The Real Taboo
By • 3/31/08Last week, Condoleeza Rice called slavery America’s “birth defect.”
“Africans and Europeans came here and founded this country together—Europeans by choice and Africans in chains. That’s not a very pretty reality of our founding.” As a result, Miss Rice told editors and reporters at The Washington Times, “descendants of slaves did not get much of a head start, and I think you continue to see some of the effects of that… That particular birth defect makes it hard for us to confront it, hard for us to talk about it, and hard for us to realize that it has continuing relevance for who we are today.”
Rice acts as though she were bravely fronting our taboos on race. However, her remarks are utterly generic and cliched. Americans plainly have no difficulty talking about the evils whites have committed against blacks. In fact, we are totally obsessed by this aspect of our history. Our history textbooks, our popular media, and the thousand and one slavery museums that have popped up around the country revel in the gory details of death during the Atlantic passage, whippings, and rape that were undeniably part of the reality of slavery.
While Americans view slavery as an an unalloyed evil for blacks, Africans’ own views are decidedly more mixed. A 2005 New York Times article discusses Ghanaians’ attitude to black American tourists who come there to discover their roots:
Many Africans, meanwhile, often fail to see any connection at all between them and African-Americans, or feel African-Americans are better off for having been taken to the United States. Many Africans strive to emigrate; for the past 15 years, the number of Africans moving to the United States has surpassed estimates of the number forced there during any of the peak years of the slave trade. The number of immigrants from Ghana in the United States is larger than that of any other African country except Nigeria, according to the 2000 census.
“So many Africans want to go to America, so they can’t understand why Americans would want to come here,” said Philip Amoa-Mensah, a guide at Elmina Castle. “Maybe Ghanaians think they are lucky to be from America, even though their ancestors went through so much pain.”
It is not hard to see why Africans don’t feel sorry for American blacks. As the article mentions, Ghanaians still live on less than a dollar a day. West Africans have suffered horrors that were as bad as anything black Americans have gone through. Certainly, black Americans were spared the horrors of the Sierra Leone Civil War, which left 200,000 dead and tens of thousands of amputees. Beyond that, hundreds of thousands of West Africans are slaves even today.
Secretary Rice says that it’s difficult for Americans to talk about race. That’s true, but not in the way Rice thinks. While we have no trouble talking about the evils of slavery, it is genuinely difficult, if not impossible, for us, however, to discuss the ways in which slavery was beneficial to blacks. The very idea is blasphemy in our current cultural climate. It would also be blasphemy to say that, whatever whites’ sins against blacks in the past, whites have, on the whole, treated blacks better than they treat each other.
This silencing demonstrates the power of the “whites as cancer” myth, according to which whites must always be the villains and non-whites the victims. Far from confronting our taboos about race, Rice is merely reinforcing them.
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The fact that their ancestors were brought here as slaves is the greatest thing that could possibly have happened to the black people living in America today. They have no idea how incredibly fortunate they are. Even those that came as slaves often fared better than they would have if left as wild men in Africa, and they got the definite benefit of Christianity. Today’s blacks are simply looking for someone to blame for their own failures that arise from lack of ability and self discipline. It has to be somewhat galling to be constantly reminded of their own inadequacy by being continually in the presence of those who are more capable. They do better when left alone and white people are left alone, so that each of us can deal with our own problem children (and we each do have them).
I have to say that I am very disappointed in Condi Rice. I had thought much better of her before this ill considered outburst. I did not think she would play the race card, but it seems to demonstrate that even the most capable, the blacks who have benefited the very most from all sorts of affirmative action, etc., cannot resist playing the race card. That tells me a whole lot right there.
By on 3/31/08 at 8:12 pm
Ian Jobling notes:
“The very idea is blasphemy in our current cultural climate. It would also be blasphemy to say that, whatever whites’ sins against blacks in the past, whites have, on the whole, treated blacks better than they treat each other.”
The arrogance and sheer ingratitude of blacks in this country, is simply sickening; the only thing that is even marginally worse, are the spoiled and clueless white “elites” in this country, who cater to their every whimsy of alleged “racism.” Please God, they are practically demanding that one of them (the pretender Obama) be simply handed the country on a silver platter, at the expense of one of their own the Red Queen Hillary. And when he is not, when the hypocritical and power hungry Hillary actually puts up a fight they hint that she can do so, because there is the whiff of “racism” coming from the white troglodytes they and she feed off of. Of course, now she (desperate as she is supposedly) is castigated for “fueling” such gauche “misconceptions” as honest white angst at what is being done to them and in their name, and she finds her “enlightened” peers turning on her.
