Potentially sensitive PoAC

This came from a comment I made in ursulav's journal, about how I found the association of slave ownership with an evil character to be sloppy character portrayal or a serious misunderstanding of historical realities. The return comment could be read a calling me a racist, and certainly did say that this was a cop-out to diminish the impact of slavery and apologize for the oppressors. (The comment wasn't from Ursula, btw.)

Here is my response.

I am not negating the evil of slavery. I am not negating the trials that slaves went through. I make it very clear to my students that those were very real, and very serious, and that they still occur and the values that inspire them still need to be fought.

I am, however, arguing against one point. This was not dehumanization. It was a different value system placed on life in general - all life, human included. They didn't decide, "Yes, all humans have value just because they're human, but we're going to make it so these humans have less value so that we can use them." They didn't acknowledge human value in the same way we do. NONE OF THEM DID. There was no serious effort at any point in history until modern times (i.e. the Renaissance and later) to abolish slavery, as far as I know. It was simply not seen as evil in and of itself.

To say that it was a conscious violation of human dignity, and that it's the grossest we have seen in a very long time, implies several things I don't think are true. First, it implies a similar concept of human dignity to ours. Second, it implies a blip in history. Third, it implies that there were those who disagreed with it vocally and that the oppressors were aware of the disagreements. NONE OF THOSE THINGS WERE TRUE until the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

If you're arguing only nineteenth-century America, you'd have a point. You couldn't have known the history that I teach my kids, so I'll fill you in: I teach ancient civilizations to ten-year-olds. A completely different context.

It is not necessary to downplay the evils of slavery in order to point out that most people throughout history have not seen it as evil. That is simply a fact. Even the Bible, the document that was most often cited as the reason for the great social change that was abolition in the West, never said slavery was wrong; in fact, it laid down quite extensive guidelines for how people should treat their slaves if they were Christians.

If you're telling me that my race and class have impacted my perspective, of course they have. I'm from a social group that were undereducated working-class people until two generations ago. My ancestors were slaves too - admittedly much longer ago than two hundred years. If you go back far enough, every ethnic group has slavery in its past, with the possible exception of most Han Chinese. Slavery was a fact of life in most parts of the world until quite recently in historical terms.

E is for . . .

We went to my dad's for dinner tonight. Amidst revelations of the political sort (my dad planning to vote NDP, for example, which nearly knocked my whole world askew) Dad and Elizabeth started playing a funny-sound game. It involved buzzing the lips. Aunty Heather and Uncle Jon got involved too, everyone happily buzzing their lips.

After five minutes of this, during which all conversation pretty much stopped, my dad looked at me with delight and said, "You know, that was a perfect buzz. She's got a great embrasure."

I haven't heard or used the word "embrasure" since my last music camp fourteen years ago, but I know what it means. It's the muscle in your lips - the one that allows for buzzing, and raspberries - and playing a brass instrument.

Elizabeth loudly announced at this point that she was "all done," so we got up from the table and Dad hurried off to find a cornet mouthpiece or two - one for him, one for Elizabeth. On an old B5 mouthpiece originally bought for my brother to learn on and used by all four of us, Elizabeth buzzed happily away, making a pretty good humming sound with just the mouthpiece. Dad buzzed right back on his lovely $200-soprano mouthpiece, thrilled.

Then he got out his cornet.

This is a beautiful instrument. It was bought as a graduation present by Dad's family when he finished training college, and it's a silver-plated gem in excellent condition. He fitted his mouthpiece into it and played a simple scale. Elizabeth watched enthralled for a moment, then said, "I do, Grandad!"

He took his mouthpiece out, put hers in, and held it to her lips.

I have never heard a child under three produce a consistent sound on a brass instrument. I've heard them do it by accident, one time out of five or six tries. I was expecting that.

What I got was a nearly-consistent, surprisingly clear tone. It wavered a bit between a C and a G, because there were no valves pressed; she was using her lip to produce the different sounds. With a few rough buzzing sounds scattered between the notes, she managed to play C, then G, and made it clear that she heard the difference. She tried again, and experimented with going up and down between them. Grandad showed her how to hold it. Her hands weren't big enough to encircle the valves, nor her fingers big enough to press them, but she was getting notes clear enough, if I hadn't known better I'd have assumed she was six years old and had been playing for several days.

Dad dug up something less expensive than the B5 - it's a $75 mouthpiece in good condition in spite of the wear and tear four learners put it through - and she wandered around for the next twenty minutes, happily buzzing away on her little antique cornet mouthpiece.

My child has just proven herself to be a worthy six-generation Salvationist. She's also clearly a descendant of my grandfather, who used to be a fine cornet soloist. She's going to be a cornet player.