White People Are Hopeless
Sometimes admitting to your situation is cathartic and insightful, other times it is this…
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You may think I have given up on White people by the content of this article’s title. Before I answer that question in my on way, I wanted to provide Whites the ability to redeem themselves. I cannot say this will be an easy task, but I am sure you will consider it with an open heart, fertile mind, and an accepting embrace of the truth of your sorry judgement, lack of positive engagement, and for your personal worsening of our skin color predicament.
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First, I must say. Wow, Whitey! You are commended for taking all that on so willingly. It is almost like White antiracist hopefulness is ascendant… While fabricating this wholly inaccurate mirage is repulsive, it gives me the same ignorance of bliss feeling that our racist commissions and omissions have for hundreds of years. Shoot! We even let our supposed christian preachers make up shit about slavery, and many of us swallowed that stupid shit hook all the way down to our flatulence-fulminating, gullible gullets.
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It is staggering how much we do not know about our history because who wants to know the truth? The truth hurts. While the truth also can be healthy, healing, and happy, if it is always about the happy, you know it is not the truth. American Exceptionalism is built on partial truths, nice happy crap half truths that is, not on TRUTH as a through line. Ironically, you can never be very exceptional if you deny truth, in its full form.
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Ever heard the concept of failure is your best teacher, or something to that effect? Great inventors, entrepreneurs, business moguls, and their paid puppets and pandering pundits have spouted this nonsense for years. I call the failure concept nonsense not because it has little truth in it, but that it is absent from most of their talk about our nation. Conservative Republicans talk in a swagger about business, but fear our failure as a government of the people. Not getting into our failures as a nation shows that fear. But how can we go to the next level without understanding our failures? We cannot.
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Therefore, Americans hardly ever go to the next level in our social project, due to not truthfully reevaluating the failures in our uniting policies. We sputter. We triangulate. We obfuscate, avoid, and inflate the value of our begrudged, mostly lateral moves. What kind of business enterprise was successful doing things that way in the 19th century, let alone today in the 21st century?! We are thoroughly debauched in our ability to take on such truth and reconciliation problems.
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Why is that? There is something deeply contradictory and hypocritical in our accessing of knowledge. Our diving and dividing into factions including Federalists, and Anti-Federalists, North and South, liberal and conservative red states and blue states, the coasts and flyover land, among many others, have put us at odds with truth delving and telling. No one, or side is better than the others except in our recalcitrance in learning the truths about how our country treated certain people, and are treating certain people.
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As a person of Irish heritage, on my mom’s O’Connell side, we were certain people for two reasons. We were only certain people for a short time, compared to African Americans born into slavery. We were indentured servants for a couple decades, Irish Not Hired Here signs showed up for a while in some cities, and we got the shit jobs for a few more decades. Besides our employment, the Irish, that were also Catholics like my mom’s family, got the bum’s rush or sometimes worse early on, in locations, on occasions, and in stations of life and work until the mid 20th century. However, both the Irish and catholicism red-flags of hostility all faded without much of any residue of racial, ethnic, or religious hate remaining in most areas of work, and life in the nation.
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Of course, in some areas it was never much of a problem. Any Irish person, if their accent was suppressed, could always escape behind the color line drawn by White Americans. This means their fight against discrimination would never be a long term fight. Even from day one, they could have set up a colony or state of mostly Irish catholics, like many protestant denominations did, whereas Black Americans could not have done such a thing. This brings to an end the fallacy that the Irish were slaves like Africans were slaves, which was for many, many generations before and after the Irish came in droves. Most Irish immigrants never even came here as indentured servants. Initially the Irish were treated more like poor whites in the South.
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The apples and oranges comparisons like “Yeah, but the Irish were slaves too, and they made it out, so why can’t Africans” were squished down into apploranges is another half truth spreading mechanism created by those who fear any deep review of our failures. Another fallacy was “if slavery was so bad, why didn’t they ever try to escape, or fight back, or….” Yet, there were many escapes, and a number of major uprisings. And it was not like the slave owners sat around, and did nothing to prevent such occurrences.
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Slaves who were thought to be causing problems that may foment rebellion were often sold to slave owners deeper in the South. Others were beaten into physical or mental paralytics. Some were summarily murdered. The most obvious affront to such lies was the Fugitive Slave Act. How did Blacks supposedly lack so much intelligence, fortitude, and work ethic that required the federal government to create a f’ing law to retrieve them? Yet these slight tweaks of reality by deniers of our harsh history toward people of color are part of the lives-threatening game played by truth obfuscation practitioners.
