C'mon, it wasn't that bad....

Taken from this site. This article really caught my attention because currently I'm taking a course on American Racism, and for the past several weeks my classmates and I have studied the ways American (that is, in the Americas) slavery was, in fact, a peculiar institution, unlike that practiced historically or in other parts of the world. This course is the only one that consistently rivets my attention each week, and always sends me home mulling something over, and requires me to really ask myself some tough questions.

That said, read up:

The latest race deflector to show his face is Michael Medved over on the conservative site, TownHall.com.

He basically says in his column that when people discuss slavery, they are exaggerating its impact. He also says those people are in effect, ‘America bashers’. He outlines six ‘inconvenient truths about slavery‘. Here I will list each one and then break down why he is wrong.

1. “Slavery was an ancient and universal institution, not a distinctively American innovation” - With this one he seeks to say that ‘hey, other civilizations enslaved people why be pissed off at the U.S.?’ It is quite simple actually, Blacks in the U.S. are still effected by the slave trade that occurred in this country AND not all slavery is the same. People always try to bring up the fact that African tribes practiced slavery, well, it is COMPLETELY DIFFERENT. African tribes would take slaves in the instance of a battle where prisoners were caught and this was not guaranteed (they could have been released or something else). As a slave, they were able to marry into the owner’s family and even inherit the owner’s wealth. The slaves were not forced to completely let go of their knowledge of self. On the other hand, in the U.S. slaves were forced to mingle with other slaves from different tribes and spoke different languages. This would make it harder to escape bondage. On top of that, they were forced to convert to Christianity and abandon any other cultural traits that defined them. Cultural genocide is a very effective tactic.

Note from Bridgett: one of the most illuminating new things I've learned in my class is that some of American slavery's most vicious tactics were related to the very nature of our slavery, namely that it involved huge slave populations and thus made whites understandably fear (and try to prevent, through incredibly strict slave codes) slave uprisings. In communities where the occasional prisoner of war was taken as a slave, this was not a concern, and thus policies were not put in place that restricted slaves' every action.

2. “Slavery existed only briefly, and in limited locales, in the history of the Republic - involving only a tiny percentage of the ancestors of today’s Americans” - You have to read between the lines on this one, another quote: “The Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution put a formal end to the institution of slavery 89 years after the birth of the Republic“. He is ONLY counting the time after we formally became the United States of America. Slavery was being practiced in the colonies well before this country won its independence from Britain. The African slave trade was practiced for hundreds of years. Also, the “tiny percentage of the ancestors” he is talking about are not blacks, they are whites, he says: “only a tiny percentage of today’s white citizens – perhaps as few as 5% — bear any authentic sort of generational guilt for the exploitation of slave labor”. I do not care how many whites owned slaves, because it was those whites that owned the VAST MAJORITY of blacks in this country at the time. His argument is like saying ‘though hundreds of employees at Enron were screwed badly, the screwing was only done by the few executives over the company so it wasn’t that bad’. By the way, he tries to say this: “the importation of slaves came to an end in 1808 (as provided by the Constitution)“. Again, read between the lines, he specifically said “as provided by the Constitution” because he knows that the importation of slaves CONTINUED after this regardless of what the Constitution said. He is hoping that people go away thinking that the importation actually stopped in 1808.

Note from Bridgett: also, as I learned in class, the decrease in importation only led to an increase in the practice of slave breeding and domestic trading.

3. “Though brutal, slavery wasn’t genocidal: live slaves were valuable but dead captives brought no profit” - This one is funny, because he is trying to just use the specific definition of genocide, the deliberate extermination of a group of people, to say it wasn’t that bad. I’m sorry, but estimates are as high as 10-12 million regarding the number of Africans dying as a result of slavery. Slave traders deliberately packed ships to full capacity to ensure that they had a high number of survivors after traveling the Middle Passage. That deliberate act resulted in millions dying which they KNEW would happen because of the conditions of enslavement, thus the reason for packing the ships. If you want to see the conditions of the travel and living as a slave, watch ROOTS. Regardless of whether you call it genocide or not, millions died and suffered as a result of slavery and cultural genocide.

4. “It’s not true that the U.S. became a wealthy nation through the abuse of slave labor: the most prosperous states in the country were those that first freed their slaves” - First off, the word “wealthy” is general, he did not even define it, so based on however he is defining wealthy, he may be right. Hell, to a poor person, someone making $30,000 a year is wealthy (see, you always have to read between the lines). Second, if slave labor was not prosperous, why did the South fight so hard to expand it to new states, and thus, causing the Civil War? People did benefit from slave labor, if they did not, they would not have used it.

5. “While America deserves no unique blame for the existence of slavery, the United States merits special credit for its rapid abolition” - Abolishing slavery after hundreds of years of use is by no means “rapid”. But maybe it is in his world.

6. “There is no reason to believe that today’s African-Americans would be better off if their ancestors had remained behind in Africa” - Of course not, because of COLONIALISM. However, he tries to counter the colonialism argument with: “Of course, those who seek reparations would also cite the devastating impact of Western colonialism in stunting African progress, but the United States played virtually no role in the colonization of the continent. The British, French, Italians, Portuguese, Germans and others all established brutal colonial rule in Africa; tiny Belgium became a particularly oppressive and bloodthirsty colonial power in the Congo.” The United States DID CONTRIBUTE to colonialism because the U.S. benefited economically from it. The Western colonizers saw the benefits of colonialism - the slave trade to the U.S. was one of those benefits. His entire argument is strictly to try to take blame off of the U.S., sad. On another note, Africa would be an entirely different continent today if colonialism had not happened.

Note from Bridgett: While I don't have the specific numbers handy, one of the topics we've discussed in my class is the millions of people taken from Africa, in many cases the healthiest, and strongest, and the disruption this necessarily caused to the communities they were taken from. We have also examined the highly developed Western African societies already in existence at the time of the beginning of the slave trade, which receive virtually no attention. It is amazing how pervasive the conception of Africa as "the dark continent" still is today. Just the other day I walked by a shop on my way to school that had an "African Cities" poster in its window, and I was struck by how this was the first time I'd seen those images. Everything in the media suggests that Africa is backwards, empty except for a few huts, and has always been so.