Frank Wilderson, Red, Black, and White: Cinema and the Structure of US Antagonisms (via so-treu)
Umm yeah that is really interesting but the way this is worded kind of makes it sound like the shoah wasnât as bad as african slavery which is not okay donât compare those things
see the bolded? is exactly what i was talking about when i said what folks REAL objection to this quote is. that this could be a possibility, that Black folks suffered something that no one else, not even Jews suffered, makes a lot of folks *real* uncomfortable. and given how Black suffering is deemed illegitimate and unintelligible, i really think this comparison actually helps to make it if not legitimate, but intelligible in some way, and that makes a lot of non-Black people REALLY uncomfortable.
But itâs true tho. And we wonât talk about the holocausts methods being used on Black Africans first. And those techniques were shared and developed with whites from the U.S. and are still used to this day on Black people (most recent incident being mostly black women prisoners being sterilized against their will as recently as 2010 aka eugenics). Plus really what are we? Can you tell me? We werenât just African, since Africa is a huge continent. we were millions upon millions of african peoples with different ethnicities and nationalities and customs and backgrounds.we were a lot of different ethnicities and religions we will never know. We are from so many places we will never see and even know are part of us. Now we are black black American African American negro nigger etc. puhlease.
(via strugglingtobeheard)
The Nazis borrowed the idea of eugenics from America, btw.
And non-black peopleâs issue with this quote isnât about taking anything away from black people. From a Jewish and Rromani perspective, everything being compared to the Holocaust is a subtle way of minimizing it. Itâs not all a giant âwhite whineâ, there are real perspectives being ignored here.
Read this response by big-gadje-world if you want to get a sense of what Iâm talking about.
erm, yes, we know that Naziâs borrowed eugenics from America. thatâs exactly what strugglingtobeheard said in their comment. and no one used the words âwhite whine.â did you read anything anyone actually said?
and iâm not gonna trust big-gadje-world on anything historical, after she once accused Black people of enslaving Romani people en masse in both the U.S. and the Caribbean, and accused Black ppl of being racist after they pointed out that the sources that she used disproved her own argument. and never apologized.
and no oneâs comparing âeverythingâ to the Holocaust. the author, Wilderson (and this is two sentences taken from an entire book so there are obvously layers missing here), is ultimately expounding upon Frantz Fanonâs reading of the Holocaust as a thing that, as awful as it was, still didnât visit upon Jews the absolute obliteration of Self and Humanity that it did for Blacks. like heâs literally saying here that yes, IT IS INEXACT AND IMPROPER TO  COMPARE WHAT BLACKS WENT THROUGH TO THE HOLOCAUST. all these people mad as this quote are not realizing that heâs AGREEING with them. but heâs saying that because to compare what Blacks went through to the Holocaust is to trivialize/understate what Blacks have gone through, and thatâs a REAL issue that everyone is having with this quote. because i have yet to hear someone, besides the author, who has an objection to the comparison saying âdonât compare the Holocaust to slavery because it trivializes SLAVERY,â and i think thatâs very telling.
[content warning for graphic discussion of slavery]
Reblogging for commentary and to think about later.
Also, the first time I read big-gadje-worldâs commentary, it bothered me but I couldnât quite figure out why because I really wasnât in a head space to ponder it. But I think itâs because itâs written as if these things didnât and havenât continued to happen to Black folks during and post slavery.
We know that enslaved Black folks were used in fucked up experiments and continue to be used in fucked up experiments. We know that enslaved Black folks were burned, scarred, whipped, beaten, raped, tortured, had our children used for target practice, killed just because white folks knew they could get away with it, and so on. We know that over 20,000 plantations existed during the height of slavery. And we know that millions upon millions of Black bodies line the ocean bottom and have fertilized millions of acres of land throughout this world.
And also, and part of me wants to apologize for the bluntness of this statement, but have Black folks (Jewish, Romani, etc.) ever had a humanity to be shattered?
the bolded. and thatâs Wildersonâs ultimate point in both this book and the general thrust of his work, Blacks are not only seen as not-Human, we are seen as ANTI-Human. we were introduced to Modernity/transformed from Africans into THINGS, things that you buy and sell, commodities that are fungible (if you lose a pen or some other object you bought, you simply buy another to replace it; if you lost a Black, during slavery, you simply bought another Black to replace it) and can be accumulated. And Saidiya Hartman, whose work Wilderson also draws on, points out in Lose Your Mother that Black Death is *incidental death.* unlike the Holocause, we didnât even have the dignity of being of being targeted for death, who tries to wipe out a commodity? our death was collateral damage. our death was a thing that happened as a mater of the marketplace functioning properly. we werenât a human population to be wiped out, we were a thing that made other people money. we WERE money. who mourns the death of a commodity?Â
fucking thank you. and yea, that point about people saying comparing the holocaust to slavery trivializes the holocaust rather than seeing it the other way or viewing any of the numerous points being made before⌠well yea. let that shit sink in. cause itâs all been done and more and still being done and i guess yea, who mourns a commodity, this is commonplace. memories and recollections mean more than actually still living through that and trying to articulate it.
