One of my favourite Twitter accounts is the frustrating and important @AfAmHistFail, run by an anonymous (for obvious reasons) docent who gives slavery presentations at a historical plantation. She shares the ups and downs of her job, the struggles to keep composure in the face of racist questions and monologues, and the difficulty of puncturing the romanticization of the antebellum South. She was kind enough to answer some questions for us.
To what degree are you able to push back when guests have offensive observations or questions?
I can push back against offensive statements and questions quite a bit, as long as I keep things professional. My job allows me a lot of leeway in correcting misinformation and asking probing questions to get at people’s assumptions and motivations. Our supervisors are good at recognizing whether write-in visitor complaints about tour guides are coming from guests with a legitimate issue versus guests who feel we maligned their heroes by mentioning slavery. If someone is being outright aggressive we can eject them from the premises, but that’s rare.
The guy on a historic home tour yesterday who, each time the tour topic went from white ppl to slaves, interrupted w/a non-slavery question.
— Af Am History Fail (@afamhistfail) February 4, 2015
Can you tell at the beginning of a tour who’s going to give you problems? Or do ignorant comments and questions come from a variety of different types of people?
Oh, everyone. A lot of the worst stuff comes from older people, but a surprising amount comes from guests in their forties and fifties. Sometimes I’ll hear something offensive from a kid, and I’ll know their thirtysomething parents taught it to them. Homeschooling families tend to be wildly liberal or wildly conservative and you never know which you’re going to get. There’s no real gender distinction in offensiveness, as far as I can tell.
I was talking about abuses by slaveowners. Tourist, smugly: “Now surely not ALL masters were like that.” #NotAllMasters — Af Am History Fail (@afamhistfail) July 14, 2014
Broadly speaking, a Duck Dynasty shirt is not a good sign. Perfectly coiffed and colored hair in women over fifty. For some reason the more carefully-prepared the hairstyle, the more likely the person is to be a slavery apologist.
At any rate, the more interesting question isn’t whether a given slaveowner was good/bad /whatever. It’s, “What was it like to be a slave?” — Af Am History Fail (@afamhistfail) June 5, 2015
Do you see a lot of burnout in your role? Either in yourself or your colleagues? How do you combat it?
Oh yes. Every day contains good, pleasant, and hopeful moments with guests, but when you talk about slavery for a living there’s no way to stop thinking about the fact that lots of people had terrible things happen to them for absolutely no good reason, and the law protected the perpetrators. Your brain is soaking in horrors, and it can warp your sense of reality–to say nothing of the anger and despair you feel when someone blindly defends the indefensible, or hears the truth and rejects it. But you have to keep telling the story. Sometimes I feel the weight of twelve million souls pressing down on me, doubly heavy because I know their story isn’t always talked about. The slavery specialists have always had a very high rate of turnover within the museum.
Today at a museum training session the trainer told our group that a certain ex-slave was “like family” to the people she served. — Af Am History Fail (@afamhistfail) March 23, 2015
Some of my colleagues cope by focusing on the strength of slaves’ resistance. Personally I have to go home and just not be disturbed by anything else at all. I barely look at news sites; I don’t watch scary movies. Being in nature helps my nerves unravel and relax. Getting exercise is huge. So are eating vegetables and sleeping enough. And I have hobbies and a faith life, and when I neglect either of them I really start to feel it. The main challenge is to stop thinking about work once it’s over. People who make good art: you help me so much. Music, comedy and television help the brain rest. They remind me that the world is wider than its past. They are much more than candy. They are necessary.
He’d just finished an intense talk on the ways the enslaved community used music for emotional and mental survival. — Af Am History Fail (@afamhistfail) May 15, 2015
When kids are in the group, how does that affect the conversation, if at all?
I adjust my vocabulary to make sure kids can follow. But I don’t dumb down the content. By and large kids respect honesty and hate unfairness. They instinctively identify with the underdog. They don’t make excuses for cruelty. Teenagers especially are interested in society and social issues, and hearing about prejudice affects them. A lot of it has to do with reading the kids, their interests and comprehension level, just like with any audience. If the kid is under seven I’ll usually just talk to the adults, with occasional breaks to tell the kid stuff like, “This is what a bed looked like back then! Observe: it is different from now.” They get into it. Most kids eight and up at least know that slavery meant you had to work without pay, and that trying to leave and start a new life could mean getting maimed or killed by your master or the slave catchers. If a kid knows that being a slave meant being considered human property, I know their teacher or parent has done a particularly good job.
She kept getting that trying-to-leave-a-party face whenever the tour topic veered from the historic house itself to the enslaved ppl there. — Af Am History Fail (@afamhistfail) March 1, 2015
My coworker was like, “Well, my job title is slavery specialist.” — Af Am History Fail (@afamhistfail) April 1, 2015
If you were running the show, can you give us a sense of how you would improve and expand the discussion of slavery at these sites?
I could (and may!) write a dissertation on this topic! One of the best things a historic site can do is demonstrate the humanity of African-Americans. When cops are out shooting people because they find black people scarier or less sympathetic than white ones, anything museums can do to remind us that historic African-Americans were complex human beings with emotions and initiative is great. Unfortunately, good records weren’t always kept about enslaved people, and those we do have are rarely in the voice of an actual African-American person. For that reason, and due to the too-frequent failures of museums past to place value on black history, a lot of historic sites’ discussion of slavery has been of slaves en masse. It lacks the careful personalization of white history, which often includes endless recitations of names, homes, and family relationships.
See, the primary problem with slavery is not that your house might be bad. It is that you are a slave.
— Af Am History Fail (@afamhistfail) January 26, 2015
So if a site can find even one concrete personal detail about even one black family on their site that they can share with visitors, then that’s awesome. Talk about laws, mores, and practices that slaves made use of or struggled against. Encourage guests to mentally put themselves in the place of an enslaved person and consider the choices available to them. Role-playing can really help develop guests’ compassion for historic African-Americans. And that’s the greatest thing education can do: expand our compassion.
Other random thoughts… If your team is all-white, try your best to get input and feedback from black colleagues and community members. Host a dinner or a cookout and offer free site admission and food in exchange for filling out a visitor feedback card or participating in a discussion. Offer participants something concrete in exchange for their critiques and input.
Schools are another social justice battleground. You might visit a museum once or twice a year (and hopefully much more!!), but you go to school every single day for years. Schools can ingrain perspectives into people. So getting schoolteachers on board with integrated history would be awesome. If historic sites are able to do programs and seminars with local teachers to increase their fluency in racial history (a.k.a., American history), then that’s wonderful.*
It’s great when sites are able to present history as one big totality, not as white history/black history. Segregating them out overly much can make black history exhibits look like a bone thrown to political correctness rather than a crucial key to the American past. I remember visiting a museum with a black history section that contained great information, but which was shoved way in the back of the building, literally off in a corner. It was easily missed behind a much much larger display on military history. The black history part came across as an afterthought. So I’d encourage sites to think of black history less as one more block in their interpretive edifice, but more as a bright red thread in an interwoven past.
