Each semester as I prepare to teach an Introduction to Cultural Anthropology, I look over my materials, and review comments made by students from the previous semester, in order to improve the course.
I looked over student remarks today, and was struck by a comment made by a student, who is "white", working-class, from upstate New York, raised in a town with few, if any African-Americans as residents (though the local prison is full of them), and who though she had been exposed to the standard fare presented in High School during Black History month, had never understood how slavery related to her, historically.
She said, "when you first covered the slave trade, I was prepared to be bored. I have never understood how slavery related to me, since my grandparents were Irish immigrants to the US in the 1900's, no one in my family ever owned slaves, and I was taught in Church (and by my parents) to not be prejudiced. Therefore, I have always felt that black people have no right to hold me, as a white person responsible, for their tragic history, and should kinda "get over it", since that was the past, and we don't live in the South. And black people should be better off, and not all on welfare and stuff, or in prison like the one in my town where my uncle works. I didn't see how it related to slavery. I could never connect any of the history to my own family, or standard of living. I also knew nothing about Irish slaves being sent to Barbados, or that the Irish were viewed as a distinctly different "race", and was totally confused by your insistence of harping on "the social construction of race" and the racism that results.
Thank you - I do now. We shouldn't call it black history I think. Just as you taught us about Native Americans and the genocide of an entire people - who most likely lived where my family's home is located, who are part of my history. why can't this stuff all be just "history"?"
I was pleased to read her remark. As a teacher, I kinda gave myself a pat on the back, since from my pov, I had achieved my objective. Taking "history", better known as "black history" and making it relevant to a young white college freshman, who will more than likely never take a course in the Black Studies Department on our campus, and who was only in my class because intro to anthropology is a GE (General Education)requirement.
Why do I even teach this as part of intro to Cultural anthropology? Because I can. And because I'm aware that most of the faculty in the History Dept don't, and that "American History" classes give this material short shrift. I've been infected for years by Howard Zinn's perspective on the teaching of history in our schools - and his alternate vision so aptly presented in "A People's History of the United States". Since my anthropological study was shaped by my former professor Eric Wolf, author of Europe and the People Without History, and by the work of scholars like Sidney Mintz,
In his book Caribbean Transformations (Mintz 1974a) and elsewhere, Mintz claimed that modernity originated in the Caribbean-- Europe’s first factories were embodied in a plantation complex devoted to the cultivation of sugar cane and a few other agricultural commodities. The advent of this system certainly had profound effects on Caribbean "plantation society" (Mintz 1959a), but the commercialization of sugar’s products had lasting effects in Europe as well, from providing the wherewithal for the industrial revolution to transforming whole foodways and creating a revolution in European tastes and consumer behavior (Mintz 1985b, 1996a).
and Eric Williams views on Capitalism and Slavery, along with the work of Immanuel Wallerstein on world systems theory.
So why am I writing about all this here today? It's been in the back of my mind for quite a few days now, since the avalanche of diaries on Rick Warren, and Prop 8, and numerous comments and flames here about black folks, and comparing slavery as history to the status of GLBT battles for civil/human rights. I tried as much as possible to stay the hell away from my keyboard. One because I knew I would get myself in trouble in the heat of argument, and once posted remarks here can't be removed, so I have self-censored me, in an effort to maintain equanimity, and not get too many troll ratings.
Now that heads are a bit cooler (I hope) I'd like to suggest that those of you who have the time, or the interest, do more in-depth research and study of Trans-Atlantic slavery, its foundational relationship to the rise of Industrial capitalism, and the subsequent oppression of afro-descendents in the New World, which has carried forward to this day in an insidious form often referred to as "institutionalized racism", which is self-evident in the demographics of incarceration, mortality and morbidtity indexes, social class, poverty, education, the plight of the inner cities - yes Katrina is an example as is the current status of Haiti.
I did a search here of diaries on the topic of slavery and other than one enthusiastic response to slamming Pat Buchanan for his remark that "Slavery Best Thing Ever to Happen to Blacks", few diaries on the topic have eve made it to the rec list.
Storm Bear has quietly posted important historical diaries here for some time, like Black History: Birth of Colonial Slavery, but most have garnered only a few comments. Black Kos often covers stories that address much of my concern, but has rarely(if ever) made it to the rec list.
Earlier this month the AP had a story that passed by unremarked here, about the new web database on the Transatlantic slave trade.
