slavery – Page 2 – Engaging Peace

Amazing Grace

Posted on October 6, 2016October 6, 2016 by kathiemm

In these troubled times, I appreciate more than ever the spiritual Amazing Grace, especially the first stanza:

Amazing grace how sweet the sound

That saved a wretch like me.

I once was lost but now I’m found.

Was blind but now I see.

I have always found the melody grippingly moving, and always want to sing along, but it was probably the film version of Amazing Grace, based on the true story of the movement against the slave trade in 18^th century Great Britain, that imbued the song with the power it has for me. That world-shattering anti-slavery movement was led by William Wilberforce, who was inspired by English poet, clergyman, and former slave-trader John Newton (1725–1807), who wrote the song.

To me, Amazing Grace is not simply a rapturous expression of Christian faith, although Christianity was the particular vehicle embraced by John Newton to rescue him from the evils in which he had become ensnared. Rather, I see it as a song of redemption and hope that reaches out across estranging and often evilly-manipulated divisions of religion, race, gender, nationality. Also, I resonate to the idea of grace as a force and gift available to all, not restricted to people claiming a particular set of beliefs in a particular religion.

My recent fantasy was that somehow Amazing Grace could become a tenacious torrent of sound that would envelop all the pseudo-Christians, deceived disciples, and lost souls of other religions who profess love and peace but promote hatred and perpetrate violence. And while it was at it, I hoped the torrent would sweep up all the angry, frightened, defensive, and sometimes venemous people who vilify fighters against injustice.

Among the people I would like to see swept up are those who scorn Colin Kaepernick for standing up against racism by sitting down during the playing of a national anthem written by a slave owner, originally including a stanza degrading runaway slaves, and a sadly apt metaphor for a nation awash in centuries of murderous racism.

My grand fantasy for the future is that the world, before it is too late, will replace national anthems and battle hymns of republics with Amazing Grace and other songs that honor love and redemption rather than violence and vicious victories.

Self-evident or reserved for the power elite? Part 1.

Posted on July 4, 2016July 3, 2016 by kathiemm

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.–That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, –That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.”

Yup, that is an excerpt from the Declaration of Independence, the lofty document presumed to have legitimized and legalized the separation of 13 British colonies from Great Britain back in 1776.

So, we might well ask, as we celebrate the achievements heralded in that document, have subsequent generations of Americans honored and promulgated those principles?

Uh, oh. The answer seems to be: Not unless it suited the interests of the ruling powers within the nation to do so.

On July 5, 1852, 76 years after the Declaration of Independence, the great American Frederick Douglass gave a speech that rings all too true today. Here are some excerpts:

“The blessings in which you this day rejoice are not enjoyed in common. The rich inheritance of justice, liberty, prosperity, and independence bequeathed by your fathers is shared by you, not by me. The sunlight that brought life and healing to you has brought stripes and death to me. This Fourth of July is yours, not mine. You may rejoice, I must mourn. To drag a man in fetters into the grand illuminated temple of liberty, and call upon him to join you in joyous anthems, were inhuman mockery and sacrilegious irony….

Fellow citizens, above your national, tumultuous joy, I hear the mournful wail of millions, whose chains, heavy and grievous yesterday, are today rendered more intolerable by the jubilant shouts that reach them….

To forget them, to pass lightly over their wrongs and to chime in with the popular theme would be treason most scandalous and shocking, and would make me a reproach before God and the world….

Whether we turn to the declarations of the past, or to the professions of the present, the conduct of the nation seems equally hideous and revolting. America is false to the past, false to the present, and solemnly binds herself to be false to the future. Standing with God and the crushed and bleeding slave on this occasion, I will, in the name of humanity, which is outraged, in the name of liberty, which is fettered, in the name of the Constitution and the Bible, which are disregarded and trampled upon, dare to call in question and to denounce, with all the emphasis I can command, everything that serves to perpetuate slavery — the great sin and shame of America! ‘I will not equivocate – I will not excuse.’”

And what about us, 240 years since that historic 4^th of July? Will we excuse the racists, the elitists, and the deniers of liberty and democracy within our own country, or will we SPEAK OUT, will we ADVOCATE for ALTERNATIVES to HATRED and AUTHORITARIANISM (AHA!)?