I told the group about the violence slaves saw. “That was NORMAL,” she interrupted. “No one thought anything of it.” Maybe whites didn’t.
— Af Am History Fail (@afamhistfail) January 3, 2015
Right when I finished talked about slaves she put her phone away and looked up again. The second the sentence ended.
— Af Am History Fail (@afamhistfail) January 3, 2015
Of course, a lot of what I’m suggesting here is already underway at many sites. Often, sites’ biggest barrier to telling inclusive history is not the actual workers or programming but a crusty board of directors or trustees. This is why I don’t like the idea of letting old people off the hook for racist beliefs. Old people still wield a lot of financial power in organizational decision-making, and they vote. Citizens, talk to your old people. Having them on the side of inclusivity could do a lot of good.
*But, you may ask, don’t most decent schools already have a fairly inclusive curriculum? Well, maybe they do and maybe they don’t. At any rate, a good curriculum isn’t enough. You have to get all the teachers to buy in. Otherwise they will go off-book, like a high school teacher of mine who told our class that though people talk about how slavery was awful, if you think about it slaves did get food and clothes out of the deal. The year was 2003, btw. Not 1955.
*
“You didn’t build that.”
Tags: history, interviews, race, racism, the internet
My uncle lives in Charleston. On a recent visit to a historic home, he was asked by the guide if he would like the tour “with or without slavery.”
Is there anything more illustrative of white privilege? “Would you like your history honest or slightly more comfortable? Here, let me alter that for you!”
I mean, I would prefer my history to be both honest and without slavery, but unfortunately, that’s not really an option. Damnit, European slave trade.
Too bad the former inhabitants didn’t get to choose.
I’m from Charleston and went on a historic home tour with a guide who called the slaves employees! I have a complicated relationship with my hometown that many people ask me why I don’t live there because it’s so beautiful, and my answer is uncomfortable.
I’m sorry, I’m am laughing out loud in my house having just read this. The last time I laughed like this was when a beggar I was chatting with on the street told me about the cops stealing his crutch after they arrested him while his foot was broken. My point is, it’s a special laugh I save for things that are comically unfair. Oh. My. God.
This is SO great. I’m about to start a grad program in public history, and when I explain to people what that is/why I’m doing it, I say basically these things. Most people’s contact with the study of American history happens in grade school and high school (if they finish) and maybe some in college, if they go, and then after that it might be haphazard visits to museums or historical sites, a book or two, and the (often really harmful!) things they soak in from media/public discourse/their neighbors, friends, and environment. Any intervention that you can make when it comes to American history, and especially the history of slavery, has the chance to have an impact on the way people vote and how they act and treat each other in our racist society.
Keep fighting the good fight.
This is a wonderful interview! I would read that dissertation in a heartbeat.
I would love to hear more from you, anonymous Af Am History Fail person!
thirded!
FOURTHED
Fifthed, and now I’m following you on Twitter, too!
Yep, me too!
I visited Monticello with my parents last summer. The first stop on our journey up to the house was the slave graveyard, which was only recognizable as such because it had been (recently) fenced off and had signs put up giving the names of the people they thought were probably buried there. Otherwise, it was just a clearing with some boulders in it. We headed up the hill, and there was the massive Jefferson family graveyard, with its wrought-iron fence, neatly tended graves, and elaborate headstones. I wish that had been part of the official tour.
Reminds me of Lucille Clifton’s poem,
at the cemetery, walnut grove plantation, south carolina, 1989
among the rocks
at walnut grove
some of these honored dead
were dark
some of these dark
were slaves
some of these slaves
were women
some of them did this honored work.
tell me your names
I was very pleasantly surprised when our tour guide at the White House of the Confederacy in Richmond was African-American. This was the main tour, not a slavery-themed one, and he struck me as extremely meticulous about talking about enslaved people forced to work in the house (naming some by name) while not actually discussing the politics of the Confederacy, which I assume had been put on a list of no-nos from the management.
That gentleman is a treasure and a decendant of an enslaved person who worked in that house.
I have a question for the collective wisdom of the Toast hive mind. I have a friend who keeps referring to people who are mixed race as “mulatto” and I feel like that’s not an acceptable word to call people? Like I never hear people refer to themselves with that word. I just have this vague sense that it’s not the most polite thing to call people and that maybe this friend should stop saying that, but so far my arguments of “I have a vague feeling that’s not a nice word and I never hear people refer to themselves with it” have not worked. What should I say to this person??
Oh no, that’s terrible. Mostly because mixed race people themselves say mixed race or biracial, and it is the simplest form of respect to call people what they call themselves–and also because terms like mulatto, quadroon, octoroon, etc, were ways of measuring how white a slave was, presumably because a whiter-looking person was more fit for indoor service (and perhaps, in the case of a young ‘bright mulatto’ woman, more desirable for rape).
History. It still matters. Words have meanings and they also have baggage.
That makes sense, thanks!
Honestly that word rubs me the wrong way too, probably because of how its tied so closely with slavery terminology. Its pretty archaic to use for everyday speech, I have no idea why someone would actually choose to use that word so frequently. I think the only time I’ve really heard someone say it was in those “Ranch It Up” sketches from the Eric Andre show, and even then the jokes only landed because he’s mixed and the people he was talking to most likely weren’t (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nseBliU80LM if anyone’s interested)
Not only is the word tied closely to slavery, but it originated as a diminutive derived from ‘mule’.
Nope! Nooooo. No way. Abort word usage. Intervene. For all reasons listed before me and general #Racism
– signed, resident mulatress
Tell them to stop using it. It’s not what they call themselves, and nobody except people who still think derivations of the n-word are acceptable would even think of using it. They don’t want to lump themselves in with those kinds of people, yeah?
Once, when I was having a conversation related to race with a white friend who was defending a perspective I found suspect, I said, in a calm, inquisitive tone, “Imagine that [our friend of the racial background in question] was here. What do you think s/he would think of that?” I found that resolved the matter quickly. My friend is an all-around thoughtful person who was suffering a small blip, though, so ymmv.
It sounds like your friend maybe isn’t American? I think it’s a word that’s still used in other countries, so someone who isn’t from the US, or someone whose first language isn’t English, might not understand how offensive it is. If that’s the case, a very gentle “hey, fyi, that word is considered very offensive in the US” would be appropriate, and they would likely be properly mortified.
Oh god, I have a white colleague from Zimbabwe who had to learn that “colored” isn’t OK here. She learned it pretty quickly, though!
I had to very gently explain this to my (white) South African uncle. He was *mortified* when he learned though!
