Bias
...from the Bottom Rail" by James West Davidson and
Mark Hamilton Lytle opened my eyes on how American history could be looked at as
one sided and even bias. Even today there is still bias in America. In today's
society, racism and stereotyping occur in all aspects of life. It can occur
because of one's gender, race, religion, culture, economic status, etc. It even
occurs amongst our finest, our law enforcement officials.
"The View from the Bottom Rail" explains the history of slavery.
It implies a lack of accuracy from the people that the information was obtained,
either black or white. Most of the black slaves could not read or write. The
ones that did, hid it from their masters. Because of this, most of the written
books and documents and even diaries on slavery were written by the white
masters. At that time most of recorded history was based on how the white
masters viewed slavery. You did not get a view on slavery from the slaves
themselves.
In the 1920's, black scholars like W.E.B. Du Bois, Charles
Johnson, and Carter Woodson, started a project to collect oral evidence from
former slaves who were still living. Even these interviews could not be viewed
as 100% accurate. One example, is a geographic bias. The people that were
interviewed were only a very small portion of the millions of freed slaves.
Counting the number of slaves interviewed from each state, it was discovered
that there were only 155 interviews from black people living in Virginia,
Maryland, Delaware, Missouri, and Kentucky, which is about 6% of the total
number of published interviews. Twenty-three percent of the southern slave
population lived in those states. In these statistics, the upper-south was
unrepresented.
Another example would be the ages of the ex-slaves interviewed.
Two-thirds of them were over 80 years of age, leaving the question of how
accurate were their...
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