It says something that there are so many people who want to tear these people down when they are trying to do something positive that they end up lashing out at people with legitimate complaints as a reflex. But then, the fact that there are people who act that way even within bubbles where they do not receive that sort of unwarranted hate is depressing for an entirely different reason.
you see all sortsa people arguing about how black the ancient egyptians were, and i never really understood why that was such a huge deal (*i mean, wouldn’t it be safe to assume that they had roughly the same range of skin tones that people have in the area today*)
until i realized that according to the history textbooks, the ancient egyptians are literally the only good thing that africa has going on. like you have egypt, then we talk about greece and rome, then the middle ages and then by the time we get around to africa it’s to talk about OH HEY SLAVERY. and then the whole damn continent is ignored until we get around to a few paragraphs about nelson mandela towards the waaay back of the book.
so egypt has to represent literally every historical good thing for an entire continent, every good thing that every black person has to look for in their past.
and this is all the history that most people ever learn
jesus
this is something that i've been thinking about a lot lately for some reason
There were tonnes of cool civilisations in Africa that were very much black in racial composition. It's just that the way history is taught in America, we tend to glaze over them because they didn't leave written records or were doing important things at points in history when white people were making asses of themselves on a grand scale or the Mongols were off taking over the world.
My school at least made a point of putting Mali and Songhai into the spotlight when we did World History.
That said, all evidence points to the Egyptians having a range of skin tones but mostly looking like, well, the Berber and other really old pre-Arabic North African ethnic groups.
well, i mean. let's take an obvious example. look at mesoamerica around the time of king tut (~1300s BC). know what there are a lot more of in the area, ethnicity-wise now? latinos.
people move around. it's usually not quite as extreme as the american genocides, but it's still pretty big.
for egypt specifically a big thing would be the Muslim invasions, when the mostly-Arab Muslims came down from the peninsula and fucked up the Byzantines. means more arabs in the area. probably you'd also have greeks coming by earlier, since, byzantine. ptolemy and them fucks.
Anyway. I have this neat book The African Past that's all primary sources from sub-Saharan Africa. Starts out with a historiographic rant with some choice quotes of colonialists (like, actual European run-military-government colonialist) just straight up denything that anything in Africa had changed in thousands of years. Good to get the blood boiling
you see all sortsa people arguing about how black the ancient egyptians were, and i never really understood why that was such a huge deal (*i mean, wouldn’t it be safe to assume that they had roughly the same range of skin tones that people have in the area today*)
until i realized that according to the history textbooks, the ancient egyptians are literally the only good thing that africa has going on. like you have egypt, then we talk about greece and rome, then the middle ages and then by the time we get around to africa it’s to talk about OH HEY SLAVERY. and then the whole damn continent is ignored until we get around to a few paragraphs about nelson mandela towards the waaay back of the book.
so egypt has to represent literally every historical good thing for an entire continent, every good thing that every black person has to look for in their past.
and this is all the history that most people ever learn
jesus
this is something that i've been thinking about a lot lately for some reason
I think about it from time to time, being half-black and all
there's this conceptualization of the nation-state of being both ethnically homogenous-ish and territorially stable, dating from... i dunno a while ago. it pretty obviously doesn't work, even descriptively, but we're still hanging onto it in a lot of ways.
well i know that egypt grew and shrank and stuff a lot over the centuries (*ancient egypt was one of my earliest Autistic Obsession Things*), but like i just didn't really think through that statement there while i was typing it
I think it's just really annoying when they get portrayed as generically white when they were clearly relatively dark-skinned, if nowhere near the degree of, say, the Nubians or Axumites, who were themselves depicted by the Egyptians as being black-skinned.
Incidentally, there are white folks in ancient Egyptian paintings. They're just not Egyptians.
You are the end result of a “would you push the button” prompt where the prompt was “you have unlimited godlike powers but you appear to all and sundry to be an impetuous child” – Zero, 2022
i just saw someone claim that mosh pits are inherently misogynistic and designed to make women uncomfortable
i need to just like express how fuckin stupid this is
and also like it's giving me internalized misogyny vibes? like are they saying that women inherently can't love punching the pair and doing stupid ninja dance moves too?
I think it's just really annoying when they get portrayed as generically white when they were clearly relatively dark-skinned, if nowhere near the degree of, say, the Nubians or Axumites, who were themselves depicted by the Egyptians as being black-skinned.
Incidentally, there are white folks in ancient Egyptian paintings. They're just not Egyptians.
incidentally, the Nubians also ruled Egypt at several points
which gets into the larger question of what "Egyptian" is.
i just saw someone claim that mosh pits are inherently misogynistic and designed to make women uncomfortable
i need to just like express how fuckin stupid this is
and also like it's giving me internalized misogyny vibes? like are they saying that women inherently can't love punching the pair and doing stupid ninja dance moves too?
