Cur Non

But the practice does reflect something that’s bugged me for a while about BuzzFeed and the Reddit-Tumblr-4chan matrix from which its list-compiling side springs: The explosion of people happily sharing images and text completely void of context. There’s a stupid disinterest in the story behind whatever shiny internet thing has gone viral now, as if knowing more would ruin the mysterious viralness of the thing. BuzzFeed has, either knowingly or accidentally, capitalized on this by obscuring the origins of its lists—both facts taken from old-school journalistic sources, and ideas found among newfangled meme-creators.

There is no history of racism in this country that chalked ‘up only to race.’ You can’t really talk about stereotypes of, say, black laziness unless you understand stereotypes of the poor stretching back to 17th century Great Britain. You can’t really talk about the Southern slave society without grappling with the relationship between the demand for arable land and the demand for labor. You can’t understand the racial pogroms at the turn of the century without understanding the increasing mobility of American women.

And this works the other way too. If you’re trying to understand the nature of American patriotism without thinking about anti-black racism, you will miss a lot. If you’re trying to understand the New Deal, without thinking about Southern segregationist senators you will miss a lot. If you’re trying to understand the very nature of American democracy itself, and not grappling with black you, you will miss almost all of it.