im starting a foundation to introduce underprivileged children to forbidden techniques

This is Sarah Grimké.

She was born to a rich plantation family in the American South during the time of slavery. She owned a slave, Hetty, a girl her parents gave her when she was a child. She was absolutely the sort of person whose racism you could justify as being ‘of her time’ and ‘just the way she was raised’.

And she cited the injustices she saw growing up on the plantation as the motivation for her becoming an abolitionist as an adult.

When she was a kid, she tried to give bible lessons to the slaves on her Dad’s plantation, and taught her own slave to read and write. As an adult, she and her sister campaigned for the end of slavery. When she found out that one of her brothers had raped one of his own slaves and gotten her pregnant three times, she welcomed her nephews into the family and paid for education for the two that wanted it.

This was a woman who was raised in a culture of slavery, looked around her as a child and said “hey, wait a minute, we’re all assholes!” and spent the rest of her life trying to put things right.

It absolutely was a choice.

This is something I’ve been forced to learn in the past two years. The world around me is turning into something I was raised to believe could only happen in history books, or maybe in other parts of the world that sort of belonged in history books.

The more I see this happening–and the more I learn about the past and how hard people did fight to stop Hitler from initially rising to power, or to point out the humanity of slaves–the more apparent it becomes that we have always had these choices, and they’ve always been the same.

And we’re always going to have genuinely appealing opportunities to make the worst possible choices again, no matter how much more modern the world appears.

George Washington owned slaves right? Most of the founding fathers did, and in grade school, to smooth over that abuse of humanity by an American hero, we as children were told “Yes, George Washington did own slaves but he freed them when he died.” And you infer that he didn’t like slavery but it was an economic necessity.

And then you’re in your mid twenties watching a food show on Netflix and you learn that because Pennsylvania was a Quaker colony, they led the nation in emancipation and if an enslaved person was in Philadelphia for more than six months, they automatically became freed. And the young nation’s early capital was in Philadelphia, where Washington brought his household of enslaved people with him. And he took them back to Virginia every five months for a time so as to start that clock over and keep them enslaved.

There’s a trend with historians to want so badly to maintain the prestige of George Washington and an exceptional and morally pristine figure. And true, there are many instances in his writing where he sounds like his opinion on slavery as an institution is turning and that he knew slavery was wrong. But his actions. He literally had to do absolutely nothing to free his household staff, and took great pains to keep them enslaved.

It’s important to remember that too. That there were people in positions of enormous power, who know what they’re doing is wrong, and choose to do it anyway.

Do not let anyone tell you his teeth were made of wood.

Lafayette left money in his will to Jefferson, to pay for the freedom and education of some of Jefferson’s slaves. Did Jefferson respect his friend’s wishes? No, he did not. He pocketed the financial gift himself and kept his slaves. That was a choice he made.

^ i think the person above is mixing up lafayette with tadeusz kościuszko, who did leave jefferson money in his will with the intention that he could use it to free slaves. i understand the mixup because they were both european abolitionists who fought in the revolution and were friends of jefferson and lafayette is better known, but it was kościuszko’s will, and it’s even worse than it sounds because kościuszko literally had jefferson help him write the will and act as his executor, and jefferson just declined to do what he promised.

i really recommend the book master of the mountain by henry wiencek, which traces jefferson’s views of slavery over the course of his life. jefferson makes a great case study as someone who sold out his convictions when he realized he economically benefitted from slavery.

just like grimké, jefferson was raised in a slaveholding family and he saw that it was wrong. a lot of his early writings on slavery were a huge inspiration to the abolitionist movement, he made friends with enlightenment-minded european abolitionists like lafayette and kościuszko, he really seemed to believe that slavery was a moral evil that would eventually have to be dealt with.

then he inherited some land and slaves as well as some debt, he got married and had kids and started worrying about money. and then he realized how much passive income he made off of just owning slaves. suddenly his views started to shift. he started talking about how COMPLICATED ending slavery would be. how freed slaves could never peacefully intregrate into american society. he started buying into early race science and speculating that maybe africans really were mentally inferior to europeans and needed to be governed by whites in order to thrive. he started opposing abolition and making excuses to his abolitionist friends about how sure, abolition would be great, but it was just not possible for now. all it took for jefferson was an economic incentive and his class interests totally overcame his conscience. he knew it was wrong and he chose not to do anything about it, even when he had people in his life trying to convince him to do the right thing.

