOL. Yet, most of the men stayed behind and followed their orders.
By the time I got to the end of this book, I was mortified. That same battalion that initially balked at killing Jews that were laid in a ditch now carried out the orders with precision and without blinking. They became professional killers doing a job, not men who once had some empathy, sympathy, and consciences.
We prefer to believe that most people cannot be manipulated and threatened in order to convert them into monsters under the appropriate circumstances. “Ordinary Men“ showed me that it was relatively easy to find and nurture the dark side of human beings.
Those of us who are fighting as hard as we can against the excesses and abuse of Felon 47 need to remember one thing—Felon 47 and the Muskrat are only TWO men. They cannot do what they are doing without willing accomplices.
Stay the course my Fellow Resisters. But watch the people around you and watch your back; and NEVER normalize or explain away bad behavior even when it’s yours.
Leslye Joy Allen 