About a week ago Gerald Horne mentioned on his youtube channel a book called Teaching White Supremacy. I thought it sounded interesting but that it would be a pretty standard and possibly boring “America Bad” sort of book, but I found myself really enjoying it and learning a lot, and it’s just like, are there any white people in 19th century America aside from John Brown who weren’t completely fucking insane? Walt Whitman, a poet I really enjoyed when I was a teenager, who was on the right side of the Civil War—fucking racist piece of shit. Emerson, a philosopher who never interested me in the slightest, but who was still mentioned in our high school history classes—fucking profound disgusting racist, freely saying and writing the most appalling shit you can imagine. And of course their wikipedia articles are like “it was normal at the time.” It’s still normal now, it doesn’t mean it’s okay!

I haven’t looked at Whitman in twenty years but I will still say that maybe he’s a good poet, but fucking Emerson? Did that guy write a single word that is genuinely beautiful, interesting, or helpful? My guess is that he’s just part of the canon because America needs someone to prove to the world that we’re not all just a bunch of mindless barbarians. But Emerson is just basically a nineteenth century hippy. And Thoreau was like “wouldn’t it be cool if I lived alone in a house in the woods.” Wow, so deep!

Maybe Herman Melville is another exception, like a literary John Brown. (Someone prove me wrong.) Moby Dick truly is a classic and Typee is honestly fucking awesome too. It’s no surprise he died in obscurity. Poe is also brilliant but he was a fucking piece of shit as a person (with a very tragic life of course). I don’t know anything about his political views but I imagine that they weren’t very good.

I’m a white cissie, so this country was built for me, and I’m guessing its shittiness doesn’t come as much of a surprise for people reading this who aren’t white cissies, but still, even if you spend just a few minutes a day reading almost anything about the USA, you are bound to get depressed. For a book I’m working on I was just researching age of consent laws and child marriage in the USA and holy fucking shit, the line “minors are not accepted in shelters” just left me unable to continue. I had to stop after researching for five minutes. So utterly fucking profoundly bleak.

  • miz [any, any]@hexbear.netEnglish
    22·
    3 days ago

    Colonists steal native land and rename it Massachusetts. Centuries of exploitation, slavery, and war go by to establish white supremacist authority in the region. Henry David Thoreau is born. He goes to live in a shack his friend helped him build and his sister and mom helped him finance. The property is owned and controlled privately and administered by an evil slave-owning empire. His mom visits twice per week to give him pies and clean his socks. He regularly goes into town to buy food grown by exploited farm labor and probably slaves too.

    Thoreau: “Ah, untapped, unspoiled nature. Living off the land and writing fancy boy essays. I’m truly the master of my own destiny.”