8 posts tagged “slavery”

500 Years Later

In honor of Barak Obama's inauguration Wednesday, I watched the documentary  500 Years Later, a perspective documentary on the status of racial relationships in those societies that once enslaved African Americans. The documentary attempts to give a brief history  of African slavery but its central value lies in the numerous interviews with contemporary black thinkers, writers, teachers, swcholars, lawyers, etc. about the present day ramilfications of slavery that can still be seen on the surface of modern society. It deals with the issue of racial education, public policy, the argument about reparations, the psychology of race and self-image, and a number of other subjects that a history teacher working in the whitest state in the Union should be cognizant of. 
 
In a speech Barak Obama gave last March, he made reference to the fact that any community that dares to publish its ideals will have to contend with a good deal of hypocricy as it struggles to achieve them. "Of course," he said in that speech,

"the answer to the slavery question was already embedded within our Constitution - a Constitution that had at is very core the ideal of equal citizenship under the law; a Constitution that promised its people liberty, and justice, and a union that could be and should be perfected over time.

And yet words on a parchment would not be enough to deliver slaves from bondage, or provide men and women of every color and creed their full rights and obligations as citizens of the United States. What would be needed were Americans in successive generations who were willing to do their part - through protests and struggle, on the streets and in the courts, through a civil war and civil disobedience and always at great risk - to narrow that gap between the promise of our ideals and the reality of their time."

I tend to think that he struck the right note when he argued that the key to better race relations had something to do with finding the commonalities in our hopes more important than the differences in our histories.

"I believe deeply that we cannot solve the challenges of our time unless we solve them together - unless we perfect our union by understanding that we may have different stories, but we hold common hopes; that we may not look the same and we may not have come from the same place, but we all want to move in the same direction - towards a better future for of children and our grandchildren."

I spoke with a friend of mine who went to the inauguration and came back feeling that they now knew "what hope felt like". I genererally prefer to leave my politics out of this blog but ... I will say that from what Barak Obama said about the need for forward looking thinking in his speach on racism last March, I suspect this is the feeling that he wanted people to leave his innauguration with.

"The profound mistake of Reverend Wright's sermons is not that he spoke about racism in our society. It's that he spoke as if our society was static; as if no progress has been made; as if this country - a country that has made it possible for one of his own members to run for the highest office in the land and build a coalition of white and black; Latino and Asian, rich and poor, young and old -- is still irrevocably bound to a tragic past. But what we know -- what we have seen - is that America can change. That is true genius of this nation. What we have already achieved gives us hope - the audacity to hope - for what we can and must achieve tomorrow."

Question for Comment: Are the conflicts that you have with people related to differing histories (you see the past differently) or different hopes (you see the ideal future differently)? How can you narrow the gap?

Beloved

Toni Morrison

The last few days, in between exams and final papers, I have managed to read Toni Morrison's Pulitzer Prize winning novel, Beloved. Needless to say, you won't get the final word on a Pulitzer Prize winning book from me. But I mean to outline a few things that Morrison speaks to me.

One of the themes of the book has to do with how long it can take to process abuse and trauma. All of the characters in Beloved have been traumatized and physically and emotionally abused by slavery. In that sense, Beloved is a second Uncle Tom's Cabin, gnawing away at the lie in the National consciousness that slavery could be a humane institution. Morrison makes it clear that it destroyed lives, whites and blacks.

Every person that came out of slavery was a survivor and every one would have to have pieces of them put back together. With any luck, they found people that could help them, some related, some not:

"“Suddenly he remembers Sixo trying to describe what he felt about the 30 mile woman. “She is a friend of mine.  She gather me.  The pieces I am, she gather them and give them back to me in all the right order.  It's good, you know, when you got a woman who is a friend of your mind.” P. 273

What is particularly interesting to me is that the WAY Morrison writes, you have to put pieces together yourself. You, as a reader have to do what the characters have to do. Work out what happened and what it means. Sometimes, you are inside people's heads. Sometimes, you are watching what happens to them through the floorboards. Memory and "rememory" are incessently present, as if the memories of these slaves are scabs that have to be peeled off to be healed, and peeled off again to be healed again, - all one can hope for is that in each round of the painful process, a little less gravel will be found in the wound. Morrison makes use of a set of characters that had lived on a "humane plantation" to make it clear that even there, abuse, psychological, emotional, sexual, and economic was rampant.

