912 words
Nanny of the Maroons
Contemporary academia loudly celebrates the concept of “lived experience” as a legitimate way of knowing. Personal narratives and subjective impressions are often treated as evidence, placed on the same level as empirical data or archival documentation. Yet this principle is applied selectively. When scholars write about slavery, they suddenly abandon the idea of lived experience, not because it loses relevance, but because it becomes politically inconvenient.
There are recorded testimonies in which formerly enslaved people described their lives in terms that do not fit modern ideological frameworks. Some even expressed nostalgia for the past, noting that although slavery was harsh, they experienced a level of material stability that they later lost. One woman named Sallie Paul, when asked if slave days were better, replied:
I know heap of de colored people fared better when dey belonged to de white folks cause dey had good owners. Didn’ have to worry bout huntin dey clothes en somethin to eat in dat day en time. Just had to work. Now dey have to hunt it en get it together de best way dey can. Oh, honey, peoples has so much worraytions dese days. Dat how come dey ain’ live a long time like dey used to.
This statement is not an endorsement of slavery but an honest reflection of one woman’s lived experience. Yet few historians would ever cite it seriously, since it contradicts the politically correct expectation that all testimonies must reinforce the idea of unrelenting suffering. Acknowledging voices like Sallie Paul’s would complicate the moral clarity that dominates modern interpretations. Thus, scholars who claim to value lived experience disregard it the moment it challenges ideological comfort.
This inconsistency reveals that “lived experience” is not a genuine method of inquiry but a rhetorical tool, invoked only when it produces the desired conclusion. In feminist theory, postcolonial studies, and critical race scholarship, subjective memory is treated as the highest authority. However, when those memories clash with the dominant moral narrative, they are dismissed as irrelevant or misguided. Lived experience is celebrated only when it conforms to contemporary political ideals.
The debate over the origins of Olaudah Equiano demonstrates how serious scholars actually operate. Vincent Carretta argued that Equiano was born in South Carolina, challenging the traditional account that he was born in Africa. Paul Lovejoy responded by identifying weaknesses in Carretta’s argument and providing documentary and linguistic evidence confirming Equiano’s African birth. Their exchange was guided entirely by evidence and reasoning, not emotion or identity. Historical truth, in this example, was pursued through careful research, not through selective memory.
The same can be said of Richard Lynn, whose research on intelligence, race, and ethnocentrism relied entirely on empirical data. Lynn spent decades gathering obscure studies, reviewing anthropological material, and analyzing genetic findings. Although heavily criticized, he always responded with methodological arguments, not appeals to feeling. Likewise, Thomas Sowell built his reputation on intellectual discipline and empirical reasoning. He examined the links between race, culture, and economics with rigorous use of data. While rejecting genetic explanations for racial IQ gaps, he defended the validity of intelligence testing and the value of evidence-based inquiry. Scholars such as Lynn and Sowell represent a tradition of truth-seeking grounded in logic, not sentiment.
The selective invocation of lived experience is especially visible in the case of Nanny of the Maroons, one of Jamaica’s most revered national figures. Nanny is celebrated as a warrior leader who resisted British rule, yet documentary evidence of her life is minimal. The strongest reference to her is a 1740 land patent that mentions a woman named Nanny without offering any description of her deeds.
Later writers expanded this faint trace into legend. The eighteenth-century author Philip Thicknesse once wrote of an “old hagg” in Jamaica, and later historians assumed this woman was Nanny, although he never mentioned her name. The priest Joseph Williams claimed that Nanny and another Maroon leader were siblings, while Herbert Thomas, in an earlier work, recorded a Maroon’s statement that Cudjoe and Nanny were married. These contradictions illustrate how speculation and folklore gradually replaced verifiable history.
When I pointed out these inconsistencies in a public forum, participants responded by appealing to lived experience. They claimed that the oral memory of the Maroons was itself evidence of Nanny’s existence. This argument transforms belief into proof and emotion into documentation. The persistence of a legend does not make it historically true. It demonstrates how lived experience is used to shield cherished myths from scrutiny.
Jamaicans, like many peoples, have turned folklore into national identity, which is understandable. Yet scholars have a responsibility to separate legend from history. To treat myth as fact is to abandon the historian’s task. The veneration of Nanny may have cultural value, but it is not the product of evidence-based research.
