Letter to Harriet Jacob

Dear Harriet Jacob,

How can I sit; how can I even breathe knowing that so many bodies have had to die to make it possible for me to sit here today writing this letter to you? Bodies didn’t just die; they were stripped of their skin; bodies were drowned in their own blood and worse of all bodies never knew their worth. Today I an African American woman have the pleasure of being considered at least human. You wrote when you father had died that, “what cared my owners for that? He was merely a piece of property. Moreover, they thought he had spoiled his children, by teaching them to feel that they were human beings” (Jacob, 13). I cannot comprehend how the color of one’s skin could blind, deafen and weaken generation upon generation. What makes lighter skin a human while a darker skin nonhuman. We all share the same organs, the same feature but mine might be bigger or smaller than yours. We all share the same heart that keeps us alive and breathing. Are the shrieks and cries of colored people more faint than those of someone of lighter skin? Why couldn’t anyone hear them? Were whites so ashamed to have evolved from apes that they lashed out their anger on people of color, people they thought resembled apes more closely. When you described Mrs. Flint, chills run through my spine. You said, “She had no strength to superintend her household affairs; but her nerves were so strong, that she could sit in her easy chair and see a woman whipped, till the blood tickled from every stroke of the lash.” If my skin were white, shame would fill every cell in my body if I knew that my ancestors were murders, if I knew that they licked their tongues at the sight of blood oozing from the pores of a colored person. But today there is no shame in the white kids, mothers, fathers. In school, slavery was a thing of the past, something of our past to be forgotten. We learned it all in a week and then we moved on to subjects of much more importance. When we the black students held events to talk more about the lives and treatment of blacks in the united states, students yawned and grew angry because they believed they had had the subject shoved down their throats long enough. The Holocaust, a castraphony, where millions and millions of people of the Jewish faith were killed. It is sacred subject, studied and studied in school, and rightfully mourned by most of the world. But millions of Africans having been dying far before the holocaust and millions more will continue to die. And I can’t help thinking that some the reason the holocaust caused such an uproar, is so mourned for, is because for the first time million whites were being killed by other whites. For the first-time, people of lighter skin realized their mortality and that they weren’t as indestructability as they had believed. So much cruelty inflicted on a group of people and a justification of superiority based solely on skin color. What slavery teaches me is the weakness of our minds. It instills fear in me and makes me wonder what cruelty I am capable of and what justification I would use to let myself off of the hook. I wonder how much someone has to hate themselves to kill someone based solely on their skin coloring. Slavery wasn’t self-defense, it wasn’t a mercy killing, it wasn’t anything but an attempt to eradicate the black race and to profit from it along the way.