"“We could move,” [Sethe] suggested once to her mother-in-law. “What would be the point?”  Asked Baby Suggs. “Not a house in the county ain't packed to its rafters with some Negro’s grief. . . . In all of baby's life, as well as Sethe’s own, men and women were moved around like checkers. Anybody Suggs knew, let alone loved, who hadn't run off or been hanged, got rented out, loaned out, bought up, brought back, stored up, mortgaged, won, stolen or seized.

. .  . what she called the nastiness of life was the shock she received upon learning that nobody stopped playing checkers just because the pieces included her children.” P. 23

... And the emotional impact would take generations to work out, not just in the time it took to announce an Emancipation Proclamation. So many of the character in this novel have scars - they have broken trusters and frozen passions. In so many ways, their ability to form bonds and to love was crippled. And clearly, as one of the characters so eloquently puts it, "Anything dead coming back to life hurts.”

Trauma taught slaves that they should put as many emotions into hibernation as possible:

"Sethe looked at her hands, her bottle -greensleeves, and thought how little color there wasn't the house and how strange that she had not missed it the way baby did.  Deliberate, she thought, it must be deliberate, because the last color she remembered was the pink chips in the headstone of her baby girl.  After that she became as color conscious as a hen.  Every dawn she worked in fruit pies, potato dishes and vegetables while the cook did the soup, meat and all the rest.  And she could not remember remembering a molly apple or yellow squash.  Every dawn she saw the dawn, but never acknowledged or remarked its color.  There was something wrong with that.  It was as though one day she saw a red baby blood, another day the pink gravestone chips, and that was the last of it."

It taught them tobond to nothing and no one:

“Risky, thought Paul D., very risky.  For a used-to-be slave woman to love anything that much was dangerous, especially if it was her children she had settled on to love.  The best thing, he knew, was to love just a little bit; everything, just a little bit, so when they broke its back, or shoved it in a croaker sack, well mabe you'd have a little love left over for the next one.” P. 45

“So you protected yourself and loved small.  Picked the tiniest stars out of the sky to own; lay down with head twisted in order to see a loved one over the rim of the trench before you slept.  Steal shy glances at her between the trees at chain-up.  Grass blades, salamanders, spiders, woodpeckers, Beatles, a kingdom of ants.  Anything bigger wouldn't do.  A woman, a child, a brother -- a big love like that would split you wide open in Alfred, Georgia.  He knew exactly what she meant: to get to a place where you could love anything you choose -- not to need permission for desire -- well now, that was freedom.” P. 162

Clearly, everyone got disconnected by the institution of slavery and needed help getting put back together. Sethe needs Paul D to provide a sense of saftey. Paul D needs Sethe to affirm his ability to create a place of safety - something he could never do for anyone before. It is because of him that she begins to see colors again:

" . . kneeling in the keeping room the morning after Paul D. came, she was distracted by the two orange squares that signaled barren 124 really was.

He was responsible for that.  Emotions sped to the surface in his company.  Things became what they were: drabness looked drab; heat was hot.  Windows suddenly had view.  And wouldn't you know he'd be a singing man.” P. 39

It is because of her that Paul D begins to assemble his disconnected self, unpacking the emotions that he had for so long slammed shut in the tobacco can that sits where his heart used to be.

