A Mental Disorder
Some time ago, there were two
separate letters in the local paper which, distilled of all the faux outrage
and pseudo patriotism, essentially chastised persons of color as embodied in
the personages of many NFL players. At the core of these complaints was “taking
a knee” to protest racial inequities and injustices. The gist of both was that
Black Americans should just "get over it" because slavery wasn't "all
that bad" and besides it was a long time ago. (No really, you can’t make
this stuff up!) Incredibly one such
slavery apologist is former Trump cabinet member and current imbecile, Dr Ben Carson,
who actually said: “That's what America is about. A land of dreams and
opportunity. There were other immigrants who came here in the
bottom of slave ships, worked even longer, even harder for less.” Immigrants
come voluntarily, slaves certainly did not. This level of ignorance makes my
head hurt.
Similarly, we are, almost daily
confronted with statements and bullying legislative efforts by our Florida
Governor to extend those same hateful sentiments to almost every social or
racial concept of which he disapproves. It truly makes one question his mental
stability and rationality.
As a historian
I am staggered by the ignorance represented in these statements and/or
sentiments. Space limits how much one can say, but in (too) short:
Other historic forms of slavery
were almost universally situational, that is the social situation
of the enslaved person made them inferior in the context of their
society. In Africa, that could mean a conquered enemy or an orphan for example.
These people were frequently adopted into families or eventually freed. They
were not born slaves, and not destined at birth to be or die as such. The same was true of Greek and Roman slaves.
In fact, the Romans called central European captives "Slavs" which is
the root of the English word "slave."
Black trans-Atlantic slavery was significantly
different in one critical aspect which is still with us today in the rants of
DeSantis, Trump, Bannon, and their associated scum. That was, the assumption on
the part of the slave holder that those he held in bondage were not just
inferior as their social situation dictated but were inferior as human beings. This assumption was not unique to Black
Africans. The English and their American
castoffs turned allies, the Americans of New England, considered the Irish as
inferior humans, actually classifying them at one time as
"non-white." Native Americans
were considered in much the same fashion.
Relatively few Americans, even
racists such as Bannon and Trump would have little trouble grasping why the
Irish in Ireland still have "issues" with the English. From the slaughters
of mid-17th century (see: "Drogheda massacre") until the violent
events of mid-late 20th, The Irish were the bastard red haired stepchildren of
the British Isles. Once in America, having been encouraged to leave by English
landlords, they met much the same treatment in Boston and elsewhere in the
Northeast, So what? So as Caucasians, the Irish were able to assimilate into
society without the constant reminder to others that they had once been social
outcasts. Without the constant reminder of dark skin, the stigma was impermanent.
You could lose the brogue, educate yourself and blend. Later the Italians would
walk that same path.
Knowing the history of Native
American /US relations, one can easily grasp why many Indians still resent many
white Americans. If you have difficulty understanding this, read Dee Brown's
remarkable "Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee." Skin color and adherence to centuries old
native "paganism" relegated Indians, in the minds of many, to the
same "lower life form" status reserved for Black slaves by white
Southerners. To the great disappointment of many whites, Indians were poor
slave material, being susceptible to diseases to which most Whites had some
acquired immunity. Andrew Jackson had little difficulty convincing many
Southerners of their racial and social inferiority and of the necessity of
simply moving many of them to a land (Oklahoma) which bore little resemblance
to their native mountains of the Southeast and the Gulf Coast.
The English, so quick to condemn
slavery and the slave trade in the early 1800s, had made a fortune in the human
trafficking business for most of the previous 200 years. Descriptions of
Barbadian society are mind boggling in their inhumanity. This, from a monograph
by Barbadian Historian and Chancellor of the University of the West Indies, Sir
Hilary Beckles, April 2017 is instructive:
"The enslavement of
Africans on the sugar plantations of São Tomé by the 1530s undoubtedly
represented the first great stride towards the creation of the Barbados black
slave society. The Spanish took the chattel enslavement of Africans to Cuba, in
the northern Caribbean, in the 1540s. Inexorably, it spread to the eastern
Caribbean and found its most fertile environment in the plantation complex of
Barbados exactly a century later. Upon this small rock, England gained its first
economic success by building the first complete large-scale black slave
society. By 1650, it was universally recognized for its economic prosperity,
physical brutality and social inhumanity towards Africans. English managers of
the model were not to be deterred, however; they pressed on and redefined for the long term the primary
character of Europe’s and the Americas’ relationship with Africans.”
