Despite what Florida board says, we know who benefited from slaves. It wasn’t us | Opinion
Whose idea is it to try to make us believe that the poor, abused and burdened people, who were snatched from their homeland and stuffed, chained together in the slimy belly of a ship, was to benefit them?
When I think about someone wanting to change our history to make it more palatable, or pretty, one question comes to mind: Why? Our history is not always pretty. But it is our history, and it should not be changed.
Yet, it seems that is what is going to happen to Black history in Florida, if we the public, don’t let our protesting voices be heard. We can’t let this happen, people. Somehow, we must get it through the heads and minds of those seeking to change our history, that it can’t be done. We simply won’t let it happen.
Look at it this way: You can apologize to a person or persons you have hurt. But you can never undo the hurtful act.
It is the same with slavery. I am certain that some of the ancestors of slave owners are ashamed of some of the deeds their fore parents inflicted on an innocent people. I understand. We Blacks don’t blame you for what happened centuries before you were born.
But to say that Blacks benefited from slavery is crazy. The Florida Board of Education recently certified new standards for teaching Black history in public schools, saying students should be taught that in some instances, slaves could “benefit” from their enslavement. The DOE’s action has sparked a national outcry.
READ MORE: Teachers enraged that Florida’s new Black history standards say slaves could ‘benefit’
Blacks are still suffering from the ugly effects of slavery, nearly 160 years after it was abolished.
While we Blacks have been successful in many areas (and I include myself), these gains have not been accomplished without a lot of bloodshed, putdowns and tears. Being successful in a profession doesn’t mean that you got there easily. And think of the millions of Blacks who lost their lives, simply because they were Black, before they could offer their gifts to the world. Please tell me — who benefits here?
It is hard for me to think of the pain and suffering that my ancestors endured in the slave ships that carried them across the ocean. Can you even imagine the filth the people had to endure in the pit of ships that brought them by force to a land that had already labeled them not even human? It didn’t get any better when they landed. Once off the ships, they were placed on auction blocks and sold to the highest bidders. Who benefited from that?
In their new homeland, African women and girls soon learned they were human enough to be raped by their new masters. And when their babies were born, they watched helplessly as their babies were snatched from their bosoms to become slaves on another plantation.
And these same African mothers whose own babies were stolen from them often had to nurse the babies of their white slave owners. Not a pretty picture. But it seems to me that the beneficiaries there were the slave owners.
What the person or persons who wrote this new history curriculum that says, “… slaves developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit…”doesn’t know or doesn’t want to know that many of the Africans who were brought to these shores came with skills of their own. They were already inventors and innovators.
When I was a child, I saw movies depicting slavery as a warm, happy time for Blacks. One such movie was “Song of the South,” in which a slave named Uncle Remus was loved and revered by the whites who owned him — according to the movie makers. As a child, watching that movie, I dreamed of being there with Uncle Remus as he sat around weaving tales about Brer Rabbit and Brer Fox and the briar patch, and eating hot, plump sweet potatoes just pulled out of the fire by Uncle Remus, himself. It made my mouth water.
But even as a child, I noticed the little white children were always clean and nicely dressed, while the little African children wore rags and were barefoot. I tried to block out that picture. After all, the “little Darkies” (as the Black children were referred to) were happy. They laughed and danced around Uncle Remus.
I was only a child. Still, I left the theater with a lot of questions in my mind. If slavery was all that good, why were the little Black children treated differently? Why did they have to live in shacks with dirt floors? And had only rags for clothes?
Then, as I grew up, I learned the real truth about slavery from stories told to me by family members, teachers and elders in our community. They knew our history because it had been passed down firsthand to them. And although it wasn’t pretty, it was worth knowing.
Our storytellers didn’t spare us anything. They told us about the beatings and the lynchings, many times just for sport. As time passed and I grew up, I became witness to some of the ugliness that started in slavery but was carried out over generations to my generation.
So when our used history books didn‘t teach us our history, we learned it anyway. It was passed down to us through generations. For me, it had not been too many generations. I am the great-great-granddaughter of slaves.
Our people told us that often on the plantations, slaves weren’t allowed to communicate in their own language, for fear of an uprising. But what the slave masters didn’t know was, that while they were able to enslave the Africans’ bodies, they couldn’t enslave their minds.
Being the clever and intelligent people they were, Africans learned the language of the whites and used it to compose songs to communicate with each other. This type of communication was common during the Underground Railroad, when many slaves were led to freedom by Harriet Tubman, nicknamed “Moses” by abolitionist William Loyd Garrison, according to the Harriet Tubman Historical Society. An old slave song would often help the runaways get the message of freedom.
As I grew and learned the truth, I realized that the movie “Song of the South” and those like it were perpetrating a big, fat lie. Slavery was not pretty. And the only ones who benefited from it were those who held my people in bondage.
I know, and so do you, that America was built on the backs of the free labor of slaves. For centuries, my people have dedicated not only our skills and gifts, but our lives, too, to the country we have grown to love — a country that has never loved us back.
We have come a long way, folks. We have come over a way, as James Weldon Johnson wrote in his famous poem, “Lift Every Voice and Sing”, “… We have come over a way that with tears have been watered. We have come, treading our path through the blood of the slaughtered. Out from the gloomy past, till now we stand at last… Where the white gleam of our bright star is cast.”
While we still have a long way to go, we are still being guided by the gleam of our bright star. But do not be fooled: We know the beneficiaries of slavery. It’s not us.
