Written and Illustrated by Koriander Bullard Okay, it’s time to dispel another internet hoax. White people, read carefully. You’ve been the mass victim of a misunderstanding turned viral threat, and we need to clear the air.
Under no circumstances do we colored folk want you to be “ashamed” of your history as you have tried to make us. Don’t make that face, it’ll stick that way. You know what you did. Every time a Black person tries to achieve something great, you quickly remind us of thugs on drugs, who shot who and Kanye West. You bring up rap stars that glorify breaking the law anytime we try to celebrate Rosa Parks, and then you act innocent when we ask you to stop that. It’s not like we bring up Lindsey Lohan’s criminal record every time one of you does something nice in the media, or Adolf Hitler every time you want to celebrate a strong, White figure, but believe us, we know what you are afraid of. You’re afraid we will turn out just like the man running your favorite, conspiracy happy, pro-Republican, anti-woman, fake news website. But let me remind you that yes, you do have White people to be very proud of in your culture’s history. Franklin Delano Roosevelt for example turned this country around after the Great Depression, and helped jump-start the Social Security platform your current presidential choice wants to steal from your grandparents. Abraham Lincoln is always a favorite, George Washington, and without Queen Victoria you probably wouldn’t think about punching children at K-Mart to get to that pretty Christmas tree. Jimmy Carter has helped get tons of families off the streets through his charity, which also provides on the job education in building homes. In celebrities, you should be proud of Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of the anti-slavery novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which sadly, has been misused and misrepresented by the media for a century. She took her pain from losing a child and transformed it into the act of writing a novel that forced people to talk about slavery in a new light, that’s a very strong figure you should be proud of. Paul Newman and Dave Thomas both went to their graves establishing businesses that not only provide us with tasty junk food, but also keep kids alive, educated and sheltered. As far as White men in history go, those two should be canonized for sainthood. Want someone current? Dolly Parton! This beautiful angel has done more to save children than most anyone you can think of. These men and women are important figures in your history, and you should be very proud to call them your own. As you would say about our heroes, they are all a credit to your kind. So then why do we get angry when you scream out “White Power” you ask? Simple. Most of the people stamping their feet, beating their chests and exclaiming “White Power” are usually hiding under white bedsheets, wearing questionable red arm bands or otherwise referring to President Obama as the n-word. Let’s face it, the only people using the term have been racists. “White Power” is not a term that elicits friendly images of saintly characters in White history. It is instead a term linked with the images of grown men lynching little Black boys, separated water fountains, burning crosses, water hoses and old, usually fat, racist, Christian men, throwing public temper tantrums, spouting out misinformation and waiving the flag of a defeated confederate army. And no, you can stop pretending this is “just about slavery” as you wrongfully dismiss us as being uppity Negroes. It goes deeper than that. But you know what? Let’s talk about that for just a second. True, we aren’t exactly thrilled that you chained up our ancestors, gave us Christian names, whipped us, beat us and made us do the labor now reserved for illegal immigrants, but slavery didn’t stop there. You sold apart families. You raped us, produced mixed race babies, and then what did you do with them? You either killed them at birth, mated them off like cattle to the darkest of your “property” as soon as they hit puberty, or you sold them as sex gifts, because a “High Yella Negro” was considered to be an exotic present. You beat children until they couldn’t walk, just for the crime of trying to learn how to read, used them to fetch your cotton and tobacco, and then threw the world’s biggest hissy fit when we wanted our freedom. But no, slavery was not the end. Not by a long shot. In fact it’s only been within the last 50 years that most of you have finally decided we were people too. Until then? We were a “thing” in many ways, we still are just barely more than objects the way you expect us to be grateful to you after one of your cops has gone and shot a child under the age of nine because he felt “threatened” by “it” being at play. We had to deal with Jim Crow laws, dealt with you telling your sons that our daughters were the kind you “play with” and not the kind you marry, dealt with you pelting our children with