READING SOJOURNER TRUTH FOR HOPE ON THE 4th OF JULY

Feeling Rebloggy
     Khadijah Costley White
     RUTGER'S UNIVERSITY

I have been feeling so much despair [in Trump's America] that, even as a media scholar, I’m often tempted to avoid the news...

It might be surprising to ear that what’s been keeping me going lately is meditating on slavery. I’ve been reading Sojourner Truth’s famous 1851 speech, “Ain’t I a Woman.”

When Truth asked the group of mostly white women in her audience whether she was a woman, she was not simply pointing to the hypocrisy of Western thought in which nations and “civilized” societies were built on the enslavement, murder and exploitation of women and children. Truth’s question was a provocation, a challenge to a racial structure built on the dehumanization of an entire group of human beings.  

[That speech] was a philosophical gauntlet. Like Black Lives Matter, it was a call to bring clarity to American oppression. Today, it’s also a reminder to me that black people have lived through the very worst of what this country has inflicted. That we have survived. 

The barbarity of American slavery should be recalled more often, if only to truly understand the significance of its demise. 

It was the grief of losing one’s child, being raped, beaten, tortured and separated from your own language, family and friends at a whim. It was a system that normalized and codified its everyday brutality. It was life in constant fear and punishing, exacting labor.

And it was completely legal...

Read More: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/04/opinion/sunday/trump-politics-hope-sojourner-truth.html?


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