Category Archives: race

Tidbits on the Irish and Black people

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Did you know that Frederick Douglass traveled to Ireland to fund raise for the abolitionist cause? And it got awkward because the people with money were the landed gentry — the Protestants, many with AngloSaxon roots — while he, as a member of an oppressed group, identified with the poor Catholics.

I learned this in a fantastic book by Irish writer Colum McCann entitled, Transatlantic.

Boston is a very racist city with a shameful past, particular around bussing. It hurts me (somewhere below the collarbones) to think about it. It’s getting worse, with hate groups on the rise, giving credence to something I heard Robin DiAngelo say in an interview* today and that is that we’ve reverted to a pre-Civil Rights state here in America.

Back in the early nineties, when I was a lot younger and also a lot stupider about matters of race, my Black boss, who was from Mississippi, said she experienced more racism in Boston than where she grew up. At the time I was inclined to think that hyperbole.

No more.

* podcast: Bossed Up, Feb 2021 episode

Thanks, Ellen and Doris for providing reference (here are my listening tips: 1) fast forward through four minutes of ads and intros at the outset and 2) if you have been thinking about anti-racism, you can maybe skip the first fifteen minutes (or listen at 1.5 speed, which is what I did)).

Black History, a selection

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From The 1619 Project, EPISODE TWO: “Rape was so prevalent during slavery that today 1/4 of the genetic makeup of Black Americans can be traced back to Europe through the paternal line.”

Colonial governments made descent of children of enslaved women matrilineal in order to ensure that any children they bore were slaves (even the mixed race children, say, of their owner).

The episode goes on to examine the lopsided health care that contemporary Black women receive, tying the shameful conditions directly back to slavery.

FACT: Black women die in childbirth at THREE TIMES the rate of white women.

FACT: Black infants die at TWICE the rate of whites babies, a discrepancy that disappears when the OB is Black.

FACTS: Black patients are under-treated for pain, as if there were biological differences between Black and white people. Furthermore, their life expectancies are shorter and they’re often blamed for their health issues.

Slave owners always had an economic interest in the reproduction of their slaves, but after Congress banned the importation of Africans in 1808, it became an even more important way to preserve and build wealth.

In the amazing novel WASH, by Margaret Wrinkle, the white slave owning protagonist hires out the enslaved character named Wash for the purpose of procreation. Keeps meticulous records. Is paid for the “exchange.” One of many poignant moments occurs towards the end when Wash burns that ledger and lets those flames then take a barn down.

I know from my research that in South Carolina in the mid-eighteenth century, slave owners believed that breeding Africans with Native Americans would produce stock better adapted to winters.

Breeding. Stock.

And BTW, another source of wealth for early colonizers as to round up, kidnap, and sell Native Americans to slave markets in the West Indies. Native Americans were not favored as slaves in South Carolina because they had family in the area and knew the landscape better than anyone, heightening the chances of their escape.

A look at racism, part 48

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Today’s idiosyncratic tour of racism, reactions to racism, and/or the history of racism swings through a twitter thread.

Yesterday a WW (that’s “white woman” from now on) posted her horror at learning that, at some point, George Washington killed all his slaves’ dogs. Her tweet is circled in yellow below.

Here’s one possible source for this fact — a Frontline episode on PBS.

Even though I’ve read about some of the most horrific forms of torture employed by slave owners and have had to really think about the heartless mercantile interests of slave owners trafficking in black bodies, I also recoiled at the dog-killing.

Does this mean I care more about dogs than about the enslaved?

Of course not.

I thought Washington’s dog-killing was an extreme and sadistic act meant to deprive his slaves of the comfort and companionship of their pets. The Frontline article though seems confirming of the tweeter’s assertion — that he was acting out of economic self-interest. The dogs were killing his livestock, perhaps?

PBS Frontline

Anyway, I didn’t spend a lot of time reading the comments because I knew the dumping on the WW would, in this instance, bother me. It’s NOT EITHER / OR.

And BTW, sometimes it’s evident that people DO care more about pets than the people involved. Take the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.

It seemed then that there was a lot of attention paid to the stranded animals and maybe not enough attention paid to the ravages of New Orleans’ largely Black parishes. Also, that the recovery effort was so botched could have been viewed through a lens of racism and generally wasn’t.

Another EITHER / OR that I’m thinking about and will come back to post about sometime soon is: how the fact that race is a scientific fiction across the board (not just for white people, in other words) can coexist with our profound acknowledgment that race as a social construct is profoundly and persistently problematic.

Collages are 2022 creations made to visual prompts from Paris Collage Collective.

Whiteness

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Whiteness means it’s snowing!

What whiteness is not, is a meaningful racial designation. It goes to status, not ancestry.

A footnote to an essay in WHITENESS IS NOT AN ANCESTOR led me to pmpress blog, where I found a post titled, The Point is Not to Interpret Whiteness but to Abolish It. It was written in 1997 by Ignatiev. Two quotes from that post follow.

… David Roediger … has insisted that whiteness is not merely oppressive and false, it is nothing but oppressive and false. As James Baldwin said, “So long as you think you are white, there is no hope for you.”

Whiteness is not a culture. There is Irish culture and Italian culture and American culture—the latter, as Albert Murray pointed out, a mixture of the Yankee, the Indian, and the Negro (with a pinch of ethnic salt); there is youth culture and drug culture and queer culture; but there is no such thing as white culture. Whiteness has nothing to do with culture and everything to do with social position. It is nothing but a reflection of privilege, and exists for no reason other than to defend it. Without the privileges attached to it, the white race would not exist, and the white skin would have no more social significance than big feet.

Back on a learning curve and you, lucky readers, get to come with me!

Meanwhile an important take away from a 30 minute audio clip on Safe Space Radio, is that learning about racism for white people can consist of BOTH the heartbreak of acknowledging harm generally and mistakes personally AND ALSO embrace the need to feel like we are decent human beings. This felt like an important jiggle forward for me.

Thank you Ellen and Doris for directing me to this resource.

Thank you Belinda for recommending the book.

Echoes of Good Friday

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Look at the tweet below. Someone said it should be a painting. With that in mind, I doctored it a few ways.

First photo below is the original, the next two, are filtered using Prisma. In the third photo, I double exposed it with one I took on Good Friday in Assisi in 2019.

I am very moved by the picture, and of course — I was raised Catholic. It also reminds me of a ceremony I witnessed in Assisi three years ago, when they ritually removed Christ from the cross in the Cathedral of San Rufino and ceremoniously carried him down the hill to the Cathedral Basilica of St. Francis. It was quite an amazing experience.

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I am not the only one to observe that some of our collective response to this crisis surely depends on the fact that Ukrainians are white.