reflections on Takaki pp. 50-150
The reflections of Frederick Douglas (“Don’t Give a Nigger an Inch”) and Millie Evans (“The Best Mistress and Master in the World”) are an interesting, almost contradictory juxtaposition. Fredrick Douglas brilliantly recognized that participation in oppression corrupts good character, noting how Mrs. Auld changed over time and internalized the framework of slavery, including its injustice, as she participated in the practice of owning slaves. Treating another human being as less than human, concludes Douglas, poisons and subverts an individual’s moral sense. On the other hand, Millie Evans portrays two slave holders who are more or less good people. My intuition is that we, as enlightened, post-moderns living more than a century after the civil war will readily interpret Ms. Evans memoir as idealistic and romanticized—it wasn’t really that good, we conclude. However, I do not think this gives a fair reading to either history or to Millie Evans. In all probability there were “good” salve owners, people who participated in a system of oppression yet were well intentioned and strove to be morally upright people.
We tend to be absolutist in our reading of history, demonizing and villainizing individuals in the past who held beliefs and/or practices that are unusual, shocking or worse to us as twenty-first century westerners or easterners. This is problematic because history is made up of both good and bad characters, just as our world today. An absolutist reading of history is as uncharitable as damning a foreign culture and labeling it “immoral,” “uncivilized” or “heathen” merely because it is different from our own. Such an absolutist mindset simultaneously overlooks the sin and filth within ourselves and our particular culture and is closed off to challenge from an other culture (historic or contemporary), seeing good in others only when they resemble oneself.
Now, do I mean to beatify and defend Millie’s owners? No. My point is rather to neither demonize nor canonize, to complicate our understanding of cultural “others” be they contemporary or from a different period in history. History and the present world is full of individuals who are neither mere minions of Satan nor walk-on-water saints. Such a duelist framework that sorts humanity into two camps, one run by Hitler and the other by Mother Theresa, is simply inadequate, as Millie’s account reminds us. Her owners participated, wittingly or not, in a system of oppression and exploitation—yet we cannot simply conclude that they were calculating, despicable people bent on creating as much misery and destruction as they possibly could because they are portrayed as actually caring for other people, treating individuals that their culture deems sub-human as something more than mere work animals. We might reasonably conclude that the owners and operators of peon-camps (described by a former inmate on pp. 102-111) were simply horrid, corrupt individuals who intentionally sought to maximize their own gain on the backs of others—these individuals strike me as more or less in the same camp as Nazi SS officers who flayed prisoners and kept their skins preserved like animal hides, making lampshades out of human hide. However Millie’s account presents us with strikingly different characters from whom I cannot simply draw back in revulsion. Rather, what these characters from a different time and a different culture do is cause me to wonder how like them I really am. What systems of oppression do I, and everyone around me, participate in unwitting or half-wittingly? What do I do or condone that will be looked on with horror by some future other? It is easy to point to one or another contemporary issue, sweatshops for example, but these are things we are remotely aware of—what might there be within each of us that we cannot even see that condemns us, along with Millie’s owners?
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