The Other

I finished Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl for the fourth time today. It is a narrative I am very familiar with and always astonished by. I wonder how was it that not too far in our past...that in a country founded on the premise of individual freedom...we turned human beings into animals and justified it because they looked different.

I then thought about today...
We do not enslave or condone slavery in America and yet...we still attempt to justify oppression or the erosion of rights based on difference.

It is easy to chip away at voting rights and disguise it as a protection.
It is easy to tell two citizens that they...although Americans...have not the same rights to cohabitation and love on a legal level because their love is not "the same" it is somehow "wrong"

There are a lot of excuses to judge and oppress... and perhaps some think that with enough excuses and justification it hides the ugly truth...

but it does not.

Harriet Jacobs, while hiding in New York, in a free state...was outraged at the fact that the Northern states had given in to the slave owning south and allowed for the Fugitive Slave Act...making the freedom she endured many pains to obtain as frail as paper in a rainstorm.  She was angry and mocked the idea of liberty and democracy in America....
She was angry because she knew enough to know what freedom and liberty and rights meant... and they should not be conditional upon skin color, wealth, or sexual orientation...they should just be.