Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

This year has been the longest three days of putin’s life.

We can’t confuse what’s necessary to win elections with the policies that we want to implement when we do.

We cannot abandon the truth and remain a free nation.

Democracy cannot function without a free press.

Pessimism assures that nothing of any importance will change.

I did not have this on my fuck 2025 bingo card.

DeSantis transforming Florida into 1930s Germany with gators and theme parks.

Weird. Rome has an American Pope and America has a Russian President.

When your entire life is steeped in white supremacy, equality feels like discrimination.

She burned that motherfucker down, and I am so here for it. Thank you, Caroline Kennedy.

I would try pessimism, but it probably wouldn’t work.

Oh FFS you might as well trust a 6-year-old with a flamethrower.

You come for women, you’re gonna get your ass kicked.

If you are still in the gop, you are either an extremist yourself, or in bed with those who are.

The lights are all blinking red.

Imperialist aggressors must be defeated, or the whole world loses.

Conservatism: there are people the law protects but does not bind and others who the law binds but does not protect.

Giving in to doom is how we fail to fight for ourselves & one another.

Republicans cannot even be trusted with their own money.

President Musk and Trump are both poorly raised, coddled 8 year old boys.

Every one of the “Roberts Six” lied to get on the court.

This must be what justice looks like, not vengeful, just peaceful exuberance.

Too often we confuse noise with substance. too often we confuse setbacks with defeat.

Sadly, there is no cure for stupid.

You are here: Home / Civil Rights / Racial Justice / Black Lives Matter / Sunday Evening Open Thread: Wrapping Up Black History Month

Sunday Evening Open Thread: Wrapping Up Black History Month

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Short end of the stick, as always… but the battle continues.

NEW YORK — Upon entering Aliko Dangote Hall at the Africa Center, you’re immediately confronted with the breadth and scope of the role African Americans have played in shaping our country’s food and beverage. Standing nearly 14 feet tall and 30 feet wide, the Legacy Quilt — part of the Museum of Food and Drink’s (MOFAD) latest exhibit, “African/American: Making the Nation’s Table” — includes 406 tiles that illustrate Black people’s impact on American cuisine.

“We’re in a few thousand square feet and we’re trying to tell 400 years of history. How do we do that?” said Catherine Piccoli, the museum’s curatorial director, on the process of assembling the exhibit. “We discussed early on the concept of a quilt — since quilts are so deeply rooted in African American culture — being part of the exhibition, and as we continued to talk about the quilt it became the sort of holding place, if you will, for telling as many stories as we could.”

Scheduled to run through June 19, a.k.a. Juneteenth, the first-of-its-kind exhibit puts Black people’s culinary contributions in agriculture, culinary arts, brewing and distilling, and commerce on full display and allows guests to see, experience and taste — yes, there is food available — the results. In addition to the quilt, it includes the Ebony Test Kitchen, a bastion of African American cuisine that was saved from demolition by preservation nonprofit Landmarks Illinois, along with photographs, artifacts and virtual reality experiences…

The Legacy Quilt was sewn by Harlem Needle Arts and features illustrations by graphic designer Adrian Franks. “The idea was to find 400 people, one for every year for the 400 years that were initially being celebrated when we were opening in 2020, which would have taken us from 1619 to 2020,” Harris said, referring to the year enslaved Africans were first brought to America. “There are blank quilt squares to indicate the number of people that we just don’t know and that are being discovered daily.”…

The first time I saw Deb Haaland cry, she was a congresswoman from New Mexico, and she was standing on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Ala.

It was 2019, during a civil rights pilgrimage led by John Lewis. Rep. Lisa Blunt Rochester (D-Del.) wailed out as a hymn was sung, and Haaland reached to comfort her. It was impossible not to be moved standing with Lewis on the bridge where he was almost killed in 1965.

So it wasn’t a surprise to watch tears well this week for Haaland, now the interior secretary, as she stood outside the Mississippi courthouse that once set free the murderers of Emmett Till. For Haaland, the first Native American to serve as a Cabinet secretary, visiting these sites doesn’t just mean remembering the injustice inflicted upon Black people; it means walking the ancestral lands that were home to Indigenous people long before the slave ships came. Long before the boundaries between the races were drawn, and then reinforced by Jim Crow. She knows what it means to come from people who experienced prejudice and violence — the kind of violence that killed Till when he was just 14 years old.

