Jeudi, 12 Février, 2015
Verse of the Day: « Il ne se réjouit
pas de l’injustice, mais il se réjouit de la vérité; il pardonne tout, il croit
tout, il espère tout il supporte tout. »—1 Corinthiens 13 :6-7
Quote of the Day: “No one speaks in out presence like they speak in our
absence. The union between men is founded but on this mutual ignorance.”—Blaise
Pascal
« Personne
ne parle en notre présence comme il en parle en notre absence. L’union qui est
entre les hommes n’est fondée que sur cette mutuelle tromperie. »—Blaise
Pascal
French Fun Fact:
The word ‘salut’ means both ‘hello’ and ‘goodbye’ (confessedtravelholic.com)
What’s Really
Happening Over Here:
More News – http://www.lequipe.fr/
A Day In the Life:
I spent all Thursday catching up on homework. Loved it.
The Hypocrisy of
American Slavery
In honor of Black History Month, I’d like to use today’s
blog to reflect on the struggle of the African American people, a people which
I am proud to call my own. That being said, I would like to offer somewhat of a
disclaimer: the people with black skin who are living up to every stereotype,
the thugs who rioted after the death of a thug who was killed in self-defense, I
do not consider them to be cut from the same cloth as those to whom this month
is dedicated. I cannot judge, for in my Father’s eyes my sin and theirs are no
different. I am ashamed however, that such activity could even be remotely
associated with the one that men and women, black and white alike, fought and
died for throughout the history of our country. They are not the same fight.
The man and the speech that follow reflect the fight that we honor.
Who Was Frederick
Douglass?
Frederick Douglass (1817-1895) was
the best known and most influential African American leader of the 1800s. He
was born a slave in Maryland but managed to escape to the North in 1838.
He traveled to Massachusetts and
settled in New Bedford, working as a laborer to support himself. In 1841, he
attended a convention of the Massachusetts Antislavery Society and quickly came
to the attention of its members, eventually becoming a leading figure in the
New England antislavery movement.
In 1845, Douglass published his
autobiography, "The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass: an
American Slave." With the revelation that he was an escaped slave,
Douglass became fearful of possible re-enslavement and fled to Great Britain
and stayed there for two years, giving lectures in support of the antislavery
movement in America. With the assistance of English Quakers, Douglass raised
enough money to buy his own his freedom and in 1847 he returned to America as a
free man.
He settled in Rochester, New York,
where he published The North Star, an abolitionist newspaper. He directed the
local underground railroad which smuggled escaped slaves into Canada and also
worked to end Frederick Douglass racial segregation in Rochester's public
schools.
In 1852, the leading citizens of
Rochester asked Douglass to give a speech as part of their Fourth of July
celebrations. Douglass accepted their invitation.
In his speech, however, Douglass
delivered a scathing attack on the hypocrisy of a nation celebrating freedom
and independence with speeches, parades and platitudes, while, within its
borders, nearly four million humans were being kept as slaves.
(The indented information above is
a direct quote from The
History Place - Great Speeches Collection.)
What Made It Great
This speech is great for several reasons (I’ve included the
full speech below). I have always admired the beautiful, proper English that
was spoken during that time period, although I will admit that our modern
dialect is perhaps more fitting for the character of the era in which we now
live except in written form. This speech is no exception to that admiration.
Although if I had to choose one thing about it that made it great, it would
again be the context.
Douglass is brutally honest throughout his address, and what
adds to the shock value was that he was asked to speak in order to celebrate
America. Clearly, he saw that we were not yet there. His speech can be summed up
in his third, and second to last paragraphs, wherein he states:
“Your high independence only
reveals the immeasurable distance between us. The blessings in which you this
day rejoice are not enjoyed in common. The rich inheritance of justice,
liberty, prosperity, and independence bequeathed by your fathers is shared by
you, not by me. The sunlight that brought life and healing to you has brought
stripes and death to me. This Fourth of July is yours, not mine. You may
rejoice, I must mourn. To drag a man in fetters into the grand illuminated
temple of liberty, and call upon him to join you in joyous anthems, were
inhuman mockery and sacrilegious irony.
“What to the American slave is your
Fourth of July? I answer, a day that reveals to him more than all other days of
the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim.