Web database catalogs slaves' trans-Atlantic treks
ATLANTA (AP) — Historians hope a new Web database will help bring millions of blacks closer to their African ancestors who were forced onto slave ships, connecting them to their heritage in a way that has long been possible for white Europeans.
"Voyages: The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database" launched Friday in conjunction with a conference at Emory University marking the bicentennial of the official end of the trans-Atlantic slave trade in 1808. Emory spearheaded the two-year interactive project, which is free to the public.
"It's basically doing for people of African descent what already exists for people of European descent in the Americas," said Emory history professor David Eltis, who helped direct the project.
"Voyages" documents the slave trade from Africa to the New World that took place over three centuries — between the 1500s and 1800s — and includes searchable information on nearly 35,000 trips and the names of 70,000 human cargo. The voluminous work includes data on more than 95 percent of all voyages that left ports from England — the country with the second-largest slave trade — and documents two-thirds of all slave trade voyages between 1514 and 1866.
Of interest to me was the assumption in the article's lead line that this would be mainly of interest to blacks tracing their ancestry (I'm a genealogist specializing in black ancestry - so it did interest me) but I was saddened that this would probably not be of interest to the general white populace, though scholars - black and white who specialize in the slave period would more than likely visit the site.
The article closes with a quote from Harvard's Skip Gates:
Harvard University professor Henry Louis Gates said "Voyages" sheds an important light on the hidden history of 12.5 million slaves.
"Their ancestries, their identities, their stories were lost in the ships that carried them across the Atlantic," Gates said. "The multi-decade and collaborative project that brought us this site has done more to reverse the Middle Passage than any other single act of scholarship possibly could."
The project expands on "The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade," a CD-ROM completed in 1999 that included more than 27,000 slave trade voyages. Gates called "Voyages" the most important tool for blacks looking to research their past in decades, that holds as much benefit to the general public as for scholars.
He said the project is a bittersweet one.
"It's a hell of a lot of people, an enormous forced migration of human beings — one of the largest in human history — for nefarious purposes, for their economic exploitation," Gates said.
"But like the Negro spiritual says, they once were lost, but now they're found."
My question is - found by whom? Black folks are aware of our enslaved ancestors, whether or not we can call them by name. Methinks it may be more important that those who consider themselves to be white, to see these numbers, read this history, and think about what it all means, in today's terms, in today's world, and how it actually relates to who you are, what you own, and what place in the order of things you inherited simply by virtue of the fact that you were not descended from one of these forced migrants.
Some discussion of this took place in two diaries All the Gay People are White, All the Whites are Men...But Some of Us Are Brave and White skin privilege, Prop 8 and gay rights which had very interesting comments. Neither made it anywhere near the rec list - but both had over 200 comments.
What stuck in my head was a specific remark in one of these diaries: How am I guilty for slavery?
I don't understand why some people hold it against me when neither of us had anything to do with it. Why am I stuck with the crimes of my forefathers? Hell, they aren't even my forefathers -- my ancestry comes mainly from Ireland during the potato famine and then later Austria, and yet I am blamed for things colonial Americans did because my skin color happens to be the same as theirs was.
which reminded me of my student. Similar perspective to where she was initially. Slavery, and the awfulness of it, and the benefits reaped from it by many, should not be about guilt. Guilt and blame, the pointing of fingers, does not educate anyone. It also creates a defensive posture that does not allow for embracing an understanding.
I often in class, instruct students to pretend that they lived in 1820, owned a plantation, with 500 slaves, and how they would run it as a good business. Forget about "slavery is evil". It was part and parcel of American life. They've asked me, how can I, as a person with enslaved ancestors actually work with descendants of folks who owned my family?
I laugh and say because it is a shared history, and I am also descended from some folks who owned slaves. I don't reject either sets of ancestors. I'm capable of rational acceptance that history is what it is. We learn from the past to change the present.
I don't pretend to be Jewish, but embrace the history of the Jewish diaspora, the holocaust, and all that it means in society today. I don't pretend to be gay, yet I embrace, fight-in and defend the rights of my GLBT family.
I now ask my GLBT family to examine slavery once again, and understand why it is not the same as GLBT struggles, nor is it the same as the fight of Jews to survive after the Holocaust, nor is it the same as the struggles of First People's to exist here in the US after an almost complete genocide.
