A Liberal Dose, Sept. 28, 2023 "Does the History of Slavery Matter Today?"

 

A Liberal Dose

September 28, 2023

Troy D. Smith

“Does the History of Slavery Matter Today?”

 

This week I am going to talk about a sensitive, and unpleasant, topic: slavery. A few week ago, my friend John Gottlied, after condemning the blot of slavery in the harshest terms, pointed out that there were slaves before Thomas Jefferson. This is very true. I am not really reacting to John here, but rather to what I think a lot of people feel: that while slavery was a travesty, it is not fair to lay all blame for it on Europeans, as if they and their descendants were uniquely guilty, when it had existed for millennia. It also occurred to me that a lot of people might not be aware of how slavery grew, and of how the transatlantic slave trade really WAS new and different, not having the historical context. It further occurred to me that future generations will understand it even less, as our current state government (and others around the country) are determined to make sure no one ever really has to think about it (or know about it) much. From some people’s perspective, if Americans simply stopped ever talking or thinking about slavery, they would stop thinking and talking about race… and it would go away. I disagree, of course.

I encourage students to watch the brilliant (and fact-based) film “Twelve Years a Slave,” which I think is the most accurate portrayal of slavery ever to be shown onscreen. I urge them that, when certain difficult scenes occur, they should not obey their instincts and close their eyes or turn away. They must witness. That has been one of the biggest problems of our country -our collective tendency to look away and not acknowledge realities that make us feel bad. That is by no means a new or recent phenomenon.

The history of slavery is one of my primary research areas and the focus of my Ph.D., so I’ve spent a lot of time learning about it… and thinking about it. I want to spend just a little time this week talking about that institution as it existed before Columbus sailed across the ocean, and then later explain what changed, how, and why.

Here’s the short, easy version of slavery: it has probably existed for as long as humans have. For as long as there have been separate bands of people who can look at those outside their group as enemies and lesser beings who can justifiably be exploited. In the ancient world, you usually became a slave by virtue of a stronger country or band conquering yours. You were more likely to become the property of a king or kingdom than of an individual, and you were lumped in with all the other captives to work on major projects for that kingdom -building roads, pyramids, great walls, et cetera. Eventually, though, slaves did become commodities to be sold on the open market. In many cases, slavers traveled with imperial armies. Sometimes individuals had contracts with the king to buy captives and re-sell them at a profit to other individuals, where they would most often become household servants or work in mines or other hard physical jobs.

However. Those captives were still just a by-product of war in the ancient world -not the GOAL of war.

By the Middle Ages, an extensive slave trade had developed in northern Africa and the middle east, controlled primarily by Arabs. They bought captives from Sub-Saharan Africa, from other parts of the middle east, and from Europe. Race was not a factor. Anyone could become a slave. Most of the slaves from that route became household servants or laborers in the Arab world, but some were sold farther afield. There was an effort in the middle ages, in modern day Iraq, to have large numbers of slaves concentrated on massive farms or mining operations, but frequent revolts kept that from catching on.

What changed? To be continued.

 

--Troy D. Smith, a White County native, is a novelist and a history professor at Tennessee Tech. His words do not necessarily represent TTU.

Buy the book A Liberal Dose: Communiques from the Holler by Troy D. Smith HERE

You can find all previous entries in this weekly column HERE

A list of other historical essays that have appeared on this blog can be found HERE

Author's website: www.troyduanesmith.com

The author's historical lectures on youtube can be found HERE

A Liberal Dose, September 21, 2023 "Now Her Ghost Follows Me Everywhere"

A Liberal Dose

September 21, 2023

Troy D. Smith

“Now Her Ghost Follows Me Everywhere”

“It is impossible to say how first the idea entered my brain; but once conceived, it haunted me day and night… I loved the old man. He had never wronged me. He had never given me insult. For his gold I had no desire. I think it was his eye! yes, it was this! … and so by degrees -- very gradually --I made up my mind to take the life of the old man, and thus rid myself of the eye forever.”

That is, of course, from the beginning of the classic Edgar Allen Poe story “The Tell-Tale Heart,” published in 1843. Perhaps you are also familiar with Poe’s “The Cask of Amontillado” (1846): “The thousand injuries of Fortunato I had borne as I best could, but when he ventured upon insult I vowed revenge. …but the very definitiveness with which it was resolved precluded the idea of risk. I must not only punish but punish with impunity.” 

