Posted on 05/02/2010 9:02:10 PM PDT by neverdem
THANKS to an unlikely confluence of history and genetics — the fact that he is African-American and president — Barack Obama has a unique opportunity to reshape the debate over one of the most contentious issues of America’s racial legacy: reparations, the idea that the descendants of American slaves should receive compensation for their ancestors’ unpaid labor and bondage.
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.
While we are all familiar with the role played by the United States and the European colonial powers like Britain, France, Holland, Portugal and Spain, there is very little discussion of the role Africans themselves played. And that role, it turns out, was a considerable one, especially for the slave-trading kingdoms of western and central Africa. These included the Akan of the kingdom of Asante in what is now Ghana, the Fon of Dahomey (now Benin), the Mbundu of Ndongo in modern Angola and the Kongo of today’s Congo, among several others.
For centuries, Europeans in Africa kept close to their military and trading posts on the coast. Exploration of the interior, home to the bulk of Africans sold into bondage at the height of the slave trade, came only during the colonial conquests, which is why Henry Morton Stanley’s pursuit of Dr. David Livingstone in 1871 made for such...
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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...
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
Righto. The losers mostly didn't survive, other than in the female line.
Interestingly, this process was in action in the Caribbean when Columbus showed up. The more or less pacific Arawaks inhabiting the islands were in the process of being slowly exterminated by the Caribs from S. America, who were genocidal cannibals. When they attacked, they killed and ate all the men and children, impregnated the women and sailed away, returning at intervals to collect the boys who were old enough for indoctrination into their society and plant a new crop of children. This had continued for so long that on many islands the men and women spoke entirely different languages.
Then of course the Spanish showed up and destroyed all the nations of the Caribbean in decades not centuries.
Many male African slaves in Muslim countries were made into eunuchs, a process with a roughly 90% mortality rate. The remainder were used as miners, soldiers, etc.
The females were mostly used as household labor.
The sexes were intentionally kept apart, so no native class of African blood grew up in these countries. Nevertheless, there are Arab countries with discernibly African minorities.
Historically speaking, in most slave societies the population of slaves was not self-sustaining and had to be constantly replenished with imports, as in the sugar islands and Roman Empire.
AFAIK, the American south is the only slave society in history to have a massive population explosion, indicating that conditions were probably less oppressive than the norm for such societies.
I got pounded pretty hard on FR for defending Gates for that incident, but hey, you gotta stand up for your experiences. Gates was one of the first Black professor to force Harvard to roll the African-American Studies department back into the History School where it belonged. He also demanded that scholars produce true scholarly work rather (in the vein of Carter G. Woodson) rather than short 50 page books based on feelings.
I kinda know where Gates is coming from. It’s hard to get some Freepers who aren’t black and over 40 to understand.
And I will totally agree with Gates...when he's right. But he was wrong...during that incident....IMO.
Many/most of these slaves would have never been enslaved by their bruthas if the white man wasn’t there buying them. The slaves were not give to whitey for free. Whitey created a market for them and the African slavers got recompense in.....I don’t know. Axes, knives, swords, metal spear and arrow tips and steel implements and clothing are a good place to start. How about matches to start fires? Steel pots to cook with and cook missionaries in (/joke)
So Henry Louis Gates big revelation (look how nuanced I am!) means nothing
Edmund Morgan attributed the rise of white democracy in Virginia to 1) the population explosion in the colonies after 1715. 2) the arrival of the first significant numbers of African slaves whose numbers also increased exponentially as much naturally as from immigration. It had taken the English colonies about a hundred years to acclimate, and the Africans profited from the better living conditions. Birth rates rose to Bangladesh heights and the death rate plummeted among both blacks and whites. White servants continued to be brought to the new world, mainly convicts,
So just what does Professor Gates want President Obama to do — who "favors reparations in theory?"
