As discussed previously, on Fridays, I present my weekly social media roundups. Note that toots of articles generally include header images from the articles, which I don’t include here unless their creators happen to have released them for use under a free license, and I notice. Most have not, or I don’t notice. But I now add my commentary here, where I don’t feel restricted by message length.

diagrams showing the division of the day and of the week

Also, I don’t generally attach pictures to posts with quotations.

9:05 – Mon 19 June 2023

Image Not Shown: Opal Lee pauses as she gives a tour of her home July 1, 2021, in Fort Worth, Texas

Meet Opal Lee, ‘grandmother of Juneteenth’ from the Bureau of Global Public Affairs

The federal holiday commemorates June 19, 1865, when Union soldiers arrived in Galveston, Texas, to enforce the Emancipation Proclamation, signed earlier by President Abraham Lincoln, which freed enslaved people. (After the U.S. Civil War ended, Texas was the last former Confederate state to recognize emancipation.)

Hashtags: #Juneteenth #OpalLee

You might also find A Beginner’s Guide to Juneteenth: How Can All Americans Celebrate? interesting, though Juneteenth already passed on Monday.

12:05 – Mon 19 June 2023

Quoted on Mastodon

The day that hunger is eradicated from the earth there will be the greatest spiritual explosion the world has ever known. Humanity cannot imagine the joy that will burst into the world on the day of that great revolution.

Federico GarcĂ­a Lorca

Hashtags: #Quotes #LGBTPride

9:04 – Tue 20 June 2023

Content Warning: Human Trafficking

Image Not Shown: An array of Ring-brand surveillance devices

How big tech and AI are putting trafficking survivors at risk from openDemocracy

As any survivor of human trafficking will tell you, privacy is safety. They cannot be separated when you are being hunted by the predator you’ve escaped.

Hashtags: #Trafficking #BigTech #Surveillance

The same, naturally, goes for victims of abuse, and many other people in danger. Remember this, whenever someone says, “if you haven’t done anything wrong, then you have nothing to hide.” You and I may not have anything to hide, but someone out there absolutely does.

12:01 – Tue 20 June 2023

Quoted on Mastodon

The house of delusions is cheap to build, but drafty to live in, and ready at any instant to fall.

A. E. Housman

Hashtags: #Quotes #LGBTPride

9:06 – Wed 21 June 2023

Image Not Shown: A man in an office looks down, away from his laptop, with a depressed demeanor

Adjusting jobs to protect workers’ mental health is both easier and harder than you might think from The Conversation


the tasks employees perform are often not what leads to their mental health degradation. Instead, an employer’s culture and the way its jobs are designed play big roles.

Hashtags: #MentalHealth #Work

While I make a point of not giving particulars about any specific job that I may have worked on, I don’t think that it would violate that principle too much—without stating where or when—that I have experienced fairly extreme burnout in my career, and can definitely confirm that the work load and stress had almost nothing to do with how that shook out. It all rested on how the corporate culture treated issues that I and others raised.

12:07 – Wed 21 June 2023

Quoted on Mastodon

If you have learned anything at all from us
you no longer think that the humans should have the whole earth to themselves.

Selma Lagerlöf

Hashtags: #Quotes #LGBTPride

9:07 – Thu 22 June 2023

Image Not Shown: A person cradling a baby

The Boldest Step To Close the Racial Wealth Divide in Generations from OtherWords

One state is showing how to move forward in advancing racial economic equality. This year, Connecticut is launching the country’s first “Baby Bond” program.

Hashtags: #CT #BabyBond #WealthGap

I hope that this goes so well that conservatives can’t make a case that it “costs too much.”

12:02 – Thu 22 June 2023

Quoted on Mastodon

Service that does not hesitate because the task seems small, or the waiting weary; service that does not fear to be of no account in the eyes of the world.

Alice Dunbar Nelson

Hashtags: #Quotes #LGBTPride

9:03 – Fri 23 June 2023

Image Not Shown: A sign after a ceremony renaming Fort Bragg as Fort Liberty, near Fayetteville, North Carolina, on June 2, 2023

Republicans vow to return racist names to military bases from Daily Kos

In renaming the base, Brig. Gen. David Gardner said, “Sgt. Henry Johnson embodied the warrior spirit, and we are deeply honored to bear his name at the Home of Heroes.”

Hashtags: #MilitaryBases #Renaming

I love that, whenever we investigate the people behind these offensive names, we invariably find out that the people behind them had almost nothing to recommend them, other than standing on the wrong side of history at a time when the people in power sympathized. And yet, we still have people who find that more than sufficient to defend the names.

12:04 – Fri 23 June 2023

Quoted on Mastodon

One does not get better but different and older and that is always a pleasure.

Gertrude Stein

Hashtags: #Quotes #LGBTPride

Bonus

Because it accidentally became a tradition early on in the life of the blog, I drop any additional articles that didn’t fit into the one-article-per-day week, but too weird or important to not mention, here.

A sack embroidered by Ruth Middleton with the story of how the sack was a gift from an enslaved mother, Rose, to her daughter, Ashley, when the nine-year old was sold
A sack embroidered by Ruth Middleton with the story of how the sack was a gift from an enslaved mother, Rose, to her daughter, Ashley, when the nine-year old was sold
Image credit: by Shameran81, made available under a CC-BY-SA 4.0 International license

Judges still cite cases in which enslaved people are property from Futurity

For example, a citation about damage to a car or damage to a dump truck that uses precedent about damage to an enslaved person dehumanizes the enslaved person—they’re all basically treated the same.

I understand the necessity of this—the unfairness of the surrounding regime doesn’t invalidate the relevance of a particular interpretation of law—but it does mean that we subject a lot of people in courtrooms to a pretty terrible version of the world.

Image Not Shown: An older Navajo woman receiving health care assistance from someone wearing a shirt emblazoned with the letters E-M-S.

American Indians forced to attend boarding schools as children are more likely to be in poor health as adults from The Conversation

Although those practices are well documented, quantitative research into whether they had an effect on the long-term physical health of American Indian people who were subjected to them was hard to come by.

This qualifies as another situation where I can’t imagine that any serious people doubted this result, but feel grateful that we now have the numbers to point at when non-serious people say predictably bad things.

Content Warning: Mass Murder, Florida Politics

Image Not Shown: Retired FIU professor Marvin Dunn stands in Shiloh Cemetery, established in the 19th century when the town of Sumner was a bustling mill town. Dunn, seen here on February 8, 2021, believes the Black victims of Rosewood were buried in unmarked graves behind Shiloh Cemetery

A 1923 massacre wiped out a vibrant Black town. New Florida laws make it hard for kids to learn about it from Fast Company

As anti-Black racism continues to plague America today, from police brutality to the arrests of Black voters, Rosewood’s descendants and researchers believe Floridians should learn about the event in order to better understand persistent racial disparities.

You can presumably see why people like DeSantis don’t want this sort of history taught: It makes it easier to draw a line from slavery and colonization to these sorts of events to policies like his.

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Credits: Header image is Circular diagrams showing the division of the day and of the week from a manuscript drafted during the Carolingian Dynasty.