W.E. Littlejohn © 2023
Vice President Kamala Harris gave a passionate and forceful July speech, in Jacksonville, Florida, rebuking the divisive tactic put forth by Florida’s conniving governor, politicians and the Republican-controlled Department of Education (DOE) that claimed enslaved Africans – thinking, feeling humans held hostage; held against their will - “benefited” from Europeans’ organized slavery.[i] She didn’t take what amounted to a scandalous insult, laying down. But, I wish she’d made it clear that those kidnapped Africans were endowed with impressive knowledge of trades, as journalist, Gillian Brockell declared in her analysis, "Note to Florida and DeSantis: Enslaved Africans were already skilled." With that, I wish the Vice President had enlightened her audience and the world with uncontested receipts. Receipts such as the intellect and skills of Onesimus, thought to be an Akan society family member in what is now Ghana. One among the twelve million stolen Africans (three million died), Onesimus introduced inoculation against disease - specifically smallpox - to an Anglo Saxon/British enslaver in Boston, Massachusetts, in 1716. Fake news, you say? Here are links to just a few of the Internet’s over two million receipts:
v Onesimus
v African roots of inoculation in America: Saving lives for three centuries
v How an Enslaved African Man in Boston Helped Save Generations from Smallpox
v Confronting Smallpox: How an Enslaved Man Helped Spur the First US Vaccine Study
This is just one of thousands of examples that show “White people were, and still are the only beneficiaries of slavery,” as Dr. E. Faye Williams,Esq declared in the Philadelphia Tribune and multiple media outlets.
I wish Vice President Harris had told Florida’s prejudiced, ignorant clans that, before the unfortunate were kidnapped (even by their own people) and enslaved by the English, Portuguese, Dutch, French, Spanish and the English colony of Rhode Island, each of which brutally stripped Africans of their identities – names, languages, rituals, and humanity - “The peoples of West Africa had rich and diverse histories and cultures centuries before Europeans arrived. Africans had kingdoms and city-states, each with its own language and culture. The empire of Songhai and the kingdoms of Mali, Benin, and Kongo [now the Republic of the Congo; the Kingdom of Kongo existed from the 14th to the early 19th century] were large and powerful with monarchs heading complex political structures governing hundreds of thousands of people. In other areas, political systems were smaller, relying on agreement between people at the village level. Art, learning and technology flourished, and Africans were especially skilled with medicine, mathematics, and astronomy. In addition to domestic goods, they made fine luxury items in bronze, ivory, gold, and terracotta for both local use and trade.”[ii] That statement on the Jim Crow Museum’s website parallels National Geographic’s, October 1996 issue, along with stunning photographs, that reported “Goldworking was already a well-honed art when Portuguese first anchored off Ghana’s coast in the late 1400s.” Smithsonianmagazine.com’s concurred with the headline, “West African Gold: Out of the Ordinary.” Even the former president, Ronald Reagan, glowingly acknowledged Africa’s nation, Mali, as being supreme in knowledge and skills in this YouTube clip: President Reagan's State Dinner Toasts for President Moussa Traore of Mali on October 6, 1988.[iii] ((The Kongo was brutally ravished, including mutilations, by Belgium's King Leopold II (the personification of evil), and was catastrophic for the Kongolese population. See book and article: Leopold II: Belgium 'wakes up' to its bloody colonial past.))
In opposing the slavery “benefit” claim and responding to the Ancestors’ call for us to speak up, professional basketball player, Kyrie Irving stepped up on instagram and shouted: "They Stole Scientists, Doctors, Architects, Teachers... And Made Them Slaves!". Irving’s “Doctors” reference reveals, again, Onesimus and the thousands of African women and men who knew how to administer various medicinal herbs to heal illnesses and wounds. That knowledge and skill was passed on to the impressively brave and undefeated Harriet Tubman who understood the botanical world and used herbal medicines from forests to keep healthy the hundreds of African hostages she helped escape enslavement, and, as a spy during the Civil War, to treat soldiers’ wounds. Ancestral African herbal knowledge and skills were later passed on to African American geniuses like George Washington Carver, a pioneer in botany.
