A
Continuing Dilemma: Slavery, By John Burl Smith
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| comon-hell-on-wheels |
The dilemma of
slavery continues to dog the United States of America (USA) 137 years
after Pres. Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation (1862)
freeing only the slaves held in the South.
Many historians say
emancipation caused more problems than it solved. These learned
scholars opine that the Civil War was unnecessary because slave masters
would have ended slavery because they would have realized supporting
slaves was too great an economic burden and that free labor was more
productive. However, slavery was about more than economics and
productivity. Slavery was the base of a value system that defined
the Southern way of life. It was tied to a Southerner's sense of
personal worth and upon which the house of cards of the Confederacy was
built.
For the Southern
gentry, it was not simply a question of freeing or not freeing slaves.
The proposition was intimately related to a society's unwillingness to
accept as human property it was taught to see as brut animals one owns
like a horse or cow. Slavery's belief system attributed everything
good/righteous to white people and everything bad/evil to
blacks. Synonymous to the mind-set of English lords, families that
owned slaves were bred to believe in their inherent right to be masters just as
they bred into slaves the rightness of being owned. People who believed
in that system could never accept that the stroke of a pen could rob them
of an entitlement to which whites clung so tenaciously for generations
and sacrificed tens of thousands of lives to preserve.
The reality is
Lincoln's signature did not undo the mental underpinning that justified
slavery and the dehumanizing process of white supremacy that was
supported by the socioeconomic,
educational, religious and political systems in the US.
Incidents such as those that occurred in North and South Carolina
recently are endemic to the 15 slave states and find their geneses in the
forlorn hope of returning to that erst while existence before
emancipation. That hope is nurtured by Article I Section II of the
US Constitution and state practices and policies that give rise to unresolved
psychological issues left over from slavery.
These types of
gruesome "hate crimes" continue to occur from Texas to West
Virginia. Such murders are not the result of wanton violence because
the perpetrators are always white men and the victims black. They
are reminiscent of ritualistic lynchings that were so popular from
the 1890s through the 1940s. They seem to be a result of latent or
repressed rage that surfaces uncontrollably when a black man is perceived as
challenging the master's status.
The aforementioned
historians would readily reject this hypothesis but when people who have
been immersed in the use of dehumanizing hatred which is tied to their
sense of worth and power lose status to those that are dehumanized, the
affect can be intolerable. Under such circumstances totally
despicable acts can result.
The next example
relates to children. Breeding slaves meant offsprings were notA
150-year-old photograph discovered in an attic in North Carolina
revived haunting images of the faces of American slavery. The picture
shows two young black barefoot slaves, wearing ragged clothes, perched on
a barrel.
children worthy of compassion but they
were "pickaninnies."
The photo, which may
have been taken in the early 1860s, is believed to be of a boy named John
and an unidentified companion. Will Stapp, a photographic historian
and curator for the National Portrait Gallery at the Smithsonian Institution
said the picture is "A testament to a dark part of American history.
What you are looking at when you see this photo are two boys who were
victims of that history." Found during a moving sale in
Charlotte in April, the photo was accompanied by a document detailing the sale of John in 1854 for $1,150.
Keya Morgan, New
York collector, who paid $30,000 for the photo album which included the
young boys and several family pictures and $20,000 for the sale document
proclaimed, "I buy stuff all the time, but this shocked me. A
portrait of slave children is rare." Morgan believes the home in
which the photo was found was owned by a deceased descendant of John.
"This kid was abused and mistreated and people forgot about
him. He doesn't even exist in history. And to know that there were
millions of children who were like him, I've never seen another photo like that
that speaks so much for children."
Stapp said the photo
was probably taken by Timothy O'Sullivan, an apprentice of Mathew Brady, the
famous 19th-century photographer whose portraits of historical figures
such as Pres. Abraham Lincoln are legendary. O'Sullivan photographed what is believed
to be some of the first slaves liberated after Lincoln issued his preliminary
Emancipation Proclamation (1862).
Harold Holzer, an
administrator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and an author of several books
about Lincoln said, "To me, it's such a moving and astonishing picture.
Abolitionists circulated photos of adult slaves who had been beaten or whipped,
the photo of the two boys is more subtle," only suggesting their
horror. Thinking of children who from birth to death, lived the
dehumanizing misery of slavery, Ron Soodalter, an author on slavery and member
of the board of directors at the Abraham Lincoln Institute in Washington, D.C.
said, "The photo depicts the reality of slavery. This picture shows that
the institution of slavery didn't pick or choose. This was a
generic horror. It victimized the old, the young."
