Netflix 9
At about 34 minutes in, an unidentified commentator, in reference to slavery, says "People want to erase American history as it truly was. White supremacy has been embedded in this country since its founding." While she narrates, we see images of some Founding Fathers and the number of slaves they owned. She describes American slavery and its history as filthy and as she does we see images of a dirty, neglected house front--folks, you can't make this shit up!
I have spent more time than I should wondering why such rhetoric as this appeals to people even when it is risibly false. The simplest answer is that the great majority of people don't think critically. Few who hear this postulate will take the basic step of evaluating its veracity, consider whether there actually are "people" who seek to suppress this history. And like all good propaganda it is vacuous and almost impossible to refute in its base iteration. There are about 8 billion people in this world, if you can find two who wish to erase this history then she is undeniably correct. However, directionally, it is nothing short of insane.
Most people don't think, they feel. If something resonates with them, pushes the right buttons, they will accept it without due contemplation. After the revolution in Russia, a group led by Lunacharsky, then Soviet head of education, tried to identify those buttons. They looked primarily at religious sentiment and tried to understand it with an eye towards channeling such spirit into socialist conviction. They became known as the God Builders, despite their atheism. In the church I was raised, that religious feeling was identified as the Holy Spirit. I early on rejected this interpretation, but I know that feeling. What this woman is saying induces, on a smaller scale, this same kind of cognitive preemption.
Bakunin wrote: "People go to church for the same reasons they go to a tavern: to stupefy themselves, to forget their misery, to imagine themselves, for a few minutes anyway, happy and free." Propaganda works in a similar way. The rudderless buffoonery offered by this commentator serves to stupefy, inoculate, provide some level of political comfort. Better a genial lie than an unpleasant truth. Lunacharsky never figured it out, and that's a shame.
The word "false" isn't strong enough to capture just how antithetical to the truth this woman's claim is. What anti-matter is to matter, her contention is to the truth, so then anti-truth. Who is trying to erase the history of slavery in the US? Not Netflix certainly. One would think that her presence in a documentary that will reach millions through mainstream media would suffice to convince her of the abject stupidity of her contention, but, alas, it doesn't.
For the benefit of my readers who do not live in the US, let me assure you that this history, far from being erased, is promoted everywhere. In America, there is no escaping the Great White Bogeyman Theory of History. In fact, it is the law. What is taught in schools at all levels is mandated by the government. To be an accredited institution of education, curricula must include the history of American slavery--and should. In order to get a high school diploma--basic education in the US which everyone gets--you have to pass a two-part survey of American history in which slavery and the myth of Black innocence will be taught. To receive a bachelor's degree, you must pass another, two-part, college-level American history class. Jim Snow is the official, state-funded, state-mandated racism of our time, and it is reinforced in many aspects of American culture, such as Netflix' Stamped. Her claim is simply mind-numbingly stupid, but it won't be recognized as such because we in America are indoctrinated from birth with this distorted history.
That Africans were willing partners in the slave trade, that they profited immensely, that just about all the slaves were captured by their fellow Blacks, that African mothers lulled their babies to sleep with boastful anecdotes about their success in the slave trade, that African tribe slaughtered African tribe to gain control of the sordid business, that African slavers crossed the Atlantic to defend slavery and deliver speeches such as "Slavery is an institution ordained by God," this is what has been erased. And it has been so that mediocrities like this woman can perpetuate the myths of White villainy and Black innocence. And why does our government mandate the regurgitation of these racist obscenities? Because government is the managerial arm of class rule. Race is a ruse. It's a fascist ploy. Race is class war in disguise.
She says that White supremacy has been embedded in this country since its founding. Indeed so, White supremacy was in effect by 1776, but this country was a colony for a century before the revolution, and it was during that period that White supremacy, with the aid of some rich Blacks who benefited from it, was created. It didn't pre-exist, and it didn't evolve naturally, it was enacted and enforced. It was made law, and every White person had to abide by it under pain of penalties which ranged from fines to whippings to exile from the colonies. Some Whites rebelled against the imposition of White supremacy, and suffered such consequences. Is this woman unaware of this history? Or is she trying to erase it? Or is she just in over her head? Whether the problem is one of ignorance, integrity, or intelligence, I leave to you, dear reader, to determine.
This woman gleefully states that this history is filthy. Indeed it is, so is the history of everything and everywhere else. So is the history of Africa. Spin the globe on your desk and throw a dart at it. If you strike land you strike filth. As Henry Ford, of all people, once said "History is one damnable thing after another." To suggest that the history of slavery in America is filthy, at least in this context, is to imply is that there is something uniquely foul about it, which is just more anti-truth. There are many people in the US, of all races, who believe that slavery here was somehow worse than elsewhere or in other eras, somehow more iniquitous. There are many people who quite erroneously believe that chattel slavery was invented in Virginia. I have made myself quite unpopular in some Left venues because whenever such inanities are voiced in my presence I correct them, and sometimes berate the offender in the name of anti-racism, and nobody likes having their favorite soapbox kicked out from under them. It's never fun when the rabbit has the gun.
I will ask "How was slavery in 17th century Virginia worse than in 13th century Bactria?" Inevitably, you get the deer-in-the-headlights look. The people who hold to the Jim Snow view that White people have been the most fiendish slavers in history invariably don't know anything about this history, and often don't wish to. They reproduce this racist filth because all that might refute has been "erased."
