kontextmaschine:

Wesley Yang made a good point on the context of the NYT’s 1619 thing and Coates bringing up reparations again and a renewed focus on slavery and “the awokening” in general.

That as new streams of immigration make America less white, they simultaneously make it less black, or at least less Negro – the nation formed in slavery in America.

And I could see that, a felt sense of danger that if slavery and blackness aren’t deeper written into the national narrative, then to the degree these new arrivals are assimilated to America, it’ll be again be to a specifically white America, with blacks left on the outside, like with the “white ethnics“ before.

But it hangs up on that nation thing. Like, if you don’t want the American narrative to just be the White nation’s story, okay, but the rightists that bluecheck shitsnots say are “telling on themselves” are right, the Black nation’s story as proposed is one featuring the White nation as an enemy, or at least Pharoah’s people, where it is featured at all.

Though I mean what were the White nation’s alternatives on offer? Well, the traditional one up to 1970 was “it was a damn shame that the White nation split and turned against itself in the waste of the Civil War and Reconstruction, and a great glory it was able to reunite”.

The upgraded one was “it was a damn shame that the White nation enslaved the blacks, but a great glory it freed them and invited them to join the White nation, thus resolving that plotline”

Which I suppose was still the promise when I grew up, the narrative as I learned it was

The Civil Rights Movement Was A Great And Glorious Thing (by which they mean the ‘50s part) but

The ‘60s Went Too Far Sometimes (by which they include the Civil Rights Movement) then in

The ‘70s [INAUDIBLE] so in

The ‘80s we remembered we were Americans, dammit, which means by

The ‘90s we couldn’t wait for blacks to escape the violent, inner-city ruin in which they had always lived

so. I mean, I put it like that to render the rejection sympathetic and understandable, but I grew up with that whole 90s colorblind “black people can be Whites too!” thing, I liked it, it seemed like it was working for a while, at least in the spheres I noticed, and when complaints became audible it felt like they could be classified and addressed as failures to live up to the ideal.

I dunno, the 90s dreams of “women can be guys too!” and “goyim can be secular Jews too!” aren’t doing too great either. Maybe there was just a strong enough monoculture with high barriers that things had to be made to work back then. Maybe the 90s utopian “the internet will lower barriers and give everyone a voice!“ thing was true but in a monkey’s paw way and the thing we thought we were celebrating as that was an early stage where it built a culture more tailored to the already-set. I dunno. I have no solutions.