End Slavery!

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The other day the topic on BBC World Have Your Say was a comment from the previous day by a black professor who described a theory (which he specified that he did not necessarily espouse) that the trauma of slavery caused such psychological emasculation of enslaved African Americans and their descendants that they tend to feel that the only place they can "be a man" is in their own home, where "being a man" often includes brutalizing their women.

Huh? Well, OK, someone believes anything you can imagine, and lots of things you can't. The professor obviously recognized that this was an unresolvable "question" and that the answer was, "Well, yes, sort of, but no, not really." He went off to teach his class after 4 minutes, lucky stiff.

A few people called in and said, in effect, "Huh?" pointing out that while the cascading effects of slavery and racism certainly affect black Americans today (Duh!) this does not constitute any excuse for wife-beating, and/or that a "real man" does not get off on that anyway.

But this did not deter the moderator, who accepted with relish various calls from angry black men who equated today's racism with yesteryear's slavery - a patently ridiculous claim, since lots of groups who have never been enslaved are targets of racism in North America (Duh!) - or claimed that racism would never end until "the white man" accepted his collective guilt and enclosed a cash compensation with his formal apology.

Uh, "the white man"? Let's flip that around: if I talk about "the black man" (and live) people will quite rightly point out that there is no "the" black man. That's the whole point of racism: to foster the ridiculous notion that, "Them X's is all the same." Think about it.

The oppressed are entitled to special rights. There are words I have not earned the right to use, because I have not suffered from them. Perhaps African Americans have earned the right to be racist toward whites, and I should shut the fuck up. But I am not complaining on behalf of "white men" here, I am simply pointing out that this sort of talk shores up racism, and if anyone really would like to see racism wane, they should set a better example for themselves.

Even if "white America" acknowledges its inherited guilt, sends reparations to every person with enslaved ancestors, eliminates all discriminatory practices and truly learns to love its black brothers and sisters at least as much as itself, I fear this self-regenerating spasm of racial paranoia will keep feeding on itself forever.

For your own sake, get over it. Then maybe we can move on.