I too don't know much about the history of slavery. I'm an anarchist, determining which form of the abomination was the worst is not my mission--it's all anathema to me, it's all filthy. So slavery in Virginia may have been worse than in Bactria, I don't know. What I do know is that chattel slavery (as it is mistakenly called) was the global norm, not a White invention. So was lifelong slavery, although in many places, including the US, slaves could buy their freedom. I also know that slaves in Europe and America had legally recognized rights, and could and did take their owners to court, and in some famous cases they actually won. It is also fallacious that African slaves were domestics and not used in production; they were miners, herdsmen, tillers, and many were enslaved to blacksmiths, the latter holding great status and wealth in the Sahel.
American slavery was indeed filthy, so are the lies told about it and the people who tell them.
I have thus far resisted fighting fire with fire as one cannot defeat racism with racism. I object to racial argument, I reject the philosophy of race categorically. I reject the category of race categorically, and for all the reasons I've detailed in this review. However, I will make a racial argument here as since the day America's racial dialectics flipped, and we transitioned from Jim Crow to Jim Snow, from the institutionalized, ideological degradation of Black people to the institutionalized, ideological degradation of White people, the ceaseless shaming of White people has become the defining, one might say codifying, principle of American politics. Exposing the extraordinary hypocrisy of the shamers may help to defeat, or at least reduce, this racism. If it isn't clear: I am not a racist. I don't believe a fucking word of it! In fact, I believe that here, a quarter into century 21, one has to be an idiot--and, let's be honest, every race produces these in abundance--in order to even entertain a belief in racial inequality. Reverse the histories of peoples A and B, and the As will act and speak like Bs and Bs like As. I don't believe a fucking word of it! I do not support the argument which I will make below because it defines people by their racial classification and ignores the underlying, causative class dynamics. The TAST occurred because of profit, not racial ideology. That came later as a result of the pursuit of wealth. Elites in Europe and Africa acted like savages to obtain these profits. In both places, predatory economic relationships pre-existed. Small, aristocratic classes lived parasitically off the blood, sweat and tears of the common people. There is not a homeopathic whisp of doubt in my mind that it was these predatory economic relationships which enabled and impelled the slave trade, not race. Race is a ruse. Race is class war in disguise. Race is bullshit. I don't believe a fucking word of it. It was in 1971 when I concluded that race was a political smokescreen. In the intervening 55 years, I have not had a single second thought about it. I don't believe a fucking word of it.
I make the following argument because I want to throw this woman's filth back at her, in the hope that it may do some good. So, to play the racebot game by racebot rules:
What right do African-descended people have to complain about slavery? What hypocrisy! Nowhere on this planet was slavery more integral to the culture or more welcome. Slavery has never found a better home, or a people more willing to embrace it, to fight for it, than in Africa. Slavery existed everywhere, but nowhere were there people more willing to sell off there own people in horrific numbers as in Africa. What right do African-descended have to complain about slavery when in just about every case African slaves were captured and sold by fellow Africans?
And nowhere, nowhere! was slavery harder to expunge. The last nations on Earth to abolish the squalid practice were African, with Mauritania only banning the abomination in 1981. 1981! However, as in other African states, the new law wasn't enforced. It wasn't until 2007, fucking 2007!, that due to White pressure, slave ownership became an incarcerable offense. However, if human rights organization are to be believed, slavery is still going on in Mauritania, still going on in Africa.
And Africa is the last place on Earth where an elected official has risen to speak and defend slavery, to dismiss abolitionism as "European liberalism," and un-African.
By contrast, the first ban on slavery in Eurrope was in century 14, the last--excluding Turkey, which is barely in Europe and represents an atypical case--was 1886. Why are traditional African societies so committed to slavery? And what is the justification for the Blame-Whitey school of Africana studies?
European imperialists took pains to eliminate the noxious practice, but so great is the African affinity for slavery, so great the African devotion to the abomination, so great the Black African clamor for its restoration, that the colonizers had to relent. African compradors, the people with whom European imperialists dealt directly, were so outraged by having to pay their army of servants that England, to choose one example, in prudence acquiesced to their demands. In Nigeria, in 1901, the colonizers reluctantly passed an act which allowed certain Black heads of households to own slaves so long as they were only used in domestic service. A decade or so later, due to White pressure, the act was rescinded and the ban renewed.
What right do African-descended people have to point fingers? Blacks complaining about slavery is like the mafia complaining about crime. Africa is ground zero for slavery on this planet, its home. What right do the African-descended, of all people!, have to complain about slavery?
I apologize for the above, but please understand that this kind of race-bashing happens to White people in Jim Snow America all the time. It never ends. Stamped is a fine example. Selectively culling misdeeds from the history of a given people, as I have done above, and as continually happens to Whites in America, is a "filthy" racist thing to do. I engage it here solely to identify the pathology. Jim Snow engenders in all people, but particularly Black people, specifically those racist attitudes which are the bane of American radicalism and the greatest impediment to social progress.
Of course Black people have a right to complain about slavery, everybody should. The TAST and other such horrors are not due to the unique venality of this or that race. That's absurd and obscene. They are the product of inequitable class relationships, and they are not going to end until we put an end to them. That will require interracial and international cooperation, which is precisely what Jim Snow and Stamped from the Beginning are designed to prevent.
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