The value of slavery?

[irosie91]

PS----lately------arabs are calling themselves "people of color" -----It
is a deflection ------a DENIAL OF RESPONSIBILITY

 

[karpenter]

For reparations for slavery-----see the arab league

Maybe The Muslims Could Un-Castrate The Ones That Died In The Desert

 

[toobfreak]

NOT ONE DIME.

Lessee, minimum wage labour was worth about a penny an hour in 1850. Subtract from that the housing, food, clothes, healthcare and everything else that blacks got for free, what their families were paid who sold them into slavery, a lot of them might still end up owing us something. If anyone can prove they are the rightful descendant of a slave and have records of hours they worked, benefits, etc., upon which to make a case, they might just end up being pursued by the IRS instead for unpaid debt to the United States. All slave descendants making claims for "reparations" please step forward and make your case so the IRS can talk to you.

 

[Coyote]

Next time someone says, “But Africans sold themselves into slavery!”, send this article to them

EDITOR’S NOTE: The following except from pages 47-50 of Overturning the Culture of Violence, written by Penny Hess, Chairwoman of the African People’s Solidarity Committee and printed by Burning Spear Publications, debunks the cynical and anti-black argument that “Africans enslaved themselves.” This argument points to the presence of Africans who collaborated with the European slave masters and “sold” Africans to them in order to shift the responsibility for the slave trade off the shoulders of the European colonial slavemaster and onto the backs of the colonized and enslaved African.

Today, as the voice of the enslaved African community asserts itself in the world and lifts up the demand for reparations, the blame-shifting “African collaborator” argument can be seen gaining traction in universities and bourgeois historical publications, not as an historical argument but as a political defense against the legitimacy of the reparations demand. As an organization of white people working under the leadership of the African People’s Socialist Party to organize white people in solidarity with the African struggle for liberation and reparations, we in the Uhuru Solidarity Movement find it timely to publish this excerpt here:

HUMAN BONDAGE: Page 47-50, Overturning the Culture of Violence

The terrible impact that slavery has had on the continent of Africa cannot be calculated: the destruction of magnificent civilizations, the break-up of family and kinship circles, the massive depopulation, forced impoverishment, famine and starvation, the ravishing of an environment which had been so conducive to human civilization for millennia. From open, educated, prosperous and democratic societies, African people now lived in sheer terror, never knowing when their village or town would be raided for human loot by these white invaders.

Some North American people cynically place the blame for the enslavement of African people on the shoulders of African collaborators who participated in the kidnapping of their own people. Impacted by the social destruction wreaked by invading Europeans, a tiny minority of the conquered people did find their own survival by participating in this treachery.

The setting up of collaborators among the colonized population has been a successful tool of domination in every instance of European colonialism around the world. Africa is no exception. Europeans attack societies in Africa, Asia, or the Americas, destroying their traditional economies and long-standing social relationships. A unilateral colonial economy, which starves the people and creates the dependency on the colonial power, is militarily enforced.

The European invader gets richer and richer through his bloodsucking relationship, and offers resources, guns and special status to a minority sector of the oppressed population. The selected “elite” or the colony can themselves become enslaved or carry out the will of white power. If they take any stand independent of the colonizer as have, say, Panama’s Noriega or Iraq’s Saddam Hussein in today’s world, white power spares them none of its wrath.

This plan has worked well over the centuries. A few people in every colony have participated in the devious imperialist schemes of slavery, genocide, torture and exploitation of their own people, a collaboration which benefits no one more than the European or North American “mother” country.

The statement that “Africans enslaved their own people” separates out African people from other colonial subjects, all of whom have had their share of betrayal among their ranks. It is a statement of imperialism’s historic need to mobilize public opinion against African people.

Like the general white attitude toward the government-imposed drugs and dependent drug economy in today’s African communities, this statement lets the parasitic colonial economic system off the hook. It is an anti-black expression of unity with the oppression of African people, saying, “They did it to themselves.” Meanwhile all white people everywhere still benefit from the parasitic economic system which has as its foundation the enslavement and continued exploitation of African people.

Most Africans resisted enslavement with all of their energy. Rebellions on slave ships were common. According to one source, “Many deaths on slave journeys across the Atlantic derived from violence, brawls, and above all, rebellions. There was probably at least one insurrection every eight to ten journeys.”

For example, Africans successfully rebelled in 1532 aboard the Portueguese slave ship the Misericordia. The 109 Africans on board “rose and murdered all the crew except for the pilot and two seaman. Those survivors escaped in a longboat. But the Misericordia was never heard of again.”

Slave ship owners often three Africans off the ships just to collect the insurance money. One famous case was that of a ship owned by William Gregson and George Case (both former mayors of Liverpool, England). The captain threw 133 Africans into the sea because if Africans were to die naturally, the owners would lose money, but if the African people were “thrown alive into the sea,” supposedly for the safety of the crew, “it would be the loss of the underwriters.”

So many African people died en route that it has been said that sharks followed slave ships all the way from Africa to the Americas.

Africans who survived the notoriously brutal middle passage, as the Atlantic crossing was known, reached the Americas barely alive. If they were too ill, they were left to die on the shore. They were sold like animals on public auction blocks, naked or in rags, weakened and emaciated, having survived the months below deck with disease and malnutrition, not to mention the emotional ravage sof such an experience. Many Africans committed suicide to avoid enslavement, a practice otherwise unknown in African culture.

White buyers came to the market for slaves, “feeling the Africans’ limbs and bodies much as butchers handled calves. The slaves were often asked, as they had been told to do before leaving Africa, to show their tongues and teeth, or to stretch their arms.”

In the Americas, Africans were “broken in” by submitting them to inhuman terror in an attempt to crush out any resistance. The “breaking” process was psychological as well as physical, and included being forced to learn a version of a European language and to take a European name, something many Africans militantly resisted.

