Let me read this to you!
You can find this auditory selection of Gospel for the Culture here on Apple Podcasts or here on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.
Whenever Black Americans bring up slavery, someone eventually says, ‘Everybody enslaved somebody.’ The sentence is true enough to end a conversation and false enough to prevent understanding.
It almost never fails, you mention slavery in a Black body & somebody’s gonna tell you that Africans sold Africans and the Irish were slaves once too.
The maafa is one of few human atrocities denied the dignity of global unified acknowledgement. Former plantations are designated as wedding venues and sites of historic beauty and significance.
Imagine a concentration camp regarded as beautiful and a site upon which to establish love and family by marriage. It immediately sounds preposterous and yet that is the state of the preserved American slave plantation—
the fact that it even gets a beautified name like plantation instead of internment camp is a signifyin’ of the sanitized American memory.
The institution of racialized hereditary chattel slavery in the Atlantic world represented a fundamentally different legal, economic, and ideological system than many earlier forms of enslavement.
Now I have no interest in engaging in oppression Olympics. My goal is never to prove that my people had it the worst in human memory. It is, however, my goal to establish that the cruelties which we’ve suffered generationally not only matter in perpetuity but that the passage of time itself is not an apology.
Captivity wasn’t invented by Europe. I refuse to give what’s now the political identity of whiteness that much influence of credit.
War captives, debt bondage, penal labor, household slavery, and various forms of servitude appear across many societies and eras.
American chattel slavery wasn’t merely captivity. It transformed people into capital assets. Not temporary captives. Not prisoners awaiting ransom. Not servants whose status might change.
Property that could appreciate and reproduce more property. That is the only extraordinary legal invention of whiteness in determining that kids inherited the enslaved status of their mothers. That shit made slavery a self-producing capital.
Which is precisely why Black capitalism won’t save us, in this context baby we are the capital and we continue to be witnessed as self-producing capital although the labor has changed.
Federal minimum wage is $7.25, the descendants of slaves have only seen their labor appreciate in value to a measly seven bucks, nobody in this country can live the standard quality of life at federal minimum wage rates.
Women were literally made into sites of economic production beyond their labor. This is especially true of Black women although not exclusively so.
But too many white women lack the self-awareness to locate themselves in that truth. So they often ally with white patriarchy for their protection despite their shared gender exploitation with the rest of us.
Many societies enslaved outsiders while the Atlantic system eventually developed an ideology in which Blackness itself became associated with enslavability. The depravity of empire’s imagination made the mere existence of the body justification to deny liberty in perpetuity. This imagination human beings became standardized financial instruments. The body was collateral, managed by shipping manifests and balance sheets. The Middle Passage wasn’t simply a transportation route. It was a supply chain. And the United States economic structure had never had a plan beyond the structural framework of these cruelties. Again look at the raggedy ass federal minimum wage. Minimum wage says if I could pay you less I would.
And its enduring epigenetic cruelty supposes nay insists that we ought to just get over this because it’s not happening today. We lost the physical chains but those bastards always knew physical chains were no match to breaking the spirit and mind of a slave. Should I remind you of DRAPETOMANIA becoming a thing of psychological science?!
Well let me self-correct, I don’t wanna imply that Drapetomania was fully accepted psychology.
It was a pseudoscientific diagnosis proposed by Samuel Cartwright to pathologize enslaved people’s desire to escape.
But I’d be remiss not to mention the dark history of psychology and the Black body that makes the worst assumptions scientifically justified in their possibility.
We know the psychological warfare of the colonial conquest, but we speak less often about the dark past of psychology itself as a discipline and a science. The origin site of both scientific racism and eugenics.
Segregated care and diagnostic biases abounded after psychology did its colonial work of pathologizing Blackness. I’m often reminded of this past when I look to the present efforts to normalize mental health therapeutic modalities across the African diaspora. The lands remember and the bodies still keep score!
Everybody wants specificity until it requires admission of guilt!
As I pen this I’m forced to decide if I’m writing to be free or to preempt every argument made to dismantle mine? I decided that I’m not softening the plantation for palatability. That’s the problem now and the default position.
