Washington, DC – There has been quite a lot of discussion about racism, critical race theory, and slavery as if all those things were the same. There used to be – maybe still are – little vignettes on Sesame Street about some things not being like the others. In the above instance, none of the things are like the others. Sadly, words are being used to mean so many different things that they mean nothing at all.
Slavery is the holding of a human being by another human being and their labor being forced without recompense. In the United States, that practice included extreme violence being used to enforce the status quo. Women were forced to carry children who would then be slaves themselves. This sort of breeding might have been consensual between individuals or a product of rape. Either way, the offspring were the property of the “owner.” Any slave could be sold or traded anywhere, thus dividing parents.
Today, there have been instances of slavery in which an employer holds a person against their Will and forces them to work. Often this occurs when the enslaved person is in the country without papers and threatened with immigration authorities, or in other cases, women or girls are held for sex. That is what slavery is.
Throughout world history, race had very little to do with who was enslaved. It had much more to do with who won the last battle. Racism in the United States grew out of one such war lost. To keep wealth distribution in the South as it was antebellum, it was a ploy to pit poor white folks against even poorer black folks, and thus was the fiction of race superiority born. One might be poor, but at least one was white. The same canard was used to keep women in whatever place men wanted them to be. Bible-toting men found all kinds of bits in the book to support women being kept down. The basis of both racism and sexism were dug out under rocks in the Bible and promulgated by the same sort of men who decided to kick churches out of the SBC because women were “pastors.” The Catholics supported those same sorts of men who stood up on Sunday and preached and diddled little kids the rest of the week. Nothing mattered, and still, nothing matters except maintaining the status quo.
The benighted governor of Florida credits slavery as an opportunity to gain skills, sort of like an apprenticeship. Of course, for the over two hundred years of slavery, this only applied to anyone who survived that apprenticeship after 1865.
“Critical Race Theory” is an academic viewpoint that studies the impact over two hundred years of being slaves and thus adding to the wealth of their owner and the subsequent years since 1865, during which the notion of racism undergirded laws and policies that systematically impeded non-white humans from accumulating property and wealth.
I write here not for those of you who already know the above content; please forgive me. However, please consider passing it along to those who, having read the first few lines, cursed me as, well, cursed me. Ignorance can be forgiven, but willful ignorance is a serious character flaw. Those among us who want to pretend that what occurred in the American colonies and the United States up until 1865 was not so bad or that people like Robert E. Lee and that whole traitorous bunch were heroes need to be relieved of their ignorance and if they still refuse, removed from anyplace where they can continue to spread their lies and confusion. That also applies to the basket of deplorables who support a thrice and counting unprincipled thug who is willing to destroy the entire country to protect his own fat …! It is stunning the level of sniveling sycophancy that we are being subjected to these days. Unless those sniveling individuals find some modicum of integrity in their tiny souls and cease to pretend that the former occupier of the presidency isn’t the loathsome pile of excrement they know him to be, then they should all be remanded to the anonymity they justly deserve and those in the media who allow them to snivel in public should stop doing so.
