I learned about slavery years before I learned about Hitler, concentration camps and genocide. My mother taught me about slavery when I was four or five.<\/p>\n
As I grew up and absorbed more of life’s complexities, that awful reality grew with me. It never shrank in size, never became less awful, or more acceptable. I never went numb on slavery. It has never been something which could be shrugged off or shoved into a corner of history, or qualified and diminished by political movement.<\/p>\n
My knowledge turned into a passionate cause, a ferocious empathy for anyone who is helpless under the absolute power of another. It causes me as much agony now as it always has. I couldn’t mute it if I had the tools to do so, and wouldn’t mute it even if I had.<\/p>\n
For me, compassion is a physical organ, like skin. I couldn’t survive without it.<\/p>\n
You might believe I was too young to be taught about slavery. You might believe my mother traumatized me; you might swear you’ll never do that to your kids.<\/p>\n
Well, what did my childhood “trauma” do to my adult sensibilities? It drove me to learn more and to think about and act on what I’ve learned. I couldn’t love this country without knowing its complexity and I can’t know its complexity without knowing what I loathe about it.<\/p>\n
I’m almost finished with Ron Chernow’s magnificent biography, Grant<\/em>. Given Grant’s life span (1822-1885) and his improbable, wildly variable life, the book is also a taut history of the Civil War, Reconstruction and the murder of Reconstruction by white Southerners, the KKK and other terrorist gangs.<\/p>\n I had to read that part, about the Southern restoration to white supremacy, very slowly, only a few pages at a time, because it was so dreadful. During the 1876 presidential campaign, John Roy Lynch, a Black Mississippi congressman, said of the Southern Democrats bent on grabbing back absolute power, “Every Southern state [they] propose to carry as they carried Mississippi last year…not by the power of the ballot, but by an organized system of terrorism and violence.”<\/p>\n And that’s what they did. Chernow details many horrible massacres of freed Black people who tried to, wanted to vote. Massacred.<\/p>\n It happened, over and over again. Don’t you call it Critical Race Theory. Your children need to be taught it because it was and is American history. History.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I learned about slavery years before I learned about Hitler, concentration camps and genocide. My mother taught me about slavery when I was four or five. As I grew up and absorbed more of life’s complexities, that awful reality grew … Continue reading