If real slaves thought they had it bad, wait until they hear what Steve Williams had to endure.
Who is Steve Williams, you ask?
A slave.
More specifically, Tiger Woods’s slave.
According to The Guardian UK, Williams is courageously sharing his 13 years in forced servitude in a slave narrative called Out of the Rough, which was released in his native New Zealand yesterday. The book focuses on the period of his life when he was horrifically stolen from his native land, thrown into chains, beaten every day and forced to work as Woods’s personal caddie.
No, I’m just kidding.
Actually, he applied for the job, got hired, and then was paid handsomely for it (specifically, $8.8 million in 12 years with Woods as reported by the Business Insider).
Still, Williams alleges there was plenty of oppression.
In particular, the time in 2010 when he had to endure “questions” about what he knew of Woods’s extramarital affairs. Granted, no one came into his house, tore his wife and children from his arms and sold them down the river. But his wife and children were extremely bothered by the inquiries.
He also said that massa Woods had a bad temper. As Williams noted in his narrative: “One thing that really pissed me off was how he would flippantly toss a club in the general direction of the bag, expecting me to go over and pick it up. I felt uneasy about bending down to pick up his discarded club, it was like I was his slave. The other thing that disgusted me was his habit of spitting at the hole if he missed a putt.”
Oh, the humanity!
Imagine the indignities of Woods expecting his fellow human being, whom he paid, to actually walk across the green, bend over and pick up a golf club like some common overcompensated caddy?
Thank God he was able to escape with Tubman and ’em to freedom using the North Star – or more accurately, get fired, get into his car and freely drive home.
Clearly this guy has deep-seeded issues. And I imagine most of those issues have less to do with some perceived captivity forced upon him and more to do with Woods being partially Black. I don’t know. Call it intuition…
Of course, this is not the first time that Williams had made questionable remarks about Woods. More specifically, he told reporters back in 2011 that he wanted to take a mock award he had just won and “shove it right up that black arsehole.” So let’s just call it common sense.
Nevertheless, what is most bothersome about Williams’s comments is how quickly he tried to co-opt the pain and the actual history of a member of the group for whom he was trying to vilify. And he is not the only White man who has done this. Over the last few years, mostly whiny White people have compared the horrors of the trans-Atlantic slave trade to a number of personal discomforts including a woman’s right to have an abortion, funding welfare, paying income taxes, and illegal immigration.
After centuries of cultural, political and economic dominance, the audacity of White men claiming oppression, particularly by the hands of the oppressed, is not only ill-informed but laughable. Moreover, claiming these indignities as their own while still denying the descendants of those atrocities equal protections, access and respect in society is just flat-out disrespectful.
If Williams feels like a slave because Woods made him do his damn job then perhaps he should suffer the same repercussions our ancestors (and their descendants) had to go through for speaking maliciously against their masters. Let’s see how he feels about the comparison then.
But the deflated White male-privileged egos of Williams and others aside, there are some of us who too use the term as a slur. And truthfully, that bothers me just as much as when White people use it. We use terms like “mental slave” and accuse other Blacks of “acting like a slave” as if there is some connection between the behavior and attitudes of the enslaved and why our ancestors were held in bondage.
There isn’t.
Our people were forcefully kidnapped and transported to a new land. They had their names, religions, languages, cultures and identities stripped from them. Although many of them were adults, they had to get permission and be told when they could marry, what they could call themselves and when they could leave the plantation. They were dehumanized, turned into property and denied even the most basic of protections under the law. And yet, many of our folks, the descendants of those held in bondage, have grown accustomed to using the word to suggest that many of us don’t truly respect our ancestors. Like we see them as “lesser people” rather than people who were treated less than.
The casual use of the word “slavery” is either proof of how poor our education system is in this country, or just how flippant we have become at remembering such a pivotal period in our global history.
I personally believe it is a combination of the two.
Now, folks who regularly read my stuff here know I am not down for the whole racial envy thing we tend to do with Jewish people and the Holocaust. But I do think their community has the right idea about how to organize against anti-Semitism. In particular, the work that anti-defamation leagues have done in many countries around the world, including Romania, France, Sweden, Mexico and Germany (to name a few), to pass laws that either define anti-Semitism or make it punishable to deny the atrocities of the Holocaust.
I know we have freedom of speech, but that speech is not absolute. And while discussing slavery so erroneously would not likely be a punishable offense here in the land of the free, we can certainly make it a social faux pas.
After all, it is not just about remembering and honoring the past. But it is also about getting us to realize the seriousness of slavery so that we can ensure it never happens again and actually help the millions who are still being held in bondage (be it children on cacao farms, in the sex industry, or in some rich person’s house) today.