Defending their new African American history standards, two members of Florida’s workgroup “cited 16 individuals” who, they say, developed valuable skills while in bondage. To the contrary, “Several of the individuals cited weren’t ever enslaved, and there’s little evidence that those who were [enslaved] learned any relevant skills for their ‘personal benefit’,” Jamelle Bouie penned in her New York Times article, Ron DeSantis and the State Where History Goes to Die.
Lacking substance in their fabrication, Florida’s governor and DOE cited “blacksmithing” as a skill Africans/African Americans supposedly “benefited” from under the inhumane yoke of enslavement. Yeah, right. I wouldn't have been surprised if DeSantis had proclimed that "victims of lynchings got to keep the rope," a quip from Washington Post’s book editor, Ron Charles’s commentary, “Texas New School book law is rated R - ridiculous.” First, let’s define “blacksmithing,” because, believe it or not, not everyone knows all that that craft entails. “A blacksmith is a metalsmith who creates objects primarily from wrought iron or steel, but sometimes from other metals [such as gold], by forging the metal, using tools to hammer, bend, and cut.”
In their zeal to minimize African intelligence, didn’t know or ignored the fact that, centuries prior to Europeans’ arrival and later destructive colonialism, there was “a major cavalry culture in West Africa,” evidenced in CuChullaine O’Reilly’s Africa’s Forgotten Cavalry Kingdoms, and informs readers that Professor Robin Law’s research indisputably shows the timeframe being “somewhere between the seventeenth century B.C. and the tenth century A.D.” This long suppressed truth radically reshapes “a major portion of how equestrian history is taught and perceived,” Law wrote. Law’s and O’Reilly’s work demonstrates that numerous West African Kingdoms, including nations now called Ghana and Mali, employed tens of thousands of horses, primarily for military purposes. Consequently, it follows that it’s highly likely many among stolen Africans possessed the skill to repair and forge horseshoes, and, although rare, but “not unknown,” metal stirrups, helmets and armor. In addition, leather craftsmen fashioned saddles. Clearly, Africans - our Ancestors - were already skilled in the blacksmithing trade as well.
Again, all this ingenuity in the sciences (i.e., astronomy) and trades occurred centuries before – one more time, centuries before - Europeans’ (and Arabs’) destructive kidnapping and colonization quests.[iv] (Some scholars suggest this prized intelligent/strategic activity was taking place while Europeans were still foraging around in caves.)
As is historically typical of enslavers, Europeans have falsely claimed credit in their literature, text books, media and marketing, that the many, many, many valuable skills and knowledge our kidnapped Ancestors brought with them and were forced, under duress, to use, like blacksmithing, belonged to them (Europeans). Florida’s governor and his allies, like their European/American ancestors, are attempting to claim credit and erase “knowledge of African societies” and high achievements, as columnist Sundiata Kita Cha-Jua observed in his essay, Warping History.
A warped history is intentionally scrubbed of truths, like the fact that Europeans plundered (and continue to plunder) African resources - humans, minerals and artifacts (sadly with the help of some greedy African traitors…traitors exist in every ethnic group). Massive looting and broken promises have resulted in much of the corruption and poverty witnessed in Africa today and around the world, including Haiti.[viii] Proof of notorious wholesale theft of African nations’ artifacts is seen where, recently, the United States “returned 23 stolen Benin Bronzes to Nigeria through the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art, the National Gallery of Art, and the Rhode Island School of Design.” Benin Bronzes were also looted during the British invasion of Benin in 1897. France was to return “26 looted artifacts and artworks to Benin,” in 2021. In 1922, Germany returned “22 historic bronze sculptures to Nigeria as part of efforts to address what its foreign minister called its ‘dark colonial past.’" Germany's Foreign Minister, Annalena Baerbock, said “Germany and other European countries must listen to those who were the victims of colonial cruelty and work toward making reparations.” The assassinated Guyanese historian, political activist and academic, Walter Rodney mapped out European’s historic destruction on the African continent in his groundbreaking book, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa.
