LOVE
The fact that slavery existed in America still baffles me. The most inhumane social structure was prevalent in a country where the ideals of freedom and pursuit of happiness was, and still is, the marketing strategy for potential immigrants. It’s the greatest example of irony in the history of the world.
This is the face I make when I think about it:
http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_yONAxkWheLA/THqcDvBnNQI/AAAAAAAADos/UcMEXMSpva0/s320/sponge+lame+face.JPG
I think I blew a fuse reading the Stevenson and Hansen essays this week, well mostly Stevenson’s essay. I’m not surprised that slaves usually had to receive their owners’ permission to marry someone, but it just gets me really angry. Who are these people to give someone orders about who to spend time, love and start a family with? I feel similarly, but less critically, about the ‘Aunt Sue’ in slave communities. In some communities, potential marriages needed the blessing of an elder female in a high social position. But the blessings between the Aunt Sues and slave owners were completely opposite. The former seemed to be looking out for the best of the couple as well as their community. Slave owners withheld approvals based on how much potential inconvenience, or hurt ego, it may cause them, regardless of how genuine the love each slave had for each other.
And then there’s then story of William Grose, a slave who was married to a free black woman. He was sold twice, then essentially thrown a wife without any ceremony. Without a ceremony, slaves believed a marriage wouldn’t hold any weight. But even though his owners attempted to keep him away from his wife and kids, Grose still managed to escape and reunite with his family. The love he had motivated his attempt to free himself from a racially and financially aristocratic society that thrives on fear. That’s pretty ballsy if you ask me.
Why mention another sappy love story? Because that’s what it is, another sappy love story. Why do so many love stories exist in this world? Why is the Lifetime Channel still on the air? Because love is that powerful. The plots in stories (including movies, songs, and everything in between) are usually driven by love. And if not, there is almost always a love-driven subplot. It’s because humans most instinctively react to love more than anything else. We want to do what we love, pursue what we’d love to be, love who we want to love, and so on. Even the mission of “finding yourself” comes back to love, because you want to be who you’d love to be.
So why do people still omit this idea of love when making life decisions?
I’m not saying let’s go back to ’69 and relive Woodstock, but think about it. Some people give up certain hobbies they love, like video games and skateboarding, as they grow older because it perceived as juvenile. People choose to become accountants when they want to become chefs (Yes, that was a Baruch reference). People fall in love with someone considered an outsider in their culture, but still submit to an arranged marriage.
If history were to hit the reset button, I wish for a successful slave rebellion to occur based on such slave owners. I’m not an expert in love or anything close to it, but reading about love within the system of slavery reconfirms my belief that we as humans got the meaning of life it all wrong. A great number of slaves in America dedicated their lives not to the arduous labor they were forced to perform, but to chasing what they loved the most. Whether it was for a spouse, a decent living situation, or their freedom, they spent their lives in the pursuit of the greatest happiness. And to think of people wasting their days on things they don’t enjoy, and have all the opportunity in the world to step away…
We live in a money-driven world. Material currency is human made. I always imagine what life would be like if currency was something abstract. Another tangential rant by me, but I had to let it out.
Tags: flawed society, love, Peiss, slavery, stevenson
April 16th, 2012 at 12:06 pm
Hi Peter,
Love is certainly one of the main themes of this course and, like sexuality, needs to be understood as having a history in which what is construed as love differs over time and within cultures, etc. Take a look at Whitney’s post and my reply and think through your statements about love in light of it as a socially constructed concept. That doesn’t negate behavioral and emotional impulses that might be biological but suggests that those impulses get understood in light of historically specific conditions. Stevenson’s essay is an excellent example of a social constructionist approach at work, so think about her analysis as a check on assumptions that love is a given that means the same thing to all people all throughout time.