A freelance writer and former liberal, La Shawn's work has appeared in the Washington Post, Washington Times, and Philadelphia Inquirer, among others.
Posted on 10/28/2003 9:31:57 AM PST by presidio9
Upon meeting me, white liberals take one look at my skin and presume I’m a left-leaning, Congressional Black Caucus-supporting, racial preference-loving, pro-infanticide crony. They condescendingly offer opinions about “diversity and multicultural” this or “Democratic fundraiser” that. I usually excuse such transgressions because it’s natural to quickly size up people based on information readily available. When I rebut these presumptions and share my deeply held conservative beliefs, however, I get open-mouthed stares.
With 90 percent of the black vote locked down tight, Democrats don’t quite know what to do with the other 10 percent, so they pull the old plantation routine by turning blacks against each other. While the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC) shamelessly attacks California Supreme Court Justice Janice Rogers Brown, a black conservative nominated by President George W. Bush for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, white liberals sit back and gaze upon their handiwork. It’s life as usual on the old plantation.
Chains of physical bondage have been broken, but mental bondage still exists. Sometimes slave-owners recruited loyal blacks to be the overseers who crushed the will of other slaves longing to be free. Justice Brown -- unlike the CBC -- is not a slave to liberal dogma, and she is mercilessly berated as a result by the CBC and their white colleagues.
Slave-owners have always exploited human weakness to control slaves with fear, distrust, envy and lies, and the exploitation continues. You see, conservative blacks are the plantation system’s greatest threat. We’re the runaway slaves who followed the Underground Railroad to freedom. We’re the “uppity Negroes” of the Jim Crow era who just won’t stay in our place.
Modern-day plantation owners -- white liberals -- manipulate paranoid blacks into attacking each other in ways that would make a blackface performer blush. A black liberal web site (to remain unnamed) recently posted a shameful caricature that depicted Justice Brown as Clarence Thomas in drag. Without hesitation or reservation, blacks take the bait thrown out by white Democrats and viciously turn on one another. All the master has to do is sit back and watch. And laugh. Almost 300 years ago, a slave-owner named Willie Lynch assured other slave-owners it was that simple.
In 1712, Lynch (from whom the term “lynching” derived) delivered a speech on the banks of the James River in Virginia and shared his secrets to keeping slaves in line. One of his methods was to create division. “I take these differences [light skin vs. dark skin, young vs. old] and make them bigger. I use fear, distrust, and envy for control purposes. These methods have worked on my modest plantation in the West Indies and it will work throughout the South…. The Black Slave, after receiving this indoctrination, shall carry on and will become self-refueling and self-generating for hundreds of years, maybe thousands.”
Lynch’s methods are still working today. In an attempt to malign Justice Brown’s character, the acerbic Rep. Maxine Waters called her a “poster woman for the far right wing,” and said that her “legal record and her views on civil rights and constitutional issues place her so far outside the legal mainstream.” Right. So far outside the legal mainstream is Justice Brown that 67 percent of liberal Californians voted for her in 1998. Non-voting D.C. Delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton added that Justice Brown was “cut from the same cloth as Clarence Thomas.” Why?
Here are a few reasons why Democrats consider Justice Brown unqualified to sit on the D.C. Circuit:
*She dissented in a California Supreme Court opinion that upheld the right of a child to have her unborn baby killed without her parents' consent. Right-wing nut!
*She wrote the opinion that upheld Proposition 209, a voter-approved measure outlawing the use of race in public university admissions and hiring in California, a direct threat to the professional grievance lobby. A race traitor!
*In order to forward their far-left agenda, liberals know they must circumvent the U.S. Constitution and the will of the people, which Justice Brown vowed to honor. She wrote: “When fundamentally moral and philosophical issues are involved and the questions are fairly debatable, the judgment call belongs to the Legislature.” This, in the words of legislator Sen. Edward Kennedy, is “despicable”! Justice Brown -- and all independent thinkers -- are a menace to plantation society. Old master Lynch warned other slave-owners about such people when he said, “It is necessary that your slaves trust and depend on us. They must love, respect and trust only us.”
