THE FORGOTTEN SLAVES:1400 YEARS OF MUSLIM ENSLAVEMENT Although Islam and black nationalism share a flame-belching, sword-swinging hatred for Western Civ, it’s an odd pairing when you consider history. American blacks who dump Christianity and shack up with Islam seem to think they’re flipping the bird at the creed that enslaved their ancestors, but they’re only swapping it for a religion that has enslaved their ancestors for far longer. The idea of collective historical guilt is often wielded as a psychological weapon, and civilizations that allow themselves to be inoculated with the Guilt Germ can be conquered without a shot being fired. Islamic apologists and Western oikophobes scoff and spit and snort that anyone would dare draw equivalencies between the transatlantic and the Arab slave trades, yet the historical record laughs in their faces. How Many Slaves Landed in the US? How many were taken to the United States during the entire history of the slave trade? Perhaps you, like me, were raised essentially to think of the slave experience primarily in terms of our black ancestors here in the United States. In other words, slavery was primarily about us, right, from Crispus Attucks and Phillis Wheatley, Benjamin Banneker and Richard Allen, all the way to Harriet Tubman, Sojourner Truth and Frederick Douglass. Think of this as an instance of what we might think of as African-American exceptionalism. (In other words, if its in the black Experience, its got to be about black Americans.) Well, think again. The most comprehensive analysis of shipping records over the course of the slave trade is the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database, edited by professors David Eltis and David Richardson. (While the editors are careful to say that all of their figures are estimates, I believe that they are the best estimates that we have, the proverbial gold standard in the field of the study of the slave trade.) Between 1525 and 1866, in the entire history of the slave trade to the New World, according to the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database, 12.5 million Africans were shipped to the New World. 10.7 million survived the dreaded Middle Passage, disembarking in North America, the Caribbean and South America. And how many of these 10.7 million Africans were shipped directly to North America? Only about 388,000. Thats right: a tiny percentage. In fact, the overwhelming percentage of the African slaves were shipped directly to the Caribbean and South America; Brazil received 4.86 million Africans alone! Some scholars estimate that another 60,000 to 70,000 Africans ended up in the United States after touching down in the Caribbean first, so that would bring the total to approximately 450,000 Africans who arrived in the United States over the course of the slave trade. Incredibly, most of the 42 million members of the African-American community descend from this tiny group of less than half a million Africans. And I, for one, find this amazing.
Posted on: Thu, 07 Aug 2014 13:52:38 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015