by Michael A. Hoffman
II
During
the protest against the death penalty for Washington Goode, a black man who was
sentenced to die for the murder of a fellow black, one media outlet suggested
that if he had been a "white man who had money" he would not be
facing capital punishment.
Opponents
of the death penalty argued that to execute this black man was "cruel
prejudice." Goode was declared a hero and a martyr and a huge protest was
organized on his behalf, in which the main speaker was one of
Recent
headlines of our "enlightened times"? Hardly. Washington Goode
fractured black sailor Thomas Harding's skull in a dispute over the favors of
one Mary Ann Williams on a sultry summer evening in
The
newspaper which bemoaned his fate was the Boston Herald and the
clergyman who argued for his reprieve was William Henry Channing. The Chief
Justice of the Massachusetts Supreme Court, Lemuel Shaw, heard Goode's case and
nearly wept at his sentencing.
Today,
everywhere from the Justice Department to the Ivy League Universities, the
bureaucrats and professors justify discrimination against whites on the basis
of the notion of "white skin privilege." According to this concept,
legal palliation for
But
Washington Goode enjoyed a privileged position in antebellum New England
because he was black, and this was not an anomaly in either
The
British Parliament outlawed the enslavement of negroes in 1808, but bills
proposing an end to the enslavement of white children who were forced to clean
chimneys by climbing inside flues, were defeated by Parliament in 1804, 1818
and twice in 1819.
Lord
Sydney Smith sneered at appeals for emancipating these white children, since
they were the "property" of their masters: "Such a measure we
are convinced, could not be carried into execution without great injury to
property." But property rights were ruled to be of secondary consideration
when the cause of emancipating negroes was advanced.
In
1830 Richard Oastler protested the conditions in the
Oastler
was publicly thanked by English laborers in York "...for his manly letters
to expose the conduct of those pretended philanthropists and canting hypocrites
who travel to the West Indies in search of slavery, forgetting there is a more
abominable and degrading system of slavery at home."
Historically,
a substantial portion of the white elite viewed blacks affectionately as a kind
of docile pet, very different from the obstreperous masses of white working
poor. Samuel Johnson, the 18th century
Harriet
Beecher Stowe, the great advocate of American blacks and author of the literary
fantasy, Uncle Tom's Cabin, approved of the starvation of
Frederic
Law Olmsted, the landscape architect who designed
The
former
Black
slaves viewed themselves as better than poor whites because their masters did
too. According to Eugene Genovese, "Rosa Starke who had been owned by a
big planter in
The
negro slave Ella Kelly stated, "You know boss, dese days dere is three
kind of people. Lowest down is a layer of white folks, then in de middle is a
layer of colored folks, and on top is de cream, a layer of good white
folks..."
The
hierarchy described by Kelly remains in effect to this day. In the 1930s, when
the Dust Bowl forced penniless
God
help any penurious white man who is roughed up or framed by the police
nowadays. There will be no NAACP or legion of lawyers to defend him and no
Such
whites are doubly discriminated against; once for being poor and again for
being the descendants of whites; due to the mythomania about "white skin
privilege," as if whites of yesteryear dwelled in a classless utopia of
racial solidarity.
Real
history tells another story, an account of black skin privilege which reveals
the monstrous injustice of the Federal government's misnamed "Civil
Rights" policies.
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