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[+] 266 points 7 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (7 children)
  • [–] 94 points 7 months ago (2 children)

    And Los Angeles building the Santa Monica Freeway.

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  • [–] 72 points 7 months ago (2 children)

    And St. Paul, MN for interstate 94.

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  • [–] 58 points 7 months ago (1 child)
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    [–] 198 points 7 months ago* (1 child)

    From the Wikipedia page

    A newspaper account at the time suggested that Seneca Village would "not be forgotten"

    Then later

    The settlement was largely forgotten for more than a century after its demolition.

    Also just kinda interesting that one of the residents was named Edward Snowden.

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  • [–] 113 points 7 months ago (2 children)

    Or Tulsa, where the whites were like “go make your own black town!” So they did, and prospered while the whites stayed poor. So the whites just straight up raped, pillaged and burned the black town and got away with it

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  • [–] 110 points 7 months ago (1 child)
  • [–] 105 points 7 months ago (7 children)

    To be fair if highschool history covered every act of overtime racism and suppression committed by the US government there would be no time to cover anything else.

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    [–] 101 points 7 months ago (11 children)

    Where I live they ran an interstate highway right through where the black business district was. Ripped through the middle of town. I hate that highway so much, they keep adding lanes too. Fucking racist twats and the effects reverberate to this day, no transit just more lanes because of handshake agreements between good ol' boys in the 1960s.

    "Nothing changes, even when it wants to" Hayes Carll

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    [–] 87 points 7 months ago* (3 children)

    To add to y'all's reading list:

    Dulles Airport (the big international airport that serves Washington DC and Northern Virginia) did the same: https://travelnoire.com/town-destroyed-international-airport

    Also, maybe tangentially related, The Tulsa Race Massacre: https://www.okhistory.org/publications/enc/entry?entry=TU013

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    [–] 77 points 7 months ago (4 children)

    Holy fuck I was not prepared for the sheer amount of similar events described in the comments. It's is almost as if racist people are inferior human beings, unable to understand empathy. Hen and egg problem, I guess. But yeah, w.r.t. structural racism, a Zager & Evans verse comes to mind: "[..] or tear it down - and start again."

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    [–] 51 points 7 months ago

    The Gateway Arch National Park in St. Louis was also a black community that got bulldozed. Unsurprisingly common

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  • [–] 47 points 7 months ago (12 children)

    Now look up the Tulsa Massacre

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  • [–] 33 points 7 months ago

    Once i learned about what they did I can't forget it and will always bring up to people when relevant. Fucking insane what they burned it to the ground because they couldn't stand successful black people. And not one person ever faced justice for this.

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    [–] 45 points 7 months ago (1 child)

    It's very similar to how a lot of Americans didn't know about the Tulsa Race Massacre until it was in The Watchmen.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulsa_race_massacre

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    [–] 36 points 7 months ago (1 child)
  • [–] 59 points 7 months ago* (1 child)

    It is common to the point where you can look at pretty much any major public improvement or monument in an American city and odds are pretty good that some black folks lived there before it got built. That is ALWAYS the property that needs to be "improved" by stuff like this. Like, "hey we turned this shitty black neighborhood into a big arch or a field of flowers, what an improvement!"

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  • [–] 34 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (1 child)

    Per the Wikipedia article, fewer than 20% of the Seneca Village residents owned the land they lived on - most was owned by local landlords who were paid pretty exorbitant amounts for their land in the final settlements (the final cost of the land was more than the US would later pay for the entirety of Alaska, and the Wikipedia article also notes one landowner who made more than 10x on his initial investment).

    Also worth noting that of the ~1600 total residents displaced for the construction of Central Park, ~225 were from Seneca Village and large numbers of those displaced were also Irish and German.

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    [–] 29 points 7 months ago (10 children)

    And for Latinx people in LA it is being evicted from their homes to make Dodger Stadium

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    [–] 29 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

    Africatown Mobile, Alabama

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Africatown

    In recent years they've done an archeology mission to find the Clotilda.

    was formed by a group of 32 West Africans, who in 1860 were bought and transported against their will in the last known illegal shipment of slaves to the United States.

    So as I remember the story--and perhaps the references in the article will be more accurate, bur a slaver made a bet with somebody that he could still traffick slaves after it became illegal. He arrived in Mobile, AL with slaves on his boat and went to collect on his bet. He left the crew with instructions to burn the ship and everyone on board (i.e. get rid of the evidence) if he did not return. And that's what they did. The people who founded Africatown escaped the fire.

    The Wiki article says similar, but that the slaves were removed before scuttling the ship. Good if true, I guess. My memory isn't great.

    Edit: typos

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  • [–] 29 points 7 months ago (4 children)

    Writing races/skin colour with a capitalized letter seems strange when it doesn't include a continent name

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  • [–] 23 points 7 months ago (9 children)

    Black, with a capital, is a culture. It’s fairly old news at this point, but the point is that it’s because of the shared experience and lack of ancestral knowledge of those people becaus of things like the slave trade and ongoing, systemic racism. They don’t get to say “African” because they were completely cut off from that culture, which is already such a wrong thing to say because “Africa” is not a single place nor a single culture, nor even only a dozen places with a few dozen cultures(it’s a helluva lot more). Besides, after developing their own strong cultures, Haitian or Jamaican immigrants are far more from there than from anywhere in Africa.

    “White” is not a culture. White people will very often tell you where their family is from, to the city, without even being asked and if you don’t know you can even just look at the last name they were able to keep when their ancestors arrived in North America. White people have the privilege to not be lumped together in our society and being referred to by their country in Europe far more often than by simply “European” while Black people will just get a useless “African” tacked in front of their country of residence’s name.

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    [–] 28 points 7 months ago (3 children)

    The USA has always been hostile to non-white people.

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    [–] 26 points 7 months ago (3 children)

    Should have seen my face when re-watching The Pitt, getting to the part of the pacemaker/first paramedics arc. Opening wikipedia and being blown away by what I learnt.

    But no, let's keep the fact that "black people invented peanut butter" as the cool fact. Not "black people helped standardise first aid"...

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    [–] 24 points 7 months ago (9 children)

    Just about everywhere in the US was taken from someone. And almost always a marginalized individual. All the way back to the native americans. It how human be human apparently.

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    [–] 23 points 7 months ago
    [–] 23 points 7 months ago

    Sometimes we demolish black neighborhoods and then don't even build anything useful

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  • [–] 20 points 7 months ago (1 child)

    On the one hand, every country has a fucked up history that they ain't teaching in classes. I learned most of my countries real history through reading books about this times

    On the other hand: the US has a particular brutal and fucked up history that they ain't teaching

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    [–] 19 points 7 months ago

    Reminds me of Watchmen teaching a lot of Oklahomans about their black wall street.

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  • [–] 18 points 7 months ago (1 child)

    People are erased all the time, our job is to make sure they were at least documented and were. The current administration is trying to erase recent and distant history. Hoard the data. Keep the dates. Write it down on paper, but still, we are watching the library burn in front of us.

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