Notices by Dr. D. Elisabeth Glassco (deglassco@mastodon.social)

Juneteenth is neither the beginning nor the end of emancipation. It marks the distance between law and reality. Freedom was proclaimed on January 1, 1863, but more than 250,000 enslaved people in Texas remained in bondage until June 19, 1865. Juneteenth is the story of freedom delayed, resisted, and finally enforced.

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Image: In 1975, Juneteenth festivities in Fort Worth. Source: Fort Worth Star-Telegram collection, The University of Texas at Arlington.

In 1866, a remarkable movement swept across the South. Thousands of formerly enslaved Black men and women appeared before Freedmen’s Bureau officials to legally register marriages that had often existed for years—-or even decades.

It was one of the largest acts of family recognition in American history, yet few Americans know the story today.

Image: Soldier and Companion. United States, ca. 1861–1865. Quarter-plate tintype. Unknown photographer. Jackie Napoleon Wilson Collection.

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In 1865, the guns of the Civil War fell silent. Many Northerners believed the nation had been remade. Good over evil. Right over wrong. But they underestimated the determination of those who had lost. The Civil War ended 161 years ago. Yet Americans are still arguing over the same questions: who counts as a citizen, who can vote, and whose America this is.

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Image: Two Black American Union soldiers, Gladstone Collection of African American Photographs, cia 1860s. Universal History Archive.

The first Memorial Day didn’t begin with Confederate widows or small ceremonies in the white South. It began in Charleston in 1865, when 10,000 newly freed Black Americans gathered to bury Union dead abandoned in a mass grave at a former Confederate prison camp. Whah happened there was more than mourning. It was a declaration about freedom, memory, and who would define the meaning of the Civil War.
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Image: Frances Benjamin Johnston, Saluting the Flag at the Whittier Primary School, ca 1899.

In February 2004, American aircraft landed in Port-au-Prince and, by morning, Haiti’s elected president Jean-Bertrand Aristide was gone. Haiti isn’t an exception. It’s part of a longer history of the U.S. removing democratically elected governments when they conflict with U.S. strategic or economic interests.

#history

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Image: Jean-Bertrand Aristide celebrates inauguration as Haiti’s first democratically elected president in decades, Port-au-Prince, 1991. Photo: Associated Press.

Intellectual Map

Coates, Ta-Nehisi. Between the World and Me. New York: Spiegel & Grau, 2015.

Coates, Ta-Nehisi. The Message. New York: One World, 2024.

Coates, Ta-Nehisi. We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy. New York: One World, 2017.

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In both societies, the language of democracy operates beside enduring structures of hierarchy.

Those shared contradictions shape how each country understands security, territory, and political control.

That parallel history does not fully explain the alliance.

But it helps explain why the two states often recognize themselves in one another.
it.

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Video: Ex-Marine Brian McGinnis is removed as he shouts, “No one wants to fight for Israel.” USA Today.

https://youtu.be/tN-aTVkI5W0?si=vzVpgvZa-EkYs1tIA

More Resources

Eberly, Keaton, and Rodney Overton. “ ‘Brian Is Finally Home’: Raleigh Man Injured During Senate Hearing Protest Released from Hospital.” CBS17, March 9, 2026. https://www.cbs17.com/news/local-news/wake-county-news/brian-is-finally-home-raleigh-man-injured-during-senate-hearing-protest-released-from-hospital/amp/.

Erakat, Noura. Justice for Some: Law and the Question of Palestine. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2019.

Falk, Richard. Palestine’s Horizon: Toward a Just Peace. London: Pluto Press, 2017.

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Both the United States and Israel were shaped by political systems built alongside racial hierarchy and contested citizenship.

Each proclaimed democratic ideals while simultaneously managing populations excluded from the full promise of those ideals.

They are both profoundly unfree and racially riven societies..

That shared history matters.

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#iran #history #histodons #israel #blackmastodon

Image: Benjamin Netanyahu hugs Joe Biden at Ben Guirion Airport on October 18, 2023. AFP.