To him your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty an unholy license; your
national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and
heartless; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mock; your prayers and
hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade and
solemnity, are to him mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy -
a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages. There
is not a nation of the earth guilty of practices more shocking and bloody than
are the people of these United States at this very hour.”
We must ask ourselves, are we not still guilty of this? Do
we not celebrate our freedom as Christians while we leave others to rot in
chains due to the “inconvenience” we must endure in setting them free – or at
least giving them the option of freedom? Share the Gospel.
The Speech (Retrieved from The History Place - Great Speeches Collection)
Fellow citizens, pardon me, and allow me to ask, why am I
called upon to speak here today? What have I or those I represent to do with
your national independence? Are the great principles of political freedom and
of natural justice, embodied in that Declaration of Independence, extended to
us? And am I, therefore, called upon to bring our humble offering to the
national altar, and to confess the benefits, and express devout gratitude for
the blessings resulting from your independence to us?
Would to God, both for your sakes and ours, that an
affirmative answer could be truthfully returned to these questions. Then would
my task be light, and my burden easy and delightful. For who is there so cold
that a nation's sympathy could not warm him? Who so obdurate and dead to the
claims of gratitude, that would not thankfully acknowledge such priceless
benefits? Who so stolid and selfish that would not give his voice to swell the
hallelujahs of a nation's jubilee, when the chains of servitude had been torn
from his limbs? I am not that man. In a case like that, the dumb might
eloquently speak, and the "lame man leap as an hart."
But such is not the state of the case. I say it with a sad
sense of disparity between us. I am not included within the pale of this
glorious anniversary! Your high independence only reveals the immeasurable
distance between us. The blessings in which you this day rejoice are not
enjoyed in common. The rich inheritance of justice, liberty, prosperity, and
independence bequeathed by your fathers is shared by you, not by me. The
sunlight that brought life and healing to you has brought stripes and death to
me. This Fourth of July is yours, not mine. You may rejoice, I must mourn. To
drag a man in fetters into the grand illuminated temple of liberty, and call
upon him to join you in joyous anthems, were inhuman mockery and sacrilegious
irony. Do you mean, citizens, to mock me, by asking me to speak today? If so,
there is a parallel to your conduct. And let me warn you, that it is dangerous
to copy the example of a nation (Babylon) whose crimes, towering up to heaven,
were thrown down by the breath of the Almighty, burying that nation in
irrecoverable ruin.
Fellow citizens, above your national, tumultuous joy, I hear
the mournful wail of millions, whose chains, heavy and grievous yesterday, are
today rendered more intolerable by the jubilant shouts that reach them. If I do
forget, if I do not remember those bleeding children of sorrow this day,
"may my right hand forget her cunning, and may my tongue cleave to the
roof of my mouth!"
To forget them, to pass lightly over their wrongs and to
chime in with the popular theme would be treason most scandalous and shocking,
and would make me a reproach before God and the world.
My subject, then, fellow citizens, is "American
Slavery." I shall see this day and its popular characteristics from the
slave's point of view. Standing here, identified with the American bondman,
making his wrongs mine, I do not hesitate to declare, with all my soul, that
the character and conduct of this nation never looked blacker to me than on
this Fourth of July.
Whether we turn to the declarations of the past, or to the
professions of the present, the conduct of the nation seems equally hideous and
revolting. America is false to the past, false to the present, and solemnly
binds herself to be false to the future. Standing with God and the crushed and
bleeding slave on this occasion, I will, in the name of humanity, which is
outraged, in the name of liberty, which is fettered, in the name of the
Constitution and the Bible, which are disregarded and trampled upon, dare to
call in question and to denounce, with all the emphasis I can command,
everything that serves to perpetuate slavery -- the great sin and shame of
America! "I will not equivocate - I will not excuse." I will use the
severest language I can command, and yet not one word shall escape me that any
man, whose judgment is not blinded by prejudice, or who is not at heart a
slave-holder, shall not confess to be right and just.
But I fancy I hear some of my audience say it is just in
this circumstance that you and your brother Abolitionists fail to make a
favorable impression on the public mind. Would you argue more and denounce
less, would you persuade more and rebuke less, your cause would be much more
likely to succeed. But, I submit, where all is plain there is nothing to be
argued. What point in the anti-slavery creed would you have me argue? On what
branch of the subject do the people of this country need light? Must I
undertake to prove that the slave is a man? That point is conceded already.
