Get a wider lens
If you search “Meryl Streep feminism” on Twitter you will find an absurd controversy in action: people expressing shock and horror that Streep wore, for the cover of Time Out, a t shirt that says
I’D RATHER BE A REBEL THAN A SLAVE
The cover story is about a new movie in which Streep plays Emmeline Pankhurst. The movie is titled Suffragette. It’s about the suffragettes. The slogan was coined by Emmeline Pankhurst.
Tweeters are freaking out because omg Streep is white, that’s appropriation, doesn’t anybody know any history?!
History. Slavery has been a thing throughout human history. It has been used as a metaphor throughout human history. It is not the exclusive property of Americans, not even Americans whose grandparents were slaves. Another widely used and related metaphor is the one about being in chains (Rousseau, Marx); that too is universal, not parochial.
End of morning history lesson.
If it’s appropriation, it is appropriated from certain eastern Europeans
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/slave#Etymology
Well the issue isn’t so much the English word “slave” but the concept, which is far larger and older than that one word.
It’s just more American Ignorance. The complainers don’t know a quote when it hits them squarely on the head, and don’t even try to remedy their ignorance. As for realising that there is history that didn’t happen in the US… You’d think Westminster and the accent would clue people up, but no.
Film looks great though. And what a debt we owe those brave and strong women!
No, no–that’s not how it works! You’re s’posed to let the twenty-somethings school you.
Did you know black people are oppressed in America? I learned that from a kid on Twitter.
/end snark
Is it always women’s history that they ignore or impugn? *sigh*
Old Norse: træl. Maybe that cuts too close to troll? ;-)
What else can we expect from a population that acquires it sense of history from Hollywood?
I’m including millions of people outside the US as well.
Delft @3
“and what a debt we owe to those brave and strong women!”
Yes, however women, in a few other countries, were given the vote a generation before the UK and the US, New Zealand was the first, I wonder if the writers of “Suffragette” will mention that fact in their script, probably not.
Because their vast experience in their 20 some years of life is MUCH more than your puny experience of (cough,cough) 50 some years of life (speaking for me; not assuming anyone else’s age in here).
I get that all the time. First year freshmen, just away from home and nicely settled into the dorm, know way more than someone who has been away from home many years, had two husbands, one child, four dogs and three cats, three graduate degrees (not to mention three undergraduate degrees), and 20+ years of work experience. Wait, that means I began working my field before they were born – no wonder I don’t know anything. Anything that happened before they were born is just plain irrelevant. Like slavery. Like suffrage. Like the Vietnam War. Like World War II. Like…the Reagan presidency.
Jim Baerg’s reference to the etymology may be a bit beside the point, but raises an interesting historical footnote. According to a massive tome on the history of Europe I read a while back (sorry, can’t remember the name or author), around 1000 AD Nordic people (Vikings) ran the slave trade in eastern Europe, capturing the ancestors of people we now call Slavs and selling them to the Ottoman Empire, from where I imagine they were traded throughout the Arabic trading empire that stretched from Indonesia to North Africa. OK, I may well have garbled this, but it rather makes the point that slavery has occurred throughout history and the slave trade to North America of the 1600s to 1800s did not occur in a vacuum.
@RJW
Wait…. there are people outside the US? ;)
Horrible phrase, isn’t it? But the point is well taken. Here’s a timeline: http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/womanshour/timeline/votes_to_women.shtml
We act like it’s ancient history.
@iknklast
My nephew informed me at the weekend that all the best people were born in 2008. That made me feel so old but actually being around him makes me feel so young. He loves to hear about what technology was like in the olden days. So I played him this song by George Hrab: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JMxQqJeOVck
@8 Mark Hadfield,
The slave trade was far more extensive, it’s estimated by some historians that Muslim North African pirates captured about one million Europeans as slaves between the 7th and 19th centuries, they raided English coastal towns as late as the 17th century. Also the Ottomans enslaved millions of Eastern Europeans.
latsof @9
Yes, amazing isn’t it, history and progress occur outside the borders of the US, actually democracy wasn’t invented in America either.
‘Given the vote’ might indeed be a ‘horrible phrase’ however it’s accurate, the right to vote was ‘granted’ by the male oligarchy, sometimes almost accidentally in some countries.
@RJW
My “outside the US” comment was a gentle reference to the joke that people in the US don’t remember that other places exist until someone asks them to point to America on a globe. The punchline is that they point to the globe. It’s a poor joke and an unfair punchline but that’s what my little dig was about.
Re: “given the vote”:
Yes, I agree with you, sorry I was unclear. The term is distasteful not because it isn’t true, but because it is. I was agreeing with you.
latsot,
Thanks for the clarification.
It’s latsot – Look At The State Of That.
I just read a fascinating explanation about how there should have been a disclaimer for Americans because the t-shirt includes the words “rebel” and “slave” and therefore would lead poor, ignorant Americans to assume the slogan reference the American Civil War.
Sorry, Americans, but your country has to get its head out of its ass.
SamBarge – I think it may be too late for us to get our head out of our ass. I think it is permanently stuck there after so many decades.
While we’re on the subject of offensive Americans with ‘their heads up their asses’, here’s a prime example.
http://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2015/oct/06/australia-has-no-freedom-fox-news-host-claims-in-discussion-on-gun-laws
BTW, Australians aren’t disarmed, on some estimates there are probably more guns in the country than before the buyback, only certain types of firearms are prohibited.
Apparently people’s IQs decrease dramatically when they’re speaking out of their sphincters.
@SamBarge:
I’ll admit, as an American, my mind fixated on the words ‘rebel’ and ‘slave’ and assumed it was related to the South/Confederacy/KKK/what-have-you. Then I read the sentence, and realized it made absolutely no sense in that context.
Like, at all. Therefore, I concluded it meant something else, and learned a new quote quite rapidly.
#NotAllAmericans!
I’ll just leave this here.
During the 17th century, most of the white workers in Maryland and Virginia came to the colonies as indentured servants. And their treatment was no better — and arguably oftentimes worse — than the treatment of the black slaves they shared the fields with.
Only about 40% of indentured servants fulfilled their obligation — because their treatment was so brutal that they either died or ran away.
Jim Baerg #1: as one of the Slavic people myself, I feel deeply triggered and insulted with this etymology. An immediate reform of English is called for!
Seriously now, I didn’t know it and it’s an interesting piece of information.
(Ah, but the thought of leading a campaign of persecuted Slavs against our linguistic English overlords is… so fresh! Alright, I think I will do this as soon as I’m retired.)