A person doesn’t have to read Rodney’s definitive literary work, or any other critical literature, to know that slavery was a massively heartbreaking, tearful, sullied, savage undertaking that included raping young girls and women (maybe even boys and men), torture, snatching babies from their mothers and selling them; selling mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers, aunts uncles, friends and neighbors and all manner of love ones away from each other, causing generational trauma or, as Dr. Joy Degruy termed it, “post traumatic slave syndrome.” Non-readers only need a DVD or streaming service to watch any one of a number of movies on slavery’s unimaginable tragedies, like Django Unchained. “How is it,” the Vice President hotly queried, “that anyone could suggest that in the midst of these atrocities, that there was any benefit to being subjected to this level of dehumanization?” Were we to collect the copious tears that flowed from soul-crushing grief over those kidnapped and sold and those who missed them, the gallons of the salty liquid might be greater than the Atlantic, Pacific, Indian, Antarctic and Southern Antarctica oceans combined.
I wish, like a dogged attorney, the Vice President had shouted to the heavens that, in addition to the knowledge and skills shown in the foregoing paragraphs, Africans were ALREADY skilled in creative arts - the “talking drum,” (an African invention), engineered steel drums, now a staple in Caribbean Calypso music, basket weaving, sculpting, dying fabric in indigo which was highly prized, and the sales of which benefited only European/White American enslavers and their offspring and foregoing generations.[ix]
Creative arts also included agriculture and culinary skills. In “…South Carolina and Georgia [Europeans/Americans] discovered that rice would grow well in the moist, semitropical county bordering their coastline,” Dr. Johnnetta Cole wrote in her personal rebuttal, Florida’s New Middle School Academic Standards Will Harm All of Florida’s Children, to the false claims pitched by Florida’s governor and his allies. With “…no experience in how to cultivate rice,” they “forced [the operative word is “forced”] enslaved Africans who knew how to plant, harvest and process this difficult crop, to do so.”
Moreover, Africans taught White enslavers how to grow and prepare okra, yams, black-eyed peas, peppers, watermelon and other food staples that had been cultivated in Africa, again, centuries before any European arrived.
“SLAVERY WAS NOT A JOBS PROGRAM!!!” Sen. William Hurd (R. Texas) exclaimed in national media, slamming Florida’s governor’s and DOE’s false “benefit” narrative. I didn't expect to hear those words from a Republican. I nearly fell down in a fit of surprise, as my Ancestors used to say. Unlike today’s divisive Republicans, Hurd spoke like those Republicans that, before and after the Civil War, were comprised of abolitionists - Black and White, named and unnamed, many of whom revealed in Beverly Jenkins’s novel - who abhorred slavery and Jim Crow "laws"; who risked their lives to assist Africans/African Americans escape bondage and secretly fashioned Underground Railroad “stations,” including in Iowa Yes, Iowa. Those “back in the day” Republicans (fought against the then Southern Democratic Dixiecrats, many, if not all, of whom were members of venomous white supremacist hate-breeders - from the KKK to the White Citizen Council - that lynched thousands upon thousands of African American men, women and, yes, some children, as well as some Whites, and Mexicans.[x] In her meticulous and diligent reporting, esteemed journalist Ida B. Wells’s Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases (1892), A Red Record documented “that more than 10,000 African Americans had been killed by lynching in the South between 1864 and 1894.” ((Oddly, the Equal Justice Imitative (EJI) reports White Americans lynched “4,400” African Americans “during the period between Reconstruction and World War II.”)) In The Beast in Florida: A History of Anti-Black Violence, author Marvin Dunn wrote, “Florida lynched more black people per capita than any other state…in the period between 1880 and 1930 - more than twice the rate of Georgia, Mississippi or Louisiana.” Typically, Whites profited (benefited) from these blood-curdling murders of African American citizens through the mass production of lynching postcards, purchased and mailed around the world. ((The United States Postal Service (USPS) didn’t ban mailing privileges of these gruesome-imaged materials until 1908.))
