racial dysphoria

Note: This post is partly tongue-in-cheek, partly serious. 

Racial dysphoria is the condition where your racial identity does not match your assigned race at birth. According to one study there are more than 35,000 new cases each year in the US.

• Examples: passing for White, wiggers, New Blacks, “I’m just human”, being universal, Lacey Schwartz, etc.
• Not examples: blackface entertainers, Fake Indians, Black sock puppets, Rachel Dolezal, etc.

Rachel Dolezal argued she was “transracial”. Court records, though, show that she considered herself White. Being born White and considering yourself White is not a case of racial dysphoria. The same goes for blackface entertainers and the rest.

What it is like: Two excellent examples of what racial dysphoria is like:

• “Black Like Me” (1961) by John Howard Griffin. He was a White man who lived as a Black man for six weeks in the US South in 1959. His book describes what it is like to be in a body of the wrong race. The book is, if anything, understated since Griffin always knew he could go back to being White. Joshua Solomon repeated his experiment in 1994 and lasted only one week.
• “Skin” (2008), a British film starring Sophie Okonedo about the true-life story of Sandra Laing. She was assigned White under apartheid in South Africa but looked mixed-race. No ruby slippers for her.

WABABs: Whites Assigned Black at Birth. The remainder of this post takes as an example those Whites in the US who were assigned Black at birth.

Signs and symptoms:

• Not feeling right in your own skin.
• A wish to be White that never completely goes away.
• Looking in the mirror and being unhappy with your appearance in ways that are particular to race: your nose might be too wide, your lips too big, your hair too curly, your skin too dark, etc.
• Preferring the company of Whites over Blacks.
• Race-variant behaviours, like mountain climbing, wearing shorts in winter, kissing dogs on the mouth.
• Using a White avatar online or in video games.

These are just examples: you might experience none of these and still be racially dysphoric. Or you might be suffering from internalized racism.

Treatment:

• Limited. The US in the early twenty-first century has no race therapists, no race reassignment surgeries, no skin whiteners that are safe for long-term use, etc. And what little treatment there is, is not covered by health insurance since racial dysphoria is not recognized by doctors as a disorder in need of a cure. Sorry, but you were born into the wrong period of history.

Some patients are left with the cold comfort of being told, “God does not make mistakes.”

Others, though, are able to transition on their own without medical help. And surgeries do help to a degree.

Note that transitioning goes beyond mere physical appearance. Those who transition often have to move to another town, talk and dress a certain way, say little about their past, and maybe even change their name.

– Abagond, 2018.

See also:

• internalized racism / colourism
• gender dysphoria
• drapetomania – what runaway slaves suffered from
• The Wigger Fallacy – what wiggers suffer from
• skin lightening
  • A cure for racism?

527

Early Victorian tea set

An Early Victorian tea set (1840-45) is one of the 100 objects from the British Museum through which the BBC told a history of the world in 2010.

Britain was over-represented: 11 of the 100 objects came from Britain, a place where only about 1 person in 100 lives. But British tea sets are something that did affect much of the world.

The tea set in question was made in the early 1840s of red-brown stoneware and silver by Josiah Wedgwood’s Etruria factory south of Manchester in Stoke-on-Trent in Staffordshire, England. A mass-market version came without the silver.

Pots: People in Britain have been making pots for thousands of years (since at least -3500 according to my sources). What makes these pots different is what went in them: tea in the kettle, milk in the jug, and sugar in the bowl.

Tea with sugar was largely the creation of the British Empire, made possible by the Royal Navy.

In 1700 in Britain only the rich could afford to drink tea. But during the 1700s the price of tea dropped, becoming something the masses could afford by the late 1700s. And people started adding milk and sugar, making a bitter drink sweet.

By 1800 tea was the national drink, taking the place of beer. In the early 1800s, tea was pushed by religious leaders and the temperance movement as better than beer, wine or gin.

Industrial value: Tea was much safer to drink than city water and, because it did not lead to drunkenness, workers were more likely to show up at the factory gate on time. Tea coursed through the veins of industrial Britain.

By the middle 1800s tea time at four o’clock (halfway between lunch and dinner) was already a thing, helping to make tea drinking a national habit – and creating a mass market for tea sets.

But there were two huge downsides to all of this: the sugar and the tea.

Sugar was grown by Black slaves in the Americas, especially in the Caribbean. Even after the British Empire outlawed slavery in its own colonies, the cheapest sugar was still being produced by slaves, in places like Cuba. (The BBC does not point this out, but some people in Britain stopped putting sugar in their tea in protest knowing full well where it came from.)

Tea came mostly from China. To pay for it Britain got China hooked on opium. That led to the Opium Wars, which China lost. Opium and tea became two sides of the same coin.

