It shouldn’t really be a surprise that Cliven Bundy, leader of the absurd Nevada cattle tax stand off against “the Feds,”* also is problematic on other fronts. As Ta-Nehisi Coates quotes from a NY Times piece, Bundy had this to say about poor Black people:
“And because they were basically on government subsidy, so now what do they do?” he asked. “They abort their young children, they put their young men in jail, because they never learned how to pick cotton. And I’ve often wondered, are they better off as slaves, picking cotton and having a family life and doing things, or are they better off under government subsidy? They didn’t get no more freedom. They got less freedom.”
Yeah.
Coates, who in recently has been writing a lot about the historical and contemporary pervasiveness of white supremacy in US society, goes on to show the grueling reality of chattel slavery in the US with examples from “Thavolia Glymph’s bruising monograph Out of the House of Bondage.” Coates then concludes:
When people like Cliven Bundy assert the primacy of the past it is important that we do not recount it selectively. American enslavement is the destruction of the black body for profit. That is the past that Cliven Bundy believes “the Negro” to have been better off in. He is, regrettably, not alone.
(*On a side note, what makes Bundy’s stand so absurd for me is that it’s not a case of age old family land being seized by a cruel tyrant government. It’s a businessman refusing to pay fees for using land that wasn’t his. Theoretically-historically, without ‘the feds,’ Bundy wouldn’t graze his cattle in ‘Murica anyway. He’d be in Mexico, or rather in the land of the Washoe.)
Thoughts?