Sunday, February 19, 2017

the last book I ever read (Ibram X. Kendi's Stamped from the Beginning, excerpt five)

from the 2016 National Book Award winner for Nonfiction Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America by Ibram X. Kendi:

On February 2, 1860, Jefferson Davis, a senator from Mississippi, presented the southern platform of unlimited states’ rights and enslavers rights to the US Senate. The South needed these resolutions to be passed if they were going to remain in the Stephen Douglas-led Democratic Party and in the Union. Davis could have easily added that southerners believed the federal government should not use its resources to assist Black people in any way. On April 12, 1860, Davis objected to appropriating funds for educating Blacks in Washington, DC. “This Government was not founded by negroes nor for negroes,” he said, but “by white men for white men.” The bill was based on the false assertion of racial equality, he stated. The “inequality of the white and black races” was “stamped from the beginning.”

Adam had driven away the first White criminal, his son Cain, who was “no longer the fit associate of those who were created to exercise dominion over the earth,” Davis lectured the senators. Cain had found in the “land of Nod those to whom his crime had degraded him to an equality.” Apparently, Blacks had lived in the Land of Nod among the “living creatures” God had created before humans. Blacks were later taken on Noah’s ark with other animals. Their overseer: Ham.



No comments:

Post a Comment