Netflix 10
Since this review has grown so long, I'd like to recap the main topics.
In my youth, there were two great myths surrounding Africa and Africans. These existed in a time when The Great White Benefactor was the official, state-sponsored racism in America
1) The myth of African backwardness. That is that Africans, on their own, could not progress beyond tribalism, that Black Africa was a land without a history, one which never produced any advanced civilizations.
I looked into this and learned that this was quite obviously, conspicuously false.
2) The myth of Black innocence in the TAST, American slavery and attendant injustices. It was widely believed, and astonishingly still is, that the TAST was something Europe did to Africa, White people victimizing Blacks. The deception went that Europeans fanned out across Africa kidnapping millions of Black people.
As my research had shown me that African backwardness was a myth, that same research revealed that Black Africans, far from being innocent victims of the slave trade, were its indispensable perpetrators. Without massive African participation--they were the slave catchers and suppliers--the TAST does not occur.
The two myths create a capacious racial divide. African backwardness gives to Whites a belief in their intellectual superiority, their greater urbanity, and African innocence bestows upon Africans a claim to moral superiority and anoints them with the sanctity of faultless victimhood. Both foster enmity, and that is the plutocratic goal--mutual racial antagonism, a divided workforce.
For reasons previously discussed, The Great White Benefactor was no longer tenable, now is introduced The Great White Bogeyman Theory of History. This is a sea change in American racism, at least the state-sponsored kind, which occurred in the 1960s. African backwardness is now cashiered with the Benefactor (good riddance to them both), but the myth of African innocence is retained. It was tolerable as racist propaganda under the Benefactor as White involvement in Black Africa purported to be beneficial for the Africans, false and absurd as that is. The Great White Benefactor was there to bring the gift of civilization as an antidote for African backwardness and to help the poor little Black insophisticates make their way in a complex modern world for which they were hopelessly ill-equipped. However risible and difficult to believe it is today, this was the racist propaganda in the time of the Benefactor. It was the official state racism of my youth.
When the Bogeyman replaced the Benefactor, it was quite a shock. Everything White had been good, now everything White was bad. Whites were responsible for all the great things which had happened in the world, now Whites were solely to blame for all its horrors. With the demise of the Benefactor, there was a danger that racism might perish, which is why the myth of African innocence was retained and the Bogeyman rolled out. His function is to preserve division in the general population and maintain the mutual racial antagonism in the proletariat which sustains the ruling class. It does so by berating Whites with tales of atrocities, real and imagined, committed by people of the White race. The goal is to weaponize guilt. If you are White in Bogeyman America, you are barraged with reminders of your race's alleged profligacy. The world is a mess, and its all your fault. The important element here is the preservation of the racial narrative. The narrative changed, but, crucially, it retains its racial character. The world is a mess, and a race is to blame, which is an irreducibly racist idea, and one which is the basis of fascist thought.
However unlikely, this sentiment is nearly universally held, even in allegedly anti-racist circles. Here in the racedom, we have had multiple instances in which Black CRT teachers have told White kids that there was slavery in America because White people are unethical. [ See examples here ] On another occasion, a Black teacher told a mixed-race class that it was a shameful thing to be White. One or more White students mentioned this to their parents who were duly outraged and complained to the school. Hideously bad enough as that is, calls for these Black racist teachers to be fired were widely opposed by the African American racebot media community. While some, like Briahna Joy Gray, acknowledged that perhaps these teachers were guilty of "overreach," they insisted that the offenders shouldn't be fired, just made to stop saying that specific thing. Worse still, there were Black media figures who defended the racist claims. White people are unethical, insisted Marc Lamont Hill. Inevitably, those White parents who persisted that they didn't want their children taught by people who hate them were accused of (a one, a two, a one, two, three, four) White supremacy.
This is what it means to be White in Jim Snow America, and, befitting its purpose, it engenders resentment of Black people, certainly for those Blacks foul enough to think it's okay to humiliate White kids in this way. If you love your kids you hate the people who abuse them. Mutual racial antagonism, mission accomplished.
Let that sink in. The Black descendants of the Black people who kidnapped their fellow Blacks in their millions and sold them into slavery are pointing their fingers at the White descendants of the Whites who purchased said slaves and are accusing them of being unethical.
Introduction to Jim Snow racism, 101.
If a White racist teacher had told Black kids that it was a shameful thing to be Black there would be no controversy. That teacher would immediately be fired, social media would be ablaze with indignation, there would be countless news items full of solemn hand-wringing and dolorous head shaking about the evils of racism. We would have heard about it in Stamped from the Beginning.
Suppressed remains the real history of the TAST, the integral role Blacks played in the development of chattel slavery in America, in its racialization, its perpetuation, how Black slave owners fought abolitionism, materially supported the Confederacy etc., and later how the Black bourgeoisie tolerated and at some junctures supported segregation, actively suppressed workers' unions and were generally as reactionary as their White counterparts. You will never read about this in those same textbooks where you will encounter the Great White Bogeyman doing the same.
This is the new racism: Jim Snow, the Bogeyman etc., and this anti-White racism serves the same function as the old anti-Black racism. It divides the population racially, and keeps the relationship between them troubled and fraught. And this is what Stamped is doing. It's hammering on all the Jim Snow talking points, and reinforcing the fake history required to maintain the racial narrative and that antagonism which is its purpose.
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