Even a half-honest account of American history must admit that the land stolen from the First Nations was made to produce and prosper through the sweat and blood of men, women, and children kidnapped from the west coast of Africa.
Slavery has tormented humanity since ancient times. However, African slavery in the New World was unprecedented in scale and brutality.
The depth of such brutality had to be justified somehow in the “Christian” hearts of the Southern aristocracy. Slaves in the ancient world were not considered to be morally or mentally inferior— just unlucky, usually from being on the wrong side of a violent dispute.
In America, even the most talented or accomplished slave was still treated as if inferior to the lowest White man. In America, slaves were considered inferior morally, intellectually, and in every other way. White supremacy ruled the day and lives on.
The brutality of the slave system in the Southern U.S. was studied and adopted by the Nazis to demote Jews to the lowest caste, from which there was to be no escape.
“At the depths of their dehumanization, both Jews and African Americans were subjected to gruesome medical experimentation…. James Marion Sims, [who] would later be heralded as the founding father of gynecology….[,] came to his discoveries by acquiring enslaved women in Alabama and conducting savage surgeries that often ended in disfigurement or death.” These surgeries were done without anesthesia (Isabel Wilkerson, Caste, New York: Random House, 2020, pp. 147-8).
This is only one incidence of how Black bodies could be tortured or killed without consequence, even long after “emancipation.” We still have many healthcare disparities across the color line. For example, Black women are three times more likely to die from pregnancy-related causes than White women (https:// www.cdc.gov/healthequity/features/ maternal-mortality/index.html).
One may think that slavery is in the deep past, but its legacy persists. White people are finally waking up to the severe over-policing of Black neighborhoods, unjustified shootings of Black suspects, mass incarceration of Black men and women, unequal sentencing by judges, restrictions on voting, and the slurs and indignities of everyday life in America for those with African heritage.
In Ta-Nehisi Coates’ widely discussed article “The Case for Reparations” (the Atlantic, June, 2014), the first lines are “Two hundred fifty years of slavery. Ninety years of Jim Crow. Sixty years of separate but equal. Thirty-five years of racist housing policy.” The progress we make in America depends on how honestly we deal with this extreme and persistent level of harm.
For centuries, Blacks were not permitted to take part in public life. Only outstanding talent that could not be ignored eventually gained recognition, exemplified by Jackie Robinson of baseball fame.
At first, only music and sports gave Negroes a chance for their talent to be welcomed by part of the wider community.
It isn’t much of an overstatement to say that singularly American music is Black music. Consider the spirituals that led gospel, that led to the blues, that led to rock and roll (listen to the Rolling Stones’ album with Howlin’ Wolf), ragtime, swing, jazz, rhythm and blues, Motown, and hip hop.
In 1920, Mamie Smith was the first African American artist to record anything, and that only because the White songwriter Perry Bradford, known as “Mule” for his stubborn- ness, got the recording studio to take a chance on her. Her first recording was a huge hit (bbc.com/culture/ article/20210216-the-forgotten- story-of-americas-firstblack- superstars).
“Race records” then flourished later in the 1920s. Record companies signed many Black artists while exploiting them at every step.
Inequities in the American financial, labor, and housing markets have long harmed Black families and made it nearly impossible to accumulate generational wealth. Even now that housing, credit availability, and interest rates are fairer to African Americans, Black families are still generations behind.
The median wealth of families in America in 2022 was: White $285,000; Hispanic $61,600; Black $44,900; and the top 1% $10,815,000 (https:// www.cnn.com/2023/10/31/ us/us-racial-wealth-gap-reaj/ index.html).
Property and land confiscations, Black codes, redlining neighborhoods, mass incarceration, and substandard education have all contributed to keeping Black families poor.
This is not an African American problem; this is an American problem. A White person may say, “What are you talking about? I didn’t have anything to do with slavery.”
Yet, the legacy of slavery haunts us all. We will never release the ghosts of the past by continuing to bury the crimes of our shared history.