Harriet Tubman $20 bill not going over well with Trump fans, other garbage humans

I recently confirmed that I have Cherokee ancestry after knowing both sides of my family had native american heritage for many years, so I’m a bit pissed that people believe that Andrew Jackson was ~such a great man~ when he committed genocide against my ancestors and uprooted everyone who was left. This tribe was scattered from what is now the deep south to Arkansas and Appalachia. With stolen land comes lost culture, leaving my grandpa and mother (both identify as mixed-race) out of contact with their roots. He robbed us of a connection and robbed this tribe of their lives. They don’t know anything about Cherokee culture. My dad is part Potawatomi and he knows a little bit, but I feel like my whole family missed out on a lot of good things that could’ve been passed down to me. I feel wronged by him and I’m very disgusted people are defending Andrew Jackson.

Oh, and as frosting on the whole shitcake, he took the South to make more slave plantations.

And UGH I CAN’T BELIEVE THEY ARE CALLING HER A CRIMINAL WHEN SLAVERY WAS/IS A CRIME AGAINST HUMANITY ITSELF.

@Alan Robertshaw

Johnny Cash was the first American to learn of the death of Stalin.

(As someone mentioned cultural Marxism I’m going to pretend that was on topic)

I had to look that up in Wikipedia! For anyone who’s curious:

Cash was assigned to the 12th Radio Squadron Mobile of the U.S. Air Force Security Service at Landsberg, Germany as a Morse Code intercept operator for Soviet Army transmissions. . . . He was the first radio operator to pick up the news of the death of Joseph Stalin.

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The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.

Some days though my optimism fails and I fear it may be asymptotic.

I had to look up “asymptote.”

For the curious, here is Webster’s definition:

asymptote

: a straight line associated with a curve such that as a point moves along an infinite branch of the curve the distance from the point to the line approaches zero and the slope of the curve at the point approaches the slope of the line

So it seems to be an arc that isn’t one long curve.

Alan, you’re making me think. Damnit!

I found the cartoon!

These people would spontaneously combust if they ever saw Australia’s banknotes.

Raises interesting (interesting to me! YMMV! 🙂 ) questions about what is or should be “common knowledge”, and how it relates to what is or should actually be taught in schools.

Quite a lot of USians on here comparing how much or how little they learned in school about Harriet Tubman and the Underground Railroad.

I heard of Harriet Tubman first from a reference in an American novel (Marge Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time, when some of the utopians reenact their imagining of history in which she delivers her “Aint I a woman?” Seneca Falls speech and then leads an attack on the Pentagon!), and then in references by US feminist writers.

I may be an unusually ignorant Brit and my formal study of history per se was long ago – O level in 1976 (“Modern” British history – ie the 19th Century to WW1: lots about Corn Laws and Chartism and whether Queen Victoria preferred Disraeli to Gladstone, but not word one about the slave trade, though I do remember seeing Wilberforce’s rather amusing monument in St Paul’s Cathedral) and A level in 1978, Medieval History (a little about serfdom, to be sure).

The 18th century just disappears, and most of what I learned about it was through doing a historically consecutive degree in English literature, where Swift follows Dryden and so on. Other notable omissions were things like how we came to have an empire, pretty much the entire development of colonies and their independence (or not) up until suddenly there’s a “scramble for Africa” just before the end of the period, the Enlightenment, the early stages of the industrial revolution, the American and French Revolutions, huge swathes of social change, and most of the development of modern capitalism.

I knew something about the slave trade, though – from films and from books and from general cultural references. A few years after I left school there was a big revival of interest in it, which I think may have been reflected in the school curricula, and certainly was in exhibitions. So almost certainly Brits younger than me would be more knowledgeable about that particular historical area. (Not sure how many would know about the Somerset case, mind you).

This seems to me to be one of the advantages of having people’s faces on money – a chance to find out a bit of history you might not otherwise have much information on. It’s a little disappointing that the one woman we get on our money (apart from the Queen, who’s there by being her father’s daughter) is pretty well known already through cultural references, rip offs, “re-imaginings”, endless films and her own novels, which have never been out of print.

It would be nice if we were allowed more than one at a time, wouldn’t it?

I do wonder if a Republican President can overturn the Treasury Secretary’s decision to change the $20 bill. Trump has already decried Secretary Lew’s decision so I know he would do his best to overturn this decision.

Just another reason to vote for the Dems this November, I suppose.

P.S. I skipped the racist tweets/comments highlighted in this post since reading them would not be beneficial to me. However, I love the fact that this website (along with others) targets racists, sexists, homophobes, etc., for well-deserved ridicule and mockery.

hey all I know is she stole property. Jackson gave Indians a new home. Tubman was a criminal

I’m late to the party, but DAMN. Referring to people unironically as property? Jackson gave Indians a new home?! Just… my brain cannot even process that.

You’d think right-wingers would be happy about this. They’re replacing a Democrat with a gun-toting Republican.

My brother or sister-in-law posted a meme to this effect on Facebook. (I assume mostly because they’re in favor of gun-totin’ and anything anti-Democrat is a plus.)

Also, thanks David for including the Drunk History segment on Harriet Tubman. Drunk History is my favorite show and I recommend it to anyone who’ll listen. I’ve learned so much from it. (Including that Harriet Tubman was a spy for the Union army.)

The “Ain’t I a woman” speech was by Sojourner Truth. (The version usually taught is apparently embellished a good deal from what she actually said.)

must be a private conversation since my reply was erased. Its fine as long as people are either ignorant and think it is great to put a person on the 20 who is completely and utterly undeserving or ignorant to fact that Jackson was not quite a hero. I conclude that the moderator here is not looking for real truth nor fact but just trying to make anti-Tubman factions look stupid and positive ones look good. You wont change the real truth and that is smart intelligent people know that black are much more racist than any white person and this is why blacks bring it up every second when I don’t even think about it. In fact I think the moderator here is a racist black ignoramus.

@ Alan – William Ewart Gladstone – which is an anagram of “Wild agitator. Means well” as Lewis Carroll discovered.

My O level history teacher told us a lot of gossipy things of this kind. Apparently after having dinner with Mr Gladstone Victoria said, “He must be the cleverest man in the world,” and after having dinner with Mr Disraeli she said “He made me feel I was the cleverest woman in the world”.

When I come to London on the coach I pass a statue of Gladstone which I believe was the last straw of the matchgirls’ strike – the one which was paid for by docking their wages because the Bryant and May owner thought the Prime Minister that none of the women employees could vote for or against deserved a statue.

@ Irene – you are quite right! Serves me right for taking fiction as historically accurate (and in fact Piercy’s point is that the futuristic utopians have garbled their history, but focus on the good bits – so I only got part of the joke).

I am just going to not take any more 20 dollar bills from anyone and there is my solution to this stinking problem.