Comment on Generational Trauma by saarnok

Parent Post: Generational Trauma · In Reply To

saarnok · 5/13/2025, 4:28:01 PM · permalink

I provided you with example after example of people who either did or did not write their own story, either early in life or later on, and talked about what effect it has on your psyche.  
  
What's killing you is that you want to not just believe, you want to KNOW that the world is turned against you if you're black in particular, because they'll ONLY see you as black regardless of anything you say or do.  
  
I gave you examples from my own life because those are what's available to me and your actual criticism of those examples are, to summarize: "But that's just a story!"  
  
Yeah, Crim. That's the point.  
  
But, what really upsets you is to find out that more than a hundred years ago there were not only white people pretending to be black for whatever advantages that carried, but managed to carry that LARP quite successfully through their lives.  
  
How exactly did 'whitey' know to oppress the blond haired, blue eyed Walter White for being "black"? It's all about skin color to the white man; right? How did they do it, Crim? Was everybody racially pyschic or something? Did they just do a double take, going: "What? I'll be damned! That's a blond haired, blue eyed, white skinned, nigger boy there!"  
  
Is that the way it was? Or maybe, just maybe, you know, on the outside chance, did he maybe just adopt a story of oppression that for some bizarre reason the people around him went along with?  
  
A superiority complex? My gosh. Where does that come from? "Reddit racism?" Do explain.  
  
What was it that ignited this "rugged individualism" observation? Was it when I said there was a world full of good people who want to help? Was that it? Is that what triggers you? Is that because you so desperately NEED to believe the whole world's against you and your kind that you can't accept anyone outside your group as a fellow human?  
  
Where is this undefined "racism" that you see everywhere, Crim? Was it in pointing out that people will take on this victim narrative under absolutely any criteria, up to and including their family name, even if their family name is actually quite well thought of? Was that it, Crim?  
  
Maybe you'd like a story of a black man who was actually black, actually born into slavery, actually escaped largely by his own efforts and in his own time became one of the best known men in the world?  
  
You probably won't like his story though. He's best known for his "Self made men." speech. We call him Frederick Douglass. Care to guess where a fair bit of my philosophy comes from?  
  
Douglass also had his share of oppression stories, but their point isn't how he was oppressed, but of how he chose not to be oppressed. What's the story of Booker T. Washington? Of how he was held back, held down and turned to a life of crime because of The Man? No. It was of how he made something of himself.  
  
Your story, anyone's story, has four character types. Heroes, villains, victims, and observers. The modern day black narrative group story is that YOU are the victim, the group are the heroes (not you), and the observers are everyone else who are really villains because they were supposed to be helping your group.  
  
Contrast the modern day "black narrative" carried and promoted by essentially our entire culture with the narrative of the people who wrote "Up from slavery" and "Self made men". Isn't the difference pretty stark?  
  
I'll give you this: I DO believe that it's better, "superior" if you will, that the story of your life be YOUR story, not the story of some mythical group. If you're black, do you say things like WE invented 'X', WE did 'Y', etc. etc.? Or do you say "I" did 'X', "I" accomplished 'Y'?  
  
Is the glory of your story what you did, or what someone else did? Did you learn something as an individual, overcome something as an individual, triumph as an individual, or are you just some bit of a "community"?  
  
When you see trash on the sidewalk; what do you do? Add to it? Or do you stop and pick it up? I stop and pick it up. I'm not doing it to impress you. I'm doing it to impress me. It's part of my story.  
  
Right now, I'm watching someone I've known for most of my life who's just begun to rewrite his story and it's fascinating to watch. He's spent twenty years or more being pretty much useless, but in the past year he's started to step up, trying to do something practical, and learn to take the responsibility of trying and failing so that he can eventually try and succeed.  
  
It's better. It's "superior". And if that's not what you're doing then it's what you *should* be doing, whatever that looks like in your particular case.  
  
But, if you think you should be credited with whatever supposed accomplishments were made by someone else did because you've decided you are part of their group, or you think you should be pitied because other people you've decided are part of your group went through hardship then you're just a LARPer.  
  
You went through some stuff. Cool. How did that make you a better person, instead of just a victim? You identify with a group. Okay. How does that improve your life? What am I supposed to emulate from you based on that?  
  
It really doesn't matter if the story you tell yourself is technically true or accurate. What matters is whether or not it's worth believing in.  
  
People who hate being fat tell themselves they can't change their condition. That's not worth believing in. It doesn't help. It doesn't help them and it doesn't help anyone else.  
  
People start to get a handle on their weight issues and then revert to gaining weight because if they get it under control it will demonstrate they always could have done so, which means they always WERE in control and aren't victims of anyone.  
  
Same things apply to everyone else who's excuse for not stepping up and making a better life for themselves is that they're someone's victim.  
  
If that's what you're doing I'm going to let you in on a little "secret". You're the victim of the people who convinced you you're a victim. You're a victim of the people who are writing your story instead of letting you write your own.

