Sauce for the goose

[nancylebov]

It occurs to me that if it's reasonable to talk about the legacy of slavery (218,000 google hits) in some black communities (if you think there's "the black community" you aren't paying attention to plausibility), it's equally reasonable to talk about the legacy of slave-holding (6 google hits) in some white communities.

Addendum: Slavery by Another Name is a book about the continuation of slavery through the legal system until the beginning of WWII-- black men (few black women and very few white men) were convicted under trumped up laws (frex, leaving an employer without permission) or just arrested without charge and handed over to deadly industrial slavery. This happened to some tens of thousands, and had a chilling effect on those who weren't taken.

(I've heard interviews with the author, but haven't read the book.)

Comments

[nancylebov.livejournal.com]

http://dolphin--girl.livejournal.com/153506.html

This link should work-- sorry about the botched html.

How much are you talking about your own experience, and how much are you talking about your best guesses?

[whswhs.livejournal.com]

I have only the most tangential experience with that sort of educational environment; I was in college when the very first black studies and "Chicano studies" (that's what it was called at UCSD in 1970) courses were coming into the curriculum. Elementary and secondary schools might have been starting in the same direction; I wasn't in contact with them, so I don't know.

In my last few years at a corporate job, we were all sent to "diversity training," and it was basically harmless tedium, nothing like the "yelling class" your link describes. My most vivid memory of it was of one of the instructors putting up a chart of our "diversities," where we could write into a circle words for things that made us distinctive, and filling it in—and her "diversities" were things like "woman" and "mother" and "professional" and "consultant." So I raised my hand, and commented that the things she had put down were not particularly unusual traits, but were presumably traits that were personally important to her, and asked if she wanted us to define ourselves in terms of what we thought was important about us, or of what we thought was unusual about us, and she said, "fill it out according to what you think the instructions mean." So I left it blank, and when she came to me, I said, "I have an unusually strong need for explicit definitions" and stopped.

It sounds as if this course was taught in a college, and to students who chose to be there, though they may not have known what they were getting into. That changes the dynamics from the "mandatory high school program" that I assumed.