The American Family Secret

I've been co-teaching a course on race and religion in nineteenth-century literature this month with my friend Dr. Tom Cooley.  Tom taught English at Ohio State University and is now retired.  He's a very insightful guy, and we've been having a lot of fun teaching together.  That said, this is pretty we're dealing with pretty sobering stuff.

This week we finish up our course taking a look at Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin.  It's not the best of books, from a literary perspective.  Nor is it the most theologically sophisticated read of the nineteenth century.  But it's impact on American society is legendary!  Hundreds of thousands of copies sold in the first year alone.  And minds were changed.  That which had been easy for some to ignore, suddenly became very real. 

Nancy Koester, in her excellent Harriet Beecher Stowe:  A Spiritual Biography, recounts Stowe's comment that writing about slavery felt like being "forced by some awful oath to disclose in court some family disgrace."  (147)  And of course, it was and is.  For the American family, it was a great disgrace.  Something we don't want to talk about--a family secret.

But talk about it we must.  For it's impact, these many decades later, is still being felt.  For though great strides have been made in terms of the laws of the land, racial bias still lies just below the surface, just waiting for a Ferguson or a frat house video to come along and remind us of it's destructive power.

Only when our biases are exposed to the light of day can we see them clearly enough to remove them.  That's why I'm teaching about our history as a nation.  The problems we face today didn't come out of nowhere.  They are deeply rooted in the soil and souls of our beloved country
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