The above pictures one of my Azalea shrubs, with a tad of an evergreen shrub. From one perspective, it kind of looks like a lush forest. Pictures are like that. One interprets a picture from one’s knowledge and perspective. This Azalea is a testament to nature’s resiliency. In December of last year, there was a precipitous drop in temperature in a matter of hours. Most all my ornamental and evergreen shrubs survived, but as you can see the Azaleas marked their trauma. On many of the branches, one can see where the leafing begins, ends, and begins again. There were few blooms on the Azaleas this year because last year’s growth, where the trauma is, is where the blooms would have been. But next year, if no new trauma, the Azaleas will be covered in blooms.
We have always had our biscuit eaters, uncle toms, oreos, etc. They are the ones who coveted white approval and acceptance at the expense of themselves and those who looked like them. However, even before them, we had the African Mulattoes. I can’t tell if they were planned or an organic outcome of male traders who had sex with native African women. The African Mulattoes were crucial to the Slave trade. They were the agents of the white traders who negotiated with the tribal chiefs for men, women, and children to fill the holds of the traders’ ships. Whether planned or not, they used their white adjacency to benefit of the white traders. They were a part of the reason that the white slavers could wait in their ships offshore, safe from the mosquito born diseases and other tropical diseases that ravaged them when they ventured ashore.
I want you to know that the traders didn’t at first come for human cargo. They’re white. They wanted gold, ivory, etc. to feed their greed. But soon found that human cargo was more lucrative. There is no way that traders would have overlooked the Slave trade to the Middle East and, with the expansion to the western arena, cheap labor was needed. Traders are always looking for a market and the goods/services to take advantage of that market.
Now, in 2023, we have the Black apologists for slavery. I actually heard a Black male say that whites were smarter, better than Blacks. Even the interviewer, who was white, was astonished by this pronouncement. I couldn’t believe my ears. What bubble has this person created for himself? Did he realize what he was saying about himself? What he thought of himself? How and why do people like him have platforms to spread their skewed view of the world? Has this person not seen the barbaric hatred exhibited by whites at, for example, the integration of the Little Rock schools, at little Ruby’s integration of an elementary school, at the lynchings of innocent men and women… The non-civil behavior that entitled, narcissistic, beastly Karens and Kevins exhibit…even today? Has this person read or seen Oliver Twist which provides a peek into how that group of people treats its widows and orphans, while the favored gluttonously eats rich foods? It’s a fictional account of a very real mentality that is prevalent today.
If that person believes the Bible that man should have stewardship over this Earth, what of their stewardship? The lives of flora and fauna lost solely to feed their greed. The Earth has been raped for its mineral resources and depleted of its sustenance that provides the nutrients that plants uptake. Plants that provide less nourishment to us. The trees, the forests that we need for oxygen, cut down…sometimes for no reason….they’re in the way of development. We’ve determined there is a better use for the land…a use that will feed some one’s greed. Better? How has this Earth benefited from their stewardship? The latest I’ve heard is they’re searching for another planet to rape and pillage.
What is better about a group that exhibits jealousy/envy/anger when you prosper and then by virulent, malicious, unprovoked violence takes your prosperity…then blames you for not prospering? (Tulsa is just a prominent example.) I have always hated when people say that certain policies will cause all boats to rise. Well, if you have no boat, if an outside force is scuttling your boat…sorry, your boat will not rise…it will sink or flounder. Same with the bootstraps…do you have shoes? If there was parity, sameness…yes, there would be some truth, but where there is no parity, no sameness, those trite sayings rub salt in a deep, festering wound.
The Talented Tenth should be another group of us called out as white apologists. I read a book by a self-avowed member of the Talented Tenth and she was repeating all the tropes invented by whites to explain Black non-achievement. But, then, she was a Mulatto. (An aside…I got the impression that she was writing the book to express her love, in an undercover fashion, for a man she could not have. She was too complimentary in her admiration of this man.) The Talented Tenth was no friend to the rank and file Black, for they were more interested in promoting and benefiting from their perceived white adjacency than in the plight of the people they were using.
Blacks who are apologists appear to confuse facts with blame. They have, in effect, assigned a value to the facts that absolves the perpetrators and chastises and belittles the persons who have suffered the “facts”. If your own literature, pictures, paraphernalia say you did X and show how you did X…that is a fact and facts should be used to review and reflect on behavior and to hold one accountable, so that one can change bad behavior, either voluntarily or through societal means.
