
Tortuous History Traced in Sunken Slave Ship Found Off South Africa - Thevet
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/01/world/africa/tortuous-history-traced-in-sunken-slave-ship-found-off-south-africa.html
======
jMyles
The middle passage is one of the most awful things anyone can say about
humans.

Another, sadly, is the current state of the US prison system.

I'm always a bit amazed at how casually people talk about how "slavery ended,"
punctuated by the civil war, when in fact, the 13th amendment didn't end
slavery at all, at least legally.

> except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly
> convicted

The drug war and prison state aren't metaphorical continuations of slavery,
but the literal legal legacy.

~~~
chimeracoder
> I'm always a bit amazed at how casually people talk about how "slavery
> ended," punctuated by the civil war, when in fact, the 13th amendment didn't
> end slavery at all, at least legally.

I always cringe when people talk about sweatshops being a thing of the past.

Being held captive and working for $0.23/hour [0] may not be _literal_
slavery, but it's at best a rounding error away[1]. And that's exactly the
state of many prisons in the US, or factories and field work in many other
parts of the world.

We haven't really ended labor inequality; we've just exported it, and we
continue to benefit from the dirt-cheap costs of exploitative labor on a daily
basis[2].

[0]
[http://www.prisonpolicy.org/prisonindex/prisonlabor.html](http://www.prisonpolicy.org/prisonindex/prisonlabor.html)

[1] Remember that prisoners are usually expected to pay for their own costs-
of-living while incarcerated, such as toiletries, and that the prices for
these are set by a monopoly seller for the prison.

[2] [https://theweek.com/articles/463364/11-products-might-not-
re...](https://theweek.com/articles/463364/11-products-might-not-realize-made-
by-prisoners)

~~~
hobbyjogger
Look, I'm as critical of U.S. mass incarceration as anyone. And there are many
problems--overcriminalization, mandatory minimums, rampant plea bargaining,
prosecutorial misconduct, wrongful conviction. But despite all those problems,
equating it with slavery--actual slavery as it was practiced in the U.S.
through the Civil War--is senseless.

You are equating criminal incarceration (even unjust incarceration) with
intentionally terrorizing innocent African villages, capturing their people
and shipping them to another continent to live in chains.

It's a little like the tendency to call bad things, when they are bad enough,
"genocide" or "holocaust" despite the very specific meanings of those words.

------
bruant
Even more "sad" is the current state of Mozambique.

------
bruant
I think the important thing to remember here - especially for gentrified 21st
century software engineers - is that to fully own your guilt for slavery in
the Americas, you must first ignore the history of slavery in Africa itself.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_Africa](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_Africa)

~~~
historylesson
It is rather sad you have been downvoted, but alas in these PC days, not
surprising. You are of course right, the audience here, of all places, should
seek further education, and whilst pointing out the horrors of slavery, should
not take the simplified modernistic version of suited Westerners sailing over,
grabbing a boat load of locals and sailing them back for work. It was and is
far more complicated than that. There is a reason it was called the 'Slave
Trade' for a reason - the locals were more than happy to sell their bretheren.
That is probably the saddest point of it all.

Well, sadest is that slavery still exists in most of the world, and yet we
seem to consider it a relic from the past.

~~~
benbreen
No one who studies the Atlantic slave trade (or the Indian Ocean slave trade
for that matter) is going to deny that slavery existed in various forms in
pre-colonial Africa. But there's an enormous difference between pre-colonial
slavery and the system that began to emerge under the Portuguese, Spanish, and
English in the 16th century - both in terms of sheer numbers, and (in many
cases) in terms of the severity of conditions for slaves. It's analogous to
constantly pointing out that Roman iron forges created air pollution in the
2nd century CE whenever people talk about 20th century environmental issues. I
don't disagree that the general public should be educated about the multi-
sited nature of slavery of course; as an historian of this period I just
wanted to point out that the people who actually study and teach this stuff
are not trying to portray it as a solely European phenomenon. However it is
inarguably the case that the early modern European empires were responsible
for upgrading both the scale and severity of a pre-existing slave system.

Anyway, to add something substantive here, I figured I'd link to the
Transatlantic Slave Trade Database, which is (from my point of view at least)
one of the most significant achievements in historical scholarship in the last
few decades:

[http://www.slavevoyages.org/tast/index.faces](http://www.slavevoyages.org/tast/index.faces)

