To Miss Harriet Jacobs

Dear Miss Jacobs,

            As I read your experiences within slavery, I’ve been noting statements that have had particular impact on me. For example, you make the claim that your masters thought your father “had spoiled his children, by teaching them to feel that they were human beings.” You make such a powerful claim only a few pages into your account. What struck me about this statement was the atmosphere of consciousness surrounding it—your ability to draw these conclusions despite the constant pressures of indoctrination by white politics and concepts of objecthood. In this way, it becomes clear to me that you’ve reclaimed, or even defined for the first time, your agency.

            You later make an additional statement which combines but simultaneously challenges the argument of “Black inferiority.”

“I admit that the black man is inferior. But what is it that makes him so? It is the ignorance in which white men compel him to live; it is the torturing whip that lashes manhood out of him; it is the fierce bloodhounds of the South, and the scarcely less cruel human bloodhounds of the north, who enforce the Fugitive Slave Law. They do the work.”

Here you begin to describe the mechanisms of soul murder, recognizing that without a soul there is no self, as white men have stripped it forcefully. How did you go about self-enlightenment in terms of challenging the subtler, and thus particularly insidious, forms of racism? That is, how did you come to pinpoint the fallacies found in even basic or seemingly trivial pieces of ideology, despite the predominance of racist dogma in your everyday life?