Under the domination of their white slave masters, African people of all ages were branded, women on the breasts. Africans were whipped until they were deeply scarred, and their ears or ear lobes were cut off. People were slashed in the face, and their hands and feet were cut off to prevent them from running away. Men were castrated; women were raped. Women’s babies were cut out of their bellies for “punishment” and any man, woman or child could be forced to wear iron collars on their necks for life.

Under such brutal conditions, normal human relationships between men and woman or parents and children were interrupted and nearly impossible. Mothers were forced to work the full nine months of pregnancy, often giving birth in the field. They were then forced to abandon their children, as they had to keep on working or nurse the children of the slave master.

Next time someone says, "But Africans sold themselves into slavery!", send this article to them

This ended 150 years ago.

Rather than focusing in it why not focus on the problems of today? Reparations won’t fix any problems, aren’t truly just in that they don’t go to those who were actually enslaved, and will only exacerbate racial hate because there will be those who will see it as just another entitlement reserved for blacks?

 

[Coyote]

Why are people still defending slavery in America? 5 common excuses, debunked.

On the latest episode of her MTV web series Decoded, comedian and activist Franchesca Ramsey highlighted the unfortunate tendency many Americans have to ignore or erase the role slavery played in the country’s past.

"We talk about race a lot on this show," Ramsey said. "But thanks to our current election cycle, apparently we have to go back to the beginning to shed some light on the myths people use to justify slavery."

After Michelle Obama’s DNC speech about her historical legacy as the first black first lady "living in a house built by slaves," slavery fact-checking ensued. The first lady’s statement checked out.

But the fact that people tried to suggest otherwise shows just how little many Americans know about an institution that defined the country at its inception, and how that ignorance prevents us from taking an honest look at the country’s horrific past.

In response, Ramsey broke down five of the most common excuses used for slavery.

1) "Slaves were well-fed"
After the first lady tried to use her DNC speech to show that her time in the White House demonstrated how far racial progress in America has come, Fox News host Bill O’Reilly decided to use her moment to put a positive spin on slavery itself.

The following day, O’Reilly challenged Obama on The O’Reilly Factor, saying "slaves were well-fed." Then, after a backlash, he defended his statement by clarifying that slaves’ diet consisted of "meat, bread, and other staples."

Ramsey cited other common arguments that parallel O’Reilly’s, like the idea that some slave masters treated slaves well or that being a slave who worked in the big house was at least better than working outside in the fields.

But, as Ramsey noted, "this argument is immaterial, as in it doesn’t matter."

No matter their housing or food, the inherent problem with slavery is the fact that people were slaves in the first place, which is only compounded by the ways Africans were taken from their countries of origin and transported to an unknown place against their will where no one was required to muster even an ounce of recognition of their humanity.

"If aliens abducted your brother, sister, and favorite uncle, and stuck a feeding tube down their throats, while forcing them to build their emperor’s house, would you think, ‘Well at least the aliens fed my family’?" Ramsey asked on Decoded. "I don’t think so."

2) Slaves were happy to have work
Slaves may have had many excruciating jobs, including building much of America. But that doesn’t mean it’s okay to equate slavery with employment.

"Newsflash: Although you might hate your job, slavery isn’t employment," Ramsey said. "It wasn’t voluntary, and it has no comparison to working at a job."

But even textbook publishers fail to get this fact straight.

Last October, McGraw-Hill Education came under fire after Roni Dean-Burren, the mother of a high school freshman in Texas, shared a photo of immigration patterns in her son’s geography textbook that said the slave trade "brought millions of workers" to the US through slavery from 1500s to the 1800s. But "workers" and slaves are not at all the same thing.

On Decoded, Ramsey explained the major difference: "Being forcibly taken from your home, put in shackles on a disease-infested ship, and forced to do hard labor from sunrise to sunset is not the same thing as clocking in at Starbucks, okay?"

3) Other countries had slavery too
It’s true America wasn’t the only country that had slavery. In fact, the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade’s name signals the scope of slave routes, which traveled from the shores of West and Central Africa to the Caribbean before stopping in the US.

Many of the people (nearly 4 million) taken from Africa to be slaves between the 16th and 19th centuries ended up in Brazil because the slavery conditions in Brazil were so brutal that continued importation was essential to make up for the high death rate, which outpaced birth rate.

But slavery elsewhere doesn’t change the fact that slavery in the US was still wrong.

"Even if slavery was common practice when America was doing it, it doesn’t make it right," Ramsey said. "Slavery is bad, and it was always bad, everywhere, no matter who’s doing it!"

4) The Irish in America were also slaves
Some people believe the Irish in America were also slaves because the Irish, historically, have faced persecution and many came to the US as indentured servants.

Ramsay’s response is simple: "No, they were not."

Ramsey has discredited this idea before. But that doesn’t change the fact that it has become a fixture for racist right-wing internet trolls.

In an interview with the Southern Poverty Law Center, Liam Hogan, an Irish historian, explained that the myth of Irish slaves "broadly claims that indentured servitude and penal servitude can be equated with racialized perpetual hereditary chattel slavery."

The point is to try to deflect the reality of black people’s enslavement in the US by mythologizing a group of white people who were also slaves.

But Ramsey underlined the main problem with this approach: "Class, let’s say this one together: Persecution is bad, but not the same as slavery!"

5) Africans sold other Africans as slaves
This is similar to saying slavery happened in other places. It’s true that Africans did sell other Africans into slavery, but that doesn’t absolve Americans and Europeans for their participation in slavery.

In fact, suggesting as much erases a lot of nuance about power dynamics involved with how both Africans and Europeans were involved in the process.

As Harvard University professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. wrote for the New York Times in 2010, "Slavery was a business, highly organized and lucrative for European buyers and sellers alike."

