...comforting, UNLESS you are one who denies the very real evil of slavery and racism in our very real history.
Some "blasphemy" from Frederick Douglass for those who want to hide our real history from our students:
“…I therefore hate the corrupt,
slaveholding,
women-whipping,
cradle-plundering,
partial and hypocritical Christianity of the land…
I look upon it as the climax of all misnomers,
the boldest of all frauds, and the grossest of all libels.
Never was there a clearer case of
‘stealing the livery of the court of heaven to serve the devil in.’
I am filled with unutterable loathing
when I contemplate the religious pomp and show,
together with the horrible inconsistencies,
which every where surround me.
We have men-stealers for ministers,
women-whippers for missionaries, and
cradle-plunderers for church members...
The slave prison and the church stand near each other.
The clanking of fetters and the rattling of chains in the prison, and
the pious psalm and solemn prayer in the church, may be heard at the same time.
The dealers in the bodies of men erect their stand in the presence of the pulpit,
and they mutually help each other.
The dealer gives his blood-stained gold to support the pulpit,
and the pulpit, in return,
covers his infernal business with the garb of Christianity.
Here we have religion and robbery the allies of each other—
devils dressed in angels’ robes, and
hell presenting the semblance of paradise...”
The more I read, the more I was led to abhor and detest my enslavers.
I could regard them in no other light than a band of successful robbers,
who had left their homes, and gone to Africa, and stolen us from our homes,
and in a strange land reduced us to slavery.
I loathed them as being the meanest as well as the most wicked of men."
https://bookriot.com/frederick-douglass-quotes/
Or, from his speech, "What, to the Slave, is the Fourth of July?"
"This, for the purpose of this celebration, is the 4th of July. It is the birthday of your National Independence, and of your political freedom. This, to you, is what the Passover was to the emancipated people of God...
...Fellow-citizens, pardon me, allow me to ask,
why am I called upon to speak here to-day?
What have I, or those I represent, to do with your national independence?
...I say it with a sad sense of the disparity between us.
I am not included within the pale of this glorious anniversary!
Your high independence only reveals the immeasurable distance between us.
The blessings in which you, this day, rejoice, are not enjoyed in common.
The rich inheritance of justice, liberty, prosperity and independence,
bequeathed by your fathers,
is shared by you,
not by me.
The sunlight that brought life and healing to you, has brought stripes and death to me.
This Fourth of July is yours, not mine.
You may rejoice, I must mourn.
To drag a man in fetters into the grand illuminated temple of liberty, and
call upon him to join you in joyous anthems,
were inhuman mockery and sacrilegious irony.
Do you mean, citizens, to mock me, by asking me to speak to-day?
...Standing, there, identified with the American bondman, making his wrongs mine,
I do not hesitate to declare, with all my soul, that the character and conduct of this nation
never looked blacker to me than on this 4th of July!
Whether we turn to the declarations of the past, or to the professions of the present,
the conduct of the nation seems equally hideous and revolting.
America is false to the past,
false to the present, and
solemnly binds herself to be false to the future.
Standing with God and the crushed and bleeding slave on this occasion, I will,
in the name of humanity which is outraged,
in the name of liberty which is fettered,
in the name of the constitution and the Bible,
which are disregarded and trampled upon,
dare to call in question and to denounce, with all the emphasis I can command,
everything that serves to perpetuate slavery—the great sin and shame of America!
...But a religion which favors the rich against the poor;
which exalts the proud above the humble;
which divides mankind into two classes, tyrants and slaves;
which says to the man in chains, stay there; and to the oppressor, oppress on;
it is a religion which may be professed and enjoyed by all the robbers and enslavers of mankind;
it makes God a respecter of persons, denies his fatherhood of the race, and
tramples in the dust the great truth of the brotherhood of man.
