Below is an exceprt from my talk What have we learned from Mandela:#Race and ethnic relations around the world and here at home wp.me/p1qkMa-me #umvisionary 4. In North America, race is often connected to stereotypes of African peoples based on the history of the Atlantic slave trade. Constructions of blackness today have been heavily influenced by the struggles of black people in the United States, the Caribbean, and South Africa against legislated apartheid systems that diminished their humanity and severely limited their freedoms and agency. We need to know that history, and to address it in productive ways, but we also need to be careful about how it is used. I support the current Caricom legal initiative to seek reparations from several European states once involved in that slave trade. If we associate the Atlantic slave trade with the evils of a past we have now risen above, it is harder to see its continuing impact in US, Canadian, and African societies today. It is also harder to see the ways in which contemporary forms of slavery still exist, involving more people than ever before. Slavery today may not be so obviously race-based (although it sometimes is) but it still relies on the belief that some people are less human than others. Some people are disposable. It can take age-old forms in places like Mauritania, India, and Pakistan, and newer forms, in complicity with contemporary capitalism, in places like Brazil, Eastern Europe, and North America. Insofar as globalization encourages the trafficking of people, it also encourages new forms of slavery. My point here is that race always needs to be analyzed in relation to other forms of discrimination, violence, and abuse.
Posted on: Tue, 11 Mar 2014 18:47:49 +0000
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