The absence of John
and millions of slave children like him is no accident of history; they have
been deliberately edited out of history by academicians who frame and write
it. Controlling that process is jealously guarded by universities; Dr. M.
Cookie Newsom, director for diversity education and assessment at the
University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill declares. "Faculty
diversification for universities is seen as "affirmative
action." There's no delicate way of describing the lack of
commitment many top research universities demonstrate as they talk about
diversifying their faculties."
When confronted with
the dismal statistics, Newsom says university decision-makers offer: 1) There
are not enough qualified candidates of color; 2) There is no need to
interview them because they are in high demand from other institutions;
and 3) They are too expensive. Recalling an instance at UNC where a black
female staff candidate was disqualified on the claim she didn't "fit
well" and because she "spoke too loudly," Newsom
proclaimed "Underlying the excuses is an insidious presumption of
inferiority. Diversity research has not focused on the inner workings of
the tenure process in committees.... that is where most of the biases
emerge."
Newsom's conclusions
are drawn from research and statistics that show, while peer research
institutions have documented plans to retain and advance minority
faculty, the outcomes reflect nothing more than lip service. "If you
are an African-American, American Indian or Latino with a Ph.D., your
odds of ever receiving tenure at a Research I (school) are between slim
and none." Between 2001 and 2007, black professors consistently
represented just 3 percent or less of tenured or tenure-track faculty
year after year at Harvard University, Ohio State University, University
of Florida, University of California at Los Angeles and Berkeley, University of
Illinois, University of Texas, Stanford University and the University of North
Carolina, according to the National Center for Education Statistics.
"It's racial
discrimination," she said unapologetically. "We know what's wrong;
there is inherent bias in committees and negative perceptions based on
race. "Institutional racism' is just the door blocking entrance,
once inside scholars find other superficial barriers for junior faculty,
including overburdening service work, undervalued qualifications, and the
lack of mentorship and support from senior faculty," Newsom reiterated.
Myths,
misconceptions, deliberate distortion and outright lies taught about black
people during slavery are still a part of white folklore regarding African
Americans and continue to be taught. These socioeconomic, educational,
religious and political processes serve the same purpose now they did during
slavery; they are the base of an American value system that defined a way of
life -- white supremacy. This value
system is no longer tied to just southerners' sense of personal worth and
power; it is as American as the "Tea Party Movement." For a
white man, there is no worst position or condition to be in than to be beneath
a black man, because he is educated to see a black as totally worthless.
The continuing
dilemma of slavery is the shared value it holds for whites, so much so, they
support each other as though status in the US is a zero sum game. The US
Constitution still values slave descendants as 3/5 of white men. That is
why the status of slave descendants can not be allowed to change. Whites
are educated to believe they deserve a status above blacks and the
failure to achieve it can trigger the kind of response displayed by the young
man in South Carolina. White supremacy is a psychological disease left
over from slavery that affects most white Americans and black people
suffer its effects as institutional racism and acts of
violence.
Footnotes:
Hell on Wheels (TV series)
A haunting 150-year-old photo found in a North Carolina attic shows a young black child named John, barefoot and wearing ragged clothes, perched on a barrel next to another unidentified young boy.
Pasted
from http://www.nbcnews.com/id/37623310/ns/us_news/t/rare-photo-slave-children-found/#.VwxFcOImxFo
Mathew Brady Biography Photographer (c.
1823–1896)
Timothy
H. O'Sullivan
“The
stunning account of modern-day slaves and traffickers in the land of the free”
Pasted
from http://ronsoodalter.com/home/index.asp
Scholar Says Research Universities Not Serious About Faculty
Diversity
Pasted
from http://diverseeducation.com/article/13868
South Carolina police: Black man shot to death, body dragged
The dragging of Hill's body sheds light onto how much the death and destruction perpetrated upon African-Americans in this country hundreds of years ago still resides in this country's DNA.
Pasted from http://www.africanamerica.org/topic/death-of-south-carolina-man-shot-and-dragged-for-ten-miles-investigated-as-hate-crime?reply=168056827305523459How Ironic, two men, same name both killed, five years apart. How Ironic!
Anthony Hill: 5 Fast Facts You Need to Know
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Thanks for your comment. Peace, NB