No Guilt Required: The Dark Script of White History

Written by Jim Crow to preserve the brutality of Jim Crow

Photo by Gayatri Malhotra on Unsplash

There is a script we have been following for about a century and a half.

Act I: White people treat black people worse than they would treat animals.

Act II: Black people object.

Act III: White people tell each other that these are rioters and slaughter as many as they can.

Act IV: Things go quiet.

Until it happens again.

St. Louis, 1917, and again Chicago, 1919, and again Tulsa 1921, and again Little Rock, Ar., 1927. There are hundreds of these. I’m going to skip around. Detroit, 1943, Birmingham, Al, 1963, Los Angeles.1964, Chicago again, 1966, Chicago again, 1976,1977, Miami, Fla. 1980, Los Angeles, 1992, Ferguson, Mo., 2014, Around the World, 2020.

This pattern is old. Older than anyone alive today. It was our ancestors’ pattern, history’s pattern. Let’s do something different.

Let’s start by calling things what they are.

Let’s break the goddamn script.

It’s a script written by Jim Crow to preserve the brutality of Jim Crow.