*Imagines a novel set in 1942 Nazi Germany described as an ‘entertaining story of the Holocaust, skullduggery and revenge’*

See now? Slavery is SO easily diminished....the way European horrors never are. https://twitter.com/historiahwa/status/1291280363420037121

I have been thinking about this recently. How many of us who are from the global south learn anti-Blackness from the texts produced in the global north.

I grew up in India and we learned about slavery in America from mostly white Western writers.

Gone With the Wind (book and movie) was actually presented as a legit texts about the American South, Civil War, slavery. And references to it showed up in other texts (always approvingly) including YA works such as SE Hinton’s Outsiders.

I remember reading The Bluest Eye when I was 12 or 13. And it was as if the world had suddenly been upturned.

When we moved to NYC, I read every book that @nypl had by African American, Chicano, Chinese American writers (even the words we use now were created in my lifetime)

But here is the issue: I was seen as the nerdy, weird one for reading these. I was fortunate that my teachers at school and then profs at @BrandeisU encouraged my readings and nurtured what in hindsight is a dissident education.

Because the wider culture sure didn’t.

Wider culture diminished slavery constantly and consistently. Wider culture constantly taught (still does) anti-Blackness which remains the primary cultural narrative in much of the Global North, especially in US cultural production.

We never went to a plantation in our travels in US but that is likely due to with my mother (an art historian). But even in museums, the horrors were diminished, denied, erased.

And any link of history to contemporary reality was completely excised.

I keep thinking how I read Exodus by Leon Uris when I was around 13-14. Even took down JerzyvKosinski’s The Painted Bird (had nightmares for months after that). And we had the movie about Golda Meir. And Flight to Entebbe.

Yet I only read the full scale of horrors of slavery - and resistance to it - at university.

Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko and CLR James’s The Black Jacobins were the first I read that provided narratives of defiance, resistance.

I keep thinking what if I had read Behn the same time I read Kosinski? Would that have given the teenaged desi girl a different view of injustice. What if I had read The Black Jacobins as s teenager?

I keep thinking of how - despite much luck that got me access to books and culture, despite a dissident education, despite a politically informed home - I have had (and continue) to undo so much brainwashing by White Supremacy.

And how that same white supremacist culture continues to brainwash the next generation. Not just in school, and racist government policies, but by ‘entertainment.’

And how the last one is the most effective and dangerous of them all.

End thread