I am sorry for slavery. Part of the privilege of being white is that I don't often need to
Last edited Thu Jul 9, 2015, 03:16 AM - Edit history (1)
think too hard about slavery. My university forced us to take a class that qualified as an ethnic studies class. My Junior year I decided I would get that requirement out of the way while at the same time fulfilling a literature requirement. I chose an African American Literature course. We read selections from the Norton Anthology of African American Literature 2nd Edition. In this course I was exposed to
Lucy Terry - Bars Fight
Phillis Wheatley - Various poems and letters
Harriet Jacobs - A fair bit of "Incidents in the life of a Slave Girl"
William Wells Brown - "Narrative of W.W.B, a Fugitive Slave" and also "Clotel"
Henry Highland Garnet - We read an Address to the Slaves of the USA
Frederick Douglass - Narrative and some other stuff
Booker T. Washington - from "Up From Slavery" and a speech which we compared and contrasted to Garnet's
Charles W. Chesnutt - "The Goophered Grapevine" and "The Passing of Grandison"
W.E.B DuBois - most of "The Souls of Black Folks"
Paul Laurence Dunbar - 15 or so different poems
James Weldon Johnson - We read all of "The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man"
Marcus Garvey - "Africa for Africans" and "The Future and I See It"
Zora Neale Hurston - "Sweat" and "How it Feels to Be Colored Me"
Richard Wright - "Native Son" Watched the Movie.
We watched a little bit of Birth of a Nation.
We watched Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Toms Cabin (didn't read it)
Gwendolyn Brooks - read a whole laundry list of stuff from her.
Toni Morrison - Part II or "Song of Solomon"
Then we each had to do an author analysis of some other author in the book who we did not read in class. I chose;
Octavia Butler - and for that I read "Kindred" and "Parable of the Sower"
Probably more, but this was from memory so it's the best I could do. Anyway, this has all served very well to open my eyes to the plight of African Americans, but the crystalizing moment for me was the day when we watched a documentary about the middle passage. They described many horrors of chattel slavery, but the one thing that shook me to my core was the image of "tight packing."
It never really struck home the utter disregard for humanity toward the African people until I saw and considered the mindset it took to rip people from their homeland, stack them in the hull of a ship for months on end lying in their own shit and piss, unable to move with no idea when this hell might cease. African American's might as well have been a box of pencils or a stack of cord wood. Maybe even less than that. What we did to you was unconscionable and horrific. And given that a politician, a leader I admire greatly acknowledged that we needed to apologize for slavery, I wanted to do my part as a white American by acknowledging your forefather's and mother's suffering. I want to say that I'm so, so sorry for slavery. I am unequivocally ashamed for what my "Christian" forefathers did to you and yours. I know it means not much, but I want you to know that this white American is interested in your struggles. This white American can only try, unsuccessfully, but try I do, to empathize with your people's plight. I am ashamed that all these years later, you are still classified by your skin color and suffer the centuries worth of indignities to this day. I am sorry for slavery. I am sorry for racism. I am sorry for my white privilege. I am sorry that cops kill your children while the justice system and our lawmakers incarcerate your brothers and fathers at rates that dwarf those of white people's incarceration rates. I am sorry that over half of your young people go unemployed. I am sorry you are often ghettoized and then forced out/priced out of the homes you manage to make in your ghetto by gentrification. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry and I wish there was something I could do to make amends. I'm sorry for the slavery you've endured at white hands for the last 400 years and still endure today. I'm sorry for slavery.
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pass your feelings on to your friends and family. 
So you've done way more than probably anybody I know to acquaint yourself with black American history and literature. Thank you, thank you, thank you for investing your time and your heart in gaining an understanding of the pain you have never and will never have to face in your own life. Honestly, thank you. If only everyone would do that, what a wonderful world this could be. 
War on Drugs, the racist for-profit prison system, and wars on brown people all over the world.
Notice that we don't "reflect" on any of the latter in modern society, very much.
I automatically assumed that 1strong got another jury alert!
...though Cruz and "Chump" are up there, too.
