alexandraerin:

First of all, the connection between the two statements is way more tenuous than your hypothetical example.

That was the point of me asking you about General Washington. When you hear about him “getting shit done”, even in terms of military conflicts in the revolutionary war, you don’t hear “killing white people”. You hear “winning battles.”

Now, the Nat Turner statement you’ve seized upon is a brusque restatement of the simplified way that history lessons treat the subject of his uprising. It’s not a statement of approval per se, and if it seems to lack nuance… that was part of the point of the post.

But I think it would actually be letting your chain of thought off a little too easily to just point that out and move on. Let’s examine it with the assumption that it was an earnest and straightforward statement of admiration and respect:

NAT TURNER GOT SHIT DONE.

Okay, now, Nat Turner is not famous for having a successful uprising. That has to be said. And because that’s said, we should also say that about twice as many slaves died in Turner’s uprising than did white people.

I’m talking combatants here.

Half again that number were executed after the fact on suspicion of involvement and twice the number of original casualties were lynched… tortured and killed. Given that, if you’re going to find something negative in the statement that Turner got shit done, focusing on the fact that some white people died seems to be… well, I don’t want to say “racist”, but that’s only because it’s such a banal, everyday word and what we’re talking about here is the brutal murder of people as an object lesson.

Let’s be very clear: all of the white people were casualties of war, a war of liberation. Yes, women and children included. If you’re squeamish about that, just consider who set the rules of engagement. I’m not talking about “an eye for an eye” revenge here. He saw it as necessary to strike at who he could to foment confusion and terror needed to establish the revolution, and there’s not a person alive today in a position to say he made the wrong call.

Because I’m not a big proponent of war as an institution, but even at my most dove-ish I would agree that a people who have been subjected to slavery of a scope, scale, and nature as unprecedented as American chattel slavery have the right to make war against the nation that has enslaved them.

The absolute and unquestioned right.

If you want to disagree with that, I’m going to treat it as an extraordinary claim and require you to show some extraordinary proof, and I’m also going to assume you’re not really acquainted with the historical nature of slavery until I’m shown otherwise.

So, we have some casualties of war, and leaving completely aside the question of innocence and guilt as it applied to the revolutionaries, we also some two hundred people who were subject to that unprecedented condition of slavery and who had nothing to do with it were brutally murdered in the aftermath of it for the sheer bloody hell and terror of it.

So again we come back to it: are you going to tell me that the problem with Nat Turner is that he killed white people? George Washington killed and ordered the deaths of white people, too, and he did it in what has been described as a revolution and a war of liberation. Surely if the Colonies had any claim to the right to violently throw off the “shackles” of having their labors taxed without adequate governmental representation and having some of their God-granted liberties as free Englishmen curtailed, then the slaves had that same right a thousand times over.

But let’s forget about rights and imagine a scene where I’ve killed, kidnapped away, or used up every member of your family and every friend you’ve ever had and I’ve got my boot on your throat and I’m pushing down and it’s not hard enough to kill you yet, at least not instantly, but it might be doing fatal damage to your windpipe you don’t know you might live like that for a good long while or you might die and you don’t know and there is a knife right there in your reach.

Forget all questions of rights.

Forget all questions of morality.

I’ve killed your family and I’m killing you and you have a knife.

The question isn’t what’s right and wrong, the question is what are you doing with that knife?

If somebody wants to say “Nat Turner got shit done”… under the circumstances, it’s not my place to quibble over the definition of “got shit done”, and it’s nobody’splace to condemn what it was he did.

Listen, this is a tangent but it’s an important one: do you realize that we (I mean the European and European descended powers, collectively) made Haiti essentially buy itself from the French after their successful slave uprising? When you think about that, don’t just think about the initial financial cost (150 million francs… I don’t have the figure in today’s money but it’s 150 million of a major currency), think about what that does to a nation that’s reeling from a legacy of imperialism and trying to establish themselves in a world that is openly hostile to their existence.

I’m bringing up Haiti to give another point of contrast, another revolution. We have the American Revolution, we have Nat Turner’s uprising, and we have the Haitian Revolution. The way history records these and the way we respond to them are important.

Here’s a question that I want you to consider and treat it as rhetorical because what you individually would say to it isn’t the point. John Brown. Say I’d reblogged something about John Brown being a man of principle and vision. You know what? A lot of white people are perfectly comfortable saying that. He fought the civil war years early. He was a man of principle and a martyr to his principles.

What his vision?

His vision was killing a bunch of white people, arming a bunch of slaves, and ending slavery.