Women can seriously mosh. People who deny this have not been to enough concerts.
incidentally, the Nubians also ruled Egypt at several points
which gets into the larger question of what "Egyptian" is.
Not only that, but they ran the empire pretty damn well on the whole and built some important monuments. That said, when I speak of Egyptians I primarily speak of the ethnic group that founded the culture, although the greater culture was fairly diverse.
Sometimes feminists come out with these things that are so based on the immutability of gender roles one wonders what they've been thinking and who they've been listening to if not their own goddamn movement, and that's one of them. Or any of the other times feminist obsessions turn to the idea that women=gentle, men=brutes, or some variation of it.
Around here, I can tell anyone who asked what Nubians looked like to look around them. Seattle has a large Sudanese population. That's the same place and the same peoples, just thousands of years later. Black, with very East African features.
i just saw someone claim that mosh pits are inherently misogynistic and designed to make women uncomfortable
i need to just like express how fuckin stupid this is
and also like it's giving me internalized misogyny vibes? like are they saying that women inherently can't love punching the pair and doing stupid ninja dance moves too?
Women can seriously mosh. People who deny this have not been to enough concerts.
I think the Macklemore/John Green hate campaigns were as terrible as they were because Macklemore and Green were kind of bland people in the first place, so putting focus on them only chocked tumblr under a massive sludge of boring moral outrage about bland people.
someone reblogged a satiric post I made (i.e. copied from reddit) months ago to point out the error, and then deleted the reblog like a second later. i guess they clicked the source link and noticed the satire, but now i feel kind of bad? i hope they don't feel stupid.
I think the Macklemore/John Green hate campaigns were as terrible as they were because Macklemore and Green were kind of bland people in the first place, so putting focus on them only chocked tumblr under a massive sludge of boring moral outrage about bland people.
it was ok aside from the super fucking ultra lazy huge-sounding detuned pumping sidechained pad which is like the most criminally overused thing in the universe ffs
I think the Macklemore/John Green hate campaigns were as terrible as they were because Macklemore and Green were kind of bland people in the first place, so putting focus on them only chocked tumblr under a massive sludge of boring moral outrage about bland people.
Also what I've found is that weirdly, both people only became MORE interesting and likable the more I found out about them.
Except Macklemore's weird Jewish stereotype, of which the only thing that even makes sense as for why is that he was too dumb to realize what he was doing. The way he talks about race indicates to me that this is the closest thing to an explanation, but it's such a damn weird situation.
Comments
this is something that i've been thinking about a lot lately for some reason
anyway songhai forever
care to tell me more
people move around. it's usually not quite as extreme as the american genocides, but it's still pretty big.
for egypt specifically a big thing would be the Muslim invasions, when the mostly-Arab Muslims came down from the peninsula and fucked up the Byzantines. means more arabs in the area. probably you'd also have greeks coming by earlier, since, byzantine. ptolemy and them fucks.
Anyway. I have this neat book The African Past that's all primary sources from sub-Saharan Africa. Starts out with a historiographic rant with some choice quotes of colonialists (like, actual European run-military-government colonialist) just straight up denything that anything in Africa had changed in thousands of years. Good to get the blood boiling
there's this conceptualization of the nation-state of being both ethnically homogenous-ish and territorially stable, dating from... i dunno a while ago. it pretty obviously doesn't work, even descriptively, but we're still hanging onto it in a lot of ways.
#relevantcomment
i need to just like express how fuckin stupid this is
and also like it's giving me internalized misogyny vibes? like are they saying that women inherently can't love punching the pair and doing stupid ninja dance moves too?
which gets into the larger question of what "Egyptian" is.
Assassin poems, Poems that shoot
guns. Poems that wrestle cops into alleys
and take their weapons leaving them dead
Macklemore arrays himself as he sees fit from the comfort of his thrift bed in his thrift mansion. He wills it, and it is draped over his thriftform.
Assassin poems, Poems that shoot
guns. Poems that wrestle cops into alleys
and take their weapons leaving them dead
Assassin poems, Poems that shoot
guns. Poems that wrestle cops into alleys
and take their weapons leaving them dead
i mean, that still requires analysis mocked by the comic
as does this post
bwooooong
Assassin poems, Poems that shoot
guns. Poems that wrestle cops into alleys
and take their weapons leaving them dead
it was ok aside from the super fucking ultra lazy huge-sounding detuned pumping sidechained pad which is like the most criminally overused thing in the universe ffs