a black who doesn't buy into slavery grievance

By An Old Friend

fri, apr 14, 2023 11:19 p.m.

a black who doesn't buy into slavery grievance

95 seconds:    https://twitter.com/WasiqUK/status/1645360042844082176

This is a natural opportunity to, once again, quote Roger Kimball's hyper-potent three paragraphs about slavery as a phony issue ... but the seed for the destruction of white civilization (worldwide, I think):

From "The Mob Comes for Madison" in the December 2022 New Criterion (https://newcriterion.com/issues/2023/1/the-mob-comes-for-madison)

If chattel slavery hadn't existed in the United States, the Left would have had to invent it. What we mean is that the idea of slavery has become so dear to the disciples of identity politics that without its moral sanction they would be lost. Absent the original sin of slavery, the entire racialist racket that holds our society hostage would sputter to an inglorious halt.

The race hustlers promoting "affirmative action" (i.e., race- or sex-based discrimination) would be out of business, as would the real-estate magnates and firebugs of black lives matter. Ditto the angry historical fantasists behind the 1619 project. Forget that most societies practiced slavery throughout history. Is anyone asking for "reparations" because their ancestors may have been enslaved by the Egyptians, the Persians, the Greeks, or the Romans?

Forget that slavery ended in the United States more than one hundred and fifty years ago because Abraham Lincoln prosecuted a brutal civil war to keep the country together and end the "peculiar institution," which was not peculiar at all. (When, by the way, will slavery end in islamic society, or india, or china?) The world has had numerous long-distance trades in slaves of different phenotypes. Most of the west african slaves who made their way to America were sold into servitude by black african slavers.

Those impolitic facts are what the Bolsheviks of old called "counterrevolutionary." That is, they are politically "false," even if empirically true. The wardens of wokeness tell us that they hate slavery and its legacy. Doubtless in one sense they do. But they are divided in their minds. They also cherish the historical fact of slavery. For one thing, they understand that it is their irrevocable meal ticket. They also perceive that it is an imperishable source of emotional power. Because it is a wound that can never heal, it is also a sin that White society can never expiate—which is why they tell the world that the legacy of slavery is ubiquitous and ineradicable. But if that were true, why should anyone have ever bothered to campaign against it? It would be like campaigning against the onset of night.

We understand that to ask such questions is to be guilty of "racism," the cardinal tort of our age whose almost aphrodisiac power is ultimately guaranteed by the inexhaustible well of victimhood that slavery, or the exploitation of the idea of slavery, has dug.

Martin Luther King Jr. famously dreamed that people would be judged by the content of their character, not the color of their skin. That is now regarded as a reactionary, indeed a racist sentiment. After all, to judge people by their character, by what they actually do, would upset the entire racialist concession. From now on, race is everything, character a dispensable epiphenomenon. And the ultimate power source, the inexhaustible kernel of animus that fuels the racialist requisition, is the historical accident of chattel slavery in the united states.

N.S.: Actually, the ultimate power source is the class hatred of the republican party.