Likely so. I’m still pretty excited about this. I can’t believe it happened so fast. (Meaning, it was a long time coming, but with the Senate vote just yesterday or the day before, I was shocked.)
We got a truly heartfelt note from the Energy Secretary today about this. It warmed the heart cockles. 
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The benevolent-slave-owner trope is basically saying some some slavers didn’t didn’t brutalize people they had enslaved, didn’t rape people they had enslaved, didn’t murder people they had enslaved. To paraphrase Chris Rock, “You aren’t supposed to brutalize, rape and murder people! What do you want, a cookie?”
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I have never murdered, brutalized, raped or enslaved anyone! Where is my cookie? (/s)
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It’s stronger than that though. They will actually go as far as saying things like “They were happier when they were slaves than after they were emancipated” and in their next tweet whine about how terrible it is that people are expected to wear masks if they haven’t been vaccinated.
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In fact, I’m actively not murdering, brutalizing, raping or enslaving anyone right now!!!
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Literally true, sad as that is
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“Song of the South” Syndrome. A white man writing about a fictional Black man who waxes rhapsodic about the “good old days” of the antebellum South.
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Yes, but it’s also about showing how the system of enslavement “wasn’t that bad”… it’s a counter to the narratives of enslaved people telling you the actual truth.
Plus, you KNOW these very same people will harp on and on about how having to pay taxes or some such is basically “slavery” to the federal government, so… if they believe that it’s not so bad, then they should not compare things they don’t like and believe is wrong to it.
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The myth of a white Rome is so embedded in the Western imagination that it has even found advocates outside Europe. It’s well known that the founding fathers of the United States held the ancient republic in high esteem. Thomas Jefferson and John Adams were great admirers of Cicero, whom they saw as a defender of justice, while Alexander Hamilton and Patrick Henry identified Cato the Younger as the incarnation of liberty.
Their idealism, though, can’t be disentangled from the realities of racism and slavery on which the US was actually built. Indeed, it’s hardly surprising, given the rhetorical efforts to disguise such unpalatable realities, that anti-abolitionists would later turn to Rome to justify white supremacism. In 1852, Thomas Roderick Dew, a well-respected professor from Virginia, argued that ancient Rome, where ‘the spirit of liberty glowed with the most intensity’, was able to do so only because ‘slaves were more numerous than the freemen’. In 1916, following emancipation, the lawyer and zoologist Madison Grant tried to exploit the fears of many white Americans by appealing to a story of Black people ‘breeding out their masters … [as] in the declining days of the Roman Republic’.
Most of us would, I hope, oppose this kind of racist discourse on moral grounds. Yet it’s important to recognise that, while there are big differences between Italian fascism, British colonialism and pro-slavery groups in the US, all have contributed to a fantasy idea about Rome’s whiteness that’s still a feature of Western civilisation. Of course, a diverse cast of high-profile figures in these countries, from Antonio Gramsci to Franklin D Roosevelt, have, in different ways, worked to rebuff this abuse of history. Here, however, I want to focus on two lesser-known arguments that are particularly relevant for our own postcolonial times: firstly, that the Romans didn’t have a sense of race in the modern sense of that word. Secondly, and just as importantly, that their empire, unlike modern equivalents, was one in which people we’d now consider nonwhite played a leading role.
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When you think of white rage, just picture Tucker Carlson.
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I have literally heard that from white South Africans.
Unbelievable.
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Ugh, that reminds me, a while back I was at a dinner party and this white South African went off on an unprovoked rant about how he was “more Black” than Oprah Winfrey bc he was from Africa. “She’s not Black! She’s not from Africa! I’m blacker than she is!”
At first I tried explaining to him that Black and African are separate things, then I left his company and had a much better time bc of it. What an asshole.
IMHO, South Africa is one of the most naturally beautiful countries I’ve been fortunate enough to visit, but I can’t imagine moving there precisely bc of this ingrained BS. Might as well stay here and try to fix what I can. 
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Neither is the White South African. Not originally.
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Totally, but also, by that definition, aren’t we all technically from Africa? Guy was an asshat.
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Nah. That’s like a bog standard white American claiming to be Native American just because they’re a Native of America.
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Oh, I just meant in terms of, when does the time start where we’re “originally” from anywhere? We (and I am not an expert in this field, so all corrections welcomed) as a species all originated in Africa, I think?
But I’m not trying to derail. I totally get the bigger point and agree. I’m, whatever, 4th generation “American,” but that doesn’t make me a “Native American,” I’m descended from immigrants and colonizers.
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That’s a good point. I would say before the Industrial Revolution just to have a starting point. That sounds kinda arbitrary and yet it isn’t. Through much of history most people just stayed in their villages for generations after generations. When people say they’re Irish American, German American, Italian American, whatever*, this is what they’re referring to.
*and yet it also annoys me a little when they do that. If you don’t speak the language or observe the cultural practices, you don’t deserve the label IMO. But at least this isn’t an outright lie.
Regardless, I doubt the argument will satisfy this kind of asshat.
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