Point of interest, I’m living in the UK and hear people use “half-caste” to describe themselves and others, which I had thought was about as acceptable as the list above. Is it different here or just the people I’ve encountered?
I just came across that term for the first time in a book called, “The Making of Mr. Hai’s Daughter” and she said it was something that at least one person (in her story) turned away from in the late 90s or 2000s, but had identified as before then. So, that’s just one example, but she seemed to suggest that it had fallen out of favor more broadly. I am very very far from being an expert on what’s good usage in the UK, which is why I am reading like a fiend right now. So one tiny bit of data, but I would love to hear more from others.
It’s not acceptable… I mean, when I was at secondary school in the late 90s this poem came up a lot: http://www.intermix.org.uk/poetry/poetry_01_agard…
I’m white and English, and as far as I understand it, ‘half-caste’ is a pretty offensive term for a mixed-race person these days, although some people are trying to reclaim it/use it ironically about themselves, cf: this poem by John Agard: http://www.intermix.org.uk/poetry/poetry_01_agard…
I grew up in England in the 1970s and was taught to use the term “half-caste” by my parents, who were very self-consciously anti-racist white people. They were concerned to teach us the most acceptable vocabulary they could. So either it was considered a polite term in the 70s or else my parents just weren’t that clued up (which is a possibility).
These days I’ve noticed that my parents use the term “dual heritage” instead. I’m not sure I’ve heard anyone say “half-caste” in the UK for 20 years or more – which isn’t to say it doesn’t happen.
This is an interesting point for me, because now I have my own children and they are mixed race… I would use the term “mixed race”. I don’t know what term my children will want to use. As with so much other stuff, I worry that my experience is going to be inadequate for understanding their experience.
I can totally imagine that a term that was acceptable or even progressive in the 1970s has been moved past. Sometimes because these terms are the compromise position, because there are worse names out there, and sometimes because these words become taunts and then the people who grew up having them hurled at them, rather than claiming them themselves, move on. I could see a day when we are past mixed. I find it nice and simple because then I don’t have to explain the rest, but maybe my children will be interested in having a different conversation or maybe they will have a different word that covers some other part of their identity. I completely agree that our experience is going to be inadequate, but I hope/plan to be receptive to hearing from the next generation what they want to say. It will be interesting, I think.
Totally.
By the way, my parents also taught me to say “coloured” instead of “black”, on the grounds that it was more polite… I’m guessing that either they were a bit clueless or the 1970s was just a different world!
Feeling old now…
I am also in the UK, and would never use half-caste – to me, it’s completely unacceptable. I used to volunteer at Oxfam, and a woman there who was maybe in her mid-forties, perhaps a bit older (her son was a year older than me, and I was in my early twenties) talked about how her son was “half-caste” (his father was Middle Eastern, I think, and she was white). I was really shocked by this, but felt that I as a white person couldn’t really tell her how to refer to her son. (Not that having mixed-race children makes one magically educated on racial issues, though.) It was very awkward.
Are there really people who still say that in the 21st century? It’s very archaic and Victorian. I’ve lived in both the US and UK, and I don’t think I’ve ever encountered it outside of (say) a Wilkie Collins novel.
I lived in Ghana for several years and the people I knew who were mixed Ghanaian and American or European refered to themselves as half-caste, so I think it’s pretty situational.
Yes, my wife is Cuban and the term is used there as well (and I imagine other Spanish speaking countries?).
I just was listening yesterday to a Fresh Air interview with a very interesting author named Mat Johnson, a biracial gentleman who said he actually looks very white (to most people), and he refers to himself as mulatto. It surprised me to hear him say that for the reasons mentioned here, but, just like trans people who have pronoun preferences, he gets to choose.
This is excellent work being done, and with a great sense of perspective. Keep on keeping on!
Loved this! As I grow older I find myself becoming more and more attuned to these issues when I’m getting my history on, and the insider’s point of view is excellent. I’d love to take your tour!!
This was great! Thank you for doing a very important job and sharing it with us!
#NotAllMasters…the mind boggles.
!!!!!!!
Yeah, right?
arghcrazinesssmashwhitesupremacyalready
Oh, man. This is great. If you have a suggested reading list, I would love to see it!
For those who are interested, one of the best (or at least biggest) sources for narratives by formerly enslaved people is the WPA Slave Narratives, available here: http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/snhtml/snhome.html
Just seconding the request for a reading list, or a list of sites you’ve been to that have impressed you.
And Chickpeas, thanks for the link!
Thanks for that link!
I think this is especially important in light of the killer in Charleston’s “manifesto” mentioning that he’d read slave narratives and it “didn’t seem too bad” (paraphrased) which made me wonder where in the heck was he reading those? And how many of them were actually written by Margaret Mitchell?
Actually a certain number of the WPA narratives mention nostalgia for slavery or fondness for a master. I’m having some trouble finding good links on it, but this is a major historiographical question as to why those sentiments are in there. Some have suggested that they were trying to find a way to communicate with white interviewers, and things like that.
I’m 100% sure white supremacists can effectively twist those narratives to their own ends through selective reading and ignoring the debate :/
And I’m sure that there were some enslaved persons who felt fondness for their master(s), either out of Stockholm Syndrome, or out of an innate human need to connect (I’m thinking of black women who took care of their white owners’ children; I’m sure some of those women genuinely loved the children under their care). But then that moment of emotional conflict gets twisted to justify all of the abuse, all of the evil.
Yeah, contemporary historians frequently side-eye the WPA narratives, and those who use them usually have a lengthy footnote, or paragraph in the introduction, justifying why. Whites who conducted WPA interviews weren’t universally progressive in their politics, and it’s easy as an interviewer to ask questions that suggest to your interviewee what their answers should be. (When doing oral histories I’ve found that most people are wanting to be as helpful to me as possible, and coloring their comments accordingly — which is great for my anxiety, but less great for the quality of the work.) Lots of the interviewers rendered these narratives in minstrel-like dialect.
And in terms of slave narratives like Frederick Douglass’s or Solomon Northup’s, part of what literary scholars try to do with them (among other things) is figure out — for example — to what extent they may have been heavily edited by people like William Lloyd Garrison and other whites belonging to abolitionist societies. As a genre — and I want to make really clear I’m not questioning anything that happened to these formerly enslaved people, but talking about the literary genre — slave narratives published by these societies are polemics, and not documentary footage. It’s possible, if one’s already primed by white supremacist thinking, to read these and think #NotAllMasters. Even Frederick Douglass mentions one that wasn’t that bad in comparison to the holy gd terrors that came later.
