This is Sarah GrimkĂŠ.
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 âof her timeâ and âjust the way she was raisedâ.
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 Dadâs 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 âhey, wait a minute, weâre all assholes!â and spent the rest of her life trying to put things right.
It absolutely was a choice.
They should probably also teach people the percentage of white people who owned slaves in the Americas. They should also teach about slave practices prior to European settlers in the Americas. They should also teach the current demographics of slaves and slave ownership today. This shouldnât be knowledge taught exclusively to white people but to of all races because no civilization, culture or race, are exempt from awful practices in history. We should also highlight more people like Sarah, too. Thank you for coming to my Ted Talk.