Florida’s governor’s and his allies’ perverted “benefit” vision is a national agenda negatively impacting school children and teachers. That agenda is ensured by William Barclay Allen, a Black male, who helped frame Florida’s new African American history curriculum, and who has “repeatedly spoken out against Affirmative action.” That agenda is also executed through “education” products such as Studies Weekly, “a national social studies publication” that formulate and facilitate lesson plans “on history, government, and society in a newspaper format,” consumed weekly by educators in K-12 schools. Of course, there’s no mention that slavery is “the blood-soaked bedrock on which the United States was built,” as a Southern Poverty Law Center representative said in a 2018 interview titled “Why Schools Fail to Teach Slavery’s Hard History,” on National Public Radio’s (NPR) All Things Considered. Studies Weekly, recently, deleted race from a Rosa Parks story. Educationweek.org, a watchdog resource for K-12 education news and information, reported that “hundreds of issues [have been] flagged in Studies Weekly lessons” regarding race and African/African American history, and that Education Week’s 2018 internal review “of Studies Weekly’s widely used materials found more than 400 examples of racial or ethnic bias, historical inaccuracies, age-inappropriate content, and other errors in the materials….” The review also flagged “biased language or age-inappropriate content, such as descriptions of graphic violence….” Maureen Costello, director of Teaching Tolerance (a project of the Southern Poverty Law Center told Education Weekly, ‘We start laying down these false narratives in elementary school’.” Consequently, children will, and in many cases already do, suffer from political and education whitewashers’ diabolical agenda of deleting or modifying truths concerning African/African American’s rich historical heritage and endurance.
The intent of the plethora of lies, of course, is to condition generation after generation of children to never know that slavery was an abyss of subjugation, pain and traumatizing dehumanization. (But, we should never forget that deletion and modification, even outright lies about history is what those controlling the dissemination of information do. Millions of children and I grew up being told that Christopher Columbus discovered America. The proven fact that he never set foot on this continent came to light in the 980s. Exposure of that and hundreds of other “fake news,” picked up steam around the mid-1990s when verifiable text like James W. Loewen’s truth-telling, Lies My Teacher told Me - Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong was published in 1995. His exposé is just as relevant today![xi]
An issue of a major, dire concern among educators who are told to sell the slavery “benefit” lie, is that some White children, in contrast to feeling any shame or embarrassment as detractors assert, feel more empowered and are motivated to insult Black children and boast they (White child) are the “master,” and the Black child is “their slave.” “Sometimes,” one teacher shared in the Education Weekly review, “it gives students the idea to call black students slaves or tell them to go work in the field…” "In the ways that we teach and learn about the history of American slavery," wrote Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) authors of their new report, "the nation needs an intervention." As the highly regarded Civil Rights icon Rev. Jesse L. Jackson penned, How we see the past reflects how we live in the Present.
Thank God and Goddess for African and African American museums, credible literature, credible websites, etc. that diligently document our Ancestors' richness, endurance and survival. Hopefully, more children will be exposed to, again, credible truth-telling treasures.
Were it not for Florida’s governor’s and his allies’ poison infecting so many children, as Vice President Harris and Dr. Jonnetta Cole pointed out, their tired and tacky divisive message would be boring, even funny. Tied, tacky and boring because their conniving spirit isn't new. Their conspiracy is centuries old. Just as Jews have heard Holocaust deniers, and Native Americans and Indigenous people – globally - have lived through the whitewashing of their people being slaughtered and being called “savages” in western movies and television programs, Africans/African Americans have heard some form of the “benefits” farce millions of times –over 400 years.
