'Abdu'l-Karim Ewing-Boyd

Father, husband, son & brother focused on justice and community organizing through child development and education. Born and bred in the briar patch, that’s me.

[Sony Thăng @nxt888]

The French state did not bring civilization to Africa.

It brought France’s needs to Africa.

The schools taught French because French-speaking administrators were more useful than educated locals.

The roads were built where the extraction required roads.

The laws applied where French interests needed legal cover.

The "civilization" was infrastructure for a project, not a gift.

And when the project ended, when the formal colonies became formally independent, France left behind borders that didn’t match ethnic realities, debt structures that ensured continued dependence, and CFA franc systems that kept African currencies tethered to Paris long after the colonial flags came down.

Then it expressed surprise and concern that the countries it "civilized" kept experiencing instability.

Then it expressed surprise and concern that the people it brought to France to do the work that French people didn’t want to do kept having children who grew up in poverty.

The surprise is not genuine.

The concern is not genuine.

What is genuine is the need for an explanation that doesn’t require examining the project itself.

[Gio @TheSportProhet]

600 year blip in human history is finally coming to an end. One of the great historical ironies is watching people in former European colonial powers lament the hollowing out of their nation-states, the erosion of monetary sovereignty, and the growing influence of unelected bureaucratic institutions like the European Commission and the European Central Bank over their economic and political lives. Then there's the hysteria surrounding immigration, with people insisting that their national identities, cultures, and ways of life are being fundamentally transformed by outsiders. Yet these are precisely the kinds of transformations European colonial powers imposed on much of the world for centuries: the destruction of indigenous political sovereignty, the subordination of local economies to external institutions, the imposition of foreign monetary and administrative systems, and the deliberate restructuring of colonized societies. The historical irony is that many Europeans now invoke the sanctity of national sovereignty and cultural preservation without recognizing how systematically their own states denied those very principles to the rest of the world.

[Sony Thăng @nxt888]

Frantz Fanon argued in his 1961 book The Wretched of the Earth that the violence in the colonies is not brought there by the colonized.

It is installed there by the colonizer.

It is the foundational grammar of colonial rule, which can only maintain itself through force.

The colonized learns violence from the colonizer, as the primary language of their relationship.

When that person arrives in the metropole, they do not bring foreign violence into a peaceful civilization.

They bring home a violence that was always already French.

They bring it back to its source.

And the source looks at them and calls them "savage."

This is not complexity.

This is a mirror.

And the civilization that cannot look into it has not, despite all claims to the contrary, grown up yet.

[Deisine @TDeisine]

The question should be: Who told you one gender is superior to or more deserving of rights than the other?

When women talk about equality, you think we are talking about physical strength?
Men have never had to fight for the right to be men. They didn't have to prove they were human enough to deserve rights, opportunities, education, or a voice in society.

Yet women have had to fight for many of these things. So, who decided that women should have less in the first place?
Equality is simply saying, “I deserve to be treated as a human being, with the same dignity, rights, and opportunities as you.”
I am not less because I am a woman. I am human before I am a woman.

My rights are not privileges you grant me. They are not favours you can withdraw. And they are certainly not up for negotiation.

[GullahMuseumSC @GullahSc]

This month marks The 500th anniversary of the arrival of the first recorded enslaved Africans to what is now Winyah Bay near what would eventually become the city of Georgetown, SC—where or museum is located.

Less than 35 years after Christopher Columbus’s first voyage, the actions of Spanish colonists incited what was perhaps one of the earliest rebellions of enslaved Africans anywhere in the New World, writes historian Daniel C. Littlefield, PhD, in the forward for “Yes, Lord, I Know the Road: A Documentary History of African Americans in South Carolina, 1526 - 2008.”

Much is made of 1619 as being the arrival of enslaved Africans, but that was to English North America. In September 1526 there was what would became San Miguel de Gualdape—a short-lived colony of about 600 people was in Spanish North America.