In an effort to get folks to see why comparing historical oppressions doesn't work - and to discuss calmly why equating one struggle today with slavery will wind up being counter-productive, I'm writing this long diary today.
But I digress.
After reading the AP piece, I immediately paid a visit to the expanded site (I'd been there before) to take a look at the new material.
Here's the headline from the intro page:
The Transatlantic Slave Databasehas information on almost 35,000 slaving voyages
that forcibly embarked over 10 million Africans for transport to the Americas between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries. It offers researchers,students and the general public a chance to rediscover the reality of one of the largest forced movements of peoples in world history.
I immediately clicked on a site link to Examine Estimates of the Slave Trade since the topic of just how many Africans were dragged here in chains has been a topic scholars of slavery have been debating for years. We are getting closer now to better approximations as a result of much of this scholarship. The numbers are staggering (for me they have always been so)
The final figure total on the site is 12,521,336
Of equal importance is the essay on the actual voyage - and why so many died en-route, making the Atlantic a graveyard:
The Middle Passage
Whatever the route taken, conditions on board reflected the outsider status of those held below deck. No European, whether convict, indentured servant, or destitute free migrant, was ever subjected to the environment which greeted the typical African slave upon embarkation. The sexes were separated, kept naked, packed close together, and the men were chained for long periods. No less than 26 percent of those on board were classed as children, a ratio that no other pre-twentieth century migration could come close to matching. Except for the illegal period of the trade when conditions at times became even worse, slave traders typically packed two slaves per ton. While a few voyages sailing from Upper Guinea could make a passage to the Americas in three weeks, the average duration from all regions of Africa was just over two months. Most of the space on a slave ship was absorbed by casks of water. Crowded vessels sailing to the Caribbean from West Africa first had to sail south before turning north-west and passing through the doldrums. In the nineteenth century, improvements in sailing technology eventually cut the time in half, but mortality remained high in this period because of the illegal nature of the business. Throughout the slave trade era, filthy conditions ensured endemic gastro-intestinal diseases, and a range of epidemic pathogens that, together with periodic breakouts of violent resistance, meant that between 12 and 13 percent of those embarked did not survive the voyage. Modal mortality fell well below mean mortality as catastrophes on a relatively few voyages drove up average shipboard deaths. Crew mortality as a percentage of those going on board, matched slave mortality over the course of the voyage, but as slaves were there for a shorter period of time than the crew, mortality rates for slaves (over time) were the more severe. The eighteenth-century world was violent and life-expectancy was short everywhere given that the global mortality revolution was still over the horizon, but the human misery quotient generated by the forced movement of millions of people in slave ships cannot have been matched by any other human activity.
These figures do not of course include those who died in the process of being captured, nor those who died prior to embarkation in the holding pens. Some of those places I had a chance to visit in Africa. The depopulation, and subsequent destruction of the local economies of entire regions in West and Central Africa are still visible today.
This is our history folks. That includes all of us. Straight, gay, black, white, latino, Native American, Asian - we've all been shaped here in the Americas by the curse and gift of shared foundational history the Transatlantic slave trade.
Can we find a way to embrace our shared history without using it as a wedge to play into other sets of divisions - whether they be by class, ethnicity, gender, or sexual orientation?
I hope so. To reformulate simply what I am getting at here. Homophobia, and the status of gay rights or lack of rights in the US is not the same as slavery. The legacy of slavery and race here in the US stands on its own. The legacy of homophobia, discrimination, stigma and inequality faced by the various LBGT communities in the US stand on their own, as a battle we must all embrace as well.
Let us learn to hear each other - and in some cases, for those black folks who are also LBGT, the other is us.
I sat here today ticking off my oppressions. I've faced oppression as a person of African-ancestry. I've faced oppression as a Puerto Rican. I've faced oppression as a woman. I've faced oppression as a Native American Tribal adoptee. I've faced oppression as a worker/union organizer. I've faced oppression as a person with a disability/illness. I faced oppression living in a gay household. Now that I'm over 60, I guess I'm beginning to understand the oppression of ageism, first hand.
I even had the "good fortune" to be oppressed as a mistakenly "Islamic" woman living in Europe (though I am nether Muslim nor North African, as a result of my phenotype I got slammed as one just the same).
So where does that leave me? Pissed off and ready to fight all oppressions, I think. But also reflective about the fact that they vary, and acutely aware that some counter movements actively work against others.
Okay I'll shut up now. This diary has meandered on long enuff.
Flame away.