(White) Liberalism, Black Lives Matter, and Historical Accuracy

I’m a socialist, specifically a communist, a communist being a revolutionary socialist advocating the total destruction of capitalism and the erection in its place of not a hierarchical dictatorship of one party but a cooperative commonwealth which replaces the sham of political democracy limited to selection of one’s rulers from among a narrow elite with a real political democracy in which economic, industrial, and social democracy are intrinsic, one in which the needs of the many outweigh the greed and ambition of the few and which rejects both capitalism of the elite and capitalism of the state a la Leninism and its offspring, both being equally destructive of the freedom, security, and general welfare of the people.

(White) Liberalism & the CBC

Having said that, let me stress how much I hate liberalism.  Martin called its adherents “white moderates”, Malik (Malcolm) called them “white liberals” (read both if their denunciations in 1963).  Liberals, centrists, moderates, “pragmatic progressives” are all the designations for the same group, and appending the adjective “white” to liberalism in America is always accurate since that ideology of status quo is dominated by and most benefits White People of the Nordic, Gentile, mostly Protestant variety.

Take, for instance, the endorsement of Joe Biden by Jim Clyburn in the 2020 Democratic primary of South Carolina.  Or the endorsement of Hillary Clinton, the woman Sister Souljah referred to as a “plantation mistress”, in 2016 by the leadership of the Congressional Black Caucus (without consulting its membership), following its likewise initial endorsement of Hillary Clinton in 2008 despite Barack Obama having already declared, though CBC did later switch.  Or, much more recently, the CBC’s endorsement of Eliot Engel over Jamaal Bowman for the Democratic nomination to the 19th Congressional District of the State of New York.  The last reminds me in so many ways of the Human Rights Campaign and the Stonewal Democrats endorsing establishment Democrat Andrew Cuomo over queer progressive Cynthia Nixon in 2018.

As a representative of the interests of Black People, the CBC sold its soul long ago in 1994 when it voted to allow the bill drafted by Sen. Joe Biden and Sen. Strom Thurmond which became the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act out of the committee into which it had been introduced.  CBC members had been holding up what many have described as the Mass Incarceration Act but caved into pressure to allow it out of the committee and onto the floor where passage was all but guaranteed.  And indeed, that is what happened, even though many CBC members such as John Lewis who’d allowed it out of committee onto the floor where passage was inevitable voted against it.

Origins of the Mass Incarceration Act of 1994

The bill was part of the Democratic Leadership Council, the “Third Way” group of neo-Dixiecrats who’d remained in the party after the hardcore Dixiecrat exodus to the Republican Party in the 1980s, program to realign the Democratic Party to the right, one part of this recasting Democrats as the “law-and-order” party (see Lee Atwater).  Clinton introduced that phase of his plan during the 1992 campaign at Stone Mountain Correctional Facility, in the same community as the founding of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan in 1915 and with the nation’s largest idol to the Lost Cause of the Confederacy, with fellow neo-Dixiecrats Zell Miller and Sam Nunn flanking him in front of row upon row of inmates standing at parade rest, all of them Afro-American, a scene which was meant to send a message to its intended target.

Naturally, I support Black Lives Matter and the related Movement for Black Lives, support which is merely a continuation of my involvement with the original group of Chattanooga’s Concerned Citizens for Justice from the early 1990s to its dissolution (the group’s revival in 2012 after the murder of Trayvon Martin by white vigilante George Zimmerman was endorsed by my friend Maxine Cousin, the first group’s principal founder).  That is why I find it necessary to correct certain positions adopted by some advocates based on what are either historical misperceptions or historical outright deceptions, most of these actually arising from the afore-denounced white liberalism.

The actual end of slavery

Slavery did not end with the Emancipation Proclamation proclaimed in 22 September 1862 and taking effect on 1 January 1863.  In fact, that document specifically exempted West Virginia, Delaware, Maryland, Kentucky, Missouri, Tennessee, certain counties in northern Virginia, and parishes of Louisiana east of the Mississippi River.  Nor was slavery ended in those territories on 19 June 1863, when the last slaves in the State of Texas were liberated under the provisions of the proclamation.  No, the slaves in the above exempt territories were not freed until the 13th Amendment went into effect 18 December 1865.  However, that date being just a week before Christmas, Juneteenth is the best day to celebrate the end of that atrocity.  Especially since the 13th Amendment did not really end slavery either, but contains a loophole allowing it to continue to this day.

Master bedrooms

The first use of the term “master bedroom” occurred in the house section of the 1926 Sears & Roebuck catalog, where the term was actually “master’s bedroom”.  Being sixty-one years after the afore-mentioned 13th Amendment, trying to connect this designation with slavery is more than a bit of a stretch, but liberals are trying really hard, calling it both racist and sexist.  The publishers of the catalog realized the second point early on, changing the designation to “master bedroom”, master in this case signifying main, principal, or predominant.  The move of Texas realtors to change the terminology smacks of pandering, but, really, who gives a shit one way or the other?

Rhode Island

Another name change currently being pushed is that of the state officially known as Rhode Island and Providence Plantations, under the historically inaccurate assertion that the word plantations here refers to slavery.  Under early modern English law, a plantation was a particular type of colony, the first in the Americas being the colony of Providence Plantations granted to Roger Williams in 1636.  Plantations were first granted to English lords in Ireland in the 1500s in the Irish provinces of Munster and Leinster, in the province of Ulster at the turn of that century, and in the province of Connacht in the mid-1600s.  Since Rhode Island legally abolished slavery in 1652, keeping Providence Plantations in its name was out of deference to its primary founder and not a reference to slavery.  However, the full official name is a mouthful and inconvenient, so change it.

Origin of police in America

Municipal police departments in the United States did not arise from slave patrols, but from the night watch brought over from England that were the primary law enforcement and security vehicles until being dissolved to make way for said police departments.  This is true even in Southern cities.  Did the practices of the former slave patrols make it into the later practices of those police departments?  Indubitably, especially in the South once Jim Crow became the norm.  But to say that police in the United States came from slave patrols is either badly mistaken or utter bullshit.

Why I’m pointing these things out

Black Lives Matter is a movement I really care about and I don’t want to see it go down the same sorts of rabbit holes American (white) liberalism often does.  Like, for instance, the current manufactured shitstorm deriving from the recent New York Times fiction about Russians paying the Taliban to kill American soldiers in Afghanistan. 

This article is sourced from “anonymous intelligence officials”, the same amorphous group which gave us the stories about Saddam Hussein’s massive stockpiles of chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons of mass destruction in 2003. 

The tall tale is being promoted by literally the very same people who pushed the invasion of Iraq in 2003 over those fictitious WMDs, now calling themselves the Lincoln Project.  You don’t believe me?  Check its roster.  After Dick Cheney tweeted a pic of himself wearing a mask, the Lincoln Project welcomed the author of the Iraq War into #TheResistance.

Taking or advocating actions based on faulty historical premises runs the risk of discrediting the movement, much as liberals seizing onto such an obviously fictitious story will make themselves look ridiculous.