I am baffled when I hear people say that no African Americans today were slaves, so the slavery history of their ancestors is not relevant. If this is what you believe... I assume it must mean you had an excellent childhood with one or two functional fully healthy parents. Because if anyone has been raised by a parent with a history of severe childhood trauma, you know that severe childhood trauma gets passed along generation to generation. So what gives? How do you see the situation differently from the perspective I'm offering? Thank you!
1) you can focus your energy on talking about something that happened to your great great great great grandparents and trauma you incurred because of it Or 2) use the resources available to you in 21st century to overcome the “trauma” and succeed in life in whichever way you see fit.
For the individual, absolutely, this is the only way to go. Totally unhelpful to dwell on trauma and disadvantages. But when you look at the collective, how is this useful? I see an entire subculture mostly trapped in poverty and hell.
Let’s say “trapped in poverty and hell” for African Americans is somehow a result of ancestors being enslaved, the segregation and racism, etc. Then how do you explain white poverty? Not just in US, but elsewhere in the world? A subculture is a collective of individuals who share certain view of the world, beliefs. You can have a subculture of believing in oppression, or subculture of empowerment.
I don’t follow the intent of this post. Are you suggesting that childhood traumas are somehow related to slavery?
Slavery stamped generations with intense childhood trauma. Forced separation from parents, rape, humiliation.
I bet it did impact those who experienced it firsthand. It must have been tough to have been ‘sold’ and shipped across an ocean by people with the same skin color as you. To claim that one’s DNA, or psyche, has been imprinted with these hardships hundreds of years later seems a dubious claim at best.
It’s used to play victim and blame difficult situations on a nonexistent inequality. As a black man, I am able to freely go where I please. If I don’t like my company, I can leave it. I can go anywhere another race can. (Not klan meetings, though). To sit here and blame my hard ships on the fact that I don’t have every single chance at a good life in comparison to any other citizen due to being black is asinine. So slavery blew, but it has no bearing on life today.
Well said!
The problem is that they use this argument as a shield to hide behind like a coward for political reasons. You act like blacks were the only ones enslaved. You also assume that all blacks would agree with you. Both are totally wrong.
If I were black I wouldn't agree with me. It's not helpful to see oneself as a victim, it's not helpful to dwell on hardships! But what shield are you referring to?
Slavery has a legacy, but the reasons for black poverty in the US are material - not only passed-on trauma and certainly not “culture” or any of the victim-blaming done by politicians of both parties. 1. Jobs: In the mid-century, tons of black people migrated from the south to cities where they fought for 20+ years to be allowed into non-service jobs (rather than being restricted to nannies and porters etc). Just when black workers started being able to get good jobs in manufacturing, urban industry moved to the US south or more remote suburbs where newer facilities could be built on cheaper land. 2. Housing Redlining existed a generation or two ago. This restricted where black people could live - generally by train tracks or docs. When industry left the home values plummeted because what good is housing for industrial workers when the plants all move away leaving pollution and joblessness wastelands. Without the same restrictions most white people had more equity and could move to the suburbs to follow the jobs. Black people, however, lost home value from redlining and de-industrialization and also faced discrimination because it was wildly believed (even after redlining) in the housing industry that black people themselves drop home values (not, you know, being restricted to living in a certain area that has basically gone through a localized depression). So black people generally could not build up equity which other manufacturing workers used to send their kids to college. 3. War on crime In the context of urban depression in the 70s, instead of job programs or support, cities cut social spending and restricted welfare programs and neglected schools and whatnot. Meanwhile they increased policing and sentencing (a bi-partisan effort) and the federal government incentivized policies of police basically going around and searching people until they found someone with a gun or drugs. Cities dealt with urban de-industrialization by basically locking up the surplus workforce. This hurt all poor people but poor African Americans most acutely (with native Americans or Latinos being the main target in more rural areas). ... All of this is not to downplay the lasting negative legacies of slavery in the US in general - the whole concept of white supremacy was created to justify slavery and post-civil war repression of blacks... and we still see these arguments today. But I think the reasons for black urban poverty are much much more recent and concrete. Housing, jobs, and urban policy reasons for African American poverty are just “inconvenient truths” for politicians in an age of austerity and neoliberalism because dealing with systemic things like this means that they would have to go against their whole ideology of helping the rich while telling workers to “pull themselves up by their bootstraps”. When the boot of housing policy, the government and the police is on your neck, no amount of pulling on it will lift you up - you have to get the boot off of you before anything else.
Thanks for taking the time to share these details.
I didn’t intend for it to be that long 😭
« Birth of a Nation » Artist: Michael Doughty https://www.instagram.com/Morethanmiked/
Stop being a whiner. Fucking 200 years of slavery and OH SO OPPRESSED. Join my ancestors out in the Siberian steppe where it’s nothing but cold starvation, cold warfare or cold slavery for 3000 years. They even named slavery after the Slavs for god sakes, and do you see them complaining?
My grandparents went through World War 2. My grandmother's pregnant sister was killed in front of her eyes (she was 5). My grandparent's father and three brother's were killed at war. He was 12 at the time. Oh, and Russia had slavery too until 1800s. My ancestors were slaves too. And there was also another world war early 1900. And repressions from the socialistic regime. In 1930s. Killed millions of people. This is a completely different scale than slavery in U.S. And Russians are kind of messed up by it. But one of the things I see there is that they refuse to be victims. My grandparents tried hard not to pass their trauma on my parents. And my parents tried hard not to pass it on us. Every generation heals and "improves", if you wish. What happens in US is I think AA are being told that they are victims. And even though their circumstances weren't nearly as severe, the perception and self perception is very different.
Nobody likes to view themselves as victims but I think this is a straw-argument. Were civil rights movements victims? When you are trying to change an ongoing problem is it being a victim? Or is it trying to no longer be victimized.
You make a very interesting point. Thank you for sharing your story. I think you have a strong argument that my view on this situation is counterproductive and actually helping to keep American blacks oppressed.
Kinda jumping to conclusions, don’t ya think?
Dude you need to explain to thinking. We are coming from a totally different set of assumptions.
Your thinking and assumptions are biased and wrong