A 2017 act of Congress spurred the current effort to incorporate existing sites that honor the history of Till’s 1955 lynching into the National Park Service, and it’s what brought Haaland to the Mississippi Delta to listen. What she heard was pain from a community that wants Till’s story told truthfully…

Reader Interactions

26Comments

  4. 4.

    different-church-lady

    I hereby decree the other eleven months of the year “Stop Shitting on Black People Months.”

  6. 6.

    Martin

    Kosovo asks to join NATO and requests a permanent US base there.

    Russia probably just bought themselves a lot of permanent US bases on their western border.

  7. 7.

    Yarrow

    Seems appropriate that Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson was nominated for the Supreme Court in February.

  11. 11.

    MC

    Any elders on here have advice on how to remain sane during something like this? I’m much too young to have had any experience.

  13. 13.

    Martin

    And I dedicate this Black History Month, like the last 20 or so Black History Months to my cousin who I didn’t learn of until I was well into adulthood. My aunt met a black man, which was very much a bridge too far for my racist Irish family, and upon learning she was pregnant was whisked away to California by her mother, along with all the other kids save my dad, who was then in the Navy (chasing Soviet subs around the Atlantic). She put her newborn daughter up for adoption, and was adopted by a wonderful family here in Southern California. After I had gotten married, my aunt came out to California to meet up with her daughter after they sought each other out, and I was finally told the story and got to meet her. She’s wonderful, of course, and a district attorney, and as it turns out she went to high school with a good friend of ours, so he knows her better than I do (I’m catching up).

    Every black American has a story to tell, full of good and bad. Nobody escapes white nationalism entirely, even from their own family. In the end she has a good story to tell. A good husband, two great kids, a fantastic career, all that. But there wasn’t a foundation laid for that to happen. The odds were stacked against her, despite the good steps (if perhaps insufficient – I wasn’t there, I was in the process of being born myself) my branch of the family took.

    I wish I had known her as a kid. Had someone to play with when I came out to visit, as we are the same age. I was robbed of time with my cousin, and I’m angry about that.

    So that’s my story of how my family came to California. Expelled by our relatives because we fell in love with a black man and had a child. And my estranged family has gotten a little better, but this is the legacy they helped build, and they did a LOT of the lifting on that legacy. My family is not a minor player, what with having headed up the FDNY union and all that.

  14. 14.

    Miss Bianca

    @debbie:  After my sister died my niece was putting up photos on FB with her. The family portrait – sis, her daughter, and her granddaughter – in front of the Tubman mural was amazing.

  15. 15.

    Martin

    @MC: Yeah, it’s hard.

    Probably the thing to keep in mind is that this sense of imminent threat of nuclear war was the status quo for like 30 years. And nothing happened.

    This is why I call Republicans cowards. They’ve been screeching from 1992 until 2016 that they needed a fucking arsenal of weapons to halt tyranny and then when someone like Obama shows up that they openly call tyrannical, they do nothing. Either they’re lying, or they’re cowards, or both. I mean, they went to DC to overthrow the government but were still too nervous about getting arrested breaking DCs firearm ordinance.

    The Soviets/Russia have been able to nuke the target of their choice with no warning since 1957. Same with the US. Nobody needs to threaten their use, we all know they’re there ready to go. Use of them would make you a permanent pariah, and probably get you a personalized Minuteman III. There’s no upside for anyone.

    But scaring the citizenry, that’s useful. That’s Fox News’ fucking business model.

  16. 16.

    Salty Sam

    @Martin:   I love this story Martin. A situation born in shame, that matured into pride…  I’m sure there are many more like it, and look forward to the day when they could be shared more freely.

    re: the quilt-  very early in my first career (professional chef), I took a job in a hotel where I was the only white boy in the kitchen.  As beautiful as it is, I don’t need a quilt to remind me the contributions of African Americans to our culinary palette- I lived it daily for years. Milton, Robert, Joanie, and many others taught me SO much more than I could have learned from culinary school.  It is one of my greatest regrets that I didn’t make the time to catch up with Milton before he passed.  In many ways, he was like a father to me.

