{"id":303,"date":"2016-09-13T14:46:00","date_gmt":"2016-09-13T14:46:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/jacknorton.org\/blog\/?p=303"},"modified":"2016-09-13T14:54:40","modified_gmt":"2016-09-13T14:54:40","slug":"how-to-build-history-and-social-justice-into-life","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jacknorton.org\/blog\/how-to-build-history-and-social-justice-into-life\/","title":{"rendered":"How to build history and social justice into life."},"content":{"rendered":"

This past weekend I visited St. Francisville, Louisiana for a family wedding. The wedding was held in a church<\/a>\u00a0built in 1860 and re-built in 1880 after shelling by Union troops<\/a>. Later, the wedding reception was held at Greenwood Plantation.<\/a>\u00a0I asked my sister-in-law: \"Hey, did you see the plaques commemorating the slaves who built the church and the plantation?\"*<\/p>\n

Her: \"No, I didn't\"<\/p>\n

Me: \"Yeah, I didn't see them either.\"<\/p>\n

As you'll see from the links above, there's loads of information about the botanical, architectural, and white familial history of these places, but, as far as I saw, no physical acknowledgement of the black Americans (slaves) who created the gardens. There are places in Louisiana that address slavery head on. Still, walking around St. Francisville, a town of fantastic architectural heritage largely built by slaves of wealthy slaveowners, I didn't see any public displays recognizing slaves. Buildings were \"Built by wealthy planter X in 1834.\" To be fair, the failure to mention the workers who actually constructed buildings isn't southern or even racist, but part of larger erasure of working people's contributions to our country.<\/p>\n

Still, focusing on the beauty of the architecture without acknowledging the horrific violence that created it seemed like a pact of forgetting, akin to the Spaniards not talking about the Franco period after the transition to democracy\u00a0in 1976-1978. Walking around everyone commented on the beauty of landscape, which to me felt akin to commenting on the beauty of the forests around Buchenwald<\/a>.<\/p>\n

So I came back to Normandale, and I had a Muslim student chat with me about the difficulties of navigating the holiday of Eid al-Adha. Eid isn't a holiday that my school has off, so she's faced with observing it and asking professors for the day off, or only partially observing it and coming to school. We talked a bit about how employers frequently had floating holidays that let people of multiple faiths take time away. I let him know the minor accommodations I made to facilitate religious holidays that weren't on the calendar, such as the High Holidays for Jews or Eid al-Fitr. Still, we wondered together about how culture builds in acknowledgement of some people and asks others to do more work to have their culture acknowledged.<\/p>\n

The two experiences coming hard upon each encourage me to think about how I build in acknowledgement of certain groups into my assignments and why that matters.<\/p>\n

* As a matter of historical accuracy, at least one source I read indicated the current Greenwood Plantation main house was rebuilt in the 20th century after a major fire.<\/p>\n

Safe home.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This past weekend I visited St. Francisville, Louisiana for a family wedding. The wedding was held in a church\u00a0built in 1860 and re-built in 1880 after shelling by Union troops. Later, the wedding reception was held at Greenwood Plantation.\u00a0I asked my sister-in-law: “Hey, did you see the plaques commemorating the slaves who built the churchContinue reading “How to build history and social justice into life.”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-303","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jacknorton.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/303","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jacknorton.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jacknorton.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jacknorton.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jacknorton.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=303"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/jacknorton.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/303\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":304,"href":"https:\/\/jacknorton.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/303\/revisions\/304"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jacknorton.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=303"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jacknorton.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=303"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jacknorton.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=303"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}