Thus far, this class has been nothing short of shocking. Sometimes history is glossed over— many times in middle school, it is a class that can come in between two fiction classes. It is hard for me to think about what people have done.

Our first class, we discussed our own prejudices. For some reason, I made myself believe that they did not exist in the North. I thought that maybe it would be a few people, but it would not be everybody. I am glad we talked about it. It is funny how everybody has some sort of prejudice caught in their mind, but because it is never talked about, some people believe that they are the only ones who have racist thoughts. I wonder if the elephant in the room ceased to be ignored, if it would go away. Why do we try to ignore these things anyway?

The reading was just as shocking as the class:

I have never read a story by Fredrick Douglass before, and although I knew he could read and write, it never occurred to me that he could write so poetically. I don’t know how he was taught to read and write, but it must have been hard to keep writing so well, when people expected so little out of him, and it is unlikely that he had time to practice. The way how he expressed himself was almost surreal. Because the story was called “The Last Flogging”, I assumed that he would run away by the end of the story, it never even occurred to me that he would go back to his master until he actually did.

What also struck me, was the cartoon we saw for homework. It is one thing to read about the middle passage, but it is quite another to have to see it. I’ve never seen a cartoon about the middle passage before, and it was disgusting! When reading something, the pages can somehow be glossed over, and the reader does not have to picture the words on the page as real. Once seen, it is a different matter.

This class made me wonder why we try to gloss over so many things. Even when we were discussing how words change to mean better ideas, we forget their original meaning, and the suffering of our past. When forgetting our past, we gloss over the present, pretending that large prejudices don’t exist.