All this we affirm to be true of the popular church,
and the popular worship of our land and nation—
a religion, a church, and a worship which, on the authority of inspired wisdom,
we pronounce to be an abomination in the sight of God.
https://www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/speeches-african-american-history/1852-frederick-douglass-what-slave-fourth-july/
There is so much in this speech that still needs to be heard and understood and heeded. Read the whole thing, again and again.
19 comments:
Marshal, you can't make unfounded, unsupported claims here. You can comment on Douglass' views or not.
For instance, if you want to comment, answer this: Douglass clearly recognized A. The evil and racism of US slavery and B. The evil of white leaders and churches promoting/defending/creating it.
Do you agree with that historical reality as described by Douglass?
You can answer the question or not.
Marshal said, in response to my question, "Yes, Douglass said that."
But that is NOT an answer to my question.
My question, again...
Do you agree with that historical reality as described by Douglass?
Saying, "Yes he said that..." answers the question, "Did Douglass say this?"
That was NOT my question.
Now Marshal is complaining that I deleted his response even though he "answered" my question. I have now demonstrated precisely why that is a false claim on Marshal's part.
Understand, Marshal?
It's an absurd question which for some certainly absurd reason you feel compelled to ask as if you have legitimate cause to question my position on the subject. You don't. You just need me to be a racist so you can feel morally superior. Why is that, Dan? You've yet to provide evidence which justifies such an attitude. To pretend my position on racial matters isn't clear is just another abject, intentional lie.
I'll leave this for now. For one thing, it shows that you YET AGAIN simply opted not to answer the question and you YET AGAIN made an empty claim.
WHY is it an absurd question?
Slavery is widely recognized as a great evil that was/has been devastating to the black survivors of slavery. As all slavery is devastating and deadly and a great atrocity. WHY is asking the question "absurd..."? I mean, for most people, I could see why it would be considered unnecessary, because OF COURSE slavery is a great evil. And OF COURSE the white men who created these policies were engaged in a great evil in doing so. It's almost an unneccessary question... EXCEPT that some people, like you, don't appear to be able to acknowledge the obvious:
DO YOU agree that US slavery was a great evil?
Do you agree that the white men who implemented these policies and allowed it to be legal were engaged in a great evil?
Do you agree that the white churches of the day (the majority of them, by all indications and at least according to Douglass who was there and in a position to know) were supporting a great evil instead of taking a strong stand against it?
I'm not saying ANYTHING about your racism or not. I'm just asking a reasonable question. That you can't/won't answer it DOES raise questions about your racism and your white fragility and THAT is precisely why it's not an absurd question.
I question your position on the subject because I quite literally don't know. You and Craig and your ilk regularly give vague, elusive non-answers when asked about slavery, rather than stating unequivocally that it was a great evil and the white men in gov't and churches and other leadership who defended and promoted it were engaged in a great evil. I ask because I do not know. That IS a reason to question your position on the subject. In fact, recently, you said on your post, and I quote,
"We know what we mean and if we don't, we ask directly. It looks sorta like this: "What did you mean when you said..." But you get all emotional because you're too stupid to understand or too embarrassed by your stupidity to ask."
I'm not embarrassed to say, I do not know what your position is and so I'm asking. Nothing stupid about the questions, nothing emotional about the questions, nothing absurd about the questions.
Now, if you want to comment here and not be indicted by your own words and your own dodging, non-answers, you will answer the questions or move on.
Marshal, you are not going to come here and just refuse to answer questions directly. Especially such an exceedingly simple question to answer for rational moral people.
I'm NOT asking you if you're racist. I'm asking if you agree that slavery is and was a great evil. I ask because I don't know your answer and I don't know precisely because you've refused to answer reasonable questions directly.
Anyone can see that you're going way out of your way to avoid answering a grade school simple question. And that probably tells us all we need to know.
YOU said if I didn't know, I should just ask directly. I've done so, repeatedly, and so shown you're being hopelessly hypocritical and deviant.