I read some of those narratives in college, and the volume I had contained a super-useful introduction that said essentially, “there is a lot of fond nostalgia in this book, and we can’t ignore it or hope to interpret exactly what it means, but consider that these narratives were collected by older people, who almost always remember being young fondly, and they were conducted during the depression, when no one got enough to eat and African Americans suffered the worst. So maybe some of that nostalgia is about having your whole life ahead of you, and maybe some of it is remembering a time when your hunger and cold were basically someone else’s problem.” Seemed legit to me, I’m sure that real historians (I was a slumming English major) would have a lot to say about this interpretation, but I felt like it prepared me for all the entries that were like, “oh yeah! Our master let us have our own melon patch! We grew these huge melons and I can still taste them, and I had a new pair of shoes every year or so and it was actually pretty great when the overseer would pass out the shoes!” A white supremacist would make a different thing out of that, but not wanting to accept racist views and confronting a story like that… leaves you wondering where you are. And saying, “oh, it’s mass Stockholm syndrome” seems unfair after a while. But being reminded that every story can be told different ways and for different reasons was helpfulike to me. I bet it _was_ awesome getting new shoes, and that wouldn’t make being someone else’s property awesome at all.
This comment is all over the place, but it makes me think that the WPA narratives need to be re-examined, and it makes me think of all the archeological data lost by the practices of the people who first unearthed Pompeii, as in, you had this awesome, once in a lifetime chance, and you blew it, you lacked tools and equipment now considered standard, and there is so much we don’t know because of your blunt instruments. We can no longer talk to people who remember being slaves, and we have all these testimonies from people who wanted to “spare that nice ethnographer the worst of it, poor thing.”
Also important to remember that the interviews were conducted in the 30s during the Depression which wasn’t exactly Fun Times either.
I have read a collection of these, also with a helpful introduction about context: there is some nostalgia in these narratives, wherein the interviewees were young children at the time they were slaves, and at the time of the interview were black and elderly during the Great Depression. So looking back it could be, well there was food and some health care and that white lady seemed nice to us…
Context.
I just posted this comment, exactly, only with more and clumsier words. We much have read the same book, and it must have been a good one to leave such in impression. I feel foolish for not reading all the comments now…
I like your comment too! There are many angles to explore about this, different ways of coming to it. This is a great conversation.
Thank you for what you do. I used to teach in a field (classical antiquity) where slavery was all-pervasive, and even more removed from my American students than our own legacy. It could be hard work bringing the ugly bits of history to their attention when they really, really wanted to sanitize it.
…but, you know, it wasn’t hard work compared to WHAT THE ACTUAL SLAVES DID. Let’s always remember and keep history ugly.
Now I want a t-shirt or a mug or something that says ‘Keep history ugly’ on it.
Some day I will make a killing selling snarky t-shirts on Redbubble to Toasties…
I completely understand why you are anonymous, obviously, but I would really like to visit your work and take a tour. This was really educational, thank you.
This is fascinating– I hope you do write a dissertation!
I also wanted to put in a little plug for the Harriet Tubman house and museum in Auburn, NY (where Tubman settled after escaping slavery and set up a home for the elderly). If any of you are ever near there, it’s well worth a visit– the tour guide is great and extremely knowledgeable.
First of all, I also used to work at a historic home where the owner also owned slaves. While I worked there, little to no research had been done on what life was like for the 50+ slaves at the home at any given time, and tour guides were on their own to mention it. (I believe these circumstances have changed since I left). Since tours were rather short, I usually mentioned that the owner of the house had slaves and if people had questions, I would take it from there. And, boy that comment about fatigue in covering horrors really gets to you. One moment stands out in particular… a little old Southern lady said to me, “Well, he was nice to his people, wasn’t he?” In front of a group of at least eleven people, my response was to shout, “NO, IT IS IMPOSSIBLE TO BE NICE TO SOMEONE WHEN YOU OWN THEM. PERIOD.” Yeah.
“Nice to his people.”
His people.
So I just read through the entire twitter account, and… oh.my.god.
I tend to read a lot of stuff about the Holocaust and Nazi Germany, and I can’t help but compare. As a European (from a non-Ally country), I KNOW that a few generations before me, Europeans just like me committed an almost unbelievable horror. This knowledge is in my bones. It’s been drilled into me since childhood. I know that Holocaust survivors had to work really really hard to be heard, even though Germany lost the war and the victors (especially the US) were morally infuriated by the concentration camps, but for once, it feels like the victims’ narrative won in the end: everyone knows that the Holocaust was bad.
If we screw up, it’s usually the responsibility part, not the horror part. If people want to excuse German responsibility for the concentration camp state, most people who aren’t actively neo-Nazi usually stick to the “oh but that was the SS, they were totally evil” excuse (like “the SS” were some kind of space aliens who just arrived one day, committed years of atrocities and then disappeared without a trace). Absolutely NOBODY disputes that concentration camps were hell on earth, again except for the actual neo-Nazis.
I went to Berlin recently and there are little signs everywhere, telling you about the Nazi past of every famous landmark or fancy building. The ministry of this hell terror and the ministry of that evil murderous injustice, this stuff was built by concentration camp prisoners but their names were lost to history, etc (for me, going to Berlin brought the horror closer, not further away). Ignorant and/or racist people defend it all (or themselves) with “not my grandpa”, “I wasn’t even born”, “yeah but we also did another thing that was good”, but I’ve never ever heard a person who doesn’t identify as a Nazi even breathe a hint of “concentration camp prisoners didn’t have it that bad”.
Scrolling through the @AfAmHistFail account and seeing quote after quote of “they were cared for, they got food”, “they were cared for, they got clothes”, “seems like they slept in a warm spot”, “seems like the family were pretty good owners!”… I literally feel sick. That’s a literal “literally”. WHAT? I mean, what else would slave owners do, not allow them to eat? Feeding slaves isn’t optional, it’s maintenance. The only alternative would be to not feed them, and then nobody would have stayed a slave owner for more than a few weeks. People who don’t eat will die very soon. Even the Nazis fed and clothed their slaves (though they killed many people by starvation and exposure when they felt that the German state had no use for them), because you actually have to put food in your human property and keep it reasonably sheltered to keep it going. How caring. How, HOW, can a person say “but at least they got to eat”? That’s literally saying “but at least they were allowed to be alive when they were forced to work”.
To walk around on a plantation and expect to be told only about the owner family – I try to translate this to what I know, and what I come up with is someone stepping into a concentration camp and turning their back to the prisoner barracks to fawn over the SS-Obersturmbannführer’s cute family, his sharp uniform and his beautiful house.
That beauty is just the slave owner’s attempted projection of the shining aura of the master race. If you feel that the owner is the most important person in a camp or on a plantation, if you believe the lie told by that pretty garden, then slavery never ended.
@AfAmHistFail: thank you for what you do. Thank you for keeping the slaves’ humanity alive. Thank you for your service. We’re all richer for it. I hope the resistance from these visitors doesn’t eat away at you too much, but I wouldn’t blame you a second if it does.
