FREE ME (US)

Today I sat in on a graduate level course in which my PH.D Prof lectured us on Feminism. Somewhere during this time we started talking about the activism of black abolitionist in Syracuse and somehow we ended up on the name Frederick to which she could not remember his last name! Now I did not say anything..Not because I did not know his last name either. But because prior to a fellow student saying Douglass, I believed it to be someone else she was about to mention, I had truly believed that this woman could not possibly have forgotten the last name of one of the most powerful men in history..Ahhhh! but you see in whose history? Not hers, not my white Anglo-Saxon privileged professor, whom I wonder if after reading the feminist workings of authors such as Bell Hooks realized she was the white woman who had become so attached to her male counterpart that she became just as privileged as he. In this privilege she was afforded the right to forget, forget the names of men and women who had suffered beatings of the mental, physical, and spiritual at the hands of oppressors, ignorant vile human beings! And NO! I am in no way bashing the white race, take notice that I gave the oppressors, the ignorant vile human beings no specific race, because I do believe that hatred has no definite color only mental capacity, or lack thereof.
I write this post for a different purpose, the reason being that I could not get over it. The it being Frederick Douglass and his forgotten last name, while she (my Prof) carried on with her lecture all I could think of was wow, how could a woman who traveled the world, researched areas such as Ghana and Nigeria forget the name of Frederick Douglass. And I realized something important, She is not a racist, she is not ignorant or closed off. It is I who has become ignorant. Ignorant to the fact that she is an old woman and you know what it may have just slipped her mind at the time. Ignorant to the fact that she does not bare the burden of her race. A race applied to me, by people who have lacked the ability to reject it as they have the word nigger. So I end with this, though we may have been emancipated for 145 years now. Why is my (our) mind(s) still held in chains?