But slavery in the US wasn’t exactly business as usual. Barbara Ransby, a historian at the University of
of Illinois at Chicago, noted for Colorlines that the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade exploited existing practices like selling prisoners of war into slavery to usher in "a heinous and brutal system that rested squarely on the dual pillars of white supremacy and ruthless capitalist greed."

Ramsey showcased the major takeaway from this historical fact: "It just means that West Africans also have a history to reckon with, just like us and every modern celebrity that thinks blackface is a joke."

So why do people still try to justify slavery today?
It turns out a lot of it has to do with the fact that America’s mythic greatness is inextricably tied to the atrocities of slavery Americans try to sweep under the rug.

Being honest about slavery, Ramsey said, forces us to grapple with the fact that our founding fathers who fought for freedom from Britain’s tyranny hypocritically kept an entire population in bondage. Additionally, recognizing slavery means addressing the systemic inequalities that have stayed with us long after its abolition.

"The blatant forms of racism we still see today, from disenfranchising black voters to police brutality, are rooted in the fact that people were brought here against their will and treated like they were subhuman," Ramsey said.

Acting like this isn’t the case isn’t a solution.

"We can’t keep ignoring and mythologizing slavery just because facing it head-on makes us feel bad," Ramsey said. "Part of the healing comes from facing it."

Why are people still defending slavery in America? 5 common excuses, debunked.

Slavery is indefensible today but it is an integral part in the formation of our country and the economy of the south would never have grown without slave labor.

You also have to understand it in the context of the times, it was a common preactice, but we clung to it long after much of the world ended it.

It utterly flummoxes me that people believe they were happy and well fed. People in a country that values freedom and liberty above all else (except maybe guns). Says something about a rather ugly underbelly that is feeling empowered to come out in the open.

 

[Toro]

Why are people still defending slavery in America? 5 common excuses, debunked.

On the latest episode of her MTV web series Decoded, comedian and activist Franchesca Ramsey highlighted the unfortunate tendency many Americans have to ignore or erase the role slavery played in the country’s past.

"We talk about race a lot on this show," Ramsey said. "But thanks to our current election cycle, apparently we have to go back to the beginning to shed some light on the myths people use to justify slavery."

After Michelle Obama’s DNC speech about her historical legacy as the first black first lady "living in a house built by slaves," slavery fact-checking ensued. The first lady’s statement checked out.

But the fact that people tried to suggest otherwise shows just how little many Americans know about an institution that defined the country at its inception, and how that ignorance prevents us from taking an honest look at the country’s horrific past.

In response, Ramsey broke down five of the most common excuses used for slavery.

1) "Slaves were well-fed"
After the first lady tried to use her DNC speech to show that her time in the White House demonstrated how far racial progress in America has come, Fox News host Bill O’Reilly decided to use her moment to put a positive spin on slavery itself.

The following day, O’Reilly challenged Obama on The O’Reilly Factor, saying "slaves were well-fed." Then, after a backlash, he defended his statement by clarifying that slaves’ diet consisted of "meat, bread, and other staples."

Ramsey cited other common arguments that parallel O’Reilly’s, like the idea that some slave masters treated slaves well or that being a slave who worked in the big house was at least better than working outside in the fields.

But, as Ramsey noted, "this argument is immaterial, as in it doesn’t matter."

No matter their housing or food, the inherent problem with slavery is the fact that people were slaves in the first place, which is only compounded by the ways Africans were taken from their countries of origin and transported to an unknown place against their will where no one was required to muster even an ounce of recognition of their humanity.

"If aliens abducted your brother, sister, and favorite uncle, and stuck a feeding tube down their throats, while forcing them to build their emperor’s house, would you think, ‘Well at least the aliens fed my family’?" Ramsey asked on Decoded. "I don’t think so."

2) Slaves were happy to have work
Slaves may have had many excruciating jobs, including building much of America. But that doesn’t mean it’s okay to equate slavery with employment.

"Newsflash: Although you might hate your job, slavery isn’t employment," Ramsey said. "It wasn’t voluntary, and it has no comparison to working at a job."

But even textbook publishers fail to get this fact straight.

Last October, McGraw-Hill Education came under fire after Roni Dean-Burren, the mother of a high school freshman in Texas, shared a photo of immigration patterns in her son’s geography textbook that said the slave trade "brought millions of workers" to the US through slavery from 1500s to the 1800s. But "workers" and slaves are not at all the same thing.

On Decoded, Ramsey explained the major difference: "Being forcibly taken from your home, put in shackles on a disease-infested ship, and forced to do hard labor from sunrise to sunset is not the same thing as clocking in at Starbucks, okay?"

3) Other countries had slavery too
It’s true America wasn’t the only country that had slavery. In fact, the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade’s name signals the scope of slave routes, which traveled from the shores of West and Central Africa to the Caribbean before stopping in the US.

Many of the people (nearly 4 million) taken from Africa to be slaves between the 16th and 19th centuries ended up in Brazil because the slavery conditions in Brazil were so brutal that continued importation was essential to make up for the high death rate, which outpaced birth rate.

But slavery elsewhere doesn’t change the fact that slavery in the US was still wrong.

"Even if slavery was common practice when America was doing it, it doesn’t make it right," Ramsey said. "Slavery is bad, and it was always bad, everywhere, no matter who’s doing it!"

4) The Irish in America were also slaves
Some people believe the Irish in America were also slaves because the Irish, historically, have faced persecution and many came to the US as indentured servants.

Ramsay’s response is simple: "No, they were not."

Ramsey has discredited this idea before. But that doesn’t change the fact that it has become a fixture for racist right-wing internet trolls.

In an interview with the Southern Poverty Law Center, Liam Hogan, an Irish historian, explained that the myth of Irish slaves "broadly claims that indentured servitude and penal servitude can be equated with racialized perpetual hereditary chattel slavery."

The point is to try to deflect the reality of black people’s enslavement in the US by mythologizing a group of white people who were also slaves.

