18degreesnorth!

[Karl]

You may like following?

https://18degreesnorth.wordpress.com/

About

18°N is the latitude of Jamaica, my country of birth, nationality and, I think, cultural definition. I’m passionate about justice; believe in fairness in all things including sports. I believe in peace and peace-making; believe we can build a better world if we try harder. I am a liberal Christian, trying my best to “do to others” as I’d like them to do to me.

Disclosure: Taught Rita. She is my friend and sister-in-law! Family member for live!

[Karl]

...there is a certain something about how she sees things...

...and a certain panache in how she expresses herself

Her writings keeps me thinking and smiling! ...but then that is just Rita...and most often with a smile on her face! (Where else on Earth can one have a smile? )

[Karl]

Why I’m not celebrating Harriet Beecher Stowe

Then there were some of her selected posts...

Why I’m not celebrating Harriet Beecher Stowe

Posted on July 2, 2015

July 1 is the day my church celebrates Harriet Beecher Stowe.

I’m In two minds about the good Mrs Stowe. While appreciating the efforts she and her brother, Henry Ward Beecher, made in the cause of the abolition of slavery in America, from my 20th/21st Century viewpoint I can see her as a not unmixed blessing to the ‘Negro Race’, as she’d have called us.

I recently reread ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin‘. It was highly, highly influential. It was the best selling book of the 19th century apart from the Bible. It was the principal vehicle Stowe used to open the eyes of the good people of the US to the evils of slavery.

However, its picture of the childlike African, to be pitied and made an object of gracious condescension, had lasting effects. The picture of the good and humble Uncle Tom, who was too Christian to even dream of fighting back when he was whipped to death by Simon Legree, made white folks believe that is the quintessential good negro.

There was more. The ‘good’ woman on the plantation, who gave her master’s white child her children’s food before she fed her children. All the good black people who put the white people first, since first is the proper place for white people.

And, the paler the black people were — the closer to white — the closer they were to human. The mulatto slave woman who drowned herself rather than be sold into slavery contrasted with the black people who were less sensitive. Topsy, the lying child, who didn’t cry when she was whipped, because she didn’t feel it much, was very black.

Then there were the other two mulattos, a black man who could pass for white, and his mulatto wife, who were so bright, who escaped slavery and went north to Canada, but eventually realized their proper place was in Africa.

Stowe pitied the plight of the black slaves, and she thought they were inhumanly treated, but she didn’t think they were ‘equal’, is what I gather from the book.

Their proper place was to be grateful for the benevolence of the good white people, but the blacks really didn’t belong in the Americas. They should have been returned to their native habitat so white people would be clean from the stain of slavery.

I may be be wronging her, this is what I get from ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin’. That being the case, I’m leaving other people to celebrate Mrs Harriet Beecher Stowe.

The above, in the context of knowing Rita...how she would argue her case on "Uncle Tom's Cabin" and the "good Mrs. Stowe" brings, wry smile! ...but then I am unapologetically biased.