YESTERDAY when I was planning on a second part answer to some hate mail from Fredrick Douglass's The Lessons of The Hour, I was intending to prove my contention of the place the media, the "free press" had played in peddling the Court power that Roger B. Taney invented to give him and the other slavery-supporting "justices" on the Supreme Court the ability to protect and extend slavery throughout the Country, I will be quoting Fredrick Douglass's address on the Dred Scott Decision later because he, himself, made the point that it was clear to him that was why the Dred Scott decision had been written, creating that power for the unelected, lifetime appointed petty princes of the Supreme Court.
But thinking more about the sordid lies of the Republican-fascists in the Senate, especially those with the power to block Democratic appointments, something which Lindsay Graham has already announced they will use to keep President Biden from making appointments to the Courts if they again gain control of the Senate, those appointed to the Judiciary Committee by the Republican-fascist leadership.
What they did with their accusations of then Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson in the matter of her entirely main-stream sentencing of pedophiles and her pro-bono representation of clients as a lawyer, clients assigned to her, not chosen by her, was to revive two strains of racist propaganda which Fredrick Douglass noted was used in the post-Civil War period to reimpose white supremacy by terror and to gull Northerners into stupid acquiescent permission for them to do it. First was that Black People were dangerous to white people through violence, and when they wanted to ramp it up, they invented an epidemic of Black sexual predation, mixing sex and violence in a way guaranteed to be carried by the media, the supposed higher end maybe with a bit of daintiness that the popular yellow journalism and, later the movies wouldn't have. Dainty racism is more easily consumed by those with power so perhaps it is as dangerous as that which incites lynch mobs or Q-anon assassins.
The elite media not as much as the more popular and, so, influential, lower end but them as well. The spread of the disease of racism certainly followed that pattern from the all-too-temporary suppression of it in the later 1960s and very early 1970 to the later 1970s when it became chic to express racism, in my memory I first noticed that among those of the smart set in New York City and, soon after, all over college campuses - though that might have been because I was in college in that period. The alleged comedians were part of that vanguard and, so, as can be expected, it spread in the feuilleton pages of the big papers and in some of the magazines, especially The New Republic which were rather genteely and so even more vilely racist even before the 1990s.
But I will give you that part of Fredrick Douglass's great last speech and ask you to consider things like the Central Park Jogger coverage in the New York Times which had no problem with accepting Donald Trump's ad calling for the judicial lynching of the innocent Black teenagers who were accused or the "ethical dilemma" promoted by the Washington Post scribbler Richard Cohen and The New Republic, along with the charges made by Marsha Blackburn that the then Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson was soft on child porn possessors, joined in by other Old South Republican-fascists and some Northern ones, too. The words change, the tactics are exactly the same ones today and the Northern "free press" has and is playing exactly the same roles as they were as their intellectual and amoral ancestors were.
But when events proved that no such conspiracies; no such insurrections as were then pretended to exist and were paraded before the world in glaring head-lines, had ever existed or were even meditated; when these excuses had run their course and served their wicked purpose; when the huts of negroes had been searched, and searched in vain, for guns and ammunition to prove these charges, and no evidence was found, when there was no way open thereafter to prove these charges against the negro and no way to make the North believe in these excuses for murder, they did not even then bring forward the present allegation against the negro. They, however, went on harassing and killing just the same But this time they based the right thus to kill on the ground that it was necessary to check the domination and supremacy of the negro and to secure the absolute rule of the Anglo-Saxon race.
It is important to notice that there has been three distinct periods of persecution of negroes in the South, and three distinct sets of excuses for persecution. They have come along precisely in the order in which they were most needed. First you remember it was insurrection. When that was worn out, negro supremacy became the excuse. When that is worn out, now it is assault upon defenseless women. I undertake to say, that this order and periodicity is significant and means something and should not be overlooked. And now that negro supremacy and negro domination are no longer defensible as an excuse for negro persecutions, there has come in due course, this heart-rending cry about the white women and little white children of the South.
Now, my friends, I ask what is the rational explanation of this singular omission of this charge in the two periods preceding the present? Why was not the charge made at that time as now? The negro was the same then as to-day White women and children were the same then as to-day. Temptations to wrong doing were the same then as to-day Why then was not this dreadful charge brought forward against the negro in war times and why was it not brought forward in reconstruction times?
I will tell you, or you, yourselves, have already answered the question. The only rational answer is that there was no foundation for such a charge or that the charge itself was either not thought of or was not deemed necessary to excuse the lawless violence with which the negro was then pursued and killed. The old charges already enumerated were deemed all sufficient. This new charge has now swallowed up all the old ones and the reason is obvious.
Things have changed since then, old excuses were not available and the negro's accusers have found it
necessary to change with them. The old charges are no longer valid. Upon them the good opinion of the North and of mankind cannot be secured. Honest men no longer believe in the worn-out stories of insurrection. They no longer believe that there is just ground to apprehend negro supremacy Time and events have swept away these old refuges of lies. They did their work in their day, and did it with terrible energy and effect, but they are now cast aside as useless. The altered times and circumstances have made necessary a sterner, stronger, and more effective justification of Southern barbarism, and hence, according to my theory, we now have to look into the face of a more shocking and blasting charge than either negro supremacy or insurrection or that of murder itself.
This new charge has come at the call of new conditions, and nothing could have been hit upon better calculated to accomplish its purpose. It clouds the character of the negro with a crime the most revolting, and is fitted to drive from him all sympathy and all fair play and all mercy. It is a crime that places him outside of the pale of the law, and settles upon his shoulders a mantle of wrath and fire that blisters and burns into his very soul.
It is for this purpose, as I believe, that this new charge un-thought of in the times to which I have referred, has been largely invited, if not entirely trumped up. It is for this purpose that it has been constantly reiterated and adopted. It was to blast and ruin the negro’s character as a man and a citizen.
I need not tell you how thoroughly it has already done its wonted work. You may feel its malign influence in the very air you may read it in the faces of men. It has cooled our friends. It has heated our enemies, and arrested in some measure the efforts that good men were wont to make for the colored man's improvement and elevation. It has deceived our friends at the North and many good friends at the South, for nearly all have in some measure accepted the charge as true. Its perpetual reiteration in our newspapers and magazines has led men and women to regard us with averted eyes, increasing hate and dark suspicion.
Some of the Southern papers have denounced me for my unbelief, in their new departure, but I repeat I do not believe it and firmly deny it. I reject it because I see in it, evidence of an invention, called into being by a well defined motive, a motive sufficient to stamp it as a gross expedient to justify murderous assault upon a long enslaved and hence a hated people.
I do not believe it because it bears on its face, the marks of being a makeshift for a malignant
purpose. I reject it not only because it was sprung upon the country simultaneously with well-known efforts now being industriously made to degrade the negro by legislative enactments, and by repealing all laws for the protection of the ballot, and by drawing the color line in all railroad cars and stations and in all other public places in the South; but because I see in it a means of paving the way for our entire disfranchisement.
Again, I do not believe it, and deny it, because the charge is not so much against the crime itself, as against the color of the man alleged to be guilty of it. Slavery itself, you will remember, was a system of legalized outrage upon the black women of the South, and no white man was ever shot, burned, or hanged for availing himself of all the power that slavery gave him at this point.
No comments:
Post a Comment