Marshal intuits - his capacity for "knowing" lags behind his gut - that if Mr Douglas is not on Marshal's side, then Marshal is on the wrong side. Marshal intuits - his powers of repression and erasure do not work so well on his god given conscience - that if MLK is not on Marshal's side, then Marshal is on the wrong side. And this is the MLK whose protests blocked traffic; severely hurt the livelihood of small business owners and entire cites; and sent children into harm's way and delayed their rescue so the white citizens of this nation could see its own hate. Marshal knows how he has lied about MLK. Marshal knows, too, what the wrong side has done: the raping, the lynching, the police executions; the sick-in-the-head lies about President Obama and all black leadership. So, Marshal erases the facts of the past and makes up myths about it that equally erase what black people stood for and said. He willfully blinds himself to what the wrong side is doing today. And this is nothing more than being a white man.
It is not our skin that makes us white. If it were, the Irish, Germans, Scandinavians, most Italians, most Spaniards, and Slavs would have been accepted as white people upon arrival. They were not. Not 6 million black folks fled north from southern terror did white politics need to expand the definition of who was white to almost all European descended people. (Under the 1924 Immigration Act that last for 40 years, Ukrainians and all Eastern Europeans were considered racially inferior.)
So, it is not our skin that makes us white: it is whether we are needed to prop up white power that makes us white. Hence, whiteness is fungible. And, so, the community's names for Clarence Thomas and Ben Carson and Candace Owens, et al. Whiteness is extendable when we want to extend it. It is not our skin that makes us white: whiteness serves power, and therefore, is a fake identity based on an ideology that justifies the power necessary to dispossess others of land and labor, life and limb, for our profit.
The exercise of that power has always, from the beginning, necessitated constant violence and brutality. White women have been subjugated to it. Poor white men have been subjugated to it. I'm sure, Dan, that you are too well familiar with the brutality shown by white society toward those you work with, seen as lesser when not. And at the top of the catalog of objects for white brutality are black folks and native folks.
A society is not sustainable, though, trying to live openly with violence and brutality without massive justifications that, themselves, become mythic: we need the narratives of authoritity that condone our violent, group identity. Between radical protestant theology and a gutter Enlightenment science, we told ourselves for generation after generation that we white people were the superior race and made Holy Scripture back that up.
So, the myths served and disseminated a psychology of whiteness which is a machinery of repression with an escalating ladder of strategies when we need them. Whiteness has a psychology, as any authoritarian, fake ideology using brutality over others would need.And Marshal and Craig and Stan and the fake bagpiper, and David, and all the rest, and even you and me, Dan, have that psychology.
When confronted with situations that make us begin to realize that we are on the wrong side, the morally losing side, we immediately begin to use our words strategically: we...
- dodge
- deflect
- divert
- deny
- prevaricate
- lie
- double down on the lie
- and eventually myth make - make up things
Never in our history has this weak, fragile, withering machinery of repression been under such stress and openly revealed its irrational gears than in the last six years. Mr Obama, and the rising joyful, resilient culture that is the humane and adaptive and holisitc and sensual (anti-radical protestant) culture that is blackness, both have brought about an epoch of pulling back the curtains on the cancer that is whiteness.
You're not wrong, Feodor.
Marshal, if you're not up to answering the reasonable questions put to you, here's an even easier one:
You literally did not answer my question (ie, "Yes he said that," is NOT an answer to, "Do you agree with Douglass on these points?" - it just literally is not). Can you acknowledge now that it's been so clearly pointed out that when you say you DID answer the question that, in fact, you didn't and it was a stupidly false claim to say you did answer it?
There's zero doubt as to this reality. The facts are the facts. Can you acknowledge you were just wrong?
Marshal said, in a now deleted comment because he STILL is being rude and not answering questions....
"As I've said, I refuse and will continue to refuse to answer your bullshit questions because of what asking them implies"
You're not understanding questions. I ask questions to get answers. Not to imply anything. You are free to waste time, words and energy and refuse to answer reasonable questions. But it's truly a waste of time, as your comments won't stay until you answer questions.
And your cowardly refusal to answer rational questions says a helluva lot.
