I recently read an incredibly interesting story about Michelle Obama's ancestry. Obama's great-great-great grandmother was actually a slave. The article outlines the general story of her life, and also relates to what he have been discussing in class. The life story of Malvinia (Obama's great-great-great grandmother) seems to be, according to this article, the story of a very average slave during that time. Generations later, Michelle Obama lives the opposite lifestyle of her grandmother; Obama is one of the most powerful women in America whereas Malvinia was deemed as barley human.
What are your thoughts? Should this discovery be considered as proof of how far America has advanced since the time of Fredrick Douglass, or is this just another average story of America's past?
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
This is so interesting, when you consider how often the white masters would rape their slaves. This became so banal and commonplace that many slaves were fathered by their masters, like in Frederick Douglass. We hear about it so much that it loses its shock value, and I think people sometimes forget how truly tortuous this was. Slavery wasn't all about bad conditions, but one needs to understand the brutality of the treatment to get a better understanding of how cruel their treatment was.
ReplyDeleteThe article mentioned that Michelle denied comment. I wasn't surprised that she declined, do to the personal nature. The horrors of her past don't need to be discussed, and treating her as though she were a celebrity is forcing her and her family into a spotlight that maybe she doesn't want to be in.
I have a lot of respect for Michelle Obama, and I think that even the New York times forgets sometimes that maybe that's not something she wants to have made known to the whole world.