“He would keep the rest where it belongs: in that tobacco tin buried in his chest where a red heart used to be.  It's lid rusted shut.  He would not try it loose now in front of this sweet sturdy woman, for if she got a whiff of the contents that would shame him.  And it would hurt her to know that there was no red heart bright as Mister’s comb beating in him. . . . working dough.  Working, working dough.  Nothing better than that to start the day's serious work of beating back the past.” P. 73

As I said, all of the main characters are having to suck out the venom of slavery from their veins and memories. Even the saintly, Baby Suggs, holy:

“Those white things have taken all I had or dreamed,” she said, “and broke my heart strings to.  There is no bad luck in the world but white folks.” (P. 89) . . . but . . .  "Bit by bit, at 124 and in the clearing, along with the others, she had claimed herself.  Freeing yourself was one thing; claiming ownership of that free itself was another.” P. 95

Perhaps one of the most moving and powerful passages in the book is a sermon (Call'in) given by Baby Suggs, holy in the camp meeting, Calling these former slaves to combat the abuse they experienced with love.

“Here in this here place, we flesh; Flesh that weeps, laughs; Flesh that dances on bare feet in grass.  Love it.  Love it hard.  Yonder they do not love your flesh.  They despise it.  They don't love your eyes; they'd just as soon pick them out.  No more do they love the skin on your back.  Yonder they flay it.  And all my people they do not love your hands.  Those they only use, Tie, bind, chop off and leave empty.  Love your hands!  Love them.  Raise them up and kissed them.  Touch others with them, add them together, stroke them on your face as they don't love that either.  You got to love it, You!  And no, they ain't in love with your mouth.  Yonder, out there, they will see it broken and break it again.  What you say out of it they will not heed.  What you scream from it they do not hear.  What you put into it to nourish your body they will snatch away and give the leavins instead.  No, they don't love your mouth.  You got to love it.  This is flesh I'm talking about here.  Flesh that needs to be loved.  Feed the need to rest and to dance;  backs that need support; shoulders that need arms, strong-arms I'm telling you.  Know my people, out yonder, hear me, they do not love your neck unnoosed and straight.  So love your neck; Put a hand on it, and grace it, stroke it and hold it up.  And all your inside parts that they'd just as soon slop for hogs, you got to love them.  The dark, dark liver -- love it, love it, and the beat and beating heart, love that too.  More than eyes or feet.  More than lungs that have yet to draw free air.  More than your life holding womb or your life giving private parts, hear me now, love your heart.  This is the prize.” P. 88-89

One of the greatest traumas that slavery inflicted on people caught in its web, as Morrison portrays it, was the ways in which it drove slaves to inhumanity themselves. In Beloved, Sethe kills one of her own children to keep it from being taken back into slavery. Forgiving whites was one thing but how did one forgive themselves for the many ways that slaves had to compromise themselves?

“You got two feet, Sethe, not four,” Paul D says to Sethe when he learns of what she did, “and right then a forest sprang up between them; trackless and quiet.” P. 165

Can one forgive a person for doing something like that? Can one forgive themselves? Baby Suggs, holy is left in a moral paralysis over it.

". . . she could not prove or condemn Sethe’s rough choice.  One or the other might have saved her, but beaten up by the claims of both, she went to bed.  The white folks had tired her out at last.” P. 180

Paul D puts his finger right on the heart of the dilemma when he says "that just beyond his knowing is the glare of an outside thing that embraces while it accuses.” P. 271 I can only assume that he is referring to God who, if the Gospels say anything, knows exactly what it is like to kill a child to save a child."

I close this review of what I got out of this book with a passage that expresses ever so clearly how we eventually create in reality what we project in imagination:

"White people believed that whatever the manners, under every dark skin was a jungle.  Swift unnavigable waters, swinging screaming baboons, sleeping snakes, red gums ready for their sweet white blood.  In a way, he thought, they were right.  The more colored people spent their strength trying to convince them how gentle they were, how clever and loving, how human, the more they used themselves up to persuade whites of something Negroes believed could not be questioned, the deeper and more tangled jungle grew inside.  But it wasn't the jungle blacks brought with them to this place from the other livable place.  It was the jungle white folks planted in them.  And it grew.  It spread.  And, through and after life, it spread, until it invaded the whites who had made it.  Touched them everyone.  Changed and altered them.  Made them bloody, silly, worse than even they wanted to be, so scared were they of the jungle they had made.  The screaming baboons lived under their own white skin; the red gums were their own.” P. 199

The world owes a debt to Toni Morrison, holy for helping us all work through our Traumas.