Thomas Sowell — in Intellectuals and Society — sheds some much needed light on slavery and reparations issues:
Slavery has been a pervasive evil around the world for thousands of years but confusing morality with causation — and seeking a localization of evil — has led to the history of slavery being stood on its head throughout our educational system, as well as in the media and by the intelligentsia in general. Thus slavery has been depicted as if it were a peculiarity of white people against black people in the United States, or in Western societies. No one dreams of demanding reparations from North Africans for all the Europeans brought there as slaves by Barbary Coast pirates, even though these European slaves greatly outnumbered the African slaves brought to the United States and to the thirteen colonies from which it was formed.A fact of the matter rarely considered is that African tribes routinely made war on each other, and sold their captives into slavery, a business facilitated largely by Arab merchants. It was a great way to "make money" and get rid of tribal rivals.Because the West has not been immune to the evils, errors and shortcomings of the human race around the world, the intelligentsia have been able to document these failings in a way that makes them look like peculiarities of "our society." In the case of slavery, what was peculiar about the West was that it was the first civilization to turn against slavery, beginning in the eighteenth century, and that it destroyed slavery around the world, beginning in the nineteenth century, not only within its own societies but also in non-Western societies it controlled, influenced or threatened. Yet there is virtually no interest among today's intelligentsia in how a worldwide phenomenon was ended after a thousand years, for it did not simply die out of its own accord, but was forcibly suppressed by the West in campaigns around the world that lasted for more than a century, often over the bitter opposition of Africans, Asians, and others who wanted slavery preserved. But that story seldom makes it through the filters.
What is highlighted is that the West had slavery, as if that was peculiar to the West. What is also highlighted is that black people were enslaved by white people in the West. But, even in the West, white people were enslaved by other white people for centuries before the first African was brought to the Western Hemisphere in chains. The very fact that these Africans were called "slaves" reflected the fact that a white group which had been enslaved for centuries before were Slavs — since the word for slave was derived from the name for Slavs, not only in English but in other European languages and in Arabic.
So Prof. Gates and TOTUS think it feasible to "extract" reparations from me, just because I'm a white American (who is half Slav)?
Seems to me they'd have to spin a pretty tall tale to sell that idea....
Another good find. Thank you.
Depends which period of history we're talking about. In the early days, when the volume of the trade was relatively low, the slave buyers probably took off the kings' hands the "normal" production of their routine wars, as well as criminals and the losers in local political squabbles. Many if not most of these people would have been killed and possibly eaten if there had not been a market for them.
As the trade grew in volume the buyers often pressured the sellers for more slaves and wars were started specifically to get slaves to sell. By the height of the trade the kings had become so addicted to the trade goods they often sold off their own people in job lots. It seems likely some of them so reduced their population in the process they were overwhelmed by neighboring tribes and themselves sold. We can only hope some of the slavers wound up in the pens themselves. I've always been a sucker for poetic justice.
Good for Gates.
He made an ass of himself with the cop, but I find him quite admirable in other ways.
I have ancestors who fought for the South and ancestors who fought for the North.
Should I pay or receive reparations?
(I'm in favor of my receiving them.)
I don't think you have to be black and over 40 to understand that we all "lose it" (i.e. our patience or composure) once in awhile. He just happened to be a well-known Harvard professor, and when he lost it, the whole world heard about it.
When the rest of us lose it, no one cares.
When the story broke, I could see his point of view, being questioned when he's in his own house. He was probably in a bad mood, to begin with, after he had trouble getting in his front door. Being led out in handcuffs must've been the final straw for him.
But, I could understand the police officer's point of view, too. He was just answering a call and trying to do his job.
The person who behaved the worst, imho, was the president. I didn't know all that about Gates, btw. Thanks for the info.
Not mostly by Sherman. It was by commanders earlier in the war who occupied the coastal areas of GA and the Carolinas. Plantations in these areas were abandoned by their owners, leaving the slaves.
The Union commanders, quite logically, split up the abandoned land among the slaves so they could grow their own food.
Obviously those African leaders who acknowledge the African role in Black slavery are “race traitors” and “Uncle Toms” (like the people of Uganda whose opposition to homosexual rape makes them “racist rednecks”).
Yeow! That is quite an account. Never knew all that. Here is a fun novel that takes place in Africa of (roughly) that time. It is very un-PC. http://www.amazon.com/Lord-Darkness-Robert-Silverberg/dp/0553243624
I don't think so. When the race hustlers blame whitey, you can shove that 90% figure, I have read maybe 95% in Encarta, IIRC, in their face.
BTTT
Suddenly, since the “Obama Beer Summit,” Professor Gates is all over the place.
The new History Channel series, “America, the Story of US” is full of cameos of Gates commenting on all (as well as an introduction of the series by His Oneness Himself, Obama.)
Haven’t yet checked it out, but I would bet my own beer money that Gates has a long record of Progressive/Marxist activism.
I agree with you. O should have not said anything about this.
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