She was born to a rich plantation family in the American South during the time of slavery. She owned a slave, Hetty, a girl her parents gave her when she was a child. She was absolutely the sort of person whose racism you could justify as being ‘of her time’ and ‘just the way she was raised’.
And she cited the injustices she saw growing up on the plantation as the motivation for her becoming an abolitionist as an adult.
When she was a kid, she tried to give bible lessons to the slaves on her Dad’s plantation, and taught her own slave to read and write. As an adult, she and her sister campaigned for the end of slavery. When she found out that one of her brothers had raped one of his own slaves and gotten her pregnant three times, she welcomed her nephews into the family and paid for education for the two that wanted it.
This was a woman who was raised in a culture of slavery, looked around her as a child and said “hey, wait a minute, we’re all assholes!” and spent the rest of her life trying to put things right.
It absolutely was a choice.
This is something I’ve been forced to learn in the past two years. The world around me is turning into something I was raised to believe could only happen in history books, or maybe in other parts of the world that sort of belonged in history books.
The more I see this happening–and the more I learn about the past and how hard people did fight to stop Hitler from initially rising to power, or to point out the humanity of slaves–the more apparent it becomes that we have always had these choices, and they’ve always been the same.
And we’re always going to have genuinely appealing opportunities to make the worst possible choices again, no matter how much more modern the world appears.
George Washington owned slaves right? Most of the founding fathers did, and in grade school, to smooth over that abuse of humanity by an American hero, we as children were told “Yes, George Washington did own slaves but he freed them when he died.” And you infer that he didn’t like slavery but it was an economic necessity.
And then you’re in your mid twenties watching a food show on Netflix and you learn that because Pennsylvania was a Quaker colony, they led the nation in emancipation and if an enslaved person was in Philadelphia for more than six months, they automatically became freed. And the young nation’s early capital was in Philadelphia, where Washington brought his household of enslaved people with him. And he took them back to Virginia every five months for a time so as to start that clock over and keep them enslaved.
There’s a trend with historians to want so badly to maintain the prestige of George Washington and an exceptional and morally pristine figure. And true, there are many instances in his writing where he sounds like his opinion on slavery as an institution is turning and that he knew slavery was wrong. But his actions. He literally had to do absolutely nothing to free his household staff, and took great pains to keep them enslaved.
It’s important to remember that too. That there were people in positions of enormous power, who know what they’re doing is wrong, and choose to do it anyway.
Do not let anyone tell you his teeth were made of wood.
there are documented cases–journals and diaries–of women who would marry into slave-owning households. and they would start out wanting to treat their slaves well, educate them, free them if they could. they kept diaries, records, logs, account books. and over the years their opinion of the people they owned would change. they’d start to say that slaves deserved their enslavement and nothing could be done. they couldn’t be educated, healed, freed. sometimes the women who married in would end up incredibly cruel and vengeful, raving about how much punishment these slaves forcedtheir masters to dole out. these women who started out uncomfortable with slavery but just willing enough to marry a slave owner and live on the proceeds of slavery would end up zealously denying any possibility that their slaves could be human beings, just to be able to live with their own complicity in the system. to be able to hang on to the idea that they were a good person, that nothing could be done, that no one could change any of it.
sometimes you make bad choices. and you cant stand the idea that this could make you a bad person. so you decidethat the people you’ve hurt are the bad ones. and you can’t find a way back so you just keep making more and more bad choices, picking up speed, gaining this horrible kind of momentum, because to ever stop would crush you flat.
but it doesn’t change the fact that slave owners were wrong. they did wrong. and they had to spend their whole lives deciding, over and over again, not to do what was right.
