Magical History Tour

An informative exhibit focusing on the history of Black cinema:

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“Owl icecream?”

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I’m sure it’s a typo for bOWL of Icecream

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I watched the show when it was on. I did not know that either…

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This book blew my mind and I would highly recommend it to everyone. What a read!

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This is meant to be a political article, but there was a nice bit of history in the middle that helps explain the weird dichotomy in states like Illinois:

According to The American Midwest: An Interpretive Encyclopedia, Bailey’s home of Clay County is part of the Upland South, a politico-cultural region that also includes southern Indiana, southern Ohio, Kentucky, Tennessee and West Virginia. Kentucky contributed the largest number of settlers to Southern Illinois. To this day, Southern Illinoisans think, talk and act more like Kentuckians than Chicagoans. Kentucky passed a ban on abortion after six weeks of pregnancy. Gun owners there can carry concealed weapons without a permit. Bailey would drive to Casey’s at 80 miles an hour to buy pens to sign those bills.

“Upland Southerners typically were the first settlers in the southern Midwest, initially controlling territorial and state governments and establishing the political and social culture,” wrote the Encyclopedia’s authors. “As northern Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois filled with Yankees, Upland Southerners’ political and cultural dominance faded. Political conflicts underlain by cultural differences emerged over African American immigration and civil rights, state support for internal improvements, public support for education, and other issues. Cultural perceptions or misperceptions added fuel to political conflicts. Many Upland Southerners believed that Yankees regarded them as socially, educationally, and economically inferior.”

(Governor Pritzker canceled a Confederate Railroad concert at the DuQuoin State Fair, so Upland Southerners may be right about that.)

Upland Southerners are mostly Scots-Irish, Anglo-Saxon, and Protestant. At the time of the Civil War, they were “yeoman farmers [who] resented the economic and political power of Lowland Southerners and the labor competition represented by the slave system.” The Upland South was mainly loyal to the Union, but here in Illinois, Upland Southerners supported Black Laws prohibiting freed slaves from settling in the state. As a result of this hostility to both free and slave Black labor, Clay County is 97.7 percent white.

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Whether it is sadness, physical pain or psychological trauma, there is a reason why Black people have the ability to make anything funny.

Makes sense of course, and I’ve heard similar explanations about Native American humor.

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https://archive.ph/93TNH

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This could go in so many threads:

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Ah! So that’s what Borat was singing (in a satiric way) about.

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