rocks for going to integrated schools, dealt with you burning anything we touched so the color wouldn’t wear off, watched you post signs showing which fountains we could use, which church seats we could sit in and just how far back on the bus we needed to sit to make you feel better. Now? We have the internet, where you send rape threats to six year old mixed babies who appear with their White and Black parents in Cheerio ads. We watch you insist Beyonce and Jay-Z force their daughter to kill herself because you aren’t happy with her Black features. We watch you disrespect and hack Black celebrities for the nerve of being in mostly White productions. When we are murdered without provocation, and we march in the streets to remind you that our lives matter too, you demand that we stop fighting for our rights to mollycoddle your feelings, and then praise you for it. Don’t lie. You do hate us. I know you do, because as soon as we had a half-Black president in office, you immediately went to find the most racist, sexist, intolerant wastes of space possible to replace him. You elected Trump and Pence because you want to erase any and all progress done by someone not the same color as you. And the more you lie, and play this make believe that Obama was some sort of tyrant, the more we point out how many things he did like Reagan, Roosevelt and all of the other White men you elected. You even do this in the media. You white-wash Egypt in almost every film about the country in Africa. Disney couldn’t have a Black princess unless her mother was working for her White best friend’s father. Most of the Black Barbie friends sold to our daughters don’t even have names, and almost every “I have a Black friend” production has to have said Black friend spout some stereotypical rap, catchphrase or have the character be a “bitch” or a pot head, but you only want the “street life” on your terms of course. And please don’t let a Black wrestler be proud of his championship, unless he gives equal praise to John Cena. Do you see yet why we’ve been angry for so long? We don’t scream “Black Power” or “Black lives matters” because we want to erase your history as you have done to ours, it’s because we have to remind you that we are people too and that we deserve to have our rights, our history preserved the same as yours. We have to remind our children that they are allowed to be proud of their Black heritage. We have to remind our children that they have any power at all. You never will. Your children will always be reminded of “White Power” as long as they have access to television. Despite what you like to pretend, your children will never have to be told why they should be proud of their heritage. Ours will. Koriander Bullard is an author, cartoonist and human rights advocate. Keep up with her on Facebook!
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Written and Illustrated by Koriander Bullard So back in May of 2016, I believe I introduced you all to the #FloatlessBoat here on Phoenix. For my new readers, let me catch you up. I currently live in Kentucky. I say “currently” because our Fearless Leader Matt Bevin is making me yearn for smarter pastures, so the duration of my time here is a card subject to change. But for the time being, I am a tax paying citizen in the Commonwealth of Kentucky. Now earlier this year, 4.5% of my taxes were stolen by Mr. Bevin right out of Kentucky’s joke of an education fund, to go to immigrant Ken Ham, to fund a life-size replica of Noah’s Ark, in a flagrant disregard for the separation of church and state old Thomas Jefferson was so fond of. Oh you remember that old thing. Why it was the clause that separated us from the terrorists we keep bombing. Ol’ TJ wanted to help us stop the Christian version of Sharia Law, where government officials try to force everyone to pray exactly the same way as they do. Good ol’ TJ. Shame they don’t make presidential candidates like that anymore. Well getting back to Mr. Bevin, I noted in my earlier piece that Ken Ham’s #FloatlessBoat, named so because it cannot stay afloat in a body of water and therefore was transformed into a museum of sorts, was already at a whopping $92 million dollars, before the state of Kentucky under Bevin’s order, granted Mr. Ham an additional $11 million dollars to rip up the local flora and fauna and install an additional highway path to the #FloatlessBoat on top of a mouth-drying $18 million dollars sent separately with love, from Mr. Bevin. Matt Bevin slashed our childrens’ educational funds and recently our it-was-working-fine healthcare marketplace KYNect, killing several cancer patients by cutting off their life saving medical insurance by the way, to fund the #Floatlessboat. I will say that again. He killed children and destroyed surviving childrens’ education to fund a #FloatlessBoat. Now I’m curious. This fake “pro-lifer” who talks up the virtue of forcing women to keep unwanted children, just got several cancer ridden children