Oracle, Optimist, Ostrich, or Obfuscator? Part 2. The Multiple Abominations of Slavery

Posted on June 29, 2015June 29, 2015 by kathiemm

Photograph of an FBI agent leading away an adult suspect arrested in the “Operation Cross Country II”
Image is in the public domain.

In his argument that violence has been declining for centuries, Steven Pinker (Oracle, Optimist, Ostrich, or Obfuscator? Part 1) claims that activities such as “slavery as a labor-saving device were unexceptionable features of life for most of human history”—and certainly slavery has been around a long time, but not equally so in all parts of the world.

However, today, Pinker insists, slavery and other such abominations “are rare to nonexistent in the West, far less common elsewhere than they used to be, concealed when they do occur, and widely condemned when they are brought to light.”

Such an assertion is disingenuous at best and dangerously deceptive at worst. Has slavery been nothing historically except a labor saving device? Is sex trafficking merely an effort at labor saving? If not, does that mean sex trafficking does not count as slavery? Has Pinker considered all the modern forms that slavery takes?

It seems unlikely that Pinker’s definition of slavery is as broad as that of the U.S. Department of State, whose definition of modern slavery includes forced labor, sex trafficking, bonded labor, debt bondage among migrant laborers, involuntary domestic servitude, forced child labor, child soldiers, and child sex trafficking (here’s a horror story on that topic). And how about convict labor, especially given that the U.S. prison population has quadrupled in the last four decades.

These forms of slavery are certainly concealed and often widely condemned when brought to light but many of them are not nonexistent and not even rare in the US and elsewhere in the West.

In a recent article in The Atlantic, J.J. Gould tells us, “150 years after the Emancipation Proclamation, buying and selling people into forced labor is bigger than ever.” Indeed, he says, “There are now twice as many people enslaved in the world as there were in the 350 years of the transatlantic slave trade”—with the current global slave population estimated at between 20 million and 30 million people.

Seems to me it would take a lot of statistical shenanigans and redefinitions of terms to translate those figures into a “decline in slavery.”

Kathie Malley-Morrison, Professor of Psychology

How many times…?

Posted on June 26, 2015June 26, 2015 by kathiemm

Among the questions Bob Dylan asked us many decades ago are…

Photograph of the slave auction block at Green Hill Plantation, Campbell County, Virginia.
Image is in the public domain.

Yes, ‘n’ how many years can some people exist
Before they’re allowed to be free?
Yes, ‘n’ how many times can a man turn his head
Pretending he just doesn’t see?

A people are not really free if, during a prayer meeting in their church, they can be assassinated because they are of the “wrong” color, a color that for centuries has led to dehumanization and the various atrocities that dehumanization allows.

Read the related article in theguardian.

A people are not really free if one by one, two by two, nine by nine, they can be murdered and their murderers, whether they are cops or civilians, can walk free. They are not really free if they are denied equal access to the educational, employment, life opportunities that can help people be free.

Read the related article in Reader Supported News.

A people are not really free when a white American male, Dylann Storm Roof, the recent assassin of innocent black lives in Charleston, South Carolina, has all the hallmarks of a terrorist but the corporate media resist calling him one.

So much easier just to see him as a lone troubled or sick individual, rejected by his girlfriend in favor of a black man.

If the “top story” of recent days concerning the massacre at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church and the countless other stories of racist violence before and since that horrific event are allowed to just blow away in the wind, perhaps murders and war really are the American way. Also see War, Peace, Justice: An Unfinished Tapestry . . ..

Folks generally think of “Blowin’ in the wind” as an anti-war song, which obviously it is, but it is also an anti-racism song. Dylan adapted the melody from an old Negro spiritual called “No More Auction Block,” which originated in Canada and was sung by former slaves who fled there after Britain abolished slavery in 1833. The auction block may be gone but people in our country need to stop looking away and pretending they cannot see the ongoing virulence of racism. It harms us all.

Photograph of the slave auction block at Green Hill Plantation, Campbell County, Virginia.
Image is in the public domain.

Kathie Malley-Morrison, Professor of Psychology