Comment on Generational Trauma by crimsonmvestro

Parent Post: Generational Trauma · In Reply To

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.

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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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