{"id":1706,"date":"2017-06-24T11:45:27","date_gmt":"2017-06-24T15:45:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/attheintersectionoffaithandculture\/?p=1706"},"modified":"2017-06-24T11:51:35","modified_gmt":"2017-06-24T15:51:35","slug":"response-apology-white-people","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/attheintersectionoffaithandculture\/2017\/06\/response-apology-white-people.html","title":{"rendered":"A Response to “An Apology for White People”"},"content":{"rendered":"

A couple of days ago, a friend of mine from Alabama shared on his Facebook wall an article from Alabama Political Reporter <\/em>by a Mr. Josh Moon.<\/p>\n

The title is, \u201cAn Apology for White People.\u201d<\/p>\n

Moon, a white man, writes that \u201cwhite people in Alabama (and other states too, I presume)\u2026like to pretend a lot that the wink-and-nod-racism that\u2019s a daily part of life in this State is surprising to us.\u201d<\/p>\n

Besides accusing both \u201cignorant\u201d and \u201csmart\u201d white Alabamans of being \u201cracist\u201d for telling \u201cracist\u201d jokes and daring to notice the color of those of some of their neighbors who cause trouble, Moon submits as proof of the rampant \u201cracism\u201d of white Alabama the case of Kenneth Nail.<\/p>\n

Nail is the mayor of a town called Hanceville who requested of New Orleans that it send to Alabama the Confederate monuments that it razed.\u00a0 Moon thinks he knows why Nail made this request, and it has nothing to do with \u201c(*wink*) historical purposes,\u201d he assures us.<\/p>\n

\u201cMaybe,\u201d Moon says, Nail\u2019s \u201cdecision was made because one of those monuments used to bear an inscription honoring white supremacy.\u201d<\/p>\n

Moon asks: How can blacks not find \u201coffensive\u201d statues to Confederates, \u201ctraitors,\u201d as Moon describes them?\u00a0 How could anyone not find offensive and hurtful monuments to a man who \u201ckidnapped your mother, took her to a faraway place, routinely raped her, forced her to work without pay or benefits of any sort, denied her an education, beat her often and then discarded her when she became too sick to do the work he wanted [?]\u201d<\/p>\n

Only those who are \u201cstupid\u201d or \u201cbrainwashed\u201d could fail to \u201cunderstand the hurt\u201d caused to blacks by monuments to the Confederacy.<\/p>\n

Moon\u2019s is a non-argument that wouldn\u2019t be worth a response if it didn\u2019t represent the Politically\/Racially Correct orthodoxy of the day.\u00a0 Due to spatial constraints, let\u2019s just assume that we\u2019re not living in the real world and that Moon\u2019s claims are correct.\u00a0 His own logic (or illogic) turns in on itself.<\/p>\n

(1)If we\u2019re going to eradicate from the public Confederate monuments because they commemorate \u201ctraitorous white supremacists,\u201d then we must eradicate monuments to America\u2019s Founders, \u201ctraitorous white supremacists\u201d all of them.<\/p>\n

The men and women of 1776, after all, were as much \u201ctraitors\u201d to Mother England as the Confederates were \u201ctraitors\u201d to America (Actually, neither group consisted of \u201ctraitors;\u201d they were secessionists<\/em> who wanted to secede peacefully from the geographical entity to which they belonged, and in the case of the Confederates, that entity was not America, but the Union<\/em>.).<\/p>\n

George Washington, the Father of America; Thomas Jefferson, the author of the Declaration of Independence; James Madison, the Father of the United States Constitution; and Patrick Henry, the man who famously declared, \u201cGive me liberty or give me death!\u201d were all white Southerners who owned massive numbers of black slaves.<\/p>\n

If Moon thinks only the brainwashed, the \u201cstupid,\u201d and the \u201cracist\u201d could fail to see how monuments to Robert E. Lee and Jefferson Davis cause \u201churt\u201d to contemporary blacks, then it follows that only the brainwashed, the stupid, and the racist can fail to see that monuments to our Founders do the same.<\/p>\n

Racial enlightenment demands, then, that all cities and states; all currency; all schools; and all statues and portraits to Washington, Jefferson, Madison, and many others must go the way of the dinosaur.<\/p>\n

For that matter, the Declaration of Independence <\/em>and the Constitution <\/em>should be scrapped.\u00a0 Can Moon and his ilk be so dense and callous so as not to recognize that in organizing our society around these documents and in treating them (at least rhetorically) with the reverence that we do that we affirm and reaffirm a legacy of \u201cwhite supremacy?!\u201d<\/p>\n

If, say, Lee, who had only a handful of slaves that he inherited and that he freed, deserves no credit for any of his many accomplishments because he was a \u201cwhite supremacist,\u201d then surely Jefferson and Madison, both of whom traded in slaves and owned exponentially more slaves than Lee ever did, don\u2019t deserve credit for any of their<\/em> accomplishments.<\/p>\n