What is it you fear so?
Marshal has no rational come back: just shocked white male offense. Truth makes them mumble and behold:
Marshal dodged
Marshal deflected
Marshal diverted
(Marshal skipped the denial - which requires addressing the content)
and Marshal rushed... as is his wont... right into childish mythmaking that pacifies his feverish mind.
Modern day Republicans would rather myth make about dead black men than relate to the living. And they would rather make a deal with Putin than Pelosi.
Marshal, you are utterly abject. Look it up.
Marshal, in a now-deleted comment because he STILL isn't answering any questions...
"The questions you're asking imply a belief by you about me or you wouldn't be compelled to ask them"
You keep saying things like this.
No. They don't.
They just don't.
I'm not suggesting anything. I do not know the answer that you would give to these questions. So, in order to get the answer, I'm asking the questions.
Just like YOU SAID we should do when we don't know the answers. I'm asking respectfully. I'm asking patiently.
I suspect that Feodor is right... You know what your answers will be suggesting and you don't want your answers to suggest what they will be suggesting. But your answers will probably perforce suggest such conclusions. But I can't know until you answer.. And you won't answer, probably, because you know What such an answer means.
But look at all the words and time you're wasting dodging the question instead of just answering reasonable, respectful questions.
Marshal keeps playing this game, saying he doesn't have to answer reasonable questions like these and telling me to guess, as if he's a third grade boy trying to coquettishly flirt.
Nonetheless, I literally do not know what he would say or how he would answer. Which is why, you know, I ask.
But here are some options.
1. Slavery and the racism that allowed it were were, of course, hideously evil And the white men and white churches just that instituted it we're engaged in a great evil.. Because, of course it is.
OR
2. While we recognize the great evil of slavery now, it was not a great evil, then, as it was more culturally acceptable back then (at least for those doing the enslaving.) Likewise, the white people then didn't realize how awful/evil their racism was, so, we shouldn't judge them too harshly. The racism and slavery ARE/WERE a great evil... but it was culturally accepted back then among many... so... sorta still evil but not really...
Something like that?
OR
3. No. It wasn't evil then, or racist. Yes, they thought black people were subhuman and thus, slavery was for the best... so it wasn't evil at all. After all, some black people had slaves... so it wasn't evil or racist.
Somehow.
I'm guessing your answer would have to be some version of one of these, but I literally do not know and that is why I ask.
Marshal... "You seem to think that implications are a matter of strict intention...hat one cannot imply what one didn't mean to imply. That's not only absolutely not true, it is most definitely not true here."
Reality... "Imply and infer are opposites, like a throw and a catch. To imply is to hint at something, but to infer is to make an educated guess. The speaker does the implying, and the listener does the inferring"
https://www.vocabulary.com/articles/chooseyourwords/imply-infer/#:~:text=Imply%20and%20infer%20are%20opposites,the%20listener%20does%20the%20inferring
Marshal doesn’t want to recognize your white man’s dictionary: it doesn’t support his beliefs.
That's pretty crazy. I literally showed him he was literally, definitionally wrong and he still denies reality. Go figure.
I delete, Marshal, because I have asked you to answer some specific questions and to not make unsupported claims. You saying, "You're misapplying the definition" is just you saying "nyu uh!" as if an empty claim means a damn thing. It don't.
I've been quite respectful and generous. You STILL can comment here. But only if you answer questions put to you, admit it when you can't/don't and support your claims with something beyond "nyu uh."
As few caveats:
- nearly all white abolitionists were northerners
- vast majority were women
- almost all abolitionists including christians, while abhorring slavery as inhuman, did not believe slaves to be equal in humanity
- slavers (owners, traders, almost all southern white people) argued from scripture that slavery was right for black people: it was god’s will - African American Readings of Paul by Lisa Bowens
https://www.patheos.com/blogs/euangelion/2020/11/lisa-bowens-on-african-american-readings-of-paul/
Facts are facts.
Oh, sorry, wrong post for my comment.
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