This Is Really Interesting!

this is really interesting!

From Tennessee Lookout:

MASON, Tenn. – The Tennessee Comptroller issued an unusual appeal last week to residents of this small, majority Black town, which occupies fewer than two square miles in rural west Tennessee.

“In my opinion, it’s time for Mason to relinquish its charter,” Comptroller Jason Mumpower wrote in a letter mailed to each one of Mason’s 1,337 property owners.

Mumpower urged local residents to “encourage your local officials to do what’s necessary to allow Mason to thrive. There is no time to waste.”

State comptrollers, responsible for financial oversight of local government, typically communicate directly with elected local leaders and not their constituents. “We have not issued a letter to citizens like this before,” Comptroller spokesman John Dunn said, noting it is “unprecedented for us to publicly call for a town charter to be relinquished.”

But the Comptroller’s unprecedented public callout comes at an unprecedented time not only for Mason, but for the state. Mason, located in the southeastern corner of Tipton County, now finds itself with some of the most coveted real estate in Tennessee.

It’s one of the nearest towns to the massive new site to be built for Blue Oval City, a key component in Ford Motor Co’s multibillion-dollar pivot to electric vehicle manufacturing.

Mumpower’s letter has infuriated Mason’s part-time elected officials, who insist they have no intention of ceding their town’s 153-year-old charter – which would subsume the largely African-American, majority Democratic community under the governance of Tipton County, which is predominantly white and Republican.

“This is our home. We were born and raised here. The majority of the town is homegrown people that live here,” Vice Mayor Virginia Rivers said. “He is trying to conquer and divide us. It’s akin to a hostile take-over and it’s not hard to figure out why here, why now.”

Town leaders are accusing Mumpower and other state officials of big-footing a long-ignored, largely Black community now that major investment is heading its way.

Mason is 60% Black and includes descendants of men, women and children enslaved in the area before Emancipation. For more than a century the town was led by White elected officials.

That changed in 2016, when fraud and mismanagement allegations led to the resignations of nearly all City Hall officials, all of whom were White. Mason’s current mayor, vice mayor and five of its six alderman are Black.

“It’s because of the Black people that are in office,” said Rivers, who first became Vice Mayor in 2021.

“And it’s because of all the places in the world, Blue Oval could have selected, they selected here. There’s no way Mason won’t prosper and grow. And now they want to take it away from us.”

Read more

The Comptroller’s office:

Yet again like in the past. New day, new Jim Crow-esque tactics, perfectly timed takeovers. This Black American town needs to be promptly saved without handing a damn thing over. The town elected mostly Black officials back in 2015. They’ve been trying to pay off the debt from when the town was previously ran by mostly white officials. Literally playing catch-up. 

This ain’t nothing but a glimpse of what it looks like before eventually uprooting and displacing Black people off the land they have resided on since forever and where their ancestors labored said land as property in chattel slavery and the move into Jim Crow.  

There’s a change.org petition to sign and share to get the word out there.

This person suggested to put Ford in the hot seat by sending a letter like this. Others are suggested to call their office. 

This is the CEO of Ford’s twitter.

Something gotta give. 

This shit should be on the news. But as usual, they make it known after the deed is done or not at all and you end up finding out years later. 

My ultimate pet peeve is women sexualising themselves being defended as “she’s embracing her sexuality”.  It could not be more removed from her sexuality.  Her sexuality is what she finds attractive.  Making yourself more attractive to men is embracing MEN’S sexuality.

"I could fix him" yeah well I could give him anthrax

Friendly reminder that the people who benefit from the idea that “sex based discrimination doesn’t exist” are males.

I really like the phrase "those perceived to carry and birth children" because that sort of sums up how misogyny affects all women regardless of their genotype and reproductive abilities. I have a friend with Turner's syndrome (single X genotype) who will never be able to have kids, but people view her exactly the same way that they view me, as a twenty-something woman worthy of all the same misogynistic bullshit.

I think…at times we get too bogged down in the nitty-gritty of what makes someone female or male. Like talking about which sex produces large gametes and which produces small gametes, or variations on chromosomes, etc. Is that a valuable conversation to be had? Yes, absolutely. But I think we get trapped in that argument and it distracts from the main issue—that patriarchy is designed to oppress those with female phenotypes and the perceived ability to carry and birth children.

Because an intersex child who looks female is going to be raised with female socialization, regardless of their chromosomal makeup. Women who do not have uteruses, from birth or via surgical procedure, are still subject to misogyny and structural sexism due to their perceived biological abilities.

I think most radical feminists know this, but I don’t know how many of us realize that picking these definitions apart are ways to distract us from identifying our material oppression and coming together as women—because the more we argue about the details, the less focused we are on developing bonds between women and ultimately female class consciousness.

I’m putting these thoughts into a coherent statement for the first time, and I’d like to know other women’s opinions.