slavery-in-the-united-states

In his book The African Slave Trade, Basil Davidson contrasts law and in the Congo in the early 16th century with law in Portugal and England. In those European countries, where the idea of private property was becoming powerful, theft was punishable brutally. In England, even as late as 1740, a child could be hanged for stealing a rag of cotton. But in the Congo, communal life persisted. The idea of private property was a strange one, and thefts were punished with fines or various degrees of servitude. A Congolese leader told of the Portuguese legal codes asked a Portuguese once, teasingly, 'What is the penalty in Portugal for anyone who puts his feet on the ground?

Slavery was immensely profitable to some masters. James Madison told a British visitor shortly after the American Revolution that he could make 257 dollars on every (black slave) in a year, and spend only 12 or 13 dollars on his keep.

Heroes deal out vengeance, wiping out insults, and in an existential sense denying their own death. In twentieth-century camps, however, Todorov found, some people instead found transcendence by displaying kindness toward other people. Through small, everyday acts that committed them to the survival of other human beings--even at the cost of lowering their own chances--they demonstrated their own commitment to an abstract yet personal value. Although heroic acts were as suicidal in twentieth-century death camps as they were in nineteenth-century slave labor camps, even in hell there was still room to be a moral human being.

Added to the shock of the routine violation of their bodies was the trauma of having to relinquish their children to unknown slave-holders. [W.E.B.] Du Bois considered this physical, mental, and spiritual abuse of black women--with its inevitable result being the destruction of the traditional African family--the highest crime committed by slave-holders and the one thing for which he said he could not forgive them.

Maybe he wouldn't end up the kind of man who needed to use his body for work. Maybe he'd be a new kind of black man altogether, one who got to use his mind.

Mistakes from our collective past are like any other: they require intervention--a remedy--to correct. They don't erase themselves over time.

To celebrate freedom and democracy while forgetting American's origins in a slavery economy is patriotism _ la carte.

An institution rooted in slavery can never set us free.

In the years preceding the Civil War in America, Christian ministers wrote nearly half of all defenses of slavery.

They were erected purposefully to send a strong message to all who walked in their shadows about who was still in charge in this city.

In Einstein's equation, time is a river. It speeds up, meanders, and slows down. The new wrinkle is it can have whirlpools and fork into two rivers. So, if the river of time can be bent into a pretzel, create whirlpools and fork into two rivers, then time travel cannot be ruled out.

Jeems was their body servant and, like the dogs, accompanied them everywhere. He had been their childhood playmate and had been given to the twins for their own on their tenth birthday.

The popular mocking of reparations as a harebrained scheme authored by wild-eyed lefties and intellectually unserious black nationalists is fear masquerading as laughter.

An institution rooted in slavery cannot be the voice of our people.

Who talks most about freedom and equality? Is it not those who hold the bill of rights in one hand and a whip for affrighted slaves in the other?

There are people who think they can dance out of slavery. ____ going to do escapist drugs and hop from one party or festival to another. I will dance my out of the harsh realities of Planet Earth