After reading “Ghostland” by Colin Dickey a quote that stood out to me while reading was the line “But what is clear is that history is not just written by the victors; it’s written by the literate”. This quote made me realize how even though black people have won against the awful treatment they experienced back in the day, full responsibility and acknowledgement for their pain and suffering that white people caused will never come. The white people of this time were very vicious, attempting to strip away all humanity from black people. So that they couldn’t feel guilt or compassion for the people they tortured on a daily basis.
The literate demographic during slavery was mainly white men and who else has a particularly white male demographic? Slave owners. As a literate white man during this time if you were writing on the topic of slavery why would you want to paint your demographic in a bad light? I doubt these writers wanted to paint their fathers, brothers, uncles and grandfathers as horrible monsters even if that’s what they were. So to me in a sense I feel the stripping of humanity from black slaves was meant to put a blindfold on us, to allow us to move on without question and not hold slave owners accountable.
Let’s say a white writer was interested in telling all the truth of what has happened in the south, how would he know what it was like for the slave. Somebody who isn’t a part of the community can only see so much, because even though slave owners were ruthless and proud there is only so much evil they are willing to show the world they are capable of. Most of the horrible hunting stories slaves shared with each other will never be heard, and will most likely remain unknown, what is not unknown is the monster in all those stories.
The song is Get Up, Stand Up By Bob Marley & The Wailers, while I was writing this, this song was playing in my head, especially around 2:12 because of how white colonizers pushed their own religious beliefs onto their slaves and other minorities they came across like the Native Americans.
