Hello Americans on Mastodon, I know we don't feel like there's much to celebrate this July 4th. It's been a rough several years.
So I want to talk about how we're making history right now.
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Hello Americans on Mastodon, I know we don't feel like there's much to celebrate this July 4th. It's been a rough several years.
So I want to talk about how we're making history right now.
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Sarah Taber
in reply to Sarah Taber • • •If you started paying attention to the US in 1960, this sure feels like the darkest timeline. But unfortunately, purges against Black & brown people are normal US behavior.
You know what's NOT normal US behavior?
This is the first time there's been a mass movement to STOP a purge in real time.
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Sarah Taber
in reply to Sarah Taber • • •This is new and unusual. To get an idea of how weird this is, let's take a quick tour of some of the many times the US federal government has officially persecuted entire groups of people.
And what (if any) pushback there was at the time.
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Sarah Taber
in reply to Sarah Taber • • •1929-1939: the US "repatriated" somewhere between 300K and 2M Mexican Americans. No due process. The federal government removed them from the US to "stop them from competing with Americans for jobs."
About half of the deported people were US citizens.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mexican_…
mass repatriation of Mexicans and Mexican-Americans during the Great Depression
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Sarah Taber
in reply to Sarah Taber • • •Few if any Anglo Americans seemed to have a problem with this.
Mexican Americans ran the court battles, protests, and educational campaigns against forced deportation on their own. While they were struggling to keep their families together day by day.
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Sarah Taber
in reply to Sarah Taber • • •WW2: the US jails 120,000 people, who hadn't been charged of any crime, as a "precaution." 2/3 were US citizens. Many were farmers. White folks wanted their land, & got it.
The loss of so many skilled farmers dented the US food system & made it harder to fight the war.
qz.com/1201502/japanese-intern…
The dangerous economics of racial resentment during World War II
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Sarah Taber
in reply to Sarah Taber • • •Some white Americans did publicly oppose rounding up their Japanese neighbors. They were in the minority & overruled.
Resistance was limited to individual efforts to tone down the impact of incarceration- tending jailed neighbors' farms while they were away, sending supplies to the camps, etc.
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Sarah Taber
in reply to Sarah Taber • • •Operation Wetback, 1954: a federal program to hunt down & deport undocumented immigrants from Mexico.
Somewhere between 1.1 and 1.5 million were rounded up & deported.
And yet again, many were documented migrants or US citizens.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operatio…
1950s U.S. immigration law enforcement initiative
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Sarah Taber
in reply to Sarah Taber • • •Public outrage over the many US citizens deported caused Operation Wetback to get its funding pulled. … After 3 months & over 1 million people deported.
This was the fastest a purge ever got rolled back. But it still took people a while to notice & stop it. At the supposed peak of US unity.
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Sarah Taber
in reply to Sarah Taber • • •Slavery & Jim Crow: millions of Americans held in captive labor.
Enslaved & sharecropping farm workers knew things were bad! They did what they could to push back the whole time.
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Sarah Taber
in reply to Sarah Taber • • •The US & its preceding colonies were at war with tribes ~each year from 1610 - 1920s- 300 years.
There was more opposition from white folks than you'd think; but it wasn't broad-based, organized, or effective. We're still breaking treaties with tribes today.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American…
frontier conflicts between American, Canadian and European settlers and Indigenous peoples of the Americas
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Sarah Taber
in reply to Sarah Taber • • •Sometimes, replacing tribes with settlers wasn't enough. The federal gov't put in the work to keep the new guys down too.
When coal miners went on strike, they sent in the National Guard. To push people back into the mines at gunpoint.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal_War…
Coal Wars - Wikipedia
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Sarah Taber
in reply to Sarah Taber • • •So it's frustrating to hear things like "This is the darkest timeline" and "late-stage capitalism."
Yes things suck & you gotta vent. But... do people think the US started in 1960?
We really forget our country, and capitalism, *started* with people on the auction block.
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AI6YR Ben
in reply to Sarah Taber • • •Su_G
in reply to AI6YR Ben • • •Sarah Taber
in reply to Sarah Taber • • •When you know what the US has been about this whole time, that really puts the current moment in perspective.
We've been up to some ugly, ugly stuff. And it usually gets either silence or applause.
2025 is a whole different animal. The response has been strong and immediate. We had *preemptive* mass mobilization.
By millions of people who *aren't* being targeted by raids, jailing, and deportation. (Yet. 🙃)
That's never happened in US history before. This is different.
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Sarah Taber
in reply to Sarah Taber • • •That's why the right keeps sniveling about how they're under attack. Even while they're successfully pulling off another purge.
They're not used to getting yelled at when they blow taxpayer dollars on witch hunts, they're used to getting high-fives at the country club.
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Sarah Taber
in reply to Sarah Taber • • •We still have a long way to go. And it's frustrating bc we have leaders who supposedly want to run our country better, and they plain don't have the levers to do much. I'm not making excuses.
I'm just pointing out how weird it is for the US to even *have* leaders who want to do better.
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Sarah Taber
in reply to Sarah Taber • • •We have so much more going for us than any generation that's tried to stop these things before.
And yes, that's left us without much of a playbook on how to do this kind of change quickly.
These movements usually take decades or centuries to build up steam.
This time, we already had one in place when the problems started. That's weird & nobody knows what to do.
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Sarah Taber
in reply to Sarah Taber • • •So if you're looking at the US & thinking "This isn't the country I know," you're 100% right. It's not.
We're actually fighting back in real time for once.
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Sarah Taber
in reply to Sarah Taber • • •I know it doesn't feel like much to be proud of right now, because we're nowhere close to done.
But you deserve to know- in the middle of all of this, we ARE making history right now.