This pattern defines modern academia. Scholars invoke lived experience when it reinforces fashionable ideals but ignore it when it exposes complexity or contradiction. The result is a culture of intellectual conformity in which emotion substitutes for inquiry. Slavery is portrayed as monolithic, and national heroes are protected from critical examination, all to preserve political respectability.
The true scholar must value truth above comfort. Recognizing that some enslaved people expressed attachment to their owners does not justify slavery, just as questioning the existence of Nanny of the Maroons does not deny Jamaican pride. It merely affirms that scholarship depends on evidence, not ideology. Until academia rediscovers that principle, “lived experience” will remain a slogan rather than a standard of knowledge.
23 comments
If you don’t mind me asking,
I want to know whether I should raise my children to take care of me when I grow old.
The world today no longer raises children on the principle of loyalty and obedience to the family.
In the past, taking care of one’s parents in old age was seen as a moral and even national duty, a sign of loyalty to one’s blood and lineage.
What do you think?
Are you asking Lipton Matthews, or just anyone on this site? I don’t think Matthews has replied to one comment over the years. Are you on the right site? It has been my observations that if you take care of your children as they are coming up in the world, they will take care of you when you are old. 🙃
I do think it’s reasonable to teach them matter-of-factly that “We take care of you when you’re young and you take care of us when we’re old.” That said, you should try to be as little of a burden on them as you can because, frankly, you’re on the way out and the resources should mostly go to the future generations and not to past ones. You should also continue helping them as much as you can, such as by keeping the family home, inviting them to live there, and helping them raise your grandchildren. I.e. you mustn’t be a stereotypical Boomer who takes out a reverse mortgage to vacation around the world and deprive your children of an inheritance. I also think it’s wise to condition your help (i.e. money and house) on them living properly – marrying, having children, etc. In short, everyone should be pitching in to help everyone else with an eye towards the family’s future.
Here’s what I’m planning. I have two daughters. If they marry and start a family, I will buy them a house, or if I can’t afford that I will move into an RV and let them live in my house, and/or build additional living space for them here. This incentivizes them to fly right while also being a big help to them. And by keeping them close, e.g. on the same property, they’d also be in a position to help me.
Over the past few generations it’s become a practice especially among white people to kick their kids out of the family home no matter what. You’ve finished high school, now get out and live by yourself (or even worse, with roommates just as immature as you). The reality is that when you are 17 or 18 years of age, or even older, you don’t have the judgment or life experience to live by yourself. You are easy game for persons who sure don’t have your best interests in mind.
And then it’s also too easy to have wild parties and what not, since mum & pup aren’t there to at least put the brakes onto unhealthy behaviors of all kinds if they can’t stop them altogether.
It’s shameful that so many white folks are throwing their kids to the lions. Of course, if the children really want out of the house, that’s another matter. But this business of everyone living alone is, I think, a fad heavily promoted by capitalism, which benefits from the great increase of separate households and all the spending and extra purchases involved. Individualism run amok.
So my point is that if parents had no compunctions about giving their child the heave-ho when they were not really ready for it, and possibly made no excuses for them when they messed up or failed in life, then maybe they are not deserving of their offspring’s consideration when they themselves may be feeling unprepared for the damaging effects of old age.
Nonwhites are less likely to throw their children out at age 18 unless they are troublemakers. They stay at home until they marry and even then, if it is possible, the married children live nearby. I know of a few such cases (Chinese & Moslem).
Indeed, there’s something to that. My contrarian lived experience, though, is different. When I turned 18, I could hardly get away soon enough. I managed pretty well on my own, decades before the word “adulting” was coined. (Perhaps the youth isn’t being taught basic life skills these days?) The only problems were economic – it was difficult to find entry level work that would support a dinky apartment, and it got worse with a recession. Surely it’s far worse these days.
Robert, you’re kidding me. Right? I was a Care Aide for many years and if you want someone to look after you at home I would suggest you start saving your money now so when the time comes you can hire someone. The days of children looking after their parents belongs to a forgotten age.
In the past, most people didn’t live to an age when they required round-the-clock care, and families tended to stay in the places they were born. Thus, supporting elderly parents was not a potentially life-changing burden for most. Increasingly, ‘children’ who are becoming elderly themselves are now faced with the prospect of having to provide or pay for the care of octogenarian or nonagenarian parents, who may have lived far away for many years. This is an unprecedented situation, and I don’t know what the solution is. In terms of lived experience, my sister and I were responsible for our mother’s care; I neither expect nor want my children to have to care for me in that way.
