what has to be a same from slavery
This commodity was published in 2017
People think they know everything about slavery in the United States, but they don't. They think the majority of African slaves came to the American colonies, only they didn't. They talk nigh 400 years of slavery, just information technology wasn't. They claim all Southerners owned slaves, but they didn't. Some contend it was all a long fourth dimension ago, but it wasn't.
Slavery has been in the news a lot lately. From the discovery of the sale of 272 enslaved people that enabled Georgetown University to remain in operation to the McGraw-Loma textbook controversy over calling slaves "workers from Africa" and the slavery memorial beingness congenital at the Academy of Virginia, Americans are having conversations almost this difficult period in American history. Some of these dialogues have been wrought with controversy and disharmonize, similar the University of Tennessee student who challenged her professor's understanding of enslaved families.
As a scholar of slavery at the Academy of Texas at Austin, I welcome the public debates and connections the American people are making with history. However, at that place are still many misconceptions near slavery, as evidenced by the conflict at the University of Tennessee.
I've spent my career dispelling myths virtually "the peculiar establishment." The goal in my courses is non to victimize ane group and gloat another. Instead, we trace the history of slavery in all its forms to make sense of the origins of wealth inequality and the roots of discrimination today. The history of slavery provides vital context to gimmicky conversations and counters the distorted facts, internet hoaxes and poor scholarship I caution my students against.
Iv myths about slavery
Myth One: The majority of African captives came to what became the Us.
Truth: Only a little more than 300,000 captives, or 4-6 pct, came to the U.s.a.. The majority of enslaved Africans went to Brazil, followed by the Caribbean. A pregnant number of enslaved Africans arrived in the American colonies by way of the Caribbean area, where they were "seasoned" and mentored into slave life. They spent months or years recovering from the harsh realities of the Eye Passage. Once they were forcibly accustomed to slave labor, many were then brought to plantations on American soil.
Myth Ii: Slavery lasted for 400 years.
Popular civilization is rich with references to 400 years of oppression. There seems to be defoliation betwixt the Transatlantic Slave Merchandise (1440-1888) and the institution of slavery, confusion only reinforced past the Bible, Genesis xv:13:
Then the Lord said to him, 'Know for sure that for 4 hundred years your descendants will exist strangers in a country not their own and that they will be enslaved and mistreated at that place.'
Mind to Lupe Fiasco – simply ane hip-hop artist to refer to the 400 years – in his 2011 imagining of America without slavery, "All Black Everything":
[Hook] Y'all would never know If you lot could e'er exist If you never try You would never run across Stayed in Africa We own't never leave And then there were no slaves in our history Were no slave ships, were no misery, call me crazy, or isn't he Run into I fell comatose and I had a dream, information technology was all black everything [Verse i] Uh, and we ain't become exploited White human being own't feared so he did not destroy it We ain't work for costless, see they had to employ it Built it up together so nosotros equally appointed First 400 years, come across nosotros really enjoyed it 
Truth: Slavery was not unique to the United States; information technology is a part of almost every nation'due south history, from Greek and Roman civilizations to contemporary forms of homo trafficking. The American function of the story lasted fewer than 400 years.
How, and so, do nosotros calculate the timeline of slavery in America? Most historians use 1619 as a starting bespeak: 20 Africans referred to every bit "servants" arrived in Jamestown, Virginia on a Dutch ship. It's important to note, withal, that they were not the beginning Africans on American soil. Africans first arrived in America in the late 16th century not equally slaves but as explorers together with Spanish and Portuguese explorers.
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One of the best-known of these African "conquistadors" was Estevancio, who traveled throughout the Southeast from present-day Florida to Texas. Every bit far every bit the institution of chattel slavery – the treatment of slaves equally property – in the United States, if nosotros use 1619 equally the starting time and the 1865 13th Amendment equally its end, then it lasted 246 years, not 400.
Myth Three: All Southerners owned slaves.
Truth: Roughly 25 per centum of all Southerners owned slaves. The fact that one-quarter of the southern population were slaveholders is still shocking to many. This truth brings historical insight to mod conversations most inequality and reparations.
Take the case of Texas.
