“I was scared of failing my people, my poetry. But I was also terrified on a physical level.
“I did know at the inauguration I was going to become highly visible — which is a very dangerous thing to be in America, especially if you’re Black and outspoken and have no Secret Service.”
I regard her as America’s sweetheart, not just for her inaugural poem, which she knocked out of the park and is possibly still travelling deep into space, but for her other poetry as well. Her New Day’s Lyric was epic…
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Not everybody sees her that way. She’s an exemplar of Black excellence, and a sizable percentage of the population sees that as a threat.
Reactionaries have destroyed entire towns because of individuals like Ms Gorman.
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But heaven forfend Karen’s little Ashley feel a bit embarrassed to learn anything in school about how this is how our country has always made people like Amanda feel all their lives
Again, the Original Sin of this country was NOT slavery, but was, and remains White Supremacy.
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I’m going to disagree with you. I do think America’s original sin was slavery. What kind of thinking does one have to devolve to believe that black people were little more than trainable monkeys? White Supremacy is the mental condition (illness) that was the logical consequence of slavery for far too many white Americans, and still persists after these many years away from the Civil War. It’s an ongoing national tragedy…
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Don’t forget the genocide of the Indigenous Peoples. That was a crime so vast, it actually changed the carbon footprint of the planet.
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White supremacy was the mental condition that allowed them to treat other humans as livestock. It was long ingrained in the European psyche that they were the pinnacle of humanity and that all other races were inferior, fit only for life as dull beasts or extermination as uncontrollable savages.
The sense of superiority is what allowed them to keep blacks as livestock, and slaughter native americans on sight.
It didn’t arise from slaveholding; slaveholding arose from it.
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Came here to say what B4 said – except I don’t know anything about that carbon footprint change thing. What’s that about?
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MD, I think he is referring to the replacement of subsistence mostly hunter gatherer cultures (and some agrarian), by genocide, with a westernized pre-industrial culture that turned into… well, us.
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That makes some sense. When I read his comment a scene from a book popped into my head, a bunch of “settlers” slaughtering wildlife and burning down a grove of trees, like a bunch of marauders. But that sort of action isn’t dependent on genocide, so I wasn’t sure if that was where B4 was going with his comment.
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Reminds me; of a couple of songs.
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