Dude, who even knows.
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Anonymous asked:
i run a bhm side blog + patreon and one of your mutuals-in-law has been my treasured mutual for years, small world :)
Black History Month?
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Went back to the Black Pride framing shop the other day to get this old double-hemisphere map print done up.
The place, like my house, is in essentially the black neighborhood of the state, so it makes sense there’s a market for appealing to pride in your black heritage. God knows Portland’s got plenty of opportunities to flatter your white heritage - Scandanavian, Scottish, Irish, German (click that one, ‘dwracu). Hell, the retro-rustic chickens/mason jars/filament bulbs aesthetic we breathe like oxygen these days is basically the midwest-American variant. (And that’s not even to mention the black/white heritage fusion places.) Even the Portland city flag (which you see more often than the American) is a Scandanavian cross, only kinked a bit and with an outdoorsy color scheme, which is pretty much Correct.
Looking around the shop there was all sorts of Egyptian-themed jewelery and busts of Nubian princesses and Zulu motifs and whatnot, which like the Swahili lingustics of Kwanzaa are a little eyebrowable as icons for proud black Americans given that Afro-America mostly traces its lineage to slaves from Western Africa. But how different is that from proud white Australians around here posting pictures of Viking warriors and Roman ruins and Viennese architecture? As long as they don’t crawl too far up their own fantasias or try to fabricate irredentist causus belli out of it, both have my blessing.
(Of course, this Pan-Africanism does have roots in a multinational and intermittently violent campaign towards regime change which… hrm.)
Aaaaaaanyway, this all reminded me that I’ve had a few essays stewing for a while on black history in America that I had in my head to post for Black History Month, only for two years now I’ve missed it. Probably because I don’t have any schoolteachers reminding me by running lessons about peanut butter. So screw it, I’m declaring Black History Month (Orthodox), lasting from now until whenever I finish up. I’ll be tagging the stuff (plus some archives) as afamhist, riffing off the “amhist” tag I shamelessly stole from monetizeyourcat, PBUH. (Who will hopefully recover from her show trial and purge by the sad anime transmarxists before too long and eventually deliver that “Oregon as Peak Free Soil/Free Laborism” piece I’ve been looking forward to for damn near two years now.)
Anyway. First up: The Crack Era, or why gangsta rap is closer to haiku than funk.