So, today I was doing an activity Mrs. Marshall assigned us about racism and slavery. We had to read a magazine article and then write about it.

One section of this article was called 4 Myths About Slavery by Erica L. Green. It talked about four things that are sometimes taught about slavery that are not entirely true. The four lies told in the article are that the Civil War was caused by the rights of separate states, slaves were actually just workers, slavery only happened in the states in the south, and, worst of all, that slavery wasn’t even that that terrible.

I think that the myth about how the Civil War started was probably caused by confusion as to why the North and the South had this huge war. Before reading this article, even I thought that the war was caused by one side wanting slavery, and the other not. The truth was, the war happened when the South tried to leave the US so they could do slavery. I think that maybe the story that slaves were workers originated when some people back then were trying to defend their cause, to say that what they were doing wasn’t totally so bad (even though it really was). Workers are paid. Workers are allowed to quit if they want to. Slaves were forced to work. They were not paid, and they definitely weren’t allowed to quit. I think that the myth that slavery only existed in the South came from what happened in the Civil War, when the South was trying to get out of the U.S. to do slavery. And even though the North were the ones that outlawed slavery, that does not mean that it did not have slaves. Everywhere in the US has slaves at that time period. Finally, I think that the lie about slavery not being that bad came from adults not wanting to teach kids stuff that might scare them, or hear about too much violence. As said in the article, one professor at Ohio State University named Hasan Kwame Jeffries said that they were teaching the kids a “sanitized version” of what really happened.

I think that what he meant by this was that they were teaching them less violent, less terrible versions of slavery because they didn’t want to scare them or make them feel bad. Even so, I think that it’s very important that kids learn the truth.

I think that if I were the one to correct these teachers and professors, I would sit down and have a talk in person so we could communicate and pay attention to each other because this is a very serious issue.

I do not think I have heard any of these myths before, but I know that even if they might make children uncomfortable, it’s important to know what really happened, and that slavery and racism are wrong and terrible. I think that we could all learn a very valuable lesson from this.