410,000,000,000 hours.
It’s a number which should be taught in American high schools, but if you mention it in, say, Texas, you will then have to (a) frame it in a way which is not negative, or (b) offer a countering, positive, connotation to this number.
410 billion hours. Remember it. For the rest of your life, @gandrews3367.
What is this number?
According to the National Institute of Health, it is the total number of hours worked by the near 10,000,000 slaves which existed in the colonies and the US from 1619-1865.
That’s 41,000 hours of labor for which each of 10,000,000 human beings received merely sustenance. Not ‘sustenance-level wages’, but sustenance. 20.5 years of as cheap labor as one can get, per person. While being beaten. While being bred. While being raped. While being kept purposely ignorant.
By white people. (Again, your preferred phrasing.) A crime perpetrated against black people.
So why is it that I, and most people reading this far, am hearing of this number for the first time? 410 billion hours is a vast amount of time - 46 million years of enslaved labor went to enrich their white owners. The black slaves in this country lost 46 million years of productive earnings, hell man, they lost 46 million years of savings and compound interest.
No… wait. It wasn’t lost. It was stolen. By, as you prefer to say, white people. 46,000,000 years of productive capacity just poured into the pockets of the white slaveholders, not the workers themselves. No… their reward was being whipped. And raped. By white people who told themselves that they, the white people, were doing all the work, taking all the risk.
So… why can’t we just say this? Why are laws being enacted to ensure that the phrasing of history is not emotionally jarring to the historical narrative white people like to tell themselves?
Here’s why: Because to admit the true scale of slavery, the 46 million years of stolen labor and capital, would cause legitimate damage to the conservative heterodoxy, a system of beliefs and policies which depend upon these assumptions being true:
- America was a pristine, undeveloped land (it was not – 15, 20 million lived on this continent when Columbus arrived, and they weren’t foragers.)
- White people came over and discovered it.
- By our own rugged individualism, white people tamed the countryside.
- Through grit and hard work, white people civilized a continent
- The American (white) ideals of freedom and capitalism propelled this country to greatness, a shining city on the hill
- In America, anyone can be a success
- In America, you will be rewarded for your hard work
- In America, you are free
You cannot reconcile the above with 46 million years of stolen labor. You cannot reconcile the above with Jim Crow. You cannot reconcile the above with 19th century labor conditions… or even the labor conditions of the first half of the 20th century. You cannot reconcile the above with 100,000,000 indigenous lives lost. You can’t even reconcile the above with indentured servitude, a moral horror which white people subjected themselves to.
And so, to me, anti-CRT laws are pathetic, frightened, weak-minded shit. Imagine being so scared of your history you need to legislate how it is taught. Imagine being so scared of accepting the moral ambiguity of ones ancestors and the origins of a country that you prefer, by supporting these initiatives, to self-brand yourself an emotionally and intellectually stunted weakling.
I don’t know, man. At one time, white people were better than this. They were better than modern conservatism, and if I had to take the same racial view of things which allows one to say “white people invented everything”, I would hope to also be man enough to accept that white people are doing a shit-poor job of running the United States of America and we’ve really been slacking since, oh, 1980, the birth of the modern conservative age.