Read this and tell me what’s offensive. “The Atlantic slave trade between the 1500s
and 1800s brought millions of workers from Africa to southern United States to
work on agricultural plantations.” If
the offensive word is “workers” then you agree with the latest flap over
politically correct speech which has prompted McGraw-Hill to promise to revise
their textbook from which this quote is found.
Roni Dean-Burren reacted with appalled shock when her son, Cody, texted
her, “we was real hard workers, wasn’t we.” And she has created a fire storm
over social media. What they were offended over was the insinuation that workers meant people who get paid. By the way, did I mention that they are of
African extraction and that Roni is an eleven-year English teacher? Do you notice any problems with the English
of her son in his text?
Seriously, my ancestors fought for Michigan
in the Civil War and we lost two cousins at Gettysburg. Never have I
sympathized with southern slave owners, and I belong to the party of Lincoln. And so if you want to change ‘workers’ to ‘slave
workers’ or ‘unpaid workers’, fine. That’s
not what offends me. I object to “1500s”
and “millions”.
There was no successful colonial British
colony that turned into USA until Jamestown in 1607. Slaves from Africa did not arrive until at
least 1630. That does not encompass 1500s. What the McGraw-Hill authors probably had in
mind is the slave trade to the Caribbean that did begin in the 1500s. Sugar cane sugar became a huge export to
Europe. It was the first time Europeans
had ever experienced a sugar product except for a bit of beet sugar and
honey. As Europe went wild for sugar,
the plantations grew aware that they couldn’t depend on Carib Indians for
work. The usual Spanish trick of getting
natives to come to the plantation and sell themselves into serfdom was half
force, half inducement with meat from cattle.
But Caribs suffered from the Old World diseases and were considered
sickly and unreliable. So Spanish, then
French and English began trading in slaves from Africa. But no African slave ship showed up at a
southern port in the English colonies until well into the 1600s.
Six million slaves were imported from Africa
to the Americas, primarily from Brazil to USA.
However, estimates of the number of slaves imported to the states vary
from 1.5 million to 2.1 million. If that
is “millions” then the plural means two.
When the war between the states was commenced, there were 12 million
people in the country, and 4 million in the confederate and border states. Only 10% of southerners owned slaves, which
were estimated to be about 2 million or half the population, and many had been
born in the south, not Africa. There were
significant enclaves of abolitionists in the South, but they were persecuted
during the war and their voices drowned by the pro-slave factions. Sam Houston, hero of the revolt of Tejas and
President of the Republic owned slaves but grew to have second thoughts about
how it treated people, the abuses, etc.
He strongly advocated Texas abolish slavery, then not join the
Confederacy and remain neutral in the war.
Nobody came to his funeral in 1863 because he was a pariah. But a year later, after Vicksburg fell and
the Union cut off commerce between the eastern and western parts of the
Confederacy, as the rebel cause lost hope, Texans started saying, “Maybe we
should have listened to Sam.”
All of which is to say that slavery’s history
is complex, dirty, and tragic, yet it existed for thousands of years throughout
the world. It is highly political here,
but people in Brazil don’t point fingers and accuse over the slavery issue,
though it was just as prominent there.
Who in Dominican Republic tries to balkanize politics over the
issue? If I were Cody Burren’s mom, I’d correct
his grammar, rather than stroke his victimization. Good speech will get you
somewhere in life. Do justice, love kindness,
and walk humbly before your God—as scriptures say.
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