I Would Rather My Ancestors Not Have Been Slaves Than Being Born An American

If someone suffers as a child, their suffering is not who they are to become as an adult. Anyone who tells them that they are their past suffering does not love them. Anyone who tells them that would rather see them angry, resentful, and powerless.

 

So you don't believe culture is a group's shared response to shared socioeconomic and enviromental conditions?

Also your statement flies in the face of modern cognative science and brains development. It seems like a wishful thinking machismo platitude.

 

Past suffering is a defining feature of culture for many groups besides just black Americans. Should we say that the Jewish people that they shouldn't be defined by the Holocaust? The Irish, that they shouldn't by the Potato famine and Centuries of British subjugation? For that matter why is US Southern culture still so focused on the Confederacy and Reconstruction?

 

Neither Jewish nor Irish people make their history who they are. They understand those things happened to them, but they are not those things. They still have strong cultures that survived all of that. They won't ever, ever wear shirts that says Built by the Holocaust or Built by the Potato Famine like some are wearing Buily by Black History shirts today.

 

I don't think history is culture. It is a part of culture, but it is not the whole of culture. Culture entails things like history, traditions, family structure, order, religion, language, customs, heirarchies, etc.

 

All those things you list are effects. You need to understand the basics of causality.

All those things are effects from responses experienced through enviroment and socioeconomics. People don't sit around in a circle and say "this tradition is our culture". It's naturally formed through stimulus of enviroment and socioeconomics.

 

I think people do actually sit around and talk about those things. Letting them just happen invites chaos and disorder into the group.

 

I would say you don't know the Irish very well, then. I don't mean that to be mean or rude, but that does not at all match my experience with the Irish. The history of their relationship with mass emigration and the British Empire define so much of their values today.

 

well you can think that but that's not how culture forms. People can sit down and discuss culture but that isn't "forming culture". Culture is a natural process that occurs over long periods of time as reactions to conditions experienced.

Yes there is a lot of chaos involved in humanity.

 

I know you have an Irish background so you would know more than me. Do they have a month dedicated to that part of their history? Is that literally the only history they are taught in grade school? I'm not saying it's not important to them, sounds like still resent the British, maybe, but I doubt it is as defining to them as Black History, which is basically slave history, is to many Black Americans.

 

Have you listened to a lot of Irish music?

 

I was told by someone who is an Irish author that Irish culture is all about the laments. He didn't like that Ireland was doing successful economically because it was taking away from the Irish soul.

 

Did the Irish face 300 years of oppresion in the United States from slavery to Jim Crow?

And please don't bring up indentured servitude. That's a common white supremacist narrative that is completely false. Indentured servitude didn't fuel an entire economy for multiple centuries in the United States where it was pretty much was as important as oil is today.

And again you convieniently leave out the 100 years after slavery ended that Black Americans still faced in terms of systemic racism which is a path of their cultural history.

 

Ordo ab chao... Order out of chaos.

There is order in culture, not chaos and there is no chaos in culture. If you want to get rid of culture, then introduce chaos. Nothing destroys a culture more than chaos.

 

There is no "getting rid of culture". Every ethnicity, race etc has a culture. Chaos or in other words new environmental and socioeconomic conditions would bring forth a new or changed culture. Culture is maleable. It shifts and changes over time based on conditions. Culture is an effect dude. You live in some fairy tale world if you think culture is formed conciously through some organized event rather than organically through several decades and centuries of shared experiences and responding to those experiences.

 

Im not sure what is being discussed here.

There seems to be a divergence between wishful thinking and reality.

 

What? He would prefer the Irish not to succeed? I get the Irish not completely letting go of that part of their history, writers and artists would be the ones to remember it, but to lament the Irish not suffering the consequences of its history anymore is strange.

 

It's Jumpman pulling a gabs in a gabs thread

gabception

here comes multiple pages of someone fighting a clearly bad fight

 

Tell me what Black American culture is. How is it organized? What is its religion? What is its family structure? What values does it hold? I think the answers would vary depending on who you ask, meaning there is no concrete Black culture. Really, the West is becoming increasingly deculturized so we're all lacking culture. If you want to find the most concrete examples of culture you would have to look to the Arabs, Jews, and Asians.

 

Yes, I would agree that we are living in a culture less world and there is a lot of wishful thinking on my part believing that culture is a solution.