Race and Slavery; two words that are synonymous in the American language. The slaves that came from Africa were dropped off and sold to help work the plantation fields in the South. Growing up children and teens are shown the path of the Transatlantic Slave trade that went from Europe/Africa to the Americas and then back to Europe. The large triangle that connected North America to Europe. I bring up this connection because in school not much detail goes into the slave trade in Latin America which was also an continent that revived a large amount of imported slaves.
The main question brought up in the beginning of the chapter is who treated slaves better? North America or Latin America. According to the Tannenbaum thesis constructed by Stanley Elkins Latin America was less harsh on the slaves and allowed for more opportunities ones they were freed. Where as in North America it was much more difficult for a slave to be integrated into free society once they were freed. Although in both places the treatment of slaves equally varied from cruel to kind. For which Smedly points out at the end of page 125 " Levels of violence and brutality alone are not the best indicators of the dehumanizing qualities of slave systems".
The section " A Brief History of Old World Slavery" slavery is tied to the separation of Kinship ties, property value, and levels of servitude. Slaves were not just taken from Africa they existed in many forms all over the Europe, these were people that were used as workers that did not belong to a family kin, were poor and sold themselves into servitude, and as punishments. At that point in time slavery was growing as an industry. But in some cases though these slaves could buy out their freedom by having a talent that allowed them to integrate into society, birth, or marriage.
Many slaves that integrated from Latin America were fully immersed into the culture and spoke Spanish some settled into the lands and began mating with the natives. The differences between North America and Latin america is that mixed children from the products of slave mothers and European fathers were treated in some respects like proper children and not the children of slaves. Were in North america the integration of mixed blood was considered illegitimate and solid the bloodlines to where they were not recognized. In a plan to make sure groups did not integrate with each other they created statuses. Instead of being treated as human being and being born with the same rights as every human slaves were dehumanized and dropped down to the status of Subhumans.Which was then "backed up with subhuman characterizations" Which grew in popularity when the slave industry was reaching its peak. imported slaves had different ethnic backgrounds and spoke a different language that added along to the idea that they were less learned and obviously not as fully developed as a normal human. Pushing the slaves down further where unlike the " Old world" slaves who had a chance to better themselves the "New world" slaves were doomed by the white settlers to be see as less.
In something that is totally outdated. How can the thoughts and ideas of a race being lesser then another still be prevalent ? How is it that in the push to come out on stop, economically separating groups of people due to their phenotypes still has an underlying influence on American Society today? If North America had adopted the "Old World" views on slavery and procreated with one another mixing the "races" would race still be an issue?
In response to Becky's last question, I suspect race would still be an issue because there is an entire world of human diversity to consider. Sufficient mixing of people might lessen the negativity associated with racism, but Becky's reference to economically separated groups is a much more difficult matter to overcome. The problem might be that we have not been able to isolate the bigger power behind the economics.
ReplyDeleteTo support the question on who treated the slaves better, North or South America, I refer to Martin Delany's 1852 book on the conditions, elevations, and destiny of the colored people of the United States-chapter XX, where he states: Central and South America are evidently the ultimate destination and future home of the colored race on this continent...Delany gives credit to the climate, the food, and the fact that "there never have existed in the policy of any of the nations of Central and South America, an inequality on account of race or color..." This was his plea not to return to Africa, but to stay in the new world.
To also add to Brenda's answer even if the New World views about slavery were different it would still effect race today. One of the things that I noticed while reading this chapter is that slavery, although occurring even before the colonization of the new world, already existed. So if the New World would have treated slavery more like the colonist in Latin America, we would still see cases of extreme abuse. The thing that may differ is what Tannenbaum argued that, the church and the heritage of Roamn law may have protected the slaves more but only to an extent of time. Eventually it would become pretty bad but after the emancipation of slaves there may have been less of a stigma about race in the New World. We may have had more racial terms like those in South America were the tend to describe multiple phenotype traits. Again there is no denying that slavery contributed to our concept of race but we can see how they vary in different places other than the U.S.
ReplyDeleteNot really a comment on the post but I just wanted to add something. In the section “A Brief History of Old World Slavery” , we need to take a closer look at the importance of the kinship relationship and how this relationship or lack of can serve as an importance to one’s rank in society and classification as a slave. On page 128, Paul Bohannan observed that “slaves are essentially kinless people” . Belonging to a kin group served as protection in Latin America. In Latin America, the rank of a slave could be lifted if the slave were somehow absorbed into the slave owner’s kin group. It is mentioned in the “Uniqueness of the English Experience of Slavery” section, that the offspring of a slave owner and a slave were classified into another social ranking. The text states that “Brazilians and foreigners alike acknowledged that the offspring of unions of masters and slave women were accepted as part of the family” (146). The children acknowledged by the slave owners and slaves were often designated jobs that whites did not want and slaves were not permitted to work. The status obtained by mulattos and mestizo populations gave them the opportunity to be cultural and political leaders that would result in the lasting effect of how race is viewed in Latin America. The intermixing of races in Latin America created the inability to structure phenotypically separate and exclusive groups. This was not the case for North America, the English did not acknowledge mixed race children because the goal was to exclude non-whites from society and maintaining non-whites at a sub-human level.
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