(via strugglingtobeheard)
But I think itâs because itâs written as if these things didnât and havenât continued to happen to Black folks during and post slavery.
Itâs just you see we had all this extra shit happen to us as well. Why does no one want to hear about or acknowledge the extra? Does it take away from your focus on you? We are a part of you. We were ashes and bones and torment, and that quote expounds upon that in that this is notably absent. You want to defend against âthe blacksâ having something being about addressing what happened to them, while (and via) not including them in your works. And no one wants to do this:
because i have yet to hear someone, besides the author, who has an objection to the comparison saying âdonât compare the Holocaust to slavery because it trivializes SLAVERY," and i think thatâs very telling.
Because weâre at the bottom of the ocean, too. 10s of Millions. This is why âcame outâ cannot be taken literally; itâs talking about those who survived. 11 million enslaved, kidnapped Africans conservatively are estimated to lie at the bottom of the ocean.
And no one hears of it. We donât know who they were, or where they were from except âAfrica.â We were stolen and forced to the Americas and West Indies and the countries the slavers saw fit and we had our EVERYTHING stolen from us. We came out black. Well, actually, no, we demanded âblack.â Before it was just colored and negro (among others). We have no country, and weâd have no continent if they had their way. (As in, we wouldnât know we were stolen from Africa). We didnât have a choice; we didnât immigrate, we were stolen.
We entered as human beings with an identity, religion, language, and culture, family, specific looks, and we came out as- âblack.â But we came out with a name that doesnât unite us in any respect except a shared dehumanization struggle that isnât even enough to keep us from hurting our own. We are black because everything was taken from us. A color for our name, for our entire identity. A color is our language.
The point of that quote is that those are atrocities. Both of them.
It isnât trying to minimize or place one as right. One left those scarred members who survived as someone to the world, someone to be mourned and recognized as murdered, and someone to each other; leaving under an identity and those who survived were known to the world as that same identity. Identity, and through that, an identity recognizable to themselves and their community. Assuming they did not have to then pass, or find some other way to leave it behind because they were not white in the countries they traveled to. This quote is not minimizing that. To say that something is a great atrocity on this level, and to acknowledge that another is also a great atrocity on yet another level is not a subtraction.
The other changed who those people were on a fundamental level; they had no nation, language, identity, community except a shared suffering. There is no place they can go to get that back. As a group, an entire group, not just individually valid experiences, but metaphyiscally and spiritually valid experiences. We say these words because it is a wash that canât just touch the body, it touches us in society, everywhere we go. We canât say, âI am black, and this is where Iâm from, down to the country, language, people.â
You still get to be that; and yes there are people who will make attempts on your humanity for being on another axis of oppression (in this case Jewish, and antisemitism attacking your humanity), this quote does not erase that. Actually, it outright states that this is a thing that happened. All it does is say that SOMEONE TOOK THIS FURTHER to someone else. Someone did MORE (I wonât say worse, because again the whole point is that these are atrocities). It is saying that the former is what we call The Holocaust, and why. It is saying this latter not only challenged the humanity of people on a physical level, but on a metaphysical level in that it erased an entire people yet kept them living. Kept them creating more people to be born dead in the eyes of society and worked. We canât get that back. We experienced one thing, and it was taken further. They kill you one way, and then they find a way to keep you dead but still living. For chattel slavery. That only ended (officially) within three generations. That lasted for 300+ years.
11-15 million at the bottom of the ocean conservatively. It is saying we went in as a people with a history, and came out only and exactly what they made us. You still have a name. You still have something to reach back to. If all you have is black, black is all you have.
because i have yet to hear someone, besides the author, who has an objection to the comparison saying âdonât compare the Holocaust to slavery because it trivializes SLAVERY," and i think thatâs very telling.
Other points I want to reiterate:
And also, and part of me wants to apologize for the bluntness of this statement, but have Black folks (Jewish, Romani, etc.) ever had a humanity to be shattered?
For those lost, this is saying that black people are included amongst Jewish and Rromani. This is not a minimization of suffrage. This is an acknowledgment that when we say âshattered,â we mean we had nothing in the eyes of anyone (even ourselves), they took everything in a way that was so sick that it lasts to this day.
 Blacks are not only seen as not-Human, we are seen as ANTI-Human. we were introduced to Modernity/transformed from Africans into THINGS,
And Saidiya Hartman, whose work Wilderson also draws on, points out in Lose Your Mother that Black Death is *incidental death.* unlike the Holocaust, we didnât even have the dignity of being of being targeted for death, who tries to wipe out a commodity? our death was collateral damage. our death was a thing that happened as a mater of the marketplace functioning properly. we werenât a human population to be wiped out, we were a thing that made other people money. we WERE money. who mourns the death of a commodity?
this is really brilliant commentary/writing, Tala.
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