Quite the contrary: they deserve to be held in contempt and their signature achievements, the Declaration<\/em> and Constitution<\/em>, respectively, the products of \u201cwhite supremacists,\u201d deserve to be junked.<\/p>\n

(2)America<\/em> itself, by Moon\u2019s reckoning, needs to be renamed, for it was America that \u201ckidnapped\u201d Africans, \u201craped\u201d their women, enslaved them and so forth.<\/p>\n

Besides this, \u201cAmerica\u201d was named after the European explorer, Amerigo Vespucci.\u00a0 Every moment in the daily lives of blacks and \u201cNative Americans<\/em>\u201d can only be spent in excruciating pain, for they are constantly reminded as long as they reside in America of the cruel treatment to which Europeans subjected them.<\/p>\n

The very country of America is a standing monument to \u201cwhite supremacy.\u201d<\/p>\n

Thus, the name \u201cAmerica,\u201d like Confederate statues, must be relegated to the dustbin of history.<\/p>\n

(3) The English language must be abolished. The indigenous peoples of this place that we call \u201cAmerica\u201d never spoke English before they were forced to do so by their conquerors.\u00a0 Neither did the Africans who were taken, against their will, to the New World.<\/p>\n

Does Moon not see the \u201churt\u201d caused to blacks and reds insofar as they are reduced to speaking the language of their abductors, rapists, and enslavers?<\/p>\n

(4)American civilization\u2014its science, technology, commerce, entertainment, in short, all of those of its achievements created by its European settlers and their descendants that have made it the envy of and magnet for the rest of the world\u2014should be reduced to dust and ashes.<\/p>\n

Does Moon not see the hurt caused to blacks (and others) who are forced to live with so many constant daily reminders of their abductors, rapists, and enslavers?<\/p>\n

(5) The terms \u201cAfrican\u201d <\/em>and \u201cAfrican-American\u201d <\/em>are standing monuments to \u201cwhite supremacy.\u201d We must purge them from our lexicon. The continent now known as \u201cAfrica\u201d was never regarded as such by its indigenous inhabitants until the Romans, <\/em>i.e. white folks, named it such.<\/p>\n

And as we\u2019ve already seen, the name \u201cAmerica\u201d derives from the name of the European Christian man Amerigo Vespucci.<\/p>\n

Anyone who uses these terms to identify others or self-identify perpetuates \u201cwhite supremacy.\u201d<\/p>\n

(6)As the sociologist of religion Rodney Stark has shown, the very notion of the \u201cindividual\u201d is, ultimately, a \u201cdiscovery\u201d for which the Christian West, i.e. Europe, deserves the credit. Other peoples, like African peoples, have always thought in more tribal or otherwise collective terms.<\/p>\n

This in turn accounts for why it was only within the context of European or white Christian peoples that \u201cracism\u201d came to be regarded as a moral offense: Since it is the individual, made in the image of God and offered eternal salvation through the atoning sacrifice of Christ, that is of paramount moral significance, it is immoral to mistreat people on the basis of such morally and religiously irrelevant considerations as race.<\/p>\n

Does Moon not see the hurt inflicted upon blacks (and others) whenever someone, like himself, who is of the same color of their oppressors, claims that they are victims of \u201cracism?\u201d\u00a0 In speaking of \u201cracism,\u201d and treating it as an evil, Moon implicitly privileges the Eurocentric, Christocentric ontology of \u201cthe individual\u201d over the non-Eurocentric, non-Christocentric metaphysical-moral scheme of the tribe or collective.<\/p>\n

Charges<\/em> of \u201cracism\u201d are like statues of General Lee and the like in being monuments<\/em> to \u201cwhite supremacy:\u201d They serve as constant reminders to contemporary blacks of their abductors, rapists, and enslavers. \u00a0The notion of \u201cracism\u201d reminds blacks that their minds have been \u201ccolonized\u201d by the metaphysic of \u201cindividualism,\u201d the legacy of a philosophical-theological tradition that was foreign to their ancestors and that they would have never imbibed had it not been for the injustices suffered by their people.<\/p>\n

And here we have it. \u00a0Moon\u2019s position, the racial dogma of our times, is self-cannibalizing. The (il)logic underpinning it proves too much.<\/p>\n

Most importantly, it proves just how absurd is the Racial Correctness that Moon mindlessly parrots.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A couple of days ago, a friend of mine from Alabama shared on his Facebook wall an article from Alabama Political Reporter by a Mr. Josh Moon. The title is, \u201cAn Apology for White People.\u201d Moon, a white man, writes that \u201cwhite people in Alabama (and other states too, I presume)\u2026like to pretend a lot…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":399,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1706","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\nA Response to "An Apology for White People"<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/attheintersectionoffaithandculture\/2017\/06\/response-apology-white-people.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"A Response to "An Apology for White People"\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"A couple of days ago, a friend of mine from Alabama shared on his Facebook wall an article from Alabama Political Reporter by a Mr. Josh Moon. 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