I am trying to finish America in Chains, the companion volume to Stillbirth of a Nation, but am experiencing difficulty due to my lack of typing skill. I can’t read something and type without looking at the keys and I’m down to extracting the rest of the chronology of Caucasian enslavement from a number of old print books. With hundreds more dates and associated events to go, what was I to do?
I called Babelicious Capri, an overqualified typist. Sure enough, she was soon at my door in sensible shoes ready to type away. I sat back away as she professionally adjusted my messed-up office chair, rearranged the mouse pad, put the keyboard in its proper place and began adjusting the tool bar.
She signaled that she was ready and off we went, me dictating and her typing.
Eight pages in she was faltering, having trouble.
Ten pages in she asked to stop and I saw tears in her eyes. The constant litany of denied slavery, child bondage, secret mass killings and rampant injustice had gotten to her. Babelicious Capri was done with white slavery history and had to go and think of sunnier skies on the horizon to even herself out.
So, yesterday, Mescaline Franklin came to town to work on his historic photography project of soon to be erased Caucasian history and I recruited him as a typist.
Ready and raring to type truth to power, we cracked open a couple beers and got going. Two hours later he was in a seething rage, ready to go find some rich hipster of British descent and cave his head in with the keyboard. Like Babelicious, Mescaline managed to type ten pages of sorrow, about 150 accounts of the founding of this nation, a nation that never knew other than one kind of race-based servitude—according to the establishment narrative, that is—and never included the hundreds of thousands of English, Scotch, Welsh and Irish men, women and children whose broken bodies fertilized the morally barren fields of Plantation America, just as the absence of a headstone fertilized the myth that they had never been brought in chains to toil and die in a savage land.
His reaction, though, being one of rage, lends some promise to this account. He just entered my room, inquiring as to the morning’s publications and I ask:
“After last night’s typing, what do you think about indentured servitude in so-called Colonial America?”
“It shows that the basis of this country is inhuman treatment of people as commodities, tinged with an underlying malevolence. That’s malevolence. You don’t do that to human beings, regardless of where they come from. You call yourself a Christian but you don’t do that to somebody. The fact that you bought somebody means you are entitled to beat them to death, rape them, take their child and sell it? It explains a lot about now. When people wonder why everything is coming apart like this and being attacked by criminals and being portrayed in a certain negative way, it pretty much makes sense that we get to this criminal/slave matrix—fuck this country!
“As a side note I would like to see some kind of narrative about American slavery without black people. You could make such a movie, about a character with an R on his cheek coming back and tearing up plantations. But you’ll never see it. It won’t be made. It’s no different than today. A white man loses his job and is free to be predated upon. The slave matrix is still alive. It makes sense that you want to be proud of your country, so you want to portray the men who founded your country in a proud light. To a regular decent person who is already taken aback by what they have seen in recent years this could be where the dream dies. Like you said last night, we [whites] are a bad slave population as evidenced by our low birthrate and high suicide rate in the present condition.”
It is clear to me now why my ancestors from the South despised the Guvment.
"...Ten pages in she asked to stop and I saw tears in her eyes. The constant litany of denied slavery, child bondage, secret mass killings and rampant injustice had gotten to her..."
That series of articles had the same effect on me. Very depressive. I wonder if these people were psychopaths or did they just become inured to the suffering? I don't think I could behave like this. I've been the boss before and I don't like that. I don't care for telling everyone what to do.I wonder if all of us are capable of this behavior under the right circumstances? Could we be raised in such a method that the plight of others gives us no pity? It's one thing to have less pity on those out of sight but to those right in front of us, it would be much harder.
Keep in mind that many of the most cruel slave owners of blacks had been slaves themselves. These small plantation operators, such as the man that owned Solomon Northup and those depicted in the movie Mandingo, had been raised to this standard of behavior. Furthermore, this standard of behavior was the standard of English parenting, as the indentured servant was often the recipient of a parent's common law right to do with his child what he sees fit, up to and including torture.