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crimsonmvestro · 5/13/2025, 5:01:02 PM · permalink

Ah yes, the timeless tradition of ignoring structural analysis in favor of motivational parables. Thank you for that TEDxRhetoric™ on ‘writing your own story.’ It was equal parts irrelevant and self-congratulatory. I especially liked the part where you unironically referenced Frederick Douglass and Booker T. Washington — two men who explicitly fought against the exact social and institutional barriers you now claim don’t exist. Beautiful irony. Almost literary.

Let’s be clear: anecdote is not analysis. Your personal Rolodex of ‘bootstrapped’ acquaintances does not negate centuries of systemic exclusion, redlining, wealth gaps, carceral disparities, education funding inequalities, medical discrimination, and generational psychological trauma. That you don’t understand the difference between individual agency and structural determinism is not an intellectual flex — it’s a foundational blind spot.

And your entire bit about ‘victimhood’ is textbook neoliberal reductionism. It frames complex, historically situated oppression as little more than a personal mindset issue — like racism is just low self-esteem with better PR. You’ve mistaken performative individualism for a cure-all and are now presenting it as philosophy. It’s not. It’s just a self-soothing narrative that lets you sleep better at night thinking inequality is a personality flaw instead of an institutional outcome.

Also: Douglass and Washington were not arguing against collective struggle. They were advocating for the uplift of a people, not pretending the past didn’t happen so individualists could feel superior on the internet. So if you’re going to invoke their names, maybe actually read their work instead of using them as props in a bootstraps fantasy that makes you feel good about ignoring real history.

Lastly, the obsession with ‘writing your own story’ rings hollow when your entire comment reads like a desperate attempt to rewrite someone else’s lived experience so you can feel morally superior. It’s not clever. It’s not profound. It’s just a long-winded way of saying, ‘I don’t believe racism is real unless it personally inconveniences me.’

But hey — I’m sure Walter White and the sidewalk trash are proud of you.

2 bumps

saarnok · 5/14/2025, 3:40:47 AM · permalink

Gee, thanks, Crim. Thanks for entirely misrepresenting Washington and Douglass, demonstrating either that you have no idea what they wrote, or that you're confident no one else does.  
  
I'm past pretending that you're an honest actor with an earnest agenda.  
  
Here's what Douglass advocated doing for the freed slaves: Nothing. Nothing whatsoever. He wasn't advocating for affirmative action, DEI, or whatever euphemism you can come up with for differential and preferential treatment of select groups, he was advocating to let the freed slaves make or break all on their own. Or, in his own words: "Everybody has asked the question, and they learned to ask it early of the abolitionists, 'What shall we do with the Negro?' I have had but one answer from the beginning. Do nothing with us!"  
  
Here's a quote from Booker T. Washington that speaks directly to the grievance culture that you're advocating for: “There is another class of coloured people who make a business of keeping the troubles, the wrongs, and the hardships of the Negro race before the public. Having learned that they are able to make a living out of their troubles, they have grown into the settled habit of advertising their wrongs — partly because they want sympathy and partly because it pays. Some of these people do not want the Negro to lose his grievances, because they do not want to lose their jobs.”  
  
You either don't care about the truth or are outright lying, or more probably just so piss-bucket stupid you can't even imagine that anyone else knows anything about the subject or actually cares.  
  
The early "self made men" didn't see the world the way you so very desperately want everyone else to see it, and regardless of how you're trying to shift the goalpost from defending "I'm a victim!" 'generational trauma' to some asinine and absurd collective action narrative, I'm dragging you back, kicking a screaming to defend your original point: The promotion of collective guilt by people who had nothing to do with "generational trauma" or whatever BS name you want to give it in order to absolve misbehavior by those who cry about how someone they never knew suffered at the hands of someone I never knew.  
  
That bit about Walter White really shakes you, doesn't it?  
  
He wasn't just "white", he was about as white as any man ever was and he actually oversaw, nurtured, all but created the grievance culture you promote by pretending he was a black man and telling his stories, "anecdotes" of how oppressed he was a hundred years ago. He didn't even do like Dolezal or Shaun King and at least make a show of being black, he was just simply obviously white and calling himself black.  
  
I'd suspect you were a paid agent to invest so much effort in this cause, but, sadly, I'm all too aware that one doesn't have to be purchased in order to be owned.  
  
But, you are a liar. You represent yourself as knowing about a subject that you either do not know about; so you're lying about that. Or: You do know about the subject and are simply lying about the subject directly. Or, again, you're just so piss-bucket stupid that you don't even fucking care. All that matters at the end of the day is promoting the idea that black people shouldn't be held to any standards because they're suffering collectively from generational trauma inflicted by white people in the past, and we should all feel sorry for them and let them rape, murder, rob and destroy as penance for the supposed sins of people who bore some vague resemblance to us.  
  
Well, FUCK you, Crim. You're a worthless piece of shit who wants to make the world a worse place and are trying to exacerbate the problems of the very people you ever so much profess to care about.  
  
Go ahead and call us racists, white supremacists, whatever idiot labels your spongy little brain can dredge up. We don't fucking care.

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