Marissa Jenae Johnson is used to talking about race with white people. As two black women and the co-founders of Safety Pin Box, she and her business partner, Leslie Mac, make their living helping white people understand white supremacy and leverage their privilege to become better allies in the struggle for black liberation. Given this, it wasn’t unusual for her to enter into a conversation with an Uber driver on the way to the airport on Sunday in Orlando, Florida, about the kind of work she does. She was coming back from the annual BlogHer conference—where she and Mac were being honored with a 2017 Voice of the Year award for their work.
What was unusual and quite horrifying was that the driver used the ride as an opportunity to hold Johnson as a captive audience and tell her all about how compassionate his slave-owning relatives were.
"About halfway through the conversation he segued really hard into telling me about the fact that his great-grandparents owned slaves and owned a plantation," Johnson said. She sat there and listened as he told her his great-grandparents taught their slaves to read and write, emancipated them once they could prove their literacy and that his great-grandfather was "so kind" that he gave the slaves his last name. The driver boasted about "why so many black people" share his last name, Johnson said.
There are about a million things wrong with this. First, this is complete and total fiction. There were, in fact, no kind slave owners and anyone who tells themselves this is simply lying to make themselves feel better or justify the sheer hideousness of keeping human beings in bondage. So we can leave that particular narrative in the garbage where it belongs. But is this not only ahistorical, this driver’s behavior is also deeply abusive and dangerous. Johnson is a black woman, trapped alone in a car with him and only knew his name and information as shown on the Uber app. Though she was uncomfortable, she didn’t let his comments go without response.
Johnson told [James, the driver] that giving slaves their master's last name isn't an act of kindness. "You own those people. It's not a humanitarian thing that now they have to have their kidnapper's name," she said.
James argued that his family didn't "kidnap" their slaves — they "bought them fair and square in Charleston."
"That doesn't really matter," Johnson said.
from Daily Kos http://ift.tt/2slJYaS
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