[lbo-talk] Obama's ancestors had slaves

J. Tyler unended at sbcglobal.net
Fri Mar 2 22:11:02 PST 2007


andie nachgeborenen wrote:


> I'll indulge in an even broader brush generalization:
> slavery or analogous forms of forced labor was a near
> social universal in every civilized society and most
> barbaric ones from the rise of the city state until
> the 19th century. That includes both the Americas --
> and not just after the European Conquest (oops, Europe
> is continent too . . . ), the Indian Subcontinent,
> China, Russia, the Near East, North Africa, and
> Europe.
>
> Why would you expect Africa, or if you like, the
> civilized nations and barbaric tribes in Africa, to be
> different than anyone else? ...
>
> Anyway, if Africa (there I go again) was reasonable
> like almost severy where else, where was a lot of
> slaveholding. Given the mix of African peoples in the
> African dispora, where it's pretty unlikely that any
> African-American, -Carribean, -Brazilian, etc. can
> trace her ancestors to just one place in Africa, one
> where slaveholding may not have the rule,a nd given
> that the slave trade itself seized both propertied
> individuals (including slaveholders) and unpropertied
> ones (including people who were already slaves), I
> think it is reasonably likely that any randonmly
> chosen person in the African Diaspora has some African
> slaveholding ancestry.

This claim is doubtful. Even if I grant you the premise that slavery was practiced throughout Africa to the same extent as the rest of the world (which, without having done serious research myself, seems reasonable enough), the conclusion that most African-Americans are descendents of slave owners in Africa seems far fetched. Because if we are to assume that Africa really was like the rest of the slavery-practicing world, then we also have to assume that--like the rest of the world--only the minority members of the ruling and upper classes were slave owners. And that, furthermore, social mobility would have been restricted, such that it would not have been easy to move between the slave-owning and non-slave-owning classes. This leaves the vast majority of the Afican population as non-slave-owning (or as being slaves themselves), with that status being passed down from generation to generation. So while I might accept--based on your premise--that *some* African Americans are descended from African slave owners, the proposition that many, most, or all are is absurd I think.



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