The Source of Self-Regard - Toni Morrison Page 0,18
more convinced I am that they will all have to be killed or be maintained as a species of pauper.”
Benjamin Franklin, 1751:
“Why increase the Sons of Africa, by Planting them in America, where we have so fair an Opportunity, by excluding all Blacks and Tawneys, of increasing the lovely White and Red?”
William Byrd, Diary, Virginia, 1710–1712:
2/8/09: Jenny and Eugene were whipped.
4/17/09: Anaka was whipped.
5/13/09: Mrs. Byrd was whipped.
3/23/09: Moll was whipped.
6/10/09: Eugene [a child] was whipped for running away and had the bit put on him.
9/3/09: I beat Jenny.
9/16/09: Jenny was whipped.
9/19/09: I beat Anama.
11/30/09: Eugene and Jenny were whipped.
12/16/09: Eugene was whipped for doing nothing yesterday.
(In April I was occupied in my official capacity in assisting the investigation of slaves “arraigned for high treason”—two were hanged.)
7/1/10: The Negro woman ran away again with the bit on her mouth.
7/8/10: The Negro woman was found, and tied, but ran away again in the night.
7/15/10: My wife, against my will, caused little Jenny to be burned with a hot iron.
8/22/10: I had a severe quarrel with little Jenny and beat her too much, for which I was sorry.
8/31/10: Eugene and Jenny were beaten.
10/8/10: I whipped three slave women.
11/6/10: The Negro woman ran away again.
Its editors describe him as “Virginia’s most polished and ornamental gentleman…a kindly master [who] inveighed in some of his letters against brutes who mistreat their slaves.”
Such is language, the vision, the memory bequeathed to us in this society. They said other things, and they did other things—some of which were good. But they also said, and more importantly felt, that.
Our past is bleak. Our future dim. But I am not reasonable. A reasonable man adjusts to his environment. And unreasonable man does not. All progress, therefore, depends on the unreasonable man. I prefer not to adjust to my environment. I refuse the prison of “I” and choose the open spaces of “we.”
With such a past we cannot be optimistic about the possibility of a humane society, in which humane decision-making is the prime goal of educators, ever becoming imagined and therefore realized. We cannot be optimistic, but we can be clear. We can identify the enemy. We can begin by asking ourselves what is right rather than what is expedient. Know the difference between fever and the disease. Between racism and greed. We can be clear and we can be careful. Careful to avoid the imprisonment of the mind, the spirit, and the will of ourselves and those among whom we live. We can be careful of tolerating second-rate goals and secondhand ideas.
We are humans. Humans who must have discovered by now what every three-year-old can see: “how unsatisfactory and clumsy is this whole business of reproducing and dying by the billions.” We are humans, not rice, and therefore “we have not yet encountered any god who is as merciful as a man who flicks a beetle over on its feet. There is not a people in the world that behaves as badly as praying mantises.” We are the moral inhabitants of the globe. To deny this, regardless of our feeble attempts to live up to it, is to lie in prison. Of course there is cruelty. Cruelty is a mystery. But if we see the world as one long brutal game, then we bump into another mystery, the mystery of beauty, of light, the canary that sings on the skull….Unless all ages and all races of man have been deluded…there seems to be such a thing as grace, such a thing as beauty, such a thing as harmony…all wholly free and available to us.
The Price of Wealth, the Cost of Care
I WANT to talk about a subject that influences and, in many cases, distresses us all. A subject that is a companion to each graduate just as it is on all campuses as well as communities all over the country, indeed the world. A subject that is an appropriate theme of a speech delivered to students during these provocative times of uncertainty.
That subject is money.
Whether we have the obligation to protect and stabilize what we already have and, perhaps, to increase it, or whether we have the task of reducing our debt in order to simply live a productive, fairly comfortable life, or whether our goal is to earn as much as possible—whatever our situation, money is the not-so-secret mistress of all our lives. And like all mistresses, you certainly know, if she has not already seduced you, she is nevertheless on your mind. None of us