Ingrid Ellis > Recent Status Updates

“Some states were slow to throw out their endogamy laws. Alabama, the last state to do so, didn’t throw out its law against intermarriage until the year 2000. Even then, 40% of the referendum voted in favor of keeping the marriage ban on the books.” bro I was ALIVE then

“the one drop rule was too harsh for the nazis”

race does not exist — all human beings are 99.9% the same

everyone else my age is an adult, whereas I am merely in disguise

“it's better to sail with a moody good captain than a laughing bad one”

there are no “black” people in africa

the country cannot become whole until it confronts what was not a chapter in its history, but the basis of its economic and social order.

People in Nantucket invest their money in whaling vessels, the same way that you do yours in approved state stocks bringing in good interest.

Schizophrenia affects an estimated one in one hundred people… that feels like a lot. Also one out of every 20 cases ends in suicide.

“Nothing exists in itself. If you flatter yourself that you are all over comfortable, and have been so a long time, then you cannot be said to be comfortable any more. But if, like Queequeg and me in the bed, the tip of your nose or the crown of your head be slightly chilled, why then, indeed, in the general consciousness you feel most delightfully and unmistakably warm.”

Ishmael contemplates whether he should join Queepeg in worshiping the idol, even though he is a Christian. I like his reasoning: “But what is worship?—to do the will of God—that is worship. And what is the will of God?—to do to my fellow man what I would have my fellow man to do to me—that is the will of God.”

“Red or white?”
“Either.”

God this woman is the most passive person on the planet and I LOVE IT because it makes her so real compared to so many other book characters. This book is my “hear me out” lmao all the characters suck and I love it

“In the American South, there are hundreds of civil war battle monuments and preserved plantation manor houses for every exhibit that in any way marks the existence of slavery. … And yet the world we live in … is shaped far less by what we celebrate and mythologize than by the painful events we trying to forget.”

“It is always temping to believe that a bad system is the fault of one bad man.”

From poet Vachel Lindsay:
“Listen to the yell of Leopold’s ghost,
Burning in Hell for his hand-maimed host.
Hear how the demons chuckle and yell
Cutting his hands off, down in Hell.”

“What would you write about if you knew you might die soon?”

“As they fled these expeditions, villagers sometimes abandoned small children for fear that their cries would give away their hiding places. As a result, many children starved.” 😭😭😭

“Since Leopold has little taste for good works, literature or drama — and a well-known dislike for music — he spent his money mostly on building things, the bigger the better.” It’s giving… white house ballroom

“Queequeg was a creature in the transition state—neither caterpillar nor butterfly. He was just enough civilized to show off his outlandishness in the strangest possible manner. … If he had not been a small degree civilized, he very probably would not have troubled himself with boots at all; but then, if he had not been still a savage, he never would have dreamt of getting under the bed to put them on.”

When villagers, in a desperate attempt to meet the weight quota turned in rubber mixed with dirt or pebbles to the agent Alberic Detiege, he made them eat it.

For each cartridge issued to soldiers, European officers demanded proof the bullet had been used to kill someone, not “wasted” in hunting. The standard proof was the right hand from a corpse. Sometimes, soldiers shot a cartridge at an animal in hunting, they then cut off a hand from a living man.

“Better sleep with a sober cannibal than a drunken Christian.”

“They attacked the natives until able to seize their women. These women were kept as hostages until the chief of the district brought in the required number of kilograms of rubber. The rubber having been brought, the women were sold back to their owners for a couple of goats apiece, and so he continued from village village until the requisite amount of rubber had been collected.”

“The first few times it is not without pain that the man pulls it off the hairy parts of his body. The native doesn’t like making rubber. He must be compelled to do it.” - Force Publique officer in his journal

fun rubber fact: “In the late 1700s, a British scientist gave the substance. It’s English name when he noticed it could rub out pencil marks.”

“the soldiers took my sisters baby and threw it in the grass, leaving it to die, and made her carry some cooking pots”
i gasped aloud at this

“because so many Congo peoples had earlier fought among themselves, the Force Publique was often able to ally itself with one ethnic group to defeat another.”

“The white men … generally accepted the use of the chicotte as unthinkingly as hundreds of thousands of other men in uniform would accept their assignments, a half century later, to staff the Nazi and Soviet concentration camps.”

I eat these types of books up. Sad that there are so many stories like this out there.

“The tools (weapons etc) were crucial, because they would soon allow a few thousand white men working for the king to dominate some twenty million Africans.”

god those numbers are crazy. it’s always wild to me when strength in numbers doesn’t work out. (see: rape of nanking)