Incidentally, the house number in which the story takes place is 124. Sethe has four kids and the third one is dead which is why the three is missing I suspect. It has been "disremembered" 

Question for Comment: In the novel, Beloved, Baby Suggs, holy insists that the work of reclaimg our sense of dignity and self worth must come from within us. We cannot wait for someone to affirm our worth to us. And yet, it seems, that no one in this novel recovers without the love and affection and support of others. When you look at the distance between where you are and where you would like to be in terms of loving yourself, do you see a need for more internal initiative or external help in the process?

Amazing Grace

This past week I have been discussing the writings of Abraham Lincoln and Ambrose Bierce with my American students and a group of  students from Amman, Jordan. Someone in the class mentioned that there must have been someone who first decided that the African slave trade had to go. I responded that this particular "someone" was William Wilberforce, a British MP who worked tirelessly to end the slave trade in the British Empire.

It seemed as good a night as any to watch the movie AMAZING GRACE and since my internet was down most of the evening, I did.

William Wilberforce: No one of our age has ever taken power.
Pitt the Younger: Which is why we're too young to realize certain things are impossible. Which is why we will do them anyway. 

"He did not know he could not fly, and so he did" as the Guy Clark song, The Cape puts it. The alliance between William Pitt and Wilberforce is an enviable one. Anyone who wants to attack an institution that makes people money needs to have a William Pitt somewhere in the hierarchy to support them. Pitt was (is) England's youngest Prime Minister but he had a sort of John F. Kennedy enthusiasm about reform it seems and Wilberforce was his Robert.

"Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves." William Pitt, Speech to Parliament 1783

An article in the journal of the History of Ideas (September 1970) makes it clear that Wilberforce knew the central argument of his case against slavery hinged on his ability to make people see that these Africans were not inferior beings, animals that looked like men, or mutant-scions of Noah's son Ham. He had to prove that it was the institution of slavery itself that was creating the illusion that slavers and plantation owners were arguing as cause. This is made clear in a History of Ideas article by William Baker entitled, William Wilberforce on the Idea of Negro Inferiority;

"William Wilberforce (1759-1833), the English parliamentary spokesman for the abolition of the slave trade in the British Empire, saw clearly the importance of the belief in Negro inferiority. "The advocates for the Slave Trade originally took very high ground; contending that the Negroes were an inferior race of beings," Wilberforce wrote in a pamphlet in 1807. "It is obvious," he continued, "that, if this were acknowledged, they [the Negroes] might be supposed, no less than their fellow brutes, to have been comprised within the original grant of all inferior creatures to the use and service of man." If the blacks were incorrigibly stupid and morally depraved to the level of mere beasts, "then all, except perhaps a few stubborn advocates for justice in the abstract, would be content to leave them to their fate."

"In the course of his labors to abolish the slave trade, Wilberforce exposed the sham logic in the idea of Negro inferiority. Arguing as a politician for specific laws of abolition rather than as an intellectual seeking to make
an abstract point, he instinctively believed the transplanted African to be fully human and a victim of abusive circumstances. But as he listened to the advocates of slavery defending their position, he saw that their prejudices concerning the intrinsic nature of the Negro served as the moral and intellectual bulwark of their system. . . .

If Wilberforce's arguments against the old view of Negro inferiority now appear to be obvious, it is because he and his fellow English abolitionists (along with their American counterparts) did their job well.

... In 1789, eighteen years before the cessation of the slave trade and almost half a century before the abolition of slavery in the British Empire, Wilberforce urged the House of Commons to consider the real meaning of the fable
of Negro inferiority. "It is we ourselves that have degraded them to that wretched brutishness and barbarity which we now plead as the justification of our guilt."

And yet, money was stuffing the ears of anyone who might have their consciences pricked by Wilberforce's rhetoric. One apologist for the slave trade argued,

"The impossibility of doing without slaves in the West Indies will always prevent this traffic being stopped. The necessity, the absolute necessity then, of carrying it on must, since there is no other, be its excuse."

