Posted on 12/23/2015 2:07:06 PM PST by Altura Ct.
For 500 years, they've exploited their fellow man and plundered the planet. It's time they reign themselves in
The future of life on the planet depends on bringing the 500-year rampage of the white man to a halt. For five centuries his ever more destructive weaponry has become far too common. His widespread and better systems of exploiting other humans and nature dominate the globe. The time for replacing white supremacy with new values is now. And just as some whites played a part in ending slavery, colonialism, Jim Crow segregation, and South African apartheid, there is surely a role whites can play in restraining other whites in this era. Beneath the sound and fury generated by GOP presidential candidates, Fox News, website trolls, police unions and others, white people are becoming aware as never before of past and present racism.
Admittedly, this encouraging development is hardly the dominant view. To the contrary, given the possibility that Donald Trump, Ted Cruz, Ben Carson or one of their ilk might become president, white supremacist ideology seems to be digging in harder than ever.
I don’t take this lightly. Once upon a time I foolishly thought that there was no way that Ronald Reagan could get elected president. Lesson learned. Now is the time to start contingency planning for intensified resistance to mass deportations of immigrants, atrocities against Muslims and extreme danger to African Americans.
That said, it would be a mistake to focus only on the negative. Recently theNew York Times ran Gordon Davis’ op-ed What Woodrow Wilson Cost My Grandfather. It is still generating debate. (Gordon Davis and I are both “alumni†of the Northern Student Movement, a 1960s civil rights group.) Davis was writing in the context of the student-led protest at Princeton University over the veneration of its former president, Woodrow Wilson. The controversy stems from Wilson’s viciously racist speech and behavior particularly when he was president of the United States.
A subsequent Truthout article by Harvey Wasserman, “Princeton Students Are Right, Woodrow Wilson Was Way Worse Than You Think,†complements the critique. Most of the 776 comments on theNY Times article (as well as 1,600 more on a followup Times editorial) were the predictably negative responses usually heard regarding white racism. Many said some version of, “that was a long time ago when values were different.†Others took the tack that “nobody is perfect and the good things Woodrow Wilson did outweigh the bad of his racism, so let it rest.â€
But there was also a substantial undercurrent voiced by those who were open-minded enough to learn.
Following are NY Times comments on the article:
Jim K. New York, NY 2 days ago
As a former Princeton professor, I applaud the students for raising this issue. It’s not about erasing history, but confronting it honestly. This beautiful column makes clear how Wilson’s policies, based on his deeply racist and white-supremacist views, destroyed the lives of thousands of black families. Why should we publicly venerate this person? Why should elitist Northern universities get to insist that we overlook this man’s systematic, consequential racism, while every Southern municipality and retail store is expected to rid itself of monuments and souvenirs of their racist politicians and soldiers. Let’s indeed, every American community, take stock of the deeply embedded racism that has been a part of our history (North and South), recognizing that a thoroughgoing accounting will involve reconfiguring our public and institutional spaces in many ways. Because that has yet to be done, and the younger generation of Black militants will, rightly, not be content until it is.
JPBarnett Santa Barbara 1 day ago
It’s sad that after having been through 12 years of grade school in CA and graduating from a UC, I just learned this about Wilson. It’s silly that I’m surprised I didn’t learn of his racism I suppose, but I’m glad I do now. My opinion is forever changed.
Many commenters were startled to learn about a long known but rarely taught side of Woodrow Wilson. White people have a lot to be surprised about. The very nature of white supremacy requires sanitized teaching about slavery, the genocide of indigenous people, the reach of U.S. militarism and many other topics.
Fortunately, gains from past struggles give African Americans increased opportunities to expose what was previously deliberately obscured. Ta-Nehisi Coates is the best known of a new generation of black, indigenous, Hispanic and white writers, scholars and activists revealing ugly realities hidden from most of us.
Even the New York Times conservative columnist David Brooks has acknowledged this development. “So much of the national conversation this year has concerned how to think about past racism and oppression, and the power of that past to shape present realities: the Confederate flag, Woodrow Wilson, the unmarked sights of the lynching grounds. Fortunately, many people have found the courage to tell the ugly truths about slavery, Jim Crow and current racism that were repressed by the wider culture.â€
Admittedly, new information does not necessarily translate into social change. Cherished and deeply rooted beliefs are not easily surrendered. I often think of how long it took for the arguments of Copernicus and Galileo that the earth revolved around the sun, not the other way around, to be accepted. Ideas and habits are stubborn. Systems resist change. Powerful institutions have vested interests in preserving the status quo.
