To the races I should know better and play it safe here at my Home on the Range. But not all gain wisdom with age; well I haven’t, anyway. Plus I’m back where I started and wrote my first political piece about a President frittering away on the golf course, to me a more serious issue than Presidential philandering. Actually can’t think of a politico who 100% fulfilled my standards, but then they are people of the people so what can you expect? A greedy, conniving public seems to produce greedy connivers and puts them in office to greedily connive for the public benefit, of course. Uh huh, so that’s how it’s supposed to work, or maybe officials are elected to amuse us. Well at least they often manage that. In any case I’d be a wiser person to avoid like Novel Flu the topic of race. But how can any of us help but face the issue? This is especially so when not adopting particular stances makes you (to some extent dependent on color) a racist. Neutrality or color blindness is unacceptable. But where to start? I’ve heard the once mainstream popular Cosby Show was not representative of actual racial experience. What is? Are Oprah, Colin K, or Obama representative or do we have to look at a Zulu Impe for a legitimate view? How’s a paleface muggle like me expected to figure this out if there’s barely a hint of explanation among the drum beats of accusation? An account given credence today begins with 1619 (aka Sixteen Teenth perhaps?) as the birth of American slavery. This is absolutely correct, but we have to remove from consideration the practice of enslavement before that date by various native groups in North and South America. And there were the Spanish, Portuguese, and French actively bringing agricultural slaves for their plantations. Can’t be certain of numbers, but a majority of African slaves were taken to Central and South America. Estimates are 10% of slaves ripped from Africa went to North America. It’s too many, but still a junior part of the bigger picture. Well before the U.S. Civil War and Emancipation U.S. and British navies harassed the slave trade by stopping
ships, sometimes with the horrific consequence of shackled slaves sometimes being dumped over to drown in an attempt to prevent seizure of the ship. Slave ships and shippers were often Portuguese, but that’s only part of a complicated web of Arab traders and African groups acting as slave hunters. North Africa, the Middle East, and Ottoman Empire imported staggering numbers of black slaves as expendable labor. Their virility feared, male slaves not going to the Americas were often castrated (a version of which was visited on the Lost Boys in more recent times.) Many died afterward from infection. Female slaves were for sex or domestic service. The survival of any of their children had lower than low priority. A snapshot view shows why we see more slave decedents in the Americas than the equally extensive Arab and Middle Eastern slave markets. There’s no question that the sugar cane to rum to slave cycle of trade that went on in the U.S. and Britain was evil and abusive; so much so that both those nations became early reformers. (Look up Wilberforce in English history. John Brown was the U.S. abolitionist who tried to speed up the process in the US. but failed. In both countries, despite their sympathies, a typical person then as today feared social turmoil and didn’t wish for open conflict.) In contrast, there was no reform movement among the Turks or Arabs, both of whom dealt in slaves on the scale and in the way Saudis sell oil today. Things that went on in the Americas from the 1500s to the 2000s are far more complex than racism alone. It’s worth a jog to note that af-ter battling the British for our independence one of the first major international efforts the new country made was to establish a navy in part to balk British efforts to press U.S. citizens to serve in their navy and balk those North African states taking American seamen for ransom or sale as slaves. With the U.S. Navy came the birth of the Marines on the “shores of Tripoli.” Turks and Arabs were known to the point of being notorious for selling non-Muslim Europeans. (Enslaving
NORTHSHORE NOTES HARRY DRABIK
DuluthReader.com
“A danger in heated times is the growth of reactionary oppression. Moral certitude is a certain danger. As the Rebel Confederacy learned, freedom in belief or politics does not include the freedom to impose those things on others.” Muslims was prohibited. Anyone else was fair game.) From before the time of the Crusades pale and blonde Christian children were prized as valuable commodities for trade. Non-Muslims in the Balkans paid a tax in children for household and military service. The Swedish Bikini Team we joke about would have brought big bucks in Arab and Ottoman slave markets. (Precise numbers are not known, but seacoast towns were often abandoned in fear of Arab slavers as they’d been over Viking raiders. In other words some evidence is indirect but reasonably valid.) To use a phrase that sounds awfully out of place, slavery and racism are not the stark, cut and dried, black and white issues often presented as being the story. I’m not a fan of Robert E. Lee, but I can say from what’s known of him his motivations as a Confederate
general were not particularly racist. I don’t understand or sympathize with his allegiance to the State of Virginia, but he believed the independence of Virginia worth fighting for even though he disagreed with it on the subject of owning other human beings as property. (Indentures and Apprenticeships, etc., were other “lesser” forms of holding people as temporary property as was the widespread system of sharecropping.) I need opine that addressing serious social concerns with accusations of guilt and malice is not the way to dialog. Throwing a roommate’s clothes out a window and burning them doesn’t start a discussion. A danger in heated times is the growth of reactionary oppression. Moral certitude is a certain danger. As the Rebel Confederacy learned, freedom in belief or politics does not include the freedom to impose those things on others.
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