Well, who shipped in the slaves and killed off the Indians? White People.
This is a really strange
narrative as we call them these days. But for a moment consider it not as a statement of simple fact but as an ideological armament. What is one to take away from it? A series of things really.
Number 1 is a sense of guilt that one is instructed, in a way, to internalize against oneself. But wait! This means that a given white person must (is there a choice offered?) bring this guilt into the core of the self and 'show remorse'. So, unless one could retort against the assertion that I and any given white person must feel remorse, regret and guilt, there is no choice: one must
become guilty.
Number 2 is that a 'guilty person' loses the right to have rights. So another function of guilt-slinging -- in this case a guilt-slinging based out of the structure of certain managed historical narratives -- is to be rendered powerless, or in any case stripped of a certain quantity of the power necessary to decide matters and even perhaps to engage in opinions and ideas in regard to those matters. So the function of the accusation is to achieve 'disempowerment' in those nefarious 'white people' who are at the core not only of the world's problems, but are a source of the
ontological malevolence I have mentioned in other places. This is important to understand. It is sort of a fancy term for existential evil but it means, quite literally, that white people are allied with this 'evil'.
It is a form of
postmodern demonism.
Number 3 is that the "You brought us here as slaves!" is a deadly accusation because it is in no sense just a simple statement of fact (and it is certainly a fact that Africans were enslaved in America and throughout the New World). Because it is 'absolutely true' there is no defense against the ancillary accusations and, if you will, damnations that are associated with it. So what this leads to is a monumental "I will hold you responsible!" and I will use this as a tool to, effectively, lord it over you on a moral level. Additionally, all my failings, if I do fail, can always be assigned to you -- you white people, source of ontological malevolence, oppressor, colonizer and (of course) patriarchal oppressor.
You are evil = Your system is evil as well.
But there is of course a retort to all of this, but it is not a 'pretty' one. Because some, certainly not all, but some African-Americans are so bound to this narrative-as-tool, the 'reality' of what happened to them, and therefore what is (still) happening to them is based on the notion "You robbed me from the shores of Africa!" and you roped me into a world not my own.
But the essential retort must therefore be: "But through this you have become you!" You are no longer that 'primitive African' who did not have even written language nor even used the wheel. Just as you say that your enslavement is the source of your ontological situation, it is just as possible to say that through that you have been given, you have received, uncountable value. On one side is 'deficit' but on the other is 'gain'. It becomes a question of perspective but also of choice.
It is not hard to see that entire narrative of 'African oppression' is inextricably bound up with the
ressentiment I have referred to often. It is an entirely complex relationship to a very complex issue.
Ressentiment is
profoundly psychological.
But here is an important point: It cannot be denied that Blacks had an oppressed status. This was inevitable in a sense given the *anthropology* of the day. Africans were totally primitive and totally barbarian (used in the former anthropological and ethnological sense). And their enslavement brought them into a totally new world of possibilities.
So what I am doing here is *looking* at these issues in very different ways. I am demonstrating alternatives to the rather sick and also disempowering narratives and the way they function. Anyone can do the same.
Finally, these 'narratives of oppression' were turned into some of the most bizarre, but also deadly, activist-armaments in the post-Sixties. Postcolonialism, postmodern theory, critical theory, radical feminist theory and activism, Queer Theory and Oppression Theory, and
New Breath for Old Marxism -- these ideas are held and handled by lunatics. It is really, or nearly, that simple.
The doctor is in!
These ideas are held and handled by
lunatics. They have to be stopped. And in this sense dismantled and, to use one of their terms, deconstructed.
Calamity: I have defined your task for the next 10 years!