Argumentative essay fundamentals and techniques

¶ … Slavery

The conspicuous absence of any significant memorial to the horrors of slavery in America signifies a collective forgetting. We are all too willing to brush aside the failures of Reconstruction, disavowing the connection between the plantation and the penitentiary. Reality for African-Americans cannot be so easily divorced from slavery, which continues to hold black Americans tight in its noose. Instead of participating in the collective forgetting, we should sponsor a large-scale memorial museum in honor of the generations of men and women whose lives were predetermined, altered inextricably by a sickening social norm advocating bigotry. Susan Sontag draws an important parallel to help us understand how the lack of a slavery memorial characterizes American culture: she states, "the Holocaust Memorial Museum and the future Armenian Genocide Museum and Memorial are about events that didn't happen in America, so the memory-work runs no risk of rousing an embittered domestic population against authority." It is simply easier to forget by blaming blacks for their poverty and disenfranchisement. It is easier to pretend slavery was a thing of the past in spite of the legacy of Jim Crow. Instead of pretending we should pour our heart and soul into a "memory museum" to draw attention to the way slavery shaped American history and culture.

A memory museum will be a multimedia and interactive experience recreating the horrors of human bondage and the plantation system. Starting with the brutal facts of the cross-Atlantic slave trade, the museum will bring visitors face-to-face with features of the international slave trade through primary source documents describing conditions on human cargo ships. Moreover, legislation approving the international slave trade shows how cruelly the founding fathers of America neglected to acknowledge their racism. The museum will show in plain view that the heroes we read about in history books tended toward racism. Because schools often gloss over the history of slavery by extolling the wonders of the Emancipation Proclamation without sufficiently condemning Reconstruction. Whatever emotional content is absent from school textbooks can flourish in a memory museum, which will be far more explicit in its descriptions of slave-beatings and rapes than textbooks can be. A memorial museum will remind all Americans of the holes in our history and rectify the ill effects of denial. Museums deliver far more poignant content than textbooks do, making a memorial museum more memorable and therefore more educational than the content delivered in public schools.

When the European nations banned international slavery, America did not follow suit and thereby distinguished itself as a nation rich in irony and self-contradiction. America continues to be a land of contradictions: such as by condemning the ways Middle Eastern cultures live while at the same time ignoring the poverty and inequality within our national borders. As Sontag notes, a memory museum is a politically safe institution when it addresses conflicts for which we were not responsible. Hitler is an easy enemy; Saddam was an apt nemesis. Drawing attention away from slavery allows Americans to feel smugly superior. Nothing like that could happen in the land of the free, home of the brave. Americans are deluded into thinking that nothing evil has happened on our time. A slavery museum will force Americans to take responsibility for a slave trade it perpetuated and for a plantation economy it profited from. Remembering slavery is therefore a frightening and controversial prospect for many Americans. It is easier to point the fingers where others went wrong than it is to face the darkness within our own past.

The memory museum reminds visitors that slavery was not limited to the plantation; it was a way of thinking that in many ways persists till this day. For instance, exploiting human beings for economic expediency appears to be a capitalistic norm in our country. Slavery still exists today in the income disparity between the wealthiest and poorest Americans. The association between race and poverty can also be traced to slavery and these are the issues that a memory museum can address frankly. No memory museum of slavery would be complete without an explication of African-American history, which is sorely lacking from public school curricula.

School children learn more about Booker T. Washington than about W.E.B. DuBois. The memory museum changes that by introducing the ways African-Americans have addressed the aftermath of slavery and how white America has failed to make reparations. Slavery did not end with the Emancipation Proclamation. The museum will erase this myth by showing how the children and grandchildren of slaves were prevented from participating in American political and economic life to the same extent as whites. Even in the so-called free states, racism prevented blacks from being treated like human beings. The museum addresses these facts through a fascinating and interactive exhibit that includes photographs as well as historical documents.