this post was submitted on 29 Jan 2026
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Microblog Memes

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A place to share screenshots of Microblog posts, whether from Mastodon, tumblr, ~~Twitter~~ X, KBin, Threads or elsewhere.

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[–] MiddleAgesModem@lemmy.world 7 points 2 days ago

People have grandiose expectations of elementary or high school education. At best, you have time to cover topics at a very high level and I've never had a class that even made it to the twentieth century.

As important as this historical tidbit is, it's not a condemnation of history education. More than likely, this would come about in a college level course that is more specific.

[–] _haha_oh_wow_@piefed.social 42 points 3 days ago (2 children)

Now look up the Tulsa Massacre

[–] AdolfSchmitler@lemmy.world 29 points 3 days 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.

[–] thermal_shock@lemmy.world 11 points 3 days ago (3 children)

I have family in Tulsa that had never heard of that until I brought it up when I learned about it a few years ago. Crazy shit man.

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[–] CombatWombatEsq@lemmy.world 253 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) (7 children)

It happened quite frequently, for instance when constructing the Dan Ryan Expressway in Chicago. Somehow it’s always easiest to demolish vibrant black neighborhoods.

[–] homesweethomeMrL@lemmy.world 101 points 4 days ago

Somehow yeah

[–] hansolo@lemmy.today 91 points 4 days ago (2 children)

And Los Angeles building the Santa Monica Freeway.

[–] Botzo@lemmy.world 68 points 4 days ago (2 children)

And St. Paul, MN for interstate 94.

[–] pootzapie@lemy.lol 55 points 4 days ago (1 children)
[–] Tm12@lemmy.ca 46 points 4 days ago (1 children)
[–] Medic8teMe@lemmy.ca 37 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) (4 children)

Halifax, Nova Scotia. Demolished a black community for a bridge.

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

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[–] sangriaferret@sh.itjust.works 29 points 4 days ago

I-10 in New Orleans

[–] surewhynotlem@lemmy.world 40 points 4 days ago (5 children)

The reason traffic is so bad out to Jones Beach on Long Island is because they built the roads so buses couldn't go. Black people rarely had cars at the time.

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[–] Tugboater203@lemmy.world 41 points 3 days ago (1 children)

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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[–] GalacticSushi@lemmy.blahaj.zone 187 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) (1 children)

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.

[–] RBWells@lemmy.world 91 points 4 days 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

[–] tocopherol@lemmy.dbzer0.com 36 points 3 days ago

People will see your comment and think "hey that sounds like my city", but you could say this about basically every major city in the US.

[–] joyjoy@lemmy.zip 16 points 3 days ago

they ran an interstate highway right through where the black business district was

Do you have any idea how little that narrows it down?

[–] BanMe@lemmy.world 2 points 2 days ago
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[–] But_my_mom_says_im_cool@lemmy.world 103 points 4 days 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

[–] Fredselfish@lemmy.world 58 points 4 days ago (6 children)

Worse part of The Tulsa Race Massacre is it took fucking tv show for it to become widely known. My wife and ex wife grew up here never heard of it. Not fucking once had it been taught in schools. Now the local media talks about it constantly. But only because it had been exposed by the HBO show Watchman. Fucking racist fucks all around.

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[–] MutilationWave@lemmy.dbzer0.com 29 points 3 days ago

Not just the local whites, the government bombed and shot them.

[–] wavebeam@lemmy.world 5 points 2 days ago (3 children)

Stupid question, but I’ve been to NYC many times and I’ve always considered Central Park to be one of the only enjoyable parts of the city… am I allowed to enjoy it if it was taken this way?

[–] Tiresia@slrpnk.net 1 points 1 day ago

Nobody should allow you or disallow you. Whether you still can and want to is up to you.

Generally what I and other anarchists find is that none of us can live outside of exploitative structures right now, so it's a matter of being kind and patient with each other and ourselves while weaning ourselves off things one at a time. Which is easier when you replace it with something better.

Eating vegan became a lot easier after helping out in a few community kitchens. Calling out unjust authority became a lot easier after organizing a soft coup of an anarchist book club lead by someone who didn't act anarchist.

