Netflix 13
About 40 minutes in, Kendi: "White enslavers tried to cover up their sexual assaults of Black women."
This is more of the same nonsense, and racist nonsense. Did Black enslavers publicize their depravities? And, if it were legal to rape in the colonies/states, why would enslavers of any color try to conceal their sexual abuses if there were no legal consequences to be faced? Slavery, over time, became almost fully racialized, so in the end Black enslavers lost access to White enslaved/indentured women, but initially they had it, do Kendi and the other "experts" in Stamped believe that no Black slaver sexually assaulted White women? If they do they are racists imbeciles, if not there goes their thesis. We'll never know what they believe because Stamped isn't "a definitive history" by any means, and the thousands of American Black slavers and their sexual assaults remain cloaked in silence.
Kendi's comment is racist not only for omitting the Black rapist, but also because he paints all the White enslavers with the same brush. Anti-slavery sentiment is new in human history, and pro-slavery sentiment still exists. One need only look at how impossibly difficult it has been to eliminate the accursed practice in Africa. The latest anti-slavery legislation anywhere was passed in Mauritania only 17 years ago! Good people of all races owned and/or traded slaves. However incongruous that may sound, however challenging it may be to accept, it is nonetheless true, and there is an important lesson to be learned from it. Human beings are extremely suggestible, inordinately malleable. One can argue for the existence of a fixed, common, infrangible, human morality, but you are not going to find it in the pages of history books, certainly you won't encounter it in the African slave supermarkets of Quidah, Goree or Dahomey.
It is facile, stupid, and simply inaccurate to see slave owners as universally evil. It is postulated that Mansa Musa (Emperor Moses), of the Empire of Mali, was the greatest slave owner in history. It seems to be generally held by contemporary African historians that he was in the main kind to them. Contradictory? Yes, to us in our time, but, crucially, both of those things might be true! In the colonies/states, there are many examples of White enslavers sending their Black slaves to universities--and no, not just the ones they fathered. In at least one case with which I'm familiar, to vacation in Europe. Some of our species' great moralists and religious leaders, such as the Buddha, Confucius, and the Prophet Muhammad, taught that slave owners had a responsibility to their slaves and encouraged kindness, but none of the aforesaid were opposed to slavery as an institution. Can we now, in a pique of presentist self-glorification, dismiss these three as frauds? Say that they were evil men?
Jesus was surrounded by slavery and never mentioned it, at least not according to his four biographers. Nothing is ever static. It is reckless and improvident to say "White enslavers tried to cover up their sexual assaults of Black women." There were both White and Black enslavers who were cruel to their female slaves and White and Black enslavers who were gentle and kind to the women in their charge. It is racist and stupid to characterize all White slave owners this way and to omit from consideration the thousands of Black slave owners and the thousands and thousands of slave women over whom they had control.
What's important here, the hyper-racialized narrative's value as class-war agitprop, is in its negation of the class dynamics. With the plow came surplus and a class which established hegemony over it. A ruling class emerged by virtue of its control over the labor force and its ability to extract wealth from its productive capacity. Slave labor begins, and with it the age of the sword.
Those historical forces which created slavery all those millennia ago, and which preserved it as a method of labor management, are still in effect. We still live in the age of the sword. All this insipid fetishism about race and sex serve to obscure the real cause of slavery which is economic exploitation. Slavery is gone, not because our species has become more moral--ridiculous!--but because in an industrial society slave labor has lost its utility. In the US, the "free labor" pathos of the anti-slavery forces of the North was championed and funded largely by the railroad interests. Its rise was occasioned by the growth of the iron/steel industry which came into existence in America as a result of Thomas Jefferson's Embargo Act. Slavery didn't come to these shores because White people are less ethical than other races--preposterous, or because White men couldn't wait to get their lecherous hands on Black women. This is racist nonsense, whose purpose is to obscure that plutocracy remains in effect. The class that rose to power those many millennia ago are still here, still empowered, they still rule us. In fact, Kendi receives funding from the current crop of plutocrats. Among those the steel/railroad/petroleum concerns eventually brought to unprecedented affluence and power by the abolition of slavery was the Standard Oil Company and its cutthroat owner, John D. Rockefeller. Namesake and founder of the Rockefeller Foundation, which was the greatest contributor to Kendi's Center for Antiracist Research.
Gee, what a coincidence.
And just in case you didn't get the propaganda message, Stamped trots out the one and only Jennifer L. Morgan to deliver the money shot. As images of a debauched White man ravishing Harriet Jacobs appear on screen, we hear Morgan in reference to slavery insisting that had not Harriet Jacobs told her story, "We wouldn't understand this system, which was allegedly about work."
Let us pause to reflect on the stupidity of what is being said. I will discuss this topic in a future part as stupidity is an important part of counterrevolution. It's a weapon, whose use is discussed in the FBI's counterinsurgency manual. For now, let's just acknowledge what race and race theory has done to this poor woman's brain. There are three important propagandistic themes in play here.
1) The racist depiction of White men. All are portrayed as undifferentiated, one-dimensional, rapacious predators, and no effort is made to humanize them. This is as racist and offensive as it could be. I've talked about this at length, so I'll leave it here. Imagine the uproar if, as in Birth of a Nation, about which Blacks have rightfully complained for a century, a Black man appears on screen raping a White woman. That's what Stamped is, it's the updated, Jim Snow version of the Jim Crow Birth of a Nation.
2) There is a millennia-old tradition of slaves being used for sex. When the woman is enslaved for the purpose, it has a name: concubinage. I cannot imagine a dumber assertion than if we didn't have Jacob's book (which is quite good), that we wouldn't understand that slave owners of all races can and sometimes do take sexual advantage of their slaves. What to say about this? My god! Look at what race has done to this poor racebot's brain.
3) American slavery, at least, wasn't about profit, it was about the White man's insatiable lust for Black women. There you have it, the mother of all inanities.
This one even surprised me. Stamped had been hinting at it, but I didn't think anyone would leave the protective shell of plausible deniability and come out and say it. I was wrong.
It's amazing as there are a good many people, many of them Black, who argue that the profits derived from American slavery constituted the primitive accumulation which funded the industrial revolution, and some of those are seeking reparations based on this claim. Indeed, various schools of economic and/or revolutionary thought, such as Third Worldism, Dependency Theory, Global Systems Theory, to name a few, suggest and depend upon this being the case. However, apparently Morgan doesn't agree. The real reasons White men plied the seas to purchase slaves was to get their prurient hands on those irresistible Black women. It wasn't all the money they were making, it was that dark skin that just drove them mad with carnal passion. No! It wasn't greed--it was libido.
Unbelievable, simply unbelievable. I wonder why Black slave women were made to labor at all given that's not the real reason they were purchased.
There are some revolutionaries who believe that we are in the late stages of capitalism. I'd love to believe this, but find it difficult. However, if this is all the bourgeoisie has, then maybe it's true. Maybe they are running out of discursive ammunition, and the ends draws nigh. This is pretty desperate stuff. I imagine even the most uninformed and unintelligent among us would find Morgan's thesis hard to swallow.
Slavery in the Americas was lucrative. The profit gained from the cultivation of cane, tobacco and cotton were nothing short of staggering. If you are, heaven help you, tempted to believe Morgan's overheated nonsense, you might read Slavery and Capitalism, Empire of Cotton, or the Black Jacobins. There's a universe of literature on the subject now, but those are the best I've read.
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