A Black educator from Cleveland, Ohio, gave a white student quite the virtual talking-to after he outrageously wrote that slav/ery was “actually a positive thing” because it taught Black people to fight for who they are.
Adjunct professor Michelle Smith responded to the student’s ridiculous claim on her blog Saturday, Dec. 17, saying white people obviously need a White History Month to teach them about the irreparable ha/rm sla/very did to African-Americans.
Smith began The Bluest I blog post by reprinting a portion of the student’s essay, which he titled, “Slavery Changed America for the Better.” In it, the first-year pupil explained that enslav/ement helped Black people learn to stand up for themselves.
“In the end, s/lavery was actually a positive thing for the world because people learned to figh/t for who they are,” the young man wrote before explaining the ways enslaved Africans were controlled by white masters. They included being prohibited from reading and writing, horr/ific working and living /conditions and the r/ape of ens/laved women.
“However, slav/es would use the underground railroad [sic] to escape and many did,” he continued. “This simple act of courage changed the world. This started the beginning of a long flight for equal rights because sl/avery started s/egregation. R/acism really came about after sl/avery, however, s*lavery was something that really opened up people’s eyes.”
The student’s preposterous statements about the centuries-long period of Black suffering led Smith to call for the implementation of White History Month, which many white Twitter users wish for during Black History Month anyway.
However, Smith wasn’t ad/vocating for a celebration of white accomplishments. Instead, she wanted it to point out the da/mage whites have done to Black people.
“Maybe if we provided them an encyclopedic number of facts about how white people captured Africans,” Smith explained. “Transported them to the Caribbean, made them [go] through t/orture and starv/ation, transported them to America, sold them, bro/ke them, rap/ed them, sepa;rated their families, murd;ered them when they attempted to escape, mai/med them when they st/ole food or read or wrote something, while the whole time justifying their actions with decontextualized and misrepresentative religious doctrine and pseudo-science, these young white people would know better than to write s— like, ‘a privilege that s*laves did have that owners and masters actually encouraged was reproducing.’ “
Smith went on to detail the way enslaved Africans were bred like dogs to produce high-performing offspring and denounced the student’s “almost complete lack of understanding of the integral role of anti-blackness in the development of American culture and white identity politics.” Then, she offered some honest readings about en;slavement for white parents to give their children — from elementary school to college-age.
“And tell your young people — from a logical standpoint — they cannot argue that sl'avery made America ‘better’ because ‘better’ is a comparative term,” Smith concluded. “And we can only extrapolate — we can’t know — what America might’ve been if there hadn’t been slav'ery. Although I wish to God that we could.”