If you were to walk from Northern Europe south to the Equator, taking pictures of native populations as you went, you would find, upon lining up the pictures, that skin complexion would generally gradually move from pale to dark. There would be no obvious break where skin tone suddenly jumped from lighter to darker. That there are white people and black people is totally a myth. You cannot reduce people to white and black any more than you can reduce the rainbow to red and violet.
Slavery has been around on every continent since the beginning of human history. Slavery in the United States was abolished, at least on paper, in 1865. Importing of slaves to America was banned in 1808. Before that time, most slaves came from Africa, followed by Ireland (Irish Catholics) and Scotland (Highlanders). Native Americans were kept as slaves in California until 1967, but were generally exported as slaves to other countries instead of being kept as slaves here. Native Americans were undesirable as slaves mostly because so many of them died from illnesses introduced from Europe.
In the beginning, American slaves came mostly from Africa not because of their skin tone, but because the African slave trade was already so well established; slaves having been a major commodity throughout Africa for centuries. Here is how people typically got to America from Africa: Coastal African tribes and kingdoms such as Yoruba and Dahomey raided other African tribes living further inland, capturing anybody they could and taking them back to the coast. There, the captives were traded to mostly British, Dutch, Spanish, Portuguese, French and, later, Brazilian traders, who took them to America, where they were sold into slavery. During this same time, Europeans, mostly those living along the Mediterranean in Italy, Spain and Portugal but also from France, England, the Netherlands, Ireland and even Iceland and North America, were being captured by Barbary pirates and sold into slavery, largely in Algeria, Morocco and throughout the Ottoman Empire. Males and females were bought in equal numbers by Americans in order for the slaves to be a “self-reproducing labor force.” Lighter-skinned slaves were generally treated better and given less physical jobs than darker-skinned slaves.
“If you know your history, then you would know where you coming from.” – Bob Marley, a Jamaican whose father was of English descent and whose mother was of African descent.
1 comment:
And the history of Jamaica is interesting- are they black or white and where did they get that accent? Native Jamaicans became extinct, according to one report I read- some were kept as slaves briefly, but then killed off. Jamaica was the slave trade headquarters of the world, first being run by the French or Spanish- I'm not sure which, then the English, and there was a lot of hanky panky happening, so many of the current Jamaicans are decendents of the white & blacks both, and with so many countries being around, they got to speaking funky and reggaein' and into Jah and all that. That's my version.
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