India & Sri Lanka: Britain did not grow tea in India on a large scale till the 1830s. To grow it in Ceylon (now called Sri Lanka), the British brought in Tamil workers, both male and female. (The BBC does not point this out, but British policies like that led to ethnic violence in Sri Lanka in the late 1900s).

Milk came from cows in Britain. They lived in the city till the rise of railways in the 1830s.

Now you know 1% of world history 😉

– Abagond, 2018.

Source: mainly “A History of the World in 100 Objects” (2010) by Neil MacGregor. 

See also:

• Rosetta Stone – another one of the 100 objects. This post, however, was not based on the BBC.
• tea
• sugar
• milk
• British Empire
  • Transatlantic slave trade
  • coolies
  • Opium Wars
  • Du Bois: The Souls of White Folk
• China, the last 13,000 years
• museum gaze

553

Tulipa Ruiz: Só Sei Dançar Com Você

Remarks: 

This song came out in Brazil in 2010. I do not know if it charted, but it does rate at least six ukulele covers on YouTube.

The main line:

Só sei dançar com você
Isso é o que o amor faz

in English is:

I only know how to dance with you
That is what love does

This song, a duet about dancing and love, could have an amazing music video and there have been several attempts at one, but no one has nailed it yet. The video above, by Glória Gomes, is in the right direction and comes closest.

Among Ruiz’s influences are Gal Costa, who has been featured here before, Joni Mitchell, who has not, and Meredith Monk.

See also:

• songs, the 2010s
• Gal Costa: Baby

Lyrics:

Você me chamou pra dançar aquele dia,
mas eu nunca sei rodar,
cada vez que eu girava parecia
que a minha perna sucumbia de agonia

Em cada passo que eu dava nessa dança
ia perdendo a esperança
você sacou a minha esquizofrenia
e maneirou na condução

Toda vez que eu errava “cê” dizia
pra eu me soltar porque você me conduzia,
mesmo sem jeito eu fui topando essa parada
e no final achei tranquilo…

Só sei dançar com você
Isso é o que o amor faz
Só sei dançar com você
Isso é o que o amor faz

Você me chamou pra dançar aquele dia,
mas eu nunca sei rodar,
cada vez que eu girava parecia
que a minha perna sucumbia de agonia

Em cada passo que eu dava nessa dança
ia perdendo a esperança
você sacou a minha esquizofrenia
e maneirou na condução

Toda vez que eu errava “cê” dizia
pra eu me soltar porque você me conduzia,
mesmo sem jeito eu fui topando essa parada
e no final achei tranquilo…

Só sei dançar com você
Isso é o que o amor faz
Só sei dançar com você
Isso é o que o amor faz

Source: Vagalume, Wikipedia.

Saheed Vassell

Saheed Vassell (c. 1984-2018) was an unarmed Black man killed by New York police on April 4th 2018, the 50th anniversary of Martin Luther King’s assassination. What police thought was a gun turned out to be – a shower head with a piece of pipe.

As with Tamir Rice and John Crawford, police received reports of someone with a gun – but did not wait to determine what was going on. Instead “within two seconds” of jumping out of their unmarked car the police gunned him down in a hail of bullets:

BANG

BANG BANG BANG BANG BANG BANG BANG BANG BANG

They did not even waste time telling him to put his hands up, drop his weapon, or anything like that – like he was a wild dog.

One bullet broke a window, the rest broke his body. He was dead by the time they got him to the hospital.

Mental illness: Vassell was mentally ill but was considered harmless. As one neighbour put it:

“It’s visible. You could see it. Listen. Ray Charles could see that man was crazy.”

He talked to himself. He picked up junk from the street and played with it. He had bipolar disorder which had not been treated in years.

Even one of the calls to the police noted, “He looks like he is crazy.”

He and his mental illness were well known to neighbours, shopkeepers, and even the police – but apparently not to the White gentrifiers and the anti-terrorism police who seemed to have set events into motion.

At 4.40pm the police were receiving reports like this:

“He looks like he is crazy but he’s pointing something at people that looks like a gun”

and:

“I don’t know what if it is if it’s a gun. It’s silver”

and:

“an African American guy. He has on a brown jacket. … He’s pointing a thing in people’s faces”

and (last but not least):

“black guy [I] see holding a gun”

Five minutes later a crack anti-terrorism force was there to save the day. They apparently did not know him or the neighbhourhood. All they seemed to know was “black guy” and “gun”.

By the rules of police engagement, once they placed themselves in front of him, they could claim they had to make a Split Second Decision to gun him down – because they “feared for their lives”.

The police claim they did not know he might be “crazy”.

