Five years later, Slave Day was gone as if it had never existed, but in 1988 no one dreamed that it could possibly be offensive. It was a tradition.
A friend of mine from high school called in disbelief after reading this book and said, “We didn’t have Slave Day, did we?” I sent him the pictures. The school I attended in South Carolina gave me a great education, but it existed in a bubble. We had a handful of minority students among our 1,200 strong student body so thinking about things like diversity and representation just never occurred to anyone. In 1988, to upper middle class white people living in Charleston, those didn’t seem like urgent ideas. It’s easy to judge from the perspective of the present, and it may even be right to judge, but my job writing this book was to show how alien and strange even the recent past can be and that means I needed to present the facts, warts and all, without giving my opinion. And the fact is, we had Slave Day, and no one thought twice about it. Now I look back on it with a great deal of cringe and a great deal of joy. I cringe when I realize that none of us thought there was anything wrong with it. But I’m filled with joy when I realize that this could not possibly happen today without a dozen people raising red flags, pulling the emergency stop cord, and slamming on the brakes. It’s nice to know that sometimes things change for the better.
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