Hello! Thank you for taking an interest in this community (at least enough to read this post). You may be wondering why this community exists, especially with such a broad mandate of what's appropriate to post. Put simply, I got fed up. I have lived in Appalachia for all but 1/8th of my middle aged life. My very first job was as a graphic designer creating displays at a museum to educate others about who we are. Increasingly, I am finding myself online encountering otherwise well meaning leftists who paint our entire region with a broad brush, often one that ignores the core defining aspects of who we are as a people, instead choosing to focus on harmful stereotypes created to dehumanize us and justify structural violence that perpetuates cycles of poverty. Some of the most accessible video format propaganda to promote leftist ideals come from that portion of YouTube called "Bread Tube." However often I find these to come from a frustrating and unhelpful Eurocentric perspective only promoting leftism as a set of aesthetic virtue signaling behaviors, often without much real material difference from the harmful systems of structural violence that leftism is meant to resist. Some examples:
- A "re-education camp" is often just a mechanism of ethnic cleansing usually referred to as a "concentration camp"
- A "labor community" is often just "slave quarters"
- A "planned economy" is often just "a central bourgeousie who owns the means of production using that owernship to control the works"
For more information about this concept, here is an article by Emma Goldman.
The contrast to this, though, has been Cornbread Tube which is the part of Bread Tube focused on Black issues. Often these videos cover labor issues in a much more useful and constructive way and don't fall into unimaginative patterns of taking an imperial structure and just renaming it. However, we shouldn't sit idly by and just make Black people handle everything for us (again). Not especially when our own labor organizational needs need to include as the Rednecks said, Black, White, and Indigenous labor (later expanding this to include Immigrant labor). If we stand idly by and don't contribute or present our perspectives, the bosses and JH Blair win.
And I would hate that.
So welcome to Spoonbread Tube! Feel free to platform Cornbread Tube creators to expand their reach and to share creators and media that helps people to better understand the value of ecological protectionism, organized labor, and just fucking treating people with some goddamn dignity.
(CWs in post body) Through Their Eyes (Appalshop) (First-hand accounts of what it is like to live in the Southern Appalachian Mountains, by gay and lesbian residents)
9d 19m ago by slrpnk.net/u/Quill7513 in spoonbreadtube@slrpnk.net from inv.nadeko.netSouthern West Virginia's Water Crisis
10d 8h ago by slrpnk.net/u/Quill7513 in spoonbreadtube@slrpnk.net from inv.nadeko.netStitched Together: A 23/54 Project Documentary
11d 4h ago by slrpnk.net/u/Quill7513 in spoonbreadtube@slrpnk.net from inv.nadeko.net