"I don't understand. How do you have a show?"

found via Slate

"Now, why don't you just go to Massachusetts and go to school? ... You could, um, ride a horse?"

Brilliance!

Thank you, Lizzie Mae/Azie! The second installment adds to the enlightenment:

"Who does not like bacon?"

Let's ask that nice white man some more questions about slavery!

.

"Can that acre be anywhere, like on Maui?"

The Daily Show with Jon Stewart
Get More: Daily Show Full Episodes,Political Humor & Satire Blog,The Daily Show on Facebook

I'd prefer my acre on Oahu. Thank you!


.

That's how I feel about Lincoln!

 Also, this:

. . . white people get to have an astonishing cornucopia of wildly divergent stories all focusing on a million tiny facets of the white experience over the last few thousand years.

Black people get Roots.

Harumph.


.

"Offense taken."

Key and Peele

"I will not have my reputation tainted selling superficial, bigoted slaves."

Too much funny.


.

Whenever I hear the words "Thomas Jefferson",

this is what comes to my mind, too:

Thomas Jefferson: The Face of a Rapist, by Renee, Feministe. Emphases mine.

Americans look at Thomas Jefferson and see the one of the authors of the Declaration of Independence, a statesman, a former president and one of the founding fathers,’ however; when I look at him, I see the face of a rapist. When Jefferson first met Sally Hemings, his slave through inheritance, she would have been no more than 15 or 16 years old. It is rumoured that when she returned from France with him, that she was already pregnant with his child.

[ . . . ]

No matter how many times Black women have angrily contested the use of the term love affair between Hemings and Jefferson, it continues to be the most common descriptor by those who believe the DNA evidence. This assumes that Hemings actually had the power to deny Jefferson sexual access, or that Jefferson had a right to Sally’s body for the purposes of sexual gratification. Both suppositions are erroneous. Due to the patriarchal nature of gender relations, many men believe that they exist with the right to access women’s bodies and that is specifically grounded in the power imbalance between the genders. If we can acknowledge in a modern context that a power imbalance exists between men and women, how much more likely is it that this same imbalance existed between Jefferson and Hemings?

Some may look back at Jefferson and simply claim that he was a man of his time and that he should not be judged outside of historical context, however; in my mind a rapist is a rapist. What he did at the time may not have been considered a violation due to current race and gender relations, however; today we can correctly name his actions. Sally did not have the power to consent to his advances even if she was so inclined; this simple fact must be affirmed not only to honour the memory of Hemings but to change the social understanding that Black women’s bodies are unrapeable. We are not naturally licentious whores who exist to fulfill the sexual fantasies of depraved racist men. We are women that must be accorded the right to control over our bodies without punishment for any decisions we make in that regard.

And yet, Mr. Jefferson has a memorial in my nation's capital. (So does his fellow slave-owner and noted tax-evader George Washington.) This is despite the fact that Meredith Simons at the controversial site Double XX does not think we in the United States live in a rape culture, mainly because she doesn't seem to know anyone who has been raped.

I have never owned anyone, assaulted anyone, or started a war with Great Britain. Yet where is my national monument?

.

It gets more colorful at 3:54.

First heard by me today on The Week According to Frangela on KTLK AM 1150, during Frangela's beloved segment, "Professional Idiot of the Week":

"Slavery was evil, there's no question about that. But you know what? If it hadn't happened, where would you be right now? If your ancestors hadn't come over here for whatever reason, where would you be right now? You'd be floating down a river in Rwanda in pieces. Or maybe you'd be chased down by machete-wielding Janjaweed militia in the Sudan. Or starving under Robert Mugabe.

"Hey, ingrates. Get on your knees. Kiss the American dirt beneath you. And, please, shut up."


- Jim Quinn, from the June 24 edition of Clear Channel's The War Room with Quinn and Rose

There is so much nonsense to unpack in Jim Quinn's statement, including 1) most slaves in the Americas came from Western Africa, which does not include Rwanda, the Sudan, or Robert Mugabe's Zimbabwe; and 2) most black people born in the United States have non-African ancestry as well, often due to the owners raping their ancestors. So, despite Jim Quinn's penchant for the one-drop rule, in a parallel universe without centuries of slavery throughout the Western hemisphere, we ungrateful black people could have been living in Europe, Asia, Africa, Australia, the South Pacific, pretty much anywhere. Correspondingly, many allegedly white people in that same parallel universe could find themselves living in Senegal, Ghana, Nigeria or picking diamonds in Sierra Leone, all homes of their hidden ancestors.

.