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Thread: Negress Redux

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    Thailand Expat tomcat's Avatar
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    Negress Redux

    You Want a Confederate Monument? My Body Is a Confederate Monument

    The black people I come from were owned and raped by the white people I come from. Who dares to tell me to celebrate them?
    By Caroline Randall Williams

    Ms. Williams is a poet.
    (NYT)

    • June 26, 2020
    • NASHVILLE — I have rape-colored skin. My light-brown-blackness is a living testament to the rules, the practices, the causes of the Old South.


    If there are those who want to remember the legacy of the Confederacy, if they want monuments, well, then, my body is a monument. My skin is a monument.

    Dead Confederates are honored all over this country — with cartoonish private statues, solemn public monuments and even in the names of United States Army bases. It fortifies and heartens me to witness the protests against this practice and the growing clamor from serious, nonpartisan public servants to redress it. But there are still those — like President Trump and the Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell — who cannot understand the difference between rewriting and reframing the past. I say it is not a matter of “airbrushing” history, but of adding a new perspective.

    I am a black, Southern woman, and of my immediate white male ancestors, all of them were rapists. My very existence is a relic of slavery and Jim Crow.

    According to the rule of hypodescent (the social and legal practice of assigning a genetically mixed-race person to the race with less social power) I am the daughter of two black people, the granddaughter of four black people, the great-granddaughter of eight black people. Go back one more generation and it gets less straightforward, and more sinister. As far as family history has always told, and as modern DNA testing has allowed me to confirm, I am the descendant of black women who were domestic servants and white men who raped their help.
    It is an extraordinary truth of my life that I am biologically more than half white, and yet I have no white people in my genealogy in living memory. No. Voluntary. Whiteness. I am more than half white, and none of it was consensual. White Southern men — my ancestors — took what they wanted from women they did not love, over whom they had extraordinary power, and then failed to claim their children.

    What is a monument but a standing memory? An artifact to make tangible the truth of the past. My body and blood are a tangible truth of the South and its past. The black people I come from were owned by the white people I come from. The white people I come from fought and died for their Lost Cause. And I ask you now, who dares to tell me to celebrate them? Who dares to ask me to accept their mounted pedestals?

    You cannot dismiss me as someone who doesn’t understand. You cannot say it wasn’t my family members who fought and died. My blackness does not put me on the other side of anything. It puts me squarely at the heart of the debate. I don’t just come from the South. I come from Confederates. I’ve got rebel-gray blue blood coursing my veins. My great-grandfather Will was raised with the knowledge that Edmund Pettus was his father. Pettus, the storied Confederate general, the grand dragon of the Ku Klux Klan, the man for whom Selma’s Bloody Sunday Bridge is named. So I am not an outsider who makes these demands. I am a great-great-granddaughter.

    And here I’m called to say that there is much about the South that is precious to me. I do my best teaching and writing here. There is, however, a peculiar model of Southern pride that must now, at long last, be reckoned with.

    This is not an ignorant pride but a defiant one. It is a pride that says, “Our history is rich, our causes are justified, our ancestors lie beyond reproach.” It is a pining for greatness, if you will, a wish again for a certain kind of American memory. A monument-worthy memory.

    But here’s the thing: Our ancestors don’t deserve your unconditional pride. Yes, I am proud of every one of my black ancestors who survived slavery. They earned that pride, by any decent person’s reckoning. But I am not proud of the white ancestors whom I know, by virtue of my very existence, to be bad actors.

    Among the apologists for the Southern cause and for its monuments, there are those who dismiss the hardships of the past. They imagine a world of benevolent masters, and speak with misty eyes of gentility and honor and the land. They deny plantation rape, or explain it away, or question the degree of frequency with which it occurred.

    To those people it is my privilege to say, I am proof. I am proof that whatever else the South might have been, or might believe itself to be, it was and is a space whose prosperity and sense of romance and nostalgia were built upon the grievous exploitation of black life.

    The dream version of the Old South never existed. Any manufactured monument to that time in that place tells half a truth at best. The ideas and ideals it purports to honor are not real. To those who have embraced these delusions: Now is the time to re-examine your position.

    Either you have been blind to a truth that my body’s story forces you to see, or you really do mean to honor the oppressors at the expense of the oppressed, and you must at last acknowledge your emotional investment in a legacy of hate.

    Either way, I say the monuments of stone and metal, the monuments of cloth and wood, all the man-made monuments, must come down. I defy any sentimental Southerner to defend our ancestors to me. I am quite literally made of the reasons to strip them of their laurels.
    Majestically enthroned amid the vulgar herd

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    or Leticia, the choice is yours. Sho' beats cotton picking.


    I mean seriously, what a load of self pitying shit.

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    Thailand Expat tomcat's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by sabang View Post
    I mean seriously, what a load of self pitying shit.
    ...supremacy guilt...I understand your pain...

