It’s too bad the US Treasury threw a big wet blanket on Trump fans’ celebrations of the Great Orange Hope’s big New York Primary victory yesterday.
Did I say “too bad?” I meant “ah hahaha ha ha ha.”
Anyway, on Twitter the people you would imagine would be most upset by the Harriet Tubman $20 bill are, well, the most upset.
https://twitter.com/DathanScroggs/status/722854409059762182
https://twitter.com/TangosWithBears/status/722823541025075204
https://twitter.com/JalynskiL/status/722900932443287556
https://twitter.com/KebabRemovalAct/status/722861754489802752
id understand if they put MLK on money but tubman was a fucking criminal. what she did was illegal.
— William Lawrence QB2. (@jakeechristiee) April 20, 2016
https://twitter.com/Iibertyys/status/722870233623629824
Apparently libertys sees “freeing slaves” as some sort of crime against humanity. But sees actual crimes against humanity as something worth celebrating.
https://twitter.com/Iibertyys/status/722856759711440896
Harriet Tubman on 20$ bill 😲 affirmative action currency… Soon transgender gets on dime… Or will the dime identify as a quarter?
— Chuck Lindbergh (@rexgoodboy) April 20, 2016
https://twitter.com/drew_leopard/status/722832010578890752
https://twitter.com/UNOwen7/status/722855942342086657
Harriet Tubman was an early
American Terrorist assisting
Runaway Slaves using Underground Railroad They were not doing
Anything goodForUSA— Mark Hunter. @[email protected] (@mtjordanhunter) April 20, 2016
https://twitter.com/FinnNogginDuude/status/722900633972412417
https://twitter.com/xavierlee_/status/722883578774720514
https://twitter.com/genophilia/status/722886924839464960
https://twitter.com/Ovenkin/status/722843029971664896
https://twitter.com/KaliYugaSurf/status/722893888470421504
https://twitter.com/JohnKuckich/status/722828069325524992
https://twitter.com/occdissent/status/722853565333684225
And then there were those who pulled out the n-word. No, not that n-word. This one:
https://twitter.com/dorklyenlighten/status/722823187273269248
https://twitter.com/UNOwen7/status/722894486204850177
https://twitter.com/PlaceInTheSun2/status/722835227584794624
Don’t worry. There were plenty of people who used the regular n-word as well.
If after all this you want to be reminded just how completely badass Tubman really was, here’s her story, as recounted by a very drunk person.
Maybe because I live in an oasis of blue, but the southern public school system did OK for me. We got plenty of Tubman, Truth, and Turner. We were taught that the Civil War was about the economics of SLAVERY and a state’s right to OWN PEOPLE. I actually seem to recall my history books being… uncomfortably thorough in depicting both slavery and the many ‘Indian removals’
Back to back bills are actually pretty cool sounding. Wish this fucker wasn’t still on it, but hopefully this opens up the option for Anthony and Stanton and Douglass and King. Maybe some non genocidal white dudes too! Like maybe…
http://www.thenation.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/marktwain_cc_img_0.jpg
Twain or…
Frost
Dollar worthy portraits, right there
Regardless, I’m excited
If anyone needs brain bleach:
https://youtu.be/VTDpN-doSd0
I adored Harriet Tubman as a kid, so I’m kind of giddy. I went to an all girls school, so lucky me actually learned about kick-ass women throughout history. I was totally obsessed with Harriet and Helen Keller (okay, so I missed her rather… troublesome opinions on eugenics, but that stuff isn’t usually included in biographies directed at kids).
Anyone else find it funny that the musical Hamilton is getting a lot of credit for this change being put on the $20 rather than the $10? Guess the musical Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson (seriously, that’s a real thing!) just wasn’t quite as effective… Gee, what a shame /sarcasm
In my K-8 school we only used textbooks for a few subjects, like math and spelling. I don’t think I learned history from a textbook until my US history class in high school. That’s probably why I knew about abolitionist heroes, the civil rights movement, the women’s suffrage movement, and the genocide and oppression of indigenous Americans when I was a kid.
I guess I was pretty lucky to go to a kind of hippyish school.
I’m not sure if my school or any other in Minneapolis is still like this now that everything is so much more standardized. I hope it’s still like that.
Our local high school is named for a confederate general.
@Bluecat Like so many Americans you have your information about Britain scrambled. Somersett’s Case, 1772, was settled in favour of escaped slave James Somersett, in a ruling which (among others) effectively declared slavery in England to be contrary to English Common Law. Formal abolition of the institution within the UK followed in 1807.
Kinda makes you hope there’s an afterlife just so people can know how their legacy turns out.
