My light complexion is a direct result of an ancestral rape. It is a result of a German immigrant who came to these shores in the first decade of the 19th century to escape political oppression in his native land. Yet what did this German/Prussian ancestor of mine do once he came here? After acquiring the freedom he sought for himself did he seek to make all of his new countrymen free as well? No, he did not. What he did do, as soon as he was financially able, was purchase slaves; slaves who's ancestors had been brought to these shores more than a century earlier from Africa in chains.
Now what did he do after acquiring these slaves? Well, he went into the slave quarters one day and raped one of them and she in turn bore him a son. Hence my light complexion. So I am the product of racism, sexism, and rape. I exist and appear as I do because one of my ancestors thought of people of color and women as his property and so what the Republican Party is doing in regards to denying people of color their basic right to vote & of their humanity; what it is doing in seeking to deny women full control of their own bodies; what it is doing through its abuse of and cruelty towards the weak and the least fortunate, strikes me to my very core because I am the product of all of these things and I refuse to refrain from raging against these evils for fear of possibly offending others, of sounding unreasonable, or even sounding hateful because I know that if I do not speak out against these injustices in the manner that I do, that I am betraying the spirit of my raped ancestor who was born, lived, and died a slave; who was brutalized & viciously violated for no other reason than the color of her skin, her gender, and because someone else unjustly regarded her as his property to do with as he wished.
You don't ever, ever, allow anyone to tell you to tone it down, to let bygones be bygones, in the face of something like this. Thus whenever I see the hateful mindset behind these atrocities germinating in the twisted perverted minds of those in this time, I go to war. I owe it to myself, to my ancestors, to who and what I am to go to war. I call it out for the evil that it is & I pull no punches and I make no apologies for any of this whatsoever.
When I think of today's Republican Party and what it is doing to people of color and women, I see my German ancestor. In today's Republican Party I see that long dead immigrant from across the sea who came to this country in search of freedom for himself; only to own his fellow Americans as slaves and to rape one of them to assert his dominance and satisfy his primal urges not for any other reason other than that he could; because he felt he had a right to do what he did. Thus, when I go after the Republican Party I am in effect spitting at his spirit and saying to him and today's Republican Party which which shares the same racist, sexist, domineering possessiveness he felt towards his human property "Hell no, I won't forget and triple hell no your descendants ain't taking us back!"
No comments:
Post a Comment