When Will Our Society Progress?

          The whole institution of slavery is completely ironic and the rationalizations behind it have never made any sense to me.  The stripping away of humanity, the commodification, the exploitation of it all and more than anything else they way it was rationalized is completely insane, whether it be for religious reasons or whatever other assumptions they were making for their own sake.  There were the people who basically initiated the idea of it, the people who were raised surrounded by it, and obviously the people whose lives and freedom were stolen from them because of it, but what I have always wondered about and struggled with are the people who did not own slaves.  Maybe it was because they could not afford to or simply because they chose not to.  But how was there no one saying that this entire idea was totally inhumane and completely wrong in every sense?  How was there no one who tried to stop it?  If there was, I’ve never heard of them.  And that to me is a depressing thought.  Obviously when slavery was the norm and all that anyone knew, to stand up against all of society and tell them that the way they were living their lives was terrible and they should be ashamed of themselves, especially when the government was supporting it, would be a very difficult thing to pluck up the courage to do.  But it just blows my mind that for so long the majority of people seemed to think that slavery was totally okay and had no oppositions to it.  I'm sure there were people who did not approve of what was happening, but clearly they did not really try very hard to do anything about it seeing as it stayed in motion for so long.

          While my entire life, from what I have learned about it, I have been ashamed that it is a part of our country's history and that it was in existence for so long, and the brutality of it all is completely horrifying, reading this book has only magnified all of that in learning about all the little things our mainstream history textbooks never included.  Then again, I'm not sure I would have been able to process it all at the age I was learning about it, but I think it is important that we are aware of all the "dirty details" now.  In my opinion, this is why our society is stuck in what I believe to be a hole where we think we are past the issues of racism etc., by having changed the laws and working towards having a society of equality but I feel that a majority of people in this world only know what they were told in school.  This book creates a whole different side to it, a whole new set of horrors.  We cannot progress as a whole without fully being aware of what we are progressing from, even though the real dirty truth is not what we want to hear or believe.

          What I really dislike about the way society has developed is the stereotypes.  I’m not going to pretend that I don’t every stereotype people, because I do, unfortunately we all do.  Every time I see someone and think a certain thing or react a certain way to someone, it immediately pisses me off.  I wish so badly that stereotypes did not exist so that I could just look at someone that I do not know at all and not immediately proceed to assume things about them.  I hate that we are so surrounded by it every day, and we engage in the racism and discrimination that runs in our society whether we are aware of it or not, no matter of what race or ethnicity or background we come from.  I used to not realize that I did this, I thought I have never been racist at all, I don’t assume things about people I don’t know, that’s crazy!  But I think the difference is whether or not you choose to let it define you, whether or not you choose to let it direct the way you interact with other people.  Every day I think about how I hope there will be a day when these thoughts will no longer rush into my head.  I always wonder how I would see the world and view other people if I had never been made aware of these stereotypes in the first place.