A Group of Anti-Woke People in the Middle

This is a response to this article:

The Indoctrination of White People | by William Spivey | AfroSapiophile | Aug, 2023 | Medium

I want to preface this by saying that there are a lot of writings I admire of yours, and I appreciate when you do add something to the conversation but your exploration of Georgia (where I worked for the Democratic side for 8 weeks).

I can appreciate the gray area you might be going for but I don’t think it comes across that way. It sounds like you’re simply trying to cancel long-dead figures to get us riled up about the present. The question isn’t that people had slaves back in the day. We already knew that. As I’ll argue below, there’s somewhat of an overabundance of writing, film, documentaries, and television shows designed to keep us emotionally moved about past sins.

Your first paragraph tries to nail George Washington for having teeth made from slaves, but that’s equivalent to trying to cancel anyone in this day for not using free-trade coffee or buying clothes from Nike. Mentioning that he went after a slave is somewhat burying the lede from his larger views on slavery and the fact that he freed his slaves upon his death.

But the larger point: Isn’t over-focusing on the past and under-focusing on the present, not particularly being honest with us either? Even if it’s not untruthful, it comes off as a tiresome fear-mongering that opens the door for someone like Tim Scott to…