The Lens:
I recently read an article originally printed in “The Washington Post” (https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2020/07/27/slave-son-racism-george-floyd/) about Daniel Smith, the living son of a slave. It was a sobering read. He was born in 1932 when his father was 70 years old. That would mean his father was born somewhere around 1862. The article recounts stories his father told him of his days as a child in slavery. The stories don’t go into detail. Just fragments of man’s inhumanity to man. “The whipping post.” Does anyone need any further words than that to know the merciless cruelty, unimaginable suffering inflicted on people tied to the post. Of course, slaves weren’t thought of as people – but that is more of a refraction than a lens.
The article goes on to Mr. Smith’s life. Though slavery was abolished by the time he was born, his world was still full of injustice, like Jim Crow laws. America had abolished slavery but did not really free African Americans. It wouldn’t be until 1964, more than 100 years after the Emancipation Proclamation, that the Civil Rights Act was passed outlawing, among other things, discrimination based on race or color.
In the article, Mr. Smith is quoted as saying, “”I remember my father and mother saying ‘It’s a free country. You can do anything you want, you can be anything you want,’ and they believed it.” He later recounts yet another tragic story that occurred years after, this one cost the life of another, and happened because of the color of his skin. Per the article, “That year, he realized that his parents had been sold a bill of goods about America as the land of the free: ‘We were all brainwashed . . . . Everyone in America fell for it.’”
The article concludes with the “Black Lives Matter” movement, where Mr. Smith relates the inspiration of a new generation of young people from all races taking on, one more time, racial injustice in this country.
The Refraction:
It’s 2020, 56 years after the Civil Rights Act, 157 years after the Emancipation Proclamation, and we are still embroiled in the battle for equality, to live up to the tenets put forth by our forefathers “that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”
Only this time, we are out of legislation. We have enacted laws that prohibit people being owned by others. We have enacted laws that prohibit discrimination based on race and color. What we are left with are mindsets.
I see this as a much harder battle to fight. How do you legislate perceptions? How do you legislate against hate?
Maybe part of our inability to reconcile the treatment of African Americans in this country is because slavery wasn’t all that long ago. How do you think of slavery in terms of history? As the long ago past? It really isn’t.
The story of Daniel Smith tells us it isn’t. Too often we hear that Blacks were freed long ago and it is time to stop using that as an excuse for their problems today. But the past people talk about wasn’t that long ago. We are just one generation away from slavery. Just one generation.
Here is another very interesting thought. If Daniel Smith’s father was a child in slavery, it stands to reason there are people out there whose parents were children of plantation owners, who witnessed firsthand the institution of slavery. That means, these people might have heard firsthand accounts of slavery from their parents. What would those stories have been? Would they have even been told?
Both just one generation away.
We talk about slavery mostly from the slave perspective and the effects of slavery on future generations (in Mr. Smith’s case – generation). What we don’t talk about is the perspective of the descendants of the slave owners. Maybe that is the missing piece.
Maybe it is a lot easier to focus on African Americans, whether you’re with or against the Black Lives Matter movement, than it is to focus on those, who might be our parents and grandparents, who inflicted unthinkable suffering on fellow human beings. Maybe for there to be any hope of true reconciliation, we need to start talking about both halves of the equation.