Belinda wrote: ↑Sat Oct 28, 2017 3:26 pm
Seleucus wrote
Can you clarify what you mean by "slave consciousness"? Do you mean what Nietzsche called "slave morality" in Genealogy of morals?
The moral worth of the USA matters a lot to Americans : the USA's wealth was partly founded upon slave importation and slave labour therefore there is cognitive dissonance among Americans.
Cognitive dissonance is uncomfortable and those Americans who are not descended from slaves can and do demonise or patronise the descendants of slaves to salve their consciences. The process is involuntary and most people are not aware they are doing it.
Demonisation is not limited to Americans of course, we can all do it if we have bad consciences. However slave consciousness is specifically about slavery. There are persons who lack consciences and many of those are recognised criminals ,but slave consciousness refers to people who have consciences.
Still paying for the sins of the father? That's Biblical. That's old school. That hasn't been a part of Western law for centuries.
As it so happens, a ancestor along the patriarchal linage of my family was a person of some small historical significance and has been accused of being a slave owner by certain zealous academics and the media. The evidence is entirely conjectural since almost nothing is known of his life or doings aside from the heroic deed for which he is remembered by history. How is it that I, eight or 10 generations later am to be responsible for this supposed crime? Should my wife and children also be held culpable -- what if my wife happens to be an African woman? A descendant of New World slaves? Our children are responsible for crimes against themselves it seems then? But since I am not American it appears I will escape scott-free since it must be the US government who will pay this reparation? In which case how is a Hmong refugee who arrived in the US in the 1980s, perhaps from slavery in Thailand, liable to pay in this rare case of an
ex post facto law? And what about the good slave owners as attested in many historical documents, including
12 years a slave? And what about the centuries of White slaves in Muslim lands? And the much more numerous Black? And what about the White slaves in America? And what about the Germans and Slavs enslaved by Romans thousands of years ago and who's descendants are Italians today, they should pay for the crime of their won enslavement? And in honor of
Londoner, let's say I have some portion of genetic African former slave, how should the payment and the award be divvied up considering I then have supposedly slave owning ancestors and also slave?
(E.g.
The demonisation of foxes is diagnostic of zoological illiteracy.
Times, Sunday Times (2013)
)
language is used to describe Black men who have been killed by law enforcement in the past year (July 2014-April 2015). Specifically, there is a demonizing process that happens to unarmed Black men posthumously. Unlike earlier Black icons and figures, such as Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X, that were vilified while alive and then sanitized in death to be repackaged as an acceptable part of the United States historical narrative, these men are portrayed as thugs and criminals to seemingly justify their deaths while simultaneously shifting blame away from law enforcement. To illustrate, we examine six different unarmed Black menii who were killed by police throughout the United States in order to understand how media coverage addresses their deaths.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5004736/
I don't mean "slave morality".
Yet you seem to be very deep in Nietzschean slave morality!