By way of example, a recurring concern of those responding to the Times’ Woodrow Wilson op-ed was, “Where will it all end? Will we have to destroy Mount Rushmore?†some asked. Maybe we should. Not just because it honors slave owners Jefferson and Washington, Mount Rushmore is also a powerful symbol of brutality and racism toward indigenous people.
As idigenous scholar Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz points out in her book, An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States, “The most prominent struggle has been the Lakota Sioux’s attempt to restore the Paha Sapa, or Black Hills, where the odious Mount Rushmore carvings have scarred the sacred site. Called the ‘Shrine of Democracy’ by the federal government, it is anything but that; rather it is a shrine of in-your-face illegal occupation and colonization.â€
White racism distorts how we think about virtually everything, including history itself. No one will dismiss Bill O’Reilly’s goofy books about Jesus or Lincoln or Patton or Reagan as irrelevant because, “oh, that was a long time ago, it’s got nothing to do with me now.†As a general proposition people appreciate that we can discover in the present important things we didn’t previously know about the past.
Not so when it comes to race in the USA. Not for some people anyway.
This matters a great deal. In many years of anti-racist work, I have discovered that whites who deny any connection to the racism of the past will also generally deny any connection to the racism of the present. “Please don’t tell me,†cry deniers of systemic white racism. One step removed is the view that we should “accept†the history but must take the good with the bad. This is sometimes known as the “warts and all†theory of history. A variation is the convenient idea that slavery was the “original sin.†Sin, of course, in the Western Christian point of view is inevitable and immutable.
This takes an especially pernicious twist when white racism deniers argue that there has always been slavery as though that itself somehow makes it justified. It’s not true that every society over all time has enslaved people. But even if it were true, the kind of slavery on which the U.S. was built is unlike any other that preceded it. It co-evolved with capitalism and it conflated slavery with “raceâ€â€”plantation capitalism as the Rev. James Lawson calls it. CSU Fresno scholars Blain Roberts and Ethan J. Kytle put it this way recently in theNew York Times: “New research has gone further, exposing how American capitalism and democracy — once thought to be antithetical to slavery — emerged hand-in-hand with it.â€
Hard as it may be for propaganda-conditioned whites to grasp, global race-based capitalism is not a system of the past with lingering effects. It is a living, breathing organism of the present. It is a unitary thing. It is therefore not a good thing with warts. It is one thing. The “good†things always comes packaged with the “bad†thing. The mechanics of how it often works has a name: grand bargains.
The mother of all grand bargains is the U.S. Constitution which accommodated slavery in several ways, including the notorious three-fifths clause. While the Constitution was by no means the first grand bargain, it solidified a pattern that continues to this day. The New Deal, as Ira Katznelson demonstrates in his book Fear Itself, was another grand bargain that combined “progressive’ achievements such as union rights and Social Security with reaffirming the power of Dixiecrats and the institutions of Jim Crow.
Katznelson is white. So am I. So are many others now writing and speaking honestly and openly about the enduring power of white racism. That is valuable because it strengthens the idea that whites can come to terms with reality, past and present, as opposed to the myths we are encouraged to believe. As we do so, another world does become possible.
Of course white people can’t “save†the world. That mindset is the problem not the solution. But we can help. As Vietnam antiwar leader Rennie Davis points out, it is when we stop being invisible to each other that we start to become a movement.
aa
Methinks this red diaper doper baby doth speak rhetoric that edges toward violence!
It ain’t our fault we’re superior.
time for blue gums to rise!
That article is quite a monument to Liberal white guilt! The stupid author would likely be shivering in some dark little hut, were it not for white men. The author would be unable to communicate his spew beyond the range of his voice, were it not for the tools of mass communications, developed by white men. To the extent that the world has been dominated for the last 500 years by white men, it is because they are masters of technology, social interaction, organization and cooperation. Explaining how they eventually evolved to that point would require a book.
Arabs had slaves.
Africans had slaves.
Native Americans had slaves.
Some Asian cultures had slaves.
The European slave trade to the Americas was unique for its racial nature. In every other instance, it was neighboring loser tribes of the same race or the poor of your own tribe.
