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.
> 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].
[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.
The US prison system (and, in conjunction, the justice system as a whole) is appalling by developed-country standards and in need of reform, but I don't think it even ranks on the list of "most awful things anyone can say about humans."
Agreed.
We need more funding, research, and articles that remind us about the middle passage and how it relates to the drug war and the current state of the U.S. prison system.
I for one, completely fail to see a relevant relationship.
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.
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.
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:
I wouldn't jump to the conclusion that the downvotes were related to the subject of the comment. More likely, they were to do with the way it (and the other comments on this thread by bruant) were presented.
It would have taken no effort to have phrased the idea in a way that invited others to discuss it and learn more about it. Instead it was an, evidently, unwelcome (and totally unjustified) stab at the people who might be reading.
benbreen's comment was far more interesting and made me want to learn more about the subject.