When it established statehood, the Lone Star State had a shorter menstruation of Anglo-American chattel slavery than other southern states – but 1845 to 1865 – because Espana and Mexico had occupied the region for nearly ane-half of the 19th century with policies that either abolished or limited slavery. Withal, the number of people impacted by wealth and income inequality is staggering. By 1860, the Texas enslaved population was 182,566, just slaveholders represented 27 percent of the population, and controlled 68 percentage of the government positions and 73 percent of the wealth. These are amazing figures, but today's income gap in Texas is arguably more stark, with 10 percent of tax filers taking home l percent of the income.
Myth 4: Slavery was a long time ago.
Truth: African-Americans have been complimentary in this land for less time than they were enslaved. Practice the math: Blacks have been free for 152 years, which ways that about Americans are only ii to three generations away from slavery. This is not that long ago.
Over this same menses, however, onetime slaveholding families accept congenital their legacies on the institution and generated wealth that African-Americans have not had access to considering enslaved labor was forced. Segregation maintained wealth disparities, and overt and covert discrimination express African-American recovery efforts.
The value of slaves
Economists and historians accept examined detailed aspects of the enslaved experience for every bit long as slavery existed. My own work enters this conversation by looking at the value of individual slaves and the means enslaved people responded to existence treated equally a article.
They were bought and sold merely like nosotros sell cars and cattle today. They were gifted, deeded and mortgaged the same manner we sell houses today. They were itemized and insured the same way nosotros manage our assets and protect our valuables.
Enslaved people were valued at every phase of their lives, from earlier birth until after decease. Slaveholders examined women for their fertility and projected the value of their "hereafter increase." As the slaves grew upwards, enslavers assessed their value through a rating system that quantified their piece of work. An "A1 Prime hand" represented one term used for a "first-rate" slave who could exercise the most work in a given solar day. Their values decreased on a quarter calibration from 3-fourths hands to one-4th easily, to a charge per unit of zero, which was typically reserved for elderly or differently abled bondpeople (another term for slaves).
For example, Guy and Andrew, two prime males sold at the largest auction in U.S. history in 1859, commanded different prices. Although similar in "all marketable points in size, historic period, and skill," Guy was United states of america$one,280 while Andrew sold for $1,040 because "he had lost his correct heart." A reporter from the New York Tribune noted "that the market place value of the right eye in the Southern country is $240." Enslaved bodies were reduced to budgetary values assessed from year to year and sometimes from month to month for their entire lifespan and beyond. By today'south standards, Andrew and Guy would be worth about $33,000-$forty,000.
Slavery was an extremely diverse economic institution, ane that extracted unpaid labor out of people in a variety of settings – from small unmarried-crop farms and plantations to urban universities. This variety was also reflected in their prices. And enslaved people understood they were treated as commodities.
"I was sold away from mammy at three years former," recalled Harriett Hill of Georgia. "I remembers it! It lack selling a calf from the moo-cow," she shared in a 1930s interview with the Works Progress Administration. "We are human beings," she told her interviewer. Those in bondage understood their status. Fifty-fifty though Harriet Hill was also little to call up her price when she was 3, she recalled being sold for $1,400 at historic period 9 or 10: "I never could forget it."
Slavery in popular civilization
Slavery is part and parcel of American popular civilisation, only for forty years the television miniseries Roots was the main visual representation of the institution, except for a scattering of independent (and not widely known) films such as Haile Gerima's "Sankofa" or the Brazilian "Quilombo."
Today, from grassroots initiatives such as the interactive Slave Habitation Projection, where school-anile children spend the dark in slave cabins, to comic skits on Sabbatum Dark Live, slavery is front and center. In 2016 A&Eastward and History released the reimagined miniseries "Roots: The Saga of an American Family," which reflected four decades of new scholarship. Steve McQueen'south "12 Years a Slave" was a box function success in 2013, actress Azia Mira Dungey made headlines with the popular web series called "Ask a Slave," and "The Cloak-and-dagger" – a series about runaway slaves and abolitionists – was a striking for its network WGN America. With less than one year of functioning, the Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History, which devotes several galleries to the history of slavery, has had more than one million visitors.
The elephant that sits at the center of our history is coming into focus. American slavery happened – we are nonetheless living with its consequences. I believe nosotros are finally ready to face up it, larn about it and acknowledge its significance to American history.
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Editor's note: This is an updated version of an commodity that originally appeared on Oct. 21, 2014.
Source: https://theconversation.com/american-slavery-separating-fact-from-myth-79620
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