BLACK LIVES MATTER
Sunday, July 10, 2016
By Rev. Dr. Larry Delano Coleman
Life matters. All that lives is matter. All lives matter. Black people live. Ergo: “Black lives matter.”
That a mere slogan could incur such alarm and consternation as “Black lives matter,” is confounding! That is, unless, all lives do not matter--black lives in particular--to certain pre-programmed, unpatriotic: police, politicians, other very sick people of all colors, genders, nationalities, ages, incomes, capacities.
During American chattel slavery black lives not only greatly “mattered,” but such lives at slave auctions and estate sales were most highly valued even more valuable than land! “There is more in the man than there is in the land,” my grandfather Toney Mitchell Coleman once remarked, looking upon family land.
Only after the end of chattel slavery, when black life could no longer be auctioned off to the highest bidder, did black lives lose their value, at first gradually, then later, precipitously, after blacks began massively migrating outbound from the South to the American North, West and Midwest for freedom.
To “gild this lily,” so to speak, poor, European immigrants were sought and recruited among “the man farthest down”—to quote Booker T. Washington’s book about this highly-sought class of immigrants. They were brought in, and brainwashed at Ellis Island to know that they were now “white,” whatever their language, personal history, nationality, culture, income, education, vocation, class; now “white!”
By the millions these now “white” bottom-feeders displaced the black skilled laborers, farm laborers, and common laborers who had fled from Southern lawlessness in quest of the opportunity to realize the national economic, political, social freedom that their black United States Colored Troops, sailors, and Contrabands had “preserved” from dissolution and destruction, intact, rather than disunited in tatters.
Instead of the usual “spoils of victory” like free land, money, loans, technical assistance, scholarships being given to the blacks by the government, these hereditaments and emoluments went to the white immigrants—indeed, to the “white” anybody immigrant or not—as a reward, an incident of whiteness. These benefits did not go to the blacks, since that would dilute the value of whiteness, which is a right coupled with an interest. Blacks have no rights—let them tell it—and no enforceable property interest.
Thus the “dilution” continues with “Black lives matter” becoming “All lives matter,” itself a canard, a lie. Dilution blacks know all too well, since even federal laws passed exclusively for blacks after the Civil War have been construed to include white women, gay women, gay men, and foreigners by federal courts. If “all lives really mattered,” there would be no wars in foreign lands, no abortions of living unborn babies.
So, “black lives matter”—the slogan—is an American land mine, a naval torpedo, as it was known to Admiral David Farragut, who famously said: “Damn the torpedoes! Full speed ahead,” before triumph!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Farragut
#30
Sunday, July 10, 2016
BLACK LIVES MATTER
BLACK LIVES MATTER
Sunday, July 10, 2016
By Rev. Dr. Larry Delano Coleman
Life matters. All that lives is matter. All lives matter. Black people live. Ergo: “Black lives matter.”
That a mere slogan could incur such alarm and consternation as “Black lives matter,” is confounding! That is, unless, all lives do not matter--black lives in particular--to certain pre-programmed, unpatriotic: police, politicians, other very sick people of all colors, genders, nationalities, ages, incomes, capacities.
During American chattel slavery black lives not only greatly “mattered,” but such lives at slave auctions and estate sales were most highly valued even more valuable than land! “There is more in the man than there is in the land,” my grandfather Toney Mitchell Coleman once remarked, looking upon family land.
Only after the end of chattel slavery, when black life could no longer be auctioned off to the highest bidder, did black lives lose their value, at first gradually, then later, precipitously, after blacks began massively migrating outbound from the South to the American North, West and Midwest for freedom.
To “gild this lily,” so to speak, poor, European immigrants were sought and recruited among “the man farthest down”—to quote Booker T. Washington’s book about this highly-sought class of immigrants. They were brought in, and brainwashed at Ellis Island to know that they were now “white,” whatever their language, personal history, nationality, culture, income, education, vocation, class; now “white!”
By the millions these now “white” bottom-feeders displaced the black skilled laborers, farm laborers, and common laborers who had fled from Southern lawlessness in quest of the opportunity to realize the national economic, political, social freedom that their black United States Colored Troops, sailors, and Contrabands had “preserved” from dissolution and destruction, intact, rather than disunited in tatters.
Instead of the usual “spoils of victory” like free land, money, loans, technical assistance, scholarships being given to the blacks by the government, these hereditaments and emoluments went to the white immigrants—indeed, to the “white” anybody immigrant or not—as a reward, an incident of whiteness. These benefits did not go to the blacks, since that would dilute the value of whiteness, which is a right coupled with an interest. Blacks have no rights—let them tell it—and no enforceable property interest.
Thus the “dilution” continues with “Black lives matter” becoming “All lives matter,” itself a canard, a lie. Dilution blacks know all too well, since even federal laws passed exclusively for blacks after the Civil War have been construed to include white women, gay women, gay men, and foreigners by federal courts. If “all lives really mattered,” there would be no wars in foreign lands, no abortions of living unborn babies.
So, “black lives matter”—the slogan—is an American land mine, a naval torpedo, as it was known to Admiral David Farragut, who famously said: “Damn the torpedoes! Full speed ahead,” before triumph!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Farragut
#30