It was, tragically, the beginning
of a new era in global economic development and race relations. With the black
slave society, England’s entrepreneurship forged and realigned the world
economic order. Investors and imperial administrators seized the moment and
abandoned traditional labor values and relations. Slavery in the Caribbean was
a comfortable ocean’s breadth away. Men who defined themselves as “Planters”
lived large in London, while their factors drove their human chattel to their
deaths thousands of miles away. Sugar plantations, stocked with thousands of easily replaceable
enslaved Africans, produced super-profits. The entire island was quickly
stripped of meaningful internal boundaries or frontiers and transformed into
endless fields of sugar cultivation. Record levels of white-owned wealth and
black deaths defined the slave plantation as a “best practice” in the new
business culture.
When White
Americans as some current letter writers did, simply say, "Well, it's
over now, you're equal, so what's the fuss" they demonstrate zero sense of
history. When the UK outlawed the slave trade in 1807 and slavery itself in
1833, most British Caribbean islands were vast majority Black. One effect of
this was that there was really not a white majority to impose, and more
significantly, to enforce "Jim Crow" practices on the former slave
populations. In the USA, however, Whites represented armed, educated and
politically powerful numerical majorities in all but the most cotton-driven Southern
states.
So when a White American points to the 13th
Amendment and says "So, what's the problem," they're looking past (or
through) more than 90 years of Jim Crow politics, Black Codes, White Citizens
councils, White supremacists openly threatening and in many cases killing
innocents, and the general continued oppression of Black Americans, for whom
the word "Citizen," stripped as it was of civil rights, had a hollow ring.
Jump ahead to World War One when,
as White soldiers mobilized, Blacks, formerly turned away from decent jobs, and barred from military opportunities in the main, came North to work, encouraged to do so by those who had shunned them as
social and human inferiors since Emancipation. Blacks went to work,
thriving in heavy industry, once closed and now open. World War One ended and
demobilized whites came home to find a willing labor pool of Blacks, some
already employed in former "Whites only" positions.
In St Louis, this
took the form of Labor Unions deciding to strike for higher wages and to keep
the best jobs for whites. During the ensuing riots, Police and National Guard
largely stood idly by as somewhere between 65 and 150 blacks were killed by
striking white workers. Samuel Gompers, white former cigar maker and then Labor
leader, vainly attempted to minimize labor's role in the matter. In a mass
meeting in Carnegie Hall, Gompers, then president of the American Federation of
Labor, attempted to diminish the role that trade unions played in the massacre
by persisting that an investigation was needed in order to place blame,
"Why don't you accuse after an investigation?" To which the former
president of the United States, Theodore Roosevelt, responded by saying,
"Mr. Gompers, why don't I accuse afterwards? I'll answer now, when murder
is to be answered."
The list of continuing
discriminatory practice based only on race in America continues today. It is,
in too many cases, more subtle but not always. Does violence beget violence? Sometimes it
does, but by any reasonable standard, Americans should, if they be religious,
thank their God for Martin Luther King Junior's influence in the 1960s.
One of the more troublesome
conundrums caused by this long-lived institutionalized racism could have been
seen in many a Boston bar in the 50s and 60s where Irish Americans scorned
Blacks, even as pro athletes, for some years after most other teams in the NBA
and MLB had integrated. If asked, they might well have responded, as the letter
writers have with, "Get over it."
These same 1960-80s Bostonians in the same bar might also have
contributed to the "tip Jar" on the bar which, with a wink and a
nudge, was understood to be a collection to help arm and finance the Irish Republican
Army. Try telling those same yahoos to "Get over" that.
Racism destroys logic, bludgeons the human spirit, and poisons children's minds. I honestly believe it to be a mental illness, since it embodies characteristics of illogic similar in some ways to other diseases. It causes spontaneous emotional outbursts similar to bipolar disorder. It makes its victims react to imaginary threats a la paranoia. It causes otherwise outwardly sane people to have total disregard and lack of empathy for an entire group of people personally unknown to them. We call that Sociopathic personality disorder. And finally, it imparts to the sufferer an unjustified feeling of superiority as a human being. Even worse than all these is the sad fact that many of the most vile, rabid and vocal sufferers of "Racism disorder" actually believe that their beliefs, actions and attitudes are in some mysterious way sanctioned by a magical spirit in the sky. Now THAT'S sick!
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