But Ramsey underlined the main problem with this approach: "Class, let’s say this one together: Persecution is bad, but not the same as slavery!"

5) Africans sold other Africans as slaves
This is similar to saying slavery happened in other places. It’s true that Africans did sell other Africans into slavery, but that doesn’t absolve Americans and Europeans for their participation in slavery.

In fact, suggesting as much erases a lot of nuance about power dynamics involved with how both Africans and Europeans were involved in the process.

As Harvard University professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. wrote for the New York Times in 2010, "Slavery was a business, highly organized and lucrative for European buyers and sellers alike."

But slavery in the US wasn’t exactly business as usual. Barbara Ransby, a historian at the University of
of Illinois at Chicago, noted for Colorlines that the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade exploited existing practices like selling prisoners of war into slavery to usher in "a heinous and brutal system that rested squarely on the dual pillars of white supremacy and ruthless capitalist greed."

Ramsey showcased the major takeaway from this historical fact: "It just means that West Africans also have a history to reckon with, just like us and every modern celebrity that thinks blackface is a joke."

So why do people still try to justify slavery today?
It turns out a lot of it has to do with the fact that America’s mythic greatness is inextricably tied to the atrocities of slavery Americans try to sweep under the rug.

Being honest about slavery, Ramsey said, forces us to grapple with the fact that our founding fathers who fought for freedom from Britain’s tyranny hypocritically kept an entire population in bondage. Additionally, recognizing slavery means addressing the systemic inequalities that have stayed with us long after its abolition.

"The blatant forms of racism we still see today, from disenfranchising black voters to police brutality, are rooted in the fact that people were brought here against their will and treated like they were subhuman," Ramsey said.

Acting like this isn’t the case isn’t a solution.

"We can’t keep ignoring and mythologizing slavery just because facing it head-on makes us feel bad," Ramsey said. "Part of the healing comes from facing it."

Why are people still defending slavery in America? 5 common excuses, debunked.

Slavery is indefensible today but it is an integral part in the formation of our country and the economy of the south would never have grown without slave labor.

You also have to understand it in the context of the times, it was a common preactice, but we clung to it long after much of the world ended it.

It utterly flummoxes me that people believe they were happy and well fed. People in a country that values freedom and liberty above all else (eccentric maybe guns). Says something about a rather ugly underbelly that is feeling empowered to come out in the open.

They say it to rationalize their cognitive biases, nothing more.

 

[Coyote]

Fixed...

Perhaps that will work out better for them ...

The only real fact is that the oppressed always have something in common.
They refused to fight in order to secure their freedom and general welfare.

.
​

/-----/ Which begs the question, If Africans didn't sell their neighbors into slavery then why didn't the African Nations do battle against the slave traders? They certainly had them out numbered 10,000 to one.

We'll just look for any straw we can.

Not to mention a display of abysmal world ignorance, the assumption that all of Africa was United on racial lines instead of thousands of nations and tribes with their own self interest.

 

[Coyote]

Guys, this thread is in Zone 2, that means there is a topic. Discuss it please.

 

[Coyote]

/-----/ Which begs the question, If Africans didn't sell their neighbors into slavery then why didn't the African Nations do battle against the slave traders? They certainly had them out numbered 10,000 to one.

There's no question to really beg.

It doesn't matter who sold who to whom if human slavery is the trade.
To me ... You cannot justify human slavery through any measure.

But by issuance of that ... It is assumed I would fight slavery in general ...
As well as fight and possibly die before allowing someone to make me a slave.

In one way or another ... Slavery involves compliance by the slave (brutal, forced, coerced or whatever).

.​

Compliance assumes there is a choice...in theory yes. In reality, most people are brutally broken.

 

[Coyote]

Africans did NOT sell their own people into slavery

HA-HARR !!
No Wonder No One With Even Half A Brain Listens
Didn't You Also Post This Contradictory Evidence ??
The Story of Africa| BBC World Service
Or Was That Your Buddy...

It Doesn't Matter
Slaves Are Chattel To Be Sold And Bought
No Matter Who Owns Them

'...would sell our own brothers and sisters?'...
The Black Owners/Traders In America Sure Did

Supposedly only whites lie about history, it appears the Africans dont want to admit their ancestors roles in slavery

Slavery In The United States Happened In A Bubble
All By It Self

Slavery Didn't Exist
Until America Went To Africa And Invented It

Is this somehow supposed to mitigate our role in the slave industry? Which continued after the Mid-Atlantic trade was abolished? Maybe we need to own our responsibility in this sordid part of American history and move on instead of flailing around and spreading blame to relatively minor characters in the drama.

 

[IM2]

Next time someone says, “But Africans sold themselves into slavery!”, send this article to them

EDITOR’S NOTE: The following except from pages 47-50 of Overturning the Culture of Violence, written by Penny Hess, Chairwoman of the African People’s Solidarity Committee and printed by Burning Spear Publications, debunks the cynical and anti-black argument that “Africans enslaved themselves.” This argument points to the presence of Africans who collaborated with the European slave masters and “sold” Africans to them in order to shift the responsibility for the slave trade off the shoulders of the European colonial slavemaster and onto the backs of the colonized and enslaved African.

Today, as the voice of the enslaved African community asserts itself in the world and lifts up the demand for reparations, the blame-shifting “African collaborator” argument can be seen gaining traction in universities and bourgeois historical publications, not as an historical argument but as a political defense against the legitimacy of the reparations demand. As an organization of white people working under the leadership of the African People’s Socialist Party to organize white people in solidarity with the African struggle for liberation and reparations, we in the Uhuru Solidarity Movement find it timely to publish this excerpt here:

HUMAN BONDAGE: Page 47-50, Overturning the Culture of Violence

The terrible impact that slavery has had on the continent of Africa cannot be calculated: the destruction of magnificent civilizations, the break-up of family and kinship circles, the massive depopulation, forced impoverishment, famine and starvation, the ravishing of an environment which had been so conducive to human civilization for millennia. From open, educated, prosperous and democratic societies, African people now lived in sheer terror, never knowing when their village or town would be raided for human loot by these white invaders.

