I was thinking about the collective consciousness and how it is a lot more potent now than it was in the past, say 1800 or 1100 or 500 BC or earlier. Thanks to the internet and the quick availability of much of recorded history’s information, people are all following the same narrative a lot more easily and ‘effectively’ than in the past. People show up to work on a Tuesday, for example, all knowing about the big news that happened on Monday. Strangers at the store all know about it too. Depending on the magnitude (for example, the mass shooter who recently killed 8 people in Atlanta at the time of writing, 6 of them Asian women), almost everyone is silently aware and conscious about it even if they aren’t discussing it.
This got me thinking about information access in the past. I’ve benefited from reading the likes of Hume, Hegel, Homer, Locke, Aurelius, and others, but that is only due to their ease of accessibility. How would someone before the internet and before public libraries get access to these critical works? Certainly they would have to be a member of some kind of elite, because literacy was not common like it is now, and the ability to obtain and comprehend the greats would be achieved by an even more select few.
I am not done pursuing this information. But I am currently distracted by what I have learned about the history of U.S. education. The main point being the exclusion of blacks from the schooling system. This is not new information — in fact it should be rather obvious, but I have been caught off guard by the public’s and my own lack of understanding of how crucial this is to the history of the United States. I was seeking neutral information and was again presented with the ultra racist truth. Basically, the first public schools were free and open to white children of any class or gender. They would be taught spelling, arithmetic, and other subjects. The nationwide phenomena of public schools spawned out of the systems in place in Massachusetts. Public schools were more common in New England than they were in the south until the mid-nineteenth century. Here, a few things have already been established. The economic dominance of the north versus the south, both past and present, can likely be traced back to the colonies’ early attitudes about education.
We must be clear and factual. The north is no less ‘racist’ than the south. Slavery was tried in the northern colonies, and only abandoned due to the winter climate. Segregation laws persisted in all northern colonies starting from the 1600s until even after the civil war in some cases. The ‘white savior’ complex many of these states and their residents have is ultimately unmerited, as it is derived from a series of financial considerations and not from any moral superiority. This is evinced by the basic facts of life in America for many black people in these places. That said, the north’s emphasis on education did encourage more enlightened thinking which would make them more hospitable locations for black people to live.
Obviously, as public schools became more widespread throughout the nation, black children would be excluded. In the south there was express prohibition of teaching blacks anything. While the full power and purse of the United States was committed to teaching white children, already abused black children would not be able to learn, at least not with the same efficacy. These clear and obvious facts, along with many other clear and obvious instances of systemic racism is more evidence of the ‘white privilege’ that exists today. I try to refrain from using that term, mainly because it is immediately polarizing (due to the sensitivity of whites who benefit from it) but also because there is probably a better term for it. Perhaps ‘white-manufactured supremacy’. Nevertheless, ‘white privilege’ does exist and this is just one of its many roots.
When one race enslaves another, enriching themselves off of the free labor and toil of the other, that is bad enough. But to continuously add insult to injury — education prohibition, government-backed slave patrols (the birthplace of modern policing), the Dred Scott decision confirming blacks were not and were never intended to be American citizens, thousands of anti-black segregation laws, the Wilmington Insurrection of 1898, the Black Wall Street massacre of 1921, injecting blacks with syphilis in the Tuskegee experiments, Harry Anslinger’s racializing of drugs as a vehicle for prohibition, black WW2 vets being ineligible for the GI bill, the FBI assassinations of Malcolm X, MLK Jr, and Fred Hampton, the unending list of other similar events, the millions of unrecorded injustices that must have occurred — it is clearly sadistic and evil. It is equally sadistic to claim these had no adverse effects on the black population, and that nothing should be done.
Substantive reparations for African-Americans are needed, with the key word being substantive, as these problems cannot and will not be fixed with a one-time payment. I like to imagine what could have been, had Europeans not defiled the African continent and partitioned it with asinine borders which still exist, extracting its resources while exploiting and torturing its people, generating gargantuan wealth for themselves and giving none of it back. I grow more uncomfortable with this reality each day.
