Dear Mr. Sands,
Linda called you kind.
She called you different. She called you merciful. She chalked her misgivings
up to a general distrust of whites caused by slavery. She was too forgiving. I
call you cruel. I call you a man with a guilty conscience he tries to ease by feeling
like the benefactor of one girl. I call you no different from the thousands of
other slaveholders who upheld this dehumanizing institution.
Let me put it this way: you cannot fix a shattered vase by gluing two pieces back together, and leaving the rest scattered across the ground. You cannot improve a system destitute of kindness and humanity by protecting one person from a horrible fate, only to allow her to fall into another one. You cannot pay lip service to kindness and freedom and then fail to hold up these ideals when it’s your turn to take a financial loss in return for a person’s integral liberty. You cannot leave the apparent object of your affections locked up for seven years in an attic and truly believe yourself guilt-free in her degradation.
I call you a hypocrite. Let
me put it this way: you deserve no more praise for your façade of kindness than
anyone else who is complicit in the oppression they claim to protect against.
Arielle,
ReplyDeleteThis is a really beautifully written piece despite the strong condemnation you express towards Mr. Sands. Which I completely agree with. From the first introduction of Mr. Sands, I was extremely uncomfortable about his representation as a benefactor. At the end, my suspicions and doubts of his character was proved right in his lack of genuine care for Linda. I love especially your last line, "you deserve no more praise for your façade of kindness than anyone else who is complicit in the oppression they claim to protect against," because this is something that even now people fail to recognize within so-called 'philanthropists' and such. Mr. Sands ultimately does nothing to change the system that he continually benefits off of. Worst, he is represented as having helped Linda in some way (due to Linda's continual forgiveness and kindness towards the worst of people), but in fact I felt that he had used her.
This issue actually reminds me of an article on the Stanford Daily that made me feel quite disturbed. "A Word on Opportunity Guilt" is a piece by a student talking about how "privilege-guilt is merely a psychological sickness, not a remedy for injustice". I agree with this and the self-indulgent nature of dwelling in guilt and acting out of guilt. However, the piece ends with "No amount of shame will undo inequality, but some amount of goodness can tip the scales back towards a more equitable, kind society. Don’t feel bad; just do good." The "good" that the author describes here, for their self, is singing with women at retirement homes. This self-satisfaction of doing "some amount of goodness" I believe is the same trap that Mr. Sands fell under. It ultimately does nothing to address their own privilege, nor does it actively work against the system that they claim is unfortunate. This phenomena is everywhere around us; it even exists within myself, no doubt. What can we do about this?