Content area
Full text
Jane Lazare, a white Jewish journalist, described herself as:
...the distant cousin of Holocaust victims, the child of an immigrant Jew, the daughter-in-law of a woman who remembers her grandmother telling stories of her childhood in slavery, the mother of two young black men who are the fifth free born generation of people enslaved for fourteen generations." (Lazarre, 1996, p. 17).
She wrote about her visit to a 1991 traveling exhibit on slavery entitled "Before Freedom Came" at the Richmond Museum of the Confederacy in Richmond, Virginia. She mused that there is no permanent slavery museum in the United States, though there is a Holocaust Museum, following the model of Yad Vashem in Jerusalem. As she stared at a white rag doll in Richmond, she realized she was "standing in an American Yad Vashem, a museum of a holocaust inadequately remembered and insufficiently grieved." She was angered by the "morally active remembering of one genocide; the half blind refusal to remember the other" (Lazaree, 1996, p 20).
Our refusal to remember is all the more remarkable since the slave plantation, (per Robin Blackburn, as cited in Eric Foner's review of The American Crucible: Slavery, Emancipation, and Human Rights (Foner, 2011) more than any other institution, "underpinned the extraordinary expansion of Western power and the region's prosperity in relation to the rest of the world" (Foner, 2011, p. 27). Indeed,
Without the colonization of the New World, the West as we know it would not exist, and without slavery there would have been no colonization. Between 1500 and 1820, African slaves constituted about 80 % of those who crossed the Atlantic from east to west." (Foner, 2011, p. 27).
If you believe that slavery was important only in the southern United States, but not in the North, the book, Complicity: How the North Promoted, Prolonged, and Profited from Slavery, will quickly disabuse you of that notion (Farrow, 2006).
The refusal to remember the holocaust of slavery came to mind as I read Gabriie Schwab's account of growing up in postwar Germany in Haunting Legacies: Violent Histories and Transgenerational Trauma. She notes that one can acknowledge the historical facts of the Holocaust yet continue to disavow its existential and experiential impact, and that silencing in postwar...