In my younger days I used to walk down the street pulling my gun on people just for laughs. I was not afraid of the police because, like what the police said Vassell did, I could always take “a two-handed shooting stance” and shoot my way out against the largest police force in the land.

Poor judgement: The mistake that Vassell made, aside from arming himself with a shower head, is that he forgot to gun down eight people at a Bible study in cold blood. Oh yeah, and have pink undertones to his skin.

Still alive.

– Abagond, 2018.

See also:

• Tamir Rice
• John Crawford
• Dylann Roof
• NYPD
  • Deborah Danner – also mentally ill, also killed by the NYPD
• killer cops
• Phantom Negro Weapons
• Unarmed Black people killed in 2018
  • Stephon Clark
• gentrification

535

The assassination of Martin Luther King Jr

I live in the land that produced Martin Luther King, Jr. And I live in the land that killed him. He turned the other cheek – and was shot in the face.

Stokely Carmichael:

“White America killed Dr King and they had absolutely no reason to do so. He was the one man, in our race, who was trying to teach our people to have love, compassion, and humility for what white people had done.”

He was killed 50 years ago today: Thursday April 4th 1968 at 6:01 pm in Memphis, Tennessee. Age 39. A week and a day before Good Friday. During that week 125 cities across the US burned.

The night before Dr King spoke at Clayton Temple. He urged his packed audience of 2,000 to buy Black and bank Black and stand bodily with the striking Black sanitation workers. He told how he was stabbed once in New York and narrowly avoided death. He ended by saying:

“We’ve got some difficult days ahead. But it really doesn’t matter with me now, because I’ve been to the mountaintop.

“And I don’t mind.

“Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I’m not concerned about that now. I just want to do God’s will. And He’s allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I’ve looked over. And I’ve seen the Promised Land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the promised land!

“And so I’m happy, tonight.

“I’m not worried about anything.

“I’m not fearing any man!

“Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord!!”

The next day, getting ready to go out to dinner, he was standing on the second-floor balcony in front of his room at the the Black-owned Lorraine Motel. He was talking to Jesse Jackson and musician Ben Branch in the parking lot below, about an event later that night for the striking sanitation workers:

JACKSON: You remember Ben?

KING: Oh, yeah. He’s my man. Be sure to play ‘Precious Lord’ and play it real pretty.

Solomon Jones, his driver, said he should put on his topcoat, it was going to be chilly. King agreed, straightening his tie. Then came what sounded like a firecracker. Just one shot.

Then came what Coretta Scott King, his wife back in Atlanta, called “the call I seemed subconsciously to have been waiting for all our lives”.

US National Guard troops block off Beale Street in Memphis as striking sanitation workers march.

On April 8th, King was to lead a protest of striking Black sanitation workers in Memphis.

On April 22nd he was to lead a March on Washington of poor people of all colours, the Poor People’s Campaign.

King had been on the FBI’s Reserved List, Section A, for six years: someone considered so dangerous that he must be watched and, in case of emergency, jailed.

But he was one of the last two bridges between Blacks and Whites at the national level in the US. Now only Robert Kennedy remained.

– Abagond, 2018.

See also:

• Martin Luther King Jr
  • his speech against the Vietnam War – made exactly one year before he was killed
  • I’ve Been to the Mountaintop – the speech he gave the night before he died
• Robert Kennedy
  • The speech he gave after King was killed
  • His own assassination
• Black Power
• FBI
  • Cointelpro
• Stokely Carmichael
• Coretta Scott King
• Dion: Abraham, Martin and John
• also assassinated
  • Patrice Lumumba
  • Medgar Evers
  • Malcolm X
  • Fred Hampton
  • Steve Biko (died in police custody)
  • Marielle Franco

591

How to find a good book: the 15 Year Rule

Here are the best-selling novels of 1949 in the US according to Publisher’s Weekly:

1. “The Egyptian” by Mika Waltari
2. “The Big Fisherman” by Lloyd C. Douglas
3. “Mary” by Sholem Asch
4. “A Rage to Live” by John O’Hara
5. “Point of No Return” by John P. Marquand
6. “Dinner at Antoine’s” by Frances Parkinson Keyes
7. “High Towers” by Thomas B. Costain
8. “Cutlass Empire” by Van Wyck Mason
9. “Pride’s Castle” by Frank Yerby
10. “Father of the Bride” by Edward Streeter

In 2018, nearly 70 years later, only two of these books even merit a Wikipedia entry, the first and the last.