If you are familiar with them, it is quite likely you first encountered them in school. I remember reading the first one in middle school, and the second one in high school. Poe engaged my imagination. And, I feel compelled to point out, I have no murder victims buried under my floorboards or behind any brick walls.

I grow weary of complaining about parents and government officials trying to prevent history teachers from teaching actual history; now, here in our town, people are calling for the head (or at least the job) of an English teacher who dared to engage her students in creativity and imagination. And we have a school board member castigating the school superintendent for not punishing said teacher harshly enough.

And what was the crime? This creative writing prompt: “I never meant to kill her. I only wanted to hurt her, but now her ghost follows me everywhere.”

Some students were uncomfortable with this assignment because it took them to “a dark place.” This may well be. The teacher’s stated goal was to get them to stretch themselves and get outside the box -which is never comfortable. As I understand it, she did not invent the prompt but learned of it through a popular website for English teachers. There are a lot of ways it could have been expanded, depending on the student doing it. Just looking at the prompt itself, I get the following ideas which could become the moral of this story: You have to take responsibility for your actions. Bad actions, intentional or not, can haunt you the rest of your life. Maybe “only wanting to hurt someone” is a bad idea because it can spiral out of control and destroy lives.  My point is, a prompt like this could inspire a meaningful and worthwhile thought process. If it were purely about the alleged joy of committing murder, and nothing else, it would not have begun with contrition and bad consequences.

Let’s say that using the prompt really was a bad idea. Even so, the teacher has suffered enough and clearly learned from it -why keep hammering at her? Should this one assignment drive her out of her chosen profession?

In fact, why keep hammering at teachers, period? We have a crisis in teaching in this country. More and more teachers are quitting, and more and more young people are deciding they don’t want to become teachers after all, because they see how teachers are treated today.

For the life of me, I can’t figure out how we got to the point that people think “making students comfortable” is the primary aim of education. It is the opposite. And often those same people are perfectly happy to make other people’s children uncomfortable to prevent any momentary discomfort for their own. 

How’s this for a prompt: “I didn’t mean to kill the teaching profession, now her ghost follows me everywhere.”

--Troy D. Smith, a White County native, is a novelist and a history professor at Tennessee Tech. His words do not necessarily represent TTU.

You can find all previous entries in this weekly column HERE

A list of other historical essays that have appeared on this blog can be found HERE

Author's website: www.troyduanesmith.com

The author's historical lectures on youtube can be found HERE

 

A Liberal Dose, Sept. 14, 2023 "Who Is It That 'Weaponized the Justice System'?"

 

A Liberal Dose

September 14, 2023

Troy D. Smith

“Who Is It That ‘Weaponized the Justice System’?”

I want to open this week by acknowledging John Gottlied’s references to my column last week. I can honestly say the same things about his writings that he said about mine: I often disagree (sometimes vehemently), I agree more often than people might expect, and I eagerly await each week’s new installment.

Now on to this week’s topic.

Sometimes my irony barometer is strained to the point of breaking. Oddly enough, it usually occurs as a result of Trump or his followers. Take, for instance, this refrain we are constantly hearing nowadays: “Joe Biden is weaponizing the Justice Department by going after his political enemies!” Or this nugget: “We have a two-tiered justice system, with conservatives on the bottom being persecuted!”

Let’s take that second one first. We DO have a two-tiered legal system, all right. What if Trump really had won in 2020 (instead of just pretending to), and those January 6 protesters had been Black Lives Matter activists? Do you think they would have all gone home and slept in their own beds that night? How many do you think would have never gone home at all? I think we all know it would almost certainly have been more than the one rioter who was killed in the real attack. This, despite the fact that all the numbers show that the vast majority of terrorist attacks in this country since 9/11 have been perpetrated by far-right extremists.

But that first one, about “weaponizing the Justice Department,” that is a real doozy. It was Donald Trump who had, as one of his main campaign slogans in 2016, “Lock her up!” This was over Hillary Clinton’s alleged carelessness with classified documents online, when Trump illegally kept more sensitive documents (involving, among other things, nuclear secrets) in his pool-house and bathroom. It was Donald Trump whose two Senate-confirmed attorneys-general, both of them in ideological lockstep with him, wound up losing their jobs because they drew a line at how far they were willing to abuse their offices at his command. In fact, just 26 days before the 2020 election, Trump called for Bill Barr to indict Joe Biden for the “greatest crime in history,” allegedly “perpetrating the Russia hoax.” Heck, just nine months ago Trump said that “A Massive Fraud of this type and magnitude allows for the termination of all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution.” 

