William Monroe Trotter, born on this day in 1872, was a newspaper editor and civil rights activist based in Boston, Massachusetts who co-founded the Niagara Movement with WEB Du Bois.
Trotter was an early opponent of the accommodationist race policies of Booker T. Washington, and in 1901 founded the Boston Guardian, an independent African-American newspaper he used to express that opposition.
Trotter was a key founding member of the “Niagara Movement” with W.E.B. Du Bois and contributed to the formation of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), although he never participated in the group due to a bitter split with Du Bois.
“My vocation has been to wage a crusade against lynching, disenfranchisement, peonage, public segregation, injustice, denial of service in public places for color, in war time and peace.”
- William Monroe Trotter
https://trotter.umich.edu/article/timeline-william-monroe-trotters-life
I hope you nerds have a good month of April
Remember no crackers
Thinking back to this time I worked as a barista and this taller, bigger Black man would come in every morning and say he wants his coffee “Black and strong” just like he is.
At the time, I thought it was so corny and goofy and it made me laugh, but looking back, I see him as nothing but an absolute legend.
Hope he’s doing well today.
The stereotype of pitbull owners being poc is a pretty dated one. Nowadays I’ve seen more poc with Chihuahuas and Yorkies while it’s middle class to rich white women who have pit bulls they can’t control.
This is the case in Guatemala as well.
I need the overly neurotic, insecure people on various platforms including on this site to really stop analyzing global events through personal betrayal narratives and start treating reality with a level of sophistication and (yes unfortunately) level-headedness if you want to not only understand it but also to change it. But maybe that’s asking too much.
This has become increasingly clear the past few years. From Venezuela and Iran, to every other country that rarely gets the spotlight in the “international Left” media. After a certain point, reaction for the sake of reaction, critique for the sake of critique, leads to nowhere. Especially when legitimising imperialist aims (which is worse than nowhere of course, it actively harms the international movement).
Apologies for vague-posting but genuinely after a certain point, one should ask oneself - is showcasing your disapproval online affecting anything materially except satisfying your own ego - in which case it may be best to invest your time in non-political hobbies if it doesn’t go beyond the screen.
I get where you’re coming from. I’ve been on the news mega more this year than I have been previously and I feel the same way seeing this in real time. Its more understandable coming from those who are close to, if not right in, the most affected areas of the conflict.
Finally got another remake done.
Was the first song I ever wrote. Despite that, it’s a long one with different parts. Had to fix a lot, mostly drums, because, like I said, I had no idea how to write drums when I first wrote this.
Something I find incredibly confusing about the term “biracial” is that it is strictly defined on a genetic basis but it is a term that exists in relation to a social construct.
Here’s what I find so damn frustrating: By the “genetic” definition of “biracial,” I am “biracial,” but in relation to all the social baggage that the term comes with? Absolutely not. How is it that simply having a certain genetic makeup means that the term gets permanently marked on my existence, but then when I see people talk about biracial people, they’re out there saying shit like, “Biracial people look different from Black people. They are racially ambiguous, have light skin, and have curly hair instead of coily hair. They can never truly understand the monoracial Black experience.” when literally none of that applies to me.
The term “biracial” is a misnomer because this discrepancy between denotation and connotation is never acknowledged. When one is “biracial” by denotation but not by connotation (as am I), discourse on “biracial” people can look incredibly disorienting, especially when it’s being conducted by people who believe in race science (and let’s be honest, it often is).
then when I see people talk about biracial people, they’re out there saying shit like, “Biracial people look different from Black people. They are racially ambiguous, have light skin, and have curly hair instead of coily hair. They can never truly understand the monoracial Black experience.”
Because this is bullshit that any reasonably aware black person who’s spent time in community with other black people would shoot down immediately as nonsense (it also isn’t even accurate; while I have wavy hair, my brother’s is coily such that he grew out both an afro and dreads just fine).
This part’s also only my experience (and may differ from yours) but I find that kind of discourse only really happens online, where there’s no social pressure to slap such inanity down.
There’s so much art about the biracial experience and how you won’t get treated as anything other than just black most of the time by society that such discourse feels like a psyop; I wouldn’t put much of any real stock in it, honestly.
Yep. Now that you mention it, I have never really seen a serious context, i.e., one that is not bozos on social media, hotep-adjacent YouTube channels, and obscure Substack articles smearing shit all over the wall, subscribe to this staunch view of race essentialism that some Black people seem to be obsessed with.
I especially find it such a headscratcher that so many Black Americans, of all people, want to play the racial purity game when that has done so much violence to them (as it is the master’s tools) but also, by that very scientific racist framework, Black Americans certainly aren’t “pure.” Black Americans are a very “racially mixed” group of people, and that plays a part into why biracial people still get treated as nothing but Black.
There really is no way to tell if a person is “biracial” just by looking at them, and this especially rings true for Black Americans because this whole phenotype I mentioned of light skin, curly hair, and racial ambiguity? Many self-proclaimed “monoracial” Black Americans who’d say they have “four Black grandparents” have this very fucking look.
However, as I (and many others) are an example of, being “biracial” doesn’t even guarantee ambiguity. I will never forget this time I saw these goofy Black race essentialists literally deny the parentage of Dennis Schröder simply because they are unable to fathom that a biracial person can look like exactly like that.
These fools were literally saying shit like, “The source that says he has a white father must’ve gotten it wrong! That must be an error!” When their narrow view that greatly distorts how genetics and phenotypical variations actually work is starting to see contradictions, it seems like their gut instinct is to think that these contradictions they’re seeing are just the product of misinformation instead of being like, “Damn, maybe I was way more misunderstood about this than I thought.” (many such cases)
Also, something that confuses me is that some of these people are sometimes so desperate to not look like race essentialists that they try to nebulously claim what, on the surface, seems like a social rather than genetic reason for rejecting biracial people from Blackness, e.g., “Biracial people have totally different experiences than Black people!”
That whole thing about “experience” is so meaningless to throw out. One of my close friends was born to two Afro-Haitian parents but got adopted by a white family at such a young age that she didn’t know her parents and really had a hard time connecting with her Blackness until adulthood. Is she “not Black” by this logic?
This is also a very US-centric thing to say, too, because what they really mean is “my myopic idea of what constitutes a ‘true’ Black American experience.”
With this being said mostly by socially conservative types, of course, it lacks intersectionality because you know what else greatly influences the kind of “Black” experience you have? Whether you are queer or cishet, whether you are neurodivergent or neurotypical, whether you are Muslim or Christian, whether you are poor or wealthy. But, of course, they’d never acknowledge this because the validation of their shaky ideas requires them to oversimplify things and throw out useless platitudes that don’t actually pertain to a dialectical understanding of race.
The cringe I feel at seeing “Biracial is biracial, and Black is Black. It’s just basic biology!” type comments.
i finally finished wretched of the earth, still digesting and parsing through but man it’s incredible how much you can tell that a lot of thinkers were influenced by this book, shoutout franz fanon (i will say though the book is incredibly male centric :/ )
“Israel” is not different from America, When Netenyahu calls Palestinians Amalek that need to be wiped out, Trump says that Iranian civilization needs to be wiped. Then the “progressives” of such entities claim that “we do not Agree with him, he’s just a right wing fascist” yet they do nothing about him, they’re not silent in fear of prosecution, they’re silent in agreement.
And to those self proclaimed Muslims and leftists who shout and cheer at every missile like they were the ones firing it, yet refuse to talk about the demonization of a whole nation, a whole sect should figure out where they stand.
All the Hasan Piker discourse in us politics makes me wonder if my joke about him becoming the 21st century Eugene Debs actually happens.
And a good April to you.