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The idea of mental deficiencies was another lie employed to disguise the abuses of slavery, and the terrible treatment of Black Americans in general. “They were better off here as slaves than in Africa”, or “Without us Whites, Blacks would not be able to survive, and thrive like they do here under our tutelage.” That we whites for a minute said this kind of garbage is sad indeed, let alone believed it, proves we could be fooled into thinking other stupid shit. The Bell Curve bookis a more recent example of that kind of foolishness, read the counter narrative essay, The Smell Curve.
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These inhuman inspired harmful and hateful dissembling statements by slave owners, sciency books by white supremacists, and religious justifications for slavery and the treatment of Black Americans will, must, and had to, be developed. Otherwise their apologist efforts were more easily uncovered for what they are, which is sadistic, difference denigration, and unadulterated hate, merely due to a person’s skin color. It is hard to be hopeful when certain people still insist on perpetuating such lies, and perpetrating such hate.
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Those people who want us to believe there is no hate based on skin color that is still systemic in America, also avoid looking at other truths. That includes not facing the harmful realities that unrestrained capitalism metes out. Additionally, how simplistic and ill-advised wars on American communists, drugs, and terror, as well as against many faux foes around the world, have weakened our international power, and our internal core. All of these failure denials and coverups have made a mockery of our (supposed) ideals.
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Our “conflicts” in the Philippines, Puerto Rico, Korea, Vietnam, Chile, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Guatemala, Cuba, Iraq, Yemen, and other fake wars cannot be dealt with correctly in our textbooks because it may offend an ahistorically bent “patriot”. The Indian wars, conflicts, massacres, treatment of, and treaties is a whole other White cracker laden with hate and death.
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If White Americans cannot face its distant past, how can it take on its ever changing future? For example, our problem with guns is buried so deep in the past, on a tiny scrap of fading parchment, that it is verboten even to discuss changes, let alone update it or refine it around the edges. This obsession with the past in these areas, where time must be frozen in place has become fetishized and intractable. The violent and precarious past can speak in perpetuity for today, and it must be augmented for more horrific violence perpetrated by just one person. As Patrick Half-Truth Henry said, Give an armory to every American, and give them multiple deaths!
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Therefore, finding truth is limited to the pristine and whitewashed parts of it. No nation can improve significantly with that kind of airbrushed and constrained inspection. Peripherals like technology can improve, but not the core of our being, and all of its potential for human flourishing. Instead, as our gun numbers increase, and we fail to seek the truth about our past, as well as our present, our nation is continually reduced to hating skin color differences, killing with lone wolf abandon, and undermining democracy.
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Wasting Lives, When Truth Lies Fallow.
We have wasted millions of lives due to our restraint on truth discovery. I read two books in the last week about W.D. Lyons (in the book Conviction) and The Lost Eleven, soldiers from WWII. These 12 Black Americans died without ever getting the justice they deserved. If stories like this were unique, it would be one thing, but they are the very tiny tip of a massive iceberg of injustice that we have never come to terms with. Coming to terms would mean a sea change in our attitudes. Something that would reverberate with fear into those who, via willful ignorance or not, raise the apocryphal flag of pristine American Exceptionalism.
Editor's note: Now more than 76 years since, one of the U.S. Army Garrison Benelux community members wrote this article…www.army.mil
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The 11 Black soldiers of the 333rd Field Artillery Battalion, were run over, shot multiple times, and stabbed, and likely suffered minutes or hours before dying. The brutal, savage torture and killing was done by 1st SS Panzer Division soldiers in December 1944, and was forgotten by the American government. In 1994 a Belgium citizen, Hermann Langer held a memorial for the men; it was his father who first reported the deaths to the U.S. military in 1945. Hermann was just 10 years-old when he made friends with the soldiers, the same day of their vile murders. The child also found their bodies in February as the snow thawed. These men had valiantly fought in the Battle of the Bulge, saving hundreds if not thousands of American troops. The 11, who were considered the top artillery unit in all of the army, and their mates, were also featured in Yank Magazine in 1944.
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W.D. Lyons may have been the Malcolm X and Martin Luther King of all male civil rights leaders. Yet, we let him rot in prison for 20 years for murders he did not commit. The town sheriff caught the original killers, who quickly admitted to the three murders. However, these White men were not convenient enough for the governor, prison warden, local DA, and sheriff. The White confessors had escaped from a very low security prison, low security for the White inmates that is. Most of the White townspeople were convinced it was those inmates who killed the family, before and after Lyons was a suspect and sentenced. Because the warden and governor would look bad for the lax environment they allowed, the killer had to be a non-prisoner, and a Black person, being it was 1940 Jim Crow Oklahoma.