Before you think I am practicing the sort of what-aboutism I criticize in others, allow me explain the difference. Hillary Clinton did not get locked up, and Joe Biden did not get indicted, for one simple reason. There was no evidence. It was not political -it was Republican officials who declined to do what Trump wanted, for the simple reason they could not win in court with nothing more than accusations. Everything that Donald Trump and his cronies have been indicted for, and are being tried for, is backed up by massive amounts of evidence. This is further reinforced by the fact that, as we learned last week, the Georgia grand jury also recommended indictments for Lindsay Graham, Mike Flynn, and several others (including both former Republican senators from Georgia). If the whole thing was a political hit job, a Republican as prominent as Lindsay Graham would surely have been getting his mug shot taken -but the D.A. declined to indict those individuals because there wasn’t as much clear evidence against them in this case.

To decline to prosecute someone with this much evidence of criminality, just because of an election… THAT would be the miscarriage of justice. Laws matter.

--Troy D. Smith, a White County native, is a novelist and a history professor at Tennessee Tech. His words do not necessarily represent TTU.

 

Buy the book A Liberal Dose: Communiques from the Holler by Troy D. Smith HERE

You can find all previous entries in this weekly column HERE

A list of other historical essays that have appeared on this blog can be found HERE

Author's website: www.troyduanesmith.com

The author's historical lectures on youtube can be found HERE

 

 

A Liberal Dose, Aug. 7, 2023 "Two Very Different Marches on Washington"

 

A Liberal Dose

September 7, 2023

Troy D. Smith

“Two Very Different Marches on Washington”

 

I want to start this week by telling you that all my columns from the last two years are now collected in a book, “A Liberal Dose: Communiqués from the Holler.” If you like what I have to say, or know someone who would, go online and buy a copy. If you despise what I have to say, buy a copy and burn it -heck, get together with friends and have a bonfire, long as you pay for ‘em first. Now, on with the column.

“My friends, let us not forget we are engaged in a serious social revolution.”

These words were spoken in Washington sixty years ago last Monday by civil rights leader John Lewis (the same man whose street Paul Sherrell tried to have renamed for Donald Trump). Yes, this was the same march where MLK gave his famous “I Have a Dream” speech, but he was not the only one there. In addition to the quarter-of-a-million marchers, two-thirds of whom were Black, there were the two African American leaders who organized the march, which was the pinnacle of their work over the previous twenty-plus years: A. Philip Randolph and Bayard Rustin. Know who else played a major role? A couple of white guys: Walter Reuther, president of United Auto Workers, and Stanley Aronowitz, a union organizer for Amalgamated Clothing Workers (another of their organizers had been arrested and thrown out of Sparta in the early 1940s for an early attempt to organize the shirt factory).

Those guys (and others) were involved because what we normally just refer to as the March on Washington (August 28, 1963) was officially called “The March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.” It was about economics and poverty as well as civil rights. Most of their demands centered on basic rights for African Americans, but they were also calling for a minimum wage increase and job training for the unemployed. That part gets left out, but labor action and civil rights have often gone together. Remember, MLK was assassinated in Memphis in 1968 while there to support a sanitation workers’ strike.

Civil rights for minorities and economic relief for poor people in general. A crowd that may have been majority-Black but which had a substantial number of white allies (up to a third, or around 80,000+). All involved in an action that was not only peaceful, it was carried out with an enormous amount of dignity, solemnity, and spirituality. An action, and a movement, that sought SOCIAL revolution -a change in society.

Contrast that with what Trump and his legion of co-conspirators are now on their way to trial for, a conspiracy with a march (or, more accurately, an assault) on Washington at its center. A horde of furious rioters, screaming and spouting obscenities and physically attacking police. Destruction and foul desecration of the Capitol, some smearing feces on the walls. And people dying. All of it egged on by a man who is, in almost every way, the polar opposite of Martin Luther King, Jr. -except when it comes to the ability to inspire some people to action by oratory. And what were they calling for? Social DEVOLUTION, resurrecting a time and a social order that was NEVER great for people in the minority. Like the 1963 marchers, they did not get what they wished for that day -but they may have pulled the country closer to it.

