As I watched the movie “12 Years a Slave” gain critical acclaim
and garner awards, I couldn’t help but cringe every time I heard the name of
the movie.
Sometimes, American English is tricky: The verb “to be,” conjugated
as “is a slave” in the present tense,
or “was a slave” in the past tense, often
unintentionally suggests identity.
Resultantly, every time we say that someone was a “slave,” which by definition
is “a person who is the chattel or property of another,” we unintentionally accept
and promote the identity that was assigned to countless people by money-hungry
oppressors who liked to refer to themselves as “masters.”
My hope, as we continue to look at this part of American history
in film and other mediums, is that we change our language so that it more clearly
reflects what actually happened. Would
we refer to those who were shackled and stripped of language, identity and
humanity as “those who were enslaved,” or “those who were told that they were
slaves,” or “those who were treated like property” versus “slaves.” Although “those who enslaved them” would like
for us to believe that they were “slaves”—property with identity or worth outside
of their ability to work and breed—our language doesn’t need to support that
idea. It can and should speak against
it.
*Note: Please excuse any unintentionally ironic grammatical
errors, as I had neither the patience nor the energy to perfect this post. In fact, it’s been sitting incomplete on my
laptop for more than a week, and today I decided to just get it done.
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