Nobody doubts it. The slave-holders themselves acknowledge it in the enactment
of laws for their government. They acknowledge it when they punish disobedience
on the part of the slave. There are seventy-two crimes in the State of
Virginia, which, if committed by a black man (no matter how ignorant he be),
subject him to the punishment of death; while only two of these same crimes
will subject a white man to like punishment.
What is this but the acknowledgment that the slave is a
moral, intellectual, and responsible being?
The manhood of the slave is
conceded. It is admitted in the fact that Southern statute books are covered
with enactments, forbidding, under severe fines and penalties, the teaching of
the slave to read and write. When you can point to any such laws in reference
to the beasts of the field, then I may consent to argue the manhood of the
slave. When the dogs in your streets, when the fowls of the air, when the
cattle on your hills, when the fish of the sea, and the reptiles that crawl,
shall be unable to distinguish the slave from a brute, then I will argue with
you that the slave is a man!
For the present it is enough to affirm the equal manhood of
the Negro race. Is it not astonishing that, while we are plowing, planting, and
reaping, using all kinds of mechanical tools, erecting houses, constructing
bridges, building ships, working in metals of brass, iron, copper, silver, and
gold; that while we are reading, writing, and ciphering, acting as clerks,
merchants, and secretaries, having among us lawyers, doctors, ministers, poets,
authors, editors, orators, and teachers; that we are engaged in all the
enterprises common to other men -- digging gold in California, capturing the
whale in the Pacific, feeding sheep and cattle on the hillside, living, moving,
acting, thinking, planning, living in families as husbands, wives, and
children, and above all, confessing and worshipping the Christian God, and looking
hopefully for life and immortality beyond the grave -- we are called upon to
prove that we are men?
Would you have me argue that man is entitled to liberty?
That he is the rightful owner of his own body? You have already declared it.
Must I argue the wrongfulness of slavery? Is that a question for republicans?
Is it to be settled by the rules of logic and argumentation, as a matter beset
with great difficulty, involving a doubtful application of the principle of
justice, hard to understand? How should I look today in the presence of
Americans, dividing and subdividing a discourse, to show that men have a
natural right to freedom, speaking of it relatively and positively, negatively
and affirmatively? To do so would be to make myself ridiculous, and to offer an
insult to your understanding. There is not a man beneath the canopy of heaven
who does not know that slavery is wrong for him.
What! Am I to argue that it is wrong to make men brutes, to
rob them of their liberty, to work them without wages, to keep them ignorant of
their relations to their fellow men, to beat them with sticks, to flay their
flesh with the lash, to load their limbs with irons, to hunt them with dogs, to
sell them at auction, to sunder their families, to knock out their teeth, to burn
their flesh, to starve them into obedience and submission to their masters?
Must I argue that a system thus marked with blood and stained with pollution is
wrong? No - I will not. I have better employment for my time and strength than
such arguments would imply.
What, then, remains to be argued? Is it that slavery is not
divine; that God did not establish it; that our doctors of divinity are
mistaken? There is blasphemy in the thought. That which is inhuman cannot be
divine. Who can reason on such a proposition? They that can, may - I cannot.
The time for such argument is past.
At a time like this, scorching irony, not convincing
argument, is needed. Oh! had I the ability, and could I reach the nation's ear,
I would today pour out a fiery stream of biting ridicule, blasting reproach,
withering sarcasm, and stern rebuke. For it is not light that is needed, but
fire; it is not the gentle shower, but thunder. We need the storm, the
whirlwind, and the earthquake. The feeling of the nation must be quickened; the
conscience of the nation must be roused; the propriety of the nation must be
startled; the hypocrisy of the nation must be exposed; and its crimes against
God and man must be denounced.
What to the American slave is your Fourth of July? I answer,
a day that reveals to him more than all other days of the year, the gross
injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him your
celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty an unholy license; your national
greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless;
your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mock; your prayers and hymns, your
sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade and solemnity, are to
him mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy - a thin veil to
cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages. There is not a nation
of the earth guilty of practices more shocking and bloody than are the people
of these United States at this very hour.
Go search where you will, roam through all the monarchies
and despotisms of the Old World, travel through South America, search out every
abuse and when you have found the last, lay your facts by the side of the
everyday practices of this nation, and you will say with me that, for revolting
barbarity and shameless hypocrisy, America reigns without a rival.
Frederick Douglass - July 4, 1852
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