Thankfully, along with the advocates for our Ancestors mentioned in this post, the fire in my belly refuses to take this obnoxious messiness lying down. Our Ancestors waited for us to speak up. I’d like to think that some of us did. Hence, in defending our Ancestors, the Congressional Black Caucus has put the Florida governor and his allies on notice and are pushing the White House, Department of Justice, and the Department of Education to investigate this new curriculum, stating that, “The Congressional Black Caucus condemns in the strongest language any school curriculum that would suggest that enslaved Africans benefited in any way from slavery. This revisionist telling of American history approved by the Florida State Board of Education is a shameful disservice to Florida’s students and tantamount to gaslighting of the highest order.”[xii] Also, in defense of our Ancestors, the oldest African American fraternity, Alpha Phi Alpha pulled its convention (and money projected for Florida for 2024) out of Florida, and the NAACP issued a travel advisory for the state of Florida, “to African Americans, and other people of color regarding the hostility towards African Americans in Florida.”
Lastly, I wish Vice President Harris had informed the world that, for most people on this planet, slavery is in their ancestry. Nearly all ethnic groups – Asian, Chinese, Koreans, Japanese, East Indians and Europeans - have ancestors who were enslaved at one time or another in history. Specifically, Europeans, Vikings “from Scandinavian countries enslaved other Whites.”[xiii] With that, the VP could have referenced the enslavement of Italians. The name, DeSantis is Italian. If he had any knowledge of the history of his own ethnic group’s slavery history, he would know (but probably deny) that his Italian Ancestors were once enslaved, documented here that “slavesin Italy were indigenous Italians,” and dramatized in the movie Spartacus, about Italian “slaves’” uprising. Knowing this, would he and his allies say that slavery benefited them?![xiv] [xv]
[i] A little over two months later after the Vice President’s address on August 26, 2023, a hate-filled White, 21-year-old murdered three African Americans at a Dollar General store, in Jacksonville, FL. Those murders occurred one day after the 63rd anniversary of Ax Handle Saturday, when 200 Ku Klux Klan members, armed with ax handles, attacked African Americans holding a peaceful sit-in protesting Jacksonville’s segregation. Police stood idly by watching the beatings until members of a Black street gang called “The Boomerangs” attempted to protect those being attacked. At that point, police night sticks joined the baseball bats and ax handles. Images of Ax handle Saturday
[ii] Regarding astronomy, the book Conversationswith Ogotemmêli (1930s/40s) documents the ability of members of the Dogon society in Mali and their ability to see the dwarf star Sirius-B, an achievement that took place before the first telescope was able to view. The Dogon, with a population between 400,000 and 800,000, are an ethnic group indigenous to the central plateau region of Mali, in West Africa, south of the Niger bend, near the city of Bandiagara, and in Burkina Faso.
[iii] Ronald Reagan is also noted for cutting social programs that helped people who were living in poverty, and for signing the war on drugs act in 1986, that resulted in African Americans being targeted and imprisoned for using or selling crack cocaine, the product of which was imported into Black communities.
[iv]
“The Arabs and the Europeans
were invaders, colonizers and enslavers, who imposed their alien religions on
Africa. Neither Islam nor Christianity is indigenous to Africa,”
wrote Nobel Prize winner/playwright and author of Of Africa, Wole Soyinka declared. And, “while the Arabs enslaved Africans in
the north and east; Europeans enslaved Africans along the Atlantic [West].” The terrifying and humiliating experiences of
the millions of Black men, women and children swept into the abyss of the
African holocaust or MAAFA is reported to have begun
around 650-AD when Arabs invaded and raped Africa over 800 years before
European invasion.
[v] The reason the word
“slave” is in quotes is because I denounce that label, as well as “master’ and
the phrase “slave trade.” Anyone kidnapped and held against their
will is a hostage. I cringe when I hear African Americans
exclaim “we came from slaves.” Despite having been enslaved also, rarely, if ever, do Jews broadcast “we
came from slaves.” I stopped
calling my Ancestors “slaves” 30 years
ago, and shared my thoughts in my essay, IDENTITY
& LANGUAGE ~ Why I Don't Call My Ancestors "Slaves". It victimizes the victim and contains the
problem of inferring that Africans’ plight was intrinsic; their own fault. The word “slave” also dismisses the act of
stealing and victimizing thinking, feeling humans, and minimizes the
unimaginable brutality and cruelty described in the chilling hostage oral
(“slave”) narratives in Bullwhip
Days. That word affects Black
children’s’ sense of self while also affecting other, non-Black children’s’
view of them. The word “hostage,” on the other hand,
definitively points the finger to the villainous acts of Arabs, other Africans
and Europeans. See also
Perlego.com.
