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Slavery was a world-historical crime unique in human history and uniquely severe and persistent in the United States. The Civil War was initiated by the South in order to maintain slavery. These are both plain facts, established absolutely exhaustively. And yet we still "debate."
Arab traders were involved in modern slavery. The Irish endured slavery-like conditions. Some black people owned slaves. All of that is true, and all of it is irrelevant to the fact that race-based chattel slavery for life was invented by modern "white" Europeans.
If you're not comfortable with the fact that "whiteness" is tangled up with the world-historical crime of race-based chattel slavery for life, then maybe you should stop clinging so pathetically to "whiteness." Or you could just make up crazy lies so you don't have to feel bad.
If you feel personally attacked when people rightly point out that black people in America are subjected to absolutely gratuitous and unjustifiable mistreatment and violence, then maybe that tells you something about your "white" identity and what it actually consists of?
If you need to justify that unjustifiable mistreatment and violence in order to feel whole and secure in your identity, well, I would just invite you to really sit with that fact for a minute or two, because that's pretty fucked up!
Could it be, implicitly, that your sense of being "white" actually *requires* black people to suffer, and admitting that black people don't "deserve" to suffer would imply that that suffering should stop? I mean, think about what you are really reacting to when you get defensive.
Is any of this "your fault"? No, you are not to blame for the fact that your social formation as "white" has profoundly morally damaged you (much less for having the phenotypical characteristics arbitrarily labelled as "white"). But you do have an obligation to become better.
And the first step in becoming better is simply to shut the fuck up once in a while, to actually listen to and accept obvious facts that you *know* are obvious facts, to get past your unconscious fear of being deprived of the spectacle of black suffering.
