The start to end of the Slave trade

THE SLAVE TRADE:

HOW AND WHY IT STARTED

To understand the African Slave Trade we must understand slavery as an institution an institution almost as old as human society. Every people, sometime or another, have been slaves. In fact, Europeans enslaved other Europeans for a much longer period than they enslaved Africans. Slavery was a permanent feature of the ancient world, in Egypt, Kush, and Rome.

The African slave period is best known to us because it is the best‐documented. However, these documents are often confusing because they were created by people who were trying to justify the slave trade. Most people, especially Europeans who created most of the documents on the slave trade, write about the subject with the intent to make the victim of slavery feel guilty and to vindicate the perpetrators of the slave trade.

There is probably more dishonesty related to the interpretation of this subject than any other subject known to man. The African slave trade, like African history, is often written about but rarely understood. This misunderstanding probably grows out of the fact that we nearly always start the study of the African slave trade in the wrong place. The germ, the motive, the rationale for the African slave trade started in the minds of the Europeans in the fifteenth and the sixteenth centuries. The slave trade could not have started at all had there been no market for it. The slave trade started when the Europeans began to expand out into the broader world; the market was created by Europeans for European reasons.

Source: Clarke, John Henrik. Christopher Columbus and the Afrikan Holocaust: Slavery and the Rise of European Capitalism.

New York: A&B Publishers Group. 1994. Ref WI 380.14409 CI.

JUSTIFICATION FOR SLAVERY

THE POWER OF DEFINITION

Most of us have found ourselves deeply engrossed in a conversation with friends or peers where someone tries, to no avail, to convince the group that his or her view is correct and true. Two common strategies are employed in order to convince the errant disbelievers. The first is to state that the point being presented can be substantiated as true because it can be found in a ʹbook,ʹ and as such, confirms their position to be the truth. The Second strategy is to state that which is being espoused has been ʹscientifically proven.ʹ What we often believe to be scientific fact is no more than a strongly held, unsubstantiated belief. Hence Not all that is written in a book or touted to be science can be accepted as truth.

How did we get here?

To fully appreciate the depths of the misconceptions, misunderstandings and outright

Lies that underpinned the dehumanization of Africans and their descendents, we first need to be clear about Some basic concepts and how they relate to each other. The following definitions are taken from Webster’s

Dictionary:

Opinion:

1. A belief or judgment based on grounds insufficient to produce complete certainty.

2. A personal view, attitude or appraisal.

Belief:

1. Something believed; opinion; conviction.

2. Confidence ...

This is a preview of the whole essay

New York: A&B Publishers Group. 1994. Ref WI 380.14409 CI.

JUSTIFICATION FOR SLAVERY

THE POWER OF DEFINITION

How did we get here?

To fully appreciate the depths of the misconceptions, misunderstandings and outright

Dictionary:

Opinion:

1. A belief or judgment based on grounds insufficient to produce complete certainty.

2. A personal view, attitude or appraisal.

Belief:

1. Something believed; opinion; conviction.

2. Confidence in the truth or existence of something not immediately

susceptible to rigorous proof.

Fact:

1. Something that actually exists.

2. Something known to exist or to have happened.

3. A truth known by actual experience or observation; something known to be true.

Truth:

1. The true or actual state of a matter.

2. A verified or indisputable fact, proposition, principle or the like.

Science:

1. A branch of knowledge or study dealing with a body of facts or truths about the physical or material world gained through observation and experimentation.

Theory:

1. A proposed explanation whose status is still conjectural.

So an opinion is basically a thought about the world and a belief is an opinion about the world that we have confidence in and/or hold with strong conviction. We all have opinions and beliefs. We have opinions and beliefs about politics, entertainment, sports, and the people in our families. It is important to note that neither opinions nor beliefs necessarily have a basis in fact or truth. Believing something to be true has no impact on its veracity. Facts are pieces of information about something that actually happened and/or actually exists.

SCIENCE AND FICTION

Cognitive Dissonance may be one of the answers to the question. Why did Europeans need to view blacks as sub‐human? Next we must explore, how did Europeans convince themselves that those of African descent were a lesser class of human ?ʹ

All manner of opinions, beliefs, halftruths and outright lies have been presented over the years to ‘prove’ blacks are inferior to whites. Many of these were presented in the name of science, and many of these were printed in text books, scientific journals and media of the era. It is important for us to be able to differentiate fact from fiction.

18t h Century Rationale

Carl Von Linnaeus (1707‐1778)

Carl Von Linnaeus (1707‐1778) was responsible for the taxonomic system we use today to classify life;kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus, species. Using his system we are able to know every living thing’s relation to all other living things.

According to Linnaeus, we can know the place of each kind of plant and animal we find on earth. Cows and oxen are bovines. Douglas firs, giant sequoias and redwoods are all conifers. Panthers, tigers, jaguars and leopards are all felines. All bovines and felines are mammals. He delineated the characteristics that made each life form fall into each group. His system was based totally on observations of an organisms physical looks . I t seemed to be a very out standing achievement . The problem was that he went too far. He expanded his system to try to account for different types of humans, and unlike all his previous‐work he classified humans using considerably fewer objective descriptors. Linnaeus began the science of anthropology and laid the foundation for 19th century beliefs about race that resulted in racism. In his work, Systema Naturae, he set forth his race classification system using color as a criterion for classifying races, while also assigning moral and intellectual capacities to each race. These concepts became a permanent part of 19th century anthropological thought and language.

According to Haller, in his book Outcast From Evolution, Linnaeus describes Homo Americanus as reddish, choleric, obstinate, contented, and regulated by custom; Homo

Europaeus as white, fickle, sanguine, blue‐eyed, gentle and governed by laws; Homo Asiaticus as sallow, grave dignified, avaricious, and ruled by opinion; and Homo After as black, phlegmatic, cunning, lazy, lustful, careless, and governed by caprice. Linnaeus misguided opinions provided the backdrop for another treatise On The Natural Variety of Mankind. He developed his own system of classification, grouping man into the categories of Caucasian, Mongolian, American and Ethiopian. Africans were among the many civilizations around the world that did not live up to European standards and so were considered inferior. They were inferior, first because they were not European, and second because they were not Christian. Thus, Africans were viewed as impure, irreligious and uncivilized, fit to be slaves.

So Linnaeus was just expressing his opinions. Did any of these descriptions have anything to do with science? Were any experiments designed to see if his observations were correct? Did he even have any intention to design experiments to test them? Do any of them have any basis in fact or truth? The answers to all of these questions are a resounding NO!!

Linneaus’ taxonomy, Jeffersonian reasoning, Phrenology, and IQ testing all served as the ‘scientific’ foundations upon which the institutions of slavery and racial superiority/inferiority were constructed. Since the time the first slaves arrived in the Americas from Africa in the early 1500’s to present day, Europeans and their descendents have gone to great lengths to justify the 500 years of trauma and dehumanization they and their institutions produced. The effects of this trauma and dehumanization are observable today, and can be explained by the theory of The legacy of trauma is reflected in many of the behaviors and the beliefs; behaviors and beliefs that at one time were necessary to adopt in order to survive, yet today serve to undermine the ability of the descendants to

be successful.

Source: Degruy Leary, Joy. Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome. Oregon: Uptone Press. 2005