In the past, most people didn’t live to an age when they required round-the-clock care, and families tended to stay in the places they were born.
People “in the past” did indeed live long lives. It is a myth, a filthy lie, that only in recent times (20th & 21st) centuries did people reach their 80s and 90s. The age of death appeared to be low in prior centuries, but only because all deaths including those of children dying of acute illness (nature taking its course by removing the weakest) were averaged. Plenty of people lived to a ripe old age. Not saying they didn’t get sick with this or that, only that they were constitutionally able to tough it out until death without incessant medical intervention, using simple remedies as available.
Old people today need round-the-clock care because the vast majority are suffering from serious degenerative disease brought about by modern way of life. Even people in their 60s and 70s are in bad shape. The ones who make it into their 80s or more are largely being propped up by drugs and endless medical procedures. There’s much info available on this.
She [a researcher] found that the majority of American men are taking prescription drugs by age 40, while most American women are taking prescription drugs by age 15. On average, a newborn boy in 2019 could expect to take prescription drugs for approximately 37 years, or 48% of his life. A newborn girl in 2019 could expect to take them for approximately 47.5 years, or 60% of her life.
https://ssri.psu.edu/news/americans-will-spend-half-their-lives-taking-prescription-drugs-study-finds
Filthy lies aside, you agree that few people lived to the point where they needed round-the-clock care. My mistake for mentioning age.
Two more prominent examples of dismissing lived experience would be regarding captivity narratives from white women kidnapped by Indians and the testimonies of white women whose allegations of rape led to the lynching of a black man. Leftist academics have a blanket policy to just dismiss all these stories, typically accusing the white women of lying without examining the claims for even a moment.
That’s true. Leftist academics are anti-White. A lot of them are Jewish.
In New York in 1989, the Central Park jogger case was a clear-cut case of rape of a White woman by a gang of blacks. The five who were tried were convicted by the evidence, which included their own boastful confessions.
No matter. In 2002, NY District Attorney, Robert Morgenthau (a Jew), arbitrarily signed a piece of paper to get them all released, based on on obviously phony theory that only one black Hispanic (Matias Reyes) had committed the entire crime. He freely confessed, because he was already serving a life sentence for many other rapes, and one more would make no difference. He took one for the team, and his memory is revered by blacks in NYC.
Jews think it’s funny when Whites are murdered or raped by a gang of blacks. The recent case of Iryna Zarutska is one example of this.
The Jew, Morgenthau, served his purpose of subverting justice in NYC. He would never do this for a White perpetrator, because Jews view Whites as enemy #1.
Yeah, just to state the obvious, Robert Morris Morgenthau, who died in 2019 just ten days short of his 100th birthday, was the son of Hank Morgenthau, Jr. of the infamous post-WWII Morgenthau Plan to depopulate Germany via pastoralization.
With Carthaginian input not only from Morgenthau at Treasury, but also from the State, and War Departments, the actual postwar plan implemented was called JCS 1067, which was idiotic and ultimately unworkable during the Cold War, according to General Lucius D. Clay, the American military commissar.
Treasury Secretary Morgenthau, Jr. was Hyde Park, NY best buds with Franklin Delano Roosevelt, another unironic Jeffersonian Democrat and agricultural romanticist.
Hank, Jr.’s son, Bob (born 1919) was first appointed as a U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York in 1962 by a man who would be “canonized” at Dealey Plaza in downtown Dallas, Texas by Lee Harvey Oswald the next year.
Grandfather Morgenthau, Sr. was President Thomas Woodrow Wilson’s ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, who devised a plan for encouraging American intervention in the Allied war against Germany with atrocity-propaganda involving massacred Armenian “minorities” circa 1915.
The word Genocide (1944) had not been coined yet, and even today some are opposed to calling these Turkish massacres “Genocide” because it potentially detracts from more modern Ashkenazi narratives involving the Shoah or Holocaust.
🙂
That’s absolutely fascinating.
I have long wondered about the “Armenian genocide”. If you have knowledge on this I would like to see if you’ve covered it more extensively or can point me to someone who has.
I haven’t studied the Armenian Genocide extensively.
I remember in the 1980s, California Governor George Deukmejian, whose parents fled the Armenian Genocide, was a bit of an activist on the subject ─ in spite of the political backlash from Jews that saw this mainly as a distraction from their Big-H.
