back
4 comments
John Brother Cade was a young academic when he first started assigning his history students to interview former slaves between 1929 and 1935...Unlike the WPA interviews with former slaves, however, which were conducted mostly by white and a few Black adult questioners, these documents have the remarkable characteristic of having been created by Black students...This may have resulted in the fact that there are many more brutal details and complaints evidenced in these interviews than one can see in the WPA narratives which are occasionally warily nostalgic.

Even this piece includes graphic details of torture. I found it somewhat hard to read and I'm somewhat callous. I'm glad I read it. I'm not suggesting you shouldn't. It's important history.

||content warning||

I mean yeah, the very fist line is:

> Punishments came on rainy days, reported Thomas Brown from South Carolina. In order to avoid losing the labor during fine weather, his enslaver would, with calculated efficiency, “… keep an account of all the things we did, and on rainy days, we were punished.”

EDIT: wanted to add something:

The Germany that Hitler took hold of was considered the peak of "rational, scientific" society. This was a time when "scientific racism" reigned supreme. Many people don't realize just how foundational eugenics science was to basically all of Western science. Modern statistics itself arose from eugenics studies and terms like "regression to the mean" are a direct result of that history.

I think examples like these why feminist critiques (for example) of science are incredibly important to the advancement of science itself.

For example, Judith Butler pointed out how almost every biology hs textbook described the process of egg fertilization by sperm in a way that reproduced our notions of gender and cultural beliefs about nature. Most textbooks describe this process as a competition or race between the fastest, most fit, sperm to get to the egg. When in reality, sperm are almost motionless and the egg does almost all of the selection. In addition, eggs contribute far more hereditary material (like 100% of the mitochondrial DNA) than the sperm do. Yet our cultural predispositions drove scientists to (unintentionally) construct this narrative about competition between males

Diversity of perspectives in STEM is critical to the advancement of science itself. Without feminist critiques of science, Black critiques of history, etc we might have never been able to discover our collective myths

I was really trying to say it's uniquely honest about how terrible it was, which makes it an important project. Because it was a project by a Black teacher assigned to Black students, it mostly wasn't whitewashed, neither inadvertently nor on purpose.

I know other people value trigger warnings. I mostly do not. I mostly think there are better ways to handle the need for signaling to your audience that this is a tough topic.

I'm under the weather today so no doubt screwing this up terribly. The takeaway I wish people would get out of my above comment is that the unusual methodology used for gathering this information means it's an especially valuable resource for people with a sincere interest in the history.

No I totally agree with your point (and I've edited my comment to expand on my response to some of this).

Regarding trigger warnings, I think the normalization of them has been really useful for friends of mine who've faced very real traumatic experiences. But I agree that in general we should try to push ourselves to read the things that make us the most uncomfortable like this work