Michael Renshaw

Good Morning, FAM. I hope you all slept well. Here is a Quick Update CPAP User: Night 1= Sucked Ass 😵‍💫 Mask Fit= Seemed Fine ✅ Actual usage= Felt like I had my head stuck out the window of a fast moving vehicle with the wind speed turned on high. 😳 Oddly, I do feel like I slept better. 🧐✌🏾

#PrayerRequest Please pray for my mother. She is actively dying. I'm here with her but this is so hard.. Please pray for me too.

THEY LOCKED HER AWAY WHILE SHE WAS IN LABOUR She told the guards she was in labour. They put her in a cell on her own and shut the door. Tammy Jackson gave birth alone on the floor of a Florida jail, and then sat there holding her daughter waiting for somebody to come. Broward County, Florida, April 2019. She was thirty-four and in a cell in the mental health unit. She told staff she was in labour. A doctor was contacted. The response, according to her lawyers, was that the doctor would see her in the morning. She was left for hours. She delivered her own baby alone on the floor of a solitary cell. There was no midwife, no nurse, no cellmate, nobody holding her hand. When staff eventually came, she was sitting up holding a newborn. The baby lived. The sheriff dismissed two jail administrators once it came out. And then the part that makes this a Monday morning post rather than a horror story. Florida passed a law with her name on it.mThe Tammy Jackson Healthy Pregnancies for Incarcerated Women Act requires that pregnant women in Florida jails are not held in solitary confinement, and that medical staff are involved when labour begins. She was in a cell that should not exist for a woman in labour, in a country that had never written that down. Her name is on the statute now.

Some people hear “Jingle Bells” and think of Christmas. But for Black people, its history carries a much darker chapter. During slavery, enslaved people were fitted with cruel iron collars equipped with bells. Every movement produced noise, making it easier for slaveholders and their dogs to track them down if they ever escaped. These devices were instruments of surveillance, punishment and terror. They also ensured that enslaved people worked without stopping. If the master heard the bell go silent, the whip would crack. And the song itself has a disturbing history. Originally titled “One Horse Open Sleigh”, it was first performed on 15 September 1857 at a Boston minstrel show, where white performers used blackface to portray racist caricatures of Black people. A song now celebrated around the world emerged from an America deeply shaped by slavery and racist entertainment. Racism has a way of hiding in plain sight.

The Greeks knew where they learned. This is not a contested point. Herodotus traveled to Egypt and wrote about it with the specific reverence of someone encountering a civilization older and in many ways more sophisticated than his own. Pythagoras reportedly studied in Egypt for years. Plato credited Egyptian priests with knowledge of astronomical cycles that Greek civilization was only beginning to approach. Thales, often called the first Greek philosopher, was described by ancient sources as having learned geometry from Egyptian priests. The ancient Greeks did not experience Egypt as a puzzling anomaly on a "dark continent." They experienced it as a source. A place you went to learn things your own civilization had not yet figured out. This is the record. Written by Greeks. About Egyptians. And then "Western civilization" built a story in which it was the inheritor and transmitter of ancient wisdom, while quietly reorganizing the geography of who that ancient wisdom belonged to. The Greeks knew. It took their academic descendants considerable effort to forget.