LJ Idol - Week [18] - Not the Slavery
Aug. 15th, 2014 01:20 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
penpusherThe history of the United States is filled with glorious stories and heroes, triumphs of the spirit and tremendous tales of overcoming obstacles to reach success. But it also has a terrible, horrible element as well.
We, as a collective society, need to talk about slavery, as it does have a continuing impact on the lives of Black Americans. As any businessman will tell you, to make the largest profit, you have to keep your costs low. Well, nothing is lower than slavery, that’s for sure. And large profits were made. Such current companies as Lehman Brothers, JP Morgan Chase, Barclay’s and New York Life, among many others, are documented as having made money from the slave trade in some form.
The wages that should have gone for the labor that would have lifted Black families up to a higher standard of living, three to four hundred years ago, multiplied over time? The playing field today would have been at least somewhat more level. Slaves endured abuse, punishment (which sometimes took unspeakable forms), and the murders of loved ones.
There was also the deliberate separation of families, and the erasing of records: names and histories, excised, making it extremely difficult to both know what occurred and to know who was responsible. Even the ability for someone to trace their family tree has been obscured in the name of protecting the guilty, and that’s all a part of what slavery’s impact has today.
As Americans, until we sit down at the table and have that discussion, which still hasn’t properly happened, we really aren’t reaching the heart of the issues of the economics and the sociological aspects of elements like slums, poverty, education, hunger, violence and inequality.
But there’s another element, a more insidious, more commonplace and much more current element that was an ancillary part of the slavery process. And it’s this completely separate element that has had the lasting impact on our country, our economy, our way of life.
When you own a slave, you own another human being.
Let’s think about that for a moment. These slave owners had human property. How could they justify that? There really is only one way to justify that: convince everyone that slaves aren’t human.
The African slaves looked so very different from their white counterparts: dark skin, differently shaped noses and mouths, differently textured hair. It’s likely that many people truly believed that those people weren’t really people at all, just based on appearances, and perhaps, based on the reactions they viewed from those “pieces of property” being removed from their homeland, put in heavy chains and forced into servitude. Like breaking a wild horse and training it to pull a plow, it took time to domesticate these “savages.”
Certainly, that helped perpetuate the thought that these slaves were not human, or at least weren’t the same sort of human as they, the genteel whites from areas of Europe were. And the fact was, people WANTED to believe that. You couldn’t, in good conscience, deal with the institution of slavery unless you believed it. Otherwise, what did that make you?
It’s that element, the belief that slaves weren’t quite human, that permitted everything else that followed. And this belief is what continues to remain entrenched and unchanged over all this time. It’s taught by parents to their children, by the media to the masses, by that desire to make it an “Us versus Them” situation. It brings the Nielsen Ratings. It wins Academy Awards. It disenfranchises millions. It’s the one element we simply cannot get beyond. “Those people aren’t people like us.”
In addition, there are two ancillary thoughts that seem to be couched in this element. The first thought: if you enslave people and then they are free, there is the fear that there is going to be some sort of retribution. And really, wasn’t that the point of the Jim Crow Laws, that not only prevented blacks from having equal rights, but disallowed things like interracial marriage, purchasing property in specific areas, or even being able to eat a sandwich at a drugstore lunch counter. Jim Crow made sure that blacks were out of sight for the whites’ piece of mind.
The second thought is that blacks are, in fact, super human. As counter-intuitive as you might think that is, there is a sense of awe about the physicality of these people. Some of the greatest athletes of all time, from Jesse Owens to Serena Williams, from Jim Brown to Jackie Joyner-Kersee, from Wilma Rudolph to Michael Jordan, to every winner of every road marathon in every city in the world, during their careers, the thought is that blacks are all capable of remarkable physical acts. Pair that with the first thought, that fear of “payback.”
That is how, in 2014, you get Michael Brown, Jr. in Ferguson, MO and Eric Garner, in Staten Island, NY, two unarmed black men, murdered by the police. That is how you have a prison system (the modern form of slavery) filled to overflowing with blacks and other minorities. That is how you have a continued undercurrent of animosity between law enforcement and residents in lower income communities.
White supremacist groups have not vanished. In fact, they seem to be more active in this country now than in the past twenty-five years. Could that have something to do with the first black US President? And certain people want to protect the legacy of their families and the fortunes that they have accumulated from that. This, as the population is becoming more brown.
Breaking news: we have biological proof that black people are, in fact, human beings. Now, we must get through the psychological issues that have plagued this country since before it was even founded. But to do that, we have to finally let go of this one little lie. And on that day, when people not only understand that blacks and whites and ALL humans are made of the exact same stuff, but embrace it, can we truly become the United States of America.
