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Just last month, a panel of community leaders and scholars gathered in Michigan to discuss the origin of racism. One of the panelists noted: “It’s really important that we talk the personal out of it and that that’s why I focus on the structure nature, there are many people who have no explicit racist intent, but we’ve embedded in systems that create advantage foe some based on race and disadvantage for other”. The essay depicts the system of slavery and people trade. It existed from roughly the 16th to the 19th century and can help the reader to understand the origins of racism.
Europeans were better able to tolerate the brutal exploitation of Africans by imagining that they were an inferior race or, better still, not even human. Lasting far longer than the slave trade itself, a race that denigrated people of African descent served to justify the later colonial takeover of African and structured social life in African colonies. It found its fullest expression in the apartheid system of South African, which attempted to separate blacks and whites in every conceived way while exploiting black labor in the economic. In the Americas, the abolition of slavery in the 1800s, far from ending racism, probably made it worse, for now the former slaves could exercise, at least potentially, a certain amount of economic and political influence. In the United States, the outcome was a racially inspired segregation, pervasive discrimination, and publicly sanctioned outbursts of violence against African Americans, poisoning the social life of the country into the twenty-first century. Many slaves in Africa during the 14th and 15th centuries were neglected by their owners, still, some of the chattels, who were more hard-working or qualified, were the object of respect. [Reilly,270].
Africa was a part of the larger trans-Atlantic network of trade that was developed after the 1500s. When you view different parts of the map of Africa, a lot of activity was going on inside the continent. One map shows that there were inter trade network it also shows that there were many different types of peoples, kingdoms, and tribes living on the continent of Africa. A big number of polities tribes existed within the continent of Africa. Within the continent there were literally hundreds of divisions of different languages spoken and different political system within a system. In many cases, you had empires that shaped Western Africa. A similar map that showed trans-Atlantic slavery trade network in which you have a slave trade that is geared toward the North what we called the Middle East. Relationships between Europe and Africa in the slavery question became relevant exactly when Portuguese people and other European kingdoms managed to reach Africa’s coastline [Powerpoint,1;Atlantic-Slave-Trade-Primary-Source, Jesse Hingson]. The diversity of African kingdoms and the empires were engaged in the slave trade for hundreds of years prior to the beginnings of the Atlantic slave trade. Europeans did not have much knowledge about what was going on inside the continent of Africa during the 14th and 15th centuries. The lack of knowledge basically is trying to trade with the Africa kingdom along the coast. [Powerpoint,1 Atlantic-Slave-Trade-Primary-Source- Jesse Hingson.]
As a relationship of commerce rather than conquest, the slave trade had its origin in a unique combination of demand and supply. The demand, of course, came from the European plantation economies in the Americas desperately in search of workers and seeking to imitate the slave labor solution pioneered on earlier plantation in the Mediterranean and Atlantic islands. Native Americana died in appalling numbers, creating the labor shortage while European, initially employed as indentured servants, could increasingly claim that being “Caucasian” or Christian should exempt them from forced labor. Africans were attractive candidates to fill the void because they were skilled farmers, herders, and miners and because they possessed substantial immunity to both European and tropical disease. They were also, relatively speaking, close to the Americans, and European seafaring technology made their transportation across the Atlantic economy. [Reilly, page 266].
It is stated that slaves had horrible living conditions and therefore had problems with health. We had cook ashore, and eat as well as we could, provision being plenty and cheap; but we soon lost our stomachs by sickness, most of my men having fever, and myself convulsions and aches in my head, that I could hardly stand to go to the truck without assistance, and they often faint with the horrid stink of the negroes, it being an old house where all the slaves are kept together, and evacuate nature where they lie, so that no jakes can stink worse; there being forced to sit three or four hours at a time, quite ruined my health, but there was no help.[Phillips, page 570.]. This extract states that it was nearly impossible for slaves to survive in the environment they were surrounded by, which made their life even worse.
When we were at the truck, the king’s slaves, if he had any, were the first offered to sale, which the slave traders would be very urgent with us to buy, and would in a manner force us to it ere they would shew us any other, saying they were the Rey’s Cosa, and we must not refuse them, though as I observed they were generally the worst slaves in the truck, and we paid more for them than any other, which we could remedy, it being one of his majesty’s prerogatives. Then the slave traders each brought out his slaves according to his degree and quality, the greatest first, &c. and our surgeon examined them well in all kinds, to see that they were sound wind and limb, making them jump, stretch out their arms swiftly, looking in their mouths to judge of their age; for the slave traders are so cunning, that they shave them all close before we see them, so that let them be that they shave them all close before we see them, so that let them be never so old we can see no grey hairs in their heads or beards; and then having liquidated them well and sleeked with palm oil, tis no easy matter to know an old one from a middle-aged one, but by the tooth decay. But our greatest care of all is to buy none that are diseased, lest they should infect the rest abroad; for those separate the men and women abroad by partitions and bulkheads, to prevent quarrels and altercations among them, yet do what we can they will come together, and that distemper which they call the yaws, is very common here, and discovers itself by almost the same symptoms as the Lues Venerea or clap does with us; therefore our surgeon is forced to examined the privities of both men and women with the nicest scrutiny, which is a great slavery, but what can’t be omitted [Phillips, page 571]. This piece of the text clearly shows that slavery trade was an obvious representation of racism as slaves were not treated as people but as goods. They were estimated as things that had not human but materialistic characteristics and were traded as nothing that had feelings.
Slaves also played a political role in colonial America, especially when their actions threatened the social order. By 1650, hundreds of runaway slave communities had been established throughout America. They range from small villages of 50 to 200 people to more centralized states with many thousands of inhabitants, such as Palmaris in Brazil. [Yates, 2.] Such communities interacted with Native American societies who often sheltered them and had to contend with European settlers who sought to destroy them. Even more threatening to European were slave rebellions. The largest and most successful of these occurred in the French colony of Saint Dominique (modern Haiti) in the 1790s. [. Tixxanen, 2.] It was stimulated by the Liberating ideas of the French Revolution, and it gives rise to the second independent state in the America and the first to be ruled by the people of African descent. Its violent attacks on white planters contributed much to the conservatism of later American independence movements whose elite leaders feared triggering further revolutionary upheavals and challenges to white control. [ Phillips, page 270.]
The working and living condition of slaves varied among countries and slaveholders also represent the purest form of racism. Many slaves were put to work on large plantations to help with large-scale production, while others worked in smaller operations or as house servants and were sometimes hired out to work in other locations by their masters. A fortunate few were eventually granted their freedom after years of dedicated labor. The slaves are called to work by the plantation bell at 6am in the morning, each person takes his hoe to the field under the supervision of overseers, either European or Creolean single line, they work in unison while chanting some African work song; the overseers occasionally use the whip to increase the workplace: at 11pm the bell sounds, they take a meal, then resume their work until 6pm in the evening. [WH,577,578.]
Conclusion: Slavery was a long- established institution in African society during the 14th and 15th centuries. The Europeans had a large demand for slave labor in America: they brought many slaves for sale and as they gradually die off more would be available. They worked on plantations for long extended hours with very little or nothing. The slaves were brutally beaten, starved, and left for dead by their slave owners or master. The working and living condition of slaves were horrifying and devasted as they continue to strive for freedom. For punishment they were tied to a pole or down on their knees and beaten with a long rope as their masters watched as they were being beaten furiously.
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