On Slavery, Blacks Should Blame Whites With Moderation
The little, shy, fourth-grade girl came home from school that evening, looking down, dejected and disappointed. She hated her white skin, white genes and white parentage. That day the teacher had mentioned something about “white privilege” and talked about the inhuman slavery of the blacks by the whites in that dark history of U.S.A. In the words of her mother, she “Was sobbing her eyes out, feeling so guilty like she was a monster!”
As the mother picked her sobbing daughter up, she told her, “Slavery was barbaric and evil, but that is not guilt for you to carry! You had nothing to do with that! White people were slaves too, and black people had black slaves.” The daughter was in shock and disbelief. She could not believe what she had just heard!
In the wake of George Floyd’s unconscionable murder and “Black Lives Matter”, the above was a Twitter post by a distraught parent.
There is a ton of truth and lots of wisdom in the mother’s answer above. Once upon a time, slaves were white people. In fact, the term slave has its origins in the word “slav”, not a black race but a white race of the Indo-European people who were a major source of slavery in medieval Europe. The Slavs, who inhabited a large part of Eastern Europe, were taken as slaves by the Muslims of Spain during the ninth century AD.
The Irish people of Ireland, not black but white as they come, were also enslaved by the British in the years following England’s 17th century civil war and religious upheavals. Many thousands of dispossessed Catholic Irish men, women and children were transported either willingly or unwillingly in this period to work on new sugar and tobacco plantations in Barbados, Jamaica and the smaller Caribbean islands. They were surprisingly even derided by the Negroes, and branded with the Epithet of “white slaves”.
Tables would turn and the galling yoke of slavery would firmly be put on the necks of the blacks in a period spanning over three centuries. Perhaps, the only novel feature of this new slavery was its cruelty and savagery. That is some good reason for the Whites to feel guilty.
Yet black slavery in the Americas cannot really be truthfully described without mention of the “great adventurer” and explorer Christopher Columbus. It would be like describing the sky and not mentioning the sun. In the background, we would also see African chiefs and tribal leaders selling their own for a piece of cloth or for strange coins called money.
Indeed it is quite surprising, in the backdrop of black oppression in white America, that the first legal slave holder in America was actually a black person and not a white person! That dubious distinction goes to Anthony Johnson, an Angolan who was captured by the Portuguese and transported across the Atlantic to Jamestown Virginia. Most of the enslaved are believed to have been captured during an ongoing war between Portugal and the kingdom of Ndongo.
In the early 17th century America, slavery may have existed only in form but not in law. Workers in various plantations were engaged as indentured servants who could purchase their freedoms, or who could be free at the expiry of their service or indenture. Therefore, with time, Anthony Johnson obtained his freedom.
As a free black man, Johnson acquired land in Virginia and engaged other blacks as indentured servants. One of these was John Casor. When Casor thought to have served his term and went under the employment of a different person, Anthony Johnson went to court. The court found John Casor guilty and in a landmark ruling, sentenced him to a life-time of slavery. He would become the first legal slave in America, then a British colony. Anthony Johnson would become the first legal slave-holder.
In those early days, there was much socializing and intermarrying in the colonies. It took about a century to gradually shift popular attitude to the nauseating level that slavery eventually became. The excuse was that cheap labor was needed. It is Nelson Mandela who in his book “Long Walk to Freedom”, said that people are not born hating each other. Instead, they are taught to hate. It took about 100 years for whites to be taught to hate blacks.
Yet though American slavery is a catalogue of pain and misery of blacks at the mercy of whites, whites should also be proud for their role in America’s Black slavery. Many of them did a lot to end slavery, suffering even more than the victims.
Take the case of John Brown. John Brown was very white and very free but slavery pained him so much that he tried to overthrow it by the use of arms. He was captured alive, though grievously wounded and covered with blood. After a week-long trial, the jury found John Brown guilty and he was sentenced to death by hanging. On hearing of the sentence, Ralph Waldo Emerson remarked that John Brown would “make the gallows glorious like the Cross.” In the period intervening, there was a secret attempt and an offer to rescue him which he declined. He was ready to die as a martyr for the sake of the disinherited race.
In court one of the questions John Brown was asked is, “Upon what principle do you justify your acts? Then came the highly divine reply, “Upon the golden rule.”
Victor Hugo wrote that the murder of John Brown would be an uncorrectable sin; “You save your shame, but you kill your glory. Morally speaking, it seems a part of the human light would put itself out, that the very notion of justice and injustice would hide itself in darkness.”
Fredrick Douglass, a former black slave, remarked that he was willing to live for the slaves of his own race but John Brown was willing to die for the slave of another race.
When John Wilkes Booth stole behind Abraham Lincoln and pulled the trigger, he was doing it because of Lincoln’s anti-slavery stance.
On slavery, Whites may put on ashes and sack-clothes but they may rightly also wear purple and carry palms.
In the words of the Bible, “The soul who sins shall die. The son shall not bear the guilt of the father, nor the father bear the guilt of the son.” (Ezekiel 18: 20)
In the final analysis, slavery is about the exercise of (illegitimate) power. When power differentials favor a certain person or a certain race, they are wont to exercise it to the detriment of the less powerful. Many have experienced this even with High School bullying. It is the dark side of human nature. High School bullying was cruel, diabolical and in many cases fatal, yet it was not about skin color but power differentials.
Blacks should therefore blame Whites but blame them moderately. In the words of William Butler Yeats, the falcon should still hear the falconer.
