There’s nothing quite like storytelling—whether written or pictorial—to give us cause to think deeply. Something about being confronted with the depiction of an event sears it into our brains by making us feel the emotions it involves. This was my experience while watching the first episode of The Long Song on PBS’s Masterpiece. A miniseries based on a novel about the end of slavery in Jamaica, the show conveys the horrible reality of slavery and racism with unexaggerated frankness.
Human beings literally being treated as animals, demeaned,
grieved, abused in every possible way and the utter blindness among slave
owners to the fact that there was anything at all wrong with this way of
life—watching it was disturbing to the core. The episode wasn’t the first
dramatization of slavery I had viewed, but it hit the hardest.
As with many other uncomfortable images, my first instinct
was to try to block them out and think of something more pleasant, but
something inside me made me stop and feel the discomfort for a while. Many
times when I see fictional scenes that are disturbing, I can rationalize my way
out of the unsettling feelings by thinking, “It’s just a story; that didn’t
really happen.” But with The Long Song I couldn’t do that. Even though
the particular people portrayed might be fictional, the situations that were
dramatized would have been the real-life experience of countless human beings
who found themselves enslaved and enslaving.
And I couldn’t help but wonder, with queasy stomach, if my
slave-owning ancestors had thought of and talked to and touched the human
beings they enslaved in the ways the characters in The Long Song did. This
is a question I will likely never know the answer to, and if I did and the
answer was “yes,” there would be absolutely nothing I could do to change it,
just as there is absolutely nothing I can do to change the fact that some of my
great-great-(etc.)-grandparents in Virginia bought and sold human beings as if
they were animals. So why bother to think about it?
I think sitting in the discomfort for a moment is important
for several reasons, but before we get into those, it seems important to
mention what those reasons do not include. Letting ourselves feel uneasy or
uncomfortable just for the sake of feeling uncomfortable is not what I have in
mind. Neither is doing so for the sake of manufacturing some sort of guilt for
sins we did not personally commit (for more on that, see my earlier post
on apologies). But our resistance to feelings-for-feelings’-sake and to
misplaced shame should not cause us to swing to the polar opposite side, refusing
to acknowledge the pain of past wrongs and to take stock of our own lives to keep
watch that we do not engage in sinful mindsets or behaviors ourselves.
Ignoring the brutal realities of slavery and the racist
worldview that allowed it to thrive is a dangerous precedent just as forgetting
any other part of history is. It is common to hear talk about remembering the
Holocaust so that we make sure it never happens again, but somehow there seems
to be reluctance among many to take the same attitude toward race-based slavery,
as if the root of prejudice and thinking others to be beneath us is not within
our fallen hearts.
Feeling the weight of the wrongs committed against enslaved
people also helps us reckon with the fact that people are complicated. No one does
only good or only bad. We all have the capacity for good and evil within us,
and this is as true of the people of history as it is of people today. Even the
most esteemed people of the past should not be treated as infallible; neither
should one form of sin keep us from recognizing the good elements of someone’s
life.[i]
When we’re studying history, we should keep this perspective, acknowledging the
good and the evil that people did as what they are and celebrating the good
while repudiating the bad—even when those things coexist within a single
historical figure’s life. (For more on this, see another previous post.)
As Christians, thinking on the dark period of transatlantic
slavery is also instructive in our spiritual growth because it shows us how
easy it is to be horribly, terribly wrong when it comes to our interpretation
and application of Scripture. A whole society of God-fearing, Bible-reading
people misinterpreted one passage in Genesis and thus saw nothing wrong with
subjecting other people to slavery just because of their ancestry. Even worse,
they thought it was by God’s direction that Africans be enslaved.[ii]
This should cause us to have great humility when it comes to handling God’s
Word. We must take great care that we do not abuse Scripture, forcing it to fit
into our own agenda.
Yet another reason we shouldn’t shy away from truly feeling
disturbed at the brutal realities of slavery is so that we don’t become
hardened to evil or calloused to those who suffer because of it. Allowing
ourselves to feel discomfort rather than quickly turning away helps us
strengthen our muscles of empathy and compassion whereby we are able to enter
into the suffering of others and show them the love of Christ by walking
alongside them.
So the next time we encounter depictions or factual accounts of the horrors of slavery, let’s not be quite so quick to brush them aside. Instead, let’s sit a moment and allow the emotions to serve as an impetus to engage our minds. Think on what keeps us from falling into the same sins our forebears did, on the complex reality of human character and behavior, on the vital importance of rightly understanding the Word of God, and on how we can better serve others by feeling their pain with them. This doesn’t mean dwelling on the darkness all the time, but rather using the weight of the darkness to drive us toward spiritual growth. Sitting with slavery isn’t pleasant, but it can increase maturity if only we let it.
[i] It should be noted that here I am talking about our evaluation as humans of other humans in the context of historical study, not the judgment of humans by God. Even one sin, not to mention the sinful nature that we are all born with and that taints every action, is enough to condemn a person before the holy God, and only through Jesus’ sacrifice can a person be in right standing before God.
[ii] For more about this, see The Gospel & Racial Reconciliation (2016), series editors Russell Moore and Andrew T. Walker.
