Posted on 12/08/2009 9:39:37 AM PST by 2ndDivisionVet
An interesting comment from CPR:
I can't speak for all white people, but I think white people want the Magic Negro because they want forgiveness. Obama's election and some of the incredibly weird things I heard some white people say about it made me realize that there is a fundamental injury that all americans carry with them (slavery and its aftermath) that has never been addressed adequately, and on the white side of the street, there is more unexplored/unexpressed guilt (which morphs into defensiveness or fear pretty easily) than I ever would have guessed. So in an archetypal way, the "unconditional gentle love of a maternal black figure" to a white person is about forgiveness, I think. Of course, it is on the cheap, as the one being forgiven hasn't faced what they need forgiveness for.
I don't have much experience with "white guilt," and really haven't spent much time examining it. But I like this point about absolution on the cheap. One problem with the debate around reparations, when it was hot, was that it allowed us to go where we are all most comfortable--our respective corners--and yell at each other. The focus on money, or on some form of direct payback, obscured a potentially deeper discussion in which white folks acknowledge some of the distressing roots of this country, and black folks acknowledge that some debts can not be repaid. Instead we got this cheap, cartoonish debate about cash. It's like everything else.
And yet it can't afford to be like everything else. The Black-White divide, to steal a phrase, this country's birth defect. (More accurately, it's one of two birth defects.) Some of it's greatest patriots--Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King, Frederick Douglass--were consumed by it.(continued)
The Author
(Excerpt) Read more at ta-nehisicoates.theatlantic.com ...
That thread on there is a steaming pile. I’m in no way responsible for slavery - my family is from a northern state and some died on the Union side in the Civil War, I’ve never had slaves, my famiy has never had slaves, plus it’s 2009!
They can take their reparations and shove it. Whose going to “reparate” my family for our Civil War dead? What about my oppressed Irish ancestors and the indentured English ones who had to work for 7 years for free to pay off their transit debt?
Ugh, now I’m ticked off.
LQ
The best reparation for the black Americans, descendants of former slaves, would be emergence of robust and viable black middle class, providing good education and employment opportunities for their kids, which is only possible under capitalism. Democrats are denying these opportunuties to them, because they are more inerested in a poor, needy, frustrated and angry underclass, for whom they may appear as a benefactor, Big Daddy giving handouts, keeping them down and dependent on the government. G-d said to the poor and hungry man begging for fish, I will give you a fishing rod and teach you how to catch fish so that you could feed yourself till the end of your days. Democrats are the worst perpetuators of slavery and its aftermath. And the new brand of Democrats wants to enslave us all.
I’ll be here: http://www.LivingInThePhilippines.com
if they ever try it.
Nothing more to say other than EPIC FAIL.
This phrase is indeed stolen - but lacks the structure to be a sentence.
But there are so many people telling me I should...I think they have a vested interest in the "white guilt" business/industry
1. Anytime a black person uses the word “folk(s)”, it is being used to separate the speaker from the listener. The word “folk” is a term of art used to say, “I am closer to the issues than you are and as a result my words have more credibility than yours.” So, if the author truly were interested in having all of us discourse at the same level, the author would not be using obvious words that create a decided social strata from the outset before discussion even begins.
2. The California Gold and Nevada & Colorado Silver deposits, their discoveries and their potential all far dwarfed the promise of slavery in 1859 as a potential wealth provider or creator looking forward from that point. Similar initial indications were what led to the Alaska purchase by Lincoln’s Secretary of State Seward and The Riggs National Bank. Similar projections were already being made by Vanderbilt and others in shipping and transportation and Morse and Marconi in telecommunications. Slavery in the South was like the auto industry in Detroit in 1859. Sure it was big. Sure it had a lot of people involved with it but everyone knew it wasn’t the future. It was more about how to transition (just like everyone today knows oil isn't the future but it is more about how to transition). One last thing. The civil war was not fought over slavery. It was fought over state sovereignty. Slavery was the bait and switch cause celeb used in the 11th hour to put the North over the victory line. It had the same overarching moral effect as the Gipper Speech used by Newt Rockne. The author pleads with the reader to respect history. Perhaps he should lead by example. Using the numbers the author gives us, slaves in today's dollars had a total commodity value of $75Billion. That seems like a lot until one thinks that this number represents, in today's dollars, less than 10% of the money we spent on the stimulus passed last March. It was not an insurmountable problem nor the backbone of the American Economic promise, even in it's heyday. Samuel Slater could have told you that.
3. Speaking of respecting history, I find it incredible that a black man in America today would say that what Blacks most want is a respect of history. From Oprah to Tupac, blacks in America have demonstrated an incredible disregard for all things historical and most can’t tell you much about what occurred before Grand Master Flash came on the scene. In an attempt to seize the high ground, he fails under the sheer vaudeville comedy of this particular argument.
4. Perhaps in the end, the demonstration of anti-social behavior that began in an earnest way in the late 1970’s and 1980’s came at the very time after civil rights when society was really looking for an exemplary demonstration of super-social behavior. White America might well have applauded black efforts in education, industry and academia had they been earnest and pervasive even with the paultry resources at the black community’s disposal. What the nation witnessed was a wholesale rejection of social structures: education, the nuclear family, the professions, hard work and the civil code. Instead we saw anti-social and even violent lyrics, extraordinary defacing of public property, entitlement abuse and a dress code that is well below the level most in society would accept as offensive. Following civil rights, most white Americans chose to look the other way giving a break to polite or impolite confrontation. The result was an interpretation of silence as obtained power or tacit approval when it really was tempered disappointment and at times even disgust.