America has largely chosen to preserve many plantations as sites of architectural nostalgia while often minimizing or aestheticizing the system of forced labor that sustained them. And now when we respond viscerally to this, our response is analyzed more than the revisionist American memory at play.
Nobody doubts the cruelties of concentration camps. While plantations get justified as not that bad. Even to the point of rationalizing visceral response to their persistence and the dignity of the bodies that labored there forgotten in favor of their reinvention as a museum relic.
Black people did not become ‘lazy’ at emancipation. The accusation became useful when unpaid labor was no longer guaranteed. You’ve got school curricula tryna remix slavery as job skills training with room & board. Whole fucking reason we were imported is because we’re an agrarian people in the first fucking place and built for the sun by melanin whereas sun dodgers burn at the slightest exposure.
Not to say that Slavers utilized biological calculations about melanin, they weren’t that smart. To that end of smarts, funny ain’t it that even today racism is rarely called racism absent a Klan hood and burning cross, it’s rebranded as ignorance. Very frequently the deliberate cruelty of whiteness must first be committed against those already seen as part of ordinary humanity to be called what it is rather than relabeled in a more sanitized form.
America has normalized places of mass racial terror into sites of romance, leisure, and nostalgia. That’s as American as apple pie.
I love when bewildered whites in the age of MAGA declare that this is not the America they know. I believe them, they genuinely mean it and it’s not deliberately obtuse. But THIS is the America I’ve always known!
So often white folks struggle to deconstruct whiteness because of their inherited mythologies. Those who seek to sustain the systems as they are lead with the claim of “white guilt,” wherein racial awareness is rebranded as an attempt to burden whiteness with the sins of its forefathers.
When in truth it is an invitation to do the right thing not just by the victims but to inherently rectify the soul of a nation so that it may be free from repetition of its most grave sins. That’s reparative justice. We needn’t ask permission to ponder Whose America has always been remembered? And whose America has always had to be survived? We simply need to pursue honesty in those answers!
America’s Moral Memory
Lacking patriotism is not inherently an absence of programming. Colonial Christianity didn’t merely colonize land or labor. It colonized moral memory.
So I counter the question by asking who produced the assumptions that belie it. Where was God? There is no statute of limitations on divine testimony.
Not in the legal sense.
In the eschatological sense.
Human courts close.
Archives burn.
Witnesses die.
Empires collapse.
But if God is who theology claims God to be, then no act disappears simply because it was never written down. I believe that God’s knowledge exceeds the archive, that Black oral memory carries its own authority, and that silence in the record is not necessarily silence before God.
Where was God? I might argue that divinity is present in the cognition of evil by people programmed to discard their humanity.
America often behaves as though undocumented suffering is forgotten suffering. And because of this I think we’re programmed to indict the Christian deity and less likely to believe that the Christianity of the enslaver required an enormous theological fiction.
I’m much more interested in knowing how did enslaved folks rescue Christianity from slavery. That’s way more interesting than debating the debasing ways of the colonizin’ folk.
Truth is theological formation itself was happening outside the institutions that claimed exclusive authority over Christianity. If we choose to view our ancestors with more agency than unquestioned deference we might recognize that Black people forced Christianity to confront itself.
History. Theology. Politics.Memory. What survived the plantations?
[moses & exodus became a greater conversion tool than slaves obey your masters or the parable of the talents]
• America was justified because slavery was inevitable.‼️False. (Also enslavement by tribal conquering versus enslavement by import!) like indigenous tribes had home court advantage of what was new unknown lands to European colonial settlers. As much as white Americans want to rewrite the story as a hero’s narrative of their ancestors as conquerors of the lesser natives. They ultimately had to import Africans who had superior agriculture skills to them but also possessed land blindness alongside them. They ain’t call that shit the new world for no reason 🤣🤣 the native peoples possessed home court advantage and the colonizers knew that to some degree this would ultimately seal their fates if they didn’t tip the scales of power toward themselves.
• Christianity only came to Black people through white benevolence. ‼️False.
• Black people are uniquely divided.‼️False.
• Black conflict is natural.‼️False.
Sometimes reformation ain’t enough. Scripture says be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind. But what happens when renewal is simply an extension of what already exists? Like renewing a checked out book. Or when reformation merely rearranges the same harm with new justifications.
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