Israel’s political structure emerged from a different history but a similarly unresolved conflict over land and sovereignty.

The creation of Israel in 1948 produced a Jewish national state alongside the displacement of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians.

Today Israelis and Palestinians live on the same land under profoundly unequal legal and political systems.

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Image: Cover of the 1st edition, showing part of The Snake Charmer by Jean-Léon Gérôme, Clark Art Institute.

The United States declared universal liberty in 1776 while sustaining a massive system of racial slavery.

After emancipation, the system reorganized itself through Jim Crow—disenfranchisement, segregation, and racial terror.

For nearly a century, American democracy functioned fully for some citizens and only partially for others.

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Image: Each time word of a lynching reached the NAACP, a simple, somber flag flew outside the group’s offices at 69 Fifth Avenue in NYC. (Library of Congress).

In August 1863, Frederick Douglass stopped recruiting Black soldiers. He forced the Union to confront its contradictions: unequal pay, denied rank…violence against Black troops. He walked into the WH, challenged Abraham Lincoln directly, and left unconvinced by policy but clear about power. He resumed speaking not because justice had been secured, but because pressure, not faith, is what moves a nation forward.
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Image: Recruiting broadside endorsed by Douglass (Gilder Lehrman).
#history

The U.S. economy is sinking. 65 percent disapproval rate. ICE is falling. Inflation is high. Health care in danger for millions. The Epstein files. Wall Street is tanking. Foreign leaders mocking him.

History shows that he will get more desperate.

To understand the modern American state, you have to look at what it learned to do at night. In the slave South, violence didn’t arrive as spectacle. It arrived on schedule. Names checked. Horses assigned. Lanterns lit. By law, patrols could stop, search, whip, detain—without warrant or cause. Suspicion was enough. This wasn’t chaos. It was governance.

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Image: 1823 illustration by Johann Moritz Rugendas. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Capitao-mato.jpg

What makes this moment distinctive is not the violence, but the audience encountering it. When white Americans describe this behavior as “what dictatorships do,” they are not wrong but they are late in recognition. America has long depended on techniques commonly associated with authoritarian regimes, while insulating much of white America from their routine application. That insulation is now thinning. The shock is real. The surprise is telling. But neither is unprecedented.

#ice #history

Silverio Villegas González…unarmed but shot in the neck … murdered by ICE 5 months ago in Chicago at a traffic stop after dropping his children off at school.

A man is dead and his family is forever changed.

He was a human being.

#ICE

Others receive detail. Africa receives blur. Russia is parsed. Asia subdivides. The Americas fracture easily. Only Africa remains whole—in speech and thought. 54 nations characterized not by nature, but by habit. A grammar learned under empire, kept after it left.

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Image; "Rider” by Pierre Cloete (Khoi).

The singular came through administration. Borders were drawn. Kingdoms split. Maps flattened complexity into paperwork. Knowledge followed power: history gave way to classification. Africa became “manageable” once it could be spoken of as one place.

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Image: Map showing the colonization of Africa by European countries in the early 1900s. Source: https://www.britannica.com/topic/Timeline-of-the-European-Colonization-of-Africa#/media/1/2271296/281547

Intellectual Map

https://youtu.be/0MMifQvuN08?si=0D7T8vFBpZz60wJ8
Video: Bill Gates referring to Africa as a country. Source: Financial Times.

Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso, 1983.

Mudimbe, V. Y. The Invention of Africa: Gnosis, Philosophy, and the Order of Knowledge. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988.

Pakenham, Thomas. The Scramble for Africa, 1876–1912. New York: Random House, 1991.

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@wesdym Sorry, I should have been clearer. What I meant is that throughout the video—starting around the 43-second mark—Bill Gates repeatedly refers to “Africa” as a single unit, a kind of homogenous mass. When he talks about poverty and population growth, he doesn’t specify countries, regions, or communities; it’s just “Africa” as a problem space.