Here are the ten best books of 1949 according to 2018 (at least among those who have posted the 50 million or so user reviews at Goodreads):

1. “1984” by George Orwell
2. “Death of a Salesman” by Arthur Miller
3. “The Second Sex” by Simone de Beauvoir
4. “The Lottery and Other Stories” by Shirley Jackson
5. “The Hero With a Thousand Faces” by Joseph Campbell
6. “Crooked House” by Agatha Christie
7. “Earth Abides” by George R. Stewart
8. “The Sheltering Sky” by Paul Bowles
9. “A Sand County Almanac” by Aldo Leopold
10. “The Weight of Glory” by C.S. Lewis

Not one of the bestsellers are now considered to be among the 100 best books for 1949 (or 1948, when some of them were published). Not even Waltari’s, the top selling book of 1949.

Tastes change, of course. The people in the US of 2018 are not, on the whole, the same people of 1949. Only about 10% are. But there is more than just that going on. I notice the same sort of thing going on with me and I am the same person.

I was not alive in 1949, but I was alive in 1980, about halfway back. Better still, I kept a list of the books I read that year. Looking at the list now, about half the books are as forgettable as the bestsellers of 1949. And the most forgettable books I read back then were the very ones I bought new at the bookstore.

What was true in 1949 and 1980 is presumably still true in 2018: bookstores are a terrible place to get books. Libraries, as it turns out, are only somewhat better.

But I noticed something: If I list the books I read in 1980 by date of first publication, they generally get better the older they are. That was the year I first read “1984”, which was way better than, say, “Utopia 3” (1978) by George Alec Effinger, which I also read that year. The Gospel of Matthew, in turn, was better still.

The 15-year rule: Nearly all the books that were at least 15 years old at the time were good. The break-even point was at the eight-year mark: most books that came out after 1972 were trash.

Shelf space: The US did not experience a cultural meltdown in 1972. At least not according to most observers. But bookstores and libraries do have limited shelf space. They make way for new books by getting rid of books that are least in demand. Therefore it is their older books that have stood the test of time.

– Abagond, 2018.

See also:

• The US in 1949
• 1949 media diet
• books
  • Reading old books
  • Lost book covers
  • The life cycle of a library book
  • Orwell: 1984
• Thoreau’s library

525

Evanescence: Bring Me to Life

Remarks:

My favourite goth metal song. In 2003 this went to #1 in Europe, #2 in Brazil, and #4 in their native Anglosphere. I always took the song in a Christian sense. I was not alone. But in 2003 the band distanced themselves from Christian rock.

Happy Easter!

See also:

• songs, the 2000s

Lyrics:

How can you see into my eyes
like open doors
leading you down into my core
where I’ve become so numb?
Without a soul;
my spirit’s sleeping somewhere cold,
until you find it there and lead it back home.

(Wake me up.)
Wake me up inside.
(I can’t wake up.)
Wake me up inside.
(Save me. )
Call my name and save me from the dark.
(Wake me up. )
Bid my blood to run.
(I can’t wake up. )
Before I come undone.
(Save me. )
Save me from the nothing I’ve become.

Now that I know what I’m without
you can’t just leave me.
Breathe into me and make me real.
Bring me to life.

(Wake me up.)
Wake me up inside.
(I can’t wake up.)
Wake me up inside.
(Save me. )
Call my name and save me from the dark.
(Wake me up. )
Bid my blood to run.
(I can’t wake up. )
Before I come undone.
(Save me. )
Save me from the nothing I’ve become

Bring me to life.
(I’ve been living a lie/There’s nothing inside.)
Bring me to life.

Frozen inside without your touch,
without your love, darling.
Only you are the life among the dead.

All of this time
I can’t believe I couldn’t see
Kept in the dark
but you were there in front of me
I’ve been sleeping a one thousand years it seems.
I’ve got to open my eyes to everything.
Without a thought
Without a voice
Without a soul
(Don’t let me die here/There must be something more.)
Bring me to life.

(Wake me up.)
Wake me up inside.
(I can’t wake up.)
Wake me up inside.
(Save me. )
Call my name and save me from the dark.
(Wake me up. )
Bid my blood to run.
(I can’t wake up. )
Before I come undone.
(Save me. )
Save me from the nothing I’ve become.

Bring me to life.
(I’ve been living a lie/There’s nothing inside.)
Bring me to life.

Source: Vagalume.

National Geographic’s racism

National Geographic, April 2018.

The April 2018 issue of National Geographic is all about race. The issue marks 50 years since Martin Luther King Jr’s death. There will be other articles about race throughout the rest of the year.

The editor’s note for the April issue is entitled:

“For Decades, Our Coverage Was Racist. To Rise Above Our Past, We Must Acknowledge It.”

It gave some examples, apologized, and promised to do better.

It all sounds good, but its latest example of racism is from 1962.

White lens: The editor is White. Most of the photographers are White. Even the photographer who took the cover picture for the race issue is White. And the cover seems to use the White We:

“These twin sisters make us rethink everything we know about race.”