William Wilberforce on the Idea of Negro Inferiority
William Baker
Journal of the History of Ideas, Vol. 31, No. 3. (Jul. - Sep., 1970), pp. 433-440.

Someone once told me that individual people could not influence whole institutions. I feel like buying them a copy of this movie.

Question for Comment: if you were to take on some cause greater than your ability to achieve it on your own, what would it be?

Adjunct

“I am an adjunct; I know hypocrisy.  I'm often surrounded by liberal men and women who cluck and coo about the plights of ‘women, people of color, gays and lesbians, the old, the poor, the ill, the Third World, and the working classes’ with all the politically correct and plastic emotionalism academe has given its stamp of approval to.  In the process, they either ignore, endorse or propagate the injustices done to the underclass of faculty that surrounds and outnumbers them. . . . Perhaps they have failed to realize that equal pay for equal work should be a tenet of any consistent liberal philosophy.  Perhaps they have been able to dismiss inherent liberal concepts like the right of all people to earn a decent living wage.  In fact, academe itself, the bastion of liberalism, according to supporters and critics alike, turns cold, cruel and despondent over its own underclass.”

I am an adjunct; and to be pitied.  I bought a bag of lies we call the American dream.  I was intoxicated on the Nitrous Oxide of idealism forced upon me in graduate school.  I believed caring, working hard,and doing a good job mattered and would add up to something concrete.  Instead I find myself on the wheel that turns but goes nowhere.  I don't expect the situation to change.  I know I have joined the huge group of teachers who become permanent adjuncts, who do a good job only to get one more chance to do it again. 

“I have known 30-year-old men living at home with their parents, 40-year-old women teaching college and going hungry, uninsured 50 years olds with serious illnesses.  I've known adjunct teachers who hand out A's and B's like vitamins and help students cheat on their exams so they will get good course evaluations.  I've watched people fall into obsessive relationships with their idealism and their pedagogy because it is the one defense against despair.” I am an Adjunct by Theodore Swift, found in Ghosts in the Classroom: Stories of Adjunct Faculty – and the Price We All Pay edited by Michael Dubson

The following comes from the slave narrative of Frederick Douglas and captures the feelings of one faculty adjunct I know almost precisely.

" In the early part of the year 1838, I became quite restless. I could see no reason why I should, at the end of each week, pour the reward of my toil into the purse of my master. When I carried to him my weekly wages, he would, after counting the money, look me in the face with a robber-like fierceness, and ask, "Is this all?" He was satisfied with nothing less than the last cent. He would, however, when I made him six dollars, sometimes give me six cents, to encourage me. It had the opposite effect. I regarded it as a sort of admission of my right to the whole. The fact that he gave me any part of my wages was proof, to my mind, that he believed me entitled to the whole of them. I always felt worse for having received any thing; for I feared that the giving me a few cents would ease his conscience, and make him feel himself to be a pretty honorable sort of robber. My discontent grew upon me. I was ever on the look-out for means of escape; and, finding no direct means, I determined to try to hire my time, with a view of getting money with which to make my escape."

Question for Comment: Should one protest? Or give up teaching?

Boothdiary

It never ceases to amaze me how people justify their cruelties to other people. Here are the last written words of John Wilkes Booth, assassin of Abraham Lincoln

“I can never repent it, though we hated to kill. Our country owed all her troubles to him, and God simply made me the instrument of his punishment.”

