~a column by Colleen O’Brien
You’d think that after 150 years of emancipation and 50 years of civil rights, racism in this country would be past history, not current.
I recently attended a class on a 2012 non-fiction book called The New Jim Crow, by Michele Alexander. The lawyer-professor from Columbus, Ohio explained concisely how the justice system in the U.S. today does what Jim Crow segregation did in the 20th century – keep African Americans in their place. In this era, that means in prison – one million; more than were enslaved in 1850—a disproportionate number. In her carefully researched data-driven arguments Alexander explains why, because of the “new Jim Crow treatment of African Americans, they of all the “immigrants” to this country have not risen as a group from poverty.
Next, I read a 2014 novel called The Invention of Wings by Sue Monk Kidd about a young slave girl in the early 1800s who is given as a birthday gift to her master’s 12-year-old daughter. The white girl tries not to accept her, but is forced to conform. She and her sister grow up to become abolitionists and are consequently banned from their native Charleston, South Carolina. The novel’s scenes of brutality to slaves come from documented research about the lives of the two privileged young plantation-owner daughters, the Grimke’ sisters, and their family’s slaves They defy their mother and speak in public throughout the North of the horrors of what they grew up with and the moral necessity for racial equality. The 1839 document the two sisters wrote called “American Slavery as It Is” influenced Harriet Beecher Stowe’s writing of Uncle Tom’s Cabin ,as well as this book by Kidd.
These two books have been racing into the clutches of book club devotees across America, according to Amazon Books online.
Then I started a class on a history book by a fellow who’s written three dozen of them. Historian Howard Zinn’s 1980 radical book The People’s History of the United States is unlike any text we ever used in any history course we ever took; it is the history of us from the bottom up – slaves, indentured servants, Indians, women, men who owned no property. The whole idea of racism, according to Zinn, was designed by wealthy whites fearful of white indentured servants from England sticking up for black slaves from Africa; there were a lot more servants and slaves than rich whites. The tactic was to teach poor whites that blacks, even free blacks, were beneath them. It’s worked for 400 years.
Then I read 12 Years a Slave by Solomon Northup, printed in 1853 –- this is after the Grimke’ sisters went on the speaking circuit to abolish slavery. A year earlier, Uncle Tom’s Cabin was published; seven years later, the Civil War began. Of all the books, 12 Years a Slave was the most devastating — it is a firsthand account of slavery from a free man who was kidnapped, sold south, set free and lived to tell the tale.
From these books comes an understanding that was never taught to us of a system that’s been undermining American ideals and what we think of as the sanctity of justice since the very beginning — since before the beginning — of our country. Racism reinforces social inequality. It creates divides – chasms – between humans. It is immoral. It is hateful. And it is stupid: anyone who gives racism any credence or practices it in any way first demeans himself.
