“John Brown was a radical abolitionist who believed in the violent overthrow of the slavery system. During the Bleeding Kansas conflicts, Brown and his sons led attacks on pro-slavery residents. Justifying his actions as the will of God, Brown soon became a hero in the eyes of Northern extremists and was quick to capitalize on his growing reputation. By early 1858, he had succeeded in enlisting a small “army” of insurrectionists whose mission was to foment rebellion among the slaves. In 1859, Brown and 21 of his followers attacked and occupied the federal arsenal in Harpers Ferry. Their goal was to capture supplies and use them to arm a slave rebellion. Brown was captured during the raid and later hanged, but not before becoming an anti-slavery icon.”
This is the report that Emma writes about from the NPR article. My colleague Hasan Kwame Jeffries, a historian of the civil rights movement, wrote the preface:
“We the people would much rather have the Disney version of history, in which villains are easily spotted, su ering never lasts long, heroes invariably prevail and life always gets better. We prefer to pick and choose what aspects of the past to hold on to, gladly jettisoning that which makes us uneasy. We enjoy thinking about Thomas Je erson proclaiming, “All men are created equal.” But we are deeply troubled by the prospect of the enslaved woman Sally Hemings, who bore him six children, declar- ing, ‘Me too.'”
The Ram Truck ad featuring an excerpt from MLK’s “Drum Major Instinct” speech is more crass than you may have originally realized. In the original speech, Dr. King discusses the impulse we all have “to be important, to surpass others, to achieve distinction, to lead the parade.” It leads us “to be joiners” and “explains why we are so often taken by advertisers. You know, those gentlemen of massive verbal persuasion. And they have a way of saying things to you that kind of gets you into buying. In order to be a man of distinction, you must drink this whiskey. In order to make your neighbors envious, you must DRIVE THIS TYPE OF CARE. (Make it plain) In order to be lovely to love you must wear this kind of lipstick or this kind of perfume. And you know, before you know it, you’re just buying that stuff. (Yes) That’s the way the advertisers do it”…
… “It often causes us to live above our means. (Make it plain) It’s nothing but the drum major instinct. Do you ever see people buy cars that they can’t even begin to buy in terms of their income? (Amen) [laughter] You’ve seen people riding around in Cadillacs and Chryslers who don’t earn enough to have a good T-Model Ford. (Make it plain) But it feeds a repressed ego.
“You know, economists tell us that your AUTOMOBILE should not cost more than half of your annual income. So if you make an income of five thousand dollars, your CAR shouldn’t cost more than about twenty-five hundred. That’s just good economics. And if it’s a family of two, and both members of the family make ten thousand dollars, they would have to make out with one CAR. That would be good economics, although it’s often inconvenient. But so often, haven’t you seen people making five thousand dollars a year and driving a CAR that costs six thousand? And they wonder why their ends never meet. [laughter] That’s a fact.”
… “And you know, you see people over and over again with the drum major instinct taking them over. And they just live their lives trying to outdo the Joneses. (Amen) They got to get this coat because this particular coat is a little better and a little better-looking than Mary’s coat. And I got to drive this CAR because it’s something about this car that makes my CAR a little better than my neighbor’s CAR. (Amen) I know a man who used to live in a thirty-five-thousand-dollar house. And other people started building thirty-five-thousand-dollar houses, so he built a seventy-five-thousand-dollar house. And then somebody else built a seventy-five-thousand-dollar house, and he built a hundred-thousand-dollar house. And I don’t know where he’s going to end up if he’s going to live his life trying to keep up with the Joneses.”
King goes on to discuss the way this instinct is “destructive,” “causes us to lie” and “distorts our personalities,” leads to “snobbish exclusivism” and “classicism,” to those who have things to think they are “a little better than that person who doesn’t have it.” He goes on to also say it leads to “blindness and prejudice,” particularly “race prejudice,” the “false feeling” among working-class whites that because they have certain things that they are “superior” because their “skin is white.”
To King, this is why we, as a society are “drifting.” He spends the remainder of the talk arguing for a redefinition of the “drum major instinct,” to point it away from such base, surface, materialistic and selfish ends and towards broader and deeper spiritual and social ends of love and justice.
So, the transgression is much worse than the initial outrage.
An article from NPR discusses American education and why it fails to teach slavery’s ‘hard history.’
“‘In the ways that we teach and learn about the history of American slavery,’ write the authors of a news report from the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), ‘the nation needs an intervention.'”
“The report lays out several key “problems” with the way slavery is often presented to students. Among them:
1. Textbooks and teachers tend to accentuate the positive
2. Slavery is often described as a Southern problem
3. Slavery depended on the ideology of white supremacy
4. Too often, ‘the varied, lived experience of enslaved people is neglected.'”
There is a quiz at the end that can test your knowledge of American slavery. The article discusses the results among high school seniors as “dismal,” as of the 1,000 seniors surveyed only 8% cited slavery as the reason the south seceded.
I thought I’d share this article because it highlights an issue with American k-12 schools in how they teach history, and this may be the reason many of us are taking this class.
In Medical Bondage, Cooper Owens examines a wide range of scientific literature and less formal communications in which gynecologists created and disseminated medical fictions about their patients, such as their belief that black enslaved women could withstand pain better than white “ladies.”
Julie Hawks: Did you face any challenges conceiving of, researching, writing, revising, publishing, or promoting this book? If so, please share those challenges and how you overcame them?
Deirdre Cooper Owens: The biggest challenge I faced was trying to eradicate all of the voices I absorbed from well-intentioned colleagues, editors, friends, writing group members, and former professors who had competing ideas about how I was to write Medical Bondage. Once I learned to trust myself, I found it difficult to isolate and amplify the voice of enslaved and Irish immigrant women whose stories and experiences were contained within medical narratives written by white male doctors.