Some North American people cynically place the blame for the enslavement of African people on the shoulders of African collaborators who participated in the kidnapping of their own people. Impacted by the social destruction wreaked by invading Europeans, a tiny minority of the conquered people did find their own survival by participating in this treachery.

The setting up of collaborators among the colonized population has been a successful tool of domination in every instance of European colonialism around the world. Africa is no exception. Europeans attack societies in Africa, Asia, or the Americas, destroying their traditional economies and long-standing social relationships. A unilateral colonial economy, which starves the people and creates the dependency on the colonial power, is militarily enforced.

The European invader gets richer and richer through his bloodsucking relationship, and offers resources, guns and special status to a minority sector of the oppressed population. The selected “elite” or the colony can themselves become enslaved or carry out the will of white power. If they take any stand independent of the colonizer as have, say, Panama’s Noriega or Iraq’s Saddam Hussein in today’s world, white power spares them none of its wrath.

This plan has worked well over the centuries. A few people in every colony have participated in the devious imperialist schemes of slavery, genocide, torture and exploitation of their own people, a collaboration which benefits no one more than the European or North American “mother” country.

The statement that “Africans enslaved their own people” separates out African people from other colonial subjects, all of whom have had their share of betrayal among their ranks. It is a statement of imperialism’s historic need to mobilize public opinion against African people.

Like the general white attitude toward the government-imposed drugs and dependent drug economy in today’s African communities, this statement lets the parasitic colonial economic system off the hook. It is an anti-black expression of unity with the oppression of African people, saying, “They did it to themselves.” Meanwhile all white people everywhere still benefit from the parasitic economic system which has as its foundation the enslavement and continued exploitation of African people.

Most Africans resisted enslavement with all of their energy. Rebellions on slave ships were common. According to one source, “Many deaths on slave journeys across the Atlantic derived from violence, brawls, and above all, rebellions. There was probably at least one insurrection every eight to ten journeys.”

For example, Africans successfully rebelled in 1532 aboard the Portueguese slave ship the Misericordia. The 109 Africans on board “rose and murdered all the crew except for the pilot and two seaman. Those survivors escaped in a longboat. But the Misericordia was never heard of again.”

Slave ship owners often three Africans off the ships just to collect the insurance money. One famous case was that of a ship owned by William Gregson and George Case (both former mayors of Liverpool, England). The captain threw 133 Africans into the sea because if Africans were to die naturally, the owners would lose money, but if the African people were “thrown alive into the sea,” supposedly for the safety of the crew, “it would be the loss of the underwriters.”

So many African people died en route that it has been said that sharks followed slave ships all the way from Africa to the Americas.

Africans who survived the notoriously brutal middle passage, as the Atlantic crossing was known, reached the Americas barely alive. If they were too ill, they were left to die on the shore. They were sold like animals on public auction blocks, naked or in rags, weakened and emaciated, having survived the months below deck with disease and malnutrition, not to mention the emotional ravage sof such an experience. Many Africans committed suicide to avoid enslavement, a practice otherwise unknown in African culture.

White buyers came to the market for slaves, “feeling the Africans’ limbs and bodies much as butchers handled calves. The slaves were often asked, as they had been told to do before leaving Africa, to show their tongues and teeth, or to stretch their arms.”

In the Americas, Africans were “broken in” by submitting them to inhuman terror in an attempt to crush out any resistance. The “breaking” process was psychological as well as physical, and included being forced to learn a version of a European language and to take a European name, something many Africans militantly resisted.

Under the domination of their white slave masters, African people of all ages were branded, women on the breasts. Africans were whipped until they were deeply scarred, and their ears or ear lobes were cut off. People were slashed in the face, and their hands and feet were cut off to prevent them from running away. Men were castrated; women were raped. Women’s babies were cut out of their bellies for “punishment” and any man, woman or child could be forced to wear iron collars on their necks for life.

Under such brutal conditions, normal human relationships between men and woman or parents and children were interrupted and nearly impossible. Mothers were forced to work the full nine months of pregnancy, often giving birth in the field. They were then forced to abandon their children, as they had to keep on working or nurse the children of the slave master.

Next time someone says, "But Africans sold themselves into slavery!", send this article to them

This ended 150 years ago.

Rather than focusing in it why not focus on the problems of today? Reparations won’t fix any problems, aren’t truly just in that they don’t go to those who were actually enslaved, and will only exacerbate racial hate because there will be those who will see it as just another entitlement reserved for blacks?

This is in response to what people are saying. Reparations will fix many of the problems if not all. I'd certainly like to see all these entitlements blacks have and are reserved for us? Coyote do you not understand that entitlements have been allowed mainly for whites? I believe you are a fair minded person, so can you explain to me why whites are so willing to ignore everything they have been given and continue getting in order to complain about basically non existent entitlements for blacks?

 

[Coyote]

Next time someone says, “But Africans sold themselves into slavery!”, send this article to them

EDITOR’S NOTE: The following except from pages 47-50 of Overturning the Culture of Violence, written by Penny Hess, Chairwoman of the African People’s Solidarity Committee and printed by Burning Spear Publications, debunks the cynical and anti-black argument that “Africans enslaved themselves.” This argument points to the presence of Africans who collaborated with the European slave masters and “sold” Africans to them in order to shift the responsibility for the slave trade off the shoulders of the European colonial slavemaster and onto the backs of the colonized and enslaved African.

