I took a rare day off on Memorial Day, but it had nothing to do with mourning dead American soldiers. Naturally, this didn’t stop me from being bombarded by the endlessly treacly and corny “conservative” online finger-wagging about how I need to honor all the dead soldiers who ostensibly shed their blood to protect my freedoms. (more…)
Tag: slavery
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Ron Chernow
Grant
New York: Penguin Press, 2017Ulysses S. Grant is one of the archetypal Americans. A brilliant general who would only accept unconditional surrender. A modest president who eschewed pomp in favor of simple, democratic attire. (more…)
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1,970 words
Black Woman Livestreams Two-Hour “Fuck Tha Police” Rant, Then Kills Rather Than Fucks a White Policeman
Jessica Beauvais is a 32-year-old black New Yorker whose major accomplishments up to last week were receiving four separate citations for driving with a suspended license. (more…)
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Thomas Nelson Page
Bred in the Bone
New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1904Bred in the Bone, a 1904 novella by Thomas Nelson Page, epitomizes race realism through the proxy of horses and horse racing. It also embodies the author’s characteristic nostalgia for the aristocratic white supremacy of the antebellum South. (more…)
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Ta-Nehisi Coates
Between the World and Me
New York: Spiegel & Grau, 2015Ta-Nehisi Coates has become one of the most eminent literary figures in recent time. In the last decade, his star has risen dramatically. He’s perhaps best known for his journalism work at the Atlantic, but he also has been published by NYT, WaPo, Time, and several other major periodicals. (more…)
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Anyone familiar with 19th-century American history will recognize John C. Calhoun as the man who, more than anyone else, represented the antebellum South. He, along with John Randolph of Roanoke, Virginia, provided much of the intellectual heft behind the character and institutions of the South and defined its position as a distinct economic and cultural region within the greater Union.
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1,795 words
All the Fine Black Cannibals
As a young white child growing up in a 90%-white country where white characters dominated the media, it was easy for a green saplin’ such as myself to conclude that the only two races in America were Cowboys and Injuns. I was vaguely aware of the existence of black people, but you hardly ever saw them on TV or in the movies — and if you saw them at all, half of the time they were depicted as cannibals boiling their human prey in a gigantic cauldron. (more…)
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So they want to ban Gone With the Wind? Pity, because a movie they would really like to strangle is Santa Fe Trail. Made in 1940, Santa Fe Trail is an Errol Flynn/Olivia de Havilland Western with lots of action and romance that discusses slavery and the Southern point of view in rational terms.
Errol Flynn plays Jeb Stuart, and Ronald Reagan plays George Custer. They are classmates at West Point in 1854 (more…)
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Spanish translation here
Michael Hoffman
They Were White and They Were Slaves: The Untold History of the Enslavement of Whites in Early America
Dresden, New York: Wiswell Ruffin House
Every few years or so a book comes around that rips your foundations from under you and makes you re-question pretty much everything. For me, Kevin MacDonald’s Culture of Critique and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago are two such books. Michael A. Hoffman’s They Were White and They Were Slaves is another. (more…)
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7,803 words
The monumental significance of the fall of Saint-Domingue, the crown jewel of the French colonial empire, and its ensuant descent into the African savagery of Haiti cannot be overstated. The terrible birth of Haiti as a mangled, stillborn phoenix from a river of white blood (more…)
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For decades now, African American leaders have been calling for a formal United States apology for the American role in the slave trade, with some even demanding reparations. Indian tribes proclaim their tax-exempt status as something they are owed for a legacy of persecution by the United States. Mexican Americans in the southwest United States seek to incorporate this region, including California, into Mexico, or even to set up an independent nation, Aztlan, that will recreate the glories of the Aztec empire, destroyed centuries ago by the imperialistic Spaniards. (more…)
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1,940 words
1,940 words
What are we to make of reparations for slavery to American blacks? It’s become a frequently repeated demand lately, and might be even more so later on. The strange thing is that that the further away in time we get from slavery, which ended well before living memory, the pricklier the topic becomes. Likewise, demands for reparations (more…)