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.
@roseapprentice Absolutely spot-on.
Story time: when I was growing up (elder American millennial here, was a high school freshman when the towers fell in a classroom eight miles from where the third plane crashed into the Pentagon, classmates could see smoke from their outdoor gym class), we heard a lot from our leaders and teachers about religious extremists in the Middle East teaching their students that their nations were the pinnacle of righteousness and that all other countries and creeds were lesser for not adhering to their particular interpretations of their religion.
This was all presented to us with a straight face as we were taught that our nation *was* the pinnacle of righteousness, that we were one nation under a Christian fundamentalist interpretation of god and god’s will, and that even though our legal system is ostensibly designed to allow many faiths to live side by side, enough of our country considered their creed to be so exclusively important that more and more laws were changed to reflect the religious beliefs of what were actually a very vocal minority that worked tirelessly to inflict them upon the rest of us.
Cut to the present: after more than a decade of hard-won progress, we’re at a point where religious zealots today are reaching new levels of power and legally running the table as they scale back protection and acknowledgment of LGBTQ folks, attack trans kids outright, protect murderous police forces that kill and imprison BIPOC folks disproportionately and without recourse, refuse to acknowledge or condemn white supremacists and actual real life present day Nazis, and force adults and children alike to give birth or die trying while the doctors trying to save them and give them medical care are threatened with violence and imprisonment.
In schools, a somehow even more distorted version of our country is being presented to our kids, and new laws are banning books in schools and changing what teachers can and cannot say in our classrooms. Fundamentalists are literally rewriting our history and our personal experiences: queer parents and kids alike are denied recognition or protection, American genocide and slavery is now a mere footnote and too controversial to discuss, and anybody who is not a straight white Christian cis-man is to be neither seen nor heard.
While defenders of the status quo work tirelessly to paint those of us who want to make the world safer and more inclusive as the carriers of dark ideas that our kids can’t handle and adults dismiss as unimportant, it’s imperative to remember that right now, we as a country are playing out exactly what we’ve been taught to fear and hate, and it’s not a stretch to see how our present will be written about by generations to come as its own dark chapter of human history.