murdered by cutting off their medical insurance. We’re not really “precious lives” after birth, now are we, kiddies? But I digress. What could possibly be more important than the health and education of our children? Dinosaurs on the Ark. That’s what. Of course, it all makes sense to me now. Who needs children surviving cancer or growing up smart, when you can have a dinosaur on a #FloatlessBoat? I am not making this up. If you go to Google right now, and type in “Dinosaur Ark Kentucky” and one of the top ten pictures will likely come from the Huffington Post, of a little boy glaring at one of Ken Ham’s dinosaurs. Additional photos from Forbes, the New York Post and several other news outlets show confused families, staring into a wooden crate, with dinosaurs inside. A friend of mine spent the $30 recently to go see the #FloatlessBoat. I asked him why there were dinosaurs on the Ark. And this is the explanation I was given:
“According to Ken Ham, all museum dinosaur skeletons are fake, developed with ivory and plasticine to test our faith. Real dinosaurs were somewhere between a dalmatian and a tiger in size, depending on species. As the penguins were waddling behind the lions to board the Ark, Noah found a few straggler dinosaurs on the side of the boat. A myriad of species, they were at an odd number, and therefore it was unlikely that they would be able to mate with their own kind post-flood. But taking pity on the savage beasts, Noah constructed a small crate with wide, wooden slats, ushered the dinosaurs inside the crate, nailed it shut, and then pushed the crate up the ramp behind the penguins and safely inside the Ark, at the end of the row, past the horses, gazelles and antelopes. He personally kept watch over them, afraid they would get out and bother the tigers. After the boat crashed in modern day Turkey or Syria, the dinosaurs got off first, walked into the ocean and drowned. I then asked the curator what happened to the unicorns, but they insisted unicorns do not exist.” At no point in this conversation did my friend smile, laugh or make any indication that the above was in jest. This is actually what employees of Ken Ham’s Ark believe. After hearing this, I flipped through my copy of the Bible. I then went to my local Walmart, which carries about five other versions of the “Good Book” for different branches of Christianity. Let me be clear. There are no dinosaurs in the Bible. None. Historians for generations have labeled the tale of Noah’s Ark as one of pure fabrication. While there was a man matching the description of Jesus in world history, albeit not necessarily in the “I’m walking on water sense” Noah and Moses are considered to be two characters based in fiction. Even if a Noah could be found, no relics of the Ark have been recovered, and it is highly unlikely that Noah could have gotten penguins to walk from the antarctic to the middle east to board a boat with African lions outside modern day Turkey. So proving that the Ark existed outside of faith has been an uphill battle for Christians. But let’s put away pesky science and history for just a moment. Let’s pretend that this was in fact “reality” and Noah’s Ark did exist. Now size wise, there seems to be a discrepancy between the Catholic, Jewish and Christian interpretations of the exact size of Noah’s Ark. So aiming for middle ground, we’re going to say it was 75 feet wide by 45 feet tall. In comparison, it was the length of a football field, while the Titanic was the length of three football fields, making the Ark one third the size of the Titanic. Now while some dinosaurs were slightly shorter than a human, the ones at Ken Ham’s display are shown at the wrong size, most notably the brachiosaurus, which were generally around 30 feet tall. In layman’s terms, this was a 3 story tall dinosaur. Even if by faith alone, the dinosaurs’ weight would not have sunk the Ark, it isn’t very likely they could fit into a tiny crate and drifted peacefully next to the lions and penguins, unless we’re talking about an underfed velociraptor or a coelophysis with the stomach flu. The thought of a pack of dinosaurs sitting pretty inside the Ark is just as laughable as the thought of a vegan lion who only eats the oats and hay Noah’s sons allegedly brought on board and doesn’t wan to nibble at the gazelles. The exhibit not only is scientifically, historically and mathematically incorrect, it’s not even accurate in the biblical sense! The Bible itself makes no mention of dinosaurs in any shape or form, and therefore cannot be used to back up Ken Ham’s bloated #FloatlessBoat. Contrary to popular fiction, this is not about faith. This is about an immigrant being granted money from a political thief who siphoned said cash from our childrens’ health and education to pay for a lie. A lie in the form of #DinosaursOnTheArk. Koriander Bullard is an author, cartoonist and human rights advocate. Keep up with her on Facebook! |
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