... and counting.
After reviewing conditions of people "bought" and boarded onto ships in chains, as slaves, to be slaves, for white people approximately two hundred years ago (and onward), I decided, were I given the choice, in some sick, awful, hellish nightmare, between living through a journey on a slaver's ship, and living through a few weeks in a Nazi Concentration Camp, that I would choose the latter.
I say this because I think that "horror" and "atrocity" are real, socially, to many people I know when it comes to "imagining" what it must have been like in Europe during the time of Nazi rule, occupations, gathering up of Jews into cattle cars, if not already killed by the S.S. (I don't know of anyone living who was in a Nazi Concentration Camp, but I know there are still people living who did somehow survive it.)
And me saying this doesn't really account for the various horrific things done to people in the Camps: the "unspeakable" things. But I guess my point is that white men in "The Americas" did these things, these same, awful, horrid, nightmarish things to Black people and to Red People, and when I grew up getting "a good white education" I wasn't taught that. I also wasn't taught about HaShoah, to be honest. I made the teacher teach a lesson about it, but she didn't wish to, I think because she was of German Christian heritage. But I new the term in my mid-twenties, and knew the term "Holocaust" as a reference to the Nazi genocides when a teenager. I didn't learn the term "Maafa" until much later. And I wish there was a term for the Genocide against Native Americans, across the Americas. "The American Holocaust" doesn't quite get at the horror of it for me. The unspeakable horror, of it, continuing, and of the Maafa--the enslavement and transport of African people treated as less than things, as worse than things, and the atrocities that come with such a condition of living, and dying. And remember that this genocide is not over, as the child in the image above reminds us.
I am aware of the unspeakable horrors committed by white men against Red people, especially to the women and girls. And being committed still. Let those of us who do not know of these things from stories told and untold by our relatives, make a point of learning what white heterosexual men have done in order to secure land, resources, and liberty for themselves only. Refuse to not know and do not let your mind and heart forget. I will try and do the same. See the blood and feel the pain and commit your life to ending the horrid forms of institutionally backed violence WHM commit, including this day against people in Afghanistan and Iraq, and in the U.S., and in Mexico, and in Canada. And in many, many countries across Africa and Asia, especially to the women and girls.
