Listening to this podcast reminded me of the “silences” in history that I learned about in my “Slavery and Freedom” history class last semester. Silences are basically what they sound like, parts of history that have been silenced because no one thought they were important enough to write down, and if they were written down somewhere, they were most likely destroyed or hidden and definitely never taught in schools. One thing that I learned was that freed Black men in America were a huge part of starting the abolitionist movement, the fight to abolish slavery. The way it was always taught to me was that black men and women were the slaves, and white men were the abolitionists who came in to save the day. I was never taught about all the black heroes who worked tremendously hard in the fight against slavery, and they never get any credit. They were just as important as all the white people and white abolitionists, but unfortunately people during that time did not think so. That’s also one of the reasons why there are not many stories and records of slaves. Even when we were trying to track down the slaves that worked on the land that UR currently stands on, our class barely found any records of the slaves that lived here. No names, no birthdays, maybe just a death certificate when owners needed to list the amount of slaves they owned and how many they lost. They were just numbers. It is sickening, and so sad. There is so much history we don’t know, and so much we will never get back.
Critical Thinking
I really like your point about silence. I also took Slavery and Freedom, and learning about silences in the slave trade and beyond in the system is so hard to read about, how owners just decided that these humans were not “enough” to be written about and they just became statistics.
I agree that Black history tends to get swept up in and focused only on slavery and parts (hence the word parts) of the civil rights movement. Teachers in high school, for me at least, would just wrap it up in American history and not really delve deeper into the complex history. I think it’s important that schools start mandating that proper education be done for students, because, in my opinion, education is a crucial part of overcoming prejudice and judgment towards others.
That sounds like a really interesting class. It’s sad and almost scary to think about the amount of history that has been erased, or at least neglected, because as you said, we can never get it back once it’s gone.
I also think that there’s a huge problem in the education system, which I focused on a lot in my blog post for today. It’s 2021, we should be learning history accurately by now (and by accurately I mean not changing the narrative to make rich catholic white men the heroes of every situation).