[vi] Scholarly research shows that Africans revolted on 1 in every 10 "slave" ship, the most famous being the Amistad. On the topic of revolts in general, that have focused on male uprisings, author, Rebecca Hall penned WAKE: The Hidden History of Women-Led Slave Revolts, "Part graphic novel, part memoir, Wake is an imaginative tour-de-force that tells the story of women-led slave revolts...."
[vii] Henrietta Marie. Pulitzer Prize–winning African-American journalist, Michael Cottman's book, Shackles From the Deep, brings to life the inhumane history of kidnapped Africans on “slave” ships, “through underwater exploration, detective work, and the author's personal journey.” Insurance companies, like Lords of London, covered investors’ losses of ships and human “cargo.” See YouTube video - Placing the Henrietta Marie Monument, 1993; and National Geographic’s “Sunken Slave Ship and the Search for Answers.” Scholars calculate that of the 12 million humans kidnapped, 3 million souls expired, not only from shipwrecks, but also from . “seasoning”
Distinguished photographer Ayana V. Jackson (https://www.ayanavjackson.com/), visualized a “mythical aquatopia populated by descendants of pregnant African women thrown (or who jumped) overboard into the Atlantic Ocean during the Middle Passage.” Jackson’s “monographic exhibition,” From the Deep: In the Wake of Drexciya (https://africa.si.edu/exhibitions/current-exhibitions/from-the-deep-in-the-wake-of-drexciya-with-ayana-v-jackson/), “includes animation, immersive video, installation, sound, and scent,” and “creates a series of haunting, yet profoundly beautiful and empowering encounters that draw upon African water spirits from Senegal to South Africa.” YA author, Natasha Bowen imagined in her highly praised book “Skin of the Sea” mermaids who collects “the souls” of those thrown overboard from “slave” ships or who jump into the ocean, during the harrowing and horrifying captive journey.
[viii] Port-au-Prince, Haiti. In 1804, Haiti became the first country where
African hostages rose up to defeat their colonial oppressors. Even after the revolutionaries won their
freedom, colonial subjugation continued as Haiti was forced to pay huge sums to France, costing
the new country an estimated $560 million over seven decades by today's standards. The US also contributed to draining Haiti's resources through the denial of bank loans, military
occupation, and outright theft. Haiti continues to be exploited and, to
date, has never recovered. National
Public Radio (NPR) called it 'The Greatest
Heist In History': How Haiti Was Forced To Pay Reparations For Freedom. Reparations
advocates point to examples like Haiti's that illustrate why reparation demands are
based on sound foundations. The New
York Times
calculated an estimated amount Haiti has lost due to France’s and other
colonial powers continued financial exploitation.
[ix] I learned about Africans’ unique blue-black indigo dyeing techniques in Beverly Jenkins’s ) creative and moving historical/romance novel, Indigo. Female African/African American children and adult hostages, on South Carolina’s South Sea islands plantation, were forced to extract the dye from small, green leaves of Indigofer tinctoria plants, after which they mascaraed with their feet. Their hands, “immersed to their wrists,” twisted and squeezed the acrid smelling dye through cotton cloth. Their feet and “…the palms and backs of [their] hands…” were “permanently [dyed] indigo,” Jenkins wrote. Jenkins dramatically captures this rarely discussed commodity in slavery, and introduces readers to Underground Railroad’s heroes and she-roes, whose names aren’t as notable as the “good trouble”-making African American abolitionists Harriet Tubman, William Still, and Robert Purvis of the Philadelphia Antislavery Society. Her novel also paints some steamy love scenes and, stunningly, references a free African American man who actually “sold himself into slavery” for his deep love for an enslaved Black woman whose enslaver refused to let him purchase her freedom. An actual witness of this unusual, almost unbelievable occurrence is relayed in the book Bullwhip Days.
