The 400-Year Holocaust: Dante D. King

 Together. The clock is ticking... Together. The time is NOW... (from Knox Book Beat, The Berkeley Times, "Bitter Truths, Distorted Hopes," 8 September, 2022.)

The 400-Year Holocaust: White America’s Legal, Psychopathic, and Sociopathic Black Genocide - and the Revolt Against Critical Race Theory by Dante D. King
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Dante D. King’s The 400-Year Holocaust: White America’s Legal, Psychopathic, and Sociopathic Black Genocide - and the Revolt Against Critical Race Theory, edited by Marguerite Mallory, is a bitter pill to swallow. (photo - Frederick Douglass (circa 1879) George Kendall Warren. His Narrative of the Life.. An African Slave should be required reading in high school American History classes. wc)

The first 40 pages and subsequent rebukes peppering King’s book left me sometimes confused and hesitant, if not reactively skeptical. Just what was he trying to accomplish here?    

“DEAR BLACK PEOPLE.” Page i. OK. (Am I an eavesdropper or ally? Should I put the book down or give it away?)

“I am not attempting to convince any non-Black person…especially not whites …to agree with me. Such an act would be futile.” (?) “I will not debate this book’s perspectives,” but “a non-Black reader,” “will also likely want to debate long-established facts.” No, actually. I think facts are facts, too. 

When he starts including those facts -- then I get engaged, want to hear more and act. A bitter pill, indeed, but I agree with him.
His understanding, explanation of and specific references to the social, legal and psychological establishment of American Anti-Blackness empowering White Supremacy from Colonial 1619 to the present are spectacular historical game-changers; his scholarship outstanding. The relatedness of land, money, labor and Black=Slave=de-humanized=sexual/physical “property” he explicates step-by-step is diabolical, horrifying, immense. And all perfectly “legal,” enmeshed in thOur "heroic" "pioneer" heritage.

 I believe few Americans know the real details of this “genocidal agenda and its impacts (that) have persisted for more than 400 years." and that "It remains normalized in American culture.” “In the eyes of the law, Whites had total sovereignty over Black bodies.” True. All deeply traditional and institutionalized in (dominant) White Culture. And they/we still do.

I'm distracted from absorbing and moving to change this grotesque national addiction, however, when he keeps throwing in stumbling-block words and phrases like “always,” “never,” and “The unwillingness to see” to label a monolithic white construct. He's describing “The core of White morality,” as a totality “embedded into the fiber of American culture” that can "never" heal or change. If I really believed that, as someone raised white, I never would have finished his book, and probably wouldn't have chosen to review and publicize it in my blogs, Goodreads and book review columns.

He keeps setting up juxtapositions like these four sentences that are both true and false at the same time, freezing us in an immobilized past/present: “We get murdered repeatedly by the same people but are not allowed to be rageful. Most Whites know this, at least intellectually, if not emotionally. They know. They just do not care.” 

Even after witnessing Police Officer Derek Chauvin murdering George Perry Floyd? Really? “Know” that viscerally, but “Not care?” (photo - Birmingham Children's March, May 1963) When I compare what he's saying to the "invisibility" of systemic misogyny in the U. S. over 100 years after we got the vote, I "know what he's getting at," but there's something about the way he's addressing us that doesn't fit his readership, or displays the same kind of blunt force he so profoundly disdains.

He is absolutely accurate that WS forces are digging in ever deeper against “Critical Race Theory,” which is no more than an accurate history of slavery, the Jim Crow South, segregation and the Civil Rights Movement; with Proud Boys to soccer moms denying and attacking that “race” is used as an “intersectional social construct.” 

“Anti-Black laws, institutions, practices and mores of yester-years continue to permeate throughout current American life and culture exclusively to benefit White folks and at the detriment of Black folks.” Uncomfortable, unfortunate, DEVASTATING. And TRUE.

This has erupted from the subterranean realms of systemic denial. Admit thoroughly that it happened, is happening and will continue to happen unless we all make deep and vast changes. Mentally, physically, emotionally, socially and legally. 

Paired with Robin DiAngelo’s White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism, her newer Nice Racism and classics of James Baldwin (photo by Allen Warren), Malcolm X, Frederick Douglass and many others, King’s book and workshops can spur multilateral action. 

Together. The clock is ticking... Together. The time is NOW...

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