Last edited Sun Feb 19, 2023, 01:01 AM - Edit history (5)
With my Abolitionist family background on both sides, that was very difficult for me. It really hurt because I knew about our five boys who fought to end slavery (two of whom died, and one was only 16 and still a drummer boy when he was captured and then slowly tortured to death in one of those horrible prisoner/war camps), and my Methodist minister ancestors who sometimes invited Black people to be honored guests in their little homes (where my ancestors did all their own menial labor). And I had to listen to lies about the Native Americans when I knew about Native American ancestors (Algonquin and Mohawk) on both sides, and my family collected signatures to close those horrible "Indian Schools." Nobody cared about my hurt feelings when I read accounts that pretended the Native Americans had been "savages." And there are people with even more valid claims in this area. I remember one of my students once saying surreptiously, "Thanks for speaking up for us," and then I discovered he was half Native American, just scared to let people know in that little ignorant town.
My ancestors left me permission to acknowledge their failings. Yes, it did take them a long time to figure out how horribly the European settlers were treating different groups, and too long to gather enough courage to really fight to end the atrocities. The right-wingers of that time were even more deceitful and aggressive than the modern right-wingers. But when my family read accounts of life among the slave-"owners" north or south, it was not the lazy rich whites they identified with, but rather the people actually doing the manual labor that was so much a part of their own lives. And the real laborers were mostly Black. And then they gradually realized that the land they had purchased here had not really been "uninhabited" but had been brutally stolen.
At age 8, I went to play around the block with a new school friend and heard that "eeny meeny miny moe" song for the first time. When I sang it at home, I said, "Ha! Ha! What is a (n-word), anyway?" My mother's jaw dropped, and she said, "No, that is NOT a funny word, and you must NEVER say it again! and you must never sing that song again!" And she told me how horrible slavery had been and how badly Black people were still suffering. She told me that if I EVER said that word again, a Black person might hear me saying it, and it might remind him of some horrible thing bad people had done to him or a loved one, and, she said softly, "He might cry." A few years later, I remember, I read something in some magazine about all the different Native American tribes. I started noticing that there were not very many Native Americans around us anywhere. I asked my mother what had happened to the Native Americans. She got a pained look and suggested I read a book about it. I put down the book halfway through and cried for an hour.
Why did I have to learn these things at home, and not at school? And why did Black and Native American children have to sit through blatant slander about their ancestors, just to protect children with European ancestry from the truth? And why do the descendants of white supremacists think that their ancestors should be held up as models of perfect behavior? Why do the white supremacists believe that only their feelings matter, and that they should be undisturbed in their fantasies of family perfection?
= new reply since forum marked as read