And whatever you think when you hear his name, it’s easier to “get away with” lionizing him than Nat Turner, because Nat Turner was a slave who turned on his masters and John Brown was a benevolent and enlightened white person. We can feel good about ourselves as white people when we think about John Brown. If someone reminds us of Nat Turner, we start looking for the knives.

I didn’t reblog that post because of the quote about Nat Turner in particular. But the sentiment behind it?

Yeah, I support it. He fought. He fought back. You cannot admire any figure of the 20th century civil rights movement if you will not admire a man who stood up and fought back against slavery. Can. Not. Unless you are an absolute pacifist and in which case again I’m going to need the extraordinary proof that American chattel slavery didn’t justify the use of violence, but if you are anything less than an absolute pacifist there is really no way around this. 

But at the end of the day it’s not about admiration. I don’t know if Nat Turner had a noble heart or a vision or a dream. I know he was a slave and he fought back. And your problem with a statement of approval for that is to single out 60 people who died, women and children? They died in a fight to end an institution that killed 10 million people before they reached our shores.

And then the other statement you singled out, about wishing that white people did fear lynching.

A little bit of context… that was inspired by something I said in the first place, which was based on a commenter on my site saying that he was afraid of being “lynched” for saying that as a white man he felt like a fair target for discrimination. I made my post to highlight for my white followers the very stark difference in what we mean we throw that word around versus what it still actually means today, to this very day.

Now, the response that piqued your… whatever it is that you want to pretend is piqued here… did not say “I wish we could lynch white people.” or “I wish white people got lynched.” I want to point this out. I really, really, really want you to reflect on this. Look at what you’re responding to. Look at hard. Does it say anything about white people being killed? 

I’m not talking to you like a child because I want to embarrass you. No. You see, in my interactions with you, I come away with the sense that you’re the sort of person who goes for… exactitude. Precision. Does that seem fair? You’re an exact words kind of arguer. And that’s not a bad thing.

But what I want to call your attention to is how fast that goes away when somebody says something about white people.

This is a common phenomenon, not unique to you. Probably the distant number two complaint of the anti-racism bloggers I follow (behind, you know, racism) is the fact that people do this. They look at a sentence like “All white people benefit from privilege.” and reply with “HOW CAN YOU SAY THAT ALL WHITE PEOPLE ARE RACIST?”

And no matter how many times they go back forth, no matter how many people point out the difference in wording between what they read and what they’re trying to respond to, it never goes anywhere. The false impression never goes away.

(Now, if we as white people actually had a reasonable reason to fear lynching, then maybe the sentiment expressed would be close enough to a threat that the insinuation would be worth replying to. But the point of the quote you’re pointing to is that we don’t.

Did you see that story in the news about the like white prep school kids who surrounded a Black kid and tried to beat him to death for the hell of it? And they got sentences of a few months and time served?

Can you imagine that going the other way?

But imagine for a second that every racial group had equal leverage and equal (actual)  protection of the law and equal social capital. We were all equally capable of pulling off mob violence against each other with nothing more than a slap on a wrist.

You may or may not be familiar with the “polite society” principle espoused by Robert A. Heinlein: “An armed society is a polite society.” You are almost certainly familiar with the cold war doctrine of mutually assured destruction. 

Right now we have a Single Superpower situation. A One Gun situation. We’re the superpower. We have the gun. 

What the lynching comment was talking about was a situation where we all have the bomb. We all have the gun. 

How can you object to that situation more strenuously than the lopsided situation we’re in now? If you’re white (and I’m posing this as a hypothetical because I’m not in a position to know) there is of course self-interest, but as an objective/moral/whatever stance doesn’t it seem like “every side has equal power to hurt each other” is the goal?

So, to tie this all off with a bow: it was a wrong question because your mind drew a link between two disparate statements by focusing on the idea that they were about killing white people and not liberation or a shift in the balance of power (or a shift to a balance of power).

Do I support the death of white people? Not uncritically. I support the statements I reblogged, though, and in the context of a fight against… you know, I can’t even finish this sentence. The English language doesn’t actually contain the words to adequately describe the American institution of slavery. Even the word “slavery” is inadequate, and this inadequacy shields us from the horrors.

“Africans were slaves in Africa.”

“Greeks and Romans had slaves.”

“Vikings took slaves from all over.”

The fact that we can say those sentences demonstrates the problem with trying to describe American slavery with a single word… it makes it sound like we’re talking about the same thing, when we’re not.

When I was a callow young college student I was fond of saying “If you go back far enough, everybody’s descended from a slave and a king.” And I would have to live a long time to ever say anything as fucking wrong as I did when I was that glib young fucker, for more reasons than trying to compare historical models of slavery to the industrial scale living genocide we perpetrated.

…

Does that answer your question?