In TomDispatch.com, Greg Grandin writes a piece that sees the foundation of the Tea Party on Racism. Well... of course it is. I was born and bred in the USA, and I know what secrets are in the closets and who is behind the woodshed...
I know most of the colours and hues of racism, how to express it, how to gloss it over, how to hide it, how to joke about it; I took in racism with every breath I took while growing up. So did most of you. We can always choose not to laugh at a racist joke, but what we cannot do is fail to get the punch line: the stereotype of the minstrel, the slacker, the dope-fiend... the shades of meaning where White is working, active, brave, and thrifty, but Black or Brown or even Yellow is dark, evil, shuffling, cowardly, and a squanderer when it comes to their bodily pleasures. Or vice-versa if our roles be reversed.
Everything is racism, more or less. When it was being discussed whether I should be employed at a girls' High School as a Latin teacher recently, I enumerated the good points of learning Latin, one of which is that Latin was the language of a slave-empire. Learning it would give access to a mind of an empire built on slavery, yet far away enough in time not to threaten our own high esteem.
What do we really know about slavery? About its effects over time? I would say not bloody much.
We had a slave-empire.
Do we still think with the minds of the slave-imperium? May we ever escape our histories, or are we doomed ever to repeat the nastier tendencies of our childhood ?
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Very interesting take. Some refresher reading made me suddenly keenly aware of the character of the Roman realm -- and the depth to which its economy, indeeds its "foreign policy" was shaped by that institution. Nice parallels here!
Thanks, Arsen, and I myself never until recently ever approached Rome and Latin in this way.
A lot of people would say there is no such thing as a "mind of a slave-imperium" ( leaving out the Mamelukes of Egypt, who are another matter all together. ), but that viewpoint then totally trivializes the rise of Christianity within the Roman Empire...
At least at that time, religion was a great blow for freedom.
...and that was the next point I put forward to the Mother Superior of the RC High School, but they weren't quite ready for a Latin that went beyond etymology.
Concerning Ma Superior, I'm sorry to hear it. Used to be Greek/Latin was taught precisely in order to let our barbarian minds penetrate the culture that those languages carried. -- Good point, there, regarding the rise of Christianity. There is something genuinely unique in Christendom and even in Western Civilization, its ungrateful progeny... One reason why trying to preserve some shreds of it is noble labor.
I guess Mother Superior doubted that you could teach the Truth of the subject with the same subtlety you employed to divine the original insight. Disappointing.
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