Chapter 12: The Old South and Slavery

             Slavery has always been read and interpreted in one way in majority of the history textbooks that I have read. Slavery has always been represented as a time in history that represented pain and misery for the slaves, but we never really thought about some of the suffering that the white people went through, especially the women. Slavery is an act that is unforgivable, the pain that these slaves went through was not okay, but often time some white people suffered as well. At one point in the reading the authors wrote about how white women often time resented the slaves because of their husband’s infidelity. Whenever a slave-owner fathered a mulatto child with one of the slaves, it caused the white women to resent their slaves. Instead of treating their slaves with some kind of humanity, these women would choose to abuse both the mistress slave and the mulatto child because they didn’t have any other way to release their shame and anger. Reading this portion brought me back to an earlier chapter that I read about how women were often time more abusive towards slaves than men were.  I never understand why they were so cruel, but now I have some insights as to were the hatred came from. These women were forced to act on their emotion because their husbands were not loyal to them, since they couldn’t take their anger out of their husbands they would take it out of the slaves. It’s sad to see how a man’s decision could affect the lives of a household.