//
This piece was created for LJ Idol using the prompt: "disinformation"
We, as a collective society, need to talk about slavery, as it does have a continuing impact on the lives of Black Americans. As any businessman will tell you, to make the largest profit, you have to keep your costs low. Well, nothing is lower than slavery, that’s for sure. And large profits were made. Such current companies as Lehman Brothers, JP Morgan Chase, Barclay’s and New York Life, among many others, are documented as having made money from the slave trade in some form.
The wages that should have gone for the labor that would have lifted Black families up to a higher standard of living, three to four hundred years ago, multiplied over time? The playing field today would have been at least somewhat more level. Slaves endured abuse, punishment (which sometimes took unspeakable forms), and the murders of loved ones.
There was also the deliberate separation of families, and the erasing of records: names and histories, excised, making it extremely difficult to both know what occurred and to know who was responsible. Even the ability for someone to trace their family tree has been obscured in the name of protecting the guilty, and that’s all a part of what slavery’s impact has today.
As Americans, until we sit down at the table and have that discussion, which still hasn’t properly happened, we really aren’t reaching the heart of the issues of the economics and the sociological aspects of elements like slums, poverty, education, hunger, violence and inequality.
But there’s another element, a more insidious, more commonplace and much more current element that was an ancillary part of the slavery process. And it’s this completely separate element that has had the lasting impact on our country, our economy, our way of life.
When you own a slave, you own another human being.
Let’s think about that for a moment. These slave owners had human property. How could they justify that? There really is only one way to justify that: convince everyone that slaves aren’t human.
The African slaves looked so very different from their white counterparts: dark skin, differently shaped noses and mouths, differently textured hair. It’s likely that many people truly believed that those people weren’t really people at all, just based on appearances, and perhaps, based on the reactions they viewed from those “pieces of property” being removed from their homeland, put in heavy chains and forced into servitude. Like breaking a wild horse and training it to pull a plow, it took time to domesticate these “savages.”
Certainly, that helped perpetuate the thought that these slaves were not human, or at least weren’t the same sort of human as they, the genteel whites from areas of Europe were. And the fact was, people WANTED to believe that. You couldn’t, in good conscience, deal with the institution of slavery unless you believed it. Otherwise, what did that make you?
It’s that element, the belief that slaves weren’t quite human, that permitted everything else that followed. And this belief is what continues to remain entrenched and unchanged over all this time. It’s taught by parents to their children, by the media to the masses, by that desire to make it an “Us versus Them” situation. It brings the Nielsen Ratings. It wins Academy Awards. It disenfranchises millions. It’s the one element we simply cannot get beyond. “Those people aren’t people like us.”
In addition, there are two ancillary thoughts that seem to be couched in this element. The first thought: if you enslave people and then they are free, there is the fear that there is going to be some sort of retribution. And really, wasn’t that the point of the Jim Crow Laws, that not only prevented blacks from having equal rights, but disallowed things like interracial marriage, purchasing property in specific areas, or even being able to eat a sandwich at a drugstore lunch counter. Jim Crow made sure that blacks were out of sight for the whites’ piece of mind.
The second thought is that blacks are, in fact, super human. As counter-intuitive as you might think that is, there is a sense of awe about the physicality of these people. Some of the greatest athletes of all time, from Jesse Owens to Serena Williams, from Jim Brown to Jackie Joyner-Kersee, from Wilma Rudolph to Michael Jordan, to every winner of every road marathon in every city in the world, during their careers, the thought is that blacks are all capable of remarkable physical acts. Pair that with the first thought, that fear of “payback.”
That is how, in 2014, you get Michael Brown, Jr. in Ferguson, MO and Eric Garner, in Staten Island, NY, two unarmed black men, murdered by the police. That is how you have a prison system (the modern form of slavery) filled to overflowing with blacks and other minorities. That is how you have a continued undercurrent of animosity between law enforcement and residents in lower income communities.
White supremacist groups have not vanished. In fact, they seem to be more active in this country now than in the past twenty-five years. Could that have something to do with the first black US President? And certain people want to protect the legacy of their families and the fortunes that they have accumulated from that. This, as the population is becoming more brown.
Breaking news: we have biological proof that black people are, in fact, human beings. Now, we must get through the psychological issues that have plagued this country since before it was even founded. But to do that, we have to finally let go of this one little lie. And on that day, when people not only understand that blacks and whites and ALL humans are made of the exact same stuff, but embrace it, can we truly become the United States of America.
//
This piece was created for LJ Idol using the prompt: "disinformation"
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2014-08-21 04:38 pm (UTC)Slavery has been over for hundreds of years, but it's that lie that was told to make it feel okay for all of those masters and their families throughout the generations that perpetuates everything, and dismantling that concept is both long overdue and likely not going to happen soon...
Thanks for reading and your thoughtful comment.