See this remarkable April 23, 2010 New York Times op-ed piece by Professor Louis Gates about slavery reparations. If I wrote it, it wouldn't be surprising. But when Professor Gates says that slavery reparations are impractical, because there's too many that can be blamed on both sides of the Atlantic--you can put a fork in slavery reparations, and call it done.
There are many thorny issues to resolve before we can arrive at a judicious (if symbolic) gesture to match such a sustained, heinous crime. Perhaps the most vexing is how to parcel out blame to those directly involved in the capture and sale of human beings for immense economic gain.
...
How did slaves make it to these coastal forts? The historians John Thornton and Linda Heywood of Boston University estimate that 90 percent of those shipped to the New World were enslaved by Africans and then sold to European traders. The sad truth is that without complex business partnerships between African elites and European traders and commercial agents, the slave trade to the New World would have been impossible, at least on the scale it occurred.
Advocates of reparations for the descendants of those slaves generally ignore this untidy problem of the significant role that Africans played in the trade, choosing to believe the romanticized version that our ancestors were all kidnapped unawares by evil white men, like Kunta Kinte was in “Roots.” The truth, however, is much more complex: slavery was a business, highly organized and lucrative for European buyers and African sellers alike.
I am so happy to see someone say/write what I have been screaming at TV sets for years. The elite African tribal leaders were making great deals of money "selling" their people.
ReplyDeleteAs a person of Irish heritage, my family were lowly potato farmers in the hills of Sligo and Donegal. Should I not seek reparations from England for attempting to starve my family out of Ireland and forcing them to flee to America?
Thank you for making my feelings feel echoed.
Prof. Gates neglects to add that the african slave trade existed long before the Portugese began exploring the west African coast; but it was with Muslim Arabs and shipped the slaves to north Africa and east to cross the Red Sea to Arabia. Slavery had basically died out in Europe, and Africans were just a curiosity until it was discovered that sugar cane could be grown, first on the Atlantic Islands, the Carribean Islands, and then Brazil. Since sugar was a hugh cash crop, it created an instant demand for cheap labor, ie slaves. Cotton did not become a big cash crop until the invention of the cotton gin. Additionaly, contrary to popular opinion, the U.S. was a minor market in the trade (under 10%). The biggest market was Brazil (50%). So, who should pay reparations? As far as I know, My father's family never had thye money to have slaves, my mother's people immigrated from Europe in the 1880's, and my wife is a native of Mexico. And who should recieve reparations? Someone like Obama, whose father's family might have been on the selling side of the trade. Maybe he should be one of the payers.
ReplyDeleteIndeed, the U.S. was a minor receiver of slaves. We ended up with one of the largest black populations in the Western Hemisphere because:
ReplyDelete1. Reluctance to intermarry meant that Africans did not disappear. The Catholic Church in Latin America was very supportive of any Christian marriage, and Africans in some areas were largely absorbed.
2. Living conditions here were much better for slaves than in many other societies, where slaves were literally worked to death, and it was cheaper to buy fresh adult slaves than to bother feeding slave babies, who were often thrown into ditches to die.
Any idea why the US had greater reluctance to intermarry than other countries? I'm just curious about this fact, since it's seems like the US attitude (at least in southern states) toward interracial marriage is something of an aberration.
ReplyDeleteIt is interesting also to note that up until the 18th century there were at least as many Europeans taken into slavery and brought to Africa. The major slavers ever since the 6th century were and are still today Muslims. These slavers raided into Europe, Asia and Africa wherever they could obtain slaves with the least effort.
ReplyDeleteMy hypotheses on why there was not more apparent interbreeding between the slaves and the rest of the US population. Comes from the late settlement of North America compared to the Caribbean and South America. The large number of European females that emigrated to the protestant settlements in North America. The small number of slaves in the British colonies of North America. For an example of how this may have worked, in Mexico the genetic makeup of the X chromosomes is largely native American and the Y chromosomes largely Spanish (European).
bombloader80: yes, the hostility to interracial marriage is anomalous. Latin America never had such a problem with it, and the reasons are complex. There is reason to think that the first restrictions, such as the 1664 Maryland statute (which you can read more about here), was to reduce competition for the limited supply of white women.
ReplyDelete