by Paul Laurence Dunbar

…born in Dayton, Ohio, on June 27, 1872. His parents, Joshua Dunbar and Matilda Murphy Dunbar, were married six months earlier, on December 24, 1871. Both slaves prior to the Civil War, Joshua Dunbar escaped and served in both the 55th Massachusetts Infantry Regiment and the 5th Massachusetts Colored Cavalry Regiment before coming to Dayton…. Many of their experiences of slave and plantation life influenced Dunbar’s later writings.

A poem about authenticity and power in America:

We wear the mask that grins and lies,
It hides our cheeks and shades our eyes,—
This debt we pay to human guile;
With torn and bleeding hearts we smile,
And mouth with myriad subtleties.

We smile, but, O great Christ, our cries
To thee from tortured souls arise.
We sing, but oh the clay is vile
Beneath our feet, and long the mile;
But let the world dream otherwise,
We wear the mask!

Brilliant history/comedy by The Amber Ruffin Show explaining why Americans desperately need a White History Month:

I do feel the need to point out her citation of Lincoln, while true, evades the important context of his speech.

First, after being repeatedly fraudulently bashed by his political opponents as someone who would dare to marry blacks to whites (narratives about protecting white women from black men is a long-time propaganda method), Lincoln said he was racist enough to not do the things he was being accused. It wasn’t his best moment to be sure and there’s no excusing it, but you have to understand he was saying in his experience he didn’t see whites and blacks as equals. He still was an abolitionist, just a racist one.

Second, this attitude changed dramatically after he became President. Like President Grant, who often reflected on where he had made mistakes and who worked to overcome and amend them, Lincoln came to regard blacks as equals. So the context is really a terrible defense he used in the heat of contest to prove he was worthy of votes even by racist Americans, which reverses completely into a story of him emancipating slaves and (through new experiences) finally describing blacks as equal to whites.

This also could be titled “quick intro to Silicon Valley ethics”:

• 1617 rent-able carriages (shared ride) by order of monarch
• 1662 fixed routes for shared ride by order of monarch
• 1823 Stanislas Baudry’s Omnés Omnibus (for everyone)
• 1853 Impériale omnibus (upper deck cheaper)
• 2008 Google bus (no poor people allowed)
• 2017 Lyft shuttle (no poor people allowed, for profit)

The last step was perfectly captured by many critics who can write better than me:

And the latest piece of truly visionary invention has come courtesy of transport company and Uber rival Lyft. The company has created what they’re calling the ‘Lyft Shuttle’, which allows users to “ride for a low, fixed fare along convenient routes with no surprise stops”. All you have to do, the company says, is “walk to the stop. Hop in. Hop out. Walk to destination”.

It’s a bus. They’ve invented the bus.

It’s not the first time a disruptive ride-sharing app has accidentally invented the bus, either. Uber has also been guilty of the same thing.

Despite the fact that THIS IS VERY OBVIOUSLY JUST A FUCKING BUS AND EVERYBODY KNOWS HOW BUSES WORK, some Twitter users have found the whole concept kind of difficult to get their heads around.

But hey, maybe we’re being too harsh on Lyft. Yes, they may have just invented the bus, the first example of which was created in 1823, but their version has loads of disruptive new elements. Case in point:

Lyft Shuttle: buses without the poor people. What an innovation.

I made some jokes about this in my KiwiconX presentation, all from personal experience hacking the Silicon Valley bus systems, and I wrote up the curious history of the apartheid “lift system“, but nothing as funny as the above.