Everything is about Race because White Folks Made it That Way
Ever since the first enslaved Africans stepped off ships, suffering from dysentery, malnutrition, and pleurisy, the marker was laid that race is the predominant politic in America. I highly recommend that if you see slavery as some sort of isolated cruelty, you read the 1619 Project. There has been criticism of its author Nikole Hannah-Jones mainly based on racial politics as outlined by conservative New York Times columnist Bret Stephens who claims Ms. Jones authored a failed attempt to “reframe the history of the US around the beginning of American slavery.” These types of denials of historical fact are not new to the African American experience. Southerners still refer to their ancestors' sedition and participation in the Civil War as the “war of northern aggression”
Inescapable…
Adherence to the norms of racial denial and political excuse-me-ism has so permeated white American thinking, in search of penance, that it continues to wash over religion, history, and politics. The common reaction black Americans get, besides an eye-roll, when the issue of race in America is broached, is—that was years ago I had nothing to do with that. In March of 2008 Republican Pat Buchanan wrote A Brief for Whitey one of the most error-filled, racist, pieces of drivel ever written, and it was debated as if it had merit. He contended, “First, America has been the best country on earth for black folks. It was here that 600,000 black people, brought from Africa in slave ships, grew into a community of 40 million, were introduced to Christian salvation, and reached the greatest levels of freedom and prosperity blacks have ever known.”
His premise first proposes that 600,000 black men and women would not have succeeded without being chained and ‘trained’ and somehow enslavement was salvation for people already free. As part of the disastrous John McCain campaign the Republican nominee for Vice-President, Sarah Palin, decided that associating Barack Obama with another group of people of color was the answer for a failing run for election. She introduced to us the phrase, “palling around with terrorists” of course this had more to do with the former president’s full name as much as his politics. That sort of in your face racism is ignored for those in search of political expedience.
Even the Christian-right is willing to throw the Bible and their beliefs out the nearest storehouse window. It seems so ridiculous to even bring up the Megyn Kelly incident but it sticks out as a prime example of the lengths racist will go to maintain a false sense of white superiority. A lot was made of her statement that a figure of fantasy [Santa] is a white man and her follow-up declaration, “ Jesus was a white man too.” Not only is that geographically inaccurate but defies the biblical description of Jesus [Revelation 1:14-15]. More insidious was the way Kelly said it making sure to assert the purity and reverence of whiteness over blackness.
Today black Americans are threatened with violence and are being told our vote should not count. The implication being that blacks are not real Americans. Embedded in the Kelly statement is the theory of America “for all you kids watching at home, Santa just is white.” Or did she mean America?
Georgians, Vote for Change.
