Some who really know me, know that DeeK, comes from my last name, Dickey. See that star on the map, near the Alabama, Florida state lines? That's Dickey, Georgia. I'm told Mason jars originated from the plantations there. What do I care?
My father's side of the family started in America there, but why should I care? I know the male side of the line goes back to a Dickey family from England. Dickey, Dixon, Dickinson, they all names that go back to Richard III, a popular king. Yeah, you know, I don't really care.
You see, the woman that my distant male relative raped will always be a nameless woman, who got some extra privileges, for bearing a mulatto child to some man who used a whole bunch of nameless slaves to pass the Dickey name down through history. Google "Dickey", follow the links and you'll be there for a couple days. But her? She will always be a nameless woman, scared to hell in a strange land, lucky to have survived a voyage across the Atlantic where pigs and cattle got better treatment than she did.
Do I celebrate being a Dickey? Hey, look that's the plantation where my great, great, great, great, great grandmother got her ass whipped. Where she was raped and maybe got to be called a house nigger, for the pleasure of having a baby, who was shunned for not being white enough to be worth anything. Yep, that's my family history or one side of it.
How many more Dickeys are out there on whose backs the European nations of the world were built? How many Dickeys are there in the Congo, where the Belgians worked Africans to the death in the latter half of the 1800s to extract rubber for bicycle tires? How many Dickeys are there in Zaire now who slave in diamond mines so some asshole, yeah, some who are black, can wear fucking "bling" on his teeth?
Please don't tell me that the civil rights movement is over. Don't tell me that your white guilt is my fault. Don't tell me that were all equal now. If had lived in New Orleans in 2005, I would have been in the Superdome. Or on a bridge. Or on in the Convention Center. You see, I don't have a car. Don't want one. Most of the time, don't need one. But it would have been my fault that I didn't leave town. It would be my fault, that I would have to live in a formadelhyde FEMA trailer, unable to speak to the press. Unable to get a job, because I am not a white Dickey, who may work for Halliburton. It is my fault the levees broke and that the wetlands could no longer blunt the force of a hurricane.
Please don't tell me that you are a minority because you are a white male who gets dumped on now and again. Don't tell you can't figure it out. It's all in front of you.
Dickey, Georgia. It ain't pretty.
4 comments:
... Did I strike a nerve with my question about marginalization?
The thing is, I have a hard time relating. My mother is Korean, and her parents survived the Japanese attack and subsequent occupation in Korea, and live with a perpetual hated (day I say, intolerance?) on the current generation of Japanese who had nothing to do with what happened. I don't think it's reasonable for a Japanese individual to continually feel bad for what happened just three generations prior.
But clearly some people feel differently. Korean culture was deeply impacted by the Japanese occupation, as the Japanese were intent on destroying the Korean culture by injecting both their DNA (through rape) and their language (by forcing people to learn Japanese), such that a lot of today's Korean words are actually derived from the Japanese language. But... I'm not sure how that impacts me, because I don't deeply identify with being Korean. People that do are exibiting a type of "nationalism" (although it should be called "ethnicism", I suppose), and I just can't relate to that at all.
jovial-- the nerve you struck has a long history one that goes back to 1685 (when supposedly my branch of the Dickeys was formed)
Please don't view this as a personal attack because is no way intended to be. I can understand your not relating to the hatred Koreans reserve for Japanese; you don't have to live it. You have options that most blacks don't enjoy. I know the tempation is high to say all is equal, but I think Katrina's aftermath proves it is not.
I have had this discussion with many white people who violently hold on to the belief that our culture and economy was built on the mind and innovations of European culture. The real story is that the culture was built and continues to thrive on Africa, Africans and African descendants. More than cotton, rice, which blacks taught Europeans to grow, and sugar constituted a huge economy and one that let many whites thrive.
Yet, for the most part we stand at the bottom of the economic ladder though most of our ancestors have been here longer than most white (and asian) peoples. WE built the American Dream, but tragically only get to observe it. For whites "all that stuff is in the past" which implies that blacks are lazy ne'er do wells who have failed to grab opportunities. For us the past is still the present to some degrew, while our struggle is simply history for most of the population.
I will have more on this in the near future. I beleive this attitude is connected to much we do and choose to ignore in our culture.
Thank you for listening and bringing up the topic. It is one that sorely needs discussion
No offense taken. I understand that I have a hard time understanding. :)
As a side note, I typically do defend minority groups on principle, given the problems with Democracy as I've pointed out in my post on the subject. But I don't defend it from a personal understanding of the issue -- I do it purely from a numbers perspective, and the desire to promote intellectual diversity. So... we're on the same side of the fight, but for completely different reasons.
Awesome. I don't expect everyone to understand. I'd rather have your upfront point of view and a discussions than total avoidance. It is not perfect world, never will be. But if we can't get the issues out in the open, how else do we know what they are?
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