Let’s airbrush the black people out of the narrative, eh?

It’s easy to spot when the “right” is distorting the past for the purpose of shaping the present and future. It’s easy to denounce their focus on kings and queens and Great Men, and the technologies of innovation that create a “whiggish” narrative of white power (in every sense).

It’s easy to get outraged by the silences and silencing when THEY do it.

But I went (a while back) to an event where not one, but two people glided and elided over the crucial role of the US Black Civil Rights movement in the late 50s and early 60s.  That movement was the initiator movement for the “new left” – the anti-war, feminist, gay rights and ecology movements.  It was some of those people and many of those ideas and tactics that have made the world a less shitty place. People died. People knew that their activism could easily cost them their lives. (I’m talking about the Freedom Summer, especially, something I’ve done a bit of reading on.)  They knew the dangers, the dilemmas. They innovated.  They created.  But since they were black, they don’t seem to get the kudos perhaps?
So when we just leap from “anarchist theory” to “feminism” we are no better that the right. In fact, we are worse, because we pretend to be “friends” while writing people who struggled and faced REAL repression out of the story.
It disgusts me*.

* Probably because I have myself done this in the past and probably will in the future.