Frederick Douglass

More gems from Disqus

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2012-04-05:

I can attest that Mr. Douglass is sadly neglected in American schools, except as a footnote to the slavery issue. I read his biography and several of his speeches as an adult, downloaded off Project Gutenberg, and they are absolutely searing. I finally understood why so many people find the display of the Confederate Battle Flag, or incorporation of parts of it in state flags, so offensive.  Waving that flag in front of a black person must be like waving the flag of Nazi Germany in front of the descendant of a concentration camp survivor. It's beyond bad taste, to put it mildly.

I personally think his "Life and Times" and the very thinly fictional "Uncle Tom's Cabin" should be required reading in school. (A number of the incidents in "Uncle Tom's Cabin" are either taken from Douglass's biography, or that sort of thing was horrifyingly wide-spread and notorious). People need to understand not only how bad slavery was for the slaves, but how pervasive and corrupting it was to every race and class and station of life. It's still corrupting our public discourse.

N'Longa and Soloman Kane

2012-06-21:

Ana, your essay makes me think of an example where POC helping out the White Hero was done right... and why is Robert E. Howard always turning out to be my go-to author for such examples?

In the Soloman Kane story "Red Shadows", Kane first meets N'Longa, a elderly African shaman who has been taken prisoner by a usurping evil chieftain who has also captured Kane. N'Longa get Kane to promise to help him since the two of them have the same enemies, and then frees both of them. Kane helps as promised, and after that, the two become friends. No "life debt" crap, just "the enemy of my enemy may be my ally," and later, "this guy is actually honorable, unlike most of the white slavers and outlaws I see, so maybe worth staying friends with". In later stories, N'Longa is a friend of Kane's, whom Kane sometimes turns to when he has a supernatural problem in Africa--though not always, because Kane is very ambivalent about N'Longa's "black magic", even if the guy is a friend--and N'Longa in his turn sometimes manipulates Kane into being N'Longa's catspaw in cleaning up certain supernatural messes. ("Hills of the Dead" comes to mind.)

Yes, N'Longa is literally a Magical Negro; however, he's not there to help the White Hero accomplish his White Hero goals. As written, N'Longa acts as if the White Hero is there to help N'Longa accomplish his aims.

Indigenous Americans never were Noble Savages and that Trope needs to die.

2013-08-17:

There are people who just don't want Rousseau's "noble savage" to die, even though it is an archetype that never existed in any age of the world, as far as we can tell.

I read Charles Mann's "1491" recently, and found myself comparing the war between Tikal and Calakmul to the Peloponnesian War. That was when I realized my own conceptions of indigenous Americans as "noble savages" was finally dead.

Closer to home is Old Stone Fort in Tennessee. The local park guides would have you believe that that 'fort' is a misnomer and it was just some kind of "ritual site", because "they didn't have any enemies that we knew of". My spouse and I looked at the site built on bluffs at the confluence of two small rivers, the archaeological evidence of palisade walls on the landward approach, and the dog-leg entrance to the site, and, both being military science enthusiasts, said, "Nope. This was a fort. They had enemies, or Old Stone Fort would not have been so obviously a defensive work. Might want to look around for those enemies."

Sadly, being just visiting tourists and not renowned archaeologists, we only got polite smiles at our "mistaken" notions.