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Take 2.
I posted and deleted this because I don't want to get banned, but if I can't talk about the things I want to talk about then I don't see much point in caring about the account, anyway. Still, I'll try to be subdued.
The Robert E Lee statue from Charlottesville has been destroyed. Liquidated, actually, and slated to be replaced with some statue for black people, which is striking symbolism of how Americans are being liquidated to be replaced by foreigners.
I'm posting the reactions on twitter, because there are dozens of two-sentence sentiments that I share. I'll quote a couple, for posterity, and you can get the gist of the other side from the WP article.
Columbia Bugle
Jack Posobiec
Jack again
Maarblek
BlueandGray1864
Spencer Klavan
That last one is really quite striking, given this line from the WP article:
Really, you should read the article, too. In it, I saw the genocide of my race, and it scares the hell out of me. I suppose this must be how the Jews feel.
So, is it justice? Is it vengeance? Should it be celebrated? Should it be destroyed?
And does the symbolism of liquidating the statue of a white man apply to the declining white population in America? Is the deliberate melting down of this statue a parallel to the deliberate replacement of the American race?
ETA: One more tweet from this morning, just a few hours ago:
GigaThaad
Elon Musk
Musk, as a white man born in South Africa, should know what it looks like when your native country changes and now wants you and yours dead and gone.
Lee fought against America and the statue was put up 60 years after the end of the civil war.
Also very confusing to me how you see Robert E Lee as an American but a statue for “black people” is for foreigners? Calling this a step to genocide is baffling beyond belief.
I don't consider blacks and Americans to be the same thing. Americans are a distinct ethnic people. Hyphenated Americans are not Americans, that's why they carry the hyphen as a mark of distinction. If they considered themselves American, they wouldn't call themselves African Americans, and if they considered themselves to be part of the same nation, they wouldn't have their own black national anthem. They are a separate people.
However, they are not foreigners. The foreigners are the hispanics, africans, and asians pouring over our Southern border.
I hope this helps you understand.
I'm not intending to derail the point you're making in this larger thread, but I come to you with open curiosity.
I am an American of mixed race; my mother is white, my father is black. My mother's side of the family has been in the US since the 1700s, her genealogy contains Revolutionary and Civil War veterans. As descendants of American slaves in Alabama, presumably my father's side of the family has been in the US since some date before it became illegal to import new slaves (1808 officially, though illegal smuggling continued into the 1840s and 50s).
When forms ask me for race information, I select "black", "multiple races", or some combination of those depending on what the form allows, but in general, I do consider myself "black" and I don't consider myself "white". If it's relevant to you, I have the complexion of a Lenny Kravitz or Barack Obama. That I don't consider myself "white" was not a choice I made and imposed on myself - I've never heard a definition of "white" that doesn't exclude me. Generally, my experience is that other people tell you what racial category or categories you belong to, and you say "okay, thanks".
I grew up around black and white (and biracial) kids. The neighborhood I grew up in was mixed, the public schools I went to were mixed, and the social circles I keep in my adulthood are not self-segregated by race. None of the black Americans I have ever known, even the ones at the radical ends of the political spectrum, have given me the impression that in their day to day life they think of themselves as part of a separate, distinct black 'nation' in the way you describe. Maybe this was more broadly true in, say, the late 19th and early 20th century? I don't want to imply the perspective doesn't exist period, just that I don't think it is a predictive way to model the modal black American experience and viewpoint.
I have always primarily considered myself an American. (For the purposes of this discussion, I mean -- 'human' comes strictly before 'American', but you know what I mean.)
Would you say that's factually wrong? (And does this hold true for my descendants? Would the race of my kids' mother dictate what their fate as potential unqualified Americans would be - does it change if my lineage bends toward 'whiter', toward 'blacker', or becomes further diluted by another race?)
Would the answer change based on whether I did or didn't think of myself as "black" or "African-American"? Is it more about self-identification than about actual ancestry? Do I have to "choose a side" so to speak? Can I choose?
Again, it isn't my intention to derail here, and I hope I haven't pulled too far off the topic of Civil War statues (I think opposing Confederate public monuments is not morally imperative, but not morally damning - my perspective on that isn't very interesting). This is just the first time I've come across this particular viewpoint re: black Americans not being full Americans.
Btw, I have no idea what the black national anthem is.
EDIT: Oh, Lift Every Voice and Sing? Well, I won't lie, I know the song and I've always thought it was beautiful. We sung it in our (mixed) elementary school choir in the early 1990s. I knew it was a black Christian hymn written in the early 1900s about liberation from slavery, and that it was a go-to hymn during the Civil Rights era. It looks like the NAACP said it was the 'black national anthem' in 1919. That's news to me, but okay.
It may be worth noting that when the NAACP declared “Lift Every Voice and Sing” the “Negro/black national anthem,” the US didn’t even have an official national anthem yet, as the Star-Spangled Banner wasn’t officially adopted until 1931. Since the US didn’t have a national anthem, it probably didn’t seem as anti-American to adopt a second, racial national anthem as it would today. That said, I still find it incredibly distasteful and divisive whenever I hear anyone refer to it as that today.
Yeah, learning about modern BLM type activists leaning into it was a little disheartening, even if not surprising. I think the song is worse off for the association. The circumstances that the hymn was written in were specific, but the lyrics themselves aren't. The imagery is of the liberation of the biblical Israelites from bondage in Egypt, like a lot of early black American spiritual music and poetry was.
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