Race Card Revisited: Recovery Starts With an Admission There is a Problem

My usual “fan club” was out in force last week. I really felt the love. Thank you for reading my essay with an open mind and weighing in with your comments. A simple re-cap; Slavery of Africans on US soil happened. Said slavery has had continuing negative repercussions to this day. Some of my die-hard “fans” decided to ignore those truths and focus on certain details that they felt somehow justified, rationalized, excused and or negated these two historical facts. I’ll repeat; Slavery of Africans on US soil happened. Said slavery has had continuing negative repercussions to this day. Zeroing in on, let’s say, when I pointed out Obama being attacked by the mentally challenged bigots in politics and elsewhere, someone snarked, “Your hero”. He might as well have called me an “Obama lover”. Obama is not my hero. I used his treatment as an example of the symptoms of our country’s diseased bigotry and lack of civility. I think I might have mentioned that recovery starts with an admission there is a problem.

I was accused of suffering from “white guilt” and called a white racist and a “libtard”. I did not write the piece to inflame people. I wrote it to hopefully encourage a constructive dialogue on, not only racism, but the general co-option of our country by the Corporate Pathocracy to the detriment of We, The People. Instead, as it turns out, my thoughts were taken as an affront/attack on White America, completely ignoring the thrust of my words.

I suggested that historically poor white and black slave had more in common than differences and the ruling class in the early eighteenth century was severely out numbered by them and feared uprising. Legitimate and respected historians have written extensively on this subject. It is not a conspiracy theory.

“There are many ways that human beings divide themselves up. Class is one, [and] gender, race, ethnicity. There’s a number of ways that people divide themselves up. And in early Virginia, race was a category that people recognized. Black people recognized difference, and sometimes, I would even argue, celebrated difference. But in this highly competitive, depressingly abusive world, poorer whites and poorer blacks — people who were marginalized in this system of dependent labor — oftentimes reached out to each other in ways that suggest that, at least in the first 50 or 60 years of Virginia, …people of African background and English background were able to work together in ways that, again, in later period of American history, were impossible.” Timothy H. Breen, William Smith Mason Professor of American History, Northwestern University

This information is meant to be encouraging and illustrate our commonality and how that commonality could be construed as a threat to the present day ruling class. As we squabble over essays in The Blue Paper right on up to squabbling over fabrications in Washington we hurt no one but ourselves.

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Alex Symington