Also from jezebel --> Cotton Mather, the Salem Witch Trials, and Our Miserable Present
>"At this point in time, though, as Kendi argues in Stamped from the Beginning, slavery was becoming a massive part of the culture of this place, and there was a lot of intellectual capital dedicated towards making it seem morally okay—and Cotton Mather was one of those thinkers, so he was helping to develop these ideologies that stick with us today that are considered racist, right?
There’s no doubt in my mind that Mather sees white European bodies quite differently than the way he sees native bodies, or African bodies. And that he sees these cultures as different and inferior because they’re not Christian. So for him, the problem is largely a problem of religion, and the sense that to be “heathen” is to be in the thrall of the devil. And I agree that his writing is part of the emerging ideologies of the 17th and 18th centuries that seek to define or describe differences and then attribute a hierarchy of qualities or values to them. That’s true, they’re deeply ideological.
[But] I just think to extract out only the deeply disturbing ideologies is too easy. It does harm to a fuller understanding of what those people’s lives were, to our understanding of what it means to be human. I’m not an apologist for Cotton Mather, at all, but look at the complications. Everybody wants to find out why it happened in Salem—is it poisoned rye, is it a land dispute, is it the crappy gender relations? Everybody is looking for the answer, and Salem will never give that answer up, ever. It’s never going to give you the origin of all hell breaking loose. It is constantly asking us to look at complications, a set of unknowns that are never going to be known, and how they intersect.
It’s like when Bridget Bishop says [during her trial], “I’m not a witch, I know not what a witch is.” And Mr. Hathorne says, “How do you know then that you are not a witch?” And you get that moment of a woman being completely cowed and intimidated by a powerful man, and you can talk about the gender relations and class positions, even the legal positions of that. But it doesn’t tell you that Hathorne is a 100% evil man, and that Bridget Bishop is a woman who is completely victimized. It just tells you what’s happening in that moment.
I really worry about these reductions that give us heroes and villains, and victims and oppressors, and that’s all it does. That, to me, is really indicative of our political moment."<
much more:
http://pictorial.jezebel.com/cotton-mather-the-salem-witch-trials-and-our-miserabl-1789775210
= new reply since forum marked as read