Liberation

“It's tapping into a waiting reservoir of inherent racism… When you single out any particular group of people for secondary citizenship status, that’s a violation of basic human rights.” ~ Jimmy Carter

My recent posts about racism have been some of my least popular. I don’t believe this is because my friends are racists. It is uncomfortable for us to read and listen to painful things. It’s easy to assume I have a good heart so I don’t need to listen to where someone else is coming from. Not too long ago I would have passed by messages like this. I didn't know what to say. Now I know, listening and learning is what I need. Sharing it with others makes me accountable. I am committed to opening my heart and waking up. May we all be free... as little children. Another dead white man…

“William Blake was an engraver who had a calling as a divinely inspired poet and prophet. A passionate believer in racial and sexual equality, Blake used his poetry and art to protest against many different forms of mental, physical and economic enslavement. He also created several memorable and specific anti-slavery and pro-abolition images. Blake's images are sometimes disturbing and show the cruel punishments meted out by white plantation owners.

The Dutch captured the British colony of Suriname during the Second Anglo-Dutch War (1667). Under the West India Company it was developed as a plantation slave society and became a primary destination for the Dutch slave trade. The brutal regime caused high mortality; despite the import of 300,000 slaves between 1668 and 1823, the population never grew beyond 50,000. ‘Maroonage’ became the major form of resistance. Fugitive slaves, or ‘maroons’, escaped inland to form permanent communities from where they waged a campaign of guerrilla warfare against the Dutch.

In 1774 the Scottish-Dutch soldier John Gabriel Stedman witnessed the brutal oppression of slaves during a campaign against the maroons, which he described in his Narrative of a Five Years Expedition Against the Revolted Negroes of Surinam. The book included illustrations by William Blake. One of the illustrations is ‘Europe supported by Africa and America’. This allegorical image is in the tradition of ‘The Four Continents’, in which the continents are depicted as female figures. Blake, the abolitionist, has included gold arm bands on the arms of Africa and America to symbolize their enslavement to the central figure of Europe. However, the fact that Europe is being physically supported by her companions suggests the possibility of a more equitable relationship.

Another engraving, 'A negro hung alive by the ribs to a gallows' (Violent image removed from Facebook) shows a man brutally hung up, while still alive, by a hook through his body. In his account he describes the plants and animals he encountered, as well as how runaway slaves who had been recaptured were tortured. The image depicts what would happen after major rebellion by the enslaved. Many of the images used in Stedman's account were developed from his sketches by William Blake. This engraving became one of most widely reproduced pieces of anti-slavery art.”

 "Blake's engravings for Stedman are horrifying - brutal whippings, torture and hangings - but they are based on other people's drawings...

That Stedman commissioned Blake speaks of his exceptional radicalism and it is hard to think of another contemporary artist for the job. Anti-slavery paintings by George Morland were shown at the Royal Academy in 1788 and Tate Britain will be exhibiting George Romney's dark and knotted drawings of prisons. But aside from its notorious ground plan of a slave ship, every inch jammed with bodies, the abolition movement simply had no images to work with the way it had words. And Tate Britain makes an apt point of reproducing the great tracts, poems and sermons.

But slavery, for Blake, is also a state of mind. His ringing phrase, 'Mind-forg'd manacles', is from the poem 'London', in which the material life of the city is seen to be crushing the spirit. In 'Visions of the Daughters of Albion', Blake is against the slavery of marriage. He rants against the bosses as mental slaves, mourns the slavery of experience over childhood innocence. Above all, bondage and liberation are Blake's great visual themes, and his lexicon of bodies shackled and free is like no other in art. Blake created the greatest metaphors for slavery and liberation. His figures are timeless, and their context, alas, eternal. To see them is to be plunged into a dungeon or taken out of yourself into a liberated world." ~ Laura Cumming, The Guardian

Nicole Rodgers writes, "All white people have to do is acknowledge how slavery still affects african americans negatively today. We don't need lectures about how y'all shouldn't be held accountable for the sins of your ancestors. Just some acknowledgement. It's just that simple. Put your ego to the side and say: Wow that was f**ked up. I see why you guys feel some kind of way. I can't change the past, but as far as the future goes, I can try to use my privilege to right the wrongs that were done. That's it. That's all."

Your point of view is interesting to me if I can learn and expand my understanding. All I ask is that those of us in the privileged majority listen to disadvantaged folks; not cause we're so good but because we're all better off if we have a human feeling for each other. An open heart trumps a closed mind - no matter what the content. I care about history but I care more about being open to the next soul I meet... She might hold the key to the liberation of us all.