Imagine you are taking an elderly relative who uses a cane -- a parent, a grandparent, whatever -- shopping at the mall. You decide to get something to eat at the food court. You park your relative at a table and go to pick up your order.
When you return, there’s a commotion going on at the table.
Your elderly relative, while putting their cane away, accidentally knocked over the drink of a kid sitting at the next table.
Do you:
- Ignore the kid’s complaint?
- Shrug it off and say “Stuff happens”?
- Tell the kid they doubtlessly spill lots of drinks themselves?
- Say it’s not your fault your relative knocked the drink over?
- Apologize to the kid but do nothing else?
- Compensate the kid by giving them the drink you just picked up?
Any answer other than (6) means you’re nothing but a sac of excrement.
There is not a single problem facing the United States of America today that was not (A) caused by white people, individually or in concert, acting to benefit themselves at the expense of others or (B) willfully ignoring the input of non-whites regarding the problem.
I’ve had people sneer at me, accusing me of feeling “white guilt” or “self-loathing”.
There’s a vast difference between guilt and responsibility.
Responsible people want the right thing to be done, regardless of how it affects them, and if circumstances prevent full justice, to at least acknowledge the wrong that was done and make efforts to prevent it from ever recurring.
Guilty people deny their guilt, coming up with excuses and blame shifting and constantly moving goal posts in order to avoid facing their responsibility.
And I feel loathing, all right, but it’s not self-directed.
Rather it’s targeted at people I am unfortunately grouped with who proudly, ignorantly cling to pure unadulterated evil and call it virtue.
We’ve discussed Prohibition before, but it’s as perfect an example of what we’re talking about as could be hoped for so let’s revisit it.
White Christian Protestant Americans, to keep those God damned sub-human Irish and Italians in place, pushed laws to ban the sale of alcohol in the form of wine and whiskey; to punish sub-human poor white trash, pushed laws to ban beer; to punish sub-human blacks and Mexicans, pushed laws to ban marijuana; to punish sub-human Asians, pushed laws to ban opium.[1]
Prohibition had nothing to do with ending a very real problem, but rather had everything to do with White Anglo-Saxon Protestants maintaining control over ”them”.
And in the process of keeping “those (sub-human) filth people” in line, we elevated small potatoes local gangs into international crime cartels; destroyed public confidence in law, police, and courts; allowed corruption on a heretofore unprecedented scale to infect our government; and did nothing to actually address a real problem but instead created a legion of new ones.[2]
A while back I reviewed a disgusting movie: Santa Fe Trail.
The only thing that can be said in its favor is that it is refreshingly candid in its brutal racial prejudice -- they come flat out and say that African-Americans should suffer pain, death, and degradation if it means white bigots don’t have to feel uncomfortable about themselves.
Screw that noise.
Just as we are responsible for what our elderly relative does at the food court for no other reason than they are related to us, then we are responsible for what white people in the past did to African-Americans and other minorities.
We can either see justice is done…
…or we can remain sacs of excrement.
[1] Despite the fact that the Asians had a handle on the opium trade until British merchants, denied the financial rewards of slavery by abolition, instigated the Opium Wars and forced the Far East to get involved in the sale and trafficking of that drug.
[2] One the other hand, Prohibition did make comic books and pulp magazines possible, so there’s that…