Negrotown: Generating 3/5ths of forum complaints.

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AtraMorS: Feb 29, 2004; If at the end of a war story you feel that some tiny bit of rectitude has been salvaged from the larger waste, you have been made the victim of a very old and terrible lie

n/m, i need to be quiet

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AtraMorS: Feb 29, 2004; If at the end of a war story you feel that some tiny bit of rectitude has been salvaged from the larger waste, you have been made the victim of a very old and terrible lie

biracial bear for uncut posted:

That apology actually was issued by Congress in 2008, but nobody cared then, why would anyone care now?

EDITED: for a direct link to the resolution on congress.gov

I hope I'm not butting in, but according to this article from The Root, that apology actually never made it out of Congress. Both houses passed a version of an apology, but they never agreed on a single version:

quote:

Five years ago this week, just months after President Barack Obama took office, the Senate unanimously passed a resolution apologizing for slavery. The Senate acknowledged �the fundamental injustice, cruelty, brutality and inhumanity of slavery� and apologized �to African Americans, on behalf of the people of the United States, for the wrongs committed against them and their ancestors who suffered under slavery.�

The House of Representatives had passed a similar measure the previous year. But Congress could not resolve the two apologies because of differing views on how the resolution would be used in any discussion of reparations. The Senate version was insistent that an apology would not endorse any future claims. The House could not agree. Significantly, the office of the president of the United States has never issued an apology.

e: A little more newsy link, less op-ed: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/news/politics-government/article24544429.html

AtraMorS fucked around with this message at 16:19 on Dec 16, 2016

# ¿ Dec 16, 2016 16:11

AtraMorS: Feb 29, 2004; If at the end of a war story you feel that some tiny bit of rectitude has been salvaged from the larger waste, you have been made the victim of a very old and terrible lie

Huggybear posted:

It amazes me that he was not assassinated, but I suspect that has something to do with how intelligent he was: any inbred white supremacist can process "I have a dream" but probably not

quote:
�Negroes know far more about white Americans than that; it can almost be said, in fact, that they know about white Americans what parents�or, anyway, mothers�know about their children, and that they very often regard white Americans that way. And perhaps this attitude, held in spite of what they know and have endured, helps to explain why Negroes, on the whole, and until lately, have allowed themselves to feel so little hatred. The tendency has really been, insofar as this was possible, to dismiss white people as the slightly mad victims of their own brainwashing.�

"James Baldwin posted:

"I do not think ... that it is too much to suggest that the American vision of the world � which allows so little reality, generally speaking, for any of the darker forces in human life, which tends until today to paint moral issues in glaring black and white� owes a great deal to the battle waged by Americans to maintain between themselves and black men a human separation which could not be bridged. It is only now beginning to be borne in on us � very faintly, it must be admitted, very slowly, and very much against our will � that this vision of the world is dangerously inaccurate, and perfectly useless. For it protects our moral high-mindedness at the terrible expense of weakening our grasp of reality. People who shut their eyes to reality simply invite their own destruction, and anyone who insists on remaining in a state of innocence long after that innocence is dead turns himself into a monster."

(I Am Not Your Negro really needs to get on Netflix or something.)

eta: Henry Louis Gates has a good essay about him in 13 Ways of Looking at a Black Man. He talks about how Baldwin was his favorite growing up, and how all those asides and parentheticals that Baldwin uses--you know, little qualifications and explanations, sometimes seem like they don't even need to be there--started working their way into his own writing. That's just how Baldwin wrote. Sometimes his sentences that were insufferably elaborate. Profound as poo poo! Grammatically correct as poo poo! But "To be or not to be" was not his game. I still haven't figured out if it's just his style or a kind of rhetorical defense against being taken out of context. Because I've tried, and when the guy is on his game, you simply cannot boil him down to a tweet-sized quote without ignoring something important. He's just too big for that. Yes, he's talking revolution, and yes, he's talking love, and his syntax tangles them. It's like, one way or another, he will force his reader to confront their own dishonesty.

Love James Baldwin.

AtraMorS fucked around with this message at 00:39 on Mar 13, 2017

# ¿ Mar 13, 2017 00:10

The Something Awful Forums > Archives > Comedy Goldmine > Negrotown: Generating 3/5ths of forum complaints.