That’s literally saying “but at least they were allowed to be alive when they were forced to work”.
Nailed it.
Very well said, thanks.
I love this comment and wish to marry it, thank you.
There is a large group of very vocal Holocaust deniers in the USA. Once I checked a book out of the library on the Holocaust, looking specifically for discussion of the Rromani people. To my horror and surprise the book was an attempt to ‘debunk” the Holocaust. it was absolutely sickening. And yes, it contained a lot of “they were fed” and “they were given clothing” and “they were housed in exchange for steady work” etc. Disgusting. But then I also live in a country that has memorials dedicated to people who fought, hard, for the right to own slaves. We have treaty-ignoring genociders on our currency. We have states flying flags that were and are major symbols defending slavery. We have people saying the Civil War and Slavery were “a long time ago” and ‘not that bad” and that Black people “need to get over it.” Some humans are allowed to be more human than others.
But Holocaust deniers know that they have a fringe opinion. That’s often a part of the opinion (“there’s a GREAT CONSPIRACY that tries to give genocide a bad name, the truth was covered up!!!”). What really shocked me with the AfAmHistFail account was that apparently “slavery wasn’t that bad” isn’t fringe at all.
There’s no widespread belief that the concentration camp system wasn’t all bad because the guards gave them food, or that prisoners refrained from escaping because they were loyal to their camp guards or because they appreciated the free room and board. No one earnestly teaches children that people were basically fine with living in concentration camps or that prisoners serving SS personnel were considered part of the family. Everybody knows that people were starved and murdered and abused and worked to death, and everyone knows that the prisoners didn’t like it. Even some neo-Nazis admit as much – many Holocaust deniers just deny the scale of the Holocaust, or won’t believe that the living conditions actually were as bad as reported. However, they usually don’t deny that the described conditions WOULD be horrible, or that Nazi ideology hated “Untermenschen”, or that the “Untermenschen” disliked being treated this way (instead, the argument is that they deserved it).
But apparently, even the GUIDES WORKING ON SLAVE SITES often think of slave owners as kind of benevolent. “He was good to his slaves” isn’t a sentence that should exist, and it absolutely has no business at all being this common. Can you imagine anyone arguing that in a Nazi slave camp? Okay, in fact I think I have read a similar thing somewhere, BUT with the really obvious point that it meant that the people in charge kept their prisoners slightly less starved, less beaten and murdered at a lower rate than in other camps or Nazi labour sites, they didn’t literally mean that this was a basically okay way to live.
I can’t believe it. I can’t believe that people apparently are so flippant about this. How is this the popular opinion? Packing people together on boats so tightly that many die, shipping them to another continent, putting them through a slave auction that separates families forever, and then keeping them as slaves for generations, making creepy bloodline charts to keep track of who should be enslaved? I mean, yes, if you don’t know anything and you mistake slavery for indentured servitude it “only” sounds like serfdom and poverty, but the splitting of families, the practice of raping women and selling the children, the race categories, the punishments for escaping, the lynchings… Why isn’t the slave auction thought of as a horror pretty much on the level of the Judenramp?
Welcome to America, eh. And Columbus Day… Just… horrific. Thank you for this perspective. So many Americans need a slap upside the head. As many as it takes.
I wish you would put your shock and disbelief into a longer more structured essay, because the germ of your argument in your first comment and subsequent ones is somewhat novel and hugely important. Mainstream white Americans absolutely do not think slavery was worse than the Holocaust, and although I’m not sure I want to balance them on scales myself just because weighing examples of human immorality and horribleness against each other isn’t very appealing, a good case could be made that slavery was way worse, or at least that the subsequent abandonment of any guilt or desire to understand is much worse than anything about the aftermath of the Holocaust–my spell check automatically capitalizes “Holocaust,” everyone knows this is a big deal we’re talking about, meanwhile Americans are remarkably casual about our history of forced labor et al. I think that your thoughts could be built up into a persuasive essay that people should read…
Seconded!
The difference- and I am NOT saying that it justifies American attitudes- is that the Holocaust was not an institution that was a part of German life for more than a century, it did not become an integral part of the past culture that people want to glorify. While slavery is.
What I am saying is that the profoundly racist mentality of everyday, average Americans, is the result of the long-term integration of slavery and black inferiority in American life, which continues today. To be an American and a normally patriotic person cannot be dissociated from hating black people and native people. The American flag is a symbol of hatred against black people and native people.
Re-read my comment and realised that it sounds like I’m German – I’m not, my country got caught in between and didn’t always handle it well. But we share a lot of culture with Germany (a LOT) and there are many complicated feelings about people’s actions back then. We had a few heroes, but also a whole bunch of Nazis, an even bigger bunch that did nothing and a few people who struck a deal with the devil.
The narrative I’ve always known is that the Holocaust is the worst thing that has ever happened and that the horribleness of it all is so deep and profound that we almost can’t grasp it. I’m also sensing something like the Holocaust means that Europeans failed as Europeans, because we’re supposed to be so enlightened and so on (cue hollow laughter from the rest of the world), but not so long ago we did this. My country definitely feels it. “We think we’re so nice and fair, but remember how we handled the Nazis” is a common thing to mention in political opinion pieces. We built our identity on niceness, but we didn’t stand up when it counted.
I think that’s what I don’t see here – the shame. Where’s the identity struggles? I would have thought that there would be a lot of cultural shame that Americans, of all people, had slaves. I keep expecting the quoted white people to draw a very sharp line between themselves and slave ownership, and that stupid comments should be related to those values (maybe insisting that slavery was so bad it’s not relevant today, or that the human spirit can’t be crushed by mere slavery or whatever). Though maybe that’s why they seem to be convinced the slaves didn’t mind it and chose to stay?
But instead the more ignorant tourists clearly identify with slave owners and believe that they would have been great at it. It’s not even “I would have freed everyone” in the way that we all want to believe that we would have hidden people from the Nazis, it’s “I would have been pretty nice to my slaves” or “they had food and a warm place to sleep which is better than they would have had otherwise, because other human cultures don’t use food or shelter”. They don’t feel ashamed or accused when AAHF tells them about slavery, they feel insulted that it would count as a bad thing in the first place.
I love this comment and my husband and I talk about this a lot — we were raised in different parts of the south and have heard different variations of the “just like family” myth our entire lives, though to different degrees of skepticism as children because of our socio-economic backgrounds. I’m still struggling when I explain to my kids how older people that they love dearly can believe things we believe are so wrong. I’m not sure if you have kids or not, but if you had to talk to a hypothetical 10 year old who is learning about the Holocaust, how would you navigate the sheer unfathomable evilness of it versus the fact that normal, everyday people participated in it? My husband always talks about it as if an entirely unrecognizable evil army landed on earth and did unspeakable, unexplainable things. But I have this need to make sure that my kids understand the level of evil but also know that normal people did horrible things so they understand and are mindful that type of evil can take root in totally normal, just-like-you people. So I worry that my husband is “othering” the Holocaust but I’m minimizing it and I can’t find a middle ground.
