Slavery and Ignorance

This week I'm going to talk about slavery. First I'm going to address the prompt, and then I will branch away from the prompt and discuss something that is slightly related. So, here goes nothing.

Thanks to the wonderful American public education system, I was taught from a young age about what slavery was and simply that it was wrong. Growing up, the idea of owning another human was something that seemed silly and foreign to me, and it didn't really make much sense why people would do it in the first place. Over time, and over a lot of history classes, I slowly learned that slavery was so much more horrible than I originally thought. Human beings were treated like property and like they were less than human. Living conditions were horrible. Good slave masters were sparse and rare, and instead a huge amount of sadistic egoists were the norm. Beatings, whippings, and other horrible forms of punishment were common and were given out often by these horrible human beings. These human beings were treated like dogs and machines, as if they had no feelings, thoughts, motives or desires.

While this all may seem horrible, what's even more horrible is that this lasted for over 200 years, since before the founding of the New World. An entire economy was built up upon the enslavement of human beings, complete with a slave transportation industry and an auction industry. Slaves were packaged like meat on ships, chained together, stripped naked, and sold much like today's cars. They were degraded, insulted, hurt both emotionally and physically, bent and bruised until they were nothing more than a shell of what they used to be.

Now onto my commentary. What's even more horrible about this is the great injustice that some educators today are doing to this. There's a growing group of people who think that slavery wasn't as bad as people made it out to be, that slavery was somehow beneficial to both parties, and that it somehow did a lot of good. I personally know several of these people, and some of the people on this very blog were taught this way. What's so very horrid and appalling about this ever growing group of Americans is that by becoming ignorant on the subjects of slavery and racial inequality, they are opening the door to allow the whole thing to happen again. By saying that this horrid system of forced labor, torture, and discrimination was actually able to do some good, these people are encouraging our youth to believe the way that they do and possibly repeat this whole thing again. While ignorance may be bliss, the very famous quote from George Santayana still rings true today: "Those that don't know history are doomed to repeat it".