I've been trying to find the right way to articulate this-- but the folks on the right have it backwards about who is driven by "white guilt" --
This impulse to cover up and distort the history of slavery reeks of shame. It's, frankly, weird. Nobody has perfect ancestors, what sort of crisis of identity leads one to lie about the past.
It's just the things that happened. You learn about them you learn from them. You do better. Don't make it so emotional and personal.
if we (whites) accept the truth about the past we will have to acknowledge that the racism of “the past” has simply mutated and is not in the past at all.*
this would require us to actually change, or live with cognitive dissonance, and we don’t like to do hard things ourselves; we usually get “people of the global majority” to do them for us.
*e.g. “let’s ban chattel slavery” - “but who will do stuff cheap?” - “what about prisoners?” - “we don’t have enough prisoners” - “oh, let’s criminalise being not-white”
myrmepropagandist
Maude Nificent