A friend of mine wrote the following, on FB, and I feel it’s worth sharing:
“1. You are your ancestors, and every strength, weakness, advantage or disadvantage you have in life is put there by the chain of lives behind you – genetically, socially, emotionally, financially.
2. That does not mean you have to drown in some incapacitating “white guilt” as some sort of punishment, but it *does* imply that the present is wholly determined by the past. That shouldn’t be a tough idea to get. And if that’s the case, I would say it does incur some responsibility to *see it*. Own it. Transform it. Write your bit of that narrative.
3. Don’t make excuses for the actions of your dead who shaped the world we inherit. I’m not even American. It’s not even directly my dead, or at least not as acutely as some people, but my ancestors are still bound up in it. I still take responsibility for the tracks of it, and that’s not any “liberal” self-flagellation shit. It’s fight an uncomfortable, difficult, challenging battle for a better future shit, and you’re either in that game or you’re not.
4. There’s no such thing as the “white race”. My people would fight you for confusing them with people from south of the river Tyne, never mind the complex cultural drift that shaped the US. It’s not a thing. The idea of “whiteness” was constructed specifically as a divide and conquer strategy for preventing enslaved Africans from forming alliances with “lower order” Europeans to start rebellions in the early colonies. Which happened a fair bit, and was a real threat to the entrenched European powers who were ultimately behind colonization. You can read up on that history easily enough. It worked and is still working. Don’t buy into that slave master bullshit.
5. BUT, don’t try and flip that into any false equivalency shite about “Irish slaves” or whatever. It’s not hard to read up on any of this history, and the differences between forced labour and chattel slavery are not difficult to grasp. The impact of chattel slavery can clearly be traced to present day social and economic realities – and that’s the thing to remain focused upon in these sorts of discussions.
6. Take one on the fucking chin. Don’t be so precious about Wypepo memes. Don’t be that fucking guy. Own it. Be better.“
Being better
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