Look where we are, a week past the 60-year anniversary of that memorable march. A Florida racist with swastikas on his guns shoots up a Dollar General in a Black neighborhood, stating it was because he wanted to kill Black people. Red state legislators and governors, including our own, pushing rules that restrict the teaching of accurate history where racism is concerned, and in Florida touting the “economic benefits” of slavery.

We must all remember, in King’s words, “the fierce urgency of now.”

 

--Troy D. Smith, a White County native, is a novelist and a history professor at Tennessee Tech. His words do not necessarily represent TTU.

 

Buy the book A Liberal Dose: Communiques from the Holler by Troy D. Smith HERE

You can find all previous entries in this weekly column HERE

A list of other historical essays that have appeared on this blog can be found HERE

Author's website: www.troyduanesmith.com

The author's historical lectures on youtube can be found HERE

 

A Liberal Dose, August 31 2023 "What Is History, and Why Does It Matter?"

 

A Liberal Dose, August 31, 2023

“What Is History and Why Does It Matter?”

Troy D. Smith

 

I’m going to share with you part of what I tell students on the first day of my basic U.S. history class -which is a “gen ed” course, one of those that everyone has to take (usually in their freshman and sophomore year). I don’t say this to upper division classes that are full of history majors or minors. Here goes:

I realize most of you are here because you have to be. Some of you may be interested in history, but most of you, probably, are not. Maybe that’s because of previous history teachers, who gave you a long list of dates to memorize. It may surprise you to know that I don’t care if you remember exact dates (as long as you’re in the right decade)… dates, you can look up online. I want you to understand. To get the big picture. To know, not just what happened and roughly when, but why, and what the consequences were. That’s much harder to find online -you may go through many pages of a google search before you find someone who actually knows what they’re talking about.

I realize that almost none of you are history majors -but I’m going to make a bold assertion. I believe that -no matter what your major, or what your future career winds up being -you’re going to look back on this as one of the most important classes you took in college. And I’ll tell you why.

No matter who you are -no matter where you fall on the political spectrum -at some point (if it hasn’t happened already) you’re going to look around you and say, “This stinks. I wish I could do something to change it.” And you can. History -especially American history -has almost never consisted of one very talented, very important individual deciding to change something and then making it so. American history has worked from the ground up. It has been groups of people -groups of informed, dedicated people -working together toward a common goal and achieving it. Sometimes it took decades, or even longer. Think about it: abolition, women’s rights, desegregation, the labor movement, LGBTQ rights… heck, even the Revolution that formed this country. It was never just one person. You can play a role, and an important one.

But first…

You have to understand where we are and how we got here. That is the first step. You can’t change anything until you know what needs changing and why. You can’t build a bridge to the future unless you have one side firmly planted in the past.

Now I’m going to tell you what the study of history actually is. It is not just looking at the past. Archaeology, anthropology, economics… a lot of fields deal with the past. History is, specifically, looking at the documents of the past. Those can be newspapers, diaries, letters, government reports, speeches, cartoons… the list goes on. I know a guy whose dissertation looked at all the ship’s manifests coming in and out of Charleston harbor in the 1700s -seeing what was bought and sold told him about the economy and the culture. Another person did a study of joke books -seeing what was considered funny and how that changed over time can tell us about the beliefs and mores of the people. Some of my work involves looking at old comic books or movies.

The important thing is… seeing what people thought at the time. Not what other people have told you about what people thought or did. Go to the primary sources. Go to the documents. You will often find that what you thought you knew is not the complete picture, or sometimes not even an accurate picture.

It is not wrong to see for yourself. It is not wrong to question. It is not wrong to want to make things better.

And this is where we start.

 

--Troy D. Smith, a White County native, is a novelist and a history professor at Tennessee Tech. His words do not necessarily represent TTU.

Buy the book A Liberal Dose: Communiques from the Holler by Troy D. Smith HERE

You can find all previous entries in this weekly column HERE

A list of other historical essays that have appeared on this blog can be found HERE

Author's website: www.troyduanesmith.com

The author's historical lectures on youtube can be found HERE