Felon 47 was recently stunned to hear a Liberian official speak good English when the fact is the state that became the nation of Liberia was established by former African-American slaves with the assistance of the American Colonization Society in 1822.
In 1847, the state of Liberia established itself as a Republic and was recognized as such by several European nations.
Yet, Trumpolini was amazed to hear a Liberian speak grammatically correct English when English has been Liberia’s official language ever since its inception as a settlement, then later as a country over 200 years ago.
It gets worse. Back when George W. Bush was president he admitted to Condoleeza Rice that he didn’t know that there were Black people in Brazil. Brazil has more people of African descent than any other nation outside of the continent of Africa itself.
During the trans-Atlantic slave trade 4.9 million Africans were transported to Brazil. Yet, George W. Bush—never the sharpest crayon in the box—was surprised that there were Black folks in Brazil.
This kind of ignorance ranks right up there with the people who don’t know and never knew that the majority of Africans were not transported to the American Colonies/United States, but were transported primarily to Latin America and the Caribbean.
And the worst ignorance of all is the notion that Africans learned specific skills once they left the continent. Africans in the Senegambia region of Africa had been planting rice for over 2,000 years before Yeshu’a ben Yosef (aka “Jesus”) was born. For the record, there is no letter “J” in the Hebrew and Aramaic languages that he spoke.
(Graphic of an African Blacksmith)
The Nok culture, the Kingdom of Kush and the Shona people of the continent of Africa were specialists in Iron smeltingthousands of years before there was any trans-Atlantic slave trade. Many African ethnic groups arrived here as Blacksmiths. Africans were transported to what Europeans called the “New World” or the “Americas” to do two things—perform the work Europeans did not want to do and the work Europeans could not do.
Now, just look at what is sitting in the White House: a man meaner than a rattlesnake and dumber than a box of rocks who doesn’t know how to do anything but mistreat people.
“Intersectionality is a metaphor for understanding the ways that multiple forms of inequality or disadvantage sometimes compound themselves and create obstacles that often are not understood among conventional ways of thinking.” — Kimberlé Crenshaw
Recently, I responded to a question about the factors that stymied women’s quest for suffrage during the mid-to-late 19th century. I brought up the pragmatism and egalitarianism of suffragist and abolitionist Lucy Stone whose legacy remains largely overlooked. And therein lies the problem.
Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton have rightfully earned their place in Women’s history. They battled for the vote in ways almost unimaginable. Yet, they both held racist and classist views. Now before you start yelling about how both of them worked in the abolitionist movement, spare me. You can be anti-slavery and still not think the slave is your social or political equal. The inability to shake off one’s sense of entitlement has extreme consequences for everyone.
When lawmakers decided to include Black men as voters in the 15th Amendment without including the franchise for white women, both Stanton and Anthony were rightfully livid, but livid to the point where they then fought against the passage of the 15th Amendment altogether. It passed, however, in 1869 and was ratified in 1870.
Stanton wrote that it was unconscionable and dangerous to give the vote to Black, Chinese or Irish men because they were inferior. Anyone that did not fit a strict Anglo-Saxon and native-born status was considered inferior. Additionally, neither Stanton nor Anthony had thought about Black women voting at all.
Stone broke with Anthony and Stanton over their racism. Orator, writer, abolitionist and former slave Frederick Douglass cut his ties to Anthony and Stanton as well. The tragedy was that Douglass had attended the Women’s Conference at Seneca Falls in 1848 and had been a huge and early advocate for women’s rights. Moreover, it was Lucy Stone’s brilliant oratory that had inspired Susan B. Anthony to join the suffrage movement.
Stone read the political winds correctly. She formed the American Woman Suffrage Association which concentrated on gaining women the right to vote on a state-by-state basis. She knew that Congress was not going to grant the franchise to everyone.
Stone believed that the enfranchisement of Black men was progress. Although she was disappointed that the 15th Amendment did not include women’s suffrage, she did not believe that denying the franchise to others would help women in the long run.
Black men, rather than white women, were granted the right to vote first for a variety of reasons. As a historian, I know that the Republican Party in the 1860s was the party of Lincoln (not the sh*t show it is now) that freed Black American slaves. They controlled both the House and the Senate in 1867 to 1869. They knew that recently freed and enfranchised Black men would inevitably vote Republican and increase the party’s political dominance.
