Bradly Mason Profile picture
Aug 23, 2019 11 tweets 2 min read Read on X
Frederick Douglass, 100 years before Critical Race Theory:

"During all the years of their bondage, the slave master had a direct interest in discrediting the personality of those he held as property. Every man who had a thousand dollars so invested had a thousand reasons ...1/
2/ "...for painting the black man as fit only for slavery. Having made him the companion of horses and mules, he naturally sought to justify himself by assuming that the Negro was not much better than a mule. The holders of twenty hundred million dollars’ worth of property ...
3/ "...in human chattels procured the means of influencing press, pulpit, and politician, and through these instrumentalities they belittled our virtues and magnified our vices, and have made us odious in the eyes of the world. …
4/ "Out of the depths of slavery has come this prejudice and this color line. It is broad enough and black enough to explain all the malign influences which assail the newly emancipated millions to-day.
5/ "In reply to this argument it will perhaps be said that the Negro has no slavery now to contend with, and that having been free during the last sixteen years, he ought by this time to have contradicted the degrading qualities which slavery formerly ascribed to him.
6/ "All very true as to the letter, but utterly false as to the spirit. Slavery is indeed gone, but its shadow still lingers over the country and poisons more or less the moral atmosphere of all sections of the republic.
7/ "The money motive for assailing the negro which slavery represented is indeed absent, but love of power and dominion, strengthened by two centuries of irresponsible power, still remains.
8/ "… [T]his prejudice really has nothing whatever to do with race or color, and that it has its motive and mainspring in some other source with which the mere facts of color and race have nothing to do. …
9/ "The office of color in the color line is a very plain and subordinate one. It simply advertises the objects of oppression, insult, and persecution. It is not the maddening liquor, but the black letters on the sign telling the world where it may be had.
10/ "It is not the hated Quaker, but the broad brim and the plain coat. It is not the hateful Cain, but the mark by which he is known. The color is innocent enough, but things with which it is coupled make it hated.
11/11 "Slavery, ignorance, stupidity, servility, poverty, dependence, are undesirable conditions. When these shall cease to be coupled with color, there will be no color line drawn."

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Jul 27, 2023
On a more serious note, this is part and parcel of what Carles Mills has called the "epistemology of ignorance," necessary for the maintenance of the Racial Contract.

If interested, the following long quote will clarify. 1/ Image
2/ "[O]n matters related to race, the Racial Contract prescribes for its signatories an inverted epistemology, an epistemology of ignorance, a particular pattern of localized and global cognitive dysfunctions (which are psychologically and socially functional), producing the
3/ "ironic outcome that whites will in general be unable to understand the world they themselves have made. Part of what it means to be constructed as “white” (the metamorphosis of the sociopolitical contract), part of what it requires to achieve Whiteness, successfully to become
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The sooner you realize the whole "Christian" masculinity cult, with their broader theology and ideology, is just a conscious or unconscious justification for controlling, manipulating, and exploiting women as sex slaves, the sooner you'll understand the movement.

They didn't 1/
2/ think their way through rigorous study into their theology/ideology and then realize that women happen to be subordinate receptors of their abuse, as some might think. No, that was the demiurge of the whole movement. The ideology is the justificatory effect, not the cause.
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Jan 15, 2023
Rev. Dr. King on his own death:

"If any of you are around when I have to meet my day, I don’t want a long funeral. And if you get somebody to deliver the eulogy, tell them not to talk too long. And every now and then I wonder what I want them to say. Tell them not to mention 1/
2/ "that I have a Nobel Peace Prize—that isn’t important. Tell them not to mention that I have three or four hundred other awards—that’s not important. Tell them not to mention where I went to school. I’d like somebody to mention that day that Martin Luther King, Jr., tried to
3/ "give his life serving others.

I’d like for somebody to say that day that Martin Luther King, Jr., tried to love somebody. I want you to say that day that I tried to be right on the war question. I want you to be able to say that day that I did try to feed the hungry. And I
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Rev. Dr. King on power:

"One of the greatest problems of history is that the concepts of love and power are usually contrasted as polar opposites. Love is identified with a resignation of power and power with a denial of love. It was this misinterpretation that caused 1/
2/ "Nietzsche, the philosopher of the “will to power,” to reject the Christian concept of love. It was this same misinterpretation which induced Christian theologians to reject Nietzsche’s philosophy of the “will to power” in the name of the Christian idea of love. What is needed
3/ "is a realization that power without love is reckless and abusive and that love without power is sentimental and anemic. Power at its best is love implementing the demands of justice. Justice at its best is love correcting everything that stands against love.
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Rev. Dr. King on Marx:

"In short, I read Marx as I read all of the influential historical thinkers—from a dialectical point of view, combining a partial yes and a partial no. Insofar as Marx posited a metaphysical materialism, an ethical relativism, and a strangulating 1/
2/ "totalitarianism, I responded with an unambiguous “no”; but insofar as he pointed to weaknesses of traditional capitalism, contributed to the growth of a definite self-consciousness in the masses, and challenged the social conscience of the Christian churches, I responded with
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What's so odd to me about the way these Christian Nationalists talk about voting rights is that there is literally no mention of voting or democracy anywhere in the Bible. Nowhere. Nothing. The ideas that created our democracy (yes, I know, democratic republic) were products 1/
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3/ because they were believed to lack this capacity (for one BS reason or another). The franchise was not curtailed because of Bible this, or Bible that, or Biblical definition of "household," or whatever. Again, the Bible literally says nothing about voting or democracy, which
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