Today, as the voice of the enslaved African community asserts itself in the world and lifts up the demand for reparations, the blame-shifting “African collaborator” argument can be seen gaining traction in universities and bourgeois historical publications, not as an historical argument but as a political defense against the legitimacy of the reparations demand. As an organization of white people working under the leadership of the African People’s Socialist Party to organize white people in solidarity with the African struggle for liberation and reparations, we in the Uhuru Solidarity Movement find it timely to publish this excerpt here:

HUMAN BONDAGE: Page 47-50, Overturning the Culture of Violence

The terrible impact that slavery has had on the continent of Africa cannot be calculated: the destruction of magnificent civilizations, the break-up of family and kinship circles, the massive depopulation, forced impoverishment, famine and starvation, the ravishing of an environment which had been so conducive to human civilization for millennia. From open, educated, prosperous and democratic societies, African people now lived in sheer terror, never knowing when their village or town would be raided for human loot by these white invaders.

Some North American people cynically place the blame for the enslavement of African people on the shoulders of African collaborators who participated in the kidnapping of their own people. Impacted by the social destruction wreaked by invading Europeans, a tiny minority of the conquered people did find their own survival by participating in this treachery.

The setting up of collaborators among the colonized population has been a successful tool of domination in every instance of European colonialism around the world. Africa is no exception. Europeans attack societies in Africa, Asia, or the Americas, destroying their traditional economies and long-standing social relationships. A unilateral colonial economy, which starves the people and creates the dependency on the colonial power, is militarily enforced.

The European invader gets richer and richer through his bloodsucking relationship, and offers resources, guns and special status to a minority sector of the oppressed population. The selected “elite” or the colony can themselves become enslaved or carry out the will of white power. If they take any stand independent of the colonizer as have, say, Panama’s Noriega or Iraq’s Saddam Hussein in today’s world, white power spares them none of its wrath.

This plan has worked well over the centuries. A few people in every colony have participated in the devious imperialist schemes of slavery, genocide, torture and exploitation of their own people, a collaboration which benefits no one more than the European or North American “mother” country.

The statement that “Africans enslaved their own people” separates out African people from other colonial subjects, all of whom have had their share of betrayal among their ranks. It is a statement of imperialism’s historic need to mobilize public opinion against African people.

Like the general white attitude toward the government-imposed drugs and dependent drug economy in today’s African communities, this statement lets the parasitic colonial economic system off the hook. It is an anti-black expression of unity with the oppression of African people, saying, “They did it to themselves.” Meanwhile all white people everywhere still benefit from the parasitic economic system which has as its foundation the enslavement and continued exploitation of African people.

Most Africans resisted enslavement with all of their energy. Rebellions on slave ships were common. According to one source, “Many deaths on slave journeys across the Atlantic derived from violence, brawls, and above all, rebellions. There was probably at least one insurrection every eight to ten journeys.”

For example, Africans successfully rebelled in 1532 aboard the Portueguese slave ship the Misericordia. The 109 Africans on board “rose and murdered all the crew except for the pilot and two seaman. Those survivors escaped in a longboat. But the Misericordia was never heard of again.”

Slave ship owners often three Africans off the ships just to collect the insurance money. One famous case was that of a ship owned by William Gregson and George Case (both former mayors of Liverpool, England). The captain threw 133 Africans into the sea because if Africans were to die naturally, the owners would lose money, but if the African people were “thrown alive into the sea,” supposedly for the safety of the crew, “it would be the loss of the underwriters.”

So many African people died en route that it has been said that sharks followed slave ships all the way from Africa to the Americas.

Africans who survived the notoriously brutal middle passage, as the Atlantic crossing was known, reached the Americas barely alive. If they were too ill, they were left to die on the shore. They were sold like animals on public auction blocks, naked or in rags, weakened and emaciated, having survived the months below deck with disease and malnutrition, not to mention the emotional ravage sof such an experience. Many Africans committed suicide to avoid enslavement, a practice otherwise unknown in African culture.

White buyers came to the market for slaves, “feeling the Africans’ limbs and bodies much as butchers handled calves. The slaves were often asked, as they had been told to do before leaving Africa, to show their tongues and teeth, or to stretch their arms.”

In the Americas, Africans were “broken in” by submitting them to inhuman terror in an attempt to crush out any resistance. The “breaking” process was psychological as well as physical, and included being forced to learn a version of a European language and to take a European name, something many Africans militantly resisted.

Under the domination of their white slave masters, African people of all ages were branded, women on the breasts. Africans were whipped until they were deeply scarred, and their ears or ear lobes were cut off. People were slashed in the face, and their hands and feet were cut off to prevent them from running away. Men were castrated; women were raped. Women’s babies were cut out of their bellies for “punishment” and any man, woman or child could be forced to wear iron collars on their necks for life.

Under such brutal conditions, normal human relationships between men and woman or parents and children were interrupted and nearly impossible. Mothers were forced to work the full nine months of pregnancy, often giving birth in the field. They were then forced to abandon their children, as they had to keep on working or nurse the children of the slave master.

Next time someone says, "But Africans sold themselves into slavery!", send this article to them

This ended 150 years ago.

Rather than focusing in it why not focus on the problems of today? Reparations won’t fix any problems, aren’t truly just in that they don’t go to those who were actually enslaved, and will only exacerbate racial hate because there will be those who will see it as just another entitlement reserved for blacks?

This is in response to what people are saying. Reparations will fix many of the problems if not all. I'd certainly like to see all these entitlements blacks have and are reserved for us? Coyote do you not understand that entitlements have been allowed mainly for whites? I believe you are a fair minded person, so can you explain to me why whites are so willing to ignore everything they have been given and continue getting in order to complain about basically non existent entitlements for blacks?

What exactly will reparations fix and for whom?

You don’t even have a reasonable way of determine who should get it and none of the projected recipients were directly affected by slavery.

 

[Andylusion]

Native Americans are the only race that should be given any money by the Government. They are the only race that the Government directly destroyed. Slaves were owned by individuals.