Granting the franchise to white women would have mixed political results as many white women still believed in the lost cause of the South in spite of its loss during the Civil War. They would have voted Democrat which was then the favored party of the former slave-holding South.
Some of Stone’s ideas were tied to her upbringing. She came from a hardworking farming family in Massachusetts. Both of her parents were abolitionists. While quite young, she, along with Lucretia Mott and Abby Kelly Foster helped William Lloyd Garrison establish the American Anti-slavery Society which was founded in 1833.
All of her brothers attended college. Yet, Stone had to postpone her education. She taught school for several years and was able to scrape up enough money to attend Oberlin College, the first college in the nation to accept Black people and women. When she graduated in 1847, she became the first woman in Massachusetts to earn a college degree.
Stone had planned to remain a single woman because she feared losing her independence to a husband. She finally yielded to Henry Browne Blackwell’s persistence. Blackwell was also an abolitionist and women’s rights advocate. Blackwell would learn years later that Stone finally decided to marry him after he met and aided a young slave with her owners while traveling on a train.
When Blackwell asked the girl would she rather be free, she answered “yes.” Blackwell and an accomplice helped get the young girl off of the train and away from her owners. It was that act of liberation that won Stone over.
While neither Stone nor her contemporaries Anthony and Stanton lived long enough to see women receive the right to vote, their different approaches and beliefs underscored a perpetual problem in the quest for women’s equality and the right to vote.
Stone never stopped fighting for the rights of Black people as she continued her fight to get the vote for women. She believed that both causes were interrelated. The same cannot be said of Anthony and Stanton.
The fight for the right to vote for women was often fractured by racism well into the 20th century. Stone’s stances on racial equality and equal rights for women cost her some popularity among some white women. Anthony and Stanton emerged as the face of white women’s suffrage. Yet, Anthony and Stanton also emerged as suspect to Black men and women.
After Lucy Stone died of stomach cancer in 1893, her only child, Alice Stone Blackwell reached out to the daughter of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and began the process of repairing the divided women’s suffrage movement. They created a new coalition. Alice Stone Blackwell followed her mother’s mantra to make the world better.
Lucy Stone deserves more historical attention than she receives. Her example should be emulated precisely because she understood the “intersectionality” of gender and race (and the political implications that go along with it) long before Black scholar and lawyer Kimberlé Crenshaw coined the term and defined the theory in the late 20th century. Stone recognized that, no matter how different gender and race may appear, women’s equality was inextricably linked to racial equality. You must fight for both, not just one or the other.
This essay is not exactly what you think it is about. It is about that long list of companies that openly support Project 25, a 900 page plan which contains many controversial initiatives designed to reshape the United States government and much of American life.
If you are prepared to boycott, you can start with the food, namely fast food. Food and Ice Cream brands are on the list too, but let us focus first on the sodium content of fast food.
The daily recommended intake of sodium for healthy individuals, age 14 and older is 2,300 milligrams. If you already have high blood pressure, your daily intake should only be 1,500 milligrams or less.
You can improve your health while you boycott fast food establishments that support the racist, sexist, xenophobic, along with many other ultra conservative initiatives that make up Project 2025.
Here’s a list of the fast food establishments that support Project 2025 (see full list below this essay) while they simultaneously raise your blood pressure with high sodium levels:
Arby’sSandwiches:
Classic Roast Beef 970 mg
Cravin’Chicken Roast 1,000 mg
Double Roast Beef Deluxe 2,150 mg
Double Roast Beef 1,390 mg
Classic Roast Beef Deluxe 1,810 mg
Buffalo Wild Wings:
20 Traditional Wings 530 mg
6 Boneless Wings w/Signature Sauce or Dry Rub 1,260 mg
I was nearing 12 years old when Barbara Lee’s mentor Shirley Chisholm ran for president. The young Barbara Lee was in college then and a single mother when she worked on Chisholm’s campaign. Kamala Harris was nearing 8 years old.
Shirley Chisholm knew that as a Black American woman with roots in the West Indies that she was not likely to win the nomination for president from the DemocraticParty.
Yet, Chisholm knew that if we Black Democrats stuck together we could put some real teeth in the Democratic Party platform that ultimately nominated George McGovern, who lost.