“After being hunted like a dog through swamps, woods, and last night being chased by gunboats till I was forced to return wet, cold, and starving, with every man's hand against me, I am here in despair. And  why? For doing what Brutus was honored for. What made (William) Tell a hero? And yet I, for striking down a greater tyrant than they ever knew, am looked upon as a common cutthroat. My action was purer than either of theirs. One hoped to be great himself. The other had not only his country's but his own, wrongs to avenge. I hoped for no gain. I knew no private wrong. I struck for my country and that alone. A country that groaned beneath this tyranny, and prayed for this end, and yet now behold the cold hands they extend to me. God cannot pardon me if I have done wrong. Yet I cannot see my wrong, except in serving a degenerate people. The little, the very little, I left behind to clear my name, the Government will not allow to be printed. So ends all. For my country I have given up all that makes life sweet and holy, brought misery upon my family, and am sure there is no pardon in the Heaven for me, since man condemns me so. I have only heard of what has been done (except what I did myself), and it fills me with horror. God, try and forgive me, and bless my mother. Tonight I will once more try the river with the intent to cross. Though I have a greater desire and almost a mind to return to Washington, and in a measure clear my name - which I feel I can do. I do not repent the blow I struck. I may before my God,  but not to man. I think I have done well. Though I am abandoned, with the curse of Cain upon me,  when, if the world knew my heart, that one blow would have made me great, though I did desire no greatness. Tonight I try to escape these bloodhounds once more. Who, who can read his fate? God's will  be done. I have too great a soul to die like a criminal. Oh, may He, may He spare me that, and let me die bravely. I bless the entire world. Have never hated or wronged anyone. This last was not a wrong, unless God deems it so, and it's with Him to damn or bless me.”

Last Journal Entry of John Wilkes Booth

Even Benedict Arnold held that his attempted betrayal of West Point was an act of patriotism. In a letter to George Washington he wrote "love to my country actuates my present conduct, however it may appear inconsistent to the world, who very seldom judge right of any man's actions". But lest Washington should be regarded as incapable of rationalizations himself, we have this letter he wrote in 1766:

"Sir: With this letter comes a Negro (Tom) which I beg the favour of you to sell, in any of the Islands you may go to, for whatever he will fetch, and bring me in return for him: one hhd of best molasses, one of best Rum, one barrel of Lymes if good and cheap, … and the residue, much or little in good ole spirits…That this Fellow is both a rogue and a Runaway…I shall not pretend to deny. But . . . he is exceedingly healthy, strong and good at the Hoe… which gives me reason to hope he may, with your good management sell well (if kept clean and trim'd up a little when offered for sale… [I] must beg the favor of you (lest he should attempt his escape) to keep him hand-cuffed till you get to Sea."

See HERE for Washington's thoughts on slaves

A little over a hundred years ago, US President Theodore Roosevelt wrote about HIS feelings about the native American Indians of the West who he watched being "replaced" by American settlers. He writes:

"... looked at from the standpoint of the ultimate result, there was little real difference to the Indian whether the land was taken by treaty or by war. ...No treaty could be satisfactory to the whites, no treaty served the needs of humanity and civilization, unless it gave the land to the Americans as unreservedly as any successful war."

"Whether the whites won the land by treaty, by armed conflict, or, as was actually the case, by a mixture of both, mattered comparatively little so long as the land was won. It was all-important that it should be won, for the benefit of civilization and in the interests of mankind. It is, indeed, a warped, perverse, and silly morality which would forbid a course of conquest that has turned whole continents into the seats of mighty and flourishing civilized nations. ...It is as idle to apply to savages the rules of international morality which obtain between stable and cultured communities, as it would be to judge the fifth-century English conquest of Britain by the standards of to-day."

"The most ultimately righteous of all wars is a war with savages, though it is apt to be also the most terrible and inhuman. The rude, fierce settler who drives the savage from the land lays all civilized mankind under a debt to him. ...[I]t is of incalculable importance that America, Australia, and Siberia should pass out of the hands of their red, black, and yellow aboriginal owners, and become the heritage of the dominant world races."

Theodore Roosevelt, The Winning of the West: Book IV, 1896

Sigh, it seems like Americans can't learn geography or anthropology without launching a war. It is so interesting to me that in the space of a hundred years, we have come to realize how ignorant he was. Had Americans taken some time to understand a few things that these "savages" knew, we wouldn't be watching movies like Inconvenient Truth today. And yet there is Teddy Roosevelt staring proudly from the rock on Mt. Rushmore next to Lincoln, Washington, and Jefferson.