Huh? One of the sisters could pass for White, but that stuff has been going on for hundreds of years. Who is this “we”?

National Geographic has been the White American lens made flesh (paper, pixels) since its founding in 1888, and remains so to this day 130 years later.

Enter John Edwin Mason: National Geographic did hire an outside expert, John Edwin Mason, to go through its archives to see what racism could be found. Mason is a historian of both Africa and photography at the University of Virginia. He did a similar study for Life magazine.

But they did not let Mason write an article of his own. Some of his findings are given in the editor’s note, but you have to go to like NPR or YouTube to find out much.

Mason told NPR:

“The photography, like the articles, didn’t simply emphasize difference, but made difference … very exotic, very strange, and put difference into a hierarchy. And that hierarchy was very clear: that the West, and especially the English-speaking world, was at the top of the hierarchy. And black and brown people were somewhere underneath.”

That is almost the definition of racism. And they are still doing it.

Black Americans: National Geographic sends its photographers to the ends of the earth but did not think to do an article on Black Americans till the late 1960s. Before then, says Mason, they appear in pictures only as maids and porters and so on, almost by accident. National Geographic would not even let Black Americans receive the magazine till 1940.

“Of the times”: Mason says National Geographic was of the times, yet in 1919 one reader wrote:

“In volume XXXV […] you use the words ‘Southern Darky,’. These are the words of the lower stratum of the white South. The word ‘Darky’ is very offensive to the refined and educated colored man. We expect better language from a first class magazine.”

And even the Whitetastic New Yorker in 1944 could tell its bare brown breast policy was racist:

“Practically all my calls come from the ‘National Geographic’.”

But at long last National Geographic seems to understand that it is too White for its own good:

“We cover a diverse world. If we want to do so accurately and with authority, we need a diverse staff to cover it.”

– Abagond, 2018.

Sources: mainly NPR, Mic, New York Times.

See also:

• White lens
• voice of colour
• National Geographic
  • tribal nudity
  • non-Westerners
• “of the times”
  • Chinua Achebe: Africa’s Tarnished Name

540

In memoriam: Linda Brown

(Photo by Carl Iwasaki/The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images, via Time)

Linda Brown (1943-2018) of the landmark US Supreme Court case, Brown v Board (1954). In the picture above, from 1954, she is ten years old, walking with her six-year-old sister Terry Lynn across the dangerous Rock Island railway switching yards in Topeka, Kansas – to catch the bus to an overcrowded Black school. It took her an hour and a half to get to school. There was a White school just four blocks from her house.

Requiescat in pace.

Brown v Board

Linda Brown outside Sumner School where she was not allowed to go in 1950 because of her race. The picture is probably from 1954.

Oliver Brown, et al. v Board of Education of Topeka, et al. (1954) was the Supreme Court case in the US that overturned Plessy v Ferguson (1896), the bedrock of Jim Crow (US apartheid). It paved the way for the Civil Rights Movement to bring an end to openly racist laws in the 1960s.

Linda Brown, daughter of Oliver Brown, was a seven-year-old Black girl in Topeka, Kansas who stood on a fault line of US history. To get to school by 9:00 am she had to leave by 7:40 to catch the bus, walking seven blocks, crossing the dangerous Rock Island railway switching yards. She often had to wait in the cold and the wind and the rain when the bus was late.

There was a school just four blocks from her house. Some of her friends went there, but the principal turned away her and her father.

Her mother told her it was because her face was black, and she just couldn’t go to school with the white races.

Her daddy told her he was going to try his best to do something about it.

In 1951 he did, becoming part of an NAACP class-action lawsuit with other Black parents in Topeka. The judge ruled against them saying that Plessy v Ferguson allowed Kansas to have “separate but equal” schools.

The NAACP, knowing that Jim Crow was built on Plessy, had been pounding away at it since 1935. They started with law schools and had worked their way down to grade schools. To overturn Plessy they had to prove that separate meant unequal. They did that with dolls:

The Clark Doll Experiment: In a nationwide study, Dr Kenneth Clark and and his wife Mamie found that Black children who went to segregated schools were more likely to think that White dolls were “nice” and Black dolls were “bad” – even when the only difference between the dolls was skin colour.

Segregation: By law 17 states and Washington, DC required Black and White children to go to separate schools. The NAACP had class-action lawsuits in five: Kansas, Virginia, Delaware, South Carolina and DC. By the time they reached the Supreme Court, they became one case named after Oliver Brown: his name came first alphabetically.

Thurgood Marshall, one of the NAACP’s top lawyers, argued the case before the Supreme Court. The dolls were part of it, but so was the sociology of Gunnar Myrdal’s “An American Dilemma” (1944) and E. Franklin Frazier’s “The Negro in the United States” (1939).

