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Nancy's avatar

Painful and powerful words. Thank you.

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adin thayer's avatar

sometimes i wonder what it takes for you to sign off with solidarity forever. over so vast a gulf as you describe here. sometimes it seems as though this may be the death throes of home sacer here. it is the case that black people, and other people of color, occupy many roles and statuses in this society that were utterly unthinkable before reconstruction, and mightily crushed by what followed for the reasons you outline above. (i would add, in the construction of the jim crow laws, the twisted psychological state of white southerners at the time, having fought to keep people as property, having been humiliatingly beaten, and then required to share power with their own former property. i don't like psychologizing political violence but i'm pretty sure a lot of white southerners might have feared the retribution they deserved, also driving them to drive ex-slaves down. that germany has done as much as it has to rewire that twisted psychology is interesting to me and used to give me hope. now i'm not sure we are morally capable of (letting alone properly educated to understand ourselves historically), let alone motivated to, come to terms with who we would be if we owned, and found some way to at least symbolically pay off, that debt.

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