Silent Why?
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Silent Why?
As a student, we go to school to learn about the past, present, and future of our culture, race, and the country that we live in and how we affected others. In the poem, “Southern History” the author Natasha Trethewey points out the usual response that students give teachers when going over a subject they have heard about since the first grade. The message the Tretheway is trying to get across is that we should not try to soften the blow about what happen in our history.
The poem “Southern History,” give the sense of being in your last year in high school not really caring about what is happening around you. The only thing that the author is worrying about is walking across the stage. The student is going over a subject that she has done projects on and wrote papers on since the beginning of her education, but this time the teacher is saying that the slaves were better off as property instead of people equal to their ex-master because they were fed and clothed.
She points out that no one in the class raised their hand no even her because they still had another period in our history to go over. The students probably did not raise their hand because they felt that the teacher would make them feel stupid or worthy of challenging what him or her just said. Another reason they did not raise their hands is because they knew that they had another subject to go over and felt that if they got to detailed in one subject that they would have to read and learn the subject on their own time. They knew that they were about to watch a movie and did not want to cut into the free sleep time.
After the movie, the teacher says that “of the Old South–a true account of how things were back then, but when she saw the actor she saw a healthy man smiling. The author probably thinking about what person would be happy about being property. The textbook in front of her was the smiling truth and her teacher would protect it at all cost and in her way she would to because she is silent.
The emotions that were in this poem were probably cowardly, guilt, helpless, childlike, and skeptical. These are just of the feeling I believe were in the poem. The feeling of being of a coward because instead of challenging the teacher about what he or she was saying they just sat there and accepted it. The author feels skeptical because she knows that the slaves were treated like property