I haven’t heard very much about it since those times. However, in 2019 ─ over a year after Deukmejian’s death ─ Congress passed a resolution recognizing the Armenian Genocide, and in defiance of President Trump who had opposed recognition.
Later, both Presidents Trump (2020) and Biden (2021) referred to the Armenian Genocide as one of the worst crimes of the 20th century and comparative to the Nazi Holocaust (LINK1).
So apparently, the Jews that Biden and Trump listen to are okay with the “ecumenical” Holocaust ─ i.e., that needs no longer worry about the sharing of top billing on the “racial extermination.”
There is a three-part article from 2024 at Counter-Currents by Morris van de Camp on Armenian ethno-religious conflict (LINK2).
The machinations of Ambassador Hank Morgenthau, Sr. in his memoirs (1918) are quite interesting. Morgenthau contributed heavily to President Wilson’s election campaign, but failed to secure a cabinet post.
Wilson wanted Morgenthau as the President’s Jewish go-between with the Ottoman Muslims and the Christians, but that did not quite work out. The ambassador resigned the post after serving for slightly over two years (1913-16)
The Senior Morgenthau was not an ardent Zionist, but he was encouraged in representing these interests by the Hungarian-born New York Zionist leader, Rabbi Stephen S. Wise.
Ambassador Morgenthau was positively obsessed with the Armenian “racial extermination.”
After the war, he continued with his atrocity cataloging and issued the Morgenthau Report (1919) on the state of Jewish pogroms in Poland.
The purpose of the report was to acquit Poland’s tarnished reputation as an Allied satrapy that was insufficiently protecting minorities in the service of the Versailles Treaty.
Critics of the Report either complained of a whitewash of atrocities in Poland ─ or were satisfied with the Report, such as in the case of food-relief czar Herbert Hoover, the future President.
🙂
Double standards in academia? Say it ain’t so!
Yes, we know liberals use “selective bias,” and outright lies to push their propaganda. 🙃
Maybe I’m mistaken, but isn’t Black History Month in February?
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Lip Man: October 27, 2025 [Q]uestioning the existence of Nanny of the Maroons does not deny Jamaican pride. It merely affirms that scholarship depends on evidence, not ideology.
Black History Month is Fake History Month. It’s a stale joke by now, but a month is too long. Reduce it to one day.
I think a nice tidy one hour should suffice. 4 15 minute segments on pbs. It would be a challenge to fill it up, but I know Lester Holt will be the host.
kolokol: October 27, 2025 Black History Month is Fake History Month. It’s a stale joke by now, but a month is too long. Reduce it to one day.
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Black History Day, what a novel idea. Have it fall on MLK Day or Juneteenth already. The nignogs already whine that Black History month is “racist” since Whitey gave them the shortest month of the year.
Always maintaining his sense of humor, an impressive clever stunt GLR pulled was to produce the thin hardback edition of Greatest Negro Contributions to Civilization. Dr Pierce had a copy of it in his personal library. Surprise: when opening it every page is blank.
One of my favorite proofs of the fakeness of contrived Black History was from William Pierce 28 years ago. See: “Brainwashing Our Children” at nationalvanguard.org reporting about the Harriet Tubman Black History Museum in Macon, Georgia.
…Here are the first six items on the list of Black inventions: the pyramids, paper, chess, the alphabet, medicine, and civilization. After this start the rest of the list is a bit anticlimactic, with such items as the doorknob, the mop, the curtain rod, peanut butter, and the helicopter.
“Lived experience” is a bull-shit term, used by leftwing “scholars” in place of real evidence. Their views are unsupported by any real evidence, so they just invent phony evidence. This article gives several examples of this kind of nonsense. Leftwing loonies tell lies as a matter of principle. They hate the truth.
Of course. And I’m surprised nobody has said this yet : it’s a very female brained, overly empathic concept.
The idea of “””facts and logic””” determining your views is a very male brained take.
Of course the touchy-feely approach goes down well in today’s bloated, neutered, drugged up West, and the factual approach is attacked as “autistic” and “weird” (both very feminine attacks – the punishment being to ostracize you from the group – the worst punishment, for a herd animal.)
If you ever have a disagreeable discussion with someone who is stupid and/or arrogant, they’ll be very quick to pull out the “You don’t know what you’re talking about, you haven’t experienced X like I have” in a really contemptuous tone. The whole “lived experience” slop rhetoric is really a trumped up, academic version of that.
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