Thanks for the kind words. 
I don't run things around here.
DU is becoming tit for tat.
And his statements were sketchy. Jmho - but sketchy as hell!
I'm totally digging this thread. First time I've laughed out loud at DU in a long time! 
So I don't have to rub shoulders. I can just chit chat with them on the internet and be done. I don't have to smile at them or be polite in real life. 
that makes this thread, pale in comparison ... Did you know that "a lot of white folks are harmed more than helped by institutional racism."
I'm back to cultural anthropology with that one! 
Slavery in America.
It's not that I'm unsympathetic to the plight of other people elsewhere because I'm not, it's still wrong, but it's not the subject of the op.
Same with a poster downthread that brought up the fact Africans sold off other Africans into slavery. Which countries in Africa I don't know.
Although I'm sure it happened, I can't compare it to what white folks did to our ancestors here in the U.S.
Perhaps poster will come back and elaborate.
for you too. **sigh**
"Ideals?" Yes. Reality? Hell no, wasn't no stinking ideal especially for the First-american nations people or black-brown people brought here to be worked to death as slaves.... it called genocide.....geez the levels of historical ignorance being shown is truly depressing.
of disagreement.
This isn't just any "something."
Cut the crap? 
who was alerted on, it makes them ignorant and look very stupid. That individual doesn't agree from a learned point of view, just a knee jerk white point of view when confronted with the truth about the HUGE WHITE culpability and responsibility for the forced bondage and murder of millions of Africans from many areas of the continent. 99.999% of the responsibility (post #164) based on true facts of history, no RW revisionism or white privilege coloring(forgive the pun) the truth. The one alerted on? Doesn't know jack about history. I do. Nothing racist in slapping that type of ignorance into the dirt.
RW revisionist history has struck home. Geez...."Destruction of Black Civilization", had very little to do with the tribal groups selling each other to the white slave trader. The Arabs were hugely involved in the slave trade,(the Africans captured if not muslim were heathen-non believers who to them were not worthy of human respect, Portuguese, Dutch, British, French, and american slave traders did 99.999 of capture, bringing to the coast for trans-atlantic shipping, responsible for up to 12 millions deaths during the 'Middle Passage' and the brutality on the slave plantations in america and elsewhere. But evidently that doesn't matter to a lot here who know nothing of THEIR real culpability, historically speaking, of the perpetuation of human bondage and the racist problems faced by this country alone in the 21st century......just had to get that truth off my chest to the 'enlightened' ones here.. Here at DU...has opened my eyes and strengthened my awareness of just how deeply people are immersed in their fallacious historical knowledge
*loud* Why are they taxing tanning booths! Blacks do it too!
The debt is owed for the American Experience (unique to America) of Jim Crow. Don't you dare try and compare it to the colonial imposition in South Africa. The black people in South Africa were not imported goods.
Tahesi Coates would agree with me.
That's a stain on the soul of this country of which the impact continues today.
It's about Jim Crow.
Certainly - you would agree that Jim Crow is an American Experience? You should watch the PBS documentary The African Americans. Gates set up white Americans with the article you linked to - with a powerful sucker punch a few years later.
oh how I wish they were.
I love watching the maestro at work.
response #164 is all you need to understand about the historical ignorance this comment is steeped in. You should be banned from a liberal, progressive, I think, forum such as this. But you're not, so I would suggest you learn history first before making yourself look so ignorant concerning who is truly culpable in slave trading history. White privileged thinking does that I think. Naw I don't think, I know...... 
Response to Hoyt (Reply #80)
And The Warmth of Other Suns - http://isabelwilkerson.com/the-book/
There's no "but Africans did it too!" there.
They can't. They are both an American Experience.
They might TRY to say "buuuuuuuuut South Africaaaaaaaaaa" - again - they are wrong.
Rwanda - different too.
Not even Brazil or Canada.
That's the next step on your journey.
Now if you want to read an interesting book about Africa - fiction - read Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe. Of course someone will try and say - "But why didn't he write it about Germany!!!!"
Cool op - thanks for sharing your experience.
