katrinageist:roseapprentice: cheeseanonioncrisps:This is Sarah Grimké. She was born to a ri
katrinageist:roseapprentice: cheeseanonioncrisps: This is Sarah Grimké. She was born to a rich plantation family in the American South during the time of slavery. She owned a slave, Hetty, a girl her parents gave her when she was a child. She was absolutely the sort of person whose racism you could justify as being ‘of her time’ and ‘just the way she was raised’. And she cited the injustices she saw growing up on the plantation as the motivation for her becoming an abolitionist as an adult. When she was a kid, she tried to give bible lessons to the slaves on her Dad’s plantation, and taught her own slave to read and write. As an adult, she and her sister campaigned for the end of slavery. When she found out that one of her brothers had raped one of his own slaves and gotten her pregnant three times, she welcomed her nephews into the family and paid for education for the two that wanted it. This was a woman who was raised in a culture of slavery, looked around her as a child and said “hey, wait a minute, we’re all assholes!” and spent the rest of her life trying to put things right. It absolutely was a choice. This is something I’ve been forced to learn in the past two years. The world around me is turning into something I was raised to believe could only happen in history books, or maybe in other parts of the world that sort of belonged in history books. The more I see this happening–and the more I learn about the past and how hard people did fight to stop Hitler from initially rising to power, or to point out the humanity of slaves–the more apparent it becomes that we have always had these choices, and they’ve always been the same. And we’re always going to have genuinely appealing opportunities to make the worst possible choices again, no matter how much more modern the world appears. George Washington owned slaves right? Most of the founding fathers did, and in grade school, to smooth over that abuse of humanity by an American hero, we as children were told “Yes, George Washington did own slaves but he freed them when he died.” And you infer that he didn’t like slavery but it was an economic necessity. And then you’re in your mid twenties watching a food show on Netflix and you learn that because Pennsylvania was a Quaker colony, they led the nation in emancipation and if an enslaved person was in Philadelphia for more than six months, they automatically became freed. And the young nation’s early capital was in Philadelphia, where Washington brought his household of enslaved people with him. And he took them back to Virginia every five months for a time so as to start that clock over and keep them enslaved. There’s a trend with historians to want so badly to maintain the prestige of George Washington and an exceptional and morally pristine figure. And true, there are many instances in his writing where he sounds like his opinion on slavery as an institution is turning and that he knew slavery was wrong. But his actions. He literally had to do absolutely nothing to free his household staff, and took great pains to keep them enslaved. It’s important to remember that too. That there were people in positions of enormous power, who know what they’re doing is wrong, and choose to do it anyway.Do not let anyone tell you his teeth were made of wood. Not slavery, but related story from my own family.My stepdad was born in apartheid South Africa. He is a white man. You would think, growing up in that milieu in the 1950s and 60s, that he would to some extent a a product of his environment. And yet, even from when he was a teenager, he would hang out with black friends (and have the shit beaten out of him for that) be a hippy (and have the shit beaten out of him for that) and supported Mandela (and had the shit beaten out of him for that).Like, literally half the stories he told us about growing up ended with - ’and the police put us in a van and beat us until we couldn’t see for the blood in our eyes, then threw us out to try and find our way back from the middle of nowhere’.Then, when he was 18, his parents bought him an amazing birthday present: a helicopter ride above Durben. He told us about how cool it was to look down over all the local houses with their swimming pools. Then he spotted what seemed to be this huge column of smoke in the distance and tapped the pilot on the shoulder, alarmed, ‘is that a fire?’No, said the pilot. That’s the black neighborhood, that’s the smoke from the cooking fires because they don’t have gas or electricity.And my stepdad said, that was what really hit it home. Like, he’d known racism was bad in SA, but that was the first time it really hit him just how bad it was. He decided then and there he would do the only thing he could think to do, vote with his feet and gtfo.So first he pretended to be Jewish to be sent to Israel, then hitchhiked from there to the UK. He lived in squats and eventually settled in Notting Hill, then one of the big windrush neighborhoods. This was all between the 1960s and 1980s. He’s still one of the most open and welcoming people I know. He recently became a Buddhist. -- source link
#family stories