That’s a great insight and I feel I’ve moved as well from a sense of “historical blindness” the idea that history is happening all around me. How did that happen? How is this Trump thing or this Covid 19 thing happening? As it turned out, the illusions that “these things” haven’t happened before a type of blinder horses wear when racing to keep them focused on “their own lane.” When your horse keeps winning, you might not even care to see the other horses, especially the ones in last place or the ones disqualified.
Trump happened before, and far more than once. White supremacy, a form of autocracy, happened not just under “Hitler’s genocide,” but under “Belgium’s genocide” of 15 million humans in the Congo, under “Spain’s genocide” when it worked 8 million enslaved humans to death starting in 1545 at Potosi Mountain in Bolivia for one hundred years, or “Portugal’s genocide” when it worked to death enslaved Africans in Brazil starting in 1516 to produce sugar, where the average lifespan of an enslaved sugar field worker as 6-7 years.
But we don’t see what we agree with. We don’t want to believe the depravity in our own system when it generates the wealth we have access to. And by we I mean whites in the 20th century. It took an act of invasion of Europe by Hitler to realize that white people, “nazis”, could that crazed to murder millions. This genocide was photographed and had to be admitted to.
But America’s is still not. The outsiders, under the “white power” of the US government, learned to deny the slavery after the Civil War that never stopped. Convict leasing in the Jim Crow South became more brutal, not less brutal, than before the war. White business owners chained blacks to work in coal mines sun up to sun down, and then chained them together to sleep in filthy shacks without showers day in and day out form the 1870s to the 1910s. The white managers worked them to death literally, with 5 percent or so of the black American enslaved workforce dying off every year. The White managers threw their black bodies after dying into shallow graves or carelessly tossed them in the blast furnaces near by the processed the coal and iron ore. We do not and cannot see, as we whites have forced history books, slavery for what it was. We gradually eliminated the idea that this was slavery.
It was in some ways “worse” than slavery before the Civil War, not just in brutality but in principle, for it was the individual states that sanctioned and controlled the ownership contracts of black labor, not the plantation whites who owned the title of the black labor. It was the state of Texas for example, as seen clearly in historical documents, as owning that black American captured labor and leasing them to the sugar mill outside Houston. Those white sugar mill owners, Imperial Sugar, acting through the white managers worked the black laborers to death and threw their black bodies into shallow graves. That is the known as the “Sugarland 95” as uncovered, literally, by a local activists in what is now named Sugarland, a Houston suburb.
The point is we don’t recognized what we do and who were are because the “natural” human tendency to write history from the side of the victors. As as long as “we” (whites) were winning—WWI, WWII—and profiting or growing wealthy collectively from it, we are willing to wear the blinders to win the horse race. Only now, once again, is there rising awareness, when there is a deep fracture in white liberals from tolerating the violence and threat of Trump, that when we take those blinders off and look backwards, we can see the some of the horses had no chance of ever winning, as their back legs were tied together or they were banned from the race altogether.
That describes black Americans and native Indigenous ‘Americans’ respectively. Black Americans were zoned off from white wealth generation from the 1890s to 1934 when cities grew quickly and industrialization sped up, to stay in black areas, ones near of in the industrial zones, to clean up the factories as cheap labor. Then they were “redlined” out of those zoned white areas by the 1934 Act that set up the FHA where federal government guidance told banks and real estate brokers they could not loan or sell to people who made a neighborhood “harmonious.” That was the legal word under the law. That law lasted until reversed in 1968, but the effects lasted much longer. Because history was written by the white victories who grew their wealth threw that system, which was whites in suburban America, they didn’t want to see their government as delineating blacks out of wealth, opportunity for education and wealth building. That is until Trump came along, disrupting that tenuous white agreement between “liberals” and “conservatives” who forged this 20th century victory American narrative of (white) wealth generation.
We are not un-delimiting that narrative. Delineation is the great key word that focuses your story in my mind, and shows this great progress of seeing the wider narrative “we” white liberals have been a bit blinded to. As long as our parents could secure homes and white jobs, the desire to wealth these “liberal” blinders was strongly motivated. Only under this current time where the threat become obvious must “we” take them off or admit perhaps we shouldn’t have been wearing them to being it.
Without the delimiting effect, “we” can take the parenthesis off to see white wealth generation, and admit “we” have not been hearing what black Americans have been telling us, there is no equality. This white narrative has been creating winners and losers, and like usual the loser it created by delimitations of laws and codes have been black Americans (and native indigenous I’ve not covered, and latinos).
Thanks for this inspirational story of your personal experiences in waking up to see all of history, unrestrained. I think many of us feel we are now on that same path.