Looks like old Willie was a prophet.
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I imagine there are many others who are battling this method of the Dims and white liberals. I hope they come forward and speak out in one big voice loud enough to stop a future filibuster of Janice Brown.
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FReegards...MUD
this is an urban legand.
The link. http://www.africana.com/articles/daily/ht20030929lynch.asp
Willie Lynch is Dead (1712?-2003)
There are many problems with this document — not the least of which is the fact that it is absolutely fake.
I long ago stopped listening to sentences that begin with "The problem with black people is," or end with "and that's why black people can't get ahead now," which partly explains my initial indifference to the now-famous William Lynch Speech.
The letter was never "discovered." It just showed up on the Internet one day.
In the few years since the speech on how to train slaves first appeared, it has been cited by countless college students and a black member of the House of Representatives, along the way becoming the essential verbal footnote in barbershop analysis of what's wrong with black people. The rapper Talib Kweli laments on the song "Know That," "blacks are dyin'/how to make a slave/by Willie Lynch is still applyin'," and one professor at a Midwestern university made the speech required reading for her class. Of late, the frequency of its citations seems to be increasing — at least three people have asked me about it in the last month.
According to the speech's preface, Master Lynch was concerned enough with the fortunes of his slave-holding brethren in the American colonies to present a lecture on the bank of the James River, explaining how to keep unruly servants disunited. The old, he argued, should be pitted against the young, the dark against the light, the male against the female and so on. Such disunifying tactics "will control the slaves for at least 300 years," he guaranteed. And that, it seems, is why black people can't get ahead now.
There are many problems with this document — not the least of which is the fact that it is absolutely fake.
As a historian, I am generally skeptical of smoking guns. Historical work, like forensic science, isn't some flashy field — it depends on the painstaking aggregation of facts that lead researchers to the most likely explanation, but rarely the only one. Slavery was an incredibly complex set of social, economic and legal relations that literally boiled down to black and white. But given the variation in size of farms, number of enslaved workers, region, crops grown, law, gender-ratios, religion and local economy, it is unlikely that a single letter could explain slave policy for at least 151 years of the institution and its ramifications down to the present day.
Considering the limited number of extant sources from 18th century, if this speech had been "discovered," it would've been the subject of incessant historical panels, scholarly articles and debates. It would literally be a career-making find. But the letter was never "discovered." Rather, it simply "appeared" on the Internet — bypassing the official historical circuits and making its way directly into the canon of American racial conspiratoria.
On a more practical level, the speech is filled with references that are questionable if not completely inaccurate. Lynch makes reference to an invitation reaching him on his "modest plantation in the West Indies." While this is theoretically possible — the plantation system was well established in the Caribbean by 1712 — most plantation owners were absentees who chose to remain in the colonizing country while the day-to-day affairs of their holdings were run by hired managers and overseers. But even assuming that Mr. Lynch was an exception to this practice, much of the text of his "speech" remains anachronistic. Lynch makes consistent reference to "slaves" — which again is possible, though it is far more likely people during this era would refer to persons in bondage simply as "Negroes." In the first paragraph, he promises that "Ancient Rome would envy us if my program is implemented," but the word "program" did not enter the English language with this connotation until 1837 — at the time of this speech it was used only to reference a written notice for theater events.
Two paragraphs later he says that he will "give an outline of action," for slave-holders; the word "out-line" had appeared only 50 years earlier and at that time was only used as an artistic term meaning a sketch — it didn't convey its present meaning until 1759. Even more damning is his use of the terms "indoctrination" and "self-refueling" in the next sentence. The first word didn't carry it current connotation until 1832; the second didn't even enter the language until 1811 — a century after the purported date of Lynch's speech. More obviously, Lynch uses the word "Black," with an upper-case "B," to describe African Americans more than two centuries before the word came to be applied as a common ethnic identifier.
