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The explicitly paternalist character of these questions suggests that a belief in the “dehumanization” of enslaved people is locked in an inextricable embrace with the very history of racial abjection it ostensibly confronts. http://bostonreview.net/forum/walter-johnson-to-remake-the-world
I forgot who it was who also said that rather than "humanizing" anyone, the attempts solidify the thinking that the subjects are people whose humanity had to be proven in the first place, and then supposedly defended over and over
This reminds me of the suggestions that Fred Hampton was class over race, and how it seems that so many of those distinctions come from trying to separate the two concepts that are inseparable as a result of slavery. Also, I love when Great Britain is exposed.
This also reminds me of the only good thing @jaycaspiankang gets angry about. Whenever there's a discussion about racism or class, it tends to be focused on the elite tier: Hollywood stars, Harvard students, politicians. It pretends that the true violence comes from top to bottom
When really all of it is maintained by the exploitation of those who find themselves at the bottom of that intermingled system of racial capitalism. Basically, who the fuck cares about Hollywood stars when Black and Brown workers are being sent out to die in a pandemic.
I actually wrote an essay a bunch of months ago making that argument that it's impossible to understand a society and the violence that maintains it without starting first with the people ostracized in it, or who live in the margins: https://www.plough.com/en/topics/justice/scraps-and-ruins
(Once you look from the margins, you really start to see how absurd everything else. That's why reading about disabilities is so important, because you also find those problems of race and class, and the declarations by design of who counts and gets to participate in the world)
