The boy said slaves didn't do much since many weren't able to read and write.
Boom. Flashback. I had a similar thought at that age. I'm transported to the spot the thought occurred. I'm shrunken in size and looking into the distance with the schoolyard behind me and I'm imagining a European peon working the fields living his life in drudgery toiling the land who's a savant pianist but never knows that because his eyes never see, nor his hands never touch a piano. Too bad for him. For us. For everyone. I imagine all the people through history living in drudgery who never get a chance at expressing their potential. I imagine all the genius through history that was never expressed.
Then that thought is overtaken by all the talent that continuously bursts through the floorboards and all the stories to the contrary of down trodden who break out of their caste by talent, skill, genius, ambition and luck.
Caught off guard the teacher said,
Baby, if I snatched you up and dropped you off in China or Germany or Africa even, you wouldn’t be able to read and write their language either. Does that make you useless or any less educated?Her door display is attributed to Nadine Drayton-Keen.
Dear Students, they didn't steal slaves. They stole scientists, doctors, architects, teachers, entrepreneurs, astronomers, fathers, mothers, sons, daughters, etc., and made them slaves.
Sincerely, your ancestors.
That would be in potential. And these specific potentials exists in the new land not in Africa or wherever else. They stole (bought, actually) hunters and gardeners, artisans and cooks, boat-builders, weavers, and jewelry makers. They stole hut makers, carvers, painters, weapon makers, and weavers and plant experts. They stole the actuality of stone age industry and brought them to pre-industrial potential. Then suppressed that potential.
Correct me in comments.
9 comments:
George Washington Carver was on the brink of inventing peanut butter powered time travel. Alas, gone too soon.
He could have at least invented peanut butter satellite communication. What a lazy dummkopf.
Don't scoff. 40 years to the gallon ain't nothing to be sneezed at.
Actually, a fair number of slaves used that potential to buy their freedom.
Be interesting to see how many who didn't liked their chains as many allege.
I have no issue with the sentiment. It's the same point many of us make about abortion. All those snuffed out lives represent diverse futures and opportunities that never happened.
At Fatima, Portugal, when Mary the Mother of God appeared to the three children in 1917, she told them that the present war (WW1) would end, but IF the world did not heed her warnings, and repent, and turn back to God, THEN a worse war would come, with the annihilation of nations, and Russia spreading her errors over the whole earth. I can't quote her words just now, but they are far more chilling. The warnings were specific.
Only recently did it dawn on me: if only people had listened to the message, then World War II and the Holocaust and the Cold War would never have happened. That's what Mary told them.
Think of how much better a world we might be living in had all those unborn children not been sacrificed.
I am pretty sure we bought sub-Saharan Africans from the muslims who enslaved them. It's not as though Europeans could just show up and steal the locals.
And based on what they have done with the place I am not sure than anyone over there has ever had a lick of sense.
There are a lot of fictions generated around slavery* - mostly to redistribute the burden of guilt to whites and white Americans in particular, but to call slavery the stealing of lives is not creating a fiction. The boy was wrong. The teacher should have told him why in simple terms a 12 year old could understand and not make the explanation fraught with emotional exaggerations and a fucking silly door display.
*Does the word "slave" presume/conjure an image of a person of African descent? Why? Is this a recent (20th century) development?
After the Europeans stopped buying slaves on the West Coast in the early 1800s, the market continued on the East coast of Africa. Saudi Arabia finally banned slavery in 1962. It still, however, continues in part to this day on the Arabian peninsula.
Peoples enslaved each other for millennia. All races. A slave is not “a person of African descent”. That’s become the CW thanks to decades of cultural monomaniacal focus on the American slave trade which was contemporaneous with other slave trade throughout the world. Slaving goes on to this day.
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