Tuesday, October 30, 2012

Melissa Harris-Perry demonstrates again what an amazing thinker/speaker she is



A few weeks ago I discovered Melissa Harris-Perry and was impressed by a lecture delivered in 2010 at a conference, and here she is again, with an incredibly powerful response to Representative "rape babies are a gift from God" Mourdock.

There is one phrase here that she says that I think is hugely important and gets at the very crux of the monstrousness of American slavery - something that is ignored and white-washed all the time and absolutely must be shouted and never forgotten: "I'm descended from American slaves and I have foremothers who found themselves pregnant with children whose birth increased the wealth of the very man who enslaved and raped them." This is the perfect encapsulation of the evil of slavery - the slaveholders raped women and then made their own children slaves. And as Harris-Perry pointed out in the previous video I posted on this blog, even Thomas Jefferson did it.