IN FRENCH ALGERIA…..colonial military doctors performed forced gynecological examinations…..on Algerian women detained during the independence war of 1954 and 1962….these examinations were conducted at French military detention centers across Algeria….under the authority of the French Army’s 10th Parachute Division…..and documented in survivor testimonies collected by historian Raphaelle Branche…..examinations were used as a form of humiliation and intelligence extraction…..women were examined without consent in front of male soldiers….medical findings were recorded in military files…..Algerian women who survived described permanent psychological damage….many could not speak of their detention for decades….and their families were told nothing……French classified torture records from the Algerian war until 2018…..no military doctor was ever tried….the women’s names remain in sealed archives.
US SOLDIERS….massacred between 200 and 300 Lakota Sioux civilians…..at Wounded Knee in 1890….and half were women and children…..on December 29th, 1890…..the US 7th Cavalry surrounded a Lakota encampment at Wounded Knee Creek….in present day South Dakota…..a single shot…..and its origin has been disputed…..triggered soldiers to open fire with rifles and Hotchkiss mountain guns on the encampment…..survivors fled into a blizzard…..the Army buried the dead in a mass grave and charged ten dollars per body as a disposal fee…..twenty soldiers received the Medal of Honor for Wounded Knee….none of these medals has been rescinded….despite ongoing congressional petitions.
MEDIEVAL EUROPEAN QUEENS…..who failed to produce male heirs were imprisoned, annulled or accused of witchcraft…..this pattern was repeated across France, England, Spain and the Holy Roman Empire from the 11th through the 17th centuries under Catholic dynastic law…..Queens were legally subordinate to their husbands…..and failure to produce a male heirs….was treated as grounds for annulment or criminal accusation…..Catherine of Aragon was imprisoned in drafty castles for years…..after Henry VIII sought an annulment…..she died in confinement in 1536…..their names survived…..their suffering was recorded only in margins of dynastic histories…..focused entirely on their husbands.
IN 1208…..Poe Innocent III….declared a crusade against Christians in southern France…..he promised that these Christians would earn the same salvation….as killing Muslims in the Holy Land…..the crusade lasted twenty years…..Armies marched through the region….burning towns and killing anyone who would not submit…..a chronicler wrote that in one town….the soldiers killed seven thousand people inside a single church…..this was the first time the church promised…..heaven for killing fellow Christians….and this idea did not die here.
THE BRITISH….deliberately engineered the Irish Famine….by continuing food exports during mass starvation….this was Ireland between 1845 to 1852…..under full British colonial administration…..one million people starved to death….another million emigrated……food, grain, cattle and butter….left Irish ports under British armed guards……while people straved in adjacent fields…..entire towns were emptied, landlords evicted starving tenants…..and razed their homes to clear land…..the British colonial government in Ireland also banned the Irish language….from all official use and made English the sole language of courts and education in 1695……the Penal Laws enacted by the British Parliament from 1695 through 1728 suppressed Catholic practice……Irish land ownership and Irish-language education across Ireland simultaneously…..Irish-language schools called hedge schools operated illegally in fields….teachers were arrested and students caught attending these schools were punished….by 1800 Irish was the first language of four million people….by 1900 after famine, emigration….English-only schooling had less than 700,000 attending classes….Irish is now spoken daily by fewer than 80,000 people….it survived only in western coastal areas called the Gaeltacht…..Ireland’s population has never recovered to pre-famine levels….and Britian has never issued a formal apology.
AFTER THE CIVIL WAR….thousands of Black men were legally re-enslaved…..this was the age of “Neoslavery” in the American South…..from 1865 to World War II…..they were arrested for minor offenses…..then “leased” to mines and plantations as forced labor….families were torn apart….men died in the camps….and women and children were left destitute, trapped in a system designed to re-enslave them….companies grew wealthy and the trauma of this legalized slavery was passed down….shaping the insidious legacy of racism that followed.
THANKING MY FAVORITE HIGH SCHOOL TEACHER…..I got your message a long time ago….and it kept me…..sane!
White people are the only group on earth that gets to opt out of studying themselves….and that pot-out is the problem….every other group has had to understand whiteness to survive it….we learned it by necessity…..white people get to just….live inside it….unnamed, unexamined, unmarked….and that created a group with enormous power and almost no self-awareness about how that power moves….you can’t interrupt a system you’ve never been asked to see….Whiteness moves through race, class, gender…..who gets believed in a courtroom, a hospital….a boardroom….it shapes everything….and the people it was built to center are the least equipped to recognize it…..studying whiteness isn’t self-punishment….it’s the literacy this moment requires.
THE US GOVERNMENT….made it illegal for Native American children to wear traditional clothing…..or practice spiritual ceremonies under the Indian Civilization Act of 1819…..this acts regulations through the 1800’s required the elimination of Native American cultural practices in schools….Colonel Richard Pratt opened Carlisle Indian Industrial School in 1879…..under the motto “Kill the Indian, save the man”…..children had their hair cut on arrival….traditional manes were replaced with English names….spiritual objects brought from home were confiscated and destroyed…..children who spoke their language were beaten…..those practicing spiritual traditions were place in solitary confinement…..letters home were either censored or destroyed…..over 400 children died at Carlisle alone…..the US Department of Interior confirmed 53 burial sites at the boarding schools…in its 2022 investigation report.