Butler and the 1619 Project
I was doing a little bit of outside reading on the background of the book and I was struck at the reason why Butler decided to write this. A young African American man told her that he was ashamed of his ancestors and their subservience and wishes he could kill them. She wrote the book to illustrate how someone from the future would have done the same. We touched on this a little bit in class by looking at the loss of her sense of self over the course of the book and how we agreed we would probably have done the same in her position so this motive makes a lot of sense. I just think this outlook is so foreign to me. In school we were always taught about the subtle forms of resistance that slaves performed to rebel against the owners like intentionally breaking things or doing their tasks slowly. The teachings of slavery before this was that they were all submissive and allowed themselves to be subjugated. In fact, this was a time when a lot of people didn’t even want to teach about...