The colony included sailors, Spanish colonists (including women and children), several priests, enslaved indigenous people, and some 100 of the first African people documented to be brought to this land—taken either directly from West Africa or through the brutal slave markets of the Caribbean.

The expedition was led by Lucas Vasquez de Ayllon, who had permission from the Spanish crown to establish a colony in North America. But the leading ship smashed into a shoal, an underwater sandbank, becoming grounded on the shifting sands that makes parts of Winyah Bay a nightmare to navigate.

Supplies were now scarce due to the loss of the flagship and its cargo in the shallows of Winyah Bay. The wreck was an omen of the unraveling to come. After abandoning an attempt to create “New Andalusia’s” first settlement, the colonists traveled south along the coast to try again.

Scholars place San Miguel de Gualdape at various sites along the coast of South Carolina and Georgia, but only an archaeological discovery will resolve this debate. (We’re going with the colony moving south along the South Carolina coast to Beaufort and Port Royal Sound area.)

In these harsh conditions, the colonists soon began to sicken and die. De Ayllon was among those who perished. After his death, some of the Spaniards mutinied and imprisoned the town’s authorities. The Africans set fire to the leader’s house, and they killed some colonists.

By mid-November 1526 the colonists had abandoned San Miguel de Gualdape. Of the expedition’s initial 600 participants, only 150 survived.

This doomed expedition predates the arrival of the first recorded enslaved Africans in Point Comfort, Virginia, in English North America by nearly 100 years, and the Pilgrims at Plymouth Rock, Mass., by 94 years.

Modern historians have identified between 250 and 313 total uprisings and planned conspiracies spanning from the colonial era through the Civil War in the continental U.S. And the first—and perhaps only successful one on what is now U.S. soil—was by the African freedom seekers of the San Miguel de Gualdape settlement.

There is no record of what happened to the Africans. We do know that they weren’t included in the ship’s manifest for the return trip back to Spain. They may have lived with the indigenous people or started a maroon community of their own.

Sources:

https://t.co/t5nwCibJTu

https://t.co/F4i0dlwhhv

https://t.co/BG0Zh4LCyY

https://t.co/0qQiZqtpqo

https://t.co/ogTOHXI8xI

[Gabrielle Blair @designmom]

Speaking of TBIs, did you see how many Traumatic Brain Injuries happen in the NFL each year? 281! So awful. And as shocking as that is, it's WAY worse in the military. Our soldiers experience 18,000 Traumatic Brain Injuries each year. 18,000!!!

Wanna guess how many women...
1/4

[Domo Julio @DapperDomo]

White Christians used to lynch Black people on Sunday in front of churches.

[mitra @mitrajoy_]

why are men so afraid of being falsely accused? just stay inside, don’t put yourself in situations like these, don’t go out alone at night, don��t drink, dress modestly, and you might not be targeted. be more vigilant and take some accountability for your own reputation. hope this helps.

[Brandon Bradford @BrandonLBradfor]

"So you're telling me if a girl gets into orgy and I invite my friends, but she didn't want to sleep with my friends, she's drunk/on drugs and they do it anyways, that's rape?!?!?"

Yes, you sniveling wet sock of a human, you living embodiment of Ted Cruz, this isn't that hard.

[Meech @MediumSizeMeech]

Really don’t understand the arguments going on here, you can do drugs and consent to having sex with 10 people if you want, but if an 11th shows up, and you don’t consent to that, it’s rape

[Nyaburi 🐝 @Nyaburinyauma]

I manage a small apartment building, and last fall I rented a studio to an eighteen year old girl who had just aged out of foster care. She arrived with a trash bag of clothes and a backpack. That was everything. No bed, no pots, no shower curtain, no curtains at all. She signed the lease with a housing voucher, took her key, and thanked me three times in a very small voice. The next morning I saw her carrying a flattened cardboard box up the stairs.

