You see, when you kill ten million Africans, you aren’t called ‘Hitler’. That is, your name doesn’t come to symbolize the living incarnation of evil. Your name and your picture don’t produce fear, hatred, and sorrow. Your victims aren’t talked about and your name isn’t remembered. This reminded me of a comment a friend made about CC earlier today - Im tired of reading dead white men. Its absolutely crucial to recognize that our education is necessarily unbalanced (one cant have unbiased learning); the diversity of students in classes like CC may be the most significant impact that affirmative action has had on my own undergraduate experience thus far. I dont think these - the perspectives and narratives absent from our curricula that we bring as students - diminish the value of what we learn, but it does help us fit the authors we read into context, that what we read did not and does not exist in a vacuum or in the illusory CC narrative. I think the point this article makes about selective readings, that we can read about Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer, but “King Leopold’s Soliloquy” isn’t on the reading list, is a crime of which we ourselves are often guilty, particularly when we read for ourselves outside of class. We read what we like read, not what we need to read. Thats the way I often see it... but to each her own. More to the point of this article, and my general Facebook audience, I would recommend you all check out King Leopolds Ghost by Adam Hochschild, an account of Leopold that emphasizes the moral dimension of the effects of Belgian colonialism in the Congo. He certainly has a bias and consequently sacrifices some of his historians objectivity, but the tradeoff is worth it. It also makes the book a more literary read (as opposed to being a history tome). Shoutout to the homie Jihad for reminding me about this.
Posted on: Sun, 10 Nov 2013 01:12:30 +0000
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