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Even with the help of the national NAACP and their lawyer, Thurgood Marshall, (who would become a Supreme Court Justice in 1967) Lyons was still not able to get the Supreme Court to overturn the ruling of the lower court, or send his case back for a new trial. Lyons was beaten within an inch of his life once, and beaten again to verify his confession. When he went to prison in 1940, where he stayed for one year before his trial began, yes in prison, he was barely able to write a few words and his name.
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After his case was taken over by Marshall, Lyons began writing short notes to those involved in his case. After being in prison about four years, he wrote his magnum opus, and pièce de résistance that was as eloquent, passionate, and groundbreaking as anything that Malcolm X or MLK ever expressed. And Lyons wrote it about 15 years before most anyone knew about those other two great Black men of the 1950s and 60s.
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The 11 soldiers were lost to history for over 50 years, and they would never have a chance to experience America without Jim Crow, because it remained in the U.S. military while they served. W.B. Lyons hoped Marshall could get him released, but sometime after the last appeal failed in June 1944, and getting paroled in 1961, the prison stay crushed him. This innocent, by a million miles, man came home broken, bitter, and angry, dying alone, and forgotten as well.
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The Supreme Court Justices ruled in favor of a White man, about a month before they ruled against Lyons. He was beaten viciously while the DA watched, and interrogated him. The White man, Ashcraft, was “only” kept awake for 36 hours, and never assaulted. The case law was basically the same, the viciousness dramatically disparate, yet two dangerously divergent rulings! Color of skin is the only reason for the difference, period. Another of many non-uniform rulings by the systemically American “Exceptional” white supremacist court system.
Check out this great listen on Audible.com. On New Year's Eve, 1939, a horrific triple murder occurred in rural…www.audible.com
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Conclusion.
There is no hope for White people, if we cannot dig deeper, and see what we have done in the past. Unless we do, we will not solve the future. If we push it off on our ancestors, we are as weak and feeble as they were to do anything about the travesties and tragedies noted above, and the negative occurrences happening all around them, before and after them.
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Consider the through line for those incidents, not just how their lives ended, most every harm that befell Lyons and the WWII soldiers, from day one, was preordained by how Whites perceived the color of their skin. The process of their demise was devised, driven, and delivered via White supremacy, especially the White American version.
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Are we hopelessly in the grip of that fear of truth discovery? I hope not. But hope is also not enough. We need fortitude, passion, action, eloquence, guts for groundbreaking work, and stamina to survive as long as we can to do as much as possible to make the future good and true.
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Those of White Privilege…
You are not serving a potential life sentence in prison for being wrongly accused of three murders, and been beaten unmercifully to admit to it!
You are not a 3rd class citizen that must fight for your country as if you had the same freedom as the White Privileged who sent you to war, yet you do it gallantly and powerfully too. Then you suffer the most horrible torturous death, for a country that did not believe you could do what you did, and finally the supposed Exceptional nation forgets about you for 50+ f’ing years!
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Now #NeverForget that Truth, Whitey. Or will seeking the truth about our past and present hurt too much, and happy crap half truth days will be your retreat?
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White Americans cannot shake off their White Privilege anymore than Black Americans can eliminate on their own the bigotry, prejudice, and discrimination that Whites subject them to.
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Epilogue: Please do not think I merely cherrypicked the two stories about Black Americans, featured above. I actually stumbled onto them, had never heard of either until a month ago. I consumed a more recent story of an investigative reporter in 1960s to 1980s New Jersey; I had only heard about his story last month. The Audible book title is Hardy/Friedland. David Hardy was a journalist who got totally White privileged screwed out of his fame and fortune merely due to his skin color. He attacked government corruption like no one else ever has.
David Hardy passed away suddenly Jan. 14, 2011, at the age of 68. The funeral is on Thursday at 11 a.m. in Rose of…obits.nj.com
In addition, I have consumed many other books that tell multiple stories of Black lives destroyed. There is a tidal wave of these atrocities by White America, and White Americans. The numbers of stories are qualitatively and quantitatively greater than the harms and hurts Whites in America have ever encountered. I also still have much to seek out and learn. Finally, it does not end in some historical fog created by the truth fearing. The consistent through line of systemic racism is obvious if you dare to look in the direction of unadulterated truth.
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