11 Matching Annotations
  1. Sep 2020
    1. They tell us of the Israelites in Egypt, the Helots in Sparta, and of the Roman Slaves, which last were made up from almost every nation under heaven, whose sufferings under those ancient and heathen nations, were, in comparison with ours, under this enlightened and Christian nation, no more than a cypher--or, in other words, those heathen nations of antiquity, had but little more among them than the name and form of slavery

      Cypher

      "A person who fills a place, but is of no importance or worth, a nonentity, a ‘mere nothing’ "

      "cipher | cypher, n." OED Online, Oxford University Press, September 2020, www.oed.com/view/Entry/33155. Accessed 9 September 2020.

  2. Aug 2020
    1. The soft hum of history spins on its tilted axis

      This symbolizes as the bloody and horrid history that started with chattel slavery that is the foundation of this country is always in the back of everyone's mind that people tend to ignore. However, if a racial problem or injustice issue is relevant, everyone refers back in time in which history can never be deleted, pushed under the rug, or forgotten.

    2. I walk over to the globe & move my finger back & forth between the fragile continents.

      This line seems to symbolize how African Americans built this country, moving their fingers back and forth, making impactful movements to shape it to where America is in modern time. Also, I think this line states how scrutinized African Americans/black people are even with the slightest of actions, even good ones, and they are unable to escape it as it states that history swallows them.

    1. By the early 1800s, according to the legal historians Leland B. Ware, Robert J. Cottrol and Raymond T. Diamond, white Americans, whether they engaged in slavery or not, “had a considerable psychological as well as economic investment in the doctrine of black inferiority.”

      This seems similar to the statement that sometimes being the bystander is worse than being the offender, in this case it was and continues to be equally as harmful.

    2. nor if they had not believed that independence was required in order to ensure that slavery would continue.

      For the majority of freedom for everyone, slaves had to give up (not like they had a choice) their freedom, which seems like a very said juxtapose.

    3. Those individuals and their descendants transformed the lands to which they’d been brought into some of the most successful colonies in the British Empire

      I like how throughout the passage she goes back and forth with the past and present examples of what the slaves endured and built, which came to be modern America,

    4. My father knew exactly what he was doing when he raised that flag. He knew that our people’s contributions to building the richest and most powerful nation in the world were indelible, that the United States simply would not exist without us.

      This line shows how her father has succumbed to a country that has never appreciated their people, but it shows the box they are kept it that they cannot escape. In those times and even current ones, society feels threatened by black people through generational influences.

    5. I didn’t understand his patriotism. It deeply embarrassed me.

      It shows a split where she feels as if she is in a country that has always disappointed African-American ancestors and other black people versus serving and "patriotizing" a place that has always denied a certain group.

    6. Dad hoped that if he served his country, his country might finally treat him as an American.

      This line is very emotional and shows how America, the land of the free and opportunities, is not available and to be of use to the very people that built it to be as such.

    7. She got off the Illinois Central Railroad in Waterloo, Iowa, only to have her hopes of the mythical Promised Land shattered when she learned that Jim Crow did not end at the Mason-Dixon line.

      The way the author writes, each line seems very powerful and impactful. Especially this line, it gives reader the apprehension and disappointment that sympathizes with her dad's mother. Also, it gives an irony as that the North is shown in textbooks and to younger generations that it was better than the South, with no slavery, but there was blatant segregation and racism still intact.

    8. where black people bent over cotton from can’t-see-in-the-morning to can’t-see-at-night, just as their enslaved ancestors had done not long before.

      I think this is a great description to describe the enduring work that the slaves had to do. It depicts a clear picture in my head