The soul of white folk

One of the misconceptions of slavery, and of the oppressive history of this country in general, is that the damage that was done was done just to black folk. It wasn’t. As Booker T.  Washington once said, “you can’t hold a man down without staying down with him.” What was the lasting stain left on the collective soul of white folks by generations of internalized hatred?

There is so much enduring trauma that plagues the black community. High crime levels. Single-parent homes. Lack of (access to) education. Poverty. Systemic health issues.

But these problems aren’t organicly created remnants of slavery. Every systemic problem that the black community faces was forced upon it and engrained in its collective psyche and being by white Americans. White americans who raped black women repetitively during slavery, and beyond. White Americans who tore families apart in order to sell their bodies, who sent fathers in every which direction away from their families. White Americans who withheld medical treatment from their slaves, forcing them to rely on the most rudimentary methods of medicine. White Americans who hung men and women from trees for even dreaming of freedom. Who withheld any thing that could be deemed as education. Starved people. Sic’d dogs on them. Whipped them within inches of their lives. Chained them down. Harassed any modicum of pride out of their spirits. Stripped any vestige of their native language, culutre, or religion from their lives. One of our white, slaveholding presidents even took the teeth right out of his slaves mouths to use for his dentures.

White people were so socialized to hate that they sent their sons to die in order to protect their right to continue their institutionalized hatred of black people.

What does that mean, after hundreds of years and generations and generations? What does it do to a people when inconceivable violence and baseness becomes a compartmentalized and normalized way of life? What does it mean, psychologically, to people who were encouraged and allowed to hurt other people for their entire lives? What happens to the soul of those people?

How do they ever come to understand the meaning of humanity? How do they ever feel true love? Or sympathy? How do they understand human emotion? How do they ever understand themselves? At what point did the white people who were born into a system of hate learn to love? If black folks are still battling the damaging effects of slavery as a people, what demons of slavery are white people battling? What does the soul of white folks look like when it is drenched in the blood of black bodies, and hearts, since the founding of this country?

W.E.B. DuBois wrote, on the “Souls of White Folk,” that “[f]or two or more centuries America has marched proudly in the van of human hatred, – making bonfires of human flesh and laughing at them hideously, and making the insulting of millions more than a matter of dislike, – rather a great religion.”

What is the legacy of slavery for white Americans? What is it that hundreds of years of hatred does to a human?

The rationalization of modern lynchings is only one vestige.