11/20/2008 (10:04 am)
Racism Shame
Michael Medved has been doing Herculean labor attempting to dispel cultural myths, mostly the ones being jammed down our throats by Progressives. Today’s instance came from Flopping Aces, and addresses the enduring myth that the US is uniquely and primarily to blame for slavery. It’s based on Medved’s new book, The 10 Big Lies About America: Combatting Destructive Distortions About Our Nation. Take a listen:
Medved likes to emphasize that despite the fact that every nation on earth considered slavery normal at the time, the US is to be blamed for permitting slavery at all. I guess that’s his attempt to mollify the Anti-Racism Enforcement Thugs who called his program (he’s a much more patient man than I am, I kept barking “Shut. Up.” at the screen every time the dufuses interrupted him.) I disagree with him; historical figures need to be judged, if at all, in terms of their own period, not ours, and for an accepted practice, the US had an awful lot of individuals who would not tolerate slavery. As Medved points out, the US came late to the scene, and abolished slavery quickly by comparison to other nations; the US should be commended rather than condemned.
What the US could be condemned for, in an objective universe, is the unusual brutality of the form slavery took in the southern colonies. American slave-holders generally separated families, taught slaves a perverted religion of subjugation, and kept slaves ignorant and dependent. This was not the case in the British Empire, where educated slaves were valued; Thomas Sowell, in The Economics and Politics of Race, notes that to this day the descendants of British slaves tend to be educated and middle-class in greater proportion than the descendants of American slaves. I note gratefully that these practices lie 140 years in the past.
I noticed back in the 1980s that social progressives were using slavery and racism as a sort of lightning rod to excuse their own moral lapses. At the time, they were busily and systematically dismissing classical virtues like filial love, respect for elders, sexual continence (especially this), honesty in business, trustworthiness, selflessness, courage, kind words, love of home and country, etc. Whenever anybody mentioned the deterioration of the culture, though, they’d wave racism as though it were a trump card that exempted them from scrutiny: “Oh, yeah, the culture used to be sooooo moral, look at how they treated the blacks!” Ignoring for the moment that this does not in the slightest way justify ignoring moral virtues, the truth is that the culture was a great deal more moral than they were even with racism taken into account. It seems to me that as the moral degeneration has accelerated, the resort to racism as a whipping-boy for their sins has accelerated as well, with the alleged evil of it growing and growing until there’s no greater possible sin. I’ve seen evidence lots of times that social progressives consider differentiating between genders or races a greater sin than murder. I’m not exaggerating. They have to do it because intuitively, they know how deep is their own sin, but they’ll never admit this; they’ve efficiently hidden it from themselves.
What’s interesting is that they haven’t even really excised racist impulses from their own character. Racism was dealt with as a taboo, not in any constructive fashion. They’ve stuffed it under the sofa, but you can still smell it. One can’t discuss racial issues intelligently with them because it’s still too tender an issue. Some express their fully-intact xenophobia as White Guilt; others simply transfer it to other groups, venting their hatred on conservatives, conservative blacks, or Evangelicals. We saw Kathleen Parker illustrating a few days ago, calling Evangelicals the “oogedy-boogedy” wing of the Republican party; this is not a whit different from the old Step-’n'-Fetchit talk about blacks, or from jokes regarding Jews and pennies. (If you missed Jonah Goldberg’s ascerbic response, treat yourself.)
Shelby Steele took up this topic just today, opining — absolutely correctly, in my view — that Obama could never have won as a white man, and that a huge percentage of his popularity among white voters was the result of White Guilt. Also, check out this response to Steele’s series, recounting how kids can’t believe whites voted for Obama because they’ve been taught repeatedly how racist we all are. The interesting conclusion we might reach is that most Republicans are genuinely post-racial, but most Democrats are not.
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2 Comments »
Comment by Thinking Man
Another fine post, Plum Bob. On top of everything, your writing style is precise, pellucid, and plumbic in the weight in carries.
But I’m prepared to go you one step more:
Not only would Barack Obama not have won if he was a white man (as opposed to a half-breed like me); he wouldn’t have been able to capture the hearts of so many millions of white people with such touching comments as these:
“My grandmother was a typical white person” (Barack Obama, 2008).
And from his poorly written autobiography — or, rather, ghostwritten autobiography — Dreams From My Father — A Story of Race and Inheritance:
“I ceased to advertise my mother’s race at the age of twelve or thirteen when I began to suspect that by doing so I was ingratiating myself to whites” (Dreams From My Father, pg xiv).
“That’s just how white folks will do you. It wasn’t merely the cruelty involved; I was learning that black people could be mean and then some. It was a particular brand of arrogance, an obtuseness in otherwise sane people that brought forth our bitter laughter. It was as if whites didn’t know that they were being cruel in the first place. Or at least thought you deserving of their scorn” (Ibid, pg. 80).
“To avoid being mistaken for a sellout, I chose my friends carefully. The more politically active black students. The foreign students. The Chicanos. The Marxist Professors and structural feminists and punk-rock performance poets” (Ibid, pg. 100).
“To that white world, I had been willing to cede the values of my childhood, as if those values were irreversibly soiled by the endless falsehoods that white spoke about black” (Ibid, pg 110).
“Questions of competition, decisions forced by a market economy and majoritarian rule; issues of power. It was this unyielding reality — that whites were not only phantoms to be expunged from our dreams but were an active and varied fact of our everyday lives — that finally explained how [black] nationalism could thrive as an emotion and flounder as a program” (Ibid, pg. 202).