And who created and enforced the laws that made it legal for white individuals to enslave, abuse and violate the human rights of other human beings of African descent (but not white human beings), including the Fugitive Slave Act? That's government created, sanctioned and enforced abuse.

One of the primary concerns after the slaves were freed was compensation to the slave owners for the "loss" of their "property". Hopefully that should tell you something.

It wasn't the US government, that's for sure. Slavery existed for thousands of years before the US government existed, or the colonies for that matter.

 

[Coyote]

Native Americans are the only race that should be given any money by the Government. They are the only race that the Government directly destroyed. Slaves were owned by individuals.

And who created and enforced the laws that made it legal for white individuals to enslave, abuse and violate the human rights of other human beings of African descent (but not white human beings), including the Fugitive Slave Act? That's government created, sanctioned and enforced abuse.

One of the primary concerns after the slaves were freed was compensation to the slave owners for the "loss" of their "property". Hopefully that should tell you something.

It wasn't the US government, that's for sure. Slavery existed for thousands of years before the US government existed, or the colonies for that matter.

The US government codified it into law and was complicit in continuing the practice after much of the civilized world banned it. Laws come from governments.

 

[karpenter]

Is this somehow supposed to mitigate our role in the slave industry? Which continued after the Mid-Atlantic trade was abolished?

If The Nation Abolished The Practice
And Took Part In An International Blockaide Of The African Coast
How Is It The Nation's Guilt
That Criminals Attempted To Continue ??

This Is No More National Shame
Than The Rum-Runners Of Prohibition

 

[IM2]

Why are people still defending slavery in America? 5 common excuses, debunked.

On the latest episode of her MTV web series Decoded, comedian and activist Franchesca Ramsey highlighted the unfortunate tendency many Americans have to ignore or erase the role slavery played in the country’s past.

"We talk about race a lot on this show," Ramsey said. "But thanks to our current election cycle, apparently we have to go back to the beginning to shed some light on the myths people use to justify slavery."

After Michelle Obama’s DNC speech about her historical legacy as the first black first lady "living in a house built by slaves," slavery fact-checking ensued. The first lady’s statement checked out.

But the fact that people tried to suggest otherwise shows just how little many Americans know about an institution that defined the country at its inception, and how that ignorance prevents us from taking an honest look at the country’s horrific past.

In response, Ramsey broke down five of the most common excuses used for slavery.

1) "Slaves were well-fed"
After the first lady tried to use her DNC speech to show that her time in the White House demonstrated how far racial progress in America has come, Fox News host Bill O’Reilly decided to use her moment to put a positive spin on slavery itself.

The following day, O’Reilly challenged Obama on The O’Reilly Factor, saying "slaves were well-fed." Then, after a backlash, he defended his statement by clarifying that slaves’ diet consisted of "meat, bread, and other staples."

Ramsey cited other common arguments that parallel O’Reilly’s, like the idea that some slave masters treated slaves well or that being a slave who worked in the big house was at least better than working outside in the fields.

But, as Ramsey noted, "this argument is immaterial, as in it doesn’t matter."

No matter their housing or food, the inherent problem with slavery is the fact that people were slaves in the first place, which is only compounded by the ways Africans were taken from their countries of origin and transported to an unknown place against their will where no one was required to muster even an ounce of recognition of their humanity.

"If aliens abducted your brother, sister, and favorite uncle, and stuck a feeding tube down their throats, while forcing them to build their emperor’s house, would you think, ‘Well at least the aliens fed my family’?" Ramsey asked on Decoded. "I don’t think so."

2) Slaves were happy to have work
Slaves may have had many excruciating jobs, including building much of America. But that doesn’t mean it’s okay to equate slavery with employment.

"Newsflash: Although you might hate your job, slavery isn’t employment," Ramsey said. "It wasn’t voluntary, and it has no comparison to working at a job."

But even textbook publishers fail to get this fact straight.

Last October, McGraw-Hill Education came under fire after Roni Dean-Burren, the mother of a high school freshman in Texas, shared a photo of immigration patterns in her son’s geography textbook that said the slave trade "brought millions of workers" to the US through slavery from 1500s to the 1800s. But "workers" and slaves are not at all the same thing.

On Decoded, Ramsey explained the major difference: "Being forcibly taken from your home, put in shackles on a disease-infested ship, and forced to do hard labor from sunrise to sunset is not the same thing as clocking in at Starbucks, okay?"

3) Other countries had slavery too
It’s true America wasn’t the only country that had slavery. In fact, the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade’s name signals the scope of slave routes, which traveled from the shores of West and Central Africa to the Caribbean before stopping in the US.

Many of the people (nearly 4 million) taken from Africa to be slaves between the 16th and 19th centuries ended up in Brazil because the slavery conditions in Brazil were so brutal that continued importation was essential to make up for the high death rate, which outpaced birth rate.

But slavery elsewhere doesn’t change the fact that slavery in the US was still wrong.

"Even if slavery was common practice when America was doing it, it doesn’t make it right," Ramsey said. "Slavery is bad, and it was always bad, everywhere, no matter who’s doing it!"

4) The Irish in America were also slaves
Some people believe the Irish in America were also slaves because the Irish, historically, have faced persecution and many came to the US as indentured servants.

Ramsay’s response is simple: "No, they were not."

Ramsey has discredited this idea before. But that doesn’t change the fact that it has become a fixture for racist right-wing internet trolls.

In an interview with the Southern Poverty Law Center, Liam Hogan, an Irish historian, explained that the myth of Irish slaves "broadly claims that indentured servitude and penal servitude can be equated with racialized perpetual hereditary chattel slavery."

The point is to try to deflect the reality of black people’s enslavement in the US by mythologizing a group of white people who were also slaves.

But Ramsey underlined the main problem with this approach: "Class, let’s say this one together: Persecution is bad, but not the same as slavery!"

