To Black Lives Matter: Grow Up

Two things should be said at the outset: One, slavery is an abominable practice.  And, two, it has a very long history.  It was practiced in biblical times and, no doubt, even earlier.

Having said that, let's now turn to the Africans brought to the New World as slaves.  Who took them from their villages?  Fellow Africans.  Before the city-state, people tended to identify as clans.  To some extent, it is still that way in many places.  Clan identification is still strong in the Middle East.  In Africa we refer to groups of people as tribes.  In the 16th century, and, no doubt earlier, stronger tribes would raid weaker ones, and, where convenient, make slaves of them.

The Portuguese needing labor to work Brazilian sugar plantations turned to slaves shipped over from Africa.  The Spanish had tried using Indian slaves but they died or disappeared into the rain forests.   It was in the Americas that the plantation system was developed for raising crops such as sugar cane, cotton, rice and tobacco.  But, in Brazil and in the Caribbean, sugar was the most important crop.

Shipping companies stepped in to get a piece of the slave cargo market.  Ten percent of the slaves died in transit to their destinations in the Americas.  Brazil took the most slaves; roughly 4 million.  The Caribbean countries took, collectively, roughly 3 million.  And the U.S. came in with a bit under 1 million.

It is interesting to ponder what makes people not see the horror of slavery.  Could it be their awareness of the practice of slavery in earlier ages?  I think not.  The only thing that occurs to me is that Africans were viewed as some sort of subhuman species.  Hadn't they been taken out of jungles?  They had no written language, as far as anyone could tell.  No, they were clearly subhuman.

And, yet, slave holders feared that they might learn to read and write.  In short, they feared testing their hypothesis that the Africans were subhuman.  They also seemed preoccupied with converting them to Christianity.  It makes no sense -- not now, not back then.

An awareness of the inhumanity of slavery came to William Wilberforce the British parliamentarian who succeeded in having slavery ended in all British colonies.  It was something also painfully obvious to American abolitionists.  Ultimately, slavery ended under President Lincoln.

It might be noted, however, that many American presidents, up to the time of Lincoln, owned slaves.  One can only assume that those who fought to maintain slavery; primarily in the south, saw emancipation as undermining their plantation system and their financial interests.  And, it must also be recognized that even with Lincoln, the first salvo in the fight against slavery was not to end it entirely, but rather to keep in from being instituted in the western territories that would soon become states.  But, of course, once the battle was jointed, the institution of slavery throughout all of the American states was to be ended.

It took many more years to end Jim Crow, the practice that denied African-Americans their full rights.  In the battle against Jim Crow, blacks were supported by a number of white groups and white individuals.  A white man helped establish the NAACP, once the preeminent black group fighting for equal rights.  Whites, including a noted rabbi and Catholic priest, among others, marched with the Rev. Martin Luther King in Selma Alabama.  And, can we forget the two young men, Schwerner and Goodman, who died with their black friend Chaney at the hands of racists.

The Yad Vashem, a memorial to the 6 million who died at the hands of the Nazis, the Jews also commemorated the non-Jews who, at their peril, worked to aid the Jews.  They are referred to as the "righteous gentiles."  There were too few of these people, but Jews recognize the importance of giving them recognition.  It is an example America's blacks might seek to emulate.