Whites of today always say they had nothing to do with Slavery. However, this is gaslighting. You see, whites must always be seen as individuals. So, in the white person’s mind, there is no accountability for the past or present actions of the group to which they belong. (Now, whites say the white individual’s bad behavior is a result of mental illness, therefore, the group has no responsibility.) That, of course, is not how they see anyone else. All others are part of a group and however whites’ view this other group is the manner in which the other individual is viewed. They are individuals; we are the group. They invented the group called “white” to benefit from the pillaging, rape, slavery, etc. that garnered riches for them. Before the invention of the umbrella “white”, they were land-based groups who had little use for each other. To this day, the invented group benefits from the past machinations that enriched them. In their minds, that’s the way it should be because “I” the individual did not actually participate in those past events. However, the group is made of individuals and the individuals of the group bear responsibility for the group dynamics that perpetuate bad behavior. Isn’t that what whites tell us every chance they get?
This is 2023. Slavery, via the 13th amendment, was abolished in 1865. (Except as punishment for a crime.) As of that date, there has been an onslaught of white brutality against Blacks that has not ceased. But to put it in context for those who think 1865 was so long ago…it’s been 158 years of hell for Black people in this country. (An aside…I knew my great grandmother. She lived to be over 100 years old. Her parents were born before 1865.) De facto slavery, with de jure sanctioning, until the Civil Right Act of 1964. That’s been only 59 years. During that 59 years, economic and legal oppression, along with continuing white barbarism, have been societally sanctioned against Black people. Where has been the respite?
I now understand why Africans do not consider themselves to be Black. In their country, everyone is a shade of brown…color is not important…tribal affiliation is how they denote difference. It’s only when there is white interference, as in the Rwandan situation, that color, phenotypical differences, etc. become a differentiating factor. I remember my confusion at the Rwandan genocide. I would look at the pictures and I couldn’t tell the difference between the tribes. One tribe’s nose is slimmer than the other tribe’s? I suppose it’s a matter of what one is trained to see.
I saw a movie a long time ago and it made the point that if the brain has nothing to compare an object to, the brain doesn’t process the image. You literally cannot see the object. I don’t know how true that is because when I see something I haven’t seen before, I study it until the something resolves into an object, etc. I can relate it to. In the example set forth in the movie, only one person could resolve the object into a knowable something…only one person could step outside the bubble of their normalcy.
So, I understand when a person who looks like me says they are not Black. Black is a reference to us, the descendants of Slaves, in the United States. We have been called many names, but I’ve always liked Black, because it was the opposite of white. Don’t want to be anything like them. However, when they who are of a tribe, come to the United States, they find that the whites do not differentiate. Whites look solely at color. And, when the ones who are of a tribe are here in the United States…guess what…they are treated like us. It’s a lesson that stuns them and they try so very hard to escape their color, but white people when they are on a killing rampage do not care if you speak with an accent or that you belong to a tribe.
When a person changes affiliation, apparently the person feels they have something to prove, so they become a fanatic of the chosen affiliation. One sees that when a person changes political party and one sees it when a group is anointed with whiteness. The persons who are some of the worst perpetrators of the destruction of this democracy are the descendants of immigrants who were not considered white. And some of those immigrants came from countries that were the homes of ideologies that subjugated and killed millions. Now, those immigrants’ descendants are touting those failed ideologies here.
It’s sad. I have recently found out that we have probably lost any hope of contact with a branch of our family. They have joined a church that does not allow contact with those who are not of that church. So, we have lost branches of family on both sides, maternal and paternal, to this church. I don’t understand the attraction. The church’s own prophecies, predictions, and tenets have been proven wrong more than once. What does it take for people to realize that religion, created and executed by man, will never provide certainty? If that is what one craves in life. The quest for certainty breeds disappointment and, in some, insanity. I grieve the loss of the information that they may have about our family.
Don’t you love the word “gobsmacked”? That’s how I feel when I see and hear what some people do in public. When I was growing up, one had a public persona that was not necessarily one’s private, at home persona. I guess we had a family and personal reputation to uphold. Now…reputation…who cares?
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