White Myth and White "Truth"

While some may consider the transcendental murmur of "life" in the ethos inspired or dismissed by universal themes of justice, vengeance, the cruelty or nature etc. etc., while pondering the imponderables of who did what to who and who allowed whom to do what to do and yada yada blah blah, some things are more immediate and relevant.

For example:

It is wrong to give people blankets infected with smallpox. If Indians give them, it is wrong. If whites give them, it is wrong. If blacks give them, it is wrong. It is a bad thing. A bad bad thing. We can not judge from high aloft in clouds looking from eternity to eternity to determine "who started it." We must make the judgments in our own brief span of time. We may make mistakes, we may judge the wrong person by mistake. But we may not stand idly by, loafing indecisively. People who do that encourage evil.

No one in the history of the world ever determined that people of certain color were inferior until the white people did it first beginning Virginia in 1670, to mixed, black and red people. This is when the idea of "white" began. Prior to this folks had religious, political, land wars. But never a color war. Never a genetic war. This sense of a "white" identity superior to all other colors, whether those colors were Christians, Moslems, Buddhist or "other" began in America. Sure there was slavery prior to America. Christian Spain state policy enslaved white Moslems, black Moslems and purple Moslems, white animists, black animists and purple animists, but not other Christian blacks. Moslem Africa state policy enslaved Christian blacks, Hindu, animist blacks but not other Moslems. No other country EVER enslaved someone simply on skin color. New York, Maine, Tennessee, North and South, East and West, they decided Christianity, Moslem, Buddha did not make men brothers. They decided that black and red could never be equal to white no matter what god they worship.

This is the difference between slavery in Africa and slavery in America 1619-1865. A Moslem in Sudan will enslave a Christian today, but a Moslem will not enslave another Moslem be he black brown or white. Religious affiliation is a matter of choice, skin color is not. If you were not white in America, you were doomed unless you fought very very hard like our ancestors fought. To the U.S. government, a Christian Negro was the same as a pagan Negro after 1670. Christian Indian was no more than a pagan Indian. Skin color overruled God according to the US government. Only our people with God's help succeeded in denying them what they wanted. Our ancestors were giants. Our mixed ancestors were warriors who lived in the camp of the enemy and taunted them. The Lumbee chased the Klan out every time they showed up.

The Redbones in Westport Louisiana blasted their white butts to kingdom come. No Trail of Tears today thank you, just a load of buckshot for the white posse. There are no people on earth like our ancestors. Our ancestors were mixed red, black and poor white and mixed is better. The wild tobacco plant must be cross-bred to be sweet and strong.

In the late 19th century along came Charles Darwin and evolution's "survival of the fittest." Read: "survival of the whitest." British and American eugenics scientists determined that the non-whites were inferior. (chuckle) They sterilized hundreds of Vermont's Abenaki Indians. In Virginia, more "mixed bloods" (of mixed black white and red blood) were institutionalized for insanity than all other ethnics, German, English, Scot, Irish, Swiss, Austrian, French, Norwegian, Spanish, etc. etc. COMBINED.

With the great stock market crash in the early 20th century, and the Great Depression to follow and the spread of communism in Russia, America's industrial leaders, Rockefeller, Ford, Edison, etc. decided that America had to stop accepting non-white immigration from Europe, Asia, Africa and the rest of the world. They determined that "coloreds" and poor whites at the bottom of the American social structure presented an easy breeding ground for social insurrection. Their hired goons massacred workers in the coal mines of West Virginia etc. when poor whites, mixed and blacks struck for higher wages.

In 1926 the huddled masses of the world were locked out of America. In 1924 Virginia, (which was) founded 13 years before Plymouth, with a stroke of the pen wiped out its Indians, calling them "Negroes" and forbade intermarriage, forbade going to white schools. This feat was engineered by state pencil-pushers like the white supremacist WA Plecker, Virginia's state registrar. America's industrialists organized the Third International Congress of Eugenics in 1932. Prominent German Nazis and Italian socialists attended and these white American pencil pushers taught them how to isolate, corral, institutionalize, label, number, count, and sterilize non-whites and mixed bloods. Guess what happened next? World War II and the genetic Holocaust. Millions dead. Thanks whitey.

