“I need white people to stop pretending consent was possible during slavery. Stop lying to yourselves that those black cousins are the result of illicit love affairs & grasp that slaves could not say no. When consent is not an option, when you’re only seen as 3/5ths of a human being & you have no legal standing? You can’t say yes. I need white America to sit down for a sec. Look into the faces of black Americans with the same last names & figure it the fuck out. Our ancestors were raped by your ancestors. Regularly. Some of the kids were treated kindly. Most were not. They were sold. White mistresses punished the slaves for “tempting” master & congratulated themselves on that bloody work. Read the narratives. Not the cleaned up ones either. Read Incidents in The Life of A Slave Girl & understand that Mammy was a victim, not the one who loved you. She couldn’t care for her kids, couldn’t choose her husband or their father most of the time. She was a slave. Millions of people died on the Middle Passage. Millions more died here at the hands of your ancestors. Own that. Now you want to sing Kumbaya & keep oppressing our communities & erasing our contributions. Spare me the tired bullshit. Male slaves fared no better. There’s a long history of them being raped, tortured & killed too. That was slavery. Stop romanticizing it. Our children were fed to alligators as bait (feel free to look that up) died of starvation or exposure & that was slavery too. Yep, we were livestock & you use sickly livestock as bait. Stop watching Gone With The Wind & fantasizing about beautiful plantations if you can’t accept what happened on those plantations. House slaves had it better in the sense of access to food & possibly better treatment, but they were still slaves. 14 year old slave girls weren’t falling in love with the men who could beat them & everyone they loved to death. Read the tales of enslaved women who killed their children to spare them. Read about people beaten to death as an example. Sally Hemings could have left Jefferson in Paris. Of course her entire family was still in his power. And his “love”? Didn’t free her. Ever. Go look at the pictures of former slaves backs. Whipped until they bled & left to scar so they were maimed for life & couldn’t run. Also before you talk about the cleaned up narratives, remember that the people relating their stories knew lynching was always possible. Records of slavery were deliberately destroyed so that former owners wouldn’t have to pay anyone. That “peculiar institution” was generations of blood, pain, & terror. That’s what built America. Never forget that. Now stop talking about anyone’s white ancestors like they deserve the fucking credit for the success of people descended from slaves. American slavery began in 1619. June 19, 1865 was the last official day of slavery. Do the math on how long it takes to heal that wound. After slavery was officially over? Black codes & Jim Crow laws followed. America’s history of oppression is longer than that of freedom. Also before any dumb motherfuckers land in my mentions. I have a degree in history. I will read you to filth & bury you in sources. Trust & believe there is no country here for people who want to romanticize a system that is still grinding away at my community. All this fluffy fucking talk about American history to coddle white kids feelings & engender patriotism? You won’t get it here. My ancestors built this country, I served this country & I will tell the damned truth about this country. Don’t like it? Fuck you. Now let me get in my feelings about slavery before Africans were brought here. Because we weren’t the first people enslaved. We were deliberately sought out for our skill sets & resistance to disease. Know why we were resistant? We’d had contact for years. All of that “My ancestors never owned slaves so it has nothing to do with me?” Go look at those NDN ancestors again. See how many were free. While you’re in there checking that out? Look up those old country ancestors & see how many benefited from slavery indirectly. Also while we’re talking about NDN relatives? Yo, learn a name besides Cherokee. Better yet, learn about the genocidal tactics they faced. Look up immigrant groups becoming white in America. Find out who had to bleed so they could gain access to white privilege. Let’s really talk about the Red Summer of 1919 & how it wasn’t an unusual occurrence. Tulsa, Rosewood? They were just famous. Let’s talk about welfare & who could access it. Hell let’s talk about who is collecting more of it right now. Let’s talk about the primary beneficiaries of affirmative action (spoiler! White women!) & what it means to attack black people instead. Shit, let’s get into the Great Depression & the Great Recession & who is hurting the most financially through both. Let’s talk about conditions on reservations, in the inner city, & the violence faced by POC who try to leave those areas. Hell, let’s talk about why we don’t see shows that reflect the American population set in the past, present, or future. Go read Columbus’ diaries & see what “civilization” really meant to the people he encountered. For that matter go read up on King Leopold & the Congo. I’ll wait while you cry. That’s the thing about whiteness as a social construct in America. It’s not about white people, it’s about white power over others. When we’re talking about white privilege? We’re talking about what it takes to shape this society based on oppression. America is a young country with a lot of power because of genocide, slavery, & continuing oppression. Individuals build institutions. All of these conversations aren’t about bringing out white guilt, they’re about ending this institution developed over the generations. Also let’s be clear that America is sick with this ish across the political spectrum. It may manifest differently but it exists everywhere. Before I go, let me also suggest that people who are curious about anything I tweeted about take a tour through Google with terms. It’s not that I won’t answer questions, but there are books out there that I think everyone should read on slavery, whiteness, & America.”
