Please read “The Narrative of Frederick Douglass”
It doesn’t matter if it’s the tail end of Black History Month. There is never a set cut-off date for my fellow white Americans to wake the fuck up and see the abominations perpetrated against loving, living, breathing people. People with passions and empathy who were subjected to the most heinous treatment for centuries.
I hereby challenge every bigoted racist to read the autobiography of Frederick Douglass and continue to label themselves the oxymoron of “the righteous bigot”.
If you don’t know who Frederick Douglass is, stop everything and get your life together. At the risk of his own life, taught himself how to read and write at the cost of becoming agonizingly aware of how unjust the world had been to him and his fellow slaves. He willingly bore the burden of knowledge instead of remaining ignorant and accepting that being a person of color meant that you were little better than the abhorred Cain.
He was among the first Afro-American slaves to successfully escape captivity and go on to become an active representative for the Abolitionist Movement in the 19th century while still being considered a fugitive slave. Much like Ida B. Wells after him, he also traveled across the Atlantic to cry injustice as far away as the great courts of Europe.
He pushed Lincoln to sign the Emancipation Proclamation. Before Frederick Douglass, an escaped fugitive slave, met with President Lincoln, the President was just as dispassionate as many other white Americans of his day. Just as with his other old white men in power, Lincoln first tried to tell Douglass to wait.
The freedoms and civil liberties that we see today - including us, white people, - were inspired and borne from the resolute hands and mouths of kidnapped slaves and civilians treated as livestock for the mere presence of melanin in their skin. You will never fully be able to process the horror and tragedy that took place in the 19th century unless you stop treating your brain like a goddamned hymen and start filling it with hard, bitter reality.
Frederick Douglass not only became a spearhead for the Abolitionist Movement and one of the founding fathers of the modern Black Lives Matter movement, but we all owe him our thanks. Including you, cishets.
Without Frederick Douglass and his valiance in the name of equality and freedom, we would never have seen Malcolm X, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Ida B. Wells, and the myriad other black luminaries of our past and present.
We would have never seen Women’s Suffrage. So, white American women like myself, we all owe the bones of raped, beaten, mutilated, and violated bones of the unheard victims of slavery our gratitude and respect, too. Otherwise, our value would still be measured in money and livestock as opposed to the value of ourselves.
We would have never seen the LGBTQ+ community become acknowledged as an orientation rather than a sin and abomination. Have you not noticed you’ve never been trotted out of a prison cell and thrown onto a burning pyre intended for the murder of an accused witch because you’re too worthless to have your own execution? I kneel in gratitude before every scar on Mr. Douglass’s person from the White Man’s lash for giving me and my fellow LGBTQ+ Americans the example to follow in the name of fighting to be visible and respected instead of lobotomized and hanged, and weep with gratitude for Marsha P. Jackson.
And white American cishet bigots out there, to whom do you owe your ancestry? To your white ancestors, or to the slaves that built them their homes, bled to fertilize their wheat and sugarcane, and died nursing your own “Mulatto” forebears. In fact, it was extremely common and acceptable for the “master” to repeatedly rape and impregnate female slaves for more “free labor”. And according to the days of “Gone With The Wind”, if you so much as have a single drop of black blood in your veins, looks like you’re shit outta luck. One drop is all it takes for you to be booted off the Island of White People Only. I am no exception, and I hang my head heavily for the abominable sins of my ancestors.
I ask you, listen and read to the words of a teenage Frederick Douglass weeping before the sight of a ship sailing out to sea out of pure envy for an inanimate object’s freedom, railing at God for making him born a slave, and tell me that Black Lives don’t Matter.