Should he feel ashamed to be there in that company? Probably not. All three of these men said some things that would get them thrown out of political office today:

"I will say then that I am not, nor ever have been, in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races - that I am not, nor ever have been, in favor of making voters or jurors of Negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermarry with white people; and I will say in addition to this that there is a physical difference between the white and black races which I believe forever forbid the two races living together on terms of social and political equality. And in as much as they cannot so live, while they do remain together there must be the position of superior and inferior, and I as much as any other man am in favor of having the superior position assigned to the white race." Abraham Lincoln, Sept 1858

... And who can forget that Thomas Jefferson the slave holder allowed the condemnation of slavery that he wrote into the Declaration of Independence to get deleted out. If you look at the original draft, you will see that he capitalized MEN to make it clear that he included Africans in the terminology "All men are created equal".

According to Wikipedia, Washington was deeply indebted to slave labor for his ability to ride off to win glory in the American Revolution and Constitutional Convention. "

"At the age of ten, he inherited ten slaves; by the time of his death there were 316 slaves at Mount Vernon, including 124 owned by Washington, 40 leased from a neighbor, and an additional 153 "dower" slaves" which were controlled by Washington but were the property of Martha's first husband's estate."

So what do we have at Mount Rushmore but a rogues gallery of men who failed to appreciate the waste of human potential that their administrations tolerated or promoted (And FDR was no Civil Rights leader either). Aim not to be great in your own day but to be great in two hundred years. Thats the point of that sermon in stone. And the best way to do that is to unleash the potential in the people you teach. Best be about the work.

Question for Comment: Are the people around you more likely to achieve their potential because of the work you do? Why? Why not? 

There's a lot of psychology to be studied in the reading of a text like Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglas, an American Slave:

"We were all ranked together at the valuation. Men and women, old and young, married and single, were ranked with horses, sheep, and swine. There were horses and men, cattle and women, pigs and children, all holding the same rank in the scale of being, and were all subjected to the same narrow examination. Silvery-headed age and sprightly youth,  maids and matrons, had to undergo the same indelicate inspection. At this moment, I saw more clearly than ever the brutalizing effects of slavery upon both slave and slaveholder.

After the valuation, then came the division. I have no language to express the high excitement and deep anxiety which were felt among us poor slaves during this time. Our fate for life was now to be decided. we had no more voice in that decision than the brutes among whom we were ranked. A single word from the white men was enough--against all our wishes, prayers, and entreaties--to sunder forever the dearest friends, dearest kindred, and strongest ties known to human beings. . . .

I suffered more anxiety than most of my fellow- slaves. I had known what it was to be kindly treated; they had known nothing of the kind. ...

I have always found the following passage particularly relevant to contemporary situations in the world.

"I have found that, to make a contented slave, it is necessary to make a thoughtless one. It is necessary to darken his moral and mental vision, and, as far as possible, to annihilate the power of reason. He must be able to detect no inconsistencies in slavery; he must be made to feel that slavery is right; and he can be brought to that only when he ceases to be a man.

I was now getting, as I have said, one dollar and fifty cents per day. I contracted for it; I earned it; it was paid to me; it was rightfully my own; yet, upon each returning Saturday night, I was compelled to deliver every cent of that money to Master Hugh. And why? Not because he earned it,--not because he had any hand in earning it,--not because I owed it to him,--nor because he possessed the slightest shadow of a right to it; but solely because he had the power to compel me to give it up. The right of the grim-visaged pirate upon the high seas is exactly the same."

He talks about how he used to hate getting paid a few cents out of the dollars that he would make for his master because it made his master feel good about himself that he was decent enough to give money to his slave when he didn't have to. Paying him something made him feel like he was a generous man WHILE he was being an exploitive man and that is a combination of perceptions and reality that we all look for in life. Politicians often search for that combination of justifications that will allow exploitation to be defined as altruism in the public mind. It satisfies both the Plymouth Rock and Jamestowns in our national psyche. We can look for gold and make money off the growing of tobacco at the expense of land and lungs while at the same time perceiving ourselves as "cities set on a hill". "God wills it. Perhaps it will pay" President McKinley is said to have confessed when deciding to annex the Philippines.

Frederick Douglas says that he would have preferred to have gotten nothing so that the injustice would stand out for what it was.

I have felt that way from time to time in life.

Phil