I was invited to join a woke, Book Club by a great friend of mine, Janelle Buchanan, aka #JBSmooveVA. The reading for the Club we were asked to read and be ready to discuss Stamped by Jason Reynolds and Ibram X. Kendi. I started reading it after I read, White Fragility but this is one of the books in the bibliography of White Fragility. That author, a progressive White professor, suggests that you need to further your anti-racist education by continuing your education and modifying your behavior accordingly. But I would actually gather that I would actually start with this novel.
606, Racism the Numbers Racket
I love how Stamped is organized from the table of contents, the introduction you are set up expectation of what to expect in the rest of the book each section. The book is further organized by century or time period. So, what is the significance of 606? Well not so fast. There is a definite chronology to racism. The tone of the book draws you in and is carried through out the entirety of the book.
Let’s start internationally, 1415 to 1728. But you could argue that Aristotle refusal to believe any non-Greek was incapable of philosophical thought, was probably rooted more in player-haterism, and his own self-doubt which really does create the likes of killers of Trayvon Martin and will allow sadistic cops to kneel on the necks of George Floyd and shoot Breonna Taylor in her bed. In 1414 Prince Henry wanted the wealth of the Moors from Mediterranean down the western coast of Africa. But he needed to spin the “jack move”. So hires the first spin doctor, Zurara whose first publication was the first race-track to justify the pillage and thievery from the Moors of Africa. This dude was the male Olivia Pope male of the 15th Century, capeing for a despicable ruler, Henry. Now the meaning of the 606 error. For those into technology or just walking talking computer viruses, we nerds hate seeing that 606 error because we know something is up and there’s badness in the digital realm. Your access to the Internet or your web browser has blocked all access to necessary information or success of research or even building publishing your podcast, but I digress. If you start with 1414 as when all that jacking supported by that thieving’ Prince Henry and sanctioned by his father and the Catholic Church, until 2020 is roughly 606 years of foolishness. Prince Henry ran amok for the entirety of his life and he did it slap smooth. Going back to the tone of the book, it is written in everyday vernacular. It is obvious the co-authors are great writers and historians, the report the facts but in manner that is not boring but more engaging. It makes the book just that more powerful it draws you in, warns you that it is not your everyday history book. You can see the authors are tripped out as we are as we read what he is actually found in his How organized religion, in this case the Catholic Church, complicity in the rape and pillage of the Moors but it was all about economic. Race was used to cheat at this numbers game. How many bodies you killed, how many bodies you owned gave you political clout. How many bodies you could conscript to work your shipyards and grow staples on your plantation determined how much money you made. And if you were the church you were intertwined with the monarchy, leadership ordained by God and you did not want to bite the hand that feeds you. The King says scratch my back you get to scratching even lying about the barbarity or savagery of the Moors, you do as you are told.
Dangerous Assimilators, Coon Logic
But this doesn’t work if you don’t dupe someone within the race you are trying to subjugate to assist you in your duplicity. You could ask the late Herman Uncle Tom, err Caine or the Attorney General of Kentucky, Daniel Tom…err Cameron, or Tim Uncle Tom…err Scott. To perform and prove their loyalty to “Massa”. The first may have be Hassan el Mohammed Al-Fassi, a well-educated Moroccan, better educated than his almost illiterate Portuguese captors, who was captured and forced to convert and spread the word of the Catholic church and fight against his own countrymen. But Americans are no better because we took our cues from them. Look at the first evangelicals in this country, the Puritans. I’m going to throw complete shade at them. They left England because they were persecuted because they thought the Church of England was had strayed away from strict Christian ideals so they wanted to find a place where they could practice their “pure” form of religion devoid of the persecution. But unfortunately, they landed in a vast country, with millions of indigenous people with a culture and societies older than their own. So how could they\ justify stealing this entire country from the indigenous people and killing every Native American tribe forced them out of the Hudson River Valley Forced them out of the Shenandoah Valley first south and then West. They would pervert the holy word, the Bible to justify this Unholy war and their general foolishness. They formed the government in every locale, and they insured the indoctrination started for all able-bodied White males at birth and ingrained into the very fabric of their first elite institution in this country, Harvard University. The nonsensical belief of racial superiority of white Puritans depended on the belief of the savageness of the Native Americans, who needed to convert and assimilate or die. But the Puritans and planters of Virginia would orchestrate their own Prince Henry like jack move. In 1619 a bunch of pirates sanctioned by probably the governor of the Virginia Colony, attached and stole several Angolan, Black, slaves from another pirate ship, The San Juan Batiste, on its way to South American. 20 of these Angolan slaves were taken and sold in the New World in Jamestown Virginia. We just we just celebrated the 400th anniversary of the first black person to be sold I’m here in this Country So now we go to 606 to 400, it’s like a time clock continuing to wind down but the numbers still don’t add up to justify this thievery. You know so many people of the elite white society claim some type of superiority if they can trace their family back to the first voyagers of the Mayflower that got lost and crashed to Plymouth Rock in 1620. But our terror, Black American that is, started a full year before that. If you had thought to ask us, we would have told you to go back, it’s not worth it.
The Salem Witch Trials, Trial of Intolerance
The ending of the first section details more about the Salem Witch trials than I ever thought. It was about not only the persecution smart loud mouthed women who dared to speak up and out against the white male patriarchy, but it was the persecution and the attempt to purge non-pure poor whites, African and Native Americans from the Puritan society that didn’t have any tolerance for difference. The orchestrator of this obsession was the Uber-Puritan a young Cotton Mather, a religious wonder kid who of course entered in Harvard at 11 years old. He would publish several hundreds and thousands of sermons supporting the religiosity of the time, and further indwelling racism and supporting racism into the psyche of the people as well as into their spirits. You have to believe this nonsense in order to take that new you can’t have a place in heaven if you didn’t believe this stupid story
Racist Codes…Jim Crow Laws, Voter Suppression, it’s all the same.
In this country there are a bunch of racist codes you must know or your life ends. You could not have any interracial relationships. There was a tax import on slaves. Natives and Blacks could not hold office. All property owned by slaves can be sold which contributes to black poverty. However, white indentured servants got 50 acres of land at the end of their servitude, but the big landowners found a way to jack that too. This contributes to white prosperity and the white privilege, the ultimate selfishness. The breath and magnitude of racism and how it has warped our society is astounding. It should be a daily running of an internal dialogue white people should have with themselves…I might be a racist if…then fill in the blanks. And it is wrong to be a racist, there is no justification and no explaining it a way. There is an unfair reward system in this country in which you are rewarded not based on your ability or knowledge but truly based on your color.
I am hopeful that there will be suggestion on how I can help to destroy this other parasite. This book makes me want to study and research to learn more, but first I have moved on to Section 2 , 1743 to 1826 a very tumultuous time in the history of the world and a tumultuous developmental time in the history of our country. We got the French Revolution, the Napoleonic Wars, The American Revolutionary War. These dates do encompass the years prior to the American Revolutionary War and then 40 years prior to the beginning of the American Civil War, fought in part due to slavery.
