this post was submitted on 20 Jul 2023
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I don't think you need to feel bad about it to acknowledge it. That's part of what makes it so infuriating. They throw around white guilt like it's something progressives suffer from, but it's very clearly something they cower and hide from.
My family hasn't been here long enough to have been slave owners, but my grandfather was a little bit racist by today's standards (and I acknowledge he may have been more racist than I realized). My dad is a boomer who always taught us to treat people equally, but he says things now (and did back then) that would be really offensive to a modern ear. I never heard the N-word from anyone in my immediate family nor grandparents, but I'm not sure it was never said out of ear shot, and I definitely heard it from a great-uncle or two.
It's a little uncomfortable for me to say that out loud, but so what? It's nonetheless true. It reflects on them, not me, and it would be no different if I could go back a couple more generations and find a slave owner in my family. Awful, uncomfortable, but something that does not reflect on today's generation beyond their reluctance to admit it and what it meant and what it did and continues to do with regard to impacts on the community and the people who are descended from enslaved ancestors.
They should be feel bad about their own cowardice about admitting what happened in the past, not for the details of those past events.
If your great great grandparents did bad shit, don't make it worse by trying to lie and whitewash it, make it better by encouraging those truths to see the light of day so society is bettered for it, or at the very least stop trying to prevent others from doing so.
But see, if someone admits that their parents/grandparents/etc were flawed, then they might come to the realization that they need to examine the ideas they grew up with, maybe change some. Maybe they themselves have behaved problematicly based on things they were taught. And what if that person starts questioning their faith/faith community's behavior as part of this introspection? What if questioning makes a person feel as though they're not "honoring their father and their mother"?
I'm 100% for that introspection and personal honestly, but I can see where a lot of people will be too scared of the work. More will be more scared of the "evil" of critical thought and nuance.
You've got a fair point, but it just makes me feel really hopeless. I think this is going to take a lot of years to turn around and fully undo the damage that's being caused while half (or at least a third) of our country works on developing anything resembling emotional intelligence and critical thinking skills - and in the meantime they are degrading our educational system, civil rights, and the general state of public discourse. It feels like they are dragging a blade through the side of our social norms - how long is this going to take to heal?
I have a neighbor who would have just been my Republican neighbor twenty years ago, if I even knew his political leanings at all. Now he's got handwritten signs in front of his yard proclaiming anyone who voted Biden is a moron. They rotate from time to time, and some of them are hard to read. One of them said something about "all four guns" but I couldn't read the rest. Now is there any chance that man and I are ever going to be friends? Absolutely not, because I have no interest in ever speaking to him, and if we did have an honest conversation he'd learn I was a member of a group he's maligned via publicly posted handwritten sign tens of times in the past few years. (Anyone who votes Democrat) I swear ever since the bud light thing Kid Rock is nearly the only artist I hear blaring from his garage when I drive by.
But maybe if things were like they were 20 years ago we'd get to know each other before we knew those things about each other, and we'd either be friends despite those things, or just never learn those things about each other at all. That's gotta be repeated around the nation millions of times with different variations - what's that doing to the state of our cohesiveness as a society and nation?
I really used to think people were over-reacting to how much influence Trump could really have, but I have no choice but to eat my words now. Lasting damage has been done which is surely causing people to be killed or traumatized every single day because these people are so terrified that trying to make things better will require some kind of admission of complicity regarding how shitty things are.
Sorry for my rant, has been really eating at me lately.