As the fictional Borat would say, ‘very nice!’
The fact of the matter is, that deep down, blacks know they are running a “clever” scam in this country and have been since the 1950s. They sense and exploit the true cancer of the white race, its weepy eyed and simpering elites’ guilt at having the good fortune of social mobility and a better pot to defecate in then their fellow whites in the middle and working classes. Unable to reconcile racial “inequalities” as realities reflective of abilities, they smugly blame less economically (and often more honest and hard working) whites’ “intolerance” and “ignorance” as being the cause of these fantasized “institutionalized inequalities.” That these wretched swine: lie, cheat, steal, and exploit us for their visions of utopia, is either lost on them at best, or at worst cynically manipulated to cover up this hard fact of life.
What more to say other than, and as always, God help us all!
By on 3/31/08 at 8:38 pm
It’s futile to expect Rice ever to realize the truth of Fred Reed’s observation that blacks are using civilization without a license. Whether Rice’s obtuseness has more to do with the limitations of her intellect or of her education is something only the most dedicated Jesuit would attempt to determine (no, I’m not especially impressed by Rice’s scholarly attainments; they’ve been the subject of some interesting scrutiny lately).
I suppose the most significant thing about this nonsense is, as others have pointed out, how utterly routine and predictable the whole thing is, this silly assertion that “Africans and Europeans came here and founded this country together.” You may as well say that humans and livestock participated as equal partners in the Republic’s founding. That blacks somehow did something of importance besides the most basic manual labor is ridiculous, but it is a part of our national religion’s catechism. Maybe we should be grateful for small favors. After all, at least Rice does not suggest, as many of our black opponents do, that Africans were sought out by Whitey for their myriad specialized skills, including expert knowledge of agriculture and botany, or that since somewhere in Washington someone built a pyramid everything about the Revolution was really the appropriated culture of space-traveling black pharoahs. Come to think of it, I’d like to hear Rice’s views on all of that afrocentric bilge. That might be genuinely interesting, unlike most of what she’s actually said and written.
By on 3/31/08 at 9:47 pm
Cassiodorus writes:
It’s futile to expect Rice ever to realize the truth of Fred Reed’s observation that blacks are using civilization without a license. Whether Rice’s obtuseness has more to do with the limitations of her intellect or of her education is something only the most dedicated Jesuit would attempt to determine.
True, and well said.
Black slavery in the United States has been described as a “peculiar” institution - meaning, I suppose, an out of the ordinary practice. Considered in the light of history, it was not.
There is nothing unique about black slavery. Slavery has existed throughout recorded history. Aristotle believed in “natural slavery” He thought some people are born to be slaves and others masters.
There are very few people (I’m talking about whites here) who, if they had access to their complete family history, would not find some ancestor in a servile condition. In feudal societies, there were huge numbers of serfs without any personal freedoms - except perhaps those granted by the lord of the manor. Many people emigrated to America as bondsmen and women: these people were slaves in all but name, and had to work off their servile status over many years.
Blacks need to understand that their experience of slavery is part of a continuum of human misery which has been alleviated or eliminated by the compassion, social reforms, science and technology of….. Well, guess who?
By on 4/1/08 at 4:20 am
To Dr. D, regarding:
“I have to say that I am very disappointed in Condi Rice. I had thought much better of her before this ill considered outburst. I did not think she would play the race card, but it seems to demonstrate that even the most capable, the blacks who have benefited the very most from all sorts of affirmative action, etc., cannot resist playing the race card. That tells me a whole lot right there.”
I have to concur with you 100% on the disappointment I feel toward Comrade Rice, for this anti-white and Neo-Marxist diatribe against whites. Of the Bush administration’s cavalcade of wretched fools, Comrade Rice always stood out as probably the best of a bad lot. Her history of Soviet study and expertise, along with the staunch anti-Communism it evolved in her are truly admirable; the high point of her public life being abandoning Mr. Peanut-in-Chief Carter for the future President Regan’s camp in the 1980 campaign. She had the wisdom to see the USSR and Politburo as being on the way out, if simply confronted with an “unmoving” Western response to their military expansion and growing adventurism, in the Third World.