5. Now, 40 years later, we have an ethnic group in this country that represents 13% of the population. It represents a far lower percentage of doctors, employers, lawyers, academics and employed individuals. It represents a significantly higher percentage of: felons, murderers, armed robbers, unwed mothers, welfare and wic recipients and drug users and dealers. 87% of this country isn’t as concerned with the notion of a “magic negro” in the White House as they are with the dirty little secret every one of us is too afraid to confront, white and black; which is: are the broad masses of black people in this country really even an asset to this society or are they a liability? The real question at this point is, "Of the remaining 87% of us who are supposed to have this guilt the author speaks of, what percentage even wants this segment of our society around anymore?"The author's argument is not a black white issue at this point. Growing affluence and influence amongst hispanics and asians in the west and sweeping east are turning this into a true 87/13 problem. It has less to do with slavery among these populations who arrived enmasse more than a century after the Civil War. There is no legacy of guilt with them, only an experiential frame of reference which these new emerging Americans have internalized and made decisions about. And in those decisions, without a legacy of slavery, the black community in this country may have come up wanting based solely on their interactions with these groups over the past 25 years.
6. This brings us to guilt. Others have written it here and I will add to the discourse. I live in Georgia, south of Atlanta. Both my parents were from Boston. My ancestors were white New England abolitionists who risked their lives to free the slaves even though to my knowledge they had never even seen a black person in the flesh. One of my great grandfathers came from Ireland as an indentured servant (that is a slave with a dubious promise of freedom at some point in the future that might or might not have been honored). My great grandfather actually earned the full measure of his freedom at Gettysburg. According to family history, the first black man he met was one he fought next to with the Union army on that battlefield in July of 1863 (when it was still a states’ rights struggle). I do not have guilt about slavery. I do not owe anyone an apology. If there is a debt to be paid (which I really do not believe there is), then someone owes my grandparents a big “Thank You” instead of an endless multi-decade chip on the shoulder.
7. If Obama represented anything in 2008, it was a collective statement by everyone in this country to tell the black community who continues into this millenium to espouse that if we just give them more and more, they could be better than the statistics they currently present. The statement was, “The ceilings you keep saying are in place are not universally there anymore.” Was Colin Powell a fluke? Well, Obama certainly wasn’t. He was elected by Whites and Hispanics more than by the black community. But the author makes a mistake in believing the rest of us have a continuing need to support Obama because of the salving symbolism he represents. That point has been made. Obama has been given awesome power to either succeed or fail. He has been given the greatest gift that all Americans have been given, supreme opportunity. His choice to use it well or squander it will not be an indictment of black Americans but finally, he will have succeeded or failed on the merits in this one part of his life’s journey. Finally, a black man in this country will have been able to say “I had all the breaks and here’s what I did with it.”
Following that, perhaps maybe black “folk” will get over their collective selves and start taking individual responsibility for their own achievements and failures just as Americans have chosen to do from all corners of the globe for eons. If they can begin to do this in a meaningful and universal way then maybe choosing to see the American Revolution through the prism of Crispus Attucks might seem as passe to them as it already seems to me.
To be honest, my family once owned slaves, in VA, KY and MO as they moved across the country between the late 18th and mid-19th centuries. The man who founded the paternal branch of my family in Tidewater Virginia, after immigrating from England, fought as an officer in the Revolutionary War. He was an overseer, farmer and local magistrate, as were two of his sons and a few of his grandsons. This all happened over 150 years ago and beyond.
Do I personally feel “guilty” for ANY of this? Not one bit!
The author of the piece must only know urban lefty caucasians and doesn't realize that the majority of allegedly white Americans have NO such guilt....
That's an urban myth....albeit, it exists in my family too.
DNA tests I've done on my extended family shows it to be false...at least in my family.
The DNA haplogroups in my family are all European, R1b, U5a, V and H.
I've "met" several third and even fourth cousins online, and one of our very early Americans could potentially have come from one the Quaker communities, or perhaps from somewhere in the Caribbean, very probably from New Sweden, but with no documentation, he could be a Huguenot or German or Irish or English or Scottish or Scotch Irish.... indeed, almost anything, from almost anywhere.
Secondly, since so very few people have had their DNA done, I've no idea where the '80% of old Americans have a Cherokee ancestor' meme originated, but I've come across it quite a few times online. I had no idea it was an urban legend.
Thank you blam.
That means that YOU are the descendant of Cheddar Man???
wOw!
The U5a mtDNA, see here, that belonged to my grandmother and Cheddar Man was not passed on to me. I received my mtDNA from my mother who is in haplogroup 'V', as are 52% of the Skolt Sami. Haplogroup 'V' is one of the oldest in Europe but is one of the smallest percentage haplogroups.
No one in my family has derived any benefit from American slavery and I refuse to give one red cent to any reparations for slavery. That debt was payed during the 1860s in blood by the soldiers that fought on both sides during the civil war.
The author, being black, is unqualified to comment on what “the white side of the street” is thinking.
Or WET White Entertainment Television LOL!
..we did not gain anything from slavery.....
on the contrary, I would say its been tougher for people like us because all the jobs seem to have that "diversity" crap.....where a person is passed over so the minority with lesser skills can have the job....
maybe we should have a class action law suit.
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