[Gabrielle Blair @designmom]

@BuddyGuyPalctw Writing ‘hope he dies’? Yes. I love it.

['Abdu'l-Karim Ewing-Boyd @LapinFrere]

And Michael Jordan (he was a professional football player) and Isaac Hayes (he was an accomplished baritone) and Michael Eric Dyson (he was a distinguished Rutgers graduate). He was also an attorney and a playwright and a political theorist.

[LEGIT EVERYTHING 🔴🔱⚫️ @Shanestackamil1]

So you telling me Paul Robeson was more famous than Denzel Washington and Michael B Jordan and said fck it & went rouge on the establishment?

[Maryam @hell_line0]

"She was going to a frat house, she knew what she was going to get."

Oh yeah?

If that's what frat houses are for, close them all entirely, immediately.

[Rachel Zader @RachelZader]

One of the best things I ever did after I was raped was get super pissed off - it gave me the motivation to hound my attacker for 10y in criminal and civil court, do loads of victim advocacy, change policy in the city I was attacked in, get news coverage about it, and get a bad guy in charge at the DA's office removed from his position.
As a counselor certified in anger management, I have to correct people on the myth that "anger is bad." It's not - it's the thing that loves you that mobilizes you to deal with a problem. The issue is whether it consumes you to illness or loss of control, or you choose to deal with it inappropriately.
We need to stop wringing our hands over victims getting righteously angry simply because we have unworked issues with our own anger, or with women. It's not their problem to be tasked with navigating for us.

[Rakesh Kumar @Rakeshhkumaar]

Black Panther Party leader Fred Hampton :

"We used to run around yellin ’bout Panther Power—the Panthers run it. We admit we made mistakes. Our ten point program is in the midst of being changed right now, because we used the word “white” when we should have used the word “capitalist”. We’re the first to admit our mistakes. We no longer say Panther Power because we don’t believe the Panthers should have all the power. We are not for the dictatorship of the Panthers. We are not for the dictatorship of Black people. We are for the dictatorship of the people."

From a speech delivered April 27, 1969

[Rakesh Kumar @Rakeshhkumaar]

“One of the most important things the [Black Panther] Party did was to make it really clear who the enemy was: not white people, but the capitalistic, imperialistic oppressors. They took the Black liberation struggle out of a national context and put it in an international context…. It was also clear to me that without a truly internationalist component nationalism was reactionary. There was nothing revolutionary about nationalism by itself-Hitler and Mussolini were nationalists. Any community seriously concerned with its own freedom has to be concerned about other peoples’ freedom as well. The victory of oppressed people anywhere in the world is a victory for Black people. Each time one of imperialism’s tentacles is cut off we are closer to liberation… Imperialism is an international system of exploitation, and we, as revolutionaries, need to be internationalists to defeat it.”

-Assata Shakur, “Assata: An Autobiography”

['Abdu'l-Karim Ewing-Boyd @LapinFrere]

Not just college. When Black people became part of the public, all KINDS of public benefits (colleges, housing, pools, etc.) suddenly became unthinkable. Y'all ain't slick and we ain't fooled.

[Acyn @Acyn]

AOC: And for anyone who says that’s unrealistic… this is literally what baby boomers gave themselves. Public colleges in America were tuition-free. You know when they started to get defunded? They got defunded when they started to get integrated.

[AFRAH 🗝️ @farah369rahaf]

@dollyqwe1

[jezz @JezziiB]

The last 24 hours of news as a woman:

- A man jacks off to the woman next to him on a plane. United makes her return to her seat.
- 7 frat boys drug and gang rape a student for hours, and advertise “free p*ssy” to their frat. Cornell makes them write essays.
- A football player rapes a student. LSU reduces his suspension.
- A teen boy stalks and stabs a girl 10 times. Courts grant only a restraining order.
- Brendan Carr spent 9 years in a cult raping teen girls. Trump made him FCC Chair.