One of the perks of being a semi-retired grandfather is that I get to tutor my just turned 13 year old granddaughter on Friday mornings. I have three granddaughters and each is smarter and better looking and nicer than her sisters or anyone else. My daughter picked out the Seton curriculum which strikes me as very good. This past week, we studied a lawyer named Taney who was a lawyer in Maryland who defended a Methodist Episcopal clergyman charged with inciting a slave rebellion shortly after we had adopted our Constitution. The protagonist of the story was a Presbyterian family who came to the assistance of the clergyman by hiring the lawyer. Old habits are hard to break and often my tutoring uses the Socratic method of gaining an understanding of the subject. I asked my granddaughter what was so bad bad about slavery. She said that the slave owners were mean and not kind. I pushed her thinking a bit and enlarged my own understanding of the evil of slavery. Sometimes a word instead of making us understand something actually causes us to gloss over the reality. Lots of words and phrases do that such as death, love, prisoner of war, sacrifice, job loss, bad investment, disability, friendship, and triumph. There are many other times when words allow us to escape facing reality. Slavery as my granddaughter and I came to deal with it meant being captured in Africa and put in ships where a certain amount of inventory shrinkage that is the loss of slaves on the trip over because of awful conditions. Once here, it often meant standing naked in a slave market and having potential purchasers gawk and probe and joke. Then it meant working in heavy chains and dealing with daily humiliation. It might mean your wife or husband would be sold if the owner faced economic difficulties. It might mean you children would be sold, and it could mean you would be sold and your children left with your previous owners. It meant exposure to horrible conditions. In a few short generations, it meant the loss of memories of place, of home, of status, of family, of beliefs, of worldview, of everything that makes us people. A lost past makes it difficult to orient oneself. For longer than this country has existed and created a sense of American, Africans and their descendants were slaves. For literally hundreds of years in North America and Latin America, to be a slave meant that your labor was not your own, your spouse was not your own, your children were not your own, your dreams were lost to you. With no sense of the present, it is difficult to orient your life. With no past and no present, what is the future going to look like? I dont know. I do know about a few things. The thugs and hoodlums who set fire to towns did no honor to Trevon Martin and Michael Brown. That there is going to be no prosecution of the officer who shot Michael Brown at the state or federal level makes his life and death no less tragic. Bullying behavior is reprehensible regardless of who does it. Perpetuating evil is as bad as starting it. I have done very little to overcome the evil of slavery. I marched in a couple of rallies in the late sixties. Most of the African Americans I have known have been good, hard working people, but I have done nothing to reach out to young men who have been hardened by the lot of black men in America. I realize that many African Americans have made progress, but frankly, a preponderance of those who have moved up are women. I think this may be because we white men are insecure in the presence of black men. Again frankly, I do not really understand how black men in America avoid going crazy. This struggle to be totally honest with myself just started Friday and I dont know where it will take me, but I am going to work on it.
Posted on: Mon, 26 Jan 2015 04:18:40 +0000
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