The US government itself weighed in, saying that the South was:

“a source of constant embarrassment to this government in the day-to-day conduct of its foreign relations.”

Chief Justice Earl Warren, wanting a 9-0 vote on the ruling, promised that school desegregation would be slow. And slow it was:

In 1979, Linda Brown, now a mother, reopened the case because Topeka still had not desegregated its schools. She won the case in 1987. Topeka desegregated in 1994.

Resegregation: in the 1990s the Supreme Court gutted Brown v Board.

– Abagond, 2018.

Sources: mainly NPR (2018); “We Shall Overcome” (2004) by Herb Boyd.

See also:

• Jim Crow
• NAACP
• Thurgood Marshall
• Clark Doll Experiment
• desegregation:
  • Elizabeth Eckford
  • Dorothy Counts
  • That Norman Rockwell painting
  • James Meredith
• The New Jim Crow
• resegregation

558

Buraka Som Sistema: STOOPID

Remarks:

This came out in 2014 but I doubt it charted – there are not even proper lyrics for it online. But the video has received over 3 million views on YouTube, where it seems to be beloved by the zumba (dancercize) crowd.

“Buraka” might sound African, but it comes from Buraca, the suburb of Lisbon, Portugal where the band is from. I am not sure which genre this song belongs to, but the band is best known for playing kuduro. Kuduro started as a kind of dance music in Angola in the late 1980s and has since spread throughout the Portuguese-speaking world and beyond. It is now old enough to have oldies, at least in Angola.

Blaya Rodrigues, the dancer, was born in Brazil, but from the way she says “reggaeton” you can tell she probably grew up on the other side of the Atlantic, which she did (Portugal).

Vhils, the art director of the video, is the one in love with all the splashing paint. He is a Portuguese graffiti artist. He tried to condense into three minutes of video what the band represents to him: “explosions, energy, colour, madness, chaos, creativity and uniqueness.”

See also:

• songs, the 2010s

Sources: mainly Público, Wikipedia, YouTube.

 

Lusitanian

Lusitanian writing from the -200s, Cabeço das Fráguas, Portugal.

Lusitanian (fl. -2250 to -200) was the main language of what is now Portugal before Roman times. It was spoken by the Lusitanians, an Indo-European farming people of western Iberia, regarded as barbarians by the Romans. The Roman province of Lusitania was named after them.

Sample (the original pictured above):

OILAM TREBOPALA
INDO PORCOM LAEBO
COMAIAM ICCONA LOIM
INNA OILAM USSEAM
TREBARUNE INDI TAUROM
IFADEM REUE…

Translation:

A sheep [lamb?] for Trebopala
and a pig for Laebo,
[a sheep] of the same age for Iccona Loim-
inna, a one year old sheep for
Trebaruna and a fertile bull…
for Reve…

All that remains of Lusitanian are place names, the names of some old gods, and about six inscriptions, one of them shown above.

The rise of the Roman Empire wiped out at least 48 languages, Lusitanian being one of them. Iberia had Lusitanian in the west, Iberian in the east, Basque in the north, Tartessian in the south, and Celtiberian in the middle. Only Basque is still with us. The rest were replaced by Latin.

The main pre-Roman languages of Iberia. Via ncultura.

The difference between Spanish and Portuguese goes back to Roman times: even as dialects of Latin they were different. Part of that comes from the difference between Lusitanian and Celtiberian. In effect, Portuguese grew out of a Lusitanian (and Gallaecian) dialect of Latin.

Celts: Lusitanians are generally regarded as Celts, by the Greeks and Romans in ancient times, and by historians and archaeologists in ours. As Celts they were cultural cousins of the Welsh, Irish and Gauls. In fact, many words for everyday things in Portuguese are Celtic not Latin, like caminho (road), camisa (shirt), carro (carriage), cerveja (beer), menino (boy), minhoca (earthworm), bico (beak), peça (piece), and manteiga (butter).

West Mediterraneans: The Lusitanians came from outside Iberia, maybe between -2550 and -2250 as part of the Beaker People (who liked to drink honey wine out of beaker cups and wear fancy jewellery). It seems that they mixed with the West Mediterraneans already living there.

Enter the pig bull: One of the few words we know of Lusitanian is the word for pig bull: porcom tavrom. The strange thing about that is it looks more like Latin than Celtic. The Latin words for pig and bull are porcus and taurus. The Celtic way of saying those words, on the other hand, would have been something like orcom tarvom, dropping the leading p and reversing the r and v – if not making the v into a b. In Old Irish bull was tarb.

Therefore some argue that Lusitanian is a lost cousin of Latin, one that strayed into the Iberian peninsula instead of the Italian one.

