Higgaion said:
msjones21 said:
And alot of it has African-American roots which brings us back to the point of the Conferderate flag being offensive to black people as a whole.
msjones,
I don’t quite agree. And I need to be careful here so I don’t give the wrong impression, though that’s probably unavoidable. While a certain amount of it was produced by black individuals, that’s different than saying it had African roots. Very little if any of it did. Which is not to belittle the real efforts and genius of many blacks, but they would not have been able to produce without the foundation of Western culture and civilizing influence of Christianity which was imparted to them by the whites (largely in the South) they came in contact with. And they wouldn’t have come under this influence at all if the Northerners, especially New Englanders, who along with the Africans who sold their own people, were primarily responsible for bringing the slaves in the first instance and dumping them on the South, hadn’t done so.
So what exactly are saying here that Africans would never have developed if not for the grace of slavery?
Well why you said you needed to be careful is beyond me but here are some facts. You need to do a little more studying of the African experience and contribution to this culture before you are so careful next time.
From Jubilee: the Emergence of African-American Culture Jubilee was written by Howard Dodson, chief of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture]
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Of the first 6.5 million people who crossed the Atlantic and settled in the Americas during the colonial period (1492-1776), for instance, only 1 million were Europeans. The other 5.5 million were African.
For more than two centuries, slavery was a central factor in the development of American life.
The transatlantic slave trade's more than 300-year history shaped the modern world as we know it. It fueled the economic development of Europe, disrupted Africa's economic and political and social life, and provided the labor force that laid the economic foundation of the Americas, including the United States. Together, the slave trade and slavery were the two most powerful forces shaping the development of the American nation. Nevertheless, the vast majority of Americans—black and white—know very little about the nature and character of these people-shaping, nation-building institutions.
Most Americans have avoided any serious study of these institutions. Whites have shied away from any earnest attempts to really know what happened during slavery because they fear that they will be implicated in its horrors. They fear that they will find their ancestors' behavior and actions repugnant and that they will be obliged to shoulder the burden of guilt. Blacks avoid such study because they fear that they will be further demeaned or embarrassed by such knowledge. Much of this fear and avoidance stems from the images of slavery and the slave trade that most Americans have come to believe are the essence of slavery and the slave trades history and legacy.
What Americans know or think they know about slavery and the slave trade has been shaped by the images of these institutions that have been handed down to us over the past 500 years. They are images of helpless, defenseless victims of unthinkable cruelty. They are images of long lines of bound captives being driven by armed captors from the interior of West and Central Africa to coastal holding pens.
They are images of hundreds and at times thousands of these enslaved African captives being held in jail cells and other prison like settings until enough have been captured to fill a slave ship. They are images of men, women, and children in shackles and leg irons. They are images of hundreds of these African men, women, and children packed spoon-fashion on slave ships. They are images of brutalized, exploited slaves working under unbearable conditions on tobacco and cotton plantations in the United States and sugar plantations throughout the Americas. They are images of downtrodden, degraded people—perennial victims—who were stripped of their culture and humanity and forced to live out their lives in slavery as pawns in vicious, all-powerful systems of human degradation.
The slave trade and slavery laid the foundations for the development of Europe and the Americas as well as the underdevelopment of Africa from the 16th through the 19th centuries. Of even greater significance, as Jubilee makes clear, is that it was in the context of slavery that
enslaved Africans invented and reproduced themselves and laid the foundations of African-American social, political, cultural, and economic development. Though victimized, exploited, and oppressed, enslaved Africans and their progeny—both slave and free—were active, creative agents in the making of their own history, culture, and political future.
There are many pieces of culture that have their roots in African culture that survived slavery:
There is almost no popular American cultural form which has not been created, or at least influenced, by people of African ancestry. American music, dance, language, visual art, religion, festivals, cuisine and attitude are embedded with African elements. African cultural forms have given birth to jazz in the United States and the tango in Argentina; to Santeria in Cuba and Candomble in Uruguay; creole in Haiti and papiamento in Curacao; and carnivals from New Orleans and Jamaica to Brazil where the rhythms of merengue, calypso, samba, and guanguanco mix with the flavors of gumbo, feijoada, and rum.
Southern cuisine and "soul food" are nearly synonymous. Both are African-American cuisines from the slavery era. Sermons, oratory, and other forms of oral literature in the African-American vernacular idiom, including contemporary rap, trace their roots to genres developed by enslaved Africans during slavery.
Higgaion said:
SUNDAE said:
God fearing Christians???
Umm, yes?
Just because one claims to be Christian does not make them so. Anyone who can beat, force, own, separate families is not in my view a God fearing Christian. What is immoral today was immoral then, so the product of their times argument does not work with me. There were whites who abhorred slavery and all it represented.
The owning one or two slaves is no less immoral than owning 100 or 200.
Excerpts from the address To The People Of North Carolina, On The Evils Of Slavery By The Friends Of Liberty And Equality
"Not only the Christian religion, but nature herself cries out against a state of slavery:"--POPE LEO. X.
PROPOSITION 1. Our slave system is radically evil.
II. It is founded in injustice and cruelty.
III. It is a fruitful source of pride, idleness and tyranny.
IV. It increases depravity in the human heart, while it inflames and nourishes a numerous train of dark and brutal passions and lusts, disgraceful to human nature, and destructive of the general welfare.
