The Sadomasochism of Everday (Black) Life

Every time a black person in this country (descendant of enslaved people or not) is called upon and takes up the challenge to illustrate or explain the justice of Affirmative Action or the injustice of the privileges (wages) of whiteness, we see the sadomasochism of everyday black life.

Each time a black person in the US turns to the holocaust (concentration camp, gestapo) as an index of atrocity it is because the holocaust is an atrocity that, at least in this country, can speak its name. Slavery, and its traumatic and material afterlife, in all of its atrocity (slave owner, auction block, slave ship, cowhide, rape, death, starvation, sale, HIV/AIDS, infant mortality, unemployment, heart disease, stroke, etc) is not. Witness the sadomasochism of everyday black life.

Witness the sadomasochism of everyday black life in relation to Hurricane Katrina, in Aaron McGruder's Boondocks on Martin Luther King and you witness the sadomasochism of everday black life.

EDITED