A GRITS Spouts Off
I haven't watched very much of it. What little I've seen is not really informative and is mired in click bait language.
It doesn't give his name in the title. His name is Mark Dean. He has his own Wikipedia page and when I typed "Mark Dean" in to search, the first suggested search phrase was Mark Dean inventions.
He's ALIVE and maybe doesn't want to be bothered while he gets on with his life, so he isn't "history." He's also not forgotten.
It's on a YouTube channel called Black History and the address is @BlackHistory-q6o and the icon is the face of a seemingly angry Black man. I'm guessing this isn't from some organization. It's one individual who wants to rail about how Blacks get no credit etc.
I haven't watched much of this video either about Mary Weahkee makes a turkey feather blanket in part because this chick is making me tired trying to soak up her mind-blowing depth of knowledge.
White Americans: Turkeys are INDIGENOUS to America! Squee! Native food!
Mary Weahkee: Actually, turkeys are indigenous to South America and didn't come to North America until around the 1100s or 1200s and let me tell you mind blowing stuff about birds all casual like while I introduce you to Native tools and traditions like this is my normal, probably because it is, try to keep up.
Sorry, I can't keep up. It will take me a few tries to get through this.
I understand Black Americans want to learn Black history and are underrepresented in the official history books. Women are also underrepresented largely because we live very private lives.
History in public school when I was growing up: Memorize these names of mostly old White men and these important dates of mostly wars until your eyes glaze over and regurgitate them on our multiguess-answer test where any idiot can see two of the four are blatantly wrong so without much studying, you have a 50-50 chance of guessing right so they pat you on the head and say "Get out of here and bother new teachers in a higher grade. You are good enough."
I hated history in K-12 and won an award as a history major in college the one year I bothered to declare a major while taking classes to avoid getting a job in my late teens.
School: Something I'm already good at.
Jobs: Scary stuff I was trying to avoid.
You know what fascinates me? Financial history, real estate history and fashion history, all not covered in K-12, no, while we bore people to absolute DEATH for reasons I cannot fathom.
I get it, it's your people and your identity and you want role models. But calling a still living man with his own Wikipedia page someone who vanished from history isn't really about celebrating the lives and accomplishments of your people.
It's wearing your victim status on your sleeve and refusing to let that identity die no matter how much things have changed for your people.
It's giving yourself a negative identity and pretending White people did that to you.
When I was getting divorced, I mostly got involved with anything but a man MY age because men MY age were talking trash about what middle-aged, loser, has-beens they were that no one in their right mind would want and even in cases where I desperately wanted to say "Dude, I could help you with that loneliness problem." it simply was not possible to find a way to get next to these guys and also keep my self esteem.
I chose my self esteem over getting next to these hot messes.
I didn't try to explain to them that while you are going out of your way to imply I should get my vagina removed because a fat cow like me was NEVER going to see action again, I knew guys who liked my curves exactly like they were.
If honkies feel sorry for you and don't get it, stop talking to those fools. That's THEIR problem.
"Hey, look homies, Mark Dean is a cool guy you may not have heard of if you aren't sufficiently nerdy. Real nerds probably know the name. Here's a list of his inventions. You need a role model? Look him up online. He's got a Wikipedia page, he's still alive and still happening. Let me nerd out for five minutes about stuff he invented."
The War of Northern Aggression is not yet history in some sense. The Deep South CLAIMS that most people in those states are 100 thousand million percent TOTALLY and completely Black or Lily White with a handful of Koreans and Hispanics.
No, no Cherokee people still living in the traditional lands of the Cherokee people. We shipped them out West ages ago via the Trail of Tears.
Doreen Traylor and her father and siblings are all WHITE. In fact, Doreen is a Pretendian imagining daddy was part Cherokee. Her one-half Cherokee friend at age 11 and one-quarter Cherokee friend at age 17...uh...they must have moved there or something. I don't know.
Anyway, 49.5 percent of the people here are WHITE and 49.5 percent are BLACK and once in a while there's an Other somewhere in your high school.
That's the Deep South keeping it's head up its butt. That's not reality.
Most Black Americans would be viewed as mixed in most other countries and I'm fairly confident that is also true of most so-called White Americans.
This absolutely is NOT anything like the story in the Star Trek 2 episode crossover story arc Birthright where Romulans and Klingons -- and ONLY Romulans and Klingons -- interbred and decided to secretly live together in peace, though I imagine this scene where Worf is a butt is probably inspired by Black vs White racism in the US.
It's not like that because there's a great deal more intermixing of many races than just two while Americans pretend it's only TWO and it's not like that because we choose to not live in harmony.
If you are a White Southerner, how about you pull your head out your butt and ASK people you know socially what their heritage is (in a respectful, non-threatening manner)? And stop insisting people there are EITHER White OR Black and don't confuse you with the facts.
I've previously written about how talk of reparations is a form of pretending all the bad stuff is ancient history.
But let me note here that if you are a Black American descended from slaves, I've never once heard anyone speak of Blacks in Africa who captured your Black ancestors and sold them as owing you reparations. Just White people here in the US.
I once saw a clip of someone who visited Africa and toured stuff related to slavery and they talked about having never thought about how Blacks in Africa were slave traders and the Black guy talking to them apologized for what their ancestors did.
Here's me talking about a woman who didn't receive the Nobel Prize because she died before her colleagues received it and it's only given to living people. And being given crap for noting that.
Women: Obligated to blame EVERY imagined slight on SEXISM.
Black Americans: Obligated to blame EVERY imagined slight on racism BY WHITES.
I know racism is alive and well. I'm not suggesting you pretend it's not.
But ask yourself this:
Do you want a better future?
Or do you just want to revel in your abandon and claim that personal choice is somehow the doing of White people?
White people whose family used to own slaves: You also have work to do and maybe you can direct how butt hurt you are about losing something you valued at something other than Black folks.
They didn't start the Civil War.
Because the good things about the South and Southern culture probably don't boil down to "We owned people and got free labor out of them." That's probably not the entire explanation for Southern hospitality and Southern manners and something deeper and more important I infer got lost in the Civil War with the burning of Atlanta etc.
I'm not suggesting it was irrelevant. But I think it was more complicated than that and this garbage is NOT healing the giant wound left behind by the Civil War which was mostly fought on Southern lands.
Footnote
GRITS = Girl Raised In The South