Sunday, February 14, 2010

Justifying Slavery

This week’s readings and discussion was centered around the Latin American slave economy, in particular, Kris Lane’s article titled, “Captivity and Redemption: Aspects of Slave Life in Early Colonial Quito and Popayan”. It was interesting comparing slavery in Latin America to slavery in North America, specifically the South, and finding how similar the two experiences were in two very different places. Also, the video shown in class depicting the transportation of slaves across the Atlantic was hard to watch. It is sickening to realize that human beings underwent that much torture and humiliation. I wondered if those white slave traders had consciences. Then, I read about the reasons in which they justify these enslavements in order to squash any amount of guilt they may possibly encounter. The slave traders and buyers (owners), justify slavery by claiming that they are doing a service to them by saving them from the barbarity and tyranny of Africa where they lived as Christ less savages who should feel it a privilege to be captured and be able to live in a world with order and religion. However, when you look at the way they are treated from capture until their deaths, there is anything but order and Christianity.

These female slaves were clearly viewed as humans because they were given the important jobs of nursing their master’s children, proving that they realized that these Africans shared the same physical bodies. It is so contradicting to me as to how they were viewed as sub-human-savages who were beaten or killed for misbehaving and used for the sole purpose of labor and reproduction for profit, yet was perfectly fine to feed their master’s children from their own “African” milk.
It is difficult to fathom how these slave traders and owners cold-heartedly viewed and treated their African slaves, and makes me wonder if they had any guilt for their treatment. Then, viewing the ways they justified slavery shows me that they did have some (even if very little) guilt because of the ways they justified their acts by claiming to be their saviors from a cruel and savage Africa.

3 comments:

  1. I think you are anachronistically implementing your morality onto the situation of slavery. You continuously condemn these slave holders as "evil," but they saw their actions as natural. They viewed the Africans as inferior by nature, meaning the rules of common decency did not apply to them. When trying to analyze history it is wrong to implant your own feelings into the situation. One needs to merely view history as the people of the day did.

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  2. I do not think that just because the female slaves were forced to be wet nurses to their owners children that they were viewed as human in the way other Europeans viewed each other as human. I think it was more a matter of property and the fact that the master owned ALL of the slave, even the most intimate or personal aspects. Being hired out as a wet nurse to someone elses child seems more like the slave was viewed as an animal, bought and sold for the services they could provide. Although I do agree that this did in effect force the masters to acknowledge that a slaves physical body was simialr to their own, but even cows produce milk for their young.

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  3. Hmmm...can we really NOT impose our own feelings and understandings when analyzing history, or anything for that matter? I think it's quite natural to be biased whether you try to or not just by separation of time and context! In saying that, however, I don't think that women in the African slave trade had any more humanity to them than the male slaves as considered by the Spanish.In class, we talked about women not even being "named" as they arrived off of the ships....why was this? I would hope that being viewed as human would mean more than breastfeeding another persons child, as well....it IS sad though that such horrible events occurred and people, Europeans in this case, saw ownership of other humans as natural...even upheld by the Bible. Again, though, as I mentioned in my own blog, what will people say about our own society today and how we treat each other? Maybe the same things exist just in different forms...

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