jumpingjacktrash:this is a baldwin quote i haven’t seen before and it’s insightful as hell. your run
jumpingjacktrash:this is a baldwin quote i haven’t seen before and it’s insightful as hell. your run of the mill white racist doesn’t think he’s racist, not because he’s a moron, but because he doesn’t have the frame of reference to understand what racism even is. he’s been fed this skewed story where all the heroes are white and nonwhites are only villains and victims. then, to make things worse, a lot of (mostly white as far as i’ve seen) progressives try to counter that with a narrative where whites are collectively a world-destroying supervillain, and nonwhites are extra-victimized victims.like those are your working class white guy’s options: the history where christians with clean underwear shook hands in brotherhood with naked savages, or the history where land-greedy anglos roared in and slaughtered everyone. he picks the happy lie because it doesn’t hurt. he doesn’t consciously extrapolate from that the conclusion that everything’s ok and anyone complaining is just being a troublemaker. but it follows.but the guy who picks the other narrative isn’t much better off. i see it a lot on tumblr – people who, in trying to counter the kindergarten thanksgiving story, end up pushing the idea that whites are powerful and non-whites are helpless. they treat non-whites as rescue projects. performative self-flagellation takes the place of activism.as baldwin implied, history’s not that simple. both the “it’s nothing to do with me” view and the “mea maxima culpa” view are blinders we wear to protect ourselves from the messy, complicated reality of how events actually occurred.if you want to be part of the solution instead of the problem, it’s not enough to care. you have to learn. -- source link
#wonderfully put