Woking Up

BAD GRAMMAR NOTWITHSTANDING, there is no defensible, justifiable eason for not being "woke". "woke" merely means being aware of the history of racism in the United States, and its persistance, in more sublte forms, in contemporary society. Failure to acknowledge this is like failing to acknowledge the reality of economic inequality in America, or sexual abuse, or bad weather. The very existence of white supremacist groups such as the "Proud Boys" proves that racism exists. Why deny it? Political conservatism and Christian apologism are complicit. The rampant racism in Spain, currently noted in the international media, as manifested by fan treatment of a star African soccer player, is ironic because racism, actually a modern invention, first appearaed in Spain and Portugal as a pretext for enslaving Africans in the mid fifteenth century. Ancient manuscripts show no trace of racism. On the Iberian penninsula, the Catholic church did nothing to discourage slavery, and everything to support it, and its Christian justification. Much the same is true in seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth century America, where religion was used to justify slavery. Europeans and European-Americans were doing benighted Africans a tremendous service by removing them from the dark, barbaric culture of Africa, with its pagan religions, and exposing them to and indoctrinating them into the true faith, thus ensuring their eternal salvation. Enslaving Africans brought them reprieve from the fires of hell, and the hope of salvation by admission to and eventual entry into the heavenly kingdom of God. Every state which seceded in 1861 to form the Confederate States of America issued a founding document, a sort of "declaration of independence" from the United States, and all of them articulated defense of the institution of slavery and the northern states' threat to it as the primary motivation for their separation. Denial of the validity of "wokism" is as false as the revisionist historical assertion, long prevalant among misguided history students and scholars, that the cause of the American Civil War was not slavery, but rather, the noble cause of the defense of "states rights." To disprove this false thesis, one need only ask: "precisely what "state's right" were the confederate states defending? The answer is that they were defending their perceived God ordained right to own human beings, and to reduce them to hard bondage and hard labor, in the interest of establishing and maintaining a propserous agricultural economy for the wealthy elite white Christian plantation owners. It is crucial to accept, and impossible to honorably deny, the reality that in contemporary America denial of extant racism derives from the descendants of the people who once promoted it.