Shockingly, Donald Trump has come out in favor of keeping Jackson on the $20. http://bigstory.ap.org/eb46a525809f4dab956abde03e95e177
Gee, I wonder why virtually no POC and a significant majority of woman voters want nothing to do with him.
Okay, the edit button is not showing for up me. That should be virtually all POC.
Well, formal abolition of the slave trade happened in 1807 (and ended up contributing to the War of 1812 a few years later, as it encouraged the British to raid American shipping looking for illegal slaves). Slavery itself wasn’t really formally abolished until 1833, which was when that was actively applied to the rest of the British Empire. Portions of the Empire had their own patchwork of laws before that, of course: for example, Upper Canada (aka Ontario) passed a law in 1793 that banned the import of new slaves, and granted freedom to children of slaves at 25. It didn’t free existing adult slaves, but guaranteed that the practice of slavery would eventually end. (And needless to say, there was massive political opposition to even that lukewarm approach.)
You could also claim it wasn’t really abolished in the British Empire until 1843, when the few allowed exceptions in the 1833 law were removed.
I read your whole comment. Point taken, but this bit was unnecessary.
As for me, this is actually the first time I’ve even heard of Harriet Tubman and learned her story. Holy shit, what a badass. Mad respect for this woman.
@ Jenora Feuer. I never said abolition was a simple thing, and it’s true slavery hung on in corners of the Empire until at least the 1830’s. The landmark 1772 court ruling stands though, and by the end of the 18th Century slavery was effectively illegal inside the UK proper. It rather undermines the credibility of Alex Hayley’s Chicken George being sent to England to study breeding fighting cocks. Such a man would have been able to claim his freedom. The story is set at a time when a number of Black American boxers were thriving as both contestants and boxing masters in England, often advertising their origins as former plantation slaves.
Rant over. Harriet Tubman is a good choice for the new banknote.
@kevin
I’m pretty sure bluecat is from the UK.
Also, no need to be a douchebag.
I don’t think John Brown is good choice to share the $20 bill with Tubman. My biggest problem with him is the cold-blooded way he murdered people who never owned slaves when he was in Kansas.
I would prefer someone like William Lloyd Garrison, Elijah Lovejoy or Cassius Clay (1810 to 1903).
Or John Quincy Adams, who has some pretty good credentials in the fight against slavery.
So it sounds like Canada is going to be putting an iconic Canadian woman on one of the bills in the new 2018 series – I really hope that it’s Laura Secord on the $100, if only to retroactively make this Kate Beaton comic even more amazing: http://www.harkavagrant.com/index.php?id=257
I was rooting for Shirley Chisholm, but I’ll happily take Harriet Tubman! I wonder why the shitlords aren’t taking this opportunity to complain about Lincoln keeping his place on the $5 yet.
But those tweets! I have completely run out of even to cannot at this point.
Peaches
While I was a cashier at a U.S. craft chain, right after Hobby Lobby vs. Burwell, this happened to me: I had finished ringing out an older woman, probably in her 60’s, and she turned to me as she was leaving and said, apropos of absolutely nothing we had discussed during the transaction: “But… Hobby Lobby won! Yay!” And she did a little fist pump, too! I kind of side-eyed her and grunted “Mm-hmm.” This did not satisfy her, apparently, because she did it again! The exact same way, as if I hadn’t heard her. This time I turned to her and said, in the most dead-pan, disapproving manner I could muster “Yes. They did.” Then I turned and called the next customer. She caught my drift that time, because she harrumphed and flounced out the door, which made me feel a bit better. But I *SO* wanted to scream at her “If Hobby Lobby’s anti-women crap makes you so happy, then WHY did you have to bring your small-minded bullshit HERE you bigoted so-and-so??”
I used to get so tired of biting my tongue at work. So yeah, I don’t miss cashiering much at all, myself.
@Snowberry
Yeah, I nearly spat out my drink when I read that one.
@Chiomara
Yup, that line’s popular here too, only replace ‘Isabel freed them’ with ‘thousands of white soldiers died to free them’.
Probably not; hardly anyone actually did, proportionally speaking. Indeed, most non-slaves were considerably worse off economically than they would have been in a non slave-based economy, and a lot of them knew it. Of course, a lot of them thought that the solution was to become a rich slave owner, and fuck everyone else, which is still a common motivation for poor conservatives.
Kinda all of the above. You own things that were made by slave labor as we speak, and so do I. It’s basically impossible to participate in economic life and not have this be true. On the flip side, now as in the past, there’s a limit to what any individual can do about it, other than continue to advocate for political reforms that would abolish slavery once and for all.
