The western construct of time is a stressful invention and one doesn’t realize its negative affect on one’s life until one is freed of its constraints. Now that I am retired, every day…time is my own. Today, it rained. Rain days are weeding days, searching for pop-ups, listening to the rain, the thunder….watching the flashes of lightning, dealing with power outages, repurposing plastic jugs by filling them with rain water. When I was working, unless there was a tornado and the sirens blared…I rarely knew of the machinations of Mother Nature.
Affirmative Action helped me get my foot in the door, but I had to perform. When I was in the work force, once hired…the least reason to terminate. So, if one survived in the work force, one did so because of performance. Supervisors liked employees who performed and made them look good, so they could receive their bonuses. Same in school…where I went to school, there was so-called blind grading. So, theoretically, the professor had no idea whose test they were grading. I never felt I was negatively assessed because of affirmative action. Maybe, because I knew that most of the white women in the work force in certain positions were there because of affirmative action.
I think this misogynistic country has decided that white women were outpacing white males in many previously male dominated fields and is attempting to turn back the clock. This racist, misogynistic country had decided long ago that it did not want Blacks in too many positions of power and the policies condoned by the laws and courts of this country have always tended toward fewer is better. (That is the reason many work environments are lonely stressful territories for the lone “Other”.)
The Supreme Court has opined there should be no race-based affirmative action. In a way, it’s laughable. Every program intended to redress the horrors this country has inflicted on the true descendants of Slaves has been hijacked by the whites to benefit either a group of themselves or a group they have deemed white adjacent. Affirmative Action was no different.
As long as Affirmative Action did not help too many Black people…whites grumbled and used it to absolve themselves of guilt of past and present acts of discrimination. But like anything else….whites must be the ones who benefit from any government expenditure/benefit. As the book Dying of Whiteness said (paraphrased)…If I the white can’t have all the benefit, then there will be no benefit for anyone. What I have never understood is how anyone with any intellect can state with a straight face that the Constitution, when written, was race neutral or, for that matter, class neutral. The Constitution was written by white, English, land-owning males for their benefit. All men created equal meant all white, English males who owned land were created equal. If you want to be an originalist or strict constructionist…be honest. Black Slaves were considered 3/5 of a human being so the southern, white, English males could maintain power over their northern counterparts. In the 18th Century, what would become the United States was agrarian. An agrarian society requires cheap labor. In England, the cheap labor was supplied by the class that was bonded to the land.
The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were when the group that we know of as “white” really came into being. In the sixteenth century, the laws pertaining to generational chattel slavery were passed that distinguished between indentured servitude and chattel slavery. It appears to me that the Constitution was a means of creating a class society based upon the country of their forefathers, i.e., England. There would be the landed white males with all the wealth and political power, there would be the landless white males to carry out the orders of this upper class, white women would be the property of the males, and then there would be the Slaves…the equivalent of the ones bonded to the land. It appears that indentured servants were too expensive for the needs of the agrarians and, because the indentured servants looked like them, they could not be as well controlled.
The whites did enslave the Natives, but they were susceptible to the diseases endemic to the whites and they knew the territory. They were too much trouble to control, so eradication would be their fate.
Stream of consciousness…I have to add this here. Some white male said that Blacks should be grateful to white people for fighting the Civil War. Grateful? For what? Lincoln said…if he could save the Union by not freeing a Slave, he would; and if he could save the Union by freeing every Slave or some of the Slaves, he would. When the poor white males in the North who made up the conscriptions rebelled and refused to serve, only then were Black males permitted to fight. (Note: white males with money could pay poor white males to fight for them.) Then, they were not paid what the white soldiers were paid and refused all payment until they were paid fairly. They were sent into hopeless battles, the Rules of War did not apply to them, and they were slaughtered by the southern rebels. Grateful? My great great grandfather enlisted in the Union Army and fought in the Civil War, as did many other Black males. President Lincoln thanked them for their service because without their sacrificial bodies, the North would not have won when it did.
Because the Civil War had become a war of attrition. The English and the French decided that it was not in their interest to interfere. So which side had the manpower and the accoutrements of war to outlast the other? Sherman was correct in his thinking…scorched earth. The South couldn’t feed itself, much less fight a war, especially with no foreign aid. The North, even though industrialization was in its infancy, with the addition of the Colored Infantry, had the upper hand.
This is where the apologists say Blacks fought for the South, they owned Slaves…yada…yada…yada. There was one all Black unit (probably more, but I’ve read about this unit) that was fighting for the South, until it was safe for them to join the Union. Hypocrites, opportunists…they decided they were better off fighting for the Union as soon as the opportunity arose. The Slaves who accompanied their owners didn’t have a choice and they were not given weapons. They did the scutwork, just as they had done on the plantation.
Yes, some Blacks owned slaves. There have always been white adjacent Blacks. However, some Blacks bought their relatives. As many people that walk this Earth, that is how many stories there are. What’s a play on the old saying…one monkey, does not a troop make?
I just read the 14th amendment…Sections 2 and 3, would, in my opinion, apply to the January 6th uprising and to what is happening across the South and other States mired in white supremacy. However, Section 4 appears to say that there will be no payment for the emancipation of a slave, yet I have seen records where payment for Slaves was requested from the Federal government and I understand some claims were paid.
So, to get back to affirmative action. They think they’ve won. But they are dealing with a people who speak with a forked tongue on the crooked path they walk. When they see the legacy admissions increase, the poor white boy who won the cowpoke rodeo competition in some dusty western state admitted, the recruitment of players for sports that no one ever heard of..there will probably be fewer of them. I don’t know if they believe their own rhetoric. The United States has never been a meritocracy. The United States doesn’t care about your character, unless you’re a minority and then you are supposed to have some nebulous something they call character. (Which you will never have as the definition will change from nano-second to nano-second.)
Why do you think there were the scandals where the parents paid mega-money for their non-qualified offspring to attend prestigious universities? This country is about the money…greed. If your goal was to assist white supremacists in ensuring that fewer Blacks have less access to the opportunities for which they are qualified, then you succeeded. Whoopee. Most white people love you. Let’s see what their love does for you.
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