Teaching about enslavement

Presidential candidate Will Hurd put it so well in his recent tweet: “Unfortunately, it has to be said – slavery wasn’t a jobs program that taught beneficial skills. It was literally dehumanizing and subjugated people as property because they lacked any rights or freedoms.”

I wonder if members of the DOE in the State of Florida have actually read any of the first-person narratives of enslaved peoples? They are quite easy to access; they could start with the Library of Congress. And while many of these narratives reflect a feeling of goodwill from masters, it is best to remember the context. These fellow human beings were dehumanized, treated as property, and always subjugated to their owner’s whims.

This, then, is the only way in which this could possibly happen in a country that professes such ideals as:

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

Preamble to the Declaration of Independence

The slave owners must have ignored reality and acted under the belief that these human beings were not fellow human beings at all; they were property to be bought, sold, and dealt with however the property owner wished. Are we carrying out this same belief today that we can simply reframe reality to make it bend to our bias? Are there certain self-evident truths?

The whitewashing of history that is being proposed ignores the fact that our country was born with a compromise to allow for the enslavement of human beings. That legacy continues to thread through much of the socio-political maelstrom we still confront. We see it on the streets, we see it in the courts, we see it with policing, we see it in our government – Senate, House, Supreme Court, and the Presidency.

Rather than whitewashing, we must diligently use our history as a lens through which we make our decisions and policies.