@ mockingbird
Every secession document explicitly mentions slavery and its continuance as the primary motivating factor. The slaveholding aristocracy was determined to hold onto power, economic, social, legal, and otherwise, and that was their motivation. The rest of the people living in the South didn’t really get a say. Indeed, a lot white Southerners were really, really pissed off about the whole secession thing, and even more pissed off that they were expected to fight and die to maintain the planters’ privilege. Many Southern states had more residents join the U.S. army than the Confederate army, and in the first two years of the war the Union had more Confederate deserters join up than they had casualties on the battlefield. A far higher proportion of the Confederate army were conscripts, and by the end of the war as many as 1 in 3 of their troops were AWOL. The war was not at all popular in the Confederacy, contrary to what modern racists like to believe. Not to say that the white people in question weren’t mostly racist as hell, because they totally were, but that didn’t necessarily make them fans of slavery.
The first is more true, but these are both kinda accurate statements, and kinda not. Basically, moral arguments completely aside, slavery is a really, really shitty way to run an economy, and automatically generates a wicked high Gini coefficient, with most of the population, enslaved or not, on the wrong side of it. 99.9% of the people living in the South (and a large chunk of folks in the North; more on that later) were totally fucked by the slave economy. Small farmers had no cash crops, because they were chronically undercut by huge plantations with unpaid workforces (These are horrible for the land too, btw; huge chunks of the Tidewater still haven’t recovered from this shit, and it’s not like we’ve ever stopped doing it). Slaveholders would rent out skilled slaves, driving down wages and opportunities for free artisans and tradesfolk, and always the money filtered upwards, to pay for huge mansions, lavish feasts, and European vacations for the planters, while actual workers, slave and free alike, lived in tarpaper shacks and ate corn grits twice a day if they were lucky.
Meanwhile, slave-made products traveled North (mostly raw materials; cloth, fiber, coal, etc.), providing cheap inputs for the dark satanic mills that sprang up like mushrooms after a spring rain across New England. There, ostensibly free workers were barracked in company towns and worked the day in and day out, with the ever looming threat of their jobs going south to be done for no wages by slaves if they complained. Every union member knew that there was no point to the union in a slave nation, and whatever their thoughts on racial equality, to be union was to be abolitionist; entire locals signed up en masse when the war broke out, suspending activities until the end of hostilities.
TL;DR: The plantation economy relied on slavery, but wasn’t actually doing any good for anyone who wasn’t a slaveholder.
@Axecalibur
Maybe the fact that I’m an English major and aspiring librarian has something to do with it, but I’d also love to see famous American writers on US currency!
And most of it involved war, slavery and genocide. As someone on Reddit put it, Andrew Jackson was a big enough asshole that the Whig party (which would later become the Republican party) was literally founded to oppose him.
Good God – these people are utterly vile.
I have to say, I went to public school in Nevada (that used textbooks, mostly outdated), and learned all about Harriet Tubman. I may have even written a paper on her at some point, although K-6 (we had middle school there) was a long time ago…
On another topic, at least the right is consistent: they castigate Mexicans for breaking unjust laws today, and they castigate Tubman for breaking even more unjust laws two centuries ago.
Oh, and Dalilama, it’s fascinating studying the apologetics of the Civil War. Lincoln was extremely hesitant to link his opposition to succession to slavery at all, precisely because he knew how resistant many northern Whites were to the notion of Abolition. So, he chose to focus on the rule of the constitution and the importance of the states staying united rather than slavery. On, the other hand, not only the various succession documents (as you pointed out), but many of the pro-succession newspapers trumpet that they were succeeding (at least in part) to defend their ‘peculiar institution’.
Fast forward two hundred years, and the sides have completely swapped arguments. And, to make it more fun, the political parties have also swapped political bases, so the democrats still argue the war was about slavery, while republicans still argue it was about anything but 🙂
She stole property
She stole property.
She helped desperate, enslaved human beings to freedom at the risk of her own life and freedom, and this asshole calls it stealing property.
It would be a privilege to spit in this creature’s face.
Of course, in England we have a woman on all our banknotes 😉
But there have been some nastiness from MRAs about putting Jane Austen on a twenty that resulted in rape threats. Not very original for these MRA loonies, ho hum. But we currently have a fiver with Elizabeth Fry on it.
@Nikki
Was mostly just looking for famous historical American white dudes, who hadn’t said or done anything particularly atrocious. Rules out so, so many people. That I came up with 2 authors… I’m sure there’s a lesson in that somewhere
Also “Out, Out-” is haunting af