Heinous Shit That American Slavery Passed Down
Lesser Known (To White People) Aspects of Generational Trauma
I’m working on how to deliver this information into a microphone in rooms full of uncomfortable white Americans in a way that won’t result in me getting shot or, at the very least, met with cricket chirping.
However, I think for now, it works better as digital prose you have to choose to click on, and I believe it’s gravely important for more people to be aware of the extent and reach of the lingering effects of slavery. Too many are still mouthing off with dipshit rhetoric like “Just get over it — it was soooo long ago,” and while this is itself indicative of a childish, narrow perspective of the world, refuting this on its own lack of merit is usually insufficient to shake up any kind of introspection.
If you’d like a little less condemnation, harsh language, and a little more of a scholarly approach, I highly recommend Mrs. Isabel Wilkerson’s book Caste: The Origins of our Discontents. I want to be absolutely clear: it’s by no means my intent to be speaking on the behalf or in replacement of black voices, but to deliver this information in a way that it might get across in areas it otherwise might not.
Most people are vaguely familiar with genetics conceptually, in a “Punnett squares”, and maybe even “Gregor Mendel is the guy that grew peas” kind of sense, but fewer know much of anything about epigenetics: the science of how life experiences can alter your genetic sequence.
Your average honkey peripherally knows about slavery-era cruelties such as floggings, forced re-naming, and Mandingo fighting (which is actually historically unsupported, but still perpetuated thanks to popular media like Tarantino’s Django: Unchained). They understand lynching and burning crosses are not nice things to do, but most act like they have no dog in the fight and don’t actually comprehend the depth of the fuckery that we’ve inflicted.
[I mean, not really “we” per se… I come from blue collar Irish stock that’s only been in this country a few generations. Although, both sides of my family tree have engaged in missionary work, which is admittedly a bit colonizer-y. Dad’s parents raised him in Zimbabwe and Mom’s parents spent years later in life in China trying to spread The Good News. Personally, I believe they did so with love in their hearts and an authentic, albeit perhaps a bit misguided, desire to save souls, but yeah, admittedly, putting it into practice leaves a lot to be desired.]
Now, as a father to a little mixed daughter, and an ex-fiancé to a black woman, I find myself in the rather uniquely situated position of someone possessing both the knowledge of the circumstances that precipitated the racial dynamics in the country as we know them today, and the privilege to say something about it and (hopefully) catch white people’s attentions.
That being said, this is directed primarily toward white readers, but I do hope it’s as entertaining for P.O.C. audiences as it ought to be informative for the Caucasians.
One stereotype that commonly gets a pretty lighthearted treatment is the African American community’s penchant for spicy foods. White kids make jokes about their black friends loving Flaming Hot Cheetos and spicy wings, but do so without an awareness that this fondness is less innate than conditioned, or a sense of irony.
A popular plantation pastime was force-feeding slaves spicy peppers and watching them writhe and sweat and plead for water.
Ha ha ha-larious. What a silly joke.
If you have black friends, and you’re at least occasionally funny, you might’ve noticed that if something you’ve said or done REALLY warrants a laugh, they may feel compelled to rush out to do it from another room entirely. This stems from Jim Crow-era, when Southern towns kept “laughing barrels” for black people to laugh into and keep from “disrupting public peace”. When black people run away from something funny, it’s not just a cultural happenstance; it’s an ingrained fight-or-flight response.
Black laughter has a longer history of being treated as an implicit act of rebellion in the United States than it does being celebrated, or even tolerated. It’s even spawned a hashtag: #laughingwhileblack.
Co-parenting was definitely not the dream, but I still love hearing my former fiancée’s enormous laugh stand out in a crowd and fill a space. Even when it’s at inappropriate moments and I feel a tinge of embarrassment, it’s still one of my favorite sounds.
Another common trope for throwing shade at the black community is their perceived lack of swimming ability. “Haw-haw, they can’t swim,” Yeah, dumbass, that’s because their ancestors got the living shit kicked out of them for learning how to swim to escape from yours abusing them. Escaping through the water assisted in throwing the hunting dogs from their scent. Even after slavery was abolished, there was no warm welcome for them at public pools or beaches.
If you have to fight to learn what ought to be a leisure activity, it’s probably not going to place high on your priorities.
All too frequently, I see and hear criticisms of the perceived hypersexuality within the black community, with no acknowledgement or accountability for the sexual abuse white slave owners perpetrated against them for generations. In case you were fortunate enough to not be sexually abused as a child, it actually does have a tendency to lead to either hypersexuality, or asexuality. This phenomena is often met with sympathy and understanding for white victims of abuse, but when a black woman wrangles control of her sexuality away from her oppressors, it’s an issue, and her fault. When a black man has multiple baby mothers, he’s considered a deadbeat instead of anyone caring to evaluate his emotional wellbeing.
The barbarism of the transatlantic slave trade is rarely, if ever, contested, but the far-reaching implications of it are just as often dismissed as being too far in the past to be bothered with. The opacity of African American backgrounds is something with which European Americans seldom have to grapple. With minimal Internet sleuthing, I can relatively easily obtain evidence of my great-grandfather’s admittance to Ellis Island from Ireland.
Meanwhile, if my daughter wants to learn about her country of origin from her mother’s side, it’d require a lot more research, and probably even genetic sequencing.
The eclipsing of an individual’s — or in this case, an entire community’s — national identity through rape, human trafficking, and brutality is an inexcusable evil that doesn’t deserve any kind of sugarcoating. Slavemasters sold off the mixed race children born of their rapes for profit, further detaching their descendants from anything resembling a healthy biological family structure. Viewing their own children as monetary assets instead of human beings with personalities and desires illustrates the level of disconnect from their own humanity from which these enslavers operated. Now, centuries later, we’ve made discouragingly little progress in recognizing and rectifying the missteps of our collective past.
Let’s do better.
