Don't worry I am not going to remind my beloved blog readers that American blacks have created their own modern form of slavery by aggressively filling up our jails, prisons and homeless shelters. I am not going to remind my beloved readers that we have created a permanent black underclass of illiterate and innumerate people who have the same level of skills and competence as their slave ancestors. (American slaves in the South were not allowed to learn to read. Ironic, now they don’t want to learn.)
I want to point out something that most people have not figured out by themselves.
I did the research on the economic history of Africa when I was in graduate school and my research became the core data for the many subsequent academic books on the subject. I know whereof I speak or write.
The slaves who were brought to North America, the Caribbean and Latin America were bought. They were bought in the open markets along the coasts of west Africa from Senegal to the Congo. Most were bought between Senegal and Ghana.
Who was selling them and why were they for sale? Slavery had been a mode of commerce in black Africa as far back as I was able to trace. Trafficking in slavery was part of African trade for more than 1000 years before European slave trade began.
So what brought about the slave trade?
Slavery was one of the most brilliant and humane inventions of mankind. It turned out that by keeping people alive after defeat in warfare those people and sometimes other members of the defeated tribes could be used productively as slaves.
The trade-off was you either died when you were defeated in warfare or you spent the balance of your life working for someone else. A very humane and ingenious trade-off.
What made this inhumane was the subsequent fact that people with dark skins were brought to societies of people with light skin who never emotionally identified with the blacks. This made it possible to create multi-generational slavery. Such multi-generational slavery is morally offensive and does not make the saving of a life nearly so reasonable a bargain for the slave.
The very few black freemen in America operated in most of the colonies as Independent men by dressing very well so no one would doubt their freeman status. Also they carried letters of proof that they were not slaves.
Today, with the emergence of the permanent black uneducated underclass, I am beginning to see non-ghetto blacks spending money on elegant dress in order to distinguish themselves from the underclass who wear hoodies with pants around their knees.