Will Shetterly's Blog, page 9

White Slaves, Black Slaveholders, and the Metaphor of Slavery

1: White SlavesI always thought “free, white, and twenty-one” was racist and redundant. Turns out it’s just racist. In the Old South, some slaves were legally white.Whiteness and slavery had different rules. Slaves were people whose mothers were slaves. White people included people who were either 3/4 white (a quadroon) or 7/8 white (an octoroon), depending on the state’s legal definition. That

Malcolm X and W.E.B. Du Bois put Class First and Race Second

Race reductionists love quoting Malcolm X when he was with the Nation of Islam because racists of all hues fundamentally agree with each other—the Nation of Islam met with the American Nazi Party and Marcus Garvey met with the Ku Klux Klan to promote their shared goals.Those who put race first have to quote Malcolm more selectively after he left NOI. He rejected identitarianism and black

Sorry, Race Reductionists—Malcolm X Rejected Identitarianism and Black Nationalism

Herman Hiller, World Telegram staff photographer, Public domainIf Malcolm X had been killed in 1963, he would be remembered as just another of Elijah Muhammad’s racist followers. Malcolm admitted that in a letter written after he left the Nation of Islam (boldface mine):“I declare emphatically that I am no longer in Elijah Muhammad’s ‘strait jacket,’ and I don’t intend to replace his with one

Why the White Elite Wants to Talk about Race instead of Class

JasonPToews, CC BY-SA 4.0Rich white people know they would win a race war and lose a class war. Rich liberals spout vapid phrases about their privilege as easily as kings proclaimed that they were sinners who were humble before God, and rich conservatives defend the “right” to exploit working people as easily as rich slavers defend the “right” to own them. The rich will say anything that protects

Tiger Girl, the first mixed-race comic book superhero?

Tiger Girl looks like a generic example of the Jungle Girl craze in comics, but she differs from them greatly. In 1944, while the South was segregated and most New York comic book publishers avoided putting out anything that might hurt sales by offending racists, Fight Comics introduced Tiger Girl, the daughter of an Indian prince and an Irish woman.Other things set her apart too: Her companions

Why the Black Elite Wants to Talk about Race instead of Class

Associação Brasileira de Jornalismo Investigativo, CC BY 2.0Focusing on race makes rich black people the heroes of America’s story and costs them nothing. Focusing on class makes them part of the problem and threatens their economic privilege.Adolph Reed provides two examples:At Neoliberalism & Black Politics: A TBS Conversation With Adolph Reed, Part 1, he said,‘I’ve been teaching mainly in the

“Systemic Racism” Can’t Explain the USA—but Class Mobility Can

Tim Pierce from Berlin, MA, USA, CC BY 2.0The first law of prejudice: The rich look down on the poor.1. Basic dataIdentitarians and universalists agree the US racial hierarchy looks like this:from https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Ce... identitarians, the racial hierarchy is all you need to understand who has power in the United States. They wave

Black Connotes Power, Privilege, Wisdom, and Sex—White Connotes Ignorance, Coldness, and Death

Nicogenin, CC BY-SA 2.0When anti-racists say white is associated with good things and black with bad ones, I wonder how they fail to see that all colors have good and bad connotations. Their belief that some color connotations affect the way humans see each other comes from discredited ideas about the power of language.When the rich dress to impress, they wear black suits and dresses. Because

Sorry, Word Cops—Changing Words Doesn’t Change Reality

Orwell was Wrong.Jordan L’Hôte, CC BY 3.0Moralists dream of making the world better by controlling the language we use. I understand their love of symbolic change—it is much easier to make words taboo and create new ones than it is to change reality. The moralists’ belief that words shape reality is known, appropriately, by several names: linguistic relativity, the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis,

Why I Love Frederick Douglass and the 1619 Project Wants to Erase Him

Frederick Douglass is the most important black American and one of the most important abolitionists of the 19th century. I admire him for the same reason I admire Malcolm X: he started with almost everything against him and rose because he was a brilliant speaker who could admit his mistakes and transcend them.Yet Douglass was left out of the 1619 Project for at least two reasons. Regarding the