Saturday, February 28, 2015

Our Country Was Built on the Backs of Slaves

In my comment on Tiffany's blog post "The Founding Fathers and Slavery" I talked about how often times people say that our country was built on the backs of slaves and African Americans. I really wanted to post this picture in the comments, but you can only post pictures in original posts, so I had to make one.


This is a picture of a fountain in the Ministry of Magic in the seventh Harry Potter movie. If you look closely the bottom of the statue, you see people carved to look like they're holding up the statue. The idea behind the statue is that the people at the bottom are Muggles, or non-magic folk, and the huge statue at the top represents magical people. Basically, the Voldemort-approved statue symbolizes Muggle-inferiority and Voldemort's belief that Muggles should be used and abused in order to further the advancement of magical folk.

This reminds me a lot of our country. Our country was built and began to prosper because of slave labor. We cannot forget that. Our founding fathers would have probably had to be back at their houses tending to their crops were it not for slaves. We would not have made money as a country without slaves doing all the hard grunt work for no pay. We cannot forget that slavery was and is integral to our history, and we cannot shy away from the horrible system that our ancestors were a part of.

1 comment:

Unknown said...

I agree with you Isabel! Hari also mentioned in class how other countries lacked economic development because their population was decreased due to slavery. Our economy greatly increased. Yet, our benefits brought about hardships for others. We rarely think about the homelands of slaves and how while were thriving others were struggling economically and developmentally. I think it's important to think about how though we benefitted, it was at the expense of individuals and other countries as a whole.