LINKS TO INDIGO INFO
[x] During California’s “Gold Rush” period (https://en.wikipedia. org/wiki/ California_Gold_Rush), Whites lynched 300 Mexicans. Source: Forgotten Dead: Mob Violence Against Mexicans in the United States, 1848-1928. “It’s estimated that 5,000 Mexican Americans were killed by Anglo Texans between 1910 and 1920,” according to The Brutal History of Anti-Latino Discrimination in America. La Matanza - "The Massacre" or "The Slaughter" - was among a “series of attacks and lynchings of Mexican ethnics.” Whites fighting racismwere especially at risk.
[xi] Children and I were also drilled into thinking that Marco Polo, in his travels, visited China. A recent study titled, “Did Marco Polo Go to china?” by Frances Wood, proves the myth is just that, an unsubstantiated myth.
[xii] Black Lawmakers Push Federal Government To Investigate Florida After Changing Its African American History Curriculum.
[xiii] Viking Age. Sea-faring Norsemen depicted invading England. The Viking Age in Scandinavian history is taken to have been the period from the earliest recorded raids by Norsemen in 793 until the Norman conquest of England in 1066.[63] Vikings used the Norwegian Sea and Baltic Sea for sea routes to the south. The Normans were descendants of those Vikings who had been given feudal over lordship of areas in northern France, namely the Duchy of Normandy, in the 10th century. In that respect, descendants of the Vikings continued to have an influence in northern Europe. Likewise, King Harold Godwinson, the last Anglo-Saxon king of England, had Danish ancestors. Two Vikings even ascended to the throne of England, with Sweyn Forkbeard claiming the English throne in 1013 until 1014 and his son Cnut the Great being king of England between 1016 and 1035,
[xiv] How Italians Became ‘White’ Ironically, for decades, Italians were discriminated against by Anglo Saxons, opined in Brent Staples’ How Italians Became ‘White’. Historian, Manfred Berg’s Popular Justice: A History of Lynching in America documents that White southerners looked at Italians as “White Negroes,” and some were lynched. “Because of their dark skin, they [Sicilians, in particular] were often treated with the same contempt as black people” Erin Blackmore wrote in The Grisly Story of Americas Largest Lynching (The Grisly Story of One of America’s Largest Lynching | HISTORY).
[xv] One more thing (as Columbo used to say), Florida’s governor also rails against the concept of “woke.” “Woke” is not a mystery. But, for anyone caught up in the orchestrated confusion that Florida’s governor and his allies have caused, “woke” simply means “awareness.” Its people opening their eyes to socio-political-economic injustices committed on Africans in America and throughout the Diaspora and all people around the globe, and caring enough to choose to actively make positive changes and getting in “good trouble” to do better. (Again, a nod to the honorable John Lewis.
P.S In rallying his ignorant troops, DeSantis boasted, “We fight the woke in the legislature. We fight the woke in the schools. We fight the woke in the corporations. We will never ever surrender to the woke mobs,” and “Florida is where woke goes to die.” What makes that asinine rant laughable is that the concept of "woke" is not a current thing. Were he not so busy banning books, and took the time to READ, he would know that long before "Woke," there were the "Wide Awakes," as Smithsonian Magazine reported. His "never surrender" rant echoes the hate-filled words of the late Republican governor of Alabama, George Wallace, who, nearly 70 years ago, proclaimed there would never be integration in that southern state. Yet, years later, in a wheelchair after a bullet paralyzed him from the waist down, Wallace rescinded his damning proclamation not long before leaving this earthly realm. So, another note to DeSantis and his allies – Karma don’t play; What goes around comes around! Sometimes more than once. It’s not complicated.
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