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Aaron
in reply to Sarah Taber • • •your auntifa liza 🇵🇷 🦛 🦦 reshared this.
Joy_intl
in reply to Sarah Taber • • •I think we needed this more than we even knew.
I'm rooting for democracy, for the real freedom that means getting close to self actualization - for everyone.
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Ricki Bowie Knives Tarr
in reply to Sarah Taber • • •your auntifa liza 🇵🇷 🦛 🦦 reshared this.
Venita
in reply to Ricki Bowie Knives Tarr • • •Yappari
in reply to Sarah Taber • • •64 Islands Aroha Cooperative
in reply to Sarah Taber • • •Play Ball and Fight Fascists
in reply to Sarah Taber • • •Didn't realize how much I needed to hear this, especially today.
Thanks for taking the time to put this out there.
fool
in reply to Sarah Taber • • •Nobody ناچیز नास्ति (he/him)
in reply to Sarah Taber • • •July! Our Sex Is On Fire! 🔥☀️🧨
in reply to Sarah Taber • • •Really good thread. Appreciate all the historical context. I learned something here. So, definitely well done.
But.
This also has vibes of, bc I like sports, hey last week we lost 100-0 and this week we only lost 90-0. Progress!
Uhhhh, we're still getting our ass absolutely kicked.
I can't put lipstick on this pig. Not today.
Marc Singer
in reply to Sarah Taber • • •Chris Petrilli
in reply to Sarah Taber • • •Radio Free Trumpistan
in reply to Sarah Taber • •@Sarah Taber
I was with you up to this point--the U.S. has NOT been about this the whole time.
What the U.S. has been about the whole time is the see-saw between the people in power who do that sort of thing and the people who give that lot the boot from time to time.
If the U.S. was all about that the whole time, there never would have been a Civil War OR an end to the Vietnam War, and this should be said. No, the U.S. wasn't born in 1960 , but it was in the 1960s that the people you describe lost power--Vietnam ended, Civil Rights were encoded into law--and it was also the time when the Republican Party morphed from the Party of Lincoln into the Dixiecrat-Kremlin Party.
But understand this: I stand with the NAACP and ACLU to make it known that we're Americans too, and we will NOT be overlooked.
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PedestrianError
in reply to Sarah Taber • • •reshared this
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Radio Free Trumpistan
in reply to PedestrianError • •Spoken like a true Soviet. Soviets believed that about "capitalism" (an invention of Karl Marx & Co. in the sense that it's been used in this thread) since the Bolshevik uprising and the fall of "capitalism" has been awaited and believed in like the second coming of Christ. Christ will arrive first.
treelzebub
in reply to PedestrianError • • •LukefromDC
in reply to Sarah Taber • • •The best pushback against slavery was in Haiti, where thousands of plantations were burned and slaveowners were hunted down and executed. Slavery was overthrown by armed force along with the French colonial regime.
THAT of course is why the US and Europe hate Haiti to this day but the alternative (submission to slavery) was obviously deemed completely unacceptable.
Fat_Farang
in reply to Sarah Taber • • •Radio Free Trumpistan likes this.
Radio Free Trumpistan
in reply to Fat_Farang • •Oh I know. I won't say that the two parties ar alike, but I WILL say both parties are rotten.
Douglas
in reply to Sarah Taber • • •my grandfather's best friend was part of that. His family was in a camp in Arizona. He ended up serving in the Army and fought all through Europe. They lost their dairy farm as a result of being rounded up.
I met him about 30 years ago when they were all old men reminiscing about the war.
We donated an audio record postcard that he sent my grandfather from the camp of his valedictorian speech to the archives at Manzanar. It was wild listening to it as a kid because it was so normal
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Radio Free Trumpistan
in reply to Sarah Taber • •@Sarah Taber
...and then there were the Los Angeles Zoot Suit Riots, 1943. There was more to that than just a catchy tune by Cherry Poppin Daddies--it actually happened.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zoot_Sui…
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Rupert V/
in reply to Sarah Taber • • •Radio Free Trumpistan likes this.
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Ivey Janette McClelland
in reply to Sarah Taber • • •Jargoggles
in reply to Sarah Taber • • •"They're rounding people up just because of their skin color and locking them up!"
Yeah, like you said, I'm just glad people are speaking up about this in a big way because this has been happening for decades. I think one of the key differences is that they've dropped the pretense that what they're doing is "justice."
Liberals have been more than happy to lock black and brown people up en masse as long as they can run them through the system first. If someone is convicted of a crime, they're completely okay with throwing them in prison. Does "convicted" mean "guilty?" Should what they were convicted of even be a crime? We've never really had a meaningful conversation about that in this country.
But the numbers really speak for themselves. Things *were not okay* before Trump was elected. When this fascist regime falls apart, we *cannot* go back to how things were before.
Radio Free Trumpistan
Unknown parent • •The US. is all of those things because E Pluribus Unum, and it's a pity such statements don't focus on the Pluribus part.
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Chris Real
in reply to Sarah Taber • • •I know you want to reassure people that "It's been bad like this before", but—
Never before has a president been RE-elected—AFTER 2 impeachments.
AND an attempted coup.
Don't normalize unrest and oppression. Your good intentions are a complex form of denial—search yourself for this flaw before you double down.
And the "How DARE you question my intention!' defense has already been discredited.
No one should be reassured until this crisis has been ACTUALLY defeated.
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wlf_warren
in reply to Chris Real • • •@_chris_real
WELL
... said! 💯💯
I wish he would ask me that!!
😆
wlf_warren
in reply to wlf_warren • • •@_chris_real
I may be an Alien Resident in the 🇵🇭
but I am still a 🇺🇸 citizen
and Absentee voted in the POTUS election
not for that pompous FOOL
so do have a right to answer him !
Sceptre.
in reply to Sarah Taber • • •