☪️ Sha Naqba Īmuru  ✡️Verified account

I don't want to read about the "complexity" of the slave-owner. I don't want to hear about her sob-story or how much she loved her children.

I am filled with nothing but anger and hatred at the vileness of the attempt by Alex Tizon to whitewash a slaveholder. No. FUCK! NO!

And you tell me this fucker won a Pulitzer Prize? Please explain to me how a Pulizter Prize-winning author neglected his mom's past.

After reading what Tizon's mother did to Lola, I am not the LEAST bit surprised that his mom also worked at Fairview. But he ignored it.

What I am surprised about is that The Atlantic actually read this story, cried over it, but refused to dig deeper into Fairview.

Hi, @TheAtlantic: can you please mention the horrors that happened at Fairview Training Center while Alex Tizon's mom worked there?

.@TheAtlantic This is the same Alex Tizon, who attempts to whitewash his mom's enslavement of a woman in your latest cover story.

.@TheAtlantic I would contact Alex Tizon directly, but seeing how the coward waited till he had conveniently died before publishing this...

You might think I'm cherry-picking... Or being too angry about a dead woman who is gone and forgotten even by her loved ones...

But Lola is not the only reason I'm mad at Alex Tizon and The Atlantic's treatment of the story of a woman's slavery in America.

Slave-owners are monsters. Every good thing they ever did is completely erased by their act of willfully taking away another human's freedom

We live in a society whose body was built on African-American slavery.. and whose veins pump the blood of racism towards their descendants.

Slavery isn't America's legacy. Slavery is America. We are a nation built on the backs of slaves. And one that whitewashes that constantly.

And one of the ways we accomplish that as a society is to collectively excuse slave-owners of what they did to millions of human beings.

From Washington to Jefferson... we've cleaned up the image of slave-owning Whites by ignoring their victims & exalting their "other" virtues

We then use this narrative of excusing the monster to build a national myth where the responsibility of African-American suffering...

...is piled on obscure individuals we cannot trace through history and whose role in building our nation is marginal to non-existent.

This in turn allows us to absolve the nation collectively of the responsibility of making African-Americans suffer unimaginably.

And it also creates an environment for White people to continue worshipping the monsters responsible for that suffering guilt-free.

But most of all, it shrugs the responsibility of making reparations to the descendants of African-Americans slaves off the nation's shoulder

To mention the slap in the face of 30 million human beings enslaved right now that this piece is with its excuses for slaveholders...

Notice how never once in the story does Alex Tizon apologize himself? Slavery isn't circumstantial. It's deliberate.

Reading about how in old age Lola would not stop cleaning, I shuddered at the thought of the trauma she went through to stay so compliant...

She wasn't cleaning out of habit. She was cleaning because she was mentally wired to clean or she would face abuse.

The monsters in the Tizon family had spent decades taking away her humanity and instead of an apology we get excuses? Fuck you, Alex.

But perhaps what angers me most is the gall of Alex Tizon to not even once point fingers at himself as a slaveholder.

In the story, he talks about how Lola didn't want to remain in the Philippines when he sent her there after his mother died...

But what about before his mother died? What about when Lola was in her 40s and Alex Tizon had turned 18? Or when he left home at 23?