Of course two wrongs don't make a right. But this wasn't about two wrongs. This was about what happens when one race screws over another so bad that the other race finally has enough and will seek revenge along with fighting for their freedom. It is about cause and effect.
So when did they teach you in school what white slave masters and their wives (and often children, too) did to slaves? How many masters raped the black women and girls and by law were allowed to? How many crying children were taken from their mother's arms and sold off? How many hundreds of thousands of slaves or more died aboard the slave ships, their bodies dumped in the ocean (yes, this included women and children, many number in the hundreds of thousands)?
It's easy to say, "Two wrongs don't make a right". But lets suppose YOU are the slave. Your slavery has been for your whole life, day in and day out, toiling in a hot sun, improper clothes, food, housing. Branded and treated and numbered with the livestock. Maybe you came to America aboard a slave ship, lying for months chained to other slaves, packed in like sardines, unable to sit up, stretch, vomiting and defecating in that spot, next to each other, rats on you and all sort of vermin. If you live, you then are sold off on an auction block. Maybe you watch your wife and children sold to different plantations. Maybe you watched your wife and little baby die on that ship. Or as often happened, the babies were thrown overboard to start, or even killed on the march to the ships, which may have been many weeks walking in painful chains. The people running that ship are all white. These are your enemies.
You have been beaten, tortured, maybe mutilated or seen others beaten, tortured, mutilated or murdered for trying to escape. Your parents, siblings, spouses, and children separated and sold off at any point in time. You are enslaved. Powerless. White people having the right to do anything they wanted to you and get away with it. And did. Your whole future is locked up in enslavement to a man. And even if he is a "nice" master, you are under a dictator nevertheless with no ability to live free, pursue a dream or a goal of your own, or raise a family and keep them safe. You are only made to live to toil to make another rich while you remain beaten down, poor, and alone with no hope in sight. This is your reality each and every day of your life from birth to your death. You live in hell. The owner of hell is the plantation master and his family, his whole darned privileged family. All enjoying the fruits of your misery.
And then you see an opportunity for freedom, by someone willing to stand up and fight for it. You know this is a fight to the death, because it is kill or be killed. You have a chance to deal a horrible blow to the people who have made your life a living hell. You feel hatred for these people and all the horrible things they do and represent. You lash out in anger against those who have enslaved, beaten, raped your wife and young daughters and sons (your children). You have seen your children beaten by masters and mistresses. You may even have seen them die at the master's hands. You have had them sold away from you, as if you are not a human with the capability to love your children as much as they love theirs. You cannot fight against your oppressor or go to court.
Is it so hard to see why they would lash out and kill the families of those who have done what they have done to them? How long do you think a society can crush and oppress other people without them finally revolting against those who have taken away their lives utterly and completely? If so you really haven't taken a good hard look at slavery.
We see these types of revolts in all cultures when the one oppressing has finally pushed down hard and long enough. People reach their breaking points. And usually by then, they will be blind with rage and the need to extricate themselves to the point of taking out the enemy COMPLETELY if possible. They know it is kill or be killed. (And exactly why do you think white women were innocent of how the slaves were treated?)
What a joke to intimate it was just a few slave masters that might have been bad (someone else said that before you). That is a farce. Why did we drop bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki? Were not women and children killed in that effort to stop the war and win? Were not women and children killed during the uprising in the French Revolution? What about the revolt against the Bolsheviks? In what uprising were not women and children killed? Whites know all about killing innocent women and children and babies. Just ask the Native Americans. I guess when they killed white men, women and children that was also a "two wrongs don't make a right"? Should they have stopped before killing a white baby as they watched their own babies murdered at the hands of their enemy? Should they have felt sympathy for the people who were slaughtering them, trying to eliminate them off the face of the earth? Would you in their situation? Native Americans do not celebrate July the 4th or Thanksgiving to this day. They have not forgotten.
The story of Nat Turner to me was a violent reaction over 48 hours in revolt to 400 years of violence at the hands of whites. Read a book, "Black Like Me". It is a true story written by a white journalist, John Griffin, you colored his skin to live in the south as a black man. That might give you an inkling what it might have been like 100 years prior to this book. Because life 100 years later was still atrocious for blacks. And lets not forget lynchings were happening 100 years after the Emancipation of slaves and whites still were getting away with murdering black men, women, and children.
You have got to get past the pablum they teach in school that leaves out the reality of the brutality and horrors of slavery in our country. It was as brutal as what the Nazi's did to the Jews, except for hundreds of years more. We get upset because 60 to 70 whites were killed, including women and children. Were the slaves wrong to do what they did? That is not something I can answer. You have never had to live like this and neither have I. Oppression will make people take actions they would otherwise not have taken. If the slave masters had set the slaves free, would that have happened to them? Doubtful. So who is more to blame? I would have to say it is more accurate to state one wrong (slavery) caused all the wrongs that followed. Including the hundreds of slaves and free blacks who were not involved in the revolt but killed by vigilante white mobs in Virginia and NC. So, a third wrong not making things right.
One post concerning the uprising stated:
"John W. Cromwell in a 1920 article in the Journal of Negro History, “Turner was skinned to supply such souvenirs as purses, his flesh made into grease, and his bones divided as trophies to be handed down as heirlooms.”
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jane_bront
8 years ago
Excellent post. Anyone who reads this and doesn't finally understand actually doesn't want to understand - or they do but prefer to pretend not to. They just want to play offense or defense when responding to topics like the one you're addressing. I see it on every forum about so-called "black films" without fail.
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littlegeorgie
8 years ago
After 500 years of virtually every second of American history being race, race, race and more race, the only POSSIBLE way to still be ignorant of that kind of all-consuming obsessiveness is to purposely try not to see and understand it all. That's the only way.
No man lies so boldly as the man who is indignant.
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