I don’t have kids, just a lot of opinions, ha. Soooo I wrote a wall of text. SO. MANY. OPINIONS.
It depends on the 10 year old, I think? I didn’t get the Holocaust talk from my parents, I just read a lot of books and found a few Holocaust memoirs pretty early, both books and graphic novels (not Maus, Maus is terrifying). I also read about it in a kids’ magazine. But I don’t think it’s typical to read just as much of it as I did, I was a kind of morbid child who really sought out knowledge about miserable stuff. When we finally got to the 1940’s in school (in like 9th grade) I already knew everything I needed to know.
The stuff aimed at kids often talks about how it’s not right to do an evil thing just because someone else thinks you should. They compare Nazi propaganda to schoolyard bullying and rumour mongering, like, if you stand by and do nothing when Anne decides that no one is allowed to be nice to Lisa, that’s similar to what happened in Nazi Germany. In 9th grade we had a camp survivor come and talk to the entire school, and he also compared Nazi oppression to bullying. At least for me, this struck a chord. A 10 year old has probably heard someone use a racial slur, seen an authority (like a teacher) abuse power to be mean to people they don’t like or participated in mean rumours. Maybe you could say something like: Germany had lost a war and was poor, scared and angry. When people are scared and angry they want it to be someone’s fault. There were a lot of rumours, and one of the rumours was that Jewish people had a conspiracy against other Germans. When you believe that someone is bad, you’ll become suspicious at everything they do, and you try to make them do what you want. You really want other people to understand that you’re not one of the bad people, so you get very mean to the victims to prove to your friends that you’re “one of the good guys”. Then you may start to feel like they deserved it, or not care that they were hurt. Etc.
But if you mean how to explain that a father can work all day long combing a Belarussian village, separate kids from their parents, kill them all and write a loving letter to his wife and kids… No one can explain that. War is hell? And yet, most armies didn’t act like that. Maybe I’ll tell my eventual kids that the German culture back then thought it was really cool, mature and grownup to be extremely loyal and never question anything, even if you thought it was a really bad or evil idea. You weren’t supposed to listen to your heart, you were supposed to ignore it. They thought it was brave to obey and cowardly to say “no I won’t do it”, but today we know it’s the other way around. Something like that?
Holocaust memoirs for children (uuugh why is that a thing that has to exist) usually point out that individual Germans could be both nice and mean. Since the stories are from real life, they have all these little details that make them feel relatable. But yeah, it’s still easy to develop the “space alien” view (evil Nazis appeared, were evil for a while and then disappeared) or the “everyone was tricked by Hitler” view. I think that most of the information that reached me tried to explain bystanding, but never really explained where the people that the bystanders stand by and watch came from. As if the assumption was that we would get the choice between doing nothing or resisting, like the people who hid Anne Frank – not the choice between the clear expectation that you would actually participate or at least be supportive, doing nothing or resisting. But for “Aryans” who lived in Nazi Germany, I think that’s more like what the choice actually looked like.
Beware though, my early Holocaust nerdery meant that I stopped believing common grownup excuses like “#sorrynotsorry that this sucks for you, but ~rules are rules~” or “welp, you can’t help everybody, gotta break some eggs if you want to make omelet” pretty early. That sounds JUST like what a Nazi would say!
There’s a German film about the period right before the world war called White Ribbon, which examines the idea of unquestioning loyalty, and which I think, if you haven’t seen, you would like. Content note for incest, no concentration camps though!
Thanks, that sounds really interesting!
You sound like a wonderful person to know.
Thanks so much for this interview! I actually used some of @afamhistfail’s tweets in a presentation a few months ago. So thanks again to you for getting back to me with permission to do that so quickly and graciously. Your work is so powerful and thoughtful, I really had my audience in the palm of my hand and the discussion was constructive and awesome. One of the best twitter accounts ever.
Thanks, this was great.
I will say, I’ve just about had it with giving old people a pass on racism. Martin Luther King Jr would be 86 if he were alive today. It’s not like the civil rights movement happened after they were too old and set in their ways. Racism is a willful choice.
Also, we tend to act like things were just absolutely unquestioned up until the March on Washington, like it never crossed anyone’s mind that the status quo was unjust until it went mainstream. Oh, except for all those slave revolts, protests, lynchings, the CIVIL FUCKING WAR, other than that there was certainly no tension that might have caused you to question whether all this was moral and sustainable.
YESSSS.
People might have heard of Denmark Vesey recently??
And black people (and other people of color, and women, and gays, and etc.) were still people back then! And even if old people were taught bigotry when they were kids, they’ve had longer to figure out that that shit is wrong. If anything, we should be holding them to a higher standard.
I’ll admit to having been somewhat ignorant about LGBT history up until recently– I’m a millennial, and it seemed to me that very few people prior to my lifetime were openly gay, certainly not a movement’s worth, and surely it wasn’t a topic that people ever thought about. Because otherwise, why would it not be reflected in terms of progress? Now that I’ve learned more about the topic, what really floors me is the way that whole communities can just be ignored in the history books. As if certain groups just didn’t exist in the past and THAT’s why we’re so far behind, and anyway it’s just some newfangled thing. When in fact our culture has been whispering and wringing its hands and exacting violence on those groups for centuries.
The Quakers were openly denouncing slavery in 1688. If old white people back then could jeopardise their businesses, reputations and lives to help the Underground Railroad, then old people now absolutely should be held to a higher standard. We all should be.
And there were white Abolitionist societies before there was even a United States! Granted, plenty of historical abolitionists have still been hella racist, but the Evils of Slavery were never a secret.
Oh, oh, oh, I read a really good book about civil rights activity before the 1950s, mostly by blacks in the South, which I think is a big hole in our received consciousness of the engaged, brave actions taken by black folks under apartheid and white terrorism. That time between Reconstruction and the Civil Rights Movement as it is commonly understood.
I will post the title when I get home. Amazingly it is on my brother’s scanty bookshelf, from use in his poli sci program which I think is cool.
