Wednesday, August 01, 2007

In Memory: The African Slaves on Whose Blood Our Country Was Built

Today is Wednesday, 1 August 2007.

Notice how --- and times your author fails to edit himself, and is guilty of this, it’s so damned engrained in our culture --- that “Black” is used so frequently as a euphemism for “evil”?

Some would say it’s because of the primordial fear of night --- the times before even the flint-struck campfire.

That was then; this is now.

Is it because, in our American culture, many white folks, of which your author is a white folk, though not with the following problem, have this little problem with Slavery, and the Second Slavery (“Segregation”), and the Third Slavery (“Discrimination”), which latter is on-going?

On this date in 1619, the first African slaves were delivered to the birth colony of the USA/USE, Jamestown, Virginia.

"Go Down, Moses": Paul Robeson singing, Lawrence Brown at the piano:



Robeson again, "St. Louis Blues":



"Shenandoah":

2 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Our country was built on the blood of "whites", "blacks", "reds", "yellows", and every shade in between. However, your slanted blog entry title is to "showcase" your dreary date-in-time shtik. Even more dreary is that the date is 388 years ago.

3:46 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Dear Morrison-Jones:

Oh my goodness. In your value system, blood must equate with money if one embraces the adage that "money has no smell."

No moral difference for living residents of the greatest country in the world between blood that was shed through the exercise of individual free will and blood shed while being held in thrall? No residual moral obligation for living citizens of these United States to make concerted efforts to restore economic balance to discrete populations from which economic advantage was stolen in order that we may all assert that our existing privilege owes no debt to the past?

That view makes mockery of the expressed principles on which our ancestors asserted justification for the colonial war for independence as "these United States of America." However that view might provide a rational basis for a dispassionate analysis of the nakedly exposed national morality that governs the conduct of our foreign affairs.

Thank you for the enlightenment.

As an afterthought, good job of marginalizing the author's message through the attack on style. In the words of one of Billy Crystal's alter egos: "It is better to look good than to feel good."

Peace (although I suspect you might take that as a curse).

4:53 PM  

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