![]() ![]() And they are easily accessible via a global information search engine that researchers are now calling “Google.” To wit: Some conservatives responded that this was “straw man” and a “bogus red herring.” They contended that conservatives never made such arguments. Karen Swallow Prior, an author and professor at Liberty University whom I respect, objected that “no conservative Christians ever made that argument.” Another said I was “mocking an argument that no one is making.”īut there are plenty examples of such arguments being made by high-level conservative Christian leaders in recent history. On the day of the decision, I posted a satirical tweet about how millions of straight conservative Christians were shocked to discover their marriages had not actually been harmed by the Supreme Court’s decision. But as the dust settles and reality sets in, we’re already witnessing signs of social amnesia. The decision, though expected, plunged conservatives into varying states of mourning, uncertainty, retreat, and retrenchment. He dubbed it “ social amnesia.” Others since then have also noted the tendency of groups to collectively repress history, usually because remembering the facts is not in the group’s best interest.Ĭonservative Americans-and particularly conservative Christians-lost a decades-long cultural battle last week when the Supreme Court legalized gay marriage nationwide. In the 1970’s, UCLA history professor Russell Jacoby studied trends in the collective forgetting of groups of people. Often the losers knit together a version of past events that disposes of the more damning details and casts their side in a more favorable light. – (Image courtesy of Dave Schumaker – ) History is not always written by the victors. ![]() Expect social amnesia as Christians debate sexuality. He quotes an editorial in the Freedman’s Journal, the nation’s first black newspaper, circa the mid-1800s, lamenting “the adoption of racist epithets by blacks themselves.†â€.Often the losers knit together a version of past events that disposes of the more damning details and casts their side in a more favorable light. Asim’s book is also an account of social anomalies: use of the word within the black community, which Asim shows is nothing new. I will spare readers a blow-by-blow account of the N word’s maleficence. Charting the 1700s, Asim pays special attention to Thomas Jefferson’s 1785 Notes from the State of Virginia, a text that, coming from a man of Jefferson’s renown, “established a model of rationalized racism.†The N word itself may not appear in the section in which Jefferson discourses on race, but the word has at its foundation an image, and Jefferson’s sexually tempestuous, uncreative, and genetically inferior American Negro “conveniently codified truths held to be self-evident by most white Americans at the end of the eighteenth century.†The (pseudo) scientific racism that marked the 1800s—harebrained theories of human intelligence as determined by cranium dimensions—was occasionally dubbed by its practitioners “niggerology.†Its first written usage on New World soil may have been in the diary of John Rolfe in 1619, noting the arrival of the first African slaves in British North America. The N word’s story is tortuous, but not always predictable. “For much of the history of our fair republic, the N word has been at the center of our most volatile exchanges no discussion of American race relations can be complete without it,†writes Asim. It so sums up the essence of the racial stereotype that it can be used as a slur against any group being portrayed as lazy, shiftless, and stupid—including, by the way, white Americans. ![]() It sits at the heart of the American consciousness like the evil twin of “liberty†or “justice.†Its familiarity has outlived that of other racial epithets once commonplace. ![]() It isn’t always a good idea to reduce vast social dimensions to a pithy cognomen—all the great “isms†are finally irreducible—but there are special cases, and when Jabari Asim asks us to examine American racism (particularly racism against black Americans) through the lens of a single word, it’s remarkable how much history he squeezes into the text.įor truly the N word (as it has been known for several decades now) is the privileged American racial epithet. Yet the subject contained within the subject is immeasurable: racism American-style. ![]()
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