A lot of people will be just as bad as they’re allowed to be.

A lot of people will be only as good as it’s profitable to be.

Also: the white supremacy slavery complex was and is a cult, by which I mean a high-control situation, which took deliberate action to enmesh itself in order to resist the effects of people’s aversion to cruelty.

It put work into making itself perceived as inevitable, necessary, too costly to do away with. It put huge amounts of effort into convincing powerful people with moral discomfort about it that ending slavery would destroy human civilization and into casting the alternative societal structures as unspeakably primitive and backwards.

I say this not to excuse the likes of Washington and Jefferson for their sins, but to point out that the same forces are at work today. The message that some people’s suffering is necessary for civilization’s prospering, the encouragement to care only about your “own” people and excuse yourself for profiting off the misery of others far away and out of sight, the comfortable reassurance that disliking something you tolerate means you’re good and being good means you’re not to blame—these are all things active against us today.

They work.

Thomas Jefferson and George Washington had to weigh their morals against their comfort and wealth, and I cannot look inside their hearts myself but their being offered, readymade, a mindset that placed “being good masters” at the same moral level as “freeing people” probably had some effect. accompanied, of course, by $$$$$.

If it were easy to be Sarah Grimke, we’d all be Sarah Grimke.

But there’s a lot of effort put in, today as then, to make being Thomas Jefferson easier.

And now, with so many groups of people under attack from so many angles, we all need to watch out for it.

Scrolled past this agakn and just can't get over how much I love it. We need to make things beautiful again and this is such a wonderful example. The beadwork on the wires of a utitarian object, contrasted with the grey concrete.

Everyone wanted to be thicc but nobody wanted to be fat. Everyone wanted the dad bod but nobody wanted to be fat. Everyone wants fat mommy milkers but nobody wants mommy to be fat. Everyone wants to be a bear but not like, an actual fat bear. You get what i’m saying

Everyone wants the mistique of fatness or use the language of fatness to denote hotness without actually being fat or acknowledging that fat people or fatness can just be hot.

golf sucks but mini golf is fucking awesome....truly one of life's great paradoxes

golf:

mini golf:

Golf: completely fucking silent practically on pain of death

Mini golf: dunking on ppl while theyre taking a shot is pretty much required

Here’s dril’s candles on a graph for reference.

:)

doing normal stuff while listening to metal is so funny because I'm eating cereal and this guy is screaming at me

extremely funny bit for nintendo to announce that the launch titles for the nintendo switch 2 are games for the nintendo switch that they're selling you again

Listen, if you want to understand how emanations work, it's like this:

If you're an infinite thing like God, and you want to become a finite thing like the world, how do you go from infinite to finite? Answer: emanation.

You know when youre at a wedding, and there's a big pyramid of wine glasses? And they fill the wine glasses by pouring champagne into the top, so it overflows and then fills all the glasses beneath it? Imagine the wine bottle is infinite. That's God.

Each of the glasses is called a hypostasis. God can emanate through many hypostases to reach it's final emanation.

As for how many hypostases there are, and how they're arranged, that's the tricky one. Every religion has a different answer, and it's never simple.

I GET NO RESPECT ON THIS DAMN WEB SITE

Inosuke!!

i feel like nobody has NOTPs anymore. like if you hate a ship now it has to be for some deep moral reason and you have to justify it to everyone what happened to just not liking stuff that isnt inherently bad but just because you personally think it sucks

Making friends at the yarn show 🐑🐈

I’ve now had multiple people tell me they ship these characters…fibre crafts yuri 🌈🧶

You have got to be FUCKING kidding me!! Holyshit bro... these motherfuckers are too comfortable with price increases...

ppl are like "the price of games makes sense if you consider how much time and work goes in to them" and i am here to tell you that just like animation, tv, comics, music, every other kind of media, the price tag does not reflect the artist's paycheck. the only wallets getting fatter are at the top, and they are fatter now than they've ever been. support indie and learn to steal or go without

something has burned away in the darkness while no one was watching. -1 something

something was born in the darkness while no one was watching. +1 something

rb to tell prev they're being so brave right now and pat their head a little please