The Truth Hurts, Very Much

I watched Episode 2 of Underground Railroad last night.

This was a feat because Episode 1 may well live in my head the rest of my cognitive life. There are scenes that one cannot unsee. But that is fundamentally the nature of slavery. It was a thousand times crueler and more horrible than we can even imagine.

If we really look at what happened, how hundreds of thousands of people were enslaved at the most basic level of their existence, with no hope and no escape, it’s impossible to unsee it. Which is why, I think, that many people decide it’s too hard to look.

“I don’t like violence.”

As if there could be an honest book or a film about slavery that doesn’t include violence. If one decides they can’t tolerate violence, then they can’t tolerate the truth about slavery. I believe that white people have to watch the violence – even if it’s fictional, even if it’s a re-enactment, even if it is a story told to a scribe by a former slave a hundred years old. We have to watch the lashes.

We can’t keep being stupid, willfully ignorant of the history stitched into every inch of the country. We have to see the truth, however it can be delivered to us a hundred and fifty years later. We think we can’t but we have to figure out how to handle it. We can handle the truth. We just need practice.

_________________________

Start by reading Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize-winning book, Underground Railroad, then watch the Amazon Prime series.

________________________

Photo by @felipepelaquim on Unsplash