In the end, doing right by people only takes sacrifice if society is built wrong, and the best solution to that is to build society right instead. Maybe you can help make NYC a better place, maybe you're glad to make it out of there needing less than a week's rest. And while sacrifice can be worth it if the short term gains are big enough, nobody is going to be helped if you're making yourself miserable.

(Concretely for NYC and every city in the US, a good start would be superblocks. Though Manhattan should probably go car-free and rely entirely on public transit. That way every street can be converted into greenery, and you don't need to go to Central park to sit under a tree and enjoy the sounds of birds and of children playing. Restorative justice for Seneca village probably wouldn't involve sweeping changes to Central Park - the descendants have built lives elsewhere - but that's for the descendants, the people of New York, and for white and black USAmericans in general to reckon with).

[–] MiddleAgesModem@lemmy.world 4 points 2 days ago

Yes. Or you couldn't enjoy the majority of the US, which was taken from indigenous people.

[–] Baggie@lemmy.zip 3 points 2 days ago

It's not a stupid question at all, it's actually quite a complex one.

I suppose the real meat of the question is it morally wrong to derive pleasure from something where suffering is involved. You didn't personally make the decision to harm people, so you have no responsibility there. You also did not consent to existing as a person, which means you largely have no say about where you find yourself as a human being, the circumstances of which led you to that park.

But conversely you're now burdened with the knowledge, which understandably changes your outlook. By way of utilising the park, you're implicitly condoning it's creation, therefore the suffering. Before you were blameless, now it's a little muddier. You still wouldn't have condoned the actions taken though, which does count for something.

If we're taking "allowed" as a social context, some may find it distasteful. It largely depends on who you talk to. I don't think it should affect your own reasoning much though.

Ultimately what we're left with is a physical space that has a somewhat difficult history. As it stands, no action you do can alter that fact, it will always be that thing, unfortunate as it may be.

Considering all that, on the range of all possible human activity, I think the enjoyment of a park is fairly reasonable behaviour. I don't think you can unlearn the context though, so whether or not you can enjoy it largely depends on your own internal moral workings. In the end, I would recommend going with what your heart, gut, and mind tell you.

[–] gmtom@lemmy.world 100 points 4 days ago (6 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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[–] jaaake@lemmy.world 105 points 4 days ago (1 children)
[–] RaoulDuke25@lemmy.dbzer0.com 21 points 4 days ago

Austin wiped out the lower income families for lofts.

[–] phoenixz@lemmy.ca 18 points 3 days ago (1 children)

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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[–] raspberriesareyummy@lemmy.world 72 points 4 days ago (1 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."

[–] okwhateverdude@lemmy.world 15 points 3 days ago (3 children)

It's always been this way. Really dumb fucks ruin everything. And the meme of racism simply won't die as long as there are dumb, gullible shitheads that gobble it up. Humanity exists on a bell curve, and the smart enough people on the top end of the curve basically fight each other for the right to manipulate the idiots for their own selfishness. Racism is an easy meme and extremely virulent among religious. The actually smart people have better things to do and have no interest in all this stupid shit. Humanity is so fucking disappointing. A bunch of stupid fucking apes with nukes.

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[–] punkwalrus@lemmy.world 80 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days 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

[–] BowtiesAreCool@lemmy.world 27 points 4 days ago (2 children)

Plus the interstate system specifically chose to go right through black neighborhoods if they could

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[–] notsure@fedia.io 17 points 3 days ago (1 children)

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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[–] Saapas@piefed.zip 27 points 3 days ago (4 children)

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

[–] Soup@lemmy.world 20 points 3 days 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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[–] movies@lemmy.world 48 points 4 days ago

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

[–] xorollo@leminal.space 28 points 4 days ago* (last edited 2 days 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

[–] MadMadBunny@lemmy.ca 35 points 4 days ago (1 children)
[–] UnspecificGravity@piefed.social 57 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) (1 children)

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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[–] hakase@lemmy.zip 32 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) (1 children)

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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[–] Sektor@lemmy.world 2 points 2 days ago

Channel 5 has a video about the Dodgers stadium in LA that was built to push latinos out.

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