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No, I’m Not Grateful That Slavery Ended
Whenever I hear, implicitly or explicitly, that Black Americans should be satisfied, or at least grateful, for the racial progress thats been made in America over the centuries, I sigh a deep sigh within. It’s an ancestral sigh.
The first problem is simple: why should I be grateful for the cessation of an institution that should have never existed in the first place. This is an earnest question.
Women aren’t told that they should be grateful for progress like women’s suffrage or domestic violence and spousal rape being made illegal. I have never heard anyone say that Jewish people should be thankful to the Allies who ended Hitler’s reign of terror.
Yet, we should be appreciative.
When something is inherently wrong — on a basic, spiritual, human, primal, and soul level, it should be righted.
Yet, white people want to remind me that there were white people who fought for abolition, civil rights, and of course in the Civil War. They want to tell me that we’ve come far as a nation, and that things aren’t nearly as bad as they used to be in this country for Black Americans — as if that wasn’t easy to accomplish. I’ve had white history teachers remind us that slavery was not only an American institution, while leaving out its the only place where chattel slavery occurred, as if…