5) Africans sold other Africans as slaves
This is similar to saying slavery happened in other places. It’s true that Africans did sell other Africans into slavery, but that doesn’t absolve Americans and Europeans for their participation in slavery.

In fact, suggesting as much erases a lot of nuance about power dynamics involved with how both Africans and Europeans were involved in the process.

As Harvard University professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. wrote for the New York Times in 2010, "Slavery was a business, highly organized and lucrative for European buyers and sellers alike."

But slavery in the US wasn’t exactly business as usual. Barbara Ransby, a historian at the University of
of Illinois at Chicago, noted for Colorlines that the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade exploited existing practices like selling prisoners of war into slavery to usher in "a heinous and brutal system that rested squarely on the dual pillars of white supremacy and ruthless capitalist greed."

Ramsey showcased the major takeaway from this historical fact: "It just means that West Africans also have a history to reckon with, just like us and every modern celebrity that thinks blackface is a joke."

So why do people still try to justify slavery today?
It turns out a lot of it has to do with the fact that America’s mythic greatness is inextricably tied to the atrocities of slavery Americans try to sweep under the rug.

Being honest about slavery, Ramsey said, forces us to grapple with the fact that our founding fathers who fought for freedom from Britain’s tyranny hypocritically kept an entire population in bondage. Additionally, recognizing slavery means addressing the systemic inequalities that have stayed with us long after its abolition.

"The blatant forms of racism we still see today, from disenfranchising black voters to police brutality, are rooted in the fact that people were brought here against their will and treated like they were subhuman," Ramsey said.

Acting like this isn’t the case isn’t a solution.

"We can’t keep ignoring and mythologizing slavery just because facing it head-on makes us feel bad," Ramsey said. "Part of the healing comes from facing it."

Why are people still defending slavery in America? 5 common excuses, debunked.

Slavery is indefensible today but it is an integral part in the formation of our country and the economy of the south would never have grown without slave labor.

You also have to understand it in the context of the times, it was a common preactice, but we clung to it long after much of the world ended it.

It utterly flummoxes me that people believe they were happy and well fed. People in a country that values freedom and liberty above all else (except maybe guns). Says something about a rather ugly underbelly that is feeling empowered to come out in the open.

Slavery was an integral part of the American economy. North and south grew because of it.

 

[IM2]

NOT ONE DIME.

Lessee, minimum wage labour was worth about a penny an hour in 1850. Subtract from that the housing, food, clothes, healthcare and everything else that blacks got for free, what their families were paid who sold them into slavery, a lot of them might still end up owing us something. If anyone can prove they are the rightful descendant of a slave and have records of hours they worked, benefits, etc., upon which to make a case, they might just end up being pursued by the IRS instead for unpaid debt to the United States. All slave descendants making claims for "reparations" please step forward and make your case so the IRS can talk to you.

That penny was worth how much in todays dollars?

The standard dumb white retort. You have no argument.

 

[karpenter]

Slavery was an integral part of the American economy. North and south grew because of it.

And Slavery Was One Of The African's Most Time-Honored Traditions

Until The Quakers In Europe
Came Up With The Revolutionary Idea
That Slavery Is Immoral

No Thanx Needed
You're Welcome...

 

[toobfreak]

Next time someone says, “But Africans sold themselves into slavery!”, send this article to them

This ended 150 years ago. Rather than focusing in it why not focus on the problems of today? Reparations won’t fix any problems, aren’t truly just in that they don’t go to those who were actually enslaved, and will only exacerbate racial hate because there will be those who will see it as just another entitlement reserved for blacks?

EXACTLY RIGHT. I doubt few here KNOWS they are descended from slaves, who those people were and actual details of their lives. Further, I bet everyone here has had injustices in their lives or that of their parents, much less their great great great great cousin. So everyone has a case to be owed something. Slavery was AT LEAST 5 generations ago, so anyone today that is related to slaves is likely less than 6% of their bloodline related to people who were actual pre-CW slaves.

If history tells us anything, it is that those seeking reparations now are really only looking for a foot in the door-- -- once reparations are paid, those paid would now only feel more empowered, more angry, demanding yet more. Blacks have been making demands for 150 years and getting most of what they wanted, yet are angrier now today than ever!

Where does it stop, with great, great grandfathers? Grand uncles? Grand cousins? And once you open the door for slavery, others will then demand reparations for other things: innocents killed in a war, treaties broken, the list is endless. The world is FULL of injustice; why should Blacks be the only ones repaid for injustices?

Further, if anything is owed, it isn't by the people of today, but by the slave OWNERS. Are there any businesses, industries, companies or farms, etc., that are directly descended from slave-owning entities? You might want to petition them, but then, if your grandfather robbed a bank or killed someone, can they hold YOU responsible? Is the great, great grandson of Jesse James responsible for his crimes? If not, then there's your answer: NO ONE today owes anything for crimes of long ago. If ever there was any case, it should have been made immediately after the Civil War.

 

[dave p]

Native Americans are the only race that should be given any money by the Government. They are the only race that the Government directly destroyed. Slaves were owned by individuals.

And who created and enforced the laws that made it legal for white individuals to enslave, abuse and violate the human rights of other human beings of African descent (but not white human beings), including the Fugitive Slave Act? That's government created, sanctioned and enforced abuse.

One of the primary concerns after the slaves were freed was compensation to the slave owners for the "loss" of their "property". Hopefully that should tell you something.

It wasn't the US government, that's for sure. Slavery existed for thousands of years before the US government existed, or the colonies for that matter.

The US government codified it into law and was complicit in continuing the practice after much of the civilized world banned it. Laws come from governments.

My statement stands the only race worthy of considerations is the Native Americans. Blacks have equal footing today because of policies put forth, they have financial opportunities specifically for them as well as employment opportunities. That is reparations enough.