“Nationalism provided that history, an unambiguous morality tale that was easily communicated and easily grasped. A steady attack on the white race, the constant recitation of black people’s brutal experience in this country, served as the ballast that could prevent the ideas of personal and communal responsibility from tipping into an ocean of despair. Yes, the nationalist would say, whites are responsible for your sorry state, not any inherent flaws in you. In fact, whites are so heartless and devious that we can no longer expect anything from them. The self-loathing you feel, what keeps you drinking or thieving, is planted by them. Rid them from your mind and find your true power liberated. Rise up, ye mighty race! In a sense, then, Rafiq was right when he insisted that, deep down, all blacks were potential nationalists. The anger was there, bottled up and often turned inward. And as I thought about Ruby and her blue eyes, the teenagers calling each other ‘nigger’ and worse, I wondered whether, for now at least, Rafiq wasn’t also right in preferring that that anger be redirected; whether a black politics that suppressed rage toward whites generally, or one that failed to elevate race loyalty above all else, was a politics inadequate to the the task.
“It was a painful thought to consider, as painful now as it had been years ago. It contradicted the morality my mother had taught me, a morality of subtle distinctions — between individuals of goodwill and those wished me ill, between active malice and ignorance or indifference. I had a personal stake in that moral framework; I’d discovered that I couldn’t escape it if I tried…. And yet perhaps it was a framework that blacks in this country could no longer afford; perhaps it weakened black resolve, encouraged confusion within the ranks. Desperate time called for desperate measures, and for many blacks, time were chronically desperate. If nationalism could create a strong and effective insularity, deliver on its promise of self-respect, then the hurt it might cause well-meaning whites, or the inner turmoil it caused people like me, would be of little consequence…. If nationalism could deliver. As it turned out, questions of effectiveness, and not sentiment, caused most of my quarrels with Rafiq” (Ibid, Pg. 198-201).
Isn’t that beautiful? Aren’t we lucky to have such a wise and towering intellect leading this once-great nation? Of course, I could go on and on with such quotes, since his memoirs are loaded up to the gills with them, but there’s really no need, is there?
Regarding the barbaric institution of slavery, however — which, incidentally, only the complete recognition of individual rights can ever fully abolish — I wonder if you’ll indulge me a bit longer here in my already too-lengthy comment? I’d like to address some important but virtually forgotten historical facts concerning indentured servitude versus slavery.
To begin with, people should know that for many decades in the early days of America, before she was an independent nation, slavery was not primarily a governmental institution, neither in Europe, nor America.
Initially, the enslavement of Africans was almost all done privately. There were, to be sure, a handful of governmental charters, but in the beginning, the preponderating number of slaves were traded by private entrepreneurs who exchanged rum, spices, and other items to tribal chiefs for Africans whom these same tribal chiefs had already enslaved; so that, in essence, they were merely relocated.
Make no mistake, however: the European traders were indeed responsible for perpetuating the utterly evil institution of slavery; but they were not the people responsible for “enslaving the tribe that had lost a war or the man who had fallen into debt or the child sold by the family” (Historian Roger McGrath). That blame goes directly to the tribal African chiefs.
In fact, slavery was not for a very long time recognized as a legal institution in the colonies of this country. Thus, the first Africans were not, strictly speaking, slaves but rather indentured servants.
The fact of it becoming a legalized institution in the United States was actually brought about by a black man named Anthony Johnson, himself an erstwhile slave back in Africa, and then an indentured servant in the American colonies. After his indentured servitude had expired — quoting from my own old article on this subject — Mr. Johnson was granted land in Virginia, where he subsequently acquired several indentured servants of his own, among them, one John Castor, an African who had been sold to him while already in the American colonies.
It was these same men, John Castor and Anthony Johnson, both black, who were initially responsible for the institution of slavery becoming recognized legally in this country.
When John Castor’s years of indentured servitude were finished, he was not immediately granted his freedom. And so he sued for it, as well he should have, as you and I would have too.
But Anthony Johnson, his owner, fought back, alleging in court that John Castor had never entered into what they called a “contract of indenture” but had been bought in toto as a slave in Africa. In a landmark decision, in 1654, the high court of the colony of Virginia found in Anthony Johnson’s favor, pronouncing that “John Castor was a servant for life.”
Chilling words, which no human should ever have to hear.
This was a monumental and precedent-setting case, later cited to weariness by the Southern colonies, so that slavery was soon officially institutionalized.
The fact that two black men are in large part the authors of American slavery is a piece of American history well worth teaching, no matter how postmodern the curriculum.
It is also a fact that black Americans held slaves all throughout the Civil War.
“In 1860, some 3,000 blacks owned nearly 20,000 black slaves. In South Carolina alone, more than 10,000 blacks were owned by black slaveholders. Born a slave in 1790, William Ellison owned 63 slaves by 1860, making him one of Charleston’s leading slaveholders. In the 1850 census for Charleston City, the port of Charleston, there were 68 black men and 123 black women who owned slaves. In Louisiana’s St. Landry Parish, according to the 1860 census, black planter Auguste Donatto owned 70 slaves and farmed 500 acres of cotton fields” (”Slavery’s Inconvenient Facts,” Chronicles, November 2001).
In terms of total population, white or black, the majority of people of either color did not own slaves in the south. In fact, “75 percent of Southerners neither owned slaves themselves nor were members of families who did” (Ibid).
All of which I mention purely as a matter of historical record.
Comment by RM
I am waiting until the race card is played after the election before I pass my final judgment on this. It was played during the campaign, so in my heart of hearts I think I know where this is all headed, but we shall see.
Thinking man, as for these quotes, if anything remotely like these had ever been published by a white person running for office (at least as a non-Democrat), they would have been toast before they got out of the gate. If there is any doubt, look no further than Trent Lott or George Allen to see how well mined the racial harbor is.
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