America: it's not us, it's YOU

Every now and again, I'll see a meme and it will remind me clearly why I generally can't stand 'em. The oversimplifications are always breathtaking. Take this popular one for example........

I feel like there are facts of history, you remember those? facts, that should be unchangeable. Their siginificance may certainly be open to interpretation, but the facts themselves remain whatever they are. They are incontrovertible. Sadly, that's not where we are these days. Were that the case in these Untied States (yeah, I said "untied"), this meme and the thinking behind it, would not exist. Since the meme does exist somebody's gotta try to explain why it's stupid. Enter Elle. It's a dirty job, but somebody's gotta do it. I'm volunteering.
So here's my explanation:

The meme is right about one thing, and one thing only: no White person alive today ever owned a slave. Absolutely correct. Go to the head of the class. That aside however, every last White person alive today has benefited directly from the enslavement of Black people. And no, no Black person alive today was ever a slave, but generations of post-Emancipation re-enslavement (have you seen 13th?) have served plenty of us up on a platter to exploitative state and county systems. 

So stop trying to obfuscate reality by wailing, "Slavery is over, let's move on!" and talking foolishness about not "living in the past". That's not what this is about and you know it. And if you don’t, your head is firmly embedded in your posterior and there are doctors who can help you with that. I cannot.

Moving on.

This battle that we're fighting against the alt-Reich, a greatly revitalized neo-Nazism and their various symbiotes isn't exclusively about enslavement. Certainly, there was a period when the primary battlefield was the plantation and the cause célèbre was the lawful - if clearly immoral - enslavement of millions, but that was never the sole battlefield. 

What folk refuse to acknowledge when they create, post and endorse asshatted memes such as this is that enslavement was only a part of the story. The greater part of the story is the hatred of all things Black, all things ‘other’. Anti-Blackness, it's a thing. Look it up. 

Anti-Blackness and anti-otherness are the themes that enlivened Native genocide; African enslavement; the Knights of the KKK; the Confederacy; and twentieth century confederacy apologists. Anti-Blackness, and anti-otherness more broadly, are the philosophies that underpinned every law I cited in earlier writing (see We Ugly As Hell), they are the philosophies that caused us to codify ignorance and bigotry (and to continue doing so), and they are the philosophies that most threaten who and what the Founding Fathers dreamed America could be.

In every instance where we have a flare up of racial ugliness, at the heart of it is anti-Black/anti-brown/anti-other sentiment. Oh, and White insecurities. Oh and White push back against "others'" progress because of those insecurities. A large part of the performance of American Whiteness is terror that they who have sowed the wind will finally reap the whirlwind. I guess those insecurities really aren't so unreasonable.

Policing Black feelings and demanding that POC 'get over' enslavement is hardly the issue. The issue is that ytfolx need to 'get over' their disdain for Blackness, their DNA-level disgust with non-whiteness and get a grip on the ugliness that they have done or that has been done to secure their wealth and privilege. The sooner performative American White privilege gets about the business of working vigorously to dismantle said privilege, the sooner all of us will be able to breathe more freely.

In this relationship, the problem ain’t us no matter how much some would like to pretend that it is. It's not us America, it's YOU.