7/29/20

My poor mother is forever tormented by her inability to obey medical news and at the same time see her family.

She is further afflicted by her new found pain for Americans of African Ascent having suffered what no other people on earth have ever suffered.

She was describing to me in tears the TV drama about Harriot Tubman and told me, “The white men treated the b#$%^& like animals, thought they were just animals—beat them!”

“No Mom,” I said, “Slave owners did not beat their animals, they beat their children and their slaves, who were often one in the same. Would they have had children with women believing the women were beasts? They treated their slaves like their children and beat the shit out of them on a regular basis.”

On and on she painfully painted the heroics of Harriot and the total evil of the white man and began pushing for the removal of George Washington’s statue and looked at me and said that I could not understand how hard it has been for b#$%^&. Me, a man born to her high school dropout husband who died penniless and who myself make less many a year than any welfare mother, when I have been harassed roughly three times as often by cops as the b#$%^ men I have known and have been attacked hundreds of times by b#$%^ men for the crime of being W#$%^.

Still, she could not see in me through the clouds of TV induced mist as anything other than the shadow of the ancient slave holder, all her family tales of ancestors being sold by the English forgotten in the flood of TV invoked grief for the only people ever to be abused. There she sat in pain, suffering her guilt, like my poor old boxing coach, Mister Frank did, when he called up Oliver and said, “I’m really sorry for the way your people were treated by my people. I had no idea.”

And Oliver came to me and said, “What the fuck, James? Mister Frank was good to me and every b#$%^ man who came to him. Why should he feel guilty?”

It is the magic of TV that our parents and my mother’s parents set us in front of and filled our minds with wonder and now in their old age, they are immobilized in front of it again and it fills their minds with foreboding and thunder.

It is faith, religion, the remnant shreds of our Christian piety twisted and sacrificed to a systemic greed.

I tried to give Mom a history lesson. But I’m just her boy. She has no idea that I am currently—and tragically for some academic should have shouldered this burden—the foremost authority on American slavery in the world. And her eyes clouded with mists as she wondered what should be done to help a people who were so uniquely and cruelly wounded that they cannot help themselves—and I think of Erique, Tyrone, Cedric, Earl, Oliver, Carbon Mike, Poet, Peanut, Joe Cru, Thomas, John Garret, Rasheed, Steven, my Uncle Robert [RIP], John Scott, Tony Ballard [RIP], Gordon, Ben Ndu, Steve Barnes, George [RIP] Reggie, all b#$%^ men far more successful than I [some of whom I worked for] and understand that against faith one cannot argue.

A new God has risen and all around us the nation of mind slaves are abasing themselves on bended knee. And who am I to deny my mother her congregation? Why she has been denied church attendance, the center of her long life, for four months now.

And I said, Mom, “I believe in reparations. Every person of African ascent in this nation should get a million dollars tomorrow. Then, every one who can prove American slave lineage should get ten million.”

My brother-in-law laughed and Mom was aghast, “But they will just spend it! This is not a joking matter.”

I objected that it was serious and that it was none of our business how other people spent their money.

So there can be no end. For this belief in unique African American victimization is really an indictment of that race, declaring them permanent dependents and pets of those who claim guilt over their condition. This claim of guilt is a claim of power, a fantasy that every Guilt Woman is a queen and every Guilt Man is a king, who must dispense charity and benevolence on an ongoing basis to their racial inferiors.

This should be profoundly offensive to b#$%^ men.

This echoes the Lady of the Medieval Christian manor, who would go down to the drawbridge and give alms to the beggars there. In the absence of the sanctifying process of suffering, the Christian must dispense charity or feel in some way unjustly privileged and thus damned. And if the Lady’s Lord somehow found a way to provide meaningful employment for the wretches at the gate: as scullion, soothsayer, crier or even fool, the Lady would be beside herself.

For if the Queen is deprived of inferiors and wretches, how so may she reign from above the shower of her benevolence?

For this reason, I suspect, that the b#$%^ American will be kept in perpetual bondage as a meat-puppet alms-singer, guilting we lordly and ladylike souls into filling the sloth troughs of perpetual despair as we one and all declare ourselves slaves to the oracle of the Shinning God flickering Wisdom in our Living Room, a place we are no longer supposed to share.