it has come to my attention there exists a subset of reenactors who go around renaissance faires “infecting” bystanders with the Plague. i wish to thank these heroes for their service
yes this can come in the form of dressing up as a pack of rats and offering people “Congratulations! You’ve Contracted The Black Death” hand stamps, but consider also:
walking around asking people if they want to pet your rat (plushie)
going in character as a fur trader carting around a wagon full of exotic wares at competitive prices
handing people a business card containing only the printed image of a flea (and on the back, the text “uh-oh!”)
cosplaying as a giant bacterium
*hands you my business card* it contains a single drawing of a flea
*instinctively you flip it over searching for information*
Gröning proposed the idea for the film to the monks in 1984, but the Carthusians said they wanted time to think about it. They responded to him 16 years later to say they were willing to permit him to shoot the movie if he was still interested.
okay so one of the most interesting/relevant things my current history class has taught me
I learned in high school that the first African slaves were brought to America in 1619. But here’s the thing. We don’t actually know if they were slaves or indentured servants.
And here’s why that’s significant: Slavery hadn’t really fully become racialized back then. Likewise, there wasn’t yet the idea that African=slave, necessarily. In the years following 1619, there were African slaves, indentures, and free people in North America. In the 1600’s, race wasn’t really even a fully mature concept. From my reading, people didn’t necessarily see skin color as constituting “race” or see “race” as an immutable, biological quality.
What changed? European countries wanted to maximize their profits from their colonies in the Americas, and it was most profitable to own people as slaves. Literally what caused it was just that life expectancy in the colonies increased and it was more profitable to own a person’s labor for life.
It’s insane; in Virginian laws in the 1600’s you can see the transition to a racialized view of the world. In 1643 laws regulating the behavior of “servants” didn’t even mention race. Punishments for indentured servants, for things such as running away, often involved having more years added to their servitude.
In 1661, a law is passed in Virginia that uses the term “negroe.” In 1680, the law regulates the behavior of enslaved people further, making it illegal for any “negroe or other slave” to move about freely without a permit or to carry a weapon. Runaways who resist being apprehended can now be punished with death. The 1680 law has a bit that is interestingly worded: “…if any negroe or any other slave shall presume to lift up his hand in opposition against any Christian…” This is an echo of the viewpoint that religious identity was the most important part of a person’s identity. Watch what happens:
In 1691, the law punishes and prohibits “negroes, mulattoes, and Indians intermarrying with English, or other white” people, and prohibits people from setting “negroes” and “mulattoes” free. The law has fully constructed the idea of racial identity (notice that “white” exists now). Words denoting a person’s status of servitude have become increasingly replaced by “racial” indentifying terms (the law doesn’t say ‘you can’t free slaves,’ it says ‘you can’t free black people.’) IIRC, around this time laws were passed making enslaved status hereditary as well.
(All of these can be found in the book Colonial and Revolutionary America by Alan Gallay (it’s a textbook and I don’t particularly recommend it but it has some good resources) who in turn is quoting from The Statutes at Large: Being a Collection of All the Laws of Virginia, from the First Session of the Legislature in the Year 1619.)
I guess my point here is that it tends to be taught like “Europeans thought Africans were inferior so they thought it was ok to enslave them” but it seems to be closer to the truth that “slavery was profitable so Africans were increasingly considered inferior so enslaving them could be justified.” Like the belief in race didn’t create racialized slavery; it was the other way around. People think of the idea of “race” as being obvious and racism being a Just How It Was In Ye Olden Days, but “race” as we know it? Was literally just constructed as a justification for evil. It’s not something that people naturally construct in their understanding of the world.
Likewise before like 1650 or so, we don’t see English eyewitnesses to Native American nations assigning the idea of “race” to them. English people literally thought that if English people were born and brought up in the Americas, they would look like Native Americans because they thought characteristics like skin color were at least partially environmental. (The book I read about this is Indians and English by Karen Ordahl Kupperman and I highly recommend it.) Kupperman goes so far as to argue that it’s likely that English depictions at the time showed Native Americans as having more “European” features not because the artists were intentionally white-washing them, but because from their perspective a person’s features were not important in portraiture for depicting who they were; it was their clothing and posture and dress and the objects they were portrayed with that was supposed to depict that. (She then goes into a tangent about English portraiture at the time and it slaps.)
I don’t know. I have a problem with how racism in the past is treated with “they didn’t know any better” or painted with ignorance. The idea of race isn’t even that old.
Like, literally, the Europeans didn’t think it was okay to pillage and exploit the Americas because of their belief in race. The idea of “race” was formed out of their desire to pillage and exploit.
people respond to incentives and ofttimes evil is profitable.
idk who needs to hear this but if you have been putting something off bc it doesn’t need to be done until the end of the month. we are almost done with the teens we are approaching the big numbers (the twenties). that date shall dawn upon you swiftly and without mercy before you know it. psa for everyone except me i got plany off time
~♡~she/her~♡~
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