criminal intent

In the New World we find the origins of modern-day racism. Racism originated in greed, & began because greedy planters all over the colonies (in the north too) wanted to steal labor. They found very early that Africans couldn't effectively defend themselves. Once the habit of stealing people out of Africa and then stealing their labor was established, various rationalizations had to be manufactured to justify such evil practices. They weren't long in coming.

Who hasn't heard the myth of the "happy darkies?" That narrative was demolished  by Nat Turner and Denmark Vesey, but persisted just the same. How many people have you heard say that we did the Africans a favor, by converting them 2 Christianity?

Racism is mostly a function of guilt. Tell white folks they're guilty and you'll get a hysterical and angry denial, nearly every time. They combine iniquity with stupidity by doing so, since People who commit terrible crimes are objectively guilty. Anybody who thinks I'm talking about people's fee-fees is way off. I'm speaking of the actual condition of literal guilt.

For example:

The 18th and 19th centuries white Americans practiced murder, kidnapping, and imprisonment of their victims for life.

In the 20th and 21st centuries we refined things a little. Now we send unstable & racist white po-lice into our central cities for the purpose of terrorizing the population by randomly shooting young black men. Some of these R armed & dangerous, but most are harmless & docile. All the police, on the other hand, R armed and dangerous. Even worse is the gulag we've constructed for young men of color & quite a few women 2. Millions are currently warehoused & serving excessively punitive sentences on overblown drug charges. The "war on drugs" is a war on young black guys. It's been going on long enough now that denying it is futile.

It's getting worse, not better. Every timeI I think about this situation, I wonder how people can be  so unaware of what they're doing. They stay unaware by constructing elaborate racist schematics, and by becoming totally obsessed with "the other." 

Self-justification is everyone's chief refuge from awareness of how horrible they've become. From the "peculiar institution" to the "war on drugs," the history of whites in the USA has been characterized by denial, avoidance, euphemism, and failure to deal with the monsters in their own past and their own psyches.

The "peculiar institution" was a methodical mass kidnapping for purposes of stealing labor by force. It's noteworthy that the best estimates of mortality on the vessels transporting Africans to their New World bondage run about 1/3, whidh means genocide has to be factored into rthe equationan as well. In rough figures, it would mean roughy 14 million made it to their new lives as prisoners, and about 7 million died at sea. The genocide was unintentional, but nonetheless real, and occurred over a period of 200-plus years

It was a record unmatched until modern times, when Hitler brought mechanization and railroads to the science of murder, and accomplished in a few short years what it had taken western Europeans 200 years 2 get done. Maybe "accomplished" is the wrong word.

Some will be offended by what I've written here, but I can back up every word, Sometimes the truth is a blunt instrument.

Portrait: Denmark Vesey in 1822, the year of his execution.