It’s encouraging to me on my birthday to read this. I fight tirelessly with people online who refuse to do the work. They refuse to authentically dissect their own identities and how it relates to the racial class system in the U.S. I’m so glad I don’t have to fight with you.
I’m considered biracial in the American racial class system. I was adopted and socialized by American white Evangelicals in the South. It’s so nice to be able to explain my identity to people who have done the work to educate themselves. It makes less work for me when I’m expressing myself.
I continue to come back to this point you mentioned. White people cannot give me equality. It is part of my mantra of sovereignty.
White people cannot give anyone equality. To suggest that they can is abominable.
This is the same way I feel about reparations. Are we to use a country’s original sin of exchanging money for human lives to exchange money for human dignity?
A proper apology from any white institution would be to acknowledge that their economic systems are built on white supremacy and slavery.
Don’t exchange money for a human life? Change the economic system that made it possible in the first place.
A few topics you may be interested in that I found to be interesting.
The Germanic myth and English constructions of an Anglo-Saxon past
They created a myth of an Anglo-Saxon people, distinguished from the Vikings, Picts, Celts, Romans, Normans, and others who had inhabited English territory. In their histories the Anglo-Saxons were a freedom-loving people who had advanced political institutions, an early form of representative government, and a pure religion long before the Norman Conquest. Although in part the English were concerned about the identification and preservation of ancient institutions to justify the distinctiveness of their political and ecclesiastical structures, they also wanted to establish and glorify a distinguished ancestry. The English too turned toward the German tribes and a “racial” ideology on which to base their claims of superiority.
This is a quick read you can breeze through in an afternoon. It really does help with analysis.
Classics was a discipline around which the modern Western university grew, and Padilla believes that it has sown racism through the entirety of higher education.