Evidence of slavery predates written records, and has existed in many cultures.[3] Graves dating to 8000 BC in Egypt may show the enslavement of a San-like tribe.[dubious ... discuss][Capoid remains not found this far north][109] Slavery is rare among hunter-gatherer populations. Mass slavery also requires economic surpluses and a high population density to be viable. Due to these factors, the practice of slavery would have only proliferated after the invention of agriculture during the Neolithic Revolution about 11,000 years ago.[110]
In the earliest known records, slavery is treated as an established institution. The Code of Hammurabi (ca. 1760 BC), for example, prescribed death for anyone who helped a slave escape or who sheltered a fugitive.[111] The Bible mentions slavery as an established institution.[3]
Slavery was known in almost every ancient civilization and society including Sumer, Ancient Egypt, Ancient China, the Akkadian Empire, Assyria, Ancient India, Ancient Greece, the Roman Empire, the Hebrew kingdoms of the ancient Levant, and the pre-Columbian civilizations of the Americas.[3] Such institutions included debt-slavery, punishment for crime, the enslavement of prisoners of war, child abandonment, and the birth of slave children to slaves.
Source: Wikipedia
Well, Frank Joyce could always set a good example by eliminating himself first, you know, because the future of mankind depends upon stopping white men. He can hardly expect anyone else to put any credence in his words unless he backs them with personal action by stopping himself first. Otherwise, he’s just a plain ol’ garden variety hypocrite like most “Progressives” who preach “Do as I say, not as I do”.
Perhaps self-starvation would be the best way for him to go, because that demonstrates white men are so worthless that they deserve none of mankind’s resources. Then once he’s gone, his white-man’s bones could be ground into fertilizer so that mankind could at least get SOME value from him. His remaining flesh, of course, could be made into Soylent White, which I’m sure that at least some would appreciate as a break from a monotonous diet of Soylent Green.
Close, it is Salon.
I’m happily a white man, feel no guilt, and apologize for nothing. Go pound sand, you whiny little eunuch.
The author is a Detroit communist.
If I self identify as batman will that help?
It’s safe now to go full bore anti-honky.
I will enjoy hearing these people scream when they are executed for their heinous crimes.
Since the author is a white man, let’s start with him. We can prevent this fool from spreading his variation of “white supremacy” by chopping off his fingers and ripping out his tongue. Let’s see if he wants to practice what he preaches.
The writer, Frank Joyce, is still a hardcore Marxist supporter of Hanoi. He started out in the late 60’s/early 70’s with the made-in-Hanoi “Peoples’ Peace Treaty” fraud and as late as April/May of this year, was part of the Hanoi Loverest sponsored by the Kroc Institute of Notre Dame (David Cortright) and NYU’s DC branch (aided by old Maoist Marilyn Young). He also helped write a book about the Hanoi Lobby supporting No. Vietnam’s “liberation” of So. Vietnam (who didn’t ask for it as they were much freer than those in the Hanoi gulag.
As we say in the trenches, “Old reds never die, they just smell that way”.
See if you can Google “The Peoples Peace Treaty” article by Human Events weekly, 1971. Lots of names of Hanoi’s top supporters on that “treaty”.
Should also be information at www.wikipedia (beware of it); www.keywiki.org; and/or www.DiscoverTheNetwork.org.
The whole story on the fraudulent Hanoi creation of the PPT can be found one of the volumes (possible Part 2) of the House Internal Security Committee’s 4 part hearings on “The National Peace Action Coalition (NPAC) and the Peoples Coalition for Peace and Justice (PCPJ)”, 1972.
These hearings helped expose the dominate role of two communist organizations in controlling the so-called “VN peace movement/protest movement”. For a the CPUSA there were the Mobes and then the factional group known as PCPJ. For the Trotskyites of the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) and its youth front, Student Mobe, it was NPAC.
Though you might like to know the back story.
It is a tragedy that more people know the name of Paul ("Population Bomb") Ehrlich, than know the name of Norman Borlaugh, the man who through genius, hard work and sheer God-pleasing, a&&-kicking obstinacy, saved a billion lives and proved Ehrlich wrong.
Wonder who said these things bout the PERSIANS,GREEKS,Romans,various CHINESE factions etc etc etc...Guess their antagonism is for modern white ONLY ??
Hutus, Zulus didm’t last 500 years either? How bout those Central American Tribes??
Guess the answer is there will always be a SALON where the ignorant thrive, huh?
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.