  17. 17.

    Ohio Mom

    @MC: You have to mentally/emotionally compartmentalize.

    You can google that for more details, it’s basically just recognizing there is something disturbing in your life and consciously putting it aside so you can get things done.

    It’s one of those defense mechanisms that can be harnessed productively if you are intentional about it. It’s not denial because you are owning it.

  18. 18.

    Brachiator

    Alexander Pushkin’s proud black heritage is a source of endless butthurt for a certain subset of Russians that is NEVER not fun to irritate.

    I noted in a previous thread that I alway thought that Prince looked a lot like Pushkin.

    ETA. I also note that on of the things that I enjoy about the HBO series The Gilded Age is its depiction of the black community in 19th century Brooklyn.

    Communities of color are rarely depicted in movies about previous eras of American history, apart from episodes about racist oppression.

  19. 19.

    Brachiator

    Wikipedia recently featured an article about Patrick Healey whose life is emblematic of the insanity of racism in America. He and his notable siblings often had been identified as Irish American.

    Patrick Francis Healy, SJ (February 27, 1834 – January 10, 1910) was an American Catholic priest and Jesuit who was an influential president of Georgetown University, becoming known as its “second founder”. The university’s flagship building, Healy Hall, bears his name. Though he considered himself and was largely accepted as White, Healy was posthumously recognized as the first Black American to become a Jesuit, earn a PhD, and become the president of a predominantly White university.

    Healy was born in Georgia to a family that produced many Catholic leaders. His mother was one-eighth Black and his father was a White Irish emigrant. Under Georgia law, Healy’s father technically owned his wife and children as slaves. Healy and his siblings were sent north by their father to be educated, and Healy continued his higher education at the Catholic University of Louvain, where he received his doctorate in philosophy in 1864. He returned to America and started as the chair of philosophy at Georgetown University….

    Patrick and all of his siblings were born as slaves, as by the legal doctrine of partus sequitur ventrem, they inherited the legal status of their mother. Michael Healy was prevented by Georgia law from manumitting his wife or children, which could be done only by an act of the Georgia General Assembly in exceptional circumstances.

    It was also against the law in the state to educate blacks, which is why the children had to be sent North.

  21. 21.

    Honus

    @Salty Sam: yep. As white kid from an all white town in West Virginia I learned a whole lot about and formed many lasting friendships with Black people working as a line cook in college and the years after.

  22. 22.

    prostratedragon

    Thank you for that. I descend from a family of Martins that is rooted in Ireland (and France) and Africa. The story of how they got together is unlikely to be an achingly bittersweet tale of thwarted romance, but nevertheless here I am, and so be it. I’m glad you and your cousin have had a chance to know each other, and that she had a happy landing.

  23. 23.

    MC

    @Martin: Thanks for this. I know it’s true. And I’m working on some radical acceptance. I’m grateful to have Biden as president, too. I don’t think we could have had anyone better suited for this.

  24. 24.

    Ruckus

    @MC:

    How do you maintain sanity in a world wide man made disaster?

    Not sure you can. But you can decide not to go off the deep end because that what there is. Most Americans have not had to experience a level of “Holy Shit” that we are quite possibly at this next few days. Likely most people haven’t had that experience. But some have and have come through it. I’ve met some at the VA. There are far more people than one might imagine who have come through a rather severe “Holy Shit” moment in their lives and they survived at least approaching fine. There is little to actually do in this case, except wait and hope that saner minds prevail. If you can, donate to some of the sources listed in the War in Ukraine link in the blue bar at the top. Read this thread and see that while we have a ways to go to good, this nation has gotten better. Progress in human terms is often slow and painful but progress is possible. But you have to keep looking forward and working at it.

    That’s all I’ve got.

  25. 25.

    Hoppie

    As Obama said, we are striving for a more perfect union.

    Thank you for posting, there is still much to be hopeful about.

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