There was no "white" ethnicity before 1670 Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Delaware, Maryland. The seeds of Holocaust were first planted in Virginia when the white man said that the mixed black, white and red would NEVER be good enough.

Is it over? Nope. Margaret Sanger was one of those early eugenicists listening to the racists and the fascists. Remember her? She started Planned Parenthood with the backing of American industrialists Harriman, Rockefeller, etc. Read what her magazine said about blacks, Indians and mixed. The originator of Planned Parenthood was a blatant bigot. Who do these white people target for abortion, condoms, sterilization? Africa, India, China, poor Appalachians, blacks, Indians. Where are plagues and starvation allowed to rage? Africa. South America. Appalachia. They have convinced themselves that wiping us out is good for us. They must "control" our non-white populations.

This is a democracy. Have many many children. Out number the whites and any other who judge by skin color. Do not be overwise. Do not oversmoke. Propagate. Then Vote. The family with the most members rule in a democracy.

I support a woman's right to choose, but do not be stupid, check the skin color of the one whispering in your mixed ear and ask why disproportionate efforts to "control population" are made in non-white communities.

Beware a conservative or liberal sympathetic white face who "knows" what is good for you.

That is no smoke.

Hello Rob,

Yes you may post the things you speak of. But please note along with it that it may not be reused without my permission.

I think you are stretching the available information regarding prior state racism. These people under discrimination by those Europeans you cite were first "pagan." Europeans assumed the religion from the color of the skin. The counter to your argument is the status of free Christian mulattos, blacks, Indians among the Spaniards, Portuguese etc. Some of these even attained high office as Christians. The Spanish also enslaved white Christian Europeans at the time. Also clouding the situation are the lingering suspicions Europeans had towards newly baptised non-whites. You likely know that such recent converts usually held dual customs for more than a few generations. In places like Peru, and even Europe today, pre-Christian practices continue in Christian worship and faith, and are viewed with disdain by the more "intellectual." This is not racism but a religious or cultural bias.

Columbus and other Mediterranean Europeans were acutely aware of the advanced Moorish culture evident everywhere in Spain, that part of the world having recently been controlled by northern Africans. We have a tendency to impose a kind of stilted, mono-dimensional stupidity on people of the past. The Spaniards were more aware of the advanced capacities of the Africans and pyramid building Indians (Aztecs, Mayans, Incans etc.) than certainly were the English.

The two distinguishing social markers from Norway to Spain up to the 17th century were: 1.Class 2. Religion

Example, in the early 17th century, Pocahontas married John Rolfe after her baptism. They sailed to England and were invited to the royal court. The king and his retinue expressed their horror that "Princess" Pocahontas, daughter of Powhatan, had married a commoner, John Rolfe. Once she had been baptised she, Indians, were viewed as equals, and Pocahontas as superior to, white English people of lower class. King James saw Pocahontas as his sister and Rolfe as his servant. Even the Spanish always handled the royal "pagans" differently. Religion and Class were the two most important social markers prior to 1670. There are absolutely NO reports of state sanctioned racism anywhere in the world prior to 1670. The Spanish Crown never ruled specially against skin color before this, nor did any other nation. The Church always argued for the equal status of baptised believers from Spain to England to the Islamic mosques. Neither did pre-Christian states claim such a distinction. The racist conduct of personal individuals does not constitute state oppression. Show me the archives where the Spanish or Portuguese law denied rights to Christian non-white citizens of equal class. It did not occur prior to 1670 Virginia, Maryland, Delaware and the Carolinas, and the first targeted were the ancestors of the Melungeons, the black Western Africans along with the Eastern Indians..

