Of spare or extra time

According to the New York Times, it would have been the first time in history Native American lands would have been handed over to a foreign company by Congress. The site has long been used for Apache coming-of-age ceremonies, particularly for girls.

“This fraudulent action is the latest in a long list of egregious bureaucratic abuses of power by the Obama Administration. I will continue to fight this overreach,” Gosar wrote in his statement.

In response to the proposed sale of the publicly-held ancestral grounds, the Apache people had been occupying the land, according to the Times. About 300 people marched 44 miles from tribal headquarters to occupy the site, beginning on February 9.

“Why is this place sacred?” Wendsler Nosie Sr., former chairman of the San Carlos Apache, told Cronkite News. “No difference to Mount Sinai. How the holy spirit came to be.”

Scientists for the Society for American Archaeology corroborate this, and testified before Congress that archaeological evidence of Apache occupation and use of the site go back before recorded history.

The talk of “abuses of power by the Obama Administration” shows that Gosar doesn’t understand how the National Register or US histopric preservation laws work.

But the site is not safe, yet:

Republican Rep. Paul Gosar and Sen. John McCain had joined forces with Democratic Rep. Ann Kirkpatrick in an effort to sell off the ancestral Native American land, known as Oak Flat or Chi’chil Bildagoteel to the Apache community, to mining firm Resolution Copper, owned by an Australian-British corporation.

The designation of Oak Flat as a National Historic Place could hamper the plan to construct a copper mine on the land. But ultimately nothing “guarantees that a historic property cannot be modified or even destroyed,” said Stephanie Toothman, the National Register’s keeper, in a letter to the two lawmakers.

The entire purpose of a protest is to be disruptive to normal activities. Protests don’t enact social change by asking for it politely: everyone just ignores you if you do that. People, particularly those in positions of power and/or social privilege, have a tendency to be both complacent in their role and stubborn in the face of any attempt to convince them to change their attitude.

If you look at all of the most effective protests in history, the one recurring pattern you will see is that they all caused a large amount of unrest. This is what protests are designed to do. They make it impossible for people to ignore the issue by drawing attention away from their everyday lives and towards the plight of the people who are protesting.

Not to mention that any search of info on there being multiple shooters comes up blank…

My cousin posted that yesterday. Dude didn’t have a digital imprint until mid morning yesterday. Meaning not only did he not have any social media. He didn’t exist as a person… you know how hard that is. No record of any kind housing. School. He was in the army and nothing. Shit ain’t adding up. Plus you not gonna confuse snipers from elevated positions with a shooter on the ground. No there is no body… 😒

Oh okay 

What Happened?

The night before Abdul was supposed to graduate high school, he attended an alumni and graduate bonfire at a beach in San Diego. As the night went on, he heard people exclaiming about five boys trying to bully a trans teenager, and stepped in to help, even though Abdul had only known of this classmate by name, in passing at school. Abdul defended his trans classmate saying he had as much of a right as everyone else to be there. This led him into a defensive altercation on behalf of himself and his trans friend. At the end of it, Abdul - a young Black Muslim man - was taken into custody by the police and accused of multiple felonies. The bullies responsible for initiating the altercation were not taken into custody.

Due to a lack of immediate funds, Abdul stayed in several jails over a period of one week, as his mother and sister searched for bail bondsmen who accept payment in monthly installments (Abdul’s total bail was set to $100,000). He has since come out of jail and had a preliminary hearing. The family has also found a good lawyer eager and willing to take the case.

The flood of financial obligations related to any legal case can be overwhelming and impossible to pay. Anyone who knows Abdul, Iman, and their mother, knows how generous, compassionate, and reliable they are in supporting others in times of distress and difficulty. Let’s work as a community to support this family by alleviating at least the financial burdens they are being faced with.

Please keep Abdul and his family in your prayers. We will update this page with information on Abdul’s case as it progresses.