Black Congressmen like Walter Fauntroy and Ronald Dellums cut back room deals and ultimately sold Shirley Chisholm out in order to win and/or maintain favor with white men who ran the Democratic Party. Do not bother to be surprised.
When Black American men have access to white men with power, they rarely give up that access in order to stand with any Black woman…and ALL Black women know this by instinct and from experience.
Chisholm ultimately forgave Dellums’ betrayal; and then Dellums gave Barbara Lee an internship in his office which she parlayed into a successful congressional run for Dellums’ old district which was once California’s 9th, now the 12th District.
Much later, I remembered Congresswoman Lee as being the only member of the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC) that voted against giving then-president George W. Bush the right to invade Iraq shortly after this country endured the tragedy of 9/11.
Lee knew, like most folks with any degree of sense, that Iraq’s Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with the terrorists that struck the Twin Towers on 9/11.
One of the ugliest confrontations I ever had with my then-Congressman John Lewis occurred not long after he, along with the rest of the CBC, voted to grant Bush the power to invade Iraq. I called Lewis a traitor to his face and accused him of violating every principle Martin Luther King, Jr. ever taught him.
“You didn’t even bother to ask for a vote on this!,” I said. I love/d the late John Lewis, but he and the rest of the CBC, were dead wrong for abdicating their duties as representatives in order to grant a sitting president the right to invade another country. The next time I saw him, we hugged. He was feeble. Soon after that last hug, he was gone.
I remember that Congresswoman Barbara Lee had to have extra security because she did not vote in favor of such an invasion in a climate where Americans wanted to feel like we were going after our real enemies.
Instead, Lee used her conscience and common sense, knowing full well that she would be re-elected to her district no matter how she voted. Just imagine if our representatives had enough of a spine to hold on to their principles and to the knowledge that their constituents are in their corner?
Back when Lee took this stand, I was working part-time at my alma mater Agnes Scott College. As the nation was bracing for the possibility of sending US Troops to Iraq, the Agnes Scott College community was having regular talks about the potential for war.
When a faculty member worried that we were heading to war and that there was nothing we could do, I just couldn’t stand that phrase “there’s nothing we can do.”
I said, “You can send a letter of support to California Congresswoman Barbara Lee.”
My last few blogs have largely been laments about illiteracy, sexism, and an assortment of problems we are facing with the incoming administration of Felon 47.
This particular blog is not really about men and women who have amnesia, but rather about those among us who conveniently try to forget uncomfortable truths. I am thinking about the now late Jimmy Carter as I write this. He was one of the few American men to write boldly about sexism and misogyny as a worldwide crisis.
So, let’s consider this. Felon 47 is not a new phenomenon in American history. I hear all this bluster from people about his abuse of women, his racism, his rape charges, and etcetera, but…
Back in the late 1700s Thomas Jefferson was having illicit sex (rape) with his 14-year-old slave Sally Hemmings. You notice how folks never bring up her age? Jefferson also knew that little Sally Hemmings was his wife’s half sister because his father-in-law was—like many slaveholders—taking advantage of their “white male privileges” to do whatever the hell they wanted to do to women, particularly Black women.
Now, before any of my Black brothers and sisters get too comfortable, let’s acknowledge that Elijah Muhammad who founded the Nation of Islam did damned near the same thing when he was screwing around with and impregnating his teenage secretaries.
Whenever I hear someone say that Malcolm X left the Nation of Islam, I want to scream because Malcolm X did not leave. He, along with Wallace Muhammad, was put out of the Nation for daring to raise questions about Elijah Muhammad’s behavior.
In spite of some of the sheer depravity we all have heard about in recent months, you would have known so much more IF most people actually listened to women in general, and Black women in particular.
The same Black women that most men and too many women never pay any attention to could have told you that there is not a nickel’s worth of difference between Harvey Weinstein, R. Kelly, Sean “P. Diddy” Combs, Donald Trump and Jeffrey Epstein. All of these men had different illicit methods of making money and illicit methods of chasing underage tail.
For the next 4 years every American will learn that the very high price of sexism and misogyny exacts far more than most are willing to pay. And the very high price of not fighting against these ills will ultimately cost you your soul.
Goddess Bless Jimmy Carter for not blinking, for owning his missteps and for speaking out when others were too cowardly to do so.
Leslye Joy Allen 