Lynched

 

Last week I went to an event celebrating Obama’s first one hundred days. The keynote speaker was a black professor from Columbia Basin College which is a community college in Richland, Washington. The room was crowded and the sound system was poor so I missed much of what he was saying, but I didn’t really go to the event to listen to someone else speak anyway. It wasn’t until I heard him start trashing women that I decided I had better figure out what he was doing at a Democratic event.

I didn’t learn the context of his speech until afterwards, but here it is up front for you. There is a conspiracy theory concerning a speech allegedly given in 1712 that tells slave owners how to subjugate Africans to make them more docile slaves. This speech, as well as the existence of Willie Lynch, the alledged slave owner, has been debunked even as far as the person who first posted it on the internet admitting that she didn’t think it was true. She just wanted to spark debate. If you want to trace the evolution of a conspiracy theory, this one is easily accessible. Because of the modern language used in this eighteenth century speech, there is little doubt that it was written in the twentieth century. (Among other evidence.)

But the speaker at the Obama event believed it. He even went as far as to say that ‘we’ are only three hundred years into a thousand year plan. He also chose to speak about a part of the mythological speech that said that (black) women should be made the head of their households so that their children would be more subservient. He claimed the speech called for the castration of the most dominant (black) male to make the other males fearful. He made a lot of angry claims about black people and ‘them’ who I must assume in this context, are contempory white people en masse.

Although this conspiracy theory isn’t any more far-fetched than those more familiar like ‘the government is trying to brainwash my children’ paranoia, it troubles me that demeaning women is an important part of it. I have never forgotten the disgusting anti-women diatribes in the sermons of the church that Obama attended for twenty years. Maybe that's why Oprah left.

I knew that women-hating was an important part of white church sermons, but I never dreamed that blacks trash black women from the pulpit as well.

That denigrating women was part of an Obama celebration was most troubling.

Nancy Sherer

 

 


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