-Your Bucky Barnes Trash Here-

oodlenoodleroodle:

frislander:

thepushyqueenofsluttown:

deducecanoe:

ourobousfamilia:

deducecanoe:

chickwithmonkey:

potootagath:

wingleader:

wakeupslaves:

the-goddamazon:

LOL man.

never forget white people did nothing first neither the best, they sleep and eat false propaganda,

Ugh, why the shit does that have to turn into a race thing? Why does EVERYTHING have to turn into a race thing?

because white people have made sure that everything is about race

as proved by the fact that when you say explorer, you think of a bunch of white guys walking the world and discovering it ~exotic wonders~ even though Zheng He travelled through Asia, to the Middle East, and even East Africa. But you’d likely never heard of him before.

Same reason you never heard of Ahmad Ibn Fadlan, an Arab traveller who, as early as the 10th century, went to the Volga area for diplomatic reasons. He wrote about it, much as Marco Polo would do later for his own travels, and is one of our sources on what viking were like (and by all accounts, he wrote about them more accurately than western scholars of the same period did)

Oh, or Ibn Battuta who travelled throughout Africa long before europeans did, and even went to Europe himself.

And that’s just some example of Muslim medieval travel writers

Everything is about race because white people keep telling everyone that their race is the only one who every got anything done.

i have heard of precisely zero non-european explorers ever in my life, and that fucking sucks. this exhibit is amazing and i need to learn more.

That boat is a frickin aircraft carrier comparatively. Holy crap. And no. Never heard a peep.

Zhenghe went to over 40 countries in Asia and Africa and probably went even further, but I didn’t encounter that in history books before. He brought gifts from China to every country he went to and everyone loved him. It was just like “Hey, I’m here with a water-helicarrier and a gift,” and the kings of every country were lilke “holy shit son well here have a giraffe.” There are paintings depicting him leading a giraffe as well. Check him out guys, he’s really cool

That is so awesome. Fuck western history. This is the real shit.

I only heard about Zheng He when I took a Chinese History class in college. He wasn’t even mentioned in my Asian History class. Western students miss out on an enormous amount of history that is ignored or whitewashed in our textbooks. It’s a travesty.

And the best bit about Zheng He for me is that he was a Hui Muslim by birth (if not so much when he grew up).

And the thing is, you don’t know what you don’t know. Sure you can google just about anything, but is it ever going to occur to you to type the words “chinese explorer” into Google? Probably not, unless you are super interested in explorers in general, or you’re doing a crossword puzzle or something. 

But you know of these European explorers, even if you only heard of them in fifth grade history class, even if you have 0 interest in explorers or history. Like some things are deemed “important enough that everyone should kinda know about” and other things are not deemed such - and that decision, of what is important and what is elective, is where the race thing is at. Someone white decided that everyone needs to know about Marco Polo, but not Zheng He, because Marco Polo was European and Zheng He was Chinese. 

And this doesn’t stop at historical figures. Right this moment someone white is deciding whether you need to hear about what is going on in Yemen or not. And while you could definitely at any moment google “news Yemen” - you’re probably not going to do that. And so if the white person who decides thinks you don’t need to hear about Yemen, you won’t. Even though there is a fucking war, epidemic and a famine (all newsworthy issues that people should know about) going on over there. 

On Tumblr we can take back some of the power to decide what is important to know about. Like OP did by sharing that picture of Zheng He’s ship. 

Curation of information is super important, even if everyone already has access to all the information in the world - because you still need to know what you are looking for in order to Google it. And you just don’t know what it is exactly that you don’t know.

(via the-earl)