Others say that Lusitanian is Celtic but arrived in Iberia early, so early that it got cut off from the rest of the Celtic world before p’s were dropped from the beginning of words. Just like how North American English has kept more of the Original Pronunciation of Shakespeare than British English.

– Abagond, 2018.

See also:

• The history of Portuguese:
  • Proto-World
  • Nostratic
  • Proto-Indo-European
  • Proto-Italic
  • Latin
  • Vulgar Latin
  • Galician
  • Portuguese
• Original Pronunciation

535

Stephon Clark

Stephon Alonzo “Zoe” Clark (1996?-2018) was an unarmed Black American man who was shot dead by police in his backyard. That was on the night of Sunday March 18th 2018 in Sacramento, the capital of California:

Show your hands! Gun! Gun! Gun!

BANG, BANG, BANG, BANG, BANG

[Clark falls to his knees]

BANG, BANG, BANG, BANG, BANG, BANG, BANG, BANG,
BANG, BANG, BANG, BANG, BANG, BANG, BANG

[Clark falls forward]

Clark does not move, but police are too afraid to come any closer because he refuses to show his hands.

Helicopter infrared video: the police peek round the corner after shooting at Clark 20 times.

They wait five minutes till backup arrives. Then they put on handcuffs. Only then do they give him medical attention – but it is too late.

They search for the gun, but there is no gun – only a white iPhone lying next to his body.

Meanwhile his grandmother, inside the house, hears the shooting and calls the police. The police question her for several hours. They do not tell her who is lying dead in the backyard. Then she looks out the window – and screams.

How it all started: The police received a report that someone in a hoodie was breaking car windows. A police helicopter saw Clark in a hoodie in his backyard. They said they saw him break a house window with a “toolbar”.

The police account:

“The officers gave the suspect commands to stop and show his hands… The suspect turned and advanced towards the officers while holding an object which was extended in front of him. The officers believed the suspect was pointing a firearm at them. Fearing for their safety, the officers fired their duty weapons striking the suspect multiple times.”

The magic words: “Fearing for their safety.”

Translation: “Shoot first, ask questions later.”

Note that the police did not identify themselves till after they fired 20 times. Clark has a brother who was killed by gun violence.

The video from the helicopter does show, in infrared, Clark advancing towards the officers a few steps. There is also body camera video but the running and screaming and hiding round corners by the police make it hard to get much from it except their extreme cowardice.

The killer cops, Officer Terrence Mercadal and Officer Jared Robinet, are now enjoying paid leave while the police investigate themselves. Mercadal is Black.

Black Lives Matter protest blocking the entrance to the Golden 1 Center on March 22nd 2018 in Sacramento, California. (Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)

Protests: Hundreds of protesters blocked the main highway and the basketball arena, delaying an NBA game.

The press, at the same time it was busily humanizing Mark Conditt, the Austin Bomber, it was dutifully demonizing Clark, reporting his police record – as if that is some kind of excuse to gun him down.

In my younger days, back before iPhones (but not before wallets), I used to smash car windows. Unlike Clark, though, I always remembered to carry my gun. That way if the police cornered me I could always shoot my way out. /sarcasm off.

Clark was the stay-at-home father of two sons, ages 1 and 3.

“Where’s Daddy? Let’s go get Daddy.”

– Abagond, 2018.

See also:

• killer cops
• Phantom Negro Weapon
• Black Brute stereotype
• Mark Conditt – the Austin Bomber
• iPhone
• Fruitvale Station – an excellent film that shows what a police shooting does to a family.

577

Mark Conditt

Mark Conditt (1994-2018) is the suspected Austin Bomber. Over the past three weeks six bombs have gone off in or near Austin, the capital of Texas, killing three and injuring seven. A seventh bomb was found by police. There may be more.

The dead:

• Anthony Stephan House, 39, Black
• Draylen Mason, 17, Black
• Mark Conditt, 23, White

The police at first suspected House, but now Conditt, both times declaring the bomber dead. Even if Conditt is the Austin Bomber, he may not have been working alone.

The police say that Conditt confessed to the crime on a 25-minute video they found on his mobile phone. A video they have not (yet?) made public.

They suspected Conditt because he was caught on security camera video at Home Depot wearing a wig and buying a suspiciously large number of nails. As he walked to his car, they got his licence plate number. Presumably from that they were able to get his mobile number and follow his movements. And they got a search warrant to look at his Google search history: he was looking up addresses, seemingly at random.

They had enough to arrest him, but then he took off in his car and ran into a ditch. The police wanted to take him alive – apparently his tail lights were not broken – but then he blew himself up.

Conditt had a list of addresses, presumably other places he wanted to bomb. The police do not know how he chose his addresses.