Delaware (1792)

Kentucky (1799)

Maryland (1801)

New Jersey (1807)

Connecticut (1814)

New York (1821 property qualifications taken away for white men and raised for black men, effectively killing the black vote)

Rhode Island (1822) (reinstated in 1842 with property qualifications only for black men)

Tennessee (1834)

North Carolina (1835)

Pennsylvania (1838)

And the states, to my knowledge (correct me if I’m wrong), that granted free African American male suffrage and never took it away all through the Fifteenth Amendment:

Massachusetts

Vermont

New Hampshire

Maine

The voter must have reached the age of majority 

The voter must be “worth fifty pounds proclamation money, clear estate in the same.”

The voter must have lived within the county for at least a year

Gender and race were not considered limiting factors, which meant that free black people who had attained a certain threshold of wealth were eligible. Married women could not technically own property, so they weren’t eligible, but single women and widows were. If there happened to be a free black woman in the state of New Jersey between 1776 (when their Constitution was drafted) and 1807 (when gender and race restrictions were put in place), and she was not married, and she had attained the necessary threshold of wealth, she was eligible. 

It would be very difficult to find out if anyone like this ever existed, and if they did, whether they voted in any elections, but it’s entirely possible. Black women faced more stringent voting restrictions because unlike white women they needed to be free in addition to being unmarried, and in a racist society it was likely much harder for them to acquire the necessary wealth and property. Still, they were eligible.

While looking into this I made a cursory attempt to find a record of any unmarried, property-owning free black women in New Jersey. I didn’t see much, but I did run across something that’s probably of interest to people:

Elizabeth Freeman was born a slave around 1744 in New York, and essentially brought about the end of slavery in Massachusetts single-handedly. Just as an example of the kind of woman Freeman was, at one point she shielded a young girl from the attack of their mistress, Hannah Ashley, and received a bad wound on her arm. Here’s what Freeman had to say about that: “I had a bad arm all winter, but Madam had the worst of it. I never covered the wound, and when people said to me, before Madam, ‘Betty, what ails your arm?’ I only answered - ‘ask missis!’ Which was the slave and which was the real misses?“

In 1780, Freeman heard a public reading of the Massachusetts Constitution and was struck by the first article, which begins, “all men are born free and equal.” She sought out a lawyer and sued the state for her freedom, pointing out that the wording of the State Constitution conflicted with slavery. Slavery in Massachusetts was declared unconstitutional as a result of this case (though it still took some time for slavery to fully end, by 1790 there were no recorded slaves in the state), and Freeman was given her freedom (and was compensated for her labor…nice). 

Freeman’s old masters asked her to come back to their house and work for a wage, but she basically told them to go fuck themselves and went to work for the attorney who represented her, Theodore Sedgwick, as a paid servant and governess. Eventually she became a popular and in-demand midwife and nurse, and she and her daughter bought a house in Stockbridge. She died around 85, and was buried in the Sedgwick family plot.

So it’s worthwhile to ask ourselves, why are we encouraged to believe that things in the past are always “worse”, and that our present must always somehow, of necessity, be “better”? Who benefits from this process, and who is disenfranchised by it?

Hidden Youth: Speculative Fiction from the Margins of History

(Phenderson Djèlí Clark)

An anthology of historical speculative fiction?  Telling the stories of children who have been marginalized throughout history? Yup, this is the SFF project you’ve been waiting to back. The Kickstarter in question, is right here.

So I don’t ever write blogs about Kickstarters, but I’m breaking that rule. If you’re a fan or supporter of diverse SFF then Hidden Youth is a project you may want to back. Did I mention I have a short story in there titled, The Mouser of Peter the Great? And that it’s set in 18th c. Russia? Or that it’s about a young “Moorish” boy who is brought to the Tsar? And that it was inspired by the real life Abram Gannibal? The great-grandfather of the “veritable Shakespeare of the Russian literary tradition,” Alexander Pushkin?

Oh, also, there’s Slavic faeries…and monsters. Of course.

Here, let me explain.

Amid all of the US’ Independence Day celebrations and Steve Rogers posts…

How Would You Be Sorted At EAGLECREST, The American Wizarding School I Made Up?