One hit me the other day as I listened to an interview with the author of a book about the multi-racial descendants of her slave-owning and enslaved fore bearers.
The epiphany was how people perpetuate the denigration of others by the unwitting use of commonly accepted terms and by being blind to hypocrisies that apply to so many aspects of the humankind.
In the interview, the author, who is classified as black because black trumps when both black heritage and white heritage comprise a person's ancestry, referred to her great-grandfather several times removed alternately as a plantation owner and as a slave owner, and to the black woman he impregnated as a slave.
It struck me as she talked that referring to people from Africa who were brought to the Americas lo those centuries ago as "slaves" brands them -- and thus their descendants -- as a lower form of existence than their "owners", as not being entitled to the same kind of human rights as other people.
What do we think of when we hear or read the word "slave"? If not that the person is subhuman, than at least that it is someone who does not have equal standing with a person who is not a slave. The word "slave" doesn't fully describe the condition of human beings who have been sold like livestock to other human beings. It doesn't convey the full impact of a person who has been captured and is being held against her/his will.
Rather than use the word slave when referring to prisoners of Southern and Caribbean plantation owners, I am going to try to remember to use the word "captive", because that's what those African people and their descendants were. Captives.
Something else that author said that raised my dander (whatever that is), was referring to plantation owners having "sexual relations" with their female captives (my word, not hers).
Sexual relations? Those plantation owners weren't having "sexual relations" with their female captives. They were raping them. And that's how it should be described. Why make such acts of violence and control sound more acceptable or less horrendous than they were? Even though the females most likely didn't fight back, no doubt they were not participating in "consensual" acts. They submitted because they knew the penalty if they did not.
Then the author said that plantation owners, at least those in Barbados where her ancestors lived, had female captives baptized if they wanted to have sex with (rape) them on any consistent basis (a single time apparently didn't count), because they didn't want to have sex with a "heathen". Yet, the author said, they had no aversion to raping (her word this time) underage girls (and I would add, women, not just underage girls).
I realized I was having a multiple-faceted epiphany when it dawned on me that people use that kind of euphemisming and rationalizing for all kinds of situations.
Many people who put themselves in the "pro-life"camp, for instance, have no problem with our military killing people, if they are "collateral damage" in war -- no matter that many are pregnant women carrying fetuses the so-called pro-lifers care so passionately about. Apparently if they are fetuses in the uteri of American females, condemned to death by a U.S. court, or on the wrong end of a gun that has been bought legally and is being carried legally.
How about the term "birth control"? Isn't the objective of so-called "birth control" really to prevent pregnancy? Why don't we say so then. That's something else I'm going to try to remember to say: pregnancy prevention in lieu of birth control.
The type of cognitive dissidence permeates our mentality and discourse as we euphemize ourselves silly over gun violence (NRA: (1) "We don't need ban assault guns and/or high capacity magazines, we need to keep them out of the hands of criminals and the mentally ill. (2) "We oppose universal background checks in gun sales." Logic: If we don't have universal background checks, how the hect do we know if the buyer is a felon or mentally ill?) Similar euphemizing occurs in thinking and discussing war; evolution vs. creationism; Bible literalism; Constitutional purism and so much more.
Maybe I'm swinging at paper tigers, but I do feel good about having epiphanized such lofty thoughts.
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