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    The Dentist English Noodles's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by tomcat View Post
    ...supremacy guilt...I understand your pain...
    Supremacy guilt? The woman's great great grandfather was a grand dragon of the KKK. She has racist blood pumping through her veins, no surprise she is a self loathing guilt ridden wreck of a woman who is trying to disown herself from her families racist exploits. She'll take the money for her story right enough though....

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    Quote Originally Posted by tomcat View Post
    I am a black, Southern woman, and of my immediate white male ancestors, all of them were rapists. My very existence is a relic of slavery and Jim Crow.
    Dont think that would stand in a court of law, bit light on evidence.

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    Those fine southern gentlemen were merely trying to offer Leticia's offspring a better future.

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    Thailand Expat tomcat's Avatar
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    ...supremacy rodeo act I: deflection...

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    Oh yeh, I'm so full of repressed southern guilt I really must visit there one day and try some grits n chitlins.

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    Thailand Expat tomcat's Avatar
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    ...yee haaa: keep deflectin'!...

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    Excommunicated baldrick's Avatar
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    What part of what she said was untrue?

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    Thailand Expat tomcat's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by baldrick View Post
    What part of what she said was untrue?
    ...exactly...

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    Member Ennis's Avatar
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    A brave woman challenging the hate, that still permeates in many societies across the globe - I stand with you Caroline Randall Williams, you ARE a brave woman, who will be ridiculed wherever you talk.

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    Thailand Expat AntRobertson's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by sabang
    or Leticia, the choice is yours. Sho' beats cotton picking.
    Holy fuck.

    Stay classy, sabang.



    Quote Originally Posted by sabang
    I mean seriously, what a load of self pitying shit.
    Says the guy in melodramatic uproar over ’The Little House On The Prarie’.

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    Thailand Expat VocalNeal's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by tomcat View Post
    whose prosperity and sense of romance and nostalgia were built upon the grievous exploitation of black life.

    Just like the England of Charlotte Brontë and others. Except the romance and nostalgia were built on exploitation of non-black people.

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    She could head back to Africa and piss on the graves of those Africans who sold her ancestors to slave trading Arabs or others.
    It's not as if a European ship could arrive on the coast and start grabbing locals - it was more complicated than that.
    If a chief fancied someone's wife there was an opportunity to get rid of her husband and maybe throw in some troublemakers or imbeciles to sweeten the deal.
    Endless opportunities for loathing if you're creative.

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    Quote Originally Posted by tomcat View Post
    I am the daughter of two black people, the granddaughter of four black people, the great-granddaughter of eight black people.


    It is an extraordinary truth of my life that I am biologically more than half white, .
    The logic behind that quite escapes me.

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    Thailand Expat tomcat's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by nidhogg View Post
    The logic behind that quite escapes me.
    ...so, too much blackness then...

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    Quote Originally Posted by tomcat View Post
    ...so, too much blackness then...
    What a strange take on my comment.

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    Thailand Expat tomcat's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by nidhogg View Post
    What a strange take on my comment.
    ......what a strange comment...

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    กงเกวียนกำเกวียน HuangLao's Avatar
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    We could always take a good look at the manufactured and romantic ideals of the extended noble savage theory or other like topical manner.
    Distant, yet closely associated.

    Research Edward Said, Frantz Fanon, Vine Deloria, Jr, Andre Gunder Frank, Samir Amin, James M. Blaut, and other notables - long and enigmatic work.
    Almost always dismissed by the usual faction of the false and illusionary Eurocentric establishment.

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    The Dentist English Noodles's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by tomcat View Post
    ......what a strange comment...
    I think it was quite reasonable.

    Can you explain the science behind her statement?

    I am the daughter of two black people, the granddaughter of four black people, the great-granddaughter of eight black people.


    It is an extraordinary truth of my life that I am biologically more than half white, .

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    Thailand Expat tomcat's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by English Noodles View Post
    Can you explain the science behind her statement?
    ...can you explain your inability to understand the depth of feeling underlying her comment?...

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    กงเกวียนกำเกวียน HuangLao's Avatar
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    Science of fashionable white man's burden bandwagoning?

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    Can you explain her ability to even know if her great great grandmothers, all 8 or 16 of them, were raped or not? Becoming a concubine was not necessarily seen as such a bad thing- such as Andrew Jackson's mistress, who had his lub child. By all accounts there was some real affection there.

    I am, unofficially, bastard offspring of the wealthy Gallaher family- by a serving wench, aka my great great grandmother, one of them. Four generations ago though- so I can't really sue boohoo. But it's a good excuse for me to be a loser apparently, and blame everyone else for it! And no- it wasn't rape. It was Ireland.
    Last edited by sabang; 27-06-2020 at 05:12 PM.

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    The Dentist English Noodles's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by tomcat View Post
    ...can you explain your inability to understand the depth of feeling underlying her comment?...
    You never actually have anything to add, do you?

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