This is Harris-Perry's stern warning: "I want us to be super-careful when we use the language 'hard worker,' because I actually keep an image of folks working in cotton fields on my office wall, because it is a reminder about what hard work looks like."
Oh, so the slave is the idealized "hard worker"? Then why, just a couple weeks ago did a textbook publisher, McGraw-Hill, have to apologize and agree to change a geography textbook that referred to slaves as "workers"?
On reading a caption in his geography textbook that described slaves as “workers”, Coby Burren sent a photo and an annoyed message to his mother. "We was real hard workers wasn’t we," he wrote."We are deeply sorry," said the publisher's chief executive for a map of "Patterns of Immigration" that had a notation: "The Atlantic Slave Trade between the 1500s and 1800s brought millions of workers from Africa to the southern United States to work on agricultural plantations."
Roni Dean-Burren was also disturbed by the language, and posted about the book online. Her comments went viral and the publisher swiftly decided to rewrite the section....
Even assuming you want to follow the instruction to "be super-careful," it's hard — if I may use the word — to figure out which way to go.
The McGraw-Hill incident teaches that you should never refer to slavery without framing it in somber moral terms. It can't be mixed in with other matters as if it were not a unique evil.
The "Paul Ryan is a 'hard worker'" incident teaches that slavery must be mixed into discussions of, well, perhaps anything. If someone complains about the heat, maybe you should get on their case for not acknowledging how much more slaves suffered from the heat. If somebody comments that the food isn't very good, you should lay into them about how poorly fed the slaves were? (That sounds like the opposite of "super-careful.")
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