Miranda: English II, Section F

Blog # 1: Tuesday, September 4, 2007

To think on… What a controversial time in America in terms of civil rights? With the Native American Indians, the African slaves, and the women’s suffrage movement, so many different groups of people were oppressed and forced to fight for their rights.

Dunbar: “We wear the mask” & Slavery

Wow, I just read Dunbar’s “we wear the mask” poem and Sojourner Truth’s speech. I think it is such an interesting juxtaposition of looking at this period of time through two different perspectives of oppression and people fighting for civil rights. Dunbar’s poem is so simple and yet, the point that he is trying to get across is so clear to me through the simplicity of this piece of writing. I think he is pointing out the fact that slaves during this period were oppressed and mistreated but that they were covering up their suffering because they would probably be beaten or treated even poorer if they showed any sign of questioning slavery or whether it was fair. Even more than that, he says “Why should the world be over-wise, in counting all our tears and sighs?” I think that with this statement he is pointing out that even when slaves show their tears, or let out their sighs, the European settlers don’t care, they just overlook it or ignore it. I think it is very interesting that I was reading about slavery tonight in the AP US book and it briefly talked about the development of slavery.
Slaves didn’t just come to the Americas and then were mistreated and looked down upon by the European settlers. The whole idea of slavery and the oppression of African slaves evolved through a period of many years. This is my interpretation of the AP US books explanation: At first, (in around the 1620s) people didn’t really know what to think of African immigrants and servants or where to place them in the social hierarchy of society in the New World. Their status was really “ambiguous for [several] decades” but as time went on, more and more African slaves began to serve as servants for life and especially when sugar cane was introduced as a profitable crop, European settlers were shown (often by other European settlers from different backgrounds) how to grow sugar cane and how to use slave labor on a “massive scale” to plant and harvest the crop. Soon, authoritative figures in the New World began to take actions that made the message to white landowners very clear, “any white was superior to any black”. (Liberty, Equality, Power, Murrin, 48-50)
I was never really aware of the fact that the idea of slavery and the superiority of white people over black people during this time period just sort of evolved. It has always been made clear to me in my history classes that slaves were beaten, mistreated, in many cases treated like animals, but I always just thought that someone thought that they were animals and should be discriminated against and everybody else just kind of jumped on the band wagon in order to justify the fact that they could enslave black people. Eventually, I thought, people probably just got too far into it and everybody else was doing it, so it seemed like the right thing to do. To me, it makes slavery seem even worse, that it went through this whole development that took place over the course of decades, and nobody stopped to think…is this really humane?? Is this really fair?? How could they justify such behavior towards people that were just people just like they were. Black, white, people. It seems like a weak explanation for slavery, this mass killing, mass mistreatment of people, that is controversial in so many ways that this theory just kind of evolved, the theory that white people were better than black people just evolved, but why didn’t anybody question it? Obviously the African servants began to feel more and more oppressed in society (and their decreasing power and respect in society would have made it hard for them to speak out against society) but why didn’t any powerful, land owning, white man stop and think about what was evolving. Or did slavery just happen in a bang and when people questioned it, was it already too far along??