reasonvemotion wrote: ↑Sat Jan 22, 2022 1:57 am
1) The descendants of captured slaves should be offered an apology.
2) White Americans were significantly advantaged by slavery while slaves struggled.
3) Modern African Americans still experience oppression to this day.
My own ideas, for what they are worth.
1) I do not think there will even be peace or perhaps the word is *satisfaction* between the formerly enslaved and that culture, and that 'history', that
did that to them. For there is too strong, too developed, a narrative that decries and condemns enslavement, which must necessarily play itself out. That narrative is an armament, a weapon, as much as it is a tool. That is, in the *psychology* of human affairs the formerly enslaved need to find a way to do what was done to them; to see
them reduced to the same condition; to observe
them suffer; and to contribute, with a certain bit of glee, to that suffering. It is 'human, all too human'. I am referring here to
ressentiment. I do not think it can be rationalized. The revenge-impulse is too powerful and I would also say that it is 'necessary'.
2) There is absolutely no doubt that English or European peoples and culture benefitted from the enslaved condition of Africans (speaking here of America). There is no way that *you* (anyone) will ever be able to get around this. It is a fundamental fact. Nor will you ever be able to get around the fact that when an enslaved people were freed -- and this is one part of the larger problem: American slaves were freed, they did not fight a war of liberation to free themselves, and in this sense their freedom was 'granted' to them, not earned by their own struggle -- that 'gift of freedom' was actually an extension, in certain ways, of their previous slavery. That is, none of this was chosen voluntarily. Neither to be enslaved nor to be freed from that condition to then be *given*, always with conditions, the possibility to participate in a civilization-project they did not choose, on any level nor at any point. This fact alone tremendously complexifies the profoundly restless psychological elements. If you examine some of the literature of the Civil Rights Era you will find that Black American struggle is a struggle for coherent identity in a sea of *identity* that was all -- all! -- determined by the people who oppressed them. So they struggle to define their own religion, to define their own relation to language, to social mores, but really when you examine it to define themselves within a historical process. Who am I? What is mine? What is
genuinely mine? And what is genuinely
not theirs? These distinctions became crucial.
The reality of African American struggle is not and I suggest could never be intelligible to Whites at the most basic level. It is something those Whites can *gaze on* and muse about. But only the one who has lived it can be said to understand it.
The more deeply that White Culture (again in America) tries to 'integrate' Black people, with their history, and their culture, is the degree to which the struggle to differentiate these two, will become more acute. Black Struggle would best have taken the form of an uprising and a Black National movement for 'liberation'. This would have been an impossibility I think on the American continent. But as I have thought it through it really would have been
necessary. Remember as well that Abe Lincoln, the Great Liberator (to indicate astounding hypocrisy in its uniquely American form) worked for
years behind the scenes to locate a place where former slaves could be shipped off to. The Chiriqui region of Panama was one but others were contemplated. What would have happened had this been carried out?
3) But the other fact here is -- and this is extremely hard to see as well as to broach, in
any form -- is that Black Americans owe their being, their present shape, their selves as creations of culture within the English-American context, to their condition of slavery! and to be forced to labor in the 'Empire of the white man's will'. Think about it. It is
that which brought them here. It is that which molded them. And that process, that historical reality, of being a molded people, a conquered and enslaved people who were then, though a perverted generosity, granted their freedom (which was not freedom at all but another level of subjugation if one looks at it through the lens I am presenting) is the source of insuperable conflict -- unless perhaps you are Thomas Sowell!
It is not that they are still *oppressed*, it is that no matter how the situation is looked at they are not in a world that they created. Their *oppression* is actually something far larger. History was their oppressor. At some point it is no longer a personal issue.
observation