Slavery isn’t Funny!
I hate, absolutely hate, when people joke about slavery. Kidnap, murder, and rape are no laughing matters. That’s exactly what happened to my ancestors. Not ALL ancestors, mine. You see the schools don’t teach you what really was going on during that time. They mentioned that slaves were beaten. But they don’t tell you about how brutal it was, they don’t tell you about how my ancestors were castrated, and they don’t tell you how my ancestors were raped. Men or women it didn’t matter. Just to humiliate them. It was all kind of swept under the rug and forgotten.
None of that was humorous. Not one of those sentences were funny. So, I’m confused on why people still think it is okay to joke about it. A student from Riverview Highs School, thought it’d be funny for his promposals to put on his sign, “If I were black I’d be picking cotton but I’m white so I’m picking U 4 Prom.” What bothers me more is that this had to be seen by more than one person before the proposal. So not only do we have a racist bigot mocking the years of humiliation my ancestors went through, but there’s other people condoning it. There’s other people who think it’s okay, and better yet funny.
I feel like until everyone acknowledges how bad slavery was, we are going to still have people making light of it. I was talking about this with my girlfriend when I first saw this online and we were comparing slavery to the Holocaust and the effects they had and still have on our society. For the most part Germans today feel ashamed (and maybe even remorseful) about the Holocaust; they are embarrassed and ashamed that their ancestors did that. In America I don’t believe slavery is seen the same way. In fact, it couldn’t be, because you wouldn’t have white boys using slave jokes for promposals. Whites are still trying to deny the existence, impact and long-term effects of slavery. For many, slavery as a practice and institution is still taken lightly.