Moreover, her clarity in describing and justifying The War on Terror, was equally refreshing. It was and is a movement from the bipolar power balance of the Cold War that she was schooled in, toward rationally dealing with the challenges of this “thawed” and unstable “unipolar” American and Western “dominated” geopolitical cesspool of Third World terrorism and “migration” coddling that is now left in its wake.
And then she goes ahead and does this, literally wallows in the Marxist based multicultural model of Third World hegemony via a slowly dissolved West?
She could do no more damage to herself by endorsing Obama, in my book!
In a final word on this topic, and simply put, putrid!
By on 4/1/08 at 6:42 am
American blacks wouldn’t be living in Africa if not for slavery. They wouldn’t exist if not for slavery. They would not have been born if their ancestors had not been brought to the “new world” as slaves. Unless they believe their lives in America are so hellish that they wish they would not have been born, blacks should be grateful that their ancestors were slaves. It’s rather odd to whine about an evil that was not only abolished 143 years ago- and that has nothing to do with the current pathologies of blacks- but which is also responsible for your existence.
By on 4/2/08 at 12:18 am
By SK’s peerless reasoning, Israelis should be “grateful” for the Holocaust.
What I’m grateful for is the astounding upward mobility of millions of blacks over the past 40 years… which could’ve happened nowhere but in America.
By on 4/5/08 at 11:23 pm
What I’m grateful for is the astounding upward mobility of millions of blacks over the past 40 years… which could’ve happened nowhere but in America.
Perhaps you should have made clear that black upward mobility was possible only because the necessary and sufficient conditions for it have been created in a prosperous and democratic society governed by whites.
By on 4/6/08 at 8:38 am
In noting that American blacks would not exist but for slavery, I wasn’t implying that blacks should celebrate slavery or get down on their knees and thank whites who had nothing to do with bringing African slaves to the American South.
I was simply noting the irony of blacks demanding reparations for an institution that’s responsible for their existence and the “astounding upward mobility of millions of blacks.” This observation must be understood in the context of blacks who’ve never been slaves demanding trillions of dollars in reparations and endless guilt from whites who’ve never owned slaves on the assumption that all the failings and pathologies of blacks are explained by the legacy of slavery and that whites today benefit immensely from the presence of 35 million blacks.
Savor the irony, absurdity, and lunacy of such demands: trillions of dollars in reparations and endless guilt for an evil that was abolished 143 years ago; that has nothing to do with the failings and pathologies of today’s blacks; whose legacy and its descendants have made the U.S. a far worse place to live for most whites in almost every significant way (rampant crime, black-on-white violence, anti-white black hatred, massive tax increases, reverse discrmination, the suppression of freedom of speech and the debasement of civility, and on and on); and without such legacy blacks would not exist and thus benefit from living in a democratic, free, affluent, and civilized society.
By on 4/6/08 at 12:37 pm
Ho-hum and Yawn to Ms. Rice’s analogy of slavery and a birth defect. Of course he desendents of negro slaves are blessed by their fate of being born into this free and plentiful nation.
If most Blacks could be thankful for this wonderous fortune that they have, and use the possibilities that this nation has to offer to their advantage instead of succombing to their, I believe, strong drive to ‘take’ instead of to ‘give’, then they would be an immensely successful race!
Why so much focus on the wrongs done to African- Americans? Why not some focus on the American Indian who most would see was even more agrieved? Could one ever mention the huge cloud of descrination that encompassed non- Western European peoples in this nation , or the traumatic sorrows the Irish suffered? What about the Inuit, wasn’ty he agrieved as much?
As the article states, slavery is still very prevelant in Africa today, and most slaves brought to the U.S. were already slaves in Africa!!!! Throughout most of history there have been many , many, more Black slaves to Blacks, and many many more White slaves, ( or Serfs, etc.) , of Whites, than the relatively small fraqction of Blacks ‘s that were slaves of Whites!
Why the constant focus on one groups ancestors ill fate at the expense of all other people and their ancestors ill fortune? Black America has been pulling a Con Game by controlling the guilt that is commonly felt in sucessful and hard working people, who commonly carry with them a compassion for the ’ less fortunate’. It is time to wake up people, before the con- man robs us blind!
By Dave M. on 3/31/08 at 8:06 pm