In some popular citations, Lynch has also been — inexplicably — credited with the term "lynching," which would be odd since the speech promises to provide slave-holders with non-violent techniques that will save them the expense of killing valuable, if unruly, property. This inaccuracy points to a more basic problem in understanding American history: the violence directed at black people in America was exceptional in the regard that it was racialized and used to reinforce political and social subordination, but it was not unique. Early America was incredibly violent in general — stemming in part from the endemic violence in British society and partly from the violence that tends to be associated with frontier societies. For most of its history, lynching was a non-racial phenomenon — in fact, it most often directed at white people. The term "Lynch law" was derived from the mob violence directed at Tories, or British loyalists, just after the American Revolution. While there is disagreement about the precise origins of the term — some associate it with Charles Lynch, a Revolution-era Justice-of-the-Peace who imprisoned Tories, others see it as the legacy of an armed militia founded near the Lynche River or the militia captain named Lynch who created judicial tribunals in Virginia in 1776 — there is no reference to the term earlier than 1768, more than half a century after the date given for the speech.
Given the sparse judicial resources (judges were forced to travel from town-to-town hearing cases, which is where we get the term "judicial circuit") and the frequency of property crimes in the early republic, lynching was often seen as a form of community justice. Not until the 1880s, after the end of Reconstruction, did "lynching" become associated with African Americans; gradually the number of blacks lynched each year surpassed the number of whites until it became almost exclusively directed at black people late in the century. (Nevertheless, between 1882 and 1944, Tuskegee University recorded 3,417 lynchings with black victims -- and 1291 lynchings with white ones.)
The Willie Lynch speech would seem to give a quick-and-easy explanation of the roots of our much-lamented "black disunity." You could make similar arguments about the lingering effects of a real historical document like the 1845 tract, "Religious Instruction of Negroes" — written by a proslavery Presbyterian minister — or the British practice of mixing different African ethnicities on slave ships in order to make communication — and therefore rebellion — more difficult. But this too is questionable — it presumes that whites, or any other diverse group, do not face divisive gender issues, generation gaps and class distinctions. Willie Lynch offers no explanation for the white pro-lifer who guns down a white abortion-provider or white-on-white domestic violence. He does not explain political conflicts among different Latino groups or crime in Asian communities. Unity is not the same as unanimity and in the end, black people are no more disunited than any other group of people — and a lot more united than we give ourselves credit for.
First published: September 29, 2003
About the Author
William Jelani Cobb is a professor of history at Spelman College.
We defeated Afghanistan and Iraqi so what’s the frigin problem here? A few uppity dems in the minority should not be able to subvert the constitution. Time for the administration to fish or cut bate. BTW Great article.
”Her public statements are that of an ultra and not a compassionate conservative.”
Whenever I hear generalities like this I always want to hear the specifics. What are her “ultra” statements? And who defines the mainstream? If you – as a self identified black – assume that the beliefs of the black community define the mainstream, you may wish to re-examine your assumptions.
You then question Justice Brown’s honesty; implying that she really does not believe what she is saying, she’s just taking her positions to get favors from Republicans. In a State that is overwhelmingly Liberal and from a race that is even more overwhelmingly tied to the Democrats, that kind of reasoning seems to be on a par with the overwhelming black belief in the myth of the church burnings during the Clinton administration.
I hope I’m wrong, but I detect a whiff of paranoia.
I would generally buy your story. Rather than play all these relatively subtle psychological games appropriate for a kinder age, two other simpler methods were more often used. One, which comes directly from the Romans, was to appoint 'trustees' to manage the rest of the slaves. Trustees were often given their own residence of a better quality and used as overseers and managers to control the rest.
The second method was much simpler. That was to single out the most 'uppity' and either beat him severely, disfigure him, or, if need be, simply kill him. In the latter case, most states compensated the slave owner for his efforts by refunding him the purchase price of this property.
As for Lynch, it is hard to say as Lynch is a very common name, and there have certainly been more than one judge. Besides, a lynching does not require a judge in any case, so the name could have been derived from a non-judge just as readily.
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