sheabutterbitch:

jamaicanblackcastoroil:

ithotyouknew2:

marsincharge:

Racism, white supremacy, and the confederacy have touched things you don’t even think about. For example, I had no idea that Six Flags was named as such because it’s named for the six flags that have flown over what is now Texas: Spain, France, Mexico, Republic of Texas, United States, and the Confederacy. Six Flags is only JUST announcing that they’ll be taking the Confederate flags down (in Texas and Georgia) in the wake of Charlottesville.

http://investors.sixflags.com/investor-overview/company-history

http://uproxx.com/news/six-flags-removes-confederate-flag/

It’s wild to me that people don’t know that. I used to go on daily rants about how Six Flags in other states don’t make sense.

Amazing Grace was named after a slave ship

Slavery, in particular, has had a huge impact on American (and British, Spanish, etc) culture. In terms of medical advancement, though, I don’t think people fully grasp how much medical knowledge was discovered through slavery.

There were so many American, British, and Spanish doctors boarding slave ships to examine the bodies of living, dying, and dead slaves. Most medical knowledge of illnesses like smallpox, yellow fever, malaria and so many more; came from slaves who were examined constantly by doctors. The doctors experimented on ways to raise mortality rates and fertility, as a lot of the knowledge we know on fertility came from slaves as well. An epidimic of blindness on a french slave ship in 1819 is what provided majority of the medical knowledge on what is known as trachoma. The list really goes on, you’d be surprised by the amount of medical knowledge that can be attributed to slavery.

A lot of mental disorders and illnesses were not even identified or discussed in any sort of medical text until the symptoms were displayed by slaves. In a time where mental illness was said to have been caused by demons, doctors began relating psychological trauma to slaves. When doctors witnessed the psychological damage that’d been caused by being severely underfed and left to sit in complete darkness with hundreds of other people crying and screaming; this sparked use of words such as melancholia, nostalgia, and schism in psychological contexts.

Basically, putting an inumberable amount of humans through unthinkable physical and psychological trauma is how we have majority of our medical knowledge today. I used the word doctor a lot in this comment but by no means were they interested in the wellbeing of these slaves. It was common knowledge amongst medical professionals, even way after slavery, that black bodies were nothing more than cadavers. Doctors have been quoted in as late as the 1960s as saying, publicly, that black people’s only purpose is to serve the medical community, that it’d be cheaper and more beneficial to use us for medical purposes than to send us to school.

So how can someone say that we are not owed reparations, when this much medical knowledge has been quite literally learned through the torture and deaths of our ancestors.