Why Pat Buchanan or Anyone Else Has No Business Telling Black People "Be Grateful"

Posted by Amanda Marcotte, Pandagon at 12:38 PM on March 27, 2008.

Now that the Rev. Wright thing has provided an even better excuse for racists to start saying in public what they usually keep in private, I knew it was just a matter of time before the “blacks should be grateful” argument came out. Being a white person from an especially racist part of the country means you can index some of these nonsense arguments, since you hear white people speak them behind closed doors so often. Not that I’ve actualized any value from being able to predict all the favorite nonsensical tropes that racists trot out, but if I can wrestle one benefit away, it’s this: I can safely say that it’s a lot like the anti-choice nonsense. The assholes making the arguments are irredeemable and should be written off. But it’s still somewhat of a benefit to engage their nonsense and show why it’s nonsense for the benefit of people listening who may be naive and can be rescued before they turn into irredeemable assholes.

I mention this, because I read the most audacious version of “they should be grateful” at Lawyers, Guns and Money, where they link this guy who says:

Far as I am concerned, many Blacks in the US ought to be thankful that no matter how their ancestors got here they are better off in the US than in some shiitehole in Africa, eating scarps of bread, swatting flies and living in mud huts using arrows and clubs to hunt their food.

Now, it’s easy to dismiss this, and in a saner world, such a blatant racist should be dismissed. It’s easy to say, “The fuck?” and “You know, Africa is an extremely diverse and complex continent that can’t be characterized so simply.” But if you look beyond the surface of this ignorant fuckwittery, you realize this is another version of “The poor aren’t poor because they have color TVs.”

Grass huts and other racist tropes aside, it’s undeniable that large parts of Africa are desperately poor and war-torn. What I think is useful to remind people, though, is that the poverty and warfare in Africa is not inevitable, because the continent is rich in natural resources that should, in a fair world, leave many nations in Africa quite wealthy with a high standard of living for everyone. That this is not true for a lot of people has everything to do with, you guessed it, the history of Western colonization of the continent. Hell, that’s not even a distant memory—South African apartheid ended within most our memories, and in a sense, it didn’t really end, because the whites that controlled the economy managed to sneak out with their economic interests intact instead of doing what was right and letting the wealth of South Africa be for South Africans. The last scene in There Will Be Blood—you know, with the milkshake?—really tells you the whole story of the West’s attitude towards Africa, an attitude that has been held back some, but not enough. The U.S.’s willingness to instigate warfare and subvert elections when the people elect leaders who will take measures to reclaim the nation’s wealth for the people (socialists!) doesn’t limit itself to Central and South America, you know. We’ve propped up our share of murderous, graft-happy African dictators in the past, with the paper thin justifications of “oh noes, communism!”

Clearly, it’s nonsense to suggest that black individual Americans are sort of faced with this existential choice—here or Africa?—which makes little real world sense, like suggesting that I would somehow individually exist if various ancestors hadn’t migrated from various European countries to mingle their genetic material in the Western Hemisphere. But I bring up the point that the same colonizing forces that brought slavery to the U.S. brought economic destruction to Africa to make the larger point that the word “gratitude” should get nowhere near this discussion.

Tagged as: race, racism, africa, obama, buchanan, wright

Amanda Marcotte co-writes the popular blog Pandagon.