Did rogues, acting as court reps far from world capitals ever abuse folks for skin color alone before this? Hard to determine because another factor is greed. General Vasconcelos, Portuguese in 1618, certainly took Christians captives among the 50,000 Angolans he seized from 1618-1621. However his motivation was not racism but the desire to get rich away from the eye of the Crown. Even so, a hue and cry was raised by missionaries, settlers, and officials condemning his actions and he was recalled. The state never sanctioned Vasconcelos, he was a truce breaker and loudly condemned by the Church.

The first government to legislate racism was the American colonial (British) government from 1670-1720. I can show you the law. If you can find a like law outside of America, please inform me. It is not present.

To explain why I say 1670 Virginia, I have attached a copy of my upcoming series "Malungu" which will begin in the Appalachian Quarterly mag this September.

According to Hanke, "Montesinos delivered the first important protest against the treatment being accorded the Indians by his Spanish countrymen, enquiring: ‘Are these Indians not men? Do they not have rational souls? Are you not obliged to love them as you love yourselves?' " This sermon in America led immediately to a dispute at Burgos in Spain from which were issued the first two Spanish treatises on Indian problems and the first code drawn up for the treatment of Indians by Spaniards, the Laws of Burgos.

The Laws of Burgos were proclaimed in 1512 but not rigorously followed.

Englishmen did not arrive at Jamestown, Virginia, in 1607, or at Plymouth, Massachusetts, in 1620, with minds barren of images and preconceptions of the native occupiers of the land. A mass of reports and stories concerning the Indians of the New World, many of them based upon the Spanish and Portuguese experience in Mexico, Peru, and Brazil, were available in printed form or by word of mouth for curious Englishmen crossing the Atlantic. From this literature ideas and fantasies concerning the Indians gradually entered the English consciousness.

These early accounts seem to have created a split image of the Indian in the English mind. On the one hand, the native was imagined to be a savage, hostile, beast-like creature who inhabited the animal kingdom rather than the kingdom of men. In 1585, prospective adventurers to the New World could read one description of the natives of North America which depicted them as naked, lascivious individuals who cohabited "like beasts without any reasonableness." Another account described them as men who "spake such speech that no men could understand them, and in their demeanor like to brute beastes." But Englishmen also entertained another more positive version of the New World native. Richard Hakluyt, the great propagandist for English colonization, described the Indians in 1585 as "simple and rude in manners, and destitute of the knowledge of God or any good laws, yet of nature gentle and tractable, and most apt to receive the Christian Religion, and to subject themselves to some good government." Many other reports spoke of the native in similarly optimistic terms.

The institutionalization of slavery within the Americas required an intellectual justification for the mistreatment of millions of African men, women and children. Muslims had mirrored this process of intellectually justifying enslavement in the earlier enslavement of East Africans. Slavery required racism and was the proximate cause of it.

I contend that American racism as we inherit it today is a social construction of reality. Prior to Columbus, the world functioned for millennia without the race construct as we understand it today.

There were no "Indians" before the conquest of the Americas. There were no "blacks" before Europeans began exploiting Africa. There were no "Latinos" until the 1970s, when government agencies and corporate marketers sought to create a generic identity for a diverse Latin American-origin population.

The process of lumping together a wide range of ethnicities, linguistic groups and tribes is nothing new. The Europeans did it to establish clear differences between themselves and others; today, it is being perpetuated in order to make nonwhites more intelligible to the majority and more accessible to the marketplace.

Sepulveda is the "father of modern racism" who claimed that the Spanish were entitled to benefit from colonization of the Indians because of the supposed virtues of the Spanish and the sins and other deficiencies of the Indians. The first was that the Spanish offered to the Indians the benefits of Spanish "civilization," a term which those who used it assumed that those who heard it would understand to designate an entitlement. The Spanish adorned themselves with the mantle of "civilization." (Forget about the origins of the word and its connection to cities: "civilization" is now completely associated with something approaching utopia, an entitlement of Christian society.)