ETA:
I misremembered. Maybe I did actually read that, but this one is Lost Revolutions: The South in the 1950s, by Pete Daniel, so covers a different time period… but it is still something interesting and illuminating:
“This sweeping work of cultural history explores a time of startling turbulence and change in the South, years that have often been dismissed as placid and dull. In the wake of World War II, southerners anticipated a peaceful and prosperous future, but as Pete Daniel demonstrates, the road into the 1950s took some unexpected turns. Daniel chronicles the myriad forces that turned the world southerners had known upside down in the postwar period. In chapters that explore such subjects as the civil rights movement, segregation, and school integration; the breakdown of traditional agriculture and the ensuing rural-urban migration; gay and lesbian life; and the emergence of rock ‘n’ roll music and stock car racing, as well as the triumph of working-class culture, he reveals that the 1950s South was a place with the potential for revolutionary change. In the end, however, the chance for significant transformation was squandered, Daniel argues. One can only imagine how different southern history might have been if politicians, the press, the clergy, and local leaders had supported democratic reforms that bestowed full citizenship on African Americans–and how little would have been accomplished if a handful of blacks and whites had not taken risks to bring about the changes that did come.”
This is so great. Retweets from Mallory and Nicole are what lead me to following @afamistfail and it’s one of the best (and eye opening) twitter accounts out there.
Thank you for doing what you do.
Another interesting source along similar lines is MedievalPOC – http://medievalpoc.tumblr.com/.
I’d avoid that blog if at all possible- the mod has repeatedly made anti-Romani and anti-semitic historical claims. http://omgstopbeingashittyperson.tumblr.com/post/…
Oh man, I don’t make a habit of taking historic home tours but a went to Mt. Vernon a couple of years ago and got a tour from a white woman who was approximately one billion years old and she maybe mentioned in passing that there were slave quarters but then spent what felt like forever describing the antiques in the house and talking about Martha Washington’s personal tastes and habits. Which, I think it’s worth mentioning, is not only bigotry and omission but also BORING AS HELL and BARELY EVEN HISTORY
It’s the kind of thing that makes people say “oh, I would never study history, I couldn’t remember all those dates.” And I mean, if you’ve pared it down to only things that the Texas Board of Education wants children to know about then yes, that’s all history is, just names of important people and exquisite drawing rooms and victory in battle. Maybe that’s a feature, not a bug– make history seem boring as dirt so that we don’t talk about it so much.
Did she mention the fact that Martha didn’t free George’s slaves even though his will stipulated that they would be free upon his death? And they were only freed after Martha had died as well?
BECAUSE THAT PISSES ME OFF. You know you’re a shitty human when you defy a will because you’re scared of black people being free. WHAT DID YOU DO TO THEM BESIDES THE BASIC INJUSTICE OF SLAVERY, MARTHA? /irrational Martha hater
“/irrational Martha hater”
I dunno, that seems pretty rational.
No, that was in no way mentioned! Ironically, the tour guide was very pleased with Mrs. Washington’s decorating sense with regards to a pure white bedroom.
Philadelphia actor/hyphenate James Ijames wrote a play — “The Lamentable Trial of Miz Martha Washington” — that Flashpoint Theatre Company produced in 2014. It takes place during Martha Washington’s death (within her dreams). The play is about her fears of the slaves and their eagerness for her death.
I totally agree with your sentiment, though as someone very familiar with the story, I’ll just say that Washington’s will actually stipulated that his slaves be freed at Martha’s death (with the exception of one enslaved person, William Lee, who was freed immediately upon George’s death). However, Martha ended up emancipating these slaves BEFORE she died, possibly because she feared for her safety in a situation where the freedom of a large group of people depended on her death…
However, I think the more interesting part of this story is that the majority of Mount Vernon’s slaves (183 of 316) actually belonged to the estate of Martha’s first husband, Daniel Parke Custis. She/George Washington was given control of this “dower” share for her lifetime, but when Martha died in 1802, this group of enslaved people was dispersed to Martha’s heirs, her grandchildren. So the narrative about George Washington freeing his slaves in his will – which is often held up (problematically) as proof that he was a “good guy” – actually obscures the fact that most of the men, women, and children enslaved at Mount Vernon remained in bondage well into the nineteenth century.
Following @afamhistfail has been fascinating; especially given my academic background (in archaeology and museum studies), seeing how public history actually works on a person-to-person level day in and day out has been fascinating — and often discouraging.
This interview consolidates all those individual encounters into something bigger, and this summed it up beautifully:
Your brain is soaking in horrors, and it can warp your sense of reality–to say nothing of the anger and despair you feel when someone blindly defends the indefensible, or hears the truth and rejects it. But you have to keep telling the story.
Thanks for the work you’ve done so diligently in insisting on the truth, educating people face-to-face, and documenting those interactions for something larger. I’d be keen to read that dissertation if it ever became public.
Can I ask whether you have recommendations for places that are doing this well? I’d love to add them to my travel list.
I will suggest this in Louisiana: http://whitneyplantation.com/
Somerset Place in Creswell, NC is excellent! You can read about its evolution from a state historical “plantation” into a site that tells the story of the enslaved people who lived there, in Dorothy Spruill Redford’s 1988 book Somerset Homecoming: Recovering a Lost Heritage. The author began a genealogical odyssey for her family’s roots that led her to this former plantation, and she eventually transformed it into a state cultural and historic site that told the story of her ancestors and the other enslaved men and women who lived and toiled there over 80 years. She became its executive director and started an annual Homecoming celebration for the descendents of the enslaved people. I had the pleasure of meeting Ms. Redford and her staff a little over 10 years ago when I took my children on history and sight-seeing a trip through eastern North Carolina. It was deeply moving! http://www.nchistoricsites.org/somerset/main.htm
The UK needs to do this too! We have got the tools now: we have a searchable list of every slave-owner in the British empire in the 1830s at ucl.ac.uk/lbs and a wonderful book on Slavery and the British Country House (free to download at historicengland.org.uk/images-books/publications/slavery-and-british-country-house/
We have got to face the fact that we were the biggest slave traders and a lot of the money that went into pretty country houses and fancy civic buildings is actual blood money. Some places are doing it right — The International Slavery Museum in Liverpool liverpoolmuseums.org.uk/ism is good. Most places are not: I went to Harewood House last year *which was 100% beyond doubt built with the profits of slavery* and there was very little reference to the fact. Apparently they had an exhibition before, but it’s not permanent. It needs to be permanent!
(and I was just checking wikipedia that I got Harewood House right — it wasn’t Harewood Hall etc — and wikipedia tells me “it was built between 1759 and 1771 for wealthy trader Edwin Lascelles, 1st Baron Harewood.” Just trader! No, no, and no.)
And Australia as well! We might not have had official slavery in that people could not by and sell others, but the station system was effectively a revival of the manorial system, with aboriginal people as modern serfs.
The ” black birding ” raids that snatched Pacific Islander men to work on cane plantations as indentured labourers came pretty close to slavery too.
Yes, any time you have land abundance and people shortage, the conditions are ripe for slavery. I mean, the British empire was officially slavery-free after the 1830s, but there was a huge system of indentured service that was often indistinguishable from slavery.
In the poorer parts of colonial Africa taxes were collected in labour (like serfdom), and people paid their taxes by doing dangerous unhealthy work. My friend studies the history of this railway (wikipedia.org/wiki/Congo–Ocean_Railway) which wikipedia says 17,000 people died building — that’s the 1920s, and the French empire — think of all the romantic visions we have of France in the 1920s! Meanwhile people were dying to build a railway in order to pay their taxes.
Thanks for the info on Australia!
Last week’s episode of In Our Time on Radio 4 was about Jane Eyre, and there were some interesting comments from the guests about the significance of slavery as an unspoken, but tangible presence in the background of the story. One guest said [paraphrasing] that Rochester’s past in the Caribbean may have been intended as a representation of his character failings, as that meant he was benefiting from slavery money, but then pointed out that the depiction of Bertha Mason, even though she is white Creole, could be interpreted as a racist concept by Bronte i.e. equating foreign/nonwhite = wild, ungoverned, bad. Also a guest mentioned that the fortune Jane inherits could have come from slavery, as the uncle who leaves it to her made it in the West Indies.
Any literary Toasties have thoughts on the significance of slavery in Jane Eyre? It’s been so long since I read it that I couldn’t really comment, plus there’s a good chance I misrepresented what the IOT guests were saying, I’m writing all this from memory!
Definitely the backdrop of slavery and xenophobia is there. I reread the book two or three years ago and was very interested in the political aspects (beyond the role of women in education/marriage). The young girl Jane tutors is French and the intensity of Jane’s initial revulsion was surprising.
I remember that question of “madness” as tied up with foreigness and nonwhiteness as one of the themes in “Wide Saragasso Sea”, which read on assignment in high school, so not as attentively as I should have and a long time ago now. Still it’s fascinating to me in British novels from that era (the Bronte era, not the Rhys era) how present and not present slavery, plantations in the west indies, etc. are. It’s this kind of assumed backstory, where just a passing mention is needed. There was a movie adaptation of Mansfield Park in 1999 that made it more obvious that it’s a house built on the profit from slavery, but the book itself glosses over that fact, as Edward Said points out <a href=”http://(https://en.wikipedia.org/?title=Mansfield_Park#Slavery)” target=”_blank”>(https://en.wikipedia.org/?title=Mansfield_Park#Slavery). It’s definitely an interesting question though, what social/political issues are observed and discussed and which ones are completely ignored. It does create a distorted lens, for sure.
The phrase which first made sense of the flaw in “good master” logic (I knew it was wrong but would get tangled explaining it) for me was: “There’s no such thing as a good master, on account of how a master isn’t a good thing to be.” From… Delia Sherman’s The Freedom Maze.
I’ve spent about 7 minutes trying to decide if “You are a champion” adequately expresses my feelings about this. I was once a 15-year-old from Indiana who (while believing myself to be both well-informed and progressive) thought our Mount Vernon tour guide judged Martha Washington too harshly for wanting Oney Judge back. (Product of her times and la-de-dah.) All I can say is that it did eventually sink in. Now, as someone who’s aware of perspectives I’d never been exposed to at that age, I remember that tour guide with such respect. Especially because I suspect he was in the minority at Mount Vernon, at least when I was there. I hope there are a few 15-year-olds on your tours who initially think “But in the context of the prevailing cultural paradigms…” yet later–say, by the time they reach voting age–will be able to think, “Wait…oh….” But in any case: You are a champion.
Has no one mentioned “Ask a Slave”? http://www.askaslave.com/
(And yay, I see that they are following each other on Twitter. Excellent! Also, reading through the whole AfAmHistFail feed made me want to seek out more local museums that have slave quarters and tell their history. There are a few good ones near me.)
Thanks everyone for reading, and for your thoughtful comments!
One quick thing—reading this back over again, the bit about Duck Dynasty shirts and meticulous hairstyles sounds kind of classist.
What I meant is, associating oneself with Duck Dynasty means associating oneself with one of its stars, Phil Robertson, who has said some famously offensive things about the Jim Crow South, and that super carefully-prepared hairstyles seem to betray a preoccupation with maintaining a certain social status.
The difference- and I am NOT saying that it justifies American attitudes- is that the Holocaust was not an institution that was a part of German life for more than a century, it did not become an integral part of the past culture that people want to glorify. While slavery is.
What I am saying is that the profoundly racist mentality of everyday, average Americans, is the result of the long-term integration of slavery and black inferiority in American life, which continues today. To be an American and a normally patriotic person cannot be dissociated from hating black people and native people. The American flag is a symbol of hatred against black people and native people.
Sometimes I feel the weight of twelve million souls pressing down on me, doubly heavy because I know their story isn’t always talked about.
Jesus.
Sometimes I feel the weight of twelve million souls pressing down on me, doubly heavy because I know their story isn’t always talked about.
Jesus.
Allow me to endorse the tour of the Whitney Plantation in Vacherie, LA. It began conducting tours earlier this year with an explicit and exclusive focus on the lives of the enslaved. I went there about two weeks ago and learned a lot about the practices of slavery in my home state.
I just was listening yesterday to a Fresh Air interview with a very interesting author named Mat Johnson, a biracial gentleman who said he actually looks very white (to most people), and he refers to himself as mulatto. It surprised me to hear him say that for the reasons mentioned here, but, just like trans people who have pronoun preferences, he gets to choose.
I wonder if there is some way to get people to put themselves in the position of a slave before they recognize that’s what they’re doing. Like maybe you’re making small talk before the tour begins, and you tell a story as if it’s a contemporary news item. Let them get totally worked up about it before you tell them, “well, actually that happened to people who lived here.”
“Did you hear about those women who were found locked in the basement of some guy’s rape dungeon? And there were some kids in there that were apparently the result of the pregnancies from the daily rapes? And one of the women actually managed to escape once, but the local cops were buddies with the guy and actually brought her back to him? The women were there for years, and they had given up hope of ever getting out.”
We recently visited Charleston and were fortunate enough to visit Middleton Plantation. The enslaved persons exhibit was excellent. One of the remarkable things to me was the copies of the freedman’s contracts and the discussion of how life really didn’t change significantly for the better for blacks after the war. Some folks want to claim that discussions of slavery are irrelevant because they are 150 years in the past. Sadly an understanding is needed to make sense of how little has changed in the past 150 years and the why associated with it. It’s been institutionally improved in last 50 years but attitudes are still mired in past for many.
Thank you for what you do….
We recently visited Charleston and were fortunate enough to visit Middleton Plantation. The enslaved persons exhibit was excellent. One of the remarkable things to me was the copies of the freedman’s contracts and the discussion of how life really didn’t change significantly for the better for blacks after the war. Some folks want to claim that discussions of slavery are irrelevant because they are 150 years in the past. Sadly an understanding is needed to make sense of how little has changed in the past 150 years and the why associated with it. It’s been institutionally improved in last 50 years but attitudes are still mired in past for many.