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The Middle Passage
> > 2.
A slave trade route known as the "Middle Passage" carried Africans from the Caribbean to the Americas under horrific conditions. As a result of this trading path, European weapons such as knives and guns found their way into African hands, as well. Plantations in the Americas and Caribbean produced goods (mostly raw materials) that were shipped to Europe, including slaves (Klein). Millions left Africa by sea, mostly on overcrowded sailing ships with crews from England, Holland, Portugal, and France, between 1518 and the mid-nineteenth century.
Most of their 150 to 600 passengers had been kidnapped and marched to the coast under appalling conditions by slave captains who frequently anchored off the Guinea Coast, also known as "the Slave Coast." After leaving Africa, the crew had to contend with a variety of dangers, such as hostile tribe raids, disease outbreaks, pirate attacks, and inclement weather while at anchor. No matter who was involved—the ship’s officers or passengers—those held as slaves suffered more than anyone else as a result of their captors’ verbal, sexual, and psychological assaults (Haines). According to 55 detailed accounts written between 1699 and 1845, Africans who had survived slavery’s earliest horrors revolted, perhaps despite or perhaps because of the ship’s conditions, and that included shackling the men on board to each other or the deck to keep them from rising up in revolt.
During the slave trade, captives were crammed into low-lying platforms stacked three high, with an average space allocation of 6 feet long by 16 inches wide by possibly 3 feet high. Many slaves died because they were unable to stand or turn over (Tinsley). Even when traveling in good weather, the twice-daily rations of water and starchy grains like millet or cornmeal were severely reduced if the weather was bad. This resulted in near-starvation and illness..> > 3. .
The emergence of American racial ideology in late-seventeenth-century Jamestown and Virginia. Its goal is to challenge students’ preconceived notions about what race is and is not. The first episode of RACE shows that race as a biological category is a mirage. So, in American history, how did this illusion become an ideology, or a systematic body of concepts through which people view themselves, one another, and their world?
The ideology of white supremacy contradicts the widely held textbook belief that race-based slavery started with the arrival of Africans in Jamestown in 1619, as if it were unavoidable. Tobacco growing for export saved the fortunes of a floundering Virginia Company, but tobacco could not be grown without a large labor force. In early Jamestown, servants (whether European, American Indian, or African) frequently banded together to oppose the planter class (Tinsley). As a result, the servant class was no longer a reliable source of labor, and the ruling class’s hegemony was threatened.
Planters turned to African slaves, who had become available in greater numbers and at lower prices at the time, as indentured European servants proved unruly and rebellious, immigration was sporadic, and American Indians resorted to flight and war. African slavery, on the other hand, is not, at least not at first, the same as racial slavery. "Historians must confront the vexing question of the relationship between slavery and racism, as well as the chicken-and-egg debate over which came first in the southern colonies, slavery or racial prejudice," writes George Fredrickson in Black People in White Minds (Watkins). Were Africans enslaved because of a pre-existing belief that the color of their skin indicated inferiority? Or were they enslaved for economic reasons, then considered inferior due to their low status, and then enslaved to justify their enslavement?
Students use Jamestown judicial court cases and statutes to answer this and other contentious questions about the history of race-based slavery in early America. These records tell an incredible story about how, when confronted with a number of difficult issues, judges and legislators began to enact slave laws (McEvilly). The students are unaware of the human dramas that led to these cases. They depict a brief period when Europeans, Indians, and Africans worked together, traded, mated, and rebelled. After a century of legal wrangling, the laws that institutionalized race-based slavery provided the planter class with a consistent source of labor.
A variety of forms of discrimination have developed around the world for a variety of reasons ranging from the historical to the sociological, ideological, economic, and cultural. As a result, discrimination is inextricably linked to structural injustice and/or low social status for certain social groups and is frequently based on factors like race, color, birthplace, or national or ethnic origin, among others. It’s not uncommon for discrimination to manifest itself in multiple ways for some victims. Particularly for women and children from socially marginalized or stigmatized groups, this is important. Tolerance and intolerance will always be replicated in a country’s legal and judicial systems as long as they exist in everyday life. Racism, xenophobia, and intolerance all manifest themselves in the administration of justice in the form of discrimination. Discrimination and disadvantage due to ethnicity or immigration status are also found in non-criminal legal processes such as civil courts(Morgan). There needs to be a lot more research done on the impact of racial and ethnic differences on the daily quality of justice in America.
Work Cited
Klein, Herbert S. The middle passage. Princeton University Press, 1978.
Walcott, Rinaldo. "Pedagogy and trauma: The middle passage, slavery, and the problem of creolization." Between hope and despair: Pedagogy and the remembrance of historical trauma (2000): 135-151.
Tinsley, Omise’eke Natasha. "Black Atlantic, queer Atlantic: Queer imaginings of the middle passage." GLQ: A journal of lesbian and gay studies 14.2-3 (2008): 191-215.
Morgan, Edmund S. "The labor problem at Jamestown, 1607-18." The American Historical Review 76.3 (1971): 595-611.
McEvilly, T. V., & Johnson, L. R. (1978). Broadband discrimination studies. Final technical report 1 June 1973–30 September 1977 (No. AD-A-054973). California Univ., Berkeley (USA). Seismographic Station.
