Kontextmaschine

30th May 2018

Post with 145 notes

I think one of my biggest realizations out of our country’s latter-day tensions is there’s a black nation in the United States, amalgamated from separate origins like the American/white one was assembled from Scottish, French, English, later Italian etc.

Which is a change from my 90s End of History model of like, an ill-treated subculture within the same people as me, or even my later one as the latest wave of immigrants from rural feudalism, dating to the Great Migration

That makes some things make sense - MLK as the consensus like, president of the black nation, and that Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson’s occasionally farcical insertion of themselves into every “black issue”, everywhere, was a competition to succeed him

Segregation, the whole water fountains thing, goes from a blatant insult to a surreal China Mieville attempt to maintain two states for the nations - a white bourgeois metropole and a South American extractive colony - in the same place, which is destabilizing because I was never trained into a moral sense that Havana should by right have as nice facilities as Boston or anything

It explains a lot of what’s happened since Obama got elected. I see a lot of black writers now gawping that white people (like me) expected the Obama election to be a final resolution of racial tensions and not like, the opening of some sort of settlement process. Because they saw it as the black nation getting its deserved seat at the table of US government, AT LAST

But yeah, speaking for myself and the other whites, yeah, we saw it on the model of (Catholic) JFK being elected as a sign of a new golden age where the “white ethnics” became white together, and black people would be White now - maybe we’d make something up like “Judeo-Christian” or “Abrahamic”, maybe we’d just leave it there for comics to get easy dunks on.

That’s what all those well-meaning years were for, right? Of giving to the United Negro College Fund ads on football, and euphemizing inner-city crime as multicultural graffiti gangs on the shows you train your kids on, or ESPN commercials where multicultural office friends come together around The Game, or the reconciliation ministries at megachurches that are ESPN At Prayer

(huh, broadcast sports. that’s why the NFL stung and Huffy Young Man Journalism swapping MLB for NBA matters)

so what was it for, then?

Tagged: amhist afamhist race