LRTs - Honestly, any time I think of the history of whiteness, I wonder about the evil done by my blood.
That discovery is horrifying, and Kim is right - whiteness will never grapple with these acts or confront them, just as it hasn't with lynching, slavery, genocide...
That discovery is horrifying, and Kim is right - whiteness will never grapple with these acts or confront them, just as it hasn't with lynching, slavery, genocide...
Reading about what Confederate soldiers did to "scare" enslaved blacks into staying in the South is horrifying, but it's something I NEVER read about until I went deliberately searching through primary sources.
16 years of school between primary and uni - not one word.
16 years of school between primary and uni - not one word.
If you told the average white person, especially in the south, the kinds of atrocities Confederates committed on the bodies of escaped black folks, they WOULD NOT BELIEVE YOU.
We like living in our bubble of comfortable deniability.
We like living in our bubble of comfortable deniability.
According to records, there were two men with my last name who surrendered at Appomattox.
My racist, white supremacist dad proudly displayed a "Sons of Confederate Soldiers" tag on his truck for years.
I have no idea if one of those two men is my ancestor, but I assume so.
My racist, white supremacist dad proudly displayed a "Sons of Confederate Soldiers" tag on his truck for years.
I have no idea if one of those two men is my ancestor, but I assume so.
Google isn't useful for finding anything more about either man, and I don't know the name of my great-grandfather, let alone my great-great (which an ancestor from the CW would likely be).
I assume these two privates in the Confederate army never did anything of note, but you know what? There were a whole lot of motherfuckers who "never did anything of note" except follow the most horrifying orders imaginable, so that doesn't exactly make me feel any better.
I would love to actually know if one (or both) of those two bastard privates was related to me - hell, they were probably brothers or cousins, given that they served in the same company.
(Un)fortunately, my access to family knowledge has been cut off by my so-called dad.
(Un)fortunately, my access to family knowledge has been cut off by my so-called dad.
Given how worthless ancestry.com was in researching it, though, I'm resigned to sitting in the knowledge that my ancestors were some evil fucking shits.
I've got some evil fucking shit in my blood. I've got complicity in genocide in my blood.
I've got some evil fucking shit in my blood. I've got complicity in genocide in my blood.
And even if you can't trace a straight line back to the bastards fighting to preserve slavery? If you're white, you almost certainly do, too.
It's not like the abolitionist side was a shining bastion of acceptance and equality.
Any group accepted into whiteness is complicit.
It's not like the abolitionist side was a shining bastion of acceptance and equality.
Any group accepted into whiteness is complicit.
We've got to start sitting with that and understanding that we can't just say, "I'm not like that."
"That" is literally what it means to be white.
Until whiteness as a concept is utterly annihilated, that is who we are.
Too many of us are happy to leave it that way.
"That" is literally what it means to be white.
Until whiteness as a concept is utterly annihilated, that is who we are.
Too many of us are happy to leave it that way.
If that got too depressing, white folks, well, too bad. I'm grumpy, have a mild headache, and I hate my blood.
Our history is fucked and full of complicity. Any time whiteness "concedes" rights to other groups, it's done grudgingly and with no culpability for the oppression.
Our history is fucked and full of complicity. Any time whiteness "concedes" rights to other groups, it's done grudgingly and with no culpability for the oppression.
(and "concedes" deserves those scare quotes. What rights have been given to other groups have been surrendered after pitched battles. Whiteness didn't "give" that shit to anyone - it had that shit beaten out of its bloody hands)
Since this thread is getting a lot more traction than I expected, this is the story, along with the next QT, that motivated the thread.
This thread is a hell of a lot more important than mine:
A teacher responded to my thread yesterday and made me think I should clarify:
At least in k-12, it is almost never the teacher's fault that kids don't learn about things that aren't on aptitude tests.
That's an administrative, legislative, and systemic shortfall.
At least in k-12, it is almost never the teacher's fault that kids don't learn about things that aren't on aptitude tests.
That's an administrative, legislative, and systemic shortfall.
But once you're in university? The teachers have a lot more leeway on what to teach. If they leave out the nasty parts (or the nasty parts that don't fit their narrative)? That falls a lot more on the teacher.
