I wanted to reblog something neat I saw on thedailywh.at:
Apparently the descendants of the Plessy v. Ferguson case (which found that separate but equal institutions could be upheld by the constitution and was later overturned via Brown v. Board of Education) got together and founded a group intended to increase understanding of Civil Rights. (Website: http://plessyandferguson.org/history.html).
The symbolism of this is really striking me. I’ve always felt that, while history, and especially our personal history is crucial to our understanding of self, I don’t think that anyone should ever feel confined by it.
I know someone whose ancestors owned slaves. And this has always made this person uncomfortable, which has made it difficult to discuss this period in American history. And while I understand this discomfort, its origin is something that often disappoints me when I enter a discussion about race. A descendant of a slave master, in this period, should not be afraid of being judged for this ancestry. None of us choose our ancestry, just as none of us are able to choose what color we happen to be. And while the identity we form is certainly effected by these factors, they are not so essential that it is fair to judge us based on them.
I have similar thoughts about reparations day (website: http://reparationsday.com/). While I can appreciate the idea behind the initiative (the way black and nonwhite people have been treated in America has disadvantaged them, and it is very difficult to compensate for these disadvantages), I think that the idea is offensive and counter-intuitive. The website explains that, on this day, black people will panhandle, asking for money from white people to acknowledge and compensate for slavery. I am white, and my ancestors arrived in America three generations ago, well after the Civil War had ended. And, because they were Irish, they were treated like less than people. While I do not feel that this experience is in any way comparable to the experience of slavery that so many generations of people suffered through, I do not feel that this experience was in any way my fault, and I find the idea of apologizing to every black person for slavery to be repulsive (as is assuming that every black American is descended from slaves). And I don’t think that handing slave descendants a couple of dollars is going to resolve the issue. From what I understand, reparations day began as an art piece, but it seems like some individuals want to spread the idea too thin by turning it into a movement, and in this way it has become something it should not. It has become about blaming current individuals for the crime of heritage, and it turns the necessary act of acknowledging history into and act of judgement.
The symbolism of the picture above illustrates this idea to me; the idea that we can learn from our heritage, and also become better through our understanding of it.
shannonxl 