Terrorism: He terrorized Austin for three weeks, particularly Austin’s Black and Latino East Side where the first three bombs went off. But the police say he is not a terrorist or a violent racist because he did not confess to it on the 25-minute video:

“He does not at all mention anything about terrorism nor does he mention anything about hate. But instead it is the outcry of a very challenged young man talking about challenges in his personal life that led him to this point.”

If he were Muslim, a confession would not be required. His actions would speak for themselves.

When was the last time a Muslim bomber was called “a very challenged young man”? Since when are the police so sympathetic to killers?

The press does it too. In their Search For Truth we do not know if Conditt had trace amounts of marijuana in his blood. We do not know if his father was ever arrested. We do not know if his mother ever did drugs – or what country she comes from. We do not know who “radicalized” him. We do not know where he learned to make his somewhat sophisticated bombs. But we do know all the nice things his friends and family have said about him.

The president himself wrote off Conditt, a Christian American, as “a very, very sick individual”. Yet last year when Sayfullo Saipov, a Muslim American, killed eight people in New York, the president called him an “animal” and called for changes in national policy.

– Abagond, 2018.

See also:

• White American terrorists
  • Stephen Paddock
  • Devin Patrick Kelley
  • Taylor Michael Wilson
  • etc
  • etc
• “Make America Safe”
• Islamophobia

520

WWSD – What Would Sade Do?

Sade, via Green FM.

Sade, the British singer from the 1980s, has sold 50 million records and is worth 50 million pounds. Most of us are not so fortunate. But she was just as awesome before any of that, before awesome was an overused American word for awesome. As a fan I might be biased, somewhat, but there is just something about her that gets to me. It goes beyond her beauty and talent.

How to be more like Sade:

Love fashion, books, gardening, horses, dancing, and, of course, singing and music:

Listen to American R&B and jazz, particularly Curtis Mayfield, Donny Hathaway, Ray Charles, Al Green, Aretha Franklin, Marvin Gaye, Sly Stone, Gil Scott-Heron, Nina Simone, and Billie Holiday. Listen to rap and reggae, but not pop music.

Work on your creative writing.

Dress like you studied fashion design. Because you have. Preferably at Central Saint Martins in London. Or some other top fashion school. Or just study how she dresses. The essentials, according to Hunger TV: hoop earrings, polo necks, red lips, white shirts, sharp shoulders, slicked-back ponytail, double denim.

Speak with an Estuary English accent. But only if you already have one. I cannot imagine Sade faking her accent. But if you are in doubt about how to say a word, see how she says it. She does not seem to be one of the five voices used by the Oxford dictionary, but in her 73 songs she has said many different words, even if they have not yet been put into alphabetical order.

Smile – luminously. Do not grin. It destroys the effect.

Believe in yourself and do not give up: All the record companies thought “Smooth Operator” and “Your Love is King” would never sell, especially in the form she had them in. Where was the drum machine? They were too different from what was selling at the time – Tears For Fears, Talk Talk, etc. She could at least sound more like Quincy Jones, for goodness’ sake. But she kept the songs just the way they were – and in time sold millions. And so:

Do not follow trends – be timeless, be classic. Tears For Fears, where are they now?

Be proud of being different, like being mixed-race. Even when people spit on you or call you names. Even when racists mess up your name on purpose and call you Sade instead of Helen.

Fall in love – or be in love. It is one of her main activities, at least according to her songs.

Be a mermaid – but give it all up for the one you love, throwing rice at your own wedding.

Take a week – to answer telephone calls and emails.

Be modest – be sexy without showing skin. Be awesome without telling everyone how great you are. Avoid the limelight and be mysterious – even if you are world famous.

Be a perfectionist.

Be minimalist – do not overdo it. Less is more, as shown by her music and fashion. But maybe not her lipstick.

– Abagond, 2018.

Sources: especially Hunger TV (2018), New York Times (2017), Essence (2012),

See also:

• the sort of music Sade would have wound up doing if she did believe in herself or was afraid to be different.
  • Tears For Fears: Head Over Heels (1985)
  • Talk Talk: It’s My Life (1984)
• Sade
  • 1984: Your Love is King
  • 1984: Smooth Operator
  • 1984: Why Can’t We Live Together
  • 1986: Is it a Crime
  • 1988: Paradise
  • 1992: Feel No Pain
  • 1992: No Ordinary Love – the mermaid thing was in reference to this song
  • 2010: Babyfather
  • 2010: Soldier of Love
• mermaid
• Billie Holiday
• Nina Simone
• Quincy Jones
• James Baldwin’s record collection – a large overlap with Sade’s tastes, though he is more old school and gospelly. Probably what Sade would have been if she had grown up in Harlem in the 1930s and 1940s.