I’m still thinking about Twelve Years A Slave.
Maybe because some Americans want us to forget about slavery.
I don’t mean not dwell on it. I mean wipe it from our collective conscience by deleting it from history books or at the least calling it by a different name.
In 2010 the latter is what the Texas Board of Education wanted to do. They proposed calling slave trade the “Atlantic triangular trade.” They didn’t want American children to get the wrong impression of their history and heritage.
That same year members of the Tennessee Tea Party called for history books deleting any references to our nation’s founders such as George Washington and Thomas Jefferson owning slaves themselves.
As foolish and racist as such ideas are, they underscore something critically important beyond the brilliance of both the book and film, Twelve Years A Slave…that we should never forget.
Here’s why.
Remembering is the way we ensure that nothing like that ever happens again. That is the lesson Jews took away from the Holocaust.
Never forget because never again. That was the motivation for Israel founding the Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Memorial, in 1953.
To remember is more than recalling the past. It is to mystically enter into it through the mind and heart in a way that allows one to participate in some small way in the suffering of those who have gone before.
That is actually possible, as I found out when I visited the Museums at Dachau and in Washington, D.C..
This kind of remembering is a sacred responsibility, and while not comparing slavery and segregation to the Holocaust, it seems right to me to say that remembering these periods in our history is also a sacred responsibility of all Americans.
Slavery was not an incident in black history; it was a lived experience in American history. Blacks lived it and whites lived it. It has played a major role in shaping who we are as a nation. To forget either slavery or segregation is to forget an essential part of what has made us the people we are.
Anyone who wants to forget about these periods of our history, or to minimize them, is not trying to tell the truth about American history. They are trying to deny it.
Yes, other Americans have also suffered, not least our nation’s Japanese citizens who were put in Internment Camps during World War II. But that only underscores the need for the history books our children and grandchildren study to tell the story of the slave trade, the Civil War, and the awful time of segregation that followed. That story is the link between the dream the founders had for this nation and every struggle we have experienced in making it a reality.
So let us never forget…and let us determine that never again…to anyone.
linnposts.com 
Thank you, Jan, for this reminder of how important remembering history is in an attempt to keep succeeding generations from repeating human acts of inhumanity.
The just concluded trial of a Mr. Dunn, in Washington DC I think, who put ten bullets into a car of young black boys killing one and wounding three because they verbally challenged him when he told them to turn down their music, not only exposed his own learned racism but that of a racist undercurrent prevailing throughout our culture.
I think our younger generations are showing improved attitudes on this issue as we become increasingly diverse but there are still too many structural and behavioral signs of this base view particularly of black members of our society but others too. “Sins of the father”, or the forefathers, must be seen for what they were, taught through factual history, so that their sons can heal and amend the misguided portions of their legacy.
We and our progeny still have a long road ahead of us. Denial only lengthens it.
Again, thank you for the reminder.
Thanks, Bob. Hope for the future is with the young who know the truth about the past even with efforts to suppress it. And they don’t have the prejudices of all kinds those of us older grew up with. That is progress.