V. It is contrary to the plain and simple maxims of the Christian Revelation, or religion of Christ.
But those who are enabled to survive the perils of the sea, as well as the horific confinement and brutal treatment which they undergo in the slave ships, are at length brought into market, and sold like cattle, or in a manner no less brutal. And here these miserable creatures often fall into hands, that treat them the remainder of their days, with the utmost barbarity, working and beating them like oxen and feeding them but little better than dogs. By such treatment as we have been describing, the sprightly and spirited African is soon reduced to a heart broken, dispirited and miserable slave, almost naked and starved, moaping over some of our lovely fields, which seem silently to weep for the misery and oppression which they bear; or perhaps groaning under the lash of some cruel master or oversee
If slavery be inconsistent with the Mosiac or Jewish polity, it is still more so with the precepts of Christ. The Mosaic dispensation was, in some respects, a dispensation of bondage, but the Christain or gospel dispensation, is in every respect, a dispensation of liberty. The genius of the gospel is "mildness gentleness and brotherly kindness," &c. And the great and ruling maxim by which Christ would have his followers to regulate their conduct is this: "All things whatsoever ye would that men should do unto you, do ye even so unto them." This rule is applied in refference to our conduct towards all men. And in addition to this, or rather by way of inforcing it, we are commanded by Christ, to "be merciful, as our heavenly father is merciful;" and St. Paul has enjoined the doing of good to all men. On these plain scriptures, the sense of which is too plain and obvious to be overlooked by any devout seeker of truth, we think it entirely unnecessary to offer any comment. Surely no serious and sober thinking christain will, with these scriptures, and a thousand others of similar import, before his
Higgaion said:
mhatten said:
Slavery whether well treated or not is not propaganda, and to justify it by saying well I only owned a couple of them is insensitive at the least and absolutely absurd at best.
.
Intentionally exaggerating the plight of most black slaves in one area of the country (the South), while at the same time failing to shine the spotlight on abuses and attitudes in another (the North) is propaganda. I wasn’t trying to justify anything, nor do I feel the need to.
I think I can imagine it pretty well. But from what I’ve heard, the majority of comments from the slave narratives by slaves about their masters are actually favorable.
Perhaps you need to actually read the Slave Narratives as opposed to what you have heard and read a bit more history of the non-revisionist history kind.
Just so you get a picture and realize African Americans are not “exaggerating” history
Source Thomas Clarkson, Letters on the slave-trade, and the state of the natives in those parts of Africa, . . . contiguous to Fort St. Louis and Goree (London, 1791), plate 2, facing p. 36, figs. 1-5. (Copy in Library Company of Philadelphia
Caption reads: "Of this mixture [gunpowder, lemon-juice, and palm oil,] the unresisting captive received a coating, which by the hand of another sailor, was rubbed into the skin, and then polished with a 'danby-brush,' until the sable epidermis glistened like a newly-blacked boot" (p. 28).
Caption, "Marks of punishment inflicted upon a colored servant in Richmond, VA"; shows the back of woman with burn marks. The victim was thirteen years old when, for reasons unexplained in the article, she annoyed or upset her mistress. She was locked in a room by herself for over a week, during which time the mistress repeatedly burned her back. The mistress was arrested, but released on $ 5,000 bail. The original photograph is located in the Houghton Library at Harvard University
Comments
Placed by Thomas Jefferson, the ad reads: "RUN away from the subscriber in Albemarle, a Mulatto slave called Sandy, about 35 years of age, his stature is rather low, inclining to corpulence, and his complexion light; he is a shoemaker by trade, in which he uses his left hand principally, can do coarse carpenters work, and is something of a horse jockey; he is greatly addicted to drink, and when drunk is insolent and disorderly, in his conversation he swears much, and in his behaviour is artful and knavish. He took with him a white horse, much scarred with traces, of which it is expected he will endeavour to dispose; he also carried his shoemakers tools, and will probably endeavour to get employment that way. Whoever conveys the said slave to me, in Albemarle, shall have 40 s. reward, if taken up within the county, 4 l. if elsewhere within the colony, and 10 l. if in any other colony, from THOMAS JEFFERSON."
Source Virginia Gazette, Sept. 14, 1769 (See Thomas Costa's website, Virginia Runaways )
Nothing like those Christian founding fathers
Source
John Gabriel Stedman, Narrative, of a Five Years' Expedition, against the revolted Negroes of Surinam . . . from the year 1772, to 1777 (London, 1796), vol. 1, facing p. 167. (Copy in the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University)
Caption, "A Negro hung alive by the ribs to a gallows"; background shows skulls (presumably of beheaded slaves) on posts. This illustration was based on a 1773 eyewitness description. An incision was made in the victim's ribs and a hook placed in the hole. In this case, the victim stayed alive for 3 days until clubbed to death by the sentry guarding him who he had insulted. For the definitive modern edition, with illustrations, see Richard and Sally Price, eds. Narrative of a five years expedition against the revolted Negroes of Surinam: transcribed for the first time from the original 1790 manuscript (Baltimore : Johns Hopkins University Press,1988 ).
THESE IMAGES ARE JUST A FEW OF THE REALITIES OF SLAVERY.
Higgaion said:
People who claim support for unbiblical forms of slavery are wrong, I agree, but disagree that Scripture is neutral on a certain variation of the institution itself. I don’t think it can be considered neutral if it speaks about it but nowhere condemns it, but to the contrary gives guidelines as to how it should be practiced. Again, we’re talking about biblical slavery here and not the kind the African slave trade.
Slavery for the slave was always wrong, immoral and cruel, biblical or otherwise.
