My own responses

I thought we had a great discussion on that first day of class; I appreciated everyone's insight and candor. Here are my responses to the questions I asked (edited for brevity of course, since I could talk about this all day...)

1) What do I "know" about slavery? Although I've certainly accumulated my share of "facts" over the years (and there are still lots of facts that I have yet to learn), I tend to think of slavery in more emotional and moral terms, as a dark spot on our national conscience that we have yet to erase or resolve. I know that slavery destroyed lives, broke up families, and was a massive injustice. I also know that while we tend to want to "contain" slavery by assigning it to the past and to other places (like the South), slavery was both a national and an international phenomenon (as our readings will demonstrate) and as we discussed in class, can be thought of as an ongoing phenomenon if we look closely at labor conditions and military conflicts around the globe.

2) Where did I "learn" what I "know" about slavery? I suppose I learned my share of info in school, but it was always very "dry" material and, despite (or perhaps because of?) my having grown up in the post-Civil Rights Era of the south, there seemed to be a reticence about slavery: we were presented with basic info and dates of the Civil War, agricultural details about crops grown by slaves, little tidbits about slave culture like spirituals, but nothing was really "alive." In college and graduate school I certainly found more satisfying sources of information, like Elizabeth Fox Genovese's book _Within the Plantation Household_. And I would say I learned the most by reading literature like the books we'll read in this class.

3)Why should we revisit this period of our collective past? (or why not?) Even though legal slavery came to end over 140 years ago, I think the legacy of the past is still with us (racism, poverty, inequalities of opportunity and white privilege). I think this material can make us more attuned to the realities of our present. And I think we would lose so much by not engaging with this history and this literature, which can teach us so much about human cruelty but also human goodness and endurance. Like many of you, I feel an obligation to share this material by teaching it to others--it has so much to tell us about both African American and AMERICAN culture.

Thanks for sharing your answers. I'm looking forward to a great semester.