‘Slave’ talk misses the awful realities of slavery

Published 9:00 pm Saturday, June 2, 2001

By Kevin Merida

The Washington Post

WASHINGTON — I arrived at work one morning to find a small group of protesters with signs and leaflets in front of The Washington Post. They were upset by the city’s decision to privatize its indigent health care system and conspiratorially accused the Post of being party to it. I accepted one of their tracts and was almost in the building when I heard the ringleader shout through his bullhorn: " … And the people who work for The Post are slaves!" Now, that stopped me.

I understand the demonstrators were all fired up, but it’s hard to see the line that connects their campaign to "Save D.C. General Hospital" to my employment at The Post to 400 years of legalized inhumanity.

As an African American, I found it especially galling to be called a slave by a ranting white guy on a public sidewalk, even if he was a follower of Lyndon H. LaRouche Jr. But any trivialization of slavery is galling, no matter whether the offender is white, black, brown, red, yellow, ranting or otherwise. And yet we keep doing it — keep diminishing the most horrendous chapter in our nation’s history, as if slavery had been after-school detention.

The Rev. Al Sharpton compares the cab system in Broward County, Fla., to slavery. New York Knicks player Larry Johnson calls his team a bunch of "rebellious slaves." A New Hampshire gubernatorial candidate, in a televised debate, likens income taxes to slavery. UPN tries out a sitcom set during the Civil War about a black English nobleman who becomes Abraham Lincoln’s servant. (UPN cancels it after four airings).

And then there are the writings of D. Stanley Eitzen, a retired sociology professor and former president of the North American Society for the Sociology of Sport. In a lengthy article for USA Today Magazine last fall, Eitzen argued — even while conceding that his argument was overdrawn — that big-time college sports parallels American slavery: The football and basketball programs are the plantations, the coaches are the overseers, the players are the slaves. "Slaves, by definition, are not free," he wrote. "The slaves of the antebellum era did not have the right to assemble or petition. They did not have the right to speak out or freedom of movement. Those conditions characterize today’s college athletes as well."

Eitzen is not the first to assert that universities exploit student-athletes. It’s a fair enough point. But this is slavery? Big-time student-athletes are courted and coddled like heads of state. They receive full scholarships, which used to mean something. Now, the best athletes, often after momentary college apprenticeships, jump to the pros, where they sign multimillion-dollar contracts and buy fleets of luxury cars.

Slavery, indeed.

Slaves were chained, whipped, bartered, sold, raped, forbidden formal education and fed cornmeal mush from a trough, as if they were pigs. Slaves didn’t win the Heisman Trophy. Frederick Douglass, after escaping slavery, struggled to find the words to describe the feeling: "Anguish and grief, like darkness and rain, may be depicted, but gladness and joy, like the rainbow, defy the skill of pen or pencil."

There is renewed interest on Capitol Hill in creating a National Museum of African American History and Culture on the Mall. The leaders of the effort, Reps. J.C. Watts, R-Okla., and John Lewis, D-Ga., envision renovating a Smithsonian building and using it to house exhibits that would cover the black experience from slavery to the present. Another idea, by local architect Michael Marshall, would place an African American cultural center on the waterfront in Southwest Washington. It would showcase a replica of a slave ship that would be docked at the marina.

These are both fine ideas. But another, more powerful, idea has received little attention: the creation of a museum on the Mall that’s dedicated solely to slavery, something with the same wrenching poignancy as the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Richard E. Smith II, a local architect and director of the United States Slavery Museum Project, calls his proposal "a national healing memorial."

"I’ve always felt our country has been quick to look across the pond to examine other countries’ evils," he says. Maybe too quick. Slavery — like the atrocities committed against Native Americans — should be confronted and debated and wrestled to the ground, but not buried. That’s why, Smith says, we need a slavery museum on our national lawn.

Such a museum might also go a long way toward eliminating the mindless use of this historical horror as contemporary simile. As in "working like a slave," which Smith notes has become "almost a joke in one sense."

Slavery was no joke. Nor was it like paying taxes or driving a cab or playing basketball. It was — and remains — a disturbing fact of our nation’s history, and we’d be a better nation